Rethinking the HR Role: How Digital Transformation is Changing HR Departments

Digitalization is enormously changing the workforce: its size was reduced, as more and more tasks are automated, and an increasingly specialized staff is required for the remaining ones. Work environments have also been impacted by the phenomenon, which has completely transformed the way employees interact with each other, the information they use to perform their jobs, their attitudes toward their careers, and their expectations towards their employers. Many of these changes are due to new technological advances and to the increasing availability of HR data, and this trend is likely to increase further in the future. In fact, with the advancement of digitization, new sources of structured and unstructured data are becoming accessible to HR practitioners, enabling them to analyze the complexity of HR decision making more deeply. Organizations have at their disposal a wealth of information related to their workforce and organizational performance, as well as various external sources that, when combined, can be treated as big data that can offer useful information for business-driven decision-making, if approached with the appropriate analytical tools. HR departments are thus facing a period of transformation in order to take advantage of the opportunities arising from the aforementioned innovations, as well as to deal with increasingly numerous and complex challenges. HR department members must not miss the important opportunity for professional growth offered by digital transformation. Despite the obvious difficulty in adapting to this relatively recent phenomenon, which to be fully exploited requires skills that until now were not required to them, HRs will have to work hard to claim the legitimacy of conducting operations with a new data-driven approach, developing the necessary skills. This should therefore not be seen as a complication of their duties, but as the long-awaited opportunity to finally consolidate the strategic importance of the function.