I think 2013 and the next two years would be the start of of Indian firms really getting serious about social business. About becoming open and transparent businesses. About embracing a new kind of management process.
Happy New Year to all of you. Thank you for spending time visiting this
blog, reading what I have to say, commenting on it, helping me learn,
helping me share.
SHRM India has Advisory Panels on different HR disciplines, which serve as voluntary bodies providing expert advice to the wider community of HR professionals.
The Knowledge Center activities for SHRM in India is an on-line, expert advisory service for HR professionals who are SHRM India members.
This is in line with SHRM India's overall mission - as a not for profit organization - that supports and advances the Human Resource Profession as a whole.
· Each panel comprises a mix of academia, consultants and practitioners.
I was requested to join the SHRM India Advisory Panel on HR and Social Media as a Subject Matter Expert. You can find my profile here.
It's a great honor for me to host 2012's final Carnival of HR (this being my 4th time, first was in 2007, the second in 2008, third in 2009 ) - with some thought provoking as well as practical blog posts submitted by HR bloggers from across the world. I've arranged the various blog posts by theme and have also picked my top blog post :)
Here goes (drumroll!!)
My top pick of the blog posts: Rawn Shah has a very thought provoking post on whether companies' employment models are "too stateful" and whether rise of crowdsourcing and collective intelligence will make companies more flexible and agile
Holidays and HR
Susan from About.com reminds us that in the party season, here are the gaffes during office parties to keep away from, while Stuart Rudner tells us the legal ramifications and how to avoid the risk of office parties. Julie tells us the top 3 gifts employees want (not just in the holiday season!)
Social Media and HR
Christopher differentiates between Talent Communities (which I have blogged about earlier) and Talent Networks. Julie focuses on social media and business as well as recruiting benefits for B2B companies. Nisha suggests that companies make their employees their social brand ambassadors
Leadership & Performance
Mark has a very helpful post for leaders who come up against a different idea and don't want to compromise. Linda blogs about how our thinking is an ethical driver for leadership. And Alex tells leaders that creating meaningful company goals means more to employees, and examples of such goals. Karin tells us who actually writes the performance appraisal when a great leader is leading. Your Boss tells you what to ask him/her to prepare for your performance appraisal.
On a different note, John Hunter brings lessons from a video about traffic jams to share how to use incentives rather than prescriptive solutions to change social systemic behavior.
Amit blogs about how mentoring helps in developing leaders.
And that's all, folks! I had a great time hosting the Carnival! If you want to keep track of the carnival as it travels across the HR Blogosphere - here's where you need to go!
It's the second time I am hosting the Carnival of HR, first time was in 2009 January.
The Carnival of HR was originally started way back in February 2007 by Suzanne Lucas aka the Evil HR Lady,
the Carnival of HR is dedicated to bringing together the best posts
from the HR blogging community! In 2008 Suzanne handed over the Carnival
reins to Alison Green aka Ask A Manager,
who did a great job increasing both participation and awareness.
Currently, the Carnival of HR is managed by Shauna Moerke aka the HR Minion or “Carnival Ringmistress” as she prefers to be called.
But what is a blogging “Carnival”?
A blogging carnival is a social media meme in which a group of
bloggers submit blog posts to a “host” who compiles the posts into one
collection that they then publish on their site on the prearranged day.
The posts and bloggers are generally focused on an similar area of
interest, such as Human Resources, and may or may not have a theme which
unites the posts on a specific question or topic. Carnivals occur on a
regular schedule, monthly/biweekly/weekly, and the carnival hosts change
after each event. You can find more information about blog carnivals here.
So what’s the deal with the Carnival of HR?
The Carnival of HR is a bi-weekly carnival that focuses on Human
Resources, Business, and Management blogs. Each carnival brings together
a diverse collection of posts that will make you think, introduce you
to new blogs, and can be a great way to drive traffic to your site if
you chose to participate.
I'm hosting the carnival on 19th, so if you'd like to submit your posts to be featured here's what you need to do:
1. Please submit a
recent (within 2 weeks) post of your own to my email gautam dot ghosh at gmail .
2. Once the Carnival goes live please help promote it via twitter, your blog,
or what have you.
3. Check out the Carnival of HR site!! This not a "rule" per se, but it's
still a good idea.
The final computer-generated Yoda as seen in the film. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Some weeks ago @jobsworth aka JP Rangaswami had a series of blogposts saying the plural of personal is social. Go ahead you must read it. JP's a thought leader in the thinking of social and business. In fact I recently called him the "Yoda of #socbiz"
What reminded me of JP's blog posts yesterday was an incident that happened between Cleartrip and its PR agency Buzz PR. They then blogged about why they did that.
First the accolades poured in. Here was a company that really did care for its influencer's and customers' privacy and did not back away from tough decisions.
Then the PR community started to question. Was this really professional on Cleartrip's part?
Someone replied on the lines of: Well, when we as customer's get treated badly by brands due to shoddy service, don't we tweet/blog about it. That's exactly what Cleartrip is doing.
Karthik who has worked in PR wrote a blog post pointing out why Cleartrip's "name and shame" approach was wrong. And then Hrush of Cleartrip replied to that blogpost and admitted that it was wrong to name the agency.
Cleartrip lost some fans yesterday, but they gained many more due to their transparency. However, Buzz PR lost a lot more. And for a PR agency whose core strength is handling reputation and crises for their clients, they did not make any statement to clarify their part of the story.
Yes, business is getting personal again. And social. And mistakes would happen. And the social side will look back (as JP the Yoda says :)).
It's been over a decade since I started this blog. I primarily meant it to be a chronicle of my thoughts as my career progressed and my points of view changed.
Somewhere along the line, people started discovering blogs and reading them. I remember sometime in 2006 when I was at a SHRM India meetup at Hyderabad I was shocked to find many people in a group of 30 people come up to me and say that they read my blog. Until that time I had assumed only other bloggers would be reading my blog.
I remember back going to a friend after that and saying that meeting people who read my blog is unnerving. "Why?" he had asked. "Because they know so much about my views and I don't know them at all. There's information asymmetry"
Yes, I am an introvert. I find it very difficult to meet people in a real life social setting and have conversations. I guess that is why I find it easier to connect with people on social media.
So last week it happened again. I was introduced to many people and quite a few exclaimed "Oh, I read your blog!" or "When I was home for three years, I kept myself in touch with HR through your blog"
It is surprising and gratifying to meet you and hear that this little blog on a corner of the internet has succeeded in getting your attention.
Attention is the least thing we have in our lives, and the fact that you choose to give me yours, I am thankful.
Thanks for reading, commenting, critiquing and helping me improve. This blog is not just mine. It is a shared space, and you by reading, curating, sharing it make it "our space".
Over the last few weeks I have been having conversations with members of the HR community on attending the 16th National conference organized by the National HRD Network. The reasons for attending and not attending were interesting to hear.
“I hope to carry one learning that I can implementThere’s hardly any learning”
“There’s hardly any learning, I only go there for the networking”
Some would say that perhaps the HR community is suffering from “conference fatigue”. However, it is my belief that while that may be true, a conference like this is important for the dispersed HR community., which has its credibility and reputation questioned in organizations most of the time. It is a time for HR professionals to tell themselves stories.
Stories are not just entertaining – they are also tools for sensemaking of all the data and information we are inundated with. Stories are what adds meaning to experiences and gives us the space and time to step back and reflect. Many believe that values are communicated by myths in the form of stories across millennia.
So what are the stories that HR professionals are telling in this conference?
In the first part of 29th November, the stories we heard (by the Young HR Thought Leaders paper presentation and the Best of Breed HR Showcase) were about thought leadership and innovation – of understanding how others and their teams faced an issue and had done something innovative to impact their businesses in a positive way. These are stories which I hope we will carry forward and spread – to learn from and spread positivity in the larger HR community.
The second half of the day was for stories for the future – of creating meaning and larger purpose for the HR Community. To stop thinking only in organizational silos and contributing to the larger community. About defining our role differently – from moving from drivers of engagement to becoming Happiness Champions.
Stories were also communicated by what was left unsaid - the lack of diversity in the conference speakers and lack of topics dedicated to the long term challenge to the HR community.
National HRD Network and NHRDN Mumbai Chapter along with FORE School of Management, are organizing a one day Seminar on "HR & Social Media – What more can you do?" on Tuesday 11 December 2012 at ITC Maratha, Mumbai.
The Seminar seeks to deliberate and discuss on hitherto less tapped opportunities for HR professionals to use social media effectively and make a uniquely positive difference at the workplace, and in the process, be seen as the profession that is leading the adoption of this technology from the front.
I would be speaking on a panel discussion on "Using Social Media to foster a culture of Innovation"
I came across this fascinating answer on Quora to why hasn't been LinkedIn disrupted yet, and I so agree with it. The answer points to "Talent Communities" built around specific domains as the places where people learn. Something that I have oftentalked about in the past :)
>What advice would you give to a young professional who is just starting his career in Human Resource?
I have just graduated from college and wondering what can I do to stay ahead of the curve and ensure my long term growth?
I try to keep up with the latest trends in HR, Management and Technology, read the books that senior fellows recommend and also religiously follow HBR. But I find that many of my friends are also doing that. Also, I am not great at networking and find it difficult to strike up a relationship with strangers quickly. Will it prove to be a handicap?
I just finished reading Anant Rangaswami's free ebook "Elephants in the Room" on the future of the Indian advertising industry. You can download the book for free here.
Once upon a time, I wanted to be a copywriter in the advertising industry. Then I sat for XAT and got into XLRI and discovered HR. But the fascination with the (what I thought) glamourous world of advertising never went away. When I was at 2020 Social my colleague went to the "Cannes of the Indian ad family" Goafest, and I so wanted to go for it too.
So when Anant's book was free for download, I was amongst the first people to download it. He talks about the big challenges facing the advertising industry (the "elephants in the room") and how the industry can meet it.
There were two big "elephants" that stood out for me when I had put on my HR hat. One was, clients were dependent on "people brands" like Piyush Pandey, R. Balki, Prasoon Joshi in the ad industry. Anant says that the clients want great creative people to work on them, so creating a second line of "people brands" is critical once the older folks retire. And yet, no one seems to be doing anything about it.
The other interesting part of the book, is where Anant draws out the HR challenges of the advertising firms, starting with the fact that many of them to do not have full fledged HR managers or follow HR systems and processes.
That triggered this thought in my mind, "why does an industry which is so dependent on people, not invest in HR"
Thinking about it, I have come to the same sorry conclusion as in the past - great HR happens when work is commoditised. When work/people are a differentiator to bring in revenues as in a case of an ad agency or a professional services firm, HR is seen as expendable, without people realising then that it's the most critical.
Even tellingly, better HR professionals don't think of joining as HR managers/heads in industries like media and advertising adding to the vicious cycle of mediocre HR practices and people decisions being taking whimsically by business heads.
Steve Denning has a scathing take on the fall of the former blue chip strategy consulting firm, Monitor Group. Founded by Strategy uber-guru Michael Porter, who propounded the five forces model. In fact I had questioned the model on this blog way back in 2005 - but of course Steve Denning does a much more detailed analysis.
The shocking part of the analysis is this:
it (Porter's model) was “lacking any foundation in fact or logic.” Except where generated by government regulation, sustainable competitive advantage simply doesn’t exist.
Hype, spin, impenetrable prose and abstruse mathematics, along with talk of “rigorous analysis”, “tough-minded decisions” and “hard choices” all combined to hide the fact that there was no evidence that sustainable competitive advantage could be created in advance by studying the structure of an industry.
Although Porter’s conceptual framework could help explain excess profits in retrospect, it was almost useless in predicting them in prospect.
I received a copy of Mark Fidelman's book, Socialized a couple of weeks ago to review. I have "known" Mark via Twitter where we've had many conversations over the last couple of years. I've avidly followed his column on Forbes, where he's profiled a lot of executives and organizations who are driving change within their companies to leverage social technologies to drive a cultural transformation - as businesses move away from primarily a "command and control" era to "driven by community" leveraging the power of their fans, advocates, influencers and employees.
Mark starts off the book saying that this "social age" is the fifth age of business - after the industrial age, the broadcast age, the management and telecommunication age and the information age.
As each business age changed, some companies could adapt and thrive, and a lot of others actually couldn't and died along the way. Mark's belief is that if organizations want to survive they cannot wish away the reality and if they do so, they are doomed. Some like IBM have made the transition from various ages with nimbleness even with their size, and they are leading the charge in the social era too.
He quotes Andy McAfee, MIT’s principal research scientist for digital business, “analog companies eventually are going to get swept aside by digital companies. It’s my firmest belief about the future of business.”
Interestingly, Mark makes a point that would make most HR and senior business leaders sit up: The old "control and command" structure demotivates employees. While customers are more loyal to socially engaged businesses.
In the rest of the book, Mark lays out the process of change and operations needed to transform a business - from people to vision to assessing the gaps, to getting the organization to rally around a common purpose.
What I liked was the reference to "internal/enterprise social networks" as a "digital village" by Mark, including customers and partners. On HR's role he says "Human Resources should focus more on developing internal communities within the digital village (via the social platform). HR’s role will be to ensure that the platform’s user experience, aesthetics, and collaborative elements support the HR mission of employee recruiting, satisfaction, and retainment. If analytics and sentiment about employee discontent are trending, HR can take meaningful steps to stop the trend or learn from it."
Socialized! How the Most Successful BusinessesHarness the Power of Social (Bibliomotion, November 2012), is
available 11/15 at US bookstores as well as at all major online
retailers. You can get your FREE copy of Socialized!, when
you register for BusinessNext Social,
the world’s premier social business conference by November 21st.
A couple of days ago it was my pleasure to moderate a roundtable organized by LinkedIn India and People Matters on "Employer Branding" and how social media is impacting it.
There were about 20 HR and Recruiting leaders from Mumbai at the event, and my co-moderator was Irfan Abdulla, LinkedIn India's Director of Talent Solutions.
Irfan started off the event by showcasing the first India Recruiting Trends survey they had done, along with their annual global survey. Some interesting facts that emerged were:
53% of respondents said they would hire more
50% of respondents said they would have a budgetary growth in recruiting.
The biggest obstacles to attracting top talent is (a) Competition (b) Compensation (c) Location (d) Lack of awareness/interest in employment brand
Recruiting leaders are concerned that their competitors will (a) Invest in employer branding (b) Improve their referral program (c) Invest in new recruiting tools
Top last landing trends were (a) Utilising social and professional networks (b) Boosting referral programs (c) Upgrading employer branding
81% agreed that employer brand has significant impact on ability to hire great talent and 90% companies are increasing or maintaining investment in their employer brand.
India is ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to regularly measuring employer brand.
So there was a healthy discussion on how the HR professionals present see these trends and what they are doing on the employer branding front. My insights were:
Most organizations have defined an Employee Value Proposition, however very few measure their external brand.
Most companies seem to be focusing on branding when it comes to B-School and Tech-Schools but very few seem to focus (or know) on employer branding for middle and senior levels
Understanding of how sites like Glassdoor and discussions on Twitter are shaping employer brand was very low.
About a quarter of the organizations in the room had some kind of social media policy.
Need help to leverage social media to understand what the perception of an organization's employer brand is? Contact me :)
If you want to go through the LinkedIn report here it is
