Technology Evolution in HR

By Pooja Taneja, HR Director, BT

Pooja Taneja, HR Director, BT

Technology disruption is taking place in every sphere of our lives. How do we effectively leverage on the current technologies available to us in Human Resources? How we can further enhance the CIO and HR partnership to make the organization agile and always ready to adapt to the ever changing business climate?

Technology is reshaping how traditional HR systems worked in the past and the CIO and HR partnership is reshaping HR and building a Smart Workforce.

End to End Process visibility and systems integration

As companies and functions expand, there is the constant need for end to end process visibility to enable faster and well informed decision making with the ‘complete picture’ analytics.

One of the challenges companies face is how to integrate the point / legacy systems which were developed as companies expanded. At BT we understand this critical need for systems and tools integration.

From an HR standpoint, we regularly see that in the past Performance tools were not integrated with HRIS, and neither did they speak to the payroll system or if you needed to look at leave details that had to be pulled from another disparate system.

Technology firms are recognizing this and starting to build solutions which now allow the integration of different platforms and processes and it is also important that such solutions do not become a cost burden for the companies wanting to adopt and move in this direction.

BT continuously builds on this integration with some markets being moved ahead to ‘beta’ test the integration and then roll that out globally.

The HR model has moved to a ‘Complete 360 degree Employee Life Cycle Management’ with each stage of the employee life cycle seamlessly integrated.

Employee Self Service

Employee self-service has been around for a few years. Itsbenefits are significant as it gives control back in the hands of the employee whether they are tracking their personal details, compensation, benefit, payroll history or those of the employees who report into them and so can plan better for their management. This is also important for HR as it gives bandwidth back to them to focus on business critical areas rather than the administrative tasks of responding on basic requests that are easily available.

But with the major shift in digitization and customer experience, this needs to cater to an individual customer experience.

This will be further enhanced as companies modernize the approach to performance management, career development as well as training and development and provide seamless self-service in an integrated manner for these.

This in turn will allow employees to see how the company strategy translates into the company goals which then trickles down to their own goals and how their performance impacts the big picture. Knowing how one is performing or needs to perform to be aligned with the big picture can have a significant increase in employee engagement and in turn productivity.

This then opens up the gate for a deeper conversation for a manager and the employee about what is the ambition for career growth and progression and the pathways available in the organization. That in turn puts control back in the employee’s hands to map their path of training and development so they reach their goal of career progression. An integrated system also allows for reward and recognition to be linked in to performance.

This has a 2-fold gain as employees feel valued through the recognition and are motivated and engaged and the company also is building on a database of talent which makes it easier to identify employees who can take on enhanced responsibilities when there is a role or skill gap in the business.

Health, Wellness, Mobility, and IoT

Major breakthroughs have been made in this area in recent times. Investing in an employee’s well-being is one of the most important investments and the current advancements in technology give companies new ways to promote a healthier lifestyle for their employees. A healthy employee is a productive employee and mobile / wearable technology is being leveraged to provide the extra edge in the health and wellness space, especially with many new apps coming out.

BT working closely with our health partners, has been able to move the benefit administration to mobile applications making it easily accessible to employees as well as importantly ensuring that the access is not time bound or through the bottleneck that may be created by going through the HR team. Turnaroundtime is fasterwith queries being addressed by the experts in the field in near real time.

Companies are making major inroads into wearable technology and introducing programs which involve tracking employee exercise / health and rewarding whatever goal is set for the behavior around that. Over time, the technology will be able to provide real-time information through HR platforms connected to the technology so that health programs can be developed that allow employees to tailor a bespoke routine for themselves. Such personalized experiences enhance other employee engagement programs, driving motivation and in turn productivity with the downstream benefit of talent retention.

But companies need to be mindful about the aspects of data privacy here. Which brings us to another area where the close partnership with CIOs will help the company to charter their strides in this direction bringing bigger benefits to employees while addressing both technology and privacy issues.

AI has advanced beyond the initial hype and it has a significant impact for us in HR as it uses systems and processes to streamline the analysis of data in the background and present an easier way to manage mundane tasks.

AI components are being included in hiring, onboarding and other HR processes for predictive analytics. But due diligence needs to be made on the AI algorithms so they cater to the organizations fair policies.

Cloud

Cloud Computing continues to provide tremendous value and at BT we leverage in this wonderful technology. Cloud Computing enables HR to have access to information globally, making the storage & retrieval of information fast and efficient with greater transparency. It allows for information flow to be instant and making data analysis that much easier.Not to mention the large scale cost effectiveness. Security aspects should be well taken care off and in HR we see the value in areas like recruitment, onboarding and performance assessment.

Collaboration within a Global workforce

Last, but not least, with global teams sitting in different time zones in worldwide locations companies continue to invest in collaborative technology. At BT, our world class video conferencing technology provides significant influence to HR. It allows us to stay connected with staff over our multiple locations, onboarding becomes faster and employee relationships thrive breaking down geographical boundaries.

This is a big differentiator in how technology can make a difference for us in HR. Not to mention the time and cost benefits.

All in all,Technology is the enabler to ensure we invest in our most important resource – people.

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