HR Thoughts

I deactivated my very minimal Facebook account today. Haven't had the time to figure out how to use this site to serve me and it was a constant "have got to get back to" hanging over my head. So long to my one friend!

Still on MySpace, in a very minimal way, to gain access to my sister's site.

Still on LinkedIn. I am slowly building connections and am seeking local connections to build a network in my immediate and surrounding area. This is a site I can see potential in and will continue to work with it as I can.

I still blog. It works for me and I will stick with this for a while.

Ok, I tried it and do have to admit that this is fun. I now have a profile on LinkedIn and I do like the site. Still need some work on my profile but it is out there and I can see the potential in the network. I have my very first connection to my buddy Kris and even sent out two invites.  The job posting feature looks promising. May give it a try for some of our tougher vacancies (internal medicine physicians and psychiatrists) but will probably grow my network a bit more first. So, thanks to Simon who planted the idea via a recent post and to Wally for the encouraging comment. Pretty cool!

How well are you LinkedIn?

Simon Meth writes about LinkedIn promiscuity and shares that he has 1044 1st level connections (trusted friends and colleagues) and over 323,000 2nd level connections (friends of friends) on LinkedIn. My first reaction? Holy smoke Simon, I only had 100 people at my wedding and I would have been hard pressed to find 1044 friends to invite. I am not sure I could even name 1044 people that I know.  In his recent post, "The Rise of Social Networks," David Lefkow writes, "after recent announcements by Facebook and the rise of networking platforms like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Ning, social networks are once again gaining momentum. Usage is accelerating, new audiences are being drawn in, and new applications are being developed that can help us all better manage our lives and contacts."

So, I ask myself, what is this all about? What don't I know? What should I know? What does it all mean for me? Throw in Second Life, Jobs in Pod, Pingshot, Feedburner, and twitter and suddenly my use of Google Reader (of which I was quite proud) seems a little benign.

Let's just take the most widely talked about social networks. Are you on MySpace? Facebook? LinkedIn?

My sister is on MySpace and to view her profile and keep up with her life, I need to be a friend. To be a friend, I need to be on MySpace. So I am, in a very minimal way. The profile is there, it is bare, but it is enough for me to gain access to my sister.

Frank Roche at Know HR encourages HR professionals to use social bookmarking. He is on Facebook and invites readers to add him as a friend. To be friend, I need to be on Facebook. So, I am, in a very minimal way. The profile is there, it is bare, but it is enough for me to gain access to this thing called Facebook.

My curiosity is piqued both as an individual  and as a parent. My husband and I have a daughter and this is the world she will grow up in. I want to know about it so I am able to gently, or not so gently, guide her through. If you are a mom with a daughter, you have to read, "omg my mom joined facebook!!" You can find it here and also linked within David's post above. 

I blog. With this, I have access to the information, people and resources in one place. More importantly, I have it at the pace that I want it. It is manageable, enjoyable and it fits right in with my life right now. What's missing? Connections with my family out East and with friends across the states. Is MySpace or Facebook an answer? With home phones, work phones, cell phones, home e-mail, work e-mail, blackberry and blog, do I really need another way for people to contact me? Maybe, just maybe, contacting me is different than connecting with me and a social networking site would round it all out.

If I have a personal profile for family and friends would I have another for colleagues? On the same site or another? I am an HR Director in a medium sized mid-western town. I plan to raise the kid right here, I do not have any plans (or desires) to move out of the area, I am not even looking to head 90 miles south to the cities. What benefits would I gain from a site like LinkedIn? Would I be able to use it the way it is designed to be used? 

I sent a message to my sister right after I set up my profile and within minutes, literally minutes, I had a friend request. Cool, I thought, my sister does want to be my friend! It wasn't Karen, it was Caleb. Who is Caleb? Well, Caleb is a young guy, hair blowing in the wind, chewing on a piece of straw . . . .you get the picture. Well, Caleb wants to be my friend. Request denied. Please! I really don't want to deal with this. I was pleased, however, to see how well protected my very bare profile is and how easy it was to deny a request for access.

People are living, thriving and connecting in this world each and every day. Calebs of the world aside, it is time for me to jump in.

The Rosendahl house now has some technology! We have a high speed internet provider and my husband is finishing up the set up our new, very sleek looking, Dell. No more unexpected computer lock ups and errors and Google Reader actually downloads. Boy, am I  going to miss the sound of dial-up, NOT!

I'd like to thank Simon Meth and Shally Steckerel for my technological leap today.

Simon had sent me an e-mail in my ERE account on 12/10/06 which I just discovered I had yesterday. Thinking there was probably more out there that I should know about, I started to look around a bit and found a recent post by Shally where he talks about his Google reader. Well, what's all this fuss about a reader I asked myself? Well, I found out today that this is something that will make my life easier,  facilitate my blog/post readings and well, it is just plain great! In a matter of minutes I set up my Google Reader with subscriptions to six blogs and now, with just  one click I can see what is going on. In less than a minute, I can add additional blogs to my subscriptions . . . .yeah!

The phrase "you don't know what you don't know" seems very appropriate here! 

"Get off the download" is one of my daughter’s new phrases this week. I am not exactly sure what it means but I do know that if she wasn’t 5 years old and giggling when she said it, I wouldn’t be laughing. She is learning. She is learning from her kindergarten teacher and from us, her parents. She is learning from her peers outside the kindergarten classroom as she talks by her locker. She is learning as she rides the bus and she is learning as she walks the gauntlet past the scary first, second and third graders. She is learning as she plays and as she jams in the living room to Jennifer Nettles and Sugarland.

This quote was presented in the Human Capital Institute web based seminar, "Collaborative Learning Technologies: Wikis, Blogs and More, Oh My!" The seminar presented information on the technology and tools to support collaborative learning. The presenters addressed the significant shifts occurring in learning. Learning is increasingly flat and informal; it is peer to peer; it is collaborative, connected and collective; and learning is being driven by individuals, not organizations.

The thrust behind Web 2.0 is capturing and exchanging knowledge that is created or shared informally. Why is this important? With a larger portion of my workforce eligible to retire right now, we are on the verge of losing many, many years of organizational knowledge. All the procedure manuals in the world are not going to be able to fill the gap of the lessons learned from experience. That knowledge base is being built on a daily basis and each day that goes by without that being captured, reflected upon and shared, we are missing an incredible opportunity for the future.

The presenters highlighted many shifts and the two that resonate with me are the shifts from training delivery to information delivery and from expert instructors to experts discovered. Experts discovered, I like that. How many employees, if given the opportunity, would step onto the field and shine? Who would it be? Aren’t you curious? I am!

Web 1.0? That is so yesterday!

In a recent post, Simon Meth predicted as his 2006 Prediction #8, that "Recruitment wikis will get started. HR leadership won’t know what a wiki is."

This post presents me, an HR leader, with a professional challenge since I don't know what a wiki is. Yes, I am aware that there are things called wikis out there, but I don't know exactly what they are. How they could be of value or benefit to me  or how they can effectively be used as a learning tool? I did contact Simon and he referred me to the Human Capital Institute's free webcast "Collaborative Learning Technologies: Wiki's and Blogs and More, Oh My!"  As you would have it, the webcast is this Friday. I have cleared my calendar and, barring any catastrophes, I am going to learn about wikis.

Recruiters are starting to use wikis, the physical education teachers at G-Town are getting wiki . . I want wiki too!

I was having problems with my Outlook yesterday - I was not able to send messages. The program did not tell me that I would not be able to send or refuse to open. What it did was it let me in, let me compose my message, let me address my message, let me spell check it and let me hit send. Then, and only then, did it lock me right out.

My first call was to the Help Desk to see if there were server problems. The server was fine but a number of updates were being installed. The updates would account for the system being slow but not locking up. It took IRM about 30 seconds to determine the problem. As it turned out, my Outlook mailbox was dangerously close to full and my personal folders were WAY too big - a very technical term for "too big to even open."

I easily receive over 100 Outlook messages a day. To manage the volume, I use my Inbox as just that, my Inbox. If the message is not something I need to be working on, I get it out of there as quickly as I can. If it is a reference information I know I will need later, I move it to the appropriate personal folder. If not, in the trash can it goes.

Over the past few years, I have saved a lot of information – WAY too much. So, throughout the day, I proceeded to decrease my personal folders down to a reasonable, system supportable size. As I went into each folder to review the multitude of documents, I read (and quickly deleted) messages that had become overcome by events and no longer necessary and I saved attachments elsewhere. In many cases, I wondered why I had even saved that in the first place. I looked at the dates of some of those messages – 2004. 2004 was only a few years ago by the calendar but seemed light years ago by the content of the messages. I saved these messages because, at the time, it was information that I did not know, it was absolutely necessary to me then and important enough make it’s own folder.

Well, Outlook has stopped taunting me, my personal folders are still A LITTLE too big and I have learned a little more about mailbox management.  I have learned a lot of the past few years, about my job, my leadership and myself.

Today, 2006, many more of those older, once very important messages will go in the trash. I know the information, I know where to find it and, in many cases, I am that resource to others now. This may be a small ray of sunshine but I am taking what I can get right now! J

I just finished reading through "Electronic Recruiting 101" by Shally Steckerel for Electronic Recruiting Exchange. If you have ever heard or used the phrase, "you don’t know what you don’t know," and I have, this was it for me. Posting open positions on internet job boards and starting my own blog is nothing more than "standing in the door." Standing in the door refers to an airborne soldier who is literally standing in the open door of an aircraft waiting for the green light to jump out.

My green light to jump was this summer when we were short physicians and did not have a pipeline or network in place to replace them quickly; we did not have anyone on the bench. We reacted and made the contacts, contracts and connections we needed to build the foundation. We are identifying candidates but it is slow going. We have not yet jumped into the electronic waters. What are we waiting for? Sad to say, we weren't waiting, I just did not know. Actually, I did know some but my perception was that of a very messy web so vast that any search would be fruitless at best. I know now that it will be messy, but order can be created out of the chaos with some pre-planning. I know now that at times it will be seem fruitless, but with statistics showing that only 5% of the recipients of mass e-mails flat out say "take me off the list" and only 10% are returned undeliverable, I have an 85% potential for success. 85% potential is fruitful and if I had those odds at the casino, I’d visit a bit more often! It will be a sharp learning curve, but a curve we must take head on and with our foot on the gas.

My first phone call Monday morning will be to our Director, Information Resource Management. I am over the jump zone now and it is my turn to depart the aircraft!