The HR Perfect Storm

So last week began a personal challenge to write a weekly blog. My hope is that you’ve come back because you found value in last week’s blog, or just to see if I actually followed through on my pledge. Either way, thanks for checking back in. Hopefully my attempt to lay some markers for the rest of the summer will work out as intended. My ultimate goal is to stitch together a tapestry of thoughts around the topics of HR, Higher Education and their impact on Talent in the workforce.

This week I’m going to begin analyzing what I call the ”HR Perfect Storm.” Being a techie at heart, I’m going to start with HR Technology. In subsequent weeks, I’ll focus on other fronts in the HR Perfect Storm.

Yes, I work for an HR Technology company.  No, this isn’t a marketing pitch. Ok, got that out of the way. So, have you ever been to HR Tech or a similar conference? If you have, and most likely you have, it’s a bit daunting. There are as many tech solutions as there are problems out there. What I’ve found from over 20 years of working with HR Technology, is how fragmented and often undervalued HR Technology has been considered by the enterprise.

I began my journey with HR Technology implementing one of the first fully fledged LMS platforms, Ingenium from Click2Learn (now SumTotal). The boundary breaking functionality was the ability to serve up online content and track instructor led training events in the same system. These features have continued to be enhanced over the past several years to the point today we are talking about Learning Ecosystems.

HR’s Perfect Storm isn’t just around Learning or Learning Ecosystems, it’s about the technology that surrounds the Employee.  Today’s latest term is “Employee Experience” which thankfully has placed the proper emphasis away from backend processes, to the actual user interfaces. For years, I know I was there, HR Departments focused on the backend data structures, integration points and reporting. No one thought to consider if the interface was intuitive or not; who cares, the “employees just have to use whatever we tell them.” Ah, the good ole days. Well, those decisions landed on some pretty empty reports and systems that no one “wanted” to use.

A shocking statistic from a recent Fosway Group survey indicates that close to 74% of HR organizations surveyed do not think their current HR systems are ready for the modern workforce. 74%?!? What’s even more dire, is the data gathered in this study that shows the breakdown of how they are managing their talent;

·        22% using Best of Breed
·        31% using Single Suite
·        33% Spreadsheets
·        14% Nothing

In many instances the HR systems are viewed as outside the realm of IT. Some organizations have an “HR Business Analyst” who acts as a liaison between HR and IT. Unfortunately, what is often the case is the HR Department wants a system, IT says “No.” HR finds a way to purchase a SaaS system, or other rogue element and viola, segmented data. This goes back to the premise that HR Technology is a major front in the HR Perfect Storm. But it doesn’t have to be this way, it could be a safe harbor. Check back next Wednesday as Paul Harvey used to say; “for the rest of the story.”