February 8, 2012
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By:
Jon Ingham/
- HR, Social Media, Technology
I’m not talking about our systems of record or even talent management technologies here.
But all the other stuff which is available to us – social, mobile, gamified etc…
I’ve been at Europe’s Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris for the last two days, and the good news is that there seem to be quite a few HR people here.
But we’ve still come in for all the usual criticism. In particular there was a session yesterday on the ‘social business mindset‘ which turned into a bit of a ‘We Hate HR’-fest, talking about HR people who can only follow policy and generally get in the way of how things are done.
There were two particular criticisms, both of which I tried to respond to:
- HR people are purely administrative and transactional – this was pretty easy to respond to. After all we all know plenty of reactive – or even unreactive – employees in IT and other departments too.
- HR don’t use the tools (why not? – this is all about connecting people). This was harder to respond to….
I got my best feel of this using Yammer a couple of years ago to support a UK based HR community I set up a couple of years ago. Conversation naturally included the use of Yammer within our members’ own organisations where by far the most prevalent response was ‘well I’m on it, but I’m the only person on our HR team who is’.
Of course it’s not the case across the board – one of the other people at the session was an HR person from Yum Brands who suggested that HR has a higher take-up of their social networking system than any other function.
But in general, the statement is largely true. Why don’t we use the technologies that are available to us? It’s not the main reason for using them, but in addition to these, other functions already have enough of a case to hate HR – why give them one more stick to beat us?
February 9, 2012 9:27 AM
John, interesting post – quite possibly some HR functions are led by policy and administration and get in the way of ‘doing things’. But, that’s by no means just an HR issue.
Perhaps, there’s a more profound issue here. Like most things in organisations you need to work hard to deliver change – building a ‘social business mindset’ is no different. Just because there is enabling technology does not mean people will quickly adopt new work styles, behaviours and attitudes, especially if there’s no clear incentive or motivation to do so.
Clearly, ‘social enterprise’ offers new and exciting opportunities, but some organisations are still coming to terms with e-mail! However, given the mandate of HR to develop human capital, talent and people it would be disappointing that they are not leading the charge with their colleagues in technology (and marketing for that matter) on development of social enterprise.
February 24, 2012 12:55 PM
Thanks Bill, I completely agree and actually, we discussed similar points at the conference, and at Social Media Week last week – social technology is only one part of building a social enterprise, but it, for most organisations, going to be a pretty significant part. I still wish HR was a little more up to speed with this part of it, alongside other things they may (or may not!) being doing in OD etc.