Ceridian’s most popular HCM stories of 2018

Last year, we said that HR leaders were focusing more on innovative ways to bring a holistic employee experience to life. This year, they’re working smarter – diving deeper into data, using insights to be more strategic, and increasingly upping the ante when it comes to employee experience.

Here are the HCM trends that were top of mind in 2018, according to our top-viewed posts this year.

Engaging a multi-generational workforce

Engagement throughout the employee lifecycle is not only an indicator of culture, but also a contributor to retention, as Ceridian’s 2018-19 Pulse of Talent revealed. Different factors – whether it be salary, growth opportunities, or total rewards – take on varying degrees of importance for different generations, and it’s important for the employee experience to address these factors.

Employers need to clearly understand their workforce, its differences, and what matters to employees. Here, we discussed proactive engagement strategies that are effective for employees across generations. And in this post, we discussed how to motivate a multi-generational team, including managing to their unique strengths, and creating a strong sense of shared purpose.

We also discussed the importance of employee recognition, but also how millennial and Gen Z employees in particular like to be rewarded. For further tips on engaging young workers, check out this post about creating a great place to work for young people.

Communication is an important aspect of engaging a workforce comprising multiple generations – in fact, a recent survey found that 38% of workers agree that communicating with different aged co-workers is challenging. One form of communication doesn’t fit all generations, so take the time to ensure information, tools, and training are accessible in multiple formats – and try these tips to rethink your overall communication strategy.

Related: Rethinking employee engagement: How to engage your modern workforce

Evolving policies and programs for the modern workforce

“Workplace flexibility and employee empowerment are increasingly becoming a focus for employers who are looking to improve the employee experience and create cultural change at their organizations. To be a trend-setter and leader in today’s workforce, and to truly address employee needs, employers must consider re-evaluating their traditional policies,” our Chief People and Culture Officer Lisa Sterling wrote this year.

She tackled two important topics on the blog related to how employers must evolve their policies and programs to attract and retain top talent, particularly in a tight labor market. In this post, Lisa discussed how to implement a flexible time-off program successfully, using Ceridian’s recently launched Time Away from Work (TAFW as an example). Important takeaways? Be clear on what you’re trying to accomplish and your desired outcomes instead of implementing the program to simply match what your competitors are doing. As you shift away from traditional HR models, understand your people, anticipate their reactions and how you will address their questions and concerns.

In this post, Lisa dove deeper into gender equality by calling out how today’s parental leave policies reinforce a bias that puts undue responsibility on women to make the choice between work and family. “We can’t press for progress and true equality if we, as leaders, don’t evolve our programs to create a culture that is not only conducive to working women, but to working parents,” she wrote.

Organizations need to build environments that treat working parents equally, and advocate for them to be successful at work, she added.

Taking action on workplace equality, diversity, and inclusion

We covered a wealth of research this year supporting the idea that diversity powers innovation and is good for business. Closing the gender wage gap, ensuring diversity in recruitment, and driving inclusion are all priority tasks for HR leaders.

But beyond simply talking about it, employers are increasingly taking action to build diverse and inclusive cultures at work. In this post, we shared some tips and action items from our Employee Resource Group (ERG) leaders for managers to get started. These included addressing and managing unconscious bias, and making it easy for employees to participate in ERGs.

Speaking of taking action, we also continued to cover women in leadership, which was a key focus of our Ceridian Women’s Network Summit at INSIGHTS 2018. Read our overview from the CWN Summit, and check out this Q and A with our summit keynote speaker Carey Lohrenz – equal parts funny and inspiring.

Elsewhere, some interesting takeaways came out of the inaugural Move the Dial Global Summit in November, related to hiring and retaining more women in tech. Read those posts here and here.

Making HR more strategic by leveraging technology

“Leveraging data can help human resources become a more strategic partner in a company,” Director of Product Management Paul Jelinek wrote earlier this year.

And according to the HR and Talent Management Benchmarking Report (conducted by HR.com in partnership with Ceridian), organizations are prioritizing leveraging data to make real-time and smarter business decisions.

Being more strategic with deeper and more powerful insights was top of mind for readers this year. One of our most popular posts, by our Senior Manager of Talent Management John Whyte, discussed compensation strategies for the modern workforce.

“Today, HR leaders need to be more fluid and creative with their compensation strategies, and take factors like timely rewards and pay equity into account.” He noted that using HCM technology, managers can leverage data and insights to factor in things they traditionally may not have in the past, resulting in smarter, more impactful and unbiased reward decisions.

Paul further explored exactly how data can help HR be a more strategic function in this post, including being smarter with recruiting and identifying top performer flight risk. And in this post, he discussed the key questions HR leaders need to ask when defining compensation strategies to make their data work for them.

Elsewhere, we also covered new tech innovations that will support companies in the future of work. These include on-demand pay (the most buzzed about upcoming Dayforce feature unveiled at INSIGHTS 2018), which lets employees access their pay at any time during the pay period, and succession planning, which helps organizations plan for the departure of key employees by pulling in metrics to evaluate possible successors.

Read more about these tech innovations in this INSIGHTS wrap post

Managing workforce compliance complexity

Today’s employers are tasked with balancing employee expectations while keeping up with new compliance regulations and understanding changes impact the future of work.

We covered the gig economy, fair scheduling, paid leave, and pay disparity, to name a few of this year’s hot HR compliance topics (see a full overview from Compliance Counsel Emerson Beishline here).

Two separate reports revealed that managing compliance is a challenge for organizations of all sizes – but technology and/or a trusted partner that can provide guidance and advice on changing laws and regulations is a valuable resource for organizations to stay on top of this complexity.

Related: Key workforce management issues affecting the retail and hospitality industries

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