As the Chief Research Officer, Managing Partner of Sapient Insights Group, Stacey Harris oversees industry research work including the Annual HR Systems Survey and White Paper. She has been a leading member of the HR practices and technology research community since 2007 and has produced groundbreaking research on high-impact HR organizations, enterprise HR technology, and key practices across the talent management spectrum.
Stacey has had executive-level roles with Sierra-Cedar, Bersin & Associates, and Brandon Hall Group, and she has worked as an industry advisor and HR leader for Fortune 100 organizations around the world. She is frequently included in Human Resource Executive® and the HR Technology Conference’s Top 100 HR Tech Influencers list and sits on the International Human Resource Information Management (IHRIM) Board of Directors, overseeing strategy and education in her role as Vice-Chair. Stacey is also the author of Introduction to HR Technologies: Understand How To Use Technology to Improve Performance and Processes.
In this episode, Stacey talks about her thoughts on HR Technology of the past, present, and future.
[0:00 – 4:00] Introduction
• Welcome, Stacey!
• Today’s Topic: HR Technology of the Past, Present, and Future
[4:07 – 9:42] Looking at Past Trends in HR Technology
• The dawn of self-service technology
• What HR looked like pre-Internet
[9:53 – 19:30] What’s Significant about HR Technology Today?
• What companies who thrived through COVID had in common
• What companies with higher talent retentions are doing differently
[19:38 – 30:16] What HR Technology does the Future Hold?
• Automating processes that get left behind
• Why workforce planning could be the key to a thriving business
[30:16 – 39:47] Final Thoughts & Closing
• Was HR Tech a success?
• Thanks for listening!
Connect with Stacey:
Connect with Dwight:
Connect with David:
Resources:
- “Organizations who’ve got the best user experience and vendor satisfaction score—we track that every year—and those organizations who seemed to come out of the COVID environment in a better place had a couple of things in common. One of the things we saw without a doubt was that if you had invested in workforce planning, or if you had invested in talent management, or if you had ensured that you had an idea of where your organization was sitting, at least from a talent perspective, you just did better in this last two or three years.”
- “The technology of the future—the piece that I think we’re all sort of trying to figure out—is taking the really sticky business challenges that we have right now, which are always more of a process than they are a technology, and starting to figure out how to automate those because we have automated, for the most part, everything that is easy to automate in our world.”
Announcer:
Here’s an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology. Invite cross industry experts from inside and outside HR. Mix in what’s happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record, pour their discussions into a beaker, mix thoroughly. And voila, you get the HR Data Labs podcast, where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate, and even irreverent, that count on each episode challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real world problems. Now, here’s your host, David Turetsky.
David Turetsky:
Hello, and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I’m your host, David Turetsky. Like always, we try to find the most fascinating people inside and outside the world of human resources to talk to you about what’s going on today, tomorrow, and what actually has happened in the past. Today, we have with us, our friend, Stacy Harris, from Sapient Insights Group.
Stacey Harris:
Hello, it’s very nice to see you guys.
David Turetsky:
It’s so great to see you in person!
Stacey Harris:
I know in real life, right? Like the IRL, like the kids say, right? That’s as cool as I get right now.
David Turetsky:
It’s also the end of the conference. And we also have Dwight Brown, how are you doing Dwight?
Stacey Harris:
Doing great. Good to be here? Yes, definitely.
David Turetsky:
And, you know, we actually had Stacey on last year, probably later on in the year. So we’re not going to ask Stacey to go through and give her whole background. But Stacey, it’s been a year, what’s changed with you and Sapient Insights Group?
Stacey Harris:
Yeah, well, you know, it’s like a year on, right. So as being a small business, lots change. So we’ve hired a few more people. And we’ve, we’ve added to sort of the research function. So we have new principal analysts, which is really good for us, because that gives me a little bit of breathing room. So as I think the biggest thing for us is that as Chief Research Officer, we’re starting to figure out that you know, how we can take all that amazing data that we’ve got and start to break it out into smaller pieces, because that’s usually the biggest feedback we get is people would like to have it in more digestible formats. And so we’re starting to start to actually have a publishing team that’s working through getting it out getting it into library. That’s the exciting part. We’re really excited about it.
David Turetsky:
So they can actually double click on the research as it were.
Stacey Harris:
Yes exactly, double click on it, open it and hopefully it kind of meets just the needs they have at that point in time.
David Turetsky:
So Stacey, you may remember this you may not, we ask every person who participates in the podcast to give us one thing that no one knows about you. Every time Ian from Visier has given us five things that no one knew for the first time.
Stacey Harris:
That is tough because I think I use my D&D already last time, didn’t I?
David Turetsky:
And my son, who was in D&D last year, really appreciated it.
Stacey Harris:
Did he? Alright, well, I’m glad to hear that. Yes, I’m, I’m working on it. It’s through my children completely. Well, I can add to that geek cred. My youngest son is getting married in two weeks. So thank you. Yes. We’re very excited about it. But he’s having a very, fairytale kind of wedding. So they’re doing kilts. They’re doing swords, they’re
David Turetsky:
But you know what? That’s awesome. And I doing some D&D role playing, they’re doing some, the whole bit, right. And so I’m like, this is really different than a big barn outside with, you know, horses or anything. But I’m realizing that this is kind of what the kids are doing these days. And he’s so excited. His my new daughter in law to be is amazing. They’re both so into it. I’ve never seen anyone have so much fun with the wedding. So it’s the first time we have you totally celebrate that because I had a traditional wedding and don’t have a Bridezilla you have someone who’s just enjoying the day. So we’re excited about it. then a non-traditional wedding, they both ended very badly. And as a geek, really good. So today, our topic is going to be really cool. You just got off stage talking about the where you see things happening in the world of HR technology in 2021. Right? So we want to talk to you what has happened? What is happening and will happen in the world of HR technology?
Stacey Harris:
It’s a big question, isn’t it?
David Turetsky:
Let’s start with, let’s talk about for context setting. Let’s talk about the past talking about where has HR technology come from?
Stacey Harris:
Well, so my book goes all the way back to 1972. My so I have a book, as you guys know last time we talked, on introduction HR technology, and I do a whole timeline of HR technology. And it goes back to 1972. I do believe one of the first vendors that I mentioned, because I give a timeline of when vendors popped up when the doing was ADP and they’re there payroll system, which was the first one just to have the sort of automated payroll that you did outside?
David Turetsky:
It was called AutoPay.
Stacey Harris:
Yes, exactly. Which was a little before my time. But But probably the space I think is the most interesting because I think that was a lot of still trying to figure out how to sort of automate sort of the basics. And I think the world the whole world was for how to use computers at that point in time. I think for the HR technology space, probably the most interesting sort of timeline was started really 1997, which is really about the time that we’d started doing the survey for would like see Martin started in 1997. And it was the the onset of self service at that point in time, then was the first time we were starting to see this great self service technology. And people were saying, Hey, we can do more with this than just put data in and take data out from our admins. And there, you know, that first, I have the data for that, for some reason, it was more interviews than anything. But you know, their comments in that about, you know, I can’t you know, people are saying, I can’t believe anybody would ever want to get their paycheck, automatically. They want to see it and put it in their hands, right? Like, that’s absolutely necessary. When would the wife get it? like that was a quote, right. There was another quote, like, I can’t imagine anybody would ever possibly want to do their benefits online, because how would they, they need to sit down with a chairperson and do that. So there’s just things that I think, you know, we definitely made assumptions about, and I think we’re going to do those same. The thing is history does repeat itself. And there are things today where he said, There’s no way anybody would want to do that. There’s no way we will accept that. But they will, because, you know, history goes on. So
David Turetsky:
But if you remember back that far, and I do very vividly, the advent of computers was really only started in a consumer based way in 1979 1980. And so it started with Apple and Radio Shack and a few other participants. And so the acceptance in the business world of computers versus admins, typewriters, and Secretaries and Administrators and clerks, really changed the way work really worked, how what happened, and then the advent of the Internet, then revolutionize things like Employee Self Service.
Stacey Harris:
Made it more accessible and democratize the whole process. Right. Now, there are some people who would say that it was not the best thing, because there are a lot of people who feel like we’ve gone too far to self service. Right. I think, you know, we’re talking about today, there is a bit of a backlash to the amount of workload that now put on employees and particularly managers.
David Turetsky:
Do you remember the days when manila envelopes used to go from office to office? And the thing that sealed them?
Stacey Harris:
Inner office mail.
David Turetsky:
Do you remember the very powerful little piece of red string? Going to infinity somewhere? And when I used to send compensation statements to managers, it would be I’d have to actually stamp confidential. On the latch on the flap, to make sure that if anybody moved it, if anybody opened it, we would know about it. I mean, that wasn’t too long ago.
Stacey Harris:
It really wasn’t No, I, I can remember inneroffice mail and my first, no, I was out of grad or, you know, graduate school and undergrad, and they were very important in the bank that I started in because you and there was a guy who walked the inneroffice mail up and down and made sure it got to other places supposed to get to. And it was a whole job right. To to manage that. And you put their name on the back? You know. And it was like a library system.
David Turetsky:
Yes! Remember those names?
Stacey Harris:
And be like, okay, there’s 30 people, you’d be like, Oh, that guy’s been gone for a year. Yeah,
David Turetsky:
It was nostalgic.
Stacey Harris:
It was.
David Turetsky:
But But that, to your point, though, the advent of these things, had its detractors. And it wasn’t just the guy who delivered mail, or the female who delivered mail was the people who said, but we’ll lose this or that. And in some ways we have, but to your point, we’ve accepted it.
Stacey Harris:
Yeah, we’ve accepted it. And and I think that’s something I was trying to tell people about change is that there are some upsides and downsides to every change that you’re going to go through. And I think that the opportunity for us is to realize that change is going to happen. And when it happens, our biggest role is to really figure out how do we We try to control it. But just ensure that everybody who is happening to has the best experience possible because you can’t stop change that, you know, we have tried for millennium to stop change in our world and it just doesn’t happen.
David Turetsky:
It happens. I mean, gets forced on us. Or the world takes over like the internet.
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David Turetsky:
So that being said as backdrop, we’re gonna skip a lot of years now and talk about now and talk about the things that we’re seeing, either in your sensing in part of your study, or what you’ve heard people say his reaction to it, what’s happening today in the world of HR technology that’s so important to us.
Stacey Harris:
I think that’s the biggest thing came out of our research this year. And and I don’t think there’ll be a shock to anybody, but I think it’s, it is a push back on where we, how far we’ve come is that those organizations who got the best user experience and vendor satisfaction scores, we track that every year. And those organizations who seem to sort of come out of the COVID environment in a better place, had a couple of things in common. One of the things we saw without a doubt was that if you had invested in sort of workforce planning, or if you had invested in talent management, or if you had ensured that you had an idea of sort of where your organization was sitting at least from an a talent perspective, who just did better in this last, you know, two or three years, and I think that’s something we all have to sort of acknowledge and step back and say, okay, yes, it’s expensive to invest in people. And yes, it’s expensive to invest in talent. But those who did ahead of time, survived the pandemic, and are now actually taking advantage of what’s going forward. And so I think that’s the piece that oftentimes, we’re gonna, we lose, because we’re going through this, we’re all just tired. And we’re just like, want to get to the other end of it. But the other thing that we saw in our data really loud and clearly this year, was that the vendors who offered services at some level, particularly managed services, they simply did better and particularly in the meant they’d better in that the buyers and the users were much happier, much had much higher vendor satisfaction for those organizations, than those who do not. And we have taken such a stance, particularly because of our stock market, because the way we value evaluate, you know, technology organizations, but how services should not be part of that valuation. So if we cut services on a regular basis, I think we really need to rethink the idea of services, because services really showed up very, as a critical element of what what made this year sort of successful that we were able to get through it. Right.
David Turetsky:
So let me first touch on a question from the first part of what you were talking about around talent management, workforce planning, because there’s a lot of things that underlie those things. You have to have good foundational and fundamental data, you have to have good foundation fundamental documentation like job descriptions, we’ve talked about skill taxonomies, and other things as well. So are you talking about talking about talent management? There’s a lot of stuff in there is compensation, performance, work design? There’s charting in some cases, there’s recruiting, there’s, there’s learning? Is it all of those things? Or was there something that’s specific? Right? No, sorry? You also mentioned workforce? Yeah. But is there something specific that was called out and most things that made it so useful this year?
Stacey Harris:
Well, and so we look at it a little bit from the backwards model, right? We say okay, so organizations who tell us that over the last 12 months, their ability to keep their top talent, or increase their top talent better than the average, which the average is really low right now. Right? So that meant you’re, you’re better than the average, what what did they do differently? Right? And so we look at that, and then we say, okay, so we see that they are organizations that also are saying that, that their per employee profit is higher post pandemic, basically, or than it was prior to the pandemic. Those organizations ultimately, were more vested in leveraging what I would consider sort of the big elements of talent management. And so they had some element of learning and development, they had some element of recruiting as a big part, but not the technology, the processes, right. And then they definitely had some level of skills or skills management within their their conversations. So it was so much any one thing I think it is the fact that they had, they already seen the outcomes from the work that they were doing. And those outcomes then led to better business outcomes, right? Because I think that it’s really easy to say, well, let’s just put in a recruiting system. And that’s not really the conversation that we’re having. What we’re saying is they put in a recruiting system and some learning and some skills, and they were able to get an outcome that they were able to keep their talent for longer that outcome then led to the business outcome that they needed. And so that’s the piece that I keep trying to explain to people is that you don’t, not one, no one thing is going to fix any of this right? It really does come down to this sort of figuring out what’s the best recipe for your organization.
David Turetsky:
You know, it’s fascinating, what you just said, is that the top management companies, and the one who used to be the best of breed had been saying what you were saying for decades, but it never happened. Because I think the other point you made they didn’t invest in the process redesign, when those other things were implemented, they didn’t use consulting, they didn’t use services, they just slam it in and say it’s gonna work, I’m gonna put in a recruiting system, and didn’t change the fundamentals of what they normally did. And so they put in new stuff, but it was the same old crap that they put in. And at the end of the day, they were scratching, why aren’t we doing better? And then at the end of the day, we would come in as consultants and say to them, when’s the last time we updated how you do something? And they said, were we supposed to do that? Were we supposed to fix our job tables? Were we supposed to create career frameworks? Nobody told us.
Stacey Harris:
But I also think we put a lot of onus on the companies themselves to do that with the technology. Right. And I think this is where the services side of that conversation comes in. Because I do think that it is really on the shoulders of the vendors who have created a lot of this technology to start talking about, how do you best utilize it, we’ve spent a lot of time selling and pitching technology, we have not spent a lot of time talking about how you get the most out of that technology.
David Turetsky:
The problem is, people say it’s the technology solve the problems. And that, you know, you get what you pay for a lot of vendors, and I’m not pointing at anyone in particular will say, look, we’ve got the best technology. And they leave it to their clients to figure out how to implement it, because they don’t have a professional services team that can give advice. They don’t they have professional services that implement, they’ll find the right piece of data to put in the right holes to be able to make it work. But they don’t know what to say when someone says, so what’s the best practice here. And I grew up as a consultant, always given best practice when I was implementing stuff. And that led to me now having a consulting services firm that then said to them, Why haven’t you looked at your job table in a decade, so I’m not going to try and but the bang for the buck comes from getting the aha moment that yes, you’re going to get that shiny new object, but you’re also gonna have a shiny new process that uses it, and gets you better outcomes.
Stacey Harris:
Yeah. And I really do think that And that really spands so much of the tech industry, it’s not organization, the vendors have to be there with they have to travel the journey with them. That’s the piece that I think we’re missing most. It’s not even that you have a consultant because oftentimes, as consultants, we tend to, here’s the idea, and then you go do it, which is a great way to sort of help someone in some cases. But I think we’re finding that most of these organizations are overwhelmed with the amount of work on their plate, yeah, they don’t have enough time to even configure the systems and implement them, let alone do the work. And so I think that is upon us to figure out a way to build whatever cost we need into to help them get it done. That’d be my sense. just the HR specific either. But, you know, you mentioned the concept of a magic bullet. And there’s never a magic bullet. And like you say, you try to slam a system in and think that from day one, you’re going to hit the switch and everything would be hunky dory. And it just never works like that. So it makes total sense that the onus really needs to be on the vendor to help clients along and walk that journey with them. So often, you know, what I’ve seen in the past is that they’re there for implementation, and maybe 30 days after. And if you want any more service, you have to pay hundreds of 1000s of dollars more to get that service where maybe it should be included.
David Turetsky:
And that’s where Stacey was talking about the managed service. Yeah. Which is you’re not buying a piece of software, you’re buying a relationship over time, right. And it’s on them and me as the as the owner of the company, or is the manager of this process from the company side. To listen to them, and to be a partner with them and work together.
Stacey Harris:
It’s, it’s a hard, it’s a lot more work. But I also think that it’s in and to your point that, you know, the the challenge, I think a lot of organizations when they’re doing this is that they, when they’re very small, and when they’re very close to their customers, it’s easy. And it because they’re, it’s you, me and you know, and and I’m the I’m the owner of the company, I can see what’s happening, I’m there, I’m gonna make sure somebody takes care of you, when we really see it start to sort of struggle is as they grow. And they start building out the implementation teams, and nobody’s really watching the next half of it.
Dwight Brown:
They’re just gonna actually start to take place. It’s kind of a critical mass.
Stacey Harris:
Exactly, yeah.
David Turetsky:
So that’s a really great transition to. So what do we see as the future? Is there? Is there a solution that we see either from what we heard today or from your research? That will change things?
Stacey Harris:
Oh, you know, you know, I’ve had a lot of really good briefings this week, and I’ve talked to a lot of really interesting organizations who are doing some fascinating stuff with Behavioral based assessments and we’re doing so anything really interesting things with workforce planning, but at different levels of it. So there’s, you know, someone who’s doing compensation for the recruiting professional, right. So they have their own data around compensation. There’s someone I talked to who’s doing, you know, a workforce planning process that goes from beginning to end, they’ve got all the questions asked along with the data. So, you know, I would say that I, to me, the, the technology of the future, that the piece that I think we’re all sort of trying to sort of figure out is taking the, the really sticky business challenges that we have right now. And which are always more of a process than they are a technology, and starting to figure out how to automate those because we have automated, for the most part, everything that is easy to automate in our worlds, I mean, you know, whether it’s through a single platform or through an RPA, or right, what we’re now left with are those really difficult solutions, like workforce planning, like behavior based assessments, and really understanding, you know, the nuances of a human brain versus just the six dynamics that you think are important, right, really understanding that, you know, the compensation that the recruiter has to understand how they would build a compensation plan, right? That’s something oftentimes that you just kind of do on the back of a napkin and doesn’t really work or does work. And then the compensation person gets upset because you didn’t have any real numbers around it. So you know, those of the situations in the places right now where we’re, we kind of push them under the rug, they’re not part of our tool sets right now. That’s the stuff that I’m seeing. That’s kind of interesting and exciting.
David Turetsky:
But the really funny part is, is that everything you just mentioned is because of silence. It’s because comp is its own club and only talked to recruiters when recruiters put in a formal request, and comp performance, comp and recruiters, you’re never on the same function, ever. Comp was comp, or it might have been part of comp and Ben. But I have never seen an organization at the time where comp and recruiting work together has a function that enabled one to build the right package, so that the other could make sure that the cost structure is right. And the other thing is, I want to talk about the work of planning, if you’re talking about where an HR does workforce planning exists?
Stacey Harris:
Good question, it’s, I will say, I don’t know that there’s a there’s a solid answer to that yet. You know, I’ve done a lot of research on this talk to a lot of organizations. And no, it’s it’s anywhere from its strategy department. Sometimes it’s it’s I under HR, sometimes it sits under talent acquisition, if it’s if it’s a headcount kind of conversation. And we’ve just started to really delve into it in our research. But what I’m, what I am seeing is that any form of it, whether it’s headcount, all the way down to you know, really, truly enterprise wide strategic planning has an impact on your outcomes. That is one of the factors that we definitely have seen how not only did people do better who were doing it from the pandemic, but we also saw that improve the outcomes. And I think that one of the big things for me is, like everything else, we tend to try and wait until we’ve got the perfect environment to do it.
David Turetsky:
And that comes when? I’m already crazy!
Stacey Harris:
Like, like, when you need to hire someone, you don’t wait till you’re the perfect hiring process, right? When you need to, you know, train, you know, train someone and compliance, you don’t wait until you have an LMS you just go start doing it immediately, you know, then eventually you realize, okay, this is what I need. And I’ll start to build right. workforce planning is really the same thing. And we, you know, I think we just keep sort of pushing it under the rug saying, well, we’ll get to it eventually. And that’s the piece that I think, you know, to me is, we have to stop sort of saying that it’s not something that’s necessary, it is absolutely necessary.
David Turetsky:
Remember, when the first World Trade Center bombing happened? What happened? We started implementing trek. And I remember very clearly, because I was working down on Wall Street, that we started having to collect emergency contacts. And we’d never done it before, and we were an investment firm. And people were scared then that God forbid something like September 11 happened, that we wouldn’t be able to not only find people, but then notify next to kin. And then a whole bunch of effort went into drip. Where’s it going? Even after 911? Where is drip? Where does it exist? Who owns drip? It is a process right? And it’s kind of like workforce planning. But it’s the one thing you never want to pull out. If you live in Louisiana, and I we have clients who deal with this almost on a monthly basis. They have disaster after disaster and it’s part of what they do. Why isn’t workforce planning or people analytics to that extent?
Stacey Harris:
The same. Yes, I completely agree. And it’s interesting. You know, we asked last year during the COVID crisis, what, what is the data that you need to do to to get through this challenge? And I was sort of surprised, but over 80% of our stations said they had things like next of kin contact lists. And I know, to your point, like, if that had been asked five years earlier, or 10 years later, I don’t think we would have had it right. There had we had sort of, collectively as a community realize that this is not an option, you have to have that data in your system somewhere, right? And, you know, I think workforce planning, even if it’s at the most basic, which is, like, if you’re going to get to 2 billion, how many headcounts do you need per employee to make 2 billion
David Turetsky:
And that’s baseline. We’re not even talking about skills!
Stacey Harris:
Exactly. No, we’re just talking. Right. And and I think, you know, everyone, it’s, it’s, you know, only about 43% of organizations say they do that financial headcount, right. I mean, that was like, Wow. You know, cuz, because why would you run a business and not think about how many people you needed? Right?
David Turetsky:
And, you know, think about a Richard Rosenow at Nike, or think about Microsoft, or think about Google, and you think about the large companies that are doing people analytics, and you know that there are disciplines in those organizations who are doing workforce planning as a part of not just HR as part of the business. Because their business is so transactionally quick, they move on a dime. Google, they build another, they’ll build another alphabet letter. It doesn’t need to be them. It could be a furniture company that’s headquartered in Indiana, or ice cream company headquartered in Ohio.
Stacey Harris:
And the thing I tell people is that, you know, the thing about doing workforce planning, if you do it in a way, that’s that, that you’re thinking about, sort of what you’re doing, and you have a couple of scenarios, it’s not an answer. We know what we’re going to do. It’s an idea of what are the options of the direction that we go? And what could happen, right, like that’s, it’s a mix between sort of where we want to be and what are the risks that we’re taking in our in our future? But I think the bigger issue is that if you have it in place, it is exactly that you don’t have to move so fast, right? Because the challenge with moving making decisions really fast without data is you make the wrong one. And then you risk really big issues. Right?
David Turetsky:
But I think part of that is you think you’re making the right one because you lack the data. Right? You’re making the right one thing turns out to be the wrong one. And it could be disaster,
Stacey Harris:
it could be disaster, and you have no mechanism to see if it’s a disaster until you’re way too far down the road. I mean, I can imagine that Kodak and Pitney Bowes and Polaroid, I mean, all of them, right? I have had got to the point at some point and going, Oh, we screwed up. Right. But you’re
David Turetsky:
The one you mentioned, Pitney Bowes. They changed enough to still be a player, right? Whereas the other two are more licensing agreements. Right. And, and the name isn’t what it used to be. I mean, we have songs that were based on Kodak, right. But Polaroid, right. They were a part of our life for for decades. They just they may exist now because of nostalgia. But it’s not Polaroid. And I think if you look at IBM, IBM was a different company. IBM gave very strategic and interesting decisions that people said were crazy selling off their computer business. Yeah. To Lenovo or whomever.
Stacey Harris:
The book, making the delfont dance, right. It’s one of the best books to read about, you know, how they changed that whole model around.
David Turetsky:
We’re gonna have to make sure that that’s part of the podcast notes, too, because that’s a really good one. But but our company’s structured, and I’m not talking about the largest ones, I’m talking about the ones that should survive the medium sized ones who could survive and grow. What can they do to structure themselves for the future?
Stacey Harris:
Yeah, you know, and I think that the, you know, it’s it’s a hard question, it feels like that it takes so much energy, right. But it really doesn’t, it takes putting in place a series just like you do with any risk management model, right? A series of steps that you sort of check ins, things to review data that you want to track, and then sort of reassessing it and it will improve over time as this is I’ve seen with every analytics function that I’ve ever watched, right? You guys have been there is that the more you use it, it’s like a muscle the bigger better it gets, right? If you don’t use it, yeah, it’s just gonna die. And so for us, the whole thing is just keep sort of feeding it the opportunity, feed it questions make it think right,
David Turetsky:
But don’t silo it in HR. Bring in your CFO or chief strategy officer bring the CEO, make sure that its their model too, and it brings in the right business context and the business data to be able to answer the questions they need. So it’s not a HR tool.
Stacey Harris:
it really isn’t. It is a business tool.
David Turetsky:
So what else you want to talk about? Because we’re now at the end, we’re at 30 minutes, and you’re tired. We’re tired. We’re at the HR technology conference, any parting words of wisdom from the person who just stood up on stage and told a lot of very interesting people your thoughts?
Stacey Harris:
And one thing is, this was actually a really good conference. And I think that’s, that’s important for people to know, because I do think there was a lot of question about whether or not, you know, I think for at least for me, the interactions were very similar to the interactions I would have had, you know, and years ago, it was a bigger conference, right. So I do think that, you know, what I have found, even in our small sense is that, you know, people are hungry for the information, right. And so when you can provide them the opportunity to get access to it, they will find a way to get to it. Right. And so I think for anybody out there who’s kind of questioning whether or not, you know, there’s a need to educate in this market, there’s still an educate in this market. And then the other thing that I think I really realized this, you know, is that I, we talk a lot about workforce planning, we talk a lot about skills management training, we talk a lot about talent management, where all that’s going the one stat that I get that I think if there’s a stat that just blew me away, when I was looking at my data this year was, we asked us, it was it was a throwaway. Say it’s a throwaway, it was a question we threw in, because we enter our emerging tech section saying we know people are asking about it. So I just want to see where it’s at. We asked people whether or not they had a process or a formal approach doing internal mobility. Only 22% of organizations, and that did not change much. But they were large, medium and small. Like like, you know, sometimes you can’t walk right? I was kind of blown away by that it you know, you get workforce planning is really low, you get other things. But internal mobility is something we’ve been talking about for a long time, the vendors have been pushing it. But I always step back. And I and I know every time I see a vendor who says I’ve got this great internal mobility tool, I’m always like, have you checked out with your customers that they’re really going to use it? Right? And we did ask, what are the barriers to internal mobility and, and basically, they are the things you would think they would be, we don’t have the skills data, we don’t have the culture, we don’t have the incentives. And I think, you know, if there’s one thing that we can start to really adjust in the market, that I think will get a lot of things we talked about today, that workforce planning, talent management, the skills is the idea of making sure that we are okay with internal mobility. And the way you have to get to that is you make sure that the people who are impacted by it are able to succeed. And that means the managers who give up the employee, and the you know, person who’s moving into a new role, and that they get the same amount of money is the person who will be brought in, because that right now we’re seeing a lot of people brought in for a lot of money, right? We’re just not putting in appraised process for it, it was really blew me away.
David Turetsky:
Can I ask you a really stupid question? Tell me what company or what technology, you know, facilitates career frameworks, which would get you internal mobility, but people don’t know. There’s a lack of education and lack of understanding by employees and managers. What are the career paths? What do I need to do in my job? I know my job description. It hasn’t been updated in 10 years. But I know my job description. What do I need to do to get to here? Or to get to there or go over there? Because I like what’s going on? It seems interesting to me, I’ve got a little background.
Stacey Harris:
Well, so that, you know, one of the she’s gonna talk tomorrow, Caitlin, who’s running Plum software. Right? Yeah, she’s great. You know, I think I think there is an idea of being able to assess where, where the possibilities are, and not just where we’re at. Right. But I don’t think, but I really want to sort of counter that. But I don’t think you have to have that tool. I think it’s good to get started. It’s as simple as just flipping your external recruiting tool inside out, right? Because I there, I can’t tell how many times I’ve talked to organizations, or people learn about jobs on LinkedIn that their company has, yeah, that they would be a fit for. Right?
David Turetsky:
How angry are they though? Yeah, they’re angry because they’re looking at jobs on LinkedIn. That’s the problem.
Stacey Harris:
Well exactly. And and then when that person is hired, and then also if someone is looking at internal, like so you can flip it inside. And then on top of that, you’re not you make the salary a lower range because that person is at a lower based on what you would pay. Right. So We, we just we made this harder than it needs to be. And part of it is because we feel like, I don’t really get it, you know? Well, you know, I didn’t get a raise when I got that internal or whatever it is, or, you know, you know, it’s gonna make John’s life harder. I don’t want to have to recruit for John, because now I have another, you know, it is we need to fix how HR thinks about internal mobility. And we need to fix how we support internal mobility, more than I think we need a tool right now. I agree that the tools are unhelpful, but only 17% of organizations said that their barrier to them was that they didn’t have a career focus tool. It’s more cultural.
David Turetsky:
Oh, and I agree. I know managers, and managers who say, This person is mine, I don’t want to give them up, you know, if I lose them, I’ll be done!
Stacey Harris:
Oh, and don’t get me wrong. I’m not sitting on a high horse here. I have an employee right now. And we had a small little company that we’re in, right. And my partner needed to have her do something, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t get the work done without her. So it is a real issue. It’s not like the managers are, are being unreasonable, right?
David Turetsky:
Well, hold on. Maybe. I take offense to that, because that’s the reason why people leave, I’m not given a chance to try other things. My manager protects me from going and doing other things. You know, there are some cultures that I helped with when I was a practitioner, where I tried to do career ladders. And I said, manager, we will help you find another person, let that person go. It’s more valuable for that company, that that person exists in another framework in another place, so that they can now bring more flavor to the world.
Stacey Harris:
Completely agree. But I challenge you, are you going to do it in a timely manner? And is that managers still held accountable for the outcome while that person is gone?
David Turetsky:
I’ll do one better. We tied their incentives to their ability to allow that to happen. I swear to God, at this one company, and I actually met one of the people today who is part of that company, I asked him to shut up. But we did you type their their management. And of course, there are other things in the management category about what we taught if there were negative outcomes on that it affected their incentive.
Stacey Harris:
Yeah. So and I think the this conversation is what has to be happening more often inside of organization? Because I completely agree. I mean, I and anybody who has worked with me knows that I’m, I’m a big proponent of like, what’s your next job, where you go, and what’s the opportunity, but I also understand the realities of what people face every day. And I think we have to have both of those inside of that picture. And we can’t, we put a lot of pressure on the manager shoulders, I think, a lot of expectations on a manager right now. And I if there’s anything that HR really could probably think a little bit about is, you know, how do we maybe think a little bit more about what we take off their shoulders. So this has been great. I mean, a lot of stuff that we’ve covered.
David Turetsky:
Thank you so much. Yeah, we love having on the podcast, and people love listening to you, too. You’re awesome. Thank you so much. And thank you for being here for both podcasts you guys have done with us at the HR Technology Conference. We’ve loved having Susan, Pam and Danielle on the last one. Thank you for joining us Dwight yet again.
Dwight Brown:
Great to be here again. Thank you so much. And Stacey, nice to meet you and I appreciate you spending your time and sharing your insights.
Stacey Harris:
Yeah, exactly. It is nice to meet in person though. I do feel like because we had a pretty good report the last year that all that I’ve kind of got a sense of who you are.
David Turetsky:
And thank you guys for listening. And hopefully you enjoyed our podcast at the HR Technology Conference. Stacey is our last podcast. We love her for it. And hopefully you enjoyed it too. And if you did, please subscribe. And if you know somebody who might like this podcast or some of the others, please send it their way. And if you have any suggestions, please send them to us. And thank you so much. Take care and stay safe.
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