Modern HR Faces Multiple Challenges from New Workforce of Connected, Tech-Savvy Employees

By Aaron Green, Vice President, HCM, Oracle APAC

Aaron Green, Vice President, HCM, Oracle APAC

Engaged employees, aligning talent supply with forecast business requirements and achieving sustainable human resources (HR) departmental operational excellence through improved efficiency will be some of the key focus priorities for HR departments in the second half of the decade.

"Modern HR leaders are now forced to rethink HR best practices from workforce planning, compensation and performance reviews to aspects such as gender and workforce age diversity and talent acquisition"

While many organisations are now playing “catch-up” on how to best engage their human capital to deliver increasingly higher expectations of business performance, it appears that solving this issue has fallen well and truly in the laps of the HR directors and their teams who are increasingly tasked with using analytics to drive successful employee engagement, workforce optimisation, position management, and performance management outcomes.

Until recently, most HR directors were preparing plans to cope up with business expansion in an era of chronic skills shortages. Now they are being asked to develop a workforce, while reducing costs and ideally without losing valuable talent in the process. Chief executive officers and finance departments are not blind to the challenge but they do expect HR to be confident, responsive and realistic about the hard decisions they are going to have to make.

At the same time, organisations are rethinking that the HR function as digital technologies are changing every aspect of how a company engages with its workforce. To embrace these changes and create real business value, HR organisations increasingly need a modern HR and talent strategy that can meet ever-increasing employee expectations.

On top of this, workforce globalisation has emerged as a key trend that will have a significant impact on the recruitment and retention of talented employees in the next few years. Modern HR leaders are now forced to rethink HR best practices from workforce planning, compensation and performance reviews to aspects such as gender and workforce age diversity and talent acquisition.

The idea of HR services delivered by the cloud has become a key foundational element that almost any business person needs to embrace and leverage. It's 2016 and business is conducted from more than just a single address. Businesses are demanding more flexibility from their systems. They want to enable their staff to break free from the shackles of the old way of doing things and have their key information, data and business tools available to them whenever and wherever they need them. This means software and services in the cloud, accessible on a multitude of devices. At the same, leading HR practitioners should look to combine HR related data from multiple data sources into a comprehensive view, which can be shared across the company for coordinated workforce assessment and planning.

Chief HR Officers and HR Directors are playing an increasingly active role in generating more value for the enterprise. The tools now exist for HR to drive the next wave of transformation and become the intersection between the people, HR and business strategy, in turn, demonstrating its commercial relevance to the business.