By Sayeed Anjum
Change happens in every organization, and every employee must be prepared to embrace it. However, adapting to a major transition or transformation may not always be easy. Oftentimes, HR faces the challenge of managing such changes while handling the varied emotions and expectations of a diverse group of employees.
According to an Accenture study, 80% of organizations have change as part of their long-term vision.
A change management initiative helps people adapt seamlessly to the proposed change and benefit from it. Hence, HR has to ensure that they maximize employee engagement and participation in the programs they roll out. They must also garner the support of different managers and the leadership to minimize resistance and achieve optimal results. A successful change management initiative will help boost employee satisfaction, business profitability, and brand image.
5 Skills Every HR Leader Must Wield
Change management initiatives can either be minor or major. Minor changes happen at a departmental level. Major initiatives impact the entire workforce. If an initiative impacts multiple teams, HR has to wield certain specific skills to make it a success. There’s no doubt that they are good at communication, planning, people management, and problem-solving. However, new-age skills and technologies will give them an added advantage while managing change. Let’s examine five of them:
HR Automation
Manual HR operations can be time-consuming and error-prone. Delays, inefficiencies, and compliance issues can result in deterioration of employee satisfaction and lawsuits. These challenges can hinder the progress of transformative initiatives that benefit an organization.
Modern HRMS platforms automate, simplify, and streamline HR activities across an employee’s lifecycle in an organization. Quick completion of tasks gives HR the bandwidth to focus on other value-added initiatives. Since HR has a key role to play in change management, they need the right tools to execute their plans. HR automation can certainly help.
Digital Transformation
Employee engagement, career growth programs, and grievance redressal are only a few of the regular responsibilities of HR. However, they have a larger responsibility in every major transformative initiative; technology adoption is a case in point. In this case, they have to manage new talent acquisition, training, and motivation of existing employees.
Artificial intelligence and other new-age technologies are transforming operations in organizations. So, HR must learn to use the right tools for different functions. At times, even
a new technology creates insecurity among employees. When HR educates and empowers employees by leveraging technology, even a major transition will become easier and faster.
Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
The role of HR is not confined to regular operations anymore. They are expected to listen actively to employees, understand them, manage their emotions, communicate persuasively, enable career growth, and resolve conflicts. They have to be empathetic and unbiased while doing all this. Hence, modern HR requires professionals with high emotional intelligence.
Any major change can have an emotional impact on an organization’s workforce. Disinterest, insecurity, and quiet quitting could be the possible repercussions. HR must possess adequate EQ to manage this scenario. They can leverage it to motivate employees, resolve conflicts, foster collaboration, and build psychological safety. High EQ enables HR to manage their own emotions so that they can handle the emotions of employees more effectively.
Data Analytics
Every transformative initiative must have clear objectives, an implementation process, and a method to measure its outcomes. A major change plan has to be justified with an action plan, expected costs, and outcome forecast. Even though HR leaders handle workforce data and perform people analytics, change management calls for more advanced analytics.
HR leaders track engagement, turnover, costs, and risks, among other metrics. However, large change management initiatives create more complex challenges that demand qualitative and quantitative analyses for making data-driven decisions. HR must also learn to use artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics to draw the right insights to predict outcomes and make course corrections while managing change. For example, sentiment analysis can reveal employees’ perceptions and attitudes toward change.
New Media Communication
HR leaders have to draw insights from a vast amount of data from diverse channels. This becomes a significant challenge when a major transformation is underway. People, especially Gen Z, tend to communicate or transmit information swiftly through different media and data formats.
Since new media channels are transforming today’s workplaces, HR has to be prepared for the change. Mobile apps and wearables have become common. Also, modern HRMS platforms have built-in features to send, receive, and analyze data from multiple channels. For example, attendance can be captured through facial recognition systems on mobile phones. Bulletin boards facilitate internal communication, while polls help gauge employee sentiment. Today’s HR teams must keep abreast of emerging technologies to manage change successfully.
Summing Up
Change is essential for individual and organizational growth. A focused change management program is needed to accomplish these objectives. Although the team managers have their own objectives and key results (OKRs), HR has a strategic role in organization-wide initiatives. Good HR leaders are excellent communicators, people managers, problem solvers, strategists, and analysts. These skills come to the forefront whenever a change management initiative is in the pipeline. However, new-age skills and knowledge of emerging technology will give them an added advantage.
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About Sayeed Anjum, Co-founder and CTO, greytHR: Sayeed Anjum is the Co-founder & CTO of greytHR. He leads the R&D, Innovation Labs, and Product Development initiatives. As a passionate techno-marketing professional, he has established his company as a thought leader in the HR tech domain. Sayeed focuses on improving the product development process and has been overseeing all aspects of product development, including requirements engineering, usability, programming, and quality. As the custodian of Greytip’s flagship cloud HR platform, greytHR, he is committed to addressing the diverse challenges of the HR fraternity, and the views expressed in this article are his own.
Sayeed holds a Master of Computer Applications (MCA) degree from SJCE, Mysore, is a corporate member of NASSCOM, and a member of TiE.
