Four conversations about HR Technology from the 2024 Unleash conference

The best insights from conferences frequently do not come from the conference presentations but from conversations with attendees. The following are four topics of conversation I had at Unleash that may have significant implications for the HR technology market over the coming years: demonstrating the value of skills management, getting serious about measuring employee performance, skills proficiency data changing how leaders think, and a resurgence of the metaverse.?

Skills management LLM solutions must start showing their value.?

The need for better skills management will only increase due to the Talent Tectonic forces of digitalization changing work and demographics driving labor shortages. But several people said companies are struggling to demonstrate that efforts required to implement and maintain Large Language Model (LLM) skills solutions are worth the benefits. I believe the value of these solutions will be shown over time, but the hype of creating a skills LLM just because companies want to “implement AI” is wearing off. We must do the hard work of demonstrating the ROI of these solutions.? Which might include shifting away from using general purpose LLMs toward more “small” language model ontologies.

We need better solutions for measuring job performance.

Job performance can be defined as the impact that an individual employee or contractor has on the financial, operational, and cultural goals of the company that pays them. Many HR tech solutions measure, develop, or influence employee attributes that predict performance (e.g., skills, engagement). But few solutions are designed to accurately measure the employee performance these solutions are trying to predict. The absence of accurate performance criteria makes it extremely difficult to calculate the effectiveness and ROI of HR technology solutions.?It also profoundly limits the ability of companies to manage their workforces. Workforce planning and restructuring decisions tend to be dominated by data reflecting employee costs since companies have no accurate data about employee performance. All companies track how much money they spend to employ someone, but few can estimate the money that is lost if they let that person go.?The "performance criteria" problem has been widely recognized for decades, yet the field of HR technology just seems to dance around it rather than address it head on. If we want companies to place more value on people then we need to get better at measuring the value people provide.

Access to skills proficiency data changes how leaders think.

The past few years have seen a steady increase in deployment of solutions that measure individual differences in employee skills proficiency. ?The initial focus of these solutions was to improve hiring decisions and ensure employees are qualified to perform different job functions. Deployment of these solutions has now started giving business leaders a new perspective on their workforces. In the past, companies tended to treat employees in the same role as having roughly the same level of skills and qualifications. Leaders knew this was not true, but they did not have an easy way to measure and understand how differences in skill proficiency impacted business operations. As skills proficiency data becomes more accessible, leaders are starting to rethink how they design teams and schedule workforce operations. Much in the same way a basketball coach designs plays and manages substitutions to reflect the unique skill levels of each player.

A potential metaverse resurgence.?

There was a lot of talk a few years about how metaverse technology was going to transform work. Although use of augmented reality technology has proven very effective for certain training applications, a widespread move to metaverse technology did not happen. But there are reasons to predict renewed interest in metaverse based HR technology solutions.?

1.??????? Platform technology used to create meta-verse solutions continues to get better and cheaper. With better platforms come far better solutions.? Remember how expensive and painful it was to use mobile HR technology in the early days of wireless networks?? ?

2.??????? Meta-verse solutions could be highly valuable in a hybrid world. The current move to “force people back into offices” is insensitive to people with disabilities and family care responsibilities and is likely to be unsustainable over the long-term. Making “ability to commute to an office every week” the primary qualification for employing skilled talent is a stupid strategy in a world of growing skills shortages. ?As companies come to accept hybrid work we are likely to see increasing demand for metaverse solutions that enable enriching, immersive interactions between employees located in different parts of the world.?

3.??????? The next generation of employees may be more comfortable in the metaverse. ?In my experience, employees expect organizations to use the communication technology they used when they were in their teens. ?Adoption of communication technology innovations such as e-mail, texting, or instant messaging tended be faster for those who used it prior to joining the company.? Metaverse technology is used extensively in online games such as Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnight that are highly popular among people under the age of 25. It seems plausible that these employees will be more interested and supportive toward the used of HR technology that incorporate metaverse functionality.?

Food for future thought

These four topics reflect just a fraction of the discussion that occurred at the Unleash conference. I chose to write about these ones in particular as I found myself thinking about them a lot after I left the conference.? Hopefully they will trigger some good discussion and thought for you as well.