IT and HR must partner more closely than ever, as hybrid work, analytics, AI and data protection trends evolve.
As an IT leader, you know partnering with other business lines is critical to ensure your peers are equipped with the technologies they need to win and retain employees and customers alike. Among those most essential: Collaboration between IT and HR.
To be clear, these two departments have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. As an IT leader, you must provide HR with software for screening, hiring and onboarding staff, as well as managing employee data, processing payroll and administering benefits.
In return, your IT department counts on HR to make sure it is aligned with the goals of the overall organization. This work includes helping you identify and hire the right leaders and staff that are critical for running a tech department—both from a skills and cultural perspective.
Yet workplace trends are evolving quicky, introducing more complexity into organizations. An explosion in data-centric technologies and other digital trends has heightened the importance of strong IT-HR collaboration.
Key Trends Driving IT-HR Collaboration
Without further ado, these trends are driving IT and HR to work together more closely:
1. Hybrid work. It’s fair to question any top trend list that doesn’t lead with this one. Indeed, 39% of global knowledge workers will work hybrid by the end of 2023, according to recent Gartner research.
No argument here if you have research debating the estimate. Regardless, IT leaders and HR managers have been huddling on technologies, processes and policies working in both corporate and home offices since hybrid work practices have proliferated.
Social distancing policies, technical workarounds and accommodating optimal work-life balance once dominated these huddles. Increasingly, HR and IT are shifting focus to supporting employees in organizations where leaders are expecting to see more employees in corporate offices than they have in recent years.
2. AI/ML. Generative AI is so hot right now, this trend almost deserves a special alphanumeric designation. Call it 1a.
The biggest issue IT and HR must contend with includes concerns about workforce automation. Indeed, recent research from Pew Research Center shows that 62% of U.S. adults expect the use of AI in the workplace will have a major impact on workers over the next 20 years.
Earlier AI tools gave employees working in back-office roles cause for pause. Generative AI is casting new light on how technology may be used to augment creative functions, which will require more conversations between HR and IT about how to manage associated concerns.
IT and HR will have to educate employees about how using automation technologies can help them perform better in their roles. And as generative AI use grows in organizations, IT and HR will have to work closely to mitigate associated governance issues.
3. Data Analytics. As hybrid policies reshape the world of knowledge work, business leaders are looking for data about how effective employees are at doing their job.
This has given rise to an emerging category of data-crunching tools known as workplace analytics, which gauge such details as how long employees spend on work tasks, which tasks they are spending the most time on, as well as the output and outcomes of those workstreams.
HR meanwhile may seek workplace analytics from IT that helps them measure the success of diversity and inclusion efforts by analyzing hiring practices and promotion rates. This can help HR pinpoint areas for improvement, as well as make changes that curb employee attrition.
4. Data protection and compliance. Organizations naturally produce vast amounts of data, critical and trivial. As corporate stewards, IT and HR leaders have significant stakes in how information is generated, shared and used, as well as how it’s protected.
Perhaps no area of focus has attracted the attention of HR and IT of late than the impact of AI consumption on corporate data. Of chief concern is the potential for leaks of proprietary corporate data and IP in these tools, many of which are easily available and unmonitored.
Organizations may get much-needed guidance from the federal government, which has is investing $140 million to research the development of AI safeguards.
But in the meantime, organizations must remind employees about best practices for safeguarding corporate data in the face of data privacy, security, bias and ethical issues. IT and HR have key roles working with compliance and other stakeholders to develop, implement and pass down such policies to the broader organization.
The Takeaway
Workplace trends are evolving rapidly for IT leaders and their HR counterparts.
In fact, 53% of IT professionals surveyed by ESG said their IT environment is more complex or significantly more complex than it was two years ago, thanks mainly to remote and hybrid work and expanding cybersecurity threats1.
It’s tough to predict how corporate and federal policies will evolve in the coming months and years, but you need to ask yourself some hard questions:
Are you collaborating with HR to ensure you have the most inclusive hybrid workplace technologies and processes? Is your data analytics strategy capable of providing the necessary insights to support HR functions? Can the organization’s guardrails for AI technologies stand up to regulatory scrutiny?
One more: Are you prepared to shepherd your organization through this exciting but uncertain future?
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