HR practices are taking a leap on social media

When it comes to talent search, companies have taken to social media like a duck to water. A LinkedIn survey pegs that nearly 44 per cent companies in India use social media to hire. HR practitioners are increasingly using social platforms for engagement and as a learning platform.

But just imagine using social media for attendance. Bang In The Middle, a three-year-old ad agency in Gurgaon, has moved its attendance systems to Twitter. Six months ago, the agency junked its old-world attendance register and created a special hashtag for its employees on the micro-blogging site. Each morning, the agency's staffers post selfies on Twitter with the hashtag #PresentSir. "We are a new-age company. We felt we should use new-age methods," quips Managing Partner Naresh Gupta. The advantage is that employees who are out for meetings or at a client site can register their presence from there. "Attendance over Twitter gives me two things - location and a time stamp." It can also tell clients whether the person they are dealing with in the agency is in office or not.

Going public with attendance is very in. Take the Modi government's attendance.gov.in portal, whereby any citizen can find out if an official is present. Apart from transparency, the portal was also supposed to generate nifty analytics on how regular at work the government servants are.

Indeed, a host of plug and play attendance apps and software that large companies use throw up automated analytics at the click of a button. On the downside, these systems using biometrics or access cards can cause irritation among employees who are "on the move". Reports suggest the government's attendance system has already run into non-compliance issues.

The drawback in the Bang In The Middle Twitter attendance system is that the collation of each employee's records is still manual. For a 50-member office, it is not a big deal, but for large corporations, social media attendance is not practical right now. As James Thomas, Country Manager, India, Kronos, says: "A lot of adhoc attendance solutions get deployed in workplaces when solutions need to be industry grade, scalable, reliable, and sustainable to larger populations spread across locations." But he admits the impact of social media is an engaging conversation especially among millennials and Gen Z who would seek flexibility. As Gupta says: "It makes the entire process of coming to office a little more fun. People even check-in in groups."

Nabomita Mazumdar, Partner, Cite HR, a community for HR professionals, describes how companies like e-Zest announce their employee of the month on Facebook or how PriceBaba shares its work culture on YouTube. "Inventive ways are here and we will see a new high in firms using social media," she says.