CoffeeCasts- Enterprise Social Networking in Talent Management - 6 Use Cases
- #1: Onboarding
- #2: Performance Management
- #3: Informal Learning
- #4: Workforce Planning
- #5: Alumni & Retiree Networks
- #6: Extended Enterprise
Employee Performance Management Use Case - Enterprise Social Networking from Cornerstone OnDemand on Vimeo.
<Jazz Intro>
Hi. Welcome to the Cornerstone Coffee Cast Series. I'm Charles Coy Cornerstone's director of Product Marketing. Today I'm enjoying a soy-milk Americano, extra hot.
The topic today is Enterprise Social Networking in Talent Management and we move on to Part 2 where we talk about: Employee Performance Support.
Use Case Number 2 of "How to tie Enterprise Social Networking into Talent Management" is Employee Performance Support. And so here we'll talk about it's not just what you know, but who you know. I think there's a lot of really interesting implications here, and if you're interested in this I'd certainly refer you to the great research being done in this area. One of the core researchers in this area is a gentleman named Rob Cross who is a professor at the University of Virginia and he talks about, among other things—I highly refer you to Rob's work—high performing employees in organizations. And that's what we're concerned about here, right? As HR and talent practitioners we want high performing employees. That's sort of a baseline objective here.
High performing employees only get so far, well employees in general, only get so far on subject matter expertise. It's high performing employees that go past subject matter expertise and into strategic professional networks: the concept of it's not just what you know but who you know. It's important to know all that subject matter and be an expert in various subject matters, but high performing employees break through that plateau through the strength of their professional networks.
Broadly speaking, Enterprise Social Networking tools are perfectly positioned in talent management to start connecting people within the organization to other people. We want to talk about an organization where information flows freely; where employees are properly networked within the organization; where people know where to turn for the right bit of expertise at the right moment; and where strategically networked employees are the high-performing employees we talked about.
Another interesting bit of research in this area goes back 30 or more years a sociologist named Mark Granovetter who talked about this concept of the strength of weak ties, and following here you have to have a lot of coffee in a coffee cast to want to go down this path, but I think it's a really interesting point. Professor Granovetter's point is that our strong ties are the people we talk to every day, they're the people who sit at the cubicle with me, they're the people who I go to meetings with, they're the people I have coffee with, they're the people who I work with everyday—we generally have the same type of professional network, we know the same people, and we're unlikely to get huge bursts of innovation or sort of new, non-redundant information from that first group. But follow me here, it's the weak ties that Professor Granovetter says are the ones in an organization that are going to expand our view in the organization. They're going to connect us to new, non-redundant information. They're going to be more likely to provide breakthroughs in innovation. And for me as an employee, those weak ties are going to start to break me out of my shell, I'm going to learn new things, and meet new people who are going to help me do my job better. And that's the bottom line, that I want to be able to do my job better.
Again, social networking tools in talent management are perfectly positioned to take advantage of Granovetter's combination of the strength of weak ties because I don't need a social networking tool to work with the person I sit next to in the cubicle, but what I do need social networking tools in an organization for—professional networking tools—is to help me expand my vision in the company to new connections, to new professional expertise, to new areas, new people, and new ideas that are likely to contribute to innovation and generally to make me that high performing employee that we're talking about. So, Use Case # 2 for Enterprise Social Networking into Talent Management is employee performance support. There are others in this series, and we hope to hear from you soon.
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