The first day of Tech HR 2018 began with great personalities sharing amazing insights. The fire side chat of Naina Lal Kidwai – Chairman of India Advisory Board (Advent Private Equity) in conversation with Sunit Sinha - Managing Director of Accenture, Strategy, Talent and Organization highlighted the necessity of HR becoming a steering force for the business by following these three guiding rules:

HR to become a Co-Pilot with Business 

The workforce is changing and every aspect of managing them is driving leaders insane. With a significant impact on HR function, demands from businesses have been building up paramount pressure on the traditional HR operating models. 

Setting this context, Naina’s talk show began with a great thrust on why HR function should wear the hat of a ‘co-pilot’ for all their business managers. Problems in an organization can never be solved as a standalone function. Hence, with a collaborative approach HR constantly need to guide businesses through its acumen in managing people with ease. This is must during today’s era that is synonym with complexity, volatility and ambiguity when it comes to all workplaces across countries.

Use Analytics in HR to make it more credible

Analytics involves a scientific way of understanding a business problem and arriving at an optimal solution by identifying, analyzing, interpreting and communicating meaningful patterns in data. HR Analytics is seen as one of the most evolving trend in the field of people management in today’s era. 

Naina urges HR professionals to use Analytics in order to present results that are more credible and meaningful to the business leaders. In fact, Sunit from Accenture too believes the imperativeness to understand the “why” behind any number and see the power of Analytics in people driven areas. The need of using data metrics by using predictive data science in people and business excellence is the future of all progressive organization.

Maneuver the steering to up-skill your workforce

The upheaval that a ‘Know it all approach’ can cost to an organization is tremendously high. By using technology into the learning space, many a times it is restricted to a mere tick box approach. Though e-learning tools are a revolution in the up skilling area and learning space, however measuring and manning its actual effectiveness have certain human driven loopholes. It has its own challenges that are gradually becoming evident. Learner engagement and completion rates for many massive open online courses (MOOCs) are dismal. This reflects that simply curating content from various sources and providing such content through online learning libraries is not enough to reliably impart useful skills. If an employee does not embrace learning, such tools cannot give the required result. Hence, HR needs to maneuver the steering of learning much more effectively. Naina insisted on using technology as an enabler only and have a blended approach with a better sense of human intervention and balance when it comes to up-skilling your workforce.

As a new age human resource professional, such approaches and guidelines may definitely help in formulating the required business and people management changes within a larger context. The convergence of technological innovation, high intellectual acumen in younger generation and discoveries of the need for new age learning is bound to revolutionize the way HR professionals and leaders will contribute to the growing business ecosystem.