HR function has moved from being a black box to Glassdoor era: Jairo Fernandez

Human resources teams need to adapt fast to the radical changes wrought by technology across industries in order to add real value to organisations, said Jairo Fernandez, senior vice president-HR at SAP for Asia-Pacific and Japan. In an interview to ET’s Varuni Khosla, he said HR will have to increasingly tap into a growing pool of talent that does not want to be employed full-time. Edited excerpts:

What is the state of human resources function in organisations globally, at present?
Every single industry is disrupted right now. The impact of technology in the last two years across industries has been radical. That’s completely changing the landscape of things — for instance, self-driven cars. There is a sentiment that the market is not finding real value in what HR does. HR, in many organisations globally, was not thinking strategically enough to add real value to the organisation.

How is technology likely to change HR as we have known it?
The use of technology has created a completely different challenge and opportunity, and HR has to be attuned to it. HR was earlier a repository of confidential information but now, with technology, so much employee-related information is generated and put on the cloud.

From a time when there was no information available, I think the HR function has moved from being a black box to the ‘Glassdoor era’. This has created the ‘naked organisation’ because companies are totally exposed on websites like Glassdoor for future employees to see.

How will the change in HR impact the future workforce?
The talent in the future will include payroll employees, workers and the external talent as well, and this is dynamic. A payroll employee may navigate to the external market. But a company must be made worth coming back to for that worker, whether they want to come back as a payroll worker or external talent. There are not enough people in the market who want to come and work full time. Millennials, for instance, need to be flexible enough in terms of not just time but also the projects they choose. Around the world, 30 per cent of the workforce is contingent, which isn’t employed with companies but works on a freelance basis. Going forward, this will change and nearly 40 per cent of the workforce will become contingent.

Why does a company need to tap into a contingent worker?
HR is the business of talent by definition. HR is motivating only payroll employees, but then HR is leaving nearly half of the future workforce out of this process and that’s going to be the make or break, or success or failure of the future.

HR needs to take into account the talent pool out there and attract them years in advance, even though they are external. In the future, companies will have to be a little less concerned about turnover but must become home for future internal or external employees.