isolved’s Geoff Webb on People, Data and the State of the Market

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Transcript

Mark:

Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Geoff Webb, iSolved’s vice president of product solution, product and marketing strategy. We’re going to talk about the craziness of today’s labor market, as well as the adaptive employee experience and the company’s approach to people analytics all on this addition of PeopleTech. Hi, Geoff. Thanks for coming by. Now not long ago, iSolved launched an adaptive employee experience they called it on People Cloud. Can you tell me about that and what makes it different?

Geoff:

Yeah, absolutely. So the whole purpose really behind us developing the adaptive employee experience for the iSolved People Cloud was to ensure that, there’s a two things. One is to make it as easy as part possible to use. So there’s very little point in building a huge amount of power behind the HR platform and the engine in there and all of the things it can do if it’s difficult to use, if people aren’t comfortable with interacting with it. So one of the things with that interface, that experience was really to make it easy and simple to consume, to interact with very naturally, and to make it much more sort of consumer tech like in the way that you would deal with it. So that essentially it becomes very simple for everybody to use and you don’t have to be specially trained on how to do things.

Geoff:

And the second part of that was to make it highly consistent. So for example, we know that while many people are using the People Cloud platform on a laptop or desktop PC, an awful lot will want to use it from mobile devices on the go either because they’re just walking around doing stuff, because they may need to come in and do something in their off hours, or they may be on the road or any number of other reasons. And so we wanted to make sure that the well, as easy as it is to use in the sort of any particular desktop platform, it was equally consistent and easy to use on all of the other platforms too. And so that’s been a significant amount of work for us over the past couple of years of ensuring that consistency and usability and accessibility for everything that we do. And it pays off because then people can interact with it much more naturally and much more easily.

Mark:

Now, one of the things that struck me about the announcement was it mentioned neurodiversity. And there’s been a lot of talk about neurodiversity lately, but it’s still kind of exceptional when it gets brought up in a product announcement. I was just wondering, how did it enter iSolved’s thinking?

Geoff:

I think I would say that one of the things that’s important to us, if you step back and look at the kind of company that we are, we’re very much an organization that is focused on defining or enabling our customers, the businesses that use our technology and the services to really sort of define and build the workforce of the future, the workplace of the future, and the sort of employee experience of the future. And that can mean anything from just sort of accessibility questions to thinking of an inordinately more diverse workforce to thinking about bringing in different groups of people, different demographics, and just the different ways that people will interact and utilize technology. And so for us, there’s a real sort of drumbeat to enable organizations that typically wouldn’t have had access to the sort of technology and the services and the support to really build out that new employee experience, that much improved employee experience, regardless of who the employee is, regardless of how they want to interact, regardless of how they work, to sort of be inclusive and embrace them as a full human being too.

Geoff:

And that you think about even things like the connections across too, things like giving and volunteering and sort of other areas. It’s really to embrace the whole person as an employee and to make the experience much more connected and much more natural for people of every different kind, every different ability, every different background, every different perspective, because ultimately those are essentially critical elements. We think of the workforce of the future, they sort of, concept of sort of monoculture workforces is really going away. We have to be as organizations, much more diverse and much more inclusive.

Mark:

I’m going to shift gears again a little bit, still looking at products. Last year you launched predictive people analytics, which is meant to really simplify, I think the access and use of data. Now that idea about simplification of data’s use has been, I think, kind of the holy grail that a lot of HR technology vendors have been after. So can you talk about your approach to that and what was the thinking behind it that made you think, okay, this was going to be a really useful and different application?

Geoff:

Yeah. It’s interesting you mentioned that because the predictive people analytics part of the People Cloud has been an area where there’s been a huge amount of interest from I think, organizations of every size. We work with businesses of a few tens of employees all the way up to 1500, 2000, 3000 employees. And it’s interesting that there is a desire to simply be better informed about what’s happening in the workforce, about the nature of employment, about what matters to employees. And what’s going to shape and drive both better engagement and better productivity, and also just build a better workforce in the future. And so there’s a real first, I think, in every organization for just good information. And what we found was the approach we’ve taken when we build the People Cloud is really to build sort of an end-to-end approach, right?

Geoff:

So it has a single underlying perspective of who the employee is right from pre-hire when you’re first talking to them and they’re just a candidate all the way through every step, every interaction. It’s all sort of consistently captured, which is nice. But it doesn’t do any good if you can’t unlock the value of that information that’s in there, the things that are driving behavior, the things that really matter to your employees and to your businesses overall. So what we wanted to do, and that’s the reason we brought the predictive people analytics to market was to say, well, we need to unlock the power of all that data. There’s a real drive to make HR organizations much more data driven. They want to understand what’s going on. They want to be able to deliver insight to the rest of the business.

Geoff:

And they also want to make smarter decisions quickly about what’s actually going to matter. How do we retain, how do we develop? So the objective there was to say, well, we’ll give you a simpler platform as possible that sort of enables you to quickly get access to that information. But that underneath it has some incredibly powerful analytics and machine learning that is basically learning your business as it goes. And it’s constantly sort of looking at behaviors within your organization, your employee base, to decide things like, well, what does drive retention? What does drive engagement? What is making people more or less productive and so on? And so you kind of have this thing quietly learning in the background, the real sort of core indicators of what’s going on in your business, and then surfacing it very easily through some dashboards. And that was really the idea. It was like, well, let’s make the HR department better enabled to have better information, to make better decisions more quickly.

Mark:

Now five or six years ago, the conversation was all about whether or not HR people were up to the task of working with data and understanding data. So five, six years later, where do you think we are on that? Do you think HR folks have stepped up? Do you think vendors have given them accessible tools? We have a ways to go, or we in a good place? What do you think?

Geoff:

Yeah, I think a little of all of the above, I would say. I think the technology had to improve quite a lot to enable people to more naturally unlock the information that was already being captured. And it’s not just HR people. It is business leaders in almost every aspect of every business. I’ve worked in organizations in a number of different areas where you start to see the impact of machine learning and AI, and these sort of predictive things unlock the power of enabling Salesforce’s to sell more effectively, enabling the operations teams to run things more efficiently and enabling HR to make better decisions. And it’s kind of, we’re moving from a world of you must hire highly, highly specialized data scientist type people and analytics folks into a world that says, well, actually, what we want to do is instead of having to bring somebody in to sort of grind through the data and understand it, why don’t we use technology to do that?

Geoff:

Because let’s be blunt, that’s what technology is supposed to be good at doing anyway. Why don’t we use technology to do that? And then deliver that to the people who are trained to make use of the information, which is to say the HR professional who is trained to understand, well, how do businesses and people interact and interface in the most productive and effective ways for both sides of that equation. Let’s just give them more information. So I think it’s been a case of they were ready. I think the technology had to develop a fair way to unlock the ability more easily to provide and present that information that they could use.

Geoff:

And I also think the data. It’s always the case when you start down these paths of delivering more information, delivering better information. You rapidly run up against walls around silos in data and data cleanliness and biases in information and things. I think there was a fair bit of work that was required to be done to get both the technology and the information stored in house in such a way that you could extract the value from it, for the HR team. So I think HR is ready. I think HR professionals more than ready. I think the technology has finally started to arrive to give them what they need to do, to do their jobs and not forcing them to learn a different job just to get access to information.

Mark:

Now, one of the things that strikes me is a lot of iSolved’s materials really talk about accessibility when you get right down to it. It’s like it’s a theme in your product development. And can you kind of talk about how that relates to the evolution you were just talking about, but also point to where it might be going?

Geoff:

Oh yeah, absolutely. So I think there’s two aspects of that. When someone says accessibility, there’s a of a couple of things that immediately sort of spark in, certainly in my mind. One, is the sort of the mechanical accessibility, are we building technology that is easy and easy to be used by anybody, regardless of how they want to interact with technology? And I think that’s a key element that most technology companies are really sort of rallying around is we must make technology that is sufficiently easy to use, sufficiently available and so on, regardless of the people that are using it in the way they want to use it in the way they’re able to use it. And that’s obviously equally important to us, if not more so. But I think the other aspect to this becomes both more subtle, but also more transformational.

Geoff:

And that is how do we infuse the sort of the daily tasks, people with access to the information and the services and the systems that they would want to use in ways that are much more naturalistic? So that in other words, we don’t have to sort of stop what you’re doing to go connect to another system, to do something, to run some process, to get some information, to then sort of, switch context back again, and return to the job that was at hand. It’s much more case I think in the world of HR technology. And absolutely this is a foundational principle for us is that we should be bringing the HR to technology, the HCM platform to the sort of the workplace, to the people that are using it so that it’s embedded much more naturally in what they’re doing.

Geoff:

And you’ll see that, one of the examples is the sort of the highly intuitive ways that you can get access to things like the predictive analytics piece, where it’s very simple to get a sort of dashboards and interactive stuff emailed to you. But I think more fundamental than that, it is opening up the door to access to things like natural language processing where I can interact with the HR platform without having to think about interacting with an HR platform as an HR professional or as an employee where things like self-service become much more important to me. So how do we deliver that in ways that are very, very easy to use and very natural and things like, again, natural language processing, and chat bots and AI, machine learning that can learn how people want to interact. All those things are very, very important to us and very much stake on the roadmap as we’re delivering those things. So that you don’t have to think about changing what you’re doing. It’s simply available to you, whatever platform you happen to be doing it from.

Mark:

Now I wanted to step back a little bit, just sort of look at the whole landscape. What’s your read on the HCM world and the HCM Technology world right now? I mean, we’re in a really tough and weird labor market. There’s a big shift going on about where and how work gets done. Some people say the economy’s doing well. Other people say it’s kind of tenuous. Where do you see things heading? And what do you see as iSolved’s priorities being as we progress over the next, say three or four years?

Geoff:

Oh yeah. We ran a survey recently. It was, I think it was about 500 odd HR professionals. And one of the things we saw was I think almost half of all businesses were being somewhat impacted and not in a positive way by this sort of great resignation that’s going on right now. I think it was like 49% of them said they were being impacted negatively by the great resignation. And that’s really kind of, it doesn’t surprise me yet at the same time it gives one pause to think about the number of organizations that are being impacted by this. There is a huge amount of pressure being put on HR organizations by a combination of changing factors, the workplace, different expectations, potentially wildly different expectations from their employees, from potential employees and from the business and the sort of the markets in which those businesses operate.

Geoff:

And a lot of those sort of, the pressures are coming together, sort of nexus of all that is in the HR organization. Businesses are saying to HR professionals help us navigate these challenges, help us build a better workplace, help us understand what matters to the employees, help us solve for the challenges of retention and so on. And HR employees, they’re saying, HR professionals are looking, saying well, we need more information. We need better tools. We need to be more agile and reactive to be able to change how we operate and we need to have better information and we need to be able to focus on the employee experience itself. So there’s a big change that is occurring in the world of the HR professional and the world of the HR business leader that is driven by all of these factors. As a result that translates to a changing set of expectations and pressures on organizations like iSolved whose job it is to deliver the software and services that enable them to do their job, to be more sort of agile and reactive and responsive, and to have better information and so on.

Geoff:

So what I’m seeing is a lot of pressure now around help me sort of find and bring on the right people and help me retain the best people. And both of those actually, the different sort of ends of that equation are very much defined by the nature of the experience of being an employee at the company at which I now work. So it’s really a case of the nature of the employee experience or the expectations they’re rather changing. HR is having to build a map and a roadmap for the future for the next several years to deliver a better employee experience. One that is more tailored to their expectations of working in a hybrid environment, working a different sort of work, life balance, different set of benefits and expectations that people want. And then looking to organizations to help and support them to sort of turn that roadmap into a reality for their businesses.

Geoff:

And I would expect over the next several years, we will continue to see HR, sorry, HCM organizations like ours, spending a lot of time thinking about rounding out the employee experience itself, what is sort of wellness and wellbeing? How do we enable sort of better career development and training and on-demand training and interactions that are much more naturalistic? And how do we deliver better insight and information to the HR teams so that they can tune and tweak and drive the necessary, correct changes quick enough in that experience and in the information they feed to their business. So there’s an acceleration of pace. There’s a upping of expectations on every part. And therefore there’s a greater reliance on, surprising on technology and information to enable those changes to occur. It’s a really big transformation. It’s huge.

Mark:

How do you feel about it?

Geoff:

It’s interesting because I, well, because you may not be able to tell this, but I am actually a human being as well. And I’m an employee, right? As well as a, I know, as somebody who works in this space. I actually am delighted by it. I really, really, truly am. I think this is an extraordinary sort of Renaissance of thinking around the nature of employment overall and how employees and businesses engage. And it’s quite delightful in many ways, because what you see is businesses that are actually investing, they’re investing in the experience, they’re investing in their employees, they’re investing in the sort of a richness of that experience and the support and so on, and the wellness of the employee and the training, I think. And they’re being successful in doing it, like it’s actually working. It actually makes a difference. It really is starting to bear fruits for them.

Geoff:

And so from my point of view, I think this sort of redefinition of the workplace that has been forced on us is actually going to be an extraordinarily positive thing for those organizations that can rally around it and really focus on it. For those that can’t, they’re going to struggle. Right. I mean, those that will not want to make those changes, they’re going to find it challenging to bring onboard and keep the best people. For those that do, there is a ocean of opportunity. And I think that is great as an employee and as somebody that works in this space, I think now is a, it’s a transformational period. It’s delightful. It absolutely is.

Mark:

Well, Geoff, thanks very much for talking with me today.

Geoff:

No, thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been a good chat. Thank you, Mark.

Mark:

My guest today has been Geoff Webb, vice president of solutions, product and marketing strategy at iSolved. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of RecruitingDaily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs visit www.evergreenpodcast.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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