Elevating human resources: A future-fit, employee-centric people and culture function

The HR function has come a long way from personnel and payroll management to being at the heart of the organizational strategy. The world is in a steep war for talent and a future-ready, employee-centric HR function can go a long way in better engagement, enhanced productivity, and therefore higher retention-rates. Employees across the world are now accustomed to seamless personalized experiences and expect this of the HR services too.

In this article, we discuss what this shift in the HR translates into for most talent functions and their operations, and how we can execute this broad vision when it comes to the workforce and individual employees of the organization.

There are mainly four shifts in people services that have taken place over the last few years, namely, the omnichannel services model, people analytics, services automation, and the agile HR services organization. The following chart summarizes these shifts:

While we now understand the components of an experience-led adaptive HR function, what are 3 steps companies can take to build it?

1. Shift to service design

To create an experience-led HR function, it is not enough to have an employee-centric mission. A radical re-thinking of the ‘front-stage’ can directly improve the employee experience. HR can use concepts like design thinking, lean, process mining, etc. to enhance service design. This will allow the experience to lead the process design instead of the other way around.

A ‘persona design’ phase helps in the segmentation of employees into 8-10 high-level groups each with different goals, tasks, needs, and pain points. To ensure every aspect is considered, most progressive organizations have switched from a linear approach to a 360°, end to end process and technology design focusing on a service blueprint for detailed experience-led process models.

The outcome of the service design is a user-centric service, delivered via a mobile-first EXP product. This one-stop-shop mobile platform offers everything that an employee needs, connecting different service applications via a single EX layer.

2. Accelerate Talent Re-Skilling through Digital platforms

Talent re-skilling or accelerated learning is a top priority for the c-suite to stay relevant in the big game. Any digital learning platform must have the following key features to be effective:

Career Navigator: A ‘navigator’ guides the learner through dynamic learning paths. These paths are crafted per-persona and designed to allow the employees to reskill and upskill, based on their current roles. Employees can choose from new-age roles created by the organization, learn a skill of their choice, enhance their current skills, or learn technology full-stack.

Learning Labs: Learners can practice what they have learned in a fail-safe lab environment with a full set course catalog. Virtual machines, projects, and environments are pre-loaded for them to go ahead, code, and have fun.

Learning Analytics: Both learners and leaders can drive impactful learning initiatives with learning insights. Intuitive dashboards should allow leaders to monitor and track the learning health metrics and allow a team-level or an organization- level perspective.

3. Shift to a new Experience Model

Employees and organizations worldwide were already moving towards a conversational AI-based services model before the pandemic. COVID-19 has greatly accelerated this new experience model which can be summarized as follows:

• Find: Employees need a Google-like search functionality to browse through multi-functional knowledge articles, policy search, analytics search, transaction search, workflow search, and so on. Finding something from an omnichannel search functionality is a very powerful experience.
• Execute: Employees need a light-touch execution model that has self-service at the heart of it. Executing a spot bonus, an LTI approval, or approving an onboarding request needs to be surfaced through a simple UX that aggregates enterprise-wide functionalities.
• Navigate: Employees need to navigate and seek help for anything that they can’t self-serve. The simplest way of doing this is also the most powerful: let the experience bot guide you to the right agent for resolution through an integrated help desk.

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