Video: Workforce Planning Use Case - Enterprise Social Networking in Talent Management - Cornerstone Coffee Cast

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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

Workforce Planning Use Case - Enterprise Social Networking from Cornerstone OnDemand on Vimeo.

Charles Coy: Hi. Welcome to the Cornerstone Coffee Cast Series. I'm Charles Coy Cornerstone's director of Product Marketing. Today I'm enjoying a simple café ole.

We're talking about Enterprise Social Networking in Talent Management and this is part 4 of the series: Workforce Planning and Succession Planning.

So if you're enjoying this Coffee Cast series as much as I am, it's probably time to go get a refill because we're on to use case number four of enterprise social networking in the context of talent management. We've already talked a little bit about using social networking in the context of onboarding, informal learning, and employee performance support, and now we're on to workforce management or even succession planning or workforce planning. I think this is another really fascinating way to think about how to tie these enterprise social networking tools that we're hearing about everywhere. It's the buzz. It's the hype. It's in the blogosphere. It's everywhere. But how do we make sense—because we obviously need to justify these purchases to someone up the food chain in these organizations. We need to make sure we have the budget authorized for these things, so we need to make explicit what our business cases are, so one really interesting one is this one: workforce management.

I'm not credentialed in social network analysis there are other people who are a lot smarter than I am who are, but social network analysis is obviously a long standing field as well as organizational development and sociological fields that talk about how if we're able to start to accumulate data about the way people in the organization work, the way they're connected, who they're connected to, and who they routinely go to for information or exchange information. We can start to draw some interesting conclusions about how the organization is arranged and sort of what the real social map of the organization is. So this is what's on your screen now—sort of a roughly stylized organization of blue and purple people, but in this case the purple person in the center is clearly well connected. We can start to, with a social networking tool like Cornerstone Connect, start to accumulate data on who this purple person is connected to, not only how many people they're connected to, but the strength of those ties.

We can start to learn something about the organization. We can learn that the person at the top left, the little blue person, is really rather poorly connected within the organization. So why does this matter? I think this matters for a lot of things. This matters for succession planning. We can start to use this kind of data for succession planning, but not just from that c-level, executive level, top down succession planning, but we can start to use this data for a gorilla / bottom-up / enterprise wide or sort of total view on succession planning. We can start to figure out who is in the organization and how they're really related. Now I borrow from Professor Rob Cross' work here to make the point that he makes, I think beautifully, in this diagram here, and that is that a social map reveals some of the latent or less understood ways that organizations are built, the way they're organized. At left here you see the formal organizational hierarchy, a typical org chart starting from the top and branching down. But that same organization, if you play it out with social mapping, with this kind of data that enterprise social networking tools, like Cornerstone Connect and others can start to gather, you can see that Cole who is way down the food chain in the traditional organizational hierarchy is actually really well-positioned, really highly networked, and probably really valuable in a way that you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell if you didn't have this ability to do some basic social mapping.

So from a workforce planning, from a succession planning, from an internal recruiting perspective, this type of data starts to become not only incredibly valuable but in some ways breakthrough on what we can accumulate. And you don't have to necessarily have a team of highly qualified social network analysts or expensive social network analysis consultants on hand; you can start to do this now with tools that are readily available. I mean, talk about readily available, you can even do social mapping out of your Facebook application. So this is my social map through a tool called Social Graph that you can take out of your Facebook application and you can start to see the way you're connected. This of course is a purely consumer-social facing. But the point is made that social maps sort of underlie almost everything we do, both professionally in the organization and in our private lives and something like Facebook. From the perspective of talent management, the ability to draw the basic social map of the organization starts to become very powerful. So that's use case number four: Workforce Planning. There are others in the series. And we hope to hear from you soon.

For more information call (888)-260-0406.
www.cornerstoneondemand.com

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