Performance Review: Can HR Step Up Its Digital Game?

When implemented properly, digital HR solutions can transform the workplace and improve business outcomes. Sabine Atieh, a partner with Bain’s Performance Improvement practice, explains the role of AI in HR and provides five conditions to bring digital to its full potential.

Read the Bain Brief: HR's New Digital Mandate

Read the transcript below.

SABINE ATIEH: Digital is transforming the way HR functions are adding value to the businesses they support. Artificial intelligence in all its forms has already delivered promising results across a variety of HR activities—from talent acquisition, where natural language processing can help screen and select candidates' resumes faster, to talent retention, where machine learning can help you predict who will resign from your organization, to HR back offices and payroll with robotic process automation and chatbots.

Digital transformation for HR is not an easy journey. In fact, three quarters of HR executives are telling us they're not satisfied with the current technologies they implemented, mainly because they have too many tools, those tools are not sufficiently integrated with each other, the interfaces are complex and hard to manage, and that complexity could grow even further as they're adopting new solutions.

We see five conditions for results if you want to bring your HR digital transformation to full potential. First, it's about fixing and simplifying HR processes before trying to automate them. Second, it's about putting yourself into your employees' and managers' shoes, trying to bring richer consumer-grade experiences to the workplace. Then it's about raising the game in terms of analytics and data to better support decision making; following a test-and-learn approach; and leveraging an ecosystem of external partners.

Now, we're not saying digital will replace human judgment. Human judgment will remain critical when it comes to assessing and motivating people. But digital is creating an increasingly broader set of solutions, and it's an opportunity for HR executives to create their own portfolio of digital bets to transform their workplace, reduce their cost and improve business outcomes.

Brief

HR’s New Digital Mandate

Digital technologies have become essential for HR to engage top talent and add value to the business.