With the turn of the millennium, several organizations have expanded to become multi-national in nature resulting in employees being dispersed across multiple locations. While roughly 60% – 70% of the employees operate out of core delivery locations – the remaining employees are often seen to be dispersed across a Long-tail of countries.

KPMG in its research report titled “Rethinking Human HR in a Changing World” examines the nature of various challenges facing the HR function and its future direction. The report states that one of the core challenges faced by the HR function is “managing a global, flexible workforce”. The global workforce has become increasingly integrated across borders while simultaneously growing more virtual and flexible. These developments have made retention of key talent and building workforces in new markets as top priorities of HR departments over the last 3 years.

Companies from developed countries are seeking newer locations to enhance their existing businesses, while those from emerging markets have acquired sufficient scale to start taking on the world. The resultant challenges faced by an HR organization will include

• Balancing the global and the local – managing, hiring and identifying talent globally while retaining important local talent.
• Managing a flexible and virtual workforce – but not at the cost of loyalty and career development.
• Retaining the best talent

When these challenges as submitted by the HR function in any board-room the immediate resolution at most instances tends to be – “What’s the best piece of technology available for us to address this”. But on the down-side several organizations with a flexible workforce tend to address each entity has a separate island resulting in a myriad of HR platforms and solutions being implemented across the organizations which results in its own sets of challenges which include inaccuracy in the availability of employee data, increasing difficulty in handling a mobile workforce and tracking cross-border compliance across various HR processes.
Use of technology – “the right technology” will certainly help organizations mitigate this challenge and hence the need for “Smart HR Technology”. Therefore, keeping your global workforce in mind, the following are the steps an organization needs to bear in mind while selecting an HR solution.

Access from the Cloud: Having a cloud-based HRMS will help the HR team access employee data across geographies. Cloud solutions tend to have better ESS & MSS interfaces that make information readily available. Talent Management happens real-time, with seamless process flows – much to the delight of an employee
An intuitive User experience: The rise of the millennial generation among the workforce and more importantly the choices an individual sees laid out lucratively in front of his/her eyes in the market has given organizations the absolute need to re-look at their employee retention policies. While providing monetary benefits and having rewards & recognition programs have been a common norm – several organizations have now realized the importance of creating a wow- experience for its employees. An intuitive user-interface in the technology put-forth to an organization’s employees will certainly help them navigate without any ambiguity. Simplicity is truly the essence here and an uncluttered design providing information on a need to know basis helps to accomplish this goal.

Security features: With regulations such as GDPR being rolled out – importance to data security has certainly taken high precedent among organizations. Hence the solution used should ensure utmost data security to employee information.

User support: Be it a proprietary platform or an off-the-shelf product – it is critical that all users of the platform are provided with adequate training and support, which will help increase user adoption.

HR Analytics: This will help the HR function to better its decision-making ability with better prediction and tangible evidence.

Technology is certainly the game-changer that will help organizations manages its global workforce effectively – However, choosing the right piece of technology will certainly propel its HR function to a new orbit.

If you would like to device the perfect HR solution for your organizations to cater to your global workforce – please write to us at Irene.jones@neeyamo.com and we would be happy to take a look at your existing HR landscape and help optimize it to serve your employees better.

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