1. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
Infinite Best: Optimizing
Human Capital
Your Guide to Better Human Resource
Management with Enterprise Social
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

2. Introduction
Part One:
The New Face of Collaboration
Part Two:
The Elegant People-Centric Solution
Part Three:
Human Aptitude
Table of
Contents
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Enterprise Social describes a new way of working that taps into the power of human networks. It’s an approach that brings the essence of consumer social
networks—connecting with others, rapid information sharing, and easy discovery—to the enterprise. By connecting individuals to a dynamic network of
people and information, Enterprise Social enables employees to respond faster, accomplish more, and keep your business moving forward together.
The Microsoft vision for Enterprise Social is to empower organizations to work like a network by delivering seamless social experiences across familiar
applications people already use, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Yammer, SharePoint Online, Lync, and virtually any other
application or service that matters to your company.

3. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
Human Resources (HR) departments used to be
the muscle in the corporate world. HR professionals
served as gatekeepers to job candidates, and they
managed employees in cases of both success and
failure. HR was kind of intimidating.
That’s old school. With some fast-growing and remarkable companies such as
Airbnb and Pinterest in the news for their investments in people, executives
are getting serious about fostering cultures that can drive market advantages.
Today’s HR mandates are at the forefront of optimizing human capital
investments by ensuring that the company accelerates productivity, empowers
employees, and generates revenue.
The new HR is more concerned with enabling employees to succeed. They’re
on the hook to build a culture of innovation. They are taking the lead in
attracting talent in a competitive marketspace and increasing
employee efficiency.
“Practically every CEO
talks about building an
‘innovation culture.’ HR
should be central to
cultivating that culture.”
—Michael Wolf, “How HR Departments
Can Create an Innovation Culture,”
Wall Street Journal
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4. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
When joining a company, many employees look closely at the culture. To ensure your reputation, your HR team needs
tools that put people at the center of the environment—tools that facilitate communication, collaboration, and learning
among employees, and measure the company’s ability to attract and retain talent.
HR teams now work at the C-level to drive operations. Their key challenges revolve around employee engagement,
internal collaboration, and training and development. They use new technologies to influence strategy, support culture
changes, and measure results.
The biggest changes are happening in internal communications. As HR teams are facilitating “activity-based working”—
where employees don’t have an assigned workstation—they are also enabling workers to connect with colleagues from
anywhere by using communication, collaboration, and social tools. Such tools are the foundations of Microsoft Enterprise
Social, a technology suite that addresses the need to optimize the workforce environment.
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5. This e-book’s objective is to show you how to optimize your HR team by adopting
Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies. First, it defines Enterprise Social and shows
the value of these solutions for HR professionals. Second, it presents approaches to
three current HR priorities—engaging employees, boosting internal collaboration,
and improving training and development—and illustrates how Enterprise Social can
help you tackle them.
Finally, it shows you how to get started in producing desired HR outcomes.

6. Part One:
The New Face of Collaboration

7. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
It has always been central for
HR to assert and defend the
company’s interests. Now, with
Enterprise Social technologies,
the field is ripe with previously
unimaginable opportunities and
mandates in areas including
benefits administration,
compensation management,
injury and illness tracking, and
employee development.
“An HR team that uses Enterprise Social has
loads of data on the workforce, ranging
from employee satisfaction and employee
engagement to business knowledge gaps,” says
an HR professional who uses Yammer. “This
data helps identify trends quickly to determine
what management and leadership should
focus their efforts on.”
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8. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
HR can implement Enterprise Social technologies to engage employees, improve communication, promote teamwork,
and decrease turnover. It can facilitate better and more accessible training opportunities, which leads to greater
retention. Moreover, HR can gather insights and analyze its progress in cultivating human capital.
Using Enterprise Social tools, HR teams can even create a companywide benefits portal, host e-learning and mentoring
programs, crowdsource new endeavors and innovations, onboard new talent, disseminate high-impact company news,
and replace their company intranet.
“Companies no longer need an HR team that handles administrative paperwork,” says the HR professional. “With new
Enterprise Social technologies, HR can focus on helping the company streamline outdated processes and stay ahead on
people management and performance management.”
What’s the return on investment of Enterprise Social solutions? Industry analyst firm IDC estimates that for a company
of 1,000 employees, eliminating collaboration challenges would be the equivalent to hiring 213 new employees. Plus,
Enterprise Social can ignite passion in the workforce, which is priceless.
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“Leveraging Enterprise Social helps us grow our business by enabling
our staff—who are innately good—to perform even better.”
—Shekhar Ramamurthy, Joint President, United Breweries Limited

9. Part Two:
The Elegant People-Centric Solution

10. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
With the business world
changing rapidly, there are
three central HR priorities.
Organizations have to address
the challenges of engaging
employees, improving
collaboration, and making
professional development
opportunities available.
Employees who are engaged have
significantly higher productivity,
profitability, and customer ratings,
according to a 2013 study by Gallup.
They also experience lower turnover, less
absenteeism, and fewer safety incidents.
Engaged employees are enthusiastic about
their jobs and committed to their work,
and they are the ones most likely to drive
innovation, growth, and revenue.
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11. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
It’s not a question of whether you use Enterprise Social tools. You can
no more avoid them than you could have avoided email. These simple
technologies create an employee social network that uses familiar
tools, frees information from disconnected silos, and eliminates clunky
communication channels. It’s happening.
Companies and HR teams are learning the value of optimizing their greatest
resource, people. They must build on employees’ unique strengths to help
them reach their full potential.
Engage Employees
They used to say a company is never the same six months later. That’s not
the case anymore: A company is not the same even six weeks later. The kind
of agility expected of leadership and employees demands new tools and a
new way of thinking about work. Annual reviews are not often enough.
By adopting Yammer, a private social network for enterprises, employees
have a place to collaborate in real time and get responses instantly. Instead
of writing an email message, a worker can post a question on Yammer,
which can trigger a dialogue and give a voice to everyone in their network.
This approach engages employees and makes individuals feel valued.
Because social networks are second nature by now, employees are less afraid
to be opinionated, thoughtful, and passionate about the work they do.
“When we’re promoting
an internal initiative or
introducing technology,
we post on Yammer. Not
only does that get the
word out, we get valuable
feedback, too.”
—Andrew Ling, Group Director of
Information Technology, Esquel Group
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12. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
Create a News Hub
With Yammer as your Enterprise Social network, you can post announcements
and updates in the All Company feed. Internal social media tools can benefit new
employees, who will enjoy enhanced experiences and speed their time to productivity.
Give Employees a Voice
Employees find it easy to join the conversation when using Yammer. Businesses can
host monthly Q&A sessions with executives. Enterprise Social networks encourage
employees to give feedback, and transparency goes both ways.
Empower Team Alignment
Enterprise Social networks can help cross-functional teams work together efficiently.
Employees can use Office 365 and Yammer to create workspaces and align quickly on
project efforts. Teams can use a Yammer Group to collect project materials and track
progress. Companies that adopt Microsoft OneDrive for Business enable teams and
individuals to set up a single repository for all documents.
Motivate with Feedback
Employees need real-time, real-world, and regular feedback. You can use Enterprise
Social tools to foster constant feedback—both negative and positive—to motivate
employees to achieve goals faster and course correct sooner.
Build a Cohesive Culture
You can connect employees across departmental, geographic, and generational
barriers. By using Yammer, employees from across your organization, including
remote workers, are brought together and the company’s culture is nurtured.
Ways to Inspire Your People
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For example, employees are not
afraid to question why a product
has certain deficiencies and why the
company needs to change features
to satisfy customers.
“Enterprise Social increases visibility,”
says the HR professional. “Managers
can acknowledge good work on a
more informal basis with a simple
“like” or by using the “Praise” feature.
At the same time, everything that’s
done in Yammer becomes the raw
material and evidence for the annual
review.”
With these tools, you can create a
constant employee feedback loop,
which promotes daily inspiration,
reduces friction, and creates a
responsive company culture. You
motivate employees by keeping
them up to date on strategies,
initiatives, and processes that drive
the company’s goals.
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13. Collaborate Internally
Efficient collaboration involves building a bridge among silos within your organization, making information and
documents easily accessible to employees, and streamlining decision making. The future workplace is inherently connected,
with people at the center. It is now possible to deliver relevant information, like documents and conversations, to members
of your company based on how they interact with a product or person, using Microsoft Office Graph.
Because technologies are becoming increasingly connected, they are also becoming smarter. Enterprise Social
technologies are as connected as the people who use them.
HR teams can use Enterprise Social to ensure that at every level of the company, people are communicating in a transparent
and organized fashion. Teams can create Yammer Groups to store all communications and resources in one place.
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76%80%
Using Enterprise Social, 80 percent of workers
are better informed about what is happening
inside the organization.
With Enterprise Social, workers experience 76
percent more visibility into other company
departments and locations.
ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR

14. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
Get ’Em Talking
You can use Microsoft Enterprise Social—a sophisticated set of collaboration and
communication tools—to help employees within a specific program, department, or
project work better together.
Find the Experts
Enterprise Social lets employees cast a wide net when seeking expertise. People can
intuitively find and discover relevant information, and learn from previous projects. By
using Office Delve, for example, employees discover what others are working on and
easily locate documents based on user activity.
Create Together—Faster
Employees can use Office 365 to co-edit documents, discuss changes in real time, and
update documents in side-by-side document conversations, which enable people to
share ideas and expertise around Office documents, images, and videos right from
within the content they are reviewing. Teams can use OneDrive for Business to sync
and store the pertinent set of documents, which are secure and available to anyone
who has a link.
Inspire Innovation
By crowdsourcing ideas from across your company with Yammer, you can tap a
vast and deep intellectual pool for ideas about a project or initiative. It also makes
a difference to be able to seamlessly provide feedback to employees and give
individuals deserved visibility
Connect Wherever
With Enterprise Social tools in place, everyone can stay in the loop even when they’re
on the go. With the Yammer mobile app, remote employees can engage in important
conversations and access documents on a device running Windows, iOS, or Android.
Ways to Boost Collaboration
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For example, employees can discuss
benefits information—such as
childcare options and retirement
planning—in one forum.
This cross-discipline,
multigenerational, and all-employee
collaboration inevitably leads to
increased innovation. And no work
environment is more exciting than
one that generates freedom of
expression and participation.
“The Enterprise Social network
becomes increasingly valuable
because it is a repository of
knowledge,” says an HR professional.
“Individuals can access information
that formerly would have been
hidden in email boxes. Informal
learning takes place constantly.”
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15. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
Train and Develop
Every growing company faces the challenge of promoting a startup feel by making sure all employees are exposed to
opportunities and granted recognition. Enterprise Social galvanizes your investment in employees by helping to drive
retention, prepare the next generation of leaders, and cultivate smoother successions and transitions.
“Yammer has been a wonderful tool to welcome new employees [and] make sure that they feel connected right away,”
says Stephanie Pettinati, senior manager of corporate communications at One Kings Lane.
The tools allow for the successful delivery of employee training and create effective structures for peer learning and
mentorship—facilitating the kind of healthy knowledge transfer that nurtures success.
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of new hires are likely to stay longer
than three years if they experience well-
structured onboarding.
—Aberdeen Group
69%

16. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
Give a Warm Welcome
Using Yammer to onboard employees has become a best practice. It enables
newcomers to form connections, ask questions, and hit the ground running. With
a Yammer Group devoted to new hires, HR can uniformly communicate important
information and provide tools such as a first-day checklist. These self-service portals
can administer all onboarding information in one place.
Be a Study Buddy
You can use OneDrive for Business to build a library of training materials for different
domain areas, and make it easy for employees to learn at their own pace. By using
document conversations, employees can start a Yammer conversation while viewing a
file and get the attention of an extended audience.
Make Mentors
Employees continuously learn from each other—and about each other—through
social conversations. With Yammer, you can simply remove barriers and decrease
friction between departments, and employees with diverse expertise can easily share
knowledge with each other.
Showcase Internal Opportunities
HR can take advantage of Enterprise Social tools to widely broadcast professional
development tools and facilitate mentorships. Employees can use Delve to nurture
specific interests and get visibility into peers’ interests.
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4Ways to Drive
Professional Development
At the end of the day, it’s not
about the technology itself, but
about how that technology
empowers employees to do
their best work.
Happy employees are about
12 percent more productive,
according to a 2014 Fast
Company report. And get this:
People who get the “grand”
treatment are even more
efficient. Imagine how your
company’s goals would be
approached if leadership—
including HR—took the time to
make all workers feel special.
Enterprise Social tools make
it possible to regularly deliver
positive feedback to employees
in front of a wide audience.

17. Human Aptitude
Part Three:

18. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
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A finely tuned Enterprise
Social solution adapts to
modern work styles, and
helps to engage employees,
encourage collaboration,
and foster professional
development.
“Enterprise Social solutions help
motivate and retain top talent by
allowing them to stay engaged with
the business and participate as valued
members of the organization,” says an
HR professional. “Being able to make an
impact and have a voice in the company
keeps employees invested.”

19. ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR HR
With the Microsoft global competence in big data, cloud, mobile, and social technologies, you can feel confident
that you are building a future on solid ground. Enterprise Social technologies should be comprehensive, connected,
enterprise-ready, and easy to adopt.
In the end, you want to attract, onboard, retain, and develop talent who are focused on a shared vision of success in a
connected, collaborative workforce. That’s what you do with human aptitude, your most potent resource with the highest
reward potential. That’s how you run a business.
To learn about HR solutions that can help you manage human capital,
visit www.enterprisesocial.com.
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20. www.enterprisesocial.com