This past summer, isolved acquired AAP, an administrative services organization (ASO) and significant member of isolved's large network of similar companies using isolved's software-as-a-service solution for human capital management to carry out part or all of HR for their clients. Demonstrating why AAP is an especially good match for the vendor, this in-network acquisition underscores several of isolved's strengths. Joining me on the video podcast to explain were Andy Osborne, who was CEO of AAP for 20 years, and Lina Tonk, who has been with isolved for many years herself, becoming the organization's chief marketing officer shortly after her previous appearance on #HRTechChat.

This acquisition of AAP reflects an important element of isolved's growth strategy. Bringing members of this network fully under the isolved brand is typically smooth and straightforward for these ASOs, professional employer organizations (PEOs), payroll service bureaus, and similar providers. Already using isolved's solution, they see business tending to continue as usual, and easily, for their clients. In the process, isolved grows in a highly sustainable way.

In recent years isolved has built a wraparound ecosystem designed to cultivate this network. Firsthand, I've witnessed extra-exemplary ASOs and PEOs et al. from this network receive public recognition at isolved's annual user conference. As for AAP, infusing its culture into isolved's proved intuitive, a natural step benefiting from the strength of relationships between leaders at both organization.

"Andy and I go way back," Lina said. "From the moment they deployed the isolved platform, I remember thinking, 'They will be such a good fit for us. And, when he made the decision to move into an acquisition with us, we knew that he had checked every single box to ask, 'Are my customers going to be okay? Is my team going to be okay?' They built such a strong culture for their customers that, as we transfer them through, you can see it; you can live and breathe it."

Lina's words make lots of sense as you hear Andy speak of looking past just the paycheck. "We see through the paycheck. We look past the electronic file. We try to take into consideration every day, what we did that impacted the person behind what was printed on the check or what was in an electronic file. We want to understand the impact if we didn't get our job right. If we missed the child support or the direct deposit, you know that those things are key. That is the culture that we built."

The story of AAP's relationship with isolved is a powerful anecdote speaking not only to the cultural fit between the two, but also the usability and capability of the vendor's cloud software for HCM.

"We started reviewing the software options that were out there in 2014," Andy said. "The platform that we were on at the time was not meeting client demand. It was not evolving and developing at the speed that the market required." In 2016, AAP made the selection to move to the isolved platform, "which checked all the boxes for all of the things that we needed." So superior was isolved for AAP's needs that, just to be sure, Andy asked his team to re-analyze all the isolved competitors that AAP had considered. "After two reviews of everybody else, isolved still came out as the clear front runner."

Incidentally, one of those needs stemmed from Andy's decision early in his tenure as CEO at AAP to target quick-service restaurants (QSRs), a vertical market that eventually accounted for approximately 65 percent of AAP's client base. This aligns with goals at isolved, which targets QSRs, too, with a solution especially well-tailored for their challenges in HCM.

As usual, the blog entry captures only a sliver of the depth of thought and conversation on display on the #HRTechChat video podcast. Do yourselves a favor and watch this episode, a very deep dive into what it takes to make an acquisition of this kind successful.

When exactly should vendor selection really start? Is it ever just about vendor selection? Many times, employers should step back, rethink assumptions, and consider whether vendor selection even is the right path. Whatever ails their HCM or impedes them from achieving their vision may be traceable to something other than technology or whatever vendor may already be deployed.

This episode of the video podcast is a brainchild of sorts. It stems from a conversation at the HR Technology Conference & Expo with Brenda Laughlin and Brian Turk, managing partners at Enavrio. "Is technology vendor selection really just about technology vendor selection?" I asked. And here we are now, the three of us, on #HRTechChat to explore the answer to this seemingly circular question.

Enavrio is "a global consulting collective of the best and brightest HR and HR technology consultants," Brian stated near the outset of the recorded chat. Working with independent contractors, freelancers and, also, boutique consulting firms, Enavrio has a front row seat when it comes to seeing how technology vendor selection plays out. When and why employers determine that they need a change in their HCM technology provider is a complex discussion with many layers and variables. The direction of their decision-making is fraught with pitfalls.

"Ideally, we have the HR strategy somewhat formulated, we know what the business is trying to accomplish, and we know how the HR strategy is linked to the business objectives," Brenda said. "Today, technology is just an integral part of almost every strategy, every piece of HR. And to ignore the technology piece and have it as an afterthought is a mistake," just as to reflexively "lead with the technology is a mistake, because oftentimes technology doesn't even solve the problem."

As can be imagined, our discussion meandered smack-dab into 3Sixty Insights' own core focus: understanding the evolving decision-making process in enterprise software. For one, it's important for buying organizations to advocate for themselves. When it comes to their needs, "it's a little bit risky to completely rely on the vendor from sales to implementation," Brian said. "Ideally, you have some way of owning that as the client and seeing it through as the client."

Longtime viewers may recall that Brenda was a guest on the podcast in late summer 2021. Here's a link. It was a pleasure to have Brenda back, this time with Brian to discuss an at once timely and perennial topic. Any organization rethinking its approach to HCM would do well to view this episode.

“Nobody wakes up in the middle of the night going, ‘Oh, great, tomorrow is my performance review,” said Jamie Aitken in a moment of light-hearted sarcasm during this episode of #HRTechChat. My latest guest on our video podcast, Jamie is vice president of HR Transformation at Betterworks.

In 2017, Adobe published a report titled "Performance Reviews Get a Failing Grade." The results to the associated survey painted a bleak picture. Startlingly, 22 percent of respondents admitted to having cried after their performance review. From the same survey, 58 percent of respondents said performance reviews are stressful, and 37 percent began searching for employment elsewhere following a performance review. One-fifth of respondents were so impacted by their performance review that they acted on a decision to quit immediately afterward.

“Why are we doing this?" Jamie asked. "It's stressful not just for employees, but for people managers. Traditional performance management doesn’t even move the needle when it comes to performance or productivity.”

It really doesn't. And it really doesn't matter that the results to Adobe's survey are from nearly six years ago. In the time that's passed traditional performance management has surely become even more anachronistic. The old way of doing performance management is, in fact, antithetical to the implicit goal of any company attempting to track and measure their employees' performance: to improve it.

Providing evidence of a viable alternative is Betterworks' own report: "2022 Global HR Research Report: The State of Performance Enablement." Surveying 2,500 employees and managers at a wide range of employers, the vendor found that respondents who were indeed users of Betterworks saw a 25 percent improvement in employee engagement and 44 percent increase in employees' willingness to exert discretionary effort on the job.

Betterworks’ term for this alternative is modern performance enablement. Jamie and I spoke at length on the idea: to dispense with standalone annual employee performance reviews in favor of promoting continuous year-round conversations between managers and their team members. This building of rapport may culminate in a much more meaningful and empathetic annual retrospective on employees' performance informed by the substance of these conversations.

As you can imagine, modern performance enablement is also a huge factor in HR transformation. First, the efficiencies found in modern performance enablement free HR from the often overwhelming administrative tedium of babysitting annual reviews. This helps significantly in delivering HR from its cost-center shackles. Second, modern performance enablement is highly engaging and, therefore, highly inviting. It's a boon to companywide participation rates, which, in turn, produce rich longitudinal data on the performance of the organization's people. With the newfound time and mental space to devote to understanding and interpreting this data, an HR department can become a strategic partner to leadership by being the source of deep insight into the company's people.

Jamie put it best, and I encourage you to watch this episode: “As HR professionals, we now have ways to articulate why what we do matters for the business, and I would say HR should be really excited. Don't wait for the seat at the table to be given to you. Just take it.”

For this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast, my guest was Nicole Davies, vice president of talent optimization at Valet Living. Our discussion covered her department's highly successful deployment of Quantum Workplace, which 3Sixty Insights details in a recently published case study.

If you've ever lived in a multifamily home, condominium complex or apartment building, it's possible that you've benefitted from Valet Living. United States-based and close to 28 years old, Valet Living operates in more than 40 states and employs approximately 10,000; about 8,500 are part-time staff. Together, these employees carry out amenity services such as package delivery, waste removal, and dog walking to the 1.8 million homes in residential communities with which the company partners.

Driving Nicole's decision to propose deploying Quantum Workplace at Valet Living was her employer's lack of modern technology — or any technology at all, really — for tracking employees' performance. The process was annual and highly manual. As we have discussed at length lately, here at 3Sixty Insights, this is no way at all in this day and age to track employee performance, let alone promote better performance, boost employee engagement or inspire staff to stay.

Annual and manual performance management has pretty much always been antithetical to all these goals, in fact. Luckily, modern technology for talent management makes it possible to leave these old ways behind and helps organizations align the employee experience to a high-tech customer experience. Valet Living already had advanced software, long in place, designed to track associates' progress day-to-day in completing client-facing work, and Nicole wanted to bring the company's employer brand into alignment with this aspect of the consumer brand.

"We pride ourselves on being a tech-enabled service," she shared during the podcast. Valet Living's associates are "out there on site. They're using very fancy technology we've developed to let us know where they are on the property. But then, on the people side of things, we were very low tech. We really had no great way for them to be able to have engaging conversations with their leaders, or for them to even really know what was happening within the company."

When Nicole joined Valet Living, she and the rest of leadership there made the decision to partner with Quantum Workplace. Doing so left them "one-stop shopping so to speak, where folks could go if they wanted to learn about how they're doing — going from a performance perspective all the way through to opportunities to continue to grow and develop from a succession planning perspective."

Positive employee engagement increased considerably right away and continues to climb. Given that daily work life for associates does not naturally lead to much interaction between them and their managers, this boon to employee engagement at Valet Living is especially notable given the fundamentals of the employer's business model. Employee retention is much higher, too, and with the deployment of Quantum Workplace has come a significant boost in internal hiring for managerial roles and attendant drop in labor expenditure related to external recruiting.

Our case study dives into these details. If you're looking for an example of how to boost employee engagement under challenging conditions, and if you need inspiration for HR transformation, then you owe it to yourself to watch this episode. The use of Quantum Workplace has helped Nicole elevate HR's strategic standing at Valet Living. Highly knowledgeable when it comes to talent management, she's a natural guest for a podcast and has an exceptionally compelling story to share.

This is my first time hosting an HR Tech Chat and my first guest is Larry McAlister! 

My colleague Brent Skinner included me on HR Tech Chats before - Talent Management - It Will Blend and 3Sixty Insights Shares its Takeaways from the HR Technology Conference & Expo.  We are going to make a regular practice out of sharing our big ideas, and he has encouraged me to host my own HR Tech Chat too. I am so grateful for this opportunity!

When I first met Larry, our professional paths intersected at NetApp and Fuel50, I was struck by his passion for helping organizations transform their talent and culture through the effective use of technology. It is not surprising that he recently published a book about this very topic - titled "The Power to Transform.” He is always eager to share his insights and experiences with other leaders in the field.

We both agree the definition of success is changing. With so many individuals working remotely and needing to adapt to changing conditions, skills development and well-being have become key components of success. And in this new landscape, HR technology is playing an essential role by providing tools for managers to have more meaningful conversations with their employees.

By leveraging innovative HR tech solutions like talent marketplace and virtual coaching tools, managers are able to provide employees with the support they need in a way that is fast and efficient. Additionally, these technologies help to promote empathy and understanding among team members, allowing them to communicate effectively even during times of stress and uncertainty. It is clear that modern HR tech is enabling a new definition of success in the age of the post pandemic, empowering both individuals and organizations as they navigate this challenging time.

As more and more companies embrace the concept of an ecosystem and explore different ways to bring together diverse solutions, it is clear that the ability to think creatively and effectively manage different perspectives is critical. And in order for companies to fully realize the potential of this ecosystem mindset, they must also pay close attention to their HR tech stack and talent strategy. Furthermore, it is crucial that businesses recognize that automating tasks alone is no longer sufficient; rather, it is how we leverage the resulting data that truly matters. With greater data democratization across all levels of an organization, people have an opportunity to see exactly what they're capable of achieving. Whether individuals are looking to climb up the corporate ladder or simply want to improve as individuals, having access to meaningful data will help them realize their full potential.

We covered a lot of ground in this discussion and there’s definitely something for everyone. So whether you’re an HR pro looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve or just starting out on your tech journey, we hope you find this information helpful.

It's been about a month since my colleague Jen Dole and I dropped our very first mutual episode of the #HRTechChat podcast. Today's is the second installment in this new internal series wherein we will discuss various issues facing professionals whose day-to-day lives intersect with human resources and human capital management and how and why technology fits into the equation.

Jen is now well past her 90-day mark here at 3Sixty Insights. When she joined us, we seriously considered whether to label her practice area something other than talent management. It has become a traditional term, after all, and part of us wanted to be forward-thinking and novel. Ultimately, we landed on the side of tradition, but we continue to wonder when exactly it makes sense today to refer to talent management as, well, talent management....

Conceived by McKinsey & Company in 1997, according to Wikipedia, the concept of talent management itself was once a novel take on the so-called softer aspects of human capital management, things like performance management, succession planning, compensation management, and, depending on who's talking, learning management and career development, too. And, in that time, an age when systematization in HCM was in its infancy, HR departments far and wide, from the leanest at the smallest companies to the most developed at the largest, were busy enough to approach talent management as siloed activities to tamp down. This continued for years.

Fast-forward to today, however, and the benefit of hindsight reveals that the practice of so-coined talent management never comprised discrete, neatly defined activities; it was just the relatively archaic state of the technology for it holding us back, forcing us to contemplate things rigidly. The state of the art of technology for HCM today has since evolved to accommodate the fluid nature of what we've long identified as talent management. And we are now at the point where the conventional domains of traditional talent management blend together every day in sophisticated organizations where HR has embraced this state of the art and the forward-thinking workflow that goes along with it. New terms such as the future of work and the employee experience reflect the reality and help these HR teams show and exercise their strategic worth to the C-suite.

But don't say any of this to those aforementioned lean HR teams at small organizations. Regale them with tales of a progressive employee experience or a bright future of work, and it may not even make sense to them. For them, it's probably best to call the softer side of HR by its traditional name, talent management. This is because every organization starts with nothing when it comes to HR, and there will always be those among us systematizing their HCM, absolutely needing to approach talent management as an array of discrete, siloed operations in need of order.

It may be hard to believe, but this is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg of what Jen and I managed to cover in what felt like the shortest 35 or so minutes ever. I encourage anyone reading this to listen in. The term talent management may yet go away, eventually. In the meantime, however, we'll call it just that for the foreseeable future. Even as the activities of talent management continue to blend beyond the vision of a now-quarter-century-old concept, the term remains a useful signpost for all.

For those of you who don't know, Jen Dole has joined the team at 3Sixty Insights as director and principal analyst to dive deep into talent management. Jen and I go back a little bit. The week before last, at HR Technology Conference & Expo, was the first time we saw each other face to face since the first time she and I met. When was that? It was when we were both at Cornerstone. Working in different divisions, we ran into each other at LAX on our way to the company's 20th anniversary celebration in Palm Springs, Calif., and got to chatting. Later, Jen and I began to talk shop a bit more after she joined Fuel50, which is where she was most recently.

Before pivoting to working for vendors of technology for human capital management, where she focused on client success, Jen was a practitioner in HR — at Fortune 500 firms, no less. And she was there in the bad old days, when technology for HCM was relatively new, especially for talent management. She tells the story of running succession planning on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets at Liberty Mutual Insurance. It was a slow, tedious exercise in administration, and her job changed profoundly once her team finally got ahold of technology purpose-built for this. "I went from being an administrator to being a strategic adviser, because I wasn't focused on collecting data anymore. The technology was doing that."

It's an idea taking hold. More than once earlier this month, at the event, Jen and I heard various renditions of the the idea: access to readily available, current data on the workforce is key to HR's transforming itself into a strategic advisor to organizational leadership. As the focus, data can orientate even the most administratively hampered HR departments in the direction of the future of work.

And what is the fast-developing, primary dynamic going to be in the future of work? The focus has shifted fundamentally, already, to the employee experience. All anyone had to do was look at the themes of the booths in the expo hall and speak with the vendors and HR professionals in attendance: this train has left the station. As Jen likes to say, and I'm paraphrasing, "People's definition of success has changed, and employers need to align their definition with this if they want to succeed, too."

Agreed. And this isn't just an aspirational HR-centric phenomenon anymore. We see C-suite executives, boards, line managers and just about everyone else clamoring to move in this direction, too. It's almost as if the wake-up call of a worldwide pandemic jolted everyone into acknowledging that organizations are made up of people. Who knew? I'm thinking about calling it the rise of the sentient organization. The state of the art in technology for HCM is helping us to listen.

We heard plenty of other terms and phrases uttered often at the event: artificial intelligence, intelligent enterprise, FOMO (fear of missing out), empathy, and more. And, in contrast with HR Tech events of years' past, there were some terms and phrases we didn't hear all that much. Automation is one. What are some others? Watch the podcast. It is a real pleasure to have Jen on our team. We cannot wait to speak with as many of you as humanly possible and learn as much as we can about your thoughts about and experiences in HCM.

It was my distinct pleasure to have Pete Tiliakos, global payroll product strategy leader for Alight Solutions, as my guest for this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast. Pete's latest role is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to his experience, expertise and, really, authority in the domain of payroll. Most recently, Pete was an analyst at two different firms. Before that, he was payroll solution architect at IBM and senior consultant, human capital management, at Deloitte Consulting, in that order. Back in the early aughts, notably, he was payroll leader for shared services at Disney Worldwide. Put differently, to say Pete is an expert in payroll is an understatement. Returning to the present, "It's an exciting time to be in the industry," said Pete, who's also a member of our Global Executive Advisory Council. "It feels like all that experience has really caught a wave."

During our chat, we shared takeaways in the wake of this year's triumphant return of the HR Technology Conference & Expo. Triumphant does seem like an appropriate word. Regarding the conference, "To me that was the biggest, boldest, most vibrant, most alive event I've seen in a long time," Pete said. "There's a lot of talk about a recession and a slowdown and things, but what we're seeing is that talent is still very important. And then, of course, we saw payroll well represented."

The possibilities around payroll are greater and more progressive today than we even would have fathomed 10 years ago. The train has left the station, so to speak, and our concept of what payroll can and does mean has expanded. "I just think it's great to see all the investment and focus on payroll," Pete said. "COVID really provided that spotlight, where payroll became infinitely more important compared to how it had been treated in the past."

It's almost as if business leaders are finally seeing the processing of payroll for what it is: not a mere cost to contain, but an investment, just as their people's pay itself is an investment, too. Pete and I delved deeply into all of this, the transformation of payroll — as evidenced by our conversations out in the wild, at HR Technology Conference — and how payroll professionals can seize the moment to become strategic advisors to their organizations. It's one thing to be highly skilled in work that organizational leadership may view as background noise. It's quite another to become bearers of crucially informative data that can change the C-suite's basic understanding of the workforce. That's when payroll and strategy start to occupy the same sentences.

I really enjoyed this discussion with Pete and highly encourage readers to tune into this episode.

Bob Cahill got his start at Ernst & Young. “And I was fascinated by the power of software and technology to expand your market or make you efficient in your operations,” he said as our guest on this episode of #HRTechChat video podcast. Over the approximately 25 years that have passed, Bob served as a C-suite executive for several technology companies, and a big part of his focus has always been on international challenges, “where I found a lot of passion to scale technology globally,” he said. “It was sort of the perfect juncture with meeting Nicole Sahin,” the founder of Globalization Partners, where Bob later became CEO. “She had this better mousetrap idea.”

Traditionally, companies that wanted to expand internationally would have to follow a very conventional process. The first step would be to set up a new entity and get a payroll registration so they could hire people. Then, they'd have to ensure regulatory compliance would be outsourced to an array of advisors. “Nicole's vision was, ‘Why do I keep doing this over and over again?’,” Bob noted.

Thus was born, about 10 years ago, Nicole’s vision for an employer-of-record (EOR). A company that needs to stand up its ability to employ people in a country new to its operations can turn to an EOR to do all the heavy lifting. The EOR’s very business is to set up these entities in any country needed to become the globally expanding employer’s single point for all things there related to employment. The EOR assumes this risk and takes on solving for all the complexity involved.

As a pioneer in the space, Globalization-Partners has trailblazed best-practices to overcome resistance to the idea of an EOR. This resistance is waning considerably as EORs have flourished to gain acceptance in recent years. The welcoming has come not only from the typical growing global organization, but also from employers clamoring to establish borderless workforces and vie for talent in pursuit of the emerging work-from-anywhere approach to talent acquisition and retention.

This is the future-of-work angle, and it’s worth noting that nearly one-quarter of CFOs are concerned over talent shortages, according to Globalization Partners' 2022 Globalization Trends Survey. Perhaps more compelling, 83 percent of CFOs believe “their long-term plans will stem around expansion into new countries,” the related press release notes.

It’s a number slightly higher than last year’s, and the report is rich with insight into the sentiments and objectives of CFOs vis-à-vis EOR. As additional context for our conversation, Bob and I touched a bit on the findings overall. We also explored the company’s philosophy when it comes to workforce inclusivity and blending service and technology for EOR, as well as Nicole’s vision for the years ahead in EOR now that she is executive chair of Globalization Partners. I highly recommend viewing this episode.

When it comes to the disruption of the past two years, "I'm probably one of the first people to say we're really thankful for that, because I think it led payroll be the star," says Danny Schulz, the newest member of our Global Executive Advisory Council and my guest for this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast. He means payroll becoming the star at Kohler Co., where Danny is senior manager of payroll, systems, and taxes. So, naturally, we sat down to discuss best practices in bringing order to global payroll — something Danny and his team are well on their way to achieving.

Says Danny:

"To me, payroll in general comes down to data and data flow. And the success of your payroll operation is really going to be dependent upon the success of your data. I'm a data junkie at heart. If you're at a place where, from an organizational standpoint, you're doing multiple data entry by humans [...] you're not going to get it right."

It's a scenario most global organizations encounter, before they ever set about to rectify the situation. This is because, once it gets to the point where leadership recognizes that global payroll needs attention, global payroll has almost always become exceedingly complicated.

Beyond the fact that it's by-definition tough to solve for global payroll before you actually have global payroll, most organizations will wait till it becomes noticeably painful to process payroll globally. For some, it is then that they will look for a fix.

For others, and perhaps more often, "There's some executive somewhere that wants the payroll data," says Danny. The payroll teams (yes, plural) do their best to get this data from, let's say, 16 different people, consolidate the data, and deliver it in a report. Suppose the process takes 26 hours to complete. The executive needs the information daily. A decision is made to make a change.

Depending on the size of the organization, it takes a lot of sleuthing to get global payroll right — figuring out who handles what, where, when, and with what system or systems. Think of it not unlike conducting discovery for a legal case. It's to determine the organization's current state.

There are, in fact, at least three best practices when bringing order to global payroll, according to Danny. One is to get your data right. Another is to corral executive alignment in your move to a strategy for global payroll. A third is to develop a roadmap and standardize processes.

Don't worry. We haven't stolen his thunder. Danny went into all this and much more during our chat. I encourage you to view the episode.