Decoding the Talent Economy with a Hyper-Personalised Employee Experience
What does it take to win in the talent economy?
“Essentially, two things. One is to challenge the core assumptions about how people will work together, enter the workforce, and develop their potential. Second, it means developing new frameworks that allow organisations to embrace these changes instead of falling behind,’” said Dr Ramon Segismundo, Founder and CEO, 1-HR.X, opening a panel discussion that deliberated on the importance of a hyper-personalised employee experience to drive the business forward.
In a dynamic business world, talent is a key asset that continues to be difficult to source and retain. But the story doesn’t end with talent retention; what is equally important is to have an engaged workforce dedicated to business goals.
At the HR Tech 4.0: Driving the Talent Economy conference, a virtual event hosted by PeopleStrong and People Matters, leading HR and business leaders including Mharicar Reyes, President and CEO at Asticom Technology Inc, Fides V. Tanay, SVP & Group Chief HR Officer, SM Prime Holdings Inc. and Agustina Samara, Chief of People & Corporate Strategy at DANA came together to deliberate on what it takes to overcome the experience gap, empower a digitally ready and productive workforce while building their capabilities all of it in a hybrid context. The event saw over 1000+ registrations from APAC’s largest organisations and was raving success with top business & HR leaders joining the forum.
Here are some key takeaways from the session:
Overcoming the experience gap in a hybrid world of work:
Creating the right experience also requires organisations to understand employee expectations, needs, and desires and leaders have to ensure that they achieve complete clarity on this matter. This requires time and energy to build connections with their people.
“By clearly mapping the experience for each employee touchpoint, we can address the expectation gap, especially in the hybrid reality we are in today. Expectations are the basis of an employee’s satisfaction and dissatisfaction. So that being the case, we must connect with our employees and understand their motivations deeply,” advises Reyes.
Unlocking employee productivity and gaining competitive advantage:
Tanay points out three ways to differentiate employee experience: talent, organisation and leadership.
In terms of talent, the values of competence, commitment and contribution play a significant role. From recruiting right and upskilling your people, what’s important in terms of commitment is developing emotional engagement by sustaining an open and honest work culture with room for a lot of empathy.
Contribution is when you enable your people to find meaning and purpose in their work while feeling a strong sense of belonging to the organisation. When it comes to the role organisations will play, it’s about creating a ‘market-oriented ecosystem that capitalises customer experience.’
Policies must be implemented to accommodate the employees into this ecosystem seamlessly. And this is where leadership comes in.
Today, a mindset shift is required from a one-size-fits-all to a hyper-personalised approach to talent management. Technology can bridge the gap between people strategy and business outcomes.
Organisations need to build a talent operating system that brings data, processes and people on one platform and provide insights into the company’s talent landscape.
As Tanay notes, “Every leader is responsible for the employee experience. So the call is for brave leaders to see potential in people and processes and have the guts or courage to develop them. The call is for them to develop brave leaders who are better than them or able to articulate and live out the purpose and the values of the organisation.”
Empowering a digital-ready workforce, building on their capabilities:
“One feedback we got is that our employees like to choose their learning paths. So, we allow them to pick one or two modules and then give them the personal budget to choose their appetite for learning,” said Samara when asked about what it takes to build a digital-ready workforce in a constantly evolving business environment. But at the same time, she also highlighted the need to focus on employee wellbeing, which is a crucial factor in employee agility and resilience at the workplace.
Immersion is also a strategy that includes on-site learning of the company’s different businesses and subsidiaries to understand the roles and responsibilities of each function and to envision career growth opportunities for the talent working in these fields.
A purpose-driven company that supports its employees with the right tools and solutions while offering them flexibility and the right growth opportunity aligned with their personal vision and purpose is the best move forward.
Measuring and driving a hyper-personalised employee experience:
There are multiple touch points in an employee’s journey through their lifecycle. Companies that map these journeys through technology and ensure personalised experience have an edge. Tanay says that while rebuilding their people strategy post the pandemic, they initiated multiple programs from repurposing and upskilling roles to continuous work design and role review to check their relevance in the current business setup to setting up holistic well-being programs.
Simultaneously, the company measured the talent management experience by getting regular feedback from their new hires on the interview and onboarding process to encourage real-time conversations. Employee engagement was driven by mentoring, coaching, clarity on the KPIs of their role, rewarding and celebrating their wins and opening up learning pathways.
The onboarding and the pre-onboarding experience is also a priority for organisations as it ensures that their new recruits know about the impact of the company at large and the impact that they, as employees with the company products, would create in the larger community. It becomes important that leaders invest in building networks and communities to support their people throughout the probation period. Further, to create the right work culture, the company ensures that the processes align with the digital solutions currently run and are made easily accessible to their people.
As Tanay says, alignment in employee experience, customer experience and the core values that make up an organisation will lead to success in the marketplace. Moreover, the leadership team must provide a clear purpose and vision to its people. A hyper-personalised employee experience will yield results on talent retention and the business. It enables positive, flexible, fair and inclusive working, developing talent and allowing mobility.
And finally, as Samara insightfully concludes, in the question of high tech and high touch, the usage of technology has to be mindful of the context and your people because even in the digital transformation era, it’s your employees that will steer the ship forward.
About PeopleStrong:
PeopleStrong is Asia Pacific’s leading, and the most comprehensive Human Capital Management SaaS platform. PeopleStrong tech capabilities span across the employee lifecycle from hire to exit, including Human Capital Management, Payroll, Talent Acquisition & Management, and Collaboration.
People Strong has simplified work life for over 500+ large enterprises across the emerging economies of Asia Pacific. Today, PeopleStrong empowers the lives of 2M+ employees with a mobile-first, AI & ML-powered talent operating system.
PeopleStrong is rated among the Top 5 in the Asia Pacific on Gartner Peer Insights and named Customers' Choice of HR Tech for 1000+ employee enterprises in the Gartner 'Voice of the Customer' Report.
For more information, visit www.peoplestrong.com