Sep 26, 2010

Thoughts on Social HR

I have earlier blogged about how HR can use social media to become HR 2.0 or to build talent communities, but when my twitter buddies @prem_k and @sameerpatel were discussing "social" everything including "social HR" I realised that there are more implications of social HR than I have earlier articulated.
So how is it different?
What I had blogged about earlier was how HR departments and professionals could leverage social media to achieve their goals.
But with "Social HR" I am potentially thinking a very disruptive thought.
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"

  • Recruitment: How about talent show where prospective candidates perform tasks and are voted up or down by current employees - and final selection of the finalists by the hiring managers. These tasks could be results or the process of doing the role itself. It could be text based, photographic or video based too. These folks can be pre-screened based on their interests and participation on the company's external communities. Of course some roles would be more suited to this than others.
  • Compensation & Benefits: How about a Quora like internal question and answer site that helps users to resolve each others queries on how to craft their own "cafeteria compensation" plan. And a group voting site on rewards and recognition for fellow employees.
  • HR Processes: This has been done. Dell employees use an internal platform to give ideas to improve systems and processes.
  • Employee Engagement: We all know that an internal corporate social network can leverage connections that exist between employees and also help in serendipitous discovery of new knowledge and innovation by getting people to collaborate and discover new people whom they might not ever have met face to face. Here's a short 5 slide presentation I put together to help illustrate my point
Social Employee engagement - Using social media tools for Employee Engagement and HR

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.
  • Learning & Development: Employee engagement and collaboration helps people to learn from fellow employees. 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

So are you ready for the social HR?
I thought so :-)