Over the last decade, the typical HR function has worked hard to meet the needs of a constantly changing business environment. To a great extent, keeping costs low while moving quickly to meet company and employee needs, focusing on streamlining transactions, and helping employees comply with policies.
With the digital revolution that is currently taking place, companies are constantly confronted with new situations and new tools such as mobile integration, analytical tools, IT security, and data protection laws. This reality often prompts calls for HR to be more strategic and leverage technology to deliver value for the business. It has become imperative for HR practitioners to understand how much tech can improve the workflow and productivity of the people within an organisation.
Embrace Technology and Analytics
In today’s environment, HR needs to understand the workforce in greater depth in order to recruit, develop and retain talent more and more effectively. The traditional approach to workforce data is no longer sufficient. The HR department holds a key wealth of data about the workforce and there is a need to find better ways to leverage its data to build an agile, responsive and focused workforce. HR data can be used to produce a range of reports which may be key to management decision making. In short, HR needs to deliver more actionable information more quickly in order to keep talent in step with business goals and strategies.
Progressive HR departments are already using HR analytics to predict and assess everything from employee retention to recruitment strategies to the success of wellness programs. For example, it is possible to predict how much revenue an individual can generate based on the employee’s psychometric profile or predict an employee’s intention to leave his or her current employment.
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Extend HR to the Workforce
The uptake of workplace technology has occurred at a rapid pace and it is likely to continue. The use of mobile devices continues to increase and individuals are using them for a growing range of functions in their lives and increasingly, on the job. In today’s workplace, meeting the expectations of employees will naturally involve both mobile and social media technologies. Mobile capabilities are now incorporated into some enterprise HR systems, making it possible to deliver HR applications to virtually any device on an anytime-anywhere basis.
HR has an opportunity to leverage this trend, and use employees’ comfort with consumer technologies to make HR tools more accessible and attractive. By using familiar interfaces and mobile and social tools, they can effectively extend HR processes out into the workforce for the benefit of employees and the company alike.
Take Advantage of Advanced Recruiting Tools
The ability to find and attract the right talent has always been important, but today, recruiting is more critical than ever and in some ways, more challenging. That scarcity of skilled talent is further complicated by the increasingly dynamic nature of the business, and the fact that companies need to access changing skill sets.
The Digital Transformation of HR is reshaping the talent marketplace and changing how recruitment is done. Vast amounts of information about talent are now out in the open and freely available, as candidates promote themselves on sites such as LinkedIn. Thus, a company and its competitors are likely to be looking at the same potential recruits at the same time.
The technology used to support recruiting has evolved a great deal in a relatively short time, and there are now a number of advanced recruiting tools that HR can draw on to optimize and accelerate talent acquisition. These tools often focus on helping HR make better use of the wealth of talent data that is available today. Some recruiting solutions offer advanced search, filtering, screening and assessment capabilities that let recruiters quickly sift through massive numbers of applications to find relatively few candidates who are a good fit for a position. With recruiting systems that are integrated into overall talent management systems, HR can also draw on data about high-performing employees to create profiles that let recruiters look for candidates with similar traits.
Integrate Cloud Computing in HR Processes
Cloud computing has evolved quickly from being an innovative approach to IT towards being a mainstream business technology. It is changing the way people and organizations work and the HR department is no exception. Cloud services can often be accessed on mobile devices, making them a good fit for on-the-move employees. The benefit of this to the HR function is that it can enable a shift to more employee self-service and manager controlled processes, helping to reduce the burden and the costs to HR.
The cloud makes HR more flexible and responsive in support of the business. As the world becomes increasingly unpredictable, organizations that can adapt to changing business conditions will outperform the competition. To remain relevant, the HR function in organizations should reshape itself so that it becomes the critical driver of agility.
Carl Tapi is a Consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and human resources consulting firm. https://www.linkedin.com/in/carl-tapi-45776482/ Phone +263 (242) 481946-48/481950 or cell number +263 772 469 680 or email: carl@ipcconsultants.com or visit our website at www.ipcconsultants.com