Week 4 Learning Log - Exploration and References

Exploration

Social media has quickly become the medium of choice for organizations to communicate both with an external and internal audience. As this has become the norm, human resources departments have had to identify useful tools, investigate how they can be used and execute by adopting tools that provide a value-add to the organization. From a human resources perspective, social media usage and adoption can accomplish several valuable purposes. The value that each social media path used can provide depends on what the HR area is trying to accomplish. HR's uses of social media, to communicate and accomplish objectives, are tied to two main audiences - internal and external stakeholders. The ways that HR can utilize social media to accomplish goals with internal and external stakeholders are as follows:

Internal

- create spaces for employees to collaborate
- way to gather feedback from the workforce
- identify top internal talent
- solve organizational problems
- surface ideas that can benefit the company and workforce

External

- can connect the company with potential new employees
- share information about who the company is and what culture exists
- improve organizational productivity by connecting employees to customers
- gather intel on the competition
- establish what type of employees would be successful at the company

These are just a few of the many ways that social media has impacted the business world, and specifically how HR departments are utilizing these tools to achieve the organization's strategic goals. Social media is also a very fast moving and evolving technology and communication tool, and HR departments will need to continuously improve their understanding and adoption of them in order to remain competitive.

References

Tyagi, A. (2012). Social media: Opportunities and challenges for human resource management. International Journal of Knowledge-Based Organizations,2(2), 40-53.

• Social media as a construct are the systems and tools that allow organizations and individuals to connect and communicate digitally in various forms and fashions. The emergence of this dynamic has had a massive impact on the business communities at large, and the effects are constantly being discovered. This emergence, and the popularity of it, has presented a very unique challenge to the human resources discipline on how to operate in this new space. In this article, Tyagi explores these challenges and how HR professionals can navigate through them.

Nassiriyar, M., Sadeghzadeh, A., Haghshenas, M., & Shahbazi, R. (2015). Social networks application for human resources. American Association for Science and Technology Journal of Education,1(3), 45-51.

• How people and organizations connect and communicate has been revolutionized with the advent of social media. The challenge that its arrival has caused the business world can not be understated and companies continue to struggle with how they fit in this arena. The HR departments and leaders in the business community find themselves operating in a hornet's nest of challenges. Everything from legal liability to reputational risk are constanly in play with an organization's own participation with social media or that of their employees. This article exlpores how today's HR professionals can mitigate some of these risks and prepare themselves to react should one of the risks become realized.