Virtual HR: the Irresistible Force? - Part 4
Posted August 31st, 2009 by SSON
It is clear, then, that for all its undoubted benefits, the trend towards automated or technology-assisted human resources is throwing up a number of new and potentially destabilizing challenges for HR practitioners. How to overcome these challenges - or at the very least navigate through them with the minimum of discomfort - will, it seems, remain a critical question for the HR community for the foreseeable future; even the most cursory glance at, for example, some of the presentations and debates featured at SSON’s 6th Annual HR Shared Services & Outsourcing Summit, held in Chicago in May this year, reveals both the degree to which this issue is dominating discussions and the diversity of the emergent challenges: “Striking The Right Balance Between People & Technology: Optimizing The Automation Model To Ramp Up The Productivity Of Your HR Services While Retaining The Human Touch”; and “Leveraging Technology To Gain Top-Level Visibility For Your Succession Planning Pipeline”, to cite but two.
Part of the responsibility for ensuring that some of the problems highlighted in previous installments of this article are avoided (or at least dealt with to the satisfaction of all concerned) must, of course, rest with the creators of the technology, processes and systems comprising “virtual HR”. If the most oft-quoted and potentially devastating problem associated with technology-assisted HR operations - the “disconnection that can result between the HR professionals and the employees and managers”, in the words of PA Consulting’s Tim Palmer - is to be avoided, it’s obvious that the designers of the technology itself need to keep the avoidance of that disconnection as one of their top priorities. While it’s clear that a degree of flexibility and a willingness to change must be demonstrated by the end users of any new system - as mandated from above - these efforts will be wasted if said end users are confronted with “inhuman” systems and processes which both alienate and confound them.