The future of work is here, and the race for skills is on. No matter how your business runs – as a fast-sprinting startup, a marathon-running multinational, or somewhere in between – building a future-ready workforce is the last place you can afford to fall behind. That’s why our first half 2023 release, available in preview today, emphasizes and builds on the strength of SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite in finding, enabling, and developing the skills you need throughout your organization.
By harnessing the power of data-driven insights, businesses can connect talent to opportunities and gaps where and when they need – from inside, outside, or across the company. When we understand the ambitions and preferences of employees, we can give them agency over their personal development and career path while ensuring they build the skills that the organization needs today and in the future. This is how we connect people with skill development opportunities – from learning content to mentorships to temporary assignments. New product enhancements to manage skills and dynamic teams as well as to the overall user interface drive the core innovation of this release, among many other exciting features.
So run your race, build your future-ready workforce, and set yourself up to win with the SAP SuccessFactors first half 2023 release.
Building Your Future-Ready Workforce
With this release, we continue to expand and deliver on our promise to help organizations build future-ready workforces.
Talent Intelligence Hub
Following the success of an initial six-month early adopter care program, we are excited to introduce the talent intelligence hub, which includes the growth portfolio and skills ontology announced at SuccessConnect 2022 as well as the attributes library. The talent intelligence hub serves as the data foundation for proactive people development, providing individuals with the ability to showcase who they are with little manual effort and powerful ways to connect them with professional growth and learning opportunities.
All customers will have access to these initial capabilities with our first half release in early adopter care, and when the innovation moves to general availability later this year, it will bring even more talent intelligence across SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite. In the meantime, organizations can begin to define the skills, strengths, styles, and preferences that can be added by employees to their growth portfolios, resulting in highly individualized recommendations in SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace, SAP SuccessFactors Learning, and dynamic teams, among others.
Dynamic Teams
Today, it’s so common for work to happen outside of traditional organizational structures. Therefore, it’s critical that organizations have transparency into what work is getting done and how. The dynamic teams functionality also launched at SuccessConnect 2022 will advance from early adopter care to general availability in this release.
We’re also further building on dynamic teams’ capabilities: team members will now be able to link objectives and key results (OKRs) to their personal performance goals, giving managers improved line of sight into the contributions of their employees. Organizations will also be able to gain greater visibility into the contributions of dynamic teams toward organizational outcomes through ready-made report stories on team structures, OKRs, and progress tracked across lines of business and departments.
Opportunity Marketplace
We are introducing the ability for employees to search and filter opportunities based on their growth portfolio attributes such as skills and aspirations within SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace. In addition, job postings from SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting can now be surfaced as recommendations to support an increased focus on internal mobility.
Engaging with Elevated Experiences
Our commitment to building employee experiences that value every person every day through efficiency, individualization, and opportunity shows up in a major way with this release.
User Interface
In this release, the Horizon visual theme is turned on by default, delivering a simple, modern, and elegant user interface. This visual change, designed to increase employee engagement, will be applied to all employee-facing pages by the end of 2023.
Digital Workplace
We have taken a huge leap forward in our vision to bring quick and high-value HR actions into the flow of work. With new APIs and adaptable frameworks, we are meeting employees where they do their work by delivering SAP SuccessFactors experiences to workplace technology tools. In Microsoft Teams, employees can now trigger actions, such as giving or receiving feedback, directly from a Teams message.
We are also bringing these quick and high-value HR actions into SAP SuccessFactors Work Zone to allow users to leverage existing to-do and engagement content directly within their workspaces. By prompting users to take direct action, tasks can be quickly and easily completed from a single place. For example, engagement cards for onboarding can prompt new hires to complete key tasks to help keep the onboarding process on track.
There are plenty more innovative features and additions available in the release, including:
- Mobile features: A new offline learning capability allows employees to complete learning assignments, even without an Internet connection. Progress and course completion are automatically updated when the mobile device is back online. We are also pleased to introduce support for mentoring capabilities within our mobile application, enabling employees to browse, sign up, store match preferences, and connect with mentors directly.
- Onboarding: To simplify and streamline the hiring process, we are extending the configurable new hire functionality to SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding. This customizable approach to new hire data collection helps save time and improve process efficiency. We are also introducing new functionality to address several customer requests, including new custom notification triggers that provide additional flexibility for e-mail notifications, homepage enhancements in offboarding, and configurable due dates in onboarding.
- Core HR: With this release, we are introducing a configurable template for concurrent employment in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. This release also includes many enhancements to localized country versions, improving data quality in supported locales.
- Absence management: We are improving the employee experience by providing more contextual information at the point of entry, including a view of leave entitlements and links to policy documents and external resources. We are also improving the administrator experience by introducing a new user interface (UI) for work schedules, which provides a list view of schedules by day.
- Time tracking: We are expanding support for complex time valuation. We are introducing the ability to define rest periods between a clock out and clock in for shifts, helping organizations comply with mandatory work requirements. Additionally, we have made improvements to public holiday handling with the ability to define work patterns.
All these and more features to help your organization build its future-ready workforce are available in our first half 2023 release, in preview today and production on June 2. Watch the highlights video and view the SAP SuccessFactors first half 2023 release brochure for more information.
Amy Wilson is senior vice president of Products and Design at SAP SuccessFactors.