shared services

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.

Of course, the possibly increased disconnection between end user and practitioner/provider – and therefore between employee and the organization – is only one of the new challenges thrown up by the emergence of “virtual” HR. The shift in emphasis from “traditional” “Personnel”-type HR operations to the new horizons opened up by automation and self-service signifies the replacement of old headaches with new ones (in the hope, obviously, of reducing the overall headache quotient). Some of these headaches (such as an increased focus on data protection with regards to confidential employee information) have clear counterparts in the wider business environment, and thus are accompanied by a number of time-honoured and established approaches for risk-reduction. Others, however, are specific to the discipline of HR itself and to this period of extraordinary change it is experiencing.

Pressing the demands for cost-reductions may be, but the impact of the increasing trend towards “virtualized” HR services and increasing self-service goes well beyond the bottom line. Just as the rise in social networking and the development of the idea of the online self is changing the way in which social interactivity occurs in the wider world, the shift in the relationship between employee and HR – between user and provider of service – must surely have some consequence for the relationship between employee and the wider organization?

Among the many difficulties facing the HR community today, perhaps none is proving as intractable nor as profound in its ramifications than the question of how to respond to the rapid automation of the discipline. The rise of “virtual HR” challenges the very nature of human resources; with more and more companies opting for increasingly hi-tech solutions devolving growing portions of the core HR burden to the end-users themselves, what is the nature of the role to be played by the remaining human participants within the process? What are the new organizational structures emerging from the interplay with the technology and how do these behave when put under the stress of, say, a financial crisis, or a ‘flu pandemic?