Moon Won, applications ASEAN VP of Oracle shares 10 tips on how HR can contribute to an organisation’s success.

More new businesses and more new companies, result in a tighter competition to provide the winning products and services.

To maintain that success, HR should be doing everything possible to retain every employee possible.

With that in mind, HR leaders need to ask themselves whether they are paying enough attention to prepare HR for the modern era.

Here are 10 ways HR leaders can form the foundation for modern HR:

1. Write a playbook for managing talent

It is never too early to begin thinking about the workforce you have today and the workforce you need in the future.

One way to address this challenge is to create a sales-like playbook that elevates the talent question within the company and documents critical aspects of the company HR’s strategy.

If you give employees the same attention you give to your products and services, you will increase the employee experience and be able to retain highly skilled talent.

2. Know your employees as well as your customers

You might know employee turnover rate and compensation from the reporting. But actually there are more interesting questions to ask your employees.

Include sources of human-generated data, such as location data, activity data, sensor data, financial data, and unstructured sentiment analysis.

A dedicated analytics team can combine workforce and talent data with business and financial data to ground decisions in facts and provide better visibility into business performance.

3. Hire “scary” people in HR

A new breed of analytics professionals called data scientists applies curiosity and business knowledge to plot new strategies for HR.

With the right analytics guru and a database populated with HR and human-generated information, HR leaders will be prepared to turn HR into a strategic business function that drives growth instead of hindering it.

4. Differentiate through a personalised employee experience

By 2020, Millennials and Generation X workers will have seven to 10 jobs and a variety of different professions during their careers.

In a marketplace where employees have so many options to advance their careers, you will have to fight to keep and get the best people working for you.

Social listening, using communities to on-board new hires, better tools for collaboration and mobile work, customised compensation/benefit packages, and flexible work styles are just a few examples pf how you can do so.

5. Bring a collaborative culture in the workplace

Social apps and collaboration technology have forever changed the way we live and work.

When applied to the workplace, these same social technologies can improve communication and increase productivity.

More jobs are bigger than can be done by one person. Collaboration enables a network effect that makes a much bigger contribution to the enterprise. HR leaders who foster true collaboration will boost enterprise performance.

6. Recruit for continuous innovation

Today’s job seekers have a variety of social channels to help them find a match, from LinkedIn, Facebook, to Twitter. HR departments can take advantage of this trend by participating in channels that reach their target candidates.

In addition to social networks, predictive ranking tools help HR automate job board processes, while databases of suitable candidates allow companies to manage their own relationship with candidates.

These smart sourcing strategies will allow you to recruit from a bigger pool of qualified candidates, build stronger relationships with job seekers, and earn a higher return on any talent sourcing investments.

7. Gamify learning

How do you offer continuous learning to Millennials and highly mobile workers?

As Josh Bersin from Deloitte puts it, one way is to extend the learning architecture to include content, collaboration, and programs in an easy-to-understand set of offerings that will help people to learn, share information, and locate and share experiences.

8. Rethink performance management

When employee and line manager behaviour are linked to result that matter not only to the organization, but also to customers and business partners, then HR becomes the driving force for business success.

HR needs a performance management model that recognises this shift and evaluates performance based on actual measures of work tied to business outcomes.

9. Go global

Organisations are expanding operationally into a new geographies and moving talent across the globe, in order to fill regional talent needs.

An effective, global HR technology foundation can support this imperative to globalize while helping to control HR’s operational costs and cater to local needs.

10. Move to the cloud

Cloud-enabled HR management systems require one-third the staff of on-premises solutions, according to CedarCrestone. Implementation times are also faster when solutions are hosted in the cloud.

Acquisitions, new product launches, and new markets and geographies all create an exciting yet challenging environment for HR. Organizations are constantly evolving as they drive for innovation and growth.

To refocus HR in a new era of growth around employee experience, we need to move beyond transactions to address business needs.

These needs include a talent-centric view of the workforce, tools and policies that encourage collaboration, applications that are engaging and mobile, and the insights that enable management to predict the business impact of modern HR efforts.

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