Embrace Low-Code for HR Efficiencies

The Great Resignation created unprecedented labor shortages, with the food service, retail, and healthcare industries being hit especially hard.

This has created significant challenges for human resources (HR) organizations, forcing them to rethink their platforms and processes in pursuit of a more seamless onboarding experience with better candidate retention. Key business problems in these areas are ideally suited to low-code innovation, with the potential to optimize processes and transform the employee experience, often without getting IT development teams involved.

Faced with the challenges of the Great Resignation, can you afford not to empower your HR organization with low-code development opportunities?

Transforming the Employee Experience Through Innovation

You obviously can’t afford not to empower your team, but you also can’t afford to just leap into low-code opportunities without your team understanding what they are doing and why.

When carefully and purposefully implemented, low-code tools and platforms can transform the employee experience by enabling HR organizations to rapidly innovate solution development.

For example, when a national energy infrastructure company was trying to navigate the Great Resignation, it discovered that it was hiring people who never completed onboarding and never showed up on the first day. The company wanted to enable better tracking of 30, 60, and 90-day milestone interactions, but struggled with legacy HR applications that were hard to support and unable to operate in certain technical environments.

The approach it took to ensuring low-code success followed four key steps, all of which are crucial for any company interested in pursuing similar innovations:

• Look at simplistic processes you want to code. Instead of leaping into low-code innovation with big plans for complex solutions, start small and consider simple processes as candidates for low-code automation. Look to those processes that rely on spreadsheets and emails or are dependent on repetitive data entry tasks, and then start prioritizing them. Ensure your processes are well-documented, with clear steps to follow from beginning to end, decision trees, standardized inputs, and templated outputs.
• Educate your organization and prepare your team. Educate the employees who will be the users/developers on what low-code is and clarify what will be expected of them. They may assume that low-code equates to low quality, so help them understand that it can contribute to the development of enterprise-level solutions, but with the added benefits of rapid application development and greater department control. At the same time, while building excitement with your HR organization over being able to modify tools without having to wait for IT resources, begin conversations with the IT team about what processes you are targeting and why, and reassure them they are not being replaced, but freed to focus on mission-critical projects.
• Designate citizen developers within your HR organization. Identify employees who know your business process best, who excel at data-driven tools like Microsoft Excel, or who are particularly comfortable with design tools like Microsoft PowerPoint. As your HR organization becomes more comfortable with the idea of taking on low-code responsibilities, look for those who take to it more easily or show a natural affinity for the tool. Train them to be citizen developers, the department resources that others go to when something goes wrong, and who interface with your IT developers to translate business knowledge into process.
• Keep a user journey/experience in mind. Once you’ve identified processes with clear documentation, undertake a user journey/experience mapping exercise throughout the process, both for your HR organization and their users (candidates or employees) to better understand the application journeys you wish to recreate. In addition to improving the process, the exercise drives increased adoption rates with stakeholders who feel represented and motivated to use what they understand.

As an output of their low-code transformation, the energy infrastructure company mentioned above was able to immediately automate 15 processes (and has since automated 20 more), with power applications and drag-and-drop wizards that allow its HR organization to point at a data source and create new applications in just minutes.

Empowering HR and Engaging Employees

Every company faces recruitment and retention challenges—the Great Resignation has just amplified them. As a result, most would love to automate their HR world, but few are ready to tackle a low-code transformation on their own.

If you’re ready to empower your HR organization with low-code development opportunities, or if you’ve already tried and found the results not what you anticipated, we can help. We’ll work with your HR organization to understand the user journey/experience and provide them with the experience they need to step in and take over.

Make plans to attend our Great Re-Imagination: HR Transformation With Low-Code Applications webinar, or contact us today.

Author

David Soden

Principal