Social collaboration tools: three things to ask HRMS vendors

Social HRMS is a broad term that covers many features and functions. How can you be sure that you’re choosing the best HRMS for your collaboration needs? As you shortlist your vendors, here are three questions to ask to ensure that you’re making the best decision.

1. How will you make tasks easier for my employees?

Social HRMS can bring together unconnected employees for a common goal. It can provide a platform that enables knowledge sharing and promotes innovative problem solving. The devil is often in the details so when reviewing vendors, be sure to drive to the specifics of how social media will enable employees to achieve better results in a shorter time period.

Recommended reading: looking for a new social HRMS? Make the right choice with our HRMS selection survival guide.

An employee wants to get an answer to a work problem as quickly as possible, will social HRMS meet that need or is email the faster route? Is the knowledge sharing functionality simple to navigate and can employees easily locate information or will an employee revert to searching historical archives of email? Ask for references to get more details about how other customers have achieved the benefits of the social HRMS beyond the sales presentations.

2. How much effort is it to integrate to other platforms?

Social HRMS is all about networking and making connections. A social HRMS by itself is a powerful tool but when it brings in content from other systems it can make an employee’s work life even better through linking to content rich systems in a targeted manner. Your social HRMS should be a collaboration hub, an employee’s go to system, part of their daily work lives. As you take customer references, ask about integration points as well as the number of integrations to help you to understand a vendor’s ease of integration.  

3. Do you support data enablement?

A new trend in social HRMS is pulling data from the core HRMS into social channels to give it more visibility. Business processes can be identified and tied to the social side, such as announcements about a promotion or a new hire, which can be targeted to employees in certain locations or job functions. A social HRMS with robust analytics can also help you to determine what announcements are generating interest and participation among your employees so that you can target future news to those areas.

As you consider the possibility of data enablement, it is useful to consider the role of your social media department. Social HRMS is beginning to have crossover activities with these resources so tap into their knowledge and past expertise to gain synergies on this front.