Tag: recruitment

Social media and utility companies

I’m moderating a panel discussion on social media and utilities at next week’s SAP for Utilities event in Copenhagen. My fellow panelists will include two representatives from utility companies, and one from SAP.

This is not new ground for me, I have given the closing keynotes at the SAP for Utilities in San Antonio in 2011 and the SAP for Utilities event in Singapore in 2012, both times on this topic.

In my previous talks on this topic I start out talking about how utilities have started to use social media for next generation customer service – this is an obvious use case and there are several great examples of utilities doing just this.

However, there are also other very compelling use cases for social in utilities. In the US over one third of the workforce is already over 50 years old, and according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics 30-40% of the workforce will retire in the next 10 years. This is not confined to the US and so recruitment and retention are topics of growing concern for utilities.

Now, utilities are rarely seen by young graduates as a ‘cool’ place to work. But this can change. Remember a couple of years back when Old Spice was the cologne your grandad might wear? Old Spice rolled out a social media campaign with a superb series of YouTube ads (the first of which has been viewed 45 million times). In the month which followed their sales went up 100%, and a year later their sales were still up 50%.

Videos like the one above produced by Ausgrid, while not about to rival Old Spice for viewership, do show a more human and appealing side of the company to any potential employees.

Rotary dial phone

Also, when I ask utility companies whether they allow employees to access social media from their work computers, the majority of times the answer is no, or limited. Even if only from the perspective of retaining good employees, this has to change. Today’s millennials are far more likely to use social media as a way to network and find information online (see chapter four of this three year old Pew Research study on Millennials [PDF] for more on this). Blocking access to social media sites, especially for younger employees, is analogous to putting a rotary dial phone on their desk, with a padlock on the dial. Don’t just take my word for it. Casey Coleman, the CIO of the U.S. General Services Administration said recently:

Twitter is a primary source to gather information about changes in my industry. It helps the organization stay current with the latest trends and thinking.

Blocking employees access to social media stifles them from doing their job effectively, and any employee who feels that s/he is not being allowed to do their job properly won’t be long about looking for a new one.

Social media can also be used internally as a means of retaining knowledge from retiring workers, and as a way of making employees more productive using internal social collaboration tools (Jam, Huddle, Chatter, etc.).

Finally, as I’ve mentioned before, with the rise of mobile usage of social media, there is now the ability to tap into social media’s big data firehose in realtime to improve on outage management.

There are bound to be more uses of social media (real or potential) that I’m missing – if you can think of any, please leave a comment on this post letting us all here know.

Also, the panel discussion is on next Friday April 19th at 3pm CET – we’ll be watching the Twitter hashtag #SocialUtils. If you have any questions/suggestions to put to the panel, leave them there and we’ll do our best to get to them.

 

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

CloudApps releases their employee engagement app Sumo

CloudApps SuMo
CloudApps recently released SuMo, their sustainability employee engagement app. The name SuMo comes from the words Sustainability Momentum we’re told, and this is because SuMo was designed to maintain the momentum of an organisation’s sustainability initiative. GreenMonk was given a demo account on SuMo so we could take it for a test drive, and it is a cool little app.

CloudApps sell a suite of sustainability software products for organisations. Their applications sit on top of Salesforce’s Force.com cloud platform, which allows CloudApps to focus on writing the software, and not have to be concerned with maintaining the server infrastructure which runs their programs.

CloudApps solutions already have quite comprehensive capabilities, so it was interesting to see them come out with this employee engagement module.

Pledging a challenge in CloudApps SuMo

The SuMo application works well on mobile devices and it is designed to foster interest and ongoing enthusiasm for sustainability initiatives amongst an organisation’s workforce. It does this by allowing employees to pledge to participate in a number of challenges supplied by the organisation. These challenges are categorised, ranked for difficulty and assigned points.

As employees carry out these challenges (anything from switching from short haul flights, to teleconferencing for their next meeting, to volunteering at a local charity event), they are assigned points and badges, which determines their position on the Leader Board.

Because SuMo sits on Force.com, it can take in data from an organisation’s ERP applications, as well as reporting them back. So initiatives undertaken by employees in SuMo can be reported directly into its back-end systems and the savings accounted for.

CloudApps SuMo adding an idea screen

Also, a nice touch in SuMo is the ability for employees to add new ideas to the site. These ideas can be voted on by colleagues, commented on and favourited. It’s nice to see a bit of social working its way into these kinds of enterprise apps. This will certainly help the app be more engaging and sticky for users. This is something whose importance shouldn’t be underestimated for industries with issues around recruitment and retention.

The user interface has a few little quirks (it is not always as intuitive as it could be), and the app needs to become more social (include Share on Twitter, Share on Facebook, etc. buttons) buttons, but presumably that will all come with time. For a version 1.0 app though this is a creditable effort.

Image credits Tom Raftery

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

(Cross-posted @ GreenMonk: the blog)

Gis a job – seriously!

I wrote a post yesterday called “‘Gis a job” where I referred to an article in the Boston Globe that claimed that blogging was good for your employment prospects.

I mentioned that in all the time I have been blogging, I haven’t been offered a job. Thinking about this subsequently, I wondered if this was because a) my blog revealed too much about me (I’m not the most diplomatic of people, for example) or is it simply b) because people assume I am not in the market for a job?

If we assume it is b) – then, what if I now say “I am in the market for a job”? Will the offers come rolling in?

What are my skillsets?

  • Well, I’m not too bad at blogging and podcasting
  • I know shedloads about social software and how to use it to raise the online profile of a company, product or service as well as how it can be used to improve a company’s internal and external communications.
  • I know a considerable amount about search engine optimisation (hence the following, for example)
  • I have an impressive and growing network of contacts
  • I am a very good communicator – well used to speaking in front of large audiences
  • I have led teams of coders in the development of large web applications
  • I am a very experienced sysadmin – and I know my way around Win2k and Win2003 Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, and ISA Server

So what of it – does this blogging for employment thing work?

By the way – the “Gis a job” expression is a reference to the very excellent Boys from the Blackstuff drama which was shown on TV here some time in the 80s.

'Gis a job!

We have heard of blogging for business – God know I have written about it enough times! but what about blogging for employment?

The Boston Globe has a piece today about how having a blog can help you land a job. They contend that because blogs come up high in Google searches:

  • Blogging creates a network
  • Blogs set you up as an expert in your field and
  • Blogs give you a leg up when you meet someone new (i.e. your potential employer)

Hmmm – while I can’t disagree with any of the points, I haven’t exactly been flooded with job offers since I started blogging – in fact, I haven’t received a single job offer. Any day now!!

I see Shel Israel has looked at the other side of the equation on his blog – employers using recruitment blogs to attract new hires.