HR technology implementation: "With great power...

...comes great responsibility." This iconic phrase was coined by our friendly neighbourhood Spiderman and is actually known as the Peter Parker principle. It resonates in so many situations, because it stresses that someone with the power to make decisions has to think through the consequences of what their decisions impact.

For me, this principle has become more top of mind since operating more in the realms of launching technology to a global audience. Over the course of the last few years, I have come to learn a lot about technology, how to choose it, how to implement it and more importantly, about how people use technology. And the realisations are humbling. People's heads are full; their days are busy. A reliance on solutions that require training is futile. Nobody gets up in the morning to learn "yet another system". Nobody rewatches an old recorded training or reads a manual to execute things they have been told they have to do. Nobody taught you to use Whatsapp - yet, you likely use it everyday. I have also learned more about technology insecurities and am in the fundamental camp of "nobody gets up in the morning to deliberately get anything wrong in a new process". So the responsibility for good user behaviour, for adoption and for system utilisation truly lies with the person responsible for choosing and implementing the system.

Let me illustrate the size of the problem. The average number of technologies, systems, apps in operation to just navigate HR transactions and processes stands at 13 at the moment. 74% of companies surveyed by a PwC study in 2020 plan to increase their spend in HR tech on top of spend that is already HR-tech related. Nearly half of those organisations are investing in their talent acquisition space; a similar number is keen to improve the employee experience with increased tech. Let that sink in. The average employee has to navigate multiple systems to do transactions that are not their day job and they will have more systems in the future. Any employee I have recently talked to about this topic typically says the same thing: "I don't mind, but make it simple. Any chance you can have it all in the same system?"

So who needs to demonstrate the ROI of the technology? The person who does not really want to use it in the first place! Therefore, is it fair to say a huge chunk of the responsibility for the ROI lies with the person bringing the technology to the users. The great responsibility of choosing the technology also comes with the true responsibility for the hard work to make the solutions stick and so simple and practical that your users cannot help themselves but use it. One of the core lessons I have learned is that this process is hard - much harder than anticipated at times. It requires patience and perseverance. Yet, something I did not factor in during early stages is that systems can also enable good adoption. They do so, when users no longer have the opportunity to "get it wrong".

Interestingly, this thinking has had a foothold in factories around the world for years. There it serves the purpose of keeping people healthy and to avoid accidents. How come this gets to be applied when it comes to people's bodies, but not to their heads? I feel that all too often today, we have people ill-equipped to launch technology and the consequences are vast. For thousands of people around the globe. Every day. And quite often - these "injuries" become only visible after a while, because technology also requires time to embed itself. So my consequence of this is the following: we, as those with responsibility to launch technology, have to become better equipped, better skilled, more conscious of the impact we create and this impact goes beyond the timeframe of the project. For suppliers of technology, I strongly encourage you to work on your technology, not just so that it flexes to all desires of the person buying the technology, but to demonstrate how the technology guides and eradicates the need for clarification, for do-overs and for compensation from other teams, while creating a seamless experience for the employee.