As organisations increasingly realise the popularity among their employees of using Facebook, and the fact that it provides an alternative email platform, more research is coming out about the impact that Facebook has in the workplace on productivity .

The latest survey, from Nucleus Research, is likely to rattle some corporate cages. The title of the research will provide a clue as to its key findings: “Social Notworking”. Among the standout headlines:
• one in 33 office workers has built their entire Facebook profile during work hours;
• the average office worker access Facebook for 15 minutes a day;
• 87 per cent of office workers have a Facebook account .

At Inbox Alliance HQ, we are hungry for data about Facebook. In our minds, Facebook generally divides the office team between the Gen Y’s (who organise their lives through Facebook) and the Luddite  Baby Boomers  who just don’t get it (guess which generation the author is in?).

The Nucleus research team draw some very interesting conclusions from their research. They argue that facebook is fast becoming an alternative to email. This will be news to many people over 30. They also argue that tech savvy email workers (read mostly Gen Y) realise that their corporate email and personal webmail accounts are monitored by corporate IT security.  Facebook messages are not monitored, so it an excellent way to circumvent corporate email security.

My thinking is that Facebook represents the famous Andy Grove strategic inflection point  of the future of email: the Gen Others are setting up a page, getting the Facebook emails, and switching off. Gen Y are embracing this medium and others that are emerging. When we are writing about electronic communication in 5 years time, we’ll be writing about the various types of IM and social networking platforms far more than we are about email etiquette on Outlook or Lotus Notes. I think the email workplace survey we are conducting will add fuel to this fire.

The only question that remains in my mind is what response we’ll get from corporate IT  to the Facebook (and others) “threat” (although that might be predictable), and how long before my generation innovates to bypass all those controls once again.