'I'm too old for twitter' and other HR excuses

How does a group of HR professionals grapple with the changing world of social media and its impact on our profession?

This was the challenge facing us on our training day yesterday. Our intrepid trainer, Jon Ingham started regaling us with the history of digital content when a brave person asked ‘what’s a wiki?

The biggest challenge for most of my colleagues attending had been the pre-course requirement, to come with a live twitter account set up on a mobile device.

‘I don’t want everyone knowing my business’ was one comment, followed by: ‘I like to talk to people, face to face’ and ‘I don’t want to spend my evenings doing this stuff’.

It was going to be an interesting day.

Jon took us on a journey beginning with the ‘death of deference’ – how old style formal power and authority was not trusted anymore, as the power of the ‘collective’ – which now had a voice through social media, had superseded.

The impact of this on organisations and how they engage with their customers are visible. The same needs to happen within organisations, and provides new challenges for the way we ‘engage’ with our employees.

Peter Cheese, Chief Exec of the CIPD has said ‘Given all the changes in work, the workforce and workplace, most of what we do in HR is no longer fit for purpose’.

This was highlighted to me last week at the CIPD’s L&D conference when someone made the point that if a Learning Management System holds all your training info in one place that’s the wrong approach…

Certainly as a L&D professional knowing that Twitter is the top global tool for learning has focused the mind somewhat in the shift from conventional formal training to informal, social learning. The important distinction with Twitter and You-Tube however, over information repositories such as Wikipedia, is the ‘social’ aspect. We are social creatures, whether on-line or in person. Seeing who has tweeted, who is presenting the You-Tube video, that one on one connection, responding to others, is the power in social media.

According to David Rock in his book ‘Social’, we’re not just social, we’re ‘pro-social’. Re-tweeting someone’s tweet is a form of learning, ‘pro-socially’. If we get the connections right, the rest will follow.

We explored the distinction between Social Capital and Human Capital (which reminded me of the old definition of ‘synergy’ eg 2+2 = 5 when talking about the collective power of effective team working). Our work has shifted from individual tasks to collaborative by 20-50% over the last 10 years. Yet we are still performance managing individuals rather than teams.

Examining our HR processes finds that they support Human Capital rather than Social Capital, and knowing that the easiest way to create social capital is through the use of social media – and you have your eureka moment.

Jon emphasised it’s about the ‘pull’ factors rather than the ‘push’ with SM, drawing people in so they want to engage rather than pushing out content. Basically someone can get an immediate response from posting a question or problem on an organisations twitter feed, rather than searching through static content on their website to find a complaints policy.

We can get better Human Capital through Social HR.

We had an interesting discussion around organisation culture, with the question ‘Do you wait for an organisation to be more ‘social’ in its culture before you introduce workplace Social Media or do you facilitate and push it through? There are many organisations that have introduced social media technologies where they have fallen flat - basically you can use tech to advance a culture, but you can’t expect 'tech' to transform a culture.

The influence of social media on recruitment is a prime example, organisations with a clear employer brand have no need to ‘post and pray’ for professional and managerial posts. They can maximise referrals, returning colleagues, or pre-identify individuals via LinkedIn to create an external Talent Pool. The cost to hire is less, time to hire is less, and the quality of hire is greater.

The emergence of sites such as Glassdoor – a website where candidates can rate their job experiences by employer, provide a very public and immediate source of feedback for organisations who can choose to ignore them at their peril.

Performance management, however, is one area which is receiving a fundamental overhaul with the advent of social media technologies. It’s not impossible to see the influence of the popular social media tools in the new wave of performance management tools available. Instant rating by peers, traditional appraisal turned easily into a wider peer review, forgetting the complex psychometrics of the traditional 360 feedback, is leading to an experience that could feel completely different to the old-style laboured annual conversation.

The number of light-bulb moments we shared throughout the day was impressive, thankfully captured by an impressive array of tweets shared between colleagues with our hashtag for the day, #SM4HR. Thanks to Jon for an interesting, informative and inspirational day.