3Sixty Insights HRTechChat

3Sixty Insights is at the Hilton Diplomat in Hollywood, Fla., this week to attend isolved Connect, the vendor's annual customer conference. So, naturally, we recorded an episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast onsite with Amy Mosher, isolved's chief people officer, and Lina Tonk, vice president of marketing for isolved.

For our chat, we dove deeply into isolved's recent rebrand, the positive impact this has had on its employees and customers alike, and, as well, isolved's successful internal use of its own platform to grow its own workforce by 40 percent this year. Earlier, this summer, 3Sixty Insights published a case study delving into the particulars. Download it for free, and, if you're feeling enterprising, go here to learn all about our case study on Key Training Center's successful use of the isolved platform.

By the way, you read that right: #isolvedconnect is an in-person event this year. Related activities and festivities remain in full swing through the conclusion of Tuesday's Final Night Party, and it was my pleasure to deliver a presentation here on Monday: Melding the Two Hemispheres of HCM: Concrete and Abstract. After close to two years now meeting with colleagues only virtually, you tend to forget how great it is to see familiar faces and meet new people in real life.

In my opinion, isolved has conducted itself in an exceptionally savvy way as of late -- Amy, Lina, and I even dipped briefly into analyzing the effect of isolved's new colors, pink and black.

This was an especially illuminating episode of #HRTechChat. Chief Strategy Officer Josep Elias joined our video podcast to discuss the company's new offering for earned wage access (EWA), CloudPay NOW. EWA is another term for on-demand pay, and CloudPay NOW is "the only earned wage access solution that can be deployed in 130+ countries," the company's website notes.

Interestingly, CloudPay is bucking the trend in on-demand pay by targeting the entire world (or most of it, anyway). Much of the growth in EWA of late has been in the United States, but EY estimates that "a total of approximately $1 trillion is accrued in employer payroll accounts on any given day," as noted in a report published in September 2020.

That report by EY is a good read all-around regarding the potential for on-demand pay and the impacts of its unavailability. Additional research elsewhere adds grist to the mill. Nearly half of employees will tolerate no more than one mistake or problem with their paycheck, according to The Workforce Institute at UKG. And, according to a 2020 survey by the American Payroll Association, more than two-thirds of employees would experience financial difficulty if their paychecks were delayed by just one week. Just as worrisome, data from CareerBuilder shows that nearly fourth-fifths of people (in the United States, at least) live paycheck-to-paycheck.

Notably on this last point especially, as Josep pointed out, it's a dynamic just as apt to dog the six-figure set, not just entry-level or low-wage staff. It would be a major mistake to attribute a gathering momentum in the growth of solutions for on-demand pay, or EWA, solely to a growing appreciation for employee sentiment and wellbeing vis-à-vis their pay. This is one factor undeniably driving adoption, sure, and socially conscious vendors want to meet the need. Swoop up and out another 20,000 feet, however, and you'll notice something....

Cultural expectations among the newer generations have changed. Generation Z (a.k.a. Zoomers) genuinely wonders why it takes one or two weeks, sometimes a month, to get paid and in just a few ways (e.g., direct deposit to a bank account or, perhaps, via pay card). These limitations fail to align with their expectations of flexibility, instancy and immediacy. To the younger generations, their expectations are compelling.

But expectations such as theirs alone still would not constitute enough of a groundswell to bring EWA to all. No, it's the technology that has caught up, as well, to eviscerate heretofore entrenched limitations  -- because, let's be honest: No matter our age or station in life, we've all at some point wished we could get paid right away without incurring some penalty or taking a risky loan out against income that we'd already earned and needed or just plain wanted right then and now, but couldn't have till the next payday. Together, the technological and regulatory landscape have only recently made the wish possible. The old impediments that made our agreed-to conventions tolerable in the realm of getting pay are falling away rapidly, and so will the traditional pay period, eventually.

Josep's insights into the relationship between people and their pay are deep and intriguing. I highly encourage you all to watch. To learn more about CloudPay NOW, you can visit CloudPay's website site.

This one has been in the queue for a while. Earlier this summer, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Debbie Tuel. It was the day ahead of Symphony Talent's annual user conference. Fittingly, Debbie found herself doing this episode of #HRTechChat from a very cool brewery adjacent to event preparations.

In February 2021, Debbie became chief joy officer at Symphony Talent. When I first spoke with Debbie, not long after she'd landed the new position, I assumed hers was a job in the vein of chief people officer or chief culture officer. As it turns outs, this is not an HR role. Debbie's charter is to advocate for Symphony's core message, the idea that talent acquisition should be joyful.

Talent acquisition should indeed be joyful. Plenty of clunky, legacy applicant tracking systems populate the landscape, sure, and this is one of the greatest impediments. But the caliber of technology exists today to take most of the frustration out of talent acquisition for practitioners and job candidates alike. For the latter, all that's left is the potential sting of not getting the job. And this should be more than enough frustration for anyone in the job search, really. Fortunately, the technology available has become more than good enough. Debbie explains how so and just what, exactly, it means for talent acquisition to be joyful. I thoroughly enjoyed our chat and encourage everyone reading this to give it a listen.

Our latest guest on #HRTechChat was Ryan Anderson. As vice president of global research and insights at Herman Miller, he helps lead a team keen on investigating aspects of the world of work long-linked to the employee experience. More recently, their efforts have focused on how those dynamics play out amid a worldwide pandemic.

Some in our audience may be aware that, for a long time, Herman Miller has been about far more than office furniture. Alongside Boston Consulting Group, Fortune, and "quite a few HR leaders," Anderson says, the company is a founding partner of the Slack-launched Future Forum. This consortium strives to help "executives at leading companies deliver on the transformation needed to thrive in the post-pandemic world." Part of that centers, of course, around protecting the employee experience and maximizing positive aspects around it.

With the sudden disruption of the pandemic last year, Ryan says, he's noticed the responsibility for optimizing office environments  increasingly becoming the domain of HR, and less the responsibility of facilities management. In parallel, the greatest influx of inquiries to his division, at Herman Miller, have come from leaders in HR asking questions on how to optimize employees' work environment as work, for many, becomes less of a physical place.

This was a great discussion for the video podcast. Ryan shares much around the nature of these inquiries, as well as Herman Miller's philosophy around the employee experience. I encourage you to listen in.

For this episode of 3Sixty Insights' #HRTechChat, we decided to approach our favorite subject matter, technology for human capital management, from a slightly different angle. Joining us was Brenda Laughlin, SPHR. Brenda is not only co-founder and managing partner of Enavrio, a consultancy that helps "create tomorrow’s world of work for today’s workforce," but also CEO and principal consultant of PeakSource Consulting.

A central area of Brenda's expertise is in helping to ensure organizations' "data collection and retention process aligns with industry rules, regulations and best practice." This is where our discussion focused: around the extensive considerations that wise organizations take when handling their people's data. The very idea that data privacy is important is just beginning to hit its stride, in my opinion. Highly varied across regions, countries and continents, the related regulatory landscape is still developing, and the act of complying can be complex. In the European Union, there's GDPR. In the United States, there are state-specific and even city-specific rules to follow. And those are just two of myriad examples.

Beyond all this compliance, however, is the principle of protecting the security and privacy of employees' data. What's compelling from a philosophical standpoint is the notion that a person's data is akin to private property. It's not technically or exactly so, but it may as well be. Just look at the opinion many have about their own identifying information. Mess with it, and you lose their trust and exact possibly irreparable damage to your employer brand. Not that we always see companies treat customers' data with the respect patrons assume it enjoys, but it's interesting to hear organizations begin equating the potential downsides of mishandling customer and employee data.

I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with Brenda and encourage viewers to watch this episode in its entirety. She was a great guest and brought a wealth of knowledge to this very important industry dialogue.

Our guest for this episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat video podcast is Anne Fulton, CEO and founder of Fuel50 and member of our Global Executive Advisory Council. On the chat, Anne shared her thoughts, informed by much experience in this market space, on workforce agility and talent mobility. And, for the latter, she shared sneak-preview findings from Fuel50's yet-to-be-released, related report. The result of a survey answered by more than 200 HR practitioners and their employees, Fuel50's report finds intriguing, highly statistically significant, correlations between positive organizational performance and progressive HR performance.

Specifically, organizations that perform better in terms of NPS scores, revenue per employee, and innovation are home to HR departments that have evolved beyond a focus solely on concrete activities, such as eliminating inefficiencies, to act on the more abstract, strategic possibilities of human capital management (HCM). What's more, the number one strategic priority of these best-performing HR departments is to invest in the future of work. For those of us sounding the alarm that we prepare for the future of work right now, lest we miss the opportunity to realize the very best possible future of work, this particular finding is valuable grist for the mill.

Getting back to workforce agility, there's a lot to be gained for employers that do it right. Anne and I discussed how those that apply a marketplace mentality to their internal hiring needs can increase the accuracy of their external recruiting and spend less on it. Meanwhile, these organizations also begin to maximize their utilization of the talent they already have in their workforce. Beyond this come boosts to the employee experience, innovation, and retention. Some might say those three are intertwined, and they certainly tend to follow as workforce agility is optimized.

Anne and I talked a lot, and every minute of it was thoroughly enjoyable. She really knows her stuff, and I strongly encourage readers to view this episode.

Nate Smith, founder and CEO of San Francisco–based Lever, joined us for this episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat. Lever's technology for talent acquisition, as well as the vendor's philosophy behind finding new hires, helps employers facing complex challenges in reaching their strategic goals identify and woo future employees whose skills are essential to the related tasks at hand. As you can imagine, this made for an interesting podcast.

Nate and I first spoke last summer and openly wondered whether it might have been one year exactly to the day that we recorded this episode -- which was Monday, July 19. Being a calendar pack rat, I did a search, and it turns out that we were off by just one week. Imagine that.

Many organizations today wrestle with antiquated, clunky or inadequate functionality to assist and facilitate talent acquisition. At the very least, it's the last two of these that make it seem like all three anyway. The thing is, the very idea of an applicant tracking system (ATS) is ill-matched to helping employers keep tabs on potential new-hires in today's recruiting environment. Long in the tooth, the concept of an ATS was so-named at a time when the workflow and scope of recruiting would have been nearly unrecognizable to today's talent acquisition professionals.

Specifically, the vast majority of ATS functionality struggle to account for today's environment. The word "applicant" itself assumes that the only job candidate worth tracking is one who's elected to apply for a job. This is simply short-sighted. Social media and the evolution of recruiting technology have finally brought us to a point where employers can target new-hire prospects with accuracy and treat them as leads to manage and nurture over the long term.

In other words, the length of the journey of a potential new-hire today is akin to that of a potential customer -- perhaps longer, if we're talking about consumer products. Truth be told, customer relationship management systems have facilitated long nurturing cycles, for sales, for many years. Talent acquisition is catching up.

For example, a recruiter may have a conversation with a high-value person who doesn't apply for a job as a direct result or any time soon. The last thing he wants to do is request this person enter her curriculum vitae into any conventional ATS whatsoever. Instead, he'd want to enter notes of the details of this contact and the attendant conversation into a candidate relationship management (CRM) system, marking the record for follow-up when and if an opening suitable for her opens. Only once she becomes an actual applicant does her CV enter the ATS.

Most organizations solve for this issue by deploying their ATS and CRM (candidate relationship management) applications separately, contending with nearly impossible integration challenges. Lever combines the two as one application running a single data set governed by a single rules engine. We've heard of single applications for multiple functions before, and it's often a very good idea. It's almost silly to call such a sophisticated, purpose-built thing an ATS, frankly.

Nate and I explored so much more. I urge you to view the entire podcast.

We welcome Tom Cielak to this episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat video podcast. Tom and I met several years ago to discuss his team's use of Ceridian Dayforce when he was director of HR operations at ACCO Brands. He later joined global asset management firm Allianz Global Investors, in mid-2018, as its vice president of HR operations. This is his current role, and Tom's team at Allianz Global happens to use Ceridian Dayforce too.

Tom is an advocate for the notion that, to be effective in their craft and as an asset to the organization, HR leaders today must become technologists. In today's environment, where decision-making to buy enterprise software involves a broad variety of stakeholders, the IT department still has a say. The HR Technologist is far better at articulating a technology-buying decision to the satisfaction of IT and able to get the most of out of a deployment.

Technology for human capital management proved to be fertile ground for a spirited discussion. One highly relevant tangent we took revolved around the various generations in the workforce today, from Boomers to Zoomers and everyone in between. Differentiation in functionality between vendors may resonate only for some buyers in that mix. For the younger generations, HCM technology vendors may need to make their case in other ways, especially as Millennials move up the ladder and take on buying authority. This led us to analyze the rationale behind why so many of these vendors focus on the strength of their own employer culture as their marketing message. From there we took a slight detour to delve into an idea covered previously on this podcast: that employers ought to rethink their calculus fundamentally by treating the workforce as an asset, rather than as a cost.

Make sure to watch this episode. Tom brings a savvy perspective to HCM and the role of the HR leader.

Joining us for this episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat is Richard Limpkin, chief product officer at Dublin, Ireland-based global payroll provider Immedis. Richard and I spoke at length a couple times prior this. The insights we unearthed in those conversations were intriguing and, fortunately, the podcast captured the gist of these idas as we reiterated previously covered ground.

When you think about it, payroll is perhaps the most concrete and most abstract aspect of human capital management. On the one hand, it's an indisputable number of outgoing money every one or two weeks (for some organizations, once monthly). Mess with that number or its delivery, and an organization can very quickly have a mutiny on its hands as job satisfaction suffers an acute, palpable blow.

Above all, what must payroll be, without fail? It absolutely has to be timely and accurate, Richard says. He's right, of course, and this applies to all payroll situations. Get payroll wrong or produce it late, and an organization immediately experiences the aforementioned potentially disastrous crisis of employee sentiment. Exacerbating matters is a strict regulatory environment reflecting the basic importance of payroll and governing how the organization must proceed to rectify the situation, whatever it is.

Here is where concrete and abstract HCM really come into play, and this gets us to the other two things payroll must do, in Richard's sage estimation: Be fully compliant with all applicable laws and fully protect the security and privacy of employees' data (for which some of that regulatory framework also applies).

Notably, as an organization's payroll becomes global, the complexities of all these factors behind payroll intensify. In a way, global payroll is the ultimate point solution, and there's essentially no way to implement that solution for global payroll until the moment you need one. We got into all that too, and I encourage readers to view this episode of the podcast. It was a pleasure to speak again with Richard, who brought deep expertise to this discussion.

Joining us for this episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat is Tom Tonkin, Ph.D., member of our Global Executive Advisory Council. A former colleague of mine, Dr. Tonkin is now CEO of The Conservatory Group, where he and his team "help executives, middle-managers and sales leaders to self-actualize in their roles." Dr. Tonkin's background in technology for the enterprise stretches back many years and includes just shy of two decades at Oracle in a multitude of roles spanning sales, technology enablement, professional services, and more.

My conversation with Dr. Tonkin centered on diversity, equity and inclusion. Through his observations, informed partially by his doctoral work, Dr. Tonkin believes several things must happen for DE&I initiatives and ideas to move beyond awareness -- frankly, only the first step of many that must take place.

For example, he believes strongly that so-identified historically privileged stakeholders' active, observable empathizing with women's and minorities' struggles in these areas will help to advance DE&I efforts overall. It's a great point. He sees much utility in the role of various affinity-related and other employee resource groups in giving voice and establishing representation for women and minorities in the workplace. The usefulness of these groups, however, while necessary, falls short in advancing the actual equity and inclusion sought.

Our discussion eventually landed on the scientifically underpinned idea of neurodiversity. Who are the neurodiverse? They are, mainly, those who place along the spectrum of autism. Our world, Dr. Tonkin explains, is structured around the neurotypical's way of thinking. The vast majority of people are neurotypical. Their minds are considered, for lack of a better term, normal. Real-world experience shows, however, that the neurodiverse have much to contribute to the success of teams. A program at SAP is one example. The problem is that they struggle, because of their deficiencies in social interaction, to get hired.

Here is where our discussion segued into the potential for psychometrics and other tools to help organizations make sure the neurodiverse make their way through the recruiting process and get a "fair shot" at joining the organization in order to offer the employer their very particular, valuable skills. The idea is that this ultimately benefits organizational performance. Thinking even further into the future of work, we pondered the possibility that artificial intelligence may one day equip both the neurodiverse and neurotypical with "mental prosthetics" that might greatly help them understand each other and collaborate optimally.

Visitors here really do owe it to themselves to watch this especially fascinating episode of the podcast. Along with his work leading The Conservatory Group, Dr. Tonkin is heavily involved in organizations whose missions intersect with these and related ideas. One, SAMI (short for Smart Answers for Modern Issues), bills itself as a "Real Time Crowd-Sourced Solution for Soft Skills. Another, aptly named Diversity Equity Inclusion, provides a "SaaS-driven solution that makes diversity, equity, and inclusion high-tech and easy to understand for any organization or business."