Times are changing rapidly and human resource teams are perfectly placed to lead the cultural change to an AI-driven workplace. What does that mean? What action should you be taking today to prepare for tomorrow? And why is it down to human resources?
When we were designing our model for driving organisational culture change, it was clear there was one group that belonged at the centre: the Human Resources team. Human Resources (HR), as a function, needs to be brought into the digital transformation process to oversee the cultural change, support staff and ensure that all those impacted by AI and data in their work understand the benefits and risks. Data processes also need to be brought into the HR function, supporting HR managers in their roles.
The HR Pentagon of Data Culture
Techsauce was a highlight of the week and included the delegation leading workshops on topics including AI in healthcare, public services and the development of an ethical national AI strategy to support advancing the AI agenda in Thailand. The UK experts also led discussions and joined panels alongside British businesses on issues such as climate tech and femtech. Techsauce was the perfect platform to showcase the UK’s AI expertise across such diverse sectors such as agriculture, finance, climate, design and cybersecurity and to encourage partnerships between the UK and Thailand.
Train & Assess
As decision making goes digital, more staff will need to become competent in using data analytics and understand the importance of using data in making decisions. We need HR to lead these processes.
- Reskilling some staff will be necessary as work previously performed by humans becomes automated. Identifying staff suitable for reskilling will be essential
- Upskilling other members of staff will be crucial so the team can develop new skills to work alongside machine insight or to take on additional roles in the new time available to them
Some staff will be specialists in analytics & data science and be able to offer support, but HR needs to lead on the training and manage the upskilling process, not leave this to the data scientists or business analysts.
It’s not just technical skills. Data regulation is growing in scope and complexity so ensuring that company applications of AI don’t break laws is essential.
Recruit and Retain
It will become increasingly important to understand the data literacy skills that new talent brings and so HR managers need data literacy themselves. Data processes can also help track the effectiveness of job advertisements, support the initial screening of candidates, target better responses with job replacement campaigns and reduce the time to fill posts.
HR teams work in highly regulated environments and at the Institute of Analytics, we promote the ethical use of data and AI within regulatory and best practice guidelines. We always explain the benefits of technology as well as the concerns, so that you’re making the right choices.
Staff retention is also important; data analytics can help you to identify patterns associated with the decision to leave an organisation thanks to data around length of service and promotion opportunities, or even by searching performance review reports. Our AI Essentials Tool Kit will help you have conversations around the kinds of analytics that you would like to make use of in the business to set the standards high for retention and to track performance and cost savings through staff retention.
Data can also help reduce turnover by identifying recurring issues the company faces, finding out why people struggle in their role or better understand the company ethos – all through creating and evaluating job satisfaction surveys.
Personalise Outreach
We know that personalisation works and today’s talent expects a personalised approach. You can set up outreach and tracking programmes using data analytics at times when you need to scale up, such as an induction for new graduate recruits that supports and tracks them over the first few months. Plus, you can help staff identify the best pathways throughout their career.
Graph data can help you map optimal routes at every stage of the staff engagement process; you can look for networks and optimal pathways to get the best results.
IoA Membership provides access to 1400+ hours of training, including graph analytics which is a relatively simple tool to use.
HR Intelligence
Human Resources departments are a big source of company data. There are a lot of reports and records on staff and on processes that could be used for insights to mine efficiencies and identify opportunities. If you are interested in learning some more technical skills, we can get you into our Business Analyst or Data Analyst training tracks. You can decide how far to take your learning.
Data skills will soon be on the ‘must have’ list for more and more job postings. Human Resource Intelligence will become a future role that you may be excited to move into or explore further.
Decision making in HR can be supported such as how to allocate salaries / distribute compensation to meet skills challenges and in response to market changes for those skills, how to advertise jobs to fill them more quickly or better and may offer HR a chance to demonstrate ROI.
Transform Culture
The scale of the coming changes is huge and opting out won’t be a choice. And companies won’t just be managing humans in the future. The benefit of using data analytics is to take advantage of the superhuman powers machines can have to see patterns in the data that people aren’t able to by picking up on problems and opportunities long before a human gaze has noticed that it’s time to act. It’s important to be well-versed in order to lead conversations about AI and data – there is a lot of fear out there. Complex business challenges and transformation are more likely to be solved by people with data analytics skills.
Check out this article from HR News featuring Dr Clare Walsh, IoA Director of Education.
We need HR managers that can deliver human and machine talent management
Machines are not perfect. Data gets its meaning from its context, and there will always be nuances and aspects of organisational practice that the data and AI cannot capture. How will you manage a disagreement between human and machine decision makers in the future?
What will continue to bind your staff to your organisation while everyone goes through this growth phase?
There will also be work to train machines to take over some routine and repetitive tasks as AI becomes more common in the workplace. Work processes that middle management might describe in 10 steps may well, in real-life execution, require hundreds of steps to complete. The HR team may need to step in to define roles and processes in a granularity never used before. Understanding all these processes will help you take a leading role in talent management as well as role allocation and, most importantly, ensure that human oversight is built into processes.
There are a lot of ways that the HR function will be impacted along with every other department, and upskilling will be part of your own personal future too. There are benefits to HR professionals going first in this transformation process.
