Employee experience has never been more top of mind for business leaders as it has been during this time of uncertainty. You want to ensure employees feel safe, valued and productive, not only for their own well-being, also because it’s critical to business success. Organizations that deliver exceptional employee experiences achieve better business results and outperform the competition – they realize 17% higher productivity, 3x revenue per employee, and 40% lower turnover (Gallup 2016 Study, 2018 Study).
Think about your own business. Are you ready to address this? Most leaders don’t feel equipped to respond, especially when they way we work, our business strategies, etc. have changed overnight.
In fact, some leaders believe they are delivering exceptional experiences, but their employees would disagree.
”2019 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends”
If you look at traditional Human Capital Management, it’s a practice that’s no longer sufficient, in and of itself, to meet employee expectations. HCM is an approach that perceives employees as assets whose current value can be measured through investments like any other asset in the business. But we know that people are not simply assets to be measured.
That’s why at SAP we are redefining Human Capital Management and we’ve have announced our new strategic intent: to stop treating people as interchangeable assets. To start putting them at the center of what powers our business.
And so HCM becomes HXM, Human Experience Management. This next evolution moves from putting the organization’s needs at the center of HR...to putting the employee’s experience at the center. From simply facilitating transactions to truly re-inventing employee experiences in ways that helps employees and your business get through these uncertain times and accelerate business growth.
HXM goes far beyond the HCM foundation.
At the center is our people – Individuals, Teams and Organizations. HXM is about enabling outcomes at all 3 levels. Not just an individual experience. It’s about helping teams to be at their peak performance and helping organizations to achieve their goals.
Next, these experiences transcend traditional HR modules. We are thinking about experiences. Think about the experience of recruiting employees. Think about the experience of developing employees. Think about the experience of being recruited or being developed, because it goes both ways. These experiences have to be intuitive for the employee, and add value to their work. Things have to be easy for the manager or the recruiter. Let’s take Learning as an example. Learning is more than an LMS – it’s about coaching and feedback, development plans, mentoring and as business strategies quickly changing, the need for reskilling and upskilling is more important than ever before.
People experiences also transcend beyond HR. They can include capabilities across the Intelligent Enterprise such as ordering supplies, booking travel, or completing an expense report. Let’s be honest, those can be some of the most frustrating and time-consuming, low value activities.
We then think about the technology elements in the HXM suite that improve the experience. At the heart of technology is the driving principals
Efficiency: such as the ability to complete tasks quickly, allowing you to get work done. These are things like Conversational AI, so you can simply ask a question and get an answer, RPA (robotic process automation) which removes frustrating low-value tasks.
Individualism: Focused on the individual and what they are trying to achieve and grow with approaches like Machine Learning nudges and recommendations to provide employees personalized and curated content
Opportunity: We need to preset visible, transparent information that allows them to uncover opportunity at every action, what needs to be done, how can I get help, or leveraging people analytics to quickly get insights into workforce-related questions.
Additionally, we tie it all together with enablers that give employees a voice with feedback and listening. Listening to employee sentiment is critical during this time of uncertainty. We provide connections to content and collaboration. And lastly, communities and connections provide the opportunity to expand networks and stay connected as we all adjust to a virtual work environment.
These things are natively embedded into our suite to drive the right people actions and decisions and to ensure more personalized experiences.
Performance management should be a forward-looking, proactive, flexible approach that’s creates a personalized experience and is focused on the needs of individuals. It’s about providing meaningful work so employees stay engaged and productive, so they feel both personal and organizational success.
When looking at our performance management solution there are really three core capabilities. The first is Goal Management: This is about aligning to company objectives, engaging employees through meaningful work, quickly adapting to goal requirements as bus priorities change. With Goal Management you can:
Stay focused on the right business objectives
Align employees’ performance to your organization’s objectives
Engage employees through meaningful and fulfilling work
Quickly adapt goal requirements to changing business priorities
Create agile, intuitive, and engaging goal setting
You can cascade goals to drive alignment at all levels; set goals the right way with SMART Goal Wizard; select from delivered 500+ SMART Goal Library; easily track goal status, progress and probability of success; manage goals on the go via engaging mobile experience
Improve collaboration and transparency for better alignment
Make goals visible to others to drive better alignment
Associate goals with company initiatives
Gain visibility into goal progress through dashboards and reporting
The second core capability of our solution is Continuous Performance Management, or CPM. So many organizations are saying the annual review process doesn’t work for them and future focused performance discussions are not happening.
CPM is all about stimulating ongoing dialogue and feedback between managers and employees – to ensure that employees are getting ongoing feedback and coaching that’s critical right now, not just for employee peace of mind but for driving continuous performance improvements as well. To ensure work is always aligned to objectives, and to be able to recognize and develop employees at any time.
Why is an ongoing dialogue around performance needed?
Need to react faster to changing business conditions
Need to develop individuals and teams to meet the future needs of the business
Ensure ongoing alignment to objectives
Clarify expectations
Employees expect real-time feedback to constantly improve and hit their goals
Less surprises when doing annual performance review
With CPM Employees can:
Keep track of performance-related activities and give visibility to their managers about what they are executing on, what their work priorities are, and what progress they are making.
Align their activities to the performance goals that are part of their goal plan
Keep track of topics they want to discuss with their managers in their next one-on-one
Capture live summary of achievements to automatically create a self-assessment that they can reference and discuss with their manager at any time.
Employees can also:
Request feedback, including ad hoc feedback, meaning users can request feedback from anyone at any time throughout the year as well as provide it on anyone at any time. Managers can also request feedback on a direct report from anyone at any time.
Employees can link feedback they receive to both Activities and Achievements. They also have the flexibility to unlink it.
The feedback tab also allows employees to view all of the feedback that they’ve received in one single place. Managers can use the employee’s feedback tab to request feedback on a direct report and view feedback that’s been received.
Permissions control who users can provide feedback to, who can access feedback received, who users can request feedback from, etc.
This feature empowers employees to get the feedback they need when they need it for ongoing development and performance improvement. Managers gain additional insight into employee’s performance throughout the year without having to wait for a formal review process.
With CPM Managers can:
1- Track teams’ progress against goals with visibility into activities and achievements. This makes for more meaningful and effective conversations.
2- Have an easy and straightforward way to provide simple feedback and coaching to employees, putting special emphasis on what they should continue doing and what they should start doing to improve their performance.
3-Both employees and managers can take snapshots of what they discussed during their 1:1s, archiving the activities, topics and coaching. They can cycle through them the next time they meet.
With CPM Managers can also access the employee’s summary of achievements and feedback on those achievements directly from the review form when they’re doing performance assessments. They can also access the achievements and feedback on achievements on the employee’s goal plan. So they can more easily perform fair, accurate reviews.
The third core capability of our solution is Performance Assessments which has been a long time part of our solution. These capabilities allow an organization to objectively and accurately assess the performance of their workforce and identify and reward top performers. This is all about gaining performance insight that’s not based on just one number of data points but a complete picture to ensure an accurate assessment of performance…making it easy and enabling mangers to do it in a meaningful way.
Performance assessments allows for:
More engaging and meaningful performance reviews:
Intuitive, easy to use and based on specific needs
Provide meaningful feedback with Writing and Coaching assistants
Easily assess teams with Team Rater
Gain valuable insight with Ask for Feedback
And with calibration, managers and HR leaders visually compare employees across different dimensions – for example, performance vs. potential for the purpose of objective performance assessment decisions. Calibration helps ensure fair and objective assessments for the purpose of rewarding employees accurately. Photolesss calibration is also an option to help further remove any unintended bias and recognize and reward employees fairly.
Employees want to feel safe and productive during these uncertain times and focusing on meaningful, purposeful work can help. By giving employees purpose, you keep them engaged and an engaged employee is a happy and productive employee. Think about an employee that can easily track their activities and achievements, feedback they have received, check-ins with their managers… all from one place without having to think ‘where do I go’…. The employee now feels like “I know what I need to do to contribute to my organization’s success.”
SuccessFactors is uniquely positioned to solve performance management challenges by providing a forward looking approach that impacts future employee performance through goal guidance, dialogue, and development. With SuccessFactors you can:
Focus on the individual
Give weekly, just-in-time, feedback
Be future and growth oriented
Support two-way communication
Be manager or employee-driven
Link to present business needs
We’re also flexible. Create the performance mix that works for your organization. You can design a process that takes into account your culture, industry, region, size, management style, business model, workforce demographics. We know that performance management processes that work in some companies don’t work in others. And practices that worked well in the past may not work well in the future.
Our solution is unique in that it doesn’t force organizations in a one-size-fits-all process. It allows organizations to simultaneously deploy different performance processes to meet the needs of different performance cultures within their organization.
Our solution is proactive. It empowers employees and managers to proactively address performance issues before they become issues. Employees can give constant visibility into what they’re working on and managers can provide just in time guidance and feedback on what their employees are doing well and what they can do better not only to ensure alignment but also to drive continual performance improvements.
What’s unique about this is that employees and managers are both more engaged. They can take ownership of the process and derive value from it based on their actual needs rather than it being a top down HR driven initiative.
It’s comprehensive, meaning it’s not a standalone process, but one that’s incorporated into the entire talent management process. It’s done within the context of development, succession, calibration, learning, etc.
And finally, SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals was built to be the hub of a robust talent management ecosystem. With HCM suite data models, you can impact holistic HR processes, or drive the Intelligent Enterprise across business functions or leverage pre-built integrations into some of the most innovative talent management technologies in the market so you can build an iterative, agile talent management process focused on delivering the greatest value to your employees and your organization.
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When it comes to human experience management, the path to greatness is not simply collecting employee feedback and analyzing it. It’s the ability to deliver software that’s designed completely around what people need, how they work and what motivates and inspires them to be and do their best. We help organizations make continuous improvements by embedding insights and action planning directly into HR systems and processes. This means combining X-data with operational data in order to make the decisions and take the actions that lead to employees who deliver more, build a positive culture, and advocate for your brand.
Only with SAP can you truly reinvent human experiences, helping you not only compete but win in the experience economy.