Does HR Need an Employee Engagement Strategy?

Part the issue stems from HR’s inherent complexity. The very nature of simultaneous tasks and functions that constitute modern HR, which includes sourcing, recruiting and onboarding new employees, talent management, payroll and benefits administration, time tracking, and much more. However, an often-overlooked dimension of this complexity derives from cross-organization employee engagement demands, from sourcing and talent management, to exit and beyond. HR is often summarily tasked with the organization’s internal brand management, implementing and sustaining programs that reinforce the company’s work culture across distributed and dynamic employee groups and interests.

While HCM applications are designed for optimizing resource management, HR often lacks an employee communication platform that makes it easy to discover, share, respond and recognize – basically, a tool to engage meaningfully with employees.

Employee engagement is most often the missing piece in the HR puzzle.

With Simpplr, we set out to build a modern and delightful social intranet. However, we were often surprised at how HR can leverage this simple and intuitive platform to engage with employees in a very scalable and effective way.

Simpplr provides a great design for the HR Help Desk, working seamlessly alongside your HCM applications.

Using Simpplr, HR can easily create a dedicated site (sites, in case of globally distributed organizations) that enables engagement workflows such as the following:

• Self service and support community where employees can post questions and receive answers and comments from other users in the community. Leveraging Chatter Answers, Simpplr can enable a seamless workflow that integrates policies, training and self-help documents into accessible knowledge content that can power this interactive self-service workflow, with unanswered questions being escalated to the HR team to close the support loop.
• Employee directory with social profiles makes it easy to connect and reach out to employees. Updated profiles provide quick and actionable analysis of employee expertise and experience, identification and collaboration with influencers and contributors across the organization.
• Onboarding new hires becomes easier to manage with the ability to provide immediate access to orientation schedules, mentors and group members, training programs, policies and procedures. Employee directory and social profiles makes it easy to induct new employees and provide them a quick and incisive overview of the organization structure, distributed expertise, and immediate team members – all in one interface.
• Managing employee referrals is a key sourcing strategy in growth organizations. Simpplr provides an open social platform for posting company-wide job openings, forming focus groups, establishing transparent reward structures for referrals, and the ability to rollout employee advocacy programs providing structured and scalable processes for employees to reach out to their external social networks.
• Socialize company events within target groups and sites with tools to share, invite, manage participation and collect feedback as well as post photos and videos that positively impact continued engagement.
• Rollout and manage employee surveys to target groups, leveraging social data available within Simpplr. With engagement metrics directly available from Simpplr, HR can now poll groups, individuals and experts on specific topics for a better gauge of the organization’s pulse.
• Provide employees real time access to data from HCM systems. Employees want quick and easy access to data like “time off balance”, applying for leave, marking attendance, etc. Simpplr provides an easy way for HR to rollout some of these key capabilities in an easy, intuitive and secure manner.

These sorts of tasks are very difficult to accomplish using unconnected systems that are not inherently social first. While HCM systems function primarily as resource managers (ERP), the social intranet adds the CRM layer so businesses can interact with employees with the same ease as engaging with customers.

To learn more about how Simpplr can help you, sign up to view our 10-minute demo here.