In the race towards digitalisation, some people might expect tech companies and IT departments to be at the forefront, but in reality, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise to learn that it’s HR professionals who are taking the lead instead. After all, to make sure that the human workers are able to find their foothold in this digital world of work, HR leaders themselves need to get ahead and learn to master and harness technology, instead of merely trying to keep pace or letting things run their course.
However, there’s a problem. While the digital disruption pace is measured in months, people and organisations take years just to process and keep up with these changes, as highlighted in
Deloitte’s brief
report about people management in the digital age. The report urged HR practitioners “to be more pre-emptive with regard to digital transformation” by working on three main areas: ‘Re-structuring the organization to enable the digital transformation’, ‘Embracing the digital talent lifecycle’, and ‘Empowering digital leadership’.
HRD chatted with Serene Wong, head of HR for Essilor Group AMERA (Asia-Pacific, Middle-East, Russia & Africa), a leading player in visual health who appears to be taking the needed steps toward achieving digital transformation. In HRD’s short exchange, we asked how Essilor Group is coping with the disruption so far and their resulting ‘Digital HR’ approach, including a comprehensive e-talent system.
How has technology impacted your job and your team’s jobs in recent times?
Digital HR is a big topic for us. With the advancement of technology, digital and mobile devices and apps, employees are expecting HR processes to be digital and accessible anywhere, at any time. HR is actively involved in driving digital across the organisation, and I am the sponsor for Digital HR transformation.
At Essilor AMERA, we have deployed mobile and online services for benefits such as healthcare and leave, payroll, eLearning, talent management and recruitment. Internet meeting and collaboration applications such as Google chat, hangout video meetings and cloud storage solutions are also widely used to enable online, multi-users' collaboration.
Technology is bringing people closer together, making work processes, outputs and team collaboration more accessible, and therefore redefining how, when, and with who work can be done.
Is there any particular aspect of HR technology that your company has utilised that might be considered cutting edge?
Our flagship HR system is the Essilor E-Talent system. It is a cloud-based enterprise system with mobile access. This tool captures our organisational structures and enables identification of critical positions within the business, succession planning, development of talent bench and tracking of emerging talents. The technology provides visibility of talent pipeline, an important feature for being future-ready.
Besides storing core personal data information and reporting lines in organisation structures, our e-talent system addresses four key functionalities:
- Annual Appraisal – Important information such as employee objectives, performance reviews, development plans, as well as career aspirations are all documented for easy referral and follow up.
- People Review – Discussions between managers and employees and their career development are documented as well; the tool allows tagging of the employees and/or positions, in order to capture the relevant information for analyses and assessment of key indicators such as bench strength
- Learning Management System – Individual development plans and completion process tracking and updating are made accessible to both the manager and the employee.
- Recruitment – This includes a system to capture our pipeline candidates for all recruitments, which creates a database that is critical for our growth ambition and consequent demand for talent. With links to multiple job posting platforms, this will reduce the time for job postings, as both internal and external job postings can be accessed from a single interface.
How are you ensuring your team and the rest of the employee base have the right level of digital skills/competencies?
As HR business partners and operational HR support are expected to support employees in their daily access to HR processes, digital mastery is the new normal; hence, digital competence is an emerging criterion for recruitment of HR professionals as well.
Our HR team members attend online and offline (classroom) training as and when a new system or application is being rolled out or deployed.
Employees in general are exposed to digital applications such as e-Learning, e-Talent, and cloud based collaborative tools, to the extent that digital is becoming a key language for communicating and connecting with one another and with the company and the Group.
We talk a lot in HR about making smarter decisions thanks to big data and data analytics – all of which is now possible thanks to technology. How are you using data analytics to do your job more effectively?
We use a lot of analytics to help us understand where we stand today, as we go back into the past data to explain how things got to where they are today. This process helps indicate directionally where the gaps are, in terms of where we are versus our goals and ambition.
However, knowing the gap and deciding on where we need to place our priorities would not be valuable if we do not have the capability to address the issue and move the needle in closing those identified gaps. Therefore, the challenge is on how to find a way to use big data or data analytics to provide predictive information. By this, I mean, to answer these important questions:
(1) If we do nothing and let the past continue into the future, what would our future be like?
(2) If we take this solution or approach, what would be the likely outcome? ie letting data analytics show us predictable results of our assumed actions or interventions before we actually take those actions and end up being surprised by the outcome.
