Mobility is important for today’s workforce. Technology has made accessing information quick and easy, especially after the invention of smartphones. We all carry mini supercomputers in our pockets that do so much more than just make phone calls. Smartphones help us complete everyday tasks like grocery shopping or banking, but also help us find love online or stay connected with friends. People automatically expect websites to be mobile-friendly, widely known as ‘mobile-first’, or for an app to be available to get the task done.
It’s imperative for companies to be mobile-first for their consumer base so why shouldn’t HR be as well? The employee lifecycle encompasses any actions that deal with an employee’s time with the organization. It begins with recruitment and onboarding and then moves into employee engagement and development to support retention. The lifecycle wraps up with offboarding and supporting the exit of employees. HR should look at each step of the full lifecycle to identify opportunities to go mobile.
Recruitment and On-boarding
Organizations’ career sites and job application processes must be mobile-first. This is especially true within industries that have high turnover and high recruitment volumes, like retail or food service. There is a high likelihood your candidates will be job searching via their mobile devices across the entire employee life cycle. If someone must log into a desktop device to complete a job application, there’s a good chance they may drop off and not come back to your vacancy to complete the application. A lack of mobile capability could be a deterrent for potential candidates.
Development and Engagement
Training and employee development should be mobile-first and available on the go. Online training that is accessible anywhere and on any device will benefit talent throughout all levels of the organization. Salespeople or executives that travel a lot will be more likely to complete training if it can be done on their phone quickly during downtime. Additionally, gamification and microlearning are hot topics within the learning and development world, which go hand in hand with mobile compatibility.
Engagement surveys can be an effective tool to gauge the current state of the organization’s culture and learn how employee’s feel about the workplace. They are only effective if the surveys capture enough of the organization’s population to create an accurate picture of the current state. The surveys should have a mobile-first option to increase the chances of completion.
Off-boarding
After reviewing turnover rates on your HR dashboard, exit interviews will help you understand the why behind resignations. Exit interviews are an important practice HR should use to learn about what is going on within the organization. If your process has employees completing a written exit interview, consider making the form electronic so that it can be completed online. It will be easier to aggregate the data as the results for most online forms can be exported to excel. A mobile-friendly form is more convenient, especially for those that do not work in front of a computer.
If an HR process is online, why not just make sure it’s mobile-first as well? It will only help increase the chances of the action being completed timely or at all.
