Human Challenges

Peter Reiser is really working on interesting stuff which he lays out in his blog “Web 2.0 applied in an Enterprise – a huge business opportunity”. He is using the case of Sun's internal Customer Engineering Web to describe how effectively set up a community or formal network within an enterprise. Let me pick this up and give some thoughts on why I think Human Resources needs to embrace Web 2.0 more. I even believe HR's involvement is crucial on a company's path to Enterprise 2.0. The article “The 21st-century organization” gives a lot of evidence on this and I will use parts of it in this entry.

I actually see 4 different benefits to using Web 2.0 mechanisms in and beyond the enterprise:

1. Knowledge Management: Employees contribute and share content via a network platform or portal that has all Web 2.0 features like tagging (which creates a folksonomy), wikis, search engines and voting in order to systemize the content and make finding content as well as contributing it really easy minimizing search and coordination cost.

   “Knowledge workers” (also referred to as “tacit employees”) in many industries (e.g. high tech industry) account for 25 percent or more of the workforce. They undertake key line activities and are the innovators of new business ideas. Therefor it is key for the productivity and even innovation capabilities of a company to create an environment that motivates them to give the best.

   HR can play a major role initiating these communities and platforms and implement the recognition model around it to secure motivation of employees to contribute high value content. Employees who are main contributors and highly valued could be voted by the community to become a member in a special group of employees who will have access to a set of benefits like being part of management teams as advisor, or have the possibility to pursue specific career paths.

2. Skill Management: Through active participation in the community employees will make their reputation as experts for specific areas. In addition every employee could be asked to establish a personal page which describes his/her experience in the form of tags. Then employees with specific experience could be found easily via search.

   On the other hand the company would have the possibility to know if there were only one or two experts in a high demand area and could start initiatives building those missing skills.

   Learning departments in most companies belong to HR, so this area is a key HR topic. HR and the learning organization should be the driver of implementing innovative Web 2.0 models to do skills management in an enterprise.

3. Communication: The most obvious element of Web 2.0 benefits for communication are probably blogs. Internally they can be used for information sharing and as discussion boards for new ideas. The web based communities foster communication amongst their participants integrating remote working employees and teams. They facilitate communication across organization boundaries. In times of an increasing matrix environment it becomes more and more critical to provide an environment for employees to gain more easy and comfortable access to information in order to participate in business processes.

   HR has a crucial interest in good internal communication to create an open company culture, overcome organizational barriers and keep employee morale and motivation high. The internal communication function is mostly tied to HR.

4. Partner Relationships: It may not be obvious why internal communities should be expanded to external partners like customers, suppliers or resellers. There are multiple benefits: tie them to the company, keep them informed and give access to crucial information but also receive the benefit of more members participating to the community and sharing contents.

All of the above benefits are based on a community of actively participating employees or simply the benefit of established formal networks. HR can initiate these networks, can help formalize the role of the network within the organization, can make sure that an owner of a network is found and established, can develop incentives for membership, can create frameworks with standards and protocols that makes the network flourish.

A formal network with specific areas of economic accountability can be used instead of a matrix structure as it often serves to attain the same goals with the difference (and benefit) of having to manage a community of self directed employees instead of a hierarchy. It makes working horizontally far more cost effective and takes tension out of the system. The performance management of self directed employees on the other hand is critical. To motivate behavior, measuring performance is more important than providing financial incentives to reward it. Metrics must be established and tailored to individual roles and people.

Overall, creating a state of the art environment will make employees feel more valued and does not only lead to higher productivity but also retains employees!

Posted at 09:41PM Mar 25, 2007 by Volker Seubert in Human Resources  |  Bookmark to del.icio.us |  Comments[1]