Crowdsourcing is an important topic and therefore of great importance in personnel management Significance. Quite a few companies have been able to improve their workflows by involving the workforce or customers improve, because in this way they have minimized errors and increased the potential for innovation. How can this be achieved?

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Crowdsourcing in human resource management - positive and negative examples

Crowdsourcing, and this is often misunderstood, is not a form of savingsMethod, but on the contrary requires more Communication and more commitment from the company because the community also wants to be looked after. Because without a community, crowdsourcing cannot work.

There are many positive Examples of companies that have used crowdsourcing for innovative work concepts - but also many negative examples, such as employers who use crowdsourcing to skim cheaply ideas and Competencies want to abuse - a milkmaid calculation that will not add up:

Crowdsourcing as a new, innovative form of work

Because with the Wikileaks revelations and at the latest since the plagiarism scandal surrounding the former Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, a form of work has become more and more public in recent months that made it possible to collect the extensive information in the first place: crowdsourcing.

But what exactly is crowdsourcing? How does it work? How can companies use it successfully in HR? And what change processes does this entail for companies?

Definition of terms: What is crowdsourcing?

The Term Crowdsourcing was first introduced in 2006 by Jeff Howe in a Article of the us-american Technology- Mentioned by Wired magazine. Since then it has become more and more established and has pushed synonymous terms such as 'swarm outsourcing' into the background. Howe's neologism is a neologism composed of 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'. The process is closely related to web phenomena such as the 'Open Source Movement' or 'User Generated Content' (UGC) and describes the outsourcing of work and creative processes as well as the storage of Background, Capital and time (from the crowd) into a company or a Organization. There is a difference

How do companies use crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing in human resources takes place in Germany, especially in human resources marketing - with different things Success. The Onlineportal ImmobilienScout24, for example, advertised the creation of a personal image campaign on Jovoto. The press release of Company himself showed that the main aim was to jump on hype: "Lars Schmidt [Vice President Human Resources of ImmobilienScout24] hopes that in this way word will not only get around about the competition itself, but also that the creation of the campaign on the employer brandingMeasures deposits.”

Mail order company OTTO was looking for a model contest on Facebook his facebook-Face and found - Brigitte, one as Ms. disguised male student who had campaigned actively. Apparently, Deutsche Bahn wanted to protect itself from such unpleasant surprises when it recently asked users via Facebook Submit app stories that you experienced on the train to recreate them in miniature format. That Objective consisted in presenting the diversity of the company as an employer, but please not too much: In the end, a jury headed by DB board member Grube chose the winners.

Companies don't trust their customers

Collecting votes, advertising ideas and stories - many German companies apparently don't trust the crowd to do more than that. There have long been completely different examples. The US agency R/GA, for example, crowdsourced job interviews, by clicking on the Facebook- Pinboards preselected Candidate Ask posted about their skills to get a valuable and authentic Feedback collect from their friends. And Claudia Pelzer from the German Crowdsourcing Association points out that in Future the crowd can even take over the job of HR – platforms like advisemejobs.com show where a journey could lead, where individuals are no longer looking for the brightest minds, but a whole Network arranges suitable contacts.

Crowdsourcing can be more than just collecting a few nice marketing ideas: It can lead to fundamental reorganizations and change the way companies work. Successful companies have long recognized this principle and implemented it:

How can crowdsourcing change the way you work?

Among them is undeniably Google. The innovative ideas are developed here by creative employees and tested by users in beta phases. This is how Google shifts Innovation like quality assurance into the crowd and has brought some of the most successful software services to the market in recent years. The Employees to include, is also the Japanese car manufacturer Toyota program: Enter Problem every employee can stop the production process at any time and make a suggestion for improvement.

Then employees, production managers and engineers or logisticians get together on site and work through a catalog of questions: Why did this happen? Could the problem be repeated in other parts of the production? How do we ask for surethat it does not occur again? The goal of this crowdsourcing is not a huge leap in innovation, but a calm, continuous improvement that takes place in small steps, about which all those involved - employees, superiors and customers - constantly exchange ideas. Everyone knows that they need the others for this process and that the way to the goal sometimes takes detours.

No inexpensive recruiting!

A mistake that many companies make: They consider crowdsourcing to be the more cost-effective method, but fail to recognize the organizational effort involved. A few months ago, IBM hit the headlines. According to an internal paper, the company wants to radically change the relationship with its workforce. In future, the group will only be managed by a small core workforce and cut up to 8000 jobs in Germany alone. IBM, on the other hand, wants to recruit specialists and skilled workers on a specially founded Internet platform.

What at first glance looks like efficient Cutting costs is not only criticized by labor lawyers and trade unions, but also has major disadvantages for the company. The one-sided attempt to pick the raisins out of the cake could fast lead to the migration of the skilled worker community - to where more lucrative offers beckon. But crowdsourcing cannot work without a community. And on closer inspection, it quickly becomes clear that IBM is trying to pour old wine into new bottles: the company was criticized as early as 1991 for introducing teleworking as a cost-cutting measure. Not everything that is called crowdsourcing is actually crowdsourcing.

Customer and employee loyalty

Because crowdsourcing is not a savings method, but has a lot to do with the loyalty of customers and employees to the company - and with Motivation and transparency. The management consultants Vollmer and Scheffczyk, based in Hanover and Stuttgart, have recognized this: Every employee has a role to play here salary himself and also decides when and how long he or she goes on vacation. However, everyone must be able to justify their decisions in front of their colleagues: #

Anyone can look at all the books and always knows what's going on Company stands. The result of this step towards complete transparency, which many companies shy away from: employees who deal with their job clear identify and who really care about the well-being of the company and the clients9. And only through this bond can crowdsourcing really work in companies.