Employee Engagement – The cornerstone of HCM

SOAIS has a proven track record to deliver solutions out of the box, not just in Oracle applications. One of our customers recently wanted a functionally simple change to improve employee engagement – but from a technical standpoint, there were challenges.

Here is a sneak peek to the problem and our approach.

Problem statement:

Whenever a new employee joins the organization, a welcome email is triggered from Peoplesoft. This email was sent from Peoplesoft Support email ID. The mail content had a generic salutation to the new joiner as ‘Dear Employee’ followed by an image which has the message for the new joiner along with a photo of the CEO of the organization.

Though this has been there for quite some years, our customer wanted to make this email more personal to the employee. The requirement was to

1. Trigger the email from the CEO email ID.
2. Use new joiner name, instead of ‘Dear Employee’. This name should be embedded within the image itself rather than printed outside.

Challenge:

Though the email ID of the CEO can be added as the message sender, the real challenge was to embed new joiner’s name on the image. We tried to use the generated image as a background image, but Office 365 wouldn’t support it.

Approach:

We started looking at the image as three different parts – the background image with the photo of the CEO, the mail content and the company logo; and worked on processing it. When the code included CSS, it rendered beautifully in the Outlook web clients (Chrome, Firefox, etc..,), but the Outlook client didn’t support CSS. There was only one option, i.e., to code the entire image with the content only using HTML. After much research and some trial and errors, we decided to use a feature in HTML, which can be used to get the desired output only with HTML coding. This code was then used in a Peoplesoft program to generate the email content internally and sent the resultant image as an attachment to the new joiner.

Result:

Generating a desired image only with the help of HTML was a challenge, where we had to use different capabilities of the HTML. It was a great learning experience for the team as well. Our team was appreciated for providing a solution, though the skills required to solve this problem was outside the purview of PeopleSoft.

The customer was elated with the outcome and they now interested to implement similar solutions at business unit levels, for various communications to stakeholders.

Are you thinking of a similar change to system to engage employees better? Write to us.