Workplace Service

RESEARCH NOTE
Number: 2014-03
January 31, 2014

Author: Jim Lundy  

 
Social HCM: The Future Is Now Topic: Social HCM

Issue: How will social HCM technology evolve?

Summary: A new era is unfolding in the enterprise. The age of
the empowered business user is here. Next-generation HCM
applications are meeting the needs of these users by enabling
better engagement, not just by tracking it.

To get work done in an enterprise, it has always been a challenge

to get people to work as a team. The modern workforce is
changing, and in human capital management (HCM) the huge
needs for finding, recruiting, onboarding and engaging people
have never been more apparent.

A new era is emerging: the era of engaged business professionals

who know how to get their work done and, when faced with a
challenge, can tap into their knowledge base to find the answers.
This knowledge base is filled with data from internal and external
sources. The new era of human resources recognizes this and is
shifting to an engagement model.

Engagement means two things:

• HCM applications will be more social and collaborative.
This means that HCM applications will adapt to help
traditional processes occur faster (such as with the infusion
of collaborative capabilities).
• The Human Resources (HR) department will be viewed as
more of an enabler to business productivity and success,
not just a facilitator.

Next-generation CHROs understand this, and are looking for the

right combination of people and technology to turn their
organizations into enablers. Software solutions and services are
adapting and changing mainly because of what business users
and leaders need. We will discuss this theme throughout this
note.

Business leaders need help in the talent wars, and people want
to join firms that are motivating, interesting and successful. For

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 Workplace Service RESEARCH NOTE
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example, we recently spoke with an HR director for a large
consumer packaged goods company who told us that they face
a major challenge: they are losing key talent to Facebook and
Google.

The Workplace of Just a Few Years Ago Looks Dated

What used to be called the “rogue user” is simply an individual
who has been empowered by cloud, social, mobile and real-time
collaboration technologies. Today, they are called “normal users.”
These are people who are not afraid of new technologies; they
embrace them.

This shift in the workplace is the realization that a one-size-fits-all

approach does not always work. Business people are discovering
new ways to get work done – and they are not asking IT for
permission. Often they do this by introducing new tools into the
workplace that are:
• Easy to use
• Easy to buy
• Mobile enabled
• Mainly cloud services that are auto-provisioned at the time
of purchase

Workplace tools now focus more on people, and collaboration

tools like social networks are driving key changes in the ways that
people work and interact. The introduction of social applications
into business processes has made it possible to accelerate work
and increase productivity. Social HCM and talent applications will
offer new levels of engagement that can help enterprises push the
productivity equation.

Another big shift is that work processes are becoming less

horizontal. For collaborative work processes, this means that
collaboration technology has to be less isolated and more
integrated.

For HR professionals, the new focus is on employee engagement.

These new capabilities make it easier for people to work with
others that they don’t know. They can also find people (via a
social network) that they haven’t met before. By embracing these
newer workplace technologies, HR can help create a better
workplace.

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These developments move HCM in a new direction. Next-
generation HCM organizations are looking for new ways to identify,
recruit, onboard and engage people. The talent acquisition process
does not end after recruiting.

The Workforce and Workplace Evolution

The workplace is changing more now than it ever has, largely
because users have a new comfort level in using technology to
get their work done. Now that their relationship to technology is
secure, attention is turning back to their relationships with each
other, and infusing collaboration into HCM is a major trend. It has
been happening slowly but now the shift from dedicated social
platforms to a focus on social business is accelerating.

For much of the 20th century, the focus was on automating work
to the point of taking the human out of many work processes. The
shift to social business, and the focus on putting the individual at
the center of work, is bringing the “human” back into HCM.

The overall collaboration market is experiencing a wave of

technical convergence. Traditional collaboration vendors have
added social capabilities to their portfolios, while standalone
social software vendors are adding real-time collaboration to theirs,
and using APIs to ensure more integration with collaboration
infrastructure platforms. At the same time, business application
vendors are adding social and collaboration capabilities, bringing
them closer to the business processes people engage in on a
daily basis.

What we are seeing overall is the integration of socially enabled

real-time collaboration with business applications in the context of
business processes. This will spur further consolidation in the
market as larger vendors round out their portfolios with adjacent
collaboration capabilities.

The workplace itself is at the center of this change. Work is no

longer where someone goes but what they do. The workplace is
anywhere a person is, as long as they are connected with a
mobile device. The workplace is moving toward a people-centric
paradigm with the goal of empowering people to get their work
done however and wherever they want to.

Diving Deeper into Social HCM

The rise of modern business applications represents a shift in
technology. In HCM this means the infusion of capabilities to
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enhance a process (e.g., recruiting) or to fundamentally change Note 1:
the way work is done. Five Sources for the Enterprise Profile
• HCM/talent management (Job ID,
organization, title, location)
Collaboration is one of the key areas being infused into traditional
• Learning management system (LMS), skills
HCM applications. New and modern HCM applications will be
• Social network (profile, contributions, tags &
about engaging people to get more work done in a faster more ratings)
efficient manner. Putting people at the center means enabling • Company directory (phone book)
work and collaboration inside the process, not outside of it, infusing • IT directory/identity (LDAP, Active Directory,
collaborative capabilities into the business application itself. identity services, presence)

The key characteristics we see evolving include:

1. Best-in-class user experience. Many social HCM offerings
leverage outdated community or discussion tools, or just offer
a “bare-bones” mobile experience. Users want the best
experience, and are willing to go try things themselves when
they don’t get it. For CHROs and HR departments, this means
first-generation tools that don’t provide a best-in-class
collaboration experience should be taken off the evaluation
list.
2. Taking ownership of the employee profile. This is what it’s all
about: humanizing the systems that are out there. The key
aspect of these next-generation applications is the enterprise
profile (see Note 1). It puts people back in the center. It
identifies who they are, what they know and how they spend
their time.

The profile is one of the most powerful aspects of working

with others, but also one of the most overlooked. Today, most
enterprises do not have a strategy for managing employee
profiles. HCM can play a role here. Since many HCM systems
already need to provide the right information to make up a full
enterprise profile, HR can make sure that this system of
record has all the right attributes, not just social attributes. The
bottom line: modern HCM applications will feature enterprise
profiles.

3. While the profile started out as a feature of social networks,

it’s a part that HCM needs to leverage as part of a social HCM
and talent solution. Beyond its social utility, information about
an individual becomes a digital representation of that person,
establishing their digital identity. The problem: Most HCM
professionals still don’t see enterprise profiles as strategic
assets.

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All too often, the enterprise approach to identity has too many
diverse flavors and incompatible elements. Today’s workplace
is as much digital as it is real, and a unified strategy must
recognize that managing digital identities is as important as
managing the people themselves. To lead in the digital
workplace, HCM has to take a leadership position on digital
identity, and particularly on crafting an enterprise profile
strategy.

4. Making work fun. Social recognition is about engaging people

and encouraging them. A modern motivating workplace
recognizes people in real time, in public and online. The goal
is not just to track performance, but also to inspire it.
Recognition is amplified when it is reinforced by a worker’s
peers, and more so when it occurs at the moment of
achievement.
Shifting and morphing from a traditional recognition program
to a socially enabled one is an easy pivot. Advanced social
HCM offerings let peers and managers say “good job” with
Likes and with on-the-spot reinforcement. People also learn
from their peers. Helping others understand what someone
put into a winning presentation is one of the subtle benefits.

Putting Social HCM to Work

Companies are using social collaboration in unique ways to
support HCM strategies. The key areas are recruiting, talent
management, learning and training, and employee performance
and recognition. In some cases this starts out with a broader
recognition that a holistic approach is needed. More often,
business users start to bring in the technologies on their own.

True social HCM applications have collaboration designed in; it

isn’t an afterthought. Mobility is key as well, since enterprise
knowledge workers will increasingly access critical apps from
their mobile devices (see Figure 1 for an example).

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Figure 1: Social HCM Application Architecture

Recruiting
The competition to find great talent is never-ending, but one of the
best ways to find great people is to use the judgment of others.
Social recruiting uses social media and social networks to find
people and get them to join your workgroup or enterprise. There
has been an explosion in social recruiting apps, led by LinkedIn,
which is often part of enterprise social recruiting strategies.

Traditional applicant-tracking systems are still useful, but social

recruiting adds crowdsourcing to its framework. For example,
since recruiters routinely post job opportunities on LinkedIn,
Facebook, professional associations and other social networks,
they can also mine these venues for information about the
applicants who respond, including grassroots feedback such as
likes/dislikes and blog comments.

Linkedin is an experienced provider of profile information, and

social recruiters almost have to interface with it when vetting
candidates. Indeed, LinkedIn’s content has become so valuable
that Aragon considers the firm a takeover target.

Video has become another driving force in recruiting. Video

recruiting is an emerging sub-segment where companies use
video to prescreen candidates as well as further along in the hiring
process. Live or prerecorded, on-demand video interviews let
recruiters and hiring managers see more visual cues from
candidates than a phone interview would provide.

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Performance
Performance management looks back at each worker’s past year
and assigns ratings that are then tied to merit pay increases or
other rewards. These “look-back” performance reviews are the
norm today in large enterprises. The goal is to motivate people
toward steady future performance increases.

Real-time recognition for good work is an effective way to

improve performance, so managers learn to give immediate (and
public) positive feedback for notable accomplishments. Similarly,
competition increases motivation and attention, so “gamification”
combines training, assessment and entertainment to enhance
performance (e.g., in learning and testing situations).

Not every enterprise is ready for social performance, but planners

should prepare to enhance their performance management
solutions with social elements such as thank-you’s, attaboys,
other comments, likes or stars, that capture what business
partners, peers and others have said or written publicly about a
worker. To make procurement short lists, performance
management products should incorporate these elements for use
in any situation where they can improve outcomes.

Learning
Learning has experienced a resurgence, partly due to a realization
that knowledge is the key to a high-performing workforce.
Learning is more than just an application, which is why social
learning is one of the main use cases for any social deployment:
Advanced social learning applications help people acquire
knowledge faster.

Enterprise Strategies
People are at the heart of any enterprise. Today many enterprises
have outdated and outmoded ways of finding expertise. It is a
revelation to many that when it comes to people, HR is now
finding new ways to connect those people. A focus on the profile
(see above) by HR allows people to connect to one another, even
if they previously did not.

As enterprises realize that a broader talent strategy is required

to compete, they also begin to take a broader look at how work
is done. A talent strategy has to embrace the entire employee
lifecycle, including how things get done. When this is taken into
account, the role of business applications takes on a broader
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significance than the traditional ways that technology enabled Note 2: Oracle - Enabling an Engaged Workplace
work in the past. Oracle has one of the largest installed bases in
the HCM market. It has been updating its
The Role of IT offerings to be cloud-ready and at the same time
has infused them with both mobile and social
Many business organizations are frustrated with IT, particularly capabilities. The key Oracle HCM modules:
• Goal and Performance Management
when it comes to infusing collaboration into business
• Talent Review and Succession Planning
applications, including HCM apps. This is partly because IT often
• Career Development
looks at collaboration through an IT lens, evaluating traditional
• Learning
suppliers and adopting a horizontal approach vs. the emerging
• Recruiting
integrated business applications, such as social HCM.
• Onboarding
• Benefits Enrollment
The cloud helps to solve this issue, since in many cases a cloud
• Core HR (payroll, compensation, workforce
deployment can be set up and implemented much faster than an planning)
on-premise deployment. Cloud solutions are so easy that they are • Workforce Management (Time & Labor,
making business people less dependent on IT. Nevertheless, Absence Management, Workforce
CHROs should work with IT, and today, they are often the driving Optimization)

force, working with IT as their partners. This is clearly one of the

best scenarios: joint synergies. In large organizations, IT is a
partner of the business unit, helping to drive efficiency by
leveraging cloud and hybrid cloud architectures for multiple
business units to achieve economies of scale. Large vendors like
Oracle are adapting to these new realities to provide more value
(see Note 2). For example, Oracle has integrated its new Oracle
Social Network (OSN) with its HCM platforms (see Note 3).
Note 3: OSN - Enabling Social Business

HCM: The Benefits of An Engaged Organization
The benefits of an engaged workforce are many, the least of
which are increased contributions from people that can increase
bottom-line earnings. Key benefits of an engaged enterprise
include:
• Better-trained and happier employees are more productive
and more engaged, which means less turnover.
• The most engaged workforces are empowered. They get
things done, they have fun and they help make their firms
OSN seamlessly integrates with Oracle business
apps such as Oracle HCM Cloud and Oracle
CRM. This seamless integration is one of the
characteristics that are helping Oracle to gain
traction. OSN’s distinguishing features include:
• Profile: Fully integrated profile across the HCM
and social layers.
• Mobile Enabled: A mobile experience that
engages the user and is good enough to use
every day.
• Conversations vs. Streams: A focus on
conversation that leverages human
interactions and business-process context.

successful. One key measure of an application’s success is if

• Productivity can be enhanced significantly. Many business
metrics can now be measured, such as time to hire, turnover
reduction, etc.
Avoid Business as Usual
The competitive nature of business in a digital economy means
that the worst enemy of the enterprise is continuing to do
it is actually used internally by the firm. OSN has
been widely deployed inside of Oracle and it is
gaining adoption at several other major
enterprises where it has been deployed.
Oracle has been hard at work integrating its
business applications with collaboration
technologies to make social business a reality.
Enterprises should evaluate these offerings, since
they allow work to get done, which is what the
workplace is all about.

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business as usual. The mere fact that external factors are
changing means that people’s expectations are changing.
In these circumstances, understanding the changing landscape
and adapting is a key aspect of success. So is communicating
with associates. Let them know that HR is on top of the changing
landscape. Avoid the legacy approach and adapt to the engaged
workforce approach.

Aragon Advisory
CHROs can’t wait for the world to change and then react. They
need to act now, by preparing the tools, technologies and
practices they will need to meet the challenges that high-
performing organizations face. Key actions include:
• Adapt forward-looking tools
• Make work engaging
• Redesign workplaces for the modern workforce
• Reinforce and recognize great performance

Bottom Line
The workplace is changing. Taking the proactive steps described
above and making them part of the overall approach to HCM will
not only help make the HR organization more strategic in the
enterprise, it will also lead to better performance, which often
translates into better business results. Proactive CHROs will not
only help themselves, they will help transform their enterprises.

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