In today’s world of work, technology is indispensable for HR to boost their effectiveness in managing people and deliver business value. The growing business focus on workforce productivity requires HR to strengthen its ability to hire, skill, and retain the right people using the right tech architecture.

 

According to People Matters SHRPA State of the HR Industry Research–India Insights, over 95% of HR leaders in India say maintaining high workforce productivity is a challenge. The report also finds that India is falling behind in its HR tech evolution journey and as a result, is facing significant challenges in ensuring workforce success. While those with advanced tech architectures are better ready to navigate the impact of a disruptive ecosystem across key areas like skilling, talent attraction, analytics and overall management.

 

In this webinar of the SHRPA Talent Talk series, we had Vaibhav Goel, Sr VP & Head of HR, Reliance Industries and Leena Wakankar, CHRO - ASK Group who helped elaborate structural and evolving challenges to HR tech impact and provided strategies that companies need to following for 2025.

 

Strategic shifts and solutions

 

In response to challenges of better productivity and improved talent management with HR tech, several strategies have emerged that HR leaders can implement to successfully integrate HR technology.

  • Securing business buy-in: Securing business buy-in is crucial. Technology adoption should not be seen as an HR-only initiative but as a business-wide transformation. HR leaders must work closely with business leaders to define the outcomes they are aiming to achieve and ensure that technology is viewed as an enabler of broader organizational goals.
  • Becoming part of the broader transformation agenda: To overcome the challenge of being seen as an isolated function, HR leaders must become part of the broader organizational transformation agenda. By aligning HR technology with the larger digital transformation goals, HR can become a valuable partner in driving business-wide change.
  • Emphasizing the people-first approach: HR should shift the narrative away from focusing on technology itself and instead esuring its people-centric implementation. The goal should always be to improve the employee experience, whether that’s through streamlined recruitment processes, continuous learning opportunities, or better performance management systems.
  • Overcome resistance to change: Resistance to HR tech adoption can be mitigated by showing employees how it benefits them, like improving performance evaluations. HR teams must upgrade their tech skills to effectively implement new systems.
  • Leveraging AI and people analytics: Addressing the broken analytics journey to improve ROI and build a better case of HR tech implementation aligned with business impact. Clean, accurate data is crucial for effective people analytics and AI use. AI currently aids in efficiency but is not yet a source of significant predictive insights in HR.
  • Importance of continuous skills development: HR leaders need to upskill in technology management and data analytics to drive successful HR tech adoption. Tech proficiency across all functions becomes essential for integrating HR technology.Additionally skills around AI literacy, data-driven decision making, empathy-led design thinking, influencing, becoming change experts with storytelling will be crucial in 2025.