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Announcer:
Welcome to People Tech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We are recording from HR Tech in Vegas, brought to you by our friends and partners at Fuel 50. 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 Exposition and Conference. My guest today right now is Mary Faulkner, and welcome Mary.
Mary Faulkner:
Thank you. Nice to be here.
Mark Feffer:
Could you take a minute and tell us about yourself?
Mary Faulkner:
Well, I was born in Elkhart, Indiana. No. So I am a principal with a company called IA. We are a boutique advisory firm that helps businesses with transformation. A lot of times we’re focused on HR, but not always, and we work on business process optimization. We help with tech selection, we help with gap analysis, we help with business cases, all this stuff.
So we really enjoy the work that we do and we come here every year to HR Tech to share our knowledge and to meet with people and help solve their problems.
Mark Feffer:
What have you seen at HR Tech this year that’s got you really thinking?
Mary Faulkner:
It’s an interesting question. I think some of the things that we’re seeing is it’s just iterations of what’s been going on for a while. I don’t know that I would say yet that I’ve seen the next big thing. It’s improvements on the little things.
So things like using AI to automate a lot of processes, that comes up a lot and there is an opportunity for that to work. And we’re really starting to apply technology to the skills questions of figuring out how do we re-skill our employees? How do we acknowledge what types of skills we have within our employee populations today? How do we define skills?
So it’s nice to see some of the providers really being focused on that in a targeted way and applying it to some of the larger HCMs that are out there so that it’s not constantly having to cobble together all these solutions. It’s how does everybody work and play nicely together on the playground so that organizations can really get a full picture of their people through the technology.
Mark Feffer:
But re-skilling or general learning seems to become a more intricate, more complicated, more expensive thing for employers to do. So it makes me wonder what all this talk about skills is about.
Mary Faulkner:
Well, I think what we’re recognizing is that with all the automation that’s been coming, that’s going to be a lot of jobs that can be automated and not just… Like manufacturing jobs has always been the first one but there are a lot of things that can be done automatically now that you used to have to pick up a phone and call a call center and ask some questions. Well, now you’re seeing benefits providers, they have chat bots that work pretty well for some of the basic questions of like, “What’s my deductible?” That. They can now get that through a chat bot.
So as we’re seeing the acceleration of replacement of some of that work, that’s an acknowledgement that, well, we now have all these great people that we need to re-deploy and maybe they don’t have the skill set to do the jobs that are coming now and in the future.We don’t even know what the jobs are going to be in the future necessarily.
So how can we streamline that to be able to recognize what those skills are going to be, first off, and then get people the development that they need to be able to meet those skills needs without constantly having to go and rehire people. Because what we’re seeing today with some of the crunch in hiring is organizations keep trying to hire people who already do the work and already have the skill set. They’re not investing in developing their people. So that’s why there’s so many job openings for a very niche set of people who have those skills.
So as technology continues to evolve, it’ll be a smaller and smaller talent pool unless organizations take the time and money to really invest in development, whatever that might look like.
Mark Feffer:
I’ve heard people say that you can do three things about skills. You can build them, you can buy them, or you can borrow them. It seems pretty simple on its face, it makes sense, but things are a lot more complicated than that, aren’t they?
Mary Faulkner:
They are. I think the biggest one is the building. The building of skills has consistently been a struggle for organizations because one of the first thing that tends to get cut is training. But on the flip side, and I have an LNOD background, so I’m saying this with love, everybody out there who runs learning. We need to get our stuff together. We’ve done a really poor job of defining skills. We focus on competencies, which is great, but what does that really mean in the role? What are the skill sets and what does that look like for each role?
We need to work together to define a common taxonomy of all these skills. So when it comes to building, that takes time, but that takes a lot of organization and it takes application. So when you look at the typical job description or job posting, it’s a mess. It’s really bad, and it’s because we haven’t done the work.
Maybe in learning has these great skills matrix and they’re working on it and they’re applying it to their content and they’re really figuring out how they’re going to develop people but that group, for some reason, isn’t talking to recruiting and they’re not talking to talent. So they’re all over the place of what those skills could be.
So I think companies get impatient and their idea is, “Well, we don’t have time to build. We need to buy and borrow right now because we didn’t anticipate this need coming up and we have to address it immediately.”
Mark Feffer:
And I’m thinking about companies that haven’t taught their employees and they need specialized skills and they’re going out and getting them by a contingent worker, hiring an agency or something like that. Then the employee is kind of left behind in all that.
Mary Faulkner:
They are and that’s, I think, when you start to see employees quitting and saying, “Well, if you’re not going to develop me… ” I mean, when I talk to people who are looking for jobs today, almost every single one of them beyond, “I want to get paid,” which is great, but the other side of it is, “I want to learn. I want to work somewhere where I’m going to learn something new. I want to work somewhere that’s going to push me.”
And if organizations are not choosing to focus on that, they’re going to lose people. Maybe you’ll get them for a year but they’re not going to stay with you long term. They’re going to get what they need from you that moment and if you don’t invest back in them, they’re going to move on to the next company that might. So I really think that this is the moment for organizations to really seize the opportunity to invest in their people in different ways.
Listen, sitting in a classroom for eight hours is not a great way to learn. We get it. Sometimes there are opportunities to bring people together and have those workshops, but if you’re talking about incremental learning, self-guided learning, ability to build career pathing in your organization, where managers and employees alike can own that process, you need to make it accessible. You need to remove the barriers for people to be able to access it, and you need to make it a good experience.
So if it’s a clunky LMS or if it’s a clunky process to get approved for a workshop that’s external to the organization, no one’s going to take it because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Mark Feffer:
It does seem like the vendors who are building learning systems are on board with that. They seem to be developing a lot of products that they wouldn’t have developed 10 years ago.
Mary Faulkner:
I completely agree. It’s really funny. I mean, I started in really working with an LMS in 2006, let’s say, and it has come a long way from those early days. Even just from being able to auto enroll people into a course. So I think the recognition is there that learning is more than just needs to be SCORM compliant and we can track it. It’s really looking at is it engaging? Is it easy to search?
You look at a thing like a flip board where people can curate what type of articles they want to read about what topics. That’s a great direction for learning to go into. These are the things I’m interested in learning more about and having a system being able to say, “Well, here are 10 things that we think might be interesting to you because based on your preferences, there’s some really great opportunities out there.”
Mark Feffer:
And with learning from the employee’s point of view, is it so important that it will keep people on board?
Mary Faulkner:
I think it’s an element of it. Learning in and of itself isn’t enough. When we say we need to develop and invest in our people, learning is a component of it to show that we’re investing in you and here’s some opportunities for you to get better. But really where it starts is the company needs to care about that employee and caring about that employee goes beyond just, “We’re giving you a 2% raise every year.” It’s, “I’m your manager. I am asking you what are your interests in your career? It might not be here, it might be elsewhere, but what can we do to make sure that you have a long term career and that you’re meeting your goals?”
That’s step one, having the conversation. After that, it’s me helping you as a manager find ways to get that. It could be learning. Learning is a great way to do it, but it’s also experiences.It’s networking. It’s giving you opportunities within the organization to work on different projects and get visibility and experience. So it’s all of that. It’s a really holistic view of understanding how you’re going to develop your people.
Yes, you need to be able to track it because you want to be able to say, “Here’s what I’ve done”. Employees like to be able to go back and say, “I’ve really come a far away.”
I remember we used to joke about giving certificates at the end of the class because it’s like, it’s a certificate. Who cares? If we didn’t do it though, people were like, “Well, where’s the proof that I took this class?” They want to be able to show it off a little bit. I’m not saying go out and print a whole bunch of certificates, everybody. I’m just saying that people want to be able to know and have a record of the things that they’ve been able to do.
Especially if they’re making an argument that they should be promoted, that’s great for them to be able to say, “Here’s all the things that I did on my own to develop my skill set and my manager helped me with this too but I went and looked and had the desire to improve myself.” So having that record is really important.
Mark Feffer:
When a manager… Well, ultimately in a company, everything sort of comes down to a line manager in a lot of way.
Mary Faulkner:
It really does.
Mark Feffer:
So if the line manager isn’t on board with this effort, may or may not happen, what’s your vision of that or your point of view, your perspective? Am I wrong at the way I’m bad mouthing a manager, or… ?
Mary Faulkner:
Part of it is they don’t know how. Part of it is they don’t have the time. I mean, I’ve worked in organizations where frontline managers, managing field employees, they’ve got 44 direct reports. That’s really hard to manage. So it’s a little bit of the system looking at, is it realistic for us to put all of this on our manager?
But on the flip side, a big piece of being a manager is people development and if you’re not willing or able or bought into that, you shouldn’t be in a manager role. So I think it’s incumbent though upon the company to be able to look at the data, look to see what opportunities the employees have had, and manage it like a performance management issue.
Really say, “This is my expectation of you as a manager,” and if it’s not happening, have a conversation with that manager and that becomes their expectation. So there’s ways to do it. I don’t want to be punitive but it’s about preparing those managers for the role in the first place.
Mark Feffer:
Seems like managers are getting it from a whole bunch of sides.
Mary Faulkner:
They are, poor things.
Mark Feffer:
So first, you got learning. Then you’ve got skills. Then you’ve got data, and they’re supposed to really understand all this stuff. Is it even possible?
Mary Faulkner:
I think it is, but what you need to do is optimize your business processes because part of the reasons why I think managers feel so buried is because it’s so hard to do all of those things. It’s hard to get data. They don’t have dashboards to go look at. It’s hard to push through an approval because there’s 50 steps for it. It’s hard to understand what the learning expectations are because there’s 10 different competency models out there.
So if we could make it easier for managers to do that piece of it, I really think they’d embrace it but when they have competing priorities of work, I’m going to spend 40 hours of my week on the work that needs to get done to be able to meet my business goals versus 40 hours a week of just trying to navigate a broken system. They’re going to pick the business goals every time.
So if you make part of their business goals, managing their people and with it, making it easy for them to do that because everything’s automated, it’s at their fingertips, it’s personalized to their team, I think you’re going to see a lot more people embrace it.
Mark Feffer:
So when you think about the next, say three to five years…
Mary Faulkner:
Okay.
Mark Feffer:
What do you see changing?
Mary Faulkner:
Would it be sad to say not much. I don’t want to be that pessimistic because we’re seeing outliers move the needle. We are starting to see those early adopters embrace what technology can do, embrace the whole person, really thinking about development. But until it’s, I’m saying economically feasible from the standpoint of it doesn’t feel like an add-on, it’s an integrated part of business, I don’t know that people are going to change as much.
Work is going to continue to change. We’re going to continue to feel that skills pressure. We’re going to continue to have that challenge of hiring the people that we need right away because we’re not anticipating it. So I’m hoping in three to five years we see more and more companies really embrace it and not just embrace it, tell their story so that people see how they do it and see that it is possible to do it.
Mark Feffer:
Mary, thanks so much for sitting down with me.
Mary Faulkner:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it.
Announcer:
You’ve been listening to People Tech of the HCM Technology Report. This HR Tech series is graciously brought to you by our partners at Fuel 50. For all other HR, sourcing and recruiting news, check out hcmtechnologyreport.com.
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