ABSTRACT:
With the continuous explosion of the use of social media in workplaces, there has been a serious debate among academics and the industry on the value of using social media during work hours. While a school of thought believed that the use of social media during work hours is a waste of productive time, another believed that it leads to improved job performance. However, most of the existing studies have approached this subject matter using students’ population which may not be a true reflection of workplace practice. In this work, employees were used as the study population. A pre-tested questionnaire was used to obtain data relevant to the research objectives for analyses. The results from the study showed that the employees used a total time of 374 hours 27 minutes per day out of the available time of 3,680 hours per day on social media for personal issues, while 61 hours 13 minutes was spent on official matters. This showed that the organizations lost 10.17% of its total productive hours per day to social media usage, while it gained 1.66%. This no doubt has negative impact on the productivity of the organizations, which is against one of the top principles of work ethics. The paper concludes that if this trend is allowed to continue, it will have an adverse effect on the envisaged digital economies.
Keywords:
Employees, Digital Economies, Job Performance, Organizations, Social Media
