How Does HR Fit Into Your Current Organization?

How Does HR Fit Into Your Current Organization?

HR Open Source, a not-for-profit community focused on collaborative learning, education, and inspiration for HR, recently released their 2018 Future of Work report. In it, this group of roughly 6,000 members from 70 countries around the world surveyed companies from 36 countries. From their research, they pulled out several deep insights and analyses that led us to ask an important question—how does HR fit into the modern organization?

Their Methodology

In their research, they gathered 521 responses. The bulk of respondents were decision makers in their organization. Company sizes ranged from small (1-50 employees) to large (10,000+) and everything in between. Although the bulk of the companies came from the technology industry, other industries responded as well, including professional services, retail, finance and insurance, and manufacturing.

The findings from these respondents were insightful. Here are a few of the key takeaways we latched onto while reading the report.

Is HR Strategic?

The report showcased some open ended responses that signaled some forward-thinking companies used HR departments to further their strategic goals. In these cases, the HR department was tasked with making measurable impacts on the organization through strategic functions that required them to be several steps ahead of other departments in their organization.

For other organizations, HR played little to no role in achieving their overall goals. This lack of strategic involvement was primarily because HR was kept out of important conversations and their work stayed within their department walls. The team was seen more as administrative than influential in the organization.

How Market Trends Have Impacted HR

Respondents were asked to rate whether an HR trend was already alive and present today, or whether it was something that was still 3 years down the road. Some of the responses, such as the increase in remote workers and the speed at which HR technology has changed, were said to already be here. These respondents believed that programs, such as our online scheduling app, were already part of the digital disruption.

The glaring difference was in automation of jobs. A whopping 22% of people said that the market is still a few years out of automation overtaking jobs, but that it’s on the horizon.

Drivers Behind the HR Tech Stack

Although we’re living in an age of digitized processes and people analytics, the core driver for adopting new HR technology remains its ability to meet business goals. Still, many respondents said that technology was brought into the company fold to keep up with the pace of tech innovations and to meet user requirements. We predict that as more technologically driven people enter the workforce, that needs to meet user requirements will continue to increase.

How Does Your Organization Match Up?

As more technology enters the fold the HR spotlight turns away from recruiting and more towards the HR tech stack. Now, modern HR teams are looking more about the impact their programs and processes can have on retention rather than bringing new people on board. How does your business keep up with these trends?

Author Profile Jon Forknell is the Vice President and General Manager of Atlas Business Solutions, Inc., a software marketing company specializing in employee scheduling software, including ScheduleBase employee scheduling software, and other business software solutions. In the past, Jon has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Atlas Business Solutions was named as one of Software Magazine’s Top 500 Software Companies in 2004 through 2007, and 2010, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017.