DM1901

APPLICATION FOCUS: HR Dm
2.Recruitment & development:
addressing skills gaps & talent turnover
Skills gaps are a persistent challenge in
most market sectors, placing increasing
responsibility on HR teams to be
creative, attentive, fast-acting and
lateral in their thinking - whether that's
in approaches to recruitment, or the
way they keep staff interested and
motivated.
If employee records and evolving
vacancy situations are being pieced
together from all over the place, a lot of
work will be needed before key
decisions and actions can be taken. If
filling new or empty posts is the priority,
then running standout recruitment
campaigns and blasting these out
through all of the relevant channels
needs to happen quickly and in a
joined-up way.
A digitisation strategy should aim to
connect disparate information sources
and marketing and communication
channels, so that it becomes easier,
faster and more automatic to feed job
opportunities or recruitment campaigns
directly to target audiences - e.g.
automatically publish messages and
opportunities to job-hunters' websites
or social platforms like LinkedIn, with
links straight back into the HR
department as candidates submit their
applications.
3.Employee self-service
Letting employees do more to help
themselves is another significant driver
for HR digital transformation. Employee
self-service via a secure company portal
offers to alleviate busy HR teams of
simple, routine administration
(accessing payslips, booking time off,
requesting training, and more), while
giving staff members an increased sense
of control.
Company portals, or intranets, offer a
powerful, low-touch way to open up
the lines of communication too: for
instance, busy managers can use them
to broadcast news updates.
For these online hubs to be most
effective, they must integrated logically
with central document/content stores,
protected with the right security
measures and access rights, and have
strong workflow in place to make sure
requests and bookings are automatically
logged and actioned - without the need
for manual data re-entry into separate
departmental systems.
4.Personal data management, security
& compliance
Updated data protection law and
individuals' enhanced personal data
rights under GDPR have proved another
driver for galvanising HR's digital
progress. Not just because of the
sensitive employee data that HR
departments hold, but also because
Human Resources is the logical first port
of call for any member of staff feeling
concerned about potential breaches.
A modern HR management platform
will be able not only to adapt to and
enforce the latest data compliance
parameters, but also trigger automated
prompts - for instance if someone
leaves the business, and a deadline
approaches by which the organisation
must wipe or otherwise close down
access to all of their data.
People's increased rights to request
access to any data kept about them
must also be managed. Again, a
sufficiently well controlled self-service
facility could help to lighten the load and
manage the appropriate security checks.
5.Mobility
Today's employees expect to be able to
work from home, be more flexible in
their hours, and be productive while on
the move.
Although there will be a balance
between safeguarding sensitive
data/maintaining strict compliance, and
fully enabling a modern digital
workplace, organisations may wish to
consider their future options when
choosing a HR management platform,
even if they do not feel they want to
'mobilise' HR at this particular point in
time. At some later date, they may wish
to roll out an employee 'app', so that
staff members can interact with their
personal files when away from the office.
Future considerations also include how
the software will be provisioned. Even if
HR is considered too sensitive an area to
move into the cloud today, it is worth
planning for a dual hosting strategy to
stay open to all possibilities, especially
as cloud hosting can make secure
'anywhere access' easier to enable.
6.Management reporting & analytics
Organisations' hunger for big data
hasn't gone away, but the emphasis
now has shifted to how quickly diverse
data sources can be turned into
meaningful and actionable conclusions.
One of the ways HR teams can expect
to add value for the business-at-large in
future is through the ability to provide
more granular and illuminating insights
into employment issues, trends and
forecasts. The ability to construct a
range of value-added reports, and
display these in different formats and
dashboards, is a further consideration
when choosing a modern HR
management platform. Being able to
integrate the HR platform into adjacent
systems such as payroll would allow
broader reporting.
PLAN OF ACTION
Whatever the current, tactical priority for
an improved HR IT capability, it is
important that organisations think laterally
about where else they could take this.
Importantly, transformation doesn't
need to require a complete overhaul of
legacy systems. The right platform should
be able to connect into and harness all
that is working well today. As long as
there is compatibility and easy
integration, it should be possible to blend
the old and the new to create something
powerful and transformational to HR
productivity and efficiency.
The potential benefits of updating HR
IT are considerable - from the
administrative time saved, to the more
timely management decisions that are
enabled and the positive impact on
employee engagement as people's
needs are more readily identified and
better met.
More info: easy-software.com/uk/
www.document-manager.com
January/February 2019
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