Employees increasingly demand a hyper-personalised management approach that provides them with highly tailored experiences as well as helps them achieve their objectives from their employment.
UKG, a people operations solution provider, has recently published a report that explains that hyper-personalisation is the mass customisation of the employee experience. Technology is the catalyst for the approach but it also needs to involve all aspects of an organisation to deliver what an individual person needs, playing to their strengths and focusing on their own lives and agendas. This clearly demands a different way of thinking about HR and employers need to confront several challenges in implementing the approach.
The BTN recently partnered with UKG for an exclusive roundtable event. The open and interactive session around “Hyper Personalisation: Taking Action” was led by Jon Ingham (Director at The Strategic HR Academy) and considered appropriate actions within the following three sets of polarities, identified by Jon Ingham as key areas of focus at our recent ERUPT conference:
- Taking action to enable broader employee transformation whilst continuing to provide a compelling employee experience
- Delivering integrated high-tech and high-touch, hyper-personalised transformations that take people towards their aspirations
- Combining increasing personalisation with required standardisation enables the approach to be scaled up efficiently, operating consistently, yet individualistically across an organisation.
The session brought about the following takeaways:
In today’s rapidly changing world, organisations are placing the customer experience at the forefront of their businesses. The term hyper-personalisation is often viewed as a marketing gizmo, but its use has been steadily increasing for the last decade and again at the start of the pandemic. It has widely been associated with using AI, user data and tailoring individual needs. Hyper personalisation is the most advanced way brands can tailor their marketing to individual customers in order to help them achieve their transformations.
Hyper-personalisations increases customer retention and satisfaction
Personalisation is not a new concept. Firms have known for a while that tailoring their offerings and communications towards individuals can significantly improve customer retention and increase conversions. More than 9 out of 10 organisations, found that their ROI increased 3x as well as increased profitability after implementing personalisation (Forbes, 2020). Hyper-personalised engagement turns the data you have into essential information, which can in turn be used to feed predictive behaviour that can accurately determine a customer’s next move.
Most individuals experience hyper-personalisation as a consumer but do not feel that personalisation happens in HR and impacts you as an employee. Some may question where exactly the journey of hyper-personalisation starts, whether that be during the onboarding process or alternatively some may argue that the process starts before even arriving at a company with statements stating that pre-onboarding counts the most. This is because employees want highly relevant, personalised communications that are designed to deepen their knowledge, improve productivity and provide them with the correct resources to enable better decisions for themselves.
At UKG, their purpose is people. They believe that the power of culture and belonging is the secret to success where they champion great workplaces and build lifelong partnerships with their customers.
Delivering high-tech and hyper-personalisation can take people towards their aspirations
Many firms struggle with understanding how to make agile work but there is a need to understand how they can develop a structure for success to allow for it to work before ever embarking on an agile journey. The point was made that one firm, in particular, uses pilot projects and studies as a way to identify what kind of skills an employee has so that they are able to understand whether they are able to work in an agile way. Offering individuals the opportunity to do this enables higher retention long-term due to the inherent way the role of change makes people feel. However, this may only work for larger organisations that have the funds, dedicate to time allowance and ability to afford for their employees to move around. For smaller firms or startup companies, this may not be the case and therefore organisations need to ensure they are hiring the right candidate for the right reasons so they develop and grow as the organisation scales.
Despite this, there also needs to be a shift coming from managers. Some roles may be impossible to be fulfilled by one person and therefore firms need to consider how the role of the leader needs to be changed so that it can. Organisations must ensure they are individually focused, and caring and contribute from a people perspective. The conversation led to a discussion around ‘duel career hierarchy’, which facilitates the ability for leaders to develop a plan that allows upward mobility for employees without requiring that they be placed into a managerial role. Does a good manager have to be a hyper-personalised manager and is personalisation really all about choice?
Delivering high-tech and standardisation can enable the approach to be scaled up efficiently
In order for organisations to become hyper-personalised, they need to ensure they obtain not just more data but better quality data so they can understand more about the individual employee. The ‘internal investment’ where leaders treat employees as ends not means and move away from the business-centric view of people can really help employee development, creating an exceptional talent pool with loyal employees who are ready for upward mobility and promotion.
Organisations must ensure they have the basics in place to deliver highly effective technology solutions, as this will allow their employees to be able to adapt learning material with ease, use digital tools to help them process information better and demonstrate a clearer understanding across the business. Technology has played a vital role in addressing learner variability and facilitating the advancement of personalised learning. Once organisations are able to successfully display this, it will allow for more personalised learning pathways and opportunities for employees to grow and challenge themselves so that they are able to scale up efficiently and effectively.
About UKG
At UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group), our purpose is people, and we believe that organisations succeed when they focus on putting people first. An ethos that has helped UKG to be one of the largest cloud HR companies in the world. Our best-in-class solutions empower HR, managers, and their employees to boost productivity, increase employee engagement, manage global compliance, and meet the challenges of tomorrow. UKG’s HR Service Delivery platform includes case management, process automation, and employee file management. Our Workforce Management solutions assist with scheduling, time recording and forecasting labour requirements and much more. With more than 14,000 employees around the world, UKG’s own workplace culture has been named the best place to work all over the world, including consecutive years on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list. To learn more, visit ukg.co.uk
