MLab Management 2.0: Bruce Rayner, You at Work

 

   Bruce Rayner’s presentation also helped to demonstrate the impact of web 2.0, particularly for a Generation Y audience.

Web 2.0 offers a variety of benefits:

• Employees who interact socially with each other work harder
• The most engaged employees spend up to one hour a day on social networks, the least engaged employees do not.

 

However:

• 25% of employees use online social networks to interact but two thirds of companies ban social networks (and this proportion is increasing)
• This is a turn-off for employees (28% of <25s are frustrated by lack of social interactions with colleagues, 33% fo <25s are frustrated by restrictions over use of the web.

 

Rayner’s take on this is that taking a slice out of each day for social networking doesn’t decrease the ‘value adding wok’ slice - it increases the overall pie.  It:

• Develops the psychological contract between employer and employee changes
• Leads to increased trust, and higher creativity and productivity
• Blurs the distinction between work and play. You put “’our whole self in’.

 

Rayner also described how web 2.0 adds value to his firm’s products (flexible benefit solutions):

• 70% of employees wouldn’t be able to say what their flexible benefits are
• When they do understand, they tend to undervalue their benefits by about a third
• Social networking can be a more important employee engagement tool than traditional benefits.

 

You at Work have therefore developed a new offering, Meet at Work, which incorporates their employee benefits platform and web 2.0 facilities.  This helps stimulate interest in benefits, allows employees to trade benefits etc.

 

My main learning: Meet at Work is a really nice example of how existing compensation and benefits arrangements can be made more social through the use of web 2.0.  Benefits potentially provides a useful basis for this extension as it is already about increasing engagement, and social networking fits alongside this agenda.  However, I don’t see any reason why other HR technologies can’t be transformed in this way as well.

 

 

Technorati Tags: MLab,Management Lab,management 2.0,Bruce Rayner,You at Work,Meet at Work

 

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