Companies have to think about much more than products and services to stay competitive. As the talent shortage continues to grow across all industries and on a global scale, meeting the needs of employees requires as much attention from an organization as meeting the needs of its customers.
Greg Tomb has been the president of SAP SuccessFactors for the last two years, and he oversees the end-to-end business for SAP’s human capital management (HCM) solutions. He’s responsible for helping SuccessFactors customers ensure that people are at the heart of digital HR transformation efforts and maximize each of their employee’s potential.
He sat down with ASUG News during SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference to discuss the human revolution, the importance of the employee experience to business results, and how companies can position themselves to be a step ahead in the race for talent.
ASUG News: What trends in the workforce are you watching right now?
Greg: The dynamics of a changing workforce right now are so far beyond what we’ve ever seen in the past that it’s forcing companies to really think about how to deal with talent differently.
Let’s first talk about the massive talent shortage, which is a global issue. There is an aging population with not enough people entering the workforce with skillsets needed, and this talent shortage is predicted to grow over the next few years. In addition to that, we’re ushering in a different type of employee with millennials and Generation Z, which represent 40% to 50% of the workforce in many countries. Last, but not least, companies are now required to be much more global.
All these factors are hitting companies big and small. Expectations are much different today than they were 10 or 20 years ago, and employers are faced with trying to figure out how to bring it all together.
If you want to have the best people, keep the best people, and train the best people, then you’ve got to have technology to do it.
We have never seen as much demand around HCM technology globally like we’re seeing today. If I rolled back the clock, HCM technology has historically been an on-premise solution, which ran as a transactional system. It provided information on who worked for you, how much you were paying them, and it ran reports that let you know what you needed to give someone if they left the company. But now, it’s a complete end-to-end process with forward-thinking tools to help you find the right talent, onboard them, treat them right, and then tie them back to the purpose of the company. You need this technology, or your competitor that does have it will swoop in and steal your talent.
We know this because we’ve seen our user base in SAP SuccessFactors double in the last two-and-a-half years. We’re currently at 125 million users, and we’re very happy about that.
ASUG News: There was plenty of discussion at SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference about Experience Management (XM). How does the employee experience concept fit within the capabilities of SAP SuccessFactors?
Greg: To start, customers can purchase Employee Experience (EX) products as part of Qualtrics XM through SAP SuccessFactors. These products allow an employer to track and measure an employee experience from the initial touch point before they’re an employee to when they’re hired, onboarded, and to their whole lifecycle through the company. You can see every touchpoint that an employee has with SAP SuccessFactors, and ask, “Are we doing the right thing?”
It’s not just about doing a survey once a year. It’s collecting the data at the time when the employee is going through whatever that event is in real time. It’s moments that matter with data that’s now so impactful that it allows you as a company to make the right decisions for your people.
ASUG News: We talked last year about the evolution of the SAP SuccessFactors mobile user interface. Are there any new updates or enhancements to the UI in the past 12 months that customers should know about?
Greg: In the last year, there have been three things that we focused on.
One was moving all 6,700 of our customers to SAP HANA. The immediate benefit is the increased speed of our technology, and now our customers can take advantage of many other SAP solutions that are on top of SAP HANA, such as SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Fieldglass. Now, we can start talking about an intelligent enterprise as we bring those processes and data together, all while using the same tools.
The second thing we focused on was to embed SAP Analytics Cloud within our SAP SuuccessFactors People Analytics solution. We rolled out new functionality for reporting in the current release, and now we’re doing all the pre-release around analytics for customers with beta programming due in Q3.
The third thing we continue to focus on is our user experience (UX). We’ve invested significantly in the past, but now we have an opportunity in front of us to help fundamentally change how people engage with our products. We’ve got a massive team is redesigning our HCM suite to leverage conversational AI to create a natural, enjoyable experience and machine learning and people data to create a truly individualized experience.
ASUG News: What do you want ASUG members to know about SAP SuccessFactors?
Greg: The most important thing to consider is that from an HCM perspective, the technology of today is light-years ahead and different than the technology 10—or even five—years ago. What we have today is so important for customers to leverage as they change the game for their companies. If they don’t invest in a new world of HCM, they’re going to fall behind competition.
ASUG News: With the workforce shortage and demand for talent on the rise, Greg’s role will become even more critical as HCM technology will be a necessity for organizations looking to stay ahead of the curve. Companies must think about the employee experience as part of the overall business strategy, and Greg and his team will need to focus on bringing it all together through SAP SuccessFactors and the intelligent enterprise.
Interested in learning more about the newest technologies in HR? Register for the ASUG Experience for Human Resources & Payroll on Oct. 16–18 in Toronto.