The past year has proven to be the most challenging one for everyone. In the corporate world, the pandemic has led people managers to take significant initiatives for the mental, emotional, and physical wellness of employees.
Human resource practitioners started sensing the need for technology disruptions in various HR functions to transform and encounter the sudden environmental changes impacting employees.
Software solutions are rapidly changing physical offices into virtual working spaces that make HR managers perform all practices digitally to enable employees to deliver better amidst adversities.
Here are the top disruptive technology trends that need to be tracked in 2021 to ensure you make human resource practices more efficient and productive.
Remote workspace technology
The first change realised this year is the increasing culture of working remotely to avoid physical contact. Out of the several HR trends, communication software and networking tools are most significant in improving collaboration among employees to execute planned actions and produce integrated results.
Existing tech tools like Zoom, Skype, Google meet, have uplifted the effectiveness of remote working culture.
While technology is enabling teams to interact better, employees suffer from fatigue due to several video calls and excessive screen time. Many businesses use tech to “lock” meetings after a specific number of hours. This has proven to help employees manage their time better, while reducing the time spent on meetings.
Virtual recruitment
Recruitment is the most vital HR process. Initially, the pandemic resulted in businesses having to take several cutbacks. And, they have been working hard to find ways to deal with the challenges associated with cutbacks.
Recruitment has become the most challenging task for many businesses as interviewing candidates in a virtual setting is quite difficult. And, this is where technology comes into play. Virtual recruitment HR technology comprises applications that crawl through several platforms the candidates are a part of, screen them, and enable businesses to find the talent that fit each others’ requirements.
Businesses are using software applications that identify facial expressions of the candidate during interviews to assess the legitimacy of the candidates.
Wellness technological HR trends
The pandemic resulted in increased anxiety and depression among the employees, causing a decrease in overall productivity. To combat this, several wellness-tech companies worked on creating corporate wellness programs, which can be integrated with HR technology.
This helped businesses enable counselling sessions, yoga, group workouts, and more, on their HR portals for employees to use. This has proven to be useful in the upkeep of the physical and mental well-being of employees to a greater extent.
There have also been HR technology solutions that perform wellness audits by generating a score of psychological and physical health.
HR technology in workforce strategies
The pandemic has pushed businesses to rethink their organisational goals, resulting in big changes in workforce structure and strategies. There has been a rise in HR tech companies building additional features that analyse workforce data like compensation, engagement, talent, degree of prowess, and more.
These analytics help HR managers identify the right workforce requirements and map them to the right personnel. Further, the analytics also enable them to assess the effectiveness of the workforce strategy interventions.
Payroll HR solutions
One of the most important HR processes of every business is to carry out salary payments to all employees. The process involves arriving at what is due to the employees for a particular payroll cycle after adjusting the necessary deductions like TDS, employees’ PF contribution, meal coupons, etc.
The pandemic nudged businesses towards payroll automation, which has been successful in paying employees on time, managing leaves & attendance, providing insurance while enabling employees to access all their information in a few clicks.
