Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Brent Skinner, the co-founder and principal analyst at 3Sixty Insights. He and I recorded a webinar the other day where we talked about HR’s changing role, how it can work itself into various business processes and how it all impacts the development and sale of HR technology. We’ll listen to it today on this edition of PeopleTech. Let me ask you a couple questions. To start, HR is always looking to protect or expand its influence in the organization. What specifically does HR need to do to accomplish that given the background you just gave us?
Brent:
Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s a tough question. It’s not an easy question, but I would say one place to start is to just for HR to reimagine its basic charter or what it is as a department, so let me give you an analogy that might help people visualize this or understand it, conceptualize it. HR wants to be seen as the high school career coach maybe and not the high school principal, right? When HR gets involved, is it because it’s a beloved teacher or a coach in the school getting involved and you can’t wait to have that interaction versus, oh gosh, I’m in trouble, HR’s involved, I’m getting called to the principal’s office. I think that’s really at the core, that’s the essence of the shift and mindset that HR really needs to take on to be able to reimagine and reposition itself in the organization for its emerging new role.
Because it’s definitely not going to be… Let’s put it this way, HR has been seen as a cost center for a very long time, and because of that, there’s a lot of technology out there that’s getting really close to solving completely for that. And so the last thing you want to be as an HR department is thinking of yourself as a cost center. You want to be outside of that, that you want to step outside of that thought and think of yourself as, now that we no longer have to be a cost center, what can we be? Let’s get out ahead of this too so that we actually have influence over that and we’re seen culturally within the organization as a place to go for that before… The last thing you want to be doing is scrambling to prove yourself in that domain as the operational piece of HR as really, really buttoned down.
Mark:
Well, repositioning yourself though, the way you’re describing, it involves changing others’ perceptions of you, not just in terms of what they think about you, but what they’re going to let you do. And I’m thinking about performance management that, who owns that, HR or the department head or the manager, they all sort of have their fingers in that pie. How does HR work itself into these different processes so that it’s ownership seems like a natural thing? My thought is that they have to be very business savvy. They have to understand not only business in general, but the organization in particular, know how it operates, know how it works, know a lot about the culture on the ground, not just in the conference room, to pull that sort of thing off, but what do you think?
Brent:
Yeah, I agree with you. HR needs to become very business savvy. We talked about the concept of HR technologists, but there’s also the idea that HR needs to understand business and that the organization is ultimately a business, so you’re absolutely right about that. I would also say that a lot of these technologies and also these newer ways of thinking that have been in part at least, prompted by innovations and technology in terms of taking your example, for instance, performance management, moving away from an annual performance review, which is we actually just recorded a podcast that’ll be going live next week around this.
I just learned that an annual review process was actually invented by the military over 70 years ago. And so it’s funny that we’ve adopted that for all of business. But the idea is that the technology’s out there and those line managers in your organization, line of business managers, they’re going to catch wind of these technologies. And so it’s really important for HR to take the lead now to be that HR technologist, those HR technologists, to understand what’s out there and take the lead on it. Because if HR takes the lead on it that I think that really greatly increases their ability to have a role in it moving forward. Because if HR is coming in from behind saying, “Oh yeah, that’s great line manager that you’ve found this, we need to be involved.” That’s not the most advantageous or powerful position to be in.
Mark:
That leads to the question about what’s going on out in the real world today. How is HR changing today and how is their revamping, let’s say. How is that going to influence the function’s efforts to position itself within the organization? Which I think what I’m asking to put it more clearly is, what’s HR doing now to make people take it more seriously and have people more willing to allow HR to get involved in the business?
Brent:
Yeah, that’s a really good question and I don’t know if I have an entirely cohesive answer to it, but there’s a few things. I saw a survey result and I don’t recall where it came from, but it was a reputable source. And from the last two years, HR, the vast majority of HR leaders are very laser focused on the employee experience, so that’s something that they are very focused on. And so I think that is encouraging. It’s interesting because in my opinion, the role of HR is going to change no matter what. It’s moving in this direction away from operational, the seat of focus being operational mostly to the seat of focus being more potentially employee experience focused. I think it’s shifting anyway.
And so it’s not so much a question of whether HR departments are going to be able to change the shift in focus, it’s more that they need to be ahead of it and make sure that they are moving where it’s going. That to me is really, really key. There’s going to be a change. There’s going to be a point at which the old conventional view of an HR department just won’t really have an analog in the real world, except in organizations that are much less further along in their HCM maturity, like smaller organizations, that are just moving to this point where they’re deciding to maybe automate HR as opposed to handling it completely manually and these sorts of things.
Mark:
Now, you said earlier something along the lines of that this isn’t about control, so what’s it about?
Brent:
Its about empowering the workforce. And when I say the workforce, I mean leaders in the organization all the way down to assembly line people, it’s about empowering them. I think if HR views this as losing control, then they will lose control. It’d be a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Because they are losing control in a sense. There’s this whole employee experience that’s happening everywhere in the organization. HR is right there in their department. It’s a relatively small number of people compared to the size of the organization. There’s only so much that they can even really monitor or really be a part of in any given moment.
And so the idea of controlling the employee experience is, they’re setting themselves up for failure. It’s more of an idea of positioning yourself as an HR department as a source of empowerment for the organization. Being that force can maybe influence a positive cascading event related to the employee experience or being there and being able to maximize any given employee experience, instance of the employee experience in any given point in time that’s of particular import.
Mark:
Is this whole discussion about ownership or about influence do you think?
Brent:
It’s about influence, absolutely. There’s definitely a piece of ownership, but it’s ultimately about influence. And it is, it’s about both, but the ultimate expression of it is influence. HR needs to understand that it needs to… Let’s talk about employer culture, that’s a little bit different than employee experience, but let’s talk about employer culture for instance. We did a podcast with the CM, now CMO at the time, the SVP of Marketing at one of the large vendors, and it’s on our website where we talked about, who should own the employer culture, who should own it?
What we concluded is that everybody should own the employer culture, but somebody should be responsible for it, and that should be HR. So if you think about employee experience, who owns the employer experience? Well, I don’t know if anybody can own the employee experience, but it happens everywhere. But who should be responsible or going to step up and say, “Okay, we are going to be the stewards of the employee experience and that needs to be HR.” And that way they can exert the influence over it that frankly they’re the types of people in HR are custom-made to do, to have that influence. Again, the employee experience isn’t necessarily part of the natural domain of HR when you think about it structured logistically. But, HR can definitely exert influence over it by taking responsibility for it.
Mark:
This brings up the question about HR technology and what is its role in all of this and is it really about HR technology or plain old business technology also, depending on what’s going to be done. How do you see the technology that HR uses, let’s say, influencing this whole pursuit? What’s that mean for the HR department?
Brent:
A couple of things. First of all, HR cannot take responsibility for the employee experience from a global standpoint, from if you want to say in a symbolic standpoint or exert influence over the employee experience without the state of the art of technology that’s out there today. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, you can have the will and the way is the technology, right? So that’s one thing I would like to say. Another thing that I would say is that technology, I don’t think there’s really a vendor out there today that would really mind ultimately whether their prospective customer remains HR department or becomes somebody else within the organization. As long as there’s a market for their technology that happens to be related to the management of the employment of people, HCM, then that company will stay in business.
What I’m trying to say there is that the technology is going to proliferate and it’s going to go where it’s needed, the development of it, the innovation of it, it’s going to move in that direction to where it’s needed. HR again, the HR technologist idea comes in where you need to be aware of what that technology is doing and so that you can get out ahead and lead as the HR department.
One of the things that’s if it’s not readily apparent yet to the folks who are attending is that HR’s role is not going to just… Right now, you know you have the plan administrator, where you have all this stuff that just has to get done, operational HR and it’s very clear cut what HR’s role is. HR doesn’t have to go out there and say at the top of its lungs, “I have this administrative stuff that you need to let me do.” No, that’s stuff that the organization just easily understands and needs to be done. In the future, as we move into the future of work, HR’s role will be more of HR making a case for itself. And part of that is that business savvy making the business case for itself, that we need to be involved. This is our natural role and we’re going to do it. And that’s where HR has become the master of its own destiny and it involves a number of variables that we’ve talked about so far today.
Mark:
I’m not entirely sure why this idea is going through my head, but let’s see. There’s a saying that nobody goes to the hardware store for a drill bit. They go because they want a hole. And I wondered, does something like that fit in here with HR technology where we’ve got so many vendors who are specializing, some in engagement, some in performance management, some in culture, some in experience. Are we going to be victims of that, where you just going to have to keep cobbling together your own solutions rather than find a couple of solutions that you know you can work with?
Brent:
Yeah. That’s a big question and I don’t know if I can answer all of it right now, because I think that might be another webinar. We can think about that maybe. But in any event, one of the large analyst organizations out there, I think it was Gartner, they came out with a report and I forgot the title of it, but this idea that part of what you’re talking about Mark, is this idea of going from one suite to handle as much of HCM as possible. I think that’s what you’re talking about as opposed to cobbling it together.
According to Gartner, things are moving back in the other direction where some of these full suite players, they have their sweet spot customers whose needs they can mostly or almost entirely, satisfied. But in general in the macro, there’s a move in the direction of cobbling together, different point solutions. We’re actually moving back outward if you want to call it outward. So that’s one thing.
Another thing that’s interesting is about, and it doesn’t speak exactly to your question there, but it goes to the idea, nobody goes to the hardware store for a drill bit. They go there because they need a hole. This you want to fix. I know our focus today is on HR practitioners keeping their skin in the employee experience game. But if we want to just go on a tangent for a moment here. If you’re a vendor in the space and you are looking at every potential customers’ or existing customers’ challenges as a performance, this is a performance management problem, or this is a compensation management problem or a succession planning problem or a scheduling problem. Maybe in workforce management it’s a little bit more clear cut.
But in those other examples, that’s the wrong approach today, because you’re selling a drill bit instead of looking at what the customer’s hole is and determining how you can solve for that. And moving away also from the siloed thinking, especially in talent management where we have these really arbitrary, honestly silos or where they’re just points of discussion and we built the talent management suite around these silos, but today this stuff is happening a lot more holistically, everything blends. I think we did a podcast with my colleague at 360 Insights a couple months ago and we said talent management, will it blend, it was a bit of a play on that. Viral YouTube guy from a few years back. But it’s all happening at the same time. Let’s go back to the self-evolving, AI self-evolving skills ontologies that I talked about a few minutes ago.
You have learning opportunities that fit right in, so you figure out whose skills are what and how you can bring learning in right away or how you can bring in talent acquisition right away. It’s kind of all moving together. That’s why organizations that approach, not to park on talent management for too much here, but there’s a lot of organizations, they run into trouble when they look at talent management as the individual pieces, we’re going to do performance management, we’re going to do succession planning, I am looking at a siloed solution. That’s where they run into trouble instead of understanding that it all happens together and the technology’s finally reached a point where it makes that possible.
Mark:
My last question is, if you go inside the vendor’s house, where they’re building this software, they’re building these solutions, are they seriously spending time and thinking about these kind of issues, or are they just basically following where the customer leads them?
Brent:
My answer to that, the smart vendors, and there are smart vendors out there, are approaching it in the more enlightened way that you just described. There are vendors out there that just kind of focused on the conventional or the meat and potatoes and just building a better mousetrap, if you will. But there are smart vendors out there that are actually thinking very dynamically about the employee experience and how HR departments can have the maximum impact in influence over that employee experience that they possibly can.
We actually just had, this is one example, there are others, but one that comes to mind is we just posted a podcast episode last week with VP of Solution Strategy, it happens to be iSOFT. We had a long lengthy conversation around that and they published a report based on the survey they commissioned around what HR departments, what they should be thinking about vis-a-vi, the employee experience.
So it wasn’t so much how to exert as much influence over it, as opposed to, what are the types of things that matter to employees when it comes to the employee experience. One is caring about how they are overall, their employee wellbeing, this sort of thing. And if you want to go down the rabbit hole there, actually one of our themes for 2023 for the HCM practice here at 360 Insights is this idea that, do we need to replace the term employee experience with something else that’s more like, what’s the next thing? What’s the next term that will supersede or will take the place of employee experience and will maybe mean a little bit more about… Maybe it’ll encompass work life balance and all these sorts of things because we hear about employee wellbeing.
Where does employee experience end and the rest of employee’s life begin or is it just all blended today? These are lots of very interesting questions. But to go, just to circle back to your main point there, there are vendors out there that are thinking about this in a smart, holistic way. There are vendors in every space that are not thinking innovatively, but it’s a little bit of a tired trope of, if you will. But I think a lot more vendors are thinking about this in an innovative, sort of integrated way than aren’t, to be honest with you. I’m encouraged.
Mark:
Brent, we’re out of time, but it is always fun going through this stuff with you, so thanks for being here.
Brent:
Well, thanks for having me. This has been just a really fascinating discussion and I’ll just second that Mark, I love our discussions and I’m glad we were able to broadcast one of them.
Mark:
My guest today has been Brent Skinner, the co-founder and principal analyst of 3Sixty Insights. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of Recruiting Daily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com and to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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