Professionals in human resources (HR) have found themselves at the center of a major cultural shift. The pandemic, remote work, and the ongoing struggle for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace have all required HR departments to quickly adapt and take on greater responsibilities than ever before.
In response, companies are currently making massive investments in technologies in hopes of more closely and accurately linking their people, customers, and stakeholders, according to a study by the Harvard Business Review. But can the world of enterprise connect humans both digitally and authentically?
As HR professionals walk a capricious line between a company’s people and its bottom line, this uncharted territory is calling for more data to help navigate the future of the career marketplace. Let’s look at some of the main overarching ways that technology is shaping HR, and why data focused on human skills and capabilities will be instrumental to the future of the business landscape.
Shaping Human Resources
Technological advancements have dramatically changed how HR departments operate.
Software has streamlined processes, reduced paperwork, and helped to automate many administrative tasks—freeing up HR professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives such as recruitment, talent management, and employee engagement. Yet, there still seems to be disparities between employee and employer in 2023, as seen with what is being termed as “The Great Transformation”.
HR departments have looked to utilize communication platforms, digital collaboration tools, and virtual onboarding to keep teams stay connected and productive, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. This is because something critical fell through the cracks when we advanced into the remote work world—engagement and the key to generating it.
A decline in American workers’ engagement started in late 2021 when remote work took over. As teams become more siloed than ever before, employee engagement has become an increasingly complex equation to solve. One way HR departments have attempted to try and solve this problem is by deploying employee engagement software, in hopes of getting inside the minds of workers so that they can both understand and support them.
But evaluating engagement is only one part of the puzzle. Employers that aren’t leveraging the massive amount of data about their individual workers and workforce population that comes from these evaluations are missing out. With the proper analyses, people-centric data can provide a company with invaluable insight into their workers’ potential, engagement, and satisfaction at work—something that can be dually advantageous to employers and employees.
Building Culture with ROI
Despite what the world of employment has historically led us to believe, soft skills, personality traits, and emotional assets—otherwise known as human capabilities—have a significant impact in the workplace.
In fact, research conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management in 2020 showed that when new hires fail, 89% of the time it is due to a mismatch in human capabilities. The same research showed that 97% of employers agreed these capabilities are equally or more important than technical skills. The problem is that to date, there hasn’t been a way to track this separate but opposite set of worker assets.
In order to help organizations and their leaders create data on human capabilities, Almas Insight has created what we have proprietarily termed the Talent Insight Snapshot (TIS)™. Taking 40 demonstrated behaviors into account, we create a unique profile for individuals across cognitive, emotional, dispositional, interactive, and social dimensions. This was a method we tested with a statistically significant group of participants and their managers, precisely reflecting the demographic background of the US across a broad spectrum of job types.
The end result is the identification of a company’s entire workforce culture down to the detail of the individual employee. Understanding your internal sample across different asset factors helps organizations gain an approximate ROI estimate of their employees’ human capabilities, helping leaders to hire new talent according to team, department, or organizational objectives.
What is more, comparing how individuals, teams, or departments average on the basis of human skills can help businesses across industries strategically enhance performance by unlocking the elements of employee engagement.
The Future of HR
According to Gallup, companies that have engaged employees boast 147% higher earnings per share than competitors. Wielding reliable, objective, and scalable people-centric data provides actionable business insight to companies—helping with recruitment, identifying potential retention issues, and revealing areas for improvement in a company’s workforce.
By gleaning data on an organization’s DNA as seen through its people, Almas Index can help build better hiring, talent utilization, and employee retention. Contact us for a consultation on how to get started with your organization’s Talent Insight Snapshot (TIS)™.
