Integrate new tech in your HR department to improve these 3 key areas.
Management can improve company efficiency and effectiveness by utilizing HRM technology that strengthens 3 key areas of human resources.
Human Resources Management (HRM) carries a stigma of being a dry, corporate practice involving endless bouts of paperwork, boring meetings, and an impersonal approach to managing human resources within a company. This stereotype is unfortunately not often disproven by modern representations of HR and its practices. However, as Kipkemboi Jacob Rotich writes, HR functions have been around since humans organized tribes for hunting and gathering. The evolution of human resource management, however, has typically focused on industrial and corporate conceptions of HRM.
This article will discuss how technology impacts human resource management and shatters such stereotypes by positioning HRM as an integral part of business decision-making and assessment. When HRM technology, and functions of human resource management more broadly, are seen as partnerships with management committed to company development, the job takes on a whole new light. Here, we will talk about how technology in HR management shifts integral aspects of company efficiency and effectiveness through improved and responsive performance assessment, streamlined compliance and training efforts, and an overall shift of HR managers to more strategy-oriented roles within your company.
How Technology Has Changed Human Resource Management
Performance Assessment
Performance assessment and management has been a core aspect of HRM. What is HR management if not the management of efficient human resources? With new database technology, HRM managers can compile complete data on employee and company performance based on any number of factors.
But what’s more, modern technology allows HRM to embed Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) right into employee workstations or company processes. Put right in the middle of a business operation, technology can improve efficiency and effectiveness by measuring both in real time. This marries human resources and technology in a total performance assessment solution that would allow HR personnel to change management plans more responsively.
Compliance and Training
A business of any significant size (or working with any significant level of risk or regulation) knows what an efficiency-killer compliance can be. Walls of paperwork, background checks, assessments, and more take up the time of employees in and out of HR just to make sure that all the company’s i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.
New technologies in cloud computing, edge-node data acquisition (DAQ), and social HR portals provide HR managers to embed updates, necessary paperwork, and other necessities into easily accessible web interfaces that can be accessed remotely. Furthermore, any necessary actions rooted in employee activity (reprimands, corrections of behavior) can be initiated, tracked, and communicated through private portals using real data gathered from unfolding conditions such as new regulations or company policies, for example.
Shift to Strategy-Oriented Functions
With advanced performance assessment and streamlined compliance, information technology in human resource management quickly positions HR managers as integral business partners within a company. This is because, as efficiency and effectiveness become key considerations for HR operations (and employees more broadly), strategies developed in HR could save a company thousands of dollars and work-hours.
The HR manager now works with advanced technology and data analytics within a business to minimize costs, maximize effectiveness and compliance, and ensure that employees are engaged. These functions are essential to an effective business practice, and their emphasis is how technology has changed HRM practices from technology-based to strategy-based functions.
These three aspects of HRM—performance assessment, compliance and training, and strategy-oriented HR functions—are integral to the evolution of HRM. The efficiency of a business operation can no longer be seen as separate from HR management, specifically because human resources and performance are now key to the success of any business. But new, data-oriented technologies are supporting new ways for HRM to make any business operation efficient, and to situate HR managers as partners in a company’s overall business strategy.
