Digital Human Resource and Employee Wellbeing: A Case for Responsible Digital Work Engagement in Nigeria

The operations of contemporary organisations, including Human Resource (HR) functions, are predicted to become fully digital. However, the degree to which this transition implicates employees’ health and wellbeing requires more in-depth scrutiny, especially in the context of developing economies such as Nigeria, where the availability of related resources is limited and the drive for financial sustainability is higher than ever. This chapter explores the future of digitalising HR roles in Nigeria’s employment terrain, with a specific focus on a responsible approach to managing risks to employees’ health and wellbeing that stem from digital transformation. By adopting an interpretive qualitative methodology and thematically analysing data from 33 semi-structured interviews with respondents across five organisations from the Nigerian banking sector, operating within three cosmopolitan cities, the study corroborated the long-standing findings in the extant literature – showcasing the extent to which the digitalisation of HRM functions is perceived to be desirable due to its associated convenience, efficiency, high-productivity and profitability. Likewise, the risks to employees’ health and wellbeing (including excessive digital work engagement and compromise of work-life balance, increased stress level, and others) as a consequence of digital transformation and the culture of bringing the workplace into the home or toother remote locations was also laid bare. To address this problem, the study proposed and developed a ‘responsible digital work transformation framework’, which organisations need to embrace as they move forward in order to harness the associated benefits of digital transformation while averting the associated risks to workforce’s health and wellbeing risks. The contributions, implications, limitations, and direction for future study on this topic are discussed.