Recent times have seen an increase in remote work. For some industries this is something quite normal, but for many employers this is something new. Any tools that can be used to support employees working from home are welcome, and SAP Success Factors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite offers a number of solutions that enable employees to work remotely.
Performance & Goals
SAP Success Factors Performance & Goals provides two core components for managing remote working: goal management and performance management.
Goal Management gives the opportunity to set goals at various organizational levels and cascade those goals throughout the organisation. Additionally, managers can set goals for their whole team or individuals in their team. This is important to ensure you are giving employees the right goals that align consistently across your organisation, as well as providing teams and individuals with specific goals that are aimed at guiding the team to completing the right activities at a time when it can be more difficult to structure and organize working time. A goal could be something like “create a weekly work plan” or “check-in with colleagues two to four times per week”. Goals can also be created and assigned after completion of a meeting or after receiving tasks or projects from senior management. Not everything an employee does is activity-based or can be directed to completion as a goal, so caution needs to be exercised when creating and assigning goals.
Continuous Performance Management (CPM) provides managers and their employees to have a continuous and interactive method of communicating and measuring performance against goals. A conversational-style approach, activity tracker, and coaching capability can really add value to engaging a team and ensuring that an ongoing, open line of communication exists between a manager and their employees. Since communication is a critical aspect of remote working, using CPM can greatly improve the engagement of remote workers by ensuring back-and-forth conversations on performance and achievements.
Career Development Planning
Similarly to the Goal Management module, Career Development Planning (CDP) can be used to align an employee with long-term goals. CDP can be used to give employees longer-term development goals to work towards, in addition to their goals. CDP is an ideal place to add those development goals that relate to the skills, competencies, and characteristics needed to manage remote working.
Learning
SAP Success Factors Learning is a perfect fit into your remote working enablement strategy. Learning can be used to distribute training to employees so that they can learn the skills needed to successfully work from home. These could be training courses on topics such as time management or making virtual calls. Training can be auto-assigned across the workforce based on various employee attributes and can include virtual classroom style training, video tutorials, quizzes, and many other types of training formats. Entire curricula can be built to fast-track employee remote learning enablement.
Onboarding
Bringing new hires onboard can be tough when the employee cannot get to the office, so using a tool like SAP Success Factors Onboarding can be a real advantage. New starters need orienting on their tasks, goals, and team, which can all be done through the Onboarding solution. Additionally, statutory paperwork that needs to be completed can be done digitally. Organizations can also prepare and manage the mailing out of any equipment needed for new starters. Although the solution is no substitute for meeting a new team and learning about a new company, it can definitely add value while employees are working remotely.
Qualtrics
Employee listening has become one of the most important topics lately. Qualtrics provides employee surveys, which can also be integrated into various SAP Success Factors modules and processes. Well-crafted surveys can help gather a wealth of information directly from employees. By combining this survey results data with existing HR data and analyzing trends, organizations can identify areas of improvement for supporting employees to work remotely.