For our latest release of 2014, we have focused our efforts on two areas that will make it much easier for managers to be better people managers: new hire onboarding and accessing team information.
Simplify Onboarding for New Hires and Hiring Managers
Starting at a new job is usually the most stressful thing you have done in a long time. So much so, that the Holmes and Rahe stress scale ranks ‘switching jobs’ right below the ‘death of a close friend’ and just above ‘change in frequency of spousal arguments’ and ‘major mortgage’.
While managers can’t go through the emotional rollercoaster for their new hires, they can surely help ease the pain. Giving a warm welcome and showing appreciation to a new team member is a great way to trigger a morale boost from the get-go. And giving direction on what to work on and who to work with is all an enthusiastic employee needs to start doing great work from day one.
Unfortunately, as much as they want to, managers can never find the right time to do these small, yet effective activities. Setting up the tasks itself might not take a lot of time but they really require some thinking and planning to make them actually useful. And as much as recruiters or onboarding specialists want to help, only managers have the right business context, knowledge and connections to make this happen.
Mobile Onboarding
Following on the heels of mobile onboarding for new hires, we are excited to launch the new hiring manager onboarding experience for iPad on this release. In a nutshell, it helps people managers easily define and assign onboarding tasks to new hires, providing a superior onboarding experience. With it, hiring managers can:
- Create, personalize and manage the onboarding tasks that are assigned to new hires
- Create a customized welcome message
- Assign a buddy to the new hire
- Schedule important meetings during the first weeks
- Connect them with other employees
- Recommend links to relevant resources
- Get notified when new hire tasks are overdue and need to be completed
As you can see, this unique list of features focuses on the soft aspects of onboarding and is not something you see in traditional onboarding software. We believe this will provide hiring managers with a more convenient and centralized way to set up onboarding tasks, and new hires will end up enjoying a more personal and engaging onboarding experience.
Simplify Life for People Managers
Having impromptu access to team talent information is something managers would like to do more often in their day-to-day job without having to go back to their desks or constantly open their laptops. Every personal interaction that managers have during the day matter and these shouldn’t be interrupted just because information is not readily available.
Managers need to make the most of their time, every day. Agendas are full, decisions need to be made and managing people requires having the right information at hand to execute on the spot.
Mobile Manager Cockpit
The new manager cockpit is a central dedicated space within the SuccessFactors Mobile iPad app where people managers can access and manage talent information of their whole organization. From a single screen, managers can get an extended view of their team, navigate to deeper organizational levels, see who is out of office, and even check whose birthday occurs that day.
This initial release focuses on building the foundation of what is going to be a new focus area in the next months for us. Our plan is to expand current functionality to include more information and capabilities related to a wide range of talent scenarios such as performance and goals, succession and learning compliance. Stay tuned in next releases for more features related to the manager cockpit.
Also part of the Q4 2014 SuccessFactors Mobile Release
To round up our existing list of mobile workflow capabilities we are excited about launching a much-expected feature by our customers: manual delegation workflow capabilities for our iOS and Android apps.
This enhancement allows managers and approvers to manually delegate any workflow from their mobile devices — provided delegation is allowed. To do so, they can search for a delegate using ‘people search’ and easily select whom to delegate it on. The delegate has the option to decline the delegation. On that case, the original approver will be asked to take over the approval again.
For more information and details on the 2014 Q4 release please go to the SuccessFactors Mobile customer community and download the release notes.
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