Individual essay vũ đức trung AEn T321WSB 7 21001387

In today's technology era, the social media wave has made huge changes in every aspect of our life.
This new type of virtual community allows users to exceed significant limits that traditional social
outlets couldn't and, thus, improve the performance of our daily tasks. Specifically, at the workplace,
social media can enhance the working productivity of the employees according to its connectivity and
multifunctionality.

The connectivity of social media is the initial beneficial feature of social media which simplifies taskaccomplishing and creates virtual connections between employees. Koufie (2015) implied that social
media will support employees and businesses with not only markets of customers but also improve and
tighten healthy relationships with clients. Due to practical research done by Dean (2021) on social
media usage, the number of social media users has rocketed massively from just 970 million in 2010 to
4.48 billion (56% of the world population) in July 2021. Moreover, the average time a user spends
surfing social media is 2 hours 24 minutes and this number spreads over countries and continents.
Technically, with limitless reach, social media is the best instrument for employees and businesses to
enter both national and international potential customer pools with ease. Additionally, working chains
can be more connective when they can make use of social media, taking Vietnamese electricity
distributors as an example. Before the establishment of social media, the incident notification center
has to use ordinary phone calls to contact engineers for error notifications which results in expensive
bills and decreases in the company's profit. However, after the application of social media, the fee is
eliminated and errors can be solved instantly as the center can direct locations of the electrical faults to
engineers through the location share feature of social media.


Consequently, the usage of social media during work time may cause hidden drawbacks to the
productivity of employees. Due to Roy (2019), a survey conducted by Workfront shows that knowledge
workers are distracted by email, instant messages, and other digital distractions approximately 14 times
per day on average. Another survey from Adobe indicated that an employee spends almost 3 hours per
day trying to race work email and have communication tools checked every 6 minutes. Social media
seem to bring about many advantages to workers and businesses but they also distract them from
getting the work done. Hung (cited in Nida, 2020) also agree with Roy that technostress created by
social media may influence the performance of a worker and decrease organizational commitment.
However, the explanation for this attitude of humans is that people seem to have a natural biochemical

need for pleasure (visiting Facebook or Instagram to see what is everyone up to) or the fear of missing
important messages (Roy,2020). He suggested that instead of removing social media at workplaces,
shifting the way workers use it is way more beneficial. The Podoromo technique (25 minutes of
working and relaxing for 5 minutes) is recommended because it will ease the tension while working
and help employees to be more concentrated on their tasks. Hensel (2010) also implied in his
workpiece that social media is crucial for businesses in general and employees in specific because
allows users to obtain and share data immediately, thus, improve the working outcome. In conclusion,
the connectivity of social media is undeniably beneficial for corporations and if employees have a
cognitive awareness of its downside, social media can be a powerful tool to widen their relationships
and gain profits.

Besides the connectivity of social media, its multifunctionality should not be ignored. The ability of
social media assisting workers is limitless so some outstanding features have been listed out by the
professionals. Initially, according to Hensel (2010), social media empower users to share content,


information, Blog and other data with ease, and Twiter (a famous social media platform) has become
well-known for its ability to break the news before the news even being forecasted by traditional media
outlets. This allows corporations to gather real-time data and come up with instant plans to deal with
the fluctuation of the market price and boost income. Sharing information rapidly can also enhance
customer services as employees can keep up with the community's needs and provide appropriate
strategies of marketing without facial contact with clients. Secondly, Savage (cited in Hensel, 2010)
indicated that with the massive volume of data and searching engines supplied by social media,
collecting, analyzing, and searching processes will be much faster and easier than before and, thus,
enhance the productivity of employees. Lastly, the Business site (2021) has mentioned a whole new
unit existing in social media is the recruiting and applying market. According to this site, instead of
months and years of applying cv for a job, people can now send directly their cv to numerous
companies by using websites like Linkedln. This saves time and interviewers can recruit skilled staff
for the company more effectively than formal interviewing processes. In brief conclusion, it is
astonishing that social media can handle a huge workload that used to take a lot of stages,

consequently, create unnecessary waste of money and human resources.

Nevertheless, the more functional social media is, the longer the time will the employees expose to so
this will generate some bad effects on human mental health. Henry Ford Health System (2018) said that
a long period exposing to social media will decrease social facial communication and result in
psychological issues such as the feeling of loneliness, anxiety, or even depression. Yu (2018) had
another perception on this topic is that although using media at the workplace can be beneficial to
employees' performance, the overuse of it may cause typical experiences like information overload,
technology overload and this will lead to social media fatigue. On the contrary, Xu (2016) had an


opposing viewpoint with Henry Ford Health System. He stated that social media played a crucial role
in the improvement of mental health. Due to its publicity, broad reach, usability, and immediacy, people
now can acquire knowledge and information about health and seek professional awareness about
specific health issues. Technically, groups and pages have been built to allow patients to anonymously
share their health status with doctors and have the advice in exchange so mental disorders created by
using social media are not remaining as a big problem in our society. Islam (2021) explained that
people with lower multitasking computer self-efficacy are likely to experience social media fatigue,
they have a lesser belief in their ability and have to use more cognitive resources to fulfill the task's
requirement. People should enhance their ability, confidence, knowledge to avoid the effect of
information overwhelming and technostress, in that event, they can improve their working
performance. In short, the multitasking of social media is important for enhancing the working
efficiency of employees but they have to keep in mind that if they are too reliant on social media,
consequences can be tremendous.

In conclusion, with connectivity and multifunctionality, social media can truly increase the working
efficiency of workers in businesses. It not only helps the employees to reach potential customer
markets but also simplifies the process of finishing tasks and gathering data for businesses. After all,
people should raise cognitive awareness while using social media to avoid bad influences on mental
health and get carried away by the astonishment of social media.

Reference list


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