News flash: People waste time at work. According to salary.com the average worker wastes 2.09 hours in a typical day, nearly half of it surfing the Internet. Believe it or not, Wisconsin ranks No. 4 in the country for most time wasted. So the desire to combat lost productivity by blocking Facebook access for your employees is completely understandable. But it’s also shortsighted.

For starters, the problem isn’t Facebook. Wasting time at work is as old as the caveman who sat around drawing pictures in the mud with a stick while everyone else was busy hunting and gathering. During the pre-Internet era (shortly after the caveman era), I worked at an advertising agency with a guy who spent at least three hours of every day on the phone chatting with his friends.

Think about how much time your colleagues spend in “water cooler” discussions about reality TV or the big game. The outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that the three biggest online wastes of workplace productivity in 2008 were fantasy sports, eBay, and poker Web sites. Facebook didn’t even make the cut. (From August 2008 to September 2009, however, its users tripled.) The point being that blocking Facebook won’t stop employees from wasting time.

But there’s no question that embracing social media can benefit your company, especially if you encourage employee involvement.

Increasingly, companies “get” that — or at least the first part of it. Audi, Disney, Coca-Cola, CNN and many others have established highly successful Facebook presences. Building a community and making customers feel like insiders can translate into sales.

But as columnist Traci Armstrong wrote recently in Advertising Age, many companies establish pages on Facebook, but block their employees from accessing that site at work.

There are a number of good arguments for giving them access. As Armstrong points out in her column, Facebook can contribute to camaraderie and on-the-job training. It’s a tool for brand evangelism and for research and inspiration. I got the idea for this column after Armstrong, one of my Facebook friends, posted her Ad Age article on her page.

I’ll talk more about using Facebook in a few weeks. Meanwhile, keep an open mind about social media. An Australian study recently determined that workers who used the Internet for personal reasons were about 9 percent more productive than those who didn’t. Turns out social media might not be the end of worker productivity after all.