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HR Digitalization Projects
Digitalization in HR has become popular and I have had the opportunity to observe mid-size companies and their HR managements as they accelerate in their efforts to achieve this. Often these efforts are made with very limited budgets and/or competent staff, because top management has not yet comprehended the real scope and impact of HR processes on organizations.
Similarly, in the unorganized efforts to “change or improve” the “existing HR Technology”, expectations of organizations about the role of technology/software used in HR processes is exaggerated. This hinders the importance of other things that should be considered to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the tools and technology in use (or to be used). This may lead to catastrophic failures in HR digitalization projects.
As a consequence, I have suggestions for organizations planning to go through the HR Digitalization process.
It is clear that the use of more modern technology is gaining importance in HR management and considerable progress has been made over the last 20 years. For example:
1. The enhancements in network and communication infrastructures expanded the utilization of technology in HR from internal HR department processes to all of the HR related processes involving employees and even employee candidates.
2. The vast increase in data processing and data storage capacity enabled much more detailed data to be kept and processed about the organization itself, the employees, candidates and even the terminated employees, which facilitated the variety of things that can be done and decisions to be made using this data.
3. With mobile devices controlling our lives, the expected level of technology used for/by every interest group in HR processes has increased.
4. Naturally, all these developments have led to more expectations about widening the functional coverage of services from HR departments. When combined with the mandatory responsibilities, this has created an overload on HR management’s responsibilities.
This is the point where a larger proportion of top management/HR teams in organizations start to embrace a not-so-effective approach to resolve or avoid this overload. If that is the case for your company, here are some of my warnings.
1. The primary responsibility of HR departments is to comprehensively coordinate and control the basic HR processes. Therefore:
- HR departments should primarily organize themselves with the right staffing, competency levels and hierarchical/task force structures. HR departments should never jump into digital transformation projects with a few new staffers or without sophisticated implementation plans.
- Not only the HR department’s, but the clear definition and documentation of the whole organization’s targeted structure, roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, competency requirements, interdepartmental process flows, control points and approval points should be finished and ready to be implemented with the implementation of any digital transformation project. Otherwise, inclusion of technology into chaos will only help existing vague processes to be more complicated and difficult to control.
2. If an HR process is going to be included in a digital transformation project utilizing new technology, all the possible test scenarios with the redesigned scenarios and tools to be used should be run before the project is implemented to avoid immediate problems. Otherwise, instead of increasing employee engagement, employees will start making fun of such new projects. HR will lose credibility and all that time and money invested will have been wasted.
3. When working with outsource teams/vendors in such projects, no matter whether it is a basic HR process or a brand new technology implementation, your counterpart team should be comprised of people experienced in related HR processes as well as the technology they are providing. Equally important is the need to have a similar level of knowledge and experience within your internal project team.
Allow me to give you some related examples to explain what I mean more clearly:
ðDo not start designing workflows in your brand new “Business Process Management Engine” software before all your top management comes to a consensus over a documented organization structure, hierarchical/functional relations matrix, job definitions, responsibility and accountability levels.
ðDo not start HR Analytics projects before understanding the basic HR processes’ working principles, data requirements, the relationships among the data; how, where, when and how frequently the data should be collected, and making sure that the data you are collecting is/can be made relevant and worth analyzing.
ðDo not start a web based balanced score-card performance management system “with mobile support” before your organization is ready to establish a long-term corporate strategic objectives library which can regularly be updated every year to facilitate top and middle-level managers to specify their own targets and cascade their targets to the lower levels aligned with the corporate strategies within a smoothly designed and up-to-date organization hierarchy.
ðDo not start a competency based, AI supported automatic assessment project before the job definitions are well documented and up-to-date and your organizational competency library is designed thoroughly and mapped onto these job definitions which can also be seamlessly used in your organizational career planning and development processes.
ðLast, but not the least, do not start any HR digital transformation project if you are going to assign a team of new recruits hoping they will learn something as they proceed, thinking that the right people for the project already have a lot to do with the daily assignments anyway and the only question you will be asking this rookie team may be “Is everything OK guys?” on the first day of the implementation.
While I believe that no one is choosing these options believing this is the right way to do it, I am observing that the frequency of such choices is increasing day by day with the overwhelming intensity of daily workloads. I hope that by emphasizing the dangers inherent in the process, the road to success in the digitalization of HR can be chosen and achieved.
