Why Digital HR is a game changer and will be a win-win for both employees and organizations

Last week Deloitte announced one of its largest investments at US$20 million over three years in Singapore to create a Future of Work Centre of Excellence in Singapore.  Last month Mercer announced the formation of Mercer Digital to offer digital solutions for the workforce of the future.

A Google keyword search on "HR Digital" shows HR digital results from Deloitte, Accenture, Aon, Mercer and many others on the first page.

What is happening here? Let me share three personal experiences.

Situation 1:

While reviewing Lenovo's Employee Benefits Program of an Asian emerging market country, I found that we have a policy to annually reimburse glasses and frames. I was curious to learn about the annual usage of this benefit (do employees change glasses/ frames annually, do employees especially value this benefit especially - a predominantly millennial workforce - and do we have a high ROI for this benefit linking it to engagement and retention)? My primary question was: do I have the means to get all the above information easily using HR data analytics?

Situation 2:

Last week I saw a Facebook post of an exasperated colleague stuck in traffic in Whitefield, Bangalore at 10 am. Soon there were comments from his colleagues and ex-colleagues chiming in on his post about his plight. One of them cheekily commented, "A good way to communicate to your boss that you are late to office ?". Is Facebook becoming the preferred way to collaborate and communicate through mobile platforms in our ever increasingly integrated work and life? Is there something for the HR organization to learn from this?

Situation 3:

Last year, HBR published an article on 'Empathy Index' ranking companies on creating empathetic cultures. The primary source of the HBR article was data from the social employee feedback site Glassdoor.com and not using the services of any Engagement Survey Partner? Is employee feedback data from social sites the new normal replacing expensive engagement surveys from the HR engagement Survey partners?

What is the common thread connecting these three situations? Welcome to digital HR.

Each of these situations offers new ways in which HR is becoming 'digital.' HR organizations today have a huge untapped opportunity to improve engagement and productivity through seamless delivery of rich and personalized content and applications on integrated social, digital and mobile collaborative platforms supported by underlying HR analytics.  

Situation 1: Using HR Analytics and Bots in HR Digital

Can an HR bot supported by HR analytics provide deep insights, for example listening to a question in natural language (via Alexa, Android and Google Chrome, Siri or Cortana) and then translating it into queries that can run across multiple datasets? (Rhizabot, a sales AI company acquired by Nielsen already does that for sales). OK, let me ask our hypothetical HR bot:

'HR bot, give me the usage analysis of the employee benefits on reimbursing spectacle glasses by gender, age and frequency." (HR bot accesses deep data analytics from Lenovo's employee benefits data sets).

"HR bot, how many companies offer this benefit in this country?' (HR bot runs analytics on external benefits provider data sets and provides benchmark analysis).

"HR bot, tell me should I continue or discontinue the annual employee benefits of offering frames and lenses to employees?" (HR bot analyses current usage patterns from benefits data set, future anticipated need from Lenovo's workforce planning dataset, and external health analysis of the nation's visual health reports).

Is this future or fiction? It's the future of digital HR.

Situation 2: Using Collaborative Platforms in HR Digital

When my colleague posts a message on Facebook about being stuck in traffic and his colleagues, ex-colleagues and friends reply, it actually offers valuable insights for HR.

Companies offering a social collaboration tool that's intuitive, easy to use and can facilitate the connection of a person's work and home life - indeed blending the two to create value would certainly lead to higher engagement and productivity

Today we are blending personal and work life more than ever. Companies offering a social collaboration tool that's intuitive, easy to use and can facilitate the connection of a person's work and home life - indeed blending the two to create value would certainly lead to higher engagement and productivity. Social collaboration tools should help people to get things done in their personal life projects too. And the more people become familiar with a social collaboration tool at home, the more it will be adopted inside the enterprise to the benefit of organizations.

In this new world with a growing millennial workforce and distributed global teams, employees (particularly millennials) want to access from any device and from any location.

Mobility experts state the global mobile workforce will reach 1.87 billion people - 42.5% of the total global workforce - in 2022 [see footnote 3]. As workers go mobile, so do their primary work devices (smaller, portable and wearable) In this new world with a growing millennial workforce and distributed global teams, employees (particularly millennials) want to access from any device and from any location.

Online tools such as Slack, Github, Box, Microsoft Yammer and Google Hangout are now growing at an unprecedented rate further confirming the untapped potential for HR to leverage social collaboration and improve organizational productivity and employee engagement.

Situation 3: Using Crowdsourced Social Data in HR Digital

In the HBR article where crowdsourced social data from Glassdoor.com data was used to index companies on empathy, there are many areas in HR where crowdsourced data is showing astounding results.
Talent searches: Networking and finding candidates should now happen not just via social media, but also using techniques like mobile recruiting, gamification crowdsourcing job descriptions, candidate referrals and of course the assessment/interview process. Google, Marriott, Unilever, Deloitte and others are increasingly using gamification in their recruiting strategy in an effort to increase candidate engagement, shorten screening time, and build brand awareness.

Organization culture: Glassdoor.com and Indeed.com offer rich real time data on organization culture. At Lenovo, the HR analytics team reviews the feedback from these sites and offers visually rich insights to HR leaders for building real time actions.

Employer branding: Prospective employees, especially the millennial generation, rely on crowdsourced sites for an accurate view of an organization before applying or deciding to join.

Organization values: When a company refreshes its core values, rather than having a top down approach, it's possible to reach out to a very large section of employees faster and more effectively to contribute to the value building process. In 2003 when I joined IBM (through the PwC Consulting acquisition), IBM executives held a worldwide IBM values "jam" to engage its huge global workforce to help refresh company values. For three days, tens of thousands of employees logged onto a company intranet to participate in an instant-message-style session. This was long before social sites like Facebook or Twitter or collaborative social platforms like Yammer or Hangout were in existence.

Recognition: Lenovo leverages social recognition platforms replete with social and collaborative recognition features, ranging from simple peer-to-peer appreciation/wishes/gifting to complex nominations, and voting through a workflow using crowdsourcing feedback.

Compensation: Third parties like PayScale.com, GlassDoor.com, Comparably.com and Indeed.com collect crowdsourced data and aggregate individual salary information to supplement traditional compensation surveys. The recent alliance of Mercer with PayScale (which provides real time crowdsourced salary data using data science) illustrates the growing interest to balance traditional compensation data with real time social data.

If the opportunity is so huge, why is HR adoption to HR digitization so low?

There are many more examples of how digitization in HR would deliver significant improvement to employee experience, productivity and engagement. If the opportunity is so huge, why is HR adoption to HR digitization so low?

I will share my perspectives on the challenges to adapting to HR digitization in my next article. The very fact that all HR consulting companies are building their HR digital practice is a cue to what is coming. Stay tuned!

Article is written by Subhankar Roy Chowdhury, Head Human Resources, Lenovo-Asia Pacific