For leaders of Global Business Services organizations, the talent discussion remains front and center. Whether you’re accountable for all HR operations globally or spearheading the creation and systematization of infrastructure to deliver those operations, talent will factor into your equation. 

Barbara Hodge, host of the SSONext podcast, sat down with Volker Schrank, Senior Director of Global Employee Experience, Processes & Technology, at Mondelez to talk about how to deliver a great employee experience. 

Volker’s body of work covers multi-industry HR transformation with a focus on HR diagnostics, strategy development and implementation, organization design, and talent management. At Mondelez, his team is accountable for making sure that all of the HR technology is not just “the latest and greatest” but also that it’s working as it should and delivering value consistently. Using technology as a driver, Mondelez delivers a high-class employee experience, always looking to the end-user (ie: the employee) to try and understand how best to make each interaction with HR frictionless.

The definitions of a successful digital HR service

Volker explains: “Modern HR has to find the right balance between technology, automation, AI, and the human experience - a human relation. A few years back, HR was all about manual interactions, a lot of people were necessary to drive HR … to drive the administrative processes.”

Today, however, human resources departments can do so much more than what they could in the past. Actual human relations sits at the center, says Volker. He reminds us that a majority of the back-end processes can be standardized. Corporations are at a wonderfully fortunate time in history when they are able to harmonize and automate through new technologies that are relatively recent, and superbly innovative. 

How do you connect good HR operations with excellent customer experience?

The connection between your talent and happy customers is a deep one. Volker says that at Mondelez, the goal for HR is to stay in the background; to be in place to support all of their employees when they need it. “The trick is to not get in the way of an employee,” he emphasizes. “And by not being in their way, they can focus on their actual work. And that is making sure we bring the right products, with the right ingredients, into the right markets, everyday, to make our customers happy.”

To achieve this, technology plays a key role. “Employee experience with all of the HR administrative processes is often eased by technology. Technology is the element that helps us get to the place we’re going to. We look at things process by process, area by area, and think about how we can automate it … how we can simplify it … and how we can bring it to the market in a way that makes sense for our employees.”

For context, Volker reminds us that at least 30% of the activities associated with a majority of disciplines can be automated. Further, that even knowledge-based tasks that were previously thought to be hard to automate without a loss of quality can, in fact, be automated.

What does the future of work look like at Mondelez?

Volker says that his team looks at solutions from a number of perspectives. A key perspective in 2022 and beyond remains in the area of flexible work arrangements. 

“Enabling the workforce to work from everywhere, while also enabling each and every one to bring their best to work each and every day, is a clear focus for us and many others.”

If you like the audio medium, and would like to hear a detailed interview that dives much further into employee experience, please listen to the SSONext podcast with Barbara Hodge and Volker Schrank on Spotify, or by pressing play below.