From labour shortages and retention issues to skills gaps and balancing flexibility and productivity, the last several years have challenged the people strategies of every organisation.

As we emerge from the pandemic, we have a boundless workforce: one that is fluid, always-on, and borderless. Traditional workforce strategies and systems are struggling to keep pace with the rapid changes in compliance requirements, the explosion in diverse work types and worker profiles, the increasing impacts of AI and automation, and evolving employee expectations.  

According to Ceridian’s 2023 Executive Survey, a staggering 66 per cent of global leaders surveyed experienced a labour shortage in the past 12 months.  What's even more concerning is that 88 per cent believe there is at least a slight likelihood that these shortages will persist in the coming year.

Moreover, 92 per cent of leaders globally see workforce challenges, including employee attraction, engaging and retaining employees, creating risks for their organisation’s ability to achieve their goals in the next year. 

In the current landscape, organisations must incorporate innovative HR strategies to improve efficiency and management of its most critical asset – people. Organisations must continue to invest in cutting-edge technology to improve the employee experience, attract and retain top talent, and mitigate the challenges of employee retention and labour shortages.

1. Recruitment and Onboarding

Strategic recruitment and onboarding can help organisations retain top talent, strengthen the employee experience, and make life easier for HR departments.

From the start of the hiring process, technology plays a pivotal role in mitigating biases within the recruitment process. Acknowledging that everyone carries their own biases, it becomes paramount to harness innovative technologies such as the Dayforce HCM suite to enhance recruitment procedures and mitigate such biases effectively.  Once hired, the right technology can empower employees to handle numerous onboarding tasks independently. This not only eases the workload for HR but also results in a significant reduction in administrative burdens, offering a more efficient and streamlined onboarding experience.

Employee onboarding software can help HR managers efficiently onboard employees while providing a consistently engaging experience across their workforce, such as:

• Support day-one readiness: Readiness checklists walk new hires through the key steps of the onboarding process. New hires can complete all necessary tasks in onboarding software before day one. Managers can communicate job expectations and track the new hire's progress to increase productivity from the start.
• Go paperless: Online forms in onboarding software let new hires complete onboarding paperwork faster and focus on their core job responsibilities sooner. Information gathered during recruitment and onboarding will automatically transfer to the rest of the onboarding software so HR team members can focus on people instead of the paperwork.
• A standardised system: Adopting a structured, tech-driven onboarding process is faster, more compliant, and easy to repeat with every new hire.

2. Learning and Development

Skills gaps have a significant impact on employers and employees and can undermine business continuity and competitiveness in the market. Creating a culture of learning is complicated; it must align employee ambitions with company goals, provide a regular schedule for learning initiatives, accommodate different learning styles, embrace technology, and provide training for all levels of the organisation.

Data from the 2023 Executive Survey revealed that leaders globally have begun embracing modern technology and reimagining talent strategies to help elevate their people operations while unlocking efficiencies.  An impressive 79% of respondents indicated that their organisation uses skills-based hiring often or very often, signifying a clear shift towards a more innovative and efficient approach to talent acquisition.

Implementing a modern, unified HR technology solution can help unlock employee potential with continuous, technology-driven opportunities for learning and development that give an organisation’s people more control over their career paths.

Equipping the workforce with comprehensive HR technology training enhances employee engagement and boosts performance. When employees can confidently use the technology in place, they feel more empowered, leading to higher efficiency and a much greater return on investment.

3. Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is critical to every organisation’s success. When people are satisfied and proud to work for their employers, it translates to higher productivity and longer tenure.

Organisations must look at their existing employee engagement practices and take them to the next level. They will need to have the right technology to continuously collect the right feedback and identify trends and gaps across the organisation. Employee engagement solutions can provide managers with real-time data from surveys so they can identify trends and build specific action plans to respond accordingly.

Annual engagement surveys are one of the most effective ways to establish trust by giving employees a voice and listening to their feedback. Engagement analysis tools help organisations to collect feedback from people and identify patterns and trends in employees’ emotional states. With this information, companies can build action plans to respond quickly to employee concerns and help reduce turnover, burnout, and absenteeism.

4. Workforce Analytics

Having the right data and analytics capabilities is critical for dynamic, informed decision-making, particularly when building a high-performance workforce. Technology and people analytics can help organisations achieve engagement and retention goals, control labour costs, and boost productivity and performance.

• Make data part of your company culture: Ensuring organisation-wide commitment to people analytics is vital. Frequently, HR data is overlooked, mixed with company history, or is misunderstood. Time needs to be taken to proactively make data a part of the company’s culture, regularly communicating what it is, the value that it can provide, and why decision-makers should feel confident making decisions with it.
• Communicate the value of turning insights into initiatives: Data insights are meaningful when they lead to action, whether it's smarter decisions, launching initiatives, or solving problems. Emphasise the importance of basing actions on data-driven insights by sharing case studies or other real-life examples of how this has happened elsewhere in the business, what the outcomes were, and how others might adopt a similar approach.
• Provide personalised access to key metrics and custom dashboards: Regularly provide key stakeholders with personalised, accessible data to integrate data-driven decision-making into their routine. Set up custom dashboards that allow them to see what’s relevant to them whenever and however they want to. Ultimately, this puts business leaders in the position to use people analytics on their terms, which is critical for driving adoption.

It is crucial that organisations begin addressing the rapidly changing workforce trends to ensure its most important asset, its people, is well equipped for the future. Whether it’s compliance complexities, employee attraction, engagement, retention or the increasing impacts of AI automation, leveraging technology to transform people processes are vital to ensuring organisations can combat workforce challenges and improve the employee experience.

Ceridian are exhibiting at the HR + L&D Innovation and Tech Fest 2023, be sure to visit our stand on November 15-16. Register Now!