Announcer:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We are recording from HR Tech in Vegas, brought to you by our friends and partners at Fuel50. Here’s your host, Mark Feffer.
Mark Feffer:
This is People Tech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer and we’re recording today from the exposition floor of the HR Technology Conference and Exposition and Conference, and talking with Robin Schooling. Robin, could you take a minute and introduce yourself?
Robin Schooling:
Sure. Hi, Mark. So glad to be here and I currently work for CLO in our consulting division, which is quite vast actually. But deep down I still define myself as an HR practitioner. That’s how I started. I started in recruiting, went into HR, back and forth between HR and recruiting, and that’s how I view myself still.
Mark Feffer:
Okay. Well this is the first HR tech conference, I think, in three years, a lot of people, a lot of exhibitors. When you walk around, what’s your sense? What do you think people are talking about? And what do you think people are concerned about?
Robin Schooling:
I think what’s struck me is that we’re kind of all about the basics this year. I don’t see, I have not latched onto a lot of really, here’s an extremely cutting edge new way of viewing things. I think we’re back to the folks that I’ve stopped and talked to are kind of reinforcing their core from a product standpoint, their core offering. They’ve strengthened it. So if I’m looking at a payroll provider, yeah, they’ve added things like, oh, they may be talking about on demand pay or something like that, but it’s almost like a doubling down on what the key offerings are, as opposed to everybody trying to be everything.
Mark Feffer:
Do you think that specialization is getting real momentum where people are going to start building narrower products and integrate wherever they can?
Robin Schooling:
I do think so. I think that as time has gone on and we’ve learned that integrations and back and forth bilateral integrations and things like that that are easy enough to do, really, I think that I have run into more HR professionals, some colleagues, peers that work in different industries that are much more in tune and much more comfortable with let me get the best product for a certain need that I have and I know I can make that talk to this other product that I have or my core system or my system of record. And that’s been a bit of a change because there’s there that thinking of let me buy an all in one solution. Yeah. That’s still there, certainly for some people, but adding on the unique tool that is going to solve my unique business need, I think people are more and more willing to do that.
Mark Feffer:
Let me shift gears a bit and talk about skills.
Robin Schooling:
Okay.
Mark Feffer:
There’s a saying that you can build skills, you can borrow skills, or you can buy skills. Now that makes for perfect sense, but it seems to me in practice, it’s got to be a challenge. Especially if you’re in a larger company you have to balance all of those options across your workforce. What do you think? And what do you think employers are doing?
Robin Schooling:
I think that there are more employers that are aware of the need to build than there have been in the past. There will always be those who are borrowing, certainly. I’m with the consulting firm. We wouldn’t exist if people didn’t need to borrow skills. That will never go away. And there are some things that somebody’s going to need for a special project, what have you. Buying skills, there’s only so much to go around, depending on what that skillset is. So I think there’s a movement and there’s more of a momentum towards, and it kind of happens from different angles because there’s the talk of internal mobility and taking our talent that we already have within our organization and deploying them elsewhere. Or having them not so much be on a job as be in a role perhaps where they’re going and they’re using their skills and their skill sets in different teams or different project areas.
And so I think out of that has grown this awareness that we can do that. We can deploy the people we have already in different ways. So since we’ve started doing that, why can’t we put some time and effort into allowing people to develop within the organization? And so I think you see that internally with learning academies that are growing up. And I think the pandemic strengthened that because things that used to be done in person, right, oh, let’s grow our team of whatever, marketing experts. I’m just picking the skillset. Right?
And there would be, well let’s have a insight training and we’ll take people through this course curriculum over the course of six, 12 months, whatever, and we’ll grow our own in house. The pandemic forced organizations to put that online, made it easier using doing work technology, using HR technology to kind of build off that LMS and let people… It’s finding that balance between letting employees create their own career and what they want to do. And that’s a part of it. What am I interested in doing? Where do I want to grow? What do I want to develop? Let me choose my adventure, choose my courses. That exists certainly. But there’s also now companies realizing we can harness that and promote paths.
They have to tie that together though with a rethinking of how they view compensation, perhaps, how they view titles in the organization because it’s folks not necessarily, to use the old cliche, the lattice, and that becomes part of the skills conversation. I may be developing skills that in the old hierarchy kind of didn’t make sense.
Mark Feffer:
Where’s the manager? And what’s their role in all of this?
Robin Schooling:
I think there are two distinct managers in this sort of scenario. There’s the people manager, who’s the coach, who’s the career coach, who’s the development driver for that employee, and then there’s the project leader or the team lead if somebody’s growing their skills and they’re going in and working on something new that they’re learning and discovering. So there may be how to do the job manager, which can be different than the career coach manager. So thinking in a hierarchy or in an organization that job manager might be the, okay, I’m tracking your day to day performance or whatever. But that career coach is also manager, people manager is a partner in that. And so it was kind of two managers potentially for someone.
Mark Feffer:
Well isn’t there a don’t bother me with this manager?
Robin Schooling:
Those managers exist. Yes, they do. And I think those are the managers that need to exit the organizations.
Mark Feffer:
Well it just seems to me that you always hear about this level of management or bureaucracy that can bring the highest priority projects to a halt.
Robin Schooling:
Yes.
Mark Feffer:
And how do you reach those people to convince them learning is important?
Robin Schooling:
You know, that takes it up to the organizational level. That takes it to the culture. That takes it to what the C-suite is talking about and saying and reinforcing. And if an organization determines that they want to be a learning organization and people coming in to do their best work will be constantly learning and maybe shifting off to a different area than they were originally hired for, that commitment to do that has to come from the highest level and then has to be consistent. And then those managers that don’t support that need to not be with that organization perhaps.
You know, think of the classic example where we see employees being held back because their manager doesn’t want to release them to another role. And that’s not even talking skills. That’s just talking I want to do an internal transfer or promotion or something. And so I always kind of get a little twinge when I run into it where an organization has this requirement that the existing manager quote approve and sign off and sometimes that existing manager doesn’t want to do that or because they’re giving up, oh well I hired them and train them and develop them and I’m going to lose my investment in them.
And it’s the same with organizations that have policies, which I despise, of you must be in a given role for 12 months, 18 months, whatever, before you can even apply for something else. If you’re really a learning organization, you want what’s best for the organization, your goal is to hire the right people. Get them in there. Get them equipped and in that mindset that they can take their career anywhere within the company. And then you allow them to do that. And so if somebody’s skills are better suited to another role that has just opened up, but they’ve only been there 90 days, let them go to that role because it’s better for the organization in the long run and obviously speaks to the satisfaction for that employee.
Mark Feffer:
Right. Shifting gears again.
Robin Schooling:
Yes.
Mark Feffer:
I want to look forward. There’s a couple hundred exhibitors here. They’re speaking. They’re displaying. They’re exhibiting. Are any of them or did any of them strike you as particularly interesting?
Robin Schooling:
I have not dove into deep, deep under the hood with any of them. No one has jumped out at me yet, but I’m not done getting through this vast expo hall either. I’ve kind of done my cursory move around and I haven’t dove enough into anything yet.
Mark Feffer:
What’s the great new idea or product that you’re looking for?
Robin Schooling:
One product that I did a quick glance at it and the person in the booth showed me a demo of it, a real high level of how it works, is something that is working to solve… This is a real issue. Right? So this is what I like. What problem are you trying to solve? They’ve thought this through. And that is basically a data repository as well as a visualization and then the reporting on it and then a tool for the employees that supports companies with a hybrid workforce. So if they have a shared workspace, right, but oh, maybe I come into the office once a week or I’m a new employee and I really remote, but oh my gosh, I’m here two months and I’m going to the office in San Diego for the first time.
This tool is onboarding new hires. It’s tracking the information behind the scenes. But then when I’m a new employee and I’m going to that office, I can pull up floor plan. I can visualize what desk I’m going to sit at. There’s a map. There’s maps built in so when I show up periodically I can reserve a conference room or reserve a desk, if I’m kind of doing a hot desk sort of thing. I can see at a glance who else is going to be in the office that day, if anybody else is there that I want to meet that I’ve maybe only done Zoom calls with. So it was really kind of an interesting look at a concern that employers have right now because the back end is spitting out usage statistics so the business can use it to determine do we really need that office space? Or how many people really are in the office on a given day? So it was kind of neat. I mean it’s a problem of the time. And so they’ve built something to help take a look at that.
Mark Feffer:
It seemed like the vendors did a pretty good job of pivoting in 2020 or 2019 when COVID really hit and now we’re talking about hybrid work instead of going back to the office. And did COVID fundamentally change any aspect of HR technology?
Robin Schooling:
Well, it certainly made people who were government agencies, for example, that weren’t in the cloud, go to the cloud finally, I guess. I think HR technology for the most part was the solutions were there to meet the needs that arose when COVID hit, which is what allowed leaders and organizations and HR professionals to successfully just change fundamentally how they worked. The tools and the work technology were out there. It drove adoption of some of the things that already existed. So I think that was probably the big… It wasn’t a change necessarily, I don’t think, in what solutions were being offered, but they were finally being used and so they were tweaked and iterated and built on even more.
But you know, think about pre-pandemic, yes, video interviewing existed forever, it seems like, right, before then, but there were so, oh my gosh, we can never do video interviews. Oh my heavens, no. Everybody needs to come in person. Now the thought of flying somebody in for an interview or even scheduling something in person is like the secondary thought now. And so again, that technology, those solutions existed to do that. And at the end of the day, the vendors rose to the occasion of, hey, yeah, we can do that. We can help you solve this now that we’re in lockdown, our version of lockdown in the US which really wasn’t lockdown.
Mark Feffer:
Right. Robin, thanks for taking time and talking to me.
Robin Schooling:
Thank you. It was fun.
Announcer:
You’ve been listening to PeopleTech of the HCM Technology Report. This HR tech series is graciously brought to you by our partners at Fuel50. For all other HR sourcing and recruiting news, check out HCMTechnologyReport.com.
