Empower the Workforce to Reach its Full Potential Q&A

HCM seeks to ensure that an organization has available and ready to work as needed optimally performing teams that make the best use of the workforce to support the needs of the business. In the face of intensifying competition and customer and employee expectations, organizations today are increasing their investments in the processes and applications that support people throughout the organization. HR is working to improve the employee experience and to enable it to better serve its internal business partners that are involved in the overall management of the workforce. 

The challenges ahead are ensuring that the HCM processes being used actually help managers and workers address their needs. What’s needed is to identify technology that will automate and better support HCM processes so that managers and workers are able to have consistent interactions when assessing goals and activities and working to achieve shared outcomes. Adopting applications designed for today’s HCM will help ensure the right work is being done in the most effective manner, increasing the productivity of the talent in the organization.

One of HR’s roles is to enable managers and workers to productively engage through continuous dialogue. Accomplishing this requires a solid foundation of technology to enable the dialogue, ensure that it is actually taking place and optimize productivity of the workforce. But just enabling interactions is not enough; talent must be able to see how that dialogue and the associated work they are doing is connected to the larger picture of what the organization is attempting to accomplish. 

Many organizations struggle to provide this context. The most direct path is through deployment of a set of HCM applications designed to support workforce processes and outcomes. Our research into Next-Generation HRMS finds that improving alignment of employees to company objectives, which is facilitated by collaboration and fostering the understanding of context, is the second-most important priority driving organizations’ investments in new applications. Taking this path of aligning the workforce through use of applications can enable an organization to improve the productivity from all the talent across the workforce.

To understand why increasing workforce productivity is critical it is necessary to consider use cases in your organization. One, as I suggested above, is the continuous performance review or assessment process, which enable not only better productivity but also greater visibility into the impact of individual contributions. Another is when hiring managers are reviewing candidates for a job opening; using a lens that assesses candidates’ potential productivity by investigating work and interaction habits and how the candidate works with others can yield better hires. A third concerns retention of skilled and knowledgeable employees: Ensuring that tenured employees feel that they have a career track and that there are steps they can take that will help them realize their potential as well as improve their engagement will lead to increased productivity. 

Clearly increasing the efficiency of the interactions with the processes and underlying applications delivers value. It thus is no surprise that our research into next-generation HRMS finds that the largest percentage of organizations (27%) indicated their top goal when investing in applications is to improve the efficiency of HR applications.

The history of the use of technology to help HR to manage HCM has been one of conflicting paths. Originally most organizations had a common HRMS that helped with talent management but did not truly support the full engagement of the workforce in the organization. New applications then came to market for employee engagement, typically resident in the cloud and subscribed to by HR. However, these systems came from a disparate array of suppliers and did not easily integrate, leading many to wish it were possible to acquire them as an integrated suite from a single vendor, which would improve efforts to unify HR and HCM. Meanwhile, many of the existing application suites were acquired by larger suppliers who concluded the path forward for them was to shift their investment priorities toward integrating the suites with their HRMS and overall platforms. This led to a lull in improvements and innovation in the applications focused on managing and optimizing the workforce in organizations. One of the features lacking in the new generation of applications is to support continuous performance reviews and guidance as a more effective alternative to an annual review. 

Despite all the vendor fanfare about technology advancements, our next-generation HRMS research finds that only half (49%) of organizations have a talent management system and only one-third (36%) have it directly integrated with their HRMS. Technology and the applications that support the HCM needs of an organization should be continuously reassessed to determine whether they are truly meeting needs or creating a gap in the mission of HCM.

Introducing technology that is neither unified nor designed to increase the productivity of the workforce can widen gaps in the organization. But as I have pointed out, the right mix of technology and applications can deliver tremendous improvements. Ensuring that the organization’s strategy incorporates the right set of integrated applications will produce a common environment in which your employees can engage and grow with the organization. It is also important that your selection of applications and the platform they operate on fits well with your existing processes and can integrate with existing applications and data. 

Many organizations have widened the gap further by making the mistake of relying for their employee engagement processes on spreadsheets and documents that are designed for personal productivity rather than for HCM. In fact, our next-generation HRMS benchmark research found that half (51%) of organizations use spreadsheets to manage HR information and three-quarters (76%) admit that they reduce the productivity of HR departments. 

But no matter what varied technologies are deployed or integrated, there is no simple switch to throw to move from where you are today to where you need to be tomorrow. You should expect – no, make that demand that – any technology you evaluate will work with and extend existing investments until they are ready to be retired. It is your organization and the processes, people and information that drive it that matter the most and its needs should undergird any considerations about applications for supporting HCM.

Your workforce will be best utilized and engaged if you acquire applications that can not only adapt to your organization and utilize best practices but also introduce smarter and faster methods for HCM. The applications chosen should retain and use the tribal knowledge of your HR organization but also empower people to optimize their talent so they can better meet the needs of their area of the organization. Doing this probably will provide the methods to capture and share best practices organizationally and departmentally to help existing and new employees achieve their full potential. Choosing to use learning systems that are designed to be continuous and not episodic will be a critical juncture point where organizations can help them become truly employee-focused. Becoming employee-focused means that you become people- and career-centric in order to help every individual reach his or her full potential – not just how the job is performed today but with respect to skills and long-term improvement. This approach to HCM applications will build confidence and trust in your talent and an environment that fosters retention and success. It will convey the message that your organization is a great place to work.

Continuing to rely on outdated legacy applications not only bars the door to the possibilities I have enumerated; it also increases the risk that productivity will decline. It will not enable development of an effective HCM strategy and may well lead to a loss of talent. Furthermore, some less obvious consequences such as degrading employee satisfaction can have significant ripple effects. It only takes a spark; one individual’s negative sentiment posted on one of the many of the public internet corporate rating sites such as Glassdoor can significantly impact your organization’s reputation. 

These problems are time-consuming, of course, and addressing them distracts your organization and talent pool from its mission. Many organizations are learning the consequences of not having a proactive HCM strategy: It can impact your competitiveness in the market or, worse, lead to potential loss of talent to your competition. Waiting is not an option; every organization must have a talent-centric focus and use centralized processes and applications that work together. Not doing so exposes an organization’s brand to tremendous negative risks and damages the reputation of the HR organization’s strategy – or lack of one.

The first step forward should be an employee engagement readiness assessment that examines not just your processes, supporting applications and technology but the strengths and weakness of how you operate today. Examine your readiness not just from HR’s perspective but from other positions in the organization and with consideration of the employee experience. Reach out for feedback from managers and workers to determine what should be addressed to increase their engagement and the productivity of the talent in the organization. The assessment may reveal a lengthy list of requirements, so prioritizing them is critical to determine what needs to be addressed most immediately. This change management process will involve considering how your organization recruits, onboards, reviews, compensates and educates your talent. Next, ensure you can educate your workforce on and guide them through all changes. Embrace best practices that are designed to increase the engagement of workers and managers, and ensure they produce outcomes that benefit both the organization and the careers of those involved. 

Last, make sure the applications that you adopt can and will be personalized and are able to accommodate individual and departmental needs of the employee and manager. The applications also should offer configuration options to enable them to meet your needs both today and in the future. 

As your business evolves, so should its expectations for human capital management to ensure that all talent is able to realize its potential. Our research finds the key reasons driving organizations to switch vendors are to improve their business processes and to increase workforce productivity. Attaining optimal productivity requires empowering all your workforce to engage with their work and to seek their full potential, unobstructed by barriers of technology and scattered, inefficient processes.