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In Berlin, HR & People Engagement

Mitigate Risk During Employment Separation with Onwards HR

Talent acquisition remains a focal point for most organizations in this dynamic and highly competitive corporate environment. Unfortunately, the pivotal process of offboarding often takes a back seat. An efficient employment separation process plays a key role in enhancing the employee experience, protecting the company’s reputation and mitigating potential legal and financial risks associated with employee separation. One solution that effectively addresses these complexities is Onwards HR, a platform that automates key portions of the separation process to ensure accuracy, compliance and a positive overall brand experience for those leaving the organization and those charged with executing what is often an emotional and stressful process.

Even under the best circumstances, employment separation is traditionally a labor-intensive and challenging process. It involves multiple stakeholders, including human resources representatives, line managers, legal counsel and executives, who must ensure a smooth and compliant transition while managing their primary job responsibilities. This dual responsibility often leads to overstretched staff and an increased risk of errors, creating a potential minefield of financial and legal implications for the organization. Examples include lawsuits resulting from unlawful terminations, potential violations of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (or WARN) Act during mass layoffs, adverse impact on protected groups and the financial pitfalls due to clerical errors or improperly executed severance agreements. The stakes are higher than often appreciated, considering legal fees and the potential damage to the organization’s reputation. Plus, the emotionally charged nature of the circumstances surrounding these events further compounds stress, making it essential to manage with precision and sensitivity.

In light of these challenges, organizations are turning to technology to ensure a structured, automated separation process that safeguards accuracy and compliance. This is a natural extension of the ongoing movement to automation in HR technology, which is critical to achieving the best business outcomes. We assert that by 2025, three-quarters of organizations will identify use cases that specify human capital management system requirements for optimum agility. This critical business process is a perfect example of how technology brings structure and automation to a business-critical but sometimes highly risky process.

Enter Onwards HR: an innovative system that streamlines employee separation actions, minimizes financial and legal risks and saves time and costs typically incurred by a long and redundant process with the engagement of external legal counsel. Onwards HR is a comprehensive digital platform that seamlessly manages the most critical elements of the separation process. The technology ensures strict adherence to laws and regulations, minimizing the potential for costly litigation. For instance, Onwards HR has built-in compliance checks for WARN Act implications, flagging potential violations during large-scale layoffs. This preemptive risk mitigation is an invaluable asset for organizations navigating the complex legal landscape of offboarding.

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In San Francisco, HR & People Engagement

Censia Talent Intelligence Launches AI-powered Executive Search Tool, Developed With Industry Leader Monica Bua

Censia Talent Intelligence is excited to announce its development of an AI-powered Executive Search tool, created with the guidance of Monica Bua. A distinguished global retained search executive, Bua has worked closely with Censia’s team on the development of Censia Executive Intelligence, an AI tool revolutionizing the landscape of executive search and talent acquisition.

Bringing over 20 years of executive recruitment and emerging product expertise, Bua guides Censia’s technology team in crafting an innovative solution that merges the realms of executive search and artificial intelligence. The new tool, Censia Executive Intelligence, is designed to provide companies with in-depth market and talent insights, instantaneous market mapping, and an unrivaled competitive advantage.

“By using Censia’s Executive Intelligence platform, we can predict with 97% accuracy how an executive will perform in year one at their new organization. Our platform has profiles on more than 550 million executives globally and can codify an executive’s past performance and help place them in the most impactful roles for top organizations. Our AI is designed to identify these difference makers with precision and speed, and with it, we dramatically reduce the placement time to 45 days, with 70% diversity hires.”

Monica Bua is well regarded across the executive search industry for her ability to identify and deliver transformational talent for preeminent organizations. In addition to her deep domain expertise in leadership assessment, Bua is a venture fund investor, a valued advisor, and a board member for numerous leading-edge technology startups. Her knack for understanding client needs and forming enduring relationships with senior leaders from the Fortune 100 has cemented her reputation as a trusted authority in the industry.

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In Press, Press Coverage

The Fight Over “Employee Experience” is Finally Here

By: Stacia Garr, RedThread Research

The term “employee experience” has become increasingly popular in the last few years — so much so that we began an investigation into what it is and why it matters, which will publish in October. In the course of that research, we came across a wide range of perspectives on what it is, including from vendors like Medallia, Qualtrics, Service Now, and TI People.

But now, the heavy HR technology hitters are here to weigh in on the subject. Today, SAP SuccessFactors announced that their technology category, which we have long known as Human Capital Management, will now be known as Human Experience Management.

Along with this announcement comes a significant redesign of their user experience (UX) to offer a more integrated and holistic view of the information within the SAP SuccessFactors ecosystem in a more accessible format that intends to put individuals, teams, and organizations at the center of the experience. This new interface integrates into one location conversational AI, robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning, nudges, and predictions to try to get people higher quality information more efficiently. There is a lot we like in what the SuccessFactors team has done, and we applaud them for this holistic revamp of their product.

That said, the grand gesture of renaming the category begs us to take a closer look and to ask:

Is this, to borrow my friend and long-time SAPer Steve Hunt’s phrase, simply old wine in a new bottle? Maybe.
Employee experience, as we at RedThread understand it, is about two things:

  • Emotionally-laden events – These often include specific events in the employee life cycle such as the first day at work, a promotion, or returning from a job leave. During these events, employees are vulnerable because their expectations are high, which can suddenly impact their experience.
  • Commonplace exchanges – These are frequent interactions between employees, colleagues, and the organization. These interactions are often relationship-based and happen on an ongoing basis, instead of specific touchpoints, milestones, or moments that matter. During these commonplace exchanges, employees are not as vulnerable as during emotionally laden moments because their expectations are not as high. Yet, these exchanges have a cumulative effect on employee experience. The SAP SuccessFactors team certainly understands the value of emotionally laden events, also called “touchpoints” or “moments that matter”. However, we couldn’t fully tell how this significant user experience redesign will enable managers to better understand – and critically, to enable and improve – how employees experience those touchpoints or commonplace exchanges. It may be that the team is on the earlier parts of the journey or that we just need to see more. So why can’t we just call this new UX old wine in a shiny new bottle? Three reasons:
  1. The Qualtrics acquisition – The SAP SuccessFactors team seems to have a strong vision and appreciation of what Qualtrics, which has a focus on both employee and customer experience, can do (I sure hope so, for $8 billion). They just don’t seem to have turned that into a reality yet, which is reasonable given that the acquisition only closed in January. There are some early indications of their efforts and direction, though. For example, with the new UX, the SuccessFactors team has integrated simple one-question surveys (from Qualtrics) on the quality of manager check-ins into their continuous performance management solution. It sounds like this is just the beginning of what they have in mind.
  2. An ecosystem play – SAP SuccessFactors is making a big deal about it being an ecosystem player, meaning that they acknowledge that they don’t have a monopoly on great ideas and are trying to be better at playing well with others. As a result, the number of apps that can integrate with SuccessFactors has shot up from just 45 last year to more than 250 this year. The variety of these apps enable organizations to build a more customized employee experience that fits their unique needs.
  3. SAP.io – For those of you who don’t know it, SAP.io is SAP’s start-up accelerator, with a vision toward potentially integrating them into the SAP ecosystem. There are several start-ups within SAP.io that are focused on truly transforming the employee experience. One of them, Cultivate (which I have written about several times in other formats), shows significant promise at truly leveraging the existing data and delivering new insights to managers and employees that can help strengthen their relationships (which are so much at the heart of employee experience). We think some of these solutions will increasingly become integrated with this “Human Experience Management” platform.

In some ways, this announcement simply puts an exclamation point on the fact that we are moving away from an era of seeing people as cogs and more toward seeing them as unique humans, which is something we obviously strongly applaud.

From the perspective of being an HR technology market observer, though, we see this as something different. This announcement heralds the mainstreaming of the employee experience concept, which again, is a good thing. As SuccessFactors further refines how employee experience shows up in their platform, they will heighten awareness of the need to take an employee-first perspective.

However, this announcement does also mean that the fight over what “employee experience” really means – and what it should look like from a technological perspective – has really begun in earnest.

And what is a fight without a worthy opponent?

Look out for the good folks in Pleasanton to weigh in with their perspective very soon. I imagine announcements coming from this year’s Workday Rising event in October will carry at least a nugget or two on what they’re thinking.