The Effects of New HR Technology on Employee Management

Technology plays the leading role in HR development since the 90’s. It caused HR field to go through 4 important phases, where the introduction of latest tech completely changed niche’s goals, objectives and work process. These phases are:

1.      Personnel administration (before 1990)- where main focus of HR experts was to create, collect and analyze employees paperwork.

2.      Human resources (1990-2000) - with the introduction of ERP technology, administrative tasks became much less time consuming and HR experts start focusing on predicting and changing employee’s behavior.

3.      Talent management (2001-2010)- Adoption of Internet brought greater access to data and HR departments start functioning as a set of talent management process, providing: recruiting, staffing, training and paperwork roles. 

4.      Business execution (from 2011 onwards)- with the introduction of cloud technology HR department shift its attention to increasing workforce productivity and in tailoring company’s long term strategy.

Specifically, these are some of the HR roles that were drastically changed by introduction of latest technology in the last 20 years:

Recruiting

Social networks drastically changed recruiting process during the last decade. LinkedIn was one of the main game changers, because it enabled company’s HR departments to search for the best talents themselves. Today recruiters constantly search for available expert staff and negotiate transfers. In addition to that, today’s job ads have much higher visibility rates, due to various social channels companies use for informing possible candidates about vacancies. HR managers also use networks like Facebook and Twitter to find more details about candidate’s expertise and personality. This way they are able to determine how certain candidates will fit into the new work environment.

Training

Many benefits that technology brought to learning process reflected on employees’ training. This process today doesn’t entirely rely on employees’ supervisors and colleagues, since there are many different learning and simulation programs that can be used for providing more efficient training in shorter periods of time. Training can also be done remotely, through webinars organized with the help of various streaming apps like Periscope for example. These virtual seminars and classrooms, also enable new trainees to ask questions and interact with their trainers.

Data storage

One of the most important changes in HR industry was brought by development of big data technology. This advanced concept enables HR staff to easily process huge piles of paperwork and store and share it in cloud-based storage. By using big data processing tools they can determine patterns for analyzing this data and using their insights for improving recruitment processes, employee satisfaction and performance.

Employee relations

Work time gradually increased in most Western societies and employees’ ties became stronger. This was also enhanced by widely available social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and enterprise specific social media platforms like Nestle’s intranet NestChatter network. This network is used by more than 200,000 people and enables them to communicate with their colleagues everywhere across the world and to share their work-related information.

Performance

Employee’s performance will receive much more important role in company’s management and business evaluation. In production facilities new Internet of Things concept will enable HR department to constantly monitor worker’s performance, reward the most dedicated ones, and warn the ones who don’t satisfy established performance standards. Performance monitoring is especially important in industries, where salaries depend on commission, such as insurance or real estate. New advanced software will enable management team of various buyersagent companies to follow performance of their field agents, and use it for pay calculations or personal evaluation.

Fast technology advance will increase the importance of HR department and practises in small, medium and big enterprises. In the future these departments might decrease in numbers, due to lesser need for paperwork processing, but they will have a direct influence on company’s development.