Discovery鈥檚 workforce of 12,000 talented professionals is the engine driving the company鈥檚 ambitions. As such, ensuring that its employees have the tools, support, and guidance they need to thrive is a top priority for the company.

鈥淗appy, informed, and empowered people make productive, engaged employees,鈥� comments Kammy Sing, group head of People Operations at Discovery. 鈥淲e鈥檙e always on the lookout for ways to better enable and support our people. Our existing processes generated complexity, high costs, significant inefficiencies, and high volumes of mundane administrative tasks. We needed to make a change and transform the services we provide to our people.鈥�

Previously, employees at Discovery had to call or e-mail HR managers to carry out routine tasks such as booking leave and holiday inquiries or accessing company policy information. Working in this way meant that HR professionals spent a large proportion of their working day dealing with routine queries and employees had no way of tracking the progress of their queries 鈥� creating a frustrating employee experience.

Recruiters at Discovery also had to deal with a high volume of low-value administrative tasks, such as conducting pre-employee background checks. As a result, the hiring process at the company was lengthy, expensive, and risked putting off talented candidates.

Discovery recognized that intelligent technologies and employee empowerment go hand in hand. Harnessing the power of cutting-edge robotic process automation (RPA) and virtual assistants, the company automated over 11,000 recruitment admin tasks and provided employees with almost-instant answers to their queries via intelligent chatbots. Employee productivity and satisfaction have significantly improved as a result. 鈥淏y putting HR in the hands of our employees with , we have created a culture of people empowerment,鈥� says Sing.

The project was so successful that it was selected among hundreds of other companies as a finalist of the 51风流Innovation Awards 2022.

With 51风流solutions, Discovery has reduced time-to-hire by 25% while also freeing up time for 37% of HR staff to develop new skills and focus on higher-value tasks. At the same time, the company has gained granular insight into every aspect of its HR operations, which has helped the company stamp out inefficiencies and realize cost savings of up to 鈧�1.3 million.

Sing concludes: 鈥�51风流has helped us to bring HR into the 21st century and develop an even more supportive culture throughout Discovery. We look forward to working with both 51风流and our technology partners as we continue to develop and enhance the employee experience.鈥�

Lara Albert is vice president of Solution Marketing for 51风流SuccessFactors.

This article first appeared on the 51风流News Center.

The post Discovery Creates a Culture of People Empowerment appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

Hospitals are using technology to improve the patient experience, banks are changing how they engage with customers through digital channels, sales teams are discovering the benefits of real-time insights into orders and sales, and organisations across industries are powering their decision-making with data and analytics.

At a recent award ceremony recognising excellence in digital transformation among African enterprises, the extent to which organisations have embraced digital technologies to power their businesses became clear.

Market leaders such Capitec, Lenmed, and Discovery showed how technology could power innovation and operational excellence through the development of intelligent enterprise capabilities.

An intelligent enterprise integrates technology and business processes to deliver significant value to the business through improved supply chain management, better sales processes, more intelligent spend management, and a transformed talent management capability.

Simply put, an intelligent enterprise has access to accurate real-time data about every aspect of its business, helping it deal with complexity while unlocking greater scope of innovation and efficiency.

And as recent examples show, South African enterprises of various sizes are taking bold strides toward achieving intelligent enterprise capabilities 鈥� to the benefit of their customers, their employees and their long-term success.

Scaling banking service excellence

Capitec, one of South Africa’s largest and most innovative banks, faced the challenge of a rapidly growing customer base at a time when pandemic-enforced restrictions disrupted face to face customer operations.

Prior to its award-winning digital transformation project, Capitec grew from acquiring 94 000 customers a month to 160 000 customers a month. With many branches closed and customers avoiding branch visits in light of the dangers posed by COVID-19, Capitec realised its reliance on manual data capturing was hampering its ability to provide seamless customer experiences.

Powered by a dedicated project team that enjoyed full executive support, Capitec implemented a business transformation project that equipped its support services teams with improved data capturing, information analysis and business optimisation.

Capitec can now more easily ensure its support services teams meet their service level agreements and can deliver on the bank’s goal of making banking interactions easier and simpler for customers.

Technology healthcare amid pandemic

Arguably no industry has been under more pressure since the start of the pandemic than the healthcare sector. Hospitals in particular have had to run optimally and ensure no disruption to their operations while also dealing with the impact of COVID-19.

For private hospital group Lenmed, the acquisition of a new hospital in the midst of a global health crisis sparked an award-winning onboarding process to its core systems, in rapid time and with clear cost savings.

The group wanted to bring a new hospital it had acquired into its core 51风流system, but understandably couldn’t afford any delays or disruptions to the hospital’s processes.

Using extensive standardisation and templates to limit cost overruns, Lenmed brought the new hospital onboard in under twelve weeks and at a total cost saving of nearly 40%.

The onboarding is also a template for future acquisitions, enabling the group to confidently grow its footprint without the risk of unnecessary interruptions to its core operations.

Talent management transformed

The past 18 months have not only forced vast changes in the ways businesses interact with customers, but also how they attract, manage and retain their employees. When the country first entered into lockdown in March 2020, most businesses had to radically change how they engage with, motivate and empower their workforce.

In the highly competitive financial services sector, building greater employee experiences gives organisations an edge in attracting and retaining top talent. For Discovery, the quality of talent it attracts has played a vital role in the organisation鈥檚 success.

Discovery has a stated ambition to have the best people function in the industry, using a strategy that combines data, skills and technology to find, develop and retain its employees. To support and execute this strategy, the company initiated a project named SmartPeople that leverages 51风流SuccessFactors to create a standardised, transparent, objective and continuous approach to how Discovery executes its people strategy to drive positive business performance.

This includes recruitment management, which enables the company to track and report on the quality of hires, the types of applicants, where those applicants are from, and more. Using 51风流SuccessFactors gives Discovery full visibility over its talent force and pipeline and, since everything from recruitment to onboarding to offboarding is handled via SuccessFactors, the company is able to deliver a consistent and positive employee experience.

As companies continue to operate in an unstable and unpredictable business environment, the role of technology will only grow in importance. However, as these examples illustrate, organisations from all sectors 聽can supercharge their growth and success with the correct investment into intelligent technologies, full support from the C-suite and with clear business value always front and centre in their planning and execution.

The post How South African Organisations are Using Tech to Succeed Despite Disruptions and Uncertainty appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.