HR Transformation – why is it relevant?

As companies strive to create competitive advantage, executives are increasingly looking to the HR function to grow beyond everyday tasks and provide leadership to ensure broader people management and development objectives are achieved.

Individual employees (that may become potential/ future leaders of the organisation) are facing new challenges as HR professionals seek to ensure they are engaged and moving forward in their professional development. The CIPD’s Talent Management matrix below illustrates how employees to the right hand side of the matrix will require different types of engagement form those on the left hand side.
Fig 1.  Source – CIPD

Boudreau and Ramstad (2007) have noted that the realm of high-potential leaders is often unique. To engage this calibre of employees tailored individual development programmes are required to ensure the learners reach a high level of optimisation for their role within the organisation. We have seen this with the recent industry term ‘Talent Management’ where companies are developing training and development programmes designed especially to engage and retain those employees that are considered to be in the top 10% (those employees to the left hand side of Fig 1 are often the opposite of this, requiring more stringent HR methods such as performance management interventions). As well as optimising their advantage by investing in potential future leaders, companies will often also look to invest in client facing employees with specialist programmes such as soft skills training.

However, many top-down training programmes also include global awareness of brand and mission, customer-centricity and diversity – not core everyday HR functions! Ultimately, these new programmes are driven from the executives, but they are typically managed by HR professionals. Therefore, HR must adopt new methods and modes of delivery to ensure that these are a success, often through online learning, reward schemes, social media and other community-building activities.

Studies from Bersin talk about ‘on demand learning’ and how social media plays a huge part in this, this is the theory that you can use social media to access a much wider audience than you might have before.

Online learning is one of the tools that is being used to develop, track and rapidly report on employees progress and to deliver much of the wider enterprise programmes. This has allowed companies to deliver ‘just in time’ learning where employees can access ‘training programmes to go’, whether travelling or virtually at home.

This all sounds good – but most HR executives will need to understand how they can realise the ROI. How best to invest, to improve business results, provide cost savings and develop your workforce?

Webanywhere’s cloud applications coupled with many open source tools (the World’s most popular course management system) and Totara Learn (the open source business Learning Management system) enables you to develop your online community at a very low cost.

The benefits of the cloud applications which Webanywhere brings means that you don’t have invest in IT infrastructure/ services such as servers/ backups/ monitoring/ scalability, which is another thing your internal IT team would have to manage.  Instead, through a managed service on the cloud, you can concentrate on the most important elements of your HR function such as compliance, reporting, cost-savings, employee engagement and reducing retention.

If you would like to read more about the theories in this white paper please go to https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-HR-Science-Human-Capital/dp/142210415X.