Over the last decade, HR function has been inundated with a slew of technologies that could redefine various activities within HR function. Until now, majority of these technology interventions have aided HR function to deliver its services to employees more efficiently by supporting existing processes and tasks. In other words, technology has been viewed as a tool that would enhance HR effectiveness by increasing the speed or reducing the cost of overall delivery.
Applications such as payroll management, intranet portals that could facilitate speedy reimbursements, disseminate organisation policies and facilitate collaboration for common goals and act as a common communication channel with employees have certainly helped HR improve the time to action and its visibility within the organisation.
Lately, digital technologies have begun to disrupt businesses by enabling them to create new markets and new businesses, acquire new customers and expand the revenue base with the view to creating sustainable advantage. Many of these technologies and tools such as social media, analytics, cloud based systems and mobile apps have entered into the HR domain as well and recognising their role in enhancing their productivity, HR teams have started adopting them to augment their functioning. However, it is now important to turn to their disruptive capabilities and examine the opportunities that are available beyond the known horizons, that could potentially transform HR functioning.
Just as consumerisation trends in technology are being witnessed in the marketing function, organisations have to rethink their HR systems which have been built for access within the context of physical office space. We now need to convert these systems covering payroll, reimbursements, learning management, attendance, leave management and others to mobile ready formats with different user dynamics and features and also consider hosting them on the cloud.
Recruitment is one of the earliest functions to embrace social media for talent resourcing. In addition to continuing to tap the well known social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, recruitment teams need to continuously research industry specific social media channels, use video channels smartly and develop meaningful content in order to attract the right talent to the communities that they wish to be part of. Now, with imaginative use of social media and the right content, top quality talent would be possible to be tapped by the recruiters and the time to recruitment will further reduce.
Performance management and feedback systems can get a significant boost with the new technologies. Instead of waiting for the year end appraisal system, it is possible to institutionalise multi-pronged and instantaneous feedback from various stakeholders that could be inbuilt in the performance management system.
HR could shift focus from facilitating reviews and appraisals once or twice a year to fostering loops of ongoing feedbacks instead of depending upon insights and feedbacks from the currently available systems that would become outdated and hence not very useful to facilitate impactful and timely changes. Now HR has an opportunity to provide strategic support closely aligned with the business needs and extend the boundary of traditional performance management systems to cover operational and customer focussed transactions.
Training and development activity also assumes new contours in the context of emerging digital technologies. From the days of classroom led training to self paced e-learning and m-learning, organisations recognise that learning also takes place outside the boundaries defined by them on account of easy access to content through a variety of channels on the internet. Training managers should therefore take advantage of the available digital tools to bring together content from multiple sources and design new learning frameworks and assessment tools to support various learning needs at workplace.
Employee engagement is another area where digital technology has the potential to favourably disrupt the current ecosystem. While employees and employers wish for more face time with mentors and counsellors, because of the distances and the limitations of time, it is not easy to make this happen. However, in an always connected environment, it is possible to facilitate such interactions and provide innovative tools for a follow through support.
Employees increasingly are eager to be associated with causes close to their hearts and thus volunteer their time for worthy causes. It has been found through several surveys that organisations which facilitate such associations for their employees rate high in employee engagement. Technology platforms specially designed for supporting voluntary work provide information of such opportunities and also connect directly with the beneficiaries if their services could be offered via online medium.
Predictive analytics is a largely unexplored phenomenon in the HR domain. In the context of people management, it would not only help HR managers to take smarter decisions about all aspects of HR, but would also help in customising actions based on
insightful data that would benefit both the organisation and the employees in the long run. In order to bring about transformation in the HR function on the strength of disruptive technologies, it is crucial that HR managers are able to appreciate the capabilities of technologies, get familiar with data modelling and envision the future of their functions on the strength of these tools.
HR managers need to develop sound understanding of technology trends and build close working relationships with IT departments. HR managers have to prepare the ground for retaining the soft touch with their employees but their actions and services would have to become more metrics driven with the help of digital tools and analysis thereof.
The writer is CEO, Global Talent Track, a corporate training solutions company
