The proliferation and growth of social media is continually growing in acceptance. (page31) Many politicians are beginning to use social media. Some use it get a pulse on their specific constituency needs, other use them to promote their areas of empowerment. Yet others have considered using them as they hire employees in doing back ground checks on potential hires.
As incumbent leaders attempt to utilize these new trends they need to be patient and be aware of possible issues that may lie in the way of successful implementation of these new practices. For example HR policies may conflict with the type of question asked of a potential hire. Consider the question of age, what happens when you go to a face book page on a potential hire and see their age, which is clearly a questioned not asked during an interview. Will the HR manager have to prove later on that knowing the age of a potential hire, influenced him or her in making a decision?
As news is disbursed into the community, what happens when you consider the digital divide of who has access and who doesn’t? In an attempt to better communicate with your constituency you maybe actually creating a better informed group of constituents versus another.
It is going to be a careful balancing act for many official’s who head in this direction, especially when you consider the various groups in the workforce today. You have the traditionalist, the babyboomers, generation x, and finally the newest group, generation y who come with an outlet ready to plug in anywhere, anytime.(page 26) Moving forward comes with many caveats to consider from HR departments as they consider the array of twitter polices, facebook policies, linkedin policies versus the growing array of government policies and HR practices.
Ismael,
ReplyDeleteGood point about politicians using social networks to reach and increase their audience. I believe President Obama used these social networks masterfully. He knew that these social networks accounted for a vast portion of the voting block and he used it to his advantage!!
Want issues presented by the authors of Social Media at Work affect HR management?
ReplyDeleteTwo issues that come to mind from reading "Social Media at Work", they are:
ReplyDeleteHow HR managers will deal with transparency, issues of privacy, right to know, and security all of these have to be legally considered by many organizations.
Also HR managers will have to decide on new policies for blogs, wikis, forums, and others forms of multimedia.