Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER & STRATEGIC CAPABILITY NETWORK WWW.SCNETWORK.CA AN INDEPTH LOOK AT KEY TOPICS FOR SENIOR HR AND BUSINESS LEADERS JANUARY 27, 2014 SCNetwork's panel of thought leaders brings decades of experience from the senior ranks of Canada's business community. Their commentary puts HR management issues into context and looks at the practical implications of proposals and policies. 5 areas where social media shines For HR, social tools can do plenty of heavy lifting GETTING SOCIAL: E A panel of five subject-matter b exper ts spoke about social o media at a recent Strategic d e t Capability Network event i o in Toronto, sharing their o organizations' experiences with r z social media and presenting a new ideas about using social d tools in the HR function. o n i BY LIZ BERNIER THE JURY IS in on social media, particularly when it comes to the human resources function. But despite the many benefits, some HR professionals and C-suite leaders still need to be convinced to adopt these social tools and integrate them into day-to-day business practices. That was the central message of a special panel discussion at a Strategic Capability Network (SCNetwork) event held in Toronto in November. Five expert panellists joined SCNetwork members to share their experiences with social media within the HR function, and to talk about the areas where these social tools can have a truly transformative effect. Mentoring One of the areas where social tools are invaluable is mentoring, according to Brad Antle, global program delivery manager, IBM leadership development in Toronto. IBM has more than 430,000 employees worldwide. "Prior to... the introduction of the Internet, mentoring had been done the same way at IBM for many years," said Antle. "It was much like Noah's ark, if you like. You'd go in two by two, you'd sort of find that mentor, and then really the benefit was between the mentor and mentee only." But with the advent of social media, IBM wanted to change that model. It launched a number of new training initiatives along with an internal "hub" that connects all IBM employees — and links them up with mentors. "This is a community where all 400,000 IBMers can practise being social," said Antle. "So with this, they can form connections directly based on business and clients' needs, and it really gets the layers of the organization out of the way. You get connected to people right away without having to go through the hierarchy." IBM completed a social business risk assessment in 2010, and it has a number of subject-matter experts (SMEs) and ambassadors to keep the momentum going. "This community now can provide mentoring in many different ways. You can do one-onone, because you can locate those mentors, you can do one-to-many though the use of blogs, and many-to-many with the use of forums," he said. "Mentoring is a naturally social event and to enable social mentoring, you've got to first create that social culture." Performance management Another useful application of social media is for collaborative performance management, according to Raymond Shih, Toronto-based program manager at Grand Challenges Canada, a federally funded startup with a focus on global health initiatives and 20 full-time employees. "We faced a problem that was not unique to our startup — that's not unique at all — and that is how do you conduct performance management in such a small organization?" said Shih. Social tools turned out to be the solution, and Grand Challenges now uses a performance management system that is socially based. tives… throughout the year, and these kind of collect." With the new system, you can also "tag" people on group projects and visually compare the differences between your self-assessment and your manager's assessment. The organization saw some valuable benefits to the new system almost immediately, includ- "How would I be able to engage my senior team, my team of leaders, to be more open, more transparent, more visible across the organization and across our sector?" "We used a 360-degree feedback performance review and objectives modules… and this doesn't look like an enterprise system. It looks more like Gmail or Facebook," said Shih. "You don't have to wait until the HR year starts to start filling these in — you can start attaching comments, feedback on individual objec- ing a lot of time saved, a lot less paperwork — and a lot more useful information from employees. "The information's much more robust because instead of employees focusing on trying to fill out all these templates, which may or may not be useful, they're able to just log in and click and just start typing away," said Shih. dit: jeff m k.co toc tters Shu r/ tzge Me Cre "S ocial media generates a lot of data. When you can comment all the time on anything… there's a lot of text and a lot of data points, and I'd be lying if I said we'd really figured out or optimized how we'd actually analyze that data, but the good thing is the data's there." Leadership Using social media to develop a transparent, clear and approachable leadership style is another way these tools can be extremely effective, according to Julia Hanigsberg, vice-president of administration and finance at Ryerson University in Toronto, which has more than 33,000 full- time undergraduates and about 770 full-time faculty. "We have a strategy of putting people first. And part of that, for me, really translated into a leadership style that generated transparency, generated a sense of authenticity, that people would know who I am as a leader, what I stand for, what I'm about, how that connects into Ryerson's strategy, and how they can interface with me," she said. "The other thing it meant for me was how would I be able to engage my senior team, my team of leaders, to be more open, more transparent, more visible across the organization and across our POSITIVE > pg. 14

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