infinite best: optimizing human capital

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR

Infinite Best: Optimizing Human CapitalYour Guide to Better Human Resource Management with Enterprise Social

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

Introduction

Part One:

The New Face of CollaborationPart Two:

The Elegant People-Centric SolutionPart Three:

Human Aptitude

Table of Contents

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Enterprise Social describes a new way of working that taps into the power of human networks. It’s an approach that brings the essence of consumer social networks—connecting with others, rapid information sharing, and easy discovery—to the enterprise. By connecting individuals to a dynamic network of people and information, Enterprise Social enables employees to respond faster, accomplish more, and keep your business moving forward together.

The Microsoft vision for Enterprise Social is to empower organizations to work like a network by delivering seamless social experiences across familiar applications people already use, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Yammer, SharePoint Online, Lync, and virtually any other application or service that matters to your company.


Human Resources (HR) departments used to be the muscle in the corporate world. HR professionals served as gatekeepers to job candidates, and they managed employees in cases of both success and failure. HR was kind of intimidating.

That’s old school. With some fast-growing and remarkable companies such as Airbnb and Pinterest in the news for their investments in people, executives are getting serious about fostering cultures that can drive market advantages. Today’s HR mandates are at the forefront of optimizing human capital investments by ensuring that the company accelerates productivity, empowers employees, and generates revenue.

The new HR is more concerned with enabling employees to succeed. They’re on the hook to build a culture of innovation. They are taking the lead in attracting talent in a competitive marketspace and increasing employee efficiency.

“Practically every CEO talks about building an ‘innovation culture.’ HR should be central to cultivating that culture.”—Michael Wolf, “How HR Departments

Can Create an Innovation Culture,” Wall Street Journal

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When joining a company, many employees look closely at the culture. To ensure your reputation, your HR team needs tools that put people at the center of the environment—tools that facilitate communication, collaboration, and learning among employees, and measure the company’s ability to attract and retain talent.

HR teams now work at the C-level to drive operations. Their key challenges revolve around employee engagement, internal collaboration, and training and development. They use new technologies to influence strategy, support culture changes, and measure results.

The biggest changes are happening in internal communications. As HR teams are facilitating “activity-based working”—where employees don’t have an assigned workstation—they are also enabling workers to connect with colleagues from anywhere by using communication, collaboration, and social tools. Such tools are the foundations of Microsoft Enterprise Social, a technology suite that addresses the need to optimize the workforce environment.

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This e-book’s objective is to show you how to optimize your HR team by adopting Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies. First, it defines Enterprise Social and shows the value of these solutions for HR professionals. Second, it presents approaches to three current HR priorities—engaging employees, boosting internal collaboration, and improving training and development—and illustrates how Enterprise Social can help you tackle them.

Finally, it shows you how to get started in producing desired HR outcomes.

Part One:The New Face of Collaboration


It has always been central for HR to assert and defend the company’s interests. Now, with Enterprise Social technologies, the field is ripe with previously unimaginable opportunities and mandates in areas including benefits administration, compensation management, injury and illness tracking, and employee development.

“An HR team that uses Enterprise Social has loads of data on the workforce, ranging from employee satisfaction and employee engagement to business knowledge gaps,” says an HR professional who uses Yammer. “This data helps identify trends quickly to determine what management and leadership should focus their efforts on.”

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HR can implement Enterprise Social technologies to engage employees, improve communication, promote teamwork, and decrease turnover. It can facilitate better and more accessible training opportunities, which leads to greater retention. Moreover, HR can gather insights and analyze its progress in cultivating human capital.

Using Enterprise Social tools, HR teams can even create a companywide benefits portal, host e-learning and mentoring programs, crowdsource new endeavors and innovations, onboard new talent, disseminate high-impact company news, and replace their company intranet.

“Companies no longer need an HR team that handles administrative paperwork,” says the HR professional. “With new Enterprise Social technologies, HR can focus on helping the company streamline outdated processes and stay ahead on people management and performance management.”

What’s the return on investment of Enterprise Social solutions? Industry analyst firm IDC estimates that for a company of 1,000 employees, eliminating collaboration challenges would be the equivalent to hiring 213 new employees. Plus, Enterprise Social can ignite passion in the workforce, which is priceless.

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“Leveraging Enterprise Social helps us grow our business by enabling our staff—who are innately good—to perform even better.”

—Shekhar Ramamurthy, Joint President, United Breweries Limited

Part Two:The Elegant People-Centric Solution


With the business world changing rapidly, there are three central HR priorities. Organizations have to address the challenges of engaging employees, improving collaboration, and making professional development opportunities available.

Employees who are engaged have significantly higher productivity, profitability, and customer ratings, according to a 2013 study by Gallup. They also experience lower turnover, less absenteeism, and fewer safety incidents. Engaged employees are enthusiastic about their jobs and committed to their work, and they are the ones most likely to drive innovation, growth, and revenue.

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It’s not a question of whether you use Enterprise Social tools. You can no more avoid them than you could have avoided email. These simple technologies create an employee social network that uses familiar tools, frees information from disconnected silos, and eliminates clunky communication channels. It’s happening.

Companies and HR teams are learning the value of optimizing their greatest resource, people. They must build on employees’ unique strengths to help them reach their full potential.

Engage EmployeesThey used to say a company is never the same six months later. That’s not the case anymore: A company is not the same even six weeks later. The kind of agility expected of leadership and employees demands new tools and a new way of thinking about work. Annual reviews are not often enough.

By adopting Yammer, a private social network for enterprises, employees have a place to collaborate in real time and get responses instantly. Instead of writing an email message, a worker can post a question on Yammer, which can trigger a dialogue and give a voice to everyone in their network. This approach engages employees and makes individuals feel valued.

Because social networks are second nature by now, employees are less afraid to be opinionated, thoughtful, and passionate about the work they do.

“When we’re promoting an internal initiative or introducing technology, we post on Yammer. Not only does that get the word out, we get valuable feedback, too.”

—Andrew Ling, Group Director of Information Technology, Esquel Group

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Create a News Hub With Yammer as your Enterprise Social network, you can post announcements and updates in the All Company feed. Internal social media tools can benefit new employees, who will enjoy enhanced experiences and speed their time to productivity.

Give Employees a VoiceEmployees find it easy to join the conversation when using Yammer. Businesses can host monthly Q&A sessions with executives. Enterprise Social networks encourage employees to give feedback, and transparency goes both ways.

Empower Team AlignmentEnterprise Social networks can help cross-functional teams work together efficiently. Employees can use Office 365 and Yammer to create workspaces and align quickly on project efforts. Teams can use a Yammer Group to collect project materials and track progress. Companies that adopt Microsoft OneDrive for Business enable teams and individuals to set up a single repository for all documents.

Motivate with Feedback Employees need real-time, real-world, and regular feedback. You can use Enterprise Social tools to foster constant feedback—both negative and positive—to motivate employees to achieve goals faster and course correct sooner.

Build a Cohesive CultureYou can connect employees across departmental, geographic, and generational barriers. By using Yammer, employees from across your organization, including remote workers, are brought together and the company’s culture is nurtured.

Ways to Inspire Your People

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For example, employees are not afraid to question why a product has certain deficiencies and why the company needs to change features to satisfy customers.

“Enterprise Social increases visibility,” says the HR professional. “Managers can acknowledge good work on a more informal basis with a simple “like” or by using the “Praise” feature. At the same time, everything that’s done in Yammer becomes the raw material and evidence for the annual review.”

With these tools, you can create a constant employee feedback loop, which promotes daily inspiration, reduces friction, and creates a responsive company culture. You motivate employees by keeping them up to date on strategies, initiatives, and processes that drive the company’s goals.

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Collaborate InternallyEfficient collaboration involves building a bridge among silos within your organization, making information and documents easily accessible to employees, and streamlining decision making. The future workplace is inherently connected, with people at the center. It is now possible to deliver relevant information, like documents and conversations, to members of your company based on how they interact with a product or person, using Microsoft Office Graph.

Because technologies are becoming increasingly connected, they are also becoming smarter. Enterprise Social technologies are as connected as the people who use them.

HR teams can use Enterprise Social to ensure that at every level of the company, people are communicating in a transparent and organized fashion. Teams can create Yammer Groups to store all communications and resources in one place.

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76%80%

Using Enterprise Social, 80 percent of workers are better informed about what is happening

inside the organization.

With Enterprise Social, workers experience 76 percent more visibility into other company

departments and locations.



Get ’Em Talking You can use Microsoft Enterprise Social—a sophisticated set of collaboration and communication tools—to help employees within a specific program, department, or project work better together.

Find the ExpertsEnterprise Social lets employees cast a wide net when seeking expertise. People can intuitively find and discover relevant information, and learn from previous projects. By using Office Delve, for example, employees discover what others are working on and easily locate documents based on user activity.

Create Together—FasterEmployees can use Office 365 to co-edit documents, discuss changes in real time, and update documents in side-by-side document conversations, which enable people to share ideas and expertise around Office documents, images, and videos right from within the content they are reviewing. Teams can use OneDrive for Business to sync and store the pertinent set of documents, which are secure and available to anyone who has a link.

Inspire Innovation By crowdsourcing ideas from across your company with Yammer, you can tap a vast and deep intellectual pool for ideas about a project or initiative. It also makes a difference to be able to seamlessly provide feedback to employees and give individuals deserved visibility

Connect WhereverWith Enterprise Social tools in place, everyone can stay in the loop even when they’re on the go. With the Yammer mobile app, remote employees can engage in important conversations and access documents on a device running Windows, iOS, or Android.

Ways to Boost Collaboration

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For example, employees can discuss benefits information—such as childcare options and retirement planning—in one forum.

This cross-discipline, multigenerational, and all-employee collaboration inevitably leads to increased innovation. And no work environment is more exciting than one that generates freedom of expression and participation.

“The Enterprise Social network becomes increasingly valuable because it is a repository of knowledge,” says an HR professional. “Individuals can access information that formerly would have been hidden in email boxes. Informal learning takes place constantly.”

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Train and DevelopEvery growing company faces the challenge of promoting a startup feel by making sure all employees are exposed to opportunities and granted recognition. Enterprise Social galvanizes your investment in employees by helping to drive retention, prepare the next generation of leaders, and cultivate smoother successions and transitions.

“Yammer has been a wonderful tool to welcome new employees [and] make sure that they feel connected right away,” says Stephanie Pettinati, senior manager of corporate communications at One Kings Lane.

The tools allow for the successful delivery of employee training and create effective structures for peer learning and mentorship—facilitating the kind of healthy knowledge transfer that nurtures success.

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of new hires are likely to stay longer than three years if they experience well-structured onboarding.

—Aberdeen Group

69%


Give a Warm WelcomeUsing Yammer to onboard employees has become a best practice. It enables newcomers to form connections, ask questions, and hit the ground running. With a Yammer Group devoted to new hires, HR can uniformly communicate important information and provide tools such as a first-day checklist. These self-service portals can administer all onboarding information in one place.

Be a Study BuddyYou can use OneDrive for Business to build a library of training materials for different domain areas, and make it easy for employees to learn at their own pace. By using document conversations, employees can start a Yammer conversation while viewing a file and get the attention of an extended audience.

Make MentorsEmployees continuously learn from each other—and about each other—through social conversations. With Yammer, you can simply remove barriers and decrease friction between departments, and employees with diverse expertise can easily share knowledge with each other.

Showcase Internal OpportunitiesHR can take advantage of Enterprise Social tools to widely broadcast professional development tools and facilitate mentorships. Employees can use Delve to nurture specific interests and get visibility into peers’ interests.

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4 Ways to Drive Professional Development

At the end of the day, it’s not about the technology itself, but about how that technology empowers employees to do their best work.

Happy employees are about 12 percent more productive, according to a 2014 Fast Company report. And get this: People who get the “grand” treatment are even more efficient. Imagine how your company’s goals would be approached if leadership—including HR—took the time to make all workers feel special. Enterprise Social tools make it possible to regularly deliver positive feedback to employees in front of a wide audience.

Human AptitudePart Three:


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A finely tuned Enterprise Social solution adapts to modern work styles, and helps to engage employees, encourage collaboration, and foster professional development.

“Enterprise Social solutions help motivate and retain top talent by allowing them to stay engaged with the business and participate as valued members of the organization,” says an HR professional. “Being able to make an impact and have a voice in the company keeps employees invested.”


With the Microsoft global competence in big data, cloud, mobile, and social technologies, you can feel confident that you are building a future on solid ground. Enterprise Social technologies should be comprehensive, connected, enterprise-ready, and easy to adopt.

In the end, you want to attract, onboard, retain, and develop talent who are focused on a shared vision of success in a connected, collaborative workforce. That’s what you do with human aptitude, your most potent resource with the highest reward potential. That’s how you run a business.

To learn about HR solutions that can help you manage human capital, visit www.enterprisesocial.com.

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