Social media demographics, managing succession and a common sense approach to Employee Engagement in this week's Three To See.

My first pick is The Age of Social Networks by Brian Solis who shares his analysis of the age demographics of social media users and draws on a number of useful infographics such as the one below:

Solis comments:

"At the moment, we can see that those 35-44 dominate the social web, representing 25% of total participation. For those who have actively monitored adoption of social networks, this next stat might not come as a surprise, but it’s worth highlighting nonetheless. Following at 19% isn’t a younger generation at all, in fact, those 45-54 are the second most active group within social networks, just ahead of the 25-34 segment at 18%.  Individuals under 17 rank fourth with 15%."

My second pick Dont Plan Succession, Manage It was posted to the i4cp blog by Mark Vickers and opens with the statement:

""Succession planning" is not just a flawed term, it's based on a flawed business paradigm. In fact, thinking of succession in terms of just "planning" is among the top reasons most organizations perform poorly in this area."

Vickers pulls on research conducted by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) in partnership with i4cp and observes;

"Yes, succession management should have a planning component. After all, the study shows it's a future-looking process in which the top two goals cited by respondents are to "identify and prepare" future leaders and to "assure business continuity." But many companies focus only on the identification part of the process rather than on the preparation part.

That's reflected in the metrics companies use or, rather, fail to use. When we asked what respondents' organizations are measuring, we found two things:

1. there's a striking and worrisome absence of solid metrics in regard to succession management, and
2. the metrics that are most commonly used are very basic indeed. Among those with succession planning programs, a meager 36% even track the positions filled by succession candidates to a high or very high extent and just 31% track the number of candidates in the pipeline to that same extent."

I think that these findings are interesting as they suggest that many organisations still have a long way to go in developing their approach to Succession Management.

Kris Dunn posted my final pick, Throw Away The Employee Engagement Strategic Plan to the Fistful of Talent blogging community.

Dunn shared this gem from Steve Church, Chief Operational Excellence Officer at Avnet:

"If you help employees fix broken process, you'll gain employee engagement"

I road-tested this statement with senior members of the UK HR community at last week's Sunday Times HR Business Network event (which was sponsored by StepStone Solutions) and it appeared to resonate with many of the practitioners participating in the discussion.

What do you think?

Tags: age, demographic, employee, engagement, internet, management, Media, morale, motivation, network, Networking, performance, plan, planning, productivity, RWW, Social, succesion, talent, web, web2.0

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at 9:33 am and is filed under Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, Three To See. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.