BUSINESS WIRE, 18 June 2001 – As a leader in defining the Employee Relationship Management (ERM) market, Workbrain today introduced an ERM roadmap that helps companies reduce costs, effectively manage and drive employee satisfaction and productivity, and focus employees on value-added activities.
As companies look to improve their return on investment from all internal expenditures, managing and strengthening employee relationships are becoming a major area of focus. Workbrain provides organizations with a technology and business platform that links employees to a company's strategic business objectives.
In the same way that CRM emerged as a strategic priority in recent years, ERM is now taking center stage with many executives. Just as customer loyalty and satisfaction impact a company's bottom line, so do employee satisfaction and productivity.
Companies look to ERM to increase profitability
Companies worldwide are looking to ERM to increase profitability, create competitive differentiation, and support innovative business practices. To achieve these goals, organizations need to take a close look at how to best leverage ERM – from effective employee communications to management/employee collaboration to efficient bottom-line decision-making.
"Enterprises are beginning to acknowledge the need and opportunity to leverage technology to optimize workforce interactions," said Jenni Lehman, vice president, Research Area Director at Gartner, Inc.
"Tools designed to improve process efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve productivity are being sought for a wide range of activities including support of HR processes, work/life balance issues, and strategies for work related activities. Enterprises that have successfully enabled the workforce with these tools are seeing enterprise-level performance benefits."
In evaluating an ERM solution, companies must look first at the specific pain points within their organization. For example, if a company supports shift workers, a vacation – time off – shift trading system may be necessary to ensure that all shifts are properly covered and that company requirements are being met.
Or it may be necessary for management to be more "in tune" with the performance and productivity of their teams to better allocate resources, hit internal metrics and meet forecasted goals.
Four key application areas
Based on the challenges of organizations with large workforces, Workbrain has outlined four key application areas essential to successful employee relationship management.
1. Workforce Management
Workforce management applications automate and manage daily employee transactions across the enterprise, including scheduling, time reporting, performance management, and skills and training tracking. Automating these transactions produces significant cost savings by streamlining processes and reducing transaction costs. The result is increased organizational efficiency and productivity.
2. Analytics
Companies can leverage analytics applications to study trends, set production metrics, allocate resources, and analyze productivity and performance of staff. A successful analytics application provides employees, supervisors, managers and executives with the intelligence needed for planning and effective decision making, resulting in peak performance across the organization.
3. Self-Service Interactions
These applications allow employees to initiate self-service transactions such as schedule management, certification testing, procurement, training registration, and benefits enrollment. Self-service applications provide a convenient and innovative way for employees to trade and bid for jobs, shifts and vacation time.
This self-service focus results in increased employee productivity and performance, as less time is spent on administrative tasks.
4. Community
Community-focused applications allow companies to foster employee communication and collaboration, and interact with employees to better understand and define common interests and characteristics. They provide employees with access to personalized and relevant services for managing their work and personal lives, creating a sense of community that leads to improved employee satisfaction and greater involvement in the corporate culture.
"With the economy placing a greater emphasis on ROI, companies are realizing the direct impact strong employee relationships have on reducing costs, while better linking to business objectives," said David Ossip, CEO and founder of Workbrain.
"Whether it be through our ERM solution or home-grown applications, companies need to recognize the value in streamlining their employee processes to maximize efficiency. Over the next year, organizations will find 'extra' money in their internal management and human resource budgets, making for an immediate, positive effect on a company's bottom line."
