Future of HR – Building reputation both online and offline

“Reputation takes years to build but a minute to destroy”. While this is an often repeated adage, it is more relevant today than ever before. Traditionally, reputation management is seen as an external function where perception of the outside world is considered to be the fulcrum of a company’s reputation. However, with increasing penetration of social media and presence of online, there has been a paradigm shift of how to build reputation and who is the custodian of the same.

In an age of Social media where information sharing has been developed at a very fast pace, maintaining good reputation of an organization becomes even more important.  With around 400 million socially connected internet and mobile users in India, the HR function has a huge responsibility of managing the corporate responsibility,

Social media, be it social or professional networking, blogs or message boards, can turn out to be a vital cog in the wheel for a company’s reputation management. But this opportunity has put a different spin to the work profile of HR team. Considering that the employees are exposed to information at real time basis, the role of HR is also dynamic.

Future of HR rests in its ability to understand the new age audience and go beyond – whether to provide access to online during working hours or which sites to restricts access. HR will now have to focus on directing the employees towards the right direction or source of information and also ensure that necessary material is available to them handy.

A proactive HR needs to know what the employees are looking for or facing or lacking, and gives the company the space to restructure its plans accordingly. This is where online medium adds muscle to HR’s strength. Many of the organisations have started investing time and resources in training programs giving employees the knowledge, skills and abilities with better opportunities. Developing skills of the existing workforce by investing in their training and development not only gives them with a better edge at work but also makes sure that the employees develop a positive attitude towards the organization which further enriches an organisation’s reputation. A very strong performance management system which can be efficiently implemented across the organization helping the members of the organization motivated to increase the operational and financial performance of the organization, digital is the most powerful tool!!

Hence the future of HR is digital that will position HR is a strategic partner to the business, advancing the company's goals and objectives, the most effective tool in motivating employees in the future.