With the rise of work from home, cloud-based tech can help with recruitment, retention
With so many employees and leaders working in a remote environment away from the office, many organizations are still struggling to adapt to the new way of doing business.
Cloud-based HR management systems can help smooth the transition to the new normal, says Simon Dealy, CEO of HIRE Technologies, a Canadian HR management consolidator.
“Teams of every size and flavour, they suffer from having ineffective people management; a lot of these managers may not be overly experienced in how to manage teams, especially remote teams, and it ends up causing low productivity, attrition, and you get that from the big resignation that’s happening in the world today.”
Bringing in a platform that focuses on employee engagement helps to drive high-performance teams who may be remote, he says.
“It increases the value of the adoption of that hybrid workforce model by providing that cloud-based system that is very scalable; doing the performance reviews and also providing Net Manager Score (NMS), which is basically scoring the manager’s ability through the machine learning algorithms that the system has to do to give them a rating on how effective they are engaging with their teams.”
When you’re trying to deploy software to a remote workforce, they need easy access to the systems, says Dealy from his home office in Boston.
“It’s easy to deploy a cloud-based solution that’s behind the firewall; employers anywhere in the world can just go onto the web and get access.”
In addition to the ease of use, many of the best HR management systems allow for quick growth, he says. “Companies were going through big shifts in the staffing levels during the pandemic; having cloud-based systems has really enabled them to do that much more efficiently than those that had the in-house server base.”
More than 60 per cent of companies expect to invest heavily in AI hiring products, found one survey.
The benefits of AI
By employing AI in HR management, organizations can hand-off “time-consuming” tasks such as candidate scanning, according to Dealy, whose company recently added Pulsify’s people management platform.
“You have lots of resumes to go through and it can be very subjective, where if you have AI algorithms running over that that review process, it’s systematically pulling out what you would like to see, what it thinks you would like to see and then it’s learning based on your responses to what is produced [and] you’re actually getting a much better set of resumes to look at.”
Once someone has been hired, AI can be effectively employed to welcome a new hire to the organization, no matter the time zone. “There’s a lot of ways that you can ease the burden of onboarding: it can happen 24-7, it doesn’t have to happen between a certain subset of hours,” he says.
For those employees already on the team, one of the main drivers of disengagement has been a lack of career progression, which can also be managed by smart use of AI.
“You’ve got that passive career development: How are you following this individual employee’s career path and how are you engaging with them and ensuring that they’re going to that next level? Are they’re getting disillusioned with where they are within a business? You need to pick up on those things, you need to have these red flags essentially identified that this person is feeling this way about their employer; the manager thinks they feel a different way and you’ve got to connect those two together and see where there is that disconnect,” says Dealy.
Employers need to a more flexible career-development learning path for employees today than what they’ve had in the past and AI is going to be a big help, he says. “It can provide the input about what they want to see, what they want to do, where they see their career going against where their manager sees their career going.”
The use of analytics in HR is something that’s expected to rise radically, according to a report.
Retention challenges
But the ongoing question of how to keep workers employed and happy is what is really keeping up HR and hiring managers today, says Dealy.
“They’re going to be remote constantly, how do you engage with them? How do you make them still feel connected to that employer, when they don’t have that water-cooler effect? You’ve got to really work hard to engage the workforce and then it’s attracting the talent: you’ve got this turnover, you’ve got to keep people [when] you’re growing as a company.”
For HR, it’s key to understand that “the sands have shifted: companies don’t have the leverage that they used to have over the employees; companies have to adjust to this new reality, that an employee can work locally in that market, or work for a company that isn’t in commutable distance,” says Dealy.
“There’s a strong resistance to going back to the way things were before that might have been comfortable for the CEOs of those companies but aren’t for the employees. The big takeaway is, things are different. Now, leverage is in the hands of those employees and candidates, and you need to be thinking about what are their goals and objectives? What are their aspirations? And really trying to look into how your company helps achieve that for them, in order to be as successful in retaining employees and attracting new employees into the business,” he says.
