The Era of Employee Centricity — Introducing Skills at the Core of HR Processes
Tags: Workforce Development, Employees, Employee Experience, HR, Skills

The Era of Employee Centricity — Introducing Skills at the Core of HR Processes Lurnii Follow Dec 1, 2020 · 6 min read

Everyone in the business sector has recently started talking about embracing employee-centric policies. But what is employee centricity exactly? More importantly, how can it benefit you and your company? Today, we will be discussing this idea. So let’s get started with defining it first.

Basically, employee centricity is the idea that the employee should be put at the heart of all organizational strategies.

In the 21st century, companies increasingly realize that their organization’s success heavily relies on employee performance. In that regard, it becomes pivotal to prioritize employee experience and integrate mechanisms that power individual performance.

Now that you know what it is, the next big question you should be asking yourself is how it can be achieved? Well, here’s the thing: to make a place in the rapidly employee-centered world, your company must encourage HR processes that have skills at their core. But before we look at how to achieve that, let’s put things into perspective.

Why is Employee Centricity Important?

Employees are, quite literally, the backbone of every organization. Without your employees, your company is just a shell. For starters, this means that you should have the best interests of your employees at heart.

Source: Late 2010 survey on US workers by Mercer

While the top management does realize this fact, they usually failed to act on it. An international survey of 10,000 workers by Ipsos found that 85% of employees are unhappy with their office environment and struggle to concentrate.

One can observe that this is most likely the result of an unfavorable work environment. If the company does not allow employees to grow, they are bound to feel disinterested. What does this mean for you and your company? In simple words: bad news.

Don’t worry, though, because you can quickly fix this discrepancy by introducing employee centricity to the workplace. Employee centricity allows an environment where ideas, creativity, and innovation are welcome.

This environment is favorable to employees because instead of incessantly burdening them in the grind of corporate culture, it offers them a safe place to grow into their profession. And what does this mean for you and your company? Lasting success!

How to Introduce Employee Centricity

This is very straightforward! It does not have to be complicated; however, it should be supplemented by data-driven observations and algorithms, as discussed later in this article.

That being said, a company can improve by simply listening to their employees. That’s right, and you can take action by letting your employees be people, have freedoms, choices, and a safe environment for them to express themselves in.

Something as small as giving employees the control to execute specific projects and make their own decisions can go a long way toward moving towards an employee-centric environment.

Benefits of Employee Centricity

Some benefits of employee-centric culture may include the following:

Efficiency, Productivity, and Increased Competence

As long as your employees are happy and satisfied with the support they receive, your company is sorted!

The way you and your company’s strategies treat an employee has a direct impact they do for you. Employee centricity ensures their happiness, contentment, and satisfaction, which provides efficiency, productivity, and increased competence for your company.

Improved Team Commodity

Employee-centric approaches boost employee strength. Moreover, they ensure that employee qualities adequately match the task at hand. You get the opportunity to understand every employee’s strengths and weaknesses better, resulting in improved team commodity.

Attain Best Talents

Want to have an impeccable team? Well then, gear up to offer more to your employees! It is a proven fact that companies that provide benefits attract top talent.

Even if the pay that you offer is less, people would still consider you as a work prospect given an environment that wholly supports employee ideas, suggestions, and challenges. The key is to make your employees want to invest in their work!

The Role of HR Processes

HR processes are the key catalyst of revolutionizing employee experience and performance. It is up to the HR department of an organization to support an employee. Every HR process should ideally help employees identify their potential and then train them to maximize it.

However, this is not reality. Often, the HR department does not have adequate resources to be able to support every employee. The focus is usually directed towards senior employees or better performers, whereas the rest (almost 95%) are independent.

This is problematic — the lack of help can harm employee performance; it also results in demotivation on the employee’s part, but it can also adversely affect company reputation.

Another pertinent issue with HR processes is that they are concentrated on a job-title approach. This approach is a minimized, local way of addressing HR questions — it beats the very purpose of human resource management! It overlooks the idea of utilizing an employee’s full competence and instead focuses on supporting the linear career paths.

But, linear careers are a thing of the past. Linear paths were a thing about a decade ago! And what did they entail?

Well, previously, a profession stood for a particular set of elements. Your job description required you to conquer a specific area and stick to it. However, now these notions have been eliminated. The lines between roles have blurred and continue to blur more every single day.

Now, your profession is not just a succession of positions; it is a succession of assignments and requires varying skills.

HR Processes for All

First, how do you ensure that the HR process is there for every employee, helping and supporting their growth while also maximizing its growth? We have compiled the following steps, which will help integrate an in-depth, tailor-made career management program for every employee.

1) Career Management for Employees, by Employees

Let the employee handle it! A successful career management program is only possible if the employee himself plans, creates, executes, and utilizes the support program. Yes, all by himself, without a middle man!

This would help enable your employees to handle this process, and you will see an improved comprehension on their end, both of their competence and the company’s needs.

2) Skills — They Key to HR Processes

For the HR processes to further be lucrative, skills must be reintegrated at the core of them. As a company, you should drop a closed-skills framework and move towards a universal, open, and dynamic model that allows the recycling and re-expressing skills that each employee possesses.

3) The Right Technology

It is the 21st century — you need to have the right technology to enhance the HR process and the all-together employee experience and company success. In this regard, artificial intelligence is an initial tool.

AI will help you produce the right tailor-made career management program, and that too on a large scale. While a career manager can only support around fifty employees, AI can help you tackle a larger number and an even more intense personalization.

4) Humanize Technology

This is important. It is not sufficient for you to put algorithms in place and call it a day. You must utilize technology in the most humane way possible — it must accommodate employees and adapt to daily interactions that take place!

For this, it should be humanized. To “humanize” technology, the best option is to focus on simplicity. The less technical complexity you integrate, the more humane AI becomes.

Key Summary

So, what do we learn from all of this? Your employees’ matter. The traditional notion of corporate culture strains on prioritizing the customer, but the truth is that your employees matter just as much! For this reason, employee centricity is increasingly becoming the norm.

However, to ensure that it is fully incorporated, companies need to reform their human resource strategies, especially skills allocation. Luckily for us, the future of human resources is looking promising — thanks to the introduction of data-driven, tech-friendly, employee-centric strategies.

Employees are more productive than ever, and a lot of that has to do with the priority given to their skills, rather than century-old, restrictive job roles.

The key takeaway for you and your company, therefore, is to support your employees!