How Trends in Human Capital Management (HCM) Will Transform the Employee Journey
Shortages of talent, increased pay, an aging workforce, and increased regulatory scrutiny have driven the increased attention to people. Enterprises now value their workforce more than ever. In this report, Constellation describes the main drivers that will raise the human resources (HR) function to prominence and presents 10 trends that will matter to Human Capital Management (HCM) and Future of Work decision makers in 2015 and beyond.
On the HCM best practices side, Constellation sees enterprises increasingly realizing the value and the cost of their employees (Trend #1). This prompts them to get more out of their employees and upgrade the talent that they have in house – which leads to the “war for talent” (Trend #3) intensifying. At the same time, daily operation in HCM gets harder, as the regulatory onslaught is at full speed. There are more laws, statutes and regulations enterprises need to follow (Trend #2).
On the technology side, Constellation sees four disrupting forces that companies need to understand. HCM professionals will need to learn to make sense of Big Data (Trend #6). Individuals and enterprises who are faster at using this new technology will reap significant benefits. At the same time, enterprises need to engage their employees more and gamification is a technology, coupled with the right strategy, that can lead to favorable motivation levels (Trend #5) across employee generations. Moreover, the rise of social media is affecting HCM best practices, starting with recruiting (Trend #4). And lastly, HCM software vendors are adding psychological information to their systems – understanding that there are more factors than the traditional information that has been so far used in recruiting, succession, performance management, team/project composition. (Trend #7).
Not surprisingly, the cloud is the preferred delivery vehicle for HCM technology these days, but it’s no longer so new that executives are naïve toward its adoption. They are much better versed in regard to cloud-lock-in, which can reach the same stifling levels of on- premise software (Trend #8). And they also have learned that there are cloud integration issues ahead – the challenges are maturing rapidly now from the traditional on-premise to cloud integration challenge, to a cloud-to-cloud integration challenge (Trend #9).
But all of these trends are overshadowed by a more strategic and transformative trend – that enterprises need to become more people-centric – and their HCM leaders should take the lead in this transformation (Trend #10). If they won’t – they may get travolged1 by these trends.
1This is the author’s signature verb – from Italian travolgere to overwhelm, to crush, to swamp – for which English lacks a poetic word
This research report identifies the emerging trends in Human Capital Management (HCM) and analyzes how they matter to enterprises and Chief People Officers.