The company I work for just had a minor social media hiccup: Over the weekend, a dozen of our most active company microblogging system users lost all of their followers. It was unpleasant: We had all gotten used to using this system as a way to communicate with people we know or don’t know; we would log into the system to share what was going on in a meeting or to get answers from the crowd – often with great insights. Losing a couple of thousand people who listen to you over night is like waking up on a deserted island: You won’t find an audience waiting for you (somewhere in this metaphor hides a joke about the cloud monster from LOST, but I digress). Read the rest of this entry »

From HR Executive Online’s report about the HR in Hospitality conference:

It’s incumbent on HR leaders to take advantage of the opportunity, [conference speaker Adam Clarke from Travelport] said, by utilizing Web 2.0 and social networking to emotionally connect to employees.

“Increasingly, our personal and work lives are intermingling and part of that is this social media phenomenon,” Clarke said.

Successful initiatives in that vein will provide transparency to employees, collaboration throughout the organization and the ability for feedback to be given and received.

The line between the individual and the organization is blurring. Think about it – organizations are social constructs; what we consider an organization is the product of our situational role definitions. A speaker at a conference might consider himself to be a representative, or to use a more Hobbesian metaphor, the voice of organization X.  If the same person goes to a private party in the evening, he might think of himself as a person who also happens to be working at X. Read the rest of this entry »

Having worked in HR for over ten years, three of them in Compensation, I can assure you that the assumption that monetary rewards – bonuses, incentives, whatever you want to call them – increase employee motivation and consequently performance is more than just a belief in HR: It’s a holy cow, a basic rule on which systems are built on, an axiom you can’t touch or shake, one where the questioning of its effectiveness borders on heresy.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a great TED talk by Dan Pink. In his presentation, Pink talks about the link between rewards and motivation. And he sends the holy cow to the butcher. Read the rest of this entry »