3 reasons to enrich LumApps employee profiles with information from your HR solutions

Adding into LumApps employee directory information that comes from your Human Capital Management or HR solutions has a business impact on employees themselves, and also on Internal Communicators, HR Departments, and other platform stakeholders. 

Employee’s skills and proficiencies (such as spoken languages, or computer science tools they are fluent in), certifications (e.g.: Agile, safety), hobbies, manager’s name, contract type: A lot of information about persons in your company is not necessarily featured in the Microsoft, Google, or Okta user directories. A lot are hosted in Human Capital Management (HCM) or HR solutions such as learning management systems (LMS).
Platform administrators can enrich their LumApps employee directory with attributes coming from SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, or any other HCM or HR solution. 

What’s in it for me as an internal communicator, HR professional, or community manager in the LumApps platform, you may ask? By providing a more holistic picture of who each employee is, the “user provisioning of attributes” (if I use IT vocabulary to describe the way to add personal data from your HR systems to the LumApps user profile) can bring benefits to your workforce and your business in times when companies are struggling to engage, enable, and empower employees to do their best work.  

1. Foster employee connections, and team and culture building 

Employees are looking for connection, meaning, and purpose at work, and social capital is no longer just nice! Employees want to know who they’re working with (in the same office, building, and across subsidiaries), and the work that they do together. McKinsey's research on social capital shows that employees who feel more connected with people in their internal network are one and a half times more likely than their peers to report being engaged at work. But their survey also revealed a slowdown in the development of exchange-based relationships in the workplace since the onset of the pandemic, especially for frontline workers (1). 

According to the consulting firm, more than three-quarters of employees working in “traditional” roles – especially women and frontline workers – report that they are connecting with others less frequently, have smaller networks, and have spent less time and effort on relationship-building since the start of the pandemic. Paying more attention to this form of corporate capital can help organizations bring people back to the office, cultivate distinctive workplaces, improve productivity—and ultimately create a better overall organizational performance.” (2)

When employee profiles in the LumApps user directory are detailed with information such as hobbies, known languages, IT skills, certifications, and other proficiencies, any of those elements can be opportunities for peers and colleagues from other offices to engage with him/her more easily than by just knowing their first and last names, and role to introduce yourself. Employees are thus encouraged to build and maintain relationships, with a platform that can be leveraged to build or strengthen connections and relationship building in the workplace.

Being transparent about people’s profiles will build trust and will contribute to both team and culture building in a company, ultimately creating a more committed, engaged, dedicated, and trusting workforce. In this post-pandemic environment, personal connections and perceptions of how communal a company is will loom ever more significant in people’s decisions about where to look for work – and whether to stay at their current jobs, noted McKinsey (2).

2. Identify quickly expertise across the organization

Employees are eager to collaborate with teams and colleagues on programs and projects. If teams feel connected, they tend to get more work done and do it faster. 

When I was serving as an Innovation project manager in a 1,500+ employee company, we were constantly struggling to identify across our 33 subsidiaries around the globe employees having given expertise (like knowledge in VR/AR technology or deep knowledge of an industry process) to set up dedicated task forces or project teams, or just to collect powerful insights. Believe me: I would have loved to have the ability to check our intranet and search employee profiles to expedite the identification of those knowledgeable employees! 

Enriched employee profiles available on an internal communication platform are a powerful way for both employees and managers to quickly find expertise across their organization, and not only in their local teams. No need to ask local HR managers to browse their HCM solutions. Not only enriched employee profiles create cultural cohesion, but they can also drive shared innovation, and improve project and program success rates.
As stated by market intelligence firm IDC: “The organizations that embrace a collaborative and transparent working culture that leverages the intelligent digital workplace as the center of the employee experience [...] will be better positioned to accelerate transformation initiatives and improve efficiencies as we settle into hybrid working models” (3).

3. Facilitate internal audience segmentation for better targeting of messages and promoted content

Every organization needs to better engage its teams around purpose, strategy, values, and other key announcements (what we like to call “company key moments” at LumApps). When communicating with their workforce, adapting the channel strategies to hybrid working is also required. Both of the above are internal communicators’ top 2 priorities according to Gallagher consultancy (4).

This represents quite a challenge when employees still complain about the amount of information they receive and the relevance of the different messages sent to them: 43% of employees frequently or occasionally fail to notice important information, reported technological research and consulting firm Gartner (5).

Internal communicators, HR managers, and other platform stakeholders can leverage detailed employee profiles to segment their internal audience and target messages to the right crowd, at the right time, and on the most appropriate channels. That’s what the newly introduced segment, broadcast, and campaign capabilities are all about, with segmentation behind foundational in reducing “communication noise” as messages will be more focused in today’s economy of attention context. 

As part of our vision, LumApps aims to bring the best of marketing automation and tools into the internal communications world, providing each employee with the most optimized and personalized experience possible, and ensuring your communications are hitting the right audiences. 
Similarly, by leveraging detailed user profiles and the information they include, Internal communicators, HR and Community managers, and other platform stakeholders will ultimately be able to better promote content to the relevant crowds, based on specific criteria.  

Enriching LumApps employee profiles with information from HR solutions (HCM, LMS, and others) is a meaningful contribution to the LumApps Employee Data Layer, a foundational platform component for understanding each employee and providing a personalized experience.  

Sources:
(1) McKinsey, “Network effects: How to rebuild social capital and improve corporate performance”, 2022  
(2) McKinsey, “Network effects: How to rebuild social capital and improve corporate performance”, 2022
(3) IDC: “IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Content Management Systems for Authenticated Digital Workspaces Vendor Assessment”, 2021
(4) Gallagher: “State of the Sector”, 2022
(5) Gartner: “User Influence on Software Decisions survey”, 2021