Extolling the virtues of social media for HR purposes

It’s probably not much of a surprise that this posting will extol the virtues of social media for HR purposes – tempered with some words of caution of course.

Clearly, social media needs to be part of any HR professional’s tool box and overall communication strategy. It certainly shouldn’t be the only means of communication, but it’s a powerful medium already being used extensively, both internally and externally. Harnessing and governing it will assure that corporate messages are accurate, consistent and targeted.

At a minimum, every organization should have a social media policy to protect itself from misuse. Too many employers have been burned by being late to the game in developing a simple yet sound policy.

Ideally, total rewards professionals will use social media to leverage the collective knowledge of the organization to drive some form of human capital ROI. The big question is how?

Achieving the highest returns on investments in human capital means attracting and engaging employees’ attention and imagination. We see social media as a natural HR play to do just that in the following areas:

• Recruiting. Tapping LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo and other networking sites is a critical step for organizational promotion to candidates, for selection of job seekers and for review of qualifications.
• Testimonials. As communication professionals, we’ve been tapping into employee success stories for years. They resonate with colleagues by sharing HR successes from the end user’s perspective. In a well-governed model, actual employee testimonials – managed through internal social media tools – can be a powerful way to drive employees to appropriate behaviors.
• Organizational competitions. Whether it’s a sales challenge pitting one division against another, or a wellness challenge seeing which group can lose the most weight, internal competitions are hot right now. Playing off of behavioral economics theory, people get engaged in local competitions that have real and personal benefit.
• Volunteering. To drive an environment of camaraderie, many organizations are allowing employees to tap social media platforms to support either small group or organization-wide volunteering opportunities. With HR’s central coordination, social media can become the conduit for like-minded collaboration efforts around external volunteering projects.
• Collaboration. Social media is certainly best at, and as defined as, deriving value from collective knowledge. No where is this more organizationally valuable than in knowledge sharing among colleagues. HR can set up the right tools, methodology and governance to allow cross-functional collaboration.
• Employee profiles. To best tap the knowledge of the collective whole, it’s critical to know the expertise that lies within. By establishing deep employee profiles on every potential contributor, those with distinct skills can be identified and accessed, even if they aren’t active social media contributors.
• Alumni networking. For both knowledge management and ongoing recruiting purposes, we’re seeing a big move to use social media to keep alums connected with the organization.

Now, some words of caution…

• Keep the social media policy basic (non-legalese) so that people will actually follow it and be clearly aware of consequences of not following it.
• Experience has shown that users will self-police online conversations, but be particularly careful to have enough filters in place that inappropriate content can quickly be pulled.
• Know that social media is not right for everyone, so key messages that develop organically may need to be repurposed into other media.
• Social media is not a one and done approach. It’s an ongoing interaction, so it’s important to constantly be plugged into the dialogue.
• It’s happening already. Your employees are communicating on Yammer, they’re sharing their thoughts about the organization on public sites, they’re creating alumni groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Monitoring these channels can help harness positive knowledge that’s shared and control the negative.

Effective employee communication is essential in meeting corporate objectives. We can help ensure the proper development of your social media strategy and tools and can help you successfully integrate it with your company’s existing communication strategy.
Ask us how.

Looking Outward to See Inside

We might be doing it all wrong.  We’ve spent years doing what we thought was right, but now we can know for sure.

HR communicators have had an “HR knows best” perspective on the ways to entice and engage employees to take action.  That could all change now. Our colleagues on the external marketing side have known for years that the best way to motivate actions is to track outreach, measure effectiveness and adjust accordingly.We can – and should – do that, too.  In many cases, the technology is right at our fingertips.

The Marketing department likely has a robust customer relationship management (CRM) tool that tracks each potential customer, their habits and the effectiveness of outreach efforts. Why not use the same tool to look inward? Why not hook it up to our portals, websites, social media, print and in-person communication efforts to see just how effective we are and how effective we can be?

HR has access to the type of information that makes marketers salivate – demographic, savings, earnings, health conditions, to name a few. Certainly, we have an ethical and legal responsibility to protect that data. Morally, though, perhaps we should be looking at ways to use certain aspects of that data to help our employees make more informed decisions about the programs we offer. Using a CRM alongside some degree of that data – depending on the degree of organizational paternalism/individualism – we can push messaging that encourages the right actions for our employees.

Applying the CRM model, we monitor the messages we send out, or post, or even hear, and measure which are having the most impact. We can also measure, to the individual, the right medium or media for those messages. Using self service, employees can augment the data by letting us know what information they need, what media they prefer and the frequency they desire.

In this way, HR can be more than just a top-down disseminator of information.  We can be a warehouse of content, a multi-channel distributor and a metrics-driven arbiter of effective internal marketing efforts.  Maybe we can even get our Marketing folks to pay for it!

We’ll dig deeper into this topic in future posts.  We’ll explore current studies of social media, behavioral economics, complex systems, marketing theory and other relevant topics that help us better understand our employees and encourage them to take the best possible actions.

Global Technology and Delivery Solutions, Buck U.S.