Want a raise from your boss? Ask the cloud Billie Frenkel, YNET July 11, 2015

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1 Want a raise from your boss? Ask the cloud Billie Frenkel, YNET July 11, 2015 At a conference held by software giant SAP in France, the impression that arose was that the day is not far off when managers will be able to access information about employees at the press of a button on their mobiles, from the time of employee hire, through employee performance measurements, to planning of employee retirement. What changes do companies need to make in order to ensure their survival; what will happen to human resources managers; and what are the challenges that the millennials pose? Imagine a reality in which each employee in the labor market has a personal card in the cloud, stored on a remote computer, from which employers can extract information from anywhere, at any time, about their work experience or performance. To judge from the vision presented recently by software giant SAP at a conference held in France, this is precisely the direction we are headed in. "The world is moving in the direction of the cloud and it is happening faster than people are aware", says Mike Ettling, Director of HR Solutions at SAP Global, in an interview with Ynet. "18 months ago I would have held discussions with managers about whether to move in the direction of cloud technology for human resources management; today it is not a matter for discussion at all. The question is only how we go about it". (Photograph: Shutterstock) The conference, attended by human resources and IT managers from leading companies around the world, dealt with solutions offered by SAP to address the challenges in the management of human capital. The flagship solution that it offers today is a cloud-based system called SuccessFactors to manage employees throughout all the stages of their life cycle in the organization - from the locating of the suitable candidate and the hiring stages, to goal setting, performance measurements, payroll data, rewards, planning of career paths, and ultimately to retirement planning. Ettling asserts that 60% of human resources applications in organizations will be converted into cloud applications within the next three years, and intimates that companies that do not keep pace are liable to lose their standing very quickly. "I think that in 20 years time, a generation will emerge that will not know what means to install software", he reckons: "Just as the mobile phone became the default, so too will the cloud within 5 to 10 years".

2 Simplification of processes in the organization SAP is a veteran German company whose products can be found at 290,000 customers worldwide. The company, which develops computer software for managing business process of: human resources, finance, production and logistics, employs a workforce of 74,000 in 200 countries, with revenues, based on its figures, verging on 20 billion. In recent years, the company has focused on a transition to cloud-based applications, the main one being SuccessFactors, a software suite that collates all the information pertaining to an organization's workforce, including recording of the personal and professional details of employees, management of work times, payroll data, etc. In addition, it enables management of talents in an organization, and provides tools for rapid processing of information and generation of [reports] on the human capital. The software is adapted to prevailing technologies, such as remote access from a mobile app, or access to social networks, search engines, and s. In a lecture delivered by Ettling at the conference, he explained that the software enables simplification of the processes in the organization and their consolidation under a single roof, instead of in disparate software packages: "Many companies despair at the number of software packages that they have to combine for the purposes of personnel management. The cloud solves this issue and enables the work to be done on one platform". Employee management in the cloud - available on mobile devices too Thus, for illustration purposes, any manager can, at the press of a button, enter in days of annual leave or sick leave, track execution of tasks, check the performance of a specific employee, track an opinion, feed in a career management path including courses and qualifications, and issue service providers in the organization with authorizations such as computer access authorizations, etc. All this, instead of waiting for human resources personnel to come to the office and retrieve the data for them from complex systems that require specialized knowledge in their use.

3 "The cloud facilitates a connection between the various managers in the organization, such as the CEO, the deputy CEO, the CTO and human resources managers by virtue of the system, which enables them to speak the same language and to view, at any given moment, how each of the employees is contributing to the attainment of the goals", says Ettling. "The solution simplifies the processes and enables managers to concentrate on employee management and on their meeting their goals". The Millennials The system comes with several standard usage options. It is a relatively simple procedure, whereby the customers receive a link to a site into which the employee data and organizational structure data are input from the existing systems. Ettling says that the advantage of the cloud is the same whether it is a company of 200 or a company of 30,000 employees, but that the complexity of the integration increases the bigger the company. However, the real challenge is in the sweeping change required in the management perspective of firms; that they start to relate to their workforce as their most important resource for growth. Ettling says that firms that succeed in retaining talented employees and help connect them to the workplace benefit from greater outputs, and consequently, from better financial results and greater profits for shareholders. Ettling. "The cloud "facilitates interconnection between the managers in an organization" According to him, most firms actually do not give enough thought and resources to the subject, diminishing their ability to retain talented employees, and consequently also compromising the firm's efficiency. "To retain 'talent' a change is required in the approach of organizations", he explains. "Management of people should be the responsibility of managers, while human resources personnel should become their advisers and personal assistants, to make them even better."

4 This drawback is especially salient when it comes to "the millennials", who grew up in the digital and mobile age and who are becoming a predominant factor in the labor market. Ettling argues that alongside similarities in their needs to previous generations, this generation also has several unique characteristics, such as the need for instant feedback and no patience for outdated technologies. "People need to feel that they are advancing in the work environment", he explains: "When millennials encounter green screens and feel that they are regressing in terms of the technology in the work environment, they become bored and prefer to leave." Steven Hunt, a SAP SuccessFactors expert, says that what is important to employees has not changed in the past 100 years, including fair wages and fair treatment, challenge and meaning, stability and growth, and a work-life balance. What has changed, according to him, is the competition over workers. "The labor market is experiencing a skill shortage alongside rising requirements", he says. "People with skills today have more options and firms stuck with obsolete methods will have difficulty retaining talent because they will not be deemed attractive". In order to locate and retain talent, he recommends first clarifying the skill set required and then selecting suitable people accordingly, giving fresh graduates without experience a chance, verifying that employees know how they fit into the company strategy and are aware of the precise job description, and being sure to provide immediate positive feedback and to create career paths for diligent and talented employees. "Managers admit that when employees express their desire to advance, in the best scenario they give them a pat on the back", he says. "Identifying skills and providing employees with feedback can enhance performance; these things are inter-dependent, it's basic psychology. Talented employees must be cultivated and retained. A firm cannot prevail when the careers of their personnel are withering, or when it is a place where nobody else wants to work. Poor management cannot be tolerated as it was in the past. You don't want to be around in an area where people don't resign. That is not a good strategy". The millennials. Poses challenges (Photograph: Shutterstock)

5 The procedure for finding candidates must also change, according to the company's experts; firms must market themselves to candidates and employees, just as they market themselves to their customers, and not make do with publishing anemic wanted ads. The cloud offers a solution to this need as well, by creating company branded content and distributing it to candidates via the social networks, constant monitoring of vacant positions, and regular distribution of messages stating why it is worth their while to work for the organization. Both NASA and Coca Cola are in the cloud Firms participating in the conference illustrated how they have integrated SAP solutions. Thus for example, a representative of communications giant Deutsche Telekom spoke about a process that took 18 months and that was implemented in the firm's 110 branches in 34 countries. In this framework, changes were implemented in the firm gradually, in the recruitment processes, in manager performance measurements, and in the learning processes. The firm is currently in the process of integrating the payroll systems. To date, 5,000 SAP customers are already using the cloud, including giants of the likes of Coca- Cola and Siemens, banks and government agencies. Even NASA has transferred specific workforce data to the cloud. SAP upgrades the system every few months, and the upgrade is automatically executed at customers. One of the notable benefits mentioned by Ettling is the cost savings due in part to improvement in the processes and increased workforce productivity, a problem that most companies have to contend with. Even the system integration process is simpler according to him: "In the past, when software packages were purchased, 80% was spent on customization. In the cloud, we can take the best application and make the necessary changes and adaptations to the new model in half the time, with less effort and at much lower cost". In answer to the question as to whether the transition does not increase information leaks, Ettling responded that they comply with all the most stringent information security standards, and that, in his view, there is no increased risk compared to the risk to information located on the servers of any firm. "As long as the information is protected - it does not matter where it is stored", he says: "The issue in the cloud is safety. Our employees undergo training and are subjected to safety audits and some of our customers use encryption".

6 SAP data center Regarding the impression that the transition to the cloud will mean that employees are constantly under surveillance, Ettling argues that this should actually increase the efficiency of the set of expectations and the communication between managers and employees: "It makes employees feel that they have the possibility of advancing in the organization, and lets them know what steps are required of them to achieve this. If this information is accessible to them, this will oblige them to take more responsibility for their career path". The central problem in the transition to cloud technology, according to him, is the absence of uniform standards for human capital management. "The world of human resources is very complex because of the absence of standardization or standards. Global firms operate differently in every country; only 15% of the processes are required by law and by the regulations - as for the rest, everyone does whatever they feel like. The processes need to be standardized in order to bring about savings in, and simplification of, human capital management". "In effect, the future of human resources is without human resources", he predicts. "Ostensibly, many processes are involved, but in practice, this is about the management of people and enhancing a firm's agenda; so this area should be part of the CEO's role and part of the firm's strategy". Netafim's transition to the cloud According to SAP figures, the company's solutions are installed in 85% of organizations in Israel. According to Ettling, they did not face any special challenges in Israel. "The Israeli market is highly technological and innovative. The only challenge is that they don't appreciate the complexity of the process as much as they should, but this is the case too in many countries around the world. One of the customers that has undertaken the transition to the cloud in Israel is Netafim, which has a workforce of 4,000 in 29 countries worldwide. "We have been working with SAP solutions

7 since the year 2000, and we chose to move to the cloud because we were looking for a system capable of encompassing all our global human resources data", explains Eran Benyamini, Head of Business Applications and Information Systems at the firm. "The process took 8 to 9 months", he adds. "From a technological perspective, it was relatively simple, because we weren't required to execute any installations whatsoever; we purchased a service and hooked up to a system in the cloud over the Internet. The integration is a slightly different story. Despite the fact that the software is easy and user-friendly on the whole, when it comes to organizations of this size, it is difficult to migrate all the information and processes to the system in a short time frame". SuccessFactors: screen capture According to Laura Naveh, Human Resources Information Systems Manager at Netafim, the main challenge is to enlist the support of the right people for the project. "Until now, each human resources manager in each country had managed the lists as they saw fit, in local systems. This is the first time that we introduced an employee management system on a global scale into the firm, and we had to collect information from all the countries in which we operate. "It is a major change in terms of how the human resources managers work", she added. "The integration process included the creation of a records infrastructure with all the data on the employees, such that by the end of December 2014 all the employees were in the software. That was the first time we knew exactly how many employees the firm had, not just approximately". The software is adapted to prevailing technologies, such as remote access from a mobile app, or access to social networks, search engines, and s. In a lecture delivered by Ettling at the conference, he explained that the software enables simplification of the processes in the organization and their consolidation under a single roof, instead of in disparate software packages: "Many companies despair at the number of software packages that they have to combine for the purposes of personnel management. The cloud solves this issue and enables the work to be done on one platform". In the next phase, they plan to enable employees as well to access the software and to input changes by themselves. "There is added value in concentrating all the data in one location. This way, it is possible to know what data an employee's pay rise is based on, who the employee's

8 manager is, and which department the employee belongs to. The data are entered into the system once, and do not need to be ported in order to show them to managers who make the decisions". Why does she think it is worthwhile moving to the cloud? "Primarily for innovation purposes", she explains. "That is the way the world is going, and other things are starting to become obsolete. The system is evolving all the time according to the needs of the customers and will continue to improve. One can wait until the systems are more highly developed, but the question is not whether to, but when". The author was a guest of SAP at the conference in France