Using blogs to promote, showcase and manage talent

Blogs have become an obvious part of the modern internet surfer’s daily dosage. With 15.5 million blogs being actively published, nearly everyone online has come across some sort of information on a blog. If you are already familiar with what blogs are, skip the next section. Else, read on. We’re going to talk about giving your otherwise silent employees an active voice, with blogs helping you discover and nurture hidden talent in your organization.

What are blogs?

In the olden days, scientists published their journals directly onto paper for their peers to read and pass judgement on. The premise of this action was three pronged:

To validate their work
To build credibility among peers
To create recorded knowledge that can be used by anyone from their peer group over time.

Blogs are the new journals. They are used by just about anyone who has something to express. They form searchable archives of daily activity, findings and information gathered, acting like pools of knowledge that help people discover each other.

Blogs (short for “weblog”) are internet applications that act as journals or logbooks. Though blogs can be used in various ways to propagate a message or an agenda, most blogs currently online perform exactly the function that they were meant to i.e. publishing a record of activities and events that influence people and perspectives.

Blogging on the job

Blogs are easy to maintain for the employee. Often, employees that have a role that contributes to their daily enrichment, blog daily. Others are more infrequent either because of their social orientation, job role, availability or aptitude. In many cases, entire departments or entire companies can also maintain a single blog. Blogs offer rich categorization for people to find and read content easier. And with RSS (rich site summary) and email subscriptions, blogs often get fetched directly and loyally into a single or easily accessible location by its audience.

Making good talent find you

Employee blogs show the quality of work that your company has to offer. They also reflect how an employee feels while working with you, how they are rewarded for their work, how their work is recognized by their peers, what are their goals and ambitions and how the company is helping them achieve them. Department or company blogs reflect the mindset of the company as a whole, showing how the company is living its mission and vision. Prospective employees, when exposed to these facets of employees and companies, get an accurate picture of themselves in the same company, influencing their decision to approach you, work out a good deal with you and work for you.

Spotting good, maybe hidden talent within your own organization

When employees blog, they are (or at least should be) encouraged to write honestly, forthrightly and without an agenda. This promotes a healthy sense of belonging and gives them a strong voice. Blogs go beyond visible perceptions and showcase an employee’s uninhibited outlook to their work and their life. Often, this voice and outlook speak out louder in text than in meeting rooms, events and discussions, allowing HR managers and management to spot good talent that could be groomed and nurtured into becoming excellent. This requires a significant involvement in reading blogs. Managers have to monitor several indicators – skills like commitment, consistency, taste and quality, the blog’s contribution to the blog owner’s peers and others.

Distributing information and gathering feedback informally

Department and Enterprise blogs replace a lot of internal practices. A company blog will replace your newsletters, notice boards, announcements, event updates, suggestion boxes and resource manuals. When employees get to comment or rate a published piece, they provide feedback in a low-friction productive and collaborative environment. Honest opinions, reasoning and decisions are collected and available for all to see, making the quality of work produced by employees improve while also helping you recognize and focus on talent.

Bringing blogging into your culture

Adopting blogs as an HR tool is easy. At times, it’s as simple as signing up for one of several free blogging services, like Blogger or WordPress. For a more secure, hosted, knowledge centric environment, you should try www.cyn.in, which is available both secured-online and in your secured intranet. If a one-blog-for-each-employee blog network interests you (recommended in media, research and knowledge-worker heavy companies), there are several easy platforms available that are capable of managing huge centralized network.

To blog or not to blog

Of course, four corporate entities should be consulted before planning a blog rollout.

Corporate Communications
HR
Marketing and Sales
IT & Legal

And yes, in this order of importance. IT is last, because with the paranoia of data security looming, IT might not allow themselves to agree to even a single blog. Corporate communications show the company in its true positioning. They will choose how the outsider world, investors, share holders, customers and prospective employees should see the company. They will choose what parts should be accessible internally and externally. HR comes next in choosing their goals for talent management and hence a roll-out method. Marketing and sales should ideally choose topics and themes. IT & Legal will create ground rules and policies for responsible, collaborative blogging.

Some examples of really good company blogs and blog networks:

Direct2Dell
IBM Developer Works
Sun Microsystems: A great blog network … Rohan Pinto’s blog is a classic example of an employee blog, within Sun’s networks.
McDonalds
Southwest Airlines
WalMart
Yahoo Yodel Anecdotal – Brilliant example of what we’re trying to explore here.

The guest author, Alap Ghosh, has 8 years of in-the-middle-of-all-the-action experience in enterprise, portal and mobile products and solutions. Having worked with the top technology and media convergent companies of the country, Alap spends most of his time connecting brands and agencies with technology to create better internet properties and new-age inventory. Connect with Alap by email or on LinkedIn or on Facebook

Comments

4 responses to “Using blogs to promote, showcase and manage talent”

September 28, 2007

Ashwini

I was reading a article in DNA titled ‘Seven ways of Innovative recruitment’, the sheer contribution that India will make to the global labor pool in terms of numbers vastly out ranks developed countries like US and the European nations. Japan’s contribution is slated to go down.

On the face of it this is good news (the economy will grow at a blistering pace), but having been giving the onerous task of recruiting quality people, these numbers are troublesome and a huge reason for worry. “Where am i going to find good talent, and having a talent pool at hand how does one retain them”, are the type of questions any manager with intentions of building and retaining a team will have.

This article does explore one of the facets of how New Media can help in recruiting and retaining talent. Yes there are pro and cons as rightly pointed out by Alap. ‘Security issues while blogging on job’, ‘People are ‘supposed’ to write without a agenda’ …has that ever happened in this country.

While i would personally explore this oppurtunity, what i would like to see is more innovations in the coming article (if there are any).

September 28, 2007

Alap Ghosh

Hey Ashwini, thanks for views, and yes, my next article will cover more innovative talent management concepts and practices.

First, something philosphical (and I’ll probably get run over by a truck for this :), still). I’ve always had a problem in accepting why, as businesses, as a society, and as a country are we afraid of endowing / imposing responsible behavior AND responsibility on our employees (or clients or vendors or leadership). All our decisions are based on a mitigation plan that tackles irresponsibility.

Moving away from philosophy, practices like moderation of posts and comments before publishing and keyword filters were created assuming that the writers are going to be irresponsible. Yes, maturity is a challenge, but in an enterprise environment where your bloggers are your own people, why are we still skeptical. We must, as businesses, cultivate the habit of ownership of responsibility in our workers and measurement of responsibility in our technologies.

Over to the others, for more views? Ashwini?

September 28, 2007

wiseone

One of the key challenges for businesses, in this new world of networking, consumer is king etc is to recognise that the relationship between buyer and seller, employer and employee has changed/is changing completely.
The employer has to look at the employee as a ‘partner’ and ‘stakeholder’ rather than a servant who is there to merely do his bidding. Once leadership and the system of managing talent within an organisation moves to that paradigm, the idea of having an ’employee blog’ will seem more like an opportunity than a problem. The reality is that most businesses are in the early stages of transiting to that paradigm. And this is not to cast aspersions on business leaders, the pace of change has been blistering.
The same holds true of ‘brands’ as well. My impression is that not many brands, in India, use the net as an integral brand building medium because they are not comfortable with the ‘ownership’ in an interactive world moving to consumers rather than the marketing guys. Again, it requires a shift in paradigm which has not happened.

October 28, 2007

Hiren

Blogs overcome the limitations of verbal conversations- shouting, vested interest arguments, reacting instead of responding. They may reveal talent to higher management at times which is probably why Bill Gates encourages people to write to him directly so that there is not hijacking or office politics in between.