With people from all walks of life getting hooked to social media, technology major Unisys has seen its internal networking site become a primary forum for exchange between all levels of employees, says Kavita Rao, head, human resources (HR), Unisys India. In a conversation with FE?s Shreya Roy, Rao talks about the future of social media for HR in India, about industry attrition and practices that are helping Unisys to keep a check on it.
How has Unisys been using social media and corporate blogs as a human resource tool?
At Unisys, we have launched My site earlier this year, which is our equivalent of Facebook. Being extremely social media savvy, Ed Coleman (Unisys chairman and chief executive officer) himself is driving this across the organisation. What has happened because of this is, all our employees across the world have a platform to talk about the work they are doing, ask questions to each other, and share best practices. My site has been giving employees constant access to everyone, including top management. This, from an HR perspective, works very well. We also have a Unisys Global Sourcing blog here, meant for sharing best practices and knowledge across our centres in Hungary, China and India.
Do you find that HR teams in Indian companies are actively looking at social media?
At a recent HR conference, which had subject matter experts talking, there was a poll on how important social media was. The results from 40 HR people, were not highly favourable. I would think given the way the generation is changing, social media is extremely critical because this is the means the generation identifies with. I am sure that organisations that consider it of limited importance now, will find it to be greatly useful in the future. From the Unisys perspective, using social media is very important because the average age of our employees is very young.
How does corporate use of social media for communication in India compare globally?
Globally social media has assumed great importance. In India, it will pick up and evolve.
Attrition has been a challenge across the sector this year. However, there have been talks of it coming down this quarter. What is your perspective on it?
If I were to look at the market, I don’t think it is likely to settle down in terms of attrition. It is boom time and the whole market is buzzing with activity. Organisations are taking it absolutely heads on and looking at what they can do from a compensation standpoint, a training standpoint, or what they can do for career development. So it does not look like it is going to settle for a while. It is the employees’ market.
What steps have you taken to curb attrition?
Our attrition levels, both voluntary and involuntary, have been within industry benchmarks. One of the things we have been doing is evolving a ?career development framework,? which is a very comprehensive mechanism of providing an employee a complete overview of where he is right now from skills and competency perspective. It will also give him an outlook of what he can do to grow, about verticals and departments he can move into and what is required to be done.