I've worked with HR departments for 25 years and there has always been talk about HR being leaders of the business.  Now is the time that we can actually do this

There are issues in the workforce that can be sorted now.  How do we get our teams to work together in a frictionless way?

How do we increase the employee experience?  How do we reduce cost at the same time?

How do we support all employees?

How do we get the best talent and before the competition?

How do we retain the talent we have?

This can all be enhanced using social media.  What do I mean?

Like Health and Safety, Diversity and Inclusion, Sexual Harassment, etc, Human Resource Leaders can no longer hide from the fact that employees use social media and a business now needs to recognize this and rather hide from it and pretend it does not exist, they have to embrace it and proactively support it.

If we look at Simon Kemp's Q4 Digital Snapshot 

https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2019-q4-global-digital-statshot

There are 3.75 Billion people in the world active on social media.  Your staff are on it, your alumni are on it and your future employees are on it.

So here's a thing.

Why don't we start using social?  Why don't empower people to use it and use it for our own advantage?

How do I mean?

We can use social to support maternity returners, make them feel welcome and get them contributing quicker.  In fact we can use social to enhance the employee experience across the business, supporting new starters enabling them to contribute faster.  We can also use it to get salespeople to contribute faster.  This, often is a game changer and the business case for this change in business.

Empowering your staff on social will also enable you to get access to the talent faster.  It will probably even reduce the amount you spend on recruiters and job adverts.  It might even make you the employer of choice in your industry.  This again is often a business case, based on the savings.

But emphasizing the employee experience, social is often a driver to help retain employees and impacting on the recruitment process. 

Finally we would expect a 25% increase in employee efficiency in using social.  That's 25% more employees for free!  Again, another business case.

As a new CHRO you could increase efficiency, reduce costs, reduce the cost of recruitment, increase retention and increase the general well being of employees.

Nice work!