Top 5 Hottest Digital HR Technology Trends in 2019

By Kevin B. Simon

By Kevin B. Simon

As organizations get competitive and technologically advanced, there is a need to train, manage and motivate the workforce apart from the emphasis on the growth of their skillsets. The "New-Age Work Order" needs employees to be more connected, technology-oriented and have the individual expertise to remain relevant to their organizations. Groups of such individuals are connected with each other from different corners of the world, having a more distributed outlook in their approach to work and collaborate at a much faster pace in real-time.

This, in turn, has put high expectations from the HRMS (Human Resource Management System) to be robust and intuitive, simultaneously. All areas such as recruiting, onboarding process, asset management, bio-metric integration & attendance tracking, employee management, performance management, payroll management, and other administrative functions has to be seamless with the new generation advancements that are to be integrated.

Such advancements will allow HR professionals to significantly reduce training budgets and resources, but also enable them to give an informed decision to other business departments from the data they possess at their fingertips.

Here are the next technology advancements that will be mainstream in the next few years:

1. Blockchain: 

A trustworthy blockchain HR system can record employees' education, skills, training, and workplace performance and can create some of the major potentials on both sides of the employment relationship. Also, it will make candidates background verification process into a stricter and cohesive one, thus automatically eliminating dubious profiles. This technology employs an encrypted, digital ledger of public records structured into clusters of data called blocks and dispersed over networks. Hence, a registered employee would have a digital record integrated with the common database accessible to multiple departments within an organization.

2. Internet of Things (IoT): 

Organizations will have a network of office devices & tools at their purview that is expected to be used by the workforce. These tools will generate data to help users to perform jobs and also indicate their performance. This gives an opportunity for decision makers to understand their workforce and create better experiences for them across the 360-degree spectrum.

3. Gamification: 

Daily HR Operations like recruitment, employee engagement or training can be gamified in the future. Applying various gaming tools to non-gaming contexts will eventually bring elements of fun, play, addiction and achievement inside the workplace. This will lead to an effective organization engagement with employees and simultaneously, will attract the best of breed talent from the market at the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) level.

4. Predictive Analytics: 

HR usually possesses large quantities of people-related data. With predictive analytics, HR can align itself as a strategic partner that relies on proven and data-driven predictive models, thus reducing their dependencies on intuition and soft sciences. Predictive analytics enables HR to forecast the impact of policies on the workforce, over different departments as well as individual well-being, happiness, and productivity of employees.

5. Mobile Platforms: 

Mobile connectivity allows employees to access HRMS functions from their mobile devices, thus not restricting their on-premise availability for different business functions like remote attendance, meeting scheduling, interview scheduling, candidate remarks, and grading, 360-degree appraisal, etc. On top of that, a set of self-service mobile platforms (also, known as Employee Self-service) will allow users to execute multiple functions without any assistance.

Implementing these technologies provide a crystal clear business edge to any organization. However, these drastic changes challenge the "creature comfort" of the workforce who are habituated in getting things done in a manner, thus finding difficulty in adjusting themselves to technology evolution. It would be better to involve every department and formulate winning Key-user training (KUTs) and End-user training (EUTs) so that a proper "adaptation strategy" can be put together and make the transition smooth.

About the Author:

Kevin Simon (ORCID: 0000-0002-2962-8008)  is a Technology Editor at IndraStra Global with a keen interest in technology-driven businesses. He is a graduate in management studies (MBA) from the Institute of Management, Nirma University, Ahmedabad.

Cite this Article:

Simon, K.B., "Top 5 Hottest HR Technology Trends in 2019", IndraStra Global Vol. 05, Issue No:04 (2019) 0070. https://www.indrastra.com/2019/04/Top-5-Hottest-HR-Technology-Trends-005-04-2019-0070.html | ISSN 2381-3652