Intranet Software aiding Employee Relationship Management

Intranet Software aiding Employee Relationship Management

Summary: How are customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction levels related? Customers shape the architecture and requirements of any business solution. And the employee needs to influence customer decisions. To achieve greater levels of customer satisfaction, any organization needs employees who are motivated, competent and knowledgeable. Read more... Key Points Work economy today Portal culture Collaboration Knowledge management Project management Personalization Content management Corporate training Employee relationship management

In any organization today, the Human Resources department takes care of employee needs like worker services, training programs and initiatives. But, are these enough?Isn't there a need for people-centric rules and processes that don’t just work within the office environment and facilitate better communication, but also extend to customer-centric applications?

Work economy today

The emphasis today is on information assets, knowledge assets, intangible assets and intellectual capital. Business model innovation requires a paradigm shift in rethinking existing strategies as well as the way information and knowledge flow within the organization.

Discovering new ways to communicate, transfer information, innovate, add value, perform, measure performance and also use communication technology in a manner that facilitates the spread of knowledge all through the organization is imperative today.

An evolutional development in the leading businesses of today is to seek the competitive edge through faster and better interactions. The ways in which we work with each other, communicate, transfer information, view authority, innovate, add value, perform and measure performance in the workplace is undergoing a definite transformation.

At the same time, higher levels of stress, customers demanding more, increase in diversity, more competition, new communication channels and a greater pressure to deliver more with less is forcing organizations to re-look the prevalent work culture.
Providing better customer service, discovering new customers and increasing customer revenues are the goals of any CRM initiative. Interactions between customers on web sites, mail campaigns, brick and mortar stores, call centers; with mobile sales force staff and other marketing resources are an integal part of customer service applications.

But what happens when interactions within the enterprise that provide CRM solutions don’t really follow a smooth pattern? With the extended virtual enterprise, independent workers who live in a work-world devoid of meaningful human interaction often as outsourced specialists on contract can feel marginalized and isolated. The current economy dictates downsizing, restructuring and reengineering. As a result more and more employees are following the virtual employee model today.

What we have here are faster and more frequent interactions between the company and employees. Traditionally companies used to spend more time and money on high induction, training and development costs. But, low morale and sub optimal employee performance proves that companies are not getting their employee relations right.

The need for an employee relationship management system within the enterprise is critical today. ERM is not a technology, or a product or an application but a strategy that aims to bring conversation into newer avenues within an organization.

Sharing and creating knowledge motivates employees to learn and think in terms of a learning community. Collective learning fosters coping skills and builds change-resilience skills in a fast changing new environment.

Collaboration

Lets trace out the evolution of collaborative efforts. Point-to-point interfaces that connected one application to another and shared information between departments (Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as they were called) didn't really collaborate too well as they don’t have the functionality that was required to fit all business processes. Sometimes, several interfaces were required to integrate ERP with existing legacy systems or with the newer applications. Then came middleware or enterprise application integration(EAI) software that provided the basic infrastructure to rapidly connect internal applications and an organization’s interface.

The challenge then was to create an electronic information highway for internal application integration. Integrating external applications would naturally follow suit. Integration begins at home; that’s the concept we are discussing here. Employee Relationship Management (ERM) systems that take care of (Enterprise Application Integration) EAI internally are the core to any organization’s competitive success today.

Workflow is the key enabler to an adaptive and responsive organization. Collaborative difficulties arise due to an inability to easily partner with customers and suppliers, an inability to share experience from previous projects and share critical information during business tasks. Application integration facilitates more efficient information exchange and delivery. Although most of the tools from EAI vendors today aim at making integration more elegant and manageable they fail at efficient collaboration.

Collaborative applications like web browsers improve co-operation and take care of all business process needs. To integrate workflow management within the enterprise and overcome the shortcomings of working in a distributed environment, the solution is a knowledge portal.

Knowledge management

Now, how different is a knowledge management portal from an intranet? Knowledge management in its complete definition is not only capturing the existing data within an organization and storing it for easy retrieval, but also creating, sharing and reusing knowledge.

In an economy increasingly progressing at Mach speeds and occasionally failing at the same, new revenue sources must be generated fast enough to justify the very existence of an organization. Staying competitive means beating the clock and transferring critical knowledge quickly up and down the enterprise value chain.

Exit research interviews have revealed that one of the most common reasons why employees leave an organization is for better opportunities elsewhere, as they felt that their talents were not being utilized to the full. This again leads us to the most important collaboration process called the portal. Not just an intranet but also a portal that collaborates knowledge.

Gone are the days when employees worked within four walls and were able to share information with each other easily. With the extended virtual workplace of today, knowledge sharing is history. Collaboration and workflow automation delivered on a customizable, multidimensional interface like a portal includes content management tools like search and retrieval, access to electronic news and information, document repository and group productivity tools. The unquestionable fact remains that the enterprise portal is the chosen delivery framework for all knowledge management endeavors.

Spending billions of dollars implementing in-house information collection and dissemination systems without taking care of collaboration across workflows, business lines and processes is definitely not the effective strategy.

Project management

Most of us are involved in projects everyday but we just don’t know how to manage them. A project is goal-oriented, coordinates activities within it, has marked beginnings and endings and is unique. It’s a system for taking corrective action and places an emphasis on timely responses. Project management software enables users to track projects, monitor and manage them. And if this is integrated with other applications through a common interface like the portal, its benefits are multiplied twice over.

Personalization

A knowledge management portal delivers customized information to its users by figuring out what is contextually relevant to its users. Personalization software makes educated guesses about employee preferences and capabilities, thus enabling companies to quickly enlist people with the right skills and knowledge for a particular project. Personalization extends beyond the content provided by the roles the user plays. The user can determine the page layout and the information he receives in the most usable and pertinent manner.

In conclusion, we can say that the portal is a collaborative element that stretches across both the enterprise and its partners. The portal is a unified point of access to all applications and documents. The user is at the center point and is able to interact with information from a variety of sources and collaborate with others both inside and outside the organization. Thus proving that the portal is the best working environment for recognizing and resolving business problems most quickly in the collaborative enterprise.

Content management

In the early days of the Internet, an online presence meant an online brochure that would increase organization exposure among browser-equipped end-users. What it did was to provide information about products and services and increase brand name recognition.

The beginnings of e-commerce saw the models of mail order catalogs and the end-90s extended internal applications in an organization to B2B and B2C applications. All these models have undergone a metamorphosis and the emphasis is now on giving the user something fresh and new and often. Data warehousing and mining technologies can divine customer preferences and pump targeted personalized content to the user. The enterprise portal is again the chosen delivery framework for content management endeavors.

Search and retrieval tools, access to electronic news and information, a repository for documents, web sites and databases and collaboration and group productivity tools of a content management system are delivered through a customizable, multidimensional interface.

Corporate Training

With corporate training gaining popularity today, the portal can be used as a training ground for employees from different branches around the globe. Training people in sound-decision making, problem solving and communication skills, lateral and creative thinking skills, the portal uses techno-enhanced and self-directed training methods by taking into account different preferences of individual employees.

Management

Misalignments can be due to a lack of clarity, misunderstandings, a silo mentality, friction and disagreement existing between departments. Free communication like open internal polls, the use of employee self-service software, and the other aspects of virtual teamwork, ongoing surveys help avoid and identify misalignments within the organization.

Moving up the ladder or across?

He can also determine and monitor personal growth through planned research and self-directed training. The employee can decide which ladder he wants to climb, the hierarchical one or the horizontal one.

The customer

Customer-facing employees when happy, deliver results. Productivity and effectiveness improve directly in proportion to their performance. ERM(Employee Relationship Management) integrates technology, strategy, process and the most critical ingredient of an organization - people. It gives customer-facing employees the freedom to develop their own strategy and implement it with ease. As for customers, they can access the enterprise through multiple channels like the call center, the web or through any other common channel.