Last month, I wrote an article about how HR professionals need to incorporate technology and its benefits into their strategy in order to advance their own performance. Looking ahead to 2015, the incessant growth of new technology and the unstoppable rise of social media will remain the key trend that will shape the future of HR.
It is obvious that since its adoption, social media have completely changed many organisational structures and hierarchies as well as job titles. However, when used wisely, technology can definitely be a boon to organisational efficiency, help improve engagement and lead to deeper insights through its innovative tools and analytical components.
Jeanne Meister, the famous writer on the future workplace, has predicted a new phase that she calls “the consumerisation of HR”, wherein employees will not only demand to bring their own devices to work, but will want to use these mobile devices to change the way they work with their colleagues, converse with their managers and communicate with the HR department. The reality is, I think we have all seen this happening in our workplaces already.
Generally speaking, people now rely on technology and the use of Big Data to transform the way they carry out their work, so what really matters now is how HR helps make these tools available to support employees in that effort. Organisations for the past few years have been working in earnest to integrate social technologies into HR practices, e.g. recruitment, development and engagement. In 2015, social integration will be no less critical.
While most organisations are embracing social media as an effective tool for external communications, there remains scepticism around its internal use. In fact, what social media can do is way more than just announcing vacancies, depicting the history of the company or communicating what’s new from the organisation, i.e. simply broadcasting information of varying relevance to audiences. Used effectively, it can also help an organisation gain enhanced insights into employees, improve staff engagement, produce better capability development as well as increase effective recruitment. Moreover, if the organisation is to fully integrate social technologies, they can completely drive the democratisation of work.
The main question in this article is: have you and your organisation tapped the full extent of social media’s capability or have you just underappreciated its values?
In detail, social media can help gauge employees’ attitudes toward the organisation. This information can later be converted into strategic recommendations to help fine-tune an employee engagement plan as well as recruitment activity.
Also, through social media — a rich user experience enabling a “whenever and wherever” type of communication —employees can be brought deeper into organisational discussions and staff at all levels can then communicate much faster with fewer levels of hierarchy. There will be consistent messages across departments, thus building better engagement directly between the top executive levels and the officer levels.
What’s more, the use of blogs or any online social media can help to attract and retain talent as they can help establish an attractive employer brand and culture that attracts Gen Y, Gen Z or any multigenerational talents. This approach to recruitment will allow organisations to identify, research and engage directly with the potential candidates even before they have applied for the role or even considered changing positions; thus, many job applicants are found and evaluated by their merits and contributors online rather than by how well they sell themselves during the interview.
Another vital advantage of social media is capability development. As I’ve mentioned several times already, traditional classroom training is no longer effective as it cannot produce capable employees fast enough for today’s and tomorrow’s jobs; consequently, learning has been pushed outside of the classroom or has been “flipped”, with students becoming the focal point of the learning process instead of the teacher. Most importantly, learning will become social and can happen anywhere as well as anytime through technology. Given the fact that social media has revolutionised how we live nowadays, HR can assist people by making it far easier to consult with experts, collaborate with peers and learn both from and with their own colleagues.
Above are just a few examples of how HR professionals can benefit from adopting social media into their practices. My point, however, is to emphasise the implication of social media for HR professionals: first and foremost, you need to help build organisational cultures that support such work, including incentives and processes fostering knowledge sharing, innovation and engagement to fully benefit from the advanced technology. In other words, organisations and HR professionals need to keep pace with the way people live their lives nowadays to be able to reap the benefits there are to offer.
In sum, I am certain that social media are here to stay in the long run, so what we all need to do is adapt ourselves, be ready for the digital age, transform our work accordingly and make the most of its benefits — be they to collaborate, innovate or learn.
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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand’s leading Organisational and People Development Consultancy. For more information, write an e-mail to arinya_t@apm.co.th or