Is your company ready for an HR Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation in HR is here to stay and involves organizations as a whole
The old HR department that relies exclusively on manual processes is on its way out of the big picture. Quoting Jose Ramon Villaverde, our WFM expert in Spain, in one of his latest articles for the SISQUAL blog: “Digital transformation is now a reality, not a dream. Adopting a digital mindset or being out of the market, that is the new paradigm.”
Indeed, digital transformation, particularly in HR, is a growing phenomenon given its impact on organizations and whose importance has been sedimented and accelerated, in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not just about the HR department; it involves the organization as a whole and only then can it be successful.
What is digital transformation in HR?
The concept of digital transformation, generally speaking, refers to the integration of digital technology in all business areas. It changes the way it is operationalized, searching for better value delivery to customers. In Human Resources it relates to transforming HR operational processes, making them automated and data-driven in order to improve the organization’s productivity while improving the customer experience. This implies the incorporation of digital technologies to perform certain tasks and solve normal day-to-day challenges, fully or partially replacing manual and analog tools. In short, it is the phenomenon of shifting to digital in the HR department.
Importance of digital transformation in HR processes
According to the PWC HR Technology Survey 2020 study, the top six concerns of HR teams driving technology decisions are:
- Finding, attracting, and retaining talent
- Developing people to reach their full potential
- Improving the employee experience
- Creating collaborative work environments
- Workforce planning
- Ensuring well-being, diversity, and inclusivity
If a decade ago the digital transformation in this area was slowly evolving, it is now a market valued at 148 billion dollars. The COVID-19 pandemic caused profound transformations in various aspects of our daily lives, and there are already some trends that may become a way of life in the post-pandemic world, which we talk about in this article. COVID-19 brought about the consolidation of home office, accelerated by the engine of necessity at a time when security measures had to be taken, forcing companies to switch to remote work practices. This had a crucial impact on the importance of digitizing HR, whose role is to create a collaborative environment, even in a remote environment.
Main impacts for organizations
Implementing digital transformation in the HR department has several advantages:
- Better information management: digitizing HR improves and simplifies the process of accessing essential information about everyone, in addition to supporting decision making, as all data is immediately accessible and constantly updated.
- Increased competitive advantage: Predictive analytics tools in this area can help improve HR processes. By leveraging data and metrics to make the most strategic decisions possible you easily achieve a workforce plan that can keep up with critical competencies.
- More effective recruitment and selection processes: there are now platforms that manage the processes in a fully automated and impartial manner, based on the information provided by the candidates and resulting in comparative analytical reports.
- Increased productivity rates and focus on core activities: automating any time-consuming or repetitive manual processes allows you to concentrate on what is important, improving overall work management and productivity.
- Better employee experience and communication: employees expect their employer to provide a similar employee experience when it comes to the digital workplace. To achieve this, you can use technology to keep every team member up to date on the latest company developments while measuring satisfaction, motivation, and team engagement using surveys, questionnaires, dynamics, etc.
- Improving the onboarding process: Especially now that remote work is a recurring practice and new hires may start their collaboration with the new company from home, it becomes crucial to provide a good onboarding process into the company culture. Technology can be helpful in this onboarding process by creating immersive and rich experiences.
Checklist before moving forward with digital transformation in HR
- Do you have a clear goal in mind? It’s not enough to pursue digital HR transformation to stay “modern” or because the competition is doing so. You need to have an internal goal, with measurable results, directly related to either HR processes (such as reducing hiring time to 10 days), the employee experience, or both.
- Are you ready for a deep change? Digital transformation depends on profound changes and may lead to some degree of resistance from your employees. Being aware of this, and how the way daily work is done is going to change, is a major factor for success. Encouraging the paradigm shift throughout the company, through concise and well-positioned leadership and by providing the necessary tools, environment, and support, is a key factor for everyone to embrace the change and for it to happen naturally.
- Are you analytically minded? Having the ability to collect and analyze data is critical and will enable you to achieve a data-driven business that helps managers with data-driven strategic decisions, ensuring that business resources are strategically allocated.
The digital transformation of HR is already a reality. Take advantage of our tips and SISQUAL’s experience of more than 28 years in the market and implement it in your company. Contact us here. SISQUAL has the necessary tools for digital transformation to be a reality in your company.