SHRM Strategy Conference 2009 -- What I'm Telling HR Professionals About Enterprise 2.0

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This week I'm in Phoenix, AZ presenting at the 2009 Society for Human Resource Managers strategy conference. The focus of the conference, which draws between 400-500 HR professionals from all over the United States, is on developing new ideas for the changing HR environment we all face. Economic uncertainty has now been added to a workplace environment already made uncertain by the changes in the demographic makeup of the workforce, changes to where those workers are located, not to mention changes to how and when they work.

My presentation is titled "Next Generation HR: Building and Implementing a Technology Strategy for the New HR Environment". And here's what the brochure advertises for my session: "Ethan Yarbrough will discuss how to design and implement workplace technology solutions and business cultures to help organizations operate effectively within the context of a rapidly evolving business environment; the next generation workplace. A new generation of employees is entering the workforce, social computing/2.0 technologies are being adopted in business, and employees are demanding more flexible work environments and corporate data is growing."

Now this HR audience already knows far too well about the challenges of the current workplace, they live it every day. But I feel I need to mention it because I want to put it in the context of how Enterprise 2.0 can, potentially, mitigate some of the challenges. You'll note that I consciously used the word "mitigate", meaning "reduce, lessen, or decrease" and not the word "solve": "to find an answer or a solution". I do that because I don't believe Enterprise 2.0 can, as your only strategy, solve all the challenges inherent in the next generation workplace. It has to be part of an overall cultural approach that changes the company into one that better matches the ways in which people are going to be working in the years ahead. As I see it, Enterprise 2.0 will not, by itself, solve the challenges, but the challenges can't be solved if Enterprise 2.0 isn't one element of your strategy.

I further believe - and have mentioned on this blog before - that HR must take a leading, strategic role in developing and implementing Enterprise 2.0 strategies. HR is one of the few divisions within most companies that has a company-wide horizontal reach. As such, HR has a significant impact on the practices and the culture of the company. IT has a similar reach and a similar impact on behaviors, but at it's heart the challenge of introducing Enterprise 2.0 successfully is not an IT challenge, it is a cultural challenge and HR, more often than IT, is the keeper of the culture.

That said, here are the main points I want to get across to the SHRM audience this week:

1.     Why Enterprise 2.0? Because Enterprise 2.0 creates a foundation for knowledge preservation and new knowledge creation. It leverages the tools and practices of Web 2.0, including user generated content, social networking, greater information sharing, more information collection and more relevance-driven information discovery. The result is stability and progress even in an environment where people are working more remotely - the "out-of-sight workforce" is what HR folks call it - where a huge population of workers is leaving and likely will walk out of the organization with a lot of critical company knowledge in their heads and where you succeed by having both better and faster innovation than the competition. Enterprise software and the 2.0 practices you build upon it can be equated with your body's central nervous system: it is the central nervous system of your organization. It sends signals, it receives signals, it tells you what signals to react to. I want HR professionals to ask themselves who is sending signals in their organization and are they receiving them?

2.   Uses for Enterprise 2.0? I'm going to make an attempt in my presentation to move the conversation off of the purely theoretical and on to the practical. Once I've told you why you should do Enterprise 2.0, you're naturally going to want to know what you can do with it. Here are some ideas:

a. Enhance Company Culture: Want a culture of sharing, collaboration, mutual support and deep employee engagement? Create a social networking environment - with your employee profile system, for example - where people can connect, form groups around whatever they want to so they can build and deepen relationships. Relationships create trust, trust leads to engagement, engagement leads to collaboration and sharing, and that leads to a more informed, more effective workforce, which in turn leads to a more successful company.

b. Foster Collaboration: Yes, I already mentioned collaboration, but that was as a by-product of cultural realignment. Once you've created an environment in which people want to collaborate, how do you empower them to do so? Create en Enterprise 2.0 platform that puts the power in the hands of the users, a platform that allows for the ad hoc creation of collaboration tools like blogs and, more so, wikis. I recently worked with an organization that encouraged its employees to collaborate and allowed them to request the creation of Wikis from the platform administrator. That's an oxymoronic approach: don't on the one hand tell them to act freely and on the other hand lock down their ability to do so by making them petition an authority. In the case of the company I was working with, they hosted wikis on their intranet and were concerned about under which section it should be hosted. One requested wiki that an employee wanted to use to capture key ideas from a knowledge development summit and continue the collection of ideas was going to take two weeks to create while the administrators restructured the intranet to make a more logical place for the wiki. If you want to foster collaboration, you have to be more agile than that. Give people a place to build what they need, give them the materials and then get out of their way.

c. Knowledge Management: This quote says it all, I think: "If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable" - Lewis E. Platt, former CEO of HP. I think every company, to one extent or another, has encountered this problem. So many heads thinking so many things, but so little visibility into what those things are. This is the liability for continued innovation made manifest. If you can't make it known what you know, then for all intents and purposes you know nothing. Giving employees blogs where they can write about their work and, in the process, reveal expertise is one way to address this issue. That will reveal the in-process knowledge, the knowledge in it's formational stages. For existing knowledge that you want to make more discoverable you should consider RSS feeds, tagging, bookmarking tools and social search.

d. Enhanced Training: HR will always have a role in employee training and development, it's part of their charter. But as the pace of change increases in business, it becomes increasingly more difficult for HR to keep up with training if they stick to a formal classroom format. Enterprise 2.0 offers a viable alternative that can empower the grassroots employee to contribute more directly to the company's success by participating in technology-enabled peer-to-peer training. For example, give your employees a platform on which to share training videos that they create; similarly, equip them with an audio podcasting platform. Both allow for the direct delivery of skill-enhancing information in the flow of the employee's work day. It's putting the reference library at their fingertips.

That's all for now. I'm also certainly going to address the issue of Return on Investment - I have 5 key points to make to the HR audience about how to address the ROI challenge. And I'm going to make the point that ROI is, itself, a by-product of adoption. So your focus needs to be on getting people to use the tools you create, a challenge for which I also offer some considerations.

But I'll tell you about those in my next post.