5 Key Steps to Modernizing Your Human Capital Management

In today’s unsettling and hypercompetitive economic climate, success depends upon the people you hire and the people you keep. To help their organizations improve at this, HR executives are looking to digital platforms to more effectively attract and retain needed talent, as well as to manage services and requirements in a more streamlined way.

The goal is to bring about a corporate culture that emphasizes talent management that adapts to changing markets and opportunities for the business. Today’s constellation of digital HR solutions—enabled by technologies such as cloud, e-signatures and data analytics—provides a more complete picture of the employment lifecycle and helps bring together formerly siloed knowledge and work practices of enterprises.

It’s important to note that digital technologies by themselves don’t magically transform HR processes. Modern HR, built on a foundation of digital platforms, requires new thinking about the role of human capital management in competing in today’s global economy.

The following are ways HR executives can help lead the digital revolution and assume greater leadership roles within their organizations.

1. Rethink HR processes and workflows: Digital HR streamlines processes, often reducing the time to complete projects from days to minutes. For example, performance reviews, which involve distributing printed checklists to involved parties, can be streamlined and consolidated online. As a result, HR executives will see their roles elevated to that of enterprise leader and advisor, especially at a time when organizations are seeing severe imbalances between skill shortages and changing priorities.
2. Focus on interactivity, and maintain the human touch: Nobody wants to have to answer to a soulless machine. As with any pursuit, interacting with technology should bring people closer together, not isolate them. A highly interactive and informal social media presence—perhaps involving a high-level executive—may go a long way toward opening communication channels. Technology interfaces and solutions should help people not only to do their jobs better but to enjoy their jobs more.
3. Think in terms of data: HR executives and their business colleagues need to adopt analytical thinking in their decision making. Ultimately, the ability to tie results to the business is the most powerful role for HR. Successful staffing, compensation and performance decisions and strategies are increasingly driven by metrics, available through today’s digital HR offerings.
4. Look at cloud options: The cloud offers many capabilities to businesses, including human capital management. Modern HR is highly agile, and capabilities can be acquired from a company’s own data centers or through cloud-based services, such as Software as a Service.****
5. Raise awareness and provide training: Modern HR brings the entire enterprise into many of the processes once hidden away within HR departments—talent management, recruiting, hiring and more. It’s important to communicate how modern HR will help make managers’ and employees’ jobs easier, as well as improve relationships across the board, including with the job applicant community. It may be a relatively straightforward process to adopt cloud-based HR solutions that replace legacy systems, but transitioning HR staff may require different workflows and processes. Reevaluate training approaches, including shifting the HR team’s emphasis towards an integrated view of the entire environment—not just slices of specific tasks.

Digital adoption is changing the way organizations do business, both on the outside and inside. As the shift to digital accelerates, HR executives have the opportunity to significantly increase the value of their roles within their enterprises.

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