Prediction 1: Reputation capital will be the top currency in the 2020 workplace. This is the sum total of your personal brand, your expertise, and the breadth, depth, and quality of your social networks.

Reputation Capital Promotion

Companies will increasingly source, recruit and promote new talent based upon their reputation capital. This means looking for employees who not only have wide, deep and high-quality social networks, but also demonstrate a track record of turning these networks into increased business value for the organization and stronger personal brand for themselves.

Already some companies, like Best Buy, are listing reputation capital as a requirement for some positions, such as the senior manager in emerging media marketing. Some of the job requirements – developed via crowdsourcing – included having active accounts and a significant following on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Plaxo, Ning, delicious, Slideshare, YouTube and PRWeb.

By 2020, hiring companies could very well make specific requirements that prospective employees have experience using these types of sites to further their business agenda.

According to Dr. Robert Cross, professor of management at the University of Virginia, high performers of an organization focus on building quality networks rather than large social networks. They may not know everyone, but the people they know, they know very well, and they invest in these relationships before they’ll actually need them to get their work accomplished.

What’s happened in the last year:

The launch of these two new companies in helping people build their reputation capital: cubedual and klout.

Questions:

Is reputation capital important to you?

Given the importance of reputation capital through social networking, should employers restrict/monitor social networking by employees?

Does your company rate reputation capital as important? Would they recruit or promote new employees based on their reputation capital?

I recently read this excellent article on crowdsourcing which explores ways in which the tool is expanding in different fields. Here are five of the best examples they came up with:

1. GrouperEye: This “survival of the fittest” project was started by and for college students looking for contract gigs. Businesses post a case on GrouperEye’s website and leave it open to students to solve. The company picks the best solution, and the student who came up with the idea is paid.
2. “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” Course: In the fall of 2009, Duke University professor Cathy Davidson started a new class called “This Is Your Brain on the Internet.” It introduces students to crowdsourcing by letting them accept some of the responsibility of running the class, including grading and teaching.
3. Crowdsourcing Help Desks: IT help desks are a necessary service on college campuses, as so many students depend on their computers and Internet access to complete their school work or even attend class online. At Indiana University at Bloomington, new IT help desks began implementing crowdsourcing to alleviate the cost and pressure of having to answer so many calls. Students and professors post their IT problems on an online forum, where other students and amateur IT experts answer them.
4. SOS Classroom: This program has helped sustain the Los Angeles Unified School District’s summer school system. USC students — along with teachers and parents — designed and collected online educational materials to teach K-8 language arts and math to summer school kids. Much of the program includes volunteers.
5. National IT database in the future: Notre Dame’s Chief Technology Officer Dewitt A. Latimer hopes to engineer a national IT database — powered by crowdsourcing — in the next few years. It would be based on the success of user-generated sites like Amazon.com and Wikipedia, and if the economy can get off the ground, the Hosted Integrated Knowledge Environment Project, or Hike, could become reality.

What ways can you think of to use crowdsourcing in human resources & corporate learning? Are you using crowdsourcing in your department? If yes, how? What implications can you see for it? Share your thoughts in the comments section!

Affinity groups have been around for some time in forward thinking companies. But now some of these companies are taking Affinity Groups to a new level: they are using them to crowdsource new products and services.

Consider Best Buy: While sales in 2009 accounted for roughly 22% of U.S. consumer electronics sales, its share of sales to women was just 16%.

Solution: Best Buy leveraged its Women’s Leadership Forum, composed of female Best Buy employees and female Best Buy customers plus a network of teenage girls to suggest new ways to sell to women.

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported:

The suggestions from these groups led to local businesswomen advising on retail strategy, and while others helped female Best Buy workers balance family and work demands. Most recently, the effort spawned a network of teenage female consultants who help the retailer sell phones and videogames to young people… Mr. Dunn and other top Best Buy executives are now behind the idea, seeing it as a crucial way to even the field against Target Corp. and Wal-Mart, where executives have long called their target shopper she.

Bottom line, this strategy of using networks formed in Human Resources to crowdsource new ideas for sales is one of the many innovative approaches detailed in The 2020 Workplace, recently published by Harper Collins: The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today. Buy the book or visit our website for more info!

Share with us if your company is leveraging groups–especially female groups to source new ideas to grow the business. I want to hear from you.