In an era where everything is “mobile,” why aren’t HR and talent acquisition (TA) applications? For all of their power, these tools are still designed to be used on a desktop computer. This means that when it comes time for employees to access them from their phones, the experience could be better.
Following are the four reasons to reimagine the HCM mobile experience:
1. A more contextual digital assistant experience.
Context can be a powerful thing. It helps you understand the context of a situation and how best to respond, which is why it’s important that your digital assistant can deliver relevant information at the right time.
To do this, you need a digital assistant that learns from what employees tell it and adjusts its responses accordingly. This way, employees get personalized and relevant information when needed—improving employee engagement along the way.
The more contextualized your mobile experience is, the faster your team can access important data and make decisions on the go—which means less time spent in meetings trying to figure things out (and more time spent doing work).
With a digital assistant, employees can get the information they need without going through a series of clicks and screens. They don’t have to wait for IT to update their software or troubleshoot an issue; instead, they can get fast answers from a trusted source.
2. A consistent, intuitive experience tailored for mobile.
You can ensure your mobile users have a consistent and intuitive experience with HCM.
- You get one single app to update instead of maintaining multiple versions. This means you can deliver updates faster and more often.
- Because the user interface is consistent across all devices, employees have no trouble finding their way around the system on their phones or tablet.
- The mobile app will look great even on older devices that aren’t as powerful as today’s top-of-the-line smartphones and tablets.
3. An app-free mobile experience.
The mobile experience is evolving. This is a good thing because it means that users have more choices regarding how they interact with the HCM system on their devices. But there’s also a lot of change in one direction: toward creating apps for each function of the HCM system.
The trend toward apps as the primary way to interact with an HCM system may make sense from an IT perspective—after all, apps are designed for specific tasks and can be easily updated when something changes—but from a user’s perspective, apps can cause unnecessary friction and frustration. Users typically get tired of having to download yet another app so that they can complete one task or another at work; this fatigue leads many workers not to use certain functions at all because they don’t want to deal with another download (or worse yet: being forced into downloading new versions of an app).
To avoid this type of user behavior and instead encourage productivity through access across all devices regardless if they’re connected or not (and whether those devices support native applications), companies should take advantage of responsive design techniques or, even better, create a truly mobile-first experience that doesn’t rely on native applications at all!
4. Intelligent interactions with persistent personalization.
Personalization is about making the experience relevant and targeted to the user. It should be persistent so that it’s always relevant. Personalization also needs to be intelligent, learning over time and adapting accordingly. Lastly, it should make use of contextual information for contextually relevant suggestions.
Personalization can be done in many ways. It could be through a recommendation engine that provides users with items based on their previous behaviors or other contextual information. Personalized search results are another way to provide relevant information to people.
Conclusion
The HCM mobile experience is important to any company’s Human Capital Management (HCM) strategy. Employees use mobile apps to access HR and payroll, receive notifications about upcoming events, and check email from their phones. As the number of smartphones continues to grow, so does the need for a great mobile experience that offers users what they need and want when it comes time for them to get work done on their devices.
