To engage means you are holding people’s attention in a way that is pleasing to them. Engagement is a necessity for the modern workforce, and is becoming a priority of increasing importance as workforces become more spread geographically, employees demand convenience, and talent acquisition becomes evermore competitive.
The challenges that employers face in terms of engagement can be solved with Human Resource Management Systems and a strategy. Human Resource Management Systems (HRMSs) are platforms that draw in data from a number of different interrelated sources in real-time in order to contextualize the decisions that HR are making. These business systems are the foundations of HR disruption, with engagement at their core.
Why now?
2017 is here, and conversations are blowing up around disruption in the HR Tech space. The HR landscape and supporting software has been developed based on decades of research and thought leadership trends. Should we embrace disruptive changes, developments will empower us to build better organizations.
We have given you 5 reasons why it is wise to act now; take a read and consider which resonate with your business.
- New Digital Workspaces
The most enterprising organizations have acknowledged that, inevitably, the best talent isn’t going to be found pooled in one location. Being cloud-based means your organization becomes instantly geographically-flexible, and is a key reason why businesses have been transformed not only digitally, but to be cloud-based; in fact, can you think of a startup that doesn’t have their foundations in the cloud? This is characteristic of HRMS, and is a key element of modern-day employee engagement. Once you have your talented workforce of ’digital nomads’, the newfound challenge for HR is to support employees despite the increasing distance. Connectivity has to be sound, so that HR professionals can collect data, and monitor employees without becoming intrusive. Being a ‘Big Brother’ figure is not the intention; data can be invaluable if utilized correctly, meaning HR can make decisions on behalf of their remote employees based on figures, not guesswork. User Interface needs to be considered additionally. A consideration that may seem somewhat superficial at first mention, can be correlated to the amount of time an employee spends (virtually) in the system. Anyone who has experienced a system implementation of any kind knows how important user-adoption is. You wouldn’t cut corners on your office space, so why have a system that has slow page load times, is hard to navigate and is not intuitive overall? Make it a pleasure to use, which leads us to the following point… - Collaboration
If you advocate an engagement-orientated approach, then you are also encouraging collaboration. Collaboration, working with someone to produce something, is increasingly challenging as workforces become spread more extensively (Point 1). It is undeniable that collaboration and active participation improves the quality of output. As a ‘people manager’ you need to remove that distance, which is why today’s HRMSs are designed with collaboration at their core.Communication platforms should be fast, and loaded with features that aid your collaboration. One important consideration is how trackable are certain details in the conversation thread? Will you be able to retrace to key moments in your exchanges? Encouraging collaboration can aid some of the challenges collecting (mentioned in Point 1), but a collaborative approach paves the way for better quality, up to date ‘people’ data.
- The Rise of Employee Self-service
Self-service: the joy of being able to do something for yourself, saving time and hassle for all parties involved. The trend in digital self-service began for B2C and B2B relations once organizations realized that by passing the responsibility onto the customer, they were saving on operational costs. A classically referenced example is call agent cost and the deflection of calls for recurring service needs, for instance, to a web form or FAQ page. Why shouldn’t HR take advantage of this? By deflecting the repetitive interactions between HR and employees, the HR team’s time is freed up and removes friction and frustration between teams internally. A great example would be to provide users with a way to access their feedback and performance metrics.Passing on responsibility to employees can be welcomed autonomy, thereby are more likely to adopt the system and be collaborative (Point 2). - Talent Attraction
Talent acquisition will be a crucial process that is under increasing scrutiny in businesses this year. Traditionally a costly service for an employer with a role to fill, now we see a shift in recruitment that is more inbound than outbound. Acquiring the best talent for your organization is fiercely competitive, now that ‘culture fit’ is just as important as skills for a lot of employers. The race for talent acquisition is only going to get more competitive. Relentless innovation changes desired skills sets rapidly, and a change in popular technology can quickly leave people out of luck with their current skill set; in this way, the talent pool can shrink to only the ‘cream of the crop’. These are the people your organization needs; pull out all the stops to acquire these people by engaging with them from the very first contact, through onboarding, and employee services. It could be the difference between keeping your business afloat, or not…
- Gamification
Gamification would have been considered superfluous, and borderline unprofessional a few years ago, but now is a widely accepted as a strategy to increase collaboration (Point 2) and encourage specific behaviours. More on gamification will be coming on the Skilo blog in the near future; for now, see gamification as employee motivation, to freshen up your company culture to take 2017 head-on.
Summary
In this post we have shared reasons for starting the New Year with an engagement-orientated strategy. The reasons ranged from the practical, technological, to the psychological, because HR will remain a holistic role. Engagement can gel a company together, a vital advantage in retaining talent in the modern age. Engagement-orientated HR will continue to humanize HR in more impactful ways than ever before.
About Skilo
Skilo is a cloud-based talent management platform for HR innovation that is adaptable and therefore, relevant to any organization and industry.
Skilo facilitates HR processes such as mapping competency frameworks, manager-employee evaluation and feedback, enforcing skills development schedules and social collaboration to create a more engaged and productive workforce.
Start creating a personal development friendly organisation: Find out more here.