People Centric People Technology
By Yogi Panjabi, Jun 2020
In the current covid-19 pandemic, distributed workforces and work from home have become mainstream. The video, collaboration tools, and security combination has led productivity to arguably increase in many organizations and functions. This despite the fact that our talent also serves as at-home caregivers and is bringing compassion in the same moment — to their
professional and personal spheres. What’s become clear is that our people are at the center of work.
People technology teams can take heart from these lessons and shape and execute a people technology strategy with people at the center. To execute an effective people technology strategy, it’s foundation should be built on 5 core pillars and deliver for its people and the business. Here, I have tried to stay clear of technology debates and these pillars take a vendor agnostic view of the core HR systems and SaaS applications, a business may have implemented:
1: Aligning to business strategy
The focus of People Technology teams must be to deliver on key business and people priorities - help employees be their happiest, become more productive and support them in achieving critical business outcomes.
Companies can accomplish this by delivering easy to use solutions and insights in an employee’s flow of work on prioritized people journeys. These journeys include — finding and attracting talent (internal mobility counts!), enhancing performance, giving & receiving feedback, individualized learning, and delivering on core people elements — compensation and benefits.
Disciplined prioritization and clarity of guiding principles are key to ensuring People tech teams deliver for the business, including:
● Align people technology deliverables to business, regional & people priorities. Focusing execution on — Key people programs, key employee experiences and high volume HR Operations/ HR business partner requests. Teams can leverage data from tracking tools to ensure execution is aligned to priorities (~ two-third of team effort should align to top 3 priorities).
● Empower teams to partner with stakeholders to shape and capture business
requirements, design employee journeys, and define successful business outcomes together prior to project initiation or vendor selection.
In the current environment, driving sales productivity through digital sales enablement has risen to be a top 5 business priority. Learning & Development teams and People Technology teams are focused on delivering individual learning paths for Sales teams to enhance their performance, productivity and help the business deliver on its quarterly revenue goals.
2: Designing employee journeys
The second pillar is around incentivizing functions including People, IT and Finance to collaborate on the employee priorities and take a 360 degree view to bringing key journeys (onboarding employees, requisition flow, compensation planning, internal mobility) to life.
Teams should review and streamline the employee experience (Top theme, LinkedIn Global Talent Trends 2020), process, systems and data flow for each of these journeys. To further focus on distributed workforces, organizations enable these experiences using a ”mobile first” mindset and deliver easy to use, fewer click journeys to employees.
In recruiting for example (we will go back to hiring someday!), the key steps in the candidate, recruiter, hiring manager journey are — requisition generation, sourcing, assessment, scheduling, interviewing, candidate evaluation, offer generation, reference checks, background checks.
These have to be seamlessly delivered to end users, supported by a digital workflow, automating processes and eliminating manual data capture. Within the recruiting systems, the data flow also has to be streamlined through the journey to optimize and iterate on decisions using dashboards to bring to life the core recruiting principles of effectiveness, diversity and quality. As organizations leverage talent pools consisting of full time and contingent workers, this streamlined recruiting journey can deliver business value, visibility and mitigate risks as it is expanded to contingent worker pools.
It is imperative to get a few employee journeys right, before organizations can look across the employee lifecycle.
3: Stitching Core systems with Best of Breed applications
To deliver these world class experiences it is important to stitch core HR applications (systems of record), best of breed SaaS applications and systems of intelligence. In the recruiting journey — this means deeply integrating Finance and Core HR systems (systems of record) with best of breed recruiting SaaS applications (ATS, assessment, background check, reference
check). The self-serve tools, bots guided by AI/ machine learning (systems of intelligence) provide real time responses to candidates, recruiters driving up productivity of recruiting teams, hiring managers and cross functional teams (People Operations, IT, Finance Operations).
To digitally enable the learning journey and deliver Personalized Learning paths, people technology teams need to integrate Core HR system & ATS data with Learning Systems. Leveraging key inputs such as individual variables (current skills, experience, development goals, function, group, learning preferences) and combining them with functional variables (competencies, product adjacencies, career progression), businesses can ensure every employee has a unique learning path and is fed fabulous content in a format of their preference and pushed to them via notifications / nudges in their flow of work. All powered by intelligent matching algorithms.
“It is imperative to move from a vendor view of HR and Learning Systems world, to design for rich and personalized employee learning paths based on the business needs and the employee’s potential”
Similarly, companies have an opportunity to streamline their internal mobility experience and identify internal roles and make them visible to employees based on their skills and/or career interests at a point in their tenure. Teams can integrate the learning journey within this experience, to identify and offer potential courses to equip employees and help them acquire the skills relevant for their next role. Once they have identified an exciting internal role, the employee needs to be supported through the interview process with the same enthusiasm and energy as companies offer to their external candidates. From a system perspective, this means tighter integrations, workflows & data flows across the ATS, core HR and learning systems for employees, recruiters, current managers and hiring managers. All supported by insights across the funnel to continue to optimize the path, leading to enhanced career progression & excited employees.
4: Shaping universal employee datasets.
Arming business and people leaders at quarterly business planning sessions with insights on their most critical capital makes people and business sense! This is brought to life by the confluence of people technology and people analytics capabilities.
Shaping universal employee datasets by integrating listening data across the employee lifecycle and connecting data pipes from the system of record and best of breed applications helps ensure execution of people programs is guided by company’s values, culture & the voice of its people.
It starts with aggregating quantitative and qualitative datasets across the touch points — including candidate surveys, onboarding surveys, 90 day surveys, engagement surveys, pulse surveys, learning surveys, exit interviews. At a process level that means the survey questions are seeking insights on experience in each step of the journey, the survey dissemination and response collection are consistent and program owners are empowered to optimize experience based on real time survey insights. At a system level, teams must leverage a single best of breed survey tool, analytics platform and visualization tool. At the data level it means adherence to privacy, compliance, consistent data definitions, connection of system of record data with learning, performance, and even cross functional data.
And finally to make it actionable, at an insights level, it means analysis focusing on key business issues, examples include distribution of talent globally or driving greater sales productivity. This is enabled by reviewing internal trends, comparison with industry benchmarks to identify outliers and opportunities and arming business and people leaders with self serve dashboards and insights to guide execution.
5: Measuring and delivering value
To bring this all together, the key measures to ensure people technology projects and investments are delivering strong impact are:
● Adoption (In a 2020 PWC survey, 82% of companies say they struggle with adoption challenges), frequency of usage
● Employee satisfaction, personal/ team goals
● Business outcome (productivity, revenue)
Focusing on mobile adoption in many of these use cases has demonstrated an accelerated path to impact.
While people technology teams configure modules within their core HCM system and best of breed ecosystem of applications. We have a bigger opportunity to take a product lens — a deep view of employee journey adoption, usage, pain points and leverage it to guide prioritization,optimize workflow and enable change management. To truly go beyond and connect the impact of individual module configuration efforts to overall employee journeys.
In the learning journey example the value captured is measured by integrating People data with Finance, Sales data. Learning & Development teams gather course completion rates, engagement rate and finance has individual & team revenue metrics and goals. As we combine the two together, there is an incremental lever for leaders and managers to visualize and accelerate company wide learning & productivity.
“If the 5 core pillars are well executed it drives business outcomes — enhances employee experience, boosts employee and cross functional team productivity and rationalizes technology investments. All at the same time!”
Summary:
In the current macro environment, CFO’s would rightfully question — Is it prudent to focus on employee experience? If the 5 core pillars are well executed with the communication and change management — it enhances employee experience, boosts employee and cross functional
team productivity and rationalizes technology investment. All at the same time!
Employee experience: Stitching select best of breed apps with a single core HCM will ensure enhanced experience in core journeys (learning, performance) and deliver them to employees in the flow of work, resulting in enhanced business outcomes.
Productivity: Leveraging intelligent self-serve tools, bots guided by AI/ machine learning platforms provide real time responses to employees, reducing People Operations ticket volumes. Enhancing productivity of employees and cross functional teams (People Operations, IT, Finance Operations) allowing them to focus on high touch experiences and employee well being.
Application costs: Shaping the application portfolio as a core HCM (system of record) tightly stitched to select best of breed apps, limiting the total number of applications to about 10 (Sierra Cedar 2019–20 HR System Survey). Quarterly reviews to identify opportunities to rationalize the
portfolio with a focus on simplifying journeys. This coupled with thoughtful buy vs. build approaches, so that teams do not engage in expensive and long drawn internal development efforts.
While the above might appear to be contradictory outcomes, executing this playbook will help the business deliver results, accelerate the digital transformation on the employee front and navigate these turbulent times with the focus on your most valuable capital — PEOPLE!