Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:14 Hello everyone. Today I want to talk about HR technology and the broad context of understanding and demystifying the HR technology issue. And it isn't just the market and the tools and the vendors, it's the issue because one of the things that's happened in the human resources profession and as well as most of the rest of business is technology is not an add-on or something you delegate to it or something you buy to automate something you're doing. It is fundamental to your job and in hr it touches everything we do and it is a part of every decision we make. When you look at the capabilities of HR professionals in technology, it's one of the lowest rated capabilities. Only six and a half percent of HR people feel that they're really experts on this and fewer than 20% feel that they're really capable and competent at it.
Speaker 1 00:01:08 And so I want to talk a little bit about why that is and what to do about it. First of all, as I said before, you have no choice If you don't know what HTML means or sequel or God forbid, somebody mentions an N F T in a meeting and you sort of tend like you understand but actually don't know what they're talking about, you're not gonna be able to do your job. There are no jobs in HR left where you can ignore the issues of technology. You don't have to be a designer or an engineer to understand what the role of technology plays and what you as an HR person need to do to design, build, create, or use these tools. The second thing you see in our data is that senior HR people do know a lot about technology. There's almost a linear increase in capabilities as you become more senior in your career because even CHROs are constantly being asked to make decisions about how we're gonna solve a given problem, how we're gonna save money, how we're gonna get better data, how we're gonna improve the employee experience.
Speaker 1 00:02:09 And underneath that problem is a set of technologies. The third thing that I want to mention is it isn't just understanding the technology itself, which I'll talk about in a minute. It's also understanding the market, the marketplace, the vendors, but even more importantly than that, how to use technology in your company. This isn't something you delegate to it, but on the other hand, you can't have a hundred people selecting and implementing technology all over the place cuz that creates a mess too. How you select vendors who is responsible for the architecture, having a team in HR who does take responsibility for the architecture or a person, it doesn't have to be a whole team. If you don't do that, you're gonna be constantly catching up, falling behind, doing projects where you're not ready. We were on a couple of calls this morning where companies said, I've been in this project to improve employee experience for for eight or 10 weeks and 10 weeks into the project somebody raised their hand and said, I don't really know what you're talking about and I haven't been understanding you for about the last six weeks.
Speaker 1 00:03:12 Could come somebody explain what that is. Obviously you don't wanna be in that situation and not everybody in HR will become specialists and everything. So let me answer the question of what we do. Number one, you as an HR professional have to feel comfortable with the language. We're gonna put together a glossary for you to help, but if you don't know what SQL is, you don't know what H T M L is, you don't know what a database is, you don't know what the cloud is, you don't know what a hybrid cloud is, you don't understand blockchain, you, you're gonna be kept behind. It's almost like not knowing how to use your computer or not knowing how to use Windows, not knowing how to use Excel. These are terms that you have to understand. Now, you don't have to take a course on HTML to know what HTML is, but if you don't know what it is, you may not know whether you wanna take the course <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:04:07 So that's number one. Fluency. Fluency with the language, fluency with the terms. You can do that yourself by going to Wikipedia. We're gonna put together a glossary for you. And honestly being to some degree a fan, I listen to podcasts all the time and I read all sorts of magazine articles and keep up with tech. In some sense this has to be a little bit of a sideline interest for you so you don't get intimidated when it comes into a project. Number two, there need to be specialists in your company. I don't think you can really run a company anymore without someone who worries about the technology in HR and and it's beyond it. We have very, very complex systems in hr, payroll, learning, recruiting, talent, mobility, career management, employee engagement, feedback, voice of the employee. Every one of those areas, including many that I didn't mention, have dozens and dozens of sub-dimensions, complexities, vendors and maturity levels in them.
Speaker 1 00:05:08 You as an HR professional don't have to be an expert on all of them. You could choose to be if you'd like and that's a great career, but there needs to be somebody in the company who focuses on that. One of the really important best practices that comes out from all of our research is the idea of running hr, like a product organization where you have product managers who own different domains and those product managers look at the end-to-end solution you're trying to create and they build a roadmap step by step, month by month, quarter by quarter, year by year of what you're gonna do across the company to continuously improve that product or solution area. And what technologies will play. Product management is a tremendously useful paradigm for HR and we are actually building a lot of content on that in our academy. Separate from product management is the platform in most companies today that sell products and services.
Speaker 1 00:06:04 There is a platform group. The platform group takes care of the financial systems, the CRM systems, the email, the communications, well that's basically what's going on in hr. You're learning and development solutions need a platform. Your recruiting solutions need a platform. Your employee voice and listening solutions need a platform. Somebody has to worry about what goes in that platform. Is it all gonna be Workday or Oracle or SAP or are we gonna buy a whole bunch of independent tools? So in addition to your role as a product manager or a business partner, someone needs to own the platform and the architecture. And like I said, that doesn't have to be a hundred people, but at least somebody has to worry about it and that person can go to conferences and keep up with technology and use our research and talk to people like us about what's going on in the market.
Speaker 1 00:06:51 The third thing is the curation of technology. There's a study done by Okta that talks about employee tools. This is an identity management system, so they have a lot of data about how many systems companies have and they found that the average large company has 140 employee applications. So whether you like it or not, you're going to be flooded with a lot of tools. Some of them will be mobile apps, some of them will be systems, performance management tools, coaching tools, feedback tools, on and on and on and on. Do you really need them all? Probably not. Most companies have reached the conclusion that it's better not to have a hundred best of breed things if they don't talk to each other. Rather have 30 things that work really well that work together. So we get integrated data and 30 or 20 vendors that we really trust and we can work with over time to make their products better and better and better to meet our needs as opposed to, oh, here's a really cool innovative thing, let's check it out.
Speaker 1 00:07:56 Now there are companies that pride themselves on being innovative business practice and people practice companies. Unilever's a good example of that. These companies have experimentation teams, they experiment with new technology all the time. They try new tools, they do pilots, they do AB tests. You don't have to do that. But if you are that kind of company, you may have 140 tools, but make sure you have a process of evaluating them and integrating them because at the end of it all, if the employee experience isn't positive, doesn't matter how great the tool is, people aren't gonna be happy and you're gonna be wasting your money. So that's the third thing. This problem of curation, and as I said you, you have to think a little bit about your company culture. Are you the kind of company that likes to experiment with new things and can tolerate that?
Speaker 1 00:08:41 Or would you rather simplify the environment of focus on results and outcome? The fourth issue that comes up a lot in technology and hr technology is data. And I have a bit of experience with this. I worked at at a database company for seven years, eight years. Let me take you a minute to talk about data. First of all, the original concepts of data and data warehousing in HR go back to transactional data, payroll data, job data, job history, data compliance, data, maybe skills, even though that's been relatively new. So we used to have this relational database. Relational database basically is like a file cabinet and there was basically a manila folder for each employee and we just stuck stuff in there. And if we needed it, we just filtered through the folders and we could find what we needed. Well the data problem has changed dramatically.
Speaker 1 00:09:31 We now have sentiment data. How do you feel? How did you respond to a survey? We have performance management data, your check-ins, your ratings, your periodic reviews. We have reputation data. How many friends do you have in the company? How many relationships do you have? We have career data. What jobs have you had? What skills have you uh acquired? What projects have you worked on? What roles have you had? What countries have you worked in? What business functions have you been in? We have demographic data. Are you a minority? Are you in an intersectionality group? Are you old? Are you young? Do you speak this language? Do you speak that language? And we actually now have data on your location. We have data on your travel history. We know whether you've been vaccinated and in fact if you use Microsoft Viva or other products like that, we know your email traffic, we know how much time you spend in meetings.
Speaker 1 00:10:28 We know whether you have a lot of communications with people inside the company versus outside the company. And if you look at O N A organizational network analysis, we also know how quickly you respond to messages. Who are the people that are your trusted connections? Who are the people that are your untrusted connections? And of course we have compliance data about whether you've been harassed or you're a harasser or maybe you're a biased interviewer and you only interview white people. I mean all of this data is out there. And as you think about HR technology and the systems you buy, data has to be a part of the decision for most companies. The number one criteria for a tool is, is it easy to use and will the employees like it? Will it grab hold and will it actually have an impact? But there's another issue of what kind of data does it capture?
Speaker 1 00:11:19 What are we gonna do with that data? Where are we gonna put it? How are we gonna organize it so that it's usable? And how are we going to be able to perform ongoing reports and analytics? We're gonna publish a report I just finished on the learning record store market, which is the learning space. But just in learning alone, we have data about course completions activity, time spent in various digital objects, virtual reality which creates vast amounts of data. And God forbids, somebody says, Hey, tell me what we're spending money on and learning and what's driving the most impact. You won't to answer that question if you don't have this data. So, so that's the fourth area that I want to highlight is somebody in your company has to look at HR data in a very holistic way and don't assume that the vendor's solutions are gonna do this all for you.
Speaker 1 00:12:06 By the way, all of these vendors, Oracle, SAP and Workday, prism, et cetera, even vizier, they have incredible systems for collecting data, but most of them are are focused on their transactional data, not everything. So you're gonna need a data architecture and a data dictionary and you're gonna have to work with it and you must work with it, uh, regardless of how much data experience you have. The fifth thing I wanna talk a little bit about in technology is the fact that it never ends. When I was at Deloitte, we used to do projects where we would do what we would call an HR transformation. And usually the HR transformation was revolving around a digital transformation. In the digital transformation was involved around selecting and implementing a platform. So it was, let's implement Oracle and that will be our digital transformation. Let's implement Workday and that will be our digital transformation.
Speaker 1 00:12:58 Nothing could be further from the truth. <laugh>, I mean if there's anything we've learned about digital technologies and technology in general, it's a journey that never ends. And when you start a massive replacement or upgrade of a technology, you get into new relationships with new vendors, you get into new technologies and you go down a new path to the journey. Just like in life when you get married, when you have children, when you buy a house, when you move to a new city, that's not just an event, that's something you live with, it's something that affects your life going forward. And that's the same thing with technology. So I think you need to think about HR technology as a fundamental capability in your company and a never ending series of roadmaps and iterative strategies to improve it. And sometimes you're gonna pick a vendor, it's not gonna work.
Speaker 1 00:13:52 The vendor's roadmap isn't what you wanted. The vendor gets acquired, the vendor has a new CEO and he or she decides to go into a different space and your company no longer is their core market. This happens. So vendor management, getting to know the vendors as companies, contingency planning, working with the procurement department on validating and valuing the companies who do businesses so you know how big they are and whether they're gonna be around creating iterative development processes inside of your company so that as the vendor roadmaps change, you are ready for that and not outsourcing everything to a third party. Now I know there's a tendency to outsource technology to big players, companies like IBM and to some degree towers and others make a big business of this. And really the whole cloud technology business model is about outsourcing. And let me make a comment on that.
Speaker 1 00:14:48 All of the billion dollar plus market cap companies today are valued high because they're cloud vendors. In other words, when you buy a cloud vendor, the recurring revenue that you pay them is an annuity for them. So they get a very high multiple on that renewing revenue. You've basically outsourced your technology to them. We used to run that ourselves and only pay maintenance fees. That means that the relationship you have with that vendor is very, very close, whether you know it or not. And what they do or don't do has a direct impact on your future. So managing technology today is not really managing technology, it's managing relationships, it's managing interconnections, it's managing integrations, it's managing your internal processes of IT versus HR so that the systems that you do buy are always available and always useful. And the vendors, various machinations that they go through in their business models don't trip you up.
Speaker 1 00:15:54 And so that's another big area of technology that's so fundamental to hr. A final point I wanna talk about in HR technology is something very new that I think is maybe one of the biggest trends taking place. You've been talking a lot about employee experience and engagement and productivity and coming back to work and redesigning the workplace and creating a hybrid work model. You're all working on that. I know those are massive, massive issues, but the bigger thing going on under the covers is HR is becoming a creator market. You really can't buy off the shelf solutions that will work perfectly for your company. There are a lot of them and they're all great, but it will turn out that you will wanna tweak them and modify them and configure them and change them. And best of all, use them for things that come up that maybe the vendor never designed them for.
Speaker 1 00:16:50 And so the big future trend in HR technology is to buy creator tools. And if I go back to my early days in it, when I worked for IBM and we used to sell mainframes and PCs and stuff, what companies did is they evaluated technology based, not on how well it did what it was supposed to do but how flexible it was to build things on top of. And that's a big thing you need to think about. If you look at vendors like ServiceNow, which is probably the fastest growing large company in the hr, the reason people like it is that they call it a citizen developer tool, which is a really interesting phrase. We as HR people, I'm not a software engineer. I mean I know a little bit about software, but I'm developing things all the time. I'm using tools like HubSpot or Monday or Excel or Word or whatever it is.
Speaker 1 00:17:45 I might use HTML to build something that I need to to do my job or that we need in our company. This is why Microsoft is gonna have such a massive impact on the market cuz Microsoft is essentially a development tools company. Everything Microsoft sells primarily is used to build something else. And so as you go out and look at technologies and talk to vendors, think about the fact that no matter how well it was designed, you are going to want to create things with it and around it and in conjunction with it. And so is the company building the tools, the configurations, the design experiences that you can use to design employee programs, experiences, responses to the pandemic. And that leads me to some final point, uh, on this podcast. We're now coming out of the pandemic in many parts of the world. We have lots of conversations with HR teams and the big reset is really continuing.
Speaker 1 00:18:46 You are going to be going back to work and designing a new work experience, a hybrid work model, much more contingent and various different forms of labor because there is such a shortage of talent and shortage of skills in the market today. And basically shortage of people that you're going to need to understand technology well. And this idea of using technology in an integrated way, understanding the nature and the tools themselves and the language of technology, having an integrated architecture team to keep you out of trouble and then thinking about technology as not just tools but vendors and solutions and things to create on top of is going to be fundamental to your success as we come out of the pandemic and go into the next economic cycle. I know I covered a lot of topics on the podcast today, but I just felt urgently this was needed. I really recommend you read the HR Technology 2021 report. It's really everything I know every year and we don't charge for it. It's on our website and spread it around. Send me questions if you'd like to talk about any of the things inside of it. I think if there's anything I'll leave you with, it's that HR technology is both the most exciting, fast growing and maybe interesting part of technology and it is now a fundamental, essential part of your job in hr. Thank you very much.
