Can Facebook save the world?

3:33pm Tuesday 26th August 2008

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It has been estimated that British industry loses £6.5 billion a year through employees loitering on social networking websites, but could they actually boost productivity and help save the world? Sarah Lewis finds out more.

It used to be that hanging out by the water cooler was the best way to catch up on all the latest gossip at work. These days the water cooler has been replaced by Facebook, blogs, instant messenger and anything powered by ones and noughts.

But despite the basic premise of all these things being information sharing and collaboration – all stuff that is great for business – last year one study showed that more than two thirds of employers were looking at banning or had banned employee access to social networking sites, such as MySpace and instant messenger software such as MSN Messenger.

Nearly 69% of bosses said their main concern was time wasting.

Yet networking and relationshipbuilding has always been a vital part of any business and it seems to be a happy coincidence that Web 2.0 not only aids these things, but can help the environment too.

Andy Triggs is the CEO of Brighton-based company Homeflow, which provides internet-based software for estate agents. The company has staff in Brighton, Richmond in London and Australia, and relies heavily on instant messenger for communications and wikis – online software for producing collaborative documents – for their paperwork.

He says: “The paperless office was talked about in the green context a while back. It’s happening now, and not only is it saving trees, it is actually a genuine improvement on paper. The shift online has plenty of green side effects. I have a colleague in Australia and I don’t need to go there to meet with him. We do all our talking online and by voice-over IP.”

The significance of going digital in this manner is massive. Last year, more than 8,000,000 business trips were made from the UK to North America and Europe by air, sea and tunnel. Of those, 81% were by air and, according to the Office of National Statistics, in total 12,200,000 business flights flew in to and out of the UK’s airports in 2007.

There are no statistics for how many of those trips could have been handled online. Daniel Lewis works for world-leading software security firm Aladdin Knowledge Systems, and travels overseas at least twice a month for his job as a pre-sales technical consultant. He says: “I think at least half of those meetings could be done online. It isn’t that they are unnecessary but with more careful planning, willingness from participants and investment in technology, there’s just no reason to travel.”

Dominic Mason is director of Brighton-based new media agency Model Interaction. His company makes software for large companies allowing employees to communicate and work using all those interactive web tools that other bosses want to see banished from the office.

He says: “People talk about Web 2.0 and it’s seen as a marketing or young persons thing. People don’t see how applicable to business it is.

It gets banned on corporate networks because all they see is a waste of time, widgets and third party add-ons.”

But in a climate where globalisation, home working and outsourcing are all growth areas – coupled with a need to curb pollution from travel and resource use – it surely makes sense to use all the things people love about talking to their friends on the internet to enhance business communications too.

Dominic says: “The idea is to shorten distances between people and to accelerate and catalyse informal communication, because that is the real driver in business.

People don’t sit there and say ‘I don’t know how this works, I’ll dig out the manual’, they go ask the person they know did it last.

“Informal communication needs to be nurtured within business.

The most successful businesses I know are the more informal ones.

I’m not talking about lying around on beanbags, but shared and open communication, clarity between staff and employers.”

Dominic’s company ran a pilot project with one of their major clients, a telco with operations in six countries. They found that if 2,500 people needed to travel twice a year, by taking advantage of social networking tools – instant messenger, blogging, wikis – they could save £5 million a year in travel costs and 20,000 man hours. Supposing all those people were also to fly short haul to their meetings. They could save at least 10,000 tonnes of CO2.

A recent Microsoft project aimed at creating a social website for time-poor, non-office-based businesses is, Dominic says, one of the first signs of acknowledgement that the reason people love Facebook is not because they can waste time there, but because the time they spend there is extremely effective.

He says: “A certain amount of face-to-face time is always going to be needed, but people are getting more and more used to almost totally virtual relationships, and that means big travel and resource savings.

“Big businesses are running scared of the latest web trends, when they should be analysing, learning and capitalising on them, as well as using them to reduce their carbon footprint.”

Of the three big areas of saving – time, resource, travel – Andy Triggs says that commuting will be the most affected by communications technologies.

He says: “The web is definitely cutting down on travel. In 20 or 30 years people are going to look back on the early days of commuting and say ‘what on earth where they doing?’. In 50 years travelling as we do is just not going to make sense.”

Do you think more business should utilise social networking to save resources? Comment below.