HR Technology

9 Exciting Trends and Opportunities in HR for 2019
Grateful to  Orlando Imperatore : Flickr 2018

Toss away the crystal ball!  Of course there is no rational way to ‘predict’ what will be important for HR leaders and business execs in 2019. In almost every case, each organisation is on a unique journey of people transformation, technical empowerment, culture mind-shift or simple operational improvements.

So my list is a collection of stuff which I’ve happened to engaged HR and other leaders about in the last 12 months and which was being considered for future plans. Perhaps only 1 is of interest to you, maybe all 9 – It doesn’t really matter. 

Here we go! and in no particular order

  1. PA – Personal Analytics 
    • HR Analytics has become an important tool for supporting organisational decision making around people. But it tends to support the employer more than the employee. As we see Employee Engagement, Happiness and changes in the Workforce and Workplace take center stage, there is a gaping hole around providing individuals with Personal Analytics in order for them to make better personal and business related decision within a continually fast-paced and constantly changing work environment.
  2. Trust
    • As we see new technologies such as Chat-bots, Robotic Process Automation, Machine learning Algorithms, Personal data-sharing and Tracking cozying up next to  human workers, the trust relationship which underpins so many things in our organisations is being diluted. The need is not just about building trust in technologies which are performing ‘human-like’ tasks or gathering our data, but effectively managing the implications for functions such as HR who have custodianship over some of these new-age tools. 
  3. Non-Exec Talent Coach 
    • Executive coaching is a mature offering, but as the nature of work and the variety of relationships between an organisation and a worker develop  ( I don’t want to say employee, because many are not technically that), the need for Independent Development Coaches at  lower levels, and which is not funded by the employer is being sought. Some of this demand exists because younger talented individuals do not want to mirror the behavior of current leaders (Think about many current Bank Leaders…. not a good model to follow), but want to become the best version of themselves without company influence.
  4. Beyond Engagement
    •  I’ve never been a fan of culture or engagement surveys – statistically they are full of errors and often based on pop-psychology. However listening with ‘Data Ears’ is becoming more relevant. In other words understand the mood of the company, or Engagement levels (Customer or Employee) or Happiness levels by analyzing the data trail left by employees, customers, your supply chain seems far more reliable and less prone to typical survey inaccuracies. 
  5. Personal Data Repository
    • One of my favorites. I’ve been engaging on this topic for a number of years. But with the changing workforce landscape, the growing contingent and gig enthronements, workers want the ability to store their own work history (think mini HR system), including Learning records, Pay and Benefit data, Performance scores, basic biographics, Job and Position history. They want control over their own data, and the ability to share it and withdraw it easily with an employer. This is not your typical Linkedin profile BTW. Big opportunity for HR Software vendors.
  6. Communication
    • Not necessarily new, but becoming an area of focus again as organisations get lost if their digital and technology transformation activities. Humans are irrational, make mistakes and are not perfect. Technology, with all its benefits, has the ability to create sterile and perfect environments, which are not conducive to human productivity or happiness. Making sure we don’t capitulate our responsibility to communicate to machines/technology is important. 
  7. The Science of HR 
    •  HR is actually a lot more complex that most people realize. Often the individual HR activities are not complex (some can be though), but ensuring there is alignment across a multitude of interrelated HR activities is where the real complexity lies, and where things often go wrong. Underpinning all HR decisions is the level of HR Maturity. When HR activities are not executed based on the Maturity level, you typically get Executive despondency towards HR or frustrated HR leadership. 
  8. Instant answers to HR Tech
    • The fast-paced and continuously changing work environments are demanding HR and IT leaders make quick, but informed HR Technology buying decisions. Gone of the days that it takes 4-8 months to do a traditional RFP, only to discover the new SaaS tools you were considering have significantly changed. There are some great services, analysts and tools available to speed up these decisions.
  9. HR Operating Model Change 
    • Many organisations are realizing the traditional Dave Ulrich HR operating model needs some adaptation. Not a radical change (as it is mostly still working), but a focus change to ensure the operating model can support ‘speed and agility’ needs of modern organisations. Changes include the ‘Business Partner’ reaching into the customer and supply chain world, the ‘Centre of Excellence’ (CoE) becoming a Networking Management Function and the ‘Shared Service Centre’ transforming into a Digital Data Centre.

That’s it!. And why not 10 I hear you ask, no reason, I only had 9 to share. Whats the point of making stuff up 🙂  

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In Search of Imperfection
written for InsideHR

People leaders need to get the balance between technology, environments and human irrationality right in an increasingly digital world, writes Rob Scott, who explains that there are a number of considerations in optimising employee performance in the process

I recently attended a presentation by Alexander Kjerulf, the Chief Happiness Officer at Danish company Woohoo Inc. He makes the point that we very often, but incorrectly assume employees are happy at work when they have job satisfaction. According to Kjerulf, job satisfaction is what we “think” about our jobs, while happiness is what we “feel” about our jobs and work environment.

The employee performance conundrum
This was timely as I have been engaging with several leading-edge clients who are struggling to find appropriate ways of improving their employee performance and engagement levels. These companies have all the great benefits and perks such as free food, zone-out pods, wellness programs and gym membership which attract talent, they have tier-1 HR technology and collaboration tools, use and explore automation, robotics and AI to augment employee capability and remove humans from work which is done better by machines. Wow, everyone should be happy, satisfied and engaged. But they’re not.

Josh Bersin, a leading global HR technology analyst cites challenges with engagement, productivity and employee experience as one of four forces disrupting organisations today. In his presentation A Wild New World of HR Technology, he alludes to the lack of employee performance and productivity improvement, overwhelmed employees and marginal improvements in employee engagement despite all the great technology we continually introduce into our lives and workplaces.

“Wow, everyone should be happy, satisfied and engaged. But they’re not”

Why leaders need to empower people to improve employee performance
For several years, I’ve been driving the point that effective digital work environments are not about throwing more technology at people and problems. Unless you empower people to do more with the technology in a modified human behavioural way, you are likely to create the challenges Josh Bersin highlights.

Furthermore, as people leaders, it’s important that we figuratively step back to see the broader technical environments we are busy creating – not just from a software and apps perspective, but inclusive of the steel, concrete, glass, noise, space and technical gadgetry we combine to form our “happy” work environments.

Often these environments are created to serve rationality and optimisation but can unintentionally become “technology concentration camps” – an environment which is perfectly rational, but dreadfully unliveable.

In my view, we have become singularly focused on building environments and supporting processes using modern and emerging technical assets in order to attract, retain, engage and develop people. But we have overlooked the potential mismatch between these creations and the fact that people are not perfectly rational and don’t operate well in sterile, passionless environments.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m a technology fan – it underpins our human desire to constantly progress and improve. However, we should realise as human beings, we are at our happiest when we can be irrational, make mistakes, share emotions, be spontaneous, indulge in passions, seek out the mysterious and have faith.

Allowing employees to be human
It was the French writer Ellul who said “The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made an enormous error in misunderstanding this aspect of human nature and presumed to exorcise all that was not rational.”

“As human beings, we are at our happiest when we can be irrational, make mistakes, share emotions, be spontaneous, indulge in passions, seek out the mysterious and have faith”

As we evolve our digital work environments, shifting tasks to robotics and AI away from human jobs which we are not good at, are less accurate at, or are slow to do in comparison to technology, we will be left with a ‘perfectly optimised’ human worker, but perhaps not a happy or engaged one. The ‘perfect’ technology environment may be producing the opposite effects of employee performance, happiness, engagement and productivity.

Our challenge as people leaders is to get the balance between technology, our environments and human irrationality right – building the perfect ‘imperfect’ environment is the goal. Those that succeed will be the attractive organisations of the future, sought out by talented people.

3 key insights: employee performance in the digital world

  • Our digital work environments are increasingly becoming optimised and rational, driven by technology. But when we put humans, who are not perfectly rational, into these environments, we are impacting engagement and happiness.
  • We have an abundance of technology in our personal and work lives, yet evidence suggests that employee performance, human productivity and engagement has only marginally improved.
  • Our desire to remain competitive organisations has necessitated leveraging modern technologies and shifting human tasks to machines and AI. Organisations who understand how to optimise, but at the same time not dehumanise will be the successful companies of the future.

Saba buys Halogen

News out today (23 Feb)  that Saba Software will acquire Halogen Software for $293 million. So what will the new “SAB-o-GEN” baby look like? What are the Common genes, the Unique genes, and who has the Dominant ones. If you are a current client should you be prepared for ‘baby sitting’ while the infant grows up? Time will tell.

sabogen

Has Technology Weakened HR?
Picture: 周小逸 Ian : Flickr
12 May 2016

This seems somewhat of an odd statement to make in todays technology obsessed world – surely HR technology has allowed People practitioners to greatly improve efficiency by reducing manual and paper-based activities, improving data access & reporting, reducing errors, helping employees make better decisions and ensuring compliance to policy and procedure.

This is of course true at a transaction level, but herein lies the problem. The way vendors have generally designed HR technology is not an accurate reflection of how professional HR and Talent managers think, nor does it signal an understanding of the complexities in Professional HR Management. In fact the slicing-up of HR into different software modules along ‘logic’ and ‘transaction’ lines of thinking has created and perpetuates the view that HR is simply a set of somewhat loosely interrelated basic transactions.

And surely that can’t be too difficult to get right! ah, yeah!  But yet time and time again we see HR functions under attack for poor performance and low value contribution. With these perceptions abound, no wonder there is doubt among some C-levels that HR is needed.

If only HR Management was so simple and logical. But it isn’t. There are a significant amount of people dimensions used by HR professionals which are not logically inclined or lend themselves to be developed into a ‘transaction’, let alone a software module. Think about important people management facets such as ‘Ethics’ , ‘Style’, ‘Diversity’ and ‘Values’ – these are key HR influences in achieving particular strategic business outcomes, and they are fundamentally intertwined into such things as learning, performance, development, communication and knowledge sharing. But they are ‘non-existing pieces’ in the HR software puzzle.

This is not a jibe at HR Software vendors. In fact some vendors clearly understand the impact of these gaps and are working hard to address them. Particularly those vendors who are focused on superior technical integration between modules.

They realize that while they have in many cases reduced HR to modular transactions to make it easy for end users, they also understand that the all-important ‘HR complexity value factor’ is partly resolved when effective and seamless integration across these modules occurs. The combination of modular interaction offers some support in achieving strategic HR objectives. Keep going vendors, there is lots more to do in this space!

HR Technology has inadvertently contributed to a weakening of professional HR outputs, but the finger should however point directly at the HR leader who has allowed the function to be reduced to a set of modules and transactions.

It’s an easy way out for poor performing HR leaders, and provides an opportunity to shift the blame onto technology. Professional HR management is not an easy job, in fact it is highly complex, with over 40 major elements or activities being continuously juggled to produce desired business outputs. Those that are successful also understand how HR technology should be used and positioned to enable people to achieve great things.

Do you have an opinion on this?

Is WFM becoming the new HR?

For many years HR practitioners have been fighting among themselves and with their executive management about the value and importance of HR, Talent management and HR technology. It’s often been an ugly and public battle of personal believes and experience rather than factual and evidence based findings. What’s more, HR people have very strong opinions about being the people behavioural experts and find it very displeasing when they are challenged in this area of how to best manage people in an organization.

Coupled with this is the lack of a clear relationship between HR and company profits and value. Certainly most of the operations people I have met, don’t fully understand the value link that HR purports to have, and often are following processes which HR drives (e.g. Performance management, Goal setting and Career planning) from a compliance perspective rather than a clear business value perspective. While I have no doubt that professional HR has got lots of value to offer, in the most, these departments are too keen to adopt the ‘next flavour of the month’, implement someone else’s ‘best practice’ and expect line managers to love their technology solutions that mostly make the HR’s departments life easier, but are often seen as extra work for the operations and line managers.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s not all doom and gloom…..someone has been listening and doing something about it.

Unfortunately it’s not the general HR fraternity, but rather Operations managers and WFM vendors. After years of experiencing the effects of HR’s ongoing battle with itself, Ops managers have decided to ‘just get on with it’ and are enhancing and using WFM people solutions that are linked directly to the P&L account, have the ability to show exactly where money is being spent, can use real-time data to enhance business decisions and in the process, engage with their employees and optimize productivity – just what the executives ordered!. And as business leaders continue to drive out unnecessary cost and increase productivity, the business cases behind these new WFM tools is simple. Quite often they can easily save an organisation a minimum of 1-2% on annual employee costs and can generate a return on investment (ROI) in months.

All this is quietly happening while HR continues to argue among themselves and promise their organisations that {insert your favourite HR fad here} will change the world.

In some cases HR has ownership of WFM tools, but mostly they are not the primary owners, but rather have a secondary role ensuring the accuracy of data flows between HR, Payroll and the WFM solutions. Many in HR may be thinking the core of a WFM solution is nothing different from the Time management functionality in their HR system which provides scheduling and rostering capability. While there are many similarities between HR and WFM solutions, over the last 5 years the complexity around awards and labour agreement interpretation, as well as the need to plan and optimize people, assets, geo-location, customer needs and competitive business strategies, has seen the explosion of specialist functionality in WFM tools that would not easily be replicated in HR solutions, especially newer SaaS based HR software.

And while HR is demanding to be the source of truth for all things people, but never quite getting the alignment with day-to-day business practices right, WFM vendors saw the gap to add functionality into their software that has traditionally been the domain of HR and Talent systems. It’s now pretty common to see WFM software solutions with Employee self-service (ESS) capability, Mobility, Leave & absence management, Competency & skills management, Employee costing & budgeting management, Planned versus actual task management (goal setting) and even Engagement capability which support team or individual recognition (often using gamification), shift swapping based on personal needs and survey capability to highlight how staff are feeling about their assigned rosters and work assignments.

What WFM solutions are achieving in the people management space is nothing short of amazing – HR is envious! The reason it’s so successful is the seamless integration with operations management activities. And it doesn’t stop there. Modern WFM tools are branching out and building links and capability to Planned-maintenance, Sales & forecasting, Contingent labour management and Financial management solutions.

In many respects WFM is winning the people effectiveness battle at the operations level. Some WFM vendors are not stopping their advancement into HR’s space either with a number of HR and Payroll acquisitions by WFM vendors taking place recently. Perhaps it is WFM that will become the new HR, at least at the operating and tactical level, leaving the strategic people activities to the current HR functions. Watch this space.

Thanks to Shane Granger @gmggranger for promting the idea over the week-end

Dear HR Vendors, are you thinking about Personal Data Stores?
keysWe have all seen the headlines regarding the amount of new data we create every year – it’s in excess of Two Quadrillion Megabytes (that’s 2 with 21 trailing zero’s) – by any standards that is a huge number and it continues to grow, spurred on by growing continuous connectivity to the internet, mobile access and tonnes of free storage space . In this process of creating data, we are also breading a new culture of data ownership – one of personal empowerment, which is giving rise to the Personal Data Store (PDS).
When you think about it, organizations have gathered, stored and managed personal data to serve their own benefits, and allowed employees and managers to access the data on a “right-to-see” basis  – they have had to carry the cost of creating and managing this data too, typically through ERP and cloud based HR/Talent systems. Much of the data organizations want from the workforce is now being created and managed by employees in cloud based tools and applications.
Over the next few years these Personal Data Stores will mature and help individuals to gather, store, access, update, use and share their data in a sophisticated and powerful way. In particular these tools will allow individuals to choose what information they wish to share, with who and for what purpose the data can be used, including the creation and sharing of new data based on the initially shared data. Personal Data Stores won’t just contain employee related data, but will help individuals manage vast amounts of data relevant to different business and personal relationships they create. These could include Health records, Scholastic and Education records, Business transactions, Employee transactions, Identity data, Life events, Government records to name a few.
While this may not initially trigger off too many alarm bells, the more you think about it, the more you’ll realize the implications on your relationships with employees created by the shift in power of data ownership from the organization to the employee. The Personal Data Store will become a new epi-center for business opportunity. Personal Data Stores are destined to become the “electricity supplier” of the 21st Century.
What will this mean for future HR systems as data ownership and management become person-centric ? Here are some of my thoughts:
  • HR systems will need to cater for an individual type API – the ability to interface with multiple cloud based Personal Data Stores or to buy into a PDSaaS (Personal-Data-Store as-a-Service) platform;
  • HR systems will need to export new and updated data back to the individual Personal Data Store;
  • Organizations will need to accept an employees “Terms & Conditions” to use shared data;
  • The ability to pay the employee for use of some data or pay for data used to generate business value or continued use of historic data after the employee has left the employ will become necessary;
  • HR systems or other systems will need to accept disparate data elements that could assist the organization eg. a list of Face book contacts that have access to possible job candidates;
  • Sophisticated OCR, facial,voice and other recognition tools to “read” non-text based shared material;
  • The Personal Data Store will in effect become an ESS tool – updating the PDS will update the HR system; and
  • HR systems will need to accept new types of verification that is attached to the shared data eg. a qualification may come with an integrated verification flag provided by the learning institution.
While I’m sure this is a but “far-out” for many readers, there are  some obvious advantages that this new data ownership model could have:
  • The quality and accuracy of HR data is improved;
  • The richness and completeness of employee HR data can be improved;
  • Reduced cost and effort for HR functions to maintain HR systems;
  • Improved reporting and opportunity to leverage new information for the company benefit;
  • Reduced duplication of data;
  • Richer and easier on boarding for employees and contractors; and
  • Lower data privacy risks
We have a way to go before this becomes main-stream, but it is already starting with some social tools such as LinkedIn. Personal Data Stores are more sophisticated than the current social tools, but if our history of the Internet and technology growth is anything to go by it won’t be too long before this becomes a reality. Lets hope the HR Vendors are leading the charge.