Have you got Sunday Night, Monday Morning Syndrome?

There's a lot of chatter about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and, let's face it, whilst most companies are still trying to get their heads around some of the challenges this presents, most people are simply getting on with it and bringing their own devices because it's often the most effective way to work.

But what can be done for those who are genuinely deskbound and limited to their corporate systems and platforms.  These are the people who suffer from "Sunday Night, Monday Morning" syndrome. At the weekend, they'll be playing collaborative games on the PS4, watching and uploading videos to YouTube, asking and answering questions from their networks in Jelly, chatting with friends in a Google Hangout and using any number of apps on their smartphones or tablets. Come Monday morning and they are waiting 20 minutes for a dusty corporate PC to fire up and, when it does, all of those slickly designed networks and apps are quite often blocked.

So where, does such a worker look for help? Well, let's hope that their company has rolled out an enterprise social network such as Yammer, or has some sort of knowledge management platform. However, quite often, those very networks which people use for personal time and leisure at the weekend are just as effective when applied to the world of work.  

Just think of how many 'how to' videos exist in Vimeo and YouTube, or how many people have asked and answered similar questions to yours in Quora. Sure, you aren't about to ask your Facebook friends about commercially sensitive projects right there on your wall, but you just might want to inbox a friend who works with a particular technology or company and ask for a piece of advice, mightn't you?

So, for those companies which still block social media and similar sites, just think about the extended networks of all of your employees and consider how they might be better used to your advantage if they could be accessed from the corporate desktop.  

You might not be able to stop people Bringing their Own Devices. Maybe you ought not to prevent them Bringing their Own Networks too.

Photo credit:  Thomas Stromberg