Oracle’s ME employee experience suite targets workforce challenges

In response to the pandemic and the resultant Great Resignation, Oracle has launched a new employee experience platform, dubbed Oracle ME, under its Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) suite to help enterprises with workforce challenges such as attrition.

“Bad employee experience has been one of the major disruptors in the HCM space. With largely distributed workforces and many contributing remotely, employees are often dissatisfied with their experience across most enterprises leading to the need of a personalized employee experience platform to tackle issues such as attrition,” said Yvette Cameron, senior vice president of global product strategy for Oracle Cloud HCM.

Oracle ME’s built-in tools offer capabilities such as tracking employee sentiment, offering contextual advice to leaders including HR personnel while they are making decisions about staff, helping employees navigate HR processes, providing personalized communications, and offering support with the help of self-service tools, Cameron said.

ME starts gathering data on an employee right from the onboarding process with the help of timely surveys. “These surveys in turn with the input of other third-party data such as information from Mercer [employee benefits] or Mettle [talent assessment] or LinkedIn help the platform provide more context to HR,” Cameron said.

An example of providing context would be a suggestion from the platform when an HR leader is offering a raise or promotion to an individual employee. The system can show the companywide norm for the raise along with other information to ease the decision-making process, according to Cameron.

The entire platform is aimed at reducing the number of third-party vendors needed for an enterprise, said Holger Muller, principal analyst, Constellation Research.

“The end game is more use of Oracle. With native Oracle employee experience tools as part of the ERP suite, enterprises don’t need a Trello or a Teams,” Mueller said. “That has appeal for CIOs because it will have less vendors to juggle and worry about integrations,” Mueller explained.

Oracle ME offers variety of tools

Oracle ME features include Oracle Touchpoints, HCM Communicate, Oracle Journeys, Oracle Connections, Oracle HR Helpdesk and Oracle Digital Assistant.

Oracle Touchpoints, according to the company, helps managers continuously capture, track, and act on employee sentiment.

“Managers get continuous employee insights through pulse surveys and receive recommended next actions to take, such as scheduling check-ins, providing feedback, or celebrating a work anniversary,” Cameron said, adding that the employee engagement center within Oracle Touchpoints allows employees to take an active role in growing their careers by providing a window to organize topics for check-ins, review pulse survey trends, and access suggested actions by their manager or HR.

In order to help HR managers and ease employee communication, HCM Communicate is designed to allow HR teams to design, send, monitor, and measure the impact of communications.

“Built directly into Oracle Cloud HCM, HCM Communicate is connected to an organization’s workforce data, making it easy for HR teams to create and send personalized communications to groups with specific characteristics,” Cameron said, adding that HR teams can also measure engagement and send followups or set up ongoing campaigns to drive more action with Communicate.

Oracle ME allows for customizable workflows

Oracle had earlier released a composable, or customizable, workflow solution called Journeys under its HCM Cloud suite —now included with HCM ME — to assist with employee onboarding, personal activity and training planning, and the exploration of  new career opportunities.

“New enhancements help employees make informed decisions by surfacing personally relevant instructions, training, and analytics along their guided digital journey. It can be extended to include workflow actions and resources from other Oracle and third-party applications to deliver guidance for different business needs across the organization,” Cameron said.

Oracle Journeys is already active in 1,200 customer companies and more than 800 prospective buyers are in advanced discussions, according to Cameron.

Another tool built into ME is Connections, which is an interactive workforce directory and organization chart aimed at fostering collaboration, the company said.

Help desk support rounds out Oracle ME

In order to help employees faster, ME works with HR Help Desk and Digital Assistant.

While HR Help Desk is a service request management solution, the Digital Assistant is a HR chatbot that provides a conversational interface for employees to get immediate answers to queries.

“With HR Help Desk, employees can search for content, securely submit inquiries, and open help tickets through multiple channels including Oracle Digital Assistant, SMS, email, and social platforms,” Cameron said, adding that Help Desk and Communicate are licensed separately with additional costs based on the number of subscriptions.

Journeys and the other tools come at no additional cost, Cameron added.