Shel Holtz has an interesting opinion piece in the New Communications Review blogzine, which monitors the business aspects of blogging. After giving examples and testimonies of companies that prohibit their employees from reading RSS Feeds, he gives the following argumentation of why this is a shortsighted policy:
* An employee’s home computer is a personal tool, but it gets used for work all the time. Work-life integration is the name of the game today. If you expect me to take work home, then expect me to live part of my life at work.
* The measure of productivity is how much work is getting done, not how much time an employee spends on non-work-related activities. Employees will stay late, come in early, or take work home. They won’t simply let it slide.
* Nobody wants to lose his job so he can check sports scores on ESPN.
* Nobody ever got fired for checking sports scores at work in the New York Times. The web is the new newspaper.
* Telling employees you don’t trust them-any of them-is a great way to earn some of the lowest engagement scores in the business world. (Trust is a key determinant of engagement and commitment.) Companies with large populations of highly engaged employees earn double-digit growth. Those with large populations of actively disengaged employees earn zero or negative growth.So which is preferable: locked down computers and no growth or open access and double-digit growth?
Ahh, there’s more. Go back and read some of my earlier posts on this topic on my blog. I don’t have time for the full-on rant. I want to focus instead on RSS.
If companies are concerned about the amount of time employees are spending on the web, RSS is the answer, not an extension of the problem. RSS allows employees to aggreagate all the content they follow in one place, scan it for items of interest, zero in on the ones that are most important and get back to work. Further, have any of the companies blocking RSS feeds studied the nature of the content to which employees are subscribing? I’d be willing to be at least some of it is work-related.