The new HR and the consumerization of work

Six imperatives for engaging your changing workforce

Work is changing faster than ever before. As an HR leader, no one understands this better than you.

The head-on collision of digitization, disruptive business models, technology advances and powerful socio-economic forces are transforming every company in every market.

The winners of tomorrow will be diverse – but they’ll have one thing in common:

The companies that will thrive in the next decade will be the companies with the most

engaged workforces.

Where everyone is on board, working for the same things and sharing the same values.We’ve seen it over and over again, from the companies overturning whole industries.

An engaged workforce is an insurmountable competitive advantage.With it, there’s very little you can’t accomplish.

But without it, any initiative can be dragged back to earth.

This all adds up to one conclusion: In times of enormous change that

demand an aligned, motivated workforce,

the role of HR has never been more important.

The choices you make as an HR leader will be critical determinants of your company’s success.

But to rise to these challenges,

HR has to change tooWe can’t do what we’ve always done and

expect today’s employees to respond.

In our HR transformation work, we’ve seen emerging patterns and themes that we believe every HR leader should be acting on right now.

These six imperatives – six actions – are shaping a completely

new kind of HRfor a new world of work.

The six imperatives

1. Align2. Integrate3. Analyze4. Engage 5. Personalize6. Streamline Let’s take each in turn…

Align

The first job of HR is to align the goals of the employee with the goals of the business. That hasn’t changed.

Employe

e

Busines

s

What has changed is the set of

expectationsthat people bring to work today.

There’s a lot of talk in HR about the ‘consumerization of benefits’, but that’s just one manifestation of a deeper shift: the consumerization of work itself.

HR

More and more people see their employers as they see any other supplier – as a vendor competing for their loyalty. At the same time, other people expect a more traditional, even paternalistic relationship with their employer.

Parental figure

Supplier

Aligning such a diverse workforce with the goals and strategies of the business is a far more

dynamic challenge than ever before.

Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right,

guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy.

Start with employees and the rest follows from that.

Herb Kelleher Former CEO of Southwest Airlines

Listen to employees in new ways.

Understand their needs more deeply.

Be flexible enough to respond to those needs.

Hire for the company’s goals and culture.

Communicate clearly and often about everything from the company’s mission to the ways you support employee health, wealth and career goals.

Use data to look for – and correct – signs of misalignment.

Alignment Actions

Integrate

People think of their lives holistically. But HR departments are

split into silos.

Today’s HR takes an integrated approach, bringing health, wealth and career together into one single view of (and for) the employee’s wellbeing.

It makes sense: a decision about retirement savings, for example, may well depend on short-term healthcare needs.

Pension > Savings > Health Plan > Career Progress > < Fitness tracker data < Insurance < Personal banking

Making connectionsHR departments are helping employees integrate

their work lives with their lives outside of work, with open employee portals that allow people to bring their own data into their workplace information hub.

Employees these days expect less of a separation of work and personal life. That doesn’t mean that work tasks should

encroach upon our personal time, but it does mean that employees today

expect more from the companies they work for.

Marc Benioff Founder and CEO of Salesforce

Unite data sources as a service to the employee.

Create a holistic view of their health, wealth and career goals and status. Ensure it can be accessed via multiple channels.

Open up your employee portal to outside data sources, so your people can see everything that matters most in one place.

Reach out to social media and expert sources to help guide employee decisions (and reduce the stresses that erode engagement).

Integration Actions

Analyze

Today’s most progressive HR departments are using data-driven decisions to guide everything from benefits options and self-funded strategies

to communication channels, employee engagement, training progression, retirement

planning guidance and wellness incentives.

Analytics also helps optimize provider discounts and simplify compliance.%

It’s a trend mirrored across every discipline, not just HR: collect data from all sources, then analyze it for insights into improved performance, participation and outcomes.

If the statistics are boring, you’ve got the wrong numbers.

Edward Tufte Professor Emeritus Statistics, Yale University

Collect data from everywhere employees interact.

Connect disparate data sources to generate insight that drives better decisions.

Introduce smart systems that learn from the data to improve engagement and start to be predictive and prescriptive.

Analytics Actions

Engage

Old HR had a duty to inform. New HR must fully engage employees to be active participants in their own health, wealth and career choices.

The stakes are higher but the old resistance is still high (thinking about things like wellness, finances and retirement can be stressful).

That’s why employee communications today looks a lot less like back-office administration and a lot more like (internal) marketing.

Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge

of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past,

but it’s pretty much the whole game today.

Gary Hamel Author and management expert

Engagement Actions

Communicate through multiple channels – email, text, social media, mobile apps… whatever your employees prefer.

Be creative – try new ways to get employees involved in programs, benefits and offers.

Explore gamification – reward interaction and ‘nudge’ people towards the right things.

Track key metrics.

Take data snapshots of the engagement levels of a given program or your entire health, wealth, and career landscape.

Personalize

At a time when everyone is bombarded with communications, the only thing that earns attention is

relevance.

One-size-fits-all programs or communications will, by definition, only be relevant to a subset of your entire workforce. So new HR leaders develop personalized programs and ‘narrowcast’ messages only to the people who will care.

It’s a hugely

powerful wayto make HR more relevant

to every employee.

Everyone talks about building a relationship with

your customer. I think you build one with your

employees first.

Angela Ahrendts SVP Apple Retail

Personalization Actions

Design custom portfolios that reflect the specific needs of each individual.

Target and generate dynamic communications that combine all relevant content into one, unique message for each person.

Create personalized portals that combine health, wealth and career information in a single wellbeing dashboard for each employee (we’ve got some great examples to show you).

Send fewer messages but with far higher relevance.

Streamline

HR has always carried an enormous workload. But with the pace of change, the pressure of regulation and the complexity of today’s benefits, your entire department is in danger of drowning in administrivia.

That would be a huge loss to the business – a business that needs

active, strategic, proactive HR

more than ever before.

It’s not just a good idea to streamline, automate and accelerate every HR process you possibly can – it’s your duty. It’s the only way you’ll ever get to the more important parts of your job.

If you don’t

optimize your HR processes,

you won’t have the time or resources to attack the other 5 imperatives.

(But if you do… you will).

I view my role more as trying to set up an environment

where the personalities, creativity and individuality of all the different employees come

out and can shine.

Tony Hsieh Zappos CEO

Streamline Actions

Outsource your benefits administration to a partner to serve employees better, save money, improve compliance and keep your HR cutting edge.

Identify non-core HR functions that can be spun out into ‘HR-as-a-Service’ style delivery.

Focus your internal HR teams on the strategic imperatives listed above.

Putting the six imperatives to work

As an HR leader, your company desperately needs the kind of strategic mission outlined here.

A mission to align the goals of the employees with the goals of the company more closely than ever before.

A mission to fully engage your people in the new era of self-guided wellbeing across their health, wealth and career goals.

And a mission to release the

full potentialof your amazing workforce.

We’re convinced that such a mission will be dramatically more likely to succeed if it’s driven by the six imperatives we just outlined.And we’re here to help.

Get in touch

Dig deeperHere are some things you’ll want to check out at some point:

Useful Ideas and Insights for HR A whole library full of case studies, articles and new approaches.

The HR Insights Blog New ideas to help your programs succeed.

Employee Engagement How we design employee engagement programs for companies like yours.

Celebrating 100 Years of HR Consulting Take a look at the past, present and future of HR.

Further readingInterested in finding out more about how the new HR works? Check out our ebook 7 ways HR can learn from marketing.

Engage your employees with these smart marketing techniques

Seven ways HR teams can learn from today’s savvy marketers

Download

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About Conduent

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We manage interactions with patients and the insured for a significant portion of the U.S. healthcare industry. We’re the customer interface for large segments of the technology industry. And, we’re the operational and processing partner of choice for public transportation systems around the world.

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