With the increasing impact of the pandemic across all the industries, the remote and hybrid work culture has become inevitable. This has led to the increased dependence of HR and the workforce on technology for casting into the molds of the new normal. This calls for an overall and speedy innovation of HR technologies.
In the session “WorkTECH: What Should the Future of HR Tech Look Like?” on the first day of People Matters TechHR India Conference 2021, Vijay Yalamanchili, Founder and CEO Keka HR, and Anuradha Bharat, Vice President, People Operations at Razorpay, elaborate the need for adoption of new HR policies about the changes brought about by the pandemic.
According to Yalamanchili, HR has undergone a dramatic shift over the last two years. The traditional HR practice has primarily maintained records over the years, but this era has led to a major shift in prioritizing employee experience, engagement, and talent management.
‘The pandemic has got us around a new set of problems, everything of which revolves around the employees,’ says Vijay Yalamanchili.
Elaborating on the changing trends of HR in the future, he adds that the future is going to be highly influenced by technology. Yalamanchili adds, ‘I see that we are going to be more focused on how the employees want the workflow to be like instead of asking them to use our interface in the future.’
Elevating employee experience
Anuradha explains that adapting to the technical needs of the hour has been a challenge to some extent. She says that Razorpay, being a technical company, every employee is highly tech-savvy, and they look forward to flexibility whenever the company tries to implement a new policy. So, the Razorpay management has been highly driven by the right employee experience while adopting new tools.
‘Employee experience has been one of the key aspects driving our decision making. The democratic and two-way approach has helped us nailing our decision making and success of what we implement,’ says Anuradha Bharat.
Personalizing HR services
Bharat says that there can be a lot of customization and personalization in modern-day HR technologies. Customization can ensure comfort to the new age workforce in every way that the workforce wants to operate. However, the democratization of the workforce and other new changes always comes with challenges during the implementation. Talking about such challenges, Yalamanchili adds that it becomes difficult to produce a perfect module for every function while selecting the technologies for the new-age workforce. This leads to the use of multiple platforms by organizations. He adds, “there have been instances where the customers have used their own modules over what we have offered.”
He insists that while selecting the right technology for a workforce, companies should look for the right product and not the brand. Evaluation of the product before adopting it is extremely crucial. There is no single product that can cater to every need or function.
Evaluating the right HR tool
According to Bharat, not necessarily the product that caters to the needs of a particular company can solve issues of similar organizations in the market. So, wisely evaluating the product is highly important. However, she adds that evaluation must be done by looking at how each tool can be stitched to other ones in the line for all the tools to work in coordination. An organization also must keep in mind that with the increased headcount, the complexity of dealing with these tools also increases.
‘Multiple tools add to the challenges in many ways and wake the purpose of providing a good experience to the employees,’ says Anuradha Bharat.
She says that using multiple tools should not affect the employee experience negatively. Adding to this, Yalamanchili says that organizations also must invest in tools that help solve their problem. He says, “quality comes with a certain cost.” Investing in the right quality product saves the time of the organization. Saving even ten hours in a month is worth the investment an organization may have made to purchase the tool.
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