According to a recent study by Forrester, 78% of human resource managers believe that employee experience (EX) is likely to become the most critical factor in an organisation’s ability to deliver key business objectives. And yet, only 15% of employees expect an excellent experience from their employer. This gap in the perceived importance of employee experience from an organisational perspective and what the employees experience and expect from the organisation poses a significant risk.
However, as organisations undertake their digitisation journey, it also offers an opportunity to unlock the potential in the form of the HR function and from a people perspective by providing a superior experience. To do that, let us look at the key challenges faced by HR professionals, ways to address those and streamline the function, and how SAP SuccessFactors ticks all the right boxes towards achieving that goal.
Challenges faced by the HR function
- Recruitment and hiring: Searching and attracting top talent has been a perennial challenge for HR professionals. And the challenge has further exacerbated in a hypercompetitive business environment. This has led to higher attrition at the lower and mid-levels, and the job market is becoming a ‘buyers’ market’. This has added multiple layers of complexities to the recruitment process.
- Performance management: Assessment and classification of current employees are critical to individual employees as well as the organisation owing to the role it plays in shaping the business strategy and roadmap. As it does with the enterprise, performance management also needs agility and flexibility, and unlike the former, a once-a-year and top-down performance appraisal system requires a major upgrade.
- Training and development: In the knowledge age, continuous learning and upskilling have become a prerequisite to retaining talent and keeping them relevant. However, given the pace of change, this has become an uphill struggle for HR professionals. Besides, identifying the skills gap from a business perspective and mapping it to the talent requires a high degree of personalisation and sophistication.
- Leadership and succession planning: The definition of and the need for leadership and succession planning has changed significantly in recent years. Succession for senior positions requires a higher degree of foresight for leaders to remain relevant within the organisation and among customers and peers. And at a mid-management level, poor leadership has been directly linked to attrition and hollowing out at the foundation, which is detrimental to any organisation.
Streamlining the HR function with SAP SuccessFactors
- Delivering an intuitive user experience: SAP SuccessFactors offers an interface design and user experience that has an intuitive and human-centric experience. With the Employee Experience Management module, enterprises can better understand employee needs and wants. In addition, it facilitates engagement and collaboration seamlessly, which allows employees to be more efficient across environments – home, office, hybrid or mobile.
- Smarter decision-making with analytics: With a fully-integrated and synchronised data environment across functions in the enterprise, SAP SuccessFactors allows the use of advanced analytics on HR-related data. With the HR Analytics and Workforce Planning module, HR managers can derive insights to improve the effectiveness of HR processes. And using advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help visualise and predict various scenarios and map emerging trends, allowing for smarter decision-making.
- Agile deployment and a steep learning curve: SAP has traditionally been known for the pace, ease and flexibility of deployment based on the specific needs of its customers. This holds true for SAP SuccessFactors as well. Moreover, SAP has a long track record of serving thousands of customers in multiple domains and overseeing tens of thousands of deployments across the world. This culmination of experience and learnings enables a steep learning curve, irrespective of whether they are a large, medium or small enterprise.
- Aiding talent management: SAP SuccessFactors plays a strategic role in delivering business value through the HR function. The Recruiting and Onboarding solutions address the talent intake agenda from a talent management perspective. In addition, the Performance & Goals and Compensation modules improve employee productivity as well as reward and recognition of employees on an ongoing basis.
- Nurturing a smart and future-ready talent pool: SAP SuccessFactors’ Learning can help enterprises deploy creative and innovative learning solutions. The learning management system allows employees to stay abreast of the latest developments and skills within a domain. This, combined with the Succession and Development solution, helps nurture and create a future-ready talent pool that is better aligned with business goals.
- Staying in sync with changing workforce landscape: As a smart platform, the Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite enables workforce transformation by helping enterprises stay in sync with innovation and changes in the talent landscape. For example, diversity and inclusion, equal employment opportunities, health and mental well-being, and transparency in pay and performance management.
- An integrated and extendable platform: SAP SuccessFactors’ modular structure and integration capabilities enable enterprises to scale-up usage and continuously build on existing enterprise IT investments. In addition to SAP S/4HANA, it can be integrated with the wider portfolio of SAP products and third-party systems. Such integration, flexibility and extendibility allow enterprises to focus on core business functions as against worrying about the IT infrastructure and platforms.
One of the biggest advantages that SAP SuccessFactors brings to the table is data sanctity and consolidation of all HR-related data once integrated with SAP S4 HANA. This helps provide a complete hire to retire process automation within an organisation. And the combination of these factors can deliver a superior employee experience across the board and help unlock value from HR.
As an SAP-certified partner, Yotta offers end-to-end capabilities – from consulting and advisory to migration and implementation, as well as application management and customer support. This, combined with our Tier IV certified constructed data center, ensure the highest uptime for mission-critical systems.
To know how Yotta can help digitise and streamline your HR functions, please get in touch with our SAP SuccessFactors consultant today.
Rajesh Garg
Senior Executive Vice President & Chief Digital Officer - Head of Applications & CybersecurityWith a stellar record in Digital Transformations in India, Rajesh leads the 360-degree growth of ERP solutions, cybersecurity solutions, application modernisation, product design and development, and consulting. He brings over 31 years of diverse experience in Technology, Strategy, Transformation, Enterprise architecture, Industry 4.0, Advanced Data Analytics, Service Delivery and Assurance, Service offering management, Governance, Business engagement and Global leadership.