6 Key Developments in HR

Talent intelligence
With organisations gaining ground on their understanding of big data, the importance of HR-themed
analytics will become more crucial in 2014. The uses of these analytics will range from developing
people strategies to exploring what if scenarios.
Involvement of the C-suite
Not only is HR expected to enter the C-suite, but a further emphasis on the workforces presence there
is also expected. The complexities and challenges created by the global economic landscape require
leadership teams to continually re-evaluate their organisations strategies. Doing so enables
organisations to determine how workforce assets can be fully leveraged, Cariss said.
How mobile has changed HR
Mobile applications are expected to play a more crucial role in 2014. Mobile career sites and
applications will be leveraged by organisations to reduce time and cost-to-hire in an attempt to combat
the widening gap between skills availability and business requirements.
Invest for success
New solutions to technology investments that offer deeper functionality will be delivered via a softwareas-a-service (SAAS) model. These tools will be used for functions such as candidate relationship
management and career path planning.
Borderless talent management
Glocalisation is a term that was thrown around in 2013, with its true colours set to be revealed in the
new year. As organisations and workforces become borderless, the ability to manage globally and
execute locally is becoming increasingly important. The ability to respect and reward cultural nuances
and expectations must be coupled with a talent management solution that supports compliance and
enterprise visibility for organisations to remain relevant in 2014.
Social is here to stay
Social media has become an important utility for recruitment. The usage of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter
and other social media platforms for recruitment is set to intensify in 2014, with organisations seeking
to keep track of both alumni and new talent pools. The use of social tools for L&D functions will also
come to fruition in 2014.

5 Trends Driving HR Technology In 2014

1) The world is your oyster (and your talent pool). Real talent knows no geographic borders
no country has a monopoly on the must sought after, up-to-the-second skills that are needed
in IT, social media, software programming, science and math. You want the best, no matter
where he or she lives. The trick is to find them. This means taking your search global by
increasing your presence on networks that have worldwide reach. Aggressively seek out talent
sites and forums around the globe. Hire outside help if needed to accomplish this.
2) Technology-technology-technology. The number and kinds of data-mining, talent search and
hiring technologies that are out there can be daunting. But they are crucial, exciting tools that
every organization should make themselves aware of. Whether its video interviewing or a
pinpoint search for a highly-specific skill set, technology can make HR easier, faster and more
effective. Dont get overwhelmed by your options. Use the technology that works for you. Be
wary of too many bells and whistles, and overly-aggressive salespeople. Focus on what you want
to accomplish and ignore the rest.
3) Real time talent analytics and big data management. In the bad old days, employees got
annual or maybe six-month assessments. Which translated into a lot of squandered time and
opportunity to learn, grow and improve (or terminate if need be). Today technology enables a
continuous real-time assessment of performance. Employees can made aware of their
shortcomings and get work on improving them, and people who are doing great work can get the
kind of support and encouragement that will inspire and allow them to soar to new heights.
4) Mobile hone. The worlds gone mobile and its pretty awesome. Now your talent lives and
breathes in real time portable connectivity. To reach this talent, youve got to go where they are.
Mobile-ize your search-and-employ efforts. Make applying for a job possible while people are
riding the subway, eating lunch, or listening to Lorde (or even doing all three at once).
5) Sweeten the deal. Organizations are cutting back on employee benefits, especially healthcare.
To make up for this unfortunate fact, its imperative to make employment attractive through
secondary benefits such as childcare, flex time, gyms and exercise classes, healthy food
offerings, gamification prizes and extras like free-lunch Fridays. You want your people to feel
cared for and cared about, morale stays high, and a healthy workforce performs at a much higher
level.

Key HR Trends in India for 2014

This is an exciting time for human resources management in India. The HR scene in India is both
transformational and challenging as businesses must recognize and create strategies at a local
level that are in harmony with a global plan.2014 is an election year for India, during which
industry typically takes a wait and watch approach. In this context, here are five important HR
trends to be aware of:
Improving Career Experience

Two decades of steady economic growth in India has resulted in maturing industriesIT, retail,
consumer goods, consumer electronics, automotive and manufacturing, and others. Many
multinationals have consolidated their set-ups in India in the last decade. Along with this surge,
the employee population has grown. This large population wishes to enrich their work, to come
into their own and to find new meaning. Defining meaningful careersthrough acquiring
mastery and specialization, through mobility, and with the help of mentoringis clearly the top
trend to keep the workforce engaged and excited.
Building a Global Mindset

In India, growth in the last decade was inevitably linked to the U.S. economy. Offshoring,
software exports and U.S. multinationals establishing a footprint in India fueled growth. Postrecession, the same companies no longer find the cost arbitrage attractive but are looking for
value creation, innovation and intellectual capital. This requires HR in India to focus on quality
and innovation rather than on just quantity and commoditized practices. Building specialization,
operating in a truly global environment as integrated (and not just extended) teams, and being
culturally aware are all key competencies that need to be built within the workforce.
Seeing Talent Strategically

More than ever, talent is a strategic function. Identifying top talent, grooming high-potential
employees, reviewing talent, strategic mobility programs and predictive tools for hiring the right
fit are extremely important. While a good sign for HR, this has also meant an influx of specialist
talent entering into the HR space. Business leaders have increased ownership and awareness of
people issues, data scientists crunch numbers to prepare models, and financial analysts are
indulging in human capital analytics like revenue and compensation.
SMAC, Gamification Are Here to Stay

Social media, Mobile, Analytics and the Cloud (SMAC) are strong waves that cut across
industries and cannot be ignored. A couple of important statistics that make these trends even
more important from an Indian perspective:

Most major social media networks have substantial Indian presence.

Mobile growth in India is among the highest in the world.

Networks like the cross-platform WhatsApp have dominant presence in India.

Overall SMAC is especially appealing to the younger Indian demographic. The expectation of
this younger, tech-savvy, networked workforce is to see an equally flexible, dynamic, techfriendly HR. It also means sweeping changes in terms of how talent is spotted, hired, onboarded, retained and engaged.
Gamification is a huge draw for young HR practitioners as well as employees in India. For a
generation that has grown up connected to the Internet and video games, gamification scenarios
that mimic work-life situations draw employees in and have great appeal.

Ten trends that will reshape the future of HR

Research by Accenture has identified 10 business trends that will radically reshape HR in the
next five years:
1. The rise of the extended workforce. Companies will be increasingly composed of an evershifting, global network of contractors, business partners and outsourcing providers. As talent
stretches beyond the confines of the company, HR teams may have to pay as much attention to
people outside of the organisation as to those inside.
2. Managing individuals. Instead of managing a workforce with a one-size-fits-all approach,
HR will treat each employee as a workforce of one with unique needs and preferences, and
will customise employee incentives accordingly.
3. Technology advances radically disrupt HR. Technology will integrate talent management
into the fabric of everyday business. HR IT will become a vital component of an organisation
characterised by social media, cloud computing, mobility, and Big Data.
4. The global talent map loses its borders. With a mismatch between areas of supply and
demand of jobs globally, companies will be composed of highly diverse workforces. HR will
need to adopt new recruitment strategies to effectively match talent with task across the world.
5. HR drives the agile organisation. The world is becoming increasingly unpredictable and
organisations that can adapt to changing business conditions will outperform the competition.
HR will fundamentally reshape itself to enable new organisations designed around nimble and
responsive talent.

6. Talent management meets the science of human behaviour. As new discoveries into brain
science and human behaviour are emerging and companies are using analytics to achieve
improved results HR will begin to arm itself with the tools and insights of a scientist to achieve
better performances from their workforces.
7. Social media drives the democratisation of work. Social media is pervading the workplace
and making it easier for employees to exchange information and ideas online. HR will need to
play a vital role in helping build effective organisational cultures that support this, as well as
incentives and processes for knowledge sharing, innovation and engagement.
8. HR must navigate risk and privacy in a more complex world. As the internet continues to
break down information barriers, HR will adopt risk management strategies covering everything
from protecting confidential information and data, to risks associated with weak hiring or
turnover of talent.
9. HR expands its reach to deliver seamless employee experiences. HR will evolve from
being a clearly defined, stand-alone function to one that collaborates closely with other parts of
the business, such as IT, strategy and marketing, to deliver well-rounded HR and talent
management processes.
10. Tapping skills anywhere, anytime. Skills gaps are widening and HR will be increasingly
hard pressed to ensure their organisations have the right people. HR will need to develop
initiatives to be able to quickly tap skills when and where they are needed.
These trends are happening now and will only get more real and impactful. A very different set
of HR and talent management practices will be required, which are better suited to a highly
volatile, global and knowledge-oriented age.
HR functions that recognise this and react will have an unprecedented opportunity to help
organisations and people become leaders in the new world of work. For those companies that
dont heed the call, HR risks irrelevance.
Source: http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/hro/features/1141966/trends-reshape-future-hr

What Is the Future of HR?

The demands of day-to-day HR may be crowding out the focus, passion and spirit that are
necessary if practitioners are to take a leading role in helping organizations capitalize on
opportunities offered by emerging trends such as big data and gamification. This could hinder an
organizations quest to maximize productivity and be competitive.
Is the HR profession moving fast enough to capture the opportunities in emerging trends? Much
of the work addressing this issue has defined the future of HR in terms of competencies,
workforce demographics, or professional techniques or practices.
Here we take a different departure point by starting with prominent emerging general trends and
examining their potential effect on HR, now and in the future, and HRs desired and actual role
in addressing them. What we found was that while HR leaders generally feel their ideal role is
one of broad leadership, their assessment of the current role often is far less than that.
Our research at the Center for Effective Organizations was conducted with a consortium of 11
large companies: Citrix Systems Inc.; Electronic Arts Inc.; Gap Inc.; Lockheed Martin Corp.;
Mattel Inc.; Rockwell Automation; Royal Bank of Canada; Sony Pictures Entertainment;
Unilever; UPS Inc.; and The Walt Disney Co. Twenty to 30 HR professionals within each
company participated in the consortium. We examined the trends of globalization, generational
diversity, sustainability, social media, personal technology, mass customization, open
innovation, big data and gamification.
Beyond Tradition: Reach Out, Venture Out, Seek Out, Break Out
Our findings suggest that human resources can make great progress by simply allocating more
time, budget and expertise to the emerging trends that have the greatest potential effect on
organizations. However, at a larger level, lasting change will require fundamentally rethinking
how the HR profession and the HR function operate. This includes:
Reaching out: By infusing talent from other disciplines such as marketing, finance, logistics and
engineering, and bringing those disciplines to bear on HR issues such as the employment value
proposition, options-based leadership development, optimized talent supply chains and riskoptimized performance management.
Venturing out: By exerting influence beyond the traditional role of functional specialist,
through direct interactions with constituents such as government, regulators, investors and global
collective movements.
Seeking out: By finding and skillfully surfacing unpopular or unstated facts or assumptions that
can be debilitating if not addressed. Such hidden assumptions are often first visible among
employees, and HR is in a position to sense them early.

Breaking out: By leading transformational change. Increasingly, change will be a constant, not a
periodic, challenge. HR is uniquely positioned to be the repository of principles and skills for
creating change-savvy and agile organizations.
John Boudreau, Ian Ziskin and Carrie Gibson
We conducted surveys with the consortium participants on all nine trends, asking them to rate
HRs role now, what HRs role should be, and to discuss the barriers they were encountering to
having a role in these trends. Each survey was followed by a webinar discussion of the findings.
Our analysis will pull from research gathered within this consortium, which has created
communities with HR leaders in several organizations on these issues and established a network
of HR professionals spanning multiple organizations.
The four trends in Figure 1 (below) have arrived, meaning HR is participating in them, though
often not at the extent HR leaders think they should. The five trends on the right are emerging on
the horizon, meaning HR has not yet established a role in these but is reaching into them.
The HR leaders see HR ideally playing a leadership role, even in trends where HR is only
occasionally involved, if at all. The work that HR must pursue is significant.
There is a very important role for HR to play in each of these trends. However, it is not always
the role that HR plays today. The five trends on the right in Figure 1 sound very technological
and may seem on the surface a strange place for HR to engage, but in the rush to become
technologically savvy, organizations may have missed the human implications in these trends.
This human element is where the real potential for HR exists. These human implications and
what HR can do with them stood out in our research. Next we will focus on four of the nine
trends: big data, generational diversity, mass customization and sustainability.
Big Data
A large financial services firm traditionally recruited sales people only from the highest gradeearners at top-tier universities. Using big data it correlated employee characteristics with unit
revenue, and found that grades and school quality were least predictive of unit revenue, with six
other variables emerging as more predictive. The company shifted recruitment away from grades
and school quality and toward the six more-predictive factors and saw an improvement of $4
million in revenue in the next fiscal period.
While it is terrific to learn how to recruit better, there are two issues on the horizon for HR
regarding big data. The first is storytelling as a way to engage people. With no story behind the
data, analytics or correctness seldom drive change in an organization.
Should HR know how to tell the story behind data? There are not many business disciplines
other than HR that are as appropriate a home for that expertise. The HR profession includes
disciplines such as psychology, anthropology and communication. Yet, if HR practitioners fail to
develop these disciplines into a practical and scalable ability to tell stories with data, the
opportunity may be taken up by other areas of organizations, such as marketing.

Then there is the art of the question. Big data is much more about questions than it is about
answers. HR has a unique opportunity to lead the organization in asking good questions by
developing the art of the question in the way they approach data and encourage others to
approach data.
This idea of asking good questions is fundamental to leading through influence, which is again
something HR traditionally does well. HR often has permission to ask hard questions or to
probe beneath long-held assumptions, because the job of forging strategies for talent often
requires much deeper understanding of strategy, execution and assumptions.
HR could accelerate this role by developing more systematic and common approaches to
questions that connect strategy with talent, such as where would improving our talent make the
biggest difference to our strategic success?
Generational Diversity
HR already has a fairly strong role within generational diversity. However, there is a large gap
between where HR is and where it thinks it should be. The preparation for the multigenerational
workforce lags well behind the reality.
Those polled have agreed that organizations will be hurt when the older generation leaves and
takes knowledge with it. To counter this, many organizations now have reverse mentoring
programs where the younger generation is mentoring the older generation to help with
technology skills and to transfer knowledge.
While HR is active in these aspects of generational diversity, coming down the road is the
question, Are organizations willing to make the social investment to make diversity come
alive? Research shows that more-diverse groups face greater challenges and may not perform to
potential unless provided more time and collaboration tools.
Diversity can be useful, but it also can be hard to manage. Investment in skills, collaboration and
understanding differences is necessary for diversity to pay off. HR should take the lead in
engaging business leaders in the story of the benefits of diversity in order to get the resources
necessary to make it work.
Figure 1. Lofty Ambitions but Less-Elevated Reality
Personal technology: Mobile platforms such as
smartphones, laptop and tablet computers, future
Globalization: Integrating world economies
technology such as wrist devices and Google Glass,
through the exchange of goods, services and
and the apps that support them, seamlessly and
capital.
constantly connecting people and Web-based
content.
Mass customization: Combining mass production
Generational diversity: The presence of many
with customization for specific individual consumers
different age groups among workers, citizens and
or groups to meet peoples needs with the
consumers.
effectiveness and efficiency of mass production.

Open innovation: The inflow and outflow of

Sustainability: Meeting the needs of the present
knowledge to increase innovation, including user
without compromising the ability of future
innovation, innovation ecosystems, co-development,
generations to meet their needs.
innovation contests and crowdsourcing.
Social media: Online networks and two-way
communication channels that connect users in the Big data: Data that are too big, too unstructured or
virtual world, establishing new relationships that too diverse to be stored and analyzed by
expand users networks and facilitate user
conventional means, processes or tools.
participation in interactions and exchanges.
Gamification: Applying game mechanics to
nongame situations to motivate and change behavior.
Mass Customization
There is a lot going on already within HR concerning mass customization, the optimal
combination of mass production with customization. Weve seen companies basing employment
arrangements on learning styles and personalities, allowing employees to choose between lower
base pay and higher bonuses vs. higher base pay and lower bonuses, and changing from career
ladders with a straight shot to the top to career lattices where a sideways move is considered a
good career move. Here, HR has done a great job of applying HR principles to its own traditional
functional processes.
HR will need to take the tools of marketing around customization for consumers and clients and
applying them to the task of talent segmentation. The key is to optimize. At one extreme, a
personal employment deal for every individual would be chaotic. At the other extreme, defining
fairness as same for everyone risks missing important benefits of customization, and in fact
may be unproductive and unfair.
Thus, HR should develop principles for understanding the optimal level of customization in the
employment relationship. Moreover, because customization will often mean that different groups
of employees receive different employment arrangements based on their needs or the way they
contribute, HR must develop principles that equip leaders to explain these differences to
employees. Our work suggests that while many leaders understand the need for customization
and differentiation in principle, they resist it because they simply dont feel well-equipped to
explain them. It is far easier to say, We do the same thing for everyone, so its out of my
hands. The concept of fairness is sometimes confused with treating everyone the same.
Sustainability
Sustainability is a trend that has arrived (HR has a strong role already as shown in Figure 1) but
there is room for HR to become more involved and even lead. One sustainability issue on the
horizon for HR is fatigue. In this technologically created 24/7 work environment, HR is uniquely
equipped to offer principles that define an optimal balance between work demands and slack in
the system that allows innovation and flexibility.
What is the optimum amount of rest/work? The fight or flight response that employees engage in
for most of the workday has immense physical effects on the brain and has negative effects on

the way people lead, on their ability to make decisions and their ability to create. HR can
optimize the notion of wellness against the notion of work in a way that is more precise.
One way to optimize wellness at work is mindfulness. Mindful meditation taking two minutes
to breathe and focus has immense effects on stress-related biometrics and diseases and has
been reported to make leaders feel more focused, less reactive and open to new ideas. HR should
take the lead in better understanding how these potential benefits affect organizations, and how
they fit into an optimum balance.
Barriers and Opportunities to Close the Gap
What are the barriers to closing the gap between where HR is and where it thinks it should be
regarding these nine trends? Based on the data, it is not because HR is seen as irrelevant or other
functions have already taken the lead. HR relevance was among the lowest-cited barriers. The
prominent barriers were more traditional: lack of time, budget and expertise.
Recall the story of del Sarto. Browning wrote of the painter: Ah, but a mans reach should
exceed his grasp/Or whats a heaven for?
Is HR at the risk of spending so much of its resources on the day-to-day that it misses the big
opportunities? To paraphrase Browning, does HRs reach exceed its grasp? Of course,
conquering such shortcomings is just the beginning.