Industry 4.0 has ever more altered the Human Resources (HR) landscape, establishing the new concept known as HR 4.0. The New World of Work has brought about transformations in the way individuals work and how organisations accomplish their goals.
It has become increasingly important for organisations to develop people strategies targeted at propelling technology adoption, promoting innovation, and how the future workforce is cultivated. As a result of these technological disruptions, HR practitioners play a pivotal role as change agents to enhance the employee experience, enabling the workforce to effectively adapt to these technological changes and facilitating organisations to maintain a competitive edge.
There are various strategies HR can endorse to ensure successful adaptation to the future of HR 4.0:
In the new world of work, HR is compelled to develop future HR leadership abilities. HR can employ data analytics to generate insights and forecast future capabilities to ensure that organisational leaders remain agile and flexible. By developing the right leaders, they will enable the organisation to successfully lead the hybrid workforce and unite the right pool of talent, capabilities, and experiences to generate meaningful contributions.
HR practitioners can employ technological innovations to drive further employee engagement. HR practitioners need to clarify, evaluate and frame the employee experience. This is an opportunity for HR to leverage technology to establish greater employee experiences. For example, HR can implement virtual employee feedback polls and surveys to evaluate employee perspectives and progress, execute virtual employee wellness and assistance programs to ensure employee wellbeing, use virtual collaboration tools such as Slack and GitHub to maintain ongoing communication, and HR chatbots to address employee inquiries as well as Applicant Tracking Systems to enrich Talent Acquisition processes and the candidate experience.
Along with the endorsement of technology many jobs can be displaced, and role requirements can perpetually change. HR plays a fundamental role in creating the ideal partnership between humans and machines. HR practitioners should undertake multiple approaches to ensure the prosperity of the organisation. HR can, for example, reinvent jobs to match the demands of the new world of work, reskill and upskills their employees to mitigate the adverse effects of Industry 4.0 and reconstruct jobs to augment the human capacity by having employees embrace and display digital behaviours. By collaborating the human potential with automation, organisations can maximise organisational performance.
With the introduction of recurring technological developments, it is reshaping the way individuals learn and as a result, it becomes significant for employees to continuously learn and upskill themselves in the new world of work. HR can use various tools to bridge current and future learning gaps amongst employees to fulfil learning pathways. For example, HR can use Learning Management systems (LMSs) to train and develop employees while maintaining feedback on their learning progress. These types of tools will facilitate knowledge retention and measure how learning enriches organisational productivity.
HR plays a vital role in assisting organisations effectively adapt to Industry 4.0 and enhance the employee experience. Therefore, employing various strategies developed by HR practitioners, it will allow the organisation to accomplish its goals in the new world of work.
