Cognizant Tech Unveils Hr

Practices
Sanjay K Pillai  |  BSCAL Last Updated at January 27, 2013 23:41 IST

 
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US-based Cognizant Technology Solutions has put in place a series of human resources
(HR) practices which will, it hopes, make its goal of a P-CMM certification easier.

Bhaskar Das, head, human resources, Cognizant, said the company had put in place
measures like assessment centres for psychometric profiling two years back and is in
the process of implementing `Peoplesoft' for HR and project management. The company
hopes to get a P-CMM rating of three or four by the last quarter of 2001.

Cognizant has an arrangement with Savellie & Holdsmith of UK for psychometric

profiling. While participation of the personnel is not mandatory, the company has found
that personnel have lesser resistance to an idea if it is not forced.

Data collected by clinical psychatrists is passed on to the employees directly to assure

them that the feedback from the assessment will not be used for making career
decisions.

It is left to the discretion of the employee whether they want to act on the feedback given
to them by the consultants and approach the HR department for corrective action.

Cognizant, Bhaskar points out, hopes to streamline HR processes to help its P-CMM
foray by integrating the existing system with the best benchmarked systems of
Peoplesoft.
 https://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/cognizant-tech-unveils-hr-practices-
100051301015_1.html

https://www.cognizant.com/perspectives/automating-hr-to-empower-people

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PERSPECTIVES

Automating HR to
Empower People
2018-10-11

As digitization sweeps across the enterprise, human capital

management is often overlooked. By infusing people management with
precision automation, organizations can elevate workforce effectiveness
and productivity, thereby increasing the role that individuals inside HR
can play in advancing the overall business agenda.
 

 
Learn more, visit our Digital Operations Practice 

New forms of digital technology are upending the ways and means of
business. Hierarchical organizational structures are giving way to matrix
configurations and project-focused teams. Simultaneously, the pace at
which work is done is accelerating, thanks to the voluminous data
generated by mobile and other Internet-enabled devices. However, not
all processes are equal when it comes to automation. A survey
by ServiceNow found that while 54% respondents use intelligent
automation in at least one business process, there are still automation
gaps that need to be filled — prominent among them is HR, in which
only 37% of all tasks are automated.
This lack of automation adds to the time HR managers spend on
completing repetitive tasks manually. The amount of time lost ranges
between 14 hours to 30 hours a week. This is in stark contrast to the
pace at which enterprises are automating their processes. A survey by
Willis Towers Watson, for example, found that by 2020 nearly 20% of
work tasks performed by U.S. companies will be automated. If HR
remains a laggard in this automation effort, it will inevitably lead to
problems. For one, automation will eventually change work dynamics.
Second, automation will require a different set of skills, pushing
enterprises to rely more on part-timers, consultants and other outside
contributors who power the gig economy  and provide specific expertise
as needed.
This signals a profound change in the way enterprises manage their
talent pools, requiring the HR department to be more agile in deploying
talent anywhere in the organization at a short notice. This will be made
more challenging by factors such as geographic presence, where
varying regulations and cultural diversity call for more adaptive work
structures that can flex with ever-changing requirements. Companies
that resist HR automation risk being left behind when it comes to
attracting and retaining talent in the digital age. Reducing manual
processes to improve HR’s agility would be a no-brainer. More important
are the benefits automation could bring to the HR department and the
enterprise.
 Impact of Automation
The basic tenet of automation applies to HR the same way as it does to
any other function — i.e., the reduction in mundane tasks performed by
employees, which allow them to use their creative skills on more
pressing business challenges and contribute more constructively to
creating business value. From the HR team’s perspective, this means
HR can make meaningful contributions to strategic initiatives such as
succession plans, and creating competitive benefits and compensation
plans. 

But HR automation also brings other tangible and intangible benefits to

the enterprise. A survey by CareerBuilder revealed that 71% of
respondents found that automation improved the candidate experience,
69% found it reduced errors, and 60% found it improved the employee
experience.
Automation’s impact on key HR processes can be extensive:
 Recruitment: Perhaps the most important HR process, recruitment
is also riddled with challenges. Orthodoxies such as creating lengthy
applications to filter out indifferent candidates have led to a situation
where 60% of job seekers quit the application process midway, according
to the CareerBuilder survey — this is something businesses cannot
afford at a time when digital-driven innovation rules. Artificial intelligence
(AI) can change this. For example, AI bots can parse hundreds of
websites to identify ideal candidates. An AI-enabled chatbot, which is
trained to answer routine questions about the employer, can then
engage with the interested candidates, thus automating the initial
screening process, which is often time intensive and inefficient.
 Employee vetting: AI can relieve the HR department of the burden
of validating candidates based on their resumes and online presence.
This task is crucial to the talent acquisition process, but also relies
heavily on manual intervention and is time-consuming. Using advanced
analytical capabilities, AI can quickly and accurately construct candidate
profiles for hundreds of applicants. Going forward, this database can
become a reference for identifying ideal candidates as requirements
arise, but, crucially, it will save time and allow the HR team to focus on
tasks such as personal interviews.
 Employee wellness and engagement: Today’s talent pool is
dominated by the millennial generation, who place greater value on
work-life-balance, health benefits and financial well-being than did
previous generations. It makes sense, therefore, for businesses to
broaden the definition of benefits, from providing health insurance and
promoting good health, to proactively creating a workplace where
 employee wellness and the organization’s long-term vision go hand-in-
hand. Creating a program like this would require employers to gain deep
understanding of what motivates employees. Data from wearable
devices such as fitness bands that track employee health combined with
a mobile-first approach would be the ideal way to engage today’s hyper-
connected workforce. Automated HR processes would be at the heart of
this transformation by providing the HR team with a holistic view of the
employees via dashboards that integrate data related to their work
performance and wellness. Nevertheless, employers will have to
consider the impact of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act (HIPAA) and other relevant regulations on these programs.
Figure 1
Other processes that can benefit greatly from increased automation
include:
 Onboarding/offboarding: Forget folders full of documents that need
multiple signatures from the employees. A digitized and automated
onboarding process will not only be faster and smoother, but also a
great way to introduce employees to the organization’s core values. For
example, automated onboarding would eliminate the need for physical
copies of all documents a new recruit needs to submit, thus making it
easier for the HR team as well as any other team (such as the local IT
team) involved in the onboarding. Reduced paperwork will cut down the
time it takes to process these documents to a few hours. This will also
ensure a smooth offboarding of employees who exit the organization.
 Performance appraisals: A heavily manual performance appraisal
system is prone to delays — from requesting evaluation through
reviewing the results. However, an automated performance appraisal
system that is tightly integrated with a human capital management
system can track employee performance on a more regular basis and
trigger the appraisal process at the scheduled time. Regular updates will
allow managers to identify gaps in performance and provide feedback,
ultimately resulting in better employee engagement and satisfaction.
 Payroll: Payroll automation is especially beneficial in the digital
age where employees are likely to be spread across multiple locations.
A payroll system integrated with the existing human capital management
system can save work and time for the HR team while making sure that
regulatory obligations are being complied with, and data security is
ensured.
 Human capital management: Monitoring employee progress in real
time allows the HR team to better match the right employees to the right
tasks based on their skills. Moreover, a clear view of employee skills can
also result in more relevant training programs that can help close the
widening digital skills gap that is impacting multiple industries. Reskilling
will also save companies the time and cost involved in hiring fresh
talent.
Getting HR Automation Right
Numerous emerging technologies will play a major role in the
acceleration of HR automation. The following are ones that decision-
makers should carefully evaluate.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA relieves the HR team from the burden of performing the most
routine manual tasks. Often referred to as a software that automates
other software, RPA imitates human interaction with rules-based
automation that reduces manual errors and boosts the speed of work.
HR tasks that can be automated through RPA include repetitive
processes such as payroll, benefits enrollment and onboarding.

Advanced analytics 
Integrating advanced analytics into existing HR systems will allow
organizations to make more informed fact-based decisions by applying
data from disparate data repositories. The ever-increasing volume of
data can be sliced and diced using soft-coded rules to gain answers —
such as understanding employee potential — that would be hard to
gauge using hard-coded rules such as employee attendance, or targets
achieved. If used correctly, these analytics can boost engagement levels
while giving the HR team deeper insights into employee productivity,
skills and motivations.

Conversational AI
Chatbots are a relatively recent phenomenon, aided largely by the rise
of social media platforms such as Facebook, and smart speakers such
as Amazon Alexa and Google Home. In a very short time, chatbots have
gained popularity with businesses and consumers alike (across
generations) for their instant responses, and 24x7 availability. For HR
teams, chatbots hold immense potential to make the enterprise-
employee experience pleasant and productive. Beyond engaging with
potential job candidates as noted above, chatbots can conduct
background checks and enable easy onboarding of selected candidates.
They can also answer FAQs from existing and new employees, improve
training efforts by making an interactive experience instead of a one-way
communication, and for end-of-year reviews, enable instant feedback
and performance insights.
Blockchain
The distributed ledger technology that powers blockchain has found use
cases across industries and processes, and HR is no different.
Blockchain-based smart contracts can automate the release of
incentives, benefits and compensation. Employee data stored on
blockchain can act as an irrefutable record of performance and could
potentially eliminate the need for a resume, making the recruiters’ job a
lot easier. This would be a boon for seasonal and contract-based
employees since their work credentials could be validated instantly and
payments released automatically upon completion of tasks spelled out in
the terms and conditions of a smart contract.

Mitigating Bias
Despite its wide-ranging applications in HR, AI has drawbacks that need
to be addressed if it is to truly become an extension of the HR
department. Algorithms replace human processes, but replacing humans
altogether needs careful implementation. By design, an AI-based
process is only as good as the data it is built on. For example, natural
language processing (NLP) algorithms have been found to be ineffective
when handling African-American dialects of English because they were not
trained to understand these dialects. Similarly, AI tools also need to be
trained to understand terms commonly used on social media platforms
such as Facebook and Twitter.
To learn more, visit the  Digital Operations   and  Human Capital
Management  sections of our website or  contact us.
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