Presenter Michael Adamson worked in IT for 30 years before joining UST Global, a leading digital and IT Services and Solutions company with 17,000 associates operating in more than 25 countries. Adamson currently manages country HR operations, global benefits, performance management and employee engagement. In 2007 UST Global selected Oracle PeopleSoft HRMS, PeopleSoft Finance, and SAP SuccessFactors. In 2016 they selected Oracle HCM Cloud with Taleo.

UST Global focuses on human-centered innovation. In this case, “human” means customers and employees. The company works to elicit outstanding – even blissful – experiences for the people with whom and for whom they work. This approach requires raising the bar for what employees and customers want and expect. It demands technology innovation, culture changes and talent management.

Technology innovations need to be woven throughout the company structure. Technology innovations for employees can be used to enable real-time feedback and coaching as so much work today is project-based. Collaboration tools – such as social media – can be used to connect and build teams with around-the-clock media. Other innovations include digitally enabled learning tools, data-based decision making, and employee-based system design.

Changes to the culture of a company are required to meet the expectations of a digital world. Adamson suggests reviewing the culture pillars of a company to determine which to maintain without modification and which pillars need to change. Adamson describes how UST Global adapted its pillars of humility, humanity and integrity.

Around the cultural pillars, Adamson recommends establishing objectives. For UST Global, those objectives are engagement, capability and organization. Engagement includes a focus on diversity, a born-to-learn philosophy, and a need for connectivity. Capability concentrates on interactions with people and sharing impactful stories. The organization addresses speed and agility with perspectives that are project-based, entrepreneurial and global.

Adamson identifies the key steps of the transformation journey as:

1. engineering transformation and human-centered design;
2. system transformation and digital innovations with speed and agility;
3. and talent transformation and digital acceleration of talent with superlative employee experience.

The UST Global talent strategy includes leveraging advanced digital thinking to accelerate talent development. Adamson believes companies can unleash employee potential and drive high performance by creating a “born to learn” culture; building digital solutions and making available platforms to enhance the employee experience.

Our key takeaways from watching their presentations are:

• An enterprise that relies on talent for success (and which company doesn’t?) needs to apply many of the same strategies for developing their customer base to developing their talent base.
• Both customers and employees of today have high expectations for experiences, products and services to be human-centered in design. Speed and ease of access are also in the set of customer and employee demands.
• The Oracle journey to the Cloud is well worth the investment and is key to providing employees the work experience they require.
• To fully integrate the innovations garnered from the journey to the cloud, additional technology innovations and culture changes are required.

Watch the complete HCM World presentation here.