My first SuccessFactors Market Influencers session at the end of November was an interesting and eye-opening experience. Here are my highlights for anyone keen to hear about their latest innovations.
Wellbeing
The first in depth discussion was around wellbeing and how companies can use SAP to discover actionable insights to improve employee happiness and health. Wellbeing can be split into three areas and acquiring and retaining top talent can only be achieved if your organisation is investing in all three:
Wellbeing of the individual
Organisational health
Organisational wellbeing culture
Being able to assess the engagement and satisfaction of your workforce is crucial not just for having a happy workforce, but also for the repercussions that an unhappy workforce can have such as lower productivity and lower employee retention. On top of this is the idea of creating a dynamic and vibrant workplace culture so that people can bring their ‘full selves’ to work.
Startlingly loneliness and weak social connections can reduce your lifespan as much as having 15 cigarettes a day. A great quote we were introduced to is that “When people feel healthy, respected, and cared for, they are 8xmore likely to be engaged, 3x more likely to be productive and 3.5x more likely to be creative & innovative” – World Economic Forum, The Wellness Imperative, 2010
The next part of the presentation helps organisations to set a level of ambition. The diagram below can act as a benchmarking tool for any business to establish wellbeing as a principal, with few companies wanting to appear on the left hand side.
For more information on SAP’s Wellbeing offering, visit this page on their website.
Talent & Recruitment
The scene was set with some painful statistics; 73% of candidates are passive, top candidates are only in the market for ten days, and the average tenure that people stay in organisations can be as little as two years.
The candidate experience therefore has to be seamless, slick and more engaging than ever before. SAP’s advice is to use a ‘simple is best’ user interface on your recruitment website which can be branded and configured to match your other externally facing sites. Stay in contact through short and frequent communication and automate the process steps with the highest risk of candidate drop out or error such as sending out job offers (which can take weeks in organisations). Use simple surveys to ask for candidate feedback so you can continually improve, and finally quantify connections between candidate experience and the bottom line to justify investment in better processes and technology.
SuccessFactors also uses sophisticated machine learning to remove unconscious bias in recruitment by identifying words in job adverts that deter certain candidates from applying for roles. The most frequent examples include “analyse” and “determine” which are typically associated with male traits, while “collaborate” and “support” are considered female. SuccessFactors suggests alternative words that are more gender neutral, giving you insights you didn’t have before, and a quick way to action them.
HR Analytics - Evolution to insight-driven leadership and the intelligent enterprise Rightly, the point was made that analytics is the key to HR becoming a driver of business success rather than a supporter of the business. The SAP Analytics Cloud allows you to discover, visualise, plan and predict all in one place. You can therefore manage risk, maintain business agility and demonstrate leadership and have a more intelligent enterprise.
This was brought to life by showing how SAP HQ utilise real time analytics on a 4 by 2 meter touch screen board that they use to run interactive board meetings. Starting with the big picture, we looked at Financial Performance by month and location, drilling down into areas that were doing well or less well. Every graph and chart could be sliced and diced to interrogate the information further and answer questions from the room there and then.
Smart Insights were used to ‘show me something I don’t already know’ highlighting trends and predictions that haven’t necessarily been tested by the user. This was a great demonstration of real time and intuitive analytics that would certainly enable HR to be a bring insight that will save or make money for the business.
If you have any questions about SuccessFactors and how it can drive Wellbeing, Recruitment and Insights for your business, please contact becky@veranperformance.com