Robotic HR or Digital HR? (Part 1)

Being an HR is not just a profession but a passion to have. This is because dealing with people from all walks of life, daily, for at least 8 hours a day, 5 to 6 days a week for the whole year, every year, and still are able to take care of ourselves and our love ones is never an easy task.

Most of us are doing the same routine, day-to-day jobs every day, repetitively. The bigger our organisation grows, the more repetitive works we have to do, without mistakes at the least time and cost to the organisation and hopefully ourselves too. This will eventually drain us because HR practitioners are also human just like any other profession or employees in the organisation. There bound to be errors and mistakes in our daily operational works especially more if done manually, without support of automated or digital system. And at the end of the day, HR practitioners couldn’t find more time to manage people working in the organisation. At most only 20% of our time could be invested into people management because we have spent 80% of our precious time into repetitive, without automated process control, operational works, for most of us.

There is massive war of talents out there in the market and we as HR practitioners need to do everything possible to reach out and retain the best talents at all time regardless of economic situation, political climate or even financial strengths of our organisation because that’s our responsibility, not just duty. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could build more rapport with these talents and put in more efforts to retain them using the 80% of our time than to use it to do operational works? People can be trained to have the right set of skills to give back to the organisation. After training them with all the resources we have or could, we need to then work on their retention because losing them especially to our competitors is very painful and a big loss to the organisation. The worse is, we as HR practitioners are answerable to that including ourselves because it is our responsibility, unless HR is just our job and not a passion.

With the growing of Artificial Intelligence (AI) replacing our human manpower constantly, it is the matter of time, HR practitioners will be replaced too. But the good news is, AI cannot replace our brain that we use to lead the organisation and the people behind it. We need to innovate or changed. In another word, we, as HR practitioners need to consider the option of changing our ways of doing our daily duties. Having automated system to calculate is a basic necessity but it does not help us provide effective and efficient reporting results for the decision making of management team or even Board of Directors in the organisation at the most needed point of time especially at critical time. Exporting and importing of files from system to system will only make us roboticing ourselves but not digitalising our work. We are still not able to turn around our 80% operational work time spent to people management. So then what should we do? 

Stay tuned and find out more in our next article.