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Cornerstone Ondemand
Being a People Pioneer is Tough-But the Rewards are Huge
Mike Erlin
The explosion in mobile technology offers a compelling way to tap the full potential of your workforce.
Digital apps are the ‘carrots’ giving your staff the opportunity to interact, learn, and collaborate in extraordinary ways 24/7, uniquely suiting their needs.
The Result?
• Adoption of mobile talent signals team member engagement.
• Team member engagement produces feedback and collaboration.
• Feedback and collaboration inspire innovation, while aligning people’s effort and focus to broader business objectives.
• Alignment to purpose, standards, and objectives drives productivity — the ultimate business goal.
This is how the story of your evolving workforce unfolds as adoption of technology increases and the impact radiates, like ripples on a pond.
Yet HR and C-Suites are struggling to manage the change and identify:
• What is the end-point?
• How do we build the architecture?
• Who is the right partner for the next 20 years?
Finding the solution, however, is essential to future-proof your organization in a rapidly changing world.
What Do People Pioneers Do?
People pioneers win the battle for staff engagement by capturing the heads, hearts and hands of their team — directing this energy to further company goals.
This unlocks the full suite of business aspirations — enhanced communication, broader and deeper capability, efficient application of your human resource to business purpose, and if done well, leveraging the resulting data to produce information and insights.
True Engagement Happens When Team Members:
• Understand the purpose of the organization.
• Know how their role, and particularly, how their effort fits within the company’s success.
• Access tailored development opportunities to enhance skills and advance their roles.
• Recognise evidence of being valued by their employer.
And genuine engagement delivers. According to 2015 AON Hewitt research:
• Highly engaged employees are 36 percent more likely to stay at an organization.
• Greater engagement in manufacturing plants leads to 75 percent fewer quality defects. [CIOS_QUOTES_REPLACE]
• Actively engaged employees have a 55 percent higher net promoter score than disengaged ones.
The Immense Possibilities of a Mobile Workforce
Too much of a good thing can be as bad as none. Many companies are now using apps excessively with different ones for hiring, onboarding, feedback, team planning, compensation, leave management, payroll updates, and the list goes on.
Does your phone finally run out of charge because way too many apps are open and running?
Well, your staff will run out of charge too—low on meaningful engagement, effective collaboration, and efficient work practices—unless you provide a unified system streamlining multiple applications.
The quality of team engagement is only as good as the systems provided to facilitate members’ daily work functions—with the right process enabling seamless workflow and optimum productivity.
As workers embrace technology via global, cloud-based systems offering 24/7 connection across multiple platforms, we are seeing—for the first time—a massive flood of data revealing what people are really doing within the business, who is doing it, when, and even why.
Smart companies are analyzing and visualizing this data in unique, innovative ways, providing futuristic insights about their business via their people.
As such, they can predict what it is to come and, even more importantly, what they should prescribe for optimal outcome.
Forget Integration. Unification is King!
Like the clogged streets of Sydney which evolved in a piecemeal way, over time, so have western business functions been cobbled together and added to over decades. Fed up with isolated silos of payroll, recruitment, performance review, IT and operations, companies over the last 30 years have seized on integration to connect them up.
But, this has resulted in organizational lines of communication like Sydney roads—congested, dealing with an accident or closed for roadwork.
Ah, for the unified, single-purpose system of Canberra, the Australian Capital so thoughtfully designed by American architect, Walter Burley Griffin early in the 20th Century— the ultimate in both functionality and aesthetics. Were Walter and wife Marion, who provided the award-winning drawings, really pioneers of the ‘unification’ movement now, blossoming in contemporary HR? Probably not, but they understood the problem.
They saw the value of a beautifully functioning system with strong centre (Parliament House), radiating arms (green bands, housing, and ring roads) and outer circle blending into the bush —all fully connected and functional with clear lines of communication.
Rely on The Skill of The Team
Yet, even the ultimate unified system needs savvy users. Visitors often find themselves trapped on a notorious Canberra roundabout, busily circling while seeking the right exit. Which highlights the challenges facing businesses today, when considering new unified and purpose-built HR systems, with the capacity to revolutionize their people and productivity.
Want to get the best from your high-performance team machine?
• Choose the team with the right skills to implement it.
• Train your staff to use it to maximum capacity.
• Create an environment where high-scale adoption is achieved.
• Optimize your solution over time to business learnings and needs.
The right formula is your holy grail.
Mobile technology minus multiple apps plus unification and big data equals productivity and future success.
Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Cornerstone OnDemand Inc. (NASDAQ:CSOD) is a cloud-based learning and talent management solutions provider.
