No Social Collaboration? That’s Why Your HRMS Sucks

Research from McKinsey suggests that an organisation that fully implements social technologies in its ways of doing business could raise worker productivity (knowledge workers, that is) by up to 25%. With this figure in mind, you would imagine that HR – as the ‘people’ function – would have been the first to adopt social technologies. Not so. But although we may be fashionably late to the social media party, with some very practical applications in the recruitment realm, HR technology is now increasingly social. Which means that if you need a cutting edge HRMS it has to have some social features; if it doesn’t, well that just sucks.

The question is... Does your HRMS suck in this particular respect?

Ask yourself, does your HRMS system leverage social tech for the following:

• Sharing knowledge across silos and other boundaries in a quick, casual cheap, and no-fuss manner?
• Managing recruitment campaigns with social-enabled systems for identifying, attracting, vetting and sifting candidates?
• Onboarding successful recruits, creating a bespoke delivery system that gives the new hire all the necessary information through the channels and methods that they prefer?
• Managing employee learning and development (both ongoing role-related activity and talent management) with online training, seminars and classes via social media platforms.
• Engaging employees by connecting the workforce, breaking down barriers and including gamification elements that encourage peer recognition.

If your HRMS is lagging on any of these social applications, then the user experience is likely to be lacking in some respect.

Recommended Reading: HRMS Software Guide - Find the HRMS Software Products Offering Social Collaboration

At the core of the social HR experience is communication; or more precisely, a broadening of the communication experience. Whereas in the past, employee-to-employee communication has rested on email (which, let’s face it, is just an electronic form of writing a letter), more and more employees have access to more innovative, creative and even left field options: network posts, videos, blogs, wikis, podcasts, instant messaging, forums, and so on. Put simply, your employees expect to see the same or better tools in the workplace that they use in their personal lives. This expectation is not always a fair one (for example, the use of individual social media accounts to connect with – and store data on – contacts made requires a policy in the workplace to avoid any potential complications; no such policy is needed at home) but it is real.

Your users expect to experience a degree of connection in the workplace. Ignore that expectation at your peril…