With the advent of technology at every step in any workplace, putting the H back to HR is getting questioned with every passing day. I could see startups & organizations are more engrossed in achieving their profit margins, thereby losing the focus on humanity. In one of the event attended with Isha foundation on #Humannotresource has made me think more on how much human touch is missing in the daily corporate lives of people around.
The leadership should rework on the values to be communicated to the employees, more attention to be paid keeping the employees at the center and not the business.
What Humanizing means?
Despite of working hard and churning out many billable hours, and even after doing excellent work for the organization and its clients, the employees let go off the organizations. The foremost reason for the same has been the lack of human touch.
There is least focus by the organization when we talk about a candidate wherein there is no fairness in the interview processes and right connect and communication to keep them posted from time to time. Once the candidate joins and turns out to be an employee, they are dealt like inventory. When they need them, they take them down from the shelf and put them in service. When they don’t, they put them back and the employee stay there until you are needed again.
There is no focus on Employee health, engagement, connect, growth & empowerment.
Why do we say humanizing is missing?
Organizations fail to understand the importance of experience be it candidate or employees. I have seen that People forget what you said, or what you did but they will always remember how you made them feel.
A lot of times during the recruitment process, the candidate gets a black box experience as the recruiters never come back with an answer. Employees are always asked to punch in punch out which nobody likes, if you ask any employees, in the survey also that we did – 90% say they feel like a slave when they are asked to mark attendance every time.
Employees get their salary, still they are dependent on HR department and processes to get their queries resolved. HR Teams become control centers. When an employee is leaving the organization, they are still running to get their things done.
Wouldn’t it be better to value your employees, work to develop and engage them, and keep them around?
I surely think so. Far too many organizations today need to put the “human” back in human resources.
How can we Humanize the workforce?
Every step of the employee lifecycle offers an opportunity to improve the human experience in the workplace. Let us understand some of the ways HR departments can help to humanize their workplace and positively impact lives throughout the employee life cycle.
For Candidates
- Digital Experience – During the process of selection, ineffective communication with the candidate can be detrimental to overall morale and experience of the hire. The organizations should focus on providing a platform for sharing the feedback and providing an ace experience to the prospective hire. Enabling an impression center, communicating through mobile apps for instant feedbacks can assists the prospective hire in seeking real time information about the recruitment process and hence creates a Whoa! Experience.
- Match Making – With a sheer volume of jobs floating in the market; it makes more tough for a candidate to search for a relevant job which matches his/ her profile. It’s a cumbersome process wherein the candidate is not aware about his fitment against a job role.Candidate job match making will assist the prospective hire in getting to see the percentage of fitment of the candidate against that job profile thereby enabling the prospective hire with the next steps.
For Employees
- Digital Experience –The mantra to work revolves around, 3A -Accessible | Anytime | Anywhere everywhere and this can be applied to our HR practices to ease out the work life as well! To quote an example, many organizations still practice the old method of manual attendance register or biometric which is taxing for the workforce.Employees can be empowered with technology which can facilitate them top mark attendance through mobile app using geo tagging basis on business requirement, application of leave through apps, performance management can be facilitated using mobile apps and the list is endless. All this creates a sense of belongingness in the employees and they feel that their time is valued.
- Appification – When organizations have deployed robots to manage their internal infrastructure and administrative tasks, why managing HR with AI seems a farsighted approach. Whenever we open any online shopping website there is a chat support being extended which is provided to enhance the user experience and give them a feeling that there is somebody available to extend support and help them.Similar chat bots can act as a catalyst between employees and act as an extend arm of the HR function
- Empowerment through DOP –Age old management principles substantiates that Responsibility and Authority are directly proportional. Generally, organization end up loading the employees with a responsibility without power. Motivational theories like Maslow’s need hierarchy or Hertzberg 2 Factor theory, substantiates that employees do have a need for belongingness.Until and unless the employees are involved in the decision-making process and are empowered this sense of belongingness will just remain in theories. When you involve the employee’s, and make them a stakeholder in the decision-making process they develop a self of belongingness and that’s where the value of stewardship is culminated in the employee.
- Enabling the “Workspace” as “Myspace” –While hiring candidates today organizations assesses them for “Stewardship” to determine the sense of ownership. When we as an organization expect the employees to be high on ownership with respect to the processes then why can’t employee be allowed to own their own workspace. How would you feel If somebody restricts you from entering your home with a smart phone, a USB or your bags are being checked while entering and exiting from your own home? Surprisingly, an employee is expected to spend approximately 40 hours a week in office with such kind of restrictions being spread across.It’s really disheartening to see that the employees are being governed for bringing in their own devices to the workspace or their bags getting checked. It’s good to have security in place however those security measures should give a sense of safety instead of letting the other person feel that they are being suspected. Consider the employees as a part of family and let them own their own workspace. Practices like “Bring Your Own Device” are getting global acceptance and when you start revoking these restrictions that’s where the employee gets deeply involved with the organizational goals.
We understand creating the perfect workplace is certainly not an easy task. But today employers should start realizing the potential of workplace designs and strategies that prioritize people.
This will help them bring out the best in an increasingly skilled workforce, avoid accidents and incidents at work and improve their operations.
Make no mistake – the mantra to HUMANIZE the workplace and UNLEASH HUMAN POTENTIAL is simply not the responsibility of organizational architects and leadership – it is as much about how each person engages their colleagues in the process of work. After all, a culture is an aggregate of tiny, everyday gestures, comments and actions that form day-to-day work life.
#Improve your employee’s life & they can improve your customer’s lives#
Contact us to know how your organisation can use PeopleStrong Alt to Humanize your Workforce
PeopleStrong’s Recruitment Technology (Alt Recruit) is a smart, scalable and one-stop recruitment solution for hiring the top talent. It is not merely an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), rather is AI-enabled, Unified, Intuitive and Intelligent recruitment platform which powers end-to-end hiring processes of 100+ organization across the globe. It is integrated with 50+ candidate sourcing channels, processes over 1 million candidates per year and rolls out 60,000+ joining offers per year.
Get in touch with our recruitment solutions executive to know more about Alt Recruit and how we can manage your Recruitments better.
