If your organisation says it hasn’t experienced the disruptive effective of digital technologies then it is either myopic or has missed the inflection point and the only way is downwards.
Digitisation is changing the way companies deliver value to their customers, pushing them to move from traditional operational efficiencies to creating personalised, information-rich solutions. And HR has an important role to play in this strategic transformation.
And yet, says Dana Minbaeva, professor of HCM at King’s Business School, King’s College London, while HR functions have started digitising various processes, from recruitment to performance management, this is more of a "doing digital" approach, improving existing processes, as opposed to "being digital," which involves fundamental transformation of value creation.
For decades, says Minbaeva, we have talked about how HR can be a strategy implementor. We have talked about the need to get that ‘seat at the table’. But now it has got that seat ‘everybody else has left the room’.
“Strategy formulation no longer takes place inside that c-suite. It takes place in a close proximity to customers outside organisational boundaries. And HR is still sitting inside that building, maybe even imprisoned by the notion of supportive function or blinded by this self-imposed role of a strategy implementor. It is to a certain extent a self-imposed role that is preventing us from getting into the driver's seat of strategic transformation,” she says.
In this video Minbaeva discusses how HR can move from strategy implementor to strategy driver. She looks at what strategic transformation is today and how CHROs can grab the opportunity to focus on creating customer value through human capital.
Like this? Then check out the first in the CHRO’s Idea Incubator video series in which Patrick Wright, Thomas C Vandiver Bicentennial Chair in Business at Darla Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, discusses how to deal with major disruptions.
Dana Minbaeva is professor of HCM at King’s Business School, King’s College London, and is presenting at the CHRO’s Idea Incubator event, a collaborative space dedicated to inspiring senior HR executives to develop innovative ideas that can transform the workplace. The event, organised by King’s Business School, Trinity College Dublin and the Center for Executive Succession at Darla Moore Business School, University of South Carolina, takes place at King’s Business School, King’s College London on 27 June 2023. For more information email Michele Gray