But the question is not when to bring everyone back, but how to use this opportunity to create a workplace that allows everyone to collaborate, focus, learn, socialize, and grow.

My colleague Steve Hunt, chief expert of Technology and Work at SAP, calls this line of thinking a “.” And I couldn’t agree more. Now that more than  of millennials and Gen-Zs prefer the option to work remotely more often, it’s clear that pre-pandemic employee experiences will never come back again.

But this sentiment doesn’t mean that the traditional office experience is dead – it simply means that employee needs are evolving. Whether your employees are working remotely, on site, or within a combination of both, delivering experiences that keep your people engaged is critically important. After all, the hybrid workplace is likely to become more common across many industries for the foreseeable future.

Sustaining a culture of employee engagement and productivity

Some businesses are already heading in the direction of a hybrid work model, allowing some people to work two or three days in the office and the rest of the week remotely, for example. But that part of the hybrid work model is the easy part.

The real magic happens when companies are able to:

• Tap more diverse talent pools
• Assess available skills and capabilities
• Realign resources to address changing needs
• Develop future leaders
• Compensate and promote people fairly
• Recognize and reward top performers in ways that increase motivation and performance

These aspects of the overall employee experience strategy must happen no matter where employees sit.

A hybrid workplace model challenges HR teams to not only keep people connected, engaged, and empowered, but also analyze data-driven insights to understand and improve the workforce culture and deliver business outcomes. But this exercise is not just for HR leaders – executive-level leaders, department heads, and organizational managers must accept responsibility to do the same.

https://youtu.be/vHOxQhSKcYA

Sales leaders are already familiar with this model to a degree. They engage primarily remote salespeople through active listening and consistently study the sales pipeline and win-loss analyses to determine which are most productive, hitting targets, and exceeding expectations. To stay competitive, sales leaders must know their organization’s cost in terms of total headcount and its implications on the company’s bottom line.

How to achieve the right balance

Transforming a workplace into a hybrid model is not as simple as writing new rules of employee conduct and setting new expectations. There is still much work to do to close any gaps in how tools and technology at work enable a great employee experience. Although employees are satisfied with some tools, they may still be skeptical about whether they have everything they need to be productive and continuously develop and grow.

However, building the connections needed to make this happen is not always easy without the right support. According to , 29% of midsize businesses cite a lack of coordination between different departments as a top internal challenge and 44% cite effective collaboration across functions as a major barrier to transformation initiatives.

Technology plays an essential role in overcoming these issues to create an engaged and agile workforce that enhances business continuity and increases resilience. In fact, employees who are highly satisfied with their company’s tech are six times more likely to be highly satisfied with their overall employee experience.

So how can a business maintain that “workplace hum” of interconnectedness when some people are in the office and others are remote on any given day? The answer goes beyond traditional HR approaches to a more human-centric one, called human experience management (HXM).

HXM is about putting people and their experiences at the center of everything, making work not only easier, but more individualized to each employee.

With the hybrid work model here to stay, it is increasingly important that employees feel connected, informed and with access to the tools they need to be productive from any device or location. And all of these capabilities are affordably accessible to midsize companies.

Digital workplace tools, such as this new HXM solution, allow employees to tap into everything they need – applications, processes, content, and information − from a single touch point and plus, they can personalize the experience based on what matters to each individual, and which insights and actions are relevant based on their behaviors.

Discovering peer groups, mentors, and intelligent recommendations with greater ease helps employees access the resources they need, stay connected, and save time to get work done. In addition, HR teams can leverage the technology to onboard and offboard employees and upskill and reskill through continuous learning, skills development, and on-the-job training opportunities.

With this modern and intuitive technology, multiple applications are integrated into a single user interface, extending the experience across all work-related touch points. And since the platform is extensible, companies can generate more value for their customers, partners, and stakeholders without the burden of ever-increasing IT costs.

Putting people first matters

There’s no doubt that the pandemic has empowered us to reimagine the workplace and created opportunities to optimize it. But no matter where or how employees work, employee experience matters, especially when it comes to employee engagement and retention.

A hybrid work environment that is interconnected with the right foundation can become an experience that gives employees what they need to feel connected, empowered, appreciated, and fairly rewarded. And when employees and their experiences come first, and their true value is well-understood, midsize businesses create a true meritocracy that empowers their workforce to take charge of their future and the company’s success.

Connect the dots between customers, employees, insights, and processes across your midsize business. Read the Oxford Economics brief, “,” for research-based insights on the value of being interconnected and the e-book, “,” for tips on how to act on them effectively.

Lara Albert is global vice president of Solution Marketing for 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors
This article was originally published on Forbes, .

The post The Hybrid Workplace: Engaging The Post-Pandemic Workforce In Midsize Companies appeared first on 51ˇçÁ÷India News Center.

A recent Oxford Economics report, “,” revealed that 47% of medium-sized companies that reported strong revenue growth over the past year prioritize the employee experience. The research suggests that creating employee experiences based on what people need to stay inspired and do their best ultimately supports the workforce agility and business resiliency needed to weather hard times.

Creating an engaged and highly productive workforce that enhances business continuity requires a profound shift in HR focus – one that moves away from simply facilitating HR-driven processes and toward delivering meaningful experiences that focus on the human factor. And it’s the practice of human experience management (HXM) that empowers such a move.

What is human experience management?

Employees are more than just assets to be managed. Employees are individuals with specific and ever-changing needs, motivations, challenges, and goals that they expect to be understood. This mindset takes shape as early as the first interaction a candidate has with an organization and continues to evolve every day after that.

The practice of HXM acknowledges this incredibly human aspect of people and work. It enables HR leaders and their teams to adopt a more agile approach by listening to employees, embracing their feedback and sentiments, and delivering programs in an iterative manner to continue to improve results.

Take, for example, the recruitment of top talent. All too often, recruiters are stuck with tasks that are highly manual, paper-intensive, and slow. Whenever they think the perfect candidate is found, a competing employer may have already hired that person with a competitive salary and benefits package.

How do recruiters effectively nurture and engage candidates in ways that build strong connections and relationships from day one? This task can be especially challenging when working tirelessly to fill 30 job openings needed to strategically move the business forward. Furthermore, they must continue to revamp their candidate experience by understanding perceptions of what’s working and what’s not.

To deliver HXM, HR leaders need to understand that they must provide intuitive tools that are more accessible and user friendly to make things more efficient, to automate tasks that were cumbersome and time-consuming in the past, and to help drive the behavioral changes and agility that businesses need today.

Why legacy HR systems cannot support HXM

If you think about it, traditional HR systems were designed for HR leaders engaged in human capital management (HCM) and responsible for acquiring, developing, and retaining top talent. This focus has led to a range of must-have capabilities that support top-down, HR-led activities, such as hiring, onboarding, development, compensation, benefits, payroll, and succession planning.

Traditional HR systems weren’t designed with the end user in mind – the employee, manager, candidate or new hire – and the capabilities needed to boost their confidence, productivity, and engagement. Since they are fundamentally transaction-focused, the technology was never optimized to capture, evaluate, or act on employee experiences or expectations.

In contrast, HXM is a different way to approach HR – where creating great experiences for people is at the center of everything.

Which technologies drive the benefits of HXM

The practice of HXM requires a dramatic shift in the design of HR software with a focus on engaging people in entirely new ways. Experiences should be redesigned to make work simpler and more seamless, as well as highly personalized and relevant.

For example, reimagined learning and development can create opportunities for every employee’s growth. Employees may be supported by conversational chatbots and machine learning-based recommendations that deliver contextual insights, suggestions, and guidance toward the right actions. By providing the tools to continuously listen to employees, medium-sized businesses can base their workforce decisions on real-time insight into where gaps exist and which steps should be taken to improve everyday employee experiences.

Technologies that enable this level of agility are transformational for medium-sized companies. Barriers that typically impede employee experience improvements – such as generational differences, difficulty scaling for growth, and obstacles hindering the evolution of organizational culture – can be removed. Doing so allows HR leaders to become more flexible as they adapt policies and programs to meet the ever-evolving needs of the workforce and the overall business.

Let’s come back to my earlier example of the recruiter with an extraordinary caseload. The entire process of posting job openings, searching for applicants, and finding, interviewing, and hiring the right candidate can be shortened to 45 days, instead of the expected 95 days. The reason is simple: technology is designed to increase recruiter efficiency by eliminating complexity while making it easy for recruiters to deliver meaningful candidates experiences at scale.

The changing role of HR and how it must continue to evolve

In recent years, HR has undergone dynamic shifts in its roles, functions, and overall impact in shaping organizations. Now more than ever with the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear that the future of HR has arrived and the time to embrace the practice of HXM is now.

Today, HR leaders are in a unique position to pave the way for a new world of work as the reigning innovator and champion of the employee experience. Just imagine the possibilities when HXM redefines employee experiences from every angle to improve adaptability, embrace change, and address human factors genuinely. Suddenly, HR technology has a new purpose: to make life at work better – for everyone.

To learn more about how to transform your operations around new technologies and human experiences that are critical to your business resilience and growth, download the Oxford Economics report, ““.

This article was original featured on , Forbes.

The post New Research Suggests Human Experience Management Is Critical To Weather Hard Times appeared first on 51ˇçÁ÷India News Center.