Dive Brief:
- Employee satisfaction and improved efficiency in modern service businesses demand an integrated approach, writes FinancialForce.com’s Laura Castillo for Diginomica.
- The struggle most businesses face is the careful balance between fully using workers without burning them out and avoiding the risk of underutilizing talented employees, leading to boredom and a waste of skill. Both scenarios lead to poor employee morale, Castillo writes.
- Castillo recommends automated systems that integrate the needs of service leaders and sales teams with the goals of HR to prevent the risks of both scenarios.
Dive Insight:
The usual refrain applies: organizations today are expected to do more with less. Automation is a key element to help solve this issue, Castillo writes, but businesses may not take it a step further and integrate or fully use the data they have gathered.
“If a business is monitoring its services, sales, finance and human resources separately, on different clouds, how do managers really know what’s going on?” Castillo says. “Do they even know if there are gaps in skills or gaps in pipeline that aren’t being addressed?”
Essentially, integrating sales, service and HR helps an organization fill its “bench” – the capacity to staff projects. With integrated insight, service leaders can look into the sales data to see a pipeline of upcoming projects and the kind of staff and skills they will need. If linked up to HR, service managers have access to recruiting and a database of past applicants to fill any gaps.
Castillo recommends that companies should perform a needs analysis and take a “hard, honest look at the current state of its technology and people and identify areas for improvement.” From there, companies can then take a look at their vendor options and see what can be done.
