The voice of HR

Making your voice heard by the management

In a modern organisation, you act as HR on an equal footing with the management and are a strategic partner for the company. You prepare decisions and actively support them. We show you in five steps how you can make your HR topics heard by the management and actively shape the future of your company.

While five years ago you were investing around four hours more per week in administrative activities, today you have more time for strategic tasks thanks to Digitization and the optimisation of HR topics. And this trend will continue to intensify in the future: Modern integrations and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly making administrative tasks superfluous. The following three developments in particular are contributing to this progress:

1. Interfaces or suite approaches: A single piece of Software can cover several areas and leads to enormous time savings. Master data, for example, only needs to be entered once instead of multiple times in different systems.
2. RPA (Robotic Process Automation): You can delegate routine tasks to bots. Manually copying data - for example from an email into SuccessFactors - is no longer necessary.
3. Intuitive access point for employees: A single access point connects several specialised Software solutions. For example, employees can register for a course via a chatbot and at the same time receive travel suggestions that comply with the guidelines. Whereas in the past, course enrolment was done via a learning platform and flight bookings via an online booking engine, the employee now communicates exclusively with the chatbot.

HR Heads as a "sealing ring"

If administrative tasks are reduced and this development continues, will HR Heads become superfluous? No! David Autor uses an analogy to explain why HR Heads will continue to play an important role for a long time to come:

Sealing ring hypothesis: the more automated and complex our world becomes, the more important individual parts become. On the Challenger Space Shuttle, all systems were perfectly integrated and harmonised. Nevertheless, the rocket exploded and led to the death of several people. The reason was a simple sealing ring that failed to fulfil its task. No matter how much can be automated in HR - people are still needed for management and coordination with the corporate strategy. To a certain extent, HR Heads remain a "sealing ring".

Never-enough hypothesis: Even if we are becoming more and more productive and supposedly have enough, we always want more. In Switzerland, productivity has risen by 32% since 1991, while the unemployment rate has fallen by 28%. We are working more and more efficiently in order to achieve even more. This development will continue to demand more and more from you and your HR team in the future.

You and your Team are central to this development. Employees are becoming increasingly important in the highly competitive labour market. Almost half of Swiss SMEs are struggling to find suitable candidates. At the same time, the demands on you are changing. An OECD study shows that the proportion of "classic" office work has fallen by 16%, while highly complex professions have grown by 16% at the same time.

Employees at the centre

As an employee, you are becoming increasingly important for the success of a company. HR plays a central role in this. While most business areas look at the world through the eyes of their customers ("user experience design"), very few HR strategies, processes or tools are designed to put you, the employee, at the centre. The time saved by automated administration processes can be invested in you with a view to the future. Here are a few examples:

• Change instead of Recruitment: Would you want to be recruited as an employee? The word alone has a military connotation. For you, the focus is on a desire for change.
• Integration instead of Onboarding & Offboarding: From your perspective, you want to feel at home in a new job as quickly as possible - like being welcomed into a family. Today's understanding of the process often only focuses on the tools and knowledge required to complete all tasks as quickly as possible. However, "feeling at home" is completely disregarded.
• HR service centre instead of administration: You want a service centre that gives you an answer to your most urgent questions as quickly as possible. In a generation that is used to having knowledge at its fingertips ("Ask Google"), an email address is not enough. Chatbots can fill the gap here. They are available 24/7 and, combined with AI, can help with many topics.

Five steps on how HR can make itself heard by management

Dream big
Derive your own HR vision and strategy from the corporate vision and strategy. Coordinate this with the management so that it is jointly supported and you can actively support the company's goals.

Keep clearing the way at
The outer circle of our Future of Work graphic must not be forgotten. Continue to optimise the processes and tools in your HR topics to create the basis for strategic work and open up more room for innovation.

Quantify your statements
We live in a numbers-driven world and this is especially true at management level. The advantage of having tidied up your tools is that you have a reliable basis of figures at your disposal. Use these figures to back up your arguments - this makes your message more credible and convincing.

Tell stories
People have been telling each other stories for centuries. Our brains are much better at memorising images and stories than pure facts and figures. Stories trigger emotions and we react to them. Wrap your message in an exciting story and combine it with suitable figures.

Stay fit
If HR doesn't stay fit, there is a risk that it will become superfluous and no one will care about employees. Stay one step ahead of everyone and keep up to date with new topics, trends and technologies.

And before you think about it for too long: just get started! Happy employee, happy company!

Workshop

Get inspired in a "Future of Work" workshop and develop concrete measures for your company with our support.

You can find more information on this at here !