3Sixty Insights HRTechChat

For this, the latest episode of #HRTechChat, our guest is Marc Havercroft, global chief customer officer for SAP SuccessFactors. Marc and I had a conversation a couple weeks ago and were both struck by how much we have in common in terms of our views on HCM. We at 3Sixty Insights speak of abstract and concrete HCM, and how you need both. Marc shares a very intriguing rendition on this, equating the two to operational-related HCM and experience-related HCM -- i.e., the employee experience. And we agree that whether it's abstract and concrete or operational and experience, all of it comes to bear squarely and undeniably on employee sentiment.

Our podcast together reiterates these points and continues in this vein. Ultimately, our discussion explores wide-ranging topics related to the principle premise: Organizations that treat HCM as solely operational (i.e., concrete) struggle to see their people as anything but a cost to contain. In contrast, those employers that treat their people as an asset will invest in them and win.

Going deeper, organizations should move their workforce out of the cost column and into the asset column -- literally. Old-school financial-minded executives might question the wisdom behind doing so. As Marc puts it, however, and I paraphrase, there comes a point when you can't worry about explaining that the world is round anymore. The world is round anyway. This or the other effort having to do with improving the employee experience may be an abstract idea and may not translate to a financially quantifiable line item any accountant or anyone in finance would recognize. It matters to success anyway.

We must begin to take as postulate that the general ledger is not a full view of the health of the organization -- i.e., of its ability to succeed over the short or long term. Employee sentiment matters to an organization's success -- to the bottom and top line. Finance may not see it. They're entitled to their opinions, but not to the final say.

I encourage you to click on the video above and view this entire episode. Marc brought much-needed energy, passion and ideas to this very important discussion.

The latest guest on the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat is Mitch Zenger, founder of Synctrics and member of our Global Executive Advisory Council (GEAC). Mitch brought to this episode a wealth of wisdom culled from decades of successful, high-profile work in executive coaching and team building.

The HCM industry and professions gathered around it speak in depth and widely about the pressing need to get better at producing and interpreting data that enables employers to make better decisions in forming teams that will operate in harmony. To achieve this, there is an urgent need to pull in big data sets produced with modern psychometric models. As if this weren't enough of a challenge to achieve this pressing goal, however, there is a similarly urgent need to completely rethink and drastically streamline organizational data models to give analytics-deriving and -delivering systems the breathing room to play their role. As with so many other things, all the encouraging potential future-of-work scenarios we hear about just won't happen without this.

Mitch makes great, provocative points here. If you have an interest in learning more about just how we can transcend some of these limitations that the evolution of enterprise software has thus far left us, click on the video.

Our most recent guest on the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat was Dr. Chris Mullen, executive director of The Workforce Institute at UKG. Chris brings an extensive background relevant to the #HRTechChat conversation. Prior to joining what is now UKG, he carried out a leadership role in HR at the University of Chicago and helped to lead employee and faculty recruiting at Colorado State University.

For this episode, we delved into why employees' feelings matter. By feelings, we mean employee sentiment. What is the role of human capital management and the technology for it in bringing about and supporting positive employee sentiment. Chris notes that there's plenty of research showing that positive employee sentiment matters to organizational success. And he's right about this.

The obstacle many HR professionals run into as they argue for investments in related solutions is that improvements in employee sentiment, the very results that bolster an organization's ability to succeed, do not translate to financially quantifiable line items in a spreadsheet. Leaders on the financial side of the equation struggle to see the value, efforts stagnate, and inertia sets in.

My own key takeaway from this conversation with Chris, partially covered in the podcast itself, is the following. One way to get around these seemingly intractable differences in perspectives is to understand that the nuts and bolts of HCM deeply influence employee sentiment too -- and show how these effects are not discrete, but part of the whole of the rationale, both tactical and strategic (i.e., concrete and abstract), for investing in efficient clocking-in technology or efficient, accurate, modern payroll processing software. The result is a toehold that HR can build upon to expand organizational leadership's concept of what constitutes worthwhile investments in the workforce.

This is only a small snapshot of the our chat. We covered much ground, and Chris is a wellspring of knowledge and wisdom on these topics.

Joining me for this, the latest episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat video podcast, were two guests from iCIMS: Rhea Moss, director of data insights and customer intelligence, and Nicole Tucker, manager of talent acquisition. Together, we delved into the recently published "Class of 2021 Report." Drawing on data from a survey "conducted among 500 U.S. human resource or recruiting professionals, 500 U.S. college seniors, 250 U.K. college seniors, and 250 France college seniors between April 9 and April 23, 2021," iCIMS Insights explored the expectations and hopes that this year's college graduates have for their first professional jobs.

In the year that was 2020, industries of most stripes welcomed much discussion -- and took much action -- around bolstering and improving the employee experience. Employers of front-line workers faced their own challenges with hybrid arrangements and the like. Meanwhile, for desk workers, a fog set in as work from home became the norm. We began to equate improvements in the employee experience as necessarily linked to organizations' flexibility in accommodating WFH arrangements.

What's interesting is iCIMS' findings around this. Whereas, anecdotally, we may conclude that Millennials and others embraced WFH as helpful to them as they tended to children attending school online or home from closed daycare facilities, the data show that Generation Z (a.k.a. Zoomers) doesn't wish to put up with much of this WFH dynamic. We may infer, from the research, that they want to experience the traditional rites of passage into full-fledged adulthood, and one of those is the opportunity to go to a brick-and-mortar office, make work friends, and experience their careers IRL.

It's just one of the many intriguing findings from iCIMS' annual survey research in this area. In the data from iCIMS' latest research are several deep implications for talent acquisition and the onboarding and subsequent employment of young new-hires. Give this episode a listen. Rhea and Nicole bring much insight to this important discussion.

Mike Erlin, co-founder and CEO of AbilityMap and member of the 3Sixty Insights Global Executive Advisory Board, has the esteemed distinction of being the first-ever repeat guest on #HRTechChat. In the previous episode with Mike, we dove into the deep end of psychometrics, which have advanced considerably since the old days of Myers-Briggs (considered for many years now a largely ineffective instrument).

In this, the latest episode, we went down the rabbit hole to ponder the future impact of artificial intelligence in hiring and human capital management generally. It's of paramount importance and urgent, we agreed, that humans develop and apply the soundest psychometrics possible to the evaluation and hiring of people, lest AI eventually apply its own and, possibly, prioritize profits and cost containment in ways our imagination can barely fathom. AI-driven criteria for hiring certainly wouldn't necessarily be ethical or value the human purpose in work, but a human-driven psychometrics model just might. And, in veering into these topics, Mike and I talked about whether civilization just might be putting too much faith, proverbially and literally, in AI.

Watch the video to catch our full conversation -- and thank you, Mike, for your wise contributions to these conversations.

Jennifer Ravalli was our guest for the latest episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat podcast. Following long stints at ADP and, most recently, iCIMS, Jenn joined PandoLogic in September 2020 to head all marketing efforts.

Jenn and I met and first spoke at the Spring 2021 HR Technology Conference & Exposition. It's when we delved specifically into PandoLogic's solution, a programmatic job advertising platform with underpinnings in artificial intelligence and available on the iCIMS marketplace.

Naturally, this episode of #HRTechChat covers much ground in the areas of AI, the future of work, and more -- among our favorite topics at 3Sixty Insights. (Go here and here for our blogging on these ideas.)

Jenn sees AI transforming the roles of recruiting (and sourcing, for that matter). Drawing on lessons learned from the analysis of massive data sets, AI will eventually become just plain better than even the most seasoned, savvy, innovative professionals at certain things in recruiting and sourcing.

Some of that will the machine learning part of things -- the repetitive things recruiters would rather not do anyway. But AI will also be better at other things, such as being far more accurate than human intuition when it comes to knowing where the best candidates for an open requisition are likely to be and where they're likely to look.

Who exactly these candidates are or should be is another thing AI will get better and better at determining, eventually better than any human ever could be. And AI will make organizations better at producing job descriptions that attract the most qualified, most diverse candidates for the job.

In sum, soft skills, skills such as people skills, will grow ever more critical to recruiting professionals' success as their day-to-day work grows to encompass mostly this aspect of their roles.

And that's just a small peek into my conversation with Jenn. I encourage you to give this episode a listen.

For this, the latest episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat, Core-Mark International Senior Director of Human Resources Ahmad Noordin joined us. Responsible specifically for systems, payroll and people analytics at Core-Mark, Amhad is also a member of our Global Executive Advisory Council. During our chat, he and I discussed the many factors employers must consider when attempting to bring order to critical aspects of human capital management at a geographically dispersed, decentralized organization. A Fortune 250 company, Core-Mark is one such entity, a behind-the-scenes supplier to thousands of convenience stores across North America.

When thinking about centralizing certain HCM functions at an organization that services a broad geographic footprint and possesses a commensurate physical presence to accommodate this, Noordin says it's important to understand that balance is critical. Satellite offices bring much to the table in terms of boots-on-the-ground intelligence on what works, and what doesn't. At the same time, the HR department absolutely needs deep visibility into activity such as, for example, compensation planning -- whose UKG module Noordin and his team are presently implementing. And, workforce-related compliance overall must hew centrally lest the organization lose control of it entirely -- and suffer the risk.

Our conversation was wide-ranging, and we got quite introspective as to the role and mission of HCM. Be sure to watch the video.

For the latest episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat video podcast, my guest was David Barak, chief marketing officer of CloudPay. Through a unified cloud platform, CloudPay provides managed global payroll in more than 130 countries. The company also offers treasury services across this geographic footprint. Here's a sampling of the ideas we covered:

Virtually no employer ever really, truly plans for global payroll in advance. At some point, most organizations that get large enough and global enough get to a place where their company-wide payroll is practically unmanageable. This becomes the official outset of a typically three-stage process that eventually gets them to a straightforward scenario wherein their global payroll is under control and working for, not against, them. The journey there is almost always backward. You'll have to watch the video to learn what these stages are.

Sure, there are vendors of full-suite software for human capital management who offer a substantial ability to deliver in the grand theater of global payroll. What's intriguing, however, is that global payroll is really a point-solution deployment. The complexity of it just lends itself to this. There is a need for so-called best-of-breed providers because the expertise in it must be deep and ability to deliver, broad.

Global payroll is never a technology-only exercise. If the software isn't up to task, yes, insurmountable problems will scuttle efforts. Deploy highly capable technology that is just right for global payroll, however, and the constantly evolving, highly complex regulatory environment remains. This is why employers ready to get their global payroll in order behoove themselves to partner with a provider that has a cadre of subject matter experts on hand to help the user navigate the span of local, regional, and national laws applicable to processing payroll internationally.

If global payroll is at all interesting to you or important to your work, then you will definitely enjoy this episode of #HRTechChat. I know that I did. Enjoy the podcast

For our latest episode of #HRTechChat, my guest is Theresa Harkins-Schulz, senior vice president of customer experience at Inspirus. And this is where our conversation began, with Theresa's sharing of her philosophy around the customer journey. Because of its customer-centered connotations, she prefers the term customer experience over customer success and other monikers denoting the realm of activities organizations carry out in tending to their customers.

From there, our discussion expanded to ponder the similarities between the customer experience and the employee experience and to what extent organizations can approach both similarly, look at them through the same lens, or even coordinate their efforts. A member of the 3Sixty Insights Global Executive Advisory Council and long-time board member (and past president and past education chair) for Recognition Professionals International, Theresa has trained her focus on the art and practice of employee recognition for much of her career -- several years ago, designing an employee recognition program for Delta Airlines.

Following is a short elaboration on just three of the many additional ideas we explored:

Campfire Girls: HR can get so wrapped up in planning and throwing great events for employees -- kind of like being "campfire girls" -- that they confuse this for the practice of giving employees recognition, which is an attitude. This aligns nicely with an idea, discussed in a previous episode of #HRTechChat, that providing pizza and beer on Friday does not equate to cultivating employer culture. It's nice to do nice things like this for employees, but it is not a substitute for the hard work.

The Components of Good Employer Culture: What are they? It's a challenging question. Unequivocally, Theresa believes trust is the essential, bedrock ingredient. Another fundamental component of employer culture is purpose and understanding of the job that needs to be done. You can't really argue with any of these, which provide as good of a calculus as any to understanding what underlies a good employer culture. "Some of this really goes back to [...] Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and establishing that psychological safety in the workplace," she says.

Pandemic, Hierarchies, Speed, and HCM Technology: The pandemic has laid bare the need for agility in working together and in catering to employees' needs. Hierarchies that have settled into existence over long periods of time slow this down. So does old, bad or no technology. There is a demand for immediacy, and there's a symbiosis to the flexible of an organizational structure and the technology in place to facilitate cooperation and promote positive culture. This need, today. for flexibility to deliver on immediacy is exponentially more pressing than it was ahead of the pandemic, and it will only increase in importance moving forward.

There is much more to our conversation.

3Sixty Insights welcomed James La Brash late last week to the latest episode of #HRTechChat. James is founding managing director of InFlight. Truth be told, James and I have had the pleasure of engaging in several conversations, and we finally concluded that we should try to capture in the podcast as many of the great ideas we've discussed as possible. As anyone can imagine, there just wasn't enough time to cover everything, but we did get to a lot of it.

The launching pad for our discussion in the video here is the idea that there just might be some room for human capital management and marketing -- the CHRO and CMO -- to cooperate, benefiting from mutual data analytics wherever possible. Furthermore, we noted that marketing has a roughly 10-year head start on HCM in the former's appreciation for measuring its effectiveness, and that CHROs may therefore learn a few things from CMOs in the interest of accelerating HCM's own foray into measuring its effectiveness. The conversation took off from there. Here's a sampling of the subject matter James and I have covered since first speaking, much of it captured in the podcast:

With good intentions, many in talent acquisition have recognized the similarities (beyond the acronyms) of systems for customer relationship management and candidate relationship management. It's a good impulse. It's also good not to follow it to the extreme, as the parallels between customers' and candidates' needs are there, but limited.

Are the employer and consumer brand separate? Or, are they one and the same? If it's the latter, is it preferable for HCM and marketing alike to treat them as one or as two. Is the answer, "sometimes"?

In some industries, it makes especially good sense for HCM and marketing to partner. Examples are when the typical employee is desk-less or semi-desk-less or otherwise interacts directly with customers day-to-day. These employees become the expression of the brand, so employer and company brand are one and the same

We all know that great marketing and a great employee experience contribute mightily to organizational success, in and outside the general ledger, but it’s notoriously difficult or impossible to quantify financially these domains’ overall benefits to the organization. Could it be that it’s because in order to prove that financially quantifiable connection, you have to measure the totality of HCM or marketing, and this just isn’t possible because of the many moving parts within these domains?

One way to chip away at this apparent impasse is to introduce leadership to the idea of brand damage -- i.e., that it's potentially expensive and avoidable. This may be a viable bridge to get us to the ideal future, when organizations understand the benefits of positive brand (employer or consumer) as a point of excellence to pursue.

There's much more. You just have to watch. We again thank James for joining #HRTechChat.