NHRD Journal Aug

Dear Readers,
The National HRD Network has been bringing out a semi-academic, theme based, quarterly journal for the last few years. It aims at compiling and publishing the professional views and experiences of reputed HR professionals, line professionals, CEOs, researchers, academicians in each theme area. We carry out extensive research, identify and invite persons who have eminent publications or have rich experience in the theme area to contribute articles for each issue. Through the journal, we aim to build a body of knowledge in all facets of HR which is not otherwise easily available for the current and future HR Professionals. So far, close to 350 eminent authors have contributed articles. Each issue is guest edited by a person of eminence in the concerned theme area. This journal is circulated free to the members of NHRD Network to stimulate their thinking and towards their professional development. Publications so far have been based on themes such as : IT in HR Performance Management Attracting and Retaining Talent Career Management Organizational Change Global HRM k Journal Women in Corporate Leadership Roles NHRD Networ Organization Development Learning and Development Leadership Work-Life Balance Institution Building Coaching For Performance and Development Human Resources Management in Rapid Growth Organizations HR Competence HR and Employee Relations CEO and HR People Power Draw, Drive and Deliver Getting HR Ready for Gen Y CSR & HR Shapes and Structures of Organizations - Today and Tomorrow Managing Change, Transformation and Enhancing Competitiveness : The HR Role Dots and connections: winning hearts and minds through internal communication Skill Building and HR Technology and HR
ISSN - 0974 1739
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The copies of these issues of the journal can be accessed from www.nationalhrd.org. The current issue is on the theme of Social Media and HR. Some of the guest editors for future issues include Srikantan Moorthy, Senior VP, Group Head of HR and Member, Executive Council, Infosys and Dr. A.K. Balyan, MD and CEO of Petronet LNG. This is your journal and will be as rich as you want it to be. In order to further enrich it, we would like to receive your 1. qualitative feedback on issues brought out so far, and 2. suggestions for themes to be covered in our future issues; 3. Any other suggestions. Kindly send in your thoughts to drpvrmurthyresearch@gmail.com Dr. PVR Murthy Managing Editor (On behalf of the Editorial Team)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our profound thanks to all the contributors of articles, who have taken time off from their busy schedules out of their passionate interest in the field of HR and Social Media. We acknowledge the excellent contribution of the Guest Editor - Elango R, Chief Human Resources Officer And Head Emerging Geo Business Unit, Mphasis Ltd. for conceptualising the entire issue and inspiring all busy experts in the field to share their thoughts. Along with the support of Co-Editors Irfan Abdulla, Dr. Tanvi Gautam, Yashwant Mahadik, Gautam Ghosh and Raghuraman M.G. this issue promises to be thought provoking and riveting. A special note of recognition for Mamta Malhotra, Susan Korath and Julian Peter who supported Elango with research and ground work. We acknowledge the support from Sunathy of Exclusive Search for passionately working with me. Dr. PVR Murthy, Managing Editor (On behalf of the Editorial Team)
CONTENTS
S.No. Title of Article Author Page No. 1 Social Media 101 for HR Gautam Ghosh 1
Section I 2 Introduction to Talent Acquisition and Social Media 3 Recruiting Gone Social 4 Talent Acquisition: The Social Way 5 Attracting Generation Y Workforce 6 Social Media Breaking Traditional Mindset and Looking Beyond Savneet Shergill Syeda Meher Taj Debolina Dutta David Istacky 5 8 11 15 Irfan Abdulla 4
Section II 7 Best Practices and Future of Learning 8 Linking Learning to Business Strategy: About Deloitte University 9 Social Media & Learning: A Perfect Match 10 Case Study: Social Learning @ Jardine Lloyd Thompson India 11 The Farm Kavi Arasu 28 Gautam Ghosh and Andrew Lax Sunder Ramachandran 26 23 Yashwant S Mahadik William Pelster (Bill) 18 20
S.No. Title of Article Author Section III 12 Branding and Communication: The Essentials 13 Creating YOUR Personal Brand 14 Reinventing Your Career for HR Professionals 15 Cross Cultural Issues in Branding and Communication 16 Brand-ing Begins At Home Managing Communications from the Bottom Up Roger Darashah Dr. Vinayshil Gautam Anand Pillai Dorie Clark Dr. Tanvi Gautam
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32 36
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Section IV 17 Balancing The Benefits and Risks of Enterprise Social Media 18 Social Media Company Showcase Elango R and Gautam Ghosh 46 Raghuraman M G 43
Editorial Comments
As you delve deeper, you will realise that at its core, social media is about conversations and connections, at an infinitely unimaginable scale and speed. Within the first 20 minutes of waking up, I have checked my emails, fixed my schedule for the day, paid bills, found
Elango R Chief Human Resources Officer And Head Emerging Geo Business Unit, Mphasis Ltd.
directions to a client meeting, made a reservation for dinner with my wife and wished my distant aunt for her 50th birthday! All this, with a few swipes of my finger on smart phone that weighs no more than 130 gms. As early as 5 years ago, this would have sounded unimaginable and futuristic, much like a sci-fi movie with unrealistic stunts. With 67 million users in India and growing at the rate of 52% YoY, smartphones are a ubiquitous part of our day, and often the cause of panic attacks when they run out of battery. We are indeed in the midst of remarkable times and the possibilities are limitless. We stand at an interesting juncture where technology is evolving at a speed that makes it impossible to predict which mode of interaction would be in 2 years from now. Web 2.0 is expected to have enormous potential to change the way people interact and work, offering HR bountiful opportunities to ride this wave and actively participate in this revolution. There is already a buzz around Social Media and weve merely seen the tip of the iceberg. For HR Professionals,
the implications are tremendous we get to impact culture and engagement at speeds and levels of influence we never imagined, but wished for. We now have access to direct 1-0-1 connect with every single employee, irrespective of how geographically dispersed they are or disparate their roles are. This is tailor made for us to reinvent our roles and take that much desired seat at the business table, only if we can figure out how to harness this beast or beauty! Just a bit of party pooper while the opportunity is real, the hype and mystification is unwarranted. As you delve deeper, you will realize that at its core, Social Media is about conversations and connections, at an infinitely unimaginable scale and speed. Consider this: I have 500 connections on LinkedIn, whom in turn are connected to 500 each, taking my second level network to a few thousands! And the key is that they are just a virtual message away. All it takes to connect, listen, ask and respond is a few seconds to a minutes and god Wi-Fi connection. Keep it simple and you can harness this for terrific business and personal success as HR professionals. That is exactly what we set out to do, in this edition of the NHRD publication to demystify Social Media and throw open the portals to a connected universe that is just waiting to be tapped. I have invited my peers from the industry to contribute their perspective and the collective expertise makes this hopefully, an unputdownable issue. At the cost of being called simplistic, we have kept this edition basic, jargon free and practical. No appendix, no
reference papers just simple 1-0-1 conversations. I hope you will appreciate this. A fitting start from Gautam Ghosh who has been a pioneer and realized the potential of the web for HR Professionals, as early as the dial-up days of the internet. He has written a great article on Social Media 101 for HR Professionals. The rest of the issue is co-edited by Leaders from our HR fraternity and beyond, who have been early adopters of Social Media, get what it takes to tap its potential and have been generous to have taken time out of their already packed schedules. They have drawn from their networks and invited luminaries in this space to write some very interesting columns. Irfan Abdulla from LinkedIn (where else) has anchored the Talent Acquisition section. Dr. Tanvi Gautam of People Tree has pulled together the Branding and Communication section. Yashwant Mahadik, Chief Learning Officer of Philips and someone well versed with the full potential of Social Media, has personally architected the Learning section. For good measure and some balance, I invited Chief Information Officer - MG Raghuraman of MphasiS to write a piece on how he views the HR communities Social Media aspirations from his perch, atop the server stacks and Internet pipes! And the tail piece is a showcase that Gautam and I put together with the help of some brash youngsters. They challenged us all the way, and contributed to a making this
last section a fitting and interesting end to what seemed a long but enjoyable journey. Crystal ball gazing in isolation can be delusional, but the help of my peers, we bring to you views and practices that are forward looking, practical and realistic. It calls for a shift, and it will take time but the transition is sure to happen. And the reason I know that is because most eyeballs for this edition will be via the virtual version rather than the print version of this edition. Enjoy the read, but dont stop there. Experiment. Dont dip your toe in the water dive in and swim to new shores, tweeting and linking all the way. While you are at it, share with us your stories and views. I am on twitter@agastyasays and would love to hear from you.
Dr. PVR Murthy Honorary Managing Editor on behalf of the Editorial Team
Dr. Pallab Bandyopadhyay
Dr. Arvind N Agrawal
Social Media 101 for HR

Gautam Ghosh
About the Author Gautam Ghosh is GM HR strategy and Projects at Philips India.In this role he owns and drives the key strategic objective of making Philips India a strong Employer Brand by leveraging new emerging media & technology. Gautam is one of Indias earliest HR Bloggers and an avid Twitter user.
eres the thing HR and other people need to remember, social media might be a new term, but what it signifies is not really new. Ever since the advent of the internet people have connected with each other in a public system (via Usernet, Bulletin Boards) to discuss and share their views and opinions. Its just that social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have emerged at a time when internet penetration is growing exponentially in our part of the world. So what does social media comprise of? When most people think of social media, they think about networks and the biggest three names are of networks. Social networks like Facebook (Friendster and Orkut earlier), professional networks like LinkedIn (and Ryze earlier) and information networks like Twitter are all networks. The networks are people-centric. My social network comprises of people who I have known, but might not know each other. The other aspect of social media is communities which are virtual places where people who have a common interest gather to share and engage about that subject. These can range from communities of practice (where professionals interact)
to hobby communities (photography or quilt weaving, for example). The principles that drive social media adoption is when people start sharing information and creating content on networks and communities. According to an oft quoted thumb rule, a minority of the people create content. Some more people curate or comment on the created content and the majority of people consume content. As a person gets more and more comfortable they start to curate and create too. These sites have also added design principles that encourage people to move from the consumption default. There are two main ways they do that. One is to reduce the effort to curate. This is what the like and the share buttons on Facebook and the favorite or Retweet buttons on Twitter do. The other thing many communities do is give recognition in the form of levels and designation to people who contribute. So as they contribute more and more and other members find their content useful they move from a beginner to an expert level. They also publish leaderboards two drive peer based competition so that others are motivated to rise up the ladder. July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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Since many people are aware of Facebook and LinkedIn here are some other communities and sites that I thought would be useful to know about. Google Plus Google Plus is Googles answer to Facebook with the promise that you can share your information with specific people and communicate with them. One of its biggest features is that you can have video conference with 9 other people, without installing any additional software. The chats also get integrated with Gmail chats. Slideshare Slideshare can be described as the YouTube of slide decks. It also has the ability to upload documents too. By nature of its content, Slideshare seems a very professional site, and businesses have found it useful to showcase their reports and viewpoints easier through this than video (which is expensive and harder to get right) Professionals also use Slideshare to showcase their expertise and build their own personal brand. After the acquisition by LinkedIn, Slideshare integration is seamless with LinkedIn profiles. Quora Quora is a question and answer site where people ask questions in various topic areas and others answer them. People who read answers can them vote on them, causing the most useful answers to rise to the top. So people can discover experts who share their knowledge in areas as diverse as Engineering to Management to Photography to Mythology to Economics. Since Quora originated in Silicon Valley the topics of startups, entrepreneurship are specially rich and detailed. A lot of entrepreneurs, VCs (like Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Craig Newmark of Craigslist) are active on the site almost on a daily basis. So what does this all mean for HR Content is shaping how people find and connect with each other. Organizations 2 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
now have to become content creators themselves to remain relevant. They cannot rely on external media (paid, like advertising or earned, like being mentioned in mass media) alone. They have to invest in creating owned media. For an employer brand that means media that showcases the organizations culture in the form of articles, presentations, videos. This is necessary as otherwise employees and alumni are rating and reviewing all aspects of an employer (from culture, to salaries, to interviews) on sites like Glassdoor and JobsBuzz. It also means that HR needs to listen to conversations on the social web about what people are talking about it, its leadership and even its competitors. This can be as simple as doing a search engine search regularly, or using sophisticated tools that track large number of conversations and can even judge the sentiments of the conversations. Within the organization, it means HR (along with IT and other functions) needs to get the organization ready to deploy tools that enable employees to use the principles of participation for a purpose to engage the next generation workforce with the larger organization. These tools can be deployed from the cloud (via the internet) or installed on company servers too. Most larger ERP service providers also offer social networking softwares these days. These tools help in employees to connect across geographies and silos to discover and collaborate with other colleagues. These are also a great tool to engage the larger workforce in larger change initiatives or communication when they are rolled across the organization. To do all this HR people have to embrace and experiment with this new medium and grow comfortable with it. It is time to stop talking about it, and to start doing it.
Section 1
Talent Acquisition and Social Media

Jobsites and recruitment agencies were yesterdays headlines. Today, hiring happens through the power of social media, and the key to success for both recruiters and the recruitees lies in their readiness to adoptsocial media and their Social Media Quotient. This section focuses on success stories and learnings of organizations that have implemented the new way of hiring.
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Introduction to Talent Acquisition and social media

Irfan Abdulla
About the Author Irfan Abdulla, is currently the Director of Talent Solutions at LinkedIn India, the webs largest and most powerful network of professionals. He joined LinkedIn as Head of Talent solutions and was responsible for building the India business from the roots. His primary focus now is in helping companies recruit, engage and retain the worlds best talent. He has worked in various hyper growth companies and enabled building businesses from the ground up. he recruitment landscape in India has evolved immensely in recent times. Traditionally, the core competency of talent acquisition was either outsourced or left to chance but the recent foray into online social communication has created new frontiers.Employers are moving towards online social and professional networks, not only look for talent but also to build their employer brand among passive candidates. In order to acquire passive talent or employees that are the right fit, employers have to be equally savvy in their ability to communicate online. This issue of NHRD broadly encapsulates the rise of social media as an effective tool in talent acquisition across industries. Sharing her insights on how Dell approaches talent differently on social media, Savneet Shergill, Director India Talent Acquisition, talks about the advent of the digital age, and reinforces the emergence of social media as a critical part of the recruitment and employee engagement tool kit. In an interesting piece on Talent Acquisition: The Social Way, Syeda Meher Taj, Global Lead Employer Branding, Infosys makes her case as to why organizations need 4 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
to smartly combine conventional hiring practices with social recruiting. She further highlights how social media must be integrated into the broader talent management agenda, b eyond just acquisition & attraction. In her opinion on attracting todays Generation Y workforce Debolina Dutta, General Manager Human Resources, United Spirits Ltd highlights how the growing war for talent that has now moved online. The article further draws a comparison between conventional recruitment and social media recruitment across various parameters. David Istacky, Head Talent Acquisition, Elgi Equipments Limited in his article Social Media Breaking traditional mindset and looking beyond, talks about re-inventing the conservative hiring strategy of the company, while keeping in mind the volatile and unpredictable markets and the economies. From engaging concepts like crowdsourcing talent to building an impactful employer brand, from insights on the war for talent to keeping pace with talent pools in unpredictable markets, this edition is an absolute treat. Enjoy the issue!
Recruiting Gone Social

Savneet Shergill
About the Author Savneet Shergill is responsible for hiring across all businesses for Dell in India. Prior to Dell, Savneet was working with Wipro BPO for over six years and led the recruitment effort for Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai sites. Wipro was her first corporate stint as prior to that she was with the Indian Air Force (IAF) and happens to be a part of the first ever batch of 12 women officers inducted into the IAF in the country.
Social networking has digitized humanity the world over, and how! Today, people engage with their colleagues, friends and loved ones through the interesting and intriguing world of Social Media. While Facebook provides people with the power to be engaged in real time, LinkedIn brings together like-minded individuals from around the world to leverage professional relationships. Twitter, on the other hand has emerged as a platform for netizens, to question thought-leaders across the globe with a simple tweet. The massive rise in the prominence of social media across all walks of life has led organizations to develop social strategies and use social platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook for a more unique purpose to attract and retain talent. As organizations adapt to the digital age, social media is emerging a critical part of the recruitment and employee engagement tool kit. Having the right set of people that fit the mind-set and culture of an organization is the need of the hour social media can not only help organizations build, engage and foster communities for employment branding, but also for sourcing, engaging and career outreach.
Ever since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media platforms, Dell has used social media in internal collaboration, product development, social commerce as well as talent acquisition and management. Dell effectively uses social media for new talent attraction through platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. When looking to find prospective candidates, social media complements the traditional recruitment platforms. Though broad attributes or criterion may not differ vastly from what an organization would look for while recruiting in a traditional environment, organizations can in fact leverage professional social media platforms to look into background details, business achievements and skill sets. This provides the organization a holistic view of the prospective professional and their career growth over the years. Furthermore, organizations can match a job description and a particular candidates profile to evaluate whether he/she will be the right fit for the particular role. Dell has in place different ways of approaching talent on social media, broadly focused on the Big 3 LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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Dell post jobs on LinkedIn on a regular basis and uses their Corporate Recruiter Licenses to source profiles. Recruiters at Dell update their profiles with information on critical positions that Dell is hiring for, and are also active on LinkedIn Groups, participating in conversations and keeping a tab on whats brewing socially. On the Facebook front, a very active Careers at Dell APJ page is used to engage the target audience. Facebook is a great way to disseminate career related information to candidates and interact with them. Dell has a job search widget on Facebook that helps prospective candidates find and look for the positions being offered. Interestingly, Dell has a Find Your Career Fit Widget which helps job seekers explore different career functions at Dell. Today, Dell has over 27,000 followers on its career Facebook page. On Twitter, Dells career focused twitter handle @CareersAtDell is used extensively to interact with followers. Dell posts jobs, career related information and answers questions through this id. With over 1500 followers on twitter, Dell reaches out effectively to its target audience. Before taking the plunge into social media recruiting, an organization needs to take utmost care when its employees engage on its behalf on social platforms. An organization needs to empower its employees to make sure that, both from a recruiting perspective as well as from a candidate experience touch point, the end to end process is seamless and delivers on the set expectations. To empower its employees, an organization needs to: Have a Social Media Strategy in place so that the designated individuals have a ground to fall back on and revert to 6 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
Have Social Media Policy in Place. Social media needs to be used the right away thereby it is imperative that a policy be in place to inform employees about privacy, information protection and related laws Invest in training employees on different social media platforms. At Dell, a Social Media University helps guide and render certifications across different platforms to employees once they complete their training. This way, employees are confident of what and how they need to communicate across social media. The new buzzwords in Social HR Crowdsourcing and Gamification Finding the right kind of people that fit perfectly with the culture of an organization can be a challenging task, and that is where the Worldwide Web steps in and opens up whole new avenues of opportunities. The new trend of Crowdsourcing can help organizations build, engage and foster communities that can be utilized effectively for branding and recruiting. A simple example of crowdsourcing is the Employee Referral Program. Very often, organizations have a few positions to close and send out information to employees asking them to help in the recruiting process. When an appropriate candidate gets selected, the employees are rewarded. Thereby its a win-win situation for both, the company whove found talent as well as the employee who enjoys the rewards. Now, imagine opening up this particular concept to the external world. Think about the kind of possibilities that it could create, the impact of collective networking of employees and the kind of reach it gives organizations! However, it is of prime importance to ensure meticulous planning and crafting of attainable objectives while carefully defining deliverables.
While new age recruiting is inundated with buzzwords like crowdsourcing and building talent communities online, gamification is another trend that is quickly gaining traction. Gamification is the integration of game mechanics & theory into non-game applications & processes in the workplace. Gamification is garnering a lot of attention these days with a yearning among hiring leaders globally, to increase engagement rates with their potential talent communities. One should also remember that new trends are not a replacement but a useful and additional resource to traditional
methods. Building, aligning and infusing attractive incentives into new strategies will ensure a win: win situation. At the end of the day, the challenge lies in devising and implementing well-thought out recruitment methods that have the ability to go viral and yet, from a recruiters standpoint, provide the ability to measure cognitive abilities of potential candidates. The art of hiring heavily depends on a clear understanding of new trends, and decoding what exactly these buzz words mean and how they can be leveraged on a day to day basis for hiring needs globally.
Talent Acquisition: The Social Way

Syeda Meher Taj
About the Author Syeda Meher Taj has over 11 years of experience spanning both B2C and B2B technology marketing. From strategy to execution, she has led global branding & communication programs while managing cross-functional teams. In her current role, Syeda Meher Taj is the India-based lead for Global Employer Branding and Digital Talent Engagement at Infosys.
eres a statistic that will surprise no one : In 2012, 93% of recruiters looked for candidates on LinkedIn. Narrow the scene of action to North America, and that score climbs to a near-perfect 97%. But numbers can sometimes flatter to deceive. North American employers 97% strike rate notwithstanding arent leveraging social media to the fullest for acquiring talent. They depend heavily on LinkedIn, but not nearly enough on other channels like Twitter or Facebook, which are also quite effective, especially for mounting a soft sell in the run up to the hard core hiring process. And any seasoned recruiter will tell you how important it is to prepare the ground. Companies looking to attract the best talent through social media should plan to utilize it all through the recruitment cycle. Even before getting into the mechanics of hiring, they should be out there in the social sphere promoting their workplace among the target audience and working up a conversation. This is particularly important in entry level hiring, where incumbents are still unsure of their 8 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
career goals and in real need of guidance. A forum like Facebook provides an informal yet personal environment for recruiters to address career concerns and softly promote their organization, right into their young audiences consideration set. Videos featuring employees talking about what they love about their work and workplace can be a great source of positive peer influence. However, in the case of lateral hiring, the role of social media is clearly at the business end. Employers have the option of earned and paid routes engaging with prospective candidates in a social networking forum, or placing paid job advertisements to attract applicants. Tools like webinars and web chats are useful for building engagement, for impressing potential hires with thought-leadership, and for fostering a sense of belonging even before a candidate enters the organization. Many companies get senior HR personnel to sit in at events that are likely to be attended by senior candidates, so that they can jumpstart the executive search process. When hiring experienced candidates,
who are usually in demand, it is very important to reinforce the credentials of the organization between the offer and joining dates, to make sure they dont drop off or choose to go to another employer. It might be a good idea to invite such candidates to join a small online community of peers and senior colleagues or encourage them to participate in other social forums where they can gain a first-hand feel of the organizations informal culture, and get to know some of their co-workers. For the organization, this could be a great way to tap into networks of networks and also in a soft, non-intrusive way, keep tabs on the candidates before they officially come on board. Although social recruitment enjoys several advantages, such as reach, authenticity, immediacy, directness, and cost effectiveness, it does not render traditional forms of hiring redundant. It is quite effective for spotting active talent those who are actively hunting for jobs but fails to make a compelling impression on passive candidates. Ironically, the mediums greatest strengths can also undermine social hiring because social networks are so accessible, job advertisements invariably attract an excess of applications, many from the wrong kind of candidates. This creates a dual problem for recruiters; one, it makes it much harder to spot the right candidates among a mass of applicants, and two, it discourages the right candidates from pursuing the opportunity. Another issue is that recruiters will find it almost impossible to maintain discretion, so important in top level hiring, on a medium that is so public. Last but not least, they might also struggle to adopt the social mindset and nail their social hiring strategy because of the dynamic nature of that space.
So, the bottom line is that social recruiting cannot work as a stand-alone solution, nor does it work in isolation. This is why organizations need to smartly combine conventional hiring practices with it. Integration is a key factor of success in social-conventional hiring strategy. Newspaper advertisements, campus presentations, and agency-led executive search must deliver a consistent message and impression about the workplace, which social recruiting must reinforce through different forums. And one must support the other, which means that posters put up in college campuses should advertise the companys Facebook forum and Twitter handle, and jobs posted in conventional media like TV, radio, and print must be replicated on the companys website, and in its Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter spaces. A logical extension of this argument is that social media must also be integrated into the broader talent management agenda, beyond acquisition. It offers great opportunities for inducting fresh hires into the organization by way of closed groups where new employees can meet each other, connect with senior colleagues, seek answers to frequently asked questions, familiarize themselves with the dreaded employee manual, and generally find their way around. Once new employees settle into their jobs, it is time to up engagement through means like blogs, which are very effective for showcasing and advertising the companys achievements and strengths, for sharing knowledge across the organization, and for building thought leadership. The company can also identify the socially active and influential through such forums, and nurture them into future brand ambassadors. July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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Social forums can also be strategic in onboarding an entire organization of employees in a merger or acquisition. Acquiring companies face immense challenges in assimilating employees in these conditions cultural differences, fear of marginalization, resistance to change, and interpersonal friction, are
but some of them. Transparency, open communication, easy accessibility, and a welcoming environment can facilitate that process to a great extent. And what better medium to enable these than social?
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Attracting Generation Y Workforce

Debolina Dutta
About the Author Debolina Dutta has 22 years of work experience in HR and Sales domain. She has a degree in Electrical Engineering from College of Engineering, Pune and a Post Graduate Degree in Management from IIM, Bangalore, and is currently enrolled in the FPM Industry program at IIM Indore. A passion for writing has resulted in development of multiple research papers and businesscase studies, some of which have been published and others are being considered for publication in the Asian Case Research Journal, HBS Case site, etc.
here is consensus that to win the war for talent, early stages of applicant attraction becomes critical, especially in a robust job market, as potential applicants have a number of choices. Moving forward, talent acquisition leaders will be required to think like marketers when developing media and sourcing strategies. Highly skilled job seekers in a tight labor market behave similarly to consumers in a crowded marketplace (Collins & Stevens, 2002). In todays day and age, social networking as a recruitment tool is increasing in popularity. With the current generation largely interacting on social media sites, organizations are waking up to the potential of leveraging these channels to build their brand images and attract applicants to their organizations. This requires development of appropriate metrics which measures corresponding outcomes through a different yardstick, compared to those conventionally used by HR to measure recruitment efficiencies. This then raises a question for reputed
organizations like United Spirits, leaders in the alcohol beverage industry with high brand equity what can compel them to use social media and what are the benefits it could offer them? A recent definition of recruitment by Breaugh (2013) says that recruitment is dened as an employers actions that are intended to (1) bring a job opening to the attention of potential job candidates who do not currently work for the organization, (2) inuence whether these individuals apply for the opening, (3) affect whether they maintain interest in the position until a job offer is extended, and (4) inuence whether a job offer is accepted. Social media clearly possesses the ability to influence all four actions defined above. The growing popularity of social networking websites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are forcing organizations to recognize the potential it provides in attracting Generation Y workforce. With over 200 million users on LinkedIn, and over a whopping 800 million users on Facebook July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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(Hunt, 2010), the advantage of using this medium is its ability to reach a targeted audience vis--vis an unwanted global audience. In their seminal paper on ROI of Social Media Marketing (2010) Hoffman & Fodor defined motivators of social media engagement as the 4 Cs of connection, creation, consumption and control. This essentially implies that social media dilutes the circle of influence and control of the organization and places higher levels of control on interfacing individuals. In the context of talent acquisition, organizations also need to look at these channels as a potential area to improve employer branding and be perceived as an employer of choice among the Gen Y workforce. Prior research on recruitment has studied pre-hire outcomes (e.g., number of applicants, job offer acceptance rates), post-hire outcomes (e.g. job performance, employee turnover), recruitment objectives (cost of hire, time to hire, number of positions filled, diversity) (Breaugh, 2013). These remain the conventional yardsticks to measure a recruitment functions effectiveness. It therefore becomes important to differentiate between conventional recruitment methods and the related outcomes, from social media methods and outcomes, in terms of their applicability, strategy and uses. Organizations today place extra emphasis on two basic metrics Time to Fill and Cost Per Hire, and neglect to sufficiently debate upon, identify and measure a new age parameter, Quality of Hire. In the effort to get the fastest available applicant, the most suitable applicant may get missed. All metrics defined in conventional recruitment practice depend on the outcome of actually recruiting an applicant. This is a fundamental difference, since active recruitment through social media reduces social media to just another 12 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
channel. The power of social media exists in its ability to enhance peripheral persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Therefore, social media can be leveraged both for active recruitment, and more importantly, for passive recruitment. Social media channels clearly allow for organizations to disseminate targeted messages to a filtered audience, thereby contributing to and increasing the quality score card. Additionally, customized targeting of potential applicants of defined demographics, through social media, lends itself for affirmative action in specific areas of recruitment like increasing diversity (gender, disability, racial etc.). The fundamental differences between conventional recruitment channels and social media recruitment are given in Table 1. A recent study indicated that of the 35% of employers using social media for recruitment, 21% are using it to recruit and research potential employees, and 18% are using it to strengthen their employment brands (Hunt, 2010). The tactical choices and investments done in social media typically emanate from four strategic goals that an organization may have. Analogous to the strategies in the sales and marketing context, as defined by Andzulis, Panagopoulos, & Rapp (2012), in the recruitment context these can be defined as building relationships, building employer brand, active recruitment, and finally, cost optimization. Based on organization needs, resource availability and priorities, HR functions need to carve out their social media plan. It may be feasible for an organization to choose a few of these or all, and decide the relative degrees of investment required. In this context, recruiting suitable talent for United Spirits Limited is not much of
Measure or Criteria Objective / Utility Channelsof communication
Conventional Recruitment Active demand fulfillment Newspapers, referrals, direct, websites, job boards, recruitment consultants Pre and post hire outcomes, operational efficiencies HR Function Medium to Low All individuals matching current open positions Relatively short term, from application to onboarding of applicant
Social Media Recruitment Active and passive recruitment Social Media channels like blog sites, micro-blogging, websites and forums/discussion groups, social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook) Employer branding and personalized engagement Social Media Community Very high Gen Y, internet savvy, having access & active on social media channels Continuous engagement
Metrics
Locus of control Level of individualization Target applicant group Tenure of engagement
Table 1: Differences between Conventional and Social Media Recruitment STRATEGY Relationship Strategy PHILOSOPHY Building trust and collaboration through personalised engagement Establishing credibility, gaining attention, demonstrating employer value propositions. Reactive demand fulfilment Reducing costs of recruitment channels OPERATIONAL INVESTMENT Dedicated Community Manager focussed on prospective talent lead generation and engagement Social media monitoring, sentiment analysis, creation of purposed communities TACTICAL OUTCOME Strategic talent inducted into the organization
Employer Branding
Organization perceived as preferred employer of choice Active recruitment positions closed Reduce recruitment spend on more expensive channels
Active Recruitment Cost Optimization
Maintaining a dynamic career microsite reflecting active open requirements Maintaining a dynamic career microsite and integrating with active open requirements. Dedicated resource to close applicants from these channel
Table 2: Aligment of Strategy, Philosophy, Investment And Outcome For Recruitment July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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a challenge primarily due to the strong employer brand. However, with a robust succession management plan in place, it became critical to adopt a relationship building strategy with potential, well defined and targeted individuals. This
became the key driver for the organization to take a serious look at the benefits of social media recruitment. Having said that, benefits accrued through employer branding, active recruitment and cost optimization become the icing on the cake.
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Social Media Breaking Traditional Mindset and Looking Beyond

David Istacky
About the Author David has over 15 years of work experience in HR and Consulting domain. He works towards reaching out to great talent across the world and building winning relationships and valuable partnerships. His specialty lies in contributing to peoples lives in a manner and that brings new meaning to what he does everyday. Head - Talent Acquisition, ELGI Equipments Ltd.
For a thriving Coimbatore based Indian engineering company, thats grown brick by brick over the last 6 decades and recorded steady growth in business revenues year on year, its a given to expect that most systems and processes are well set and so are the mindsets. In our industry, such an environment is a boon for an employee as the sense of security is high, people have a chance to settle into their roles and become experts. Expertise brings in consistency and helps both the employee and the organization stay focused on current objectives and plan ahead. As a result employee engagement is high, attrition is low and hiring kept on a leash. Our hiring strategy therefore, could afford to be conservative, focused and specific, based on run-of-the-mill methods and practices, driven by a well-oiled HR generalist, whos been-there-done-that and can now do it with his/her eyes closed. Hiring was earlier supported by a band of hiring partners, who developed
certain competencies to support our specific needs and with time, they became an extension of the company. Hence, all the Recruitment Team had to do, while being the glorified coordinator, was to keep the hiring partner in good humor. This more or less became the norm for all the hardto-find, mid management and the senior management open positions. Another option was to scan job boards,which were automatically subscribed to annually. The recruiter downloaded CVs of potential talent worth engaging and ran them through the mill, while machine operators and junior level position got filled through word of mouth, contactors and employee referral. All this coupled with the Employee Referral Policy saw us through with all our hiring requirements. But enter a new era where markets and economies are volatile and unpredictable, governments and policy unstable, new businesses emerging and older ones moving into oblivion, business plans and forecasts going haywire. We often found July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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ourselves grappling with questions that had no right answers and soon realized that, what got us here,wasnt going to get us ahead. The era that we live in, has the ability to change, very rapidly, the way organizations and people are perceived and valued, which can result in growth or declination, depending on the choices and decisions we make. Come to think of it, our families, friends, colleagues, professional contacts or their connections influence most of the choices and decisions we make. They become a free knowledge pool and a versatile intelligence network that help us think, analyze, learn, grow and choose a path, if only we can tap into it. With technology moving from PCs to mobile devices, technology and people now go hand in hand. We are constantly using mobile devices to connect calls, video, email, SMS, MMS etc., with people or a network of people, whom we chose to connect and share information with. Imagine what could happen when we start evaluating and classifying our contacts and communication and enabling those in our networks to work for us? Imagine what would happen when you discover that there are so many people sitting in places around the world, who share your personal or professional interests or can do business with you or lend insight into something thats even beyond your comprehension. What if they in turn can connect you with somebody who can change or impact your business beyond your imagination, or your life itself?And all this for free? That is the power of social networking. Our company is in the leadership quadrant in India and we see great 16 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
opportunity for us to grow our presence in the international markets. The last three years have seen three overseas acquisitions in France, Italy and the USA, two of which happened in the last year alone. We have also established manufacturing outfits in China and have warehouses in several countries like Brazil and Australia. As this led to a challenge of finding talent in these countries, it became important for us, as a company, to be understood well by local talent and to build a framework that would target specific people with specific information and create a forum that will help them communicate with us. We picked a leading business-oriented social networking site as the platform that could help us do just this and more. Professionals who we encountered on this platform were not active job seekers unlike those on job boards, but powerful networkers who were there to learn from each other through forums and communities. This also offered a platform for professionals to introduce and get introduced to others. In our first year, we encouraged the Talent Acquisition Team to get onto the tool, understand the application better and start networking. They soon discovered new visibility, with people reaching out to them for information regarding our company, products, and job opportunities or requests to be partners or vendors. We then got a paid subscription for domestic job seats and slots and this gave the team a lot more power to reach out to people directly and network with people in our industry, on the basis of specific technologies or skills. We also started adding valuable contacts onto our networks, and by exploring their
connections, we developed a list of followers. By the end of year one, we were ready to do a lot more. We got ourselves a Career Page, a recruitment advert, global seats and global job slots. We put up testimonials, videos, banners and updates, which helped our brand create a buzz in the market place, both in India and overseas. This changed the game for us dramatically and within a few months, we moved from conservative to viral, with the number of followers on our company page touching 3800 people from across the globe.
Weve closed a few critical positions and have discussions in progress with potential talent from different countries. We are now creating talent pipelines that will allow us to map and stay connected with critical talent, with specific plans to engage our followers more evocatively. Based on the success that is unfolding before us, we are also working on leveraging our brand on other relevant platforms, as part of global networking and branding strategy through online media. As we continue to network, next in line will be to plot returns on investment in all these avenues.
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Section 2
Best Practices and Future of Learning

With social media available as a new pedagogy of learning, the role of a Training Professional is set to evolve from being a creator of content to a curator of content. The entire spectrum of brick-and-mortar learning as well as social learning, and the progressive manner in which learning is experienced has been showcased in this section.
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Best Practices and Future of Learning

Yashwant S Mahadik
About the Author Yashwant S Mahadik is a seasoned global HR professional with 24 years of experience across industries/sectors and geographies, in top-class companies like Colgate Palmolive, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson. He has established a track record of success in all his roles and assignments as part of his experience as Head and Leader of the Human Resource function at enterprise levels. He can be reached at yashwant.mahadik@philips.com or on twitter @indianyash
hen Elango requested me to co-edit this section on Learning for the NHRD Journal, I was thrilled because I was sure that this experience is going to be a huge learning opportunity for me. I present this section along with colleagues and friends from the Industry top-notch HR and Learning professionals, passionately engaged in transforming learning in their organizations, and yet they call themselves students of the subject. Learning is a very complex subject. Complex, because it concerns human beings and every human being is unique and different. Research in neurosciences has thrown a lot of light on how the human brain works and learns. If you read the paper presented by Dr. Lila Davachi, Dr. Tobias Kiefer, Dr. David Rock and Lisa Rock on Learning that lasts through ages, they suggest that with more to learn than ever, faster innovation cycles, and reduced training budgets, organizations everywhere are trying to get more from their learning programs. However, to increase the effectiveness of learning, some of our intuitive understanding about learning may need updating. For example, while people generally predict 20 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
that concentrated learning in one block of time is more effective, neuroscience research is clearly showing that it is far better to break up learning interventions to facilitate successful long-term learning. Many organizations are now focusing and discussing technology as an enabler of learning, which is important. In my opinion, to understand how learning works and to become good designers of learning in schools, society or organizations, its equally important to first understand research and findings in the space of cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. Further, its also important to understand the paradigm shifts that are happening in the world. The challenges and needs driving us to be more effective with learning are as follows: F ast changing environment that surrounds organizations, such as macro and micro economic changes, implies that organizations need to build business models and businesses that can withstand economic uncertainty F ast changing customers needs and demand implies that organizations
need to remain agile with customer centricity as their mantra D emographic changes happening in the world - falling birth rate and ageing population of developing economies, younger people entering the workforce in emerging economies etc. implies that organizations need to understand and develop the diverse work force and deal with its unique needs T he fast paced and constantly changing technological landscape implies that organizations need to remain early adopters of new technology and do it in the most cost efficient manner I ncreasing needs to build sustainable businesses and products to preserve natural resources and the environment implies that organizations have to act more responsibly and innovate for the sake of customers and mother earth!! These five challenges are compelling us to learn fast and continuously. Every organization is realizing that the capabilities it required to play and win in the past are very different from what it needs in the future, and it will only continue to change further. The litmus test for learning and development professionals is to create a new mind-set of continuous learning, irrespective of whether its in the form of brick and mortar, virtual or social. Each have their own advantages and limitations but when blended together in the right proportion, it has the propensity to take learning to the next level altogether. Social learning in itself may not yet be a mainstay of corporate training departments, atleast not as yet although it has great potential. In addition to including social media in their service portfolio, L&D managers are now using social media to position themselves strategically as subject matter experts.
At Philips, we are busy transforming learning and building a best-in-class virtual Learning University. Our focus is shifting from class room and e-learning offerings to becoming a more leader led and action learning oriented organization, where best in class learning technology and techniques are leveraged to create more value for our learners and build their capabilities. 70-20-10 is our learning model: 70 being self-directed action learning whilst on the job, 20 being leader led learning via coaching and mentoring and 10 being traditional class room learning and e-learning offerings. We believe in providing learning to all our employees on the go and anywhere hence we are trying to make sure that all learning offerings are available on smart phone and tablets, instead of laptops only. And there is a lot of other cool stuff happening, but well keep that for another day. In this section, I am very happy to present contributions of some prominent global HR and Learning leaders and professionals, each representing a different, yet interesting part of the learning continuum, one end of is classroom training and at the other, social learning : 1. A n article contributed by Bill Pelster, on how his global organization has created a benchmark, the Deloitte University, and is investing in its human capital development 2. A n article contributed by Gautam Ghosh and Andrew Lax on how Social Media and learning are a perfect match 3. A case study contributed by Sunder Ramchandran of JLT on how to leverage Social Learning to create value 4. A story contributed by Kavi Arasu from Asian Paints drawing parallels between a farmer and a learning professional. July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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Linking Learning to Business Strategy: About Deloitte University

William Pelster (Bill)
About the Author William Pelster (Bill) has over 20 years of industry and consulting experience. In his current he is responsible for the talent development experience of Deloittes professionals to include learning, assignments, and career/life fit. His knowledge spans the many aspects of HR to include strategy, talent acquisition and university relationships, HR technology platforms, knowledge management, strategic change, communication, culture assessment, training, and HR delivery models. Bill manages a team of over 350 talent development professionals based in the U.S. and India delivering services to over 50,000 U.S. and India based professionals.
earning and the linkage to business strategy is an on-going journey for many of us as learning leaders. We constantly seek ways to enable the overall business strategy through our learning programs and how we develop people within our organizations. In 2008, Deloitte decided to make a major investment in the way we develop our professionals as a key to meet our longterm business objectives. We purposefully chose to go against the prevailing wisdom around moving to more virtual learning and eLearning and instead invested $300 million into a physical learning facility outside of Westlake, Texas. In making the decision to invest in a physical learning facility, there were several principles that we wanted the facility to embody. This includes culture, demonstrated through the design and learning experience of what Deloitte values, who we are and how we serve our clients. This also includes giving our professionals a sense of the size of Deloitte, 22 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
with over 200,000 professionals in over 150 countries, our scope of services and our history dating back over 125 years. We wanted this to be a place where our apprenticeship model is practiced in its highest form. To do that, all our learning programs at Deloitte University are leaderled with an average student to instructor ratio of 5:1. Finally, we also wanted this to be a safe place to try new skills, so we moved away from a lecture based model to an experiential based learning model. A combination of the above principles allowed us to create a facility that focuses on building business leaders and is open to all employees of Deloitte. Deloitte University The Leadership Center, is designed to deliver up to one million hours a year of experiential based learning that will allow everyone in Deloitte from our new hires to our most experienced partners to develop and enhance their business skills through real life scenarios, business simulations and the application of their core technical skills. Throughout
a persons career at Deloitte they will be invited to attend multi-day, immersive sessions that will allow them to hone their skills, experience a variety of business scenarios relevant to their level in the organization, and to learn more about who they are as a leader. The curriculum at Deloitte University also helps Deloitte professionals stay on the leading edge of issues impacting our clients. In addition to core programs around leadership, Deloitte University serves as the main vehicle to deliver insights around industry trends, changes in the regulatory environment, and other issues our clients are dealing with. When Deloitte professionals come to Deloitte University, the interactive media walls, information centers and our streaming of content throughout the facility, allows us to constantly update our professionals on topics that are important to us both domestically and globally.
Through Deloitte University, Deloitte accelerates how our professionals are developed so that they can deliver those skills to the clients they work with. Clients expect that professional services firms not only have staff that are well versed in their particular technical areas, but also possess insights, are able to work in a global setting, and are willing to voice their views. Deloitte University provides the forum to develop our professionals to deliver exceptional client service. So why create a physical facility and not just more eLearning? Given that the core of our transformation is to develop business leaders, we needed to create an environment where we could impact behavior. This type of learning transformation is best done through a live learning event, an event that is experiential and has firm leaders in the classroom to coach and mentor. Given the amount of accelerated transformation in core business
Deloitte University, Westlake, Texas, USA. Spread over a campus of 107 acres, has top-class learning environment and infrastructure - 800 guest rooms, 35 class rooms, 36 break-out rooms. Includes a large auditorium and ballrooms. July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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High tech class room at Deloitte University, which is designed to facilitate leader led and connected (globally anywhere) social learning. skills we are looking to achieve, we needed to create a facility that could do that level of transformation and do it at a scale that has previously been unheard of among other firms. The creation of Deloitte University is a clear example of how learning and the learning function within an organization can directly impact and support the broader business strategy. Through transformational learning programs, we are creating business leaders at all levels in the firm who are well positioned to help Deloitte meet its broader business goals around serving our clients with distinction.
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Social Media & Learning: A Perfect Match

Gautam Ghosh and Andrew Lax
About the Authors Gautam Ghosh owns and drives the key strategic objective of making Philips India a strong Employer Brand by leveraging new emerging media and technology. He is one of Indias earliest HR Bloggers and an avid Twitter user. Andrew Lax specialises in managing and implementing HR Strategic projects, from Learning and Development, Change Management, Organisation and People Planning, HR Mid Term Plans, HR MI, Recruitment, HRIS Strategy Design and Implementation, Organisation Design and Leading Instructional Designers.
f you were to survey business professionals with one clear question What has been your most memorable learning experience?, its very unlikely that anyone would respond by saying corporate training/learning event. The reason for this is typical learning/training approaches used by corporates are not really learner-centric. They are typically event-based (a day or two) and driven by a facilitator. People come with different and varying skill levels and when they finish the course they go back to their workplace/ team and struggle to implement what they have learnt, as they are stuck in the stage of conscious competence. This phase is characterized by experimentation and repeated failures before the person can move to the unconscious competence, where learning becomes a part of doing without thinking about it. Most training delivered fails at this crucial transition. Additionally, according to a paper presented at ASTD in 2007, two weeks after the course, recall and retention of
learning comes down to about 10% of the training delivered. How could social technologies help? S ocial technologies can help create a community of fellow learners before they attend training. This would help them learn from each others experiences S hifting the focus from competencies needed to people sharing their expertise and strengths S haring content and theory before the training, so that face to face time with facilitators could be used for practice and feedback T he community of learners could form support and ideation groups when they go back to the workplace and implement their learning. This would help reinforce concepts and practical application in the context of the workplace July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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M anagers could also be a part of the community to understand how best to support their teams learning and translate it to the workplace These methods not only support the learning process but also reinforce key take ways, pre and post the event, making learning more memorable and far more cost effective. Examples of content that could be put together using social media: B asics on the subject files, websites, videos, list of books that act as a primer for gaining knowledge A dditional reading material documents and aids that people can download L ist of resources agencies, thoughtleaders andpartners, all collated at one place L ist of people (yellow pages) employees who have worked on initiatives, along with their coordinates (email, Skype, IM) F AQs A series of basic questions focused on what a new employee needs to know, like best practices, eBooks, videos, power point presentations. All the above artifacts should be editable by key stakeholders, like the course facilitator and instructional designer. In fact, the role of the facilitator changes from content creator to content curator. Other employees can add comments and their ratings against the published content. Once employees have gone through this, they can then be tested on their knowledge using a quiz or survey tool, which acts as a measure of learning effectiveness. Coaches, subject matter experts and mentors can be invited at a specified time, or requested to answer queries via social collaboration tools like wikis, threaded bulletin boards. 26 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
Updating new information Keeping content dynamic by updating what is new in the domain, the buzz around the firms products/services/ operations and what is the market/ competitive intelligence, can be done by using: R SS feeds of Google Alerts: with key words around the brand name, competitor name, and market name R SS feeds of thought leaders blogs and websites:- to ensure new ideas come directly to the employees desktop. T witter updates by subject matter experts: so that employees can keep track and even interact with them U sing list curation services like http://listorious.com/Competitive Intelligence: a dynamic page which is updated with news/tweets about major competitors, based on publicly available data which is collated and shown on a specific site. Comments would enable employees to add their personal views and experiences N ew videos and slideshows: using a keyword tracking processes, new videos and slides updated on the specific subjects (like Financial Modeling or Consumer Behavior or HR Trends) could be embedded in the dashboard of the employees. Collaboration Is about enabling employees to learn from each other using learning logs and ideation platforms to connect. Some ways this can be done are: I deation platform: a blog/wiki in which senior management asks for ideas around a certain campaign, initiative, problem statement or even new policy
S tatus updates: would let other people know what the employee is working on so that, if anyone has any ideas/lessons to share, they can do so via the tool L essons learnt: similar to the ideation platform, it focuses on past initiatives, what worked and best practices learnt from them S haring project plans: getting other employees feedback and views Q &A: with partners, senior management or consultants, which are then archived D iscussion around events like conferences, trainings that employees attend and come back to share their learning with the rest of the peer group. Implication for Learning Professionals If learning professionals have to leverage social technologies, they must get
comfortable with new skills to become online facilitators and move from a we will build content mindset to we will find the best content and curate it along with facilitation mindset. Understanding why people share content online and how to design interactions that help them connect and learn as a community, is the key skill facilitators need to build. These skills are known as community management skills in the digital realm, and L&D professionals need to transfer this offline skill to an online skill. Its an exciting period for the L&D function, as it moves from event-based focus to continuous learning focus, finally impacting the 70% and 20% of the 702010 model. Hopefully, the next time professionals are surveyed about their key learning moments; they would look back and say the learning in the community facilitated by our L&D team.
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Case Study: Social Learning @ Jardine Lloyd Thompson India

Sunder Ramachandran
About the Author Sunder Ramachandran is a highly energetic training leader with extensive experience in building capabilities for large teams in the offshore/outsourcing space. His articles on workplace learning have appeared in Indian & International media including - The Economic Times, Hindu Business Line, Times Ascent, National HRD Newsletter, Rediff.com, Askmen.com, Top7business.com, Human Capital and HrmAsia.com. Sunder was an entrepreneur for five years and has gained valuable experience on both the Buy & Sell side of the training business. He brings an entrepreneurial spirit & a profit maximisation mind-set to all business endeavors.
LT Group (www.jltgroup.com) is an international group of Risk Specialists and Employee Benefits Consultants, one of the largest companies of its type in the world. The India office is home to over 850 employees engaged in operational & knowledge service roles.
To focus and grow in specialist areas, JLT partners with CII (Chartered Insurance Institute www.cii.co.uk) which is the worlds largest professional body dedicated to insurance and financial services qualifications. Success in CII qualifications is universally recognized as a global standard. Social Learning @ JLT India A team of 40 employees from JLT India were preparing for the CII professional qualifications in May 2013 and were supported by social learning. It has become increasingly clear that employees are hooked onto the virtual world, 28 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
and social networking, micro blogging, YouTube videos for learning are realities that employees embrace in their personal learning space. The idea was to use the same engagement principles and support these employees to prepare for their professional qualifications. Social learning involves participating with others to make sense of new ideas, using technology platforms. To meet this goal, we used chatter (our internal collaboration platform from Salesforce.com) to provide these engagement opportunities to all the learners. The following were the key mechanics of this engagement C ommunities of practice: We created a CII Exam Community on our internal social platform. This became the epicentre of all discussions pertaining to the exams. Participants were encouraged to share content, tips, answer questions and post updates on their own progress. The training
team watched from the side-lines and moderated where required. It was amazing how peer to peer information sharing and learning was adding speed to the knowledge sharing process. The group was learning at will, by getting questions answered at their workstations. O ff-line meets: A strong sense of ownership led to offline meets. Participants met once every week, for 45 minutes, to discuss key updates and share tips. Any key points made on the online forum that involved further deliberation were brought up in the offline meets. This was also an opportunity for senior managers to address the participants which further encouraged them to succeed at the exams. C hatterthons: We used the widely popular tweetathons concept (used on twitter) and launched Chatterthons. Each week, a topic of importance was picked up and chat sessions were organised within the online community. This enabled us to drive engagement within the community and learners responded well, with over a dozen questions answered in a 30 minute slot (which is very difficult if done in an offline classroom environment) G amification through Fastest Finger First -Contests were launched within
the community which focused on the ability of learners to provide correct answers with speed. This was an important skill for the exams as well. A list of questions was prepared and all the participants were invited to be a part of these events. As the activity kicked off, the response was absolutely overwhelming and we were elated to see participants answering questionsin the spirit of competition. The winners were rewarded with goodies and incentives and as were learners who were the quickest to provide the correct answer. We saw an evident change in the way learning gets delivered, with 84% success rate in the actual exams held in May 2013. Social Learning was clearly the most pragmatic and effective way to ensure that participants take ownership and engage in peer to peer learning. The key benefits of social learning @ Jardine Lloyd Thompson India were: Improved knowledge sharing Fostered collaboration P r o v i d e d i n f o r m a l l e a r n i n g opportunities E ase of finding resources & relationship building
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The Farm
Kavi Arasu
About the Author Kavi Arasu specializes in Training Design and Delivery, Individual Coaching, Organization wide Training Processes and Strategy and Psychometrics. The core anchor of his life and career is a firm belief that people and teams can do better than they are doing now. Igniting and facilitating people to discover their potential and help move their dreams closer to reality has been an area that has been fulfilling.
e meet after several years. We were in school together. We bumped into each other. In some time, we are sipping coffee. Catching up on lost years that have quietly slipped by. He tells me he is a farmer and quickly asks, What do you do? I answer slowly, Learning & Development. I pause. A variety of programs for developing leaders, capability building, preparing the organization for future challenges... My voice trails. He quips, I live in a different world. Plants, livestock and land We sip our coffee. I notice he sips it with a certain care. Savoring each sip. I speak gingerly. I know you put it simply. There is a lot that must go into farming. We begin with a piece of land. His voice oozes confidence. Decide what crops to grow when. Each crop has its own cycle I am all ears. I plough the field. I need to get it ready for the seeds to germinate. I cant plant 30 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
the right seed on an unprepared surface you see. And then, there are choices to be made. The season. The land. The water. All these components determine what I plant. I have suffered both with the wrong seed for the right land and the right seed at the wrong time, because I kept my eye on what the merchant will give me The striking similarities in his work and mine pique my interest. I warm up. Thats a big decision. But who tells a farmer what is the right thing to do for his land? He places the coffee cup on the table, soaks in some air, and says quietly, If the farmer doesnt know his land and the seasons, he isnt a true farmer. My mind runs back to office and to the leaders we deal with. Leaders and managers, who are self-aware and own their development, are the ones who go a long distance. I look at him for more. He continues. Mother Nature keeps it simple. But you cant just plant the seed and wait for
Mother Nature to do the rest. You need to know when to water and how much water. Too much water can kill too! So is the case with fertilizer. As is with pesticides. Just the right dose, at the right time, in the right sequence. And that is very different for different plants in different soil. Just because something works well with the rice crop, it doesnt mean it will with millets. We need to find the right mix. In fact, every farmer needs to I smile. And say, So, its a question of finding the blend? Right? He smiles. Finding the right blend EVERY SINGLE TIME! A true farmer nurtures. He nurtures by walking the fields. He nurtures by talking to his crop. He nurtures by doing the right thing and not over doing it So how successful are you in growing your crops? I ask. He laughs. I dont grow the crops. The crops grow by themselves. I am just there. I realize I am just there conceals as much as it reveals. Yet it sinks in clean. The elegance of his description makes me wonder how we miss the most obvious in the quest of the new / shiny / fancy! A good farmer is patient. To him, who sows the right seed in the right soil and
does just that much to nurture and watch them grow, a good yield is a given. That night I stare into the skies. And his words keep coming back to my mind. I dont grow the crops. The crops grow by themselves. I am just there. I want to write that down and put it on my desk. Perhaps pass it on to our leaders and managers. Development is natures way of ensuring all is well. And yes, true development is a natural process. **************************** The Farmers story is perfect for concluding this section on Learning. Its clear that its all about value creation and not just value addition via learning. The importance of the third building block of Social Learning, next to the two blocks of formal & informal learning is fast gaining importance. Creating learning organizations has become a strategic imperative for organizations to stay relevant, perpetual and competitive. Learning has a lot of art and science to it and the science is becoming more important for designing the right and relevant learning experiences. The challenges are tougher than ever before and understanding and developing human capital effectively is an area ripe for research and experimentation.
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Section 3
Branding and Communication The Essentials

Personal branding is a personal choice, brought alive by many aspects of our behavior, including how we show up online. With no effort at all, our connections, comments,engagements, or lack thereof, matched with our experience, expertise and skills, creates a perception that may not represent the true self. This section focuses on making ourselves relevant to others, in a manner that does justice to our purpose and their need.
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Branding and Communication: The Essentials

Dr. Tanvi Gautam
About the Author Dr. Tanvi Gautam consults and trains on innovative talent management practices, leadership; cross culture team management, as well as diversity. She was recognized by the Business Manager magazine as one of the leading women HR professionals (July 2012), and also serves on the boards of ARTDO international (a pan Asian HR consulting and training organization headquartered in Malaysia) and D.K International (HQ: India). She has written for, been interviewed and quoted by international publications such as Harvard Business Review (On point, 2013) and Forbes, USA.
0 seconds. What can be done in one minute?
living in this information rich but insight poor environment. For instance, in this diverse and overloaded environment, how do we powerfully capture the attention of relevant others? How do we communicate in a manner that the meaning is not lost in translation? How do we create organizations that cut through the noise to resonate with the best talent out there? While there is no one or universal answer to these questions, much depends on the frameworks we adopt to find and define our solutions. Given my own work in employee engagement, cross-cultural teams and corporate storytelling, I tend to lean towards solutions that emanate from that space. In this particular section that I am anchoring, the authors approach these questions from the lens of branding and communication. And hence the proposed solutions lean towards creating of personal and professional brands and challenges of communication in a global and diverse world.
While it does not seem like a lot, consider this: In less time than what it will take you to finish reading the next paragraph, Google would have attended to more than 2 million search queries, YouTube would have had 1.3 million video views and 204 million emails would have been sent globally. If you are still not overwhelmed consider the prediction that by 2015, five years worth of digital video will traverse IP networks each second (yes, per second not per minute). These predictions come from the popular Intel info-graphic on the topic. To say that we are living in the age of information overload is to grossly understate the issue at hand. The rise in the volume of data, while in and of itself is overwhelming, to my mind it is not the core issue. The real challenge arises from our ability to personally & professionally cope with 34 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
The articles provide some important insights and a road map on how to approach some of the questions raised earlier. The first article underscores the importance and value of having a personal brand in capturing the attention of relevant others. The proposed model and clear steps to success provide much needed clarity on the issue of personal branding. The second article on reinventing your career is a very timely one as HR professionals acquire new knowledge and competencies, we may find ourselves in roles that may not have existed a few years ago. Reinventing our career in a manner that enables success in the information age depends on creating great content, taking on leadership roles and having the ability to embrace the quantitative. Indeed, the act of reinventing your career is related to the idea of creating a powerful personal brand. The third article, examines what it takes to create an employee brand that attracts and resonates with the talent we are trying to attract an issue that is close to the heart of all HR professionals. And the final article, reminds us that while creating a brand is critical, being mindful of cultural boundaries when trying to communicate in global world is an imperative that simply cannot be ignored. I am positive that the articles will only whet your appetite for more and so I would like to share with you some amazing insights generated through #indiahrchat (Indias only twitter chat for the HR community). In the tweets from this particular chat on
the topic of personal branding for HR professionals, Anand Pillai (one of the authors in this section) was the guest. I do regard #indiahrchat as a space where the HR community learns together and communicates in a manner that allows us all to grow as professionals, a model of communicating and learning that will become even more common in the years to come.
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Creating YOUR Personal Brand

Anand Pillai
About the Author Anand Pillai has more than 31 years of rich experience in the corporate world, having handled challenging assignments in general management and as head of operations in companies such as TATA Group (10 yrs.), Hughes Network Systems and Bay Networks and HCL Technologies Ltd (14 years). He is a much sought after speaker in many national and international forums. Given his thought leadership in the field of leadership & innovation, Anand has been recently appointed as Member of the World Economic Forums Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership 2011.
very individual brings a unique combination of strengths, passions, gifts, and purpose to the workplace, a combination that coalesces into a unique brand; a brand which exemplifies the unique him/her, inside as well as outside the organization. Not many people recognize that they are unique, and even in case they do, they fail to do anything about it. When they try doing something about it, they may fall victim to doing it ineffectively. I ask people What is your Personal Brand? Most of them end up defining themselves based on their nationality, ancestral origin, qualifications or achievements. People often confuse their identity with the way they look, the community they belong to or the position they hold. They think that their identity is fused with their achievements. They associate their identity with a specific circumstance or instance of success. 36 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
Creating your Personal Brand So what is a Personal Brand and how to create it? Your personal brand is what people would say when they hear your name, or the results Google would throw up when a search is run in your name. Personal Branding is about knowing your uniqueness, discovering your strengths and leveraging them. It is about making a full-time commitment to the journey of defining yourself as an individual. To quote Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale of Funky Business The surplus society has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, working in similar jobs, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality. The world we live in presents everything as an equalizer; the one and only differentiator is YOU. Creating a personal brand involves showing genuine interest, which radiates outward and engages others.
Building Your Personal Brand In todays competitive market, building a personal brand is critical to any individual, particularly HR professionals. The seven steps of building and leveraging your personal brand are: Believe in Yourself Discover Yourself Re-Invent Yourself Build Yourself Let Go of Yourself Renew Yourself Be Yourself Believe in Yourself: Do you believe in yourself? Do you accept yourself the way you are, the way you are made? That is what will enable you to establish your identity and build your personal brand.
things which you seem to learn rapidly, the things which you enjoy learning. You learn those things rapidly because you are hard-wired for that. Ask yourself, what kinds of activities do you seem to pick up quickly? The third test is Flow. In what activities did the steps come to you automatically? As if they were programmed in your mind, though you may not necessarily be qualified for it. The fourth test is Glimpses of Excellence. As you are doing your work, you suddenly get a WOW feeling!! You feel proud of yourself and commend yourself for doing that fantastically. Glimpses of excellence come to you. Reflect and ask yourself, during what activities have you had moments of subconscious excellence, when you thought, How did I do that? The fifth and the final test of discovering yourself are spotting signs of Satisfaction. Doing some things,even when you are tired and completely knocked off, gives you a sense of satisfaction. That energy validates the Chinese proverb which says Find a job you love and youll never have to work a day of your life. Ask yourself, which activities give you such a kick? Either while doing them or immediately after finishing them, you think, Oh, when can I do that again? Reinvent Yourself: Once you discover yourself or become fully aware of yourself, you should not stay that way, you have to get into the next step which is Reinvent Yourself. Unless you reinvent yourself, you are going to go back into a blue game; youll have to move with the changing time. Becauseyou need to progress with time. You can reinvent yourself by working on your courage zone. Come out of your July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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Believe in your self , because if you dont, nobody else will!!

Discover Yourself: Once you believe in yourself you need to get into the journey of Discovering Yourself. Gallup gives us five simple tests of discovering ourselves. The first one is Yearning which is, the unspoken desire to do things that naturally appeal to you. For example, for me, it is People Development. You will be making me much happier if you wake me up in middle of the night and ask me to facilitate a session on Personal Branding. Ask yourself, what kinds of activities are you naturally drawn towards? The second test of discovering yourself is Rapid Learning. There are things which you dont learn at all, even if a best teacher in the world is teaching you. But there are
4. Let Go of Yourself: The next step towards building a personal brand is Let go of Yourself. You need to learn to give up to go up. It entails making three exchanges with self: Affirmation for Accomplishment Stop being a people-pleaser. If you always say yes when you would rather say no, then you will find yourself unhappily going through the motions of living, giving control of your time, energy, and spirit to anyone who asks for it. Fundamentally, leadership involves serving others and adding value to them. comfort zone and challenge yourself in unexplored territories of work and life, what I call, the areas of risk, difficulty and discomfort. You need to keep reinventing yourself once every 18 to 36 months, and the pattern youll have to adopt is: 60% of your day to day activities should be in comfort zone, while 40% should be in your courage zone. Venture out; try things which you have never tried, because that is how youll reinvent yourself. Once you reinvent yourself, youll then be able to rediscover yourself, be able to build your identity. Building your identity means creating your individual signature. Personal branding is not an easy job, you need to work hard, work smart and stamp mark whatever you do. It requires mapping your passion to address new opportunities or threats within the organizations walls, benchmarking self, having a dream company/position in mind and decisively working towards achieving it. It involves networking with value adders, and creating your own blue ocean. That is, creating bandwidth for doing things which are high in value, and by eliminating or reducing things which are low in value. 38 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal Security for Significance Security can be tough to pass up and yet, significance usually calls for risk. It involves stepping away from familiar territory in order to explore new lands. To be a pioneering leader, you have to change your attitude toward uncertainty; otherwise you will confine your influence Immediate Victory v/s Long-Term Sustainability To excel as a leader, you have to change the timeframe in which you view success. If you measure your performance solely in terms of immediate results, then you run the risk of giving up when times are tough. Invest in .yourself: Make SPICE the way of your life.
Invest in yourself Spiritually, Physically, Intellectually, Community and Emotionally.
Renew Yourself: Continuous learning, renewal, refreshment and re-invention are key to remaining at the cutting edge at all stages and ages of your life. Be Yourself: Be yourself, because everybody else is taken. Never let go of the unique, special qualities that define you as an individual. Maintaining your Personal Brand Once you go through the seven steps to building your personal brand in a systematic focused manner, you will be able to differentiate yourself from others in your field and thats when you get to, not only branding yourself, but maintaining
and evolving that brand. This is a life-long exercise.

God has made each of us as a f ir st class or iginal. Dont die a second gr ade copy!
It is difficult to cover personal branding in just one article. However, some of the simple and basic steps covered can ensure that every interaction is an opportunity to create, build and maintain your personal brand. Discover yourself and let the world discover. Happy Branding!! To know more on Personal Branding, follow me on twitter @Anand_Pillai.
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Reinventing Your Career for HR Professionals

Dorie Clark
About the Author Dorie Clark is a strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the Ford Foundation. She is also the author of the newly-released Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). You can listen to her podcasts or follow her on @ dorieclark
ouve worked hard to build your reputation as an HR professional. But what if you now want to reinvent how youre perceived by others? Perhaps youd like to work in a different industry, handling talent management in the technology space instead of pharmaceuticals. Maybe youd like to move to an even more senior level at your company, where you need to showcase your leadership abilities. Or you may simply want to demonstrate that, as the industry is changing, your skills are both keeping up and moving forward. Here are three strategies you can employ to ensure others recognize your true capabilities. Create content to demonstrate your expertise: The single best strategy for demonstrating your value to others is creating online content whether its in the form of blogs, podcasts, videos, or even a smart Twitter feed it shows youre engaged in key discussions and you know what youre talking about. Particularly if youre moving into a new industry, this 40 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
is your opportunity to allay any concerns from your new employer; they can see with their own eyes that youre thoughtful and have a smart perspective to contribute. Take on leadership roles: Being the leader of a professional organization sends a powerful signal to others your peers have agreed youre a worthy leader. So if youre involved in a group, make the extra effort to become a leader. As I recount in my new book from Harvard Business Review Press, Reinventing You, a U.S. consultant named Alan Weiss took on a role, in the mid-1990s, as the New England Chapter President of the National Speakers Association. He thought hed make less money in those years because he was devoting extra time to volunteer. On the contrary, he made an extra US $250,000 directly traceable to his role, because his visibility and network increased so much during that time. It pays to be seen as a leader. Embrace the quantitative. As Ive written about in Forbes, the new frontier for HR
may be Big Data and how to adapt its insights into measurable performance gains for your organization. Many HR professionals arent trained in analytics, but given its growing prominence, diving in now and establishing your expertise may be a smart way to stay ahead of the curve. For instance, eBay uses analytics to identify departmental and managerial hotspots where employees are leaving, thus allowing them to discover and address problems at an early stage. Theyve also
turned to analytics to help them adjust their maternity leave policy, enabling them to better retain top female employees. HR like much of the business world, is rapidly changing. If you want to reinvent your career and how youre perceived by others, developing insightful content, taking on leadership roles, and mastering Big Data may be your ticket to advancement and future success.
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Cross Cultural Issues in Branding and Communication

Dr. Vinayshil Gautam
About the Author Dr. Gautam (IIT-Delhi) is an internationally renowned management thinker and consultant. He was the First Head Management Department; IIM-K (Founder Director), IIM-S (Leader, DPR consulting Team) DCM Engineering and Electronics Division (Head, Management Development Centre). He is a past Director of International Federation of Training and Development Organizations (London) and Past President of ARTDO International (Manila). He is, along with other decorations, the recipient of the Hall of Fame Award 2013; Devang Mehta Life Time Achievement Award 2012; G51, Millennium Award; Outstanding Contributions Award of ARTDO International and Industries. Dr. Gautams deep expertise in management has been sought internationally in places such as USA, UK, Germany, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. He has represented India in UNESCO and APO events.
nd what do you do Dr. Gautam? came a perfectly valid question from a casual acquaintance at a recent dinner gathering. I paused for a moment because the reply may have ended up raising more questions than it answered. My profession requires me to wear several hats a researcher, a consultant, a teacher, a trainer, a mentor, a counselor, a public speaker, a committee man, an author and much more, with the aim of meeting the needs of my international client base. Yet while these are all my roles, I am not just about my roles. My roles are a response to the context. My brand is my essence. My roles are what I do while my brand is who I am, as perceived by others. It is true; image can be no different from reality! 42 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
My brand which underpins all my roles, is not something I actively created. It got ascribed to me with over four decades in the profession, buttressed by the image that literally thousands of my students, trainees, those in the audiences I addressed, and others, gave to me. My brand was being created and conveyed as a spontaneous response. It is not a method I am advocating but rather elaborating a reality of what field conditions can be like. It needs to be recognized that a brand is created not only through all that you say and do but also by what you dont say and dont do. The brand defines the expectation in each interaction, and in my case it has come to be a brand that conveys operational expertise
and international exposure to many layers of overlap between the corporate world and educational processes. Given the scope of my work across five continents, a question that is interesting to explore is how branding & communication interact with culture. My first response to the topic is that I have not seen cross cultural issues affecting my brand. My audiences have laughed with me and agonized with me, in Caracas, Leipzig, Abu Dhabi, Penang, Melbourne and elsewhere. And so one might conclude the world is amazingly one. Inter cultural issues are pass. Incorrect. The truth is that the responses of my clients/audiences lie along a unified continuum. This is because I am dealing with homogenous groups who broadly have similar background and cultural scalar fashion. There is the global reference point. Consider the case of pilots. They communicate with Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) through the flight and landings. They are what can be called the cosmopolitans. Put simply, the world is divided, not just geographically but also, through cultural orientation. Air Traffic Controllers come from different parts of the world just as the pilots do. Yet, because of standardization of the mode of communication and the framework of issues handled there, it is an example of the cosmopolitans at work. Yet this cannot be made an algorithm. When one is talking of cross cultural issues in branding and communication, one is talking of motifs, symbols, assumptions, contexts and deliverables in a very different way. An example would clarify the point In India touching another persons forehead is a symbol of conferring a
blessing, while in Thailand it is considered a taboo. Branding is the label put on expectations and the defining characteristics. Communication is the only way of accomplishing this. For this, a thought through positioning is necessary. This requires cross cultural communication. Communicating across cultures Cross-cultural communication need not necessarily be across sovereign states or ethnic groups. It can also be across professions. An illustration would help clarify the point My profession has brought me close to several business families. In a characteristic Indian style, I have been almost adopted into some families, making it very difficult for me to even to define my consulting role. I have often been heard, just as a family elder or consular would be heard. Again, culturally this would make perfect sense in Asia but may seem incongruous to a consultant brought up in the American management tradition, where the personal and professional worlds are often compartmentalized. Recently a well-established industrial family group, decided, as indeed many families in India have done, to diversify into education. After several years of work, their effort bore fruit and a University was established as per due processes of law. It was soon discovered that each year, the number of enrolments were going down and each year there was deficit of an equivalent of approximately US $ 1.5 million. No educational promoter can afford to bear this endlessly and hence, I received a panic call. I discovered that the Vice Chancellor and his group of luminaries had no reliable information on the number of educational groups running parallel July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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courses in the city or detailed information on other degree granting institutions in the 75 km radius of the city. They had no clue about the social or economic background from which the students came. The fees were being arbitrarily fixed or lowered. When I raised this with the key decision makers of the system, I was asked Have you done it for IIT?. How was I to explain the difference between an IIT and an autonomous state University? That, as they say is another story! The purpose of sharing this experience is to illustrate the type of cross cultural issues that can and do arise. An industrial group making a foray in the education sector has to be oriented to handle this issue of cross cultural orientation. Indeed culture itself could be defined in multiple ways, recognizing the exigencies of the situation. Cross cultural communication would then have to be devised. In essence Whether it is branding we are thinking of or communication across cultures, the aim should be to create shared mental models between two parties. Reaching that common ground should be the ultimate aim. In my limited experience of consulting, research and training, I have found it
worthwhile to spend some time trying to understand the assumptions, constructs, beliefs and indeed the prejudices of the decoder, that is, the person with whom I would be communicating. This is so because at the end of the day all words are symbols. They would be understood, not necessarily as intended, but as the listener perceives them to be. This can be deeply influenced by cultural factors, such as the profession from which he comes. Illustratively in psychology one may have to manipulate figures for smoothening purposes of statistical analysis and acknowledge it. In everyday life to manipulate something may be considered totally reprehensible! Similarly its important to recognize that communication is a composite process, it is not just sounds (symbols), but gesture, body language and more. At each stage a set of complex inter cultural factors can leave an impact. As for the question I got asked at the dinner reception, I could not help but smile and finally say I facilitate growth and learning. For, no matter what role I am in, I never forget the privilege and opportunity that is of being a facilitator. Like someone said, such person as a teacher effects eternity, s/he never knows where their influence ends. Now that I feel is a brand worth aspiring for!
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Brand-ing Begins At Home Managing Communications from the Bottom Up

Roger Darashah
About the Author Roger Darashah has over 20 years of technology PR experience managing international programs for companies such as HP, Adobe, Research In Motion (BlackBerry), Garmin, Western Digital and Compaq. He currently manages Rediffusion/Edelmans relationship with the Tata Group providing PR strategy and counsel for nearly 30 separate companies. Campaigns cover a range of audiences from traditional print to social media, analysts and other influencers.
elf-expression does not stop at the workplace and is not a necessary evil simply to be tolerated by employers; individual self-expression is, in fact, now a fundamental facet of the Indian worker, particularly amongst todays millennial employees. Also referred to as Generation Y, the millennial is typically aged between 20 and 35 years, and displays unprecedented levels of certain characteristics such as individualism, self-expression, independence etc. compared to their predecessors. And Indias millennial are no different they are demonstrating these traits en masse. Infact, MTV goes on to call them the Dictators while each of them wants to stand out, youth as a group has no loners. According to their recent research, 97% millennials believe they have the power to change the world. They dont take dictates from the media; they are the dictators of our times. 95% of them believe that they
are more empowered than the previous generation and they have no inhibitions about proving it. It goes on to say that traditional peer pressure cuts no ice with millennials while 56% will fight against society or norms if they believe that they are right, 37% simply wont care about what the wider society thinks of them. They believe in themselves and its their personal opinions which count, far from safety in numbers looking for identity, prestige and endorsement from a wider group. Millennials - The chattering class In short, todays millennials tend to reject conventional labels, opting instead for self-definition and direct/personal communication via platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Their individual values take precedence over traditional forms of conventional thought, and are applied equally to peoples personal, as well as their professional lives. This is July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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further emphasized by a recent study conducted by Network Box, which suggests that social media has become a primary medium of such self-expression, with Facebook and YouTube accounting for more corporate bandwidth usage than any other site. And such behavior has vital implications within the workplace. Customers, employees, shareholders, partners and collaborators within this demographic, are all diffusing personal opinions on todays issues, whether or not they are qualified or authorized to do so in the traditional or hierarchical sense. Individuals relationship with their employers has fundamentally changed too. It is no longer simply based on an exchange of labor for remuneration, but far more profound. In effect, employees have become one of the most powerful and vocal purveyors of brand values and meaning. Todays workforce sees employment as a reflection of their wider selves, applying the same values and logic to work as to their lives outside the office. This means that they expect to uphold the same commitment or transparency to the environment as they would in their private lives. This shift has been further amplified by the proliferation and use of social media. Given it is no respecter of rank or hierarchy, every person, even if it is the Chief Executive of the organization or policy, is open to scrutiny and comment. And in the event that company values do not (or no longer) reflect those of the individual, the employer/employee relationship enters a forbidding terrain. Powerful brand ambassadors This makes employees (particularly millennials) the best place to start when communicating a company brand and they can make very powerful brand ambassadors! Millennials represent the 46 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
Worlds exhibitionist class. Everything is shared, endorsement and validation is actively sought for virtually on every activity. This could take the form of likes on Facebook or retweets on Twitter. In India this could also mean recognition from traditional family networks, a crucial driver for this generation. Edelmans 8095 2.0 Study reveals that 74% of millennials believe they influence the purchase decisions of their peers and those in other generations. In fact, Indian (along with Chinese) millennials are most likely to share their experience and feedback with the others. Interestingly, Indian millennials actively share and heed their peers advice on everything . . . from their choice of music, to their choice of employer. Engage Them Given these brand ambassadors are self-sufficient and confident about what they think, it is imperative for employers to engage and connect with them. It is important to create an organisational culture that fosters and promotes development of positive relationships among employees across departments, regardless of the job title. In hindsight, it also stimulates collaborative thinking and engagement for all employees. According to Hershatter and Epstein, millennials expect to work in hierarchically flat organizations with ready access to senior leadership. And have no regrets to move out of the system if these conditions are not met. The implications for brands are clear employees are the first, fastest and most effective purveyor of brand values for better or worse. Brand managers, including HR teams, take note! Ignore them at your peril if your millennial employees dont buy into your brand . . . no one else will.
Section 4
Balancing the Benefits and Risks, Showcase

As organizations ready themselves to introduce/scale social media across their enterprise, this section will serve to be a guide, highlighting the aspects to enhance and avoid as well as some off-the-shelf tools that are gaining popularity.
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Balancing the Benefits and Risks of Enterprise Social Media

Raghuraman M G
About the Author Raghuraman M.G. (better known as M.G) is a senior IT professional with more than 32 years of experience, traversing over General Management and IT. Currently he is responsible for managing Enterprise IT at MphasiS and is chartered to deliver integrated technology architecture, IT agility and drive cost efficiency. He is also responsible for enhancing the user technology experience and make IT a force multiplier for MphasiS.
heres no arguing that social networking has changed the way people interact with each other in their personal lives. Today, it is a moot point to even debate the benefits of social media and networking in organisations enhanced brand reputation, connections with customers, improved collaboration, spur innovation, marketing assists and the list can go on. Any business worth its salt recognizes that social media has strategic value Deloittepredictsthat by the end of 2013, over 90% of Fortune 500 companies would have partially or fully implemented an enterprise social network. Organizations have woken up to the fact that these interactions trigger new information and insights, and those entities that are able to harness this energy to drive business processes and decisions, will transform their business. The aim of these new tools is to enable businesses to tap into the collective intelligence of their workforce, in new and faster ways. Over the next 3-5 years, or maybe even earlier, Enterprise Social Networking is 48 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
expected to change the organizational fabric in the following ways: 1) D issolving Hierarchies by discovering people in other parts of the organization who have critical skills and relevant knowledge, rather than limiting interactions based on job descriptions 2) I ncreasing Customer Centricity by leveraging the opportunity to garner instant reactions, good or bad, from the customer and responding in the here & now 3) I ntranets will become obsolete - by using social networking platforms to cascade information, share knowledge, build cohorts and seek guidance rather than navigating through static impersonal links 4) M aking every employee a brand Ambassador - social networking makes everyone in the organization a walking billboard. Every comment by an employee who talks about the company on social networks, is an authentic PR activity for the firm.
Though many organizations have already realized the benefits of social media, others remain skeptical and worry that the tools will replace traditional watercooler discussions. Moreover, the single biggest risk of compromised information that could threaten both customers as well as employee privacy, keeps most organisations at bay. A CIOs top most priority is to determine whether business benefits outweigh the risk. Is there measurable ROI that is not hidden beneath the intangible feel good factor? The jury is out on this one. Feedback from CIOs on this matter is decidedly mixed varying from causing more problems than solving, waste of effort and money to total embrace as a collaboration miracle, the opinion swings between two ends of spectrum. These extreme views are possibly due to different expectations of the organization and the user. The latter demands freedom of choice and control they want to decide whom they would like to engage with, when and how often, what they would like to say, how they would like to say it. The organization, on the other hand, wants to micromanage all of the above! This mismatch in expectations leads to several other roadblocks that many firsttime implementers stumble upon when trying to launch a new Enterprise Social Media solution 1) Perception - that social networking is meant for Gen Z only, or for folks in the Technology Industry 2) No perceived need why move away from 1-0-1 chats and emails ? 3) Lack of adoption no champions for the cause, Leaders dont walk the talk! 4) Transparency - sharing of information creates a level of transparency that may
or may not be appreciated or welcomed by all 5) Privacy and security - because many things that were normally private and internal to the organization or the function, will now be in public domain None of these need to be show-stoppers as long as the organization recognizes and acknowledges some fundamentals in a work environment, 80% of users are consumers and only 20% contributors, while the reverse may be true in the personal space. Hence, organizations should be realistic and not expect the same levels of enthusiasm and participation in Enterprise Social Media, or be surprised at the diminishing value and loss of sheen in their first attempt. To avoid disappointments, there is a need for cautious implementation strategies. If done well, and the essence of the freedom of speech not threatened , Enterprise Social Media can be valuable at every level of the company employee engagement, tearing down knowledge silos, talent discovery, identifying and tapping into subject matter expertise and so on. But when implemented haphazardly or seen by employees as a fancy senior management idea that has been forced onto them, the benefits simply evaporate and participant energy diminishes. Listed below is a 3 step approach that can help tilt the balance in favor of Enterprise Social Media, thereby outweighing, or at least reducing, the risks that come part and parcel: Step 1 : Align with the culture it is essential to seek synergies between the social media strategy and the fabric of daily work. If not, employees will see the engagement as an additional task or chore demanded by the Management. July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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This implies two risks either employees wont use it at all or theyll rebel against it and use it inappropriately. Both the results are damaging. Start by assessing the current collaboration patterns between teams and employees and understanding the organizations current culture. Different types of work environs, like BPO, software development, helpdesks, support functions like Finance and HR, have different propensities for collaboration. What does the organizational culture propagate? How open, transparent and inclusive are leaders? Ensure then that managers and employees see the alignment between engagement with Enterprise Social Media and their daily work. This is very critical for adoption. Step 2: Executive support and strategic goals to be locked in: After measuring current levels of collaboration, the next step is to define or develop a strategic goal. These goals could be different for different organizations. Marketing and customer service may sound like the most obvious and relevant goals, but it need not apply for all organizations. The three big Cs Communicating with employees, Collaboration between teams, Community building could be the most popular and practical strategic goals for most organizations. Whatever be the case, a clear set of goals and expectations is an absolute must. And the goals need to be strategic, even if its a simple goal to develop a brand of a young organization.
Policies could be defined to assure risk mitigation through employee education, role based access, rule engines and real time content monitoring. This must be shared upfront and transparently with employees to develop a culture of selfpolicing, much like parking responsibly within the white lines rather than in fear of an impending fine. You may require some quarantine policies for very critical information being shared, to enable review before posting on the enterprise web. These techniques would vary based on the culture, measures and strategic goals. Step 3 : Controlled introduction with employee participation Forming a core committee of employees to implement the social media policy would be the best way to launch as its necessary for it to be seen and felt as an employeeendorsed initiative. Awareness on issues such as being a responsible corporate netizen, accountability to customer interests and privacy, fellow-employee sensitivity can be achieved through campaigns and training. This helps create an evolving culture of Enterprise Social Media acceptance rather than being driven down as set of rules. In summary, the move to social media will soon become a practical necessity. Approach your roll out plan deliberately and involve all stakeholders. The surest way to protect your organization is through an informed, clearly articulated, communicated and enforced social media acceptable use policy.
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Social Media Company Showcase

Elango R and Gautam Ghosh
s we were conceptualizing this NHRD issue, it seemed apt to include a showcase, highlighting a few companies offering social media products and solutions. While we limited our search to NASSCOMs Emerge Out forum, we definitely werent prepared for a deluge of options. In this surprisingly crowded space, most companies seemed to be operating in and around employee referrals, staffing, rewards and recognition or performance management work streams, with generous helpings of gamification thrown in! In order to make sense of the clutter, we evaluated solutions on three parameters : 1. Robustness of product or solution: i. Does it solve a current industry issue? ii. Is the solution closely aligned to the problem?
Despite using clear qualifying criteria, we werent able to peg any solution or product that stands tall on all three parameters. While some stood out for their robustness, others were very innovative in their design. I invited two bright young sparks from my team, Julian Peter and Susan Korath, to experience and demo each product and get a first-hand feel. Along with Gautam Ghosh, the four of us then ranked the products / solutions and following four emerged as favorites: The Editors Pick - ZALP
Is the product or solution intuitive and idiot proof 2. Customer Base: i. Are crowds attracted by free subscription or do customers choose to pay, knowing well that the return on investment will be high? ii. Attracting customers may be tough, retaining them is tougher is there a clear value proposition that will make users stay? i. Basis founder credentials, who has funded etc. ii. Are t hey prepared t o meet tomorrows needs? iii. Their innovative bent of mind
ZALP a SaaS based tool (software as a service) stood out in the space of social recruitment. Product of Pebstone Infotech, an Indian company based out of Mumbai, they have recently ventured into the Indian market after having done well in US. As a tool, ZALP is hosted on a platform that seamlessly integrates with social media connections, making it a one stop shop for recruiters and employees to manage referrals. They have even thought through simple workarounds for organisations that restrict social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. ZALP enables employees with not just one, but several options to make referrals and keep track of the status of their referrals on a real time basis. As for recruiters, they can either tag a resume to a specific skill set or make use of the repository that stores every referral that comes in. Thus, as and when a suitable opening comes up, the tool July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
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3. Ability to sustain:
matches the two immediately and notifies the recruiter. We selected them because they score on intuitive design, idiot proof workflow and high focus on solving real problems. They could improve, however, on their installed base. Another pick was MYPARICHAY huge installed base, excellent backend processes and good testimonials. Their strength lies in enabling users to leverage connections via Facebook and LinkedIn. Many companies have expressed their trust in the tool and it shows on their long clientele list. The Staffs Pick Ripple Hire
Solutions : Our referral numbers increased considerably on deploying RippleHire. There was visible buzz and employee participation. The RippleHire team is very seasoned and customer oriented making the overall experience delightful. RippleHire is steadily excelling in the social media space and building its clientele, and our gut tells us that this is one to watch out for! Next Generation Learning Platform MindTickle
While I toyed with ZALP, my young team was strongly cheering another product RippleHire. They felt that the intuitive product and its ability to bring in the dimension of gamification, takes social recruiting to another level altogether. Their evolve, revolve and involve philosophy struck a chord with all evaluators! RippleHire appears to be a good gobetween social media and game mechanics, much like Value for Money very simple and easy to use. It can be deployed with existing HRMS and allows for customization too while we didnt ratify this, the plug and play features available were apparent. Their client testimonials speak volumes of the impact they are creating. Sodel Solutions, an IT services provider, wanted to build an inclusive recruiting culture in the organization and brought on Ripplehire to help them reach their goal. To quote Nalin Agarwal, Director at Sodel 52 July | 2013 NHRD Network Journal
While a majority of the products we came across were in the space of recruitment, it was by serendipity that we reviewed products / solutions pertaining to other segments such as learning and employee engagement. To be fair, we didnt evaluate the latter on the same scale as social recruiting tools, and my pick on this front is MindTickle. Founded in 2011, this team claims to have reinvented the process of learning for several Fortune 500 organizations by capitalizing the power of social mechanics and creating learner engagement. MindTickle offers a solution that clubs employee engagement and learning, making it flexible and deployable across platforms. Their robust customer base, which includes names like SAP, MakeMyTrip, Yahoo! and HCL, validates the fact that the solution provided by MindTickle solves traditional training problems by keeping the target audience engaged. As long as they continue to make learning fun, there is nothing (and no one as yet), to beat them on this front!
Close Contender - eMee
our thinking. Social Media will not remain a buzz for long it will be a way we do business and interact, and if we continue to do what we did in the email era, we will not be able to harness the full power of social media. Social media survives on the premise of connecting people, ideas and thoughts and if a product / solution maintains and build on the same principle, we believe that product companies in this space will find it very easy to adapt to changing times and technology. We are grateful to all the companies who participated in this exercise and wish you good luck as you embark on your Social Media journey. Both Gautam and I will be happy to hear from you as you dabble with some of these technologies and ideas. Have fun changing the world as we know it today!
Another name that stands out in this space is eMee. For a Facebook addict, this tool will look and feel very similar to Farmiville in its user experience and the way it uses game dynamics to promote employee activity. What we liked about the tool though is the manner in which it brings together employee engagement and performance management. The USP is the methodology used for performance feedback. The road ahead is not so easy This is still a very nascent space and the challenge lies not in the tools available, but in our willingness to change and in
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NHRD Journal Aug

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Dear Readers,

M V Subbiah Arun Maira

Dr. Sharda Prasad S Mahalingam

Lakshmi Narayanan Dr. K C Reddy R C M Reddy

Skill Building and HR

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Dr. Santanu Paul T Muralidhara n

and Megha Aggarwal Dr. Devesh Kapur

Dr. Pallab Bandyopadhyay

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Measure or Criteria Objective / Utility Channelsof communication

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