The world of managing people is a movable feast of transformation. For today's organisations, the focus has shifted from automating and integrating your talent practices, to providing holistic product ecosystems that act as enablers for the provision of stellar people management. The key concern for today's HR professionals and business leaders can be summarised as: employee engagement, teamwork, innovation, collaboration and empowerment. Leaders and managers need HR technology solutions that provide more than just the automation of processes and tasks. The systems of the future need to offer functionality that can increase engagement, enhance efficiencies and improve productivity so as to provide your business with better operational performance, increased value, strategic oversight and the capacity to pivot on a dime when the need arises in any of these contexts. As the HR technology market continues to evolve, disrupt and be disrupted, what will this mean for the future of HR and the future of work?
According to the Bersin report HR Technology Disruptions for 2017: Nine Trends Reinventing the HR Software Market, the real focus is on reinventing how people work. The report concludes that:
'Creating team-based tools for goal alignment and coaching; putting in place systems to provide feedback and measure engagement; and rethinking the way we measure performance, manage careers, and enable individual learning. Overall, we see this as a shift from the integrated talent management practices of the early 2000s to the people management concerns of today.'
The Evolution Of HR Systems
Bersin's report outlines to evolution of HR software from process automation, via intrgated talent management and systems of engagement, towards apps that make work life better for all employees and can be integrated to form an ecosystem that will provide a holistic experience of work.
The Transition From Talent Management to People Management
The following diagram from Bersin's report illustrates how the functionality of HR software has influenced the transformation of work and workplaces. In the nineties and the first decade of the new millenium, the focus was on automation and integration. Since around 2012, that has shifted again to engagement and is now looking set to make yet another transition to a focus on empowerment.
Nine Trends Transforming The HR Software Market
As the very foundations upon which human resources has been built continue to change and evolve, companies would be wise to stay aware of the transformational changes that have the potential to transform the HR landscape in the coming years. Bersin's report names 9 trends that are shaping up to be game-changers:
- The accelerating revolution of performance management.
- An explosion in real-time engagement evaluation - and its intersection with performance and feedback.
- The explosion of growth in people analytics.
- The continuing explosion and evolution of the learning market.
- A new landscape for talent acquisition.
- Growth in contingent workforce management, gig work, and part-time work environments.
- The growth of team management tools and their merger with HR tools.
- The explosion of wellness and fitness apps - and their potential merger with employee engagement.
- Digital HR: self-service, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation.
Our focus here at Subscribe-HR has always been on creating software that enables businesses, especially HR professionals, to focus on your most important assets - your employees. We have long advocated (and indeed built our software around creating systems of support for) one of the conclusions outlined in the Bersin report:
'With employees feeling overworked and overwhelmed, wellness and emotional fitness are now becoming issues of employee engagement and performance.'
Our current and future development is definitively aligned with this conclusion, and our newly released Pi (π) solution is designed along these lines. If you would like to discover more about how you can manage operations, add value and align strategy by using software that empowers employees to perform at their best, then download the free White Paper that outlines the methodology behind Pi (π). Better yet, download the Bersin report, read that, and then read the methodology behind Pi (π)!
