Are Traditional HR Practices Holding Your Organization Back?

Are antiquated HR practices holding your organization back?  While the practices that worked well over a century ago still get the job done, your organization shouldn’t settle for mere adequacy – modern workplace tools and processes that enable greater improved peer-to-peer interactions are a necessity for any organization looking to thrive in today’s digital age.

The old adage “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” is perfect for HR. Practices that worked just fine over 100 years ago are still in place today. But who aspires to be merely adequate?

You certainly could work as those first “personnel” departments did in the early 1900s — and many probably do — but today’s HR technology makes it unnecessary. Laborious tasks, and reams of paper, are things of the past.

Whereas the old ways were heavily transactional, the new way of doing things enables better interactions. If you’re intrigued by stronger connections and a stronger culture, consider the impact the right software can have.

Alleviating the burden of onboarding

Few things are more convoluted than onboarding. Involving as many as 30 different steps — form submissions, approvals, data entry, verification and so on — it’s the very definition of cumbersome. Many things can go wrong, which is not what you want to happen during an employee’s first experience with your company. The onboarding process can be incredibly time consuming for both employee and employer, even when technology is there to assist. That’s because the average company is said to have 14 separate software solutions.

Fortunately, it’s getting easier to find a single platform that’ll let you push relevant documents to a specific class of employee while ensuring others are notified about mandatory training that’ll keep them compliant with federal or state regulations. Features like read receipts and expiry dates also give HR team members time back, as they’re not required to prod employees to action. With this level of automation, all involved benefit from greater clarity, visibility and speed, as well as a reduction in errors and risk.

Eliminating the distance for remote workers

It’s not uncommon for front-line staff to describe themselves as isolated or neglected. Those working in stores, call centers, factories or the field are sometimes treated as an afterthought. Integration largely depends on how motivated managers and peers are to keep in touch over the phone or email. Even those with access to shared kiosks have limited access time, and contractors can be excluded entirely (especially if they’re a part-time or short-term employee).

Fostering engagement within this audience is a tremendous opportunity for HR departments, and it’s not as difficult as you might think. More and more companies are starting to encourage employees from across the organization to use internal blogging tools to share what’s happening with departments, teams and at the individual level. Others are looking to inspire more direct peer-to-peer interactions via widgets that allow for recognition of a job well done. Centralized hubs are also being used to promote socialization outside of the workplace by enabling the formation of interest-based groups.

Fostering Greater Collaboration

In recent years, HR teams have been asked to create connection points beyond the standard cultural ones. It’s not enough to improve how employees interrelate, HR leaders must also improve how employees collaborate. This can be a daunting proposition for those who’ve focused on more traditional functions like employee locators and time keeping. 

What was once the purview of IT is now something that HR is taking the lead on. The tech savvy, like those mentioned above, have likely already created digital workplaces. Thankfully, for the uninitiated, this doesn’t mean building a platform from the ground up. Licensed, ready-made solutions already exist and accommodate productivity tools like Skype, Yammer and Microsoft Office 365.

Meeting the new demands placed on HR

In one of the larger roll-out efforts to date, Shell recently named Unily as their digital workplace platform. We’re responsible for connecting more than 135,000 internal users in over 70 countries and territories.

Delivered on both desktop and mobile devices, Shell’s new intranet will:

• Combine eight core and ancillary applications, providing a single point of entry
• Offer targeted, personalized corporate information via a simple-to-use interface
• Act as the gateway through which employees can access the tools needed to work (including IT support and HR activity)
• Host employee profiles to encourage social networking and knowledge sharing

With its adoption of a digital workplace, Shell joins the HR innovators at Barclay’s, Coca-Cola, Hershey’s and Microsoft.

Justifying the effort (and expense)

It’s worth noting that you don’t need to be a large, multinational corporation to adopt a platform like Unily. The licensing cost is based upon the number of users, and some of our clients have fewer than 500 employees.

The cost you’ll really want to be concerned with is this: the attrition of current employees and the inability to attract new ones. In a recent executive survey conducted by Deloitte, just 22% of respondents felt HR is adapting to the needs of their workforce. A mere 20% say HR can adequately plan for their company’s future talent needs. Furthermore, a staggering 80% of respondents believe their company’s HR skills are a significant issue.

As if that’s not sobering enough, a Sungard Availability Services survey conducted back in 2015 — the first year millennials represented a majority of the American workforce — pointed at the challenges ahead. Their findings:

• 32 percent have left an employer that didn’t embrace digital work practices
• 45 percent believe their current employer is lagging in digital tools and technologies (when compared to competitors)
• 83 percent believe having the latest digital tools makes jobs easier and people more productive
• Before you write this off as being the preference of a single subset of employees, consider this response from the same survey:
• 42 percent of those age 35 to 44 would quit their job to join a more digitally progressive organization

Saying goodbye to outdated HR practices

Whatever the reason has been for sticking with “the way things have always been done,” there’s real business proof for abandoning that kind of thinking. From recruiting to retention, there’s incredible upside to transitioning to a digital workplace. If you don’t believe me, ask your employees.