HR teams are bearing unprecedented responsibility during the pandemic: between leading
“People teams should be spending time with people, not in spreadsheets,” says Baccaro. “There's a lot of work on HR’s plate, and the more we can take off, the more thoughtful they can be about the things that truly matter.”
Tech startup Sora is looking to alleviate the administrative burdens that are weighing HR leaders down. Co-founder Laura Del Baccaro saw this struggle first hand when witnessing her fiance’s constant uphill battle with administrative tasks like onboarding new hires and maintaining employee records through various data systems. She knew that something needed to change.
“All of the things you need to do that involve more than one system are a huge headache because those systems aren't talking to each other,” Baccaro says. “So Sora actually keeps your data in sync.”
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Sixty-four percent of HR professionals are struggling with managing employees in remote or hybrid work environments, according to a survey by TrueCue, a data and analytics platform. And more technology means more headaches: an HR team can be in charge of 35 to 40 different platforms, all of which carry crucial employee data, says Craig Sabol, Sora user and the executive director of people operations and analytics at Myovant Sciences, a healthcare company focused on women’s health and prostate cancer.
The power of Sora’s system alignment lies in its ability to not only reduce errors in employee data, but free the hands of HR teams who are either bogged down in moving data between systems or constantly telling others to input information. Sora even sets reminders and flags overdue tasks, ensuring HR teams are notified of what must be manually placed among different systems.
Sabol’s team tapped into Sora’s platform to streamline the number of programs they are using to manage their workforce. For example, Greenhouse, a recruiting software, cannot transfer data to ADP, which deals with online payroll and benefits administration, making for a more tedious onboarding process. Sora bridges the gap, allowing for information from Greenhouse to be shared in ADP, going as far as to change the fields in ADP’s system if need be.
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“Sora has just been a godsend for us because it allows us to connect a lot of tools,” says Sabol. “Instead of going with a big HR hub, we're going to engage with companies that are best in class for that module.”
And in the face of growing concerns about the future of work and the “great resignation,” HR may need to spend its energy elsewhere. Automating these administrative tasks can free them up to provide person-to-person support.
“I personally feel that the HR industry is falling a little behind in how we think about engagement, retention and attraction,” Sabol says. “We're trying to challenge ourselves to throw out the playbook that existed before and think differently on how we can support employees.”
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However, it takes time to think about solutions and put initiatives into action. HR is at the head of a pivotal moment in workforce history. The way in which employee performance management is conceptualized to best onboarding practices are under revision. What diversity, equity and inclusion look like in the workplace is still a process of trial and error.
Sora’s mission amounts to giving HR teams time. Sora is already developing the ability to marry payroll, demographic and performance data, so companies can see if their
“HR should be able to take a step back from the constant fire drills and reactivity and think about larger employee trends,” says Baccaro. “If anything, people teams are the most important teams at a company, and without people teams, there are no other teams.”
