Introduction to the “How to assess your level of digital HR maturity” method
Today, to stay in the game, you have to be “digital”. Fad or reality? This isn’t the first industrial revolution to “change everything in business”, nor is it likely to be the last!
But what does it mean to be digital today?
A few years ago, it was more or less understood: digital meant having your own website and selling via the Internet. But today?
Digital is a much broader concept, and one that many people find hard to grasp, so many things are thrown into the mix. But to borrow from older words, doesn’t digital simply mean knowing how to embrace modernity, anticipating change, living with the times – in short, not risking becoming old-fashioned and outdated?
Associated with Digital, we often hear about the customer experience. We no longer sell products, we sell customer experience. In services, it’s user experience. And now in the enterprise, we’re talking about the employee experience. In other words, what do we need to do to make this experience as positive as possible, in order to win the loyalty of the person concerned, and of course guarantee the best possible profitability for our company?
For Human Resources, the employee experience has real meaning. All the more so as loyalty to the company is no longer very fashionable, far from it. But ROI for an employee is just as important as ROI for a product, isn’t it? So how can we best develop the employee experience?
As we all know, the HR department has a number of responsibilities: it must instill managerial dynamism, by being the guarantor of organizations and people, it must guarantee social peace, and finally it must ensure quality service for employees, thus becoming the guardian of what is now called the employer brand.
On this last point, there is much to be said. Guaranteeing a quality service that projects an image of dynamism and modernity means ensuring complete consistency from HR strategy through to HR service organizations and HRIS information systems. These are not usually the subjects of choice for HR managers, who are more at ease with labor relations and management systems. And yet…
What can we say about the difficulties involved in ensuring that a company’s information systems properly convey its image? that the services deployed meet the new Internet consumption habits of the latest generations? that the quality of services is up to scratch, while complying with the numerous regulatory obligations that frame the life of corporate human resources? And what about the financial stakes behind these services? No less so than the need to manage payroll as closely as possible, with its attendant challenges of flexible working hours and colossal tax implications.
Yes, today’s Human Resources departments are in charge of major corporate issues, and their digital maturity is at the heart of the company’s reactor. Aligning its strategic ambitions in terms of image and attractiveness, with the optimized organization of its back office and the urbanization of its information systems, Human Resources is today piloting projects whose scope and complexity largely equal the IT revolutions that companies have already encountered in other fields, from production to finance, via the wave of ERPs and infocenters over the past 20 years.
Digitization of processes, optimization of service centers, industrialization of payroll, management of working time in ATM, anticipation of fundamental regulatory changes (GDPR, PAS, etc.), mobility of systems, are all digital challenges that make the difference from one company to another, either in terms of attractiveness for employees, in terms of complete costs for the company, or in terms of services rendered. Will you be one of tomorrow’s best digital HR managers?
