By scaling informal learning processes across your company, each employee can benefit from collective knowledge – without interrupting their colleagues or diverting limited time and resources from other objectives.

With many experienced Baby Boomer employees nearing retirement, now is a critical time to capture their knowledge in order to maintain continuity in the future.

While social technologies certainly can play a direct role in increasing productivity and knowledge capture, they can also have an immediate impact on core HR activities.

Here are three examples of using social tools in the employee learning process

Blended Learning
A study by the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), the world’s largest association dedicated to workplace learning and development professionals, reported the average cost to create an hour of instructor-led training is nearly $1,400. Perhaps the most effective way to get more out of this sizable investment is to blend social with instructor-led training. By creating a private online forum or community setting, instructors can easily distribute materials to employees and engage in dialogue in a time-effective manner. Blended learning encourages greater participation which is proven to improve retention.

Onboarding
The Aberdeen Group reports that for most companies, a majority of new hires do not complete their first milestone on time – and 39% are not retained after one year. Social tools for onboarding can get new hires up to speed faster and help them form a bond with each other and your company. By encouraging new hires to contribute knowledge and questions, you can help them understand your corporate culture and processes. Social tools also provide HR professionals with better analytics to monitor the progress of new hires more easily, ensure they are engaged, and spot possible problems before they emerge.

Social Tools in Talent Management
Companies often struggle with semi-regular performance reviews, goal setting, and compensation analyses. Because reviews, goals and compensation play a critical role in employee morale and their alignment to your company’s objectives, doing these processes well is critical to your company’s success. Yet, because they happen just once or twice each year, it is difficult for managers to remember how to conduct them consistently. By providing clear, concise, and interactive performance review, goal setting and compensation planning tutorials online, managers can quickly refresh their memories on proper methods. Rather than flooding the HR department with questions as deadlines approach, managers can access this information easily and conveniently. This will free HR to counsel and coach managers on individual issues. Ultimately, having better information about employees in your talent management system will lead to better decisions on promotions and an informed succession planning process.

We’re in the early days of the emerging “shared era,” which will impact the ways we live our lives and do business for years to come. With increasing numbers of employees expecting information that is both interactive and on-demand, companies have a historic opportunity to get ahead of the trend by implementing innovative social tools today. By helping HR departments hire the right workers; help them acclimate quickly; and make all employees more productive, social tools can help HR improve productivity and improve your company’s bottom line. In this way, HR can become a bigger part of your company’s strategic thinking – and bring stronger results company-wide – than ever before.

Source: Improving Employee Productivity with Social Tools – SuccessFactors white paper