Empowering Employees In The Digital Age

3 practical tips

According to a recent survey by Manpower, 46 percent of employers in the United States are having difficulty filling jobs. There is stiff competition for talent, as more and more job candidates are fully aware of their market value and are demanding a new kind of relationship with their employers.
 

 Managing HR challenges like fostering a productive and happy employee base and recruiting new talent may seem daunting, but there are simple solutions to these challenges. Here are our top practical tips on how to make sure your HR processes are set up to get the best out of your employees.

1. Emphasize Employee Experience

Everyone makes a big deal of the customer experience and how much they are trying to find out how best to serve their customers. But that principle isn’t always the case with employees. In fact, almost half of respondents in a survey said they’d never been asked by their employer how they can improve their working experiences. Only 12 percent were asked on a regular basis.
 
HR’s most trusted tool for gleaning employee opinion—the annual survey—is no more than a tick-box exercise for many. To keep today’s workforce engaged, organizations must be proactive about engaging employees. It’s more than buying a new ping-pong table or pizzas on Thursdays. It is about listening to employees’ concerns and acting on them to advocate for positive change.

2. Position HR as a Business Unit. Not the Office Police

Too often HR is seen as those guys that only come out for the performance review or when someone has done something wrong. The HR team also sits away from the rest of the office, unwittingly creating a barrier between themselves and everyone else. However, this shouldn’t be so. HR and People teams should play a significant role in driving culture and influencing growth.
 
Access to information on performance, recruitment and payroll, for example, puts HR in a unique position to deliver real and tangible benefits to the business and employees. Just like every other business unit. This will move organizations from the old world of transactional HR to the new focus on people, creating a generation of People Companies; organizations that use people data, insight and HR automation to see what their people need, taking that to inspire greater workforce engagement and productivity, and ultimately, improving the business as a whole.

3. Encourage Employee Ownership

Another longstanding HR practice that’s becoming increasingly redundant is the position that employee information is locked away from them in HR’s vaults. For today’s employees, many of who bank, track their health and do their shopping whenever and wherever they want on their mobile phones, the suggestion that they cannot access their own personal information or perform basic tasks because the HR person is on their lunch break just doesn’t make sense.
 
With the prevalence of mobile and digital technologies, organizations can empower employees to own their workplace experience. Employees can, and should be able to, access performance information, work schedules and incentives at their own convenience, without interrupting anyone else’s workflow.

People are the most important asset to any business. At a time when over a third of employees admit to being productive for less than 30 hours per week, investing in workforce happiness could lead to outstanding business growth.

Author Bio

Paul Burrin is an expert on workplace trends, self-proclaimed “People Geek” and Vice President at Sage People, a global cloud HR and People platform that helps organizations around the world to acquire, retain, manage and engage their workforce. Previously, Paul served Chief Marketing Officer at Fairsail Limited, utilizing his extensive experience with global marketing, communications and business development to build the company’s brand, drive growth, and scale the business. Connect Paul Burrin Follow @PaulBurrin