Can companies use SNA to improve employee retention and increase productivity?

In today’s highly connected work environment, companies are having more and more trouble retaining their employees. While surfing the internet, I came across an interesting article on businessinsider.com related to SNA “Some Companies Once Banned Their Employees From Using LinkedIn”. I was shocked when I realized that most of these companies view Social Networks as a thread, maybe a couple of years back they didn’t realize how useful this networking platforms could be used to gather important data. There are numerous reasons for why people are changing jobs so often.

I believe that finding the right balance in this subject can be beneficial for both companies and employees. The average employees will not last longer than 5 years in a given job position or company. For some companies, loosing talent and highly experience workers can come at a very high cost. In my experience, most human resource departments and career services are using the same old methods for hiring and measuring employee satisfaction. There are many indicators that are missing or not taken into account when analyzing what people need and what prospective employees are looking for when applying for a job.

It is important to gather data from Social Networks to find better detailed insights from employees. The misconception is that people searching for a job are advised to sometimes close their social networking accounts, to avoid an adverse judgment from the company they are applying too. I believe that firms and people should be encouraged to communicate more openly their interests. Once gathering the data, companies should use SNA tools like UCINET to find relationships between the job positions, working hours, pay, productivity, people and other indicators. Also, it will be important to look into employees personal interests as something that companies can use to improve the working environment.

Raul Martinez #55603