What happens when you refocus the world’s most popular business cloud technology towards the needs of your employees?
At its inception, Salesforce was an online CRM platform. In building and refining it, Benioff et al. created a framework for one of the world’s most powerful engagement engines. They may not have realised it at the time, but they were also building an ideal scaffold for advanced Human Capital Management (HCM).
But, before we get into the 3 benefits of managing employee experience from Salesforce, let’s take a quick lesson into HCM.
What is Human Capital Management (HCM)?
Human Capital Management (HCM), as the name suggests, incorporates every aspect of people management. It includes core HR tasks like recruitment and performance, through to Payroll, benefits, expenses, and more.
HCM lags behind business areas where cloud adoption is already mature by comparison.
But, this is changing. Against the backdrop of a strong economy, low unemployment and a dearth of talented young recruits, the current buzzword among HCM professionals is ‘employee experience’.
Benefit #1: Employee Experience
What does that mean? Well, if employee engagement is the measurement, employee experience is the strategy. It’s a strategy that asks: ‘how do we want our employees to feel, and what do we need to provide for them to feel it?’.
As Salesforce users, we grasp the concept of customer experience – the platform’s architecture makes it easy to streamline, automate and optimise an organisation’s ability to deliver great customer experience.
Therefore, surely it’s not too far fetched to use the same technology to deliver an enhanced experience for employees – ownership of their personal information and global, anytime self-service access to key tools around leave-booking, performance and development.
The CRM platform is perfectly designed to standardise traditionally sketchy processes like employee onboarding and performance review, automating reports and reminders so the experience is consistent across an organisation.
Benefit #2: Data & Admin
HCM’s other big challenge is data. The main benefit of moving the entirety of your HCM onto Salesforce is data – and with that, automation, analytics, security, and the hallowed single source of truth.
As a result of the cloud adoption lag in HCM, it’s not uncommon to find organisations running a mishmash of legacy systems, siloed, incompatible and burdensome. Indeed, if you talk to any HR professional at length about their job, it’s unlikely you’ll get too far before the subject of administration comes up.
HCM professionals are drowning in admin. They spend up to half their time manually processing holiday requests and expenses, chasing managers for performance reviews, or transferring data between incompatible HR and Payroll systems. Seriously, ask your Payroll department how much time and energy they’d save if they no longer had to wait for HR to accurately update employee records each month.
Benefit #3: People Analytics
Traditionally, HCM has struggled for tools to mine its treasure trove of data for actionable, practical insight, despite sitting on a veritable mountain of the stuff. Now, because business leaders are beginning to recognise the advantages of a data-driven workforce strategy, complex analytics, dashboards and predictive modelling are suddenly part of the people management zeitgeist.
Integrating HCM data into your org, (such as team calendars, attendance, skills, performance and CPD), enriches planning and decision-making across the organisation, in CRM, finance, ERP, PSA, and more – it brings workforce analytics onto executive dashboards.
Crucially, it also moves the company’s most sensitive data, the personal records, medical histories, performance reviews, bank details and addresses of its employees, under Salesforce’s sturdy security umbrella.
Summary: Can Salesforce Do Human Capital Management?
So can Salesforce do HCM? On its own, yes, to a basic degree. It is possible to manage employee records in a user instance using a standard record contact.
But to deliver the kind of experience, automation and reporting capabilities I’ve covered above, to bring your people data to life, is more complex and requires a deeper dive into the way people data interconnects.
Job roles, salary details, line management, leave, overtime, expenses and more. Under the bonnet, modern HCM on Salesforce is an interdependent web of highly sensitive data that drives deep complexity within the object structure and the way role-based permissions are delivered.
There are solutions on the AppExchange that can do HCM. I urge you to explore the data benefits, efficiency gains and employee experience wins that Salesforce integrated HCM can offer.
