How SAP India is Accelerating Digital HR Processes

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Although NLP is still a new concept in the world of HR, this is one branch of AI that will be more sought after in the foreseeable future. As a business function that depends heavily on the way people communicate, HR can use NLP to make better-informed decisions.

How SAP India is Accelerating Digital HR Processes

Today, businesses of all sizes must rely on their people and on the agility of their organizations to transform digitally and thrive. SAP has a long history of over 45 years leading in the business software arena. Our Digital Transformation journey in HR began in 2010 as a company with a clear vision and mission, to help the world run better and improve people’s lives and to help organizations become best-run businesses.

“We have been seamlessly evolving our personalized HR Consumer Experiences with the right blend & balance of HR being digital as well as human.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged all of us at SAP to be more creative and find newer ways to work together so that we can continue to work in collaboration with our employees, customers & partners to ensure their safety, wellbeing, and success. Here are some of the examples of our journey in the current normal, delivering consumer-style experiences to our employees.

Delivering “Experiences” to Prospective New Hires and Employees

Through our SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting solution for our acquisition processes, we had already standardized job postings and hiring process. Responding to the change, we moved all our hiring activities virtually, conducting our job interviews through video conferencing, phone & collaborative tools. One of SAP’s behaviors is to ‘Keep the Promise’, and I’m pleased to share that SAP has honored all the offers that we made to the selected candidates, be it professionals, students, or interns.

We believe the first milestone in building an exceptional candidate experience is elevating one’s on-boarding experience and we have been able to achieve this by leveraging the power of technology & flexibility – we have ensured that we onboard our new hires virtually with a seamless transition into SAP.

A welcome email is sent to the new-hires giving them an overview of SAP, it’s onboarding process and access to a pre-start portal which is our one-stop platform for them to learn about SAP’s unique and award-winning benefits, organization’s history, values, mission and strategy through gamification, quiz contests, and videos. We have redesigned all our new-hire content in a quick-guide, to help them navigate through their onboarding journey in these extraordinary circumstances effortlessly and also with an onboarding app enabling them to navigate through their new role, team, and the organization.

Driving Measurable Change and Simplifying Complexity

Our “Empathy to Action” pledge enables our people-centered approach and focuses on eliminating complexity from the user experience so we can deliver the best experience. We created SAP In It Together which is our single portal (mobile & desktop) with all information relevant to our workforce for staying informed together, staying healthy together, and staying connected together along with all emergency information.

Virtual workshops are continuously being conducted to share work-form-home best-practices, IT tips & ticks, keeping children better engaged, mindfulness, music concerts, antaakshari, and yoga practice. When it comes to wellbeing, we are mindful of the physical, emotional and mental wellbeing of our employees, therefore our 24X7 helpline through our Employee Assistance Program Sahayog is available for counselling services in dealing with stress, loneliness, and uncertainty for employees and their families.

We also relooked at our policies to ensure that we’re providing the best work-from-home support, be it for health, infrastructure, and even setting up their new workplaces. In a time when everything seems to point towards uncertainty, a heartful recognition & gratitude becomes a comforting food for the soul. We dedicated an “Appreciate Day”, globally for our employees where each person could recognize and thank their colleagues through a personalized & customized heartfelt note using the Appreciate tool, our employee recognition program.

Leveraging Data Analytics and Predicting Outcomes Tied to the Business Strategy

As we all navigate this new terrain, we focused on ensuring that our employees’ concerns were heard in order to address and close experience gaps. Remote Working Pulse Checks were done across SAP (twice so far) using SAP Qualtrics and we adopted intelligent intervention measures based on employee sentiment and feedback. From the first survey we learnt that employees needed more communication and from the second, we understood that there is a need for further enablement on topics like building resilience& balancing priorities.

Through intelligent analytics & insights, actions were taken to enable all managers & guide them with tools based on data-driven intelligent recommendations and real-time employee feedback. We also created customized manager response toolkits as a one-stop-shop resource on enablement content on empathetic listening, leading remote teams, dealing with pressure & keeping teams motivated. Along with this, we have leveraged data analytics as a strong partner for us to build our people & organizations strategies to make business decisions. From Mission Control Center, My Team Dashboards to even our Digital Boardroom, these tools have been instrumental in providing real-time data and insights to influence the right action.

So, what is going to change for organizations going forward? From where we stand today; we don’t know exactly how the change will look like on the other side, but we can reimagine our existing people practices and processes to make them future-ready. Our outlook needs to consider multiple layers:

  • Purpose-driven culture: we have all come to terms with the future being a virtual experience, and technology has greatly enhanced and not diminished, the value of human connection. Through the digital medium, continuing to offer a culture that instills a sense of purpose especially during these times enables the building of connections leading to a healthier and more engaged workforce. It also reinforces a strong sense of belonging and thus creating business impact.
  • Re-imagined leadership: The ability of quick decision-making is extremely crucial through the current crisis and into the next normal but managing in this new and unfamiliar environment demands more from leaders. Along with reinforcing beliefs, agility, and inspiring their teams to navigate through uncertainty, leaders need to nurture &leverage trust as a catalyst in the new remote working setup. The challenge for leaders in the new now is to connect the dots, reinforce trust, lead with empathy, and ensure alignment is fundamental for delivering the best outcomes.
  • Transformed organizations for agile working: If distributed and remote working is here to stay, organizations will need to put in place the practices and policies that will support that change. We will need to fundamentally look at job redesigning to carve out clear roles, tasks, and functions to fit the evolving working models. In this context, the internal boundaries of organizations are likely to become more blurred. In fact, not only these but, the external boundaries of organizations will also become fungible on account of newer operating models and newly discovered interdependence across organizations to deliver superior customer value.

What we have come to realize is that pivots have changed and in fact, still changing as we continue to navigate through this time. Organizations will be judged on their ability to respond to this change which will test their competitive advantage in the times to comes. In short –it comes down to the survival of the fittest where only the agile will thrive!

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