Social HR, Self Service Style

One of the most important steps to putting social HR in it’s place is to take a look at the employee lifecycle and determining your best opportunities for integration within an HR portal. Doing so drives self-service, relevancy to employees’ every day work and the ability to interact and engage with employees. Effective social HR is more than just building online communities… it’s also about integration of backend data and enabling self-service — improving the way employees help themselves online.

Self service is a driving force in how companies now interact with customers: mobile apps, social technologies, etc. are all enablers of self service. It’s becoming, or has become rather, the norm. So it’s not a stretch to say this same methodology needs to be applied to how organizations interact with its employees. Check out this infographic by ZenDesk that explores why implementing more intelligent self-service technologies is important to business success.

I also like this infographic by Evocos because it highlights some good points on learning and development — a key area in the employee lifecycle — and identifies ways to let employees manage their own training & development via an integrated online portal — the result: self service.

Beside reducing your costs, increasing efficiency and improving employee motivation, there are many other advantages, most noteably:

• Give your employees a sense of empowerment and control
• HR staff are able to focus on more strategic tasks
• Get a clear view of your employee ‘s career development
• Employees are able to update their own records at any time
• Manage all organization training from one central platform
• Improved training reporting and analysis
• Leverage the investment made in your back end systems/HR solutions
• Improved efficiency and control over staff training
• Provide more for less and better for less

I will be holding a 4-hour workshop at the IntraTeam conference (along with my friend Kerry Leidich, SVP Strategy at Humantelligence) in Copenhagen where participants will work hands on with me to break down the employee lifecycle, identify opportunities for social integration such as the Learning and Development ones presented in this infographic, and how to execute an HCM strategy that results in an integrated HR portal that enables, educates and engages employees. I hope to see you there!