Transcript
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 Exposition and Conference. Joining me here at the HR Tech Conference is Sarah White. Welcome, Sarah.
Sarah White:
Hi. Thank you for having me.
Mark Feffer:
How does technology help address a human issue like that?
Sarah White:
I think there’s a couple of things. One of the things we found in our research last year was only 17% of companies thought burnout was an issue at their organization. When we actually asked individuals, “Are you feeling burnt out?” more than 51% actually reported being actively burnt out at that point. When we looked at only HR people, it was actually over 63%. So we have a major issue in the market.
I think one of the biggest things that we can do with technology is identify it. Sometimes we think about we have to solve it, we have to solve it. Quite honestly, we just have to identify it and make sure that executives at organizations know that this is an issue to start with. And so we were like, “Oh, there’s an issue. We have to jump to step F.” And I’m like, “Actually, we just need to get to B. We just have to be able to get to B, and from B to go to C, C to go to D.” I think at the initial stage, we just have to be able to find and understand fully some of these human issues are issues and people want data. We need to have ability to back it up and show that it is actually an issue at our organization to get a business case to solve it, just like every other department has to get data business cases to go through.
The other way that we’re solving some of these human issues is actually, we’re bringing in more of the wellness technology. So tools that are not necessarily designed for the HR teams and going through, but they’re actually designed for the employees, and there isn’t necessarily a response that goes to HR at all other than some aggregate data of what’s happening.
The winner of Pitch Fest today is actually a company called Spotlife that is looking at this whole person and letting people assess, how are you doing in your real life? How are you doing at work? What are three things that you’re concerned with? It’s not necessarily even about the work, but they have been able to find with some of their clients that by helping them address some of these stressors and some of these other issues in their personal world, it does impact work. It makes them feel… We have higher retention and all these other factors when people are treated as a whole person. And so again, I think awareness, at its core, is probably the primary way right this second.
Mark Feffer:
I want to talk about skills for minute. I hear a lot of people say that if you have skills or you need skills, you can buy them, you can borrow them, or you can build them. Which sounds right to me. But it also sounds incredibly difficult to execute on. Because how do you orchestrate this whole workforce with full-timers and… Try one more time.
Sarah White:
Hopefully they edit this part out.
Mark Feffer:
Right.
Sarah White:
Technical difficulties.
Mark Feffer:
It sounds like a very difficult thing to orchestrate an entire workforce with the right mix of full-timers and part-timers and gig workers and all of that kind of thing. Is it?
Sarah White:
Well, I think for me, I have a love hate relationship with the term skills. I feel like it’s become 2021 and 202’s AI term of the past. I think it’s not necessarily even being used correctly by many of the vendors that are utilizing it and many of the people that are talking about it. I think at the end of the day, it isn’t just skills where, yes, we have skills gap. Yes, there’s all of this. But our individuals at work are so much more than just their skills, and where the actual gap is is understanding what that person not just has those direct skills, but also where their desires and passions of where they want to go and grow are as well. If we don’t look at those two combined, we’re never going to have the success. It’s why a lot of skills development and skills programs are not working effectively.
We’ve been re-indexing the entire HR tech market, more than 87 different categories, subcategories, into three different segments. The talent acquisition, the employee experience of talent management, and then workforce management and core. One of the things that we found is the one thing that is consistent across all of them is actually talent mobility. Talent mobility not in the way that we might have thought about it a few years ago where it was a talent marketplace, but talent mobility in a way where people are able to go in and make sure that their skills, what they’ve gone through in their LMS, what they’ve gone through in their training, anything else, is being identified and recognized. But also where their interests and desires and hopes and other things they would like to learn, and skills that they personally are interested in are going to be able to be seen and heard and valued by an organization.
I think we have to really broaden our conversation around what skills are, and stop looking at them as just this really minute little piece of the puzzle. If we really want to do, at the end of the day, what we need to do, which is actually impact the business, we have to impact retention, we have to impact engagement, we have to impact all of these other areas that are business drivers, and we’re not looking at the big picture. We keep coming down and looking at these single one off tiny little conversations when it should be a much broader one.
Mark Feffer:
You just mentioned internal mobility, which a few years ago was up at the top of the highchart.
Sarah White:
Yeah, succession planning.
Mark Feffer:
Do you think that that’s just moved itself into a place where internal mobility is just working in various ways at various companies?
Sarah White:
Yes and no. Succession planning is going to exist and continue to exist. It really is more about high potential identification, like senior levels, executive levels, and training people to move into those certain roles. That is 1% of the population. For the rest of everybody else, they were left to defend for themselves. What internal mobility has really done and where it is moving is giving people a little bit of control over their own career, so career pathing and some of these other areas. But it is not just looking at here’s the next step I need to take for, it could be a supervisor, and then I could be a lead and then a good manager and then a director. But it’s allowing them to look at where there’s mobility laterally or in completely different areas.
Where we’re seeing the product shift is fully pulling in this contingent workforce that you mentioned. So people that are inside and outside the organization technically can be assessed and we have a true full understanding of the talent that is taking place. Beyond that, we can look and see, then, what skills we have available, not just by our current employees, but also by those contingent workers that are spending their time within our organizations.
From there, the big mobility piece is not just being able to raise our hand, but identify what training we want to do, what the next steps are, and even going down to volunteer to work on certain projects instead of a learning program. I want to join this project team or something else that is going on within the organization to develop the skills in a very real way that isn’t staring at a video.
Mark Feffer:
Do you think employees are after skills to the degree the vendors say they are?
Sarah White:
No. No.
Mark Feffer:
What do you think is the disconnect there?
Sarah White:
There’s a lot of money to talk about skills, and so you’re going to hear it from… I know somebody’s probably going to cut this out,
Mark Feffer:
No, they won’t.
Sarah White:
The reality is it’s a buzzword at this point. If we can get enough media and we can get enough influencers and we get enough people talking about this thing, it’s like in Mean Girls, we’re trying to make fetch happen. At the end of the day, we have to get back to talking about the human and what the business issue is. If the business issue is that we’re not able to find people that have the right talent, what our conversation needs to be is, how are we developing people? Not just looking at what skills, what skills, what skills. Because as a CEO of a company, I very rarely hire on a specific skill that is a hard skill. Most of the hard skills can be trained and developed. It’s the soft skills that are really hard.
A lot of the conversations I’m seeing around skills lately are definitely leaning much more towards those hard skills than the soft skills, which doesn’t even align with when CEOs are surveyed, what they think is actually the main issues in their job. I think there was a study came out a couple months ago that less than 20% of college graduates are actually ready to take on work, and it’s because of the soft skills and communication skills. They’re not being taught this stuff at the college level. That was the response of CEOs, executives within organizations tell them.
Mark Feffer:
It makes you wonder whether or not employers will end up picking up a lot of that education.
Sarah White:
They are absolutely picking up a lot of that education, and then it’s leaving. It’s why retention is becoming a big deal, because we are doing a lot of education. We’re spending more money than ever on learning platforms and learning content and microlearning and all of these other areas. But then we’re not doing a really good job of mobilizing that education, the mobility piece of it, mobilizing those skills within our own place.
I think a lot of times when we talk about that there’s a skills gap within our organizations, it isn’t that we actually have a skills gap, it’s that we don’t understand and trust our employees and what their skills might be. For instance, you might have an employee finish a degree. They finish their bachelor’s degree, they finish an MBA. Well, they’ve been in customer service for five years as they worked there as they were going to school. When they finished the degree, the degree happens to be in design, they go to apply for a job internally in design. A lot of times, they’re kicked out by that recruiter because they’re not a designer, and so they actually have to leave the company.
There’s a lot of people that would rather not leave their organizations, but the way our entire mobility, the way our recruiting, the way our companies fundamentally have been traditionally set up, actually discourages people from wanting to stay, unless they’re following a very traditional career ladder of this is my exact next step. I’m not jumping projects, departments, approaches. I’m not trying to expand out of where I’m at. We know, especially with millennials and Gen Z coming in, this is just not how they’re going to focus and work. We have to update how we functionally work as a world if we really want to address a skills gap. We’re talking about putting a band-aid on a broken artery.
Mark Feffer:
Can you think of anything going on at HR Tech that is particularly exciting and on base for you? Just something that looks really promising that actually works.
Sarah White:
I’m geeking out over all of the intelligence tech. I know everybody’s going to be like, “That’s a total buzzword.” It is kind of, but there is this entire layer of stuff that we’ve been dreaming about being able to do for the last 15 years. We’ve supplemented by doing analytics in our ATS, or analytics in our talent management system. We finally have these data lake and overlay layers where we can pull in all of this intelligence and all of the data from all of our different systems and all of our things. Companies are going to have 30, 40 systems at this point within HR. The companies that are doing this in a really advanced way are also pulling in external market data, that’s happening, and then pulling in things from their Salesforce and pulling in things from ERP solutions and Jira.
We’re pulling in information so we can do true workforce planning, we can understand our skills, we can understand everything that is going on in such a way where it’s like, “Oh, okay. Hey, we want to grow 20% year over year. Great. How do we do that?” Well, according to this, if we want to grow here, based on where our sales are, we need to grow in this division and this division. And this location needs to add more people, but there’s a shortage of talent in this from our external market labor data. And then it’s going to take nine months to be able to hire these people. Our talent pool currently only has about 30% of the people are internal people. We have about 40% of those people, which means we have a gap of another 30% or 20%. The level of detail at a very executive strategic business conversation level that we can do now blows away what we even dreamed about five years ago. I’m super, super geeking out over this.
Mark Feffer:
Sarah, thanks so much for talking to us.
Sarah White:
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Image: iStock
