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Hi! Let me introduce myself. I am Raghu, Co-founder and President-HR of WebNext Technologies. Over the last seventeen years, I have worked in the HR domain with a start-up called Google which is now an on-line behemoth, the consulting major McKinsey and am now leading the HR department for my own venture. Over these years I have seen methodologies change, technologies obscure and operations re-invented. However, what has remained unchanged has been my aim as an HR manager. My goal is to maximize my company’s profitability by increasing productivity of its most valuable resource – people.
Changing face of HR
Increasing employee productivity is a challenging task and I have adapted and pioneered innovations in this regard at every stage in my career. I joined the HR profession when companies had fixed working hours of 9-to-5. This was the time when people struggled to find required information for their work and there was no synergy within the company. It was also the time when finding that one right candidate needed me to screen a hundred applications.
Work environment across organizations has been changing since then. In my first company I introduced the flexi-work-hours concept. Then I saw concepts like work-from-home and work-on-the-move becoming popular. Balance scorecard and management-by-objective were introduced and building a favorable corporate image became all the more important.
The Disruptive Technology: Web2.0
Things have been evolving but never as drastically as they have in the last four years. Terms like Enterprise2.0 and online-social media networking which were unheard of have become commonplace and have changed the way people and businesses communicate and collaborate.
Being a technology-enthusiast, I have experimented with Web2.0 from the very beginning. I realized that it had instant and lasting appeal because it catered to two basic human needs – information sourcing and sharing. It was a tectonic shift from all existing media which facilitate only one-way communication. In fact, I was among the first few users of Friendster, the oldest on-line social network based on Web 2.0. This and many other were among a list of web services I experimented with, to get a greater understanding of the emerging trends. In the meanwhile blogging became popular, micro-blogging arrived, and social and professional networking thrived. Being a man of HR, I wondered how Web2.0 could change the enterprise - how it could affect employee productivity to generate more profits for the organization.
Implementing Enterprise-Social-Networking
Today, extensive use of Web2.0 has helped my organization flourish. I have implemented enterprise-social-networks in two forms – internal and external. The internal social network serves the primary purposes of innovation, knowledge sharing and building personal relationships among employees. The external social networking helps us in connecting to our customers, building a positive corporate image, problem solving, and recruitment.
Internal
Internally, we have deployed our own social network using Microsoft OfficeTalk 2010. With all features required in a social network, it facilitates personal bonding between employees. Our internal Corporate Blogs help knowledge sharing between top management and other employees. I personally write a blog on HR practices and get instant feedback which helps me in policy formulation. Our ingeniously developed Corporate Wiki provides an easy-to-use environment for subject-matter experts to publish their interpretation on any subject. It has the features for forming interest-communities which facilitates an exchange of ideas. This gives my company the synergy for innovation – employees freely share knowledge and learn from their peers. Creating web pages for each employee has facilitated the change from top-down appraisal to continuous 360° appraisal where project-mates regularly update their evaluation of peers.
External
Our external social network includes a Corporate Blog and Social Media pages for sharing information and answering customer queries. To restrict negative publicity, we have a team which monitors third-party writings on social media sites. This has helped me build a positive corporate image. As an HR person, I am thrilled by the prospects of recruiting via our integrated external and internal social network. Referrals are now made on our Microsoft Office Talk Recruitments page by posting Linkedin profiles of the candidate. We also use Linkedin for profiling and locating experts who are globally dispersed. Their services are then sought on a part-time project basis thereby helping us in high-level problem solving and still maintaining a lean organization.
Signing Off!
Enterprise social networking has changed the way business was done not-so-long ago. It has made it easier for me to make people more productive and the organization more profitable. I believe that endless possibilities still lie untapped and well-directed efforts towards realizing them must be made.
Anish Sinha, Angshuman Ghosh, and Hitesh Mathur
