The digital age is moving at a swift pace, changing the way organisations work, be it in the private or the public sector. It’s not just about changing anymore; it’s about transforming at an accelerating rate. HR department is also affected by these changes and is on their way of finding new approaches to problem-solving. Business and HR pioneers can never again keep on operating as indicated by old ideal models.
A decade ago, the HR department was simply a set of employees handling wages and compensations, keeping records, ensuring that the companies keep up with the rules and regulations, etc. However, over the past few years, it has made drastic changes due to the evolving global technology. Today, the HR is not a set of employees; it’s a digital platform that handles all the operational HR tasks that were previously handled by HR talent management. In addition to that, HR now helps critical people centric decisions with a broad range of accurate and real-time workforce analytics.
Rather than using their energy primarily on personnel management and administrative tasks, HR now focuses mainly on employee engagement, managing talent and strengthening culture. They also open doors to employees to increase their positivity and happiness, so that the employees will have less stress on their work which results in better outcome. How is this transformation created with new Digital HR platforms?
HR and business leaders leverage digital HR to reinvent the performance management with real time feedback and on-going evaluation. This helps employees to perform consistently, thus increase their positivity and happiness at the workplace. Employees will have lesser degree of stress and new HR will enable your mobile workforce to manage their routine HR needs via mobile. Applying for leave, completing the self-performance appraisal, completing a training program is no longer a tedious task to employees as mobile enables self-service capabilities are offered by all new digital HR platforms.
Despite all these new benefits, 80% of respondents of a recent global research has indicated that the HR skills of their company are unsatisfactory. The key reason for this is, humans are skeptical to embrace new technologies, where everything is automated and they cannot interfere. A part of these employees are the ones who were used to negotiate with HR department for their benefit, while the rest is hesitant to accept and adapt to change. Regardless, Digitalization of HR provides a legitimate and trustworthy system for every employee, which will improve their morale, and ultimately the productivity of the company.
Based on the above trends, let’s have a look at how digital HR has changed the nature of three aspects in the workplace;
Employee engagement
Engaged employees are happy to work and perform well in routine tasks. They find their work interesting and satisfying, therefore put their heart and soul to work. Research efforts conducted globally says that the employee engagement has increased from 59% to 63% during the past six years, the improvement is majorly due to the satisfactory service provided by Digital HR platforms. As we discussed above, bringing employees closer to HR via mobile, social capabilities result in a much engaged workforce.
Talent Management
Talent Management is completely refreshed with new HR solutions. The killer components of novel talent management are performance management and learning management capabilities. Performance appraisals have always been a cumbersome process between a superior and an employee. Not only the appraisals are time consuming to conclude but also create unnecessary disputes between you and your employees (if conducted in the wrong way). New HR platforms enable employees and superiors to create goals in line with the company mission. Employees are able to update their progress on goals as they achieve. This lets superiors to assure that employees are on track. Continuous feedback and conversation between superiors and employees helps employees to sharpen their skills and avoid potential mistakes.
Learning management is always a boring and less engaging exercise in the company. Do you always have solid analytics to monitor the results of your training programs? New HR platforms will provide online learning capabilities and analytics to understand the effectiveness of training programs. In our future posts, we will discuss how other elements of talent management would be transformed with digital HR.
Strengthening Culture
The stronger the workplace culture is; happier the employees will be about their working environment. Digital HR platforms provide employees with the ability to share their thoughts, ideas and to give their feedback, all within one window. Pulse surveys are an interesting add-on in today’s Digital HR platforms through which HR can extract data from employees’ responses and deliver them to the senior levels in order to improve work culture.
Needless to say, the changes of HR over the past few years have tremendously changed and improved the workforce and therefore contributed to the success of each and every organisation. We will be discussing further on the other aspects the HR has helped in improvement through these years.
