HR departments are familiar with using LinkedIn, Twitter and external social networks for leveraging talent, but what benefits can they get from using an internal social network at work? I joined the HR department at TIBCO® over a year ago, around the same time we were starting to use our internal social network tibbr®. Since then, I’ve become quite a power user. Why? Here are my top five reasons (in no particular order):
Collaboration to fulfill hiring needs
Employee referrals are a proven way to source talent. But, to maintain a robust talent sourcing pipeline, there needs to be a way to advertise job openings internally without interrupting our employees’ day-to-day work. Our staffing team started using tibbr to post job openings within the company. Employees would subscribe to an “HR Recruiting” subject to hear about the latest positions. We also created private subjects for collaborating with hiring managers and teams to find the specific talent they need. tibbr worked as a bulletin board, where employees could learn about the latest job openings. And, it became a way for HR to collaborate with the right audiences to meet our hiring needs.
A listening tool to discover market intelligence
On our internal social network, our staffing reps spark discussion on ways to find new talent. We disseminate information on the appropriate subjects, so our followers chime in with additional insights into the market. tibbr made it easy to gather information about our competitors’ talent strongholds in the market and learn about pending layoffs and rising talent. With such information transparency, we don’t miss out on key talent to hire.
Social intranet for new employee on-boarding
Not only is an enterprise social network a great tool for employees to get to know who’s who in the company, but it’s helping HR become more interconnected with new hires globally. TIBCO’s staffing department uses tibbr for on-boarding new hires. We post orientation schedules, slide decks and other collateral to help our new employees assimilate in the company. It also let’s our hiring managers know of orientation dates, making sure new employees attend. Furthermore, we encourage new hires to: follow subjects and bring themselves up to speed on areas relevant to their work and interests; use tibbr’s integrated directory and profiles to learn who their co-workers are; and post messages to introduce themselves and start to have a voice in the community.
Gathering company-wide feedback and information to improve our services
Gathering internal opinions and suggestions is not the easiest task, but recently our HR team started using polls on our internal social network to gather constructive data. Rather than send out another corporate email and hope employees take the time to open it, we posted a poll to the community asking which training courses they would like to attend. Within a day we had about 50 responses, which helped us make better decisions so our training programs would align with the needs of our workforce.
A new way of engaging employees through announcements
Sure, you could send another company-wide email announcing “The Employee of the Month,” but what if you could engage your employees without spamming their inbox? At TIBCO we created a “Loudspeaker” subject on tibbr, where managers from each department can broadcast important announcements. The HR department uses it to announce our value awards, holiday schedules, gift giving programs, recordings of our company meetings and more. In this way tibbr has become a good resource for employees to refer back to, according to their schedule.
A documents repository for finalizing standard operating procedures
With the TIBCO HR team increasing in size and growing more geographically distributed, standardized operating procedures were needed to ensure that scalable practices were used globally. We needed a way to collaborate, edit and share documentation to finalize our SOP. Using a private subject on tibbr, the global team works together to revise our procedures and come up with best practices. tibbr works as document and collaboration platform all in one, so instead of receiving hundreds of emails with large file attachments for each revision, we can easily access the latest SOP manuscripts and feedback around them.
