The Impacts Blogs Might Have On Our Company

Dear Mr. Pereira,

As per your request, I have fully researched the impacts blogs could have on our business.  My finds will prove to be surprising in some ways more than others.  With today’s trends on blogging about anything that is on your mind, business’ can be impacted in a positive and or negative way.  It can be a form of free advertisement and publicity even; however, at this time it might injure us more than we can withstand.

Blogging can lead to a reduction in productivity within a company.  Some bloggers might dedicate so much time to their blog which can affect their productivity at work.  With internet access, companies have to worry about how their employees dedicate their time while they are at work.  This can be costly for the company because they pay their employees and expect a certain amount of productivity per day as well as actual results.  When employees are not meeting these demands due to dedicating some of their time at work towards their blog, business’ are impacted.

I have conducted a survey within our small company of around 50 employees and here are my findings.  As you know, most of our employees are young and up to date on all new and upcoming technologies.  This obviously is a positive as we must keep up with new technologies if we plan on remaining successful.  The survey asked questions related to how our employees use their time at work.  I made the survey anonymous in order to receive a more accurate response from my fellow coworkers.  With a slight margin of error, employees are spending around 0.5 to 1 hour a day on blogging.  These hours are not hours spent during their lunch or break times but actual working hours.  The survey showed, as well, that the method of accessing their blogs is a mixture between their personal devices and their work PCs.

Given the 0.5 to 1 hour a day our employees spend on blogging I was able to compute what this means to us financially.  Our average hourly salary amount is $18.50, so with this we know that per employee the company is spending $46.25 to $92.50 per week, of the company’s money.  If we were to assume all our employees were partaking on this, we are looking at $2,312.50 to $4,625 on a weekly basis and $111,000 to $222,000 yearly.  The yearly amounts have been calculated using 48 weeks in a year due to vacation days and holidays.

Not only is this a costly expense to the company but we must also take other factors into consideration.  While our employees spend their time blogging at work, they are taking away their permitted daily hours to work on their day to day tasks.  Meaning, each employee loses 2.5 to 5 hours a week which is allocated to accomplishing their weekly tasks.  This creates backlogs and unmeet targets, as well as, loss of potential outcomes.

I understand it is hard to track exactly how much time is spend per employee doing unrelated work tasks via their PCs if they use their personal electronic devices.  We can only do so much with our web filters and PC monitoring software.  So as you can see, our company will be negatively impacted by blogs.  If we were to allow blogging we will be incurring additional expenses on top of the ones we are already incurring, it could possibly double or even triple. 

So with this I hope you take into consideration my findings when making your decision.  If you have any questions or would like to further discuss the matter, please let me know.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Couto