‘Digital revolution and Human Capital Management’

Title -‘Digital revolution and Human Capital Management’

Abstract-

Digital transformation – The revolutionary matrix as a parameter for the technological growth of a nation has been widely discussed as a modern concept. The new digital age of the 21^st century goes beyond technology and is able to enhance a new wave of transformation of industries and the entire gamut of business models. Human resource development is the mechanism to drive the tool of the digitization readiness of employees. It can be lucidly stated that people, not technology are the most important piece in today’s digital transformation puzzle. In this paper, attempt has been made to focus on the ‘human capital’ management in a digitalized world. In a cutting edge competitive world of technological innovation, managing human capital is sparklingly making job markets more transparent and improving the match of skilled workers with high labour needs. This outcome is reflected since more companies use digital and social tools and platforms to integrate and optimize their recruitment, development, and employee engagement and retention efforts. Digital revolution has sensitized the entire human race in regard to achieving total perfection in varied aspects. Human talents have got ample opportunity to accelerate its pace of development in today’s age of complexity.

Introduction –

The age of the new millennium is often regarded as a ‘revolution’ to the technological advancements. In this age, we have seen many industries and professions seeing disrupted by the digital wave. Therefore, managing HR capital in the ‘digital disruption’ moment is an arduous and challenging task. Playing a critical role in adapting the business anticipation and to manage organisational changes, the HR needs to play a pivotal role. This in a nutshell means, HR has to ‘include’ technology as its core.

            In this rapid age of technological revolution, HR professional needs to rethink, redesign as well as reinvent and renovate all aspects of the core HR functionaries. This is not limited mainly to – talent acquisition, talent management, building the employer brand, employee engagement services.

            The orthodox method which the companies have been generally following to recruit new employees are mainly- recruitment camps, referrals, ads and short listing them through multiple layers of interviews. However, though this processe continues even today, the emergence of digital innovation and inclusion in the HR launch pad has made the process more focused and effective.

            Today, analytics allow recruiters to assess the potential talent of the employees in real time based information from a varied multiple digital sources which includes social media, chat nods, e-learning, cloud storage etc.

            The traditional stereo type of hiring employees is on the verge of extinction since with the advancement of technology and digital revolution, ‘analytical’ skills based judgement on recruitment for hiring future employees, identifying training need at an individual / team level, career planning, spotting opportunities for role rotation and role enhancement and leadership development have been the main ‘focal’ factors for adjusting to the new digital milieu and hiring employees for an organization. In this paper, I am trying to make an attempt on showcasing the complex HR capital management and the role of digital revolution – its effects and scope for further changes in HR capital management is lucidly described with core studies.

Need for the Study -

            Advances in the field of digital technology have made the today’s corporate world adaptive, inclusive and more technological oriented. With the rapid change in technological surges, the level of competition and competitive environment within the corporate houses has increased drastically manifold. The ‘Human Capital Management’ in a digital revolutionized world has made today’s job markets more transparent which also has a repercussion for the skilled workers to make them adaptive and upgraded with today’s changing digitalized world of technological revolution.

            Through this study, attempts have been made to highlight on the ‘impact’ of digital revolution for the ‘Human Capital Management’ in a corporation. A simple case study is taken as a role example in order to improvise the issue and its practical significance to take this change as a progressive insight to build the ‘HR’ Capital Management of a corporation stronger and competitive, adaptive to the changing scenario.

Objectives –

            The main objective of this study is to relate the HR with the digitalized technological revolution and its implications, modifications and ramification in order to manage the Human Capital in an organization more effective, competitive, updated, upgraded and adaptive to the complex imbroglio of technological advancements. In this paper, with the help of a case study, I will try to find out the significance of the study and how it has a practical implication on the today’s technological and digitalized revolutionary world where the role of HR in human capital management is pivotal and most challenging.

Methodology –

            An analytical method has been adopted by the researcher to complete the paper. The information furnished in the paper is mostly taken from the secondary sources. Different journals, newspaper, magazine internet etc.have provided the necessary details & data for the researcher in the preparation for this researcher paper.

Findings –

Stewarding a company into the digital era takes unique skills. The leaders in addition to creating the future they have also to build a bridge to the part. The set of required skills demands more from the digital leaders and this is why they have to find out ways to bridge the expertise and knowledge developed in companies that are born with the strategic needs and management & cultural challenges of ones that must go digital.

            In this paper, I have made an attempt to relate the HR and human capital management in a digitalized world with the help of an example taken by Accenture in this regard! Accenture has been conducting a research effort in order to better understand how HR will change in the coming years. In this example of Accenture, we will try to find out how technology will radically disrupt HR in the near future for human capital management. We will be the ‘digital HR’ – how it works in changing the way HR works and the role it plays in a changing digital environment.

The Future of New HR function of Accenture

1.      New approaches to delivering HR services should be enabled –

In today’s digitalized world, mobile tools, social media and other technologies makes it possible to enable the HR access to rich technological up gradation. The HR can take advantage and model of familiar consumer technologies – smart phones etc. to upgrade their adaptive association with a changing digital revolution. Also use of multiple channels to provide services on an anywhere-anytime basis and integrate channels to let employees use their devices of their own choice, seamlessly and interchangeably.

2.      Enabling HR to act more like marketing –

It’s been quite clear that an injection of marketing thinking could help lead to the HR transformation the company needs. Some of the possible ways the HR could benefit from adopting seven marketing practices:-

i)                    Compete for talent the way cos. Compete for untoward –

When a high – Potential employee checks out a co, the first place they go is mainly social media platforms like- FB, Linked In etc. Since the company presence on these sites is usually owned by marketing, finding the best employee might be as important as finding the best customs.

ii)                  Pay more attention to user interfaces –

As a job applicant, one would want to fill in a few fields and then have a coos to a live person through Chat/ Skype/ Webvidere. In most of the companies, many applicants apply to the web page of them. Nowadays it is information is designed to feed into an algorithm. This process is not human oriented, its computer oriented.

iii)                Being more human –

In most high-tech companies, there is a toll free no. And one can talk on this by dialling and from the other side of the air; a random person will answer the call and tackle with the customer. Large companies can promote this option like the way Sweden did a cool promotion by the tag line – ‘Sweden has a phone number’.

iv)                Think strategically about touch paints –

Considering adding content for each of the decision points in a potential employee’s journey like helping them to access or ever compare the company’s culture, pay, benefits etc.

v)                  Using influencer marketing to recruit –

Hiring a well-known industry blogger to create content on behalf of the company is a precariously new idea to recruitment process. A blogger’s prestigious status can instantly gain credibility for the company’s goodwill and trust amongst the customers.

3.      Driving the democratization of talent management –

In today’s world, HR can use technology to extend its processes into the orgz., enabling employees & managers for perform many of the processes themselves closer  to the business. It basically means embedding talent management into the business to involve employees and managers in recruiting, on boarding, performance reviews, learning of the design of career paths.

            From the above disused brief description on the changing role of HR we can infer from Accenture’s recommendations that by adopting new techniques in digital methodology, HR is likely to be less centralized, more nimble and more embedded in the business, which in itself is a grass transformation of today’s HR functionaries. Maureen Brosnan, MD of talent & HR lead, Accenture has said, “Often HR spends too much time on routine processes & adm. Work, but that burden will be largely eliminated’. This can be justified absolutely since a digital HR will spend more time on shopping the workforce support growth and keep up with changing and often volatile business realities.

            The impact of adv technology on HR is almost clear. From a research study based on human capital management, success factors has found out that more extensive use of human capital management solutions saw a 15.2.% decrease in turnover, 13.7% increase in internal job fill rate and 5.4% increase in productivity. As HR become more adoptive to better are of technology, there benefits have become more widespread.

Solution to better upgrade technologies for HR transformation and Human Capital Management

            From the research study of Accenture and success factors, we can infer some key technologies which they have recommended for upgradation and rapid transformation of the role of HR in HCM. Some of them are discussed below in brief –

1.      Use of analytics for deep insight into the field –

In this technique, Companies can use the technology to create and monitor metrics that clearly measure the effectiveness of HR and its impact on biz. To strengthen the HR processes, analytics can be used extensively. In today’s world, though this technique is not extensively used, still there is ample scope to improve it and utilize it utmost. This happens mainly because data collection is a challenge. Therefore, many HR groups are avoiding this technique. To help sort out this issue, some of today’s analytics systems can tap into varied data from different sources and thus it can avoid the need to change source systems or going through extensive data modelling and integration efforts. The best outcome of this process would be that these technologies will allow HR to integrate traditional business and talent data with Big Data gathered from sources such as – tweets, blog, posts, etc. this can lead to deeper insights into the workforce’s abilities and needs. Business analytics model will surely be a key element in digital HR and an enabler of the ‘HR as marketing’ model. This can create HR to take a more predictive approach to matching talent strategies to biz needs.

2.      Making HR mobile –

To reach a critical and a constantly moving workforce, mobile technology is very suitable. Some mobile apps, now-a-days provide sophisticated tool and enable employees to do much more than being always practically in touch. There apps provides support effective learning, letting employees work with experts or complete classes. These apps also enable hiring teams to collaborate and speed up recruiting efforts that can help streamline the gathering of performance info to provide more frequent feedback to employees. This mobile based technology can be used to push-HR related, individualized alerts and info about development opportunities and progress toward goals out to employees.

3.      Leveraging social media platform to get close with employees –

Social media is a tool for democratization of HR and enabler of marketing adoption strategies approaches. It can end HR’s traditional role as a ‘middleman’ in delivering many services. To enable employees for defining their compensation or use shift-trading sites to negotiate in scheduling changes with one another, social media as a tool for digital revolution can play a pivotal role in enhancing the HR’s role in Human Capital Management. HR can take advances of this technology to improve collaboration and speed up HR processes. Now-a-days, some HR systems provides social-based on boarding tools that can quickly connect new employees with the people and info they need.

4.      Moving towards an integrated, consolidated HR platform –

It is now recommended in business research of HR and Human Capital Management; that a centralized HR platform which can provide unified, consistent data for the workforce management and automated extended processed which can work seamlessly across employee-interaction channels is a time bound need for the hour. Most of the HR groups lack an integrated platform and hence data is scattered across disparate systems. One needs to open up particular files in different sources for learning / recruiting processes or in different formats that may be hectic at the need of the hour. But this to some extent has been solved by the end-to-end talent management systems that address the full range of HR processes which are now available at the stores. Overtime, Cos can implement an integrated suite to handle core HR functions and hen can gradually expand it to include the full range of talent-management processes.

5.      Shifting focus for agility and innovation –

David Ludlow, Group V.P., Line Biz. Solutions has said – “We have found that in moving to the cloud, HR has an opportunity for streamline and improve processes – rather than keep doing ‘business as usual’”. The cloud can be an important enabler of information and flexibility in supporting changing biz needs. Cloud computing has in fact, rapidly become mainstream and more Cos are using HR capabilities delivered from vendors. In this situation, the vendor and not the HR group, is responsible for maintaining and improving the technology and in delivering end-to-end talent management tools. Some HR organisation use Cloud/ SaaS solutions in this regard. They have realized that many typical HR transactions are commodity and can be consistent across the enterprise.

The cloud based model is essentially cost-effective since vendors offering flexible pay-as-you-go models can be beneficial for HR in readily adjusting to changing biz. needs. In this process, those who adopt cloud platform can have now capacity to focus on activities that make a difference to the biz and deliver value like succession, compensation packages, individual skills, retention strategies.

Thus from the above findings and discussion, we have seen how Accenture as well as success factors have adopted itself to the digitized technical revolution and the various roles HR needs to play for HCM in a diverse and complex scenarios. If these are adopted by the Indian Cos. today, we hope to see a digitized Indian corporate scenario that can multiply the scope, order and platform of these Cos. across the country and make it more dynamic, adaptive and suit to the globalized world to complete at the international market.

Conclusion –

            The digital revolution has proven how Companies will benefit from dynamization capabilities and digitization fitness of their employees. Updating the HR towards digitization leads to more anticipation, more modernity, and more proactively in order to break the vicious circle of missing the future. The focus on the dynamic future of the digitized economy is said to increase the success rate of Companies. The very list of new digitization-related professions like-social media manager, Comm. Manager, chief Exp.officer, online reputation manager, Augmented Reality Architect are indicators for the upcoming changes in the corporate world. Digital info systems are big and fast enough to deal with the big amount of data that accompanies the dynamic view. Maureen Brosan has said in their regard to change in revolution of digital technology as – “The role of HR will change and in some ways the HR function will have a smaller footprint”.

            The HR function may become smaller as transactional processes become more efficient and line managers and employees handle more HR processes themselves. Now HR will transform itself into project-oriented and able to devote more effort to improving organization effectiveness rather than executing administrative work. This can mean mining employee data for insights, creating customised talent offerings, helping to constantly improve the understanding and use of the drivers of workforce performance.

Reference and Bibliography –

1.      Research article by Accenture – ‘Building the Digital HR organization.

2.      HRD in Times of Digitalization – A dynamizaton Agenda by Volker Stein.

3.      ‘The Digital Talent Gap’ by Capgemini Consulting.

4.      HR Transformation – Envisioning the future by Capgemini Consulting.

5.      Digital transformation article by Digital Transformation perspectives.

6.      Article by Avijit Bhattacharya – ‘The Future is Digital’ on Times Ascent, 12^th April, 2017.

7.      Digital Economic Value Index, Accenture, Jan, 2016.

8.      Times of India, “What’s the shelf life of a techie? Just 15 years”, Nov, 2012.

9.      Economic Times, “Why Companies call the young and the inexperienced to mentor older professionals”, December, 2012.

Direct marketing news, “Google, P&G swapping employees”, Nov.,2008.