Today I met with a former director of Motorola human resources. We had an interesting conversation about how blogging can have a profound impact on the HR world.

After sitting and talking for some time he told me the greatest problem any HR person faces is “measuring people results.” He told me that HR professionals are constantly measuring employee satisfaction, moral, salaries, and other similar info. But since each of these involve people and not hard statistics it’s hard to measure. And couple that with the long lag times it takes to get employee survey’s completed in an organization spread out like Motorola and you’ve got yourself a HR nightmare.

So as we began to talk further about HR issues and how blogs might be used to help alleviate some of them, my friend began to work through some specific issues he faced. He said the three problems with data survey’s are:

1. The speed at which results can be compiled and returned to the employees (letting them know the company is out for action based upon their results)
2. Non-authentic results because the survey questions didn’t hit the root problem
3. Duplication of the surveys on a more regular basis to measure initiative effectiveness

We continued talking for a while about this and everything came back to data. Data surveys are valuable tools, but they only tell half of the story - they only tell you where you’re at today (and most don’t even take into account the entire organization). So what we were able to come up with together is that if a company wants to deploy an assessment and solicit authentic feedback regarding their performance in a specific area then they must open that up for dialogue and use a vehicle like a blog to gather feedback about the data returned in the survey.

The big “ah ha!” was that the data should begin to push us to initiatives (the Innovation in Nebo Group’s i4 Methodology). A good data survey should produce observations about your organization that you didn’t even know had problems and coupling that with a blog to dialogue about the data is the second hand in a two-handed handshake.

When people are engaged to dialogue about the data set produced by them, they generally have the answer as well. If you give them a forum, whether a smaller focus group for an individual department or a blog-style forum, innovative ideas will come forth from the people who are most effected by the problems. And as Dr. John C. Maxwell stated “Decisions should be made on the lowest level possible.”

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