The Role of Social Media in HR Function

Muhammad Farhan – m.farhan.sm@gmail.com

HR is often thought of as a more customary part of the business, more likely to practise and
embrace the tried-and-tested rather than push the boundaries of technological
development. HR is generally quite traditional, and we know there has been a lot of fear
around people using social media to say negative stuffs about their company or colleagues.

I think, today customers expect companies to be online and there is no doubt that using
social media for business branding is key to success in business to business or business to
customer contexts. The question is, can HR leaders control the social media movement and
enable the type of radical culture that will transform organizations? Well, yes I believe that
the social media can help HR leaders create value for employees, potential employees and
other stakeholders in the organization by facilitating employee voice. A good way to
describe this is to draw on the ideas of Li & Bernoff (2008), who discuss five strategies for
value addition through social media to HRM and people management.

1. Employee Engagement: Listen to your employees, promoting the use of employee blogs
(internal) and online discussion forums (internal) to raise issues that important to
employees, so surfacing authentic employee voice rather than responses to attitude or
climate survey.
2. Learning: Using corporate blogs and RSS feeds to help people learn about important and
up-to-date knowledge of matters that are relevant to them.
3. Word of Month: Use the power of online recruitment portals (Linked IN) to virally
market positive messages about the organization for recruitment purposes. For this
participate in and encourage online groups that discuss your employer brand.
4. Knowledge Creation / Sharing: The use of wikis (Wikipedia) The use of wikis, which
draws on the wisdom of crowds, is an extremely important example where social media
can be used to great effect to create collective knowledge and help contributors and
readers learn at the same time. Pfizerpedia (Pfizer internal learning portal) is the
excellent example.
5. Employer Branding: Most of organizations take a top-down approach to this, sometimes
consulting employees about decision that have already been taken. Some organization
have begun to use online discussion forums (internal) to the surface the values, attitudes
and opinions that ‘really matter to staff’ before taking such decisions.

It is clear that HR professionals need to keep abreast of these developments and gain the
knowledge and confidence to help shape the approach to social media adoption. With the
social media trend showing no signs of slowing down, HR leaders need to develop social
media strategy for HR function, by this they are likely to help their organizations achieve
their strategic goals in a contemporary way that connect with new and older generations of
employees alike.

References and further Reading

• CIPD. (2008b)Web 2.0 and HR [online]. http://www.cipd.co.uk/subjects/hrpract/general/_web20hr.htm

• LI, C. and BERNOFF, J. (2008) Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston,
MA: Harvard Business School Press.
• MARTIN, G. (2005) Technology and people management: the opportunity and the challenge. London:
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.