Thinking Differently About HR Transformation

As technology transforms the workplace, here’s how HR can keep pace

The potential for artificial intelligence and big data analytics to drive efficiency and unlock new business opportunities is widely acknowledged. We know that these technologies will help businesses achieve meaningful growth at a time where leading economies are experiencing weak productivity gains. We also know these technologies will do much more, transforming our societies with as much impact as the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions of the past. 
 

However, this potential for organizations will only be unlocked if HR can keep up with progress, adapting while also guiding employees across industries and jobs to thrive in a world where traditional roles and functions are being upended. Recent research from Accenture and the G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance estimates that 90 percent of workers’ time on average, across all roles, will potentially be affected by intelligent technologies, either through augmentation or automation. "If skill-building doesn’t catch up with the rate of technological progress, G20 economies stand to lose as much as US$11.5 trillion in cumulative GDP growth in the next ten years". 

There’s no question that with so much current and impending disruption, organizations are racing to understand and address skills gaps. What is less clear is the new role of HR to drive this organizational imperative. For this to happen, HR must evolve and rethink its ambitions and its associated customers, services, and capabilities. In short, it is the next evolution of HR’s transformation, and it requires new and more agile ways of operating.  After all, an HR team based on an outdated model, services and capabilities will struggle to lead the workforce and future of work for their organization in the post-digital future. HR leaders, therefore, must address how the function can best organize itself to support new workforce expectations, what services, skills, and capabilities are needed, and how technology can best enable these imperatives.

To do this, HR organizations must break traditional boundaries and think end-to-end and top-to-bottom. There are three key things HR teams must do to achieve the benefits of new technologies and prepare the workforce for the future:

Be service-oriented: As companies swiftly move toward as-a-service delivery models to deliver plug-in, scalable, consumption-based services, HR too needs to transform to be service-oriented. Moving to demand-driven HR services—supported by a shift in how HR operates and organizes itself to deliver services and associated experiences—will help meet the diverse requirements of the modern workforce. By breaking down silos, HR can evolve toward insight-driven, continuous improvement and innovation, delivering services aligned to the business. Notably, organizations are already aligning workforce data accordingly, combining workforce, financial and operational data in secure, digestible ways with tools that allow managers and leaders to view analytics contextually to more closely align with HR on a rapid realignment of services to meet specific business needs.

Embrace continual change: HR needs to navigate and reconcile advances in technology with the requirements of the business and its employees. Having an agile approach enables HR to engage with the business to assess and prioritize its needs and establish tools needed to drive transparency and measure outcomes. Why are agile methods so important? It’s becoming increasingly clear that what works today may not work tomorrow. Getting ahead of a rapidly changing workforce to prepare for what’s ahead forces HR to adopt new ways of supporting the organization and its stakeholders. To meet this imperative, many HR organizations are adopting agile principles to keep the function aligned with broader organizational changes while driving incremental change and repeatable quality. 

Embed data-driven practices: Data-driven HR services drive continuous improvement through workforce analytics and data-driven insights to optimize the workforce makeup and talent productivity. It’s key to put this data in the hands of workers – whether it’s HR or a business manager or a combination of the two -- to enable greater self-reliance. Enabling a data-driven approach pays off: in the very early stages of a Workday deployment for a global technology firm, for example, executives were able to see how their workforce was aging, leading to a renewed focus and expansion on succession planning and accelerating talent attrition programs. Embedding data-driven practices require that organizations establish data owners and access rules to ensure security; make the tools and system intuitive and easy to use; and look ahead, preparing to capture the benefits of improved natural language processing and machine learning.

Moving away from the rigid, inefficient ways that stereotype HR functions and processes toward a more service-focused, agile, data-driven organization underpinned with technology will take HR into the ‘new’ so it can support the workforce of the future with the right skills, efficiency, and innovation it requires.

Author Bio

Ed Miller is Managing Director and the Advisory Services lead for the Accenture Workday practice.  Connect Ed Miller