Traditional HR departments need to embrace digital

Digitalisation is about people

Imagine a few years from now, your HR department is data-driven by technology combined with data points from real humans, real individuals. The team itself. What would the impact look like and how can the modern organisation steer the boat based on that knowledge?

Author: Toke Kruse, Entrepeneur & Founder at Successteam

It’s a common misconception that digitalisation is about technology and hiring more technically skilled people. That is all wrong. Digitalisation is about humans. Before we can expect humans to adapt to new ways of working and new ways of staying up to date, we need to understand why technology is implemented and how. In other words, humans need to transform, not technology. That being said, technology needs to support and help this transformation along.

Performance and employee satisfaction – no longer a gut feeling

For a long time, HR departments have been tied to legacy systems in terms of how they use technology to help their company hire, organise team members, and get a good understanding of employees’ health, stress-levels and performance. Many organisations have been doing all that based on leaders’ insights and gut-feelings – especially in the mid-level market. These organisations have not had the possibility of measuring any of these things with technology. Perhaps new employees take a personality test before they get hired, or go through interview rounds, but once they’ve started, how employees feel and perform is often left up to humans. This is not an efficient way of working and can bring down performance and satisfaction levels.

Creating a flexible, agile organisation

Teams today have very different expectations from those of ten years ago. They want to get input and feedback much more often than once a year. The workforce has changed, and HR departments need to keep up. This means faster turnaround time, faster reaction time, and getting more in sync with employees on all levels. In other words, a much more agile, flexible and evolving organisation. 

The solution for this is technology that supports the HR department, leadership, and the entire organisation by providing insights combined with human interaction from people who appreciate the new working landscape. Look at Successteam, where the team is measured based on four parameters: stress, performance, satisfaction and loyalty. This data is collected in a hassle-free way, replacing the old yearly interviews with employees. The kind of software that can collect such valuable data in a way that doesn’t take up a lot of time is what will define how modern HR departments work and how they measure positive and negative pulses in an organisation.

Yesterday was about accounting, tomorrow will be about HR

Long before this transformation within HR, organisations had already digitalised a lot of other processes and areas with large-scale impact and great results. For instance, look at the accounting department, which has been drastically changed by online accounting software in the cloud; accountants don’t type, print and send physical invoices anymore, for example. Or think about how the way we communicate has been upgraded with apps like Slack or Trello.

The digital age is upon us and HR departments that embrace it will bring untold value to their organisations. Change is never easy, but it does make for exciting times!