Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, tech company MiHCM’s founder and Chief Executive Harsha Purasinghe understood the challenges confronting people logging into multiple systems at work. MiHCM itself deploys one of these systems, MiHCM, a digital human resources platform that allows employees to interact with HR on a unified app. Since launching more than three years ago, MiHCM has gained market share in South & Southeast Asia from global competitors, including SAP’s Success Factors, Oracle, and Workday, by making MiHCM available in native languages, tailor made for the unique legal and regulatory requirements of each market. In 2020 during the Covid-19 outbreak, MiHCM launched a virtual workplace assistant called MiA which runs on top of Microsoft Teams software so companies can engage employees working from home better and monitor progress. Now that working from home and remotely is part of the new normal, MiHCM focuses on solutions for a new set of challenges around employee experiences. For instance, MiHCM has introduced AI and voice technology to transform MiA & MiHCM mobile app respectively. While MiA was initially a separate product from MiHCM, Purasinghe’s tech team have integrated the two and allowed companies to build and integrate other systems with their mobile platform & virtual assistant, making MiHCM one super app.
How is Covid-19 transforming the world of work? What are some of the emerging trends that have captured your attention?
Across the world, companies are reinventing themselves and reimagining the future in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.Some adapted quickly enough, while others needed weeks or months to put the infrastructure and processes in place to enable working from home. Today, working from home or remotely is the new norm, except in circumstances that require people to be physically present where they work. New challenges around engaging and motivating people, driving productivity, and collaborating effectively, next confronted businesses that had adopted work from home practices, resulting in an explosion of technology developments enabling remote working, upskilling, and reskilling.
NEW CHALLENGES AROUND ENGAGING AND MOTIVATING PEOPLE, DRIVING PRODUCTIVITY, AND COLLABORATING EFFECTIVELY CONFRONTED BUSINESSES THAT HAD ADOPTED WORK FROM HOME PRACTICES
Covid-19 has changed how people consume and how businesses connect with customers. They are transforming processes and delivery channels with digital technology to stay connected with customers and other stakeholders in a meaningful way. Now meetings and even conferences are held online, and extensive business travel will become a thing of the past. Flexible work and flexible hours are here to stay, and work will move to a hybrid workplace where people can choose to work remotely or come to the office. Young people coming into the workforce will want it no other way. Suddenly, the digital transformation everyone was talking about is gaining momentum.
As working from home and remotely becomes the norm, how are companies creating engaging employee experiences?
The emerging new world of work presents an interesting problem: how do you create employee experience in a virtual world? Firms globally are investing in communication and reimagining engagement to meet this new challenge. If you look at the employee experience, companies need to deliver these in a mobilefirst manner. However, this transformation will not happen overnight. A business may have archaic systems that it has considerably invested in over the years. Therefore, achieving mobile-first experiences for teams requires clarity of vision and objectives. Start small by focusing on the most impactful employee experiences first, and gradually intensify the transformation while keeping track of overall impact. Eventually, you will have to complete the transition fast because the best talent will not wait around for you to figure this out, especially the zoomers (Gen Z) now joining the workforce. They grew up with smart devices, and they will demand the same experiences at work too. Filling forms, filing documents, and logging into multiple systems and VPNs will not appeal to them. They would rather join a startup instead because they want to be a part of an exciting, purpose-driven culture that offers unique employee experiences.
Your company would have understood that these changes would eventually happen even before the Covid-19 outbreak, so how did you respond when the pandemic accelerated these changes?
In MiHCM, we already had the collaboration technology to transform employee experiences almost overnight. The transition to remote working was a breeze. Next, we wanted to improve engagement and productivity while keeping track of employee wellbeing and safety during the pandemic. We also wanted to have some level of visibility on what they have accomplished each day. That is how we ended up innovating and coming up with an AI-based personal assistant product called MiA. So, the whole concept isevery single employee of a business will have a personal assistant that will help them navigate their day, whether they are working remotely or from home or in the office. We felt that this AI-based personal assistant would help people have a flexible work-life. It was mobile and text-based, but it was a standalone product. Virtual assistants overcome several challenges workers face. The first is eliminating the need to log into a workplace assistant app as it runs on Microsoft’s Teams. The second advantage is eliminating or reducing the need to log in to other platforms as MiA accesses data from connected systems to help with work. So far MiHCM’s own MiHCM platform and several of Microsoft’s systems, like ‘Calendar’, ‘Planner’, have been enabled to work with MiA. People can focus on what they are good at, which is problem-solving and decision making. Other tasks can be done with virtual assistants like MiA. For instance, with MiA you do not need to submit a form applying for leave.
Instead, you say ‘I’m taking annual leave Monday to Friday next week’. The system will submit the request to the company’s policy engine for compliance and then submitted for approval. And with the latest MiHCM Mobile App you can accomplish many such tasks and querries as “what’s my leave balance”, “check into work”, “who’s on leave” to more using voice with native integration to Apple Siri & Google Assistant.
Can you tell us how MiHCM helps to shape the future of work, especially around employee experiences?
We see ourselves as architects of the future of work, enabling the most compelling employee experiences with modern state-of-the-art solutions catered to the distinct language, legal and regulatory requirements, and consumer needs of each market we serve. As the pandemic crisis unfolded, we decided to revamp our entire offering because we envisioned the future and enabled clients to integrate MiA with our flagship MiHCM platform, a digital human capital management platform. Employees can use the app to apply for leave, submit expense claims and other work-related stuff. Managers and business owners can use the app to grant the necessary approvals and get the information they need for effective communication with teams, collaboration, monitoring, and decision making from anywhere. Innovation is a constant.
Every month, we introduce new capabilities and features to both MiHCM Mobile & MiA Virtual Assistant for Teams. A leading telecommunication company has even deployed our mobile app as a hub application because we have enabled other apps to integrate with ours so a business can bundle all their apps within MiHCM. So now, MiHCM Mobile is something of a super app allowing our customers to integrate and launch other apps for a seamless employee experience. What we did then was to bring voice and cognitive solutions to the mix. MiHCM Mobile now enables two-way voice communication on smartphones: much like Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant, but also, in many ways quite different. We designed MiA Virtual Assistant to proactively engage with users and understand instructions in natural language. This will enable people to engage with workplaces and teams in a more efficient and fun way. For instance, they do not have to log into various apps, and they can check, apply, approve, and most importantly learn about various corporate policies to product knowledge. We are transforming MiA into a super-agent at a workplace which talks to various other systems. People can lead fuller lives because they can manage their time and priorities better with a digital workplace assistant. Everyone at MiHCM, including our customers and partners, are excited about what we have achieved and the new dimension we are bringing to the employee experience. To succeed beyond Covid-19, companies will have to reimagine or reinvent how people work and invest in the right platforms to deliver hyper-personalised experiences. We are building solutions for companies to elevate employee experiences in the workplace.
TO SUCCEED BEYOND COVID-19, COMPANIES WILL HAVE TO REIMAGINE OR REINVENT HOW PEOPLE WORK AND INVEST IN THE RIGHT PLATFORMS TO DELIVER HYPERPERSONALISED EXPERIENCES