Facing up to Facebook

Helen O'Brien writes:

With an estimated 360 million Facebook users worldwide, it appears that social networking sites are becoming ever more popular. However, the potential problems they can cause for businesses mean they are not so popular with employers.

How can employers tackle these issues?

Some employees are spending excessive amounts of time during their working hours accessing social networking sites. This can be very costly for employers in terms of productivity and could potentially amount to a disciplinary offence. It is therefore important for employers to have a clearly worded policy informing employees what is and is not acceptable use of the internet and social networking