Oracle HCM Cloud paving way for HR digital strategy

Yazad Dalal is the Senior Director of HCM Strategy and Transformation at Oracle Corporation where he is responsible for developing thought leadership and identifying trends in all areas of Human Capital Management. He works with HR leaders to deliver technology solutions that enable them to transform their organizations and modernise their workforce tools. 

Prior to joining Oracle in 2015, Yazad was EVP, Asia, of TMP Worldwide, the world’s largest independent HR communications and technology firm. He held various leadership roles at TMP in both the US and Asia, including Regional VP of TMP New York and General Manager of TMP India.  
Yazad has spent nearly 20 years working in the human capital space, including senior positions at Vault.com, the leading career information resource for high potential students and young professionals, and at Monster Worldwide, where he led the Global Sales Development group. As a Human Capital expert, he has appeared in Forbes, New York Daily News, Black Enterprise, CNN Money, Crain’s, NY1, and the Washington Post. Yazad is based in Singapore.

Following are the excerpts of an interview with Dalal.What should an ideal HR digital strategy look like? What will be the key components of a successful digital strategy?
Today, we thrive in a digital world.  The digital marketplace has totally revolutionized the way organizations interact with their customers.  It comes as a matter of no surprise that employees want a similar experience when they go to work.

The digital world requires HR practitioners to implement their own unique digital strategy, to engage with and improve the productivity of the workforce. An ideal HR Digital strategy incorporates technology that is personalized, connected, insightful, mobile, purposeful, secure, talent-centric, social and agile.

A comprehensive HR Digital strategy allows organizations to hire the best talent, engage them more effectively and increase their productivity, innovation and tenure of the entire workforce. By doing so, HR professionals can address one of the greatest challenges facing organizations today – the challenge of talent scarcity, engagement and productivity.

How can digital improve talent acquisition initiatives? 
We all know how competitive the job market currently is, so employers need to do all they can to attract and retain the best talent. A digital strategy is a key enabler for identifying, attracting, engaging and retaining an organization’s talent pool.

The key to success is using technology that is talent-centric, leveraging the unique attributes 
and characteristics of an organization’s workforce.

These technologies allow organizations to identify and attract not only qualified job-seekers actively pursuing job roles within their organization, but more importantly identify passive talent who are not on active lookout, but open to exploring opportunities as they emerge and those which present a compelling reason for them to leave their current job role.

Key to this aspect of talent acquisition is tapping into the passive candidate pool. This is where sophisticated social sourcing, job distribution and candidate engagement technologies can be employed to leverage the social connections of your own workforce, and provide access to a qualified candidate pool that has not been available to organizations in the past.

Tell us more about Oracle’s HCM solutions for HR professionals in the APAC markets. 
Research by PwC reveals that 62 percent of Asia-Pacific CEOs believe that a shift in workforce demographics will transform their business in the next 5 years.

This shift in demographics would require HR professionals to rethink workforce optimization and talent management, and to adopt and deploy HCM solutions to cater for a vastly different workforce and business environment.

Organizations must rethink the HR function, as digital technologies are changing every aspect of how a company engages with its workforce. To embrace these changes and create real business value, HR organizations need modern HR and talent strategy that can meet ever-increasing employee expectations.

Modern HR technologies can support this transition by enabling collaboration, optimizing talent management, providing complete workforce insights, increasing operational efficiency, and making it easy for everyone to connect on any device.

How is digital revolution in HR transforming performance management?
Communication is the key to improved performance management. Within many organizations, the communication is poor, this presents HR managers with an opportunity to champion and improve employee engagement.

As such, collaboration is and will become increasingly important. ‘Social’ tools are now pervasive in our leisure time and are becoming increasing powerful within the domain of work. The ability to readily facilitate conversations and discussions among small, empowered teams will likely improve organizational innovation, dramatically in the years to come.

While performance management is on the top-of-mind, current trends suggest that significant changes might be underway in this area. Most notably, there is a movement towards informal feedback systems and regular workplace ‘check-ins’, moving away from the traditional annual performance appraisal model.

Technology has a role to play. Smartphones are now ubiquitous, and for many individuals, the channel of choice to meet a wide range of needs. There is implied growing expectation among employers being able to offer the same kind of user experience to employees at work, as they already receive at home – for example, enabling staff learning through YouTube-style tutorials.

What are your views on the use of social media recruiting tools and its success rate?
For HR departments and recruiters seeking congruence, social sourcing is a critical capability to utilize. This is also because social media doesn’t just allow recruiters to advertise on a broader scale, but it also enables them to channelize campaigns through employees’ networks.

Why is this important? Most people’s networks are networks of like-minded people. Recruiting through your number one sales representative’s LinkedIn network is likely to increase your chances of hiring a new employee of similar ability. Moreover, this will help save money on recruitment fees.
Oracle’s Social Sourcing solutions are designed to increase the number and consistency of referral candidates. It further allows organizations to create go-to talent communities to source from. The fully branded service provides rich registration and community management features suitable for branding, new business development, and recruiting.

If a company with over 15,000 employees were to invest in intelligent referral practices such as social networking, it could increase its referrals from 10 to 15 percent of all hires, a 50 percent improvement.

Despite the potential to save time and money, and attract more qualified candidates, recruiters have been slow to implement such referral programs, because of several internal obstacles and challenges such as lack of proper communication, the right motivation and complex processes. These obstacles can be easily addressed with the right solutions.

How can the potential of predictive analytics and big data be harnessed in talent management, acquisition and retention?
HR should create a single, shareable view of the workforce that provides instant insights into workforce productivity, behaviours, concerns and issues, and those which can deliver measurable analysis of the success of new initiatives, training and retention measures.

HR must be able to show credible data relating to factors such as productivity, engagement, and performance.  The ability to access, interrogate and leverage this type of data builds significant credibility for the HR practitioners in an organization.

Three key areas are operational reporting, regular monitoring and tracking of performance, modeling the future of the organization, predicting what will happen etc.

What are the expected benefits of embracing cloud for HR professionals? How far has the industry in APAC markets embraced cloud for increasing efficiency and responsiveness?
Several key benefits have motivated HR professionals to embrace the cloud:
Winning the war for talent: Finding, developing and retaining the brightest talent requires fast access to new capabilities that traditional on-premise solutions struggle to deliver.

A better user experience: Greater usability and web-based self-service tools increase employee engagement with HR applications.

New ways of working: The cloud allows organizations to provide advanced collaboration and social tools to enable new, modern ways of working that help make employees more productive 
and motivated.

Empowering the mobile workforce: Providing anytime, anywhere access to applications and services helps HR organizations reduce costs while improving service quality and accessibility.

List some of the best practices in Human Capital Management – to include workforce and payroll management? How can HCM applications assist HR managers to ease the hiring and retention process?
Modern best practice does more than just improve efficiency; it transforms entire HR operations. For instance, you must ensure that you pay your workforce, on time and according to global and local compensation rules, while remaining compliant with tax liabilities, filings, and deposits.

You must also ensure global payroll processes distribute payments on time. Best practices include taking advantage of mobile, social, analytics, and big data to proactively monitor global payroll status with interactive dashboards.

On the talent acquisition front, modern best practice enablers of mobile, social, analytics, and big data have led to tremendous advances in the ability to plan your workforce, create vacancies, source and screen candidates, generate offers, and bring your best assets—your people—onboard.

With Oracle HCM Cloud, organizations can find, grow, and retain the best talent, enable collaboration, provide complete workforce insights, increase operational efficiency and make it easy for everyone to connect on any device. This also helps to ease the hiring and retention process.

For instance, if you are managing the HR department of a global company, you can align common HR processes to leverage a single global person and local employment model to drive operational excellence. You can also have complete view of your team and your organization, to take immediate necessary actions and initiate 
HR processes.

How do you think organizations today can catch up with the dynamically changing demands and design a well-integrated recruitment framework to harness the potentials of social media to boost recruitment efforts?
Organizations need to scale up referrals and leverage trusted social connections to repeat one-to-one communications across networks until the right candidate’s emerge. The ideal referral solution should meet four key success criteria. They are: Maintain online communication with employees and alumni, Support motivation efforts, Make the process easy, fast, fun and rewarding and  Keep communication lines open. 

From an operations perspective, emphasize on the role of today’s CEOs and CTOs towards modernizing HR in the industry?
Modernizing HR shouldn’t be solely held within the HR department. CEOs, CTOs and CIOs also act as catalysts to this transformation.

Building a positive and lively work environment where employees thrive and grow together within the company should be the key objective of CEOs. Many at times, this boils down to whether you can find, hire, develop and retain the best talent.

A modernized HR department provides a complete talent solution—that’s social and collaborative, mobile and engaging, which allows you to understand the best sources of internal and external talent such that you can respond quickly to talent needs and execute a forward-looking talent strategy.
For CTOs, by utilizing big data, predictive and embedded analytics solutions, a modernized HR department can help answer complex workforce questions, forecast performance and empower the HR department to make decisions based on real-time data.

How can businesses benefit by promoting employee well-being and work life balance as an What should be the strategies implemented by HR professionals for better employee engagement and retention of the talented workforce?
HR is a vital function but it needs to challenge the perception of being company gatekeepers and establish itself as the heart beat of the business. To do this, HR must get the fundamentals right and implement lean yet productive processes; ones that delivers a better quality of service to the business.

Once achieved, it can look at tackling board level business issues that will help improve its standing further.

By adding social to the HR tasks that your employees do, you get them involved in the processes and engaged in the business. By analyzing relationships and interactions among the employees and work groups in the enterprise, a social Human Capital Management (HCM) technology solution can provide greater insight into how work actually gets done, how processes are executed (or stalled), how knowledge flows into, through, and out of the organization and how opportunities are captured (or missed).

The right social HCM solution also looks at interactions in the extended enterprise – vendors, customers, service providers, contractors – so your organization can get a better understanding of these relationships.