April 6, 2011

Edited and Written by Ira S. Wolfe

Published by Success Performance Solutions.

What's Inside this issue of The Total View:

1. Stop, Look, & Listen... Before You Write That Social Media Policy

2. Workforce Trends

3. What Motivates Employees

4. Annual Performance Reviews Simplified!

5. CandidClues Assessment

Stop, Look & Listen... Before You Write That Social Media Policy

If you have no idea what Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn is, how can you expect to write a social media policy that will properly embrace... or limit its use?  Before you can write a social media policy, stop, look, and listen - take a tour around the social "mediasphere." What you don't know about social media can hurt you. 

To write a good policy that protects the company but doesn't suffocate, stakeholders need to spend time exploring each site. Management, IT, and Human Resources (HR) must invest time to understand that social media is much more than just Facebook. 

Social media is not just a bunch of  idle chatter and noise.  Social media is a new mode of communication, just as the telephone was just 100 years ago. The technology includes applications and software such as blogging, video, podcasts, wikis, and even review sites such as Amazon and Yelp. If a site allows a visitor to share their experience and leave comments, it falls under the sweeping umbrella called social media... and customers and job candidates are spending a lot of time using social media to make buying and career decisions. 

Writing a policy that can be enforced without stifling productivity and morale requires that you understand it, as well as the type of culture that embraces it. For example, to the non-user, Facebook and LinkedIn appear quite similar.  Aside from getting invitations to friend and connect from people you don't know, both sites allow you to post status updates, develop a network, and interact in groups.  But once you begin to engage with your connections and peruse the site, you get a very different feel for its capabilities and possibilities.  

Facebook to date is a great place for socializing.  However when planned and executed correctly, it's an even better place to build a community of raving fans.  LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a professional networking site which allows business people to expand their networks, to generate leads, to recruit candidates, and to engage in professional development. Strategically both sites offer significant possibilities but the choice isn't as simple as either-or.  For some companies, one site or the other might be the right choice. For others, the right decision will be embracing both. 

Once you have toured each site, it is important to sit down with decision makers and stakeholders to define what it is that you want the policy to accomplish. Management, IT, and HR must put aside their personal biases and agendas.  The question on the table should be "how can we make social media work for us?," not "what can we do to crush it?"  Stakeholders at the table might also include customers, vendors, and suppliers.  Explore how you might be able to utilize employees and other partners' personal accounts in order to gain a larger following... and set up the policy accordingly.  If you decide to separate what happens at work from what happens on personal accounts, your policy needs to express that too. But be careful - you might be able to control what happens at work; but what happens off-the-click is a different story. 

You also want to find how many and what kind of policies you want to put into place. Internal employee policies only cover one aspect of good social media guidelines that will protect an organization. To complete the puzzle, there are 3 more pieces: (1) internal organization, (2) external audience, and (3) safety, security, and regulations.  Ignoring one piece without addressing the others will only lead to breaches in your efforts to minimize the risks. Though it would be easier to have one all-encompassing policy, it is much more helpful to isolate what is acceptable for each network.   

Each of these social media aspects has its own set of pros and cons. Ultimately what you decide to do - embrace it or limit it - must consider the impact it might have on your business strategy and how it might represent your organizational culture. 
 

Disclosure: The information provided in these guidelines is not legal advice. I am NOT an attorney (although my wife says I argue like one!) An employer should seek legal advice from an experienced employment law attorney before finalizing its guidelines to make sure the guidelines express the employer's intent and don't run afoul of any employment laws.

Workforce Trends

One in five of all American moms have kids who have different birth fathers, a new study shows. And when researchers look only at moms with two or more kids, that figure is even higher: 28 percent have kids with at least two different men.

For more  workforce and hiring trends, visit Perfect Labor Storm website and Perfect Labor Storm blog.

What Motivates Employees

Business values and motivators determine the "why" of human behavior.  
 

For managers, Business Values and Motivators answers the nagging question - How can I motivate my employees?  
 

For employees and individuals looking to re-energize their careers, the Business Values and Motivators report helps them understand what they value most.  As people, we tend to value certain viewpoints positively and judge others negatively.   How we value or judge determines our motivations and provide us with our sources of energy or conflicts and stress in our personal and professional lives.
 

What are Business Motivators? Read more.

Annual Performance Reviews Simplified!

Save time, increase productivity, and eliminate hassles when administering employee performance reviews with HReviewer.

Ask any manager what he or she hates most about the job and you'll often hear "performance reviews."   That's why we've created HReviewer.

We recognized a huge gap in the performance evaluation market between paper forms and online performance management. 

HReviewer is a user-friendly, centralized online solution to streamline and improve the annual, semi-annual or periodic review for small to medium sized organizations. It's convenient and very affordable too.  Our goal was simple: to help take the hassle out of getting managers to complete performance appraisal forms and giving employees more frequent feedback. 

The system comes with a library of competencies, an easy to use form creator, at-a-glance dashboards and reports, and a built-in reminder system to help HR track down managers when reviews are due....or past due!

More about HReviewer or Email us to schedule a FREE demo. 

CandidClues™

The cost effective solution to curb absenteeism and employee theft 

There is wide-spread concern about the honesty and integrity of employees. Most organizations have serious problems of pilferage, absenteeism, tardiness, employee disagreements that lead to violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and computer misuse. The annual loss from these counterproductive behaviors is estimated in the billions of dollars. There was a clear need for a brief assessment that could be used as part of the pre-employment screening process. CandidClues™ was developed to meet that need.

CandidClues™ assesses six areas of potentially counterproductive behaviors by a self-descriptive inventory that taps six substantive areas of concern as well a Good Impression (validity) scale.

• Hostility
• Conscientiousness
• Integrity
• Substance Abuse
• Sexual Harassment
• Computer Misuse