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| Amy Wilson, senior vice president of Products and Design for SAP SuccessFactors, speaks during an interview at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas hotel in southern Seoul, Tuesday. Korea Times photo by Baek Byung-yeul |
SAP SuccessFactors said companies need to use a bottom-up method in managing their manpower after the COVID-19 pandemic, adding that upscaling employees' capabilities and innovating the way of working using the company's human experience management (HXM) suite is necessary to create a sustainable organization, according to a company executive, Tuesday.
"We talked about upskilling prior to the pandemic, but it was really more of a future thing. That was something we needed to think about in five years. Everyone needed to know what skills are needed, how they could deploy people and so on," Amy Wilson, senior vice president of Products and Design for SAP SuccessFactors, said during an interview at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas hotel in southern Seoul.
"And that the tools of the past were not sufficient in order to do that because it was too rigid. It was too stuck and everything too top-down. And so truly this bottom-up more dynamic way to understand the changing skills and to redeploy people based on the demand on the ground," she added.
Wilson said listening more carefully to the voices of their employees has become more important after the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Another change that we saw during the pandemic was the importance of the employee voice. It was certainly important prior to the pandemic. But after the pandemic, organizations felt the need to connect emotionally to their people to understand if they were doing okay, what they needed, and how they were connecting all sorts of different kinds of questions that were usually asked in surveys. That was a really important trend that continues," the executive said.
The SAP SuccessFactors executive said its manpower management system has evolved from human capital management (HCM) to HXM because the success or failure of an organization depends on how it manages its people, and SAP SuccessFactors provides programs that allow its customers to manage their workforce more efficiently and at the same time recognize the value of their employees.
"Three years ago, we introduced a new category, human experience management or HXM. We felt that considering people as assets was not sufficient to describe the power of employees which can either elevate or sink a business.
"There are two major elements that distinguish HCM from HXM. First, giving employees experiences that they deserve. Recognizing that each employee is an individual who experiences the world differently. The second is recognizing that the pace of change in the world is moving too fast for organizations to be in a reactive mode and instead need to prepare ahead of time to upskill and rescale their people in the face of change," Wilson said.
Headquartered in California, SAP SuccessFactors is a subsidiary of the Germany-based software company SAP.
On the sidelines of the roundtable interview, SAP also hosted the SAP HR Connect Seoul conference for the human resources departments of domestic companies and IT companies here.
