Number one “Great Place to Work” for two years in a row, SAP Labs strongly believes that “Reimagining human experience with the help of technology is going to be the future of HR” said, Shraddhanjali Rao, VP Human Resources at SAP Labs and SAP India.
There are 27 human feelings that an individual experiences, ranging from confusion, sympathy, fear, to disgust, envy and many more. These feelings have the power to make or break a company, even an industry. Stating that 80 percent of the workforce will be millennials by 2025, Shraddhanjali shared how several digital technologies like Big Data, Iot, AI, ML, Blockchain, In Memory Computing are changing employee expectations. To address the changing expectations, 90 percent of SAP’S HR processes already run on cloud across functions like onboarding, development planning, continuous performance management, learning, HR Analytics, etc.
The four fundamentals SAP lives by to balance people practices and technology are:
- Building human elements in the digital revolution: Organizations need to anticipate the future demands and prepare their workforce to be future ready. That is critical for the survival of both the organization as well as the employee. It is also important to align future readiness with employee aspirations. Empower employees to integrate learning with work and skill themselves through system generated personalized learning suggestions basis their individual aspirations, over and above social learning. “To build human elements there is one practice that needs to stop. Control. We have to learn to let go, believe in people and technology”, said Rao.
- Creating human experiences at scale: Speaking of reimagining and reshaping HR, Rao said, “If you want to build experiences that matter, you have to relook at how you structure HR.” Creating human experiences at scale demands creating personalized experiences. This can be done by building distinct HR segments catering to unique employee needs as well as crafting personalized health and benefits for employees. Every employee segment has a different need such as:
- Simple/easy employee focused services like career coaching, etc.
- Tactical support and consultation on complexities
- Strategic support on organizational design
HR services need to be bifurcated into focused segments as above.
- Building connected organizations: In an always-on world, connectivity and agility play a big role in driving any change. SAP recognizes the importance of social collaboration and encourages building employee communities. These communities not only serve the purpose of internal networking and communication but can also be leveraged to inspire entrepreneurship with the help of startup studios, Bridge forums, flexible fellowships, etc.
- Infusing inclusion via technology: Organizations can infuse inclusion via technology by building a culture of business beyond bias. By using technology as an enabler, organizations can push for jobs to be bias free. Creating generic job descriptions that do not use biased stereotypical gender traits, encourage photo less calibration sheets, diversity reporting tools, etc. are tech enabled practices that help attract diverse talent and at the same help remove bias at the time of hiring such talent.
“We are an experience economy. Be the experience company.”
The above content is based on the session by Shraddhanjali Rao on “Reimagining the human experience with technology” at People Matters TechHR 2019.