Enterprise Business FAQs
Unleash the power of your people
1. What is Performance & Talent Management?
Performance & Talent Management is a holistic approach to maximizing your company's potential by helping your employees realize theirs. It encompasses a set of technological solutions and processes that help you identify your talent needs, your best applicants, and your star players; align employees' goals with the organization's goals; and then evaluate performance, coach people to improve over time, and reward excellence.
With the right Performance & Talent Management program in place, you simply outperform the competition. Why does that happen?
- Team members' goals align with organizational goals, and productivity skyrockets.
- Favoritism and politics lose their influence over the compensation process, and employees' commitment and engagement increase.
- Motivation builds as new responsibilities and challenges spur people to higher levels of performance.
- Succession planning linked with career planning means you and your employees create a shared vision of an exciting future.
2. Why are so many organizations focused on this - now?
CEOs declare, "Our people are our company's greatest asset." Their unspoken fear is that they are wasting the potential of the majority of their employees - and that soon there won't be enough talent around to waste. There are some very real macro trends that are triggering a talent crisis. Bottom line: Companies must get very good at developing and retaining talent, or they will find difficult times ahead.
The Facts:
- Employees have broad access to job-related information over the internet. Since there's no longer a stigma to changing jobs, turnover is increasingly difficult to manage.
- Retiring baby boomers are about to cause an unprecedented talent shortage and "Generation Y" has more demanding employment expectations making them tough to recruit, and harder to retain.
- More organizations have employees in multiple locations worldwide, which makes it more difficult to engage with, evaluate, develop, manage, and align employees with organizational goals.
3. What are some common pitfalls?
Now that "managing talent" has become a buzzword, companies are scrambling for tools to help them do it - and hearing pitches from a confusing array of vendors selling products and services. How can you be sure that a solution is worth its price?
SuccessFactors' Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model means that we've got "skin in the game." Either we earn your business - day after day - by making our customers successful, or those customers just walk away. We've invested millions to develop capabilities, services, and processes to ensure that our solutions don't just work but achieve results.
From working with well over a thousand customers of all sizes and in every industry, we've often been brought into situations that have gone south to help turn them around. Here are some common pitfalls:
Adopting an incomplete solution that fails to account for the big picture or the long view - Take automation. Eliminate paper-based performance reviews and you save time and cost in the short term. Automation alone, however, does not bring bottom-line results. With our Performance & Talent Management technologies, you align individual and company goals, foster ongoing discussions between managers and employees, and incorporate timely behavior-based coaching into management. In other words, you transform the entire review process.
Failing to address all stakeholders - Performance & Talent Management works only when employees at all levels buy in. Those stakeholders need to understand how they will benefit. Executives need results and a high return on investment. Managers need to make their teams more productive without spending a lot of time away from their real jobs. Employees need clearer expectations, a better sense of their value to the company, and visibility to those who make key decisions about their compensation and future opportunities. Our comprehensive solutions address all of those needs.
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4. How do I succeed with Performance & Talent Management on a global scale?
Rolling out a Performance & Talent Management solution to employees around the world presents a unique set of challenges. Here are a few things to consider that can help improve the success of your efforts.
Let employees use their native languages and currencies. Asking employees to participate in a system that's not in the language they speak is a set up for a failure! So is asking a manager to make compensation decisions in unfamiliar currencies. SuccessFactors supports 18+ languages and virtually all major currencies.
Prioritize - Then Phase it In. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither should your Performance & Talent Management system. Choose a core set of capabilities that will make a major impact. Add capabilities later as your organization adapts to the new way of doing things.
Involve a Global Team. Adoption on a global scale starts with participation on a global scale. Invite a representative sample of managers and employees from your talent pool to help shape the process.
Get us in early. The sooner you partner with a vendor for such a large project, the sooner you can outline an attainable approach. Success and results are easier to achieve with a solid plan in place.
Build a solid business case. Linking Performance & Talent Management to business results is not only possible, it's critical. Establishing the business outcomes helps local leadership and those at the helm at headquarters understand why the effort is important and how it will be used to fuel their success.
Pick a vendor who does Global daily. Choose a partner that has blazed the trail before -- and has successful global customers to show for it. Experience counts.
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5. Why is SuccessFactors the right vendor?
Rolling out a Performance & Talent Management solution to employees around the world presents a unique set of challenges. Here are a few things to consider that can help improve the success of your efforts.
Our Customer Success Team has a unique mandate. The other guys have "customer support groups" that solve your problems. We understand that it's not about just solving problems; it's about ensuring that you get the most out of your investment, and attain your Performance & Talent Management goals .
Prioritize - Then Phase it In. Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither should your Performance & Talent Management system. Choose a core set of capabilities that will make a major impact. Add capabilities later as your organization adapts to the new way of doing things.
Get us in early. The sooner you partner with a vendor for such a large project, the sooner you can outline an attainable approach. Success and results are easier to achieve with a solid plan in place.
Build a solid business case. Linking Performance & Talent Management to business results is not only possible, it's critical. Establishing the business outcomes helps local leadership and those at the helm at headquarters understand why the effort is important and how it will be used to fuel their success.
If it's not in the product today - just ask! We welcome your feedback, input, requests and suggestions to guide our product development efforts.
Come on over. Customers are invited to numerous in person events each year including our global and regional user group meetings. Come to talk to product managers, network with other customers and learn great stuff about Performance & Talent Management that will help you do your job better.
Our online Customer Community is the largest and fastest growing in our industry. Log on 24x7x365 to get support information, log cases, hold discussions with other customers in the forums, get access to training videos, and more.
SuccessFactors' customers use the leading Performance & Talent Management platform and enjoy a number of exceptional benefits that other vendors just can't match.
Pick a vendor who does Global daily. Choose a partner that has blazed the trail before -- and has successful global customers to show for it. Experience counts.
Involve a Global Team. Adoption on a global scale starts with participation on a global scale. Invite a representative sample of managers and employees from your talent pool to help shape the process.
Let employees use their native languages and currencies. Asking employees to participate in a system that's not in the language they speak is a set up for a failure! So is asking a manager to make compensation decisions in unfamiliar currencies. SuccessFactors supports 18+ languages and virtually all major currencies.
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6. Why is ERP not the answer?
Many of our customers have switched to SuccessFactors after having tried (sometimes over many years) to install a Performance & Talent Management system based on their ERP solution. Building from ERP systems seems like a good idea - so why doesn't it work?
We've learned 3 three real reasons why ERP systems like Oracle and SAP and others just don't get results:
ERP systems are designed for domain experts, not everyday employees. They were intended to be used by a few highly trained users to accomplish role-specific tasks. For Performance & Talent Management systems to be effective, they need to be intuitive to every employee at your company with minimal training. ERP just isn't built that way.
ERP systems are designed to be customized, not configured. What's the difference? Customized systems are built to your specs. What's wrong with that? Build a customized system and you are both completely alone and completely dependent on your software company. You're alone because no one else has a system like yours. Have a support issue? It may never have been seen before. Want a new feature? No one but the provider who's intimately familiar with your system can make updates or changes. Don't like the service, the high fees, or the results? Tough.
Configured systems are completely tailored to your company and your processes, but are part of a larger whole. When fixes are made, they're made for everyone. When updates and upgrades are put in place, everyone benefits immediately.
ERP can't match capabilities. Performance & Talent Management is small potatoes to an ERP company. Since it doesn't generate huge revenues, it doesn't get all that much attention. ERP offerings tend to be limited and not often updated with new capabilities.
Your HR department should be the ultimate decision-maker about which Performance & Talent Management system is best able to move the organization forward. The ERP system may do a great job at addressing your Finance and IT departments needs; however, ERP is ultimately more expensive and less effective that SuccessFactors for the purpose of Performance & Talent Management.
You wouldn't let your HR department select computer hardware; so don't let your IT department or Finance stymie your efforts to move your company forward by moving your people forward because they are attached to the ERP system. Ultimately, choosing ERP is more expensive and less successful than choosing SuccessFactors.
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