How can technology help HR add value to your organization? Last week, I had an opportunity to go to the IBM OutThink program in LA. It was a great opportunity to see how HR is adding value on the West Coast.

Today, I talk about what I learned and how it might impact your organization.  One of the keynote speakers was Jeanne C. Meister, co-author of The 2020 Workplace She had several interesting ideas about how HR is changing. 

Jeanne Meister shares her perspectives on what we can do to attract, develop, and keep our employees empowered and engaged. The most important takeaway I got is that the same tools that marketers developed to engage their customers are used by great HR organizations to help enhance employees’ experience. She shared several ideas that can help you make your organization an employer of choice in your markets.

Jeanne believes that technology can increase collaboration between your team members. She shared that collaboration is a critical element in building a great HR capability. The more complicated business becomes, the more critical it is to have different parts of the organization work well together. She pointed out that many millennials put an increasing importance on how team members work together. She shared that HR can help put this foundation in place from the beginning of the onboarding process throughout the employee’s career with your organization.

She stressed that for communication to be effective, you must be authentic to be heard and trusted. It is not enough to just communicate with your fellow team members, you must also do it in a way that is consistent with how you are perceived inside and outside of your organization. Great HR organizations communicate not only key ideas and strategies, but values that resonate with their many stakeholders and constituents.

Personalization can be enabled by technology to optimize an individual’s experience within the organization. It’s critical to find out how and what a team member hopes to achieve in their role and then provide the tools they need to achieve their goals. Personalization can help HR provide a wide range of capabilities to enhance the employee’s experience with the organization.

From individually deployed employee development plans to customizable employee benefit programs, HR can provide tools that help retain key team members across the organization. Today’s HR technologies can allow you to meet your team members and organization’s needs quickly and cost effectively.

Today’s workforce expects connection and social community where they work. HR can help create value networks to connect people around the world. In cases like IBM, they invest significant resources to monitor and learn from their own internal social networks. These social networks not only have a value in helping retaining people, they also provide management with a real time feedback system that can be used to support organizational change and growth.

Finally, Jeanne Meister shared that organizations that focus on their employees’ workplace experiences are more innovative. She believes HR has an ability to create a more agile organization by leveraging these to ideas to create a healthier organization.  We will share more of Jeanne’s thinking in future blogs.

As leaders, it’s critical to create an outstanding experience for your team members. HR leveraging technology is just starting to take off in many organizations. I believe that we are just starting to understand the impact that it can have on your organization.

Next week, we will discuss this further as we talk about how HR technology is going to change the way you manage and lead. If you want to jump ahead, and I know several of you will, grab a copy of The 2020 Workplace by Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd. It may be the best book you read this year on what’s happening in your workplace. I know it was for me.

See you next week.