Building a Best-Practice Talent Management Strategy with SAP SuccessFactors Solutions

Building a Best-Practice Talent Management Strategy with SAP SuccessFactors Solutions

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A myriad of factors, such as business strategies or available resources, influence whether a business achieves success. But at the end of the day, there’s one factor that trumps almost all others in importance: people. You could have the best business plans or the smartest resource strategy around, but if they’re not carried out by the right people, they’re almost useless.

As the most sought-after employees find themselves with greater employment flexibility and choice in the digital economy, it’s imperative that businesses work hard to retain and nurture these employees. For these reasons, HR is becoming more than a simple administrative line of business. Instead, it’s evolving into a strategic business enabler – especially when it comes to talent management.

So how does a company build a talent management strategy that attracts and retains the very best? To start, it’s helpful to use these “three C’s” of modern HR as guidelines for developing your strategies and technology:

  • Comprehensive: The most effective talent management strategies involve a wide range of solutions with in-depth capabilities
  • Collaborative: Connecting employees throughout the organization helps to better leverage shared knowledge by building relationships across different departments
  • Continuous: In the digital age, successful HR means making talent management strategies a part of everyday work

These principles define some of the more innovative developments that have been made to SAP SuccessFactors solutions. Understanding just how important talent management is in the modern economy, SAP SuccessFactors has added capabilities that make it easier for organizations to integrate the “three C’s” into their HR strategy.
Below are some examples of how these new capabilities appear in specific talent management modules and how you can leverage them.

SAP SuccessFactors Compensation

Compensation is one of the most important aspects of retaining talent and making your employees feel valued. Among other innovative capabilities, SAP SuccessFactors Compensation now includes an in-depth modeling tool that matches various forms of compensation against your budget, enabling you to:

  • Improve planning and budgeting accuracy
  • Create models of both base and variable pay prior to your planning cycle
  • Use a variety of approaches when creating your compensation models, including top down, bottom up, and automated
  • Use machine-generated recommendations to better align models with your budget

These developments make for a more comprehensive compensation tool that helps organizations get an in-depth look into the best options available to them.

SAP SuccessFactors Learning

Another key part of talent retention – and talent cultivation – is learning management. Traditionally, learning means requiring employees to sit in a classroom or complete an online training module every few months. But these forms of learning rarely lead to noticeable improvements in performance, and they’re often viewed by employees as inconvenient obligations.

SAP SuccessFactors Learning has added new features that allow for more engaging, relevant, and useful employee training. Some of these features include:

  • The ability for any manager to write how-to “QuickGuides” about their specific processes
  • An easy way for managers to build and administer quizzes
  • Gamification features that motivate employees to complete training modules on their own time in order to gain points, complete challenges, and achieve rewards

With these capabilities, learning management becomes more collaborative as both managers and employees take a more active role in skill development. Furthermore, the gamification of learning transforms employee training from a few occasional sessions to a continuous (and enjoyable) experience of constant improvement.

SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals

Constant improvement is essential to both nurturing your employees and encouraging high performance. And sound learning management isn’t the only way to achieve this improvement; it’s also achieved through good performance management and review.

Most companies operate on a yearly review model, but it’s nearly impossible to discuss an entire year’s worth of performance in one session. In order to more efficiently provide feedback for its employees, organizations should consider faster review cycles that allow for continuous feedback and opportunities for improvement.

This is a tall order for busy managers, but SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals helps make it possible. The solution allows for fluid two-way communication, task-centric feedback, and collaborative goal-setting all in one place. With it, managers can:

  • Gain more specific insight into what employees are accomplishing and how these accomplishments align with goals
    Offer actionable feedback in real time
  • Archive one-on-one meetings in order to keep track of progress
  • Use captured achievements from throughout the year to more easily prepare a formal assessment

By leveraging this model, organizations can make performance review a continuous process instead of a lengthy and complicated one. It also allows for greater collaboration between managers and their employees.

More Innovations to Come

These examples are only a sample of what SAP SuccessFactors solutions can enable you to do. They don’t even touch on the innovations being made in the other solutions available in this bundle (such as SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding, and SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development). As always, SAP SuccessFactors is improving its talent management solutions, constantly making them more comprehensive, collaborative, and continuous.

Business is changing, but the importance of an organization’s people will never change. By embracing innovative talent management solutions, you can ensure your organization always has the right people to build success.

To learn more about recent innovations in SAP SuccessFactors solutions, view Simplify your approach to comprehensive talent management: Best practices using SAP SuccessFactors talent solutions.


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