Gunung Raja Paksi

Sopar Marpaung - Head of HR

In the past 1 year (or so), I received numerous emails and personal messages from various HR Tech companies through their consultant. Every single one starts with questioning how your HR is going? Let us help you with AI, HR Bots, HR Smart Platform, Learning Platform, Engagement Automation, advanced analytics system, and so many other things.

A moment, I’m really thinking how many companies actually are out there using these technologies? are the changes and the needs have reached criticality to adopt these technologies? Or is it still something nice-to-have? But honestly, I am amazed at how people and companies build the technologies around Human Capital aspects, it says one universal message: “people matters”.

Now, looking back to the question, how is my HR going?

HR issues have transformed incredibly fast in the past 2 years since the pandemic, companies need to survive and retain their talent at the same time, you don’t want to lose them when things bounce back.Technology certainly should be able to help mitigate and anticipate some risks, but it won’t be that easy in Indonesia and perhaps in most developing countries in SEA, despite the promise of HR Tech brought for process simplification, automation, and effective workforce management, huge barriers are there.

"We used technology to be our tools to help us expand and improve our human touch to each of our employees, not the other way around."

Let me take one example of the most promising HR Tech advancement I could mention: “cloud learning”, the application absolutely going to help companies with their people development, simplify HR training management, talent program, and grow the team capability to establish new business/operating model during or post the pandemic. Employees can self-develop or are assigned to learn some new skill to support business diversification, expansion, or put learning as part of a change management process to adapt with new operating model. The technology certainly will help HR to manage and break the boundaries of training hours and time for an upgrade as you can do it literally anywhere. The application data processing also helps one step closer to on-demand analytics for better performance management.

So, What’s bugging?

I’m about to share with you one experience and approach we used here in my company, hopefully you’ll get something out of this. Let me start by serving the facts that workforces in developing countries are dominated by semi-skilled workforce, my company for instance, 90 percent of its workforce are blue collars and this is a generic demographic for most companies in the manufacturing industry within the region. Let's take another fact; 73.7 percent of Indonesia’s population are accessing the internet (4th largest in the world) and it's mean 202 million citizens are connected, but in the other hand, Indonesian were ranked as one of the lowest among 32 countries for its digital literacy and civility, it give us an impression that we use internet not in the right way to help us improve life quality.

How does this relate to our initial issues? Using internet facilities for learning is not really a habit, it’s another challenge to move people out of their comfort zone. Secondly, semi-skilled (and below) workers mostly are not digital literate, optimizing internet usage for productivity and work was considered a burden for most of these employee groups.

Another issue is the Company itself, most companies struggled to get their basic right and fire-fight with internal talent issues or priorities. I know we might never get the basics right, but we (HR Managers) tend to choose to invest in something more critical first to address our biggest headache, whatever it is.

How do we tackle it?

Inevitably we need technology solutions to solve HR issues and change management should be part of the package. Solutions - in my point of view - should not only address current issues but it should serve you in a longer horizon and wider HR spectrum, thus an integrated (or integratable) solution will be the main consideration on how we approach the changes.

We started by building the road-map, the end-in-mind state of how technology will help us to reach our long-term ambitions, in other words “define the north star”. By exercising the roadmap, along the way we identified our key strengths and weaknesses, and what technology we need to address it.

Furthermore, implementing technology requires strong and planned change management processes, this is the process of how we identified our stumbling block, it can be the organization structure, operating model, people capability, or budget. A realistic plan needed to be in-place. In practice, we exercised scenarios of our ambitions, people analytics for example and would it help to achieve the main goal to increasing productivity that is measurable in our financial statement? This is more on the practical side of course with narrow scope.

With financial and resource limitations on one side and the ambition on the other, we realized an integrated system (to our ERP system) is a must, but softlanding approaches  too are something we need to consider, so breaking out the needs to a module based software become one feasible option for us, despite it cost us slightly higher compare to purchase a complete end-to-end modules.

We found out that growing our HR technology for cloud learning and integrated talent management platform require step-by-step development for us and careful investment approach. We were thinking that it’s important to show the employee first that we are making something different and better, even though they (must) learnt it in a hard way such as applying and attending online learning as part of their KPI, but starting small is one step for the major upskill program with the help of technology.

How is it going? Where are we now?

Technology will keep growing beyond our thinking in the present. This applies to HR too, however, dealing with human will need the touch of humans. We used technology to be our tools to help us expand and improve our human touch to each of our employees, not the other way around.

We’re doing great with process simplification and using technology to fasten our touch and services. We let our employees know that HR is looking after them with the right data in hand, and making decisions or policy with accurate information on our desk. Along the way, we keep on introducing HR technology as a service feature to bring employees closer to the Company.

I hope this sharing of view and experiences bring a value and some sort of ideas to you to anticipate and select the best technology for your HR.