As we continue to endure the coronavirus pandemic, new workforce challenges are emerging across the globe as more and more employers adapt to completely different work environments, including the expansion of remote work. With strict lockdowns still a reality in many parts of the world, employees are forced to continue working from home, with some companies making remote working a permanent fixture in their business models. The new challenges, however, of balancing employee needs and productivity, organisational goals, changing policies, culture and effective communication, all done remotely, are human capital management (HCM) challenges most employers have never faced before.
According to a new SAP SuccessFactors report on addressing the emerging challenges of remote work, SAP SuccessFactors President Jill Popelka said: “While HR leaders across the globe ranked maintaining productivity as their biggest challenge, it’s critical that we not lose sight of long-term strategies around learning and reskilling, and diversity, equity and inclusion. The urgency for more agile processes, easier access to data and the ability to support remote work is accelerating digital transformation. It’s critical that leaders develop a culture of continuous learning and inclusion. This will enable workforces to drive needed transformation projects, even during a period of unprecedented change.”
Fortunately, the SAP SuccessFactors HXM suite is equipped with the tools to overcome the new challenges and meet the remote working requirements that businesses may be struggling with now.
WHAT IS SAP SUCCESSFACTORS HXM SUITE?
At its core, the SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite is a global, cloud-based human resource management software system, but it is evolving to help people and businesses thrive in the experience economy. Explore the suite, which is organised into four categories:
- Employee Experience Management
Provides solutions for employee engagement, lifecycle feedback, staff survey analysis, and benefits package optimisation. - Core HR and Payroll
Provides global HRIS as well as software for payroll, admin, time and attendance, HR help desk, and more. - Talent Management
Provides tools for recruiting, onboarding, performance management, compensation, learning, and succession and development. - HR Analytics and Workforce Planning
Provides powerful, embedded HR analytics and reporting tools for strategic HR planning.
WHAT IS HXM?
Human Experience Management (HXM) takes HR processes and decisions beyond simply facilitating transactions, to reimagining employee experiences in ways that accelerate productivity and business growth.
Greg Tomb, President of SAP SuccessFactors explains: “At SAP, this means redesigning experiences with the end user in mind across the entire HR ecosystem. In other words, creating experiences that allow candidates, new hires, recruiters, employees, managers, and HR leaders to do things more quickly and easily so they can be more productive”
Let’s dive in to find out how digital transformation with SAP SuccessFactors is helping businesses adapt to a changing work environment.
SAP SUCCESSFACTORS PERFORMANCE & GOAL MANAGEMENT FOR REMOTE WORKING
SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals is designed to improve employee performance through thoughtful goal setting, ongoing dialogue, and continuous development. The following features promote an efficient remote working experience and allow employers to:
- Focus on future development and employee growth;
- Conduct weekly, just-in-time, and fluid one-on-one meetings;
- Encourage two-way communication.
With a focus on Goal Management, SAP SuccessFactors enables managers to set and assign goals across the organisation, on a team or individual level. This is particularly advantageous in a remote working environment when it can be difficult to consistently align employee goals with business objectives without efficient data management structures in place. The Goal Management solution streamlines processes and keeps employees on schedule, productive and guides them continuously in reaching achievements. Additionally, employees are able to track the progress and completion of their individual goals while providing managers with visibility into individual, team, and company-wide achievements.
Value-added benefits include:
- Library of more than 500 ready-to-use goals: Goal recommendations are available that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
- Goal management on demand: Managers can capture employee efforts, achievements, and comments – all from the convenience of using any device, anytime and anywhere.
- Goal sharing: This function helps ensure that employee and team goals are aligned with overall company objectives to maximise organisational success.
The SAP SuccessFactors Continuous Performance Management (CPM) module enables managers to facilitate regular and productive conversations to track and maximise employee performance. Engaging positively and effectively with remote workers is essential to ensuring that employees are motivated and incentivised to perform at their best. A conversational-style approach, activity tracker, and coaching capability can really add value to engaging a team and ensuring that an ongoing, open line of communication exists between a manager and their employees.
Value-added benefits include:
- Activities and achievement tracking: Employees can keep managers up to date on work priorities and progress for more effective one-on-one conversations.
- Continuous coaching and feedback: Managers can provide ongoing guidance to help employees stay focused on the right things to meet individual and organisational goals.
- Insight into the frequency and quality of one-on-one meetings: Organisations can track how often managers meet with employees, send reminders, and offer coaching guidance for more productive employee check-ins.
Goals are easily created in your Goal Plan, permitting the creation of activities related to these goals within a continuous performance management section. This displays two screens, highlighting activity and achievements, ensuring clarity and visibility for managers and their employees. Employees and managers can easily add comments, provide progress updates or create additional activities and achievements.
SAP SUCCESSFACTORS CAREER DEVELOPMENT PLANNING FOR REMOTE WORKING
SAP SuccessFactor’s Career Development Planning (CDP) solution is used to engage employees with meaningful career development opportunities, close talent gaps, and nurture leaders. Having the right people in the right roles, especially in a remote working environment, is essential to developing and retaining the best performing employees and helping them and your business grow. Playing an important role in employee experience, Career Development Planning can help remote employees expand their skillsets, accelerate development with intelligent mentoring programs and leadership development plans, empower them to proactively explore career paths, assess readiness, address gaps, and explore “good fit” role recommendations to find positions that match their skills and interests.
Value-added benefits include:
- Org chart for succession planning: Get quick visibility into talent gaps, including key indicators such as risk of loss, impact of loss, and bench strength.
- Talent search: Uncover hidden talent through company-wide searches that leverage comprehensive employee talent profiles.
- Talent pools: Obtain a dynamic view into pool membership and simplify administration and management of talent pools.
- Presentations: Present and share live talent information to more easily engage in strategic succession planning and talent pipeline conversations.
- Analytics and reporting: Measure the effectiveness of succession planning and its impact on business outcomes.
SAP SUCCESSFACTORS LEARNING FOR REMOTE WORKING
SAP SuccessFactors Learning is a crucial element of your remote working enablement strategy to develop your employees’ skills and reduce compliance risk with a unified learning management system (LMS). Creating a culture of continuous, relevant learning for your remote workers promotes employee engagement and reduces administrative issues by automating compliance training experiences. If remote working is new to your organisation, Learning can be used to educate and encourage employees with the skills needed to successfully work from home. Training courses could focus on topics such as time management, making virtual calls, or how to stay productive at home. Training can be auto-assigned across the workforce based on various employee attributes and can include virtual classroom style training, video tutorials, quizzes, and many other types of training formats. Entire curricula can be built to fast-track employee remote learning enablement.
Value-added benefits include:
- Learning recommendations and development paths: Grow employee skills through learning linked with clear development goals, career paths, assigned profiles, and recommendations.
- Collaborative, social, and blended learning: Support collaborative, community-based learning and mobile access to content, such as microlearning and e-learning videos.
- Digital experience platform through SAP Content Stream by Skillsoft: Engage learners by recommending curated content and subject-matter experts based on interests, goals, and preferences, like individual playlists.
- Extended learning ecosystem of partners: Get content from SAP’s partners in the Open Content Network and benefit from gamification in learning and other learning innovations.
SAP SUCCESSFACTORS ONBOARDING FOR REMOTE WORKING
Onboarding new employees in a remote working environment poses unique challenges that can be addressed with SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding tool that enables organisations to fast-track new-hire processes with step-by-step wizards, intuitive dashboards, and built-in electronic forms, from any device. Shaping employee experience, the Onboarding solution provides personalised, interactive and engaging features that help new employees connect with peers, and gain access to new employee orientation resources and an onboarding dashboard that streamlines the onboarding process. The built-in step-by-step wizards guide managers as they create new hire welcome messages; recommend peers or mentors; and assign meetings, goals, or equipment.
Value-added benefits include:
- Electronic forms: Maintain data privacy and HR compliance standards with custom-configured new employee forms.
- Electronic signatures with SAP Signature Management by DocuSign: Guide new hires through all necessary paperwork in a convenient way by using e-documents and e-signatures on any device.
SAP QUALTRICS EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT FOR REMOTE WORKING
SAP Qualtrics Employee Engagement provides real-time insights with employee engagement surveys and feedback that can be integrated into various SAP SuccessFactors modules and processes. With best-practice engagement surveys on hand, employers can combine survey results data with existing HR data to analyse trends and identify areas of improvement for supporting employees to work remotely.
Value-added benefits include:
- Flexible survey creation: Access best-practice engagement surveys or build your own with our flexible survey builder.
- Role-based dashboards and reporting: Empower your leaders and managers with personalised dashboards mapped to your organisation’s structure.
- Built-in, customisable impact reports: Know where to focus your attention and which actions to take to improve employee engagement immediately.
- Guided action planning: Track improvements with action planning tools to ensure the changes you make drive results.
SAP SUCCESSFACTORS TIME TRACKING FOR REMOTE WORKING
Per SAP’s press release, here are the capabilities that come with the newly released (2021) SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking product:
- Greater flexibility for employees: To help employees manage their work-life balance, time account payout allows eligible employees to choose either to be paid for their overtime or to use it toward time off. Flextime handling enables employees to determine the start and end times that work best for their schedule.
- Streamlined time administration: Smart time tracking allows employees to clock in and out at terminals and track time across midnight. It enables HR to set automatic alerts to remind employees and managers about time sheets and clocking out. Time alerts provide warnings and error messages that allow administrators to review and fix time keeping and management issues, such as excessive overtime. Additionally, the time valuation trace feature provides detailed insights into each valuation step for an employee, demonstrating how specific time entries are calculated. This supports HR in quickly and easily answering employees’ questions about their pay.
- Enhanced transparency of pay processes: With intelligent approval workflows, HR can set rules to automate batch time-sheet approvals. With single-record approval, managers can preapprove specific requests, such as travel time.
- Increased visibility into the total workforce: Leaders can access a complete view of workforce labour costs, including planned and recorded time sheets, time accounts and pay types. This informs workforce costs, leave liability and productivity, and supports better decision-making.
CONCLUSION
The future of human capital management is vastly different to what it was a few years ago, and with the changes in working environment, organisations are having to adopt digital transformation rapidly in order to source, train and retain engaged, productive employees in remote working spaces. SAP SuccessFactors is fully equipped to enable the shift from transactional human capital management (HCM) to end-to-end experiences — creating a more flexible, engaged workforce and a more resilient business.