Improving productivity using SAP-HR Performance Management

By Terisha Gooroocharan

 

What is SAP-HR Performance Management?

                The SAP Performance Management tool is a solution that enhances performance feedback processes. This solution supports end to end processes that provide organisations with transparency and helps them to align their business initiatives and goals throughout the organisation, communicate their organisation strategy, analyse employee performance and reward employees accordingly. The solution is extremely adaptable, allowing you to custom design both the performance feedback documents and reports. Not only will it simplify your business strategic outputs, but it will ensure that your employees are measured and rewarded appropriately for their contributions and performance within the organisation.

 

How can it benefit you?

                This tool enables organisations to strategically align their goals with their initiatives and resources, thus assisting in closing the gap between their strategy and their method of execution. In addition, it will improve visibility to ensure that the major stakeholders are able to identify the areas of performance that require attention. From a business perspective, this tool has increased agility which will improve your business processes to improve the cycles of performance management within the organisation. In terms of your employees, you can be guaranteed a satisfied workforce that can leverage off a consistent and trusted organisational performance system.   

  

Now that you have it, how to successfully train your employees?           

SAP-HR Performance Management like all other modules of SAP is a tool best used to simplify your business processes and assists in enhancing your business potential. Being a system or tool, for a technologically inclined person, working on this system would be a piece of cake. However, for the majority of the workforce who are not as inclined, adjusting to the system can be quite a daunting task. The most effective method of learning how to work with this tool is through face-to-face training sessions. Training sessions provide employees with the ability to use the system and understand its functionality.  It is important to remember that the sessions can also be used as a platform to communicate the importance of such a system as well as clarifying your organisations policies, values and philosophy regarding performance management.

 

 It is essential that the training is closely aligned with the business processes. This has a much more effective impact in terms of a user’s experience while training. This is of utmost importance as a good understanding of this system will give employees the confidence to work effectively on SAP Performance Management. The ability to achieve this will lead to a highly motivated workforce which will mean a happier, more productive workforce. Employees will not only feel motivated but they will feel a sense of belonging. Satisfying the essential need to belong is an act that goes far beyond personal growth. Fulfilling these needs will give an organisation the ability to assist its employees with growth within their careers but also result in growth for the organisation.          

 

How to ensure that your employees are using the solution to its full potential?                              

Employees should be educated on how the system functions and the benefits of such a system to ensure total buy-in. It is important to bear in mind that a performance management system cannot work effectively if employees cannot see the benefit of such a system.  SAP has developed a tool that can assist organisations in identifying how their employees react towards SAP solutions and whether or not they are managing them to their full potential. It is called the SAP User Experience Management Application Tool. This tool may be used to monitor whether employees utilise the SAP Performance Tool to its full potential. It does so by providing input to comprehensive reports, pinpointing training needs, adjusting business processes and it ensures that employees are delivering all the value that organisation’s expect from their SAP solutions.

Taken as a whole, SAP Performance Management holistically ensures that together with the correct face-to-face training, it would be an asset to any organisation, as management would have a clear overview as to how day-to-day employees utilise the resources supplied to them by the organisation’s investment. The tools provided, benefit both parties being the employee and employer, as the tasks that employees are required to complete are standardised and simplified. Thus this gives the employers a conclusive result. By allowing this to flow within the organisation with effective feedback processes, crossing all boundaries, organisations have the ability to capitalise on an increase in productivity and the smoothness of business operation.

SCENARIO PLANNING COMES TO HR STRATEGY

Rob Scott : HR Strategist

Against a background of almost 17 000 science and technology professionals (about one percent of the total science and technology workforce) emigrating from South African between 1994 and 2001 and a GDP growth forecast for 2008 and 2009 set at four percent and 4.2 percent respectively, HR departments are faced with an unprecedented task of managing scarce talent within their organisations.

 

The situation is exacerbated by a global shortage of skills and talent, and futher fueled by demand in markets such as China and India. For example, China is commissioning a new power station every week, which gives some indication of the number of engineering and related skills that will be absorbed into that economy in the foreseeable future. As a result, global mobility of talent is also a growing phenomenon.

 

So how are HR departments to manage these pressures? Companies are developing tool which will help companies have much more sophisticated and accurate information of their future talent requirements and which provides defendable information to formulate action plans to ensure that they have the correct talent in place at the time the talent is required. Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) identifies where and when organisations as a whole will be vulnerable to talent shortages or excesses based on historic organisational data and quantifies the critical skills that will be required in the short, medium and long term depending on the organisations strategy and external influences. These services combines HR Strategy, HR talent management and actuarial statistical and modelling capabilities. The statistical analysis of historic data and influencing external data to do predictive modeling is an extremely value adding advantage over normal supply and demand modeling tools.

 

Depending on the industry, turnover rates in some companies have reached levels of between 20% and 25%. HR departments need to interrogate their standing strategies to successfully operate in this environment and need something more that trend analysis based on historic data to formulate proper talent planning

 

Once an organisation has a good handle on their talent gaps for the medium to longer term, they can start developing plans to address these shortages – typically this will involve a holistic and creative view of talent attraction and retention as well as HR strategies.

 

In the wake of this, many  companies have set up corporate universities to train up junior employees and ensure a pipeline of talent and stem the rate of attrition. Companies such as Deloitte has been successfully running the Deloitte Graduate Academy for the past three years to bridge the gap between tertiary education and the workplace.

 

These factors are all contributing to HR playing a far more strategic role within any organisation. New generations of employees with different expectations have meant that organisations become more flexible in their approach. Scarce skills demand flexible and innovative solutions! – the HR adage of 1 policy fits all, is a dying thought process.