LEVERAGING SOCIAL NETWORKS AT WORK: 8 GREAT WAYS FOR THE HUMAN RESOURCES DEPARTMENT

One obvious innate human instinct is gregariousness. Even when hidden, for example, in introverts, the fact remains that some parts of the human, man or woman, crave friendship, either with same or the opposite sex, known or unknown. This is why the social scientist have posited that “man, is a social animal.” The crave is always there in man, to be seen, heard or noticed and appreciated by the others.

A deeper look into the Abraham Maslow’s theory of motivation underlines the above proposition. According to him, immediately the basic human needs of shelter, clothing and food are fulfilled, the next need on the line is the need for love; need for association, need to be noticed and appreciated by others. According to this revered scholar, except this need is fulfilled, like other cadres in the hierarchy, the need for achievement which is next may not surface. Even if it does manifests, it is easily frustrated.

The social networks have leveraged on this knowledge and are driving towards making an actual reality of the axiom: “the world is a global village.” Copying the initiators of this technology therefore, human resources managers can very well leverage on the rare advantages offered by these social networks. Some of us really need to change our perspectives and outlooks of and about these social networks. We need to see the positives they could bring to our effectiveness on the job.

Apart from the very and most common usages such as recruitment and selection, online interviewing, marketing and sales, etc into which organizations have put these networks, as human resources managers, we can still use the social networks, at work, in a number of positive ways to enhance both our own performance and those of our entire workforce. Some of the areas of these application are:

•  Building work-groups/teams

• Manage teams

• Ensure team cohesion

• Enhance team performance

•  Discover talents at work

• Conduct surveys in the workplace

• Training purposes

•   Event planning

Let us take a closer look, now.

1.       Building workgroups/teams: We probably already know that on social networks like Facebook, Eskimi, LinkedIn, etc we can create pages for our organizations. Likewise, we could create different groups, possibly on the company’s page, where all members of a particular work-group/team could be meeting and discuss issues relating to their job at work. For example, when there is an assignment for the group, the HR person in charge of the group could start a discussion based on the assignment at hand and ensure that every member of the group participated in the discussion. It could and would really be fun and the HR manager/supervisor would be surprised at the kind of ideas that members of the group whom s/he had hitherto thought knew nothing would come up with.

2.       Manage teams: Team management at times could be daunting given the fact that a team comprises different individuals with different characters and temperaments. One use to which we could put the social networks is bringing the team together in a group as said above and taking time to study individual contributions. The HR manager imbued with the knowledge of organizational/behavioural psychology and group dynamics would, from the members’ interaction know who and who to pair whenever the group has a task to accomplish in the workplace. Besides, it can be used to monitor individual performances in the group. Here, cautions could be issued to individuals without every issue becoming a management issue.

3.       Team cohesion: A team must, as a matter of necessity, be able to stay together in order to achieve the team’s set objectives. One good advantage of using the social networks is that people are easily brought together, even when they are miles apart. So, an HR person could leverage on this to ensure that his team members at work are always together and speak with one voice.

4.       Enhance team performance: “A problem shared”, they say, “is a problem half-solved.” If members of a team have the opportunity to communicate and discuss a particular assignment at any time of the day with individuals coming up with different solutions, it should be expected that problems would be solved faster than expected without unnecessarily hampering job performance. This would get the job done faster without the usual group meetings which at times eat up man-hour at work or taking up employees’ personal times.

5.       Discover talents at work: One of the major functional areas of HR today is talent discovery and management. Leveraging the social networks at work would leave most HR handlers amazed at the diverse talents that abound within a work group. It could be of great assistant during personnel audit, especially if the HR handler is new to the company. The truth is, if write-ups are carefully analyzed, they often reveal the unknown or hidden personality.

6.       Conduct surveys in the workplace: A carefully handled social network group or page can be used to resolve some HR issues at work. When in this kind of a use, discretion requires that since individual opinion is required, employee contributors’ names may not be required except if the trust is there between the employees and the HRD that their opinions, whatever they may be, wouldn’t be used against them.

7.       Training purposes: As we all know, most of these social networks allow users to send electronic media to friends and associates via their network. Therefore, training videos and audios could be sent to members of a group for training purposes. Equally, there is room for group chatting which can easily be explored to pass information across to members of a group in terms of lectures.

8.       Event Planning: Since in most organizations, the HR and the Admin functions fall within the purview of the HR, the HR handler could leverage the social networks to plan, announce and invite people to the company’s upcoming events. This will undoubtedly save the company some liquid cash which would have been used for media advertisement such as newspaper, radio and Televisions.

These are a few ways the HR could avail itself with the diverse opportunities offered by the social networks.

Caution however needs to be exercised to ensure that the time meant for normal work is not converted by the employees. To ensure this, the company’s phone/internet policy should be effectively used to guide against abuse.

Employees should also be monitored to ensure that certain policies of the company, e.g. sexual harassment, are not infringed upon by group members.

TRAINING AND MOTIVATION – 9 WAYS TO USE TRAINING TO MOTIVATE WORKERS

As it is said in our last article which explained the various methods of training, the purpose of training is the overall development of both the employees and the organization at large. The purpose of training is that it would elicit career behaviours that would bring about the achievement of desired and specific goals, not only of the organization, but also, of the employees. 

Most often, organizations rarely consider the employee-trainee in the process of training design. This practice, will undoubtedly elicit, sometimes, undesirable behavioural outcomes from the trainees during and after the training. A training design that does not take the employee into consideration should be deemed to have failed, even before it started at all. This position is informed because training is expected to increase employee morale in order to engender a performance better than the one before training.

With the above position in mind therefore, organizations and their training handlers need to carry the intended “trainee” along right from the training design to the implementation. This practice will undoubtedly give the employee a sense of belonging and individuality that after all, they are being recognized either for their individual value and contribution to the organization, or at least as a person, and not being seen as a mere tool being used as the organization pleases.

Therefore, a training programme that would motivate workers must involve the following:

1.       Employee involvement: As posited above, the intending employee-trainee must be carried along in the training design in terms of all the whys of the training programmes.

2.       Clear goals and objectives: The goals and objectives, for the training must be made very clear to the employee. In fact, this brings about employee empowerment and a feeling of importance on the part of the employee-trainee.

3.       Simplicity: The materials for the training must be presented in a way that it will be easy for the trainee to easily understand and digest. If the training involves use of machines, the training handler must be able to simplify the operational processes for the trainee to facilitate motivation after the job.

4.       The training environment: Conducive training environment that allows for easy interaction amongst the trainees and the trainer is a must if training must elicit motivation. This is the edge that structured trainings have far and above unstructured training and training methods such as E-learning.

5.       Job enlargement: A training that will motivate an employee to perform should be outside, possibly, what the employee currently knows or does in his job at work. Such trainings must include new higher level responsibilities that will challenge the employee.

6       6.  Opportunity to grow: Motivational trainings should (not necessarily must) provide for the opportunity of career advancement at work. It should bring about employee-empowerment that will, for example, bring about a more contributory effort from the employee and possibly assign reporting staff members to the employee’s leadership or supervision.

7.       Practice: Even when the training will not lead to lateral promotion of the employee, if such employee is made to know that he/she will come back to train other staff, the motivation will be there to be dedicated to the training programme because employee training other employees attain certain level of fulfillment and are hopeful of their career advancement with time. Such practice opportunity also come with some aura of importance on the part of the employee. Another dimension to the practice is that a trained employee must be given the opportunity to practice what he’s bee trained for. This will not only motivate the trained employee, but also, his/her co-staff.

 8.       Unfamiliar roles: For motivational purposes, apart from expanding the job content, a training that will motivate could also involve cross-training in other roles and responsibilities. The aim of this is to enrich the employee’s organizational knowledge and the knowledge and understanding of what the others are doing elsewhere in the organization. Sometimes, such an employee could be drafted to fill a lacuna in such areas when such arises.

9.       Employee empowerment: A training that will bring about employee motivation will, after the training, ensure that the employee assumes a self-manage state whereby he’s able to make some important decisions for the organization. As well, it should ensure that the employee is able to contribute more to important departmental and company-wide decisions and planning as well as provide more access to privileged information within the organization.

Using training in these ways will surely ensure that trained workers enjoy their works more and even not only be ready to go on the training, but will be ready to give more to the organization.

THE HUMAN RESOURCES AND THEIR ORGANIZATIONS

The Entrepreneur and the Other Factors of Production

Elementary economics asserts the saliency of the entrepreneur among other factors of production being the one factor that combines other factors in the production of goods and services. The churning necessity of other factors in the act of production makes the importance of the human factor something that can not be overemphasized. Money, land and the other factors will remain, at best, what they are, if the entrepreneur is not involved.

When faced with an unavoidable need to produce, the entrepreneur brings to the fore, his knowledge, abilities, skills, learning, experience and what have you, in other to bring about the very necessities of mankind. Without these attributes, the entrepreneur may not be too different from the other dormant factors of production. Therefore, it can be said that what stands the entrepreneur out are the knowledge, abilities, skills, learning, experience, etc that he possesses.

Sometimes however, the human factor in the process of production may not possess much of all the above attributes. This development brings about the dichotomy between skilled and unskilled. While the human factor in possession of the afore-mentioned attributes may be referred to as being skilled, the one without will be called the unskilled. However, no matter the dichotomy, even the unskilled labour can still not be compared to the other factors in the production process because the labour called unskilled does the dirty jobs, for example, cleaning the factory floor after production, sweeping, dusting the offices, moving files from one office to another, etc, without which the production process will be incomplete.

It therefore follows from here that whatever the manifestation form of the human factor in the production process, whether skilled or unskilled, its importance still can not be over-emphasized.

The Human Factor and Skill Acquisition

The skilled/unskilled dichotomy notwithstanding, (because there is no part of the production process that doesn't require one skill or the other, even “ordinary” sweeping), what each human factor in the production process requires is the very necessary need to sharpen whatever skill it possesses with the vision of upgrading such skill and also, possibly, acquire new and more profitable skills.

The position in the preceding paragraph stems from the fact that the human mind, even at birth, isn’t a tabula rasa (i.e. a clean slate). Every human factor in production brings something unique that the other may or may not know how to do. For example, it may be possible to have managers who have never swept all their lives, it therefore follows that for the production process to be complete, somebody must be there to rid the organization of environmental filth and those generated in the production process so as to make the environment, habitable, and welcoming, even to the customers/clients.

Apart from some inborn skills (which are not very common), skills can also be acquired in diverse ways ranging from structured to unstructured. The structured means of skill acquisition are usually planned and mapped out for particular purposes they are designed to achieve within the organization in the production process. Unstructured skill acquisition means however, most often, are unplanned and accidental, and most times are individualistic in nature without the organization being involved. Whichever, the goal of skill acquisition is to develop the individual human factor in preparation for a better performance both in personal life, and in organizational involvements.

Whatever the level hitherto attained by the human factor before enlisting in an organization, the truth is that there is always the need for knowledge upgrading for the purposes of performance improvement by keeping in tandem with the latest global best practices in the field of choice. Skill acquisition, also known as training and development, equally ensures that the employee (human factor in production) contribute meaningfully to the organizational development. A lack of skill acquisition and or upgrading may result in career stagnation.