So today I complete 100 days at Philips India - in a role that supports the HR team in leveraging social media and technologies to impact their effectiveness and to create new value for the organization.
So what did I learn in my first 100 days at Philips India HR?
So what did I learn in my first 100 days at Philips India HR?
- Management support is critical: India HR Head and global CLO Yashwant Mahadik (Blog, Twitter) is one of the few HR leaders in India who "gets" the fundamental shift and power of social to business. His support in creating my role and then empowering with responsibility is what makes me successful.
- Cross functional education: As a "social media" enabler in the HR function my role is to ensure that the existing groups within HR (like Recruiting, Learning and Recognition) - so educating and working with them to understand social and how it can help them achieve their own business results. One of the first things was a Social for HR education for all the HR employees.
- Business education: Being one of the first "social media" hires in Philips India - I am working on "reverse mentoring" some business leaders on how digital and social is impacting businesses and am also working with groups like Strategy & Business Development and the Corporate Communication groups on helping them use social for their work.
- Content is key: This cannot be over emphasized. As someone who is looking to engage with external audience - understanding who they are and what content they value is one of the main parts of making a role like this successful.
- Agencies can help - but the strategy has to be yours. In the employer branding space in India I haven't really met agencies who can give you "big ideas" - most of them are great in execution, but you have to rely on your own ideas.
- Challenge conventional wisdom: When we were thinking of CampusJournos.com - conventional wisdom says that if you want to engage with B School students you have to leverage Facebook and spend on ads to reach out to them. However we went for Wordpress as a blogging platform, spent zero money on ads and achieved more success in engagement than we had ever hoped for :)
