In today’s world, technology and business are inextricably linked. In recent years, HR is being driven to take on a larger and crucial role in helping organizations become digital. With the pandemic forcing organizations to take a detour from their usual priorities, the role of HR has only become more crucial than ever. While a multitude of organizations has begun to comprehend the inevitability of digital HR transformation, HR leaders are exploring newer technologies and different platforms every day to reap maximum benefits from the transformation.
But are HR digital transformations smooth roads? When your organization is following a protocolled path and you bring in a change that disrupts normalcy, you are bound to expect humps and bumps midway.
Following are the major challenges that stop organizations move towards a successful HR digital transformation journey:
1. User adoption
Although organizations try to keep up with the pace of technological changes involved in digital transformation, some fall prey to Digital Darwinism. Every organization exhibits a culture that it had developed since its inception. Employees follow these cultures that have a prescribed way of operating and delivering. This limits them to be receptive to any technological change and hence leads to poor user adoption of any new technology that the organization brings in to use as a result of digital transformation.
2. Vendor management
Managing a technology vendor and a different servicing partner is one of the most challenging phases in an organization’s digital transformation and assumes mission-critical significance. Having multiple vendors can be difficult as in that case, the time, effort, resources of the organizations need to be spent in order to build relationships and manage them. It also involves different invoices, different sets of paperwork. Moreover, the total cost of ownership will be high in this case.
3. Multiple sources of data
The extraction of data that will be used by the HR function is another major challenge in case of a digital transformation as they would be inevitably required for better analytics and decision making. Lacking a single source for data extraction might possibly lead to inaccuracy in data. Multiple data silos can result in redundancy and unnecessary confusion between disparate groups that need to collaborate. Different approaches to data storage will make cohesive blending a tedious task.
In the case of multiple systems, each throws data in different formats and the organization might be forced to spend time and internal bandwidth to convert the data and make it useful.
4. Cost optimization
Organizations require today’s HR leaders to not only satisfy the digital aspirations and the needs of the workforce but also transform the HR function into an efficient and strategic partner to businesses. Cost optimization initiatives form a critical component of an HR transformation. But, very often, they are lost out in the mess that follows. Hence, many organizations fail to keep their cost optimization on track during their HR transformations and end up with exorbitant HR costs – significantly greater than their peers.
Is there a silver bullet?
To overcome these challenges and undergo a successful digital HR transformation, organizations can choose an ‘integrated HR technology and operations’ approach where both the technology implementation and the service delivery are carried out by one single vendor. Let’s dig deeper into this approach.
The integrated HR technology and operations approach offers bundled HR services with technology to fill the white spaces in an organization’s technology landscape. It typically involves three phases – Build, Execute, and Support. Let’s see what an integrated transformation journey looks like.
What do organizations gain?
With such an approach toward digital transformation, organizations can gain:
- A fully managed, flexible cloud solution
- A single global system that brings together components under a single system
- Single-vendor experience, rather than fiddling with multiple vendors in different locations who point fingers at each other
- A risk-free experience since the single vendor takes up all responsibilities
- Focus on core business objectives rather than the transactional activities
- A globalized and standardized transformation journey that is more seamless and rapid
- A truly holistic integrated solution
- Transformed user adoption and change management
- Better cost value proposition
COVID-19 has forced organizations to look at ways to wade through a tough terrain that, without a resilient HR service delivery model, will become non-viable. Neeyamo addresses this need with its unique HROS framework that has been tested to guarantee the continual functioning of organizations’ HR processes through the integrated ‘technology & operations’ approach.
