Study: People That Think Social Media Helps Their Work Are Probably Wrong

RichDiesal writes: "In an upcoming special issue of Social Science Computer Review, researchers set out to understand how people actually use social media while at work and how it affects their job performance. By polling workers across 17 industries, they identified 8 broad ways that people use social media that they believe help their work, and 9 broad ways that people use social media that they believe harm their work. Although the harmful social media behaviors were related to decreased job performance, the beneficial social media behaviors were unrelated to job performance. In short, wasting time on social media hurts you, but trying to use social media to improve your work probably doesn't actually help."

Re:Hmm..

[RichDiesal]

The people participating in the study thought these behaviors would help their job performance.... communicating with customers, reaching out to new customers, participating in an online work community, communicating with coworkers, gathering information from colleagues, asking friends/coworkers/family for help solving a work problem, and using social media as a technical solution (e.g. transferring a file from one computer to another). On the surface, it looks like these things would help in many jobs. But from the data, they were unassociated with better work performance.