HR Goes Digital - Why You Should Take Note, Now!

Posted on 13th May, 2020

What is Digital HR?

One of the most trending terms in the HR fraternity, boosted especially by the constraint of the Covid-19 times, Digital HR, facilitated by the tech boom in the recent years is not simply a fancy term coined for HR in the 21st century.

Rather, Digital HR, refers to a tectonic shift away from traditional HR, with HR going digital facilitating a process optimization through which HR is made more efficient, effective, and connected, by leveraging social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies.

While the use of new technology is an essential component of the transition from traditional to digital HR, it is also essential to align company culture, structure, talent, and process to sustain a measurable impact on a continuously transforming organization, as well as to balance innovation and efficiency.

From the Traditional to the Digital - Travelling with HR

According to Dave Ulrich, the four phases which encompass an organization's transformative journey from traditional to Digital HR, include:

1. HR efficiency

   In this phase, organizations invest in and/or build technology platforms which can efficiently manage HR processes. Using existing HR technology providers, is a popular option for achieving HR efficiency.

2. HR effectiveness

   Technology is used to upgrade practices in people, performance management, communication, and work, in this phase of transforming to digital HR.

3. Emphasis on Data and Information

   One of the key requirements of making an impact with HR is being able to show that impact. This is where data comes in.

   In this phase of the journey to digital HR, information is shared, to create business impact. Data is made accessible, available internal data is combined with sourced external data, and, people analytics is leveraged, to achieve business-relevant insights.

4. Creating Connection and Connected Experiences

   In the final phase, digital HR is leveraged to create a nexus between people. Existing social networks are leveraged, new experiences between people are created, and, technology is used to enable a stronger feeling of belonging and connectedness.

What does Digital HR do for your organization?

As digitization has transformed lives over the years, revamping our daily activities in small, often not immediately noticeable ways, yet leaving us with a massively impacted new routine; HR too sees the influx of digital enables HR too to carry out routine tasks, in a new, more efficient and impactful manner!

Among other things, the advent of Digital HR in an organization, brings about opportunities to:

• Use Data and Analytics in HR
  • There's HR technology out there to measure every single aspect of the employee lifecycle, including preselection, learning & development (L&D), employee engagement
• Make recruitment future-proof
  • Encouraging features such as having a smooth web and/or mobile application based experience, engaging in a data-driven preselection process and developing a personalized, AI-based onboarding program are just a few ways in which recruitment can go digital, freeing up time, making the process more precise, and help manage recruitment TATs, minimizing attrition etc.
• Offering employee's self-service options
  • Offering Digital HR processes, can help employees stay connected with the HR department
  • Employees often want to be in charge of handling their own HR related data, similar to them being free to handle their own emails, workload etc. Enabling employees to do this (e.g., change their mailing address in the record, when shifting homes; adding a change in marital status), with adequate checks and balances (e.g., requiring an approval, or, requiring a marriage certificate/rental agreement copy to be uploaded) in place, helps employees control their own data, as well as free up the time allocated by HR, for such tasks
• Stay competitive in the talent hunt
  • With millennials and gen z, the up and coming workforce of today and the future, being glued to their smart devices more often than not, and transacting largely on the digital platform; it is important for digitization to be visible within an organization and its culture, to attract and retain the best talent from this population