3Sixty Insights HRTechChat

Building a successful career requires the right mindset, skills, and strategies to navigate the changing job market. In this conversation with Swati Jain, a transformational advisor and leadership coach, she shared her experience of building her professional journey, highlighting the importance of building career resilience, self-discovery, and a deep understanding of one's strengths and weaknesses. She emphasized that hard and soft skills are crucial but not the only focus for career success. Rather, she recommended three key strategies to build career agility, take risks, and network effectively. And, that is what we dive into in the podcast.

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I wish we could just push a button and have payroll process without a hitch, like everyone thinks we do," joked Robyn Torgius, guest on this episode of #HRTechChat. Instead of just falling into the work, as most have in the past, people are increasingly choosing payroll as a career path. This is a good thing. As global head of payroll at IFS and member of 3Sixty Insights' Global Executive Advisory Council, Robyn shared her considerable insight into how payroll can be elevated into a profession -- and why it should be.

For this episode of #HRTechChat, Purbita Banerjee, senior client partner and head of product management at Korn Ferry, joined 3Sixty Insights Co-Founder Brent Skinner for a barnburner of a discussion. Their topic? How future-of-work technology is upending long-held notions in #talentacquisition and #talentmanagement. "We're here to create pathways to success for humans at work," said Purbita.

Last week, just before the morning's program commenced at the Boston stop along the 2023 #isolvedRoadShow, this episode's #HRTechChat video podcast guest Geoff Webb and I met for some impromptu "green room" time and joked that it was too bad the camera wasn't rolling. Never fear, however: I plan to build on that very interesting discussion soon with a dedicated blog entry....

Following the conclusion of last Thursday's itinerary at the Courtyard by Marriot, Geoff and I sat down for this episode of the podcast -- recorded "in concert, so to speak," from the Road Show floor. And this may be the right time to explain just what the 2023 isolved Road Show is, because it relates directly to the conversation captured here. A multiple-city trek that executives and others at isolved are making to reach as many of the vendor's customers as possible, the Road Show is isolved's vehicle to deliver an important, timely message to HR leaders and their teams: it's possible to stop spinning your wheels under a mountain of administrative work and become strategic, laser-focused on the all-important employee experience. And you can get there one step at a time.

Geoff shared a metaphor for all this, the Red Queen Effect. In Lewis Carroll's 19th century classic Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen teaches main character Alice the underlying subtext and metaphor of running faster and faster and, yet, staying in one place.

"When you think about what that means to an HR organization," Geoff said, "I think it's very, very appropriate. We see HR teams being asked to do more and more and more, to react and respond to changes in employee expectations and to change to the needs of the business. And, of course, there's just a relentless drumbeat of new legislation, new laws, new compliance requirements, new mandates, and so on. So, of course, what they're doing is have to run faster and faster, just to stay in the same place."

The gist of the Red Queen's lesson is to work smarter, not faster. Species evolve to evade falling prey to predators. These same predators then evolve to catch these same prey anew. Each draws on the same innate imperative, and HR can evolve, too. HR can stop running faster and faster just to stay in one place. With this deliberate, intentional shift in thinking, HR will see many desirable benefits over time. Their evolution will lead them to more gratifying work that organizational leadership will recognize as strategic. The best part is, just like biological evolution occurs in tiny steps, so does HR evolution. HR presses forward and upward in gradual increments -- easily mastered, effective steps.

Geoff is a repeat guest on #HRTechChat, by the way, and you can view a previous episode featuring him. In the midst of doing well over 60 for 2023, isolved is serious about its Road Shows. Those into math will recognize right away that this means at least one city every week this year. Yes, the isolved team is busy, and we at 3Sixty Insights enjoyed the opportunity to join them and host this episode of the podcast.

Brandon Dorr, director of people technologies at WPS Health Solutions, guested on this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast. He and host Brent Skinner discussed how Brandon's training in IT led him into HR. There seems to be a robust career path in HR (and other lines of business) for IT professionals needed for their expertise in sorting the data that SaaS for HCM produces (and in developing custom, tailored functionality). During their conversation, they also touched on the high caliber of attention that UKG pays to customer success.

I'm going to date myself here. My first encounter with Mike Ettling, CEO of Unit4, was over 10 years ago. Technology editor for HRO Today at the time, I was relatively wet behind the ears, as the saying goes, when it comes to human capital management and the technology for it. I attended a briefing for analysts and the industry press with Mike, CEO at the time of what was then NorthgateArinso. The gathering was in real life, a.k.a. IRL (a term that had not even emerged yet).

"Well, Brent, that goes back some time," Mike said when I brought it up to open the discussion on this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast. Much has happened since 2011. NGA became NGA Human Resources and, eventually, a part of Alight, and Mike went on to even greater things. Possibly most notable among his past roles is that of CEO for SAP SuccessFactors, a post he held from 2014 to 2018.

To say Mike loves thinking about HCM is evident. He sees how it all blends, and he takes it a step further. "Unit4 focuses on ERP for people-centric businesses," he says, and his philosophy there is, in fact, to treat HCM and Unit4's software for enterprise resource planning and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) as being inextricably linked and having one holistic application for business.

Mike's perspective here is refreshing. The idea to integrate these activities closely has been forming bit by bit for years, and, from a messaging standpoint and more, the approach has been just screaming for a go-to-market vehicle. The benefits afforded to an organization that treats these activities as linked are many and go beyond potentially sizable newfound efficiencies. The company that can give its financial people visibility into the organization's people overall, its workforce, will cultivate a greater appreciation among the former for the upside of a positive employee experience.

Perhaps it is no accident, then, that one of Mike's first executive decisions, when he took the role to lead Unit4, was to rename the human resources department as People Success, a term that captures the essence and spirit of recently gathering trends in HCM and business leadership overall: the tenet that organizations' profitability and overall perpetuity hinges on their embrace of a new guiding ethos, one that asserts the success of the company's people ultimately translates to success, period.

Not for naught, the concept is baked into Unit4's tagline, too: "in business for people," which is what initially drew Mike to Unit4, he says. The saying implicitly intersects with diversity, equity and inclusion, another topic we explored during the podcast. Mike says that he is grateful for his upbringing in South Africa, as it instilled in him what he sees as a second nature for DE&I. "You cannot solve DE&I with a process," he says. "You can solve it with empathy and the right leaders in an organization."

It was a wide-ranging conversation. Just before recording began, Mike and I joked that our discussion would probably dip into speculation over artificial intelligence at some point (as does most coffee talk in HCM these days, it seems). Amazingly, it did not, but he says he's interested in returning to #HRTechChat someday to discuss AI specifically. That would be yet another fantastic discussion.

March 8th marks International Women’s Day and a special opportunity for organizations to celebrate the contributions of their female employees. This is an especially important day to me because it is about empowering women in the workplace. So this year on International Women’s Day, let’s take some time to recognize our hardworking women and find new ways to challenge the status quo.

Celebrating with me today is Maji Tharpe from University of Illinois’ Discovery Partners Institute, and she is doing everything she can to diversify the tech ecosystem in the state of Illinois by disrupting the internship model. We met at the virtual HR Tech Conference, and instantly hit it off! We both operate in the cross section of HR Tech, succession planning, upskilling and pipeline diversity. We are both committed to challenging the status quo to create a better workplace for our daughters.

“It is important that we address these issues systemically and conscientiously so that we can actually make a difference,” said Maji, “because if we just say we want to do good, that's not solving anything, we've got to create solutions. We have got to push ourselves to the point of being uncomfortable if we are going to make a difference that is actually going to affect and make our system more equitable across the board.”

International Women's Day is just a great opportunity to put this message out there with a solution of what can be done.

Reach out to Maji at [email protected] to learn more.

#HRTechChat: Jamie Aitken, Vice President of HR Transformation at Betterworks by 3Sixty Insights

#HRTechChat with James Brogan CEO and Co-Founder of PepTalk by 3Sixty Insights

#HRTechChat: Geoff Webb, Vice President of Solutions, Product, and Marketing Strategy at isolved by 3Sixty Insights