HR Tech Confidence Check: On the edge of glory or complacency?

HR Tech Confidence Check 2024
Are we more satisfied or just more complacent?
At a glance, overall satisfaction with HR tech seems to be on the rise, particularly among budget leaders. Satisfaction rates across this group increased by 30% year over year, while dissatisfaction rates decreased by more than 39%. Similarly, HR teams are citing greater contentment with the ROI they’re seeing from their HR technology.
However, a closer look shows extreme satisfaction and extreme dissatisfaction around HR tech ROI have both decreased since last year, signalling we may be settling. Instead of tech completely amazing or absolutely angering us, more of us seem to be just ok with how it’s doing. Should this complacency continue to grow, organisations risk falling behind in their efforts to drive historic productivity gains and truly outmanoeuvre their competition.
Budgets are still uncertain
What’s hot, what’s not
Investments in core HR (HCM) and foundational technologies like learning and development (L&D) are cooling slightly, while investments in AI, analytics, employee experience and skills are on the rise. Where we see investments cooling, it’s often because there are few new customers to tap in these markets (most have already invested) and there’s increasing resistance to ripping out old tech and replacing it with new tech — unless that new technology can significantly improve business outcomes or change the way work gets done.
Where we see increased investments this year — across AI, HR service delivery, upskilling and reskilling, and workforce management — there are clear ties to what’s top of mind for the C-suite, namely productivity and agility. Clearly, driving better business outcomes is hot while rip-and-replace of technology is not. For today’s HR tech buyer, if it’s not significantly impacting business outcomes, the status quo is good enough for now.
Struggling to realise desired outcomes
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HR tech is making strides in satisfaction and ROI gains but serious challenges remain in deploying tech strategically and realising desired outcomes. HR has a history of investing in technology without being able to prove the impact. It’s not enough to be good at selecting and implementing technology. We need to be good at deploying capabilities and executing change. Those will be the true measures of HR transformation success but we have a long way to go to build HR’s transformation muscle and learn to be digital.
Our latest research explores how HR teams perceive the value of their HR tech investments and how that impacts the future of innovation in our space.
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