The advent of virtual communities and their influence on shaping the workforce in undeniable.\u00a0 What started ages ago with people talking over the phone but perhaps never meeting has turned into true communities where people can identify themselves with groups of people based on semi-unique traits.\u00a0 Within our organizations, this can simply mean \u201cI belong to sales\u201d or \u201cI worked on Project X.\u201d\u00a0 However, more and more it also means that we can search out people with unique capabilities to augment our teams with skills that are increasingly evident in other employees.<\/p>\n
Our workplace is now inexorably shaped by both physical and virtual communities \u2013 so much so that often the boundaries are quite blurred, and that blurring will only become more opaque as time goes on.<\/p>\n
Andrew<\/a> points us in a great article<\/a> by John Hegel who tries to explain some of the characteristics of virtual communities:<\/p>\n Vitural communities inexorably seek to extend their interactions into physical space and a complex interweaving of physical and virtual communities occurs over time.\u00a0 ((Hagel, John, March, 31, 2007.\u00a0 \u201cCommunity 2.0.\u201d\u00a0 Retrieved from http:\/\/edgeperspectives.typepad.com on April 3, 2007.))<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Why is this important to HR you ask?\u00a0 The obvious is in recruitment where candidates are sourced and lost to the web of easily found job opportunities.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not what I\u2019m concerned about.\u00a0 I\u2019m very concerned that HR has not found it\u2019s place in how our businesses actually research, develop, create, and innovate around new products.\u00a0 After all, we do provide the talent that drives our businesses.\u00a0 And when we talk about talent management, we aren\u2019t only talking about making sure our employees are happy and engaged to perform well, but should we not have a vested interest in seeing that they also have the right tools and organizational connections to do their jobs most effectively?<\/p>\n I have and will be talking a lot about innovation and collaboration networks.\u00a0 How we can use data to understand our workforce and in turn, help our workforce identify opportunities within itself will be key to our future success.\u00a0 It\u2019s part of the big HR clich\u00e9 of \u201chaving a seat at the table.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019m not saying that we should be driving virtual communities and innovation networks, but we should definitely have a part in shaping their design and use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The advent of virtual communities and their influence on shaping the workforce in undeniable.\u00a0 What started ages ago with people talking over the phone but perhaps never meeting has turned into true communities where people can identify themselves with groups…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,10,8,2,44,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communications","category-engagement","category-strategies","category-hr-technology","category-innovation","category-talent-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}