The shift toward digital business and the evolution of the workforce have helped drive two key trends in business today — the rise of digital HR and the rise of teams.¹ As the two trends emerge together, they push organizations to ask questions about how best to enable the modern workforce.

The Rise of Digital HR

Digital HR involves giving workers the modern tools they need to connect on a variety of workforce-related issues — including performance reviews, management feedback, contractor assignments, benefits administration, and more. It’s a trend that integrates social, mobile, cloud, and analytics to create a new digital ecosystem for understanding workforce needs, engaging efficiently with employees, and enabling workforce agility — all of which helps to drive business productivity and performance.

Helping to propel this trend are the demands of workers, who digitally connect and collaborate outside of the workplace and who expect comparable engagement capabilities in a business environment. For business leaders, the primary digital HR challenge becomes refining processes and deploying solutions that can empower employees, integrating personalization and contextual elements to make the experience relevant to the individual and the individual’s role.

The Rise of Teams

With several generations working side by side in the enterprise today, many organizations face an unprecedented opportunity to blend vast sets of knowledge to generate new business value. They can tap decades of know-how and experience from veteran workers while also benefiting from the modern savvy of millennials, for example. The new dynamic means that teams and teamwork — as opposed to traditional departmental structures — become new sources of value.

Teams are on the rise for other reasons. For one, workers increasingly want to garner a wide range of new experiences. Working in teams can provide those experiences, since teams can operate nimbly and slide across functional and departmental lines. Secondly, within many organizations the activities of the contract workforce continue to blend with those of the traditional workforce. Teams help support the integration of contractors and regular workers. As the team trend rises, organizations face fresh questions on how to support and enable this new workforce structure.

Working on Workforce Management

For HR leaders, the rise of digital HR and the rise of teams help push the transformation of workforce management to the top of the agenda. Today’s disruptive digital and team trends mean you need to ask whether you still have the right capabilities to manage the workforce. Dynamic digital tools and the agility to support teams are capabilities that many of today’s workers expect. Without them, great workers could pass you by.

The good news is that SAP solutions are well positioned to address these trends. Enhancements to SAP SuccessFactors solutions include new feedback features that can help make teams more effective, for example. And throughout the SAP portfolio, core workforce management capabilities now integrate with corresponding mobile apps so workers can get the digital functionality they often seek — whether it’s querying vacation balance while on the go, providing alerts to supervisors, or sending a performance reward through a mobile app.

Start the Conversation

With SAP primed to address today’s trends, the challenge facing organizations becomes figuring out how to align processes and put together all of the pieces effectively. To undertake such a transformation, a conversation with an SAP global services partner such as Deloitte can serve as a great first step. To get the conversation started, contact me at bthiebault@deloitte.com or visit us at www.deloitte.com/SAP.

^{1 Deloitte, “Global Human Capital Trends 2016 — The New Organization: Different by Design” (2016; www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/human-capital/articles/introduction-human-capital-trends.html). [back]}