Reaching New Workplace Collaboration Milestones with HR Tech

Angela Mancuso, EVP of Global HR, AIT Worldwide Logistics

Can you provide insights into your journey, experience, and expertise in the HR tech space?

Through the years, I have tried my hands at several roles within the HR domain, including recruiting, employer branding, employee relations and engagement, and training and development. I also worked as the HR director at a payroll software company, where I witnessed the company grow from 70 employees to over 800 within a short span of time. Working with a software company helped me view HR from a technology perspective, and that’s where I started to have an appreciation for what HR technology can do to help drive the efficiency of effective employer-employee and employee-employee engagements.

When I joined AIT Worldwide Logistics, as the VP of Human Resources, I wanted to bring this enlarged view of HR tech to my present company as well. Currently, I lead the company’s global human resources team as the Executive Vice President of Global HR.

What, according to you, are some of the challenges in the HR domain today? What are some of the HR pain points you are tackling in your company?

The biggest struggle that we encounter today is how to effectively reach out and engage with our teammates and humanize their employee experience. For years, HR used to be hands-on, where you could walk up to someone’s desk in the human resources department and make an inquiry. But things have taken a different route today with hybrid workforces,remote employees and teammates all across the globe.Today’s work-from-home landscape has made it all the more relevant for HR teams to effectively manage a humanized digital employee experience. The need of the hour is to leverage technology that drives the employee experience while offering hands-on, high-touch HR services to support the employees. Hence, finding the right technology solution is imperative to achieve this aim.

What are some of the technological advancements that can be adopted to combat the HR challenges that exist today?

One of the biggest technology trends now is AI-based HR systems. We are looking for features like chatbots that can offer an around-the-clock support system. AI chatbots ensure instant, brief, and precise responses so that your teammates won’t have to peruse a three-page article on how to do something. Additionally, they make inquiries, cut user wait time, and provide a smoother user experience. Through this AI-driven approach, the HR team won’t get swamped with emails and phone calls for every single question that can be easily answered by chatbots, giving our HR teams to spend more time on strategic initiatives that drive the business forward.

“The need of the hour is to leverage technology that drives the employee experience while offering hands-on, high-touch HR services to support the employees.”

Talent analytics is another major technology trend in today’s HR domain. It offers valuable insights to the HR team and helps make better recruitment and talent management decisions by analyzing the trends we are seeing within our candidate pool and workforce.

Likewise, software solutions with customizable dashboards and HR reports have also become a game-changer in the HR Tech space. Gone are the days when HR professionals spend their days dealing with massive Excel spreadsheets. With electronic data interfaces (EDI) between HR systems and automated surveys and feedback, HR technology today replaces manual inefficiencies to a great extent. Our company has always depended on EDI to improve the our manual processes and data flow between systems; we are now using EDIs to completely automate the onboarding process, including new hire surveys and our annual core value index surveys.

Can you comment on some of the projects that you have supervised?

We are currently evaluating a new enterprise-wide AI-driven ticketing software to create and manage employee queries in a self-service model. Suppose your teammates are in Europe and they want to engage with their HR team (which could be based anywhere across the globe) to enquire about something; our proposed ticketing software enables them to raise questions that will be addressed, managed, and resolved by the shared services teams across the organization as quickly as possible by providing an immediate knowledge base article, answer to their question or create an automatic ticket to be routed to the appropriate regional team.

Having acquired a sizable number of global teammates, the onus is on us to provide a teammate experience beyond borders, and in their native languages. For this, we are also targeting the necessary technology tools to provide translation services so that our teammates have the best employee experience.

How do you expect the HR Tech space to change in the coming years?

There are many software vendors offering a one-stop solution to a variety of needs, including payroll, recruitment and training, and HR and performance management. However, the emphasis is now shifting froman all-inclusive package to specialized services. In the coming years, there will be more HR vendors focusing on niche services within the HR tech space. For example, vendors targeting the recruiting space will likely focus on leveraging more technologies to improve the applicant tracking systems and will partner with other HR technologies to ensure a seamless integration of systems. HR professionals are realizing it’s hard to find a one-stop HR system that is able to be the best at all facets of HR technology.  The HR community can benefit greatly from choosing those specialized services that best suit them to provide a seamless experience for their customers.

What’s your advice to the HR community?

My one piece of advice would be to work closely with your people, find out their pain points, and figure out how you collectively work together, in order to understand the gaps and areas where you can drive internal efficiencies. With the HR tech software taking the lead, HR teams will become strategic partners in boosting work culture with the help of technology.

HR Technology

HR systems

Logistics