Social media in HR London

Engaging The Social Culture

Taking Stakeholder Management

To The Next Level
Peter Wilkinson

Peter Wilkinson

Social media and HR
Social media has an impact on all of the following: -
– Internal communications and culture.

– Employer branding.

– Recruitment.

– Team work.

– Training.

– Learning.

Society for human resource management 2012
survey
 Responsible for leading social media - Marketing (35%),
IT (17%), HR (14%) or senior management (14%).
 12% of organisations identify at least one full-time
employee to manage social media efforts.
 28% have a social media strategy.

 21% of organisations measure return on investment
(ROI).

survey

 39% of organisations monitor employees’ social
media activities on company-owned devices.
 20% of organisations use social media for
internal communications. The most common
internal uses of social media are information
sharing and group discussion.

survey
 40% of organisations have a formal social media
policy.
 Of the organisations with formal social media policies,
HR is most often responsible for creating (43%) and
enforcing (44%) these policies.
 33% of organisations with a social media policy report
taking disciplinary action against employees who
violated their policy in the past year.

The way we communicate has changed

Your social media brand – Risks and rewards

Your organisation has two brands! You have an employer
brand and a consumer brand. With the rise of social
networking, you, your company and how you run it is
under the microscope. Your culture has become a fishbowl
— everything you do can be seen by everybody. Your
employees have many channels for broadcasting their
opinions — both negative and positive.

Which factors drive the creation of
energy?
 Leadership quality A vision should not be summed up in a few
words. It will lose its power & meaning. You
 Strategic direction need to continuously recharge people’s
 Confidence understanding so the energy level of the people
is high enough to perform. This is done through
 Commitment communication, communication and more
communication. Using social media allows us to
 Teamwork
change the energy level, and its networks
similarly can channel the flow.

What is social media | external & internal?

How social media fits into the business at
BT
Mark Morrell has been BT’s intranet manager
for over seven years and in that time this
100,000 employee organisation has
implemented a wide range of social media tools
and platforms including a business wide
blogging platform, a wiki called BTpedia, a
media platform for audio and video podcasts
and more, while the CEO hosts online chats
with employees across the business.

BT’S MY PAGES
BT wanted every employee to have a place of
their own on the intranet, where they could…

•Create web pages and allow others to edit
them (wikis)
•Share photos and files
•Create as many blogs as they wished
•Connect themselves with other people in
their organisation

“The fact that individuals could manage all
this functionality through a single ‘portal’ was
incredibly powerful and sent adoption rates
through the roof.” Richard Dennison, Senior
Manager Social Media, BT

Generation Y will be expecting that
social media tools are available

“The face of our workforce is dramatically changing.
We have the four generations here, and they’re very
different in how they use technology to connect in
their everyday environment.

The younger generation is expecting that social
media tools are available to them. They don’t know
any other world; they are totally wired in multiple
fashions at the same time.

They expect to find this in the work environment,
and if we don’t provide that for them here, they very
quickly disengage and leave for other companies that
are providing that robust connection.”
Laurie Buczek, Intel’s social computing manager

ASDA’S Green Room

“Trust and transparency are
key to earning real customer
loyalty…

…My ambition for Asda is to
actively involve customers in
every aspect of the business, to
lift the lid on how we do
things, and enable our
customers to help make
decisions that have an impact
on what we sell and how we

Change is needed
Organisational change management is required
People interact with the system and people deliver the
social media service.
Give them structure and incentive so they engage with the
social media system.
Ensure that the HR department, corporate internal
communications and governance are leading the change.

Social media aids and needs transformational
change

Social media in organisations is an evolution
 Companies don’t do social media, people do.

 Ownership should belong to the stakeholders who are
going to make this work.
 You need someone who has enthusiasm, passion and the
right emotions to drive social media. They need the
passion to push back all the barriers that people will throw
in their way.

Social media in organisations is an evolution
 Who are the people using and implementing social media
in organisations? Who takes responsibility within the
programme? Is it the PM through the communication plan
or perhaps others?
 Are employees and project teams bypassing the
organisational channels and using collaboration spaces,
blogs, micro-blogging services, all in front of the firewall?
 In reality, they probably are... it is already happening, you
may not be aware!

It requires a behavioural shift so
track outcomes through behaviours
 Once a small number of people begin to change their
behaviours, ask them to what extent different types of their
behaviours change. This will help you to see what role the
new media played in comparison to more traditional
information sources.
 Use a pilot or control group approach where you promote
the new media channel more heavily in some locations than
in others. Then measure the difference in behaviour change
and business outcomes between the control groups and the
pilot groups.


If you tried to take email away from
your organisation today, people simply
wouldn’t know what to do. Social
media is an evolution of
communication.

 Within a broader change management survey ask additional questions
about exposure to, and usage of, various communication channels. Using
the answers to these questions, you can see if people who frequently visited
a blog had more favourable answers to the other survey questions than
those who didn’t. Once you quantify the percentage impact a particular
communication approach has had on behaviour change, you can calculate
the return on investment.

 The survey questions or differential outcomes of the pilot study will tell
you what percentage of the credit social media can take for the financial
value of overall behaviour change. Then simply compare that value against
the cost of providing electronic channels.

Where do we start?

 Find & speak to stakeholders early.

 Work out what makes them tick.
 Identify blockers – and ways to overcome
those.
 Find allies and friends in high places.
 Establish guidelines.

Where do we start?

 Start your social media in a small way.

 Aim to develop a blended solution.

 Base the blend on specific uses and ties.

 Focus on the human, and emotional not the
technological.
 Get very comfortable with ambiguity and lack of
control.

Where do we start?

• Be tenacious and never give up.
• There’s no one solution, try and
experiment.
• Tie everything to the programme
management - objectives and align.
• Craft strategies and implement the plan.
• Measure impact and quantify ROI.

Where do we start?

 Share the vision and begin the
conversation.
 Repeat, repeat, repeat.

 Make it fun and be social and engage
their emotions.
 Be patient – it can take time.

Where do we start?

You have to TRUST the employees,
stakeholders and users to use the social
media networks as they were intended.
You need to stand back and keep
control through listening and engaging.

Where do we start?

We need to consider governance.
How will the organisation be
managing and mitigating the risks
and fears social media has brought
along?

Governance – What should it cover?
 Spamming.

 Styles of communications – tone of voice?

 Copyright.

 Legal, privacy, signatures and email addresses.

 Use of name or anonymous.

 ‘Do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ of sensitive issues.

 Respect.

 Who has final say and consequences.

 Processes and help.

Solve problems with social media

There are three core areas for success in a social
service help desk:
Ensure you are an effective curator.

Have effective social search.

Organisational change management .


Ensure you are an effective curator
Have a curator strategy and approach.

Choose the best items from the collections to display.

Experts need to be the curators of their material.


Have effective social search
Search is a hard and evolving problem.

Natural language and text processing should be considered
as a strategy.
Social service desk operations should be expert on social
search across all their social assets such as forums and wikki
etc.

The strategic paradox
 The paradox of the social network, that no one wants to admit, is
that as the size of the network increases our ability to be social
decreases.
 The paradox of social media, may cause readers to narrow to only
selected news feeds depending on their interests which creates
opportunities and threats.
 On the flip side social media is addictive and employees will push to
engage as management needs to harness its power – The fallout and
impact on the internal and external brand is potentially dangerous.
 Social media speaks globally and instantly without control – cultures
and communications need to be localised with control.

Peter Wilkinson
07930330125

Peter @socialmediastrategy.org.uk

www.socialmediastrategy.org.uk/blog

Social media in HR London

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