Using HCM Technology to Drive Innovation and Empower Employees

As human capital management (HCM) technology evolves to meet employee demands, the best solutions create people-first user experiences that use data to drive product innovation and make users’ work lives easier, writes Joe Kleinwaechter, vice president, UX at ADP.

September 19, 2022

Employees have come to expect the same ease of use from their work software as they experience in their personal lives. They want technology that is intuitive, insightful, and proactive. Put plainly, and they’re looking for the same level of convenience and simplicity at work that they experience when they order groceries, book transportation, or make purchases online. As human capital management (HCM) technology evolves to meet such demands, the best solutions create people-first user experiences that use data to drive product innovation and make users’ work lives easier. Doing so also strengthens employee engagement and retention, a key issue in today’s labor market.

Where HR Tech is Evolving

Historically, HR tech has mirrored HR functions – like payroll, benefits, time, and HR development – but this siloed approach can result in a cumbersome, frustrating user experience (UX), especially when the functions aren’t necessarily communicating well behind the scenes. The reality is that from a user’s perspective, talent, time, pay and benefits are all intertwined. At the core is an employee trying to balance their finances and retirement goals, manage healthcare, and ensure they’re paid correctly. Employees don’t want to struggle with confusing software and multiple platforms. They want to complete tasks efficiently, get answers to their questions, and return to work. 

HR technology now has new powerful tools to solve these issues. Using AI and machine learning, large amounts of data can be mined to provide predictive and accurate information. These insights can drive better UX and, ultimately, a more efficient HR function.

The Three Most Important UX Design Principles

A positive UX starts with understanding the users’ needs and wants. Are they encountering challenges with the current design? Do errors point to new opportunities to understand the task in their environment? Is HR having difficulty getting trusted data from the system? What are the most common user challenges? Good UX design runs on real-life data like product utilization, adoption rates, drop-offs, and changes in the competitive landscape. With this information, developers can identify tangible ways to improve the user experience.

See More: A Quick Guide to UI and UX for Your Marketing Platforms

Effective HCM technology should deliver a user experience that is intuitive, insightful, and proactive. 

1. Intuitive

HCM technology that is intuitive helps users find the information they need to get tasks done more efficiently. We need to match the experience to how they see their job being done most effectively, which may differ from how we initially thought. That means finding and surfacing significant data at the right time and in the right context. It also means simplifying the workflow and leveraging intelligent self-service capabilities. This might include, for example, a highly customized homepage, using the function or location-specific data to personalize the content it displays. Onboarding, an extension of the global HR system of record, can be personalized by role, team, or country-specific requirements so new employees can see a personalized checklist of things to do. These smart actions are powered by machine learning that anticipates what users need to do based on user pattern detection. 

2. Insightful

Insightful HCM technology goes below the surface, linking important data points and providing information to improve decisions. For example, we pay one out of every six Americans and 39 million workers worldwide at ADP. This aggregated and anonymized real-time data capture insights from every point of the employee journey. Using AI and ML to interpret this data pool, we provide benchmarks that enable accurate comparisons across geography, function, position, demographics, and skills. How would applying these insights impact UX design?

Let’s say you have an employee who is a turnover risk. They’re underpaid compared to their peers, haven’t been promoted in a long time and have low engagement scores. But based on their reviews, they’re still a high performer. What can we do to support them? Based on data about the employee’s role, the system recommends they take an analytics course, a skill in high demand and a requirement for two potential career paths that could be a good fit for them. It’s a step the organization can take right away to get the employee engaged and lower their risk of leaving the organization. Insights and recommendations like these, derived by comparing similar individuals at similar companies and geographies, can greatly support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts as well.

3. Proactive

HCM technology that is proactive learns from how users interact with the software and identifies ways to improve the product. Here’s a typical HR service challenge – the missed time punch. This common mistake can kick off a series of complicated steps to correct. It often doesn’t even emerge until the employee sees a problem in their pay. What if the technology recognized this in real time before it became a significant issue? So, when an employee missed a punch, the system would immediately identify it, then alert the employee to correct it with a few quick steps. Caught and fixed early, any extra steps for HR could be avoided, and the employee wouldn’t need to wait weeks for corrective pay. Proactive HR technology also connects to payroll cycle data, knowing if the employee can be paid immediately. Best-in-class HCM technology understands the user and what interrupts their daily work and provides an easy, user-friendly fix.

Take this a step further. Every year at benefits enrollment time, employees are faced with many choices. It’s easy to go with the same package. A proactive HCM system connects all the data points. It knows, for example, that an employee got a recent pay increase, is ten years from retirement, or recently had a child. The technology can offer better options to help employees make their selections with this knowledge.

Rapid advances in data science and analytics have made this all possible. We now have the AI and machine learning tools to quickly parse large amounts of data and put it to good use. The goal is to provide a solution before users even realize they need one. Good UX design focuses on the task that needs to get done rather than the software that enables that interaction. 

In a highly competitive labor market, employees have options. The equation is simple. Making HR systems work better for the user can lead to better employee engagement. HR professionals can better retain talent by empowering employees with intuitive, insightful, and proactive user interfaces. 

How do you think HCM technology can help create a people-first user experience? Tell us what you think on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d be thrilled to hear from you.

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Joe Kleinwaechter
Joe Kleinwaechter is the Vice President of Global UX for ADP and leads the full UX product organization responsible for both external and internal products worldwide.
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