Where do people, technology and your business really intersect?
As we all know, flexibility is the lifeblood of HR, especially when it comes to adopting new technologies for attracting candidates. In fact, HR’s willingness to adapt to whatever comes is a vital part of your business strategy.
By understanding that nothing will stay the same and adopting a future workplace mindset, organizations can accept change and thrive.
But what is a future workplace mindset?
As technology becomes more important for keeping employees happy and productive, businesses must understand tech’s role in business success. And more importantly, act on this understanding.
On the latest #WorkTrends podcast, which you can hear below, Unit4’s Michel Visser, VP of People Success and Enablement, answers this question—asking how a company develops a workplace mindset for building a global identity that supports its brand and culture?
For Michel, it’s all about communicating your company’s values. Yes, your values determine how your business operates, but they also influence how your people interact with each other.
Making your values apparent lets candidates know up front whether they’re a good match for your organization. Sharing values throughout an organization also takes the transactional aspect out of work and encourages everyone to work towards a common goal. It helps employees feel like they’re doing something more than just getting a paycheck every week.
“It is absolutely critical to communicate organizational values to candidates because, without clear values, employee experience becomes transactional,” says Michel. “If you make your business’s values very clear, then you give candidates a chance to relate to your mission. You can use values as an instrument to attract and retain talent.”
And HR is fundamental in crafting these values.
HR is now front and center when it comes to being visible and showing how employees actually deliver value to the business. It’s HR who starts formulating answers to questions like what does the business stand for? What do we value?
- Michel Visser, Unit4 VP of People Success & Enablement
Technology’s Role in Communicating Values
Today technology plays a big role in communicating values. But it’s still HR’s responsibility to strengthen the workplace mindset and ensure adapting and harnessing tech continues to keep employees engaged. So it’s vital that you continuously monitor and measure that engagement.
For Michel, the question is: how do you keep track of employee engagement? “If you find a proper tool to do that, how do you start acting on the insights you’ve gathered?” Michel says.
You can’t just stop by a coffee maker and ask employees how they feel anymore. You need technology to gauge this.
- Michel Visser, Unit4 VP of People Success & Enablement
Once tech is adopted, it’s even critical HR has a plan to help people engage with that tech. You’ll also need to dive into workforce planning to understand whether a two-year workforce plan makes more sense than a five- or 10-year plan.
It’s essential to identify how long people stay with your organization and adjust to that. And you need to understand what skill sets (existing or emerging) your people need to thrive, how to create more engagement, and how to stay true to the communicated values. In other words, companies can’t just be “all talk.” Businesses have to deliver on promises if they want happy people.
Everybody will tell you on their website that they put people first. But at the end of the day, you have to deliver and make sure people feel that the company values are true. Every HR professional should focus on putting values into place.
- Michel Visser, Unit4 VP of People Success & Enablement
Dig deeper into your future workplace mindset
To discover more about the future workplace mindset and hear more expert insight from Michel, listen to the full #WorkTrends podcast today. In it, you’ll learn more about the workplace mindset and how adopting new technologies can help transform the culture and future of your organization.
Or, you can learn about how people management and technology can combine to give organizations a competitive advantage by downloading this Unit4 whitepaper.
