What are today’s biggest HR challenges that technology can help resolve? From keeping company culture alive with a remote workforce to employee upskilling, here’s the top ten challenges that HR professionals and leaders believe that tech tools can help harness effectively in response to the current demands of the workplace.
Here are 10 of today’s biggest HR challenges that these leaders believe technology can solve:
- Keeping Company Culture Alive With a Remote Workforce
- Providing Child Care Support
- Being More Assertive When Hiring
- Delivering Relevant Benefits to Attract and Retain Employees
- Better Employee Retention With Automated Career Mapping
- Juggling Workforce Management and Regulatory Compliance
- Applying Fairness in Hiring Qualified Candidates
- Tracking Organizational Behavior
- Embedding Diversity and Inclusion into HR Services
- Employee Upskilling
Keeping Company Culture Alive with a Remote Workforce
One of the biggest challenges of switching to remote work models is keeping company cultures alive. It's easy to lose that sense of community teams shared through a physical workplace now that everyone's working from home. However, Human Resource departments can still leverage digital technology to keep trust, care, and other aspects of the company culture alive. Scheduling monthly workgroup calls on Zoom is one way of keeping the community together, despite geographic distances. Regular check-ins among team members can foster that same sense of togetherness and sociability they once had through in-person office settings.
Brian Nagele, CEO, Restaurant Clicks
Providing Child Care Support
Child Care has become a big issue for HR teams as it directly causes reduced retention, higher absenteeism, and as much as 86% lower productivity. Unfortunately, most options to solve it, such as building on-site care, providing an FSA allowance, or contracting for backup care, have significant flaws and require heavy administrative burden. However, new technologies like TOOTRiS, are built specifically to allow businesses to provide comprehensive Child Care benefits to every employee, on-site or remote, with zero admin. As a result, employees have more affordable choices while employers improve retention, productivity, and recruiting.
Kevin Ehlinger, VP Product Marketing, TOOTRiS Child Care On-Demand
Being More Assertive When Hiring
There are several challenges facing HR that can be addressed today. Being more assertive when hiring is one I consider vital as we are living in times of extreme competitiveness for acquiring and retaining talents. Technology can help once hiring platforms are more responsive, faster, cost-effective, and assertive. The technological ATS platforms have mechanisms and filters that help to identify candidates with the most requirements for that position. The system makes a faster and more scaling selection regarding the best candidates, and the risk of their profiles not matching the standard needs is lower.
Ricardo von Groll, Manager, Talentify
Delivering Relevant Benefits to Attract and Retain Employees
One of the biggest challenges in the HR world would be delivering engaging and relevant benefits and perks to retain and attract employees. With it being harder to get employees into a collaborative working environment like an office, offering small incentives like free food and drink or staff outings after work hours is even more challenging. But where technology helps HR tackle this issue is now through video chat services like Zoom and Google Chat; getting the whole team together virtually to partake in competitions and contests for prizes online helps maintain morale and build the necessary relationships to keep the business running smoothly and happily.
Wendy Makinson, HR Manager, Joloda Hydraroll
Better Employee Retention with Automated Career Mapping
Effectively retaining good employees is one of the biggest challenges in HR. Fortunately, emerging tools can provide a cost-effective solution, especially in large organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees. AI-powered talent management software can help employers map out individual career progression paths for each worker. This effectively matches an employee’s unique skills and interests with the appropriate learning opportunities and team assignments, which improves motivation and engagement levels on the individual level. It’s an efficient way to make each employee feel valued that ultimately improves retention rates.
Milo Cruz, CMO, Freelance Writing Jobs
Juggling Workforce Management and Regulatory Compliance
With the rise of the gig economy and the popularity of remote work, many companies are struggling to keep up with the changing needs of their workforce. HR professionals are faced with the challenge of managing a more diverse and dispersed workforce, while also dealing with the increased demands of regulatory compliance.
Technology can help HR professionals manage these challenges by providing tools for tracking employee engagement, automating dull and repetitive tasks, and improving communication and collaboration between employees. HR can also tap technology to help with the demands of regulatory compliance using software solutions that can help automate the process of compliance tracking and reporting. This can free up time for HR professionals to focus on more strategic tasks. Additionally, many compliance-related software solutions offer real-time alerts, which can help prevent HR issues before they become serious problems.
Linda Shaffer, Chief People Operations Officer, Checkr
Applying Fairness in Hiring Qualified Candidates
To be human is to be biased. We all gravitate to what is familiar even though we consciously believe we are being open and unbiased. AI assessments allow employers to hone in on candidates that are most qualified and have the appropriate skill sets. An advanced applicant tracking system can filter, rate, and rank candidates and pre-employment assessments can further validate their capability. Used in tandem, these technologies can level the playing field for all candidates, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender.
Michele Kalas, Vice President, Mattress Firm
Tracking Organizational Behavior
Organizational behavior is the sum outcome of what each employee puts into it. It helps leaders understand how their departments, for example, respond and interact within the organization as a whole. It also predicts and prescribes workforce interventions designed to improve employee development. Then the transfer of the intervention to improved skills and attitudes can be tracked for cost savings or productivity improvements in the organization's bottom line. Organizations grow and prosper when their employees also grow and prosper. Organizational behavior lies at the root cause of why goals, roles, and relationships succeed or fail.
Dianne Crampton, President, TIGERS Success Series
Embedding Diversity and Inclusion into HR Services
Modern service design and technology converts this intent to action and has rapidly become a key driver of change. All technology can remove accessibility barriers and enable people to access important information and services from their smart devices anytime and anywhere.
By integrating Al into HR services, organizations can make their services more accessible and inclusive for a diverse workforce. Emerging technology such as Artificial intelligence (Al) can play a significant role in creating inclusive job descriptions that would attract a diverse pool of candidates. By utilizing keyword analysis technology, employers can better understand the meaning of their job postings. By analyzing various keywords to identify language that unintentionally excludes certain groups of people, companies can more effectively reach diverse candidates and improve their chances of finding the right person for the job.
Naga Kadiyala, Associate Vice President, HR Technology & Compensation, UTHealth Houston
Employee Upskilling
Traditional training programs can no longer keep up with the demand to upskill employees quickly. Technical training is essential, but as technology rapidly changes and the workplace shifts to online or hybrid teams, it can’t be a one-and-done process. HR teams need to incorporate technical training into workflows to address developments and problems as they arise. Additionally, they must perform regular assessments of employees’ soft skills. HR is responsible for cultivating future leaders, and improving soft skills like empathy and communication is critical to achieving this goal. HR teams can leverage technology to build a flexible, continuous learning environment.
Alexandra Fennell, Co-Founder & CEO, Attn: Grace
