Podcast: Technology Failures with Jason Lauritsen of Cultivayo. Brought to You by Fuel50!

Unhappy Businesswoman

Transcript

Speaker 1:

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 PeopleTech. 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. I’m going to welcome my next guest. I’m going to let him introduce himself.

Jason    Lauritsen:

My name is Jason Lauritsen. I am a speaker, author, management trainer, kind of on a quest to think, make the work experience more human by teaching managers and leaders how to really truly check in with their people, so they know what’s actually going on and can help create a work experience that works better for them, for the employees.

Mark Feffer:

So given all that, what are you thinking as you walk through with the expo hall? Is the industry doing what it needs to do?

Jason    Lauritsen:

I would say we’re trending the right direction, I think. Technology wise, I would say from my seat, if you look back a few years, you had places like I think work human, work humans been at the forefront, I think, of carrying a banner for the human workplace or whatever. Obviously, it’s even in their name and they had their event or whatever. I mean, Fuel50 was early on into that rethinking, putting the human at the center of the career path and all of that.

And so I think we’re starting to see early on, several years ago, there wasn’t as much of it. Now you’re seeing so much talk about humanity at work, I think because COVID forced people to realize there are humans here and we need to make this work better for them. So we’ve been forced into it. So I think it’s trending the right way. I think there’s still a lot of unnecessary complication that gets created by technology, to be honest. The fact that we have this many different solutions, I think, sometimes gets in the way of actually doing the work that we need to be doing in the workplace.

Mark Feffer:

That’s a good point. Because I often wonder if the vendors are really delivering what they say they’re delivering.

Jason    Lauritsen:

Yeah. Well, I don’t think half the people that buy that technology know that either. I mean, that’s always the irony of technology is… I’m so glad I worked for a technology company for three years, in HR tech company for three years. And I’m so glad to not be in that world because I think it’s a very fickle world because you’re positioning this technology product as a solution to this problem that HR has. And then HR gets excited about the technology and they sell it to their team and the executives or whoever they need to sell it to internally. They invest a bunch of money. They roll it out. And then in three years, if it hasn’t solved the problem that it was intended to solve, without knowing why or without knowing if it’s the technology’s fault, the technology gets blamed. Because it’s better to blame the technology than to take blame yourself that your process or your approach didn’t work and you replaced it with a new technology. And then every three to five years, we just keep kicking it down the road.

And so a lot of times, I don’t think there’s a great feedback cycle always on. Is the technology delivering what it should be? But I don’t think it’s always the technology’s fault. I think a lot of times it’s because… And I spent a decade in corporate HR leadership. It’s because we, as HR, aren’t clear on what problem we’re trying to solve and applying the right technology to solve the problem we have. So I think the observation is a good one. And I’m not sure.

Mark Feffer:

One of the things I wonder about is the frontline manager. It seems that an awful lot of, not worry, but a lot of energy about skills and such comes from the frontline manager. Do you think vendors are addressing that? Are they selling enough to the frontline managers rather than the executives to be meaningful?

Jason    Lauritsen:

I don’t know about… I don’t think that the frontline manager is being supported in the way that they should. I think middle management and frontline management is the hardest job. I think in any organization. They are getting it from both ends. That’s where the pressure comes with employee expectations are dialing up. And when employees quit, you get blamed for them quitting. When employees underperform, you get blamed for them underperforming. And yet you’re not always given the tools or the training or the resources to really help. And then what happens is… I mean, I think with great intention is we go looking for a technology to help these managers and we roll out a tool and we roll out an approach. And I think the managers, at least what I’ve been hearing is managers are overwhelmed, they’re busy, they’re already time crunched, and then we throw new tools at them without the appropriate support. And I think that almost makes the situation worse at times.

And so I remember when I was in the HR seat. When we were trying to roll things out, it was… And actually, the best way I’ve ever heard this said was when I was doing a profile for my book. I was interviewing an HR leader and he said, “The test of whether our solution from HR, whether it’s a process or technology, whether it’s successful, is whether the manager or the employee uses it, if we have to force them to use it. If we have to compel them to do this thing, then it’s not a good solution because we exist to help make their job easier and more effective. And when it makes it more complicated, that’s counterproductive. It’s actually making their job harder.”

So I think that gets lost a little bit. I think there are some tools in here that are great for that. And I think, increasingly, there is more attention being focused on that frontline manager. But I’m not sure that we’ve really gotten there. That’s where I spend all of my time is thinking about, particularly just managers, but that frontline manager, and what do we need to do to equip them to do their job better? And I don’t think the technology often is necessarily helping because they don’t have the skills oftentimes to do the job. And then you throw technology on top of it. It’s never going to solve a skill problem.

Mark Feffer:

Speaking of skills, they’re getting an awful lot of attention today. It seems like it’s one of the driving forces behind any HR operation.

Jason    Lauritsen:

Yep.

Mark Feffer:

. What’s going on?

Jason    Lauritsen:

I mean, call me cynical, but I think it’s another cycle of what we often do. And I think there’ll be people that will probably argue that I’m completely wrong on this, and maybe I am. But it feels to me like it’s a relabeling of the same conversation. And I don’t think it’s a bad relabeling. 10 years ago we were talking about competencies or whatever, and now it’s skills. And I know that skills and competencies, everybody will get into an argument about that. But I don’t know that it’s new. But I think the language is helpful. I think skills help managers, leaders, HR organizations to think more tactically about where the gaps are. It’s a more thoughtful approach, I think, to think about, okay, where are our gaps and what are the things that we need to either equip those people with, or train them up on, or help them learn that helps fill that gap.

And I think that’s right. I think that the conversation about skills is helpful. I think it’s good. I just am not entirely convinced. It’s as new as it feels like it is here with all the conversation. I think it’s the same conversation. It’s just packaged differently. And perhaps this time will be the time that we break through.

Mark Feffer:

No, it seems to me there’s three ways you address skills, you can buy them, you can build them, or you can borrow them. And when I first heard that, I thought it was neat, but then I started to think about how complex was that? If you were trying to deal with skills and say, even a small enterprise, that’s an awful lot of fine tuning you have to do to get a program that works.

Jason    Lauritsen:

I think it is. And honestly, what I would argue is that, again, back to what I said earlier about technology, is that I think a lot of times we can get crystal clear about skills, we can define skills, we can have skill hierarchies, all these things that get talked about. But if I’m not really clear about what the role is, what I need that person to do or produce in that role, whether it’s a manager or whether it’s an individual contributor doing whatever job, I think a lot of times we’re trying to… Now we’re working on skills, but it’s like, “Well, how do we know what skills we need? How do we know what skills we should buy, or build, or grow, or rent, all of that?” So you’re right, it’s really complicated. And I think sometimes this language makes it more complicated as opposed to let’s get really back to clarity about what it is we’re trying to do.

Especially in small business, right? Small business. I think if you come here as a smaller organization, several hundred employees, it gets really overwhelming really fast because you’re like, “We don’t have the budget, we don’t have the staff to do any of this.” And you start to feel really inadequate about what you can do. But I think it all boils down to still, you got to be clear about what it is your… Getting really clear what’s the business need, what’s the need of this role, what’s the things that need to be accomplished? And then you can break it down to, well, do we have this? Can we hire it? Can we get a contractor? Then the questions become a lot simpler. I just think sometimes we start like, it’s a tail wagging the dog. We start at the end, as opposed to starting at the beginning.

Mark Feffer:

Well, it does seem that learning in the flow of work is a nifty way to address some of those issues, the frontline issues. Is that a movement on its own, or is that just HR gloaming onto an existing technical trait?

Jason    Lauritsen:

Well, I think to me it’s more of an aspiration. It’s more that it’s actually the way learning happens is you don’t learn unless you’re… I mean, at least as adults, we learn most effectively when we’re applying things. And so when we’re doing our job, and I run into… I think about this. I think about how my kids learn. My son, he’s a video gamer, and he tries new video games all the time. And if he runs into something he doesn’t know how to do or he’s stuck, in that moment, he goes to YouTube or he goes wherever and he finds somebody that has solved it or teaches, and he’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s what I do.” And then he goes immediately back and he applies it, and he’s off to the races. He doesn’t get stuck. And it’s like, that is our innate nature, human nature. That’s how we learn. That’s how we’re wired to learn.

The reason that we’re not doing it is because our traditional tools at work aren’t designed for that. It’s like, “Well, you need to go off for a week somewhere to learn.” As opposed to, “No, I just ran into this. Or I need somebody to help mentor me or coach me through it the…” We just haven’t been aligned really well to the way we learn. And so I think, again, back to learning in whatever we call it, learning in the flow of work or whatever you want to call it as an HR buzzword. I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s good that we’re talking about it. I think it’s good that we’re focusing on it. I think it would be good if we aligned more tools and resources around that, but I’m not sure that it’s some kind of novel breakthrough necessarily, as much as it is in alignment back to where we started really understanding work as… Starting to center it around humans and the way humans actually learn and actually experience work. So I’m glad to see more tools and focus on it.

Mark Feffer:

Do you think this whole discussion around skills is a long-term discussion or is it going to run its course in a couple years?

Jason    Lauritsen:

I don’t know. I don’t know that I have a good answer to that other than the focus on skills feels more like a feature. It’s more of a conversation about features of technology than it is of the experience of the way work gets done. Because it’s like we still are trapped in this human capital framework or human resource. Well, we can take our resources and break them down into two skills, and then we can think of people as individual skills, and it’s like, people don’t come packaged that way, that you need this skill. Well, that skill comes packaged with a whole bunch of other stuff, some other skills and some other things. I don’t know about the complexity. I think it’s probably a good thing to wrestle with.

I mean, skills aren’t new. They’ve been around forever. They’re just getting their moment right now. And I wonder if it’s more about technology, selling technology, and technology design than it is actually a chain and change in conversation or thinking about how we’re actually developing people or organizing work. I don’t know. I don’t know. I think we’ll be talking about skills into the future because we’ve been talking about skills for a long time, just not as much as we are today.

Mark Feffer:

Jason, thanks very much for your time today.

Jason    Lauritsen:

Thanks for having me, appreciate it.

Speaker 2:

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.

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