employees

Personnel-related "efficiencies" can be good or bad, depending on one's perspective.  Companies want to save money, of course, and their shareholders also appreciate savings.  But employees like to keep their jobs.  So let's take a look at what sort of effect the Microsoft-Yahoo deal may have.

On the heels of a study indicating that social media can significantly impact a brand's bottom line positively, another one has come out saying that Facebook is costing companies productivity. To be more specific, the new independent study from Nucleus Research is saying that Facebook costs companies 1.5 percent of total productivity, and that one in every 33 employees has built their entire profile during work time.

Layoff described by one source as ":massive" are coming to MySpace although there is no official word yet from the company.  MySpace shed 5% of its staff a year ago and laid of as many as 45 more last month. But these cuts will go far deeper, according to TechCrunch and could hit several hundred. Management will inevitably blame a tough economy and plummeting ad revenue, but declining traffic is the real culprit.

Facebook's employees may soon get a special payday that goes well beyond the normal end-of-the-week routine.  A new report indicates the company is raising $150 million in order to buy out workers' shares and effectively give them a pre-IPO reward. 

We've seen newspaper publishers forbid employees from accessing social networks before. The Wall Street Journal is not restricting access, but they are restricting how social networks are used by their employees.

Update: The original title of this article was "USA Today Publisher Restricting Employees from Using Social Networks?" USA Today called Murdok requesting a change because it made it look like USA Today itself was discouraging social media use, which is apparently not the case.

Visiting sites like Facebook or YouTube while at work can make employees more productive, claims a new University of Melbourne study. Dr. Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing, says that workers who engage in "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing" (WILB) are more productive than those who don't.

There once when a time when it was a very bad idea for American autoworkers to own foreign vehicles.  A lone Toyota in the employee parking lot might, according to some stories, get mysteriously overturned.  Fanatical Microsoft employees shouldn't even think about enforcing a similar rule set, though, because almost half of the corporation's workers use Google.