Digital Heroes in Workforce Management

When I was young, I wanted to be a super hero. Seriously. I wanted to wear capes and shoot lasers from my eyes. What kid didn’t, right? That ambition has long since passed, but changing the world in some dramatic form is still very much part of my daily life. But, change requires work. It also suggests that status quo is ineffective to some varying degree and should be condemned. Today marks an important revolution in the world order of Workforce Management. Today we abandon traditional practices.

Infor has a growing team of heroes making revolutionary changes to both the predictive and measurement aspects of Workforce Management. We’ve condemned and now depart from medieval corporate expectations that force employees – including the millennial worker – to interact with uninspired and poorly engineered systems for forecasting, scheduling, timekeeping and attendance management. There’s a change-based revolution underfoot that will forever alter this industry.

Design Thinking

What’s most important about these changes is that it originates from you – the employee, the company, Infor’s customers, and the at-large partner community. This is the most organic form of Design Thinking – when service providers, like Infor, identify challenges and innovate solutions within the eco-system, not in isolation. With that in mind, the most significant recent change in the employer-to-employee relationship is the expectation and use of technology at work. It’s about millennials. It’s about all of us.

Today’s technology standard is high. Apps must engage and inspire, promote only the most relevant content, and have familiar user experiences. This is as true in the consumer world as it is on-the-job. Workforce providers have moved at a glacial pace, however, to truly embrace this reality. What’s crazy about this is that Workforce, unlike other HR areas, is used by most employees five to eight times per day and literally thousands of times per year. Workforce is both strategic and highly transactional.

Why has it taken a hero effort to recognize the importance of Design Thinking in the Workforce discipline? Why a revolution, not a natural evolution? From my vantage, service providers have lacked the courage to redefine their own vocabulary and humbly engage customers and partners in a meaningful way. By not listening with outcome-based intent, Workforce providers have continued to rely on decade-old practices while both consumers and other app disciplines have leaped far ahead.

The Digital Workforce

The time for change is here. Infor has introduced the most significant advancement in the Workforce Management discipline since the first automated time clock was bolted to a wall in the 1970’s. No longer does time and attendance need to reside on different server environments from that of scheduling or analytics, and no longer will Workforce lose priority to other systems with less meaningful employee interactions. Today is the day for change – the day when Workforce can inspire the employee.

Welcome to the world’s first Digital Workforce Management platform – Workforce Xi. This is both an application and technology standard that promotes Design Thinking for both the 1) millennial worker and 2) beautiful user experiences for each individual industry. It’s a digital framework that’s more than just mobile. Workforce Xi is a thoughtfully engineered cloud-native and social platform that is responsive, touch-enabled, mobile first, and includes the industry’s most powerful BI/analytics engine.

It’s a compelling advancement that corrects years and years of no action while speaking directly to the demands of today’s employees. Infor is proposing a revolution – a digital revolution – that workplace leaders have been demanding for years. This type of change requires work but the adoption of Digital Workforce transformation in a manner that is thoughtfully engineered based on industry needs, is surprisingly low risk. Simply put, employees are motivated to adopt tech that is familiar and digital.

What an exciting time to be a Digital Hero in Workforce Management

Dr. Scott Morgan, SPHR, Vice President, Workforce Management, Americas