Putting Social HR in Its Place: The Employee Lifecycle

hr vetting

By Elizabeth

Emphatically believe that a social workplace considers employee behavior in order to create a truly collaborative and  integrated social experience. HR is critical in understanding the needs of your employees so that social tools enable them to be productive, communicative, and engaged in their daily work life.

Your roadmap to accomplishing this is through the employee life cycle.

Whether your employees are onboarding, developing or growing their talent, maintaining status quo, or separating, they are all somewhere within that employee life cycle and have unique needs. What involving HR and basing social programs on the employee life cycle provides:

- Connect with real work goals and processes
- Focus on improving performance
- Involve people who have the power to take action regarding these goals
- Balance employee actions with business context
- Increase employee capacity, productivity and recognition
- Focus on learning about learning, in settings that are collaborative and relevant

Ways Social Can Be Infused into the Employee Lifecycle

The base camps for the employee lifecycle can vary based on your organization’s needs and objectives. What I’ve outlined below are  based on the base camps I’ve developed for organizations. Oh, and to help illustrate the points below, I’ve also created this shiny infographic for you. Feel free to download, share and use.

Attraction

• Peer to Peer Recruitment – A key area that social really enables. Allows companies to use their own employees as brand advocates and give potential hires a unique perspective into the culture of the area of the company they are thinking of joining.
• Reputation and Brand – Somewhere a conversation is taking place that will effect your reputation as an employer. At a minimum, you should be listening to the social conversation to mitigate brand risk but ideally you would be contributing value to the conversation stream as well.
• Referral Schemes – Recruitment is dependent on referrals as a source for qualified candidates. Further develop your current referral schemes by tapping into the digital social and professional graphs of your employees and leverage their social connections.
• Talent Communities – Create talent communities to develop job seekers. When implemented thoughtfully, these can become real communities rather than just socially sourced lists of names.

Recruitment

• LinkedIn overwhelmingly trumps Facebook and Twitter as the social network recruiters use to search for job candidates.
• Facebook is the least-used network by recruiters, although more candidates are looking to use it.
• A recruiter’s Twitter followers are three times more likely to apply to a job posting than a LinkedIn connection.

Onboarding

• Role Specific Wikis – Living, breathing documents based on user’s role.
• Q&A Discussions – Question and solution approach to new hire issues (think Quora).
• Experience Platforms– Allow new hires and long time employees to contribute tips to help others through the onboarding process.
• Track Search Terms and  Refine – As new hires search intranet content, search terms they enter should be analyzed to ensure content relevancy.

Learning

• Extend virtual classrooms beyond the course time by allowing employees to connect before and after the course.
• Enables just-in-time, fast, and targeted learning opportunities.
• Creates positive attitude toward learning, which leads to learning more efficiently.

Growth

• Goal Development – Permit  employees to solicit so they can set specific development goals with a focus on training.
• Idea Generation – Foster  innovation that have acknowledged results.
• Development Groups -  Connect employees on similar development plans so they can encourage and support one another.

Retention

• Using Social Business Tools/Platforms give employees an idea of how their actions impact overall company performance and helps them meet their own objectives.
• Endorsements and strong individual analytics will go a long way toward having employees use this data to exceed their objectives.
• Companies who strive to create a culture of innovation must reward and recognize employees in innovative ways.

Separation

• Establish a dignified exit process by soliciting genuine feedback.
• Today’s business is often project-based: retired employees are a flexible source of experience.
• Candidates referred by former employees are pre-screened candidates and tend to fit the companies needs.
• Alumni Community – Keeping in touch with employees who already know your business, and as they increase their skill sets, it’s a talent pool worth tracking.

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