Question

Firms in India are losing productivity because of Facebook. Office staff are spending too long on the social networking site. According to The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham) employees use Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, and Linkedin for "romancing" and other purposes. On average, employees spend an hour a day on sites like Facebook. This reduces productivity by 12.5%. Nearly half of office employees accessed Facebook during work time. Some 83% saw nothing wrong in surfing at work during office hours. In September 2009 Portsmouth City Council in England banned staff from accessing Facebook on its computers when it was discovered that they spent, on average, 400 hours on the site every month.

Question 1. What is meant by productivity?

2. Analyze the impact on a fall in productivity on costs.

3. Analyze the possible consequences for businesses in India of banning access to Facebook and other social networking sites.

4. Do you think access should be denied?

Answer 1

What is meant by productivity?

Productivity is the key source of economic growth and competitiveness. It is a country’s ability to improve its standard of living depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker, i.e, producing more goods and services for a given number of hours of work.

Productivity is the the ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it. Usually this ratio is in the form of an average, expressing the total output of some category of goods divided by the total input of, say, labour or raw materials.

Since these factors are limited by nature, and human wants are unlimited, we, as a country, face a shared decision over the efficient allocation of these scarce resources or factors of production.

Analyze the impact on a fall in productivity on costs.

The four factors of production are inputs used in various combinations for the production of goods and services to make an economic profit. The factors of production are land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship.

In the Cost Theory, there are two types of costs associated with production – Fixed Costs and Variable Costs.

Total Cost = Fixed Cost + Variable Cost

When the output is zero, variable costs are also zero. But we have fixed costs which is where the Total Costs start.

If the price does not cover average variable costs, the firm prefers to shut down. In other words, if the total revenue (total sale proceeds) does not include total variable costs, the business must shut down. Otherwise, its total loss will be higher than the fixed costs.

Analyze the possible consequences for businesses in India of banning access to Facebook and other social networking sites.

Social media like LinkedIn has become a major resource of employment. More than 89% recruitments take place by using Linkedin and company websites.

140 word tweet contains a world of information. It keeps you informed about the world and your interest.

Using social media for business is extremely beneficial. With effective use, it brings down the overall marketing cost. online success comes with the effective use of social media. You can create potential customers and increase your business.

The importance of social media marketing results in increase in the lead generation and search engine ranking of sites have improved drastically by using social media for more than two years.

Many users use social media for time pass but excessive and uncontrolled use can lead to severe addiction.

Therefore, banning access to Facebook and other social networking sites will makes huge consequences in Indian business.

Do you think access should be denied?

Social media sites like Facebook have become an inevitable part of modern life.

It helps you to connect with your friends instantly and in real time. Users can interact, reconnect and socialize, excessive use of Internet can lead to the deterioration in concentration. While working on social media you constantly keep switching form one task to another.

Your ability to concentrate on one task gets impaired. Such an activity also tires your brain. Information abundance leads to brain fatigue and stress.

You must have noticed that whenever you start your work or do something over Internet, the first thing you do is checking your personal profiles especially Facebook. It actually wastes lots of productive time.

Social media has opened up the possibility of identity theft, data theft, cyber fraud, hacking and virus attacks. You are left with no privacy if you have updated your address, phone number, work place, information about your family on any of the social media sites. We generally add our pictures of day to day life on Facebook.

Hence, it is imperative to understand the functioning of social media and way to use it. Excessive use of social media can do harm than good.

In order to prevent it you have to limit your time on social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc.Take out time to relax and go out. Do understand that Internet is not just about social media. It is a store house of information so use it wisely.One has to be very cautious while doing so as the pictures and other information can be misused by the bad elements of the society.