The Use of Social Media at the Workplace the Case of Black Lion Specialized Hospital
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Date
2022-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Social media use permeates everyday life, including work lives of employees, it has materially changed the way in which workers communicate. Social media offers a readily and easily available ways to stay in touch with family, friends, colleagues, and co-workers, with the luxury to rapidly and widely share information. The widespread use of cell phones, and fast internet connection as well as availability of Wi-Fi and cable connection at the workplace has helped employees to gather and share information among the wider community, but with all its pros and cons. Nowadays, HR executives have been facing with challenges on how to address this amicably. The objective of this research is to investigate the use of social media at the workplace especially among employees of a health institution in an attempt to identify and describe what are the major concerns or issues of social media poses at the workplace. Since social media is a recent phenomenon in our country, this research will also provide an insight about social media usage at the workplace and its possible impact on the workers and the organization. The data for this research was collected from the employees of Tikur Anbessa Specialized Hospital. (TASH). With 165 respondents from the sample size of 260. Since there was no previously validated questionnaire available, a questionnaire, using a Likert scale method was developed. The questions were designed to gather information on the demographic data of respondents, social media use driving factors and possible impacts. These questions were pretested in another hospital having a similar work environment which is St.Pawlos Specialized Hospital. Based on the pretest feedback from the five respondents, the questionnaires were modified. The final questionnaires were anonymously distributed manually and collected. The responses from the collected questionnaire were manually entered and analyzed using the SPSS Ver.25 software. The results of this study show that all respondents use social media at the workplace, even though the amount of time spent on SM, the visited SM platform, the area of interest, the driving factors, etc differs from employee to employee. Most of them indicated that they spent approximately 1- 3h daily on social media at the workplace/during their working hours. The study also shows that Telegram, Facebook and YouTube are among the mostly used social media platforms in the TASH workplace. When asked about the basic driving factors or reasons for using social media at the workplace, the majority indicated that they use social media to get updates on current events, chat with their relatives, colleagues, and friends and for some, they use SM for academic and research purposes. Respondents who are in the management expressed their bigger concern on organization information security because of the uncontrolled or unmonitored nature of social media at the workplace. Even though, social media has provided workers with numerous opportunities to conduct research in their relevant fields, potential harmful outcomes can result from SM and should be monitored, especially as they relate to confidentiality of patient information. The findings also showed that the majority of social media users at the workplace indicated that SM may lead to employee poor work performance, behavior change, effect on workplace team bondage and in some cases, SM can lead to addiction problems. And therefore, most of the respondents agree that SM at the workplace should be closely monitored. In light of this, TASH and similar organizations need to develop a workplace SM policies or guideline, design different mechanisms or systems to enhance information security with keeping the balance between employee motivation and organizational interest. The study further suggested that organizations in Ethiopia need to revise their employee code of conduct, HR manuals, employee induction & training guidelines in line with the impact SM poses at the current workplace. The research has also some limitations. Due to differences among organizational settings, objectives and nature may limit the generalization of this paper across workplaces and hence similar studies in multiple locations are required. Moreover, not having a validated questionnaire also is a limitation of this study