The sudden growth of social media has changed the way people communicate with each other. Social media helped people to stay connected with each other better than before. It resulted in people being more productive and smart at their social and work life. This shift resulted the managers in the organizations to adopt social media platforms at their workplace for a productive, efficient and effective workforce. But like anything else in this world, even social media platforms have its own advantages and disadvantages.
The few ways Manager’s use social media to find and manage talents are through hiring new interns to a company in the form of job sites. And they ask the interns to share their experience and talk about the intern programs on the intern’s personal social media accounts and in the organization’s social media account. By this way, the organization will get a good reputation and this will attract more eligible and educated job candidates in the future.
Frequently used business applications in social media includes strategic real time listening tools for business intelligence, recruitment etc. Another important application of social media used by the mangers are knowledge sharing platforms such as employees using blogs and microblogs, communities of practice and expert directories. These collaborative tools help and improve work product and workflow.
The risks related to social media use arise when employees use their personal social media accounts in the organization might affect their productivity, network security and data security at work. Managers usually give guidelines on using social media to his employees in the organization.
Managers use the social media platform to facilitate communication and share information with external and internal audiences. Social media can take different forms but few well known social media platforms are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
The different forms of social medias are picture and video, internet forums, podcasts, internet based voice service etc. Examples of social media application are Blogs, texting, wikis, google docs, google reader etc. These are also called as Web 2.0.
Managers could use social media in different ways. One of the way is asking the departments to hold brainstorming sessions or start a conversation with questions and answers on a blog or they can use wikis to manage projects, research case studies etc. The Manger can record a podcast or keep a blog so that the employees in the organization can immediately deliver news from the manger.
Social media is appreciated because of their helpfulness in improving understanding and teamwork, developing lateral communication and building relationships. Because social media is relatively new area for both employees and managers, many questions will arise regarding how to use it and what shouldn’t be done in social media at workplace. The main challenges of a manger would be, with the use of social media how he/she will get business benefits and to make sure it does not distract the employees while they are doing their work and it is not potentially harmful to the organization.
34% of U.S workforce are Millennials. They have born and brought up using social media platforms. Introducing social media at workplace make them easier to work and get a better understanding of everything happening in the organization. Mangers started realizing the fact that this is the future. Because of this 80% of companies in U.S now have social media policies and a lot of organizations has taken disciplinary actions against employees those who violated their policies.
Managers should include social media in their business strategy of their organization to avoid the risk of losing relevance in the market. Even the traditional companies have their fair share in the social media platforms. At least their CEOs or mangers have an account on Twitter or Facebook to promote their organization and interact with the public. A lot of mangers in different organizations are adopting social media platform as a part of their training and development, planning process, recruitment etc.
The pros and cons of using social media to the manager’s jobs are; There is no one size fits all approach to everything. Every manger in different organizations will have different pros and cons of using social media platform.
Advantages
> Open communication between the manger and the employees.
> Employees can discuss their own ideas and thoughts in the blog or discussion form of the organization.
> More business contacts.
> It reaches a lot of audience and result as the effective recruitment tool.
> Business reputation and client base could be improved with minimum advertising.
Disadvantages
> Possibility of virus attack and hacking.
> Employees might fall for online scams believing all of them are genuine. It will result in hackers getting important informations of the company.
> In the blog or discussion forum employers might pass negative comments about the organization.
> Organization might face legal actions if the employee uses the social media platform for viewing offensive material.
Not so distant past managers had to host expensive job fairs to find the right candidates for the organization and had to go through thousands of resumes posted on job sites. Now with the effective use of social media platforms. Mangers could do recruitment process much easier than the hassle they used to go through in not so distant past.
An example of recruiting is that a manger could post challenging technical questions on the social media platform and she/he could contact the person from whom he/she got the best response to the challenging technical question.
Relationship management tool could help find the passive job candidates and not currently job hunting eligible candidates, and track relationship with them. New mobile applications for recruitment is helpful for the manger to find the right candidates and exchange information’s with them easily with the advanced search found in those applications. The advanced social media applications allow to creating specialty recruitment sites for specific industries. Mangers could even post recruitment post on their Facebook or Twitter news feed for the job seekers who have being following them could see and apply.
Employees will work effective and efficient if they realize their opinions are also being taken into considerations and they are well informed about everything happening in the organization. Social media could help mangers to spread their words to the employees and channel employee comments.
Some mangers use the corporate Facebook page to communicate with their employees. In this case, the employee could react immediately to the announcement with their comments and questions. Other mangers use video sharing or a corporate blog to engage employees around the world in regular meetings.
In conclusion, social media is a great tool a manger could use for the successful running of his department or organization. Even multinational companies like “Wallmart” has completely changed their orientation for new associates, schedules for associates, calling off a request for their associates etc on their own secured application. By this way, they could reduce the cost and save a lot of time of both their associates and mangers
Frequently used business applications in social media includes strategic real time listening tools for business intelligence, recruitment etc. Another important application of social media used by the mangers are knowledge sharing platforms such as employees using blogs and microblogs, communities of practice and expert directories. These collaborative tools help and improve work product and workflow.
The risks related to social media use arise when employees use their personal social media accounts in the organization might affect their productivity, network security and data security at work. Managers usually give guidelines on using social media to his employees in the organization.
Managers use the social media platform to facilitate communication and share information with external and internal audiences. Social media can take different forms but few well known social media platforms are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
The different forms of social medias are picture and video, internet forums, podcasts, internet based voice service etc. Examples of social media application are Blogs, texting, wikis, google docs, google reader etc. These are also called as Web 2.0.
Managers could use social media in different ways. One of the way is asking the departments to hold brainstorming sessions or start a conversation with questions and answers on a blog or they can use wikis to manage projects, research case studies etc. The Manger can record a podcast or keep a blog so that the employees in the organization can immediately deliver news from the manger.
Social media is appreciated because of their helpfulness in improving understanding and teamwork, developing lateral communication and building relationships. Because social media is relatively new area for both employees and managers, many questions will arise regarding how to use it and what shouldn’t be done in social media at workplace. The main challenges of a manger would be, with the use of social media how he/she will get business benefits and to make sure it does not distract the employees while they are doing their work and it is not potentially harmful to the organization.
34% of U.S workforce are Millennials. They have born and brought up using social media platforms. Introducing social media at workplace make them easier to work and get a better understanding of everything happening in the organization. Mangers started realizing the fact that this is the future. Because of this 80% of companies in U.S now have social media policies and a lot of organizations has taken disciplinary actions against employees those who violated their policies.
Managers should include social media in their business strategy of their organization to avoid the risk of losing relevance in the market. Even the traditional companies have their fair share in the social media platforms. At least their CEOs or mangers have an account on Twitter or Facebook to promote their organization and interact with the public. A lot of mangers in different organizations are adopting social media platform as a part of their training and development, planning process, recruitment etc.
The pros and cons of using social media to the manager’s jobs are; There is no one size fits all approach to everything. Every manger in different organizations will have different pros and cons of using social media platform.
Advantages
> Open communication between the manger and the employees.
> Employees can discuss their own ideas and thoughts in the blog or discussion form of the organization.
> More business contacts.
> It reaches a lot of audience and result as the effective recruitment tool.
> Business reputation and client base could be improved with minimum advertising.
Disadvantages
> Possibility of virus attack and hacking.
> Employees might fall for online scams believing all of them are genuine. It will result in hackers getting important informations of the company.
> In the blog or discussion forum employers might pass negative comments about the organization.
> Organization might face legal actions if the employee uses the social media platform for viewing offensive material.
Not so distant past managers had to host expensive job fairs to find the right candidates for the organization and had to go through thousands of resumes posted on job sites. Now with the effective use of social media platforms. Mangers could do recruitment process much easier than the hassle they used to go through in not so distant past.
An example of recruiting is that a manger could post challenging technical questions on the social media platform and she/he could contact the person from whom he/she got the best response to the challenging technical question.
Relationship management tool could help find the passive job candidates and not currently job hunting eligible candidates, and track relationship with them. New mobile applications for recruitment is helpful for the manger to find the right candidates and exchange information’s with them easily with the advanced search found in those applications. The advanced social media applications allow to creating specialty recruitment sites for specific industries. Mangers could even post recruitment post on their Facebook or Twitter news feed for the job seekers who have being following them could see and apply.
Employees will work effective and efficient if they realize their opinions are also being taken into considerations and they are well informed about everything happening in the organization. Social media could help mangers to spread their words to the employees and channel employee comments.
Some mangers use the corporate Facebook page to communicate with their employees. In this case, the employee could react immediately to the announcement with their comments and questions. Other mangers use video sharing or a corporate blog to engage employees around the world in regular meetings.
In conclusion, social media is a great tool a manger could use for the successful running of his department or organization. Even multinational companies like “Wallmart” has completely changed their orientation for new associates, schedules for associates, calling off a request for their associates etc on their own secured application. By this way, they could reduce the cost and save a lot of time of both their associates and mangers