Book Review: Socialized by Mark Fidelman - A book on building a Social Business

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 Businesses Harness 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.

Employer Branding, Recruiting in India and Social Media

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:

1. Most organizations have defined an Employee Value Proposition, however very few measure their external brand.
2. 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
3. Understanding of how sites like Glassdoor and discussions on Twitter are shaping employer brand was very low.
4. 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

India Corporate Recruiting Trends from LinkedIn Talent Solutions

Related articles

• LinkedIn attempts to quantify the Employment Brand

Interview on Social Media, Human Resources and emerging HR Technology

I gave some talks as part of the Oracle HCM Executive Briefing seminars some months ago, and the communication folks at Oracle took the opportunity to interview me on the latest trends in HR and Technology.
You can watch the interview here :)

Recruiting the Social Media celebrity? Here are the pros and cons

Employee of the Month Reserved Parking Sign (Photo credits: myparkingsign.com)

The Wall Street Journal has a good article on hiring what Jeremiah Owyang called the Perfessional bloggers/social media celebs, and which it calls the "Co-Branded" folks:

Their activities can either complement a company's own brand image or clash with it. Companies that fail to make room for co-branded employees—or worse yet, embrace them without thinking through the implications—risk alienating or losing their best employees, or confusing or even burning their corporate brand.

increasingly, companies are recognizing that these activities have a business value. When a management consultant leads a large LinkedIn group, he builds a valuable source of referrals and recruitment prospects; when a lawyer tweets the latest legal news, she positions her firm as the go-to experts in that field. How can an employer resist? And yet, there is a downside: Co-branded employees can raise tough questions about how to contain their online activities—and how to compensate them.

 It also isn't easy for managers to balance responsibilities among the bloggers and nonbloggers within a team. And it takes an effort to make sure employees' brands align with the company's.

Related articles

• LinkedIn attempts to quantify the Employment Brand
• Your Employee Is an Online Celebrity. Now What Do You Do?

No. Social Technology or Social Media will not make your employees engaged

English: Description: Social Networking Source: own work Author: koreshky Date: 12/10/2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yes. That's true. Using social technologies (like internal blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, social networking etc) will not help you to increase the employee engagement scores of your organizations.

Employee engagement is impacted by three factors, IMHO:

• The engagement between the person's skills, passion and purpose with the role he/she is working in. If you have a person in the wrong job, no matter what you do, the person's engagement level is unlikely to go up.
• The relationship between the manager and the person - and the team the person works with.
• Organizational culture 

Social tools can help a person do his/her work faster by making discovery of information and experts faster. However if any of the above three factors cause engagement, it's unlikely that the employee would be using social tools - unless the tool is embedded in the way of work. As in, it auto updates details and updates when the employee updates a business record. These kind of "social glue" technologies (as Sameer Patel calls it) is still early stage.

Companies who expect such employees will get engaged and involved in sharing and participation need to address the root causes of disengagement and then expecting the tools to increase engagement.

LinkedIn attempts to quantify the Employment Brand

Image via CrunchBase

Last week LinkedIn introduced a metric it calls the Talent Brand Index which it says is a measure of how desirable as an employer a company is.

The Index is calculated by the number of people who have actively engaged with an employer (comprised of who have researched the company, applied to jobs and who have followed a company on LinkedIn) divided by the number of people who are aware of the company (defined as people who have viewed the employees' profiles and who are connected to the employees) Multiplied by 100 this number gives the Talent Brand Index.

With this index LinkedIn is telling companies that their brand is shaped by employees, and if they actively engage on social media they can push up that numerator.

Recognizing that an Employment Brand is not useful without a context, LinkedIn can offer the TBI based on geography and compared to peer companies as well as by function. If you're a recruiter for an investment bank based in Mumbai you'd want to compare your TBI to other financial companies based in Mumbai and amongst Finance professionals.

LinkedIn has about 17 million Indian members and as more and more join the site, the TBI can become the way a HR leader can track the so far subjective measure of Employment Brand. I am sure that the formula of the TBI would evolve over time as LinkedIn adds more data points - hopefully from other third parties to determine how truly in demand an employer is. It is a great start anyway.

Here's more detail (pdf document) and LinkedIn's site for the TBI

Related articles

• Talent Brand Index Makes the LinkedIn Recruiting Platform Indispensable
• LinkedIn's Newest Crusade: Fix That Employer Brand!
• Ranking the 100 Most InDemand Employers Using LinkedIn Data [INFOGRAPHIC]

Don't hire "Rockstars" cautions @AbhijitBhaduri

Abhijit Bhaduri (Photo credit: Mediocre2010)

Abhijit Bhaduri, the Chief Learning Officer of Wipro has written a book called "Don't Hire the Best" on how to hire CXOs.

Have you wondered why when certain leaders who have been tremendously successful for a long time in a company and are recruited into a new company cannot repeat their success and actually quit soon?

Abhijit says that most hiring decisions at the critical senior positions are still assessed subjectively by hiring managers. The real issue is that the predictor of success is not knowledge that the new employee brings, but the cultural fit with the organization's culture and values that are the real predictor of success.

Using tools like DDI's Success Profile and Hogan Assessments, Abhijit explains the various ways in which organizations can save time, money and employee morale by hiring the right fit rather than running after "stars". Drawing an analogy, he says it's like buying a great shirt without testing whether its your size.

The most insightful part was the chapter on "derailers" or what causes people to fail. These are deeply ingrained personality styles that affect leadership behavior, and flare up during times of stress. People with more than 3 high risk derailers would be very problematic to handle.

The book is written for recruiting leaders, but I think it is very useful for even people who are looking at joining a new job. It shows what are the various kind of organizational cultures also and what kind of behavior is expected in that - and one can assess a company in that way and think whether one's own personality would fit into a culture like that.

So if you're in a leadership role or trying to get into one - go ahead read this book. It might save you a lot of money and bad experiences!

What I am upto these days in #SocialHR

Here's a little update. I am currently in Mumbai on a two month long stint, working along with India's largest social media agency - Social Wavelength. They handle social media management and marketing for some of India's largest organizations. Social Wavelength has been a winner of the Red Herring Asia 100 award too.

My role at Social Wavelength is to conceptualize their first big different service vertical - into Social HR. Over the next two months I would be interacting with external HR heads to take their inputs into what the readiness of the HR community is to embrace social.

Some thoughts I have - which I'd like to validate are:

1. Organizations that are looking at embracing social media internally, need a partner to understand their needs, and help them choose relevant tools and guide them through with implementing it successfully.
2. Organizations need to monitor social conversations about their employment brand and joining those social conversations and would need help to do so.
3. Organizations understand the benefits of employees acting as social media evangelists for their brands but are wary of the risks vs the returns. They would like a partner to suggest an enabling social media policy and educating/ training employees on how to use social media.

Would you be interested in any of these offerings? Let me know at gautamghosh @  socialwavelength.com 

Linkedin launches a "blogging platform". Unimpressive

Image via CrunchBase

Today Linkedin announced that you could "follow" 'thought leaders' in generic areas like Richard Branson or in specific areas like Charlene Li.

By doing so Linkedin is following the lead of Twitter which allows people to "follow" a person and later Facebook which allowed people to "subscribe" to a person.

A two way connection between is smaller but is stronger. Linkedin had earlier thrived on a smaller more tightly knit network. If I had to connect to Richard Branson, I had to have his explicit permission that he knew me.

The purpose of Linkedin is also getting diluted in this race with Facebook and Twitter. While Twitter is the place most people go to follow celebs and others, Facebook is the place they go to converse with people they know.

Where does Linkedin feature in this? Facebook's notes features have not been a success as they don't get indexed in the open web. Am not sure if Linkedin's will. Even if they do, it begs the question why a thought leader would share content on Linkedin and not their own blog.

Personally I think this is not a strategically significant move for Linkedin.

What do you think?

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• PRO: Is LinkedIn trying to become WordPress for the business executive set?
• LinkedIn Launches Blogging Platform With Help From Obama, Romney
• Ugh, LinkedIn Gives "Thought Leaders" Another Platform for Bloviating

Musing on Innovation and learning

Innovation (Photo credit: Seth1492)

Last Friday, I was part of a panel discussion at Amity University's HR Summit on Innovation. The panel moderator asked me what the challenges were for large companies who wanted to innovate. Here were the points I made:

1. Disruption vs Learning: All learning should lead to change in behavior, which should lead to a better way of doing things. However this disruption is tough to achieve
2. Processes: Most organizational processes are designed for predictability, however innovation needs unpredictability
3. Tolerance for failure: Organizations normally penalise failure, however innovation needs failure to finally succeed. Companies need to start penalising inaction rather than failure.

What do you think are the challenges for innovation in large firms?