Social media at work a must for 50% of UK youngsters

Nearly half of under-24-year-olds in the UK would refuse to work for a company whose policy forbids using Facebook in the office, a new survey from recruitment provider Hyphen points out.

The results from the survey come as yet another proof of the significance of social media for the young people in the UK. In addition, almost 60% of the polled are convinced that having access to social networking sites would in fact increase their effectiveness on the workplace. The findings suggest that employers do not understand the way young people communicate these days.

The importance of social media decreases with the advancing age of the participants in the survey. Those who refuse to work in a firm which bans Facebook and Twitter were a quarter of the 35-to-44-year-olds and one-fifth of those aged 45-54.

The need for communication should be respected and even moderately approved of as a prominent factor for young employees, Hyphen points out. According to the research, employers should not be too preoccupied with the thought that visiting social networking sites might interfere with work, as employees spend about 10 minutes on average doing their personal business and nearly one-third of the polled say they do not use social media at the office.

Zain Wadee, managing director of Hyphen, thinks that more and more companies are becoming flexible in terms of social media use, which he considers to be the right policy.