Digitally-powered HR for ASEAN

Creating great employee experiences starts with infusing employee centricity into HR services. That means treating employees as consumers and focusing on all important touchpoints.

Accenture works with clients to make this happen. We helped one Singapore-based MNC identify, design and bring to life ‘Moments that Matter’ for its teams. We created a blueprint for high-touch, hyper-personalized employee experience exchanges. By capturing employee feedback on HR services and offerings, these exchanges identified opportunities to delight internal stakeholders.

To meet today’s dynamic digital demands, organisations need:

1. Highly adaptable employees

2. A change-ready liquid workforce

3. Fluidly sourced skills

Millennials will soon be the largest segment of the global workforce. And by 2020, Asia will have 60 percent of the world’s millennial population. In line with this trend, our clients across ASEAN are restructuring their workforces into cross-functional teams that are agile, change-ready and liquid.

Continual training is key to building these liquid workforce capabilities. One regional conglomerate headquartered in Singapore conducts over 10,000 training sessions each year, including scenario-based development programs and digital masterclasses. It also has a state-of-the-art consumer interaction simulation branch for employees to learn the latest technologies first-hand.

HR must radically transform itself to meet business needs. The pressure’s on to evolve from cost centre to value creator. This means:

1. Transforming the HR organizational model

2. Refreshing HR tools

3. Revisiting enterprise roles and skills

4. Challenging old ways of managing HR processes

HR leaders across ASEAN are looking to new technologies that will support the highly adaptable, change-ready enterprise. Accenture works with ASEAN clients across industries to improve their HR processes. The priority? Moving from legacy systems to an integrated cloud-based HR information system (HRIS).

For instance, we helped a global company to implement SuccessFactors Employee Central – a centralized system of personnel and organisation record. This improved HR decision-making capabilities through embedded workforce analytics.

Best in-class HR operating models are integral to the business and aligned to the enterprise people strategy. To drive an optimal HR model, priorities include:

1. Enabling agile operations and service delivery

2. Establishing HR as part of the business, not just a support function

3. Creating a change-capable workforce

4. Driving sustainability and long-term engagement

Accenture research shows that CHROs struggle with problems related to the inflexibility of their HR operating models. These problems include insular HR functions, duplication of work between HR roles, and the creation of universal, one-size-fits-all talent practices that are out of tune with today's diverse workforces. The result? Slow reaction times, lack of innovation, and fragmented, conflicting solutions.

To stay relevant, CHROs must evaluate their current operating models to be more agile and flexible. For example, in Indonesia, we redesigned and validated the enterprise organisational structure of a large home-grown heavy equipment and construction company. To drive this forward, we applied leading industry practices related to Accenture’s Zero-based Budgeting Organization™ engagements.

Customized work experiences create a new proposition for employees by tailoring:

1. Physical workspace design

2. Virtual workplace policies

3. Securely accessible connectivity

It’s essential for HR leaders to create these new employee experiences. But with the pace of technology change accelerating all the time, it can be challenging for HR leaders to understand which technologies are right for the business…as well as when and how to implement them.

Accenture helps clients across ASEAN to overcome this challenge. For example, we helped a transport regulatory board to identify cutting-edge digital communication tools, sketching ‘Day in the Life’ scenarios for employee segments and pointing the way to an optimally networked and ‘smart’ work environment.

Being digital goes beyond incorporating new technologies into the business. It means adopting these technologies to reinvent the organisation and thrive in a digital world. For HR, technology can unlock new opportunities for transforming the business into a highly adaptable, change-ready enterprise.

Accenture helps organisations across ASEAN to adopt new HR technologies – from large-scale system implementations and social collaboration tools to analytics, mobile HR services and robotics. Our clients are using these technologies to improve HR decision-making and drive employee engagement through people-centric, highly available HR services.