Social Media and Employee Empowerment

After reading the amazing article “People are not your greatest assets”, I was wondering if we can ever think on this tagline because we have always widely accepted that the employees are the greatest assets of any business or organisation. For any organisation to grow its employees are at the core of any business strategy, however, now I am beginning to have inclination on the other side of the story. Do we really care about these employees who we always say that this is my strength?

I will go by the views of the authors of “People are not your greatest assets” that what really is important is how you ‘EMPOWER’ your employees rather than just saying these are my assets. It really matters how you treat them and give them the real freedom to innovate and express themselves inside the organisation. ‘Social Media’ is the best way of empowering our greatest assets.

What really is happening in the case of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube? It is bringing people on the same platform, making relationships and sharing knowledge. Same is the case with Social Network inside the organisation. It brings collaboration into the organisation and empowers the employee.

Some of the advantages that a social media gives to the organisation are:

Building Relationships: With the social media, employees from different geographies and different locations can network together for the same goal.

Collective Knowledge: Talent pool can work together for a common vision and accumulate a vast knowledge.

Real Time Solution: With different minds working for a common solution will help in faster resolution to a problem and help in finding the specific expertise.

Common Interest: People with the same passion and interest can work together and ultimately can leverage the network built through social media.

We should work towards the empowerment of our employees through this mass collaboration which will help us to achieve our strategic objectives. 

Resume : A Passè

Soon it would be the day when the employers would be asking the prospective candidates to share their LinkedIn profiles and not their Resume’s. Today, many organisations have already started asking the candidates to send their LinkedIn profiles.

There are many advantages if the employers ask for LinkedIn profile. It helps the organisations to search for the candidates’ profile instantaneously. They can track the activity of the candidate on the LinkedIn network. This helps the employer to gauge candidates’ pro activeness and willingness to be active outside the work boundaries.

Moreover, the recommendations feature of the LinkedIn also helps the employer to get the readymade reference check.  It helps the organisation to get the true picture of the prospective candidate long before the candidate has been hired. Through the recommendations the employer also gets to understand the type and quality of work the candidate is doing in the present organisation.

Let’s gear up for this change in the world of Talent Acquisition and also the candidates should make themselves available and be ready.

Social Media: A new training tool at the workplace

Social media, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, is gaining popularity among the employees especially the generation Y and generation Z who are now entering the workforce. This is impacting the learning and development tools being adopted by the organisations, forcing the organisations to have a proper social media policy in the workplace and also educating the workforce about the do’s and don’ts of the proper usage of the social media at the workplace.

It is an enhancement to the traditional learning processes at the organisations. What it used to maybe a full day dedicated for training, wherein, a trainer would be called for giving specialised lectures on a particular topic evolved into e-learning. The advent of IT impacted a lot the way learning was done in the organisations. E-learning revolutionized the skills addition for the employees and it also cut down the costs involved in the training with the availability of training software at a comparatively reduced price rather than arranging the training programs again and again.

Chat? Text? Status Update? Blog? Tweet? The new in-thing for the employees. The organisations are exploring ways to create new social media strategy for their businesses. There is a large Corporation with its new Social Media Guidelines. As per Digital Strategist at this MNC, the social media policies does not necessary means that the employees will just understand the policies and incorporate them in their daily work life. However, it is to train the employees to use them effectively and efficiently to reach towards the organisation’s business goals and also to participate in the social media.

As per the latest report from Awareness, Inc. more than 75% of the employees are now using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for businesses purposes, which is up from 15 percent in 2007. Informal learning is becoming a key part of learning and development in the organisations.

Now the employees can share the problem within the company on an internal sharing website and multiple minds can be put to work and a more optimum solution can be found to the problem.  The employees can look into as what was the diagnosis to a similar problem and take help from that. This is learning without borders in a global environment. One such example of this learning environment is a database at one of the largest corporations which consists of over 15000 articles from employees defining, collaborating and documenting their part of the organisation workspace.

Some upcoming social media programs are like ‘Tweet like you mean it’, ‘Importance of Brand equity in social media’ and ‘Mobile marketing’. With increased competitiveness and dynamic business environment, the organisations are compelled towards creating a dynamic learning mindset. Within no time there would soon be ‘Chief Learning Officer’ who would put emphasis on rapid, collaborative and self directed learning. The new social learning can help people to become more informed, gain a wider perspective and to be able to make better decisions by engaging with others.    

Reference: : http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/02/intels_social_media_employee_t.html

Apps and Us

Are we ready to take the ride on the various apps that are being used by the new generation?

There are number of apps available for free download for the Android, iPhone or Blackberry users. Android with over 130,000 apps is becoming very popular with the new recruits entering the organisation. The question that arises today is that are We, the organisations, leveraging on these mobile applications which are becoming the new fad among the Gen Y people.

Recently one of the largest Food and Nutrition Company of the world launched an android app that targets the new recruits. The app is freely available for download and explains the values and culture of the organisation. The app also has links to the Youtube videos which help in creating and establishing the organisation brand.

Through these apps we can propagate the best practices of our organisation that will help us in attracting the best talent. In order to make ourselves as an employer of choice we need to enter the mobile software market. The reason is that the new generation frequently uses these apps to find the right career opportunity. It will also help us in finding the right candidate if we post our job requirements via such apps.

Organisations should make a strategy to use these increasingly popular apps to be included in their recruitment and branding strategies. In the near future the mobile market would be the place where all the job posting and search will be done. To become the leader in this market, organisations should start focussing and also developing applications that will help in employer branding.