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Creating An Adaptive HR Tech Strategy
Creating An Adaptive HR Tech Strategy
Creating an Adaptive
HR Technology
Strategy
Creating an Adaptive HR Technology Strategy
Published 10 May 2021 - ID G00750498 - 19 min read
HR Technology Research Team
Initiatives: HR Technology Strategy and Management
Overview
With the growth in workplace digitalization, HR technology has become the key enabler for
employee experience and productivity. Investments in HR technology are typically long-
term and expensive. To get returns from this large-scale investment, HR leaders must
ensure that the technology implemented can adapt to meet evolving business and
employee needs. To create an adaptive HR technology strategy, HR leaders can implement
a dynamic trigger-based review approach, align solutions with employees’ personal and
professional objectives, and create a governance mechanism to review HR technology
investments as a portfolio, not siloed projects.
Key Findings
■ HR leaders continue to operate in an uncertain and volatile business environment.
■ While most HR leaders aim to improve employee experience with technology, half of
CHROs feel HR technology hinders, rather than improves employee experience at
their organizations.
Recommendations
To create an adaptive HR technology strategy, HR leaders should:
■ Prepare to respond quickly to shifting needs by outlining how and to what extent the
HR technology strategy and roadmap can flex to meet these needs.
HR technology’s role has grown from providing the infrastructure to complete basic HR
tasks efficiently to becoming a key enabler of business continuity, productivity and the
employee experience in a virtual environment. It is unsurprising, then, that in 2021, even
as a third of HR leaders plan to decrease their overall budget (twice as many as in
2020), 90% plan to either maintain or increase their investments in HR technology.1 The
growth in business disruptions along with the expansion of the HR technology market
makes it urgent that HR leaders review how adaptive their technology strategies are in
the face of change. HR technology strategy needs to keep pace with changing business
priorities, employee needs and the technology landscape.
Create static HR technology plans for a Create dynamic HR technology plans for an
predictable future. unpredictable future.
Focus on improving only the end-user experience. Focus on improving the total employee experience.
Manage technology solutions as different projects. Manage technology solutions as a single portfolio.
Source: Gartner
In the following three sections we show how HR technology leaders can improve their strategy
review process, their approach to improving the employee experience, and technology governance
to ensure their HR technology strategy can adapt to changes quickly.
HR leaders should adopt a mechanism to check in with partners in IT, HR, CoE and
business leadership to ensure they stay aware of emerging shifts and developments and
can identify and act on triggers soon. Strategies created in siloes cannot capture these
shifts. Involving these partners in the creation and review stages also makes it easier to
explain limitations, discuss trade-offs and obtain signoff.
While trying to improve the employee experience, organization A applies user interface
and user experience principles to improve the interface of its career management software
(for example, by highlighting calls to action and reducing the number of clicks required).
Employees provided good feedback on the user experience and intuitive design, but their
adoption of the software remained low. This is because organization A failed to meet the
actual need of its workforce for a fair and transparent way to look for internal career
movement opportunities. Instead, the company focused purely on enhancing the usability
of the features it has in place.
On the other hand, organization B started its journey by understanding exactly how its
employees want career management software to help them advance their careers. The
company uncovered employee challenges in finding the right internal mobility and
redeployment opportunities (e.g., lack of visibility, long and confusing process, managers
discouraging internal movements). Organization B focused on how they can fix these
challenges with technology and other measures. Upon deployment, employees adopted
the technology, as it demonstrated it could have real value for them.
■ Success criteria — Instead of tracking only usage and satisfaction metrics, measure
HR technology’s impact on equity, employee wellness and productivity.
This short-term, project-focused approach results in long-term financial loss and low ROI.
Poorly allocated costs and a low strategic alignment of investments results in a disjointed
and often outdated set of technologies, impeding efficiency and the user experience. For
example, HR technology teams can fail to decommission an obsolete technology and
continue to bear its cost because they gave it limited attention after its deployment.
Without a comprehensive and integrated view, HR leaders cannot be sure whether their
technology investments still address current business needs in a rapidly transforming
business environment, and they have limited visibility into which components they should
flex to meet those needs.
HR leaders focused on improving the ROI of their technology investments should set up a
governance framework that manages the ecosystem of technology solutions as a
portfolio of interrelated technology solutions. They should make decisions keeping in
mind the position of different technologies in their life cycle stages. The action plan
should include only a prioritized set of improvement initiatives based on their business
criticality and feasibility.
This framework can be used to review the overall health of the portfolio and to lead
further analysis and discussion with IT and business leaders. HR leaders should list their
solutions — both suites and point solutions — and partner with IT to rate them on
“business fitness” and “technical fitness.”
Business Fitness
■ Business support — How well does it improve user productivity (of employee or HR
team member)?
■ Longevity — How well does it meet both current and future business needs?
■ Cost — How controllable or predictable is the current and future cost of the solution?
Technical fitness is defined by how maintainable and stable is the technical infrastructure
that supports a solution. HR leaders should partner with IT to assess solutions’ technical
fitness on parameters such as:
■ Reliance on skills and subject matter experts — How dependent is the solution on a
small group of professionals for maintenance or enhancement? High reliance on a
small group of experts for maintaining technology solutions may result in delays to
problem resolution enhancements.
■ Vendor viability and support — How commercially sustainable is the vendor? How
committed is the vendor to supporting and enhancing the solutions?
■ Security — How well does the technology infrastructure protect information from
unauthorized use or extraction?
Solution Categorization
Based on their business and technical fitness, each solution in the portfolio should fall
into one of the following four categories. Discuss the results of the assessment to decide
next steps with IT and business partners. To decide how to assign resources and decide
trade-offs, allocate percentages of the HR technology management budget across the
four categories based on their strategic impact and their time/cost investment. This
categorization helps in prioritizing the right set of next actions as well as making it easier
to discuss and communicate the logic of investment decisions.
1. Maintain — Solutions that meet the business needs well and are technically sound.
Newly acquired solutions or old solutions that are well-maintained or upgraded
usually sit in this category. These applications either did not have to face a high
pace of change or were able to flex and evolve according to changing business
needs. HR leaders should manage these applications as strategic business
investments and identify ways to improve their agility and efficiency as required.
4. Upgrade — Solutions that meet business needs but pose technical inefficiencies or
risks. Low-to-medium technical fitness can be caused by the use of old or
unsupported technology, lack of skilled workers, high complexity or high technical
debt. Consult IT to understand its plan on the next steps (e.g., rehost, replatform,
rebuild).
Conclusion
HR technology must keep pace with the speed of change in business and employee
needs. As organizations’ investment in HR technology grows, HR leaders are responsible
for ensuring they manage the technology strategy and deployment to meet current and
future business needs. To do this, HR leaders must take an adaptive approach to
technology strategy and management. They should partner with business and IT to define
how HR technology can flex when triggers are activated, understand shifts in employees’
personal and professional needs to drive a total employee experience, and evaluate their
entire technology portfolio when creating their action plan.
Endnotes
1
2020 Gartner HR Budget and Staffing Benchmarking Survey
2
2020 Gartner Workforce Responsiveness Survey for HR Leaders
3
CHRO Agenda Poll Survey 2021
4
2020 Gartner Employee Adoption Index Survey
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Trigger Threshold (If Applicable) Implications for HR What Cannot Flex What Can Flex
Technology
1. Rapid Expansion: Increase For example, a greater than Current workforce We can only consider We can increase the number
in total number of employees 15% increase in employee management tool will need to upgrading, but not replacing of seatholders for technology
bench strength in one year. be scaled to support new the onboarding software as workforce management
workforce. the supplier contract is valid software.
As the number of new hires until 202x.
increases, onboarding
technology will need to be
reviewed for upgrades.
2. Enterprise Acquisition: N/A HR technology will need to Performance management Cloud-enabled workforce
Change in org structure align with the new workflows software is not yet integrated management software
and team structures. to reflect changes in team supports dynamic org
structure from the workforce structure shifts.
management tool. Discuss
with the vendor when they
plan to introduce this
functionality.
3. Reduction in Budget: For example, a greater than Solutions and projects at the Ongoing major projects such From the low- and medium-
Sudden disruption leading to 25% reduction of HR time of disruption will need to as cloud migration cannot be priority technology solutions,
cost constraints technology budget in one be categorized as high-, scaled back or discontinued. evaluate which can either be
financial planning cycle. medium- and low-priority discontinued or scaled back
Source: Gartner
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