When it comes to achieving desired business results and exceptional products, services, and end- customer relationships, individual incentives and specific HR processes are all inextricably linked. However, in many organizations, it is extremely complex to sensibly link all these components and execute upon a consistent employee-centric and customer-centric strategy. In most cases, not all parts of the business need to be connected, but organizations need to make sure they have the right connections in place to find the right information at the right time. Connecting business processes to incentives, particularly those processes that have workflow dependencies or those that are shared with customers, business partners, or suppliers inside and outside the business, also requires support from social collaboration tools to deliver intelligent information filtering with controls to ensure the right level of information can be shared whenever it is required.

1. July 2017, IDC #US42881117
White Paper
Understanding the Business Value of Social Solutions
in Human Resources
Sponsored by: SAP
Michael Versace
July 2017
IDC OPINION
The confluence of a changing competitive landscape, strategic business objectives, and how
organizations are changing to meet future needs is having a deep impact on current business
dynamics. Understanding this impact forms the basis of a plan about how organizations can enable
users to work and collaborate across global, mobile, and cloud scenarios, all supported by a more
social workflow. The right combination of traditional collaborative applications (email, messaging, and
team collaborative workspaces) and enterprise social networks is a core part of how organizations can
manage the transition to a new way of acquiring talent, working, and ushering in a more holistic
cultural change that is key to success in the digital era.
Human resources (HR), being a shared service, needs to build relationships with internal stakeholders
as well as implement strategies that impact the entire organization. The HR organization needs to
communicate and collaborate with all internal customers in a seamless and streamlined manner to
ensure it has an impactful but just the right touch relationship with all users. Within this, there are some
cues in the HR function where enterprise social networks and collaborative tools may add value to
existing business processes:
▪ The most critical component of an HR organization is communication with employees and
business partners. The ability to streamline the communication channels from HR can be
supported by a centralized communications mechanism like an enterprise social network that
helps facilitate and direct conversations to specific groups or hierarchies within the company.
▪ Education and learning, enabled through face-to-face interactions for both broad-based and
specialized expertise, remain a critical success factor for the HR organization in creating a
learning culture across the organization, whether in person or via electronic means, including
dynamic digital content or video. Connecting to users via video (both real time and recorded
for learning, training, and compliance purposes) on a platform can deliver a strong
communication channel while delivering a face-to-face experience in both self-directed
settings and classroom style. Enterprise social networks and collaboration tools can support
this by becoming the central platform from where the content delivery takes place.
METHODOLOGY
This white paper establishes and validates a core set of metrics in the human resources line of
business based on individual key performance indicators (KPIs) and role-based outputs. The metrics
are added to a framework that enables the benefits of enterprise social networks and collaborative

2. ©2017 IDC #US42881117 2
technologies to be mapped against existing business objectives and future potential scenarios. This is
in line with IDC's ongoing research into the challenges associated with traditional collaborative
applications and enterprise social networks, and the deployment of software tools designed to improve
those processes. Research includes interviews with software vendors in 2017, as well as their partners
and customers, to understand the key attributes and benefits of enterprise social networks systems.
IN THIS WHITE PAPER
This IDC white paper describes how augmenting social workflow through the use of enterprise social
networks and collaborative tools can add business value to existing business processes for the HR
function inside the enterprise. This document is one of the series of line-of-business white papers that
help articulate the business value of social solutions across sales, HR, marketing, and support
functions, primarily through the linkage of key performance indicators and role-based outcomes and
outputs. Understanding the basis of how HR executives, management, and staff are incentivized to
perform can elicit where a social process may support existing business metrics. In addition,
processes that are shared can also be supported by enterprise social networks and traditional
collaborative applications, so understanding how those are accounted for between employees,
customers, partners, and suppliers adds another dimension to where an organization can recognize
explicit business value from social solutions. Over and above this, there are a number of scenarios
where enterprise social networks can impact the HR function directly because of the changing nature
of businesses' strategic objectives. Understanding these scenarios will enable business decision
makers, particularly those looking to support the changing nature of HR, formulate plans to support
specific business processes through enterprise social networks and ultimately add incremental
business value across the organization.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
With the HR function operating across the entire organization, the collaboration that takes place in this
group is heavily project and workflow driven, and some very explicit roles and processes have evolved.
This means that the KPIs, incentives, and processes that support this are extremely individualized. To
be of significant value, an enterprise social network or a collaborative tool needs to be deeply
embedded into the workflow and daily activities of HR associates and readily available to
management. It also needs to support existing enterprise transaction systems and other collaborative
applications.
Human resources, being a shared service, supports all business functions equally; this means that
each module of the HR function has explicit collaboration processes that are deeply embedded in the
workflow as well as provide a horizontal layer to support the entire organization.
IDC has identified some specific measurable outcomes inside the HR function, from both a team and
an individual perspective. With the success of the HR function being tied to the overall organization,
the majority of processes are shared with other business units and command shared outputs and
outcomes. This sets a more collaborative approach where enterprise social networks and collaboration
tools can support existing relationships through lightweight task and workflow management as well as
integration with key HR business applications, and the KPIs for employees in the function support this
view.

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Key Performance Indicators
Although human resources is a nonrevenue generating business function, with the overarching
department objective being management and development of human capital, HR costs are typically
shared back to the operations, business lines, executive, and other corporate administration functions.
To demonstrate business value from HR and to justify costs, it is critical to understand the interactions
and relationships that business units have with the HR function as well as users inside HR. To
measure the impact of these relationships and interactions, the HR function requires a more broad-
based and horizontal alignment approach to business goals and measures of the company. In
addition, KPIs of individual employees will be more individualized against specific roles and
responsibilities. The combination of overarching company objectives and how individual HR
employees interact with the organization, all the way from recruitment to retirement, will underpin
where social collaboration can add value to existing business processes, particularly those processes
that are semistructured and shared with other business units. Elaborating further:
▪ Employee experiences. With the changing nature of work, "employee engagement" is
becoming much harder for organizations to measure. With this, many organizations,
particularly in utilities, banking, telecommunications, and in other regulated industries, where
more of the core business process are becoming automated, are no longer placing emphasis
on employee engagement as a business measure. More generally, organizations are looking
to improve employee "experiences," so by proxy improving overall employee engagement.
Enterprise social networks and collaborative technologies can help facilitate these experiences
through the ability to parse data and information from other systems and by providing context
to existing applications any user in an organization may use. They can also provide lightweight
analytics and reporting to allow users make connections with experts or other information
sources to help show current behavior as well as future potential behavior.
▪ Workforce planning. With an increasing pressure on workforce productivity and the
incremental automation of business processes, the level of autonomy of individual employees
increases. However, this means that exception handling or ad hoc decision making decreases
while becoming more critical and self-directed. Organizations IDC spoke with were focused on
planning for a more flexible workforce that can respond with the appropriate skill sets.
Enterprise social networks and collaboration tools could generate recommendations of other
employees to connect with or any relevant materials associated with certain skill categories.
▪ Overall health of the talent pipeline. An overarching output of recruitment (either internal or
external through partners) is the need to understand the talent pipeline. Applying individual
metrics to the talent pipeline, like allocating appropriate backfill candidates and identification of
key person risk (where there may only be one employee that is able to perform a certain
function), can help support the health of the overall talent pipeline. An enterprise social
network or collaboration tool could be utilized to bring in external partners or other internal
stakeholders to discuss, rate, and track risks.
▪ Managing communications. With the need for HR users to work closely with all business units
as well as with partners, communication is critical to disseminate information, share practices,
talent, and work expectations. Desktop/screen sharing is most common in processes where
materials need to be created and distributed. In addition, collaborative file sharing becomes
critical to deliver not only the document or information that is being worked on but also the
context around the document. As an example, an enterprise social network or collaboration
tool could be used in the rollout and ongoing support of a new performance management
system. Screen sharing can be utilized to share information, and any questions can be asked
in a central forum.

4. ©2017 IDC #US42881117 4
▪ Integrating hiring practices. A current trend across the HR industry is the focus on internal
promotion rather than external recruitment. With external recruitment taking a secondary
focus, the inputs from third-party recruitment providers need to become more targeted
because they are supporting a specific need that can't be fulfilled by an internal candidate. An
outcome of this is the need for organizations to streamline information throughput between the
internal hiring processes and practices and the inputs from third-party recruiters. The ability to
pull together all contributors, where they have access to shared data as well as metrics and
measures on the status of the relationship, can be facilitated through an enterprise social
network or a collaboration tool that can enable user and group-based permissions.
▪ Cost and safety. Explicitly in the utilities industry, the focus is on capital investment in
infrastructure, where employees play a supporting role. This means that cost per employee is
not a critical measure, but making sure those employees are supported to perform at their
peak is critical. This involves measuring accuracy and success rates in specific tasks. An
enterprise social network or a collaboration tool can be utilized in onboarding new employees
where there is a structured set of processes; this is particularly pertinent in utilities but also
relevant across other industries where processes are less structured.
▪ Metrics. Individual KPIs in HR are heavily tied to the specific function within the department,
making aggregate functional metrics more complex. For example, recruiting metrics explicitly
measure time to hire and cost of hire, where these metrics would be irrelevant for an employee
whose focus is on performance management. An enterprise social network or a collaboration
tool could support learning, where formal learning can be extended using topic-based
communities.
Cross-Function Collaboration
With human resources supporting all business functions equally, there is the distinct ability to support
workflow and process within each module of the HR function through 1:1 and explicit collaboration
processes. These processes would tie to an individual KPI where they are responsible for specific and
measurable outcomes. Across the organization, measures for the HR function are tied directly where
the impact is associated with system workflow. HR, being a shared service, interacts equally across
organizations, although some interactions are deemed more important than others:
▪ Finance. Human resources is a cost center, so being able to deliver sound metrics on
contribution of staff remuneration as a function of operating expenses is critical. Finance users
could be involved in workforce planning facilitated by enterprise social networks or
collaboration workspaces that act as a repository for financial management metrics as well as
a space to plan and forecast future workforce allocation.
▪ Communications. Where people are involved, communication is also critical. With
communications and HR both being internal shared services, having a single consolidated
message is critical. Open communication between both groups can be facilitated through an
enterprise social network or a collaboration tool, where conversations about urgent topics can
be highlighted and a single consolidated message can be shared unilaterally so that both
business units are aware of changes. The most common scenario for this urgent response is
where organizational structure changes are being made. Other qualitative value comes from
increased collaboration across the organization rather than through traditional hierarchical
layers. Organizations are historically highly structured with command chains, and in the worst
cases overly stovepiped where employees have to communicate up and then back down.
Communication through collaboration tools allows like-minded individuals to be able to share
their successes, questions, problems that require resolution and to learn from one another in a
way that's much more fluid and natural.

5. ©2017 IDC #US42881117 5
▪ Information technology. The entire HR life cycle, from recruitment to retirement and every
employee/HR milestone in between, is underpinned by technology systems. Enabling external
partners, information sharing, search and collaboration, and delivering reporting and analytics
are all critical parts of the life cycle. A clear and deliberate relationship must exist with internal
IT departments and external IT services providers, with service-level agreements,
chargeback/share-back expectations, and shared outcomes being documented and
measured. To enable streamlined communication and support, an enterprise social network
can connect all users for not only information sharing but also service and support.
▪ Learning management. The activity of training is inherently social as there are many users and
participants active in the process. The ability to share and collaborate, particularly in online
training, around how to execute explicit business processes is critical. In a training scenario,
sharing information in an activity stream feed can help quickly disseminate all relevant and
supplemental information as well as highlight any user questions or concerns. Learning
management is also increasingly connected with employee performance management. In this
scenario, the linkage of learning and performance systems can be facilitated through an
enterprise social network or a collaboration tool as the information broker.
▪ Employee performance management. Gathering and facilitating feedback is inherently
collaborative so lends itself well as a process that could be facilitated by collaboration and a
more social workflow. With the need to capture many information types, notes, interviews,
conversations, emails, and documents, an enterprise social network or collaboration tool can
become both a central information repository and an information transit. All participants in the
process could access certain parts of the workflow process and information contained in
groups as well as enable restricted permissions and user-level information privacy settings.
▪ Collaborating with talent suppliers. Collaboration products enable disparate groups to jointly
plan, create, and revise strategies and documents shared with HR partners, including talent
providers. Aligned to both the relationship validation through constant contact and the need to
manage multiple customer, partner, and supplier relationships, email and networked file
sharing were still the most widely used tool to collate and distribute information, whereas web
conferencing (audio and screen sharing) was the next commonly used functionality. Screen
sharing and recruitment are inextricably linked, so the reliance of the HR function on the ability
to quickly share and deliver content to talent suppliers and partners has become an
increasingly important function. Although screen sharing could be a piece of this overall
collaboration across internal and external parties, it is now just becoming targeted way to help
these organizations deliver faster value to the corporate functions that rely on HR.
FUTURE OUTLOOK
The ultimate success for human resources is based on how effective it is at delivering streamlined and
impactful experiences across the employee life cycle, from recruitment to retirement. Currently, there
is a gap between how organizations understand the impact of those experiences and how the function
and individual users are incented to perform. There are some specific use cases where organizations
can add value to existing business processes by using enterprise social networks and collaboration
tools. The most pertinent components are:
▪ Personal and professional information. Delivering an impactful experience for employees
should transcend the relationship they have with the company they are employed at. The
overarching experience should tie together learning, training, and development, where
individual users have a vested interest in the personal and professional information they
contribute to and have been provided by their employer. The use of an enterprise social

6. ©2017 IDC #US42881117 6
network or a collaboration tool to deliver intelligent filtering of appropriate support training and
development information as well as detailed management of personal information through a
case management approach can help an employee capture all relevant information in a timely
manner. It also builds a relationship between the employee and the employer beyond current
tenure.
▪ Video for learning and training. Connecting HR users with broader constituents in the
organization over a video format is essential to enable a more interactive and engaging
experience. Enabling a scenario where HR leaders and trainers can connect with specific
users in a private video-enabled workspace embedded inside an HR or a productivity
application can help create a single consolidated platform. That platform would contain all HR-
related information as well as parse other systems to deliver other relevant information to
streamline the workflow.
There were some additional cues in the broader organizational metrics discussion that highlight
opportunities for an enterprise social network, and collaboration tools may be able to close the gap
between unmet needs and incentives. Elaborating further:
▪ Building and maintaining relationships. Enabling a single stream of communication (single
source of truth) that captures communications, activities, and actions will help an individual
disseminate information quickly and effectively, creating the difference between a simple
connection and an ongoing engagement. The value an enterprise social network or a
collaboration tool will bring at this stage is the ability to parse business systems to
acknowledge existing business relationships, consolidate prospective profile information, and
deliver a stronger basis to build a level of relationship appropriate for the situation.
Collaboration tools act as a home base for learning initiatives and employee relationships with
a blend of formal and informal content and also provide a way for employees and HR partners
to share supplemental material that really didn't fit in other enterprise systems. The outcome of
this is also beneficial to the service and support organization, where it could then take the
details about relationships and information sharing to build a more proactive response profile
from an internal operations perspective as well as an external response mechanism.
▪ Small changes adding up. Supporting the changing needs of employees over time requires a
consistent and conscientious effort. However, supporting business systems is often not on the
same change cadence as the business itself, so ad hoc and additional business processes are
built to support this change. For an organization to deliver a holistic and consistent experience
to its constituents, the concept of continuous innovation and learning as an organization needs
to be applied to the business. This is applicable across all lines of business, with the most
critical component being the ability to successfully account for and deliver shared processes
either internally or externally (with partners and suppliers). With traditional systems and
application changes often being more structured and big bang in approach, making
incremental business processes and systems changes can add up to much larger business
benefits over time.

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▪ Quality not quantity. For HR organizations to continue to meet the changing expectations of
employees, the organizations also need to understand all the future potential touch points
those employees will have with the business. Focusing on the quality of business outcomes
through deeper engagement and understanding of the needs of individual employees provide
a way to build a greater profile of the overarching business change an organization is trying to
make. It will be critical for all business functions to quickly identify the influencers inside and
outside any organization as well as create a fast bond. This will help enable more proactive
engagement earlier on in the relationship. Enterprise social networks and collaboration tools
will support this by streamlining initial relationship building where documents and information,
as well as associated profile information, may need to be shared. With the additional context
provided by the enterprise social network, users are able to gain a greater insight into the
future needs of a customer and be more proactive in servicing the ongoing relationship.
CONCLUSION
When it comes to achieving desired business results and exceptional products, services, and end-
customer relationships, individual incentives and specific HR processes are all inextricably linked.
However, in many organizations, it is extremely complex to sensibly link all these components and
execute upon a consistent employee-centric and customer-centric strategy. In most cases, not all parts
of the business need to be connected, but organizations need to make sure they have the right
connections in place to find the right information at the right time. Connecting business processes to
incentives, particularly those processes that have workflow dependencies or those that are shared with
customers, business partners, or suppliers inside and outside the business, also requires support from
social collaboration tools to deliver intelligent information filtering with controls to ensure the right level
of information can be shared whenever it is required.
The notion of relationships and engagement underpins how all business teams perform based on the
criticality of any given decision, as well as where the handoff points exist for any given decision. The
ability to streamline this decision workflow, particularly where multiple customers, suppliers, or
partners are involved and workflow is required between internal business functions, will become a
critical success factor for organizations looking to complement existing business processes with social
collaboration tools. Being available and responsive are the main goal of the HR function from a
strategic perspective. This translates to a core requirement to streamline operations and deliver
seamless connections to information and data. This focus on operational excellence and efficiency will
continue to be a core focus in information sharing and dissemination. However, enabling the most
appropriate connections and delivering streamlined access to information in a measurable way where
it is needed can help perpetuate the move to a more flexible, agile, and adaptable organization.

8. About IDC
International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory
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based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts
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