Role of HR in digital transformation journey at IBM

Businesses are undertaking digital transformations, rethinking what customers value most and creating operating models that take advantage of what’s possible for competitive differentiation. Chief among forces for transformation are surge in devices for mobile connectivity, such as smart phones and tablets, and the creation of social networks. Such developments have created an exponential explosion in data, which, in turn, requires business analytics to make sense of the information and also take full advantage of it. The challenge for businesses is how fast and how far they can go on the path of digital transformation. 

IBM is agile and has devised new transformational initiatives to engage with its employees. Our guiding principle is to constantly enable every IBMer to embrace learning and build skills that are relevant and that can be leveraged for our clients. The principles of Design Thinking and agile mindset are slowly but surely getting embedded in our day-to-day working. 

Our People strategy has undergone a change and now a big focus is on differentiated employee experience, up-skilling, employee engagement, and continued focus on coaching and feedback, & leveraging all generations of talent with special attention to the millennial workforce. Our employee workforce is nearly 42% millennials globally and their use of feedback in learning is more significant than other generations. The inclusive work culture that IBM encourages is for employees to be innovative and continually push for transformational excellence. And with business imperatives being defined around Cloud, Analytics, Mobile and Social, the focus has shifted to new areas like artificial intelligence, data scientist, security specialists, big data and analytics professionals, mobile specialists, etc. 

The HR team at IBM is leading and enabling digital transformation across its function. IBM has an Integrated Talent Acquisition solution powered by IBM Kenexa, which offers cutting edge mobile capabilities to its users. Such innovative mobile technologies provide greater flexibility to engage with internal and external candidates, and collaborate better with hiring managers. It also offers video interviewing options & solutions using HireVue. We have received positive feedback from the candidates, hiring managers and the HR team about the high-touch employee engagement. 

Another example of digitization has been around the employee performance management system – Checkpoint, an online evaluation tool. This system has been designed to match the way employees work and was created by the employees for the employees. With Checkpoint, employees set shorter-term goals, and managers provide feedback on their progress, at least every quarter. At the end of the year, employees will be judged across five criteria — business results, impact on client success, innovation, personal responsibility to others, and skills. Managers assess whether employees have exceeded or achieved expectations for their role in each of the five dimensions or if there’s a need for improvement.

ACE (Appreciation, Coaching and Evaluation) is IBM's feedback model and the ACE app is a new, agile approach towards giving and receiving feedback. ACE is available as a mobile app, or can be used through the ACE Desktop Application. This is a milestone in our cultural transformation that has provided a new way to give and receive feedback! In addition, at IBM, analytics now enable us to predict an employee's propensity to leave. In fact, some of our HR professionals have obtained the U.S. patent for our proactive retention algorithms. Each year, we run proactive retention programs whereby we increase the salaries of employees who have a high propensity to leave. This program has resulted in net savings measured as the avoided cost of hiring a replacement. 

The approach is now based on a cognitive system that understands the relationships between the potential drivers of attrition, reasons how they are related to each other and to attrition, and their relative importance automatically from historical data. 

This is transformational giving us 92% accuracy in predicting attrition, and the ability to react quickly to dynamic market conditions and make investments — as opposed to traditional batch processes.

IBM has initiated and adopted digitization in several areas. Some of the examples include, the mandatory paper-work process for our new employees during onboarding, which is now online via Kenexa, that has significantly reduced the time that this process takes. Digitization has made the income tax validation process a paperless one for all IBMers. Employees can now upload their documents in a portal and the processing team validates it online by viewing it directly in the portal. This eliminates issues with documents and allows IBMers to track the status of their documents online.

Employee reimbursables like telecom, car rental, air travel and hotel expenses can be submitted online. This has resulted in the reduction of turn-around time by 2 days and has significantly eliminated the use of paper sheets annually. We also have various HR services that are provided via mobile apps for the convenience of our employees. IBM Think Academy also has many mobile enabled learning courses. Here are some more examples: 

IBM Connections Chat: A social networking tool, which enables employees to communicate and collaborate with one another.

ISOS mobile app: This app is available for IBM travelers to avail ISOS services e.g., emergency evacuation from a disaster hit region, emergency air ambulance etc. 

Smartcloud Meetings/Sametime/Verse: Enables IBMers to collaborate via chat and web conferencing, and check mail and calendar on the go.

The measures to success are easily assessed by adoption of tools. Usage of IBM Apps is also increasing by the day and it is measured by frequent mini pulse surveys.