HR, Social Media and creating the organization of tomorrow

According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by McKinsey, social technologies stand to unlock from $900

billion to $1.3 trillion in value. Two-thirds of the value unlocked by social media rests in “improved

communications and collaboration within and across enterprises,”

Over the last few years the external facing groups of companies have embraced (enthusiastically or in

some cases- gingerly) social networks and online communities to connect with external stakeholders.

Marketing, Customer Service and PR groups in organizations have leveraged it to build an army of fans

and advocates.

However, many feel that getting an organization ready internally should be the first step to being a true

"social business". Social can scale only if employees are engaged and connected to each other and

external stakeholders.

However, the reality in most organizations is that the budget of the external facing groups is much

higher. Social there also shows more immediate benefits and benchmarking is easy (however can get

misleading)

So if there is budget available and executive sponsorship then an organization should focus on getting

internally ready and externally focused at the same time. However for the vast majority of organizations

the "social competencies" would be learned by folks in marketing, sales, PR, customer support and then

travel to the other parts of the organization.

This is not to advise HR and other people in organizations not to focus on social - far from it. But to

recognize that once top management understands the value of social media they would expect that

other groups then leverage the tools for their business ends.

However there are differences. Externally social media campaigns can be done again and again to get

across to more and more customers/fans. However when launching a social initiative internally, it would

need to be successful in a far smaller group and would need to be designed to succeed.

Often you'll hear Social Business (or Enterprise 2.0) enthusiasts say - like we said in the days of KM -

"The key to success is people, process and technology"

And then followed by the statement - "Success is dependent 80/90 percent on people"

I believe that "people" issues have a whole lot of other issues that get hidden behind that word that

companies might miss. I have mentioned "culture" in the title of the post which is itself like "people" a

composite of many other things.

Using social technologies (like internal blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, social networking etc) will not help

you to increase the employee engagement scores of your organizations.

Employee engagement is impacted by three factors:

The engagement between the person's skills, passion and purpose with the role he/she is

working in. If you have a person in the wrong job, no matter what you do, the person's

engagement level is unlikely to go up.

The relationship between the manager and the person - and the team the person works with.

Organizational culture

Social tools can help a person do his/her work faster by making discovery of information and experts

faster. However if any of the above three factors cause disengagement, it's unlikely that the employee

would be using social tools - unless the tool is embedded in the way of work. As in, it auto updates

details and updates when the employee updates a business record. These kind of "social glue"

technologies is still early stage.

Factors that can help drive adoption of social technologies by employees

Vision : Leaders and employees need to know why social technologies are being deployed and

how do they link to the existing vision of the company.

Role Modeling: Leaders need to exemplify the sharing and collaboration behavior on social tools

that they expect employees to display.

Rewards and Recognition: Social tools have to be in the "flow of work" - but traditional reward

systems that do not recognize and reward new behaviors would be a hindrance to widespread

adoption.

Linkage with goals: The team focusing on implementation needs to learn with each and every

group in the organization to map how social technologies can help them achieve their goals - in

a faster and better way. Without articulating that, the support of crucial group leaders and

middle managers would be a pipedream.

Finding and empowering employee advocates: Data shows that according to various studies that

in most large workplaces the majority of the employees are not engaged or disengaged.

Expecting them to adopt new tools without being clear of future value is going to be difficult at

best. Organizations must map the actively engaged employees who are active creators and

sharers of content and showcase how the platforms have helped them achieve their goals.

Organizational values: These are the big ways in which shape the behavior of employees. Is

dissent encouraged? What happens when people make mistakes? Can leaders be questioned

and criticised openly? How do they respond to such questions? These are the "norms of

behavior" which operate on the ground. Answers to such questions determine whether social,

openness and transparency would thrive in the organization.

Education and Training: Even though social tools seem to be intuitive to use – but the purpose

and how of using would need to be communicated

Companies who expect such employees will get engaged and involved in sharing and participation need

to address the root causes of disengagement and then expecting the tools to increase engagement.

While companies come to terms with employee usage of social media and HR departments start

working on “regulating” social media usage and come up with “policies” – I think they are missing one

key point – leveraging social tools to make HR itself a social activity.

In a certain way, HR is ripe for social disruption. It impacts external perception (employer branding) and

internal employee engagement unlike any other part of the organization save the CEO

Let’s start with policies themselves. Using a social tool which leverages crowdsourcing ideas from

employees can help HR in co-creating processes and policies – and raising acceptability when they are

finally rolled out. Dell’s EmployeeStorm is a great example by which employees give ideas on everything

in the company.

Recruitment – Since it’s an external facing part of HR the Recruiting teams have been quick to

leverage social media to “Broadcast” vacancies and several applications. However the next level

would be actively creating and nurturing communities of practice shaped around skills where

hiring managers can gauge level of skills of people and also develop them

Learning: Social technology can make learning more of a continuous process than the 2-3 day

event it currently is. These tools can also be used by trainers to add more to the classroom and

create a community of learners who can continue to share experiences and be a support group

as they implement learnings in their workplace. Marcia Conner’s book “The New Social

Learning” shows how various firms are using tools to augment employee training.

Employee communication is often the most ignored aspect of HR initiatives without too much

thought or resources being dedicated to it. HR people often forget that communication is a two

way process. In my view it is critically important to listen to what employees are saying, and that

is an aspect that is usually not done in organizations on a regular basis, apart from an annual or

semi annual satisfaction surveys. Communication is the bedrock on which the success of change

initiatives depend.

More and more listening to employees. I foresee large organizations large organizations will

soon start analyzing data on which employees are thought leaders, experts and influential

amongst the workforce (like marketing does for external customers) and try and build them as

employee advocates.

Recognition : Companies like Rypple, Globoforce have started the concept of social peer

recognition and it can be a powerful factor to excite employees than traditional reward and

recognition.

Knowledge Sharing: Forget the idea of databases acting as “repositories” of knowledge, internal

social networks can capture employees work activity as social intranets connect deeper into

business applications – and team members can follow what others are doing on their activity

streams. Newer tools like Opzi and MindQuilt can also emerge as a enterprise version of Quora,

the popular Q&A site.

As more and more younger workforce enter organizations, their expectations shaped by consumer

social applications like facebook, twitter and blogging, they would want access to similar tools within the

workforce

The next step would be mobile. For example many internal networks are already available as a mobile

apps. This would be a key aspect for organizations with a large sales force who are distributed and need

constant communication.

Communication would lead to collaboration – as more and more employees connect and communicate

with each other, they would change work processes itself, making things work faster better and

changing processes. Organizations have to continue being open and continue the trusting processes

earlier.

Can employees and HR professionals and management folks together work together using social media -

to do work that was only done by HR people?

Let's think about the aspects of HR work and what can be made "social"

The skills needed for HR people to become savvy socially

To manage online communities – HR people would need to become community managers. Community

managers are online facilitators who understand how people connect and share online and understand

what kind of discussions and content gets people to open up and share.

Community management is a subset of roles incorporate various disciplines - and can best be described

as Technopologists - a combination of marketing (or recruiting/HR), technologist and social

anthropologist.

The focus of the online Community Managers would be to bring in members leveraging the weak ties

between people - and providing content around the social object of the community - so that they help

members develop strong ties.

Communities and Learning Talent communities are where people go to connect with fellow professionals and learn. Hence they are

more “communities of practice” than anything else.

Talent communities are places one goes to find experts and also to build their own personal career

brand.

Companies must engage in talent communities by letting their internal experts connect with and build

their own networks.

The best Talent Community Facilitator would be an expert in the roles – not necessarily a recruiter.

The Talent community is a place to discuss, solve other's problems, share war stories and visions of the

future, to look at where the field is headed and what are the skills needed tomorrow.

The focus on jobs/recruiting has to be secondary to the above.

The skills a Talent Community Facilitator would be a combination of facilitation, teaching, guiding,

triggering conversations, mapping the skills of community members and of course skills in the domain of

the community.

How to Implementation an Internal Social Network

Create a Social Media Policy – This is a comprehensive document that spells out in detail the behavior

expected from the people with access to the enterprise collaboration network. This would include the

ways they can use access to the software and what kind of information they should share and also the

kind of confidential information they should not share. It would also clarify that they have to be civil in

their online discussions.

Social Network Needs Survey – Conduct a survey of the employees who to find the following:

The challenges they face in information sharing and accessing expertise

The level of openness in the organization

Their comfort with using social tools to share information and engage with others

The challenges in keeping track of changes to information and version control

The challenges of managing email overload

The familiarity of colleagues who are not in their immediate team

Leadership Readiness Survey – Identify areas in which the leadership can support the internal network.

This survey would be administered to the department heads and other leaders identified. The survey

would identify the following:

1. The goal what they want from this implementation.

2. The challenges they have in communicating with the employees.

3. Their own readiness to be role models in implementation and usage of the tool.

Survey Finding

The focus would be on the following:

1. The culture and processes that support the enterprise collaboration software

2. The needs of the organization where information sharing will have the immediate and most impact.

3. The strategy and planning for the implementation of the tool.

Implementation and Set-Up

Decide on:

Content to be prefilled on the software

Access Controls

Department Creation

Project Creation

People who would have administrative controls

The modules in the tools that need to be activated and which ones do not need to be. Who will have

access to which content and module would also need to be decided. Other processes which need to be

moved to the tool would also need to be decided and users trained on how to use the social technology

to do that process.

2. Ongoing Community cum Engagement Management

Choosing Community Managers and training them on community management is critical to adoption of

the internal network. Designing communication plan (like a contest, internal campaign) before launch so

that people are excited when it launches and sign up.

Launch internal social network by implementation of the designed Communication plan.

Use social recognition to incentivize desired sharing behaviors

Design a content plan for senior executives to share content like blogs, photos, updates on the

enterprise network.

The focus and objectives of these would be: Share company updates

Suggested Content Plan

1. Company Updates

2. Client wins

3. Rewards & Recognition.

4. Ideas/Suggestion

5. Press Coverage of leadership/Company

Assess: On going assessment of employee engagement – and driving engagement by triggering

conversations on a regular basis.

Outcomes: Survey of users after 6 months to find out if the network is helping them do their work better

and faster. Do they:

Know more about colleagues

Know more about their company

Join and engage in internal communities

Other outcomes could be:

1. Metrics like how much time has come down to turn around a document.

2. Tracking projects and assigning tasks are done on the network and not on emails

3. People create interest based communities on their own and share interesting content on them.

4. Employees give each other recognition and therefore raise motivation and engagement.

Implementing external online communities Before implementing external communities organizations should conduct a “listening exercise” using

third party tools (simple to complicated, free to paid all available) and find out if there are any

conversations about it and if there are, what is the tonality of that conversation.

Once a listening exercise has been conducted a purpose of external communities has to be articulated,

why, which target group, and which channel. After that what content and conversations need to be

created and therefore roles assigned to people either internally or to an outsourced partner. An

escalation and response plan also needs to be in place, if questions and doubts are articulated.

In conclusion In conclusion, social media can be used in a variety of ways, and it is not a question of if but when, all

companies would need to respond and react to it. The ones that make the initial moves will be the

winners over the laggards. HR has a critical role to play and also one of the critical functions that would

be impacted by business being social. To be relevant HR needs to build its own capability in social as well

as facilitate the change that organizations will go through.