October 2 2020: As the business impact of the COVID-19 crisis mounts, leaders in every industry are moving urgently to protect employees, and build resilience. In such times when immediate action is critical, most leaders are embracing a new agenda - one which is digital-first and fosters agility. In such times of crisis, organizations are looking inward and seeing tectonic shifts in the Human Resource (HR) technology landscape with high investments to adapt to the new normal and consequently win in the post-COVID workplace.
HR technology leaders Darwinbox recently surveyed over 140 organizations on how they are reimagining their HR technology portfolios - their priorities, focus areas, and key decision drivers. The collective analysis presented in this report aims to help enterprises introspect their COVID response strategy and learn industry best practices from peer organization. The report covers:
-The current market landscape of HR technology.
-Effectiveness of HR Tech to foster productivity & Employee Safety even in the remote mode.
-Organisational response to COVID-19 from an HR tech standpoint. 
-HR technology investment trends fuelled by COVID-19.
-HR digital transformation objectives in the new world of work.
Although the cloud was a novel technology in the early ’2000s, today it is a ‘must-have’ infrastructure for any ERP technology intervention which organizations undertake. With biggies like SAP, Oracle, and IBM pushing their customers away from their on-premise systems to cloud, the rise of the Salesforce-generation of companies and investments made into data-security to minimize losses presented a completely new way of managing human resources.
Out of the total respondents, 58% of organizations were already on cloud HR systems while only 18% of organizations use an on-premise HR system before the pandemic hit.
This crisis surfaced weaknesses in the existing digital HR landscape but also offered an opportunity for HR to take the lead and model how the rest of the organization can thrive in a continuously disrupted environment by applying more digital ways of working.
The existing HR systems enabled 75% of all organizations to moderately or very effectively adapt to the new compliance & regulations, but 35% reported ensuring business continuity to be the topmost HR technology challenge.
Organizations using cloud HR technology have been 55% and 50% more effective in remote engagement and facilitating employee safety, respectively than the ones who have not focused on cloud prior to the pandemic.
The coronavirus has become the accelerator of one of the greatest workplace transformations of our lifetime. How we live and work is changing with technology being the enabler of the new normal. As organizations with some form of HR Technology usage pre-COVID-19 look at building on top of what’s already there, companies who had no HR Technology found themselves struggling to build resilience during such unprecedented times.
Full report can be accessed here.
Darwinbox , Asia’s fastest growing Human Capital Management platform, is a mobile-first end-to-end software solution which helps enterprises make HR their competitive advantage. The company’s India HQ is in Hyderabad