During a recent wine tasting tour of the Temecula Valley with my Sr. Compensation Analyst bestie and fellow Millennial, we started discussing some of the recent opportunities missed by senior leaders in HR. As professional women in our early 30’s, our perspective on how HR leaders can become better player-coaches and developers for talent to the youngest generation of emerging HR talent was much more high-tech driven than that of our Gen-X counterparts. For the areas of highest concern to us at the moment where we identified as having a gap, we found that there are cutting edge technology solutions (aka RESOURCES) that could help bridge those gaps while encouraging professional development, collaboration and socialization within organization of all sizes.  This led to a high level technical discussion about the different HRIS and HRMS systems on the market. I won’t bore you with the geeky, technical details, but suffice to say, there are a lot of awesome tools out there than can help HR Departments of One (me), large HR teams managing a team of globally based employees (her) and everyone in between enhance the user experience of deploying their human capital strategies of 2016.

I am sharing a list of some cool tools that we have either used, are currently using, have demo’d or have colleagues in Human Resources that have referenced as go-to applications to aid them in executing on their strategic HR objectives from a technical standpoint.

Performance Management: A great performance management system will help HR leaders focus on collaboration, improve organization, turn negative feedback into an opportunity to highlight constructive ideas, build a platform for open communication and improve real time feedback.

• Halogen Software – Supports enterprise size clients
• BambooHR – Supports small to mid size business
• tribehr – Supports small, mid-size and enterprise business, but I’ve heard this is a great fit for SMB

Learning Management Systems: Web-based LMS systems allow organizations to deliver centralized content to their learners while simultaneously monitoring and tracking participation and assessing performance. LMS systems also offer the capability for instructors to interact with learners on a global level – video conferencing tools allow learners to feel as though they have direct access to the person leading the learning module and threaded discussions and forums allow learners to chat with each other on a wide range of topics form around the world.

• Litmos – Incredible UI, intuitive, integrates with Salesforce, offers SMB and enterprise solutions.
• Blackboard – A solution that can be implemented by SMBs, large corporations, professional associations and government agencies; Security and data compliance is a hot topic issue and you know that if government agencies are using this application, their data security must be on fleek! This application can be accessed via desktop installation, mobile or web-based.
• TalentLMS – This cloud-based solution states that you can “build e-learning courses in minutes.” It supports SMB up to enterprise and enterprise groups can set up an SSO (Single Sign On) for their organization over a secured and encrypted channel for data communication.

Employee Engagement/Satisfaction Measurement: I shared my thoughts on employee engagement and feedback here.

• Tinypulse – my HR buddies in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley are RAVING about their experiences with Tinypulse. TinyPulse states on their website that using their product can “reduce employee turnover by 49%.” I think that’s a bold statement that needs an asterisk.* *Reduce turnover by 49% by acting upon every employee recommendation/suggestion that you receive from your employee satisfaction surveys! If you’re in the tech industry, big players like Airbnb, Hubspot and LivingSocial are using this system to manage employee engagement which speaks volume about this product.
• Engagedly – Engagedly is cool because it provides a platform for managers to start and encourage conversations with large teams (they may or may not be located around the globe) which encourages idea and information sharing among coworkers. This application hosts employee recognition, performance management, OKR/goals, employee surveys, online learning (they call it LMS lite because it’s not a full LMS), and provides advanced analytics and reporting capabilities. The UI is bright and clean and the application is fairly intuitive.
• CultureAmp – This application also name dropped big players such as Airbnb, Adobde, Slack and Squarespace. This application really is a survey tool, but I’m sure you creative types can find a few additional uses for a tool as robust as CultureAmp.

I hope you found blog post useful. Q4 is typically the time where HR professionals are researching and identifying resources they need for the following year and asking for big ticket items such as software applications to be included in their budget requests so I thought that this timely review may be helpful.

-Namaste

This article is not a full and comprehensive list of the HR applications currently on the market nor was it sponsored by any of the product organizations that were reviewed. A big thank you to Capterra  for providing a forum for software application review and discussion.