Dressed in multicolored pants, combat boots and spiked leather bracelets, SAP’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Stefan Ries proudly strut onto the stage of the MGM Park Theater in Las Vegas to the strains of “Bring Me to Life” by Evanesence.
Ries was here to pump up of thousands of HR professional in attendance for the annual SAP SuccessConnect event, but a more important mission statement soon emerged, emblazoned across his black tee shirt: “HR Punks.”
Stefan Ries, Chief Human Resources Officer at SAP.
SAP“The heart of the human revolution is us,” said Ries. “The old days of HR are over. Today onward we need to revolutionize and the best people who can do this are HR punks.”
According to Ries, an HR punk attitude embodies all of the attributes that made the punk rock movement so distinctive: disruptive and innovative while challenging the status quo. Companies the world over need to embrace this mindset as the future of work continues to transform for employees.
End consumer experience
According to recent MIT Sloan study, 78 percent of employees want to strike the perfect work/life balance but soon enough, work in the office and the private life at home will merge.
“It will only happen through amazing technology that will help you get out of a back office function and position HR where it should belong — at the heart of the company,” said Ries. “We have an obligation to our customers and our customer’s applicants, managers, employees and even alumnus — we need to create and deliver a very positive end consumer experience with an end consumer focus. It needs to be intuitive, simple and fun.”
At SAP, Ries runs an HR team of over 1,000 that serves the company’s 95,000 global employees. Ries and his team recently achieved an important industry milestone as the first largest enterprise to go live with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, powered by SAP HANA. The solution meets all standards of data protection and privacy and is GDPR compliant within 25 different industries on an international scale, and fully embedded into the rest of the business.
Here’s why “fully embedded” is important: The volumes of HR data Ries and his team examine now easily connects to finance, controlling, purchasing and data collected from the contingent workforce.
“Nobody else can do this,” said Ries. “This is not something that is sitting on a PowerPoint. It’s real.”
Ries chalks this achievement up to much more that SAP drinking its own champagne and says it’s really about becoming a “Formula 1 test driver” for customers. And what could be better than showing what a working digital experience looks like by running HR services for more than 95,000 employees around the world?
“The big takeaway is that all of this great technology leaves more time for creative work,” said Ries. “I don’t need to do headcounts every single day, I simply push the system on my mobile phone, on the digital boardroom on any other device and I have that information available at my fingertips. It allows us as HR professionals to focus on the really important aspects of people.”
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