By Aaron Green
In today’s competitive landscape, employees are what set organizations apart. Their unique skills, experiences, and contributions help companies innovate, compete, and grow.
Due to the pace at which technology and innovation are introduced, though, the skills organizations need are constantly changing. In fact, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that technology will disrupt 1.1 billion jobs in the next five years—making the skills gap one of the biggest hurdles growth-focused organizations face today.
Addressing those gaps starts with figuring out what skills you need now and in the future and whether you should acquire them by hiring alone or by upskilling, cross-skilling, and reskilling your current employees.
Taking a skills-based approach is how all organizations—especially growth-focused organizations—need to look at talent. But to make this possible, you need technology that’s built for the job. Without it, HR and recruiting teams lack integrated, real-time data frameworks, meaning that they are making decisions based more on gut instinct than on data-driven evidence.
Considering the many challenges growth-focused organizations face today—such as rapidly changing market conditions, the need to keep employees productive and engaged, and the race to attract top talent—having the right HR technology in place to meet the evolving needs of your business and your people can be a game changer.
A connected cloud HR and enterprise resource planning (ERP) approach helps free that data from silos, so all departments can access the same people data in real time. This boosts efficiency and productivity, cuts operational costs and noncompliance risk, improves people’s experiences at work, and helps organizations get people with the needed skills into the right roles.
Putting People at the Heart of Your Business Transformation
Investing in this technology means investing in your people—and people are what drive business transformation. Today, people expect an employee experience (EX) where every interaction is as easy, seamless, and personalized as it is when they go shopping online. By using technology to enhance EX—from automating time-consuming processes to offering personalized learning recommendations—people have more meaningful work experiences, which translates into a more engaged workforce, higher productivity, and better business outcomes.
Companies like MOD Pizza, Growmark, and Sun Communities are great examples of how focusing on people by strengthening the connection between HR and business operations can help drive growth.
To eliminate friction in the hiring and onboarding process and enable new hires to become productive faster, the HR team at MOD Pizza determined that it needed to replace siloed people data and manual processes with scalable, cloud-based technology.
Moving to a single cloud platform for both HR and ERP helped MOD Pizza automate the onboarding of 1,000 hires each month and 400 daily event changes related to new hires, promotions, and separations—resulting in 15 fewer hours of manual data entry each week.
The company has also integrated survey touchpoints across the hiring and onboarding experience to gather feedback during this important stage of the employee life cycle. This connected approach is helping MOD Pizza gain efficiencies across the business while improving EX.
The agribusiness cooperative Growmark manages HR for an internal workforce of 3,600 and provides payroll support for an additional 4,200 employees at its member companies. Streamlining its HR and ERP operations by moving to a cloud-based solution helped Growmark integrate management processes, improve visibility across the business, and automate manual tasks. Analytics combining people and operational data helps ensure Growmark keeps its employees at the center of performance tracking, risk planning, and decision making.
Sun Communities, a leading owner and operator of manufactured housing communities and recreational vehicle resorts, transformed its business processes by replacing a patchwork of legacy tools with an integrated cloud-based solution. This helps its HR staff streamline the management of processes and experiences across recruiting, onboarding, performance management, and payroll—without having to rely on internal IT resources.
Growth-focused organizations like these need to ensure their HR systems, experiences, and strategies are not operating in a disconnected state. The ideal platform brings together the talent, demographic, experience, and operational data an organization needs to inform its HR, finance, supply chain, and customer decisions. With this connectivity, organizations can also replace legacy and inefficient processes with end-to-end automated business processes and improved experiences.
With real-time insight into your total workforce and an understanding of the resulting impacts on your business, you can unlock new opportunities for both your business and your people. You gain insights into your employees’ skills, aspirations, preferences, and performance. This view enables an unprecedented alignment of the needs of your business with the needs, wants, and competencies of your people.
With the right cloud technology, today’s growth-focused organizations are strengthening the connection of HR across the business and scaling personalized EX across their entire workforce. These organizations are working smarter, hiring faster, and planning for what’s ahead—and that makes their employees excited to be a part of their future.
Aaron Green is SAP SuccessFactors’ chief marketing & solutions officer.
