Which are the Indian IT Brands most mentioned in Social Media?

I blogged about this report earlier, and so the time has come to share the full report with you.

To analyse the conversations and mentions of an Employment Brand on the social web we looked at them in these ways:

• What are the work and HR related conversations that people are having? These would be linked to an employee’s personal work or a prospective employee’s perception of work in the organization.
• What are people mentioning about the Organizational Culture?
• What are people mentioning about the Leadership/Leader of a firm
• What are the news items around deals, results that are being mentioned and referenced on the social web?

Some highlights:

Analysis of Conversations related to Human Resource issues

• TCS HR issues were mentioned the most followed by Infosys
• Negative mentions in this category were most for Infosys

Organizational Culture issues are a key component of discussions

• Culture gets defined externally by various organizational activities from CSR to Sports
• Such activities are mentioned in an overwhelming positive tone on the social web

TCS and Wipro led the conversations when it came to news - The nature of news determines the tone with news about salary increases being cheered by the online crowd.

Social Businesses: 2020 Social's report on IT Brands Mentions on Social Media sites in March

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

Insights

1. There is a lot of discussion about IT firms related to work and HR related subjects .
2. There is little or no engagement that the organizations are taking to connect with influencers and to drive the conversations
3. Whatever the representation these firms have on the social web , is primarily driven by corporate communications
4. We believe that HR and Recruitment groups who own the perception of the Employment Brand must engage with the conversations
5. These conversations should be linked to an online platform where people can connect with subject matter experts and recruiters and to get to know first hand information about the firm.

Arun of Trak.in shared a very good round-up of the report on his blog. Go ahead and read his full analysis there.

What motivates us?

On twitter @beastoftraal brought this video to my notice. This was based on @DanielPink's thoughts (which is now in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us) which I have blogged about earlier, but the video is great and deserves to be posted and shared as much as possible!

Thoughts on growing trend of HR Outsourcing in India

Times Ascent recently had a write up on the growing trend of Human Resources Outsourcing (which is something more than just temping) which is catching on in India with firms like XecuteHR , HuSys and PeopleStrong getting bigger and bigger projects and not just from the Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises sector.

Here is the article.

HRO - growing popular each day
by Monarose Sheila Pereira


The concept of human resource outsourcing is growing popular with each passing day. However, there are disadvantages to this concept too along with the numerous advantages, say experts.

Human Resource is now the golden career option. Companies are realizing the importance of hiring, training and retaining their employees, therefore giving tremendous importance to the HR Portfolio. HR outsourcing has been picking up in a big way too. Teams of highly experienced professionals provide clients with customised HR solutions which range from short-term based solutions, to an on-going HR relationship with the client. However there are advantages and disadvantages to HR consultancy.

According to Consultant Gautam Ghosh, the advantages of HR Outsourcing are of different types - because different types of HR work can be outsourced. “Payroll Outsourcing helps freeing up HR and Finance people from doing operational work and to instead focus on high end work. C&B Survey outsourcing is the norm because competitors are comfortable sharing information with a third party and not with organisations directly. Third party recruiters and Executive Search Consultants have huge databases that internal recruiters rarely posses. Training outsourcing, specially for high end training means using the high cost resources only when needed and not spending a salary or management time for trainers on the time. Coaching outsourcing is critical because often employees need to share information that they would not be comfortable sharing with an internal employee,” he expresses.

Consultant Trevor Ferandes believes that in order to become more responsive to the needs of the business, HR must increase its strategic capability, or pursue alternative models that will free resources to support business strategy. “Delivering an integrated and compliant HR service is highly complex. HR commonly scores poorly with the business, since its focus has traditionally been on transactional and administrative processes. In most cases, building a world class HR function is not a core competency or strategic priority for most organisations. Outsourcing gives them access to world class skills and allows them to focus on what they do best – product and service innovation,” he says.

HR can deliver the right mix of core and non-core HR services efficiently and effectively. By allowing the organisation to keep in-house what it does well and outsource what it does not, the outsourcing option facilitates access to proven ideas and solutions and thereby increases performance through disciplined use of standard processes and solutions. This helps maintaining the HR focus on value-added activities in sync with the organisation's requirements.

However, besides the advantages, there are disadvantages to HR outsourcing too. Ghosh informs, ”The disadvantages of HR outsourcing is that it forces HR department to rethink its core role, and give up the earlier comfort of being ‘administrative expert’ and build new skills, which many are not able to do; and their business sees that they are no longer adding any value or stepping up to the ‘business partner’ role.”
Fernandes says “Cost is a critical consideration, but it is a mistake to evaluate HR outsourcing primarily on the basis of financial savings. Companies should consider broader enterprise requirements.”

Personnel and HR Director Tulsidas B Patel, believes that besides the cost of consultancy being very steep as compared to hiring your own staff; the most important factor going against companies opting for consultancy is that HR is a very confidential field and many companies would not like to compromise on this important aspect.

So with the field growing, the pros and the cons fighting for viability, companies now have a good low down on information to help them make their options.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Virtualization of Businesses: Controlling More With Less (online.wsj.com)

The Top 50 HR blogs to watch in 2010

EvanCarmichael.com which is the Internet's #1 resource for small business motivation and strategies has published a list of top HR Blogs to watch in 2010 and this blog makes the list, in the "technology" category :)

I guess this is the only blog from Asia to make it to that list which is mostly US and UK centric.

And I even get this cool badge to show off ;-)

There are a lot of my fellow HR bloggers like Jon Ingham, Penelope Trunk, Dub Dubs, Steve Roesler, Lance Haun, Jim Stroud, Laurie Ruettimann buddies on the list, which you can find here.


Oh yes, I had also made the list in 2009 but seem to have move categories from Organizational Theory to Technology ;-)

Employee Recognition Solution Firms - a new kind of HR services firm?

I recently had a fascinating conversation with a senior from XLRI, Jayanth who joined a firm called Rideau as its Asia Pacific head.

We setup a call as I wanted to understand what is this new kind of firm and how does it fit in the overall scheme of HR consulting and services.

Jayanth shared that while the employee recognition industry is a relatively young one (barely about a decade old) the firms themselves have been around from a long time.

Most of them originated as organizations that manufactured gifts that became corporate gifts - and slowly they built the expertise to manage the recognition program for large corporations. As Jayanth shared "Most organizations budget about 2.5% of their payroll costs on employee recognition schemes - whether they be tenure based, or JIT performance or team rewards, but they are not managed very well"

I could relate to that :-) When I was a HR manager in the IT industry I used to spend quite a few hours following up with line managers on whether they have used the budgeted amount given to them or not.

Jayanth says "and freeing up HR generalists' time is not all. Since we maintain the centralised data organizations are asking us for that data during performance appraisal time to bring that as a measure also in the overall performance discussions."

What impressed me was that this industry already has a certification program and a think tank institute too.

The interesting thing Jayanth shared what that they deploy a social tool within their clients to get a 360 degree view of recognition.

You can keep a track of Jayanth's blog on employee recognition here.

The Social Business Employee Manifesto

David Armano recently posted the Social Business manifesto focusing on the relationship between a social business and its customers.

So I thought I'd give a shot to making a manifesto for the Social Business and its relationship with employees (it'd be great if you can read the changing nature of employees in the forthcoming Organization 2.0 era too along with this).

1. We will no longer view you as "employees" only to do the work you are assigned. Instead, you are co-creators, participants, critics and advocates.
2. We will actively ask for your input on products, services, structures, processes and give it to you to co-create them with us.
3. We will focus not on the time you spend in office but the results you achieve.
4. We will provide value, not jobs.
5. We will provide you the tools to connect across silos, departments, locations to meet the changing demands of a networked economy and social customers.
6. We will focus on your needs vs. our ends.
7. We will together focus on reducing the noise within the organization.
8. We will together destroy processes that do not let us build human relationships within and without.
9. We will encourage you to build relationships that connect all of us with partners, stakeholders and customers in ways where we all benefit.
10. We will act ethically and transparently, and expect you too, because it's no longer a choice.

What else? Any other point that you'd like to add to this manifesto? Leave a comment and let's make this an ever growing list.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 9 Truths About Social Media Big Business Wants Us to Know and 2 Proofs They Want from Us (successful-blog.com)
• Social Media, the next wave of business (mba-geek.com)
• The Conflicting Definitions of Social Business (newcommbiz.com)

Great video: Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch

Came across this great video which shows the reason why Organizational Development and change efforts are so difficult

Strategy is easy - but changing culture is really hard.

Analyzing the conversations on the Social Web

Image of 2020 Social

Often people wonder - sure there are people discussing our firm and brand on various social networking platforms like Twitter, Blogs and discussion forums, but how can we quantify it? How are we perceived overall? What are the themes people talk about? And is it mostly positive or negative?

So we at 2020 Social decided to do a little experiment.

We took a look at all the India based conversations on the social web which mentioned 5 Indian IT companies - Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Cognizant and Patni Computers over a period of one month (March 2010) and then analysed them.

The findings were quite interesting.

We found that the themes that these conversations could be classified in the following areas: Relating to HR, Culture, Leadership and News items.

Most of these mentions (86%) were overwhelmingly in microblogs followed by discussion forums and then by blogs.

Most mentions were around news items, followed by Culture and HR

Take Aways from the report:

1. There is a lot of discussion about IT firms related to work and HR related subjects .
2. There is little or no engagement that the organizations are taking to connect with influencers and to drive the conversations
3. Whatever the representation these firms have on the social web , is primarily driven by corporate communications
4. We believe that HR and Recruitment groups who own the perception of the Employment Brand must engage with the conversations
5. These conversations should be linked to an online platform where people can connect with subject matter experts and recruiters and to get to know first hand information about the firm.

If you'd like to blog about the report, , we can send it to you. Send me an email at gautam@2020social.com with "IT Brands Report" in the subject line

The changing nature of the employees in the forthcoming Organization 2.0 era

Updated: See also my post on Social Business Employee manifesto. 

So, what is an organization 2.0 exactly? It's an organization where:

1. Natural communities of people connect and share information
2. The organizational structure co-exists with networks of practice, interests and sharing
3. Work is openly shared and co-evolved and anyone interested can come onboard as a stakeholder and contribute.
4. Work is a series of projects and people constantly are looking for new ones to add to their skills and knowledge.
5. Leadership is no longer about controlling and division of labour, but is about connecting people together and encouraging open conversations.
6. Understanding the customer and engaging with him becomes everyone's role and the lines between the organization and the external world become more and more porous. Customers and employees co-create new products, services and experiences.

So what does this bode for the traditional employer and employee relationship?

1. Employees will be engaged as long as they can find projects that are engaging to them.
2. Customers will behave more and more like employees and vice versa.
3. When a person leaves the employee relationship he/she continues to be engaged and contributing and connected with the organization.
4. The connection will continue to be with the purpose of the organization and with the existing networks.
5. The organization will always see ex-employees as ambassadors and will reach out to them when they feel a project meets their needs.

So, in a gist, the current normative employee-employer transactional relationship which has "compensation" as its fulcrum - will shrink, and a more stakeholder- network relationship will evolve - where people will be looking at other needs - the larger purpose. And this will shift to be the fulcrum of that relationship. 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Empowering Your Employees to Empower Themselves (blogs.hbr.org)
• Harvard Business: Restore Trust with Employees? Forget About It (blogs.hbr.org)
• The Social Impact of Technology | The Coherency Press (linusfernandes.com)
• The Power of Social Media: An Employee Engagement Project (socialmediatoday.com)

On Social Learning and Community Management

Thierry de Baillon posted a great presentation on going from Social Media to Social Business

From Social Media to Social Business: The Social Continuum

View more presentations from Thierry de Baillon.

If you go through the slides 25 to 38 you'll realise that Thierry refers to the knowledge gained from listening to customer interactions and conversations as Social Learning. These are conversations that even employees would participate in - helping them create products and services that customers want to experience.

Slide 35 shows the model in this true sense, internal communities and networks that listen, share, co-create and formalize learnings and products.

What would be the Training groups' role in this scenario?

I think trainers an training managers would need to become more and more into internal community managers and helping employees to listen and distill the conversations.

What do you think?

Personal Branding - a conversation

By the way, this is my 2501st post on this blog :-) That's about roughly a post per day for the eight years of the blog's existence :-)

Some days ago I talked to tech author and journalist Ajay Jain about personal branding.

You can find some of the videos given below. Apologies for the quality of the audio. I will try to make up for it with a detailed blog post on it sometime soon. In the meantime here's what my colleague Divya wrote post the talk.

Leadership 1.0 in the Organization 2.0

So here's a scenario. At an organization they communicate majorly with each other using email. People get cc'ed and "fyi" is common, and employees have come to hate the plethora of emails they have to wade through every morning.

On the other hand, there never seems to be information when one needs it. Documents are stored in servers made in a tree structure the logic of which remains with the person who started it (and who's no longer with the firm)

To ease the confusion the HR manager of that firm invests in a modest cloud based social technology offering. A "Facebook for the organization" is born. There is a microsharing option where people can share useful links, their updates and other files and documents. There are shared wiki-based workspaces where groups of people collaborate on documents and spreadsheets.

Slowly people start to notice a change. Some people who take to the new system, seem to be the ones who enjoy doing so. They love the serendipity of discovering new things and creating other things.

However, there are others who sneer at these approaches. They stick to email and documents on their hard drive. The more the evangelists try to convince them - the more they go back to the old ways "Have you seen anyone else using it? What about the top management? If they won't why should we? This new thing is just a fad. It'll go away. Why change our way of working?"

So while the benefits of social tools are apparent, and people are connecting and learning from each other - the organization will not really move to becoming an open organization if the organizational leadership does not believe and support it whole-heartedly.

The tools are just the visible part of the change - but as Gary Hamel says it will really occur when we reinvent management (and leadership!) for the 21st century.

Check out this case study on how a firm Built the Social Web into the Fabric of the Organization

The process has to be both, focusing on the tools as well as the context, culture and processes to support the new way of working. The organization 2.0 cannot be supported with Leadership 1.0

Social Media within the Organization

Geetaj from The CTO Forum recently interviewed me on the challenges and benefits of using social technologies within the organization and Enterprise 2.0

You can read the interview here.

My fundamental belief is summarised in this statement:

The challenge is that the technology needs to become embedded in the business processes. If ERP was all about business processes, Enterprise 2.0 has to do with business relationships.

Some exceprts

Q:What is the biggest challenge in making people use social media tools?

A: The challenge is that the technology needs to become embedded in the business processes. If ERP was all about business processes, Enterprise 2.0 has to do with business relationships. There are currently lots of tools for managing the relationships within the enterprise and also for building relations with customers. There are CRM systems and e-mails. These systems are not giving anybody any pain. Nonetheless, they are frustrating at times in the etiquettes they employ and the way they are structured. Also, the vendors have not been able to showcase how these things will be able to ease some pain that currently the business relationships have.

Q:Are you saying that Enterprise 2.0 does not have a strong enough value proposition?

A: I would say that it is not championed well. It is not being sold well. This is because the organisations that make these tools mostly focus on the US market. I haven’t heard of any organisation that is really trying to market it here. There are organisations like Cynapse which has Cyn.in, which is open source. Organisations can deploy it on their own servers or buy it as a service.

Vendors also believe that Europe is a great market for them. They are also concentrating on the product itself. There are very few consulting organisations for this.

There are organisations who are using tools like Yammer and it does not require the CIO’s mandate to be deployed because it is on the cloud. Tools like Yammer will be used by certain groups in the organisation. For instance, the sales and marketing could be using it without the others knowing about it. The CTO may not realise this. So employees may be using Yammer and Twitter for business purposes.

Q:What are the benefits?

A: I would like to see it as a spectrum. One of the parts simply has to do with connecting people. In a large distributed organisation or a smallish from that is distributed, it is important to know one’s colleagues. That is the corporate social networking part. It becomes an employee engagement and communications aspect. This is like Facebook for the enterprise.

The other end of the spectrum is the collaboration part, where knowledge is the centre. I may have a document that I have worked on and I put it out there, fve people add stuff to it. The collaboration results in a document that undergoes constant versioning instead of an email that goes round and round. It is like Wikipedia in the enterprise.

Tools like Social Text combine these two aspects. It is like a participative intranet. This is like an additional layer on top of the intranet.

The best part is that the language here is not too different. It is something that people are used to on Facebook, Twitter or Orkut.

So, you may not have a choice in co-workers, but you may be able to discover people who share the same interest. It is an additional way to connect you to the organisation.

Q:Is there any way the organisation can get monetary benefts by using tools like Socialtext and Cyn.in?

A: One of Social Text’s testimonials include a a CTO of a financial from who says that earlier their employees spent, at an average, a day in a week searching for information. Before using the social networking tools, they had to rely on a taxonomy-based system that the servers used for searching. The social networking tools use tags, and thus are faster to search with.

This CTO was able to cut this time down from a day a week to two hours a week. Thus, saving them close to $5 million in a year.

And, as more people get on to it, more knowledge gets into the system. Thus, while saving money the organisation is also able to save all that knowledge that could have been lost.

Q:What are the things to remember while deploying these tools?

A: The key thing is that it should be embedded into the business process and people should not see it as a separate task, above their regular work.

You never know what will click in an organisation. There is a steel organisation where professionals with more than 20 years of experience working in a brick and mortar company suddenly took to microblogging. It happened because it takes less time to use and learn. They did not take on to the bigger tools that allowed them to upload fle, because it was diffcult to include in the day-to-day working.

This example shows that if companies can get their employees to use one functionality it is easier to get them to start using other facets of the tool.

Related articles by Zemanta

• What Enterprise 2.0 means for the CIO and IT department (rossdawsonblog.com)
• From Social Media to Social Business: The Missing 'Social' Link (socialmediatoday.com)

50 Most Powerful HR professionals in India

Prof. Madhukar Shukla shared this list on Facebook, the HRD Congress identified 50 Most Powerful HR Leaders last month and the Business Standard brought out the list some time back.

Interesting to note that business leaders like Aditya Puri and Amand Mahindra make the list. And that most of the professionals are from "Indian" firms as compared to MNCs.

Great to see one of my ex-bosses, SV Nathan of Deloitte US India there. Also great to see Prabir Jha, my classmate, Rajkamal Vempati and Judhajit Das my seniors from XLRI also in the list

The future of the HR Professionals' Community on Ning

As some of you may know I manage a HR professionals' community on Ning. Some weeks back Ning announced that it was planning to phase out free networks, which is why I had bought a domain to move the community to http://www.humanresourcespeople.com

On 4th May Ning made an announcement on the new models it would support.

According to the new models, we come under the Ning Mini plan, which unfortunately will only support 150 members

At a personal level I do not have the resources to maintain the community at the Ning Plus or Ning Pro plans.

So it seems likely that unless we get a sponsor for the community at $200/year or $500/year the HR Professionals' community will be discontinued.

I'll keep you updated on the future course of the community as and when it becomes clearer.

If you'd like to sponsor the community - do let me know at gautam@gautamblogs.com

How Social Media Can Revolutionalise Your HR Department

Guest Post by Arthur Clyne , a Montreal-based web and technology consultant for several local area businesses. He currently consults for Halogen, an HR software company that specializes in employee performance management programs.

The development of social media sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn has completely revolutionized the world of human resources. Previously, human resource departments were forced by necessity to put out job offers and then winnow down who arrived. This of course results in large amounts of time wasted in interviews which go nowhere and in employees who later need to be fired due to a lack of real competence. It also means that HR departments are limited to those persons they can find out about, which often means relying on the recommendations of coworkers and employees to determine who or who isn’t worth hiring. This is not only inconvenient for the human resources department, it means that many people who are talented and hardworking yet lacking in contacts end up being unemployed for extended periods. Fortunately, much of this wastefulness is slowly being eroded by the development of social media, which enables human resources departments to know more about the people they might hire or even are currently employing.

Social media now allows human resource departments to aggressively seek out potential applicants. This is particularly true on LinkedIn, which is a site that revolves around one’s profession and professional training. Almost all LinkedIn members have their resume prominently posted on their personal webpage, as well as a listing of their employment status and history. Sites such as LinkedIn permit human resources departments to quickly determine if there is anyone they should extend a job offer to immediately, without the need to resort to expensive headhunting services. It also enables a human resources employee to quickly and efficiently determine if a person is worth hiring after they have submitted their resume. Though one might think that job applicants would be smarter, all too often applicants who exaggerate on their resume fail to do so on their LinkedIn account, or are unable to do so due to the verification process involving other previous and potential employers. This enables HR departments to quickly eliminate liars, as well as find out about relevant facts that may have been left off the resume.

The use of social media also allows for a certain degree of vetting when it comes to new applicants. A strong resume and good recommendations can often conceal a person who is lazy, shiftless or untrustworthy. It can also reveal when a newly hired employee is failing to apply themselves, or is so caught up in other projects and moonlight employment that they are unable to concentrate on the job for which they were hired. Revelations to this effect were once limited to hushed conversations in crowded bars, but they are now quite common through the use of Facebook. An employee who keeps taking sick days due to “headaches” or “allergies” yet posts a large number of photographs of them partying in their Facebook account may thus reveal that they are unprofessional. The new nature of Facebook means that many people are, as of yet, not quite used to how much personal information they post on the web, and thus they may incriminate themselves when a trip to grandma’s funeral yields nothing but photographs of the Bahamas. Facebook can also have a positive aspect as it permits HR personnel to determine that a particular employee is genuinely having certain concerns that could be addressed by the department. An employee who complains about a terrible boss or unfair working hours may have legitimate concerns, and an applicant with a clean Facebook page that is devoid of incriminating photos is probably a cleaner, neater and nicer person than an applicant who has otherwise.

Social media has revolutionized the way that HR departments do business, in that it allows them to seek out and find people instead of just resumes. By looking around on various webpages and determining who and what is available, they can narrow down their application search and send out job offers to people who didn’t even know they were available. The use of social media also allows human resources to eliminate employees with a history of lies or malfeasance, since it is often harder to hide statements online. By being picky, HR departments can get the best possible candidates, as well as eliminate liars and cheats.