Today’s people teams are under enormous amounts of pressure to function as standard bearers of this new era and ideate and introduce strategies that support the transformational growth required of modern organisations.
To further complicate matters, HR professionals are also still contending with the need to hit those core business KPIs and strive for greater output and growth- in many instances, in the face of wider macroeconomic challenges and external crises.
Unfortunately, what this also means is that these transformative, people-experience-led initiatives are often at risk of falling by the wayside and being side-lined for what are perceived as more business-critical measures.
What if we told you that you didn’t have to choose? At Advanced, we believe in “Doing HR differently” and at the heart of this philosophy is the belief that there doesn’t have to be a compromise between employee engagement and wellbeing initiatives and wider business growth strategies- in fact, we believe they are inexorably linked.
This philosophy sits at the heart of our latest eBook “Do HR Differently” We’ve sat down with some of the top personas in Advanced’s People Experience team and found out in their own words, the steps Advanced has taken to transform the people experience within our own organisation and making bold changes in doing away with older, more traditional forms of people management.
To find out more, the eBook is available for free to download at your convenience. In the meantime, we thought it would be a clever idea to give you a brief taster of what you can expect to find.
Gender pay gap reporting
For some years now, it has been a legal requirement for businesses across UK and Ireland which comprise of 250+ employees, to disclose information detailing pay disparity between different genders within their organisation.
Advanced like many organisations have taken the opportunity to broaden these requirements out into capturing broader diversity pay gaps. Viewing reporting requirements as less of an administrative burden and an opportunity to gain a unique insight of your organisation, can help pivot your pay reports into a key weapon in your people experience arsenal.
In our latest eBook, Nicole Merriman from the Advanced People Experience team outlines the steps Advanced have taken to embed diversity pay gap reporting into our every day working structure and the importance of focusing on asking the right questions to gain access to the key data metrics you need to drive success.
Improving employee engagement through data.
Employee engagement is intricately linked with levels of output and productivity. Against a backdrop of wider economic challenges, all organisations will be feeling under pressure to deliver positive results- goals that may necessitate asking their people to go the extra mile.
Reconciling the need to push for greater business success with the wider requirements of ensuring elevated levels of employee engagement and wellbeing is a challenge very much at the forefront for HR professionals across all organisations.
We sat down with Clare Ross from the Advanced People Experience team who was able to shed some light on how Advanced were able to harness our Advanced HR solution to give the organisation access to a wealth of data metrics which empowered our strategic decision making.
Clare places a huge emphasis on the importance of your people management systems and technologies in helping influence your ongoing strategies. HR deals with a wealth of data each day but organisations very rarely harness it to its full possibility. Clare found that Advanced HR was invaluable in helping us identify key hotspots such as areas of prolonged absence, which empowered us to allocate resources where best needed.
Talent Snapshots. Paying for performance.
We all like to be rewarded for a job well done. An issue organisations tend to face however is being able to gain a clear understanding of where those key performers who go beyond, exist within the business.
Furthermore, years of economic downturn have meant that many businesses are now simply unable to implement broad scale pay based rewards schemes. With pay still a dominant priority in terms of employee rewards, how do organisations strike a balance?
The answer seems to lie in focused approaches to pay bonuses- leveraging pay bonuses for top performers. Although this seems simple enough, a common hurdle facing businesses is the inability to easily determine those employees who have gone above and beyond.
Marianne West sat down with us to lend some insight into the importance of talent snapshots and leveraging people data to help build a rewards scheme which is fair and representative of performance.
Marianne found that by leaning on Advanced HR’s built-in functionality, she was able to leverage people data to identify those top performers quickly and effectively. In turn, this has empowered the organisation to build a distribution curve for rewards based on output. This is a critical step in helping embed a culture of trust within an organisation, as employees can easily appreciate that rewards directly reflect their efforts.
Building talent pipelines.
Recruitment and onboarding represent a huge part of the common demands on people teams and the search for viable talent is a huge investment of time and money from an organisation. When candidates do not work out in the long run, these costs can quickly become inflated as businesses find themselves returning repeatedly to the recruitment cycle.
Organisations are posting a record number of positions at a time when unemployment is at an all-time low. In short, this means that every candidate comes at a premium, with organisations all vying desperately to secure key talent.
Marianne West from our People Experience team was very frank in her belief that Advanced, like many organisations had fallen prey to relying too heavily on outdated and unsuitable recruitment ideology.
Marianne felt that businesses are often guilty of entering the recruitment cycle without a clear understanding of what they are looking for in a candidate. She pointed to the adoption of Advanced HR as a turning point for our organisation as the wealth of reporting at our fingertips means leadership teams have access to an unparalleled overview of company structure. This data is invaluable in helping identify gaps in your processes and in turn, being armed with that information is key in helping you determine what good looks like from a candidate perspective.
Knowing what you are looking for in a new hire is invaluable in helping you guide interview questions and managing the entire talent pipeline journey to ensure you are hiring based on specific qualities.
Employer Branding and building Advanced’s brand.
Today’s people teams are consistently finding themselves contending with the challenges presented by a working world which is undergoing near constant accelerated growth and change. This has most significantly been seen in a shift from employee values away from traditional metrics such as pay and office benefits, to broader concepts such as a focus on work-life balance and a commitment from their employers to act as responsible champions of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues.
What was once considered as a “nice to have” or vague, blue-sky concept is now forming a core component of how successful businesses not only think about how they distinguish themselves above their competitors when it comes to securing new talent, but also how they are able to retain the services of their most skilled and key people. Organisations and their HR teams cannot afford to wait around and find out passively what their people and the wider market think of them as an entity.
Our Talent Brand and Enablement manager, Jordan Cooper, joined us to offer his perspective on the challenges facing Advanced when building our brand and reconciling our place in the wider market.
Jordan found that Advanced HR was invaluable in helping the team build a complete picture of our workforce. They then used the data provided to identify populations of our employees at various levels in the organisation and then scheduled interviews and focus groups to understand what our Employee Value Proposition was, and how we should market it.
By understanding our strengths as an employer to our current people, we were empowered to articulate our values and ethos to the wider market- to help candidates understand why they should choose us.
What’s next?
Hopefully that teaser has whetted your appetite for further insights. To discover more, the eBook is available to download for free right now.
Although we touched base with the team on a broad range of topics, we found a common thread emerging in all our conversations. Regardless of the challenges discussed, there was a clear link to be drawn between the people data which is an everyday occurrence with HR and its ability to offer meaningful insights.
Far too often, organisations find themselves clinging to outdate methods of working. It’s easy to acknowledge that a process may be clunky but without the ability to visualise a better way of doing things, change can seem far too broad and risky to pursue.
This is the heart of the philosophy which drives the idea of doing HR differently. Breaking out of the mould and shedding older, less efficient ways of working requires passion and dedication and a specific focus to achieve meaningful transformation. It also necessitates asking tough questions about existing processes – why do you do things in that way? What value is it offering us?
