People are the heartbeat of every organisation, and as such attention to human capacity development is very important.

Digital transformation has been a buzzword for a while now, with technology growing at an exponential rate and organisations looking at tapping into all it offers. Digital transformation seeks to transform business process for better user experience, products, and services.

But how has digital transformation affected people management?

In 2015, KPMG carried out a study on HR transformation. This study revealed that close to half of the enterprise studied, 37% still rely on paper-based processes for compensation activities, while 42% still use paper for global grading or job levelling, and 28% still rely on paper for some performance management tasks.

Fast forward a few years later, there has been a tremendous digital transformation to different components of people management. Let us look at some of these components and the transformation they have seen due to digital explorations.

Hiring processes

Remember when you had to walk in person into an organisation to submit your CV or application? Organisations were mostly advertising for vacant positions through hard copy flyers and by word of mouth.

The hiring process has seen an immense transformation over the years. Candidates can now apply for jobs from anywhere using online recruitment platforms enhances with search algorithms that enable candidates to search for the right jobs that matched their skills and career path.

On the organisational side of things, recruitment processes that used to take ages to complete can now be completed seamlessly in the shortest possible time.  With Application Tracking Systems (ATS) organisations can now sort through numerous applications in an automated manner, saving time. This enables HR managers to invest more time in developing and retaining talents.

Mobility and Remote Work

Imagine a world where there are no digital tools to support on-the-go and remote work, being stroke by a pandemic. This would have been a bad scenario for organisations and HR managers. Thankfully, digital transformation has not only provided tools that enable people to work from anywhere, but it has also provided HR managers with tools to manage, motivate, and track work from anywhere.

Cloud-based tools (Google Drive, Dropbox, Google sheet, etc) now provide employees with the means to work and access their work from anywhere, while also enabling managers to track employees work.

HR managers can now focus on recruiting people with the talent and skills required for a role, rather than focusing on their proximity to the office.

Performance Management

As more organisations look to move beyond performance measurement to performance management, which seeks to not only measure but align peoples talent to organisational goals and objectives, digital transformations have provided the means for continuous measurement and evaluation of workforce performance, providing real-time data to drive performance improvement.

A quick look at some of the challenges.

With all the good fortunes provided by HR tech, a few challenges have been expressed by leadership in some organisations. Some of these challenges are:

• Increase spending on tech.
• Organisations struggling with adoption and change agility.
• Cloud foundation proving strong but not being a full solution.
• Not all Users of C-suite are happy

Source: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/workforce-of-the-future/library/hr-tech-survey.html