The changing employer-employee dynamics have ushered in new trends like the ‘great resignation’ and the ‘upskilling imperative’, that are driving talent management priorities today. Today’s talent wants to be continuously connected and engaged. 

Typically, the talent management process tends to focus on the identification of High Potential and their Development and Succession Planning. HONO’s suite of solutions - “enable, engage, and transform”, covers the entire spectrum of managing talent – right from acquiring the right talent, onboarding, engaging, retaining, developing and grooming them to be successful leaders.  

Over the past two years, HR leaders and practitioners have had to unlearn and find new ways to reinvent the talent management wheel. They had to tap into the right blend of low-touch and high-tech processes to engage and develop talent. 

A new normal for talent management

Leadership development, upskilling and reskilling, virtual collaboration, the culture of empathy etc. are no longer mere buzzwords but have become the core enablers of business.  During the pandemic, as HR fostered close collaboration between leaders and their teams, it became necessary to design jobs around new aspirations and lifestyles by taking on the values and personalities of their people and their communities. Hyper-personalization became the key to unlocking people's success. 

68% of executives believe that workforce strategies will be more customized in the future to individual needs
– Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2021

Naturally, listening and understanding deeply is the need of the hour, made possible by today’s emerging technologies like HONO’s  that leverage Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies while simultaneously applying the power of human intelligence to make empathy-led yet business-forward decisions. 

Holistic Technology as a talent enabler

Technology can be a powerful tool to enable, engage, and transform the workforce. Holistic approaches utilizing HONO’s suite of technologies can help in meeting today’s talent management needs. HR leaders must look at how HR technologies can enhance the value across the entire employee life cycle, from pre-hire to post-exit: 

• Recruitment: Hiring the right person at the right time within the right cost requires recruiters to identify and screen candidates in alignment with a well-defined skills library. HONO’s vast skill library enables recruiters to spot the best talent internally and externally.  Since candidates today expect a great candidate experience, an anytime-anywhere digital onboarding module can go a long way in engaging and motivating incoming talent.
  
  
• Employee experience: Not just candidates, but employees too expect solutions that will help them to work effectively from anywhere.  Be it payroll, overtime, compensation, leaves, attendances, or travel expenses, every people operation touchpoint must be digitized as a self-service module that enables the employee to take control.
  
  
• Employee connect: Periodic pulse checks, surveys and psychometric analysis can now be embedded into web and mobile chatbots and easily made accessible to employees, thanks to AI. For example, HONO’s Moments of Truth Index helps uncover employees’ nine critical moments of truth throughout the employee journey. This provides evidence-based, actionable insights to enable a purpose-led organizational culture.
  
  
• Cultivating a culture of belongingness: Instilling the brand culture throughout the organization requires much more than just employee connection. For example, for today’s digital workforce, effective virtual collaboration can be fostered through social tools. Some tools that HR should harness to build an open and approachable work culture are social shares, messengers, file-sharing tools etc. that encourage digital conversations in real-time. With HONO’s Social tool, leaders and managers can connect with their people through secure, hassle-free and on-demand groups.
  
  
• Employee learning and growth: HR technology can facilitate the development and growth of employees through objective performance evaluations, development discussions and clear career paths. HONO’s continuous feedback mechanism helps create a culture of continuous review so as to ensure employees are on track and that corrective action is agile. 360 degrees feedback can help generate multi-rater feedback and when clubbed with skill-based mobility frameworks, can help increase cross-skilling and career happiness. Succession and career planning are possible by analyzing performance, potential, engagement levels and flight risks. Ultimately, all these performance and development inputs would feed into the learning strategy to move towards a continuous learning and growth culture.
  
  
• Employee performance and motivation: One-size-fits-one when it comes to bringing out the best of one’s people! Timely rewards and recognition, designed and delivered well, can help employees grow, develop and succeed. One such mechanism to help gain insights into hidden talent is point-based leader boards. To manage such highly customized total rewards programs, HR and business leaders can utilize HONO solutions to deliver the WIIFM for employees and make them outperform.
  
  
• A smooth employee exit experience: While early warning systems can help identify attrition proactively, it is important to put in place workflow-based separation processes, final clearance processes and automatic generation of documents to make the exit process smooth and effective even under remote working. . . Also, sharing documented feedback from exit interviews with stakeholders will help address undesired attrition. “Turn your alumni into strong brand ambassadors”, is the HONO motto for a great exit experience.  

A plethora of HR technologies, from workforce analytics to predictive analytics, to NLP and AI-driven prescriptive analytics are available for HR leaders to leverage. HR professionals to fully understand and apply these technologies for the people’s and organisation’s benefit. To achieve this, HR leaders themselves must deep dive and develop HR tech know-how, and learn how to make tech work for business.

“Technology can play the role of a critical enabler to architect the right employee experience. It can directly impact productivity measures, assist in employee development and help craft career pathing efforts. HR teams need to not just invest in these technologies but they need to actively leverage the data and insight to boost talent strategies on engagement and retention, said Mukul Jain, CEO of HONO

At the core of a successful HR technology transformation is how it best fits the specific needs of people and each organization. HONO customises solutions to fit the specific needs of each individual organisation so that the context, culture, and processes are fully captured in designing the solutions.