HRIS In 2022 And Beyond

Future HRIS technology must be agile, intelligent and accessible

The problem with predicting how technology will evolve over the next year is that it often forces us to focus on exactly that – the technology.  

It’s understandable, but such exercises often miss the point that the HRIS is there for one reason: to help HR teams and business managers focus on what really matters – connecting the needs of their employees directly and fully with the demands of the business. This, however, has never been more complex or challenging.
 

Whether it’s retooling for an unpredictable supply chain or re-engaging employees working in remote office environments, the pressure on HR to solve problems and occasionally work miracles will only grow next year, not decline.

To be ready for a less predictable, more rapidly changing future, HR departments must embrace three core tenets in how they define themselves and the characteristics of the services they deliver in 2022. They must also align themselves with HRIS technology that quickly supports and enables profound changes.

1. Agility Is Essential

First, successful HR teams must be exceptionally agile.

They must be agile enough to anticipate changes in legislation, in the business landscape, and in the wants and needs of the employees themselves. HR teams must also be agile enough to quickly respond to those changes to minimize disruption and maximize opportunity. It’s important to differentiate between agility and responsiveness here too.  

They must respond with a high degree of certainty, and they must be highly proactive, meeting challenges head-on and not waiting to fight fires.

To do this, they must lean on technology that is equally agile in nature. HRIS technology must not only make it possible to respond, but it must also be agile enough to respond quickly, indeed. Typically, such agile technology will be highly connected – banishing the problems of data siloes and disconnected workflows that have so often put the brakes on accelerating HR responsiveness. 

The HRIS technology of the future will be connected, open and simple to deploy. This setup will enable HR leaders to quickly bring on board a technology solution to a problem, or to open the door to easier access to information so their HR teams can make more informed decisions through access to data. It must, in short, be as responsive to changes as the teams that use it.

This brings us neatly to the second characteristic of the successful HR team of 2022 and beyond, and that’s a bias for data-driven insights and intelligence.

2. The Data-driven HR Team

Moving quickly, and being agile, is good only if you are moving in the right direction. Otherwise, the risk is that you are simply making bad decisions faster.

So, HR teams must have access to better insight, to data-driven decision making, and to the tools that let them see through the oceans of data to understand the world of their employees more fully.

As a result, HRIS technologies must begin to embed analytic technology capabilities to sift through data to spot emerging trends. This technology must enable the HR team to dig into information to better understand everything from the cost to onboard a new employee to the likelihood of that employee leaving in 90 days or 900 days. 

Some of those capabilities will be pure analytic and visualization tools, others will infuse intelligence from artificial intelligence (AI) to not only help answer these questions, but also ask better questions in the first place.

HR technology vendors are applying all the lessons that the broader technology industry has learned over the past decade on the deployment of machine learning and AI to help predict the future, and analytic tools to help surface insights to make decisions more rapidly.  Expect to see a lot more embedded AI tools to continue this trend in 2022.

3. Employee Experience as Competitive Edge

Thirdly, and most critically, the successful HR team must be even more employee-experience-centered than ever. While obvious to some, many HR teams will continue to struggle to deliver a better employee experience, and thus engage and retain the best workers, simply because the underlying technology is incapable of freeing them to do so. 

Instead, outdated systems and processes lock the HR professionals in a never-ending cycle of manual tasks that consume their time, are error prone (and thus consume even more time to remediate) and are as inefficient as they are ineffective. This is the most powerful role that HRIS can play in unlocking the potential of both HR teams and the employees themselves, by reducing workload through automation and intelligent workflows.  

The HRIS must also play its part in engaging the employees directly with tools and a user experience that is intuitive, inviting and intelligent. The HRIS trend for the next three to five years will be one of establishing a supporting technology fabric that the employees can interact with in many different ways, at times of their own choosing, to take greater ownership of their employment experience. 

The HRIS platform must move from a back-office style infrastructure to a relatable and intelligent partner for both HR teams and employees alike.

However, the capacity to be focused on defining, shaping and delivering the best employee experience is only realizable once HR teams are both agile in their execution and data-driven in their planning. Each builds on the other to present business and HR leaders with the capability to respond, intelligently and correctly, to challenges and opportunities as they present themselves., Most importantly, they can now more fully form that most crucial connection between the business and the employees who power it.

The HRIS technology that enables these changes must itself be agile, intelligent and accessible. HR technology vendors understand this clearly and will continue to build toward these goals.

The Evolving Role of HR Beyond 2022

There is, though, an interesting emergent property of the adoption of this kind of technology. As HR teams become free from the “daily grind” – and as they are presented with better information to make more informed, data-driven decisions more quickly – the role of HR equally evolves. 

Instead of an operational function that is often seen as a supporting service organization, HR teams can now begin to rightfully assert their growing role as strategic partners to the business, offering not only predictive insight to changes before they occur but also data-driven analytic answers to pressing business problems. HR becomes, simply put, catalysts for meaningful and powerful transformation.

HRIS technology is designed to help manage the most powerful element of the business – the employees. As it evolves to support agile, data-driven, employee-centered HR teams, so those HR teams will evolve too. Those businesses that embrace this ideal will be able to find, develop and retain the best employees – a strategic business advantage that will define winners and losers not just in 2022, but for the next decade.

Geoff Webb is VP Solutions, Product & Marketing at isolved. Geoff has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry.  Connect Geoff Webb