How to Improve Your Workforce Using HCM Strategies

The editors at Solutions Review have compiled some tips and insights on improving your workforce with HCM strategies and processes.

Do you see your employees as a monetary expense—or a lucrative investment? Human capital management is a process that recognizes employees as your greatest asset. It consists of strategies that aim to extract the most value from your employees throughout the entire employee lifecycle. In this article, we’ll explore how you can utilize HCM strategies and software to get the best out of your workforce. Let’s dive in.

What is Human Capital Management?

Human Capital Management (HCM) is a holistic approach to administrative HR activities. Generally, HR strategy focuses on streamlining administrative processes, often with the help of HR automation. Increased employee productivity is a sought-after byproduct of their end goal: maximizing operational efficiency.

HCM is different. Streamlining HR tasks serves HCM’s primary objective: to attract, recruit, develop, and retain the best employees. So, HCM strategies focus on obtaining top talent and continually investing in their learning, development, and well-being. Using HCM to create great employee experiences maximizes employee productivity, economic value, return on investment (ROI), and business growth. 

How to Utilize HCM to Improve Your Workforce

So, what HCM strategies should you adopt, and what tools do you need to succeed? It starts by using HCM to streamline the recruitment process.

High organizational turnover, hindered productivity, and increased cost-per-hire are some negative effects of a poor recruitment process. To effectively source and retain high-quality talent, you must create positive candidate experiences. What does a positive candidate experience look like? According to research by Employ, the top factors influencing positive experiences are easy-to-schedule interviews (52 percent), followed by easy job application processes, and effective communication.

Talent acquisition software is an AI-powered HCM tool that improves candidate experiences by streamlining and automating recruitment processes from end to end. In action, talent acquisition software can: 

• Post jobs to different job boards and social media platforms.
• Sort through resumes, matching candidate skills and experience to job requirements.
• Conduct online screening tests.
• Schedule interviews.
• Collect recruiting metrics to help you optimize your hiring process.

Streamlining recruitment using HCM tools helps you quickly source and retain more high-quality candidates, improving the long-term quality of your workforce.

Provide opportunities for skill development and continuous learning.

Investing in your employee’s continuous learning and development (L&D) is a foundational HCM strategy. From a business standpoint, it bestows employees with new/updated skills that maximize their ROI potential. And from an employee-centric perspective, L&D increases job satisfaction, motivation, and happiness. Centralize training and upskilling using L&D software. Not only can you create online classes and provide knowledge resources, but you can also use in-built analytics to track and measure the progress and success of every employee’s training experience. 

Establish a performance management system.

A performance management system fairly and consistently measures employee performance. Its goal is to align employee missions with strategic business objectives to develop a performance-driven organization. There are four main stages in a performance management system lifecycle: planning, monitoring, reviewing, and rating.

• Planning: Sit down with your employees and devise personalized SMART goals that inspire motivation and drive action. For goals to be SMART, they must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. 
• Monitoring: Monitoring employee and team performance through effective communication, physical observation, or performance-tracking and assessment tools.
• Reviewing: Now, it’s time to provide constructive feedback. Peer-to-peer reviews and 360-degree feedback can add value while improving employee relationships and collaboration. 
• Rating: Recognize and reward employees and teams who meet their performance goals. For those who don’t, suggest ways to help them improve.  

Foster a positive work environment.

Employees thrive in environments that prioritize their mental well-being, which is why the economic value of mental health is central to HCM initiatives. Employees with high well-being are more productive and less likely to feel stressed, demoralized, and burnt out.

So, go beyond team-building activities and approach employee well-being more holistically. Add employee recognition software to your HCM tech stack to create fulfilling employee reward programs. Engage your employees in collaborative decision-making and adopt an open-door policy. Ultimately, your aim should be to foster a culture encompassing values such as open communication, trust, recognition, and work/life balance. 

Utilize data and analytics to gain insights into your workforce.

How effective is your team’s project management? How engaged are they with their role? What improvements could you make to improve their performance? Using HCM software, you can access data and analytics that deliver these valuable insights. One example of this is time-tracking software. It can uncover hidden bottlenecks in team project workflows by tracking project statuses in real-time to help you more accurately manage priorities, timescales, capacity, and resources.

Establish open lines of communication.

Poor workplace communication is a significant issue, whether between colleagues, teams, or at an employee-manager level. It leads to information silos, knowledge hoarding, internal conflict, and poor problem-solving. Open your lines of communication by modeling transparency from the top down. Establish an open-door policy encouraging employees to approach managers with questions, complaints, and feedback. Welcome contributions, set up peer mentoring programs, and embrace knowledge-sharing.

Consider using an HR mobile app to promote transparent communication between employees and HR. Through the app, HR can directly request and provide feedback, share recognition, and immediately approve or deny time-off requests. Employees can also request and provide feedback to HR and independently view their team availability. 

Promote flexible work arrangements.

HCM strategies understand that a positive work/life balance promotes employee well-being. And they comprehend that there are significant financial and productivity benefits to flexible working. 64 percent of workers are likelier to choose a job that offers flexible hours over a job that doesn’t. And 43 percent of remote workers say flexible work has enhanced their productivity.

Simply allowing employees to work from home isn’t enough. Remote employees require productivity-enhancing digital employee experience (DEX) tools such as video conferencing, document-sharing, virtual whiteboards, and project management tools. So, empower remote workers to thrive by supplying them with the necessary cloud-based software.

Empower Employees with HCM

There’s almost nothing that directly influences your bottom-line health more than the productivity and performance of your workforce. Even the best business models and ideas can fail if they aren’t backed by motivated, high-performing employees. From using AI-powered technologies to fostering a positive work environment, there are plenty of HCM strategies and software that you can use to increase the value of your workforce.