Is social media hype or reality?

“I’m not worried, soon somebody will find a way to use it for formal learning, but this is certainly a great way to ensure better participation during a learning event.”

An avid blogger, a twitter-addict, with 1000 friends on Orkut and an enviable fan following on Facebook, Gautam is a social media and network junkie. But when asked how he’d like to categorize himself, Gautam Ghosh says, “my foremost identity is as an HR professional.” Those who know Gautam describe him as the “Face of HR blogging” in India as well as the global community. This young man has successfully connected the dots between HR, learning and social media. He believes that “learning happens by doing and sharing!”

Gautam has rich experience in the corporate world through his journey as an HR professional in organizations like DELL, Deloitte, HP, Satyam, as an independent OD and Training consultant as well as a consultant with 2020 Social. “I see everything kind of fitting into a larger umbrella of saying how do we make a more human organization,” he explains. By ‘human’ he refers to an organization that is open and transparent. Gautam believes that all his L&D work, HR professional work, HR journalist work, and his social media work belongs to the larger umbrella of building an organization that is more open, transparent and human. “While it wasn’t really obvious when I started off the journey but now when I look back, that’s one thread that has continued throughout the journey,” he adds thoughtfully.

How true is the expectation that HR should be responsible for keeping everybody happy?
“Today’s organizations do not relate to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and it’s application in workforce where the three most important levels are purpose, profit and passion. In any organization, profit is at the basic level, next comes safety needs, social needs, self-esteem needs and finally the self-actualization needs. At the state of self-actualization, the organization has the passion to discover its larger purpose. “This journey cannot be undertaken by HR alone.” If the business is entirely focused on profit, and HR alone tries to meet the larger purpose of building a human organization, then there is a disconnect between what the organization says and what it is doing. This is what is happening in most organizations today.

Do you think organizations are moving towards realizing the self-actualization needs of its employees?
Not really. I think people still don’t see the need. They still see organizations like Zappos or Semco as exceptions and not the norm. They are yet to draw inspiration from organizations that last for more than a century. The common traits across these organizations are adaptability and flexibility.

“Today, people do not think of organizations as being open and transparent.”

So why is HR is not consciously trying to drive it?
Everybody in the organization is looking at it as a job, a paycheck. At times, the HR may want this but the business leader may say: “No, No, I don’t need all these.” At some point even the most enthusiastic HR professional may lose steam. Most organizations have a very clear focus on quarterly results and profitability; these are the metrics they live by.

Also in the same metrics we have parameters like managing attrition, resolving conflicts, and maintaining workplace ethics. Aren’t these inwardly responsible for making people happy within the organization?
For HR, this is a number and they say, ‘Okay let’s control the number.’ So they quantify their needs. In my 7 years of learning and training, I have seen that the main focus is on how many got trained, how many programs were rolled out, how many sessions were held, and what is the coverage of all these input metrics.

When HR people say, “we have no control over the output,” my response is “Hey! Sales too do not control anything but still takes responsibility of the outcome. It does not control the larger economic climate of the organization, it does not control budget, it does not control the client querying for it, it does not control the product, it does not control the marketing plans but still abides by the target, which is outcome oriented – they achieve it or don’t achieve it.”

Few HR people say, “Ok, if I have control over my managers, I can ensure that learning is applied at the workplace”. And that willingness to make the outcome metrics act as an influencer rather than a controller is the biggest thing. This is what makes HR credible

Is it true that HR must be delinked from L&D? Do you believe that HR is a more generalized role and L&D is a specialized one?
“I have seen both models work. For example in Dell there was a part of the training, which is more of process training, operational training that has a different group delinked from Learning and Development as well as HR. But HR still had an L&D role that looked into the overall management and leadership skills needed to help people grow.

I believe that some parts of the learning should be always owned by the business, whereas other part may be owned by the HR group, which may be autonomous or within HR or purely an HR part.

But the other thing I notice about HR is that the principle of designing any HR intervention is slowly being outsourced – functions like performance management design and compensation design. Today, the HR manager is more focused on needs analysis and the relationship between the business units whereas the full competency of the design initiative is slowly being moved out.

I feel HR needs to be internal since it deals with people whereas other departments can stay away from people and still handle things. There are also some people related issues that managers need to be involved with along with HR people."

So what happens to the generalist HR role?
“At some level it only gets larger and larger and not deeper and deeper. The HR head of a 1000 people company wants to become the HR head of 10,000 people, then move to an MNC, a pure IT company, or an Indian conglomerate. These are the canvases that change and become broader.”

A common trend with mid-level HR personnel is that they move out and start a consulting firm of their own or grow with job-offers. There are many HR heads who hop jobs every year and simply keep moving from one company to the other. “Essentially, the scale of operation changes and the role does not necessarily change.”

What role do you currently play and how does your HR background help you do that now?
I look at how organizations deploy social technology, specifically how social technology can be deployed internally to increase employee engagement. The three levels of ensuring employee engagement through social media are:

Level 1: Engaging work
Is the work interesting or exciting? We see organizations where the work itself is so exciting that we don’t see the need for HR personnel. Examples are design consultancy, advertising and management consultancy firms. These places do not need HR because the work itself is great and exciting. But in organizations providing BPO services, manufacturing etc where work engagement is low, you need HR to market work internally and engage people with it.

Level 2: Engage managers with people
People are first engaged with their job and then with the manager and the extended team.

Level 3: Engage people with the community around them
Help people engage with the larger community of colleagues, help them make friends, and enable them to learn. Imagine a ‘Facebook’ within the organization and you are always up to date, informed about what your friends, colleagues and leaders of the organization are doing. This is where Gautam plays an active role in helping organizations build talent community. “Right now it is a slow progress especially in India where organizations are very traditional in the way they think about the roles,” he adds.

What’s your advice to young L&D professionals trying to use social media?
Use it to gather information or set expectations before a learning event, generate participation and gather real-time feedback during the event as well as comments and suggestions post event. “I’m not worried, soon somebody will find a way to use it for formal learning, but this is certainly a great way to ensure better participation during a learning event.”

Recently, when he and his ex-colleague conducted a social media workshop for an organization, they asked, how many had Twitter accounts. A few hands went up. They gave out hash tag for the event and asked the participants to share their real-time feedback. They were pleasantly surprised to get “quiet a few” tweets.

They got a much detailed and real-time feedback than the normal post session feedback. “Then we thought that in the same way we could gather expectations before the program from participants, managers, colleagues and even the stakeholders who have a say in the training.” In fact, those who can’t make it to the training can also join in saying “Oh! You guys are discussing this, here’s my take on it.”

Classrooms in the US have hash tags on screens running throughout. Everybody uses Twitter and micro-blogging sites and follows ongoing discussions. So these are the innovative ways social media technology can help people learn.

Of course people can share action plans and presentations. When people do it publicly, the chances of success are much better.

But is social media scalable?
“It becomes scalable when you have a many to many relationship. You have one marketing Manager trying to engage 40,000 employees on the Twitter, but when you put all the employee guidelines on how to engage with people on Twitter, it becomes scalable. This happens externally. You also have processes internally where people put across their queries, complaints and intent to buy a commodity or gadget. When the organization acts on such a query then Social CRM happens. “CRM does not always happen after the purchase, it also happens when you express the intent to buy.”

Is social media hype or reality, what is your take on this?
“Hmm, let me offer the e-commerce analogy here. There is a bit of hype to it. A lot of it will crash when people realize that it is not scalable the way they are doing it. But we all know how e-commerce has fundamentally changed the way we do basic transactions in India like buying train tickets or air tickets. For those who do not have Internet access, they can walk into a cybercafé and buy a ticket paying Rs 20 extra. This has and will alter the way society and people are behaving, subsequently, altering the way businesses will behave. There is an amazing book called “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky that talks about how people change due to the social technologies. He is basically saying, after the industrial revolution came the Industrial revolution that prompted a consumerism behavior. With the advent of social technologies, people are gaining back their urge to create. While you may doubt the quality of content being created but philosophically, it is better to create than consume. So the way we learn is also changing.

Even our learning was consumption oriented – ‘Give me a book and I’ll learn from it!’ But now with open source technologies, you learn by practice. ‘How you do’ now assumes a lot more importance than ‘what you do’!

As an avid blogger, he should know best. Gautam’s blog has been listed by HRWorld amongst the top 25 HR blogs worldwide. His blog is also featured on the Alltop Careers and Alltop India and HR. Earlier his blog was featured as a case study in the book Business Blogs: A Practical Guide.

Rapid Fire Round

What is your favorite tool?
Twitter, Facebook

When is the last time you wrote with pen and paper?
I did write in longhand couple of weeks back during a client meeting. But yes, have not written longhand for a very long time except the occasional letters to the bank!

What do you enjoy doing the most?
Connecting with people, talking about larger ideas, metaphorically an architect – call me a blueprint artist (smiling), love to design training interventions, initiatives. I believe if the design is well then half of the job is done.

How do you react to the tag Gautam Ghosh, the blogger?
I’m OK with the tag! Well, it’s as one-sided as saying Gautam Ghosh the HR professional. They are all facets of my personality. At 2020Social, they called me Gautam Ghosh the cartoonist!

What is your vision for the next generation learning space?
As I said earlier, the importance will shift from “learning what” to “learning how.” Today, it is more about learning and practice, learning from role models. Let me give some examples. Lots of people are turning authors and cartoonists than ever before. They have easier access to authors like Ashok Banker and to communities that encourage people to learn and create learning.

(Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of guests and authors, and do not necessarily represent those of their organization.)