Employers are facing increasing challenges in attracting and retaining the employees they need. Growing demand, labor shortages and changing expectations around reward and work/life balance are just some of the factors that make it harder to get and keep staff with the key skills organizations need.
In our recent eBook we examined how a fresh approach to HR management is needed to meet these challenges and seize the potential of an increasingly talented and diverse labor market. Subsequent articles focus on what the new age of HR looks like and the importance of driving strategic HR management from the C-level of the organization.
The workforce is a key competitive differentiator and asset, and the people in it, the brains behind the business, are certainly a company’s most valuable asset. As such, they require careful management and nurturing to ensure that they are employed to best effect to drive business success.
To do this effectively, HR managers need to be able to view employee lifecycles holistically and manage them accordingly to optimize their value to the business. However, this can be difficult without effective measures in place.
In this article we consider the vital role that processes, data and systems play in optimizing HR management. Enterprises have long accepted that effective asset lifecycle management is required to maximize ROI on valuable capital assets. Employee lifecycle management does not usually get the same level of focus, yet people are increasingly a vital and precious corporate asset who require the same level of management to optimize their lifetime value.
People, Processes and Performance
All businesses bring people together with processes to deliver business performance.
The digital revolution has demonstrated how optimizing processes, supported by automation and effective data exploitation, can transform how a business performs.
Applying the same capabilities to the people component has the potential to deliver the same kind of transformation. It means considering employees in the same way as any other critical business asset, managing the employee lifecycle to optimize utilization and return on investment.
This is not about dehumanizing employees, rather the opposite. Respect, inclusion, and diversity management are key factors in optimizing employee engagement, quite apart from being ethically the right thing to do.
The end-to-end HR management process must be transparent, fair and flexible to meet people’s growing expectations around ways of working, work/life balance, diversity and inclusion. Developing such a structure builds trust, credibility and confidence from employees, creating better employee attraction and retention rates.
At the same time, it must deliver all this at minimum overhead to the business, given that the days of large HR departments have long gone. Optimizing HR process efficiency, and effective use of systems and data are key enablers for this.
What does optimized end to end HR management look like?
An effective, end-to-end HR management process has a number of key attributes
- Each stage of the employee lifecycle is supported by a transparent, consistent, optimized process, part of a single, coherent flow from recruitment campaign to exit interview.
- Technology and data underpin the entire process. Studies such as this one from Michigan University have highlighted the role data analytics can play in improving HR management throughout the lifecycle.
- The ability to deploy new system capabilities rapidly in response to regulatory changes, or to keep pace with changing expectations around ways of working, ensures consistency and accuracy is sustained in a fluid environment.
- Capturing usable quantities of high-quality data on job skills and performance metrics enables accurate matching of applicant skills to requirements, drives transparent pay equity, and enables resourcing levels to be optimized through accurate matching of skills availabilities to requirements, creating an objective foundation for hire and fire decisions.
- Business performance data analytics provide gap analyses of current resourcing and skills against business needs and strategy. These insights drive consistent, templated processes to recruit people with the precise skills needed, or develop existing employees.
- Performance metrics drive reward and are matched to current and future skills needs to drive development programs, through a transparent, data-driven performance, reward and development process.
- Adaptive systems and processes accommodate flexible working practices and contracts, whilst maintaining the rigor and audit trails to ensure these are managed consistently and fairly.
- Analytics forecast the changes in skills against business needs that necessitate employee retraining or release, and consistent processes enable these to be managed effectively, with the exit process capturing data to feed back into the loop.
How HR Strategies Consulting can help
HR Strategies Consulting uses the transformative power of technology to help our clients deliver the employee experience and HR journey they need.
Many business leaders know where they want to take their organization but have no idea how to get there. We can help you build short and long-term strategies with key success metrics and a detailed roadmap. We developed our unique “Re-imagine HR” approach to partner with organizational leaders to drive individual and organizational growth and become forward-thinking and future ready.
To find out more, download our eBook or visit us at https://hrsc.bsnio.com/
