According to global research undertaken by the Hackett Group consultancy, over commitment represents the ‘greatest transformation hurdle’ for HR management.
In addition, the Hackett Group’s HR Key Issues research - based on data from 200 global executives - illustrated that the most critical development area for HR was organisational culture. The research also found that talent management and development is a high priority.
Tony DiRomualdo - Senior Research Director for The Hackett Group - said:
“Culture has always been in the top 10, but the move to the number-one spot in terms of both top issues and critical development areas is unprecedented and disconcerting. It speaks to the challenges that both the enterprise and HR have had in coping with the impact of digital business. Even if they’re making progress on the technology front, legacy organisational culture is holding the organisation back from achieving its full potential. HR executives are feeling the pressure to help the business move faster, to innovate, take risks and to be more experimental.”
Franco Girimonte - The Hackett Group Associate Principal - stated:
“We are seeing more and more organisations invest in their talent management processes such as recruiting websites, applicant tracking and assessments, candidate and employee experience, engagement tracking and inner mobility.”
He added:
“Achieving a proper balance - while transforming the function - is critical. As HR technology changes are made, it’s important that they also look at things like their operating model, skill sets, alignment of responsibilities and more. Ignoring this will hurt them in the long run.”
The research found that in the adoption and effectiveness levels for various technologies, HR is more aggressive than other business functions in adopting cloud-based systems, expecting to see a 26 per cent growth - but nearly 60 per cent of respondents were found to still rely on legacy on-premise systems, which frequently fall short of expectations.
Although less than 10 per cent of HR functions had completed large-scale deployments, robotic process automation met respondents’ expectations 83 per cent of the time, whilst 8 per cent said it exceeded expectations and 8 per cent said it fell short.
With regard to digital skills, 76 per cent of respondents said they had either large or very large skill gaps in analytics and modelling – with 67 per cent saying the same about ‘data savviness’.
Surveys and focus groups were thought to be the most effective practices to improve the employee experience by 23 per cent of the respondents.
Franco Girimonte stated:
“It’s an uphill battle for HR to improve its ability to support enterprise objectives while moving forward with their own functional improvement agenda. The challenges identified in our research are too numerous to be overcome in a single year. Instead, HR leaders should aim to make measurable improvements in capabilities that address top business priorities such as enterprise digital transformation, culture and skills gaps. This will increase HR’s value contribution to the business and help it to secure further support from top leaders for HR transformation efforts.”
