Downturn dilemma

Stock market cratering, employees on edge with 401(k) values plummeting, layoff rumors buzzing, not a great time here in corporate America.  While I am not smart enough to predict how all this will shake out, I do know one thing, your organization may need to start postponing planned or needed technology projects in order to cut costs and ride out the storm.

What can you as an HR Technologist do in the interim?  Because in the current environment your employees are more nervous that ever, your need to help your company execute the strategy is more critical than before, and you may have had your project funding and/or resources yanked from under your nose.

In a strange way, the downturn may actuallly help you kick-start some experimentation and pilot projects using technologies that are simple to implement, do not require a significant investment, and don't 'trap' you into a long-term situation that you worry you won't be able to afford.

Some ideas:

1. Kick-start a Yammer trial with the HR department

2. Organize and seed a simple wiki to share internal infomation in your department (everyone's e-mail inbox is maxed out already) - check out PbWiki or Socialtext, both offer free versions totally acceptable for a trial deployment

3. Get a read on your Employment image in the Web 2.0 world.  Search for your company name followed by 'Jobs' or 'Careers' on Google, FlickR, YouTube, Facebook and other popular site where your target candidate pool congregates.  What are you seeing in the results?  Do you need to upload a simple 2 minute recruiting video to YouTube?  You probably already have something like this on your corporate website, it will take you 5 minutes to get it on YouTube and cost you nothing.

4. Get on Twitter. Use Twitter Search to see who and what is being talked about your brand, industry, region. Consider if an active presence on Twitter makes sense for your brand. Save the Twitter search(es) you need as RSS feeds in your feed reader.

And here is another point to consider, whether your focus is tying to build better community and collaboration among your employees, or to gain insight to the external community of customers, prospects, potential applicants, either way those folks are already out there in Web 2.0, talking about you, commenting, tagging, and influencing your organization. 

So, maybe you no longer have the funds for the ERP upgrade, or the new Applicant Tracking System, but there are lots of other HR Technology avenues to pursue in the meantime.

What else can you be doing to make sure when the downturn shifts back to an upturn you are smarter and more prepared that before?

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photo credit - FlickR Simon Willison