Shortways, supporting the user of HR’s digital tools

Employees have to use dozens of different HR applications on a daily basis. As we pivot to hybrid working models, this will only increase. So how can you help your end-users engage with your HR applications and use them successfully?

• After a year of quick-fire digitization, it’s time HR leaders began to harness available solutions to enable end-users of these technologies to take advantage of their capabilities, without presenting a bigger burden on HR departments, managers, employees, and support staff.
• Digital transformation affects employees but only 27% of employees feel completely at ease with new digital practices and 64% of employees feel badly or not sufficiently supported by their company to take advantage of new technologies.
• It’s about providing the right support and information, at the right time to be able to get the most out of the technologies that have taken vast amounts of time, energy, and financial investment to implement in the first place.

UNLEASH Product Spotlights look at products across the HR technology spectrum and are based on research and member input. Today we look at Shortways Assistant that allows organizations to digitize end-user support and training by embedding content within business applications. Designed for large organizations, Shortways Assistant saves time and ensures the effective support required to ensure employee adoption of digital solutions.

Building the plane whilst taxiing down the runway

After an unprecedented digital transformation within the HR function across so many organizations, employees are now being expected to master new tools and software that HR has implemented, without having the time or traditional face-to-face onboarding time to get fully acquainted with them.

We appreciate how much time and resources can be put into building up the business case and choosing solutions that fit within the HR leaders’ organization. Especially in today’s economic contexts, where more and more HR departments are having budgets cut and procurement decisions are facing more and more scrutiny. But without the buy-in and appropriation of the end-user, these efforts will be found wanting.

Technology should be there to enable people to do more and be more efficient. But with 2020 being named ‘the year of technology adoption’, with so many organizations having to digitalize so many processes they weren’t anywhere near ready to do so, HR leaders now need to put the employee and user experience first to maximize ROI on these new technologies that promise so much.

But the solution doesn’t have to be complicated. Shortways is a digital adoption platform that supports employees who have to use dozens of HR applications, that don’t have the time to get to grips with the processes and functionalities of every solution. Shortways Assistant displays tips, step-by-step guidance and FAQs whilst users are in the application, meaning employees are learning in the moment, at the time fo need. Employees become more efficient, less dependent on support staff and managers, and ultiamtely better trained in their digital applications.

Watch our Product Spotlight Video to learn more about some of Shortways Assistant’s key features and read some use cases below about how Shortways can help function-specific leaders in HRIS, as well as recruitment.

Why should you care about the adoption of your digital solutions?

The HRIS User

At UNLEASH, we’ve been following the HR technology market for almost two decades now, and have long been aware of adoption challenges. We recently released our Why HR Tech Project’s Fail report, where we gathered the perspectives of over 700 leaders globally who have been involved in significant HR technology projects in the past four years.

The study uncovered some important findings. Firstly, effective HR technology implementations are neither system replacements nor automation projects – they are business transformations. And when companies understand this, they gain a much greater return on investment, adoption, and impact from these investments.

Today, the HR practitioner’s number one focus has to be the employee experience: designing micro-experiences that help employees, managers, executives do their jobs better by providing information about the organization’s processes at the point of need.

HR leaders need to find ways to make work easier – the goal of a business transformation. Our research found that when buyers focus on these problems, they get outstanding returns on their investment.

Some of the negative impacts of poor HRIS adoption include:

• Burdened support staff due to the workload of providing assistance and support for employees and managers to be able to use their HRIS.
• User discontentment resulting in low usage of HRIS – bad for employee engagement, productivity, and employee experience levels
• Line-manager discontentment due to the technology not solving the problem it’s there to fix, leaving managers continuing to spend time on HR matters, including showing employees how to use systems and how the processes work (or needing valuable time to understand themselves!)
• Poor HRIS data quality leading to poor, incorrect reporting due to employees and managers not using the systems to update and record important information

Find out more on HRIS adoption in organizations from the likes of Engie and Bouygues Telecom in this report from Shortways.

Shortways’ virtual assistant enhances and helps sustain the adoption of the human resources management system, such as Oracle HCM Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, Talentsoft, or Workday, by all employees. By integrating contextual information directly into HR leaders’ business applications, Shortways’ solution trains, informs and supports end-users within the use of their HRIS application.

Some key Shortways Assistant features to note for HRIS:

• Guides users within your software at the point of need, with answers available 24/7, avoiding unnecessary calls to support.
• Through various aids such as notification bubbles and step-by-step devices, users are accompanied through their HRIS journey and supported the whole time.
• Users have access to specific aids to enable them to become more efficient and reduce their doubts about processes, specifically data security.

With a Digital Adoption solution like Shortways, employees are more self-reliant in their tasks because they can access relevant information when and where they need it. Managers are more efficient on complex processes and administration tasks, and HR specialists can easily secure the back office by quickly mastering cloud-based applications.

Digital adoption may seem like something an HRIS leader would and should care about, but adoption and user experiences matter to most, if not all, HR functions, and recruitment is no different.

The Recruitment Leader

The remote and hybrid working world isn’t going anywhere, so virtual hiring and on-boarding strategies must keep up.

Furthermore, we are witnessing that the boundary of HR is no longer constrained to permanent employees; but HR now has to grapple with a blended workforce of contingent, full-time, and flexible workers, and thus, talent pools have grown exponentially outside ‘traditional’ internal employees.

With so many new types of workers entering the workforce, the line between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ talent is blurrier than ever and the number of employees that need to be onboarded into unique HR processes can lead to labor-intensive and time-consuming processes and procedures for talent. This also means that unique job offers and adverts are having to be created for each and every vacancy.

So, how can a Digital Adoption solution help a recruitment leader?

• Systematize and streamline onboarding for new users on the recruitment and HR processes
• Managers and HR leaders are able to use pre-made templates to create job offer models to save them time on more human-centric tasks
• Decrease the processing time of offers and applications
• In Mercer’s Global Talent Trends Study, they found organizations who were further along on their digital journey reported higher scores on change agility, a more compelling and differentiated Employee Value Proposition, and a stronger partnership between the C-suite and HR.

So, not only will Shortways Assistant be freeing up time for recruitment leaders to focus on the human-value side of their work, but it will also be more attractive to potential employees and improve retention and productivity by making their relationship with HR and its processes easy and painless.

Other Function Specific Use-Cases

Having a Digital Adoption solution like Shortways can mean that HR, in a number of functions, can improve their delivery deficiency. Having an Assistant at hand to automate and streamline the basics of HR: paying people on time, recruiting, terms and conditions, etc. doesn’t necessarily win HR the medals, but unless it does these basics well, the function doesn’t have the credibility to engage in the real value-added work.

Entering into the era of digital change management, it’s imperative to understand the user journey when implementing new technologies and when you’re trying to make the most out of HR tech you already have.

Whether it’s giving employees and managers the confidence and guidance to complete an annual performance review correctly; autonomy for an employee in their own training plan and more effective support for virtual learning environments; optimizing the quality of employee records leading to better data and analytics for HR to make more informed strategic decisions; or standardization of definitions and rules in relation to your HR data, a digital assistant like that provided by Shortways can be the solution.