Integrating the hardware with “heart-ware”

Written by Mohd Fauzi, VP HR.

While technology has many benefits, I think it’s important and humbling to remind ourselves as HR professionals, that it’s the welfare and well-being of people who should be at the heart of these plans. The key lies in integrating hardware (technology) with “heart-ware” – understanding what motivates and engages people so that our employees feel empowered and not burdened or overwhelmed by new technology.

In my previous  article, I talked a little about how technology acts as a catalyst to promote collaboration and communication. Building upon that, I would like to elaborate on two ways technology can be used to build a compelling employee experience.

Using technology to manage employees effectively

Talent management is a process that requires consistent and long-term planning. It is also a time-consuming process that involves keying in lots of data, sometimes repeatedly. By using digital platforms that allows updating of information at your own pace, and automating some of the processes such as goal setting and measurement, the entire process can be made more efficient, and let’s admit it, less painful for both managers and employees.

At Zuellig Pharma, we recently implemented PeopleSpace, a cloud-based employee management solution that is basically a one-stop portal to maintain the quality of data and information about our employees. This way, managers, HR and employees can carry out multiple functions, including goals and performance management, talent and succession planning in one place. The platform is also ‘smart’ in analyzing the data to rank talent based on performance, which reduces the need for manual assessment and helps us make better critical decisions concerning talent.

When we make decisions that improves the wellness and engagement of our employees, we get one step closer to creating a personalised and valuable employee experience for each individual. In the long-run, when employees see that ample efforts are taken to enable fair assessment of employees and improve productivity, I trust that this will help strengthen employee engagement and better attract and retain talent.

Delivering employee satisfaction in a digital age

Organisations must make the conscious effort to listen and a continuously make improvements. In fact, it’s very much like how companies conduct customer relationship management – but this time with employees.

Measuring employee satisfaction can be challenging and most of the time, companies use surveys and polls to measure their employee engagement levels. This helps to measure the loyalty of the firm’s employee relationships and the likelihood of an employee recommending the company to another friend or colleague. This improves the accuracy of our understanding of employee perceptions and sentiments, which will give us a better idea on how we can “co-create” tailored employee experiences because different employees have diverse and varying expectations, needs and preferences.

At the end of the day, any effort to redefine the employee experience must start from the top. Managers have to be advocates of driving employee experience and champion the steps that must be taken to reach this goal. As managers, walk the talk by becoming first adopters of these effective strategies to engage and empower your colleagues and employees.

By creating a synergistic relationship between technology and talent, this can drive employee engagement and help our employees to live, work and play better.