What an Organization of the Future Looks Like
Digital transformation looks bigger, faster and scarier as it happens. But if you stay ahead of the curve, it can be your “normal.”
Keeping your organization in-step with progress is important, but it also needs to happen in a way that benefits a wide range of people in your organization.
Let’s talk a bit about what the future of an organization will look like and how you can adapt.
We will cover what is changing, then some examples of technologies that will be adopted by organizations to respond to that change.
Here is the latest.
How Does Digital Transformation Affect HR?
Digital transformation, from a high-level perspective, is the gradual automation of business processes. In human resources specifically, it is a matter of modeling processes and adopting technologies that work within those processes to the benefit of the people and the greater company.
What makes the human resources role so special is that it needs to focus on this process from the top, down. HR is concerned with everything from employee productivity to teamwork and professionalism.
The “organization of the future” has become a term tossed around in this sphere, because that is the essential, underlying goal of digital transformation. It is finding the right technologies and the right people to work in sync with them.
The technologies have to be cutting edge, so the people using them need to be highly capable employees of the digital age.
Broadly, most businesses recognize the need for digital transformation. The difficulty comes with how it’s put in practice.
What Digital Transformation Should Look Like
You could easily jump on the “digital transformation wagon” due to outside pressure. Or from reading an article like this one.
But one of the most important things to consider is that digital transformation should not be rushed.
Hurried “transformation” can in fact create more problems than it solves. If you implement the wrong technology for your people, you could backup entire workflows now that they are forced to learn operate a clunky new technology.
Another important consideration is that your underlying operations – absent of technologies – might need work before you go adopting anything new. Investing in new technology and automating without careful maintenance of your processes beforehand is like slapping a new coat of paint on a broken car.
That’s why, before forcing any new digital tech on your organization, you need to take a good look in the mirror and establish a corporate philosophy that will actually scale when automated.
Ask first why you are interested in new technologies. Then ask which ones.
If you are an organization that wants to continuously adapt, this constant questioning is a process that is never finished.
Once your organization’s goals and identity are firmly established, here are a few technologies you can consider for digital transformation.
HR Digital Transformation Tools
The first things you look at when pursuing automation is tasks that are easily repeated and take a lot of time. Human resources teams use digital tools to help them with employee onboarding and off-boarding, managing time off, training employees, and much more.
The technology we’re going to talk about here addresses both pools of new recruits and employee performance. With these tools implemented, your organization will hopefully have better decision-making capability when hiring, promoting and adjusting personnel.
Transformed Recruiting
Many recruiting tasks can be among the most repetitious candidates for automation mentioned earlier. Today, with the unemployment rate so high – around 7%, compared to 4% in 2019 – human resources departments could be getting more applications than usual.
Automating recruiting processes can give HR teams more time in making important hiring decisions. With artificial intelligence, the HR team is empowered to make those decisions more quality as well.
It has only been a few years since the process of recruiting and hiring were more physical tasks than virtual. HR teams would sift through paper documents and have in-person interviews with prospects. They would go through a real stack of resumes to find some top candidates and toss the rest.
Hiring today is more dynamic. A growing gig economy paired with AI analytics tends to broaden the pool of prospects you’re interested in, with maybe several different ones that could supply skills that used to be for a single role.
Better hiring results from a more carefully vetted candidate pool. Rather than eliminating most of the candidates, artificial intelligence can help optimize your talent search by filtering for exactly the features you are looking for in a prospect.
This is a case of artificial intelligence saving you actual money. Hiring poorly can be a huge hit to an organization financially and morally. AI can analyze whether an employee will be the right fit for your future organization and minimize that risk.
Automation also works toward this aim, giving your team more time to brainstorm who would be the best fit for the job.
That’s a little bit about how digital transformation impacts the future of recruiting. Now, here’s the future of your in-house staff.
Transformed Performance Management
Just like with onboarding new staff, automating and optimizing internal performance management can pay huge dividends.
Performance management has been one of the least-favorite HR processes across the board for years. Especially in the days of paper forms. Even with digital documents, this has been tedious.
Now, with AI and automation, companies can establish clearer goals through these processes and track them more efficiently over the year.
No longer will this be a simple formality, but an actual return on investment. A companies learn to better identify success and failure, they can start identifying weak points in processes and fine ways to improve.
With a constant, automatic feedback loop of helpful data, employees – and the organization as a result – is pushed to consistent improvement.
Conclusion
No matter what technology you adopt into your “organization of the future,” the people you hire will always be the glue that holds it all together.
Better technology can assist you in finding the perfect candidates for the job. Artificial intelligence can come quite close to identifying what you need.
But at the end of the day, no one knows people better than…people.
Newman’s International Associates (NIA) connects world-class talent with companies around the globe. If you are trying to establish an organization of the future, contacting NIA might be your first step.
