Let’s go digital: Digital HR strategy

Why Do We Need A Digital HR Strategy?

Countless researches underline that digital transformation is a strategic requirement to win competitive advantages against competitors. Digitally savvy workforce has expressed their desire for more digital experience at work (The digital workforce experience: Getting technology to work at work, Deloitte Review July 2019). At the same time, fast growing technology in HR has affected traditional HR practices in how we staff, integrate, evaluate, develop and reward our employees (Deloitte Human Capital Trend 2019). That emerging information has led me to a thought that there are three major environmental forces to urge HR to develop a new digital HR strategy. (Fig.1)

 Figure 1. Three Driving Forces

Business Strategy for Digitalization

Companies have transformed their business model for growth in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They are adapting emerging technologies to improve the efficiency of production. McKinsey Survey shows that 80 percent of the respondents agree that digital manufacturing and design are a critical driver of competitiveness. Moreover, World Economic Forum explains in the Future of Jobs Report 2018 that companies are competing on new products and customer experience to satisfy digital natives. For the purpose to digitalize a value chain or develop a new digital product, digitalization has become an inevitable strategy for business. HR needs a corresponding strategy for an internal fit.

Digital People

The term, ‘Digital Natives’ is not only about young generation any longer. Regardless of age, people so called, ‘Digital Immigrants’ have rapidly accepted technology and been comfortable with and reliant on the use of technology (Prensky, 2001). More employees get to desire to be connected to various communities by social network platforms. More than half of Gen Ys believe that increased mobile working would improve their productivity (Deloitte 2014). Our employees want to have more digital experience at work. HR is expected to deliver it.

HR Technology

HR technology has been evolved very rapidly. Cloud and AI based HR IT systems and tools have been intelligent enough to be dynamically customized for company-specific needs and personalized use of individuals. They are more engaging, personalized and data driven. Many IT companies such as SAP, IBM and Google have already made use of the cutting-edge HR technology to monitor real-time metrics or analytics on employee engagement, talent acquisition, turnover, strategic workforce planning and learning and development. IBM and Google begun to use AI tools to identify the patterns of employee behaviors for high performance and to explore causational correlation for retention of key talents.

What Are The Strategic Directions for Digital HR?

Firstly, we should think about the current employer image of our company. Is it known as the great company for digital talents to work for? Secondly, we should offer our employees joyful digital experience at work to keep up their engagement and productivity. Thirdly, we should incorporate analytical intelligence (herein after called ‘People Analytics’) for data-driven decision through intensive efforts for digital data management. Lastly, we should reskill HR professionals to maximize their contribution in the digital environment. (Fig.2)

Figure 2. Strategic Directions

Digital Employer Image

We need to think about how to modernize our practice of job posting in digital recruiting channels. The lack of physical contacts in the online platforms makes it even more difficult for employers to demonstrate the value of jobs and requirement and to attract the talents. Thus, we should be able to express inspiring employer image and job story on the posting in prevailing social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Redesigning Employee Value Preposition is a prerequisite to acquire the digital employer image that can attract digital talents.

Digital Experience 

The digital experience cannot be made only through new IT solution implementation. It will be ultimately embedded when we leverage HR IT to improve the interactions with our employees. Thus, we should focus more on interactive User Interface where our employees can find useful information and exchange their feedback with HR experts in real time. In addition, as Accenture argues, we should embrace personalization features in our products to create positive customer experience and relationship. Employees show high level of buy-in and satisfaction when they feel that HR solutions stand for their individual needs.

New Skills in HR

A paper of Harvard Business Review in year 2018 ever explained that HR needed to nurture the right mindset as well as analytical capability in order to effectively build and use innovative IT tools and platform at the point of need. Even though many HR IT tools outside have provided HR professionals with the significant benefits, the challenge is that the professionals have seldom prioritized to make use of them in their organization due to unfamiliarity with the benefits. Therefore, we need to think about a hands-on way to catch their eye and stimulate impulse on learning new skills for new IT tools and analytics. I think that an action learning process can be a useful solution because it trains the new skills to the HR people through the participative problem-solving process. My experience means a quick win matters to resonate the benefits of analytics in HR.

People Analytics

Driven by the widespread adoption of cloud HR systems, companies have been heavily investing in HR data analytics for workforce planning, talent acquisition and retention, re-and-up skilling and operational improvement. (Deloitte, 2017). The companies that substantially invested in People Analytics for years begin to enjoy fruitful insights from their matured predictive analytics for recruitment, performance assessement, retention, talent detection and engagement. They have reached at the reliable level of analytics at the expense of various time-consuming trial and error. If we want to speed up the implementation of People Analytics, minimizing trial and error would be the key. We shouldn't overestimate the learning curve of HR skills. And short-term deliverables should be decided based on the user needs.