Recently in HR Category

Thought this was very interesting. Shel Holtz being interviewed by Ron Shewchuk

Question #2: Which company do you think does internal communications best, and why?

Shel: I'm reluctant to pick "the best," because there are a lot of companies whose internal communication programs I haven't seen. That said, I've always been impressed with the communications at Best Buy. It's open and candid. It promotes business literacy. It uses multiple channels. And they're always open to new ideas. Not too long ago, for instance, they introduced the Blue Shirt Nation, a social network for retail workers accessible over the World Wide Web. It has become a force of nature. Twenty percent of retail workers have created profiles. Turnover in the retail workforce is about 75%, but among those with BSN profiles, it has dropped to 8%. These are engaged employees with a solid network of colleagues they would have to abandon if they left.#

via For your Approval

That sounds pretty conclusive, but it's possible that it's only the employees that are engaged and motivated anyway who are joining Blue Shirt Nation. It would be great to identify a control group that share similar engaged characteristics to see what the difference in turnover is.

Thinking about this some more (what - you expect me to think *before* I post ??), maybe it doesn't matter. We *know* that engaged employees are less likely to leave, and if we can provide more places for them to communicate and network, thus deepening and broadening their engagement with the organisation, and, more importantly, their peers, then we're doing a good thing - regardless of whether the place is virtual or real.

Marcel de Ruiter asked "What corporate functions should lead in Enterprise 2.0?'.

I left the following reply:

Having HR lead an Enterprise 2.0 initiative is probably the quickest way to consign it to irrelevance and indifference. HR typically has credibility in HR and benefits – and should be focusing on that. Attraction and retention are bonuses from E2.0 – not the core benefits.

An Enterprise 2.0 initiative (which sounds unwieldy, cumbersome and committee driven, and thus doomed to fail) has to be driven from need and controlled by the people it’s trying to serve – normally those at the sharp end of the business

Now this isn't meant to denigrate HR - but most HR led systems I've seen (when I was at Mercer) are shining examples of bad usability, bad design, and ivory tower mentalities - causing employees to swear under their breath as they use click through flexible benefits systems. (This is true of most corporate driven IT systems).

So, not a good starting point to design something that should be people focused, nimble, adaptable and emergent.

[tags]HR, Enterprise 2.0, corporate, Web2.0, internal[/tags]

Via systematicHR

Sometimes a firm actually publishes a study that is neither 'salesy' or full of common-sense information that we already knew. Deloitte put out a "Making HR Business Process Outsourcing Work" study/paper here

Technorati tags: hr,hro

Interesting - a newly hatched blog community for HR professionals, started up by Michael Specht: hrblogs.org. (via the HR Technology Discussion Board )

hrblogs.org is a free blogging service for HR professionals that will provide Wordpress based blogs to anyone who works within the HR profession regardless of location. If you work as a generalist, manager, recruiter, industrial relation specialist, or remuneration and benefits, in fact any area of HR, hrblogs.org will enable you to establish a free blog.

Running on wordpress, I think it needs an aggregator page with an RSS feed, and an OPML listing of available blogs. I can see how this might be interesting for people new to blogging, but I'm wondering if it's better to sign up for a service like this that might end up locking you in to a community, or start up a more general purpose blog and get added to a community directory. In fact, hrblogs.org could (should) also be providing a community directory service - "add your HR related blog here". But overall, I like the idea, and considering the benefits HR people could realise from social media tools, any initiative that makes it easier to start and experiment with blogs is a good thing.

If you have any interest in HR, HR technology, and HR Outsourcing, then you need to read the HR Technology Discussion Board, run by a chap called "Dubs" (hmm - may not be his real name). I'd be very interested to find out who he works for !