Increasingly HR leaders are playing a key role in shaping and driving digital transformation in organisations.  Between 2006 – 2022 I was a HR professional in the financial services sector, before moving into HR search. During that time, it was often said ‘we need to be a technology company who happens to be a bank’.

I’ve since heard this many times from clients and candidates across industry sectors, and this manifests in different ways. For example, in wholesale banking and markets, there was a huge focus on Blockchain in improving efficiency. Whilst in retail banking, the impact of digitisation on the future of bank branch networks was constantly on the agenda. Throughout these experiences, a common thread of process improvement ran which – at its core – had the objective of supporting the digital agenda. HR can, and should, play a pivotal role in supporting digital transformation. Here are five ways I’ve seen over the course of my HR career.

1. The future skills agenda

In additional to the acquisition of digital skills and reskilling employees, digitisation has a huge impact on learning and development. Fostering curiosity and a culture of continuous learning is important as the pace of digital transformation gathers speed.

I’ve seen learning teams launch programmes aligned with the future skills agenda and also in promoting cultural change to underpin a more flexible learning agenda and learning agility.   For example, learning campaigns and initiatives where curiosity is actively promoted or using technology to create customised learning pathways.

2.Organisational design

HR provides a key role in providing consultancy on organisational design and crucially implementing this – both structurally and culturally.  As a Business Partner, HR professionals understand the soul of the organisation and provide an effective view and work with leaders on what’s optimal, given the context.

This ranges from organisations making a radical change to more agile ways of working and those maintaining more traditional structures but seeking to elevate their digital offering.  HR taking an active role in change management which features communication – and enabling leaders to communicate – is critical to the success of changes in organisational design.

3. Agile project management

In a narrow sense, I’ve seen HR play an important role in supporting the pivot from waterfall to agile project management by providing leadership on all things people in multi-disciplinary teams. Additionally, I’ve also been involved in HR aligning core parts of the employee life cycle to be fit for purpose in this new world – for example, in ensuring that assessing agility is an integral part of the recruitment process and that performance management is fit for purpose in an environment where people are working in teams that have a different structures and ways of working.

4. Role design

Most pronounced in a retail context  – for example, in the design of chat roles in contact centres (including chatbot to human handover) or roles in a physical branch that support and enable a digital customer journey (this could include ‘rescuing’ a broken journey that the customer has been unable to progress digitally through to branch roles being focused on more complex transactions as simpler tasks are completed online).    In wholesale financial services this includes leadership roles on, say, digital assets or innovating payments.

5. Using technology to deliver HR services

Especially in large organisations, delivering HR in a digital format has a profound impact across the employee lifecycle – as every early careers’ leader will tell you, engaging potential recruits using the right channels is critical.

Beyond recruitment, the role of HR Shared Services has become more important in enabling a high-quality employee experience.  Increasingly organisations are looking to AI here – including the use of chatbots, skills based internal mobility platforms and – an area we see emerging – personalising employee experience through using technology.

In this dynamic environment, where the pace of change is only accelerating, and where the impact of AI is coming into increasing focus, HRs role in digital transformation is growing and successfully enabling this through a multi-faceted approach.

This article is brought to you by Hannah Russell, Consultant in our HR Leadership Practice. For more information, please do contact us.