Social media still has some way to go before it’s truely accepted in the workplace, with a persistent feeling amongst some managers that it’s a time sink and a waste of employees time rather than a crucial element of their strategic operation.

Suffice to say, there are good uses of social media and bad, so I thought I’d look today at a major cause for some of the bad uses of social media.  Right in the middle of the cross hairs is a lack of sleep, or tiredness if you will.

Research conducted last year suggested that the average manager in Britain has nearly 50 ‘weak days’ per year.  These are days when we’re not sick, but we’re not at our best either.  A lack of sleep is a common cause of these weak days, with several studies highlighting the important part sleep plays in our workplace productivity.

What is perhaps less well known is the role sleep plays in our self control.  Various studies have indicated that a drowsy person is much more likely to display less willpower, and therefore engage in activities they ordinarily would not.

New research has looked at whether we waste time more on the web when we’re tired compared to when we’re awake and alert.

They fitted participants with sleep monitors to measure the quality and quantity of sleep they had the night before the experiment.  The next day they were each asked to watch a video of a Professor giving a lecture and assessing whether the college should employ them or not.  Of course they weren’t really testing for that but rather how often the candidates engaged in other things on the web instead of doing that task.

Cyberloafing

The findings are fascinating.  The participants who had suffered a bad nights sleep, or simply not had enough, were signficantly more likely to loaf off during the subsequent days task.  The only people that didn’t were those found to have very high levels of self-control in a test conducted before the experiment.  So if you’re tired and weak willed you’re pretty liable to a bit ofcyberloafing.

Of course despite this finding I hope this isn’t used as a means to bash social media, when it appears clear that the main culprit is a lack of sleep.  Given how few companies offer employees powernap time during the work day perhaps employee alertness should be as worthy a goal as employee engagement.