The need for a Social Business

Bill Ives, covering IBM's Lotusphere as a blogger covers the opening of the conference.



I thought the excerpt below was a great way to capture how a "social" business can add value to organizations.



Don't miss the ways how IBM uses social technologies in HR

Amplify’d from billives.typepad.com

A social business allows people to get engaged and provides analytics on this engagement. There is increased transparency and a new nimbleness. He quoted the recent McKinsey study on the business value of networked businesses.  He noted that Lotus has always been about social connections. Having an open architecture is the way to be social. They have introduced a new depth of capability to the Lotus product line, along with increased analytics and simplicity to drive adoption.  This built on the extensive experience in collaboration of Lotus. Now it is time ot draw on this experience.

AT&T needs to have employees understand granular information about their products and communicate it to customers. They use social networks to speed the communication around these needs and find the right expert to match customer needs. They have been doing this approach for some time.  I was involved in building a knowledge management system for their call centers 15 years ago that enabled employees to be smarter with their customers.

Sandy Carter VP of Sales came out next. She saw the social transformation of IBM into a social business. In HR they use social capabilities for recruitment through to rewards. They use games for collaboration. They measure return on everything. For every 1 percent improvement in HR processes they save $50 million.  They have a social media aggregator.  They were also one of the first to have social media employee guidelines in 2005.  They also use social media for product development through a Jam for brainstorming. Latest CIO study found the successful companies are 57% more likely to use social business. Read more at billives.typepad.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/ao40u

Peter Block says HR's Compensation Philosophy leads to unethical behavior

This is an interesting view. Peter Block, author of the bestselling book on Organizational Consulting, Flawless Consulting, says that HR compensation and benefits systems encourage unethical corporate behavior.

He singles out stock prices and ESOPs along with variable pay for encouraging short term thinking. Here's an excerpt of his thoughts at India's leading HR publication People Matters:

Amplify’d from peoplematters.in

HR is a player in the question of corporate and societal ethics. Most unethical or corrupt behavior starts from the HR/Management philosophy of compensation and rewards; they think that money motivates people and they also believe that variable pay is the way to motivate performance. The extreme version of this is including stock options as a serious component of executive pay. This philosophy creates a context of excessive short-term orientation where unethical behavior is more likely. If companies link payment to stock prices, they are creating a false god. Then CEO will not be incentivized to invest in the long-run, they will be incentivized to cut costs, maximize short-term profits, and postpone development. What is interesting about this compensation philosophy, especially at the executive level, is that companies are not rewarding for commitment and long-term alignment of these managers but actually creating conditions to encash compensation and leave the organization. It is not only a question of compensation and motivation philosophy, it is a question of purpose. Leadership needs to look at their business with a larger purpose than shareholder value. Leaders focusing on just making money will not build companies or the country. Asking oneself what is the larger purpose of the organization is the ethical question that managers should pose to themselves. Read more at peoplematters.in

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/anueh

Am No. 8 in the 25 Online Influencers in Leadership

Am flattered that I was ranked by the Traackr algorithm to be number 8 in the HRExaminer list of 25 Online Influencers in Leadership - 2011.

Yes, the list is based on content produced in the areas - and is therefore heavily biased towards people who blog, tweet or manage online conversations in these areas.

Here's the complete list

Amplify’d from www.hrexaminer.com

Top 25 Online Influencers in Leadership 2011 1 / David Zinger 2 / Kevin Grossman 3 / Sharlyn Lauby 4 / Josh Bersin 5 / Aman Singh 6 / Alice Snell 7 / Cindy Esposito 8 / Gautam Ghosh 9 / Maynard Brusman 10 / Dan McCarthy 11 / Tracy Brinkmann 12 / Robert Lavigne 13 / Abhishek Mittal 14 / Naomi Bloom 15 / Mark Smith 16 / Jon Ingham 17 / Trisha McFarlane 18 / Jim Holincheck 19 / Erik Samdahl 20 / John Hersey 21 / Tom Hood 22 / Eric Jacobson 23 / Sramana Mitra 24 / Wayne Hurlbert 25 / Michael Specht The Entire List Read more at www.hrexaminer.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/answs

Managing Careers and Talent

HR people are constantly talking about "Talent Management" figuring out who their key "talent" are placing them in the correct roles.

However, is there anything like a correct role?

What are careers? It's a function of chance, instinct, choice and developmental inputs.

The seeds are sown somewhere in school, when not knowing where one is going - one chooses subjects based on what one is pushed towards (by family, parents, comparison, peers)

However, we need people to be drawn to careers and work and tasks (yes, those are different) as JP blogs in this post and JSB and John Hagel have written in their book "Pull".

However, building on the pull factor is difficult for organizations. That's because changing careers is like uprooting a grown up tree and transplanting it into a new garden - only more difficult.

Triggering career changes are driven by instinct - and need to be supported for any mistakes they might make.

Have you changed careers? What did your organizations do to facilitate that move?

Blogging about bad news on the corporate blog

A principle factor of open and transparent organizations is open and transparent communication. The aspect is easy to think about when the news is good. But what do blogging CEOs do when they have to make tough decisions, like layoffs?

Do they stick to the open system? And if yes, do they regret it?

Personally, I think the way to open and transparent organizations 2.0 is a one-way street. Once you have committed to it, you cannot go back.

But what are the business benefits or risks?



Here's an interesting article on the PR Daily.

Amplify’d from www.prdaily.com

The first rule of holes: When you find yourself in one, stop digging. That’s good advice for a number of life situations, but how does it apply to firms who have been forced to downsize because of the weakened economy? Is it better to say nothing or to broadcast the potential for job cuts and risk making a bad situation worse? In the social media age, many companies are opting to communicate despite the risk, using blogs to get out the news about layoffs and weaken any potential PR blows by maintaining control of the story. Zappos.com is one example. The online clothing and shoe retailer recently cut its work force by 8 percent, a move that CEO Tony Hsieh announced in an e-mail to employees that was followed by a blog post. “This is one of the hardest decisions we've had to make over the past 9.5 years, but we believe that it is the right decision for the long-term health of the company,” Hsieh wrote in his Nov. 8 blog post. The posting said that Zappos would pay all of its laid off employees for at least the next two months and reimburse them for any COBRA-related health-care costs. Hsieh told Ragan.com that the blog post is consistent with the company’s focus on “open and honest communication” as a core value. For us, transparency is just part of our culture,” Hsieh said. “While it's hard to translate into specific numbers, our belief is that our culture and our brand are two sides of the same coin. The brand may lag the culture, but eventually it will catch up. Our belief is that if we get the culture right, most of the other stuff (like great customer service), will happen naturally on its own.” Steven Carpenter, CEO of Cake Financial, said a culture of transparency was a factor in his decision to blog about the company’s Oct. 20 layoffs. “Blogging is all about making the company transparent and opening up a direct communications with all of our constituents: employees, customers and partners. Cake's mission is to bring transparency to the investment world, which is traditionally not very open, and therefore we run the company in the same manner,” he says. Loic Le Meur, CEO of online blogging site Seemic.com, blogged about layoffs when he let a third of his work force go on Oct. 10. He told The New York Times last week that the blog entry was done to head off the possibility of bad PR. But in a Nov. 10 post on his blog, Le Meur said that while the decision to be transparent about the layoffs was difficult, was the right move. “Looking toward the future and not the past is the most important, being transparent and talking about bad news helps digest them and keep going,” Le Meur’s blog post says. “Going through positive and negative cycles is just the normal life of a company.” Other firms that have blogged about recent layoffs include Tesla Motors and real estate valuation firm Zillow.com. The practice has earned kudos in some quarters of the Internet. An example is the response to a post by Jason Calacanis, the CEO of search-engine and media site Mahalo, about the company’s decision to pare its work force by 10 percent. Read more at www.prdaily.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/anhhc

Quoted in Mint story on Co-CEO Organizational Structure

Was recently quoted in a story on how a Co-CEO model is difficult to pull off - as is the case recently in Wipro.

Amplify’d from epaper.livemint.com

Gautam Ghosh, a human re- source (HR) consultant, said in a two-head structure it is nec- essary for the rest of the firm to know they represent different functions, and so the nomen- clature needs to be different. “So while a CEO and COO (chief operating officer) would really be equivalent, the CEO would be external-facing and the COO could be the internal head,“ he said. “In Wipro's case, this doesn't seem to have happened.“ Read more at epaper.livemint.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bndx0

HR Blogging to be accepted for US HR certifications

This is going to be interesting and I'd be interested to see whether the decision of the HRCI to accept "fact based 700 word blog posts" for recertification credits would encourage more and more HR professionals in the US to start blogging.



This is hugely progressive of the HRCI and hopefully other industry bodies will also recognise blogging as a way to showcase expertise and give credit for it.



Here are the details from the HRCI site:

Amplify’d from www.hrci.org

The HR Certification Institute announced yesterday that it now will accept blog writing for recertification credit for the Professional in Human Resources (PHR®), Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR®), Global Professional in Human Resources (GPHR®) and California Certification (PHR-CA® and SPHR-CA®).

Credit is awarded under the Research/Publishing category.

Blog posts must be 700 words or more on a subject related to the HR knowledge base.

Posts must contain facts/data and not be an editorial or opinion piece.

Blogs must be posted on a site that is open to the public, whether it is the writer’s blog or as a guest blog post for another site, such as SHRM Connect.

Links to posts must be provided in the submission for recertification.

Blog posts submitted for consideration for recertification credit in the Research / Publishing category may include a writer’s opinion, which is the norm for blog writing, but must be based in fact. For example, if a state were to pass legislation that affects how an HR professional in that area must conduct business, a blog post about it could include an overview of the legislation, a “how to” update HR practices to ensure compliance, and an opinion about what the writer thinks about the new legislation. A post that only includes the author’s opinion about the legislation and does not offer facts and/or data about it is not acceptable for recertification credit. Read more at www.hrci.org

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bna07

Do you need a Personal Learning Network?

Image via WikipediaOn Twitter Howard Rheingold shared 8 insights on how to build a personal learning network.

What is a personal learning network?

In my view, a group of people whom you follow, connect with and learn from.

Social networks, lifestreaming and activity streams are the new tools of learning.

That's because in today's time and in the future - what people know is not going to be as important, as compared to how they do what they do.

Think of it as "learning by watching" except that instead of watching you are "listening" to them as their activities are shared either in first person or by tools.

So do you need a personal learning network?

Well there are two kinds of people. One who put their careers in the hands of their organizations where they work. When the going's good they focus on the work, and the organization - like a paternalistic system - takes care of them. However, business cycles change, competitors come up, contexts change. And then the career plan along with jobs can go out of the window.

This is where having a personal learning network - of people across industries and geographies - is most useful. Hybrid skills are the way new careers would develop in the future. And in my opinion, building and nurturing a personal learning network is the best way to future-proof your career.

Recruiters turning their back on jobsites?

Scale does bring problems - as this WSJ article shows. How long before Indian firms start getting disenchanted with the India job boards?



What this also means is that recruiters will need to build skills to leverage social networks and engage with talent communities.



That means building conversational and engagement skills rather than traditional sourcing and selling skills. Are these skills learn-able? Will traditional recruiters be able to make the transition?



Read some excerpts from the WSJ article:

Amplify’d from www.wallstreetjournal.com

Many plan to scale back their use of online job boards, which they say generate mostly unqualified leads, and hunt for candidates with a particular expertise on places like LinkedIn Corp.'s professional networking site before they post an opening. As the market gets more competitive again, they are hiring recruiters with expertise in headhunting and networking, rather than those with experience processing paperwork.

About 24% of companies plan to decrease their usage of third-party employment websites and job boards this year, according to a December survey from the Corporate Executive Board Co., a business consulting firm. Meanwhile, nearly 80% of respondents said they plan to increase their use of job-board alternative methods this year, such as employee referrals and other websites like Facebook Inc. or LinkedIn.

Food services company Sodexo USA, owned by Paris-based Sodexo SA, slashed the number of jobs it posts to third-party job boards by more than half since the recession started, says vice president of talent acquisition Arie Ball. The number of applications to some executive openings at Sodexo rose more than 50% to 300 since the downturn started, Ms. Ball says, but the increase brought many unqualified candidates.

Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Services Group Inc. remains concerned that relying too much on job boards could be bad for business. Read more at www.wallstreetjournal.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bmvuh

Future of Employment is not Employment

There have been some different things that have been running through my head. First there was this post triggered by JP and Debu's blogs. In addition there was a conversation I had with my friend Jayanth, and then there was Dub's post on employee engagement and maybe it's just economics - and some other conversations with traditional HR folks and what they expect from employees.

So here's my conclusion: employment as we know it - is broken.

The employer-employee psychological contract is coming apart and we all pretend that it's not an issue.

People are loyal to various other factors that the "employment brand" connotes. The increasing consumerisation of society has meant people want to work for firms that are considered "cool" right now. It was Microsoft some eons back, Google then, Apple now, and who knows that then.

Some people are loyal to their profession. When I was a HR Manager in a professional service firm - which did SAP consulting projects - it was pretty evident that if you hired a SD MM specialist and didn't have a project for him for a couple of months he would up and leave - irrespective of the fact that you had a great "employment brand". He wouldn't think of changing his skills as long as there was a market for it.

Some people are loyal to their bosses/ mentors - and follow them to whichever firm they go.

There is research that now more and more people want their brands and their workplace to be part of something larger than just being a market leader.

And sometimes they just want to be connected more to people.

Sure there are various kinds of industries employing various kinds of people - and there will be many people just getting by. Working for a paycheck. Waiting for the clock to strike the shift time - and to get out.

Those people are not going to be the one who're going to give you great ideas and make your firm more competitive.

So if you want to hire the best for the roles you have maybe you have to tear up that organogram and job description and how you want them to work. You have to tear up your performance management system. Get rid of that industrial era mindset to "work"

Because in the Organization 2.0 employment will not be anything like the employment that we know.

Embracing the new way to facilitate the Exchange of Value

My friend Dave Evans has insightful advice - in his ClickZ column- for organizations who want to embrace social business. Specially those who think getting ideas from consumers is a new way to do business.

Amplify’d from www.clickz.com

Before you jump in, though, have a plan. Ideation - asking customers, for example, to submit ideas and to collectively vote those submissions up or down so you can pick off and implement the winners - is not for every organization, nor is it a universal fix for every ailment. Consider this: If your customers were to offer their ideas, would your organization accept them or defend itself against them? Does your organizational culture embrace and value change, or does a senior manager still get a desk that, by fiat, is made of oak instead of metal and exactly two inches wider than those occupied by subordinates? Social media has brought many organizations face-to-face with their own inability to respond to change, to embrace customers as collaborative partners, and to take seriously the necessity for creating cross-functional teams charged with producing defined business outcomes rather than tracking (in a vacuum) some arbitrary set of departmental measures. Follow my friend and colleague Gautam Ghosh, or look at the work being done in forward-looking organizations like Philips and PGi for really smart implementations of social technology that enables organizational transformation and response to opportunity and change. (Disclosure: Both Philips and PGi are clients.)

The above may sound harsh - and to be sure, real and sustained transformation in organizations that lack a company-wide, shared, and well-defined culture is difficult - but it's also the "new reality" of the combined impact of the global popularity of the social Web and the global adoption of consumerist sensibilities being driven by the global effects of current economic conditions. External to your business, markets are no longer isolated: internally, work teams are no longer isolated either. There is a growing recognition that we're all connected - and that, through the open exchange of information as it occurs on the Web, outside the confines of the Facebooks and similar walled gardens, we can increasingly seek the value we desire and then vote with our dollars for the businesses and organizations that deliver that value. Read more at www.clickz.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bmt0j

Musings on the future of Work and Organizations

Debu Mishra has a great post on why Performance Management/ Appraisal doesn't work. He raises some pertinent points, the critical one for me is how HR leaders keep changing and going by latest fads on performance management. Just because it worked in one organization doesn't mean it'll work in your organizations.

There are no best practices. They are contextual to the culture and climate of an organization.

However, the nature of work is itself changing. JP Rangaswami (one of the most incisive thinkers I have come across recently) blogged about how the "maker generation" will force organizations to think about work in new principles. Go read the full post, I can't do justice to all the thoughts here.

So the future of work in the future knowledge-based organizations is all fuzzy. As I noted in my comment to JP's post:

if these principles are really embraced and integrated – maybe there will not be any “corporation/ enterprise” at all.. just a “brand” and free agents willingly aligning with that brand – to services customers, suppliers (and other stakeholders)

Will the future look like that at least for some knowledge-based organizations? Will they become the “un-organization”?

The idea itself is not radical. Visa (the credit card firm) emerged out of similar principles.

Dee Hock and his committee of bankers retreated to a hotel in Sausalito, California to try to envision the structure of the new organization. He says he began with a purpose, "enabling the exchange of electronic value," a vision far more expansive than that of his peers, and then set out to devise some principles by which to achieve that purpose:

• it must be equitably owned by all participants

• power and function must be distributive to the maximum degree

• authority must be distributive within each governing entity

• it must be infinitely malleable yet extremely durable

Using these guiding principles, Hock and a small hand-picked staff created NBI, which opened for business in 1970 with 243 charter members. In 1977, NBI changed the BankAmericard brand name to Visa, and similarly renamed itself Visa International.

So the future was already in the past. How long before the old structures go away and new organizations like Visa emerge?

Some more posts about the workplace of the future: PwC's scenarios, Gartner's predictions

What are your predictions?

HR's new role - Storyteller

The more I think about it - the more I am convinced that HR's real role is not to draft policies and processes, or even to hire and "motivate" people (how do you do that, seriously?)

As a blogger who's been blogging for almost 8.5 years, I have realised that HR's undefined role has to be a storyteller.

In fact, management and leadership is about storytelling.

Let me illustrate what I mean by storytelling.

Storytelling is the process by which you craft a narrative in which people see themselves as protagonists - which focuses on where they have come from and where they are going. It helps them to make sense of the chaos and hyper-information that they have all around them. Stories are the filters by which we make meaning for ourselves.

Each of us has stories inside of us, and there are narratives that we tell ourselves. In our stories we cast ourselves as the underdog/ hero/ bystander and by doing so we shape our own reality.

So it is with organizations. Each organization has a story - whether they acknowledge that or not. In my view, HR has to be the storyteller who links the organizational story and enabling people to make sense of that meaning.

Stories are great vehicles to communicate norms, values and behaviors than any dull corporate brochure.

And yes, I do think that these thoughts are triggered by Prasad's post on HR's role as Architects of Meaning.

What do you think? If HR people start seeing themselves as storytellers, what are the skills they need to learn and unlearn?

McKinsey research says Social Businesses are more successful

Here's some interesting results from McKinsey Quarterly which shows companies who are deploying social technologies, ranging from external social media marketing, to social CRM to internal Enterprise 2.0 tools are reporting that they are seeing measurable results.



Interestingly when use of social technologies are not integrated with an employee's work - the companies report seeing minimal increase. Which shows that more integration of social technologies in the workflow makes financial sense.



Take a look at the survey results. I personally like the classifications of the "three kinds of networked enterprises" as they call it

Amplify’d from www.mckinseyquarterly.com

The share of companies where respondents report using Web 2.0 technologies continues to grow. Our research, for instance, shows significant increases in the percentage of companies using social networking (40 percent) and blogs (38 percent). Furthermore, our surveys show that the number of employees using the dozen Web 2.0 technologies continues to increase.4 Respondents at nearly half of the companies that use social networking say, for example, that at least 51 percent of their employees use it. And in 2010, nearly two-thirds of respondents at companies using Web 2.0 say they will increase future investments in these technologies, compared with just over half in 2009. The healthy spending plans during both of these difficult years underscore the value companies expect to gain.

Among respondents at companies using Web 2.0, a large majority continue to report that they are receiving measurable business benefits—with nearly nine out of ten reporting at least one. These benefits ranged from more effective marketing to faster access to knowledge (Exhibit 1).

Among respondents who say their companies are using Web 2.0, most (79 percent) achieved a mean improvement of 5 percent or less across a range of business benefit metrics (Exhibit 2). Respondents at the companies in this group report the lowest percentages of usage among their employees, customers, and business partners; say that Web 2.0 is less integrated into their employees’ day-to-day work than respondents at other companies do; and are least likely to report high levels of collaboration or information sharing across the organization. We call these companies, still learning the ropes of Web 2.0, the “developing” group.

Internally networked organizations. Some companies are achieving benefits from using Web 2.0 primarily within their own corporate walls. The survey results indicate that companies in this group—13 percent of those using Web 2.0—derive substantial benefits from deploying these technologies in employee interactions. Respondents at such organizations report a higher percentage of employees using Web 2.0 than respondents at developing organizations do. Respondents at half of the internally networked organizations reported that Web 2.0 is integrated tightly into their work flows, for example, compared with only 21 percent of respondents at developing organizations. Web 2.0 also seems to promote significantly more flexible processes at internally networked organizations: respondents say that information is shared more readily and less hierarchically, collaboration across organizational silos is more common, and tasks are more often tackled in a project-based fashion.

Externally networked organizations. Other companies (5 percent of those deploying Web 2.0) achieved substantial benefits from interactions that spread beyond corporate borders by using Web 2.0 technologies to interact with customers and business partners, according to survey results. Executives at these organizations reported larger percentages of their employees, customers, and partners using Web 2.0 than respondents at internally networked organizations did. But the responses suggest that the internal organizational processes of externally networked organizations are less fluid than those of internally networked ones.

Fully networked enterprises. Finally, some companies use Web 2.0 in revolutionary ways. This elite group of organizations—3 percent of those in our survey—derives very high levels of benefits from Web 2.0’s widespread use, involving employees, customers, and business partners, according to the survey. Respondents at these organizations reported higher levels of employee benefits than internally networked organizations did and higher levels of customer and partner benefits than did externally networked organizations. In applying Web 2.0 technologies, fully networked enterprises seem to have moved much further along the learning curve than other organizations have. The integration of Web 2.0 into day-to-day activities is high, executives say, and they report that these technologies are promoting higher levels of collaboration by helping to break down organizational barriers that impede information flows. Read more at www.mckinseyquarterly.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bm32a

Amplifying Strengths and Talents - HR's Achilles' heel?

So someone asked me "Why do people in organizations spend so much energy focusing on what is not there? Why don't they polish and make what's already there, and grow that? When customers pay you, they pay you for your strengths, not for what you're doing to remove your weakness"

I agree. We spend too much time, effort and energy focussing on "I lack this. This is my weakness" kind of thoughts. When we get feedback from our managers. Or when we give feedback to our subordinates.

I remember when I had read Marcus Buckingham's book "First Break all the Rules" - he said the strengths based thinking is usually not transferred to organizations, because careers are not designed to maximise on strengths. In the book he gave the example of a law firm, and how when a lawyer grows in his/her career- the focus sharpens from a generic area to a specific area. Compare that to a typical corporate career where people usually see an expansion in their skills - and therefore the need to develop newer and newer skills - until they hit what is known as the Peter Principle.

The way to really leverage the concept of strengths in an organization is to look at not one career path and therefore a pyramid, but a multitude of alternate career paths (earlier posts here and here) , taking off from each role. Giving rise to fractal career ladders.

Such careers will not just leverage each employee's inherent strengths but also contribute to the organizational knowledge and innovation, reducing the need of people to blend in - and encouraging their individuality.

The question is: are organizations really mature enough to embrace the creativity and the chaos that this calls for?

What is Social Business vis a vis Enterprise 2.0? #sbjam

I'm excited - as the folks in IBM's Social Software Adoption team have invited me to participate in an online "Social Business Jam"

So what is social business, you might ask?

Social Business is the way organizations integrate social technologies in each aspect of their business - from marketing, customer support, innovation, internal networking, knowledge management, learning and procurement. It means embracing a new way of thinking about organizations, using a different metaphor - of it being networked in the truest sense of the word.

Enterprise 2.0 is merely (according to MHO) the use of technologies and systems to link an internal organization.

The term social business according to me - embraces the three aspects of technology, processes and people to actually change organizations in a fundamental way.

From a presentation I made 

So in the Social Business Jam I'll be focusing on these two areas:

• Building the Social Business of the Future -- What new social innovations can we theorize?
• Building Participatory Organizations Through Social Adoption -- How can we align our organizational model, corporate culture, leadership/ executive adoption to drive social business adoption internal and external?

Hope you'll join me online during the jam. It's on between Feb 8th and 10th.

Watch out for the twitter hashtag #sbjam

P.S. Here's my answer to a similar question on Quora

Talent Management in Organizations

Today, I sat in a discussion about how assessments can help a company hire good people - and with higher validity than traditional interviews.

I know. Interviews are pathetic ways to assess people. Specially the way we do them currently.

A recruitment consultant looks at CVs. Forwards it to the corporate recruiter. Mostly the corporate recruiter has very little idea of the business and no idea of the critical needs of the hiring manager.

The hiring manager who really knows what is expected of a candidate is also rare.

Is it a wonder why so many people leave after recruitment in less than 2 years?

On top of that, in most industries people also look for the A level talent. Often forgetting that they are B and C level organizations. That also contributes to the talent churn.

On most industries "A" level talent is contextual - depended on the systems, processes and structures of that industry. The knowledge and context in most cases is also context specific. Moving them across industries is a case of disaster.

So taking all these people out of the talent equation one is left with a small universe of successful talent in organizations ... this then hits the ceiling of the Peter Principle.

Is it a wonder why HR is not trusted by business leaders?

Welcoming some new HR bloggers

It's been a busy 2011 so far for the Indian HR Blogosphere - have discovered some interesting new blogs written by very senior practitioners.

Debabrat (Debu) Mishra - writes at Consulting Jungle. Read his post on how "experience design should replace HR management"

Krish Shankar (HR Director with one of India's largest and fastest growing firms) has started a blog in 2011 - and I hope we see more insightful posts from him. Go give him some encouragement and leave comments on the post :-)

And Gurprriet Siingh who's Heading OD for a large Indian conglomerate has started his second blog to help OD practitioners and students. Go check it out

And have you checked out the list of the Indian HR Blogs ?

A story about a social media strategist and a HR Manager

At the recently held Social Media Club Delhi meeting where the folks of NM Incite ( a Nielsen and McKinsey JV) presented on their social media listening tool Buzzmetrics, I met someone interesting.

After the meeting this person approached me and said "Hey I have to thank you"

"What for" I asked, "I don't even know you"

"Well, I am a social media strategist employed by [name kept secret] firm, and while the Marketing folks were the ones who made this offer to me, the HR manager of the business has always felt that I was an unnecessary resources in a role that was not needed"

"Oh" - this is not surprising, specially when roles are created in a group and HR does not have the authority to question the change in organizational structures (more common that you think). I asked "So what happened?"

"Well I came across your blog posts on how HR can benefit from social media. I sent it to him by email, and in an hour he replied - hey this is great. I had no idea, that HR could leverage social media. It's been some days after that incident and now he treats me with more respect" the social media strategist concluded.

Stories like this make blogging worthwhile.

Has this blog helped you in any way? Why don't you send me your story, and if you want I will feature it on the blog.

Blogging in the Social Media Strategy

Blogging can feel terribly old-fashioned in this age of twitter and Facebook. However I believe that blogging should be the mother-ship of any organization trying to build a social media presence that focuses on thought leadership and influencing customers and others.

There are various reasons for this:

1. Blogs are great for Search Engine Optimisation
2. They enable you to showcase your expertise
3. They give an opportunity for your customers and others to communicate directly with you (which Twitter also does)
4. You are the owner of a blog - but on Twitter and Facebook you are always on the mercy of the site's changing policies and rules.
5. Blogs are the way to build a firm's influence (both visibility and credibility) - I feel- than any other platform

So when the folks at Digital Vidya wanted me to come and address the participants of their social media workshop on the topic of "how to blog for business" I was excited. 

This is the workshop I did for them:

Leveraging Blogging for Business in Social Media

View more presentations from Gautam Ghosh.

This was the feedback from some of the participants who were live-tweeting the workshop

Real time feedback by participants - and involvement of external interested people who are not present in the workshop.

Welcome to the future of training :-)

HR structures in the social era

Someone asked me this question on Quora:

How do you see HR Departments changing their stucture in response to our new social world?

Here's what I answered:

Personally I see a lot of resistance on the part of the HR community to embrace social technologies. The thought that employees internally can form communities and engage with each other - or external prospective do the same - is scary for them.

I think the traditional structuring of HR (on the lines of expertise - Recruitment, Business Partner, Learning & Development, HRIS, Compensation & Benefits) is flawed. I have thoughts which I have written here

After such structuring embracing Social would make more meaning for HR to become social

Having Fun on Quora

What is Quora, you might ask?

Well, it's a niche social network focused on one use, helping people ask questions and making those questions open to anyone to answer. You might say that sounds like Linkedin Answers or Yahoo answers - and yes in the general description it is like them - though the way it has started it has a lot of CEOs, VCs from Silicon Valley asnwering startup founders' and other people's queries.

Here's how it has borrowed best practices from Twitter, Facebook, Blogging to create a really sticky online community.

So I've started getting active there answering questions on Social Business, Enterprise 2.0, Blogging and of course HR :-)

Go ahead, explore Quora - I guarantee you'll learn a lot from it!

What's wrong with the MBA

Rashmi Bansal blogs on how the expectation of students in the not-so-highly rated B Schools need to be changed - and what the schools themselves need to do to ensure students get good jobs.



I agree with her. What is needed is not just B Schools but B Schools who build some skills that are usable by employers.



In 2020 Social we took a couple of interns - and one of the MBA interns was unable to use MS Excel properly.



If that is the nature of preparedness that students have, then it'll ensure one can never really learn on the job.



Communication skills (both written and spoken), Computing skills, Internet skills should be a given. If an employer has to first build these in a new employee then when will that employee learn about the business?



The other factor is the quality of teaching staff.



Even in XLRI in 1999 we noticed the huge difference in quality between full time faculty and visiting faculty. Visiting faculty have limited knowledge - and really don't have the skills needed to teach.



I also have taught a course at a B School - and even though I am a trainer there were logistical issues that I faced that made learning tough. For one, the classes were on weekends (since I was based in another city) and that ensured 4 classes for the students over the weekend. How do you retain the learning and reflect on it when you attend 4 classes in 2 days and then spend 5 days not thinking about it at all?



So I was stunned when my students wrote thank you mails to me saying "your classes were the most useful" after they joined their jobs



That makes me scared about the quality of the other teaching staff.



Anyway, here's what Rashmi writes:

Amplify’d from youthcurry.blogspot.com

The first thing the bottom 3/4th of the bschool pyramid needs to do is junk the IIM model. Spend the first 3 months just improving language and communication skills. Next, realistically prepare students land in the industry feet-first. Train for the kind of jobs they will be expected to do. Not a single student from a tier-3 school will get a hard-core finance job, yet 90% claim that is where their interest lies. Fine. You can fulfil their aspirations, but in a direction different from what IIM students are taking. Train your students to truly understand the stock market - let them find work with brokers. Brokers don't care much for which bschool you are from. Heck, they don't even care much for an MBA degree! As long as you produce results, or help the company to. Most importantly, train your students to be good salesmen. Because there is always a demand for that breed of people, across industries. Sales is not a lowly job, it requires a high degree of skill and intelligence. Read more at youthcurry.blogspot.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/kbzk

Quoted in ET story on how employees should use Twitter and Facebook

Yesterday, I was quoted in the Economic Times about how employees should be careful in commenting about office and work on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.



This is particularly true in organizations that still block these services - and don't have any policy to guide employees on what they expect.



So unless you have a job as a Community Manager/Social Media Strategist and your role is to communicate on these networks on your employers' behalf - one should exercise caution as to what one makes visible to the world - specially when it's searchable and leaves digital traces for a long time.



Here's an excerpt from the ET article written by Shreya Biswas:

Amplify’d from economictimes.indiatimes.com

Don’t link it all up

Differentiate between social and professional networks. “It is not great for your professional contacts or prospective employers to know what you do in your personal life,” says Delhi-based Gautam Ghosh, an enterprise 2.0 expert and management consultant. Let them be unaware of your booze parties, a troubled relationship, if any, your friend from the rival company or people you hate the most in office. It might expose you to scrutiny and bias. Read more at economictimes.indiatimes.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/k61f