Early Adopters Breathe New Life with Social Technology

Software vendors are working diligently to launch new social tools that drive collaboration, enable real-time feedback, and give employees (and their bosses) more visibility into what’s going on in their organization. And according to Josh Bersin, President and CEO of Bersin & Associates, we should expect deeper integration of social features as the HR software market continues to mature.

Early adopters of social technology are already seeing some immediate value-adds. I recently connected with one such organization–Dominion Enterprises, a marketing services firm based in Norfolk, VA–to talk about their success.

Social Software Breathing Life Into Door Policies

Dominion has always had an open door policy, inviting its 3,000+ employees to share feedback and ideas. But leadership struggled to sift through and act upon all the input they received. They realized they needed something more: a central platform for gathering, sharing and developing ideas.

“While we had channels for feedback and input, it was hard to get traction around ideas,” explains Susan Blake, VP of HR.

Dominion implemented UserVoice Feedback software, which allows employees to submit ideas, vote on others’ ideas, and discuss them. After giving UserVoice a test run in one department, they rolled it out company-wide in March. The software had immediate impact, giving management the tools they need to give their open door policy new life–with employees from every department offering suggestions for improving products, policies and processes.

Based on employee feedback, Dominion has revised their paid time off policies and implemented several product improvements. By showing employees that their feedback results in real changes, they’ve seen a spike in employee engagement. “To say UserVoice was a catalyst is an understatement,” says Blake.

Social Technology Has Hurdles to Clear

While social technology has brought significant value to Dominion’s open door policy, social technologies–particularly in talent management software–still have room to evolve. For Dominion, seamless integration (for example, simply having a single sign-on across systems could greatly boost user adoption) with other systems was critical.

“It’s a real problem if every product requires another log-in or user profile,” says Joe Fuller, CIO at Dominion. “We want single sign-on–it’s the biggest complaint.”

Many companies also want better data sharing. For instance, in light of their success with UserVoice, Dominion began reviewing performance management software. Because they were already using Salesforce, Rypple was their first choice. They loved the product, but decided to wait until Rypple was more deeply integrated with Salesforce (which bought Rypple last year).

What do you think are the greatest opportunities for social technology to drive innovation in talent management? What hurdles are there to clear before we see widespread adoption?

image credit: examiner & freelance

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Kyle Lagunas is an HR Analyst at Software Advice, an online resource for HR and talent management software buyers guides, demos and more. He reports on trends and best practices in human resources technology.