In today’s business landscape, organizations must equip themselves to respond to workforce opportunities or challenges before they arise. If recent trends have taught us anything, it’s that by the time a business reacts to a market shift, a new one is already occurring. Staying a step ahead of workforce demands is no longer a step ahead – it’s step one.
The SAP SuccessFactors second half 2022 release, which is available for preview today, introduces new innovations focused on empowering organizations to create an agile and future-ready workforce in a rapidly changing workplace as well as further investments for individualized experiences and agile and compliant HR.
Creating a Future-Ready Workforce
In the face of increasingly complex and more urgent transformations, organizations must accelerate their talent development at scale. At the core of such adaptability is an understanding of the skills organizations need to build and grow. As part of our early adopter care program, select customers will have access to skills ontology, growth portfolio, and dynamic teams, which work together to deliver greater intelligence on the skills and capabilities that currently exist and are needed within an organization.
The skills ontology is a major advancement for SAP SuccessFactors that’s connected to global skills databases to help ensure that organizations have a comprehensive and up-to-date view of the most important skills for their workforce. It delivers machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) powered recommendations to employees about relevant and trending skills to prioritize for development.
The growth portfolio, also part of the early adopter care program, is how employees can reveal their skills, capabilities, education, language proficiencies, and certifications. In the second half release, this data will connect employees to the most relevant assignments in SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace. While the skills ontology gives organizations the ability to align talent development to the ambitions of the organization, the growth portfolio enables employees to align their own talent development to their ambitions.
Dynamic teams is also part of the SAP SuccessFactors foundation and available to all customers. Within organizations today, there are countless teams that exist outside of traditional organizational structures – groups of people that work cross-functionally on a project for a certain amount of time. The dynamic teams functionality can provide organizations with visibility into these teams as well as tools to help manage and assemble teams. Team progress can be measured using objectives and key results (OKRs) and employees can find a dynamic team within SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace to help learn new skills and continue to grow their career. This transparency within the organization levels the playing field and creates equal opportunity for employees.
With richer data and greater talent intelligence, organizations can help ensure that employees are connected to the most relevant talent development opportunities that are aligned to the ambitions of employees and the needs of the organization. Skills ontology, growth portfolio, and dynamic teams provide significant updates to the foundation of SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite – built into what customers already have instead of requiring an entirely new solution.
Some more exciting features for our second half 2022 release are around individualized experiences and agile and compliant HR, including:
- Chosen name and personal pronouns: As part of our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, we are taking important steps to help every individual be seen and valued. People can now indicate their chosen name, personal pronouns, and gender directly within the people profile. This information is displayed consistently across SAP SuccessFactors solutions – from recruiting to learning, helping to foster a greater sense of belonging.
- End-to-end visual redesign: We are enhancing the overall look and feel of SAP SuccessFactors by implementing the Horizon visual theme for SAP Fiori. This new theme enhances consistency while delivering a more informed and streamlined product experience. Employees will find nearly every element of the solution updated with new colors, typography, iconography, layouts, and visual hierarchy focused on intent and success. We remain on track to have every employee-facing SAP SuccessFactors experience unified with the theme by the end of 2023.
- SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone guided onboarding experience: By bringing together SAP SuccessFactors solutions and third-party integrations, organizations can more efficiently handle an array of complex onboarding processes. This new feature helps ensure that employees receive individualized experiences, even before their first day. Covering key phases of the new hire journey, the guided onboarding experience for SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone helps provide the tools and information employees need, both before and after hiring.
- Cross-system workflow capability: We are unveiling a new cross-system workflow capability for processes that involve multiple users from multiple systems, such as SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and the payroll component of SAP ERP Human Capital Management. A guided activity framework for key processes enables our on-premise customers to more rapidly unlock the value of the cloud with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and the latest HXM innovations while maintaining and progressively moving on-premise processes to the cloud over time.
- Time management enhancements: We are continuing to enhance our capabilities in time management with the much-anticipated ability to export leave events into calendar applications along with better support for public holidays and handling of grace rules. Time administrators can now copy time-related configuration objects, reducing the need for manual duplication during configuration. In addition, temporary work schedules and absence information on a per day basis will now be available for reporting in SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics.
All these and many more exciting features will be available in our 2H 2022 release, in preview today and production on Friday, December 9. Please watch our second half 2022 release highlights video for more information.
Amy Wilson is senior vice president of Products and Design for SAP SuccessFactors.