From the companies perspective it can be enormously valuable if the organisation is open to new ideas, the employees are happy and enjoy good conditions and are well managed.  It can promote the company image, help in recruitment and product and service promotion. If however the company culture is poor, employees are not happy and there is a general atmosphere of mistrust then this benefits will not be realised.

On the other hand it can become another distraction to work for employees, in some cases it could allow the leakage of confidential private documents or publish inaccurate company information.

The reality is that whether employers like it or not it is here to stay, they need to recognise that it is hard to control and must look try to work the positives and learn to live with it.

Some strategies to help cope with it are:

• Set a policy for social networking around confidentiality, publishing laws and disclosure laws
• Provide open channels at work for employees to provide feedback and  ideas
• Create a flexible, relaxed atmosphere at work
• Give employees responsibility and freedom to act
• Focus employees on targets and agreed dates and not on non work activities such as the media, work breaks, etc

In these ways social media will turn into an asset for your company and productivity will rise.

In the past, HR professionals in small businesses have been reduced to relying on a haphazard system of spreadsheets and paper records for managing their core employee information.  With the emergence of web-based and software-as-a-service (SaaS), though, small-to-mid-sized businesses (SMB) have a more cost-effective way to access the HR technology that was once only available to big-budget enterprise businesses. Human resources management systems, for example.

Because of the diverse offerings out there, people have a lot of questions about the best HRsoftwaresolutions for small businesses. Finding the system that’s right for your organization can be a serious challenge. I recently put together a list of a few of the more popular HR systems for small businesses – including ActionHRM- and offered a brief overview of what you should be looking for in an HRMS.

You can find the full article on my HR blog at: http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/hr/hr-software-for-small-businesses-four-solid-solutions-10092211/

Comparing Systems: From Basic Needs to Bells and Whistles

When comparing HR systems for your small business, there are a few key items that you should take into consideration (size, pricing model, deployment method, operating system).

Different systems offer different applications and modules to meet the myriad needs for process automation in small businesses. It’s important to keep in mind just what your organization really needs. That said, here are a few of the core functions most small business HR departments are looking for:

Bells and whistles look great, sure, but you probably don’t need a succession planning application when you have 20 employees. That’s why some vendors, like ActionHRM, offer different levels of HR functionality. Be sure to weigh your options carefully when selecting an HR management solution. Do your homework, ask for user reviews, and don’t be afraid to ask questions during demos. You’ll be glad you did your due diligence.

Currently an ActionHRM user? Write a review and tell us about your experience

Most of talent community mainstream relates to recruiting new employees for a company, and now with a heavy social recruiting component (whose success emphasis varies depending on who you talk to), but they also form inside your companies with your existing employees, and their networks, both inside and out — a mass of mad-method circles within circles within circles that you only wish you understood (like a fancy Spirograph fractals).

There are of course many software solutions today that can help you slice and dice, but that’s not the point of this post. Neither is the fact that communities can be outside of the recruiting/employee primary circles and be driven more by social causes, political movements, shared professional and/or personal likes (and dislikes) and other less compelling social reasons.

One common three-dimensional element throughout all communities I’ve seen and heard and participated in is the fact that a community is only a community when those who belong collaborate, commiserate and connect with one another regularly for what can amount to infinite combination of reasons.

But the most common reality is that we usually end up with a two-dimensional recruiting model that includes a database of people where occasional, hopefully relevant company and job information is shared with them. Maybe its starts off strong, but it usually ends up abandoned with sourcing/hiring results varying wildly.

There’s just no true “community” inside.

In my sandbox analogy I wrote: Other kids may be running around and around the sandbox, but for those who are in it, for whatever time that is, it becomes an impromptu community where folks aggregate again and again. They’re not coming to the sandbox because you put it there. They’re coming because they want to play with the other kids and parents.

And recently in Chris Hoyt’s post (The Recruiter Guy) titled Communities with Intentionality, he wrote: The success of these groups and communities is not their existence, but rather how they thrive. Think of this in terms of a meeting held with your colleagues and peers.  How successful the outcome is doesn’t depend solely on having the meeting, but instead is related directly to what is accomplished in that meeting.  What is distributed, what is collected, what is shared, what is planned.

To play is to thrive and to thrive is to play, so create those 3-D talent communities.

I used to worry about bubbles and company valuations. But now? Bubbles make for much needed, truly “engaged” talent communities and encourage those out of work to go back to school.

Wait, what?!?

Just over a decade ago I worked for a firm that created and managed “talent” communities – primarily software developers and engineers. Prospective employers would then plug their job descriptions into our magic algorithm and wallah – a short list of qualified applicants, on paper at least.

However, these weren’t so much communities as much as they were applicant databases that we sent relevant industry news and jobs to during the dot.com heyday.

Whatever you want to call them – the good news was that during the height of the heyday, the top 5-10% of our qualified applicants were extremely engaged and active in their job searches and employer explorations (yes, queue the bidding wars of yesteryear and today). Of course more than the most qualified were active, but those were mostly unqualified.

How many times has this model been recreated? Quite a bit over the past decade, especially with the growth of social recruiting, and yet most of the time they don’t succeed long-term unless the fervor of a particular industry segment is running hot.

Like today, in social and mobile tech.

Consider this from a recent Wall Street Journal article by Marc Andreessen who co-founded Netscape and is now a general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz:

“Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.”

Which is why I wrote a post for Glassdoor.com recently that included recommendations for those struggling to find work to “go back to school” as well as find like-minded mentors in their industry of choice. The unemployment rate is still over 9% in the US, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 14 million unemployed Americans, more than 44% have been out of work for 27 weeks or more.

Getting people excited about innovation and the world of work today is so critical – it motivates us to learn and grow and engage with employers who need us desperately to learn and grow in order to remain competitive.

So don’t burst those bubbles – blow some of your own. Create talent communities or find the right partner who can help you create them that get folks excited again about the why of work.

(Kevin W. Grossman, Guest Blogger)

I thought, Mercy, I’d really like to be that someday.

The last starfighter, not a software developer. Sadly neither of those occupations has occupied my workspace to date. But I can certainly write about it from an HR B2B marketplace perspective. That much I got right.

What is literally amazing today is that I can control my entire virtual office via my laptop, tablet computer and smartphone. And that’s because of software – software that takes up a gig or two of hard drive space, if that. And it’s also software-as-a-service (SaaS) that allows me to purchase and use software online without having to download anything. And it’s also cloud computing where the software is delivered more as a service rather than a product, giving me access to software, data access and storage services.

The glitz and glamour of big-screen entertainment, consumer software, apps and the social cloud we play in (and don’t even really know we’re in clouds) – these are all sexy cool and rich in marketing romance.

HR business software? Not so much. But that really doesn’t matter when software runs the world these days. Or, when it’s eating it according to Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape and is now a general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz:

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

Why is this happening now? Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.

Eating the world, running the world – however you want to view it, it’s happening, sexy or not, in Silicon Valley and many other places in the world. Companies like ActionHRM provide HR management software for small to mid-size companies. It’s one of a few from a new breed of innovative SaaS providers that focus on the customer and end-user experience as well as creating an emotional connection between product and consumer. Tough to do, but these new companies are addressing multiple business problems with easy-to-use, highly configurable and cost-effective subscription software.

Those of you attending, exhibiting and/or sponsoring at this year’s HR Technology Conference & Exposition, October 3-5, 2011, can check out the all the awesome HR technologies from companies both new and old (including ActionHRM) over three amazing days HR tech conference sessions and expo hall demos.

Now, although it’s not quite there yet, once HR business software self-configures and adapts automatically once deployed, providing talent acquisition and management recommendations automatically Watson on AI steroids, that’ll be one fine day for HR tech.

Or when I become software developer, or the last starfighter, whichever comes first.

See you at HR Tech!

(Kevin W. Grossman, Guest Blogger)

More precisely, you must be able to understand the molecular makeup of your talent clouds, and how rapidly the combining and recombining of the molecules change the innovative power of your people.

Wouldn’t you rather be able to predict your weather rather than be carried away in the storm? That means having to look outward for talent sunshine, which is usually more costly in regards to attracting, recruiting, hiring, on-boarding and training. Necessary depending on who and what you’re hiring for, but more costly.

Companies today need talent insight on:

• What happened before
• What’s happening now
• What will happen if I move the warm front to the cold front and back again…

I’m talking about understanding who you have now who can then help later when you need them then, over there, or over there. This can include selecting from full-time, part-time, temps, contractors as well as your own customers, partners and competitors (poaching is a lightning storm and story for another time).

Internal mobility has been mixed blessing for many organizations because although many would prefer to hire and promote from within, if they don’t have the right insight on their employees and teams, then it becomes difficult making those decisions, especially in such an interconnected global economy, with hot job markets elsewhere while jobs are still scarce here.

Of course you can open up you position searches to internal folks and compare and contrast them and then hire/promote the most qualified, but that linear thinking doesn’t help when it comes to understand how your internal folks work individually, together, what their value is combined and recombined, and how they impact your business.

In the smaller organizations I’ve worked in, it’s easier to orchestrate your talent clouds. But in larger ones it can become the cliché of the resume database that stagnates like pooled rainwater that then breeds mosquitos, not mobility.

The HR software available today gives organizations the tools to better orchestrate their talent weather, although we all know how glacial change management can be. And you can’t have just-in-time sunshine if you can’t see through the clouds.

All right – enough with the weather. Internal mobility done right with insight can help the cost of hire be lower.

Like Judy Lindenberger’s post on the Women of HR blog recently titled What’s Next for Human Resources Professionals?

Judy shares some predictions about the future of human resources and here are three of my favorites:

Social Networking Goes Mainstream

Social networking will be widely used to recruit employees and find jobs.  In this past year, I have provided career outplacement training and coaching for many organizations. I have found that I spend much more time this year, than I did even last year, explaining how to create a killer LinkedIn profile. I predict this trend will continue and that means job seekers and recruiters will need to bone up social media tool and increase their social marketing IQ.

Costs Decrease and Retention Increases

Organizations will conduct compensation and benefits reviews to reduce overall health care costs and retain high performers. Much of my consulting work this year has been helping organizations review compensation and benefits plans. As a citizen of the State of New Jersey, I watched the Governor reduce public workers’ pensions and health care benefits in record speed. As a board member of the YWCA Trenton, I helped conduct an internal and external review of their compensation and benefit plans to save money and retain talent.

Bullies, Bullies Everywhere

Information about bullying in the workplace will be included in training on workplace harassment. Several years ago, two employees in Texas were awarded $250,000 in damages after a supervisor continually yelled at them, put his head down and “charged at them like a bull,” and made an employee wear a sign that said “I quit.” Because of cases like this, I include information about bullying in the sexual and workplace harassment courses I teach and predict this will be the norm for many organizations.

(Kevin W. Grossman, Guest Blogger)

Workplace entitlement fixations?

Why is it that every generation seemingly goes through this, since the beginning of time? The fact that the latest and greatest in restless youth are ungrateful spoiled brats who want everything given to them without working hard and paying their dues for what’s due. I remember my high school civics teacher reading a passage that described the unbridled horror of the teenage wanton wasteland, only to find out it was written nearly 2,000 years ago.

And applicable to my generation as well, Generation X, the generation also known as the “Me” generation, and every generation before and since.

I read this article recently titled The Truth About Generation Entitlement. It’s all about how the Millenials speaking up against the bad press they’ve gotten in the workplace for the past decade. For example: “They are Generation Entitlement, the ambitious Millennial children of baby boomers who grew up hearing ‘you can be whatever you want to be because you’re special.’”

C’mon. Every mom in my generation including my own told us that. It’s the entitled American way, that we can be whatever we want to be because we’re number one. Patriotic nationalism aside, I just always find it amusing how we label every generation with generalities and a name that sticks and can’t be shaken no matter what.

Again from the article: “This unflattering and condescending charge found legs when young professionals started—seemingly en masse—to ask for promotions, higher salaries, and grander titles in spite of their brief work history.”

How about others from any one of the five generations now in the workplace who do the same in spite of their workplace tenure? Why do some of us continue to hobble aspiring youth because of our own shortcomings? From my experience, some of the most egregious entitlement fanatics I’ve worked with were my own peers. Yes, I agree that for the most part it still takes time and experience to build a better mouse trap and mouse trap management, but there’s nothing wrong with a little impatient hurry-up-and-fail attitude to build one’s fortitude.

Again from my vantage point, some of the most exciting business startup activity in over a decade is coming from a mixed generational group, young and old alike, all re-imaging the way and why of work within an emotional connectivity context and cultural inclusivity.

(Kevin W. Grossman, Guest Blogger)

And it’s getting there for many HR executives. Yet still for others, not so much. No matter the title you give Human Resources, those “business partners” I know in the space are the ones who manage the internal talent economy.

That doesn’t mean that the HR executive does the day to day tactical of recruiting, training, reviewing and all the minutia of compliance and administrative tasks. However, to all my recruiter friends out there, no need to throw rocks; I’m not discounting recruiting to basic tactical work. But I am saying that whether you call it VP of HR, VP of Talent, Chief Human Resource Officer, Chief Talent Officer, Chief People Officer, you name it, and you work for a company of any significant size, usually over 2,500 employees, you more than likely have a specialized team working for you.

Again, when HR is truly about the business, embraced by the business, then they should manage all of people management, from beginning to end.

But as I’ve written before, if someone says “seat at the table” one more time, I’m gonna blow (and many others along with me). I’ve talked with many HR practitioners of late who are part of their company’s executive business strategy, but unfortunately the dissing “buzz” of disservice continues. The good news is that smart CEOs who want growth have strong talent management, which means they have smart people management who understand the business, what drives growth and how to keep the workforce in order to get there.

And what better way to check on the business of HR than to take the shuttle bus at this year’s SHRM 2011 back in June. On one such ride I struck up a conversation with the nice woman next to me and find out she’s VP of personnel and talent acquisition at a large company in the Midwest back from the brink of death (and yes, she used the word personnel — add that to the VP list above).

So I start asking her questions, and she tells me things like:

•    We have no mainstream HR or talent management software deployed. Our systems are home grown, tedious and temperamental. But, we have no plans to dump them any time soon because we’re just getting our life back. (But that will be on the priority list soon…)
•    We still had net employee losses last year, but this year we plan on hiring a few thousand before the end of 2011.
•    We’re in the midst of developing a broader scope succession plan that includes not only upper management but middle management and line managers as well.
•    We’re going to be cross-training management across lines of business, including those of us in personnel and HR.
•    We’re in the midst of developing a social media strategy that includes establishing employee guidelines (meaning loose ones — we want folks to participate now), employment branding, recruiting, marketing, you name it. That’s a far cry from the traditionally conservative world we’ve been living in for a long time.
•    In fact, when I came across Glassdoor.com for the first time recently I was horrified of what I saw written about us and other companies. It’s time to participate in the conversation and rebuild our brand.

Human resources and workforce management is maturing and businesses along with it. The above example is just one of many stories I’ve heard recently. Remember, we may still be on the front end of “the business of HR” mainstream, but the next 5-10 years I believe will be amazing.

(Kevin W. Grossman, Guest Blogger)

HR and people management professionals are hopefully tuned in to their organizations and are aware of the stress, as well as trying to do something to alleviate it.

According to a recent study referenced in an HR Executive article, the University of Zaragosa in Spain found that two key factors — workplace stress (mainly monotony and feeling overburdened) and a perceived lack of recognition — are the prime factors in employee burnout.

And consider this from a recent TLNT post titled Survey: Half of Employees Want to Leave or Have Checked Out on the Job:

“Mercer, the global HR consulting firm, just released the results of its new What’s Working survey, conducted over the past two quarters among nearly 30,000 workers in 17 countries, including 2,400 workers in the U.S. It found that nearly a third (32 percent ) of American workers are seriously considering leaving their organization at the present time, up sharply from 23 percent in 2005.

As bad as that sounds, another 21 percent of workers say they are not necessarily looking to leave but view their employers unfavorably and have rock-bottom scores on key measures of engagement, meaning that when you combine the two, more than half of all employees (53 percent) are either looking to leave for a new job or have mentally checked out of their old one.”

I’m sure you’ve seen enough survey research recently to make you pass out from the stressed out and unhappy workers you deal with everyday.

But wait – there’s more:

The Spanish researchers surveyed 409 employees working at the University of Zaragosa, including administrative, services, teaching and research staff and interns. Among their findings:

• An employee who works more than 40 hours per week is six times more likely to develop the burnout than someone who works less than 35 hours;
• A worker who does monotonous tasks — creating the tendency to get bored and lacking personal-development opportunities — is more at risk than others of developing the under-challenged burnout profile;
• Employees who are in the same job for long periods often ignore responsibilities due to the lack of recognition they perceive in their environment, and frequently fit into the worn-out profile; and
• Workers with more than 16 years at the same workplace are five times more at risk of developing a worn-out profile than someone with fewer than four years at the same job.

Regardless of the type of burnout, however, the result is emotional exhaustion, cynicism and a lack of productivity, the researchers concluded.

Listen, you and the rest of your management team may not think about these things, or even care much, but the reality is you should care a little if staying in business with top talent means anything to you.

Here are some suggestions from the experts you should consider:

• Encourage authentic communication that fosters a sense of belonging.
• Periodically take the pulse of your employees to identify their specific areas of concern and link employee opinion to outcomes such as productivity and retention.
• Ensure your employees that their opinions make a difference, and mean it.
• Offer effective training, either within or outside of the company, to enable advancement opportunities and give employees a sense that it’s possible change their environments.
• Create “influence teams” who can look at ways to improve employee situations, including offering a paid month, 3-month, or 6-month sabbatical for long-term employees.

And one final sentiment from the experts: listen to your employees, recognize and share in their success, and never underestimate the power of caring in the workplace.

Never.

(Kevin W. Grossman, Guest Blogger)