Here at Advanced, we believe there are 6 key pillars of people experience that make up a great organisation. These pillars are performance management, talent attraction, culture & inclusion, productivity, talent management and modern workplace.
In this blog we’ll take a look at how you can modernise your workplace to make processes easier for every employee.
The past few years have precipitated a great deal of change across the working world. Not the least significant of which has been the relationship between employees and their workplace. Global disruption as a result of the pandemic saw people cut off from the traditional structure of their usual working environment, and in some cases people found themselves furloughed and faced with unprecedented amounts of downtime and uncertainty.
The global disruption precipitated a vast shift to remote and hybrid working structures, with many of us finding our domestic and professional responsibilities fetching up against each other like never before. This has meant for many, a re-evaluation of priorities and fundamentally upending the way they work. Removed as we are now from the wider disruption of the pandemic period, these fundamental shifts are now seen to have had significant impacts on modern working structures.
Today’s businesses have found themselves thrust into an ever evolving world where the priorities of the modern workforce have undergone fundamental change. With organisations undoubtedly wanting to focus on driving forward greater levels of productivity and profitability, failing to account for how the priorities of their employees and indeed, the wider working world may have shifted, could present a significant barrier to growth.
We believe that the systems that your HR teams use should allow them to leverage their experience to become truly influential driving forces in your business, giving your HR team up to date software tools can go a long way to helping them say yes to building a better people experience.
The role of workforce management in driving productivity
For businesses across all sectors, productivity is going to be the driving force behind any future business strategies. After the stresses of the past couple of years, all organisations will be firmly focused on casting aside that period of disruption and upheaval and driving forward their profitability
A key element in achieving this success will be how effectively businesses can leverage the technology and systems they use in order to remain connected with their employees and craft a working environment which is able to nurture and drive a sense of productivity and engagement. The wider shift to flexible working has also demanded that organisations re-evaluate their internal structure, requiring HR teams and management to rethink some of the ways that productivity and engagement can be measured.
From the HR perspective, the ability to leverage this information and effectively craft and promote policy around productivity will largely be dependent on their capacity and workload. For this reason, businesses will need to explore ways their businesses can achieve the power of doing less- maximising their impact and influence whilst also reducing the amount of time sacrificed to manual processes and admin heavy tasks.
The ongoing war for talent
HR as a role is closely linked with the recruitment and onboarding of new talent. In the post-pandemic world, organisations will be looking towards their people teams to help them secure the services of key talent in order to drive forward productivity and profitability, and their Employee Value Proposition (or EVP) will have a huge role to play in determining the success of any recruitment drives.
Today’s job market is an extremely scrappy and competitive space, with organisations desperately vying for what seems to be a relatively narrow crop of key talent. The key to success may very well lie in how organisations are able to distinguish themselves from their competitors.
A well-defined EVP allows businesses to market themselves as a cultural entity and to effectively communicate their ethos and commitments to issues such as environmental concerns or a greater desire for heightened diversity and inclusion initiatives.
There is a clear role to be played by HR as a function within organisations to help define their EVP and to lean on the systems and technology they use daily to gather metrics around the people experience in their workplace. By understanding your strengths as a brand, you are more able to communicate them to the wider market.
The recruitment and onboarding of new talent is a critical element of any modern organisation, and there’s no getting away from the fact that the recruitment cycle demands a lot of the time of their HR people. The systems that their people-teams rely on day to day absolutely must shoulder the burden and help make the acquisition of new talent as painless as possible.
The systems and technologies utilised by HR teams also offer the perfect opportunity to gather key metrics and data points to help understand the employee experience within your organisation, either by engaging with current employees or from information gleaned by exit interviews and other methods. The most successful programmes of transformation of the EVP can only happen with a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your organisation, and your people teams are the key to unlocking that crucial information.
Making hybrid and remote models work for you
Go back a couple of years and remote working would have been viewed as little more than a fringe benefit, a novelty offered by some organisations but in all honesty, not considered all that much as a priority. Come the advent of the pandemic and suddenly working from home became the new orthodoxy, with many of us forced into a strange new set up as an emergency expedient.
Although the mass adoption of remote working was an emergency measure, what was most interesting was what it highlighted about the productivity of employees and how it may be less tied to the office setting than previously held. With many organisations reporting record successes even amongst tumultuous times, even the most hard headed business leaders couldn’t fail to see the significant role that hybrid working models played.
Hybrid working presents a wonderful opportunity for people to build a working set up that suits them, rather than being dictated by an office location. The boost in employee engagement and wellbeing such flexibility offers is also a factor which cannot be ignored by organisations, particularly in their constant drive for productivity and profitability.
Despite the undoubted successes presented by hybrid working, there is still a suggestion that organisations are failing to embed it properly within their ongoing makeup. Where the willpower may be present to make it a reality, often the framework in place can be lagging behind, with the systems and technology relied upon daily by organisations unable to support their goals of making long term hybrid working a reality.
HR teams have a significant role to play in helping ensure that organisations enjoy a proper sense of business continuity between their remote and office-based teams. One of the most effective ways businesses can achieve true success in the adoption of hybrid working models is by having access to the tools necessary to free their HR teams from the drudgery of admin heavy tasks, and leverage their talents in more meaningful ways.
We believe that investment in digital transformation will be key for businesses to achieve excellence through remote and hybrid models.
What's next?
The modern workforce is a unique and key challenge for today’s organisations to untangle. Reconciling how attitudes and priorities have shifted over the past few years is absolutely crucial in order to ensure that business goals remain aligned with the overall needs of employees.
Businesses should consider how the technology they rely upon to engage with their people can be harnessed to help create a culture, and a way of working which supports their employees and places an emphasis on wellbeing. Employees who feel valued and secure in their roles are more likely to pay it forward in terms of greater motivation and output. Furthermore, a happy and engaged workforce is the ultimate advertisement for your brand and can serve as the ideal way to help you stand out from the crowd when looking to attract talent.
At Advanced, we understand that the modern working world is an ever evolving space. We believe whole heartedly that technology has a huge role to play in helping businesses meet the demands of today’s workforce, and this is a philosophy which constantly guides and influences how we see our solutions.
We believe that your HR teams have a key role to play as standard bearers in helping your organisation align with the needs of today’s workforce. We also know that without the proper levels of support, those same influential individuals can all too often find themselves losing precious hours to admin heavy tasks, leaving precious little time to leverage their talents in more meaningful ways. Which is why it’s important for organisations to ensure they are doing all they can to support their HR teams by using up to date tools and processes.
For more information on building a modern work place, and the other 5 pillars of people experience check out our eBook: ‘Say yes to transforming your people experience’.
Get in touch with our team today to know how you can unlock a truly modern workplace!