HRM in the digital age – digital changes and challenges of the HR profession

HRM in the digital age – digital changes and challenges of the HR profession

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Employee Relations, Volume 36, Issue 4.

The world has undergone far reaching cultural, societal and economical changes based on the increasing dominance of digital technologies. In sum, these changes have led to the current period being characterized as the “digital age”. In line with these changes, digital technologies play an increasingly prominent role in both the lives of employees and human resource management (HRM), which seems to be affected in multiple ways. This special issue focuses on the impact of these changes on HRM, in relation to changes to the workforce, to HRM in general and more specifically to the use of technology in delivering HRM activities.

While a broader discussion and categorization of digital changes of HRM is missing at present, reviewing the literature yields three focal areas that might be briefly labelled as “digital employees”, “digital work” and “digital employee management”.

As a first major area, the concept of “digital employees” figuratively refers to assumed larger changes in the core subject matter of the HR profession: labelled with various terms such as “digital natives” (e.g. Prensky, 2001), “millennials” (e.g. Deal et al., 2010) or “net generation” (e.g. Tapscott, 2008), it is assumed that the early, intimate and enduring interaction with digital technologies has shaped a new generation of people with distinctively different attitudes, qualifications, behaviours and expectations. Early literature on the phenomenon suggests that, based on the enduring interaction with digital technologies, this new cohort of people is generally characterized by marked digital qualifications, multitasking capabilities (in particular fast and parallel information processing), affinity for networking, learning by doing and preference of instant gratifications and frequent rewards (Prensky, 2001). Given this, literature is additionally concerned that these differences will aggravate or even prevent mutual cooperation and understanding between generations (e.g. Lancaster and Stillman, 2002).

It is obvious that HRM should react to such changes and align its strategies and activities to this new labour market cohort, and search for adequate ways to recruit, develop, compensate, etc. such “digital employees” and moreover to integrate them with previous generations of employees. Yet, ongoing research on the topic could expose such assumptions as oversimplifications and overgeneralizations. The generation of younger employees grown up in a digital environment is both considerably more complex and considerably more heterogeneous, while there are, however, obvious differences that have to be considered (e.g. Bennett et al., 2008; Helsper and Eynon, 2010). The challenge for HRM therefore is to identify actual digitally induced changes in attitudes, qualifications, behaviours and expectation of younger employees, while yet avoiding any stereotyping and considering heterogeneity of actual changes. Based on this, the strategic and operative adaptation of HRM to a changing workforce constitutes a step necessary to support organizations further on. In this way, “digital employees” constitute a first notable area of digital changes and challenges of the HR profession (e.g. D’Netto and Ahmed, 2012; and the contributions in Ng et al., 2012).

A second major area might be called “digital work”, referring to the content as to the organization of work. Relating to work content the ongoing digitalisation implies an increasing automation of manual and routine work, and a slow but steady change of remaining tasks towards “brain and information work”. Given that, […] all information today is either digital, has been digital, or could be digital” (Bawden, 2008, p. 19), information work of employees more and more depends on digital tools and media. In consequence, qualification demands placed on employees have continuously changed, and in particular “digital literacy” – understood as a broader set of technical as well as mental skills to systematically acquire, process, produce and use information (e.g. Bawden, 2008; Nawaz and Kundi, 2010) – turns out a crucial key qualification for more and more employees. In order to enable both individual employees as entire organizations to keep up with the digital change, HRM has thus to systematically prepare, accompany and often also cushion this enduring change of work content and corresponding qualification demands in its multifarious facets. Moreover, beyond work content in particular work organization is affected by digitalization. Digital technologies have enabled new forms of organizing work that range from single virtual workplaces, to virtual groups, teams or communities, and even to virtual organizations (e.g. Powell et al., 2004; Hertel et al., 2005). While there are diverse varieties of organizing work digitally, the overarching principle is to support and connect task performing humans by means of digital information and communication technologies, and to organize work across the borders of geography, organization and time in any desired way. As a consequence, members of such virtual units are often remote and unknown. Managing such members clearly differs from managing conventional employees in a lot of aspects such as leadership, performance feedback or development, while still a lot of practical aspects are not sufficiently tackled (Hertel et al., 2005).

How drastically digital forms of work organization changes HRM may be best illustrated based on e-lancing (Aguinis and Lawal, 2013). E-lancing organizes work via web-based marketplaces where organizations offer certain tasks to be performed by interested persons, which yet are freelancing. This uncovers that e-lancing replaces conventional employees, and therewith deeply changes and sometimes even questions “classic” HR functions such as recruiting or development (cf. the discussion in Aguinis and Lawal, 2013). The basic challenge for e-HRM thus lies in recognizing the requirements that such digital forms of work organization pose on managing employees as well as further categories of contributors. In this way, the ongoing digitalization of work content and organization constitutes a major change that visibly poses multiple new requirements on the HR profession.

A third and final area of digital change might be labelled “digital employee management” and refers to the planning, implementation and in particular application of digital technologies to support and network the HR profession, a phenomenon also known as electronic HRM (e.g. Bondarouk and Ruël, 2009; Strohmeier, 2007). In the interim, not only administrative HR functions such as pay roll processing, attendance management or record keeping, but also managerial HR functions such as compensation, performance management or development are “digitally” supported and enabled, and thereby often deeply changed (e.g. Strohmeier, 2007). Moreover, digitalization has also affected HR organization, by establishing new actor categories, as for instance employees incorporated via digital self-service, and by establishing new kinds of cooperation subsumed as “virtual HR” (e.g. Lepak and Snell, 1998). In consequence, HR qualifications also show a clear shift to incorporating technical implementation and application skills (e.g. Hempel, 2004). This ongoing digitalization of HRM is basically assumed to offer large opportunities for the discipline. In particular, it is hoped to improve operational aspects, such as costs, speed and quality of HR processes, relational aspects, such as corporation and trust among HR stakeholders, and also transformational aspects, such as the strategic orientation, organisation and standing of the HR function (e.g. Parry, 2011; Strohmeier, 2009). However, e-HRM research also uncovers that desired results and actual outcomes not necessarily coincide (e.g. Parry and Tyson, 2011; Strohmeier, 2009). Known downsides of digitalization are for instance: lack of user acceptance, threats to privacy, contribution to the “digital divide”, loss of personal contacts, downsizing the HR-department or burdening HR professionals with technical implementation, administration and application tasks, among others. Against this background, a basic challenge of the HR profession is to identify, develop and utilized the positive potentials of digitalization, while avoiding or at least reducing the accompanying downsides. Though rather silently, the digitalization of HRM therewith even constitutes one of the major changes of the discipline throughout the last decades that ambivalently confronts HRM with both new opportunities and new risks.

It is against this background that we present this special issue that deals with “HRM in the Digital Age”. Born out of a track at the European Academy of Management Conference in 2013, we sought papers on all three of the areas above. In line with the current emphasis within academia, the vast majority of the papers here discuss the use of technology to deliver HRM activities. These papers all represent important developments to this field. However, our first paper focuses on a slightly different area but examining the job preferences of generation Y, or “digital natives”. Specifically, Guillot-Soulez and Soulez use generational theory to examine the preferences of French young graduates for job and organizational attributes of a future employer. Innovatively using conjoint analysis, the authors found that, while, generally digital natives valued job security and a relaxed work atmosphere over other characteristics of the workplace, their preferences were heterogeneous, suggesting that it is actually difficult to categorise them a single group.

For the rest of the special issue we move on to focus on e-HRM. Our second paper, by Strohmeier and Kabst presents an in-depth examination of e-HRM configurations, contexts and consequences in order to provide a more detailed understanding of the drivers, types and outcomes of qualitatively different types of e-HRM systems. This paper provides a useful platform for the rest of our examination of this area. Using a large-scale survey, Strohmeier and Kabst identify three configurations of e-HRM: non-users, operational users and power users and explain these in relation to a set of contextual variables. The authors suggest that all three configurations have the capacity to contribute to organizational success but that the “power user” configuration has the greatest impact on success.

In our third paper of this special issue, Burbach and Royle draw on institutional theory, existing international business practice and e-HRM models to discuss the factors that affect the successful diffusion of e-HRM use across subsidiaries of a multi-national corporation (MNC). Based upon a series of interviews in the German and Irish subsidiaries of a US MNC, Burbach and Royle identify that the successful transfer of e-HRM is affected by the interaction of a number of external, relational, organizational and individual factors within both the headquarters of an MNC and its subsidiaries.

In our fourth paper, we move the focus to the potential outcomes of e-HRM. Bissola and Imperatori provide an interesting analysis of whether web-based technological innovation within HR contributes to the rebuilding and reinforcement of the employee-HR department relationship. Focusing specifically on the relationship between e-HRM adoption, procedural justice and trust in the HR department, Bissola and Imperatori conducted a survey of 526 digital natives. Their results confirmed a positive relationship between relational e-HRM activities and procedural justice and trust in the HR function, suggesting that e-HRM can influence the employee-HR relationship.

Tansley, Kirk, Williams and Barton's paper examines the use of e-HRM within a UK local authority in order to conceptualize the ways in which a balance can be achieved between maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of e-HRM and enabling innovation to occur during the system implementation. Tansley et al.'s case study shows that ambidexterity is achieved via simultaneous exploitation of e-HRM via the practices undertaken by HR practitioners and accidental exploration via this process of exploitation. This paper, the fifth in this special issue, provides a useful identification of the dimensions of ambidexterity in balancing e-HRM work.

The final two papers in this special issue focus on a specific area of e-HRM, that of electronic recruitment. Eckhart, Laumer, Maier and Weitzel, in our sixth paper, uses a longitudinal case study of e-recruiting in a German organisation to examine the process of transformation that is undergone within recruitment as a result of technology adoption. Eckhart et al. identify five stages of transformation: transformation of tools; transformation of systems; transformation of workflows; transformation of tasks; and transformation of communication. The authors also highlight that each stage is affected by developments in both the external and market context.

Finally Holm, also focusing on e-recruitment, examines the impact of the external environment on recruitment practices in Danish organizations. Using institutional theory and a range of qualitative data, Holm suggests that recruitment practices are strongly influenced by functional and social pressures existing in the wider society, reflected in the use of e-recruitment and digital HRM in general. Holm goes on to offer a framework for future research into e-HRM adoption from a neo-institutional perspective.

Taken as a whole, these papers discuss a variety of aspects of HRM in this new digital age and therefore enhance the field by strengthening our knowledge on the factors affecting the use and outcomes of e-HRM and e-recruitment as well as considering the nature of the digital native workforce. In these papers we see a variety of topics, theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, reflecting the diversity that exists in this field. What is also apparent throughout this special issue is that this area remains relatively under-researched. We therefore hope that the readers of this special issue will identify avenues for further investigation as a result of this special issue and will continue forward to develop and expand the evidence base for HR in the digital age.

Dr Emma Parry
Reader in Human Resource Management, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield, UK

Professor Stefan Strohmeier
Chair of Management Information Systems, Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany

Acknowledgements

In the preparation of this special issue the authors have received help from a number of referees, whom the authors would like to thank. In addition, the authors would like to thank the editor of Employee Relations, Dennis Nickson, and his team for their support. The authors would also like to thank EURAM and all those involved in the conference track on “HRM in the Digital Age” which spawned this special issue.

References

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