Kellogg’s, the $23.5 billion company achieved great success by just transforming its HR functions. An organized HR function can provide direction, motivation, and impetus to the organization’s most important asset, its workforce. The vision and mission of an organization can only be achieved if the leadership of the company works in harmony with its HR function.
Motivation metrics of the current workforce consisting of millennials have challenged the HR function to rethink its talent acquisition & retention strategies. Offer to Joining ratio is drastically falling, attrition rates are increasing. The changing needs of the business contexts demands, transformation of Human Resource management to be more strategic to align the HR functions with strategic business objectives.
Here are five areas HR need to pay attention to:
- Increased need for data and analytical tools - The ability to collect, process and analyze "big data" is becoming a crucial factor in identifying and managing the challenges of business lifecycles. Companies that want to gain a competitive edge increasingly need to use analytics to gain data-driven insights into workforce trends and take action to refine recruitment, compensation and other performance incentives to meet employees' evolving goals and interests. Technology will continue to keep us connected globally, driving new innovative ways to identify and evaluate talent.
- Prioritizing employee engagement- Increasingly, organizations are focusing on improving their employee engagement to drive better performance. According to Gallup research, employee engagement is strongly connected to business outcomes essential to an organization's financial success, such as productivity, profitability and customer engagement. Engaged employees drive the innovation, growth and revenue. Compensation and job security are both very important, but another emerging human resource trend is, the employees having a sense of loyalty to small businesses that are honest with them. An open-door policy and transparency will keep the employees from jumping ship and moving on to the competition. So, start sharing with your employees, discussing issues with them, and getting their input. Make them feel important.
- Devising retention game plans- Companies at a risk of high attrition should develop a rigorous game plan to drive higher retention.
- Inculcating entrepreneurial/ intrapreneurial push - With digital disruption and the unleashing of the entrepreneurial spirit, we will witness a new set of benchmark skills, which were non-existent a decade ago, determining success. Age-old strict practices will decline eventually.
- Aligning themselves with the unconventional hiring and retention plans, if the need arises- Thinking out of the box, has not just remained as an interview question anymore, but instead compelling the HRs to do so. Companies are getting ready to hire outside the boundaries, knowing the risk of it, but taking a chance to succeed in getting and retaining the purple squirrels.
Employer Branding, Employee retention rate and employee engagement rates are the most common metrics which are used to analyze the success of this huge transformation.
Fact Sheet on how transforming HR functions have created wonders
- Innovative Hiring has lead Ingenium( a student flagship program conducted by QuEST Global) to diversify its skilled talent pipeline by reaching out to more than 400 campuses with 20,000 student registrations that too within a short span of 2 months. And surprisingly, all this was possible at an unbelievable reduced campaign management cost which has brought down the cost per hire ratio by 50%
- India’s one of the largest IOT Hackathon Program conducted by ITC Infotech, became radically popular in the year 2015, among the student community of leading campuses. Apart from that, the company has successfully hired 50 best IOT talent within a very short span of time with increased student registrations
- IBM Bluemix, an innovative community Engagement Program, has created revolution in adoption of its Bluemic cloud platform.
There are several third party vendors, who assist you to deploy the customized and trending business solutions for this transformation. This will enhance the experience of handling various Human Resources functions like Hiring, Training and Development, Employee Engagement, Performance management, Safety and compliance.
Apart from these, the senior HR leaders need to network with company owners and CEO to understand the future HR requirements and decide the future successors for the big role in order to avoid choosing incompetent personnel in the end.