Social Media – HR and Training & Development

The decision to embrace the introduction of Social Media tools to an organization is best followed by some fairly standard business practices, deciding what goals and objectives are to be met by the use of the tools and developing governance protocols for the use of the tools.

When developing governance policies at some point the decision making will shift into two streams of consideration:

1) External use of the tools-marketing, branding, customer service and recruiting are the most common uses as well as awareness, community building and fundraising for not for profit organizations.

2) Internal use of the tools – inside the firewall-opening communication channels to improve expertise/knowledge sharing and disseminating information rapidly, training and development, increasing cross functional collaboration, reducing the need for traditional surveys, detecting and addressing rumours earlier.

Many organizations have introduced technology solutions to their training and development efforts in the past decade but the user interface is most likely user to technology rather than embracing the use of community interactions to improve the learning opportunities. One of the biggest complaints about traditional online learning, whether at an educational institute or within a corporation is that it reduces the opportunity to share experience and ideas with others in the learning community. The use of Social Media tools has now changed that concern simply because it simplifies and encourages such sharing and allows users to share across a broader knowledge base than ever before.

When looking at internal uses of Social Media it is easy to see that collaborating with marketing and customer service teams that have already entered the world of Social Media will bring valuable experience to the use internally. Interacting with the public at large provides insight to what to expect within the organization as to the behaviour, needs and wants of the end users of the tools.

What other potential uses do you see for the internal use of Social Media tools? What do you think the biggest challenges will be to introducing the tools? What is your current practice for developing governance policies for new technologies in the organization? Do you have union contracts that include clauses related to the introduction of new technologies? How does that affect your process?