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When the COVID-19 shutdown happened last spring, I received a call from my daughter who lives in Washington, D.C. Her company had mandated a stay-at-home order, so she had to accommodate an office space in her 500-square-foot studio apartment. After getting approval from her boss, she called and asked if it would be OK for her to drive from D.C. to central California to spend a few months with us. Of course, I was thrilled with the idea. She packed up the car with her office equipment, luggage, and Barkley, my grandpup, and she headed west!

COVID-19 has had an impact on our county, and the world, like nothing we could have ever imagined. One of the ultimate impacts may be how business will be conducted moving forward. The U.S. Labor Department estimates 4 million people decided to leave their jobs in April this year alone, placing job vacancies at a 20-year high. And here is the kicker: No one wants to fill them! This has been dubbed ” the Great Resignation,” and we are in uncharted territory.

It would be easy to conclude that employees, after spending a year working out of their homes and spending more time with family, are rethinking where and what they want to do with their lives. They have realized that they no longer have to be tied to a brick-and-mortar building and deal with a long commute to and from work, time away from their families, and the daily grind of the office. They can choose to live where they want to live, not where they need to live in order to get a job. The pandemic is forcing organizations and their HR departments to rethink how they do business and how to keep employees engaged.

Reality is that “employee engagement” is far more than what technology provides. It is a business philosophy that needs to be embraced by an organization. But technology can be a part of that philosophy, enabling employees by providing information at their fingertips and the ability to get their jobs done more easily. No matter where they work, at home or on-site, it’s essential to give employees the tools they need to succeed. And your Workforce Go! HCM solution can do just that!

The company hub

Workforce Go! HCM’s company hub may be a part of the answer. An internet hub within the Workforce Go! solution allows an organization an ecosystem to house and curate resources for communication, references, and resources. This provides a place to house all of those great engagement ideas that HR is working on. This in-platform solution provides communication and a vital resource for employee engagement.

Mobile

Nowadays, mobile capabilities are not just a nicety; they’re expected, especially by newer employees entering the workforce. Having information at an employee’s fingertip allows employees to be more productive. It moves the “work” from process to flow. Imagine new hires being able to fill out their onboarding paperwork (i.e., forms 1-9 and W-4) right from their phones if they choose. Workforce Go! HCM makes it so easy by letting them navigate the actual form while checking for missing data.

Personalized workflows and checklists

With personalized workflows and checklists, you can provide managers and administrators with the tools they need to make sure that new hires feel appreciated and included in the team. By personalizing workflows and checklists in Workforce Go! HCM, you will be able to onboard new employees quickly while collecting necessary compliance information. Managers can use checklists as a reminder to check in with their employees so they feel like part of the team. It’s important to have the tools to keep employees engaged during that critical first-year period!

Succession planning tools

As employees settle in, it’s important to focus on their development. Just think, what if you could fill upward of 80% of key positions with internal hires? Succession planning helps identify and prepare the right people for key positions critical to ensuring leadership continuity. You can create succession plan profiles based on specific metrics (i.e., performance readiness, potential, risk, impact of loss, or company­ specific metrics). Then, utilizing the 9-box (although you can configure any size box), you easily can identify and understand the development needs of the employees so that key employees understand their career paths and the roles they are being developed to fill.

Workforce management

Workforce Go! HCM lets managers become strategic leaders for their organization by enabling them to reduce time spent on their daily tasks, identify optimization opportunities, and engage and motivate their teams. From an engagement standpoint, communication is critical, as is letting employees control their environment with things such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. With these sophisticated tools, employees can submit time-off requests and get responses instantly, or you can have the system identify the best-fit employee to fill a shift based on past experience.

Advanced scheduling: preferences and self-scheduling

With Workforce Go! HCM, employees can define their preferences of when they are available to work and even self­ schedule with Advanced Scheduling. This flexibility enhances the employee experience and provides the flexible options employees are looking for.

There are so many features in Workforce Go! HCM that you can take advantage of to help with your organization’s engagement philosophy! However, to finish my story, luckily, my daughter now has the option to continue to work at home. As things begin to open, her company is revisiting their go-forward plan to provide more flexibility to their staff. Unfortunately for me, she loves living in D.C. and is very happy in her job. She has no plans to be part of the Great Resignation. The question is, are you doing all you can for your employees?