HR 2.0 as an ongoing process

This post is the continuation of the one I wrote on the central role HR have to be given in the change process businesses need to undertake to grow in the current economy.

Most often, identifying a need implies that a project has to be undertaken. A project is made of a number of known and planned actions. Is the need about training, a training program will be undertaken. A need about HR marketing (retaining staff members, improving employer’s brand) ? It will be a communication project. Etc..

HR 2.0 or, not to mix things, adopting social computing tools from the web 2.0 to serve an HR strategy imply a new way of doing things. I don’t say it has to replace all what’s being done now, it has rather to be seen as something complementary.

In the above mentioned post I wrote that HR people will have to learn how to deal with the fact we were mainly talking about things that have an impact n HR and that are not into their hand but in line manager’s. HR having to pilot managers, provide them with a framework but not having to be directly involved in end actions.

Here are a few examples.

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Why HR are really central to Enterprise 2.0

Relationships between human resources and enterprise 2.0, or rather the use of social software”, are very complicated. Whatever the way you consider the issue, you always have to deal with HR.

There are two reasons to that :

The first is that many people came to take an interest in enterprise 2.0 because their primary issue was an HR one. In this case, tools were seen as catalysts for new desirable practices that were hard to put to work because of barriers (time / space / tools) social software helped  to get rid of.

The second is that the others, those who were passionate about tools but didn’t care much about how large organizations internal concerns, finally realized that they could not avoid bumping into HR people, who, most of times, were not very social software savvy and had a suspicious attitude. I don’t even mention that, in many cases, HR are most often askek to keep things as the are instead of behing innovative. What shows its limits today as we have to admit how the human dimension matters in today’s crisis.

Experience teach us that when HR were deeply involved things were successful (for example Cisco did a great job on leadership and appraisal) and, when they were not, they were taken for troublemakers.

In fact that’s not that simple.

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