Life has gone through a sea change for everyone in the past year due to COVID-19. Work from home is routine, and virtual onboarding is the norm. Amidst all this, we can find the world of HR professionals grappling with means to offer employees a better experience; people who have been away from the office for over 1.5 years now. Thankfully, we have the technology to the rescue. Integrating technology with employee lifecycle right from the first touchpoint is making the entire process a bit more easy, friendly, and a lot more accurate.
While HR continues to be all about people, technology is helping us streamline operations, attract and retain, and deliver a better experience to employees. Let’s look at 5 trends that are emerging strongly in these disruptive times:
Digitization of HR
This is the need of the hour. Covid19 has pushed every industry and organization to adopt digitization, and to that end, there is an immediate need for HR functions across industries to transform themselves and adopt digitization sooner than later. With people working from home, HR has to rethink the digitization aspect. Information has to be made available in real-time and digitization is the key to make this happen. Whether it is through cloud-based HR tools or re-strategizing processes, digitization will help HR create a collaborative and seamless work culture resilient to such uncertain times.
Digital Employer Branding
Social media has become a key factor in enhancing a company’s profile and bolstering its image to prospective employees. According to a LinkedIn report, 72% of recruiters have opined that an organization’s reputation plays a vital part in attracting and recruiting the cream of the crop. Digital platforms play a big role today in reviewing and generating employee voices. Employee advocacy is a crucial part of brand building, and social media platforms encourage employees to share their personalized content and become an ambassador for the organization.
People Analytics Tools
Employee retention is one of the most crucial responsibilities for the HR team in any company. It has been observed that many organizations struggle to retain employees due to the discord between the company’s goals and the employee’s career aspirations. Companies not sharing the roadmap of growth and their vision with the workforce sufficiently may leave employees unhappy and demotivated. People analytics tools using advanced tech like AI and data science have come up big time in bridging this gap. These tools collate and process employee data in almost real-time and deduct patterns. These insights help HR professionals know employee needs, their understanding of the company goals, levels of employee engagement, and take measures accordingly.
Blockchain Integration
With digital taking over everything, it brings along certain challenges such as data security and access management. While still at a nascent stage, blockchain integration can help in maintaining workplace transparency and data integrity. It can help HR managers to standardize employee data that increase the collaboration between various departments. Blockchain ledgers are tamper-proof since they have key-based access, making data security more robust.
Real-time Performance Management
Feedback is the fuel to increase efficiency. The trend of getting constant feedback on employee performance is not yet that common in the HR domain. But there are real-time performance management tools that can help employees, their managers, and HR to gauge their performance constantly. Using these tools, managers can identify non-performing employees and look for ways to help them improve their performance, and reward and recognize the high performers to keep them motivated. Performance management doesn’t have to wait an entire year to happen.
HR has integrated with technology extensively in the last decade. With the stupendous growth of opportunity across industries, talent management plays a critical role in business and revenue growth in a company. This needs C-level involvement to modernize and evolve new and efficient ways to attract, hire, manage and retain a highly engaged workforce leveraging technology. Staying updated on this front provides the best chance of staying ahead in the market.
The above article is authored by Krishna Muniramaiah, Head of Human Resources, Asia Pacific, Altimetrik
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