The Comprehensive Salesforce for HR Guide

Salesforce might be one of the most popular CRM platforms for sales and marketing teams. Still, the SaaS also caters to an abundance of HR-related needs, too.

The modern employee can rely on various apps and services to get them through their workday happily and productively. One of HR professionals' leading roles is to ensure that employees have everything they need to work efficiently, from sourcing the best work-related mobile app to establishing engaging employee communities.

One digital resource that greatly helps HR professionals in their quest to forge both engaged employees and happy customers is Salesforce. While the software as a service (SaaS) is more commonly understood as a platform for salespeople and marketers, it has a very relevant place in HR.

The current working world has radically shifted in the past few years, and people's homes double as their offices today. This domestic transition has made many employees far happier, with the majority agreeing that they prefer remote working to offices.

Still, the shift has also brought far more responsibility and subtle stress, and HR professionals have been tasked with supporting employees as they adapt to the new standard. Let's take an in-depth look into all the features and tools that Salesforce provides HR teams with and how it can accelerate your efforts to streamline your workforce's daily tasks.

How Technology Improves Employee Experience

A business's growth often hinges on its employees' engagement and empowerment levels. Those organizations that put huge stock in improving their employee experience (EX) are liable to enjoy almost twice as much growth as those that ignore their workforce's needs.

Indeed, developing your employees should be a priority for businesses across the board. Granted, employee experience is often difficult to define, given the technological, cultural, and physical qualities that make up a working person's professional life.

But there is one factor that underpins this varied experience: an individual's capacity to work to their full potential. Ask yourself this simple question: are my workdays overly challenging?

Modern employees may do their best to be as industrious and efficient as possible, but often they cannot find answers to their questions quickly or work effectively outside the office. Then there are the physical and mental health factors that contribute to employee well-being.

Technology is integral for ensuring that employees are fully supported. Apps and SaaS can cater to almost every professional need in the employee performance management cycle.

HR to the Rescue

HR professionals, in conjunction with IT specialists, are integral to providing employees with a fully modern and supportive platform that allows them to work remotely to a level as close to office standards as possible. This progression is achieved by establishing a digital employee experience management platform known as a Human Resources Management System (HRMS).

Such a platform provides employee engagement tools and communication channels that permit workers to stay connected and on top of their work. It also allows for meaningful and productive conversations among employees to enable HR to perform detailed wellness checks.

These digital employee management activities include a variety of health resources to ensure that their bodies and minds are in the best shape possible for optimum performance.

This digital platform also acts as an educational center or an employee experience platform brimming with training and development resources. Digital upskilling courses will now supplement employee growth.

As an employee journeys through all these tools and resources, they are almost guaranteed to stay on top of their work as efficiently as possible with a greatly reduced risk of burnout and the constant option to better themselves.

As fantastic as this employee service sounds, it will need a comprehensive management system to consolidate everything. That is where Salesforce comes in.

Why Salesforce Works for HR

It might sound like an inappropriate avenue to take an HR platform, but Salesforce is more than capable of handling all your related needs, especially if you are part of a mid-to-large-sized business.

Let's go through the main benefits that HR can reap from an investment in Salesforce.

Simplified Process Management

You will find all manner of details and qualities that differentiate one business from another. The genius of Salesforce is that it caters to a plethora of professional and corporate needs.

The good people over at Salesforce understood the discrepancies between each business and built a central platform that was comprehensively suitable.

But what makes Salesforce even more appealing is its wider ecosystem that hosts all manner of apps, educational solutions, partners, and communities. You'll be amazed at how many motivated and passionate professionals you meet when you engage with the more comprehensive Salesforce network.

Now, think of an HR solution that offers this level of dynamism? Most focus on a single outcome, which, albeit well designed, will not provide much in the way of creativity.

The problem with traditional HR solutions is that they can pigeonhole HR professionals, and much time is wasted trying to keep all your data synced across various apps and services.

Employees must also be onboarded if they lack familiarity, often without any additional training tools. These tried-and-tested apps suffer from restricted data cross-referencing capacities, meaning that comprehensive reports cannot be generated.

Then there is the limited automation across various apps and platforms and the costly and numerous subscriptions.

You might be thinking that there are plenty of products that cater to all your needs, at least for now. The difficulty with such services is that although they have a vast capacity, such a range doesn't necessarily guarantee quality and efficiency.

Many subscribers to these broadly defined platforms will often find their services defunct once their HR department and its business develop to a certain point.

Salesforce also works incredibly well for automating your bonus and payroll calculations. You can export this rewards-based information to Salesforce to pinpoint the benefits and the employees deserving them before HR members take care of the rest in their processes.

Data as a Business Necessity

Data should be the driving force for any business decision, yet so many companies struggle to implement intelligent solutions into their procedures. Even when a business sets up the right infrastructure and manages to conduct the proper research, its leaders can be deterred by the costs and effort of it all.

Companies that decide to collate, present, and analyze their data through Salesforce will benefit from an incredibly clear, efficient, and affordable research method.

Salesforce compiles all your crucial customer information and contact details, meaning that customer support issues can be responded to quickly and with the most detail possible.

HR professionals can instantly access plenty of data relevant to their tasks, such as their recruiting efforts. HR professionals must monitor a new employee's performance and satisfaction to ensure that they are a good fit for the company and that they are personally happy in their roles.

You can monitor the effectiveness of your recruiting styles and how long new employees stay in their positions, thanks to your efforts. Once a new employee is satisfied in their new role, you can track their performance and establish whether they have been appropriately placed or not.

You obviously want your new employees to be as productive and profitable as possible, and Salesforce allows you to establish how committed they are to the good of the company. Their mental and physical health is vital, and you can also create reports in Salesforce that show you who is thriving and who needs help.

Once you have enough recruitment data, you can better forecast your hiring requirements. Find out which gaps need to be filled, and hire those professionals that are best suited for the role.

Forging Relationships Through Integrity

All these capabilities are superb, but no service is worth the risk of an incomplete security system. Salesforce has managed to convince countless traditional businesses to shift their operations to the cloud thanks to its unshakable commitment to honesty and trust.

As proof of this commitment to integrity, Salesforce has all manner of regulations in place in its ecosystem. Companies looking to list an app in Salesforce’s marketplace need to jump through various hoops before they can join the wider Salesforce community.

How Salesforce Keeps Employees Connected and Efficient

Everything from employee onboarding to employee service requests can be managed with Salesforce, specifically through its integration services.

You might have a highly developed employee experience management platform, but if its tools aren't properly integrated, the confusion could do more harm than good to employee productivity.

The more admin-related processes like payroll and leave can be managed through an HRMS integrated with Salesforce. Seeing as so many employees are working remotely in 2022, it is essential that this system is properly celebrated and connected.

The Single Source of Truth for Your HRMS

Online working environments must focus on efficiency if employees are to make the most out of self-service tools. Our world is constantly shifting, and connectivity has never been a greater need, as has personalization.

The point of an HRMS is for employees to have access to all the communications and resources that they would in the office, and Salesforce helps management to stay connected to all their employees. Salesforce will consolidate all your engagement apps and platforms while integrating your HR network and employee profiles.

The Comprehensive Help Desk

Employees will have plenty of questions and requests spanning across various departments. This higher level of service requirement means that our definition of customer service must include employees too.

Watch How to Run Your Customer Service on Salesforce >

IT can work with HR to set up an online help desk stocked with all manner of training resources, tutorials, and videos, an FAQ section, and the right people's contact details. This self-service resource can also form part of your online learning platform, meaning that employees can become autonomous while upskilling.

You can create a centralized hub for all your employees' relevant (and subtle) needs. Salesforce created such an employee wellness service using the Salesforce Platform called Concierge.

Previously, Salesforce employees relied on a defunct intranet that forced them to buzz about the place in search of things like benefits explanations, onboarding courses, and IT tickets. With Concierge at hand, employees could now enjoy:

• A search tool that predicted employee needs before they'd finished typing
• A combined help-desk and self-service customer service software that took a load off IT
• A central place to lodge support tickets, reinforced with a chat function
• Salesforce Mobile App functionality
• A greater focus on employee health and security

What does it take to support every employee's mental, emotional, and physical well-being? Everyone expects to be taken care of at work and feel protected to operate with peace of mind and security.

HR is responsible for looking after employees, even across great distances.

One of the best ways to get a concise overview of your employees' statuses is through custom surveys. Obviously, online surveys aren't limited by geography, but they can also be left indefinitely open so that employees can update their statuses in real-time.

HR professionals and managers can stay up to date with their employees' progressions with as much anonymity as is needed for everyone to feel comfortable and respected. Choose which communication style works best for your teams, be it email or mobile apps.

These surveys need to have actionable responses, of course, and employees need to feel like their communicated needs are being responded to adequately.

Answering Employee Needs With the Right Resources

Mental health has become a huge concern in the modern workplace. Employee mental health-related research found that more than three-fifths of workers would appreciate psychological support.

Burnout, depression, and anxiety are all very real consequences of an unmanageable or even toxic working environment.

An adequately stocked mental health aid will go a long way towards promoting a resilient and engaged workforce. Of course, HR is integral to supporting struggling employees.

But when HR teams up with IT to deliver benefit programs that extend beyond traditional methods, employees can be indefinitely covered.

Take, for example, an app that allows employees to fill out assessments that, once completed, will link them to the appropriate well-being solutions related to stress management, work-life balance management, and more.

It can often be difficult to decide which parts of your health could be improved, especially when your job is very demanding and involving. This kind of well-being app helps employees know exactly where they stand health-wise.

Once your employees' collective health is in good hands, they can begin focusing more on training and learning.

The Complete Digital Learning Platform

An employee will struggle to progress without an adequate onboarding system. Hiring managers were once burdened with providing training, documentation, and other development tools for new hires.

In 2022, however, HR has once again stepped in to lighten hiring managers' loads while assuring all employees that their training needs will be taken care of. Onboarding is just one of the needs that such an educational system will fulfill, and all employees will benefit from a wide range of multi-disciplined courses and training resources.

One of the best ways to provide customizable learning is with Salesforce's myTrailhead feature.

Tailored Learning With myTrailhead

Salesforce's myTrailhead feature allows you to build your own tailored learning platform using existing templates. You can include the colors and qualities of your brand in this customized learning solution for a unique learning center.

You can begin this process with existing templates and then craft them into something that works specifically for your employees. You can ensure that everything that your users learn sets in with tests.

Said tests can be fun, of course, and making them more like games can bring out the childlike enthusiasm in employees. This learning is not just for fun, of course, as managers can track users' progress through detailed dashboards and reports.

Salesforce uses data to quantify any process's value, and myTrailhead is no different. Whenever you feel like your courses could use a little tweaking, you can chop and change your learning resources to best suit employees and their upskilling needs.

In time, you can cover every department and its members' training needs. The main outcome is a unified workforce that is always developing and upskilling.

The Salesforce Aand Flair Partnership

In 2019, an opportunity was presented to flair's co-founders that made them decide to launch an HR platform entirely native for Salesforce.

It might sound crazy to navigate this market with many great HR tools out there. But we believe we're on the way to creating the perfect solution for fast-growing, mid-size companies to big enterprises to manage their HR department. Here is why:

1. Process Automation

Every organization is different and very individual, and Salesforce did a fantastic job creating a platform that helps many companies focus on their customer experience. They understood that every company is unique and enabled them to translate their processes into management software.

And it isn't only the platform. There is a whole ecosystem of other tools, partners, education material, professionals, and events around it that help their customers along the way.

It's incredible the problems people solve with it and how excited they are about it.

Most HR systems don't give you this flexibility with such a wide range of functionality. They either do one thing well or do everything average.

Having tools that do one thing well often means that you must subscribe to many of them, resulting in the following problems:

• Time spent keeping data in sync amongst all these tools
• Challenging employee onboarding, if they are not familiar with these tools or cloud technology
• Difficulty to cross-reference data and generate meaningful reports for a successful employee experience and employee success
• Difficulty in automating business processes that involve multiple workflows or more than one product
• Higher overall subscription costs

Then there is the second type of product. The one that does everything, but everything is mediocre.

Unless you're not paying much attention to your HR department, it'll come a time when your processes will outgrow these tools. You will then end up solving these problems by signing up for new, specialized tools and having the same problem described above.

For this reason, we chose Salesforce. Besides being the world's #1 CRM platform, it allows us to create an HR platform and HR solution that will give you complete control after you subscribe.

We'll provide you with a powerful HRMS tool that you can build anything on top of. And we will do it by using techniques that are already well-known to the market, allowing you to quickly find an employee or implementation partner to do the customizations for you.

Previously, while in the meeting with our customer who was a beta tester for our shift planning solution, the following scenario came up: they wanted to use data they had from bookings to decide how many employees of each skill they should have on their stores at each time.

Unless we were building software for their vertical, this would be a problem that is too specific for us to solve. It would have compromised our HR tool if we had developed it internally.

Because of this, the customer would typically either have to find another tool that solves this problem, ending up with more complexity, or live without this critical business decision ability.

Thankfully to Salesforce, we can provide them with our general shift planning solution, and they can add their logic on top of it. And they could potentially build these customizations by themselves through the Salesforce platform.

Another good use case we have is the combination of real-time payroll automation and bonus calculation. Companies often export data from Salesforce to calculate bonus schemes on a spreadsheet and then send it to HR to manually input their payroll solution.

Because everything exists in Salesforce, you can easily automate all these manual steps. Our customers automatically trigger the bonus calculation software whenever a payroll run is started and then add the results to the respective employee's payroll entry.

2. Data-Drivenness

Whether you are a startup or a big corporation, making business decisions based on metric data is crucial. Everyone knows that.

Still, many companies can't find a way to do it. Even if they can, the whole infrastructure needed to set it up is so complicated that it requires a lot of manual work, money, and maintenance.

Many companies already have sales and customer support data in the Salesforce service cloud and often even data from other processes. If your HR platform is in the same place, you can cross-reference these data metrics and get access right away to many reporting capabilities. Things like:

• Effectiveness of recruiting
• How much time employees that were hired by X, or in Y way, stay in the company
• How employees perform in their department
• How happy they are
• How to improve employee engagement
• How much revenue they're bringing to the company
• Predict hiring needs by demand forecast

Besides the cross-referencing capability, Salesforce gives you the ability to generate many kinds of reports on your entire data set. And most tools won't give you that.

3. Security and Trust

The last but not least point is security and trust. Employee data is often sensitive and needs care when dealing with it.

Salesforce is known for bringing many conservative enterprises to the cloud. And it achieved this migration by enforcing a culture of trust throughout its entire ecosystem.

As a small example, every team has to do an anti-corruption and anti-bribery training to be listed on their AppExchange.

Besides that, the platform comes with a state of the art permission management out of the box. Anything you do, or any software you install, you can create a system to control who sees or does what.

For all these reasons, flair envisioned the possibility to enable HR leaders & HR teams to provide an excellent service to their employees. And we're doing this by allowing companies to automate any process they have, adapting the tool to their needs, and making access to data much more manageable.

If you have any questions or believe in these ideas as we do, connect with us at [email protected].

The Most Notable HR Trends in 2022

Now that we know precisely how Salesforce will boost your HR department's productivity and efficiency with Salesforce, let's learn more about the newest developments in HR. The aim here is to implement these novel approaches with your Salesforce system for the most optimized HR network possible in 2022.

Watch 10 HR Trends for 2022: From Adaptation to Transformation >

Technology is a central driving force for change in the business world in general, and the way that we work today began shifting even before the pandemic unfolded. Regardless of the cause, the way that we work has indefinitely changed, and we must continue to adapt to the new normal.

Employee Happiness Is Crucial

We have discussed how important well-being is for working people in general and how Salesforce allows you to keep track of employee satisfaction while providing the resources to better a struggling employee's place.

An employee's good health, mental and physical, should not be treated as a privilege but a regulation. Employee well-being should be regarded as an opportunity for managers to better care for those that put their faith and trust in them.

This goodwill should extend beyond work hours, meaning that a person should feel supported in their homes too. Employee well-being goes well beyond their bodily wellness and includes their career, financial, emotional, and social lives.

One good that came from the pandemic was the realization that we are so much more than just individuals in the workplace. The support that we give each other in the office or remotely is key to maintaining a thriving and connected workforce.

But this awareness should stretch to our larger social circle too, and today's professional well-being programs also include our families. Take Hewlett Packard's model, for example, where an employee's benefits program encapsulates their entire family.

Hewlett Packard supplies its employees with all manner of apps focused on well-being, including teaching tools for parents to manage the homeschooling environment better.

Becoming more aware of your employees' needs in the "new normal" is integral to ensuring that their home lives are as efficient as possible, which in turn allows for better professional efficiency.

Watch How Salesforce Onboards and Fosters Ongoing Employee Engagement >

Benefits Breed Loyalty

It comes as no surprise if employees view their well-being benefits as a crucial job satisfaction deciding factor. Although raised salaries are the traditional method for retaining employees, a study by Future Workplace and Paychex found that there was more to keeping employees satisfied.

The study found that well over half of the employees that they surveyed chose the quality of their well-being advantages as integral for deciding whether they would stay in their current positions or not.

The younger members of the workforce, like Gen Z, overwhelmingly focus on well-being benefits when considering a potential position. So, which benefits are the most important for the modern employee?

Most respondents selected mental and emotional support and financial security as the key components of a well-being system.

Current workers are also very concerned about their financial status, and training and education in this department are becoming more in-demand than ever before. This need is so great that it should be standard practice for managers to include economic tutoring in their overall training programs.

However, this financial savvy goes beyond traditional financing and retirement, and employees today need extensive financial advice.

Surprisingly, less than 30% of the reviewed Paychex study responders highlighted mental health resources and support as integral to their well-being. While mental health aids are perhaps the most important forms of employee support, and therefore need a high level of investment from corporate, at least they are growing in relevance.

Employees Need a Match for Their Values

While covering the basic needs of employees is crucial for retention, workers have higher-level requirements that need satisfying too, such as value matches. According to Future Workplace, four-fifths of employees need their personal values to resonate with those of their companies.

Sadly, such a fit is difficult to achieve in most businesses, and employees will often care more for pressing workplace issues than their employers. Subjects like LGBTQIA+ rights, office discrimination, racial inequality, and economic fairness were statistically a more significant concern for knowledge workers than those who pay their salaries.

Such a discrepancy in values can become a real issue when you consider how vital it is to three-quarters of the workforce that tries to hold its employers accountable for inspiring change in society. The younger members of the working world are especially considerate of intersectional integrity.

Employers need to align their values with their employees better or risk losing them. Knowledge workers are especially prone to quitting if their employers do not demonstrate real commitments to equity.

Futuristic Skills Are In-Demand

While things like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning might sound like buzzwords to many business owners, the reality is that these smart technologies are already revolutionizing the workplace.

Indeed, much research has gone into establishing how AI-related positions will change according to new technologies.

Amazingly, the next eight years will see an abundance of new jobs being created that require machine-related skills, such as Human Machine Teaming Managers and Algorithm Bias Officers.

Future HR professionals will need to prove that they are competent in AI-related fields, and their academic credentials might not be enough to convince technologically focused employers.

Indeed, it seems like managers are taking a more significant focus on what candidates can do rather than what they learned. This change in values means that inherently talented workers have a greater chance of landing a superb position.

At the same time, existing employees can enjoy greater career mobility as they continue to upskill.

HR is integral to ensuring that both new hires and existing employees are supplied with relevant training courses, which they can achieve by implementing new technology-related skills into their myTrailhead custom courses.

Longer Lives Mean Longer Careers

We know that modern humans live increasingly longer and healthier lives, but what does this mean for the future of the working world?

Given that around 50% of young children are likely to live for a century, the average career could span six decades.

Of course, a person who works for this incredible period is unlikely to remain on the same career path forever. HR is then faced with an interesting challenge: upskilling such lengthy and varied careers appropriately and adequately.

A business like Amazon has some insight into this future worker phenomenon and has already invested $1.2 billion into Amazon Career Choice. This educational program is devoted to funding Amazon workers' high school and university requirements, as well as English-learning courses.

Those Amazon workers can also re-skill themselves for thriving industries like Information Technology, Construction, Engineering, Accounting, and Transformation.

HR Needs Upskilling

It is a sad reality for HR professionals that much of their workplace focus goes into upskilling employees while neglecting their own development. While we have emphasized HR's place in developing and supporting the workforce with the help of Salesforce, the facilitators for positive change in the working world need to be taken care of too.

Too often, HR professionals have to mind their own upskilling ambitions while finding the time and energy to do so in-between their employee devotions. Future Workplace identified the need for HR upskilling in a related study.

The best way to nurture our HR professionals of today and the future is to establish a learning and development culture that lasts a lifetime.

An Emphasis on Soft Skills

Soft skills have never been more important than they are in the modern workplace. Given how independent the modern worker is, the abilities needed to manage their own workplace and weekly tasks with minimal guidance are essential.

Working from home means being comfortable with a number of apps like Slack, Monday, Microsoft Teams, and WebEx. While remote working offers a lot more comfort and freedom to the average employee, it also guarantees increased responsibility.

LinkedIn's latest Learning Report put digital proficiency and resilience skills on the list of 2021's most crucial abilities. These skills include better adaptability and resilience, a higher emotional intelligence, time management, and cross-functional communication and collaboration.

Resilience took first place in LinkedIn's ranking, which is detailed with the capacity to prove one's independence, investigative skills, and positivity. Granted, HR professionals play a significant role in ensuring that every team is coping at home.

Thankfully, HR can use Salesforce to create a communication and training platform where employees can work through resources that will train them to have a self-sufficient and optimistic relationship with their work.

Salesforce can also be a resource for mental and emotional well-being, where employees can fill out questionnaires and surveys and be connected with the right professionals for support.

Parents Need Support

If you are an employed parent, then you can probably speak on the pressures and stress of having both your office and children's education migrated into the household.

Working parents have taken on much of their childcare and educational responsibilities, on top of having to be more independent from home.

The current Omicron variant's presence has shut many schools down across the world, and parents have once again found themselves being charged with ensuring that their children's education continues as undeterred as possible.

As a result of these mounting pressure and responsibilities, employed parents are mandating a greater level of support from employers. A lack of care from working parents' managers will directly lead to job dissatisfaction and quitting.

Many parents are simply exhausted and overburdened and are struggling to cope unless their HR professionals find ways to mitigate this compounded work and home stress.

Conclusion

It is clear that HR professionals face a growing responsibility to the modern workforce (as well as to themselves). Upskilling, well-being, and value alignment are just three of the main focus areas for the modern HR team, and without the proper digital resources and support, such duties can easily become unmanageable.

Salesforce allows HR members to focus and streamline their work, reinforcing their resources with digital tools and establishing the clearest communication channels possible.

But beyond all the goodness that HR professionals bring to the workplace, managers need to take care of those individuals that spend their entire careers trying to help people work better and more happily.