How different is what you do today from five years ago? Are you able to do it faster than before? Have you invested in systems, technology and process improvements to lower costs and improve the speed to hire, develop, retain or engage your employees? If not, you are clearly lagging behind those who have and will have a tough time catching up. HR will be (and maybe already is) under full assault from the third-party world.
The evidence shows that increases in productivity significantly lag the investment in tools and process improvements. We normally first use new technologies to emulate what we already do in another way. It’s only after significant time that we begin to find new and innovative ways to use the tools and adjust our processes accordingly.
An example is the introduction of the typewriter. In the early days of the typewriter a manager would dictate to a stenographer who would take shorthand and then use the typewriter to create a document. This took 2 people and three steps. It took decades before we got to the point of eliminating the stenographer by having the manager learn to type and enter the document directly. But when this occurred, the profession of stenographer disappeared (as did shorthand), efficiency went up, and the number of people an office needed went down. While this is a very simple example, it illustrates what I mean: It takes a lot of time from the introduction of a new technology for people to learn how to use it and to adjust processes and structures.
From the 1970s through the mid-1990s organization globally were investing heavily in computers and software and everyone assumed that because of those tools productivity would soar. For anyone old enough to remember, that did not happen and lots of economists called this the productivity paradox. It seemed that no investment in technology, computers or software caused any major change in productivity. Then, around 1995 everything changed. Suddenly productivity began to climb and averaged 2.6 percent until 2000. Then another amazing surge occurred when productivity jumped to 3.6 percent through 2003. It has now settled back into a comfortable 2.4 percent per year growth which is still greater per year than those before 1970. The great lesson is that investments in technology and process improvements pay off – but it takes time for that to happen.
Resisting technology and the related process improvements it requires means you are not investing in quality nor are you investing in developing people. This is a strong statement but technology forces forward movement. It makes us all figure out what could be more meaningful or useful for people to do. Rather than big ditches and plow fields by hand, we have machinery that makes that work faster and safer and frees individuals up to do work that machines cannot. Rather than takes work from people, technology creates new opportunities.
Education
In education, this means actively finding ways to turn the delivery of facts, data and information over to the Internet and the sources it makes available. It means using games and simulations to teach math, science, history, and many other subjects. It means that eventually one teacher/mentor/coach could work with hundreds of people — some virtually and some perhaps face-to-face — with no loss of quality. But to achieve this, would require new processes, new ways of thinking about education and the implementation of lots of new technology. Fortunately, the technology is relatively cheap compared to just a decade ago, mostly lives in the Cloud and is distributed by ASPs. Small apps mean lots of things can be downloaded to mobile phones and laptops.
Recruiting
In recruiting, it means investing in software that will increase your ability to interact with candidates. This includes all sorts of things from websites and highly-targeted marketing systems to candidate relationship management (CRM) tools. The goal might be to refine how candidates are sourced and to reduce the number of people needed to do each step of the hiring cycle. The goal might be for a single person to attract, source, screen and present a candidate while the administrative tools automatically track everything that is happening and generates the appropriate reports and paperwork.
Career Development
In career development, it means leveraging the advice and testing tools that are freely available in the Internet. It might mean developing self-guided career dialogues and realistic video-bsed job previews. It could be linking to blogs and commentaries about careers and work that would inform and guide decisions.
In almost every field of HR there are more possibilities than I can imagine. Some outsourcing firms are already investing heavily in developing technology and new systems to raise productivity. IBM and many Indian companies fully understand the productivity paradox and realize that every dollar spent today will pay itself back many times over down the road.
Technology, combined with process improvements, will either revolutionize a stale and unproductive function or force its services to be outsourced to more efficient and effective third-parties.
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