Why You Need Human Capital Management

Organizations today are quickly recognizing that their workforce is by far their greatest asset. After all, it is a company’s employees that possess the skills and knowledge needed to most efficiently execute day-to-day activities. And it is the front-line staff members who truly understand what’s required to keep operations running smoothly. Additionally, studies show that it costs far less to retain a valuable employee than it does to find, hire, and train a new one. That’s why many companies are turning to human capital management solutions. So what is human capital management, and why do you need it?

Human capital management systems automate and enhance all facets of human resources operations. From recruitment, hiring, and training through performance evaluation, promotion, and separation, human capital management empowers companies to achieve true performance excellence by dramatically improving the ways in which they acquire, manage, compensate, and retain their employees.

Many companies already have simple human resource automation systems in place. Yet, these applications do little more than automate traditional HR functions such as time and attendance, payroll processing, and benefits administration. Human capital management solutions take it one step further, providing the tools and technologies needed to enhance the entire employee lifecycle from start to finish. As a result, they significantly increase the value of the relationship between company and each of its staff members.

Human capital management also bridges the gap between corporate goals and strategies and the needs and ambitions of individual workers. These solutions enable career growth or work/life balance by directly linking skill enhancement, advancement paths, and roles and responsibilities to company objectives. As a result, human capital management applications ensure that everyone gets what they want. Long-term profitability is reached, and employees gain the kind of career growth they desire. This, in turn, significantly minimizes attrition (both voluntary and involuntary), as well as, all associated costs.

Other benefits of human capital management include:

• Full automation of routine, repetitive, and paper-heavy manual processes, for increased productivity or HR staff.
• Complete, unhindered visibility into workforce trends as well as the factors that positively and negatively impact employee behaviors and performance.
• Faster identification of correctable skill gaps, so the proper training programs can be put into place.
• The ability to prevent bad hires and personnel shortages through the development of more successful recruitment strategies.
• Creation of more compelling benefits and incentive packages to entice new talent to join the company and encourage existing workers to perform to the best of their abilities.
• More accurate time and attendance tracking to prevent costly payroll errors.
• More flexible and collaborative performance management procedures that allow both employees and supervisors to offer feedback during the evaluation process.
• Accelerated on-boarding, so new staff members can get up to speed – and become productive contributors – as quickly as possible.
• The ability to manage global-scale workforces by facilitating compliance with cultural and regulatory requirements and coordinating staff management across multiple disparate geographic locations.