Human Resources.

The term and title conjures up images of payroll, benefits, and interviews.  It almost seems clinical at this point and definitely not the group you look forward to receiving an email from.  Why is that?

If there is any group in the company that should be responsible for getting people to work better with one another, to collaborate, to communicate, to make the most of the most important asset of the company, shouldn’t that group be Human Resources?

HR is the business of people.  And People are social.  The relationship is transitory.  HR is Social.

There is a groundswell change to how business is managed and conducted.  That groundswell is social.  HR has the opportunity to redefine their role in business by championing tools and platforms that enable social business.  HR truly begins to facilitate a higher level of collaboration, efficiency, and by proxy, productivity throughout the entire organization they are tasked with shepherding.  But where to begin…

I recently spoke at Jive Software’s worldwide customer conference, JiveWorld, last week.  Obviously this is a crowd receptive to the idea, having already purchased a social platform, but it’s worth noting that businesses are only starting to scratch the benefits epidermis of moving conversations out of email and into a structured, collaborative, and social environment.  Ideas are running fast and welcome.

The idea is this.  Your social platform provides the collaboration substrate. People operating on that substrate need incentive to collaborate, in essence to get out of their native environment and into this new warmer and more effective medium.  The work they do needs to exist here.  To accomplish what needs to get done, key information needs to exist in the new environment.  Once early adoption occurs it needs to take root via interactivity.  Other people inside and outside the work group need to not only consume the information but also interact with it.

The incentive is positive feedback from the environment and even more importantly from the other people participating in the environment.  And just as Gabe Zichermann describes in his book on Gamification by Design and in his Keynote at JiveWorld11, in order to provide that positive feedback loop it’s extremely important to know how the individuals are wired; what motivates them, what makes them feel satisfied.   A targeted feedback loop is what lifts the entire system off the ground.

Three easy steps:

1) Post your important work into the social environment

2) Comment and collaborate with others in a way that targets their motivational core

3) Reward others in a way that creates a sense of fulfillment

HR is the group that helps managers build incentives and manage to success.  HR can help to build social best practices, foster communication and collaboration, help to embed monitoring and reward systems into social environments, and lead the evolution of business from hierarchical and stultified to social, collaborative, and hyper-performing.

Let’s start working together better.  HR, you can help lead the way.