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Guide To Modern HR

The role of human resources is evolving, and industry now demands far more from the people function than ever before.

In this guide you will learn to link modern HR initiatives, such as the new talent-centric model of managing your organisation, role changes for HR practitioners, engagement and collaboration, HR Technology, big data, predictive analytics, changing demographics, allowing your workforce to convert innovative ideas into viable processes, products, and services that bring value and increase competitiveness in the knowledge economy.

 

Social apps and collaboration technology have forever changed the way we live and work. When applied to the workplace, these same social technologies can improve communication and increase productivity.

More jobs are bigger than can be done by one person. Collaboration enables a network effect that makes a much bigger contribution to the enterprise. HR leaders who foster true collaboration will boost enterprise performance.

Employees have unprecedented speed and access to anything and anyone from anywhere. This is dramatically shifting employee expectations, and continues to do so as new innovations continue to be absorbed into the mobile landscape.

In addition to social networks, predictive ranking tools help HR automate job board processes, while databases of suitable candidates allow companies to manage their own relationship with candidates.

These smart sourcing strategies will allow you to recruit from a bigger pool of qualified candidates, build stronger relationships with job seekers, and earn a higher return on any talent sourcing investments. HR needs a performance management model that recognizes this shift and evaluates performance based on actual measures of work tied to business outcomes.

 

Changes For You As HR Leader

You are no longer the organization’s HR professional! Sure, change is constant and difficult. But you now have the responsibility and resources to make changes succeed. And that is the CHRO’s best opportunity to win friends and influence people—to demonstrate true enterprise leadership.

Workforces often cannot adjust to change, making long-term engagement and performance declines common.

How can heads of HR create a workforce that consistently performs well during change and vastly improves the probability of change success?

Before you get all excited.

Given the world of work has changed so substantially since traditional HR processes and systems were introduced, we believe there is room for bolder approaches to be considered.

A little skepticism may be wise:

Beware the ‘sample of one’ – when exciting results appear from companies breaking the mould, be cautious of one-hit wonders riding good luck and self promotion rather than good management.

There is no silver bullet that applies to all – many stories of truly innovative HR approaches are coming from small to medium hi tech organisations. A radical approach does not necessarily make sense for your organisation and HR team. Ensure your changes are fit-for-purpose.

Nurture new approaches carefully and realistically.

Do not be led so much by where you want to be in ‘best practice’ that you miss out on important steps on the (re-)design, implementation journey. It is important to be realistic about your organisation’s capabilities!!

 

Could This Be The End Of Traditional HR? 🙂

As technology advances and presents us with more talent spread across a broader playing field, many HR functions are distancing themselves from the typical image of pencil-pushers and grievance councilors. HR is being rebranded!

Human resources in the future will have to deal with the highest number of freelance or remote workers we have seen, and will be tasked with engaging up to five different generations in the workforce. With such drastic changes in employee demographics and work habits, perhaps the HR function should be rebranded, changing in accordance with the developing office environment.

The advantages of a rebrand are endless.

We know that if a customer receives good service, they will probably come back. Therefore, People Operations will learn that good communication and accurate results is paramount to sustaining talent within their organizations. The future of HR is fast developing, and so must our strategies if we plan to remain strong influencers, we are becoming more people-centered than ever, and we might even change our name for it!

 

Fostering Corporate Culture and Collaboration

The new world of work presents organizations with challenges that require a new playbook – one that makes HR more agile, forward thinking and bolder in its solutions,” reads Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends Report.

Today’s emerging office culture is one where employees are constantly connected to their roles, using technology to be immediately and consistently available to the organization where needs be. Currently it formulates a culture of employees with massively unprecedented levels of engagement and productivity, linking two concepts together in a way that stands to benefits business profitability, BUT not necessarily the lives of employees.

This is a concept that will continue to develop in business in the upcoming years, and People professionals must actively seek to eradicate issues that come with a radically changing culture. Keeping a close eye on the office climate and attending to issues and challenges as soon as they arrive will enable HR the ability to accurately dissolve problems.

Fostering a collaborative culture through social networks is a key point in this strategy, developing maximum transparency and collaboration. Such networks also enable employees to participate in collaborative innovation processes The creation of such a culture of collaboration starts with the firm commitment from executives and business leaders in favor of transforming processes, systems and structures.

The organization that learns from the environment leads transformations which energize markets and surprises employees. Likewise, it expands access to experiences, practices and knowledge outside the physical boundaries of the company, through intensive and extensive use of social technologies and next-generation collaboration. Implementation of a socio-technical approach to the work organization will offer workers the opportunity to enjoy greater responsibility and enhance their personal development. For this to be possible, it will be necessary to deploy a culture of change via participative work design and lifelong learning measures.

Collaborative partnership

The focus on the current workforce will involve networking and integration of several different teams through value networks. This collaborative partnership will only be possible if a single set of common standards is developed!  A reference architecture will be needed to provide a technical description of these standards and facilitate their implementation.

There is a fine balance to be struck between gaining the benefits of collaborating and making the situation worse. Identifies many factors important to this balance. The notion of collaborative advantage has an important role to play in raising awareness about the nature and desirability of collaborative activity. So why is common context so important?

Because it is a way to share the same information in the same perspective in order to provide shared understanding. Local context is composed of many separate contexts:

Personal context. What is going on for you personally: Are you sick, having money issues, not liking your job, thinking about your kid’s birthday?

Work context. How many other projects are you working on? Will you be getting a bonus? Do you think others are out to get you (office politics)?

Company context. The company you work for has strict security policies, so you can’t tell anything to anyone (which begets poor collaboration).

A more complex legal environment, laws influencing employee rights

Project context. How many individuals are on the project team? Do you like all of them? Is the project manager good? Will this really happen, or is it someone’s pipe dream?

Understanding all of these contexts for the members on a distributed team makes the team successful.

Although it may not exactly be trust understanding, these contexts about other team members enable you to collaborate and work together more effectively, even in complex situations. That is why context is  replacing trust in a society that is growing more complex by the day and in which we have less security and never know who might be spying on us.

Creating value and novel business models, it will provide start-ups and small businesses with the opportunity to develop and provide downstream service, addressing and solving some of the challenges facing the world today such as demographic changes. Allowing organisations to be organized in a way that takes demographic change and social factors into account, by using smart systems, enabling your employee to focus on creative, value added activities.

 

How Do You Prepare Your Company For Shift

As a leader, how do you prepare your organization for this collaborative shift that will not only encompass the nature of teams but also most likely the structure of your business?

Below are a few bullet points on what might help ease this transition or paradigm shift.

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Learn to let go: Not everything is under your control. Although corporate cultures tend to take on the personalities of their CEO, making your organization more transparent and less hierarchical is a good way to start moving in the direction of this shift.
50%
Be more transparent: Don’t be totally transparent but enough so that anyone working on a team or project has enough information about others on the team and the work they are doing.
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Work with sales and marketing first: They often have processes that have great collaborative leverage and are often willing to try something new, especially if it results in getting a proposal to a customer sooner, a new product getting learned by the sales force more quickly, or facilitating secure work with partner companies and outside consultants.

The future of teams is mixed, and, as in any shifting point or paradigm change, some teams will stay the same while others evolve into new structures that can tackle the more complex problems of today with greater expertise, in a much shorter time, and with a greater level of success.

 

Performance Management

Effective performance management requires work processes and human resource management systems that are aligned to the company’s philosophy regarding performance management. The more radical changes include removing performance review and ratings altogether, removing the link to reward and abandoning the annual review cycle!

Effective performance management is an employee-valued system of encouraging and rewarding employee contributions for the specific purpose of improving employee performance which directly affects organizational success.

Organizations must reexamine the pay for performance process or risk driving unintended consequences and the wrong employee behaviors. It’s critical to effectively reward employees when performance scores are eliminated and to develop the core manager skills needed to effectively execute pay for performance as discretion increases and layers decrease.

 

Engagement Levels

Every organization’s HR experts should be looking into their own engagement strategy, and needs to have a clear vision of the reality of their own statistics. Tweaking the strategy and making changes before the company loses its big talent or fails to acquire the right employees is critical, and prevention is much easier than the cure.

Maintaining a good level of job satisfaction, providing necessary training and development programs and ensuring well-being assessments are undertaken are some simple ways that most companies are already promoting engagement, but data should be analyzed to ensure these processes are still relevant and hard-hitting enough to make a clear and beneficial difference.

 

Marketing and Corporate Culture, Engagement and Brand

Do your employees fully grasp the brand goals and aspirations of your organization?

Teaching your mission and values is crucial for employee engagement, and provides a clear understanding of how you expect your talent to work for you. Charitable companies will likely scout for a very specific type of employee personality, because their goal is to expand a philanthropic company identity. Employees must believe in the company prophecy in order to buy into it themselves, and then be able to sell it to others. Your staff must be engaged in your company culture in order to contribute, and they should feel that they are an integral part of the cultural journey, not just another number in a very big machine.

It is not enough to produce an operational plan that tells you how to integrate the brand into the business if the current culture will resist the changes in direction. If you are addressing any form of brand development into your HR team, you are talking about change. This is an exercise that goes beyond the marketing team. You will want to create forums for open dialogue, an interactive and contributory process that is undertaken in a way that secures people’s honest views.

Using principles from organisational theory, such as appreciative inquiry and other systemic practices, you can unearth the potential cultural patterns and other factors that are either consistent or in conflict with the brand direction.

 

 

Global Influence & HR

The world of marketing has changed almost beyond recognition since the phenomenon of social media emerged on to the global scene.

Influencer programmes are all about identifying those people who can stimulate change in an industry and marketing via those influential people.

There are also different categories of influencers.

One person might have lots of sway within an industry or on a certain subject, but is invisible outside of it.

Others may be valuable for their inter-industry connections (for example a science writer with a talent for making complex science accessible to the lay person).

A third group of influencers may be powerful due to the quality of their connections, regardless of industry or topic.

Influence and HR

In the face of uncertainty, large corporations have been seen to fall back on the cruder measures of influence such as gross number of Twitter followers or high-profile celebrity status.

But a strategically placed message on the HR or people forum of a powerful (HR or organisational) influencer can have as much impact if, for example, they respond to a message, which is then picked up by management or the outside community supporting the brand of your HR team.

Who are the influencers in your team/organisation? Isn’t it about time you found out?

 

New and Adapted People Concepts

The average workplace consist of five different generations.

From Traditionalists born prior to 1945 and Gen Z’s born after 1997, management teams need to develop new, innovative techniques to cope with conflicting personalities.

Each generation is unique in the way they work and think, and getting to know the typical characteristics of each age group can make managing staff as a whole lot easier and more effective. It is all about encouraging respect and communication (offline or online) at every level, and if conflict occurs the main focus is not to alienate an employee because of their age or experience.

Without effective and clear leaders, this cross-generational culture of many companies is slipping, and leaders must work to stabilize their generational leadership initiatives so their organizations can maintain a level of productivity that can compete in the modern business environment, and has the power to influence the new generations.

It’s important to understand that the differences between the generations are not simply a matter of age. Each generation has been shaped by events, and it’s the events during the formative years for people that make the most lasting and important impressions.

Dealing with diversity in the workplace means understanding and relating effectively with people who are different from you. In traditional diversity training, generational diversity is usually not included (many within the People arena feel that it does not exist or belong). In any large organization, you are bound to find divisions or work teams where at least three to five distinct generations are working side by side.

Be tolerant of different behavior, even if you don’t understand it. Realize that being tolerant of different behaviors is essential to a harmonious, productive workplace.

Each of us has our own unique characteristics. But, it is our differences that make our lives together interesting and rewarding.

Everyone has something to contribute. We all need to remember to accept others for who they are and look for the best that they have to offer. That is what valuing diversity is all about!

 

Workforce Mobility & The Digital Natives

The new workforce comprises of a set of diverse people who interact within a networking community using new media constantly; it is thus crucial to provide a business environment conducive to their lifestyle. Organizations have had to change their policies to make them more flexible and collaborative.

However as these teams are more conversant with the new technologies, they are better able to work efficiently with the advancement in technology. Their mindset is different. They tend to be more outspoken and demand freedom in their working environment. They seek to work freely, at their own pace, in their own way and without a lot of supervision in order to yield better results.

For most of the different functions in the business, including HR, to stay connected with this new generation of digital natives within the company, there is need for more interaction with them through these new technologies and the online world.

For example, a standard procedure in most companies today is to ensure cohesiveness among teams who should work together as an engaged team communicating in real time despite the different geographic locations.

This is one area where HR can improve this digitized interaction to better engage a dispersed workforce.

HR professionals therefore need to think about the strategic approach to the design of the organization and of the working culture, environment in order to keep up with the digital trends. Their ultimate goal is to create a successful workplace to ensure the satisfaction of all diverse groups involved, as IBM highlighted, “a social business is an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value”.

However, some businesses fail due to poor planning and inability to integrate new HR technology (check out this course). Others fail due to lack of security of their digital content or due to insufficient information technology infrastructure to cater for a sophisticated digital back office.

In a real globalized digital company, employees are able to choose the most effective way to access any business application, this ability to choose their own personal gadgets at work enables a different kind of boost in morale and motivation among employees. Likewise, they will be able to understand customer needs more clearly and provide the right services that cater to current market needs for increased productivity.

 

Agile HR…

Agile is not only a methodology for software development. No, it actually is a means to ways of working that helps with the delivery of a business values cheaper, faster and with minimal risk.

Organizational agility is the level at which your company is able to adapt without changing, the capacity to cope with new developments both within the sector and the business itself. It initially started as delivery procedure and software development, but over time, this has grown more scaled and broader to the organization level.

Business agility is a skill that enables companies to flourish amongst the competition, and along with organizational resilience, the equivalent of a preemptive strike that relates to how a company predicts, prepares for and deals with sudden changes without suffering dire consequences, can produce a strong, impenetrable foundation that is prepared for anything.

Agile HR is actually not a new and radical way of delivering extensive improvements, but rather a significant evolution of best PEOPLE work philosophies and best practices that have definite shapes and can be executed to bring considerable improvements across an organisation or HR team.

The agile HR leadership and values are ideal things that teams must pursue in order to achieve their goals.

The agile principles are said to be the application of agile ideals or values to a particular industry:

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Value - This focuses on risk mitigation and business benefits.

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Speed - Concentrates on sustainable development an d timely delivery.

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Collaboration - Focuses on working together actively and leveraging collective ideas and knowledge.

400

Simplicity - Focuses on keeping things easy and simple.

500

Flexibility - This concentrates on adapting to welcoming change and business requirements.

600

Teamwork - Focusing on creating self-adjusting and empowered teams.

 

There is actually more to an agile ultimate success rather than just making use of practices. However, these practices can serve as beneficial techniques to help you with your HR work in an agile environment.

To unleash exceptional competitive advantage, creative leaders must encourage engagement among staff in new ways, and set the example of an adaptable business mind that is prepared for change with strategies that can be tweaked to suit the current environment.

In this sense, HR can improve their resilience prospects by focusing on how connections may be formed with customers, be this through social media interaction, email newsletters or follow-up phone calls.

Focus attention on workplace resilience

Human resources can do this by implementing policies and practices that allow for this kind of resilient, adaptable culture that incorporates happy employees who will adapt to change together. This allows the company as a whole an edge over the competition as there will be little room for frustrations or stress as change develops.

Working the agile way

HR is the key within every business to promote organizational agility and resilience, promoting a company culture that will rise to the challenges related to unforeseen developments and environmental changes. Concentrating on stakeholders and leader and within agile project teams, agile leadership is about leadership roles when dealing with HR teams and agile project generally “working the agile way”.

Agile leadership works and utilizing the agile methodology delivers excellent advantages.

This offers a functional and technical framework to HR team members for greater collaborative system, it also facilitates s smoother workflow by means of delivering functional knowledge and sharing such a platform with employees within the organization. Generally, agile HR & leadership promotes collaborative approaches. With the help of the agile methodology, many HR Professionals are able to quickly respond to varied requisites in a more efficient manner.

 

Making Social Learning Productive

L&D functions lack the resources to stay on top of the increasingly diverse and rapidly changing skills employees need in today’s complex new work environment, and their traditional approaches have become too costly and ineffective.

Most L&D functions focus on reducing their investments in classroom and experiential learning by getting more activity to occur through social learning networks. Much of that activity is unproductive and, at times, even harmful to the organization.

The best L&D functions focus on developing social learning solutions that enable employees to learn from the right experiences and expertise of others. In this way, they reduce L&D spend by replacing expensive L&D solutions with low-cost, scalable, and high-quality social learning solutions. They also direct team members away from poor-quality learning content and to the best individuals and expertise for enabling productive learning.

 

The Digital HR Lead And Work strategist

As new technology allows information to be processed, protected, created and exchanged in various ways, work processes, interactions and tasks will continue to undergo major transformations. Businesses that capitalize on new technology discover new ways of working and are able to increase their productivity at lower costs than conventional operating models.

Traditional work is becoming more virtual-focused as technology continues to grow; physical responsibilities are automated and people become intellectual sources. Team members using digital tools and smart machines create large amounts of comprehensive data that are automatically gathered and then used to create better decisions. 

Many organizations, however, are still not really taking full advantage of digital technologies. A company may have started to use social media to communicate online, but likely has not really explored how it can drive innovation, business growth and differentiation.

HR are proactive caretakers of workforce digitization

Companies have expanded globally searching for talent in different parts of the world. This new talent has to been connected digitally to ensure real time interaction and exchange of ideas, allowing for a new type of virtual workspace environment to pop up, designed by and for employees. It is all evolving and there is the urgent need for companies and HR to design this new workplace in order for them to attract and retain the best talent.

Today, HR professionals as the caretakers of the workforce’s talent potential, productivity and growth also become co-custodians, together with ITC departments, of how digitization is best used for HR processes and optimizing the workforce. Likewise other areas of the organization need to use digitization to facilitate their own work, e.g. customer services and support departments need to harness digitization to provide even better services and support.

In fact, other functions have already fast moved on with digital media, digital ideas, digital workspaces, and more—in short, digital anything, whatever leads to business innovation and creativity.

HR however seems to move forward slowly, wanting to keep the power and still remain productive. Those that do change, go at it full-heartedly without sufficient in-depth technical expertise or experience. This brings on other problems of unorganized implementations, design and usage of anything to do with technology!

What HR professionals need to understand, is that the workforce is changing. The increasing popularity of mobile, cloud and social technology has created new responsibilities. These require vastly different skills and competencies that are changing at a fast pace. Today’s generation of teams have grown up in this digital world, making them highly familiar with the ways this is shaping their lives.

Digital tools also allow HR to identify the true leaders in their digital workforce through online reputation management and social networks. HR can work together with these leaders to get more things done and improve their processes and operations.

 

Global Virtual Reality

Technologies that unite into intelligent digital processes are capable of supporting a global workforce that is craving for more efficiency and engagement. Working in a connected manner, irrespective of time zones and physical locations, is far more likely to help a global workforce to succeed in their business goals.

This enables new work designs that can provide the HR function with considerable quality and cost benefits. It is possible for HR to improve the organization’s digital workforce, whilst mastering the techniques stated earlier and understanding how to efficiently incorporate them into daily processes and applications.

There are still challenges that HR will need to deal with such as pulling the existing technologies together to enhance their HR processes, while bridging the gaps in their HR technologies and processes. As Albert Einstein wisely put it, 

I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.

Existing products currently used are not designed to openly support the process of re-design options. Organizations are responsible for managing their own transformational change and such legacy products may cause HR and other functions to either limit their efforts to gradual digitization of their current processes, or completely avoid investing in this area.

Intelligent Digital Processes

Intelligent digital processes are made to provide insightful data and let organizations control that information to make it beneficial to the overall workforce. Digital technologies that operate on smart digital models and devices are used to arrive at smarter decisions. They respond immediately to shifting conditions, deal more efficiently with complexities and communicate better with every colleague. This delivers a much more promising formula for true employee engagement.

There are different digital technologies that play an important role in creating intelligent digital processes. These include:

Wearable and mobile interfaces allow organizations to work together with all of their tools to make applications and data available where and when required.

Real-time collaboration technologies promote better presence using tools like video and audio conferencing at different bandwidths.

Digital behavior-shaping and gamification tools engage and help employees track the progress of their objectives, build an achievement portfolio and develop new skills.

Social collaboration technologies, such as enterprise social networking and tools for content sharing and collaborative authoring allow colleagues to communicate better.

Intelligent assistants and analytics turn information into insights about the external ecosystem and internal processes. Digital assistants are beginning to have a physical form, rather like robots that are involved in information flow and physical workflow.

Virtual workspaces, virtual job fairs and virtual conferences (online events) permit global employees and delegates to interact and ‘walk around’, engaging live at the water cooler.

In a nutshell, intelligent global digital processes support smarter execution of current work processes. They do this by enabling a range of various work design options that drive changes for the better within the company’s culture. Creating these intelligent processes operating on digital models with enough support from some of the above mentioned tools can help improve the physical, cognitive and collaborative abilities of the workforce.

 

Beyond The Hype – HR Tech or The Tech of HR

HR Technology should provide your business with the integration tools and utilities that apply to all environments, irrespective of your technology ecosystem. The solutions that can be delivered will be applicable regardless of your stage of Digital Transformation. Integration, Performance, Security and Big Data Analytics are the 4 key pillars that should help HR drive the success.

The currently hyped notion of “Digital Transformation” has moved to the top of the strategy agenda in most enterprises today.

Its strategic relevance has grown alongside the disruptive impact of digital technologies on business models, industry structures and competitive landscapes. Management teams around the world are developing strategies on how to use digital technologies like mobile, advanced analytics, social media, cloud computing, or connected devices (internet-of-things) to provide for a unique and seamless customer experience, to create innovative new business opportunities and to improve operational processes.

However, the success of digital transformation is not predominantly determined by the scale of technology investments. Even if applied in innovative new ways and combinations, technology by itself does not transform a company.

Successful digital transformation is primarily determined by the degree to which people are empowered to actively embrace constant change as an opportunity for growth and innovation.

While technology innovations have disrupted markets and business models for centuries, speed and magnitude have been increasing exponentially. As a result, the globally connected economy has become so dynamic and complex that most enterprises – with their traditional control and steering mechanisms and viscous decision-making processes – are incapable to react with agility and speed, continuously losing resilience for change.

Improved productivity, reduction in reporting errors, improved compliance and more accurate reports each offer businesses the ability to improve their underlying operations. Over time, these improvements lead to an increased work flow and improved bottom line.

The most strategic businesses choose software that can easily integrate with multiple third-party systems and provide the most seamless experience possible. Integrations reduce manual data entry, improve data integrity and reduce risks to the business.

Data accumulation from every aspect of one’s life is an ever growing market because those with the most data can predict the trends and understand more about the market than their competitors, which for a HR function is important to know. For the moment, it is necessary to understand that the data HR collects and analyzes to find patterns and understanding. This information can then be relayed to the company in order to make sure they make better informed decisions.

By utilizing the more trusted and stable advances, HR can turn their teams into a highly efficient part of the company that can shift its focus from maintaining employee satisfaction to growth by utilizing technology to perform the more routine aspects of the job.

Mobile HR Technology

The HR industry has been famously slow at catching up with other operations in terms of technology use, but in recent months many departments have been mobilizing their resources and exploiting available systems to transform their departments into a modern, technologically-able machine.

This has led to an increased amount of mobile HR technology at our disposal, with some working to benefit the day-to-day of HR, and others lacking in functionality and productivity.

The Information Services Group (ISG) discovered though a study into HR technology trends that “HRMS systems are being replaced by SaaS HCM solutions nearly as often as upgrades.

SaaS, or software-as-a-service technology are favored by bigger corporations, and the report found the most common reasons SaaS systems are implanted as “a globally consistent and improved user experience, scalable, end-to-end processes that deliver better functionality, improved talent management, better decision-making through workforce insights and highly configurable solutions that are fast to deploy, provide continuous innovation and reduce dependence on IT.

 

Ultra-social engagement

As technology continues to advance, so does the scope and responsibility of the HR function!

The secret to advancing in this area is staying aware of trends, implementing new technology only when it is applicable to your workforce and training employees on how to exploit these new systems to the advantage of themselves and the wider internal and external collaboration network. As teams are able to social networks at work and converse with colleagues in new ways wherever they are, whenever they please. This has dramatically increased productivity for many industries, but leaves HR with the task of safeguarding the traditional concept of a work/life balance!

 

New Technologies In The Workplace Make Processes Efficient

For companies to remain competitive they have to create workflows that are collaborative and connective. They must be communicating, interacting and exchanging ideas even more easily and faster than ever with their employees wherever they are located. Harnessing information technology to ensure cutting edge digital sophistication will attract the next-generation workforce.

Remember what Bill Gates stated,

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

The organization should have role models or so-called technologists in place for promoting collaboration through innovation and by using modern technology tools. This system of learning and sharing information through a central access point, leads to direct savings in management effort and infrastructure cost.

The key to attracting and retaining this global, diverse and digital workforce is by creating an environment that is conducive for them—it should be flexible, interactive and connected.

It should enable the company to stay competitive as employees share ideas and information with their teams globally, keeping them up with the current trends in social and business transformations. Once again, Albert Einstein hit the nail on the head,

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.

This sums up how the technology we designed shapes the way we not only think but also work together.

Designing a global digital workplace is a challenge, but through proper planning and using new strategies, the HR function becomes technologists. HR professionals themselves become more comfortable with data, as mobile technologies and social media have penetrated almost all aspects of businesses and their own lives. The bottom line is that HR should consider all this to maximize the full value and benefit to the organization.

 

Sourcing Talent in the Digital Age

The proliferation of social professional networking and recruitment technologies has leveled the playing field for sourcing candidates. In fact, 60% of recruiting professionals indicate that these technologies have made recruiting more competitive than ever. In this environment, heads of Talent Acquisition must answer this question:

How can we effectively compete for critical talent that is increasingly visible and accessible to other employers?

Automate your recruitment process with dedicated talent acquisition technology.

Make providing a great candidate experience a priority.

In a recent survey 91% of respondents said that improving their company’s candidate experience was an important strategy at their organisation.

The candidate experience encompasses every touch-point a candidate has with your company, including your website, application, communications with your recruiters, and the interview process. Because first impressions are everything, the slightest negative experience will cause the candidate to disengage and view your employment brand poorly. Ensure that your website is easy to navigate so that candidates can find vacancies quickly. Then, keep the application process short and simple, between 5-10 minutes.

Realize that you need a mobile recruiting strategy, as applicants are increasingly accessing the internet via their phones and tablets, companies have recognized that mobile recruiting strategies are a key piece to their overall recruiting success.

Recruiting functions must create competitive advantage by unlocking the supply of talent and creating demand in the labor market. The best recruiting functions: refine candidate profiles to unlock new and non-obvious talent pools; embed influential messaging in candidate outreach to convert passive candidates; and identify where candidates go to learn about opportunities and influence the conversation.

Using Big Data to Build a Successful Talent Acquisition Strategy

Big Data allows HR to analyze trends within the depths of their company, enabling the department to capitalize on emerging patterns of successes and wipe out policies that can be concluded as failures. This analysis is particularly influential in terms of talent acquisition, and can provide indispensable information to encourage changes in the recruitment process and later talent development. Without appropriate talent, there will be little to no business progression and a catastrophically low level of productivity.

  • Decisions made based upon relevant and accurate data can have a huge impact on the level of talent you acquire, and ensure that the business gets the right kind of employee for each role.
  • Data that outlines the characteristics of the most valuable employees makes the recruitment process faster and more accurate, and can promote unity among a workforce that respect each other’s work practices and understand and respect how each individual works.
  •  This mindset has held HR back from using analytics to their fullest extent, meanwhile it is likely that the other functioning departments in their organizations have been depending upon data analysis to formulate their work and talent acquisition methods for years.

It is time for every HR department to begin executing research and analytics, using Big Data as a tool to provide a detailed and accurate representation of the needs of the business.

 

Getting to grips with analytics

Analytics can seem like a scary word, especially if you don’t have a mathematical background. The good news is that modern technology has taken the pain out of it. Now, you can invest in programs and apps which do all the hard work for you. Then you just channel the results into your HR strategy (learn more).

 

Social Technologies and Behaviour Science

It is known that the study of human behavior will result in better technologies, and the study of technology can bring about a better understanding of human behavior. We use a variety of theoretical lenses to look at how these technologies shape communication processes, social interaction, individual behavior, and broader society

We also understand that behavioral science draws from a number of different fields and theories, primarily those of psychology, social neuroscience, and cognitive science. So how should organizations respond to the rapid changes “sense and respond” capabilities are becoming increasingly critical, requiring organizations to increase specific organizational capabilities:

Understand employees more deeply.

Continue to learn more about employees journeys and recognize that for most organizations, there are a near unlimited amount of journeys, but they take place across the same primary outposts.

Create and shape “playgrounds” for employees to interact with at their preference, with meaningful offers of value exchange at each step.

Organizations should be investing in the following:

Evolving towards a more experience focused culture.

Capturing, merging, and analyzing broader, more unstructured data.

Increased teaming and collaboration across organizational functions and touchpoints.

Translating data into insights.

Leveraging those insights to operationalize value creating recommendations and responses.

 

Today

Today, nobody has the time to think of an analogue clock or a calculator or a camera that mattered a lot 20 years back! Even a new-born baby is exposed to the wonders of technology in the form of Facebook and Whatsapp and all sorts of photo sharing from the moment he or she enters the world.

HR Managers, Directors and CEOs have performance criteria that do not require to operate or execute, instead, what counts is innovation and new ideas and whosoever comes up with a breakthrough idea gets the pie in the market. Share markets fluctuate based on what the world thinks every day, “something new every day” and does not depend on what a select few think.

Everybody is an influencer when you consider networks such as Tik Tok, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. Everybody is talking, going global, travelling and enjoying life. Everybody from school going kids to working professionals are so aware and alert of what is going on around them that it is not very easy to fool people and exclude anyone!

Indeed, the world of work and employment has changed seamlessly over the past 30 to 40 years. Quite naturally, the role of HR practitioners has become more challenging and exciting. Organizations operate on a chain reaction by consistent sharing of knowledge, data and people in order to create a win-win situation for all.

As technology takes over more and more HR-related tasks, security will always be a sensitive factor due to the vulnerable information these systems will be handling, from team member salaries and compensations to personal private data, tech security is likely to remain a challenge for all organizations in the years to come.

 

Innovate Realistically

Think bolder and create opportunity for evidence based innovation, but don’t innovate for innovation’s sake. Be realistic about your organization’s requirements and capabilities and the steps required to implement a change.

Establish measures to support the case for change, and quantify impacts and report on these.

Test and correct if desired results aren’t being observed.

Reduce process but maintain strong sponsorship from leaders within the business.

Ensure you effectively manage risk where your business is increasing discretion.

Be less ambitious – obtain consensus on two to three key objectives and nail those.

 

© New To HR

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