Surfing to Productivity

by Don Harkey

I want to thank "Church" for the comment and link on yesterday's article (she's always a valued contributor!). The linked article references a study that found that people who were allowed to "surf the internet" up to 20% (up to 1.6 hours of an 8 hour day) of their time at work were 9% more productive. What's going on here?

This makes sense within a framework. Remember the 3 factors that lead to motivation? Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness. A bit part of relatedness is feeling like you are part of something bigger than yourself. Handling emails, chatting with a friend, reading blogs, watching videos of others, scanning through Facebook status updates, Tweeting... these are all ways to build relatedness in people. The issue I see is "what are you becoming related to?".

I have had friends with addictions to the internet. One in particular that I know used to spent 10 hours or more every day playing an online role playing game. He certainly felt competent, autonomous and related to playing the game. The online interaction gives us something that computers used to lack... the ability to relate to others while sitting alone.

A good question for businesses and organizations is how to do use this tool to build relatedness to the tasks at hand (ex: doing your job). The answer is challenging because of the sea of information available. Looking up information online is often very helpful, but more recent applications give us the opportunity to do more than that.

Imagine that I am given a new task at my job. I'm told to organize a fundraising event for a local charity. I've never done that before. I am feeling less than competent and, if there is no one else in the organization who has organized a fundraiser, I am also feeling a lack of relatedness. So I go to the internet.

Let's say I Google "fundraising". I quickly find links to companies who sell fundraising supplies as well as links to sites that give fundraising ideas galore. The information is overwhelming, but potentially valuable. I spend several hours reading articles, building up my competence.

The next step is I go to my Twitter account and post (a post in Twitter is called a "Tweet", discouraging thousands of serious business people from using this powerful tool) a simple message, "I need to plan a fundraising event and I don't know what I'm doing. Help!". Within a few hours, local resources for fundraising have contacted me with advice and words of encouragement. Even a few friends offer their 2 cents. I just discovered that I am not alone and am interacting with others who have done the same thing I am about to do. I am starting to feel able to relate to the task!

To sum up, social online networking is more than interacting with information, its about interacting with people. With some focus on tasks at hand, it can be powerful and motivating tool for your people!