By Rajiv Kumar, Vice President & Country Leader, SumTotal System
HR in the Driving Seat:
Work culture has undergone a sudden transformation because of the pandemic. Nobody had a well-devised formula for dealing with the new normal. Everybody – be it organizations or individuals – has tried to adapt to the constantly-evolving situation. Organizations had to figure out a way to make remote working productive and manageable for the employees. Undoubtedly, there were challenges involved. Organizations, then, had to depend on their HR department for solutions.”
Impact on Employee Engagement and Productivity:
Since a lot of employees moved back to their hometowns, ensuring effective business continuity became crucial. The process of recruitment also turned challenging as everything had to be decided virtually. It was the same with employee training where extra effort was required for building skills and competency of the trainees because of the lack of physical contact. As we turned our operations digital, most of the processes became manageable.”
Rather than investing in video conferencing technologies, our customers also started using our adaptive streaming solution for conducting video conferencing and collaboration. Consequently, the overall productivity and employee engagement has been efficient on account of our advanced tech-based digital infrastructure.
Talent Development During this Period
Learning has become the core tenet of every organization. New-age organizations are investing significant resources to establish a learning-centric work culture with the aim of driving productivity and efficiency. Further, a new trend of billing-centric culture is becoming more prevalent as enterprises are seeking to build those skills that provide the maximum output in view of their cost-to-billing. Another more visible trend is occurring in the HR technology space as new-age players are leveraging cutting-edge tools and resources to not only drive learning programs but also for driving employee performance based on 360-degree feedback.”
“The third trend involves the uptake of upskilling programs for upgrading the skillsets of existing resources within organizations. There are major cost-benefits in investing in developing existing talent than acquiring new one and modern enterprises know it. Further, by focusing more on upskilling and reskilling programs, organizations can utilize their resources on limited people, thereby optimizing the output as well as benefits that they stand to gain.”
Importance of LMS in supporting Business Continuity
Organizations today have become very serious about building their Individual Development Plans (IDPs) and LMS plays a critical role in it. For instance, a project may require a professional to be a Java expert, but they prefer to use dotnet. If an organization has a strong LMS in place, the employee can use java to execute the project while building their scripts on dotnet. This will enable them to be available for any subsequent project if it comes on dotnet. The LMS platform, therefore, not only allows businesses to achieve their organizational objectives but also helps individual employees to develop and execute their own individual development plan.”
