3Sixty Insights HRTechChat

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.

Who should own the employee experience (EX)? "There's room for everyone," said isolved Senior Vice President of Marketing Lina Tonk during her guest appearance on the #HRTechChat video podcast. And she's right. The EX occurs everywhere any employee is involved in work. "I do believe the final responsibility should reside with HR. And I think HR leaders will probably agree with that." They probably would, yes. HR's job is not to micromanage the EX, however; it is to shepherd, lead and help shape it. From this, responsibility naturally flows.

Speaking of marketing, have you ever wondered whether, why or how marketing and HR could join forces to bolster and improve EX? I know that I have. And it turns out that it's an idea gaining steam....

In January of this year, isolved conducted a survey of 500 HR leaders based in the United States and from a broad cross-section of industries. The resulting whitepaper, "Transforming Employee Experience: 500 HR Leaders Talk Talent, Tech, Tactics & Threats," is an interesting read that spans several areas of interest as they relate to isolved's goal with the research: ascertaining HR's top challenges of today and top opportunities for tomorrow. And the exercise unearthed some intriguing findings vis-à-vis an emerging role for marketing in the EX and HR's sentiments regarding this.

According to isolved's survey, 65 percent of HR leaders say they want their marketing team involved with EX. Specifically, 52 percent are seeking marketing’s involvement because the department plays an important role in how the company is perceived in the market, and another 40 percent want to leverage marketing’s creative ability.

HR and marketing work together in these ways at isolved. During our chat, Lina described her on-the-job relationship with her colleague Amy Mosher, chief people officer at isolved. "I'm super transparent with Amy," with whom she speaks daily to align goals. During our conversation, Lina got granular in explaining what aligning marketing's goals with HR's looks like at isolved — where HR has its own goals for the employee experience, and marketing has some related to the employee experience, too, "and I believe that cross-functional teams can only work in that manner if goals are attached to them."

Lina delved even deeper, providing a glimpse into what this kind of collaboration, between HR and marketing, looks like from an executional standpoint — something else I've always wondered about. For example, advocacy is incredibly important to isolved, especially for HR leaders because of its impact on retention, which is "key to everything that we're doing," said Lina. Related to this, isolved has an internal advocacy tool that it provides to all its employees. "We needed not only the creativity on the content for marketing, but also the insights and the drive from HR."

Usually, several tangents will surface during the #HRTechChat video podcast, and this episode is no different. Lina and I got to talking about where EX possibly matters most. There's probably no definitive answer to this question, but we both agreed: it's hard to argue that onboarding isn't critical to EX in terms of setting the tone for the long term. Incidentally, speaking to this is a soon-to-be-published report by isolved compiling results from a survey of 1,000 employees. Among the findings is this: 49 percent of employees say they’ve been tempted to leave a new job after a poor onboarding experience that includes limited transitioning, an unprepared first day and excessive paperwork.

"At the end of the day, we are all humans working with humans," says Jeff Andes, vice president of talent management at University of Phoenix and my guest for this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast. Jeff's is a story not only of doing the hard work to do away with traditional performance management in favor of a more progressive, far more effective approach. It's also a tale of how a large educational institution was able to return its organizational culture to one better reflecting the company's origins in innovation and the entrepreneurial spirt.

My conversation with Jeff gets into the gist of all of this, as well as University of Phoenix's decision to replace SAP SuccessFactors with Betterworks to support what Jeff's team now calls Everyday Performance Development. It's a fascinating deep-dive into what it takes to transform a culture for the better at a large organization. Jeff has a savvy philosophy when it comes to his thoughts on what performance management should and shouldn't be, and I encourage readers to watch this episode.

Joining me for the #HRTechChat video podcast is Rachel Jordan. At Unit4, provider of business software for human capital management and enterprise resource planning, as well as financial planning and analysis, Rachel is vice president of HCM product management. Just like several of her fellow relatively new additions to leadership at Unit4, Rachel has a strong a pedigree in the industry.

Unit4 is a vendor keen on finding the best ways to align and combine HCM, ERP and FP&A. The possibilities are intriguing, and you'll be hearing more about these from 3Sixty Insights as we stroll through the second half of 2022. Think of this episode of the podcast as an appetizer. HCM technology (including the ethos behind it) has evolved drastically over the past five years, from a focus on talent management to one of supporting the success of people. (Those are two different things, yes.) HR continues to mature in its role, from a largely reactionary position mired in transactional work to one aspiring to proactively support organizational growth and strategy -- and capable of doing so.

It makes sense. Organizations have had to adapt their HCM systems broadly and deeply, especially since the pandemic took hold and ushered in work from home, hybrid work and other dynamics once considered novelties or exceptions to the rule. HR's charter now is to facilitate and advocate for the employee experience, and the HCM system is no longer just a database of people, but an ecosystem to support a total employee lifecycle that has, on average, become unconventional and nonlinear -- e.g., career progressions no longer track straight, effective internal mobility hinges on accurate insight into soft skills, etc. Better-delivered information from payroll and compensation strategy and regarding employees' skills influences the employee experience by optimizing internal mobility, facilitating tenure, and rendering current and future personnel costs more predictable.

All this change changes the fundamental calculus that HR and other organizational stakeholders must follow to justify their proposals to invest in HCM systems. One way for them to make this argument is to show the value of HCM data as HCM systems become better connected to other domains of the enterprise and the related data becomes more easily combinable in real time. The idea is to shorten the time it takes to figure out how or whether this or that decision regarding people success would deliver value to the organization.

As my conversation with Rachel ultimately implies, HR leaders and other HCM-immersed internal organizational stakeholders in positions of influence should emphasize that one major benefit of all this is not only greater organizational agility, but stability, too. Data that an HCM system produces can give employers invaluable insight into which actions are best to take. The ready availability of this data, especially when it's the result of data exchange between systems supporting areas of the business that need alignment anyway, means leaders can take these actions early.

Isabelle Bichler is co-founder and chief operating officer of retrain.ai. An employment litigation attorney, Robert T. Szyba is a partner at Seyfarth Shaw LLP. Both are well-qualified to discuss the at once inescapable and intriguing trends at the intersection of AI and human capital management, and they joined us as my guests for this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast.

retrain.ai is the creator of AI-based self-evolving ontologies that unearth the relationships at the intersection of an organization's existing and future roles, its people, and their hard, soft and transferable skills. During the chat, Bichler provided an impassioned, detailed explanation on why this is so important -- and why the development of responsible AI in this area is essential to helping leaders act equitably as they plan more efficient, more targeted external and internal hiring with implications, as well, for learning and performance management.

That we're even having this conversation is evidence that we are finally here: AI has finally evolved to the point that it is now a bona fide benefit to HCM. And, right on cue, AI for the workforce has become the focus of an inchoate, nevertheless quickly gathering regulatory framework.

That the latter has promptly followed the former is unsurprising. Fraught with the potential for misuse both intentional and unintentional, AI is an emerging technology also holding much, much promise for the world of work. Regulators are still wrestling to approach AI effectively. There is always the chance that an early, reflexive, inaccurately or only partially informed flurry of laws governing its use in the workplace could stifle innovation in the field and have the opposite of the intended effect on AI's impact on people, Szyba cautioned during the podcast.

Take this new AI Audit Law that will affect employers in New York City starting in January 2023, for example, regulating their use of AI in screening job candidates or employees up for promotion. Reading it, Those needing to comply might find themselves legitimately unclear on just how to do so. Bichler, Szyba and I will be co-presenting a webinar exploring the subject of this law on June 8 at 10am EST. You can register here.

You could say AI and the future of work are inextricable. There's no stopping where we're going with AI in HCM, and we humans must, therefore, embrace and learn as much about AI as we humanly can. With this episode, we do our best, the three of us, to help us all scale the learning curve just a little bit more, and I highly recommend that readers listen in....

Consider: It's not necessarily that an employer has a performance management problem or, say, a learning management system problem. We must strive to marshal the discrete domains of human capital management, the silos, as one multidisciplinary instrument to solve employers' people-related needs and challenges. This is the high-level strategic value in industry-specific and industry-tailored suites for HCM, in my opinion. They help us think about HCM more holistically. They help vendors and users alike of technology for HCM break free from silo-think.

There's plenty additional value, as well, for the industries these tailored HCM suites address. Software-as-a-service provider isolved recently launched People Cloud for Healthcare Services, a version of its HCM software suite exclusively for employers in health and medical services. To discuss the new product (and accompanying professional services) James Norwood, chief marketing and strategy officer at isolved, joined us for this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast.

"Once you're in a battle for talent, and it becomes a seller's market, then you do have to invest in these things," James says. He's speaking of the perennial need for registered nurses in healthcare and the need to combat and address this with people-focused solutions.

RNs are always in short supply, it seems. It's a top-of-mind challenge in the health and medical services space. The pandemic has only exacerbated this shortage to become even more acute (if that was even possible). The vendor's own research shows 100 percent of HR leaders in assisted living facilities saying its hard to retain RNs.

You read that right, by the way. In a large isolved-initiated survey of many subsets of the healthcare space, yes, all the HR leaders working in assisted living reported difficulty in retaining talent. It's indicative of the urgent and deep challenges related to employing people in the healthcare space.

"What is isolved doing? We're helping on some of those things," James says. For healthcare-related employers, through the new healthcare-focused version of the suite, "we're helping with people getting onboarded. We're helping them get compliant. Our learning management system has very industry-specific certification training courses, which will automatically notify people in advance when a particular certification might be coming up to expire. So there's lots of things that can be done to work with employees, to make them feel like they have more control in their own destiny."

The new version of the suite does a number of things to address the idiosyncrasies of healthcare employers' people-related needs, and we recently published our analysis of the People Cloud for Healthcare Services launch. I encourage you all to watch this episode. James and I delved deeply into the rationale behind isolved's decision to launch this new version of its product, how it helps, where the vendor looks to tackle industry specialization next, and much more.