HR Technology – Boosting organizational performance
A certainty nowadays is that human resources, by its specificity, is becoming increasingly present in the economic field of theory and practice. Permanently located at the center of management science approaches, human resources’ potential opens a variety of ways in which it can significantly contribute to achieving organizational performance.
It is more and more visible that, in the conditions of scientific accumulation, information and technological explosion, the managerial act of human resources is asked to provide substantiation and promote the best decisions to ensure the performance of an organization. Moreover, the expansion of computer technology influenced HR departments to operate as a core business function and have a strategic role within organizations.
“Human Resources isn’t a thing we do. It’s the thing that runs our business.” – Steve Wynn, former CEO of Wynn Resorts
Given this reality, organizations are redesigning their HR management departments, moving from traditional approaches to the scientific ones, in which Human Resources Technology (HR Tech) plays an increasing important role.
HR Tech is an umbrella term for software and associated hardware for automating the human resources function in organizations. It includes employee payroll and compensation, talent acquisition and management, workforce analytics, performance management, and benefits administration.
The HR Tech field expanded rapidly during the last years, with tools of all sorts being implemented in many organizations around the world.
One of the first aims of HR Tech was to automate paper-based processes. In this regard, we can mention that technology changes the way HR departments contact employees, store files, train, interview, hire, compensate and analyze employee performance. Technology makes it easier to gather and break down data on employees to get an overall image.
There are some important HR processes within which technology can greatly improve the overall quality of a practitioner’s work, and can even optimize organizational performance. These are as follows:
- Recruitment – HR Tech has saved a lot of time for both employer and employee, allowing them to conveniently find the perfect match for any given position;
- Data Organization and Security – digitizing important documents, such as employee records, will save a lot of effort and time;
- Performance Assessment – HR Tech can gather and break down information on an employee’s overall performance;
- Payroll software – ensures that payment and employees’ wages and salaries tracking, together with tax deductions, work well;
- Learning and Development – corporate training and education programs are migrating to interactive online platforms, created by HR Tech. This will allow users to learn at their own pace, while accelerating their development at the same time;
- Talent management – HR Tech is comprised of various forms of applications and SaaS platforms, which are used to recruit job candidates, evaluate candidates’ pre-interview and track them during the hiring cycle;
- Employee engagement – employee engagement platforms and apps use a variety of approaches to try to keep workers interested in and enthusiastic about their jobs.
There is now an emphasis not just on automating certain tasks or processes, but on increasing productivity in general, by helping individuals and teams work better and achieve synergistic performance within the organization.
Some of the HR Tech key points considered very important in achieving organizational performance are the following:
- Automation: software applications can play a significant role in automating traditionally manual processes (e.g., forms, inquiries etc.);
- Economies of scale: pooling common and shared resources can lead to more efficient processing of work and, in turn, higher productivity across the organization;
- Analytics: nowadays, the new generation of performance management systems provides a vast array of tools that can harvest critical information such as indicators, patterns, and trends of employee productivity, in order for leaders to make much more informed decisions about their workforce;
- Integrative: Some performance systems can provide comprehensive solutions with the help of advanced interfacing capabilities, which can align with other business operating systems.
The great diversity of the ways in which HR Tech works at present and influences organizational performance brings phenomena and processes both old and new developments into the foreground, making it easier to gauge which ones will bring about lasting change. This further emphasizes the fact that tech evolution leads to HR evolution.
At current, we can talk about a second generation of HR Tech, by migrating from local systems, to new cloud platforms, such as SaaS.
A study conducted by Oxford Economics has shown that more than 80% of HR managers are eager to adopt new technologies, in order to improve employee research and performance. HR managers need to find flexible and proficient candidates with great digital skills.
It is therefore essential for them to integrate the needs of their organizations with the world of technology. Annual reports show that every year, the most successful companies are the ones investing in technology.
It is clear that good HR practices maximize benefits and minimize problems. With the evolution of organizations, implementing a complete SaaS system is slowly becoming a necessity. Obviously, such a system will have to include specialized processes, adapted to each company’s needs.
It turns out that there are a variety of ways in which HR Tech contributes to achieving performance, proving that these are and will remain, in fact, essential forces that support and ensure the fulfillment of goals and objectives within organizations.
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Tags: Analytics, Employee Performance, Human Resources performance, Technology
