From regulating social distancing at offices through video analytics, conducting job interviews to performance appraisals, the outbreak of covid-19 is fast-tracking the use of technology in human resource like never before.
TeamLease, a staffing solutions company, says it has seen a 30% increase in demand for technologies that are related to HR over the last 30-40 days alone. With 60-70% of the workforce working remotely, the demand for such productivity related platforms have increased.
Recently, a leading insurance company with over 12,000 employees in India migrated to a digital management platform after the outbreak with a substantial number of employees working from home.
“HR Technology has to be at the forefront to enable remote work management, minimize productivity loss and enable outcome based collaboration. This is needed for both services and manufacturing. HR Tech will now drive organisational strategy and culture and not just experience and process,” said Sandeep Chaudhary, president and board member, PeopleStrong.
But the use of technology is creeping into HR in not only for mainline functions like productivity, but also ensuring safety protocols are maintained. A prominent car battery maker based out of South India has employed such digital tools to keep tabs on employee’s sanitation and health protocols with workers rejoining offices.
“As the lockdown eases across the globe the need is seen for monitoring hygiene and safety for food handling workers, factory workers, and employees at offices for a risk-free environment. We have seen the adoption of these use cases across 3,800 cameras in the last 2 months and new customer demand of more than 70% above our projections,” said Adit Chhabra, Co-Founder & CEO at Wobot Intelligence, a video analytics startup.
Additionally, demand for mobile based live sessions or pre-recorded training sessions have grown by almost 40-50%. AI-enabled chatbots are being used on such platforms to also answer any pandemic-related queries to even nudging employees to finish work within deadlines.
Another HR management platform Darwinbox is allowing companies to engage with their employees through WhatsApp. It allows employees to receive messages and requests from team members directly on Whatsapp. They can also approve reportee’s leave, reimbursement request or adjust attendance without having to go to Darwinbox HRMS platform.
“In the wake of the crisis, productivity has become key for businesses, and convenience is the crying need of the hour for today’s remote workforce. The conversation has shifted from work-life balance to work-life integration. So we wanted to get enterprises one more step closer to convenience, by going where they are,” said Chaitanya Peddi, co-founder and product head, Darwinbox.
In addition to the emphasis on adoption of technology in HR, there are talks about deploying a comprehensive platform that has all HR tools under one umbrella.
“In the current scenario companies have been forced to look at the HR operations, polices and processes through a digital lens. All the systems that HR requires, be it for attendance, salary, on-boarding or assessment have already been in market but are being used in silos. In pre-covid-19 era there have been talks about merging all these. Due to covid-19, there is a growing interest in one platform which has all the services integrated in them,” Kaushik Banerjee, vice president and business head at Teamlease.com and Freshersworld.com.
This article was published on LiveMint.com
