So, is it justified to ‘live it up’ at work because one is mostly at work? Is it alright to make one’s social phone calls from work or, these days, complete one’s social obligations by constantly checking and responding to the goings on in their friends’ lives on Facebook or IM? Or, for that matter, intersperse one’s work day with regular reads of RSS feeds?

I don’t think so.

I believe that a work place is for making your contribution towards your organisation’s business and productivity, and reading for self-development or relaxation is best kept for hours when you ought to be relaxing. With myriad avenues for social networking through the Net, there is a higher need for us to exercise self-regulation rather than have the HR and IT devote their resources into analysing employee usage of IM or entertainment sites from work. I also believe that regular self-development is essential and employees must be encouraged to leave their work place early enough to read, blog, tweet and generally do what they must to refuel for the next day. And, if employees find their supervisor’s watching over (MBWA) demeaning, they must exercise self-regulation and, while at work, use social networking to advance their company’s interests.

Here’s some more from Steve Tobak and his commenters on the subject.

I’m a big fan of many about.com sites, and find that its guides do an excellent job of updating their readers of goings on in their subject area as well as offering primers to understand those areas. The site offers a mind boggling range of subjects to delve into and all one has to do is to subscribe to a sub-site newsletter to be regularly informed of that subject.

During my 2½ years of studying Human Resources Management, and even more after that, I’ve been reading through the posts of their HR Guide Susan M. Heathfield on everything HR, and found them extremely useful in clearing my head on employer ethics, organization processes, HR policies, leadership qualities among many other concerns. Very importantly, she provides a good repository of sample policy documents that would give more than just a starting point to HR professionals thinking through those functions.

A recent post of her’s emphasises the need for creating a personal vision statement to direct one’s actions. She has been thoughtful in sharing her own vision statement and offered a list of exploratory questions that we should ask ourselves for crafting our own. Of course, during the HRM course, I understood the importance of creating a vision or mission statement to guide an organisation’s processes and people, but I never considered the need to carry out an internal assessment to formulate my own. Well, I’m going to change that now as I’ve written down her questions to mull over my interests, strengths and weaknesses to know myself some more and seek guidance from that assessment.

Hope my readers would feel inspired to construct their own vision statements too.