Several key developments are changing the nature and mechanism of HR technology delivery in the coming months. While some of these developments are a result of new economic conditions, several others are a factor of the growing maturity of the market and also of supply-driven evolution. These trends present several opportunities and threats for the HR technology landscape in India.

The first trend is from the perspective of a thought paradigm, which is predominantly driving the nature of HR in organizations. An increasing number of organizations are asking the question on how to segment the workforce and identify people who are closer to the business than the rest. The idea of this kind of workforce segmentation is rapidly picking up steam as organizations continue to pivot their business objectives and strategies around human capital. Organizations are thus really keen to know which roles relate more directly to business objectives. Accordingly, the second trend is that of analytics. The nature of what an organization wants to know is changing with time and the trend of analytics-driven decisions will continue. The third workforce trend is of role rationalization. Organizations are increasingly getting back to the drawing board to rationalize their investments in the workforce to optimize their human capital investments. Essentially, there are three kinds of workforce in an organization: Full-time employees, support workforce, and the highly commoditized workforce. Organizations are in a quest to find the perfect balance between having in-house employees and outsourcing those parts of the workforce that will allow them to get access to superior skill and cost efficiencies.

Anytime-anywhere is picking up

In terms of delivery mechanisms, the trend of anytime-anywhere access to information is rapidly gaining ground. Technology companies realize that the Indian consumer, as well, has welcomed the idea of cloud with open arms and a significantly large number of cloud-based implementations are getting planned. It would not be unfair to say that India has the highest adoption rates of cloud compared to the APAC and Middle East markets. Lastly, as organizations continue to go more strategic, CHROs are demanding the availability of an HR manager’s time for strategic activities more. As a result, employee self-service and mobile self-service are rapidly picking up in organizations.

The new age workforce and their need to stay active on the social network are trends that cannot be ignored and need to blend-in with the other technological advancements.

HR leaders have to be bold

It is, of course, important to note that technology services in India are also responding to these needs by building more contextualization of a HR process. For example, load-balancing and consultative services are ways by which a technology service provider ensures that an organization is not building cost-redundancy into their decisions. That said there is a great need for HR leaders in organizations to transform existing mindsets. The market still predominantly is unsure about technology’s influence on the human capital of an organization and is often not willing to relinquish their administrative and operative responsibilities. The need from HR, however, is of strategic contribution and hence Indian HR leaders need to quickly adapt to these new demands. Even while staring at the face of uncertain returns, an HR leader has to take the “leap-of-faith” and make bold decisions. It is important, however, that to enable such transitions, the IT head and the CHRO are in complete agreement. The aspect of change management has to be driven by the CHRO, in a manner which is participative and holistic.