There are 3 elements to Social Media as popularly understood. They are:

1. It is a platform enabling much more, faster and free-flow communication with an ever maximizing coverage potential,
2. It is based on the premise that users who, by the way, were traditionally considered to be consumers of information actually become the creators of content for communication (i.e. Information),
3. Rising adoption of ICTs in a big way are believed to be drivers of this SOCIAL MEDIA revolution

HR as a practice area has itself been undergoing transformation and development especially in India. Our HR frameworks and models, most of them for sure, are those adapted (and later customized) from western HR practices. In my own opinion, HR in Indian Organizational landscape is a rapidly evolving practice area. It has the potential to become “Humane Living Management.” Enabling living the life of the stake-holders [employees a major segment] in a humane way will become the philosophy and practice of management to bring out the best from them and ensure satisfying work-force on rolls!!

Now, what does it actually mean to bring HR and Social Media together? In most simple terms, it effectively means there is huge potential for HR Professionals in organizations to come across incredible amounts of information from their immediate and extended stakeholders. This can be about almost anything and everything! The deeper and pertinent implications are however, in my view, going to be determined by the state and maturity of HR processes and mandates to react, synthesise, analyse and act on such information.

Scenario based case in point – most common social media utility is witnessed in the HIRING process. An employer FAN page on Facebook has literally become the company’s window to its current & future employees. Jobs are listed, News about the company is shared, Experiences from a company event captured and broadcasted (photo/video), etc. Where-as when it comes to LinkedIn, there are job-posts but unlike Facebook Fan page, there is a higher degree of specialization in coverage and potential for targeted approach. In other words, there is Intelligence at play! HR process maturity in organizations should have to better a threshold to actually be placed to make best use of the LinkedIn feature. Organizations operating in an environment where their internal HR processes are streamlined and designed to predict requirements due to well planned growth do stand a better chance to leverage the abundant opportunities social media offers.

On a different note, our students during their on the field assignments are asked by their guides at the host-organizations to conduct, for instance, employee satisfaction surveys that can be statistically reliable and valid. Students do enjoy working on such projects because they get to learn a lot not just about HR but also research essentials. Organizations find it useful because they are aware that it costs much less with near zero compromise on the quality since we involve our subject faculty experts.

Employee satisfaction surveys are very common. Social media can in a big way augment this exercise by providing some of the indicators and criteria perceived to be important by a generation of employees across the sector or just a particular region/location, or by employees of a particular company, so on & so forth. Again, how well is the HR in the company designed as of today to use that information available on social media sources to initiate action? (this para was quoted (and first published) in page 12 of Wipro’s report titled Social Media Impact and Relevance in Managing Human Resources in India)

Maturity of HR processes in an organization is important as I like to demonstrate its role in internal communication piece. Typically, organizations are evolving their structure to bring about a collaborative inter-departmental environment from a traditional compartmental set-up. Today, increasingly, Internal Communication is joint property of both Mktg. & Comm. – Branding practice and HR practice. The trigger for this is the increasing need felt by the leadership to improve effective communication with employees. There are a number of occasions where these internal communication interventions almost go unrecognized (& unnoticed). These extreme cases make it necessary to look at the internal structure and inter-departmental relationships.

In my view, social media is just in its nascent stage and does seem to have a potential to become a “disruptive” force to reckon with in the medium term future. Until then, it is perhaps going to be tried, tested, re-tested, before a concrete value-proposition is defined for HRs.