The Future of HR is here: All you need to know

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Driverless automobiles, robotics, wearable technology, augmented reality, 3D printing and what not, we are already living in the future. The future always was fascinating since yesteryears full of cutting-edge technological advancements that are driving our lives by leaps and bounds.

In fact, technology is greatly affecting the way we work and execute business processes, live and socialize. Business is one area that has been witnessing some amazing changes with all kinds of technological advancements in the recent times.

Business is all about people regardless of the industry vertical. In fact, employees undoubtedly are the most valuable assets and the face for a company. The reason being employees are the ones, who run the show helping a company attain new heights.

As Richard Branson, the renowned business tycoon and philanthropist famously quoted,

“The way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers”.

This is the reason it is of paramount importance for a business to have proper employee management and engagement practices and this is where HR forays into the picture.

Today, a modern HR’s duty is not confined to recruitment and onboarding, as they also perform a range of other critical tasks pertaining to employee engagement and management.

So what the future holds for HR? Will it be reshaping the essence and function of HR in an organization? In short, how the technology of the future would be reviving the roles of HRs?

Industry gurus are predicting are some really insane and amazing futuristic things for HRs and this article intends to shed light on a few key ones.

1. Get ready for consolidation of admin chores

For an HR department that distributes admin chores all through the company, it certainly is shredding its finances. Yes, that department is certainly not taking the advantages offered by today’s technology. Be it merging key HR admin tasks in-house or outsourcing the same, you would be consolidating them for sure in the near future.

2. Robotics and AI are all set to take over mundane HR tasks

Yes, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics would be taking over most of the complex and cumbersome tasks of the HR. For example, several businesses find it challenging to execute payroll and other employee benefits related processes for multiple locations or complex legal structures. Nevertheless, a few years from now, we would be able to program a robot or an AI system to perform all these intricate tasks in a seamless and faster way.

3. Get ready to meet a mix of intuitive and strategic breed of HR

The next-gen HR would certainly be in a better position when it comes to predicting employee behaviors rather than simply providing the management with indicators. In fact, future of HR won’t be all about cribbing over increasing employee turnover problems, but it would be about determining and telling the exact turnover rate. Yes, SMAC (Social Media, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud), Big Data and IoT (Internet of Things) would collectively make real-time employee management a dream come true for HR personnel all around the world. Further, insightful analytics and algorithms fetched through these tech trends would be of great help to HR leaders, managers and talent acquisition experts for making sound hiring decisions.

4. Brace yourselves for the specialists

Yes, the trend of specialist is at its all-time high. HRs no more need to rely on their instincts and gut feelings nor do they need to make decisions based on things they hear at the cafeteria. Big Data, analytics, and automation expertise would become a key competency thereby, HR personnel that companies would be appointing in the future will have economics degrees, statistic degrees, marketing degrees and alike, but will be still able to plan as well as execute that Christmas bash.

5. Remote workforce management would become mainstay

Yes, managing remote employees would be a quintessential thing for HR. With mobile technology taking the world by a storm, mobile workforce management would become a mainstay. Today, managing remote workforce is one of the biggest challenges for companies all across the globe. This is the reason the future HRs would possess specific skill sets. Folks with such skills would be able to work and report from anywhere. This is already been made possible by cloud-based HR solutions that allow the HR personnel to manage employees on the fly.

Conclusion:

So these are five tech trends that would be reshaping the way HRs have been functioning. Simply put, future HR professionals would have a more targeted approach towards every problem they encounter, as they would be straightaway digging into the data to find out the root cause of the problem.

This article is written by Anwar Shaikh. He writes about HRMS solutions and Payroll Software. A self-made, reared-up writer and a poetic soul, Anwar is a wannabe Cloud evangelist and has a great penchant for SMAC, CRM, ERP and human resources. He writes for Pocket HCM, a leading provider of cloud based payroll and HR management solutions to small and mid-sized businesses all across India. Follow him: LinkedIn | Twitter | Google+ | Facebook.