With a rising tide of news reports about employers banning their employees from the site, and mounting fears about the effect on the nation's productivity, the TUC has now issued its own guidelines for employers and for employees.

These contain eminently sensible advice, not the least of which is to tell employers that they should have clear and consistent policies about what they expect of people. Nor do they shirk from warning keyboard-happy employees that there are limits to the time and energy they can put into maintaining their social lives from their desk.

But while thinking about this very blog post this morning, all attempts to log on to Facebook (strictly for the purposes of work-related research) came to naught.

In fact, the repeated time-outs kept me out of the site for nearly an hour. Surely the site couldn't be groaning under the weight of HR departments checking out what everyone's doing instead of work. Doesn't that also constitute Facebook-related time-wasting?

Before the Facebook panic gets entirely out of hand, it is worth keeping in mind that this is just one of many websites where people may while away part of the working day. And, indeed, that most of us are quite capable of time wasting even without access to the internet. Ban Facebook and you may as well insist on water coolers and kettles being removed from offices all over the country.

We will shortly be publishing on XpertHR (subscription required) the latest in a long-running series of IRS surveys about email and internet policies. This will show that while most employers do, indeed, have a bit of a problem with people spending too long online, most of the issues they have to cope with are relatively minor.

Furthermore, only a fairly small minority have had to deal problem employees posting inappropriate material to a website of any sort.

The most common advice given by the HR practitioners we spoke to is:

get a clear policy dealing with all things web related; make sure HR is in the driving seat (leave it to IT and your policy will revolve around what is technically possible, not what is desirable); communicate the policy clearly; implement it with a dose of common sense; and keep the policy up to date.

All of which sounds eminently sensible. Oh, and if you have time to spare, you can always log on to Facebook and give me a poke (so to speak).