By Freya Purnell
To truly engage the next generation of workers – the infamous Gen Y – organisations must offer applications that are at least as compelling as those they use in their personal lives. That was the message from Murray Sargant, SuccessFactors vice president, Asia Pacific, opening the SuccessFactors SuccessConnect in Sydney this week.
With many in this generation using social apps as an integral part of their life, and accessing them from a variety of mobile devices, they are imply “uninspired” by the types of applications they are required to use at work, Sargant said.
“It really doesn’t engage you, it doesn’t draw you in, it doesn’t make you feel like the company is showing you the passion and the love,” he said.
“If you want to engage that workforce, they have to want to use all the applications that we have to give them, and they don’t differentiate. So when they come to work, let’s put some products in front of them that absolutely look like the systems that they use when they’re outside of work.”
He said SuccessFactors is focused on building solutions for this generation, as they are “what the game is all about”.
“Not only will we engage them, we’ll improve productivity, they work harder, they work longer and they tend not to flip from organisation to organisation, when they know a company is working in this way.”
There has also been a fundamental change in the way technology is bought and implemented, according to Jeff Diana, chief people officer, SuccessFactors, who also presented at SuccessConnect.
“The days of the past are gone, where you would have a very linear approach – you start with financials, move to logistics, core HR, maybe sales, and you have this time-based approach with nice neat building blocks. That’s not how people are buying software any more,” Diana said.
Instead, CIOs must now contend with their internal customers wanting solutions that can be implemented quickly, which respond to their immediate needs and which can leverage existing technology or data.
“The solutions people need and the speed at which they need to move has changed. It’s all about dynamic choice of the customer – we’re going to have customers buying any number of combinations. This is a pretty big shift in the buying patterns.”
