‘Tech savvy’ HR practice
How does becoming ‘tech savvy’ improve your professional standing and the HR practice in your organisation?
How does becoming ‘tech savvy’ improve your professional standing and the HR practice in your organisation?
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The CIPD Profession Map defines the knowledge areas that HR professionals need to drive change, create value and make a positive impact in the world of work. One core knowledge area is ‘technology and people’. A Chartered Member of the CIPD, for example, would be expected to know how to assess the impact of current and future technologies on the workforce and people practices. They would need to be aware of the technologies that can help the people function and organisations be more agile, things such as robotic process automation, extended reality and intelligent chatbots. |
Over the course of this Technology, the workplace and people management series, we revealed insights from the CIPD's survey of HR and other bosses on the theme of ‘technology and people’, covering a broad range of topics.
Before exploring how HR professionals can leverage these insights, let’s take a closer look at HR software and people data to see how their use varies by organisation size. And then examine further the link between software satisfaction and how effectively people use technology at work.
While large organisations generally report more workforce metrics and use software to undertake a wider range of HR activities than smaller organisations, those differences are sometimes small. Compare the light and dark purple bars in Figures 1 and 2.
The respondents’ data was separated by size between medium-sized organisations (50–165 employees worldwide) and very large organisations (over 5,000 employees worldwide). For brevity we’ve not shown responses from organisations in between these two sizes but can confirm that generally, those from larger organisations had a wider range of workforce metrics and HR software. Those that didn’t respond ‘yes’ said ‘no’ or ‘don’t know’.
Focusing on Figure 1, respondents said HRIS and payroll software – but not recruitment software – were widely used in organisations with 50 or more employees, where these were within the HR remit. Although HR is best known for overseeing recruitment activities, those from very large organisations were twice as likely to say their organisations use recruitment software than those from medium-size organisations. Looking at the open text responses, respondents typically mentioned whether their organisations had an applicant tracking system (ATS) rather than other recruitment technologies which might be free to access like social networking platforms.
Figure 1: Availability of HR software or platform where activity is within HR remit (by respondents’ organisation size)
Looking at Figure 2, we can see it’s relatively common to report absenteeism rates compared with quality or cost of hire, regardless of respondents’ organisation size. Differences were only 6.7 and 7.1 percentage points respectively between respondents from medium-sized and very large organisations that reported these metrics.
But when it came to reporting pay gaps, respondents from very large organisations were more than twice as likely to report pay gaps than medium-sized organisations, reflecting statutory reporting duties of large organisations in England, Scotland and Wales.
With widespread use of HRIS, this is an opportunity for HRIS vendors to help medium-sized organisations close the workforce reporting gap. Having more of these metrics (Figure 2) readily available through an HR dashboard would reduce the effort needed and increase the likelihood of management using these metrics. Of course, there may be valid reasons that management may not look at these regularly, for instance, because the figures rarely change.
Figure 2: Workforce metrics reported to management (by respondents’ organisation size)
Comparing perceptions at the extreme ends (strongly agree vs strongly disagree) in Figure 3, we can see satisfaction with HR software can swing from satisfied (2.4) to fairly satisfied (3.5). In contrast, satisfaction with HR software didn’t vary as much when we instead consider respondents’ perceptions of how well they themselves or their team use technology at work.
A key takeaway is that to get the best out of HR software (or any software at work), make sure there is a great digital experience for most employees who’ll interact with the software. It needs to be intuitive for employees who won’t use the self-service features regularly. This may mean sacrificing some opportunities to make back-end activities easier.
Figure 3: Average (mean) satisfaction with HR software grouped by respondents’ perception of whether people in their organisation make good use of technologies to enable them to work effectively
Key to becoming a technologically astute HR professional is to use technology and people data in ways that improve people’s working lives. This could include:
The more employees your organisation has, the more likely you’ll have a bigger budget for HR software and a wider network of technology experts to lean on (Figures 1 and 2). Make the most of it to help others if you have the good fortune to be in this position.
Even if you don’t have a big software budget or technology experts to lean on, you can still explore free tools to help you work more effectively. For example, ChatGPT is one that has gained huge popularity and attention and helped push generative AI into the mainstream. Within HR, people have used it to draft interview questions, create job description templates, develop company policies and more.
Understanding technology and people will become more and more important for HR professionals as we look ahead. We hope the articles in this series have provided you the insight and inspiration to explore further how the ideas discussed can support and improve your HR practice.
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Hayfa joined us in 2020. Hayfa has degrees in computer science and human resources from University of York and University of Warwick respectively.
She started her career in the private sector working in IT and then HR and has been writing for the HR community since 2012. Previously she worked for another membership organisation (UCEA) where she expanded the range of pay and workforce benchmarking data available to the higher education HR community.
She is interested in how the people profession can contribute to good work through technology and has written several publications on our behalf, as well as judging our people management awards, speaking at conferences and exhibitions and providing commentary to the media on the subjects of people and technology.
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