Impact Of Digital Employee: Prosperous Or Disastrous

The world has undergone all embracing cultural, societal and economical changes build on the increasing supremacy of digital technologies. In sum, these changes have led to the current period being characterized as the “digital era”/“digital age”. In line with these changes, digital technologies play an increasingly eminent role in both the existence of employees and human resource management (HRM), which seems to be overblown in multiple ways.

This paper focuses on the impact of digital employees on HRM, in relation to prosperous or disastrous changes to the workforce, to HRM in general and more concretely to the use of technology in updating HRM activities. The concept of “digital employees” descriptively refers to assumed huge changes in the key subject matter of the HR profession: mark with various terms such as “digital natives” (e. g. Prensky, 2001), “millennials” (e. g. Deal et al. , 2010) or “net generation” (e. g. Tapscott, 2008), it is assumed that the early, familiar and persist interaction with digital technologies has formed a new generation of people with distinctively different attitudes, qualifications, behaviours and expectations. Early literature on the phenomenon suggests that, based on the rigerous interaction with digital technologies, this new unit of people is generally featured by marked digital qualifications, multitasking potential (in particular fast and parallel information processing), harmony for networking, learning by doing and leaning of instant satisfaction and frequent rewards (Prensky, 2001). Given this, literature is additionally concerned that these differences will irritate or even intercept mutual cooperation and understanding between generations (e. g. Lancaster and Stillman, 2002). It is obvious that HRM should act to such changes and line up its strategies and activities to this new labour market unit, and find adequate ways to recruit, develop, compensate, etc. such “digital employees” and moreover to merge them with previous generations of employees. Yet, current research on this topic could reveal such assumptions as oversimplifications and overgeneralizations.

The generation of younger employees grown up in a digital environment is both considerably more complex and considerably more heterogeneous, while there are, however, obvious differences that have to be considered (e. g. Bennett et al. , 2008; Helsper and Eynon, 2010). The challenge for HRM therefore is to identify actual digitally induced changes in attitudes, qualifications, behaviours and expectation of younger employees, while yet avoiding any stereotyping and considering heterogeneity of actual changes. Based on this, the strategic and operative adaptation of HRM to a changing workforce constitutes a step necessary to support organizations further on. In this way, “digital employees” constitute a first notable area of digital changes and challenges of the HR profession (e. g. D’Netto and Ahmed, 2012; and the contributions in Ng et al. , 2012).