Motivating Employees

I'm a compensation manager. My first two jobs out of school were with traditional companies who are celebrating their centennial in 2009. In both of these companies, and in most other large companies in the world, what we have done in HR is rein-in employees by putting a nice, clean box around how to get people to do exactly what we need them to do. If we can add a calculation, strict pay incentive rules and lots of formulas tied to water-tight SMART objectives, we've succeeded in controlling our employees, and keeping them in their (our) nice little box. We call this "best-practice". Have a look at the video below and think about how this applies to your organization:



Our best-practice approach isn't going to work for much longer, and it severely butts heads with the way the brains of our future workforce (generation Y) are wired. What are some steps we can take to breaking the molds that we find many of our companies shaped to? Is it broken?

Social Media implications for HR

Social Media (Facebook, twitter, blogging, shutterfly, flickr, etc.) has a huge following. With so much people-attention and time focused on this activity, the future of HR will be impacted. That impact may in some cases be dealing with employee abuse of these sites, but we need to look beyond that at the potential these tools have to increase the productivity of our companies.
The video below gives an entertaining overview of social media and its power. What does the future (and the present) look like for social media in the HR Profession? We're looking for comments on:
How do we think this will change the future of HR?What are the challenges and benefits of having Social media in the workplace?How could we leverage tribes to contribute to employee learning, development and engagement?Is anyone currently using social media for a net-positive impact?