Strategies and Social Media Policy for Employees

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In an exclusive face to face conversation with SightsIn, we have Kent Price who serves as the Center for Creative Leadership’s (CCL) Chief Human Resources Officer. Kent develops  innovative strategies for talent development with strong client focus, while improving business performance by aligning people strategy with organizational goals. Kent has worked in a wide range of HR leadership positions in Global companies and brings expertise in many facets of human resources, including organization design and effectiveness, talent management, leadership development, labor relations, talent acquisitions, and mergers and acquisitions.

Kent holds a BA from the University of Delaware and an MA in Human Resources Development from George Mason University. He has been the recipient of two ASTD Excellence in Practice awards and is SPHR certified through the Society of Human Resources Management. Kent is also a certified coach through ICF.

Kent is also very actively involved in the communities where he has lived, and he currently
serves as the HR chair for the board of the United Way of Greater Greensboro.

Q-Hearty welcome to India Kent. Thanks for an opportunity to meet with you, please let me know about the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)?

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) is a top-ranked, global provider of leadership development. By leveraging the power of leadership to drive results that matter most to clients, CCL transforms individual leaders, teams, organizations and society. Our array of cutting-edge solutions is steeped in extensive research and experience gained from working with hundreds of thousands of leaders at all levels. Ranked among the world’s Top 5 providers of executive education by Financial Times and in the Top 10 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, CCL has offices in Greensboro, NC; Colorado Springs, CO; San Diego, CA; Brussels, Belgium; Moscow, Russia; Addis Ababa,Ethiopia; Johannesburg, South Africa; Singapore; New Delhi-NCR, India; and Shanghai, China.

Q-Social Media has great impact on business, how do you see role of social media in HR?

Social media can be used by organizations, business units,functions, or teams to influence the information their targets will find and use. Social media is most effectively used for
generating awareness, improving reputation, strengthening connections, building credibility and trust, reinforcing messages. HR can use the medium to do the very same, however, internally the reach that HR has is much larger than any other business unit or function. If a business unit uses social media, it would influence a specific audience. When HR uses social media, it influences all employees, and potential employees for that matter. HR uses social media to enhance the employer value proposition, look for potential candidates, publicize organization’s best practices, builds awareness around policies, and most importantly connecting with employees when and how they want.

Q-What is your strategy for social media and how companies should write social media policy for employees?

Our social media vision is very clear: Get everyone who is connected to CCL – clients, employees, partners, and supporters, to talk about CCL online. CCL has been using social media to increase brand awareness, create connections, develop thought leadership, disseminate content and news, drive traffic to our website, build CCL community, recruit candidates and build our employee value proposition awareness to applicants. We encourage employees to responsibly use social media to share thought leadership, news and articles, invites for webcasts and events, doing so helps us drive our objective of helping others and touching lives.

Social media are powerful communications tools that can have a significant impact on organizational and professional reputations. Because they can often blur the lines between
an employee’s personal voice and institutional voice, organizations should craft their social media policy to provide direction and guidance regarding protecting the reputation and privacy of institution and employee when leveraging the benefits of participation in social media.

Q-Technology can be real game changer in L&D, how do you see role of technology for learning & development?

L&D needs to adapt technology to fit the needs of the business. With the employee-user in mind, organizations should design platforms that work best in their world. Implementing technology or digital learning is not as simple as it is often advertised. Most companies face many barriers like cost of development, digital learning adoption, challenges with IT infrastructure, lack of implementation skills, etc. Therefore there is a need to carefully plan for it.

Q-In your opinion, how to use social media for recruiting and employer branding?

Professional networking sites and social media have become one of the most useful ways to reach out to all types of candidates. Organizations are taking a proactive approach to
attracting talent by managing their employer brands through investment in their websites and social media marketing. Keeping these up to date, attractive and useful are ways to
experience advantages of the use of social media. For CCL this is one of our best mechanisms for recruiting employees and sharing our employee value proposition.

Q-How can social media help us in managing people performance, employee experience and in improving employee retention?

Firms are more regularly starting to use social media to share content, share best practices, foster employee engagement and communications and shrink the size of the world to a central place for our people to connect. All of these benefits help to improve the employee and experience and are a factor in improving employee retention.

Q-How companies can enhance diversity & inclusion?

Leveraging diversity has become a business imperative. Accomplishing it brings many benefits to an organization: it increases productivity, efficiency, and quality; boosts morale
and enhances problem-solving and decision-making abilities through the inclusion of multiple perspectives. We have worked with numerous leaders who make decisions about
diversity awareness and management. We have found that the diversity measures taken by most organizations are at best only part of what they should be doing and at worst only oriented towards damage control, stopgaps or compliance efforts. To effectively leverage diversity, to ensure that all employees reach their full potential and make their maximum contributions to the organization and its mission, leaders need to take a structured approach. Even for CCL, we remain firm in our principles and values, which include a steadfast commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace and in our interactions with all the individuals, organizations and communities we are privileged to serve.

Q-How does CCL differentiate itself in the digital learning marketplace?

High-tech and high-touch: We promise a learning experience that is high personal touch integrated with world class technology.
Teaching methodology: No one teaches leadership as well as CCL as we have been a leader in the field for years. We believe strongly in the power of blending learning approaches and the power of 70/20/10. 70% of leaders development comes from on the job experiences, 20% comes from learning from others and 10% comes from traditional training or educational efforts.

Q-Tips for using social media effectively?

  • Enrich content and user experience in the social stream.
  • Stay in the know: explore new social media technologies as they become available.
  • Continuously evaluate current strategy, adjust as needed to apply resources available towards improved uses of social media as they become available.
  • Invest in an enterprise level social media monitoring tool for improved reporting.
  • Avoid making social media anti-social: Make it more human and less machine.

Q-What are your views on succession management?

Most companies are still using succession management plans that are decades old, too rigid and too focused on top jobs.

High-Impact Succession Management: Best Practices, Models and Case Studies in Organizational Talent Mobility is Bersin & Associates and CCL study to take a comprehensive view of succession management and explore how companies are
approaching it at all levels of the organization.

 

Among the study’s findings:

  • More than half of survey respondents said their companies implement succession management processes at only the most senior executive levels.
  • Only 12 percent of respondents said their companies’ succession management programs are integrated with talent management programs, such as performance management
    and employee development.
  • Fewer than 40 percent of respondents said their companies include mid-level managers and skilled professionals in succession planning initiatives; just 11 percent included first line supervisors.
  • Many organizations are spending a lot of energy creating succession plans, but few are able to integrate succession management in all company operations and among all levels of employees. We learned that the companies struggle most with identifying employees with high potential, development planning and global implementation. There is a clear need for organizations to focus on these and most importantly, put in place a succession planning strategy.

Thank You Kent!

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