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THE (TECH)
FORCE
AWAKENS HOW HR CAN HARNESS THE POWER OF DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY
TO OUTTHINK THE COMPETITION IN A NEW AGE OF BUSINESS
By Melissa Campeau
Maybe your last hour looked a bit like this: you
gathered data from an online training mod-ule,
chatted on an internal messaging system,
sent a text to a colleague, pulled a report from
Dropbox and then settled in to research potential hires’ so-cial
media profiles and watch their application videos.
Clearly, tech is changing the nature of work. But the
changes we’ve seen in the last handful of years – the prolif-eration
of mobile and cloud computing, game-like apps for
employees and big data among them – are just the begin-ning.
Expect disruptive technologies to come our way at a
faster pace than ever.
Conduct business as usual at your own peril; this wave of
change will upend how we connect, engage and make deci-sions,
and drastically impact HR’s role within an organization.
Shane Cragun, co-author of Reinvention: Accelerating
Results in the Age of Disruption, says one of the key com-petencies
shared by successful leaders is their ability to
master change.
“They can see incoming global shockwaves and learn
how to leverage them,” said Cragun. “They will not just
survive, but they’ll handle the change quickly and leapfrog
their competition.”
NEW WAYS OF CONNECTING WITH TALENT
Many disruptive technologies are already in play within
forward-thinking organizations, impacting every aspect of
the employee lifecycle.
A recent survey by IBM asked 5,247 business lead-ers
what they believe the future holds and how they’re
positioning their organizations to prosper in the age of
disruption. The report (Redefining Talent: Insights from the
Global C-suite Study: The CHRO Point of View) finds lead-ers
are “…capitalizing on emerging technologies to improve
the employee experience, building a flexible skills base,
drawing on analytics to predict future workforce trends
and creating a social dialogue with employees to manage
change more effectively.”
To find job candidates, for example, HR professionals
have been making the most of social media for years. A
fresh take on recruiting, though, is the idea of using gam-ing
to assess potential hires.
Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte,
Deloitte Consulting LLP, points to a company in Australia
that’s created a game for potential job candidates.
“The game gives them a few challenges to complete
and measures their learning agility,” said Bersin. For
most candidates, it’s an engaging way to apply for work.
And for a recruiting team, it can help differentiate job
candidates in a fraction of the time needed by more tra-ditional
models.
Tech’s also being used to influence culture, with inter-nal
chat programs, employee performance recognition
software and sharing tools that make the most of cloud
computing and encourage cross-functioning teamwork
and collaboration.
HRPATODAY.CA ❚ JULY/AUGUST 2016 ❚ 19