What’s next with enterprise social networks?

Contribution: Shankar B, Ramco Systems

Enterprise and Social Media have reconciled successfully.  The combination does not sound oxymoronic anymore.  So, what’s next here?  How would organizations really make use of (internal) social media?  It is time to go beyond a ‘feel good’ network of employees.

1) Social media with context:  Standalone enterprise social networks are hard to sustain.  It’s hard to quantify and qualify what a person is doing there and how it contributes to business.  So, social media should be more embedded and social business networks should happen more in the context of a business situation.  

We see this happening a lot in the HCM and CRM space.  In HCM, social recognition and gamification have stared becoming mainstream.

2) Predictive Analytics:  A lot could be deciphered from an active enterprise social network.  Questions such as

§  Will my project run on time? 

§  What is the likelihood of this prospect converting? 

§  Will the new product succeed in the market?

can be answered more easily through the crunching & analysis of all the informal information/ data floating in an enterprise social network.

3) Insight into employees: An enterprise social network can provide great insight about a company's talent:  Who are the key employees?  Who are the leaders? Who are the influencers, high-networked employees?, experts in a particular topic, overall employee sentiment, satisfaction levels are some areas where a social network can provide quick insight (which a typical HCM software will find hard to provide).

Are you using your social network for any of these purposes?  Please share your thoughts.

Ramco HCM helps you even when on the move!

Supporting Workforce Mobility

Author: Abhijith Kohli

Traditionally, a mobile workforce is defined as one which does not have one fixed place of work or which moves between work locations but is linked to the company and its resources through virtual private networks, the Internet, and mobile networks. It was this set of people that initially necessitated workforce mobility support and given their limited numbers the mobility support was usually optional and mostly limited. It was limited in terms of the number of people to be supported, the numbers of business processes to be supported and the number and type of platforms to be supported.

However, with rapid strides made by technology the concept of workforce mobility has undergone a paradigm shift. With the proliferation of mobile devices, especially smart phones, and the decreasing cost of mobility services, the days of the 9 to 5 worker are long gone. Workers today have the ability to stay connected to their organization 24X7. The estimated number of the new mobile workforce is expected to cross the 1 Billion mark by 2013.

Hence, the need to support workforce mobility is no more optional but essential for organizations. If it needs to engage its workers and help improve their productivity, it needs to reach out to them using the platform they prefer the best. A few key factors that need to be considered for providing workforce mobility support are:

·         Identifying Business Processes – An organization has to first identify which business processes should be provided on mobile, given the obvious limitations of smart phones – the screen size. Therefore not all business processes, especially those which require heavy data entry or complex steps, are ideal candidates to be taken mobile. Every business process needs to be designed and if required tweaked to fit the mobile landscape. A guideline for choosing the appropriate business processes could be:

o    Approvals – The first set of business processes that can be taken mobile are Approvals. Approvals usually do not need heavy data entry or complex steps per approver, hence they are the ideal candidates for mobile adoption. Moreover, there can nothing more frustrating for an employee than delayed leave or expense approvals just because their supervisors are travelling and do not have access to their systems.

o    Frequent Self Service Transactions – The next set of business processes to be taken mobile could be frequent self service transactions like leave application, time booking, expense claims etc. Enabling an employee to perform such transactions on the go using their mobile devices boosts their productivity while in office.

o    Dashboards – The leadership of the organization, which is often on the move, should be provided mobile access to intelligent dashboards which helps them gauge the health of the organization and take corrective action as and when required.

·         Cross Platform Support – The days of Blackberry being synonymous with enterprise mobility are history. We are in the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) era now. Iphones have taken over the mantle of leadership with Android devices in hot pursuit. Employees prefer to use their own mobile devices, even if they are provided one by their organization. The bottom line being that whether an organization likes it or not they need to provide cross platform mobility support. Even in a single platform they have to contend with varying form factors. Hence an organization should always be on the lookout for products or services being provided using technologies like HTML5 or cross platform tools like Sencha, Appcelerator etc.

·         Tablet Support – Providing cross platform support was just playing catch up. To be future ready an organization needs to ensure that their mobile designs are Tablet ready too. With the cost of tablets coming down it is estimated that 58% of mobile workers will rely more and more on tablets by 2013.

These are just a few of the factors and organization needs to consider before going mobile, there are other things to consider like native apps vs cross platform apps vs HTML5 apps, mobile device monitoring, mobile application security etc. The factors to be considered may be many but there is no running away from the fact that a mobile enabled enterprise is no longer an advantage but a necessity.  

Achieving one’s potential

Author: Shyaam Sunder

CKO & Vice President-Ramco Systems

Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, “The Ugly Duckling” is 150 years old but still relevant in the message that it delivers. It is a story of a barnyard bird that is jeered for being ugly in its childhood and then growing up to be the most beautiful bird of all – the swan. It’s widely regarded as a tale of transformation.

The author confessed that the tale was inspired from his own life. He was apparently ugly looking boy who had a good singing voice and a passion for the theatre which was mocked in his childhood and youth. He then went on to win the attentions of the peoples of the world with his creations.

The important point is that, the ugly duckling does not face any challenges in its transformation into a swan. By its natural growth it becomes a swan.

In Ramco’s Talent Management software recognizes that the transformation of an employee, from being a “Novice” to a “Leader”, should be enabled just as naturally.   While the standard processes of career planning and training enable this transformation, a lot attention is given to “employee speak” – that is employee’s changing views about their work and progress. These changing views act as powerful inputs in crafting the employee’s journey. Listed below are some of the “employee speak” mechanisms.

1.    Confirmation Appraisal: This appraisal is usually done 6 to 12 months after a new employee joins in. It captures the experience of the employee in these first few crucial months. It gauges their “fit” into the system and the maturing of the understanding of the business.

2.    Training Requests: Employees may request for training courses by way of this self-service mechanism

3.    Employees may record their feedback into annual or semi-annual appraisal systems

4.    Employees may record their suggestions, grievance etc.

5.    Their activity in knowledge banks may easily be gauged through analysis of frequency of visits and tests performance.

6.    Results from their social media and gamification activities may be combined for further analysis

The most tangible of the channels (of employee speak), hence a perpendicular, is usually the performance measurement (KPI) aspect. This cannot be the only parameter through which an employee is measured. A system that relies only on KPI measurement can never explain why an employee is parked in a certain grade for prolonged periods with the same average performance. How can anyone grow if they aren’t updating their skills or connecting with the outside world through professional networks is the question?

This also points to another important aspect of leadership development – locus of control. The louder the “employee speak” and more aligned it is to their career aspirations, the more independent the employee. This is in turn implies potential to work without supervision or an ability to manage their own time. This is how a leader grows – through a series actions that bolster their ability to perform and hence set direction. 

Locating and Nurturing Good Talent

 Author: Shyaam Sundar,

             CKO &VP, Ramco Systems Ltd

The functions of locating and nurturing good employees are enabled by the running of exceptionally good Talent Management processes. We are familiar with the scope of global recruitment or succession planning processes. These should be tuned to targeted business requirements and local/cultural demand.

In Talent Management, one of the challenges is to have ready a set talent pools; sets of peoples with grouped by capabilities and performance. The idea is that when a key position falls open, talent from these pools may be analyzed for their fit into the position in question. In practical execution, organizations look at the experience profile and other typical HR parameters such educational qualifications etc before making the decision. There is always the possibility that the answer to this succession is not in black and white. This may be because the candidates in consideration may be too close in terms of performance and profile.

Extra data points are needed to make such a decision. The following additional questions may have to be answered. If the position in question has been measured by native parameters such as position size etc. That is, positions are measured by the target they carry or the number of people reporting into it. We submit it must be measured further by environmental factors such as cultural and social parameters.

Cultural Parameters are paramount in succession decisions; especially in the higher level positions as these positions affect many others in the organization. For instance, senior project directors must have demonstrated “outcome orientation”. Granular referencing to budget and time parameters of projects may be yield more important information than typical KPIs and performance records. A second level parameter could be “people orientation” – this can be valued from attrition numbers and key words from exit interviews. While outcome orientation helps us understand how the successor performed in project delivery, people orientation measures the ability to lead the team as they fight their way through delivery pressures.

Social Parameters are indicated by the number of connections into interest groups that feed the domain of job in question, the number of tweets, followers, etc.

And these are not going to add up to one whole in as in financial statement. They will sit as measures in multiple dimensions, leaving the importance of these dimensions and therefore the need to reckon with the measures to be determined by the planners. Growing organizations may place emphasis on social parameters – connections that the successor brings in. Mature organizations look at the culture of execution and outcome orientation. 

Whatever may be the case, decision making is by making an exception – choosing the best fit candidate to a context and not to a position. What is the demand of the position in the current business environment? What sort of social and cultural leadership is needed in order for the successor to meet the targets assigned to the position?

  

Exception!

Here's a good definition of an Exception!

"An Exception is an action that is not part of ordinary operations or standards. These actions are important in the discovery of talent"