I spent some additional research hours on “social media and the workplace” last week. Perhaps you have experienced yourself there is some really interesting guff out there – for & against.

Summarising, 54% of American companies means there is another rule for the growing “global employee handbook” on social networks being banned from the workplace. Interesting for us on this side of the Atlantic we have just completed a benchmark study, a similar poll on the HR profession – Pan European involving the participation of 32 countries.

We found a similar story to the US with close to half or 48% of European companies polled have taken measures to prevent certain websites/social networks being used during core office hours amongst ‘general staff’. Our study did go a few steps further and as intended discovered some of the clever ideas and practices the other 52 percentile have adopted to counterbalance some of the quirks social media has on the workplace.

Anyways word of warning to the applicants even those whom have just been offered a job, “take heed” I personally spoke to Cisco earlier this year about the “how to get fired in 1 tweet” and also the site that followed Cisco Fatty.

To illustrate, here’s the tweet the now Web-infamous “theconnor” shared with the world:

“Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

It wasn’t long before Tim Levad, a “channel partner advocate” for Cisco Alert, shared this open response:

“Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”

LOL ….

Looking to the bright side could have been much worse – hows about starting a job and being kidnapped on the first day! In the world of “Big Brother” Peter and I have personally taken a keen interest deciding to include in our latest research mix, we discovered 31% of HR executives across Europe do carry out background search on new employees using social networks such as twitter, facebook, linkedIn, xing, myspace, bebo, etc .

This against an article I found through facebook which has the US of A down for 45% It is easy to observe why the 31% are on-line, recent news where Nomura used facebook to rehire 60% of Lehmann Brother’s graduate trainees sounds like a bargain to me and it seems curiosity doesn’t kill the cat.

Search firms like most of us have had a tough time of it, will find some solace in hearing that HR in Europe still rank Search Firms 4.86 out of 5 preferred method of recruitment, with social media climbing 4.54 to second place passing ‘company websites, business schools/uni’s, written applications, career fairs and employee referrals.’ I wonder how these numbers will look this time next year.

It was also interesting to pick up on details we weren’t looking for – for example many of the banks (10% of the poll) continue to use the traditional methods of head-hunting while in IT (11% of the poll) find their best talent through referrals and social media.

No guns blazing – a more recent research from Alex Edmans at Wharton has shown that engaged employees do in fact drive company performance. My reasons for mentioning this is that it is a much more qualitative unbiased study compared with others I have observed. Alex looked at Fortune magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work for in America” and found that an annually rebalanced portfolio returned 14% between 1998 – 2005 compared to the market in general of only 6%. We have stated recently that the number of employees that are disengaged has doubled since the beginning of 2008 coupled with businesses who are now on the other end of the retention spectrum – ’suffering’ 100% retention – one of our members recently mentioned their Italian operation has 100% clean sheet – zero attrition.

It is not surprising in many cases that employees are looking for a distraction especially when many reports refer to at least 50-70% of managers being poor to very bad managers-leaders. Close down Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn whatever you will not see an increase in productivity – I think the “culprits” will replace it with something else to ‘kill the time’ or escape poor working conditions with more visits to the toilet, mms, cafeteria/cigarette breaks perhaps even a visit to the clothes shops if in the vicinity! If employees are spending too much time using social media I would have to question do you have a management problem or a technical problem?

Anyways, I am sure there are clever ways of dealing with all of this and would love to hear some “European” case studies. Here is a short advert from ANZ Bank down under on targeting Gen Y customers! Njoy