November 12th, 2009
Synchronicity?
At the exact moment in time that business desperately needs what only human resources can do, there is a big noisy pile of new tools available almost custom designed for the work of human resources. Human resource leaders can bring a lot of additional firepower to bear on the work they are doing, play a leadership role by bringing Web 2.0 understanding and practice into the organization and put a stake in the ground as a true source of innovation.
I am trying to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall in the hopes that one or two will stick for you. I started with these nine, added another eleven and today I throw some more ideas into the mix. Let me know what you think…and let me know if you have any ideas or examples of your own that you would like to share.
21. Study hard. Continue reading, observing and listening to those immersed in Web 2.0 tools, trends and technology. Here are some perspectives that I value and I try to hit everyday (in no particular order):
22. Develop an interactive online community for the families of your employees. A great way to keep them connected to the organization, connect them to each other and build community.
23. Use your people. Use them, use them, use them. Equip them and encourage them to carry your brand into the world. Looking through a Jennifer Mclure slidedeck, I came across this insight from the The Corporate Leadership Council:
“We have found that current employees are the most widely used and are by far the most trusted source of information about organizations for candidates.”
Invest in a couple of Flip cameras and sponsor a quarterly contest for the best 45 second video about Why I Love My Work, or Why I Work Here. Let employees vote on the videos and provide some kind of reward to the winner. And them make sure that every single employee gets that video clip and is encouraged to share it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other places that they are active.
24. Do away with your absurd print directory and make sure that all of your employees use LinkedIn. Make setting up a complete profile, and knowing how to use LinkedIn part of the on-boarding process. Make sure that you have a LinkedIn group for your organization and use the sub-groups.
25. Get in the habit of asking your employees what social media/social networking tools they use, how they use them and why they use them. Do not ask executives who are notoriously disconnected from reality, ask employees from a variety of role and levels of experience.
26. Build a Share the Skills team to help spread Web 2.0 knowledge, ideas, examples and resources across the organization. Try to get one member from each department / team / function to get together once a month for some down and dirty Web 2.0 knowledge that they can take back to their teams.
27. Host or sponsor a Tweetup (could be specifically for employees or could be open to public) and use this as an opportunity to promote your brand and to collect success stories from people about how they have used Twitter to find people, information, resources, etc.
28. Get your team signed your team up on Foursquare, Yammer and Socialcast and experiment. Experiment with how you might use it and how others in your organization might use it, so that you will be prepared to educate others on these tools from a position of experience.
29. Set the goal of having all of your learning and development materials (text, audio, video, etc.) available for on demand download to individual employee mobile devices.
Be good to each other.
I opine that to get the home loans from creditors you should have a good reason. But, once I’ve received a bank loan, because I wanted to buy a house.