Empowering Professional Employees Through SAP SuccessFactors

Increasingly more remote professional employees present new HR challenges

For the purposes of this dialogue, “professional employees” loosely refers to employees who have some type of advanced skill, training, or education, are typically salaried (though not always), and have a high degree of work freedom — controlling their own schedules and planning their workday. Because these employees can often work from home or remotely, either by choice or by force (as underscored during the pandemic), a special consideration in managing them is how to keep them connected, engaged, and growing within the organization.

SAP SuccessFactors: Self-service to connect, engage, and develop

The potential for feeling disconnected, unengaged, and stalled in terms of personal and career development is heightened with remote employees, and can ultimately lead to lower retention. Think about it: Remote professional employees are not interacting with others in the breakroom or having lunch with a co-worker – they may call in for a team meeting, but then they go back to working independently. They also can’t just walk down the hall to HR.

At the end of the day, you want your employees to be happy, to feel valued by the organization, and to stick around. Ultimately, focusing on connection, engagement, and development leads to higher levels of employee satisfaction, and higher employee satisfaction leads to better employee retention. That’s where SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite can help, emphasizing self-service and empowerment while providing the right checks and balances along the way.

Spotlight on key features

Robust Home Screen — Provides a single place to receive information about what’s going on in the company, but also to access tools to be successful. On this screenshot of SAP SuccessFactors home screen, notice the quick tiles for an employee to look at their talent profile, internal careers, goal-setting, performance reviews, and learning activities.

Pulse Survey | Engagement Checks — Tools to gauge how satisfied employees are with their current role and the resources available to them, with the organization, with their team or management

Setting Performance Goals | Continuous Performance Management — Engaging the employee to not only set goals, but also to tie initiatives/activities/achievements to them, engage with team members or other project-based colleagues, and receive feedback in terms of progress and capabilities in these areas throughout the year. The result is a running digest of accomplishments in support of goals, ultimately facilitating performance reviews.

Development Goals and Plans — Employee-driven planning to foster improvement in a desired business skill or soft skill for a current or future role they’ve identified, using SAP SuccessFactors tools to set and track goals, assign learning activities, and conduct internal job search and profile match-ups.

Training — Developing the employee in terms of job-specific requirements in a fully immersed talent management system that encompasses goal-setting, assigned learning activities, and connections to development goals already established.

Talent Profile — The opportunity for the employee to indicate areas of interest in the company, skills or prior work experience, licenses, certifications, advanced degrees, and the like that may not currently be on record but could assist in promotion and growth opportunities.

Role Readiness Assessment — Through self-assessments or pushed out as manager/peer assessments, using the basic requirements of a particular role to identify if an employee is ready to move into that role or to address deficiencies or gaps in a current role.

Mobile Capability — The entire SAP SuccessFactors solution being mobile-enabled (accessible via browser or mobile app), putting all of these tools at the professional employees’ fingertips wherever they are located. There is self-service functionality that includes an interactive organizational chart with quick contact methods via hyperlinks (phone/email/text), the ability to make time-off requests, check pay slips, do mobile-based training, and more.

If you’re already a fan of SAP SuccessFactors but haven’t yet rolled out the mobile application, starting with your professional employees is typically a good place to begin; they’re likely already comfortable with technology and are always looking for ways to be more efficient.

Learn more about SAP Business ByDesign and how SAP platinum partner Illumiti applies its smarter, faster, leaner methodology to help businesses optimize their operations: https://illumiti.com/solutions/sap-successfactors/