Market Perspectives

The workforce has gone through several major shifts in the past three years. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a transformation from working in an office to often hybrid or totally remote work. In what has been described as the Great Resignation, employees – often feeling unappreciated by their employers – resigned in droves. Organizations have taken several measures to deal with these challenges, including updating human capital management software.

Many HCM vendors, such as SAP SuccessFactors, enable organizations to reinforce the value and potential of each worker. SAP made several significant updates to SuccessFactors in 2022 related to individualized experiences to help empower organizations to create an agile workforce. Many of these updates support what SAP describes as the “opportunity marketplace,” a capabilities framework to connect workers with recommendations such as upskilling and reskilling. These individualized recommendations consider extensive worker attributes – such as aspirations, strengths, work style, motivations, education, experience, communication style and environment preferences – to identify the most appropriate opportunities for growth. SAP describes this as the “whole self model,” or the idea that you need to consider the whole person, not just view someone as a replaceable part of the organization. SAP made these changes across its entire human experience management suite.

The core element of SAP’s whole self model is the identity of the worker. By being better informed about individual preferences, the software can best match the needs of the employee with the needs of the organization. The expectation is that a better understanding of the workforce will help organizations create more effective and motivated workers.

Another key feature of SAP SuccessFactors is dynamic teams. Dynamic teams is designed to create cross-functional, motivated teams by relying on workers that are often “hidden.” Leaders may rely on anecdotal information to determine which workers have the skills and talents suited to a particular task. The dynamic team application is designed to be a quantifiable way to determine which workers would best support a task. This ensures people are assigned to a team based on skills, ambition and the needs of the organization.

SAP enables organizations to meet the needs of the changing work environment. In the past, time-management applications were built only for office workers. As workforces move to hybrid or fully remote, organizations need enhanced time-management software. SuccessFactors addresses deskless and hourly workers with features like export your calendar, time off, grace periods for start and end times and holiday time-off selection.

The path to remote work can often require paperwork and approvals. With SAP SuccessFactors, an employee can use Work Zone to easily request to work remotely. The request is automatically sent to the worker’s manager, and upon approval, is routed to the HR administrator. With the administrator’s approval, a home-office stipend can automatically be added, and the information is sent to payroll for approval. The worker is notified when all approvals are complete. This process occurs in both cloud and on-premises systems.

These tools align with SAP’s overall mission of human experience management. According to SAP, HXM is a shift away from the traditional HR focus of the hire-to-retire pipeline to a focus on optimizing workforces. By relying on machine learning and artificial intelligence, HXM provides actionable guidance to workers, listening to employees and managers without crossing into invasiveness. The traditional role of HR is being expanded in the HXM framework.

AI-related tools that delve into the experience of workers will continue to proliferate. Ventana Research asserts that by 2025, intelligent virtual assistants using AI will be able to discern intentions to better address employee issues and answer questions without time consuming rerouting or escalation, benefiting over three-quarters of organizations.

Organizations are recognizing the importance of demonstrating that workers are valued members of the team. In the past, employees were viewed as easily replaceable. However, with changes to the economy and major shifts in the workforce, organizations are using advanced technology to help attract and retain talent. The features of SAP SuccessFactors aid in creating a motivated workforce and support efforts to attract and retain top talent. Organizations interested in adopting technology that allows them to react to workforce cues and help workers feel like valued members of the team would benefit from SAP SuccessFactors.