Reflecting on last year’s events, it’s common for the business and technology press (among other authorities) to cite technology as the ship that provided some calm and continuity in many enterprise types.

But the fact is that Covid joins other disruptive influences on the financial and professional services sector, changes being fueled by the mass technologies that now dominate everyday lives: social media, mobile, cloud computing, typical uses of AI (artificial intelligence) and big data analytics.

In addition to outside influences, customers and clients for the services sector now expect an always-on service, one that places at its core the individuality of the customer, the highest quality of user experience and immediate responsiveness of the organization’s teams.

And while the financial sector is perhaps not the fastest to respond to change (the vertical is known for its understandable conservatism when it comes to change in many ways), there are signs that significant changes are coming.

For the sector, this revolves around the types of expertise required at the touch of a button and the way such expertise is presented. Therefore, the service sector needs to transform both its communication and customer experience concepts into a fully omnichannel delivery model and realign its in-house staffing policies to address new customers’ requirements better.

It’s not an oversimplification to say that, in business, technology and people are now intertwined and co-dependent – one cannot exist effectively without the other. In our new world of virtual and hybrid work, and with a new generation of employees entering the workforce, businesses must be ready to embrace new ways of optimizing that most important, central, and valuable of assets.

HR in a new age of professional and financial services

The evolution and growing impact of HR itself has been facilitated by increasing access to technology; software that enables effective resource planning, requirement forecasting, talent sourcing, and recruitment assessments. Today, around 3 out of 4 HR teams worldwide use recruiting software to great effect.

But the same technologies are increasingly in everyday use by customers, who are coming to vendors better informed, armed with recommendations from crowdsourced data, and acting on advice given (in part) by AI-powered algorithms.

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Finding, onboarding and keeping employees in the financial services needs to reflect this increased level of awareness overall. The challenge is on, therefore, to source a new generation of HR solutions capable of responding with much more agility to the permutations and unique needs of the service supplier.

Employees who are expected to be agile in skillsets and knowledge need freeing from repetitive and bureaucratic burdens. HR has its role to play here, more than any other department. Features for staff like on-the-job training through mobile platforms (with subjects offered aligned to customer demands) will soon be the bare minimum expected by new hires.

In each of the employee lifecycle steps, from pre-onboarding to exit strategies, technology platforms provide the required speed and elasticity of employee support and development.

Beyond individual employee satisfaction, when executed in a way tailored to the organization and its individuals, Human Capital Management (HCM) achieves a combined workforce that’s motivated, collaborative, continually developing – and one that feels rewarded and recognized for its performance.

Market view

An annual study by IBM found that most CEOs reported that empowering a remote workforce was their top priority during 2020:

“The COVID-19 pandemic challenged many leaders to focus on what’s essential, like their people,” said Mark Foster, senior vice president, IBM Services. “Many employees’ expectations of their employers have significantly changed. The ‘anywhere’ workforce can require leaders to provide agile technology, to adopt more empathetic leadership models that prioritize employee well-being and to champion flexible and inclusive cultures.”

For performance-driven organizations, such as those in the finance and professional services sectors, already tech-centric HR teams must ensure they have the HCM tools optimized to enable their people to adapt and grow in a new and longer-term era of hybrid work.

In these times, those organizations who prioritize and foster employee well-being and champion flexible, inclusive, and dynamic cultures will produce the best output from their people. And with the people of an organization forming a significant part of the overall end-user’s experience — the “public face” of the company — ensuring knowledgeable and helpful people on the front line will be a business imperative.

HCM for the remote workforce

SAP SuccessFactors is the most comprehensive and powerful HCM platform available to businesses today that reflects this highly competitive service-based sector’s changing nature. But leveraging SuccessFactors in a way that provides optimal business value is a complex and resource-intensive undertaking, requiring specialist knowledge.

That’s why some of the best-run companies today are turning to Rizing, the go-to partner for SuccessFactors implementation and software extension. Perhaps most crucially, Rizing offers access to a team of specialists that know both HCM and this vertical inside out.

Click the image to get a hand-prepared custom report to help assess your organization’s performance and identify specific opportunities.

Many issues—like health and safety, upskilling & reskilling, and new ways of working—are familiar to leaders in HR and across the business, but most have now taken on a unique complexity and speed of change.

To address this, Rizing’s flagship Synchrony People is an out-of-the-box solution with a host of offerings, all of which are deployable in as little as eight weeks. Rizing populates the required modules and processes, ‘turns on’ the reporting, and lets organizations choose the level of application maintenance support that fits their needs.

Modular successes

The Synchrony People Core HR Solution module aims to digitize and simplify service organizations’ processes to improve operational efficiency and workforce insight, all while being legally compliant with global and local requirements.

While Rizing admits that most HR transactions are ‘no brainers,’ even the weight of the bare necessities – like requesting time off, updating personal information, and keeping org charts up to date – all adds up in a world where seamless employee experience and people-centric solutions are drivers behind customer retention.

Rizing knows that there is a direct correlation between employee and customer experiences. In the financial and professional services market, the people and their knowledge form much of the high-quality customer interaction.

Rizing’s Synchrony People Talent Acquisition ensures financial service businesses can quickly onboard the best talent according to the business’s strategic needs. It marries recruitment marketing, recruitment posting (on specialist or generic job boards), and recruiting management (for selecting and hiring the best candidates), to make the recruiting function more aligned with overall company direction. Once that talent is identified, Synchrony People Onboarding will accelerate new starters’ productivity and enable pre-start engagement, so new hires get a jump start, ready to respond on day one to whatever challenges the market may bring.

Rizing’s Synchrony People Learning solution, meanwhile, instils a culture of dynamic and continuous learning among an organization and its people. Managers use the software to quickly navigate to a team member to which they’d like to assign a training program, select up-to-date courses, and assign them to team members with deadlines. Employees can log in and make progress on learning tasks on any device, while managers can check in on employee progress and ongoing development at any time.

For performance-driven financial and professional services firms, worthy of note is Rizing’s Synchrony People Performance & Goals solution, enabling managers to align employee activities with organizational strategy and monitor achieving those goals. This replaces quickly aging annual or bi-annual performance measurements with a focus on continuous, meaningful feedback and coaching, enabling companies to quickly adjust to the dynamic changing world and ensure that their employees are on track at any time of the year.

We’ve only scratched the surface on how Rizing can enhance the organization’s approach to managing their most important and valuable asset. Interested to health check your current practices and see how your organization stacks up against its industry peers? Rizing has developed a Talent Management Industry Benchmark Report which includes insights from over 5000 participants. Simply fill out the 15 minute survey  – your answers will inform the contents of a hand-prepared custom report to help assess your organization’s performance and identify specific opportunities. Use it to compare practises with competitors’ or as hard evidence for decision-making. Ensure your organization is putting people first as it adapts to the new world of work. Your bespoke results will be emailed to you in two working days — highly recommended.