HR digitization refers to the increased use of digital technologies in driving business objectives in the human resource department.
Human resource professionals have, for a long time, worked mostly in isolation, performing their day-to-day administrative duties in isolation. Companies usually hired them for legal compliance and employee management.
However, digital technology has been rapidly changing, forcing all business functions, including HR, to undergo a reinvention. Many software vendors have managed to transform the human resource management processes to what they are today with breakthrough technologies. HR departments now embrace IT systems and rely on them for the automation of their processes as their business objectives.
Whether you adopt an advanced recruitment management system to automate your SMEs recruitment or use a cloud-based HCM system, digitization is certainly blurring that have been in existence between IT and other key business functions such as human resource management. It is not surprising, therefore, that technology is slowly but surely disrupting corporate HR functions.
HR has seen an upsurge of many digital tools that seek to reinvent the role of HR and open up new productivity channels. Welcome to the technology age, which is proving to be a challenge for HR, although it presents a great opportunity. Only those in a position to harness the great power of digitization will remain completive in the market in the long run.
As you can see from above, SMEs can derive immense benefits from digitizing their human resource management system. It’s a sure way to give your business a competitive edge of the rest in the industry. Below are some of the benefits.
1. Provides a Strategic Edge
Automation was once just a means of cutting costs and improving productivity. However, with the emerging cloud-based HR solutions, HR will play a new role in the future. It will be a strategic anchor to your business.
In today’s competitive world, HR is no longer just about hiring employees and managing them. You have to give them an opportunity to contribute towards strategically positioning your business. This they can do using data-driven insights.
Digitizing your human resource management system will provide real-time information on your employees’ behavior. You can then use such information to improve services for them. HR can embrace data analytics tools to make them more effective competitors for global talent.
This can help in streamlining the processes, thereby reducing your administrative workload. Therefore, digitization will act as a catalyst in transforming your HR in the future. This will help you in carving out a strategic role for your HR team in your business.
2. Enables Better Employee Engagement
A successful implementation of a digital human resource solution will enable your business to reduce its workload and minimize the amount of money you would spend on IT equipment. This will, in effect, free up your HR department’s bandwidth to relocate its resources to other more pressing duties.
In addition, such solutions will provide your business with the capacity to gather your employees’ vital data and feedback. This will enable HR analytics to add some value to your firm’s employee engagement.
The HR department can use this data to develop a comprehensive understanding of your firm’s employees. Accordingly, the department can go a step further and create training and incentive programs as well as new engagement tools. You can also segregate your employees in various categories and customize each employee’s engagement efforts.
Did you think that digitizing your HR would be tantamount to dehumanizing it? If so, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Digital solutions can help your HR department to create a new and more comprehensive understanding of your employees’ behavior and needs using HR analytics.
Based on the data interpretation, the HR department can deliver customized solutions to each of your employees tailored to their individual strengths. This is certainly more meaningful.
3. Better Decision Making
Ultimately, the purpose of digitizing your human resource management system will not be realized by merely adopting new technologies. Instead, your HR department has to reshape itself as a completely new and fully digitized function that is capable of setting its own digital agenda.
The department should refrain from merely working on a technology strategy that the IT department has created.
This evolution is quite similar to what you may have witnessed in marketing where the marketing department in most companies has taken control of its technology strategies and placed itself at the forefront of the company’s digital transformation. Digitizing HR will provide your business with data insights to help it make better decisions.
For any HR professional, the human touch will always be a crucial part of their job. However, they must also derive important insights from the enormous data they have on their employees. This can only happen when HR managers take the initiative of making themselves, together with their team, digitally literate.
They must own and be responsible for their IT assets. Fortunately, there are many analytics tools to make this possible. They include cloud-based Saas HCM solutions. In case you need customized reports and any added features, you can communicate with your software vendors.