We are currently in the middle of the Top Employers 2014 Certification cycle. We are assessing employers in more than 60 countries and we are seeing many great examples from what Top Employers are offering their employees in order to create optimal employee conditions for their people. The 2014 results are obviously not in yet, but we can show what Top Employers are offering this year. And there is one emerging trend that is visible across various employee conditions: the degree to which technology is influencing employee conditions.
Employee Feedback Channels
Many relatively common practices to get input from employees are still being applied: management visiting the different sites, team meetings, forums and town hall meetings are common for many Top Employers. This year we see a strong surge of the application of social media as a means to collect employee input : most prominently Yammer, but also Google+, and various forms of intranet applications are becoming the tools to hear the people’s voice.
Not too long ago, companies were struggling with the place of social media within their companies. Wasted time, lack of focus were often heard as concerns. But now, we see that HR and management are embracing (internal) social media as a vital condition for their employees.
Company Communication
The annual or quarterly report used to be the most normal way to share results on the company performance. Often followed directly by a CEO speech, town-hall or other forum. Now, we see from the 2013 Top Employers that all technology driven angels are used to communicate internally about the results: through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, via Ipad and Iphone apps across Plasma screens and in some cases also through the own company radio or TV channel.
Succession Planning
Succession planning seems a very people driven area. And it still is . Emerging trends are the application of cross department shadowing, secondments in other departments, and ‘identify your own successor’ programs. But also here Yammer and Sharepoint are being used more and more to share opportunities within the company, to post one’s ambition and altogether facilitate internal succession management.
HR is and always be people driven. But as we see increasingly people are being supported by technology. And so goes the same for HR: technology drives employee conditions and the application thereof.
