Why do the employees still perceive the HR department to be performing only the paperwork or other trivial administrative functions? Worse still some perceive HR department as a “cost center” and be completely abolished from the organization. The panacea to most of today’s HR related concerns is Technology. Let us delve into the matter to understand and explore how technology has the potential to bring multidimensional changes in its functions.
The timeline
The HR operations and deliverables have been undergoing transition since its inception. A closer look at these changes reveals that technology has brought far reaching repercussions in this journey. Let us take a look of it.
Traditional Personnel management
During this phase, HR was supposed to be inferior to other departments like marketing or finance, not contributing much to the organization. The line managers were passive players performing the task of transactor of the policies and decisions of the HR professionals. So, the functions were primarily restricted to the operational level.
Business Partner
This phase involved the evolution of the Human Resource Management (HRM) which included onset of the strategic functions into the administrative tasks. The functions were categorized as operational functions related to the routine personnel functions. In addition, the managerial level comprising of activities like acquisition, development, engagement and retention were included. Major challenges at this stage were:
i) Lacked power and autonomy in decision making
ii) Was not integrated with the line managers
iii) The operational functions (paperwork and routine tasks) overloaded it that it could not focus on the managerial functions
Strategic partner
The HRM practices have evolved over the past with the inclusion of the strategic functions that included future development plans. At this point, the role of line managers and employees in performing the operational functions became crucial with the HR getting focused on the higher level tasks. A major challenge here was how the above target be achieved without affecting the employees’ normal job commitments and also keeping them motivated in performing these “additional” functions.
Why technology?
The repercussions of technology are far reaching, some of them are covered below as:
The diagram above shows that as we move ahead in the technology value chain, the involvement is shifted from the transactional to strategic functions.
Stages of the technological embodiment in the organization
1) Transaction Automation:
2) Automation for convenience:
3) Customer service
This application has revolutionized how jobs are dealt with. Some of them are:
- Economical method to publish the job openings
- Far reaching and quicker processes of receiving the application response, screening, hiring and background verifications.
- The video conferencing technology has helped to reach the candidates across the boundaries thus widening the talent available and diversifying the talent pool of the organization and also cutting down the traveling costs.
4) Future Analysis
Challenges
The discussion is incomplete without considering the challenges involved.
Losing the “human aspect”
Let us not forget the basic function of the HR professionals: the human element. So, a major challenge in the way of the technological evolution is maintaining a balance between technology and the human aspects.
Technological obsolesce
It is evident that technology keeps evolving every second day and hence it becomes imperative that the organizations keep themselves abreast with the latest technological innovations. Having obsolete technologies at workplace is worse than not having it at all.
Proper training of employees and line managers
Our discussion focused on the fact that the HR functions should be shared by the line managers and employees through tools like the intranet, self service etc. However, we cannot ignore the fact that the employees have to be trained well before working with these tools. An absence of expertise or semi-skilled employees will affect the accuracy and productivity causing data damage.
This article has been authored by Ela Koshal from Welingker Institute, Mumbai.
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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