The Party in My Head – Collection of Thoughts on HR, People Analytics, and Technology from Sept-Oct 2023 (Oops Did I Think That Out Loud #11)

In no particular order, here are some things that I noodled on this Fall:

HR is Broken at the Start

How HR is taught in schools and certification programs is not conducive to creating the future of work and the future of HR we need. I vividly recall sitting through my Employment and Labor Relations class in my senior year—where the whole semester was focused on a labor negotiation simulation—and thinking to myself, “Oh goodness, just let me pass this class, and I will never touch the topic of HR again.” Fast forward eight years, and I am in classes for my SHRM accreditation. All I can remember about this experience is panicking during the section on Laws and Regulations, where we need to memorize all the labor laws in the US and their implications to pass the exam. I sat through my SHRM classes in 2018, and I can attest to the fact that I have never needed to access that knowledge again after passing the exam because somewhere between Google back then and ChatGPT today, the ability to recite lines from FLSA isn’t needed daily.

I’m not sharing this to have a dig at the institutions. Given all the misconceptions of HR in the market, I know they are doing their best. I am sharing this in the hopes that we can start looking at this industry's future at the start of its value chain: education. Few things we need to get right:

·?????? HR is not just Labor or Industrial Relations

·?????? HR is not just a culmination of laws and regulations

·?????? HR is not just “being a people person.”

Suppose we require all business degrees to attend strategy, technology, and process/operations classes. Why do we not need education/courses in managing people, which could be the costliest variable in a modern organization?

HR needs to stop using “partner with the business,” “be at the table,” or “it’s for the business” as our slogans

The number of times I have heard these things said in a meeting room makes me cringe. The problem isn’t HR’s desire to do these things; it’s the fact that we still talk about them like they are innovative. Also, 9/10 times I hear this said in a room, I would turn around to find a series of decisions and policies HR has created that are straight out of the 90s. It’s like we are giving ourselves a bad reputation. ?

HR being a part of the business should be so natural at this stage that it should be like the internet. We don’t walk around saying, “I will work on the internet today” or “This needs to be done with the internet”; it is just a part of our being. We only talk about it when the internet disconnects, and we feel we are back in the Stone Age. So, why can’t we all assume that HR is already at the table with the business and behave like such?

There is a Practical Experience Gap between HR Technology Buyers and Users, and it is impacting HR SaaS Solution Sales

I hear a lot from HR tech users and sales teams across various organizations and industries. The most familiar ones recently are 1) sales teams telling me about how their key client contact loves the solution but can’t seem to get a final signature on the contract from the buyer and 2) HR practitioners telling me about the newest tech their organizations invested in and wondering why they just spent the kind of money they did for technology that isn’t all that useful to them.

Here is my hypothesis as to what is happening: those who are more senior in an organization and own the budget tend to 1) have been removed from the daily tasks of their operations for quite some time, and 2) have grown up in an era of HR where you apply more people power to solve people problems. As a result of these two factors, the solution to a challenge often becomes a half-step solution where the technology may be applied to do manual tasks faster but necessarily fix the broken processes that are the root cause of the problem. The bottom line is that we all need to remind ourselves that what got us here in the first place (i.e., people executing processes faster) will not get us out of it (i.e., increased cost of people resources and the constant demand to do more with less).

“Employees need to own their careers” is the Worst Excuse Ever

Suppose the current system is broken and inequitable. In that case, no amount of aspiration or effort will get someone from a historically marginalized community to the same place as their colleagues with the same amount of effort. We would genuinely be delusional if we thought that. If that is the case, we are making our historically marginalized workforce work X times harder than their counterparts to get the same opportunities in the workplace. I’m pretty sure that is the literal definition of inequity.

The number of times I have heard, “Well, we don’t need to do [insert talent initiative like mentorship programs here] because that would be us dictating our workforce’s career path, and we need to show them flexibility and empower them to drive their career here” said in a room is one too many. Here is the thing: there is a vast array of options between “do nothing” and “dictate your employees” career path. Yes, I agree that it is not HR’s job to own the career paths of its workforce; however, I firmly believe that it is HR’s job to create an equitable talent environment where everyone has equal opportunities to own their careers.

Terrible Policies Happen at the Intersection of Missing Data and Distrust

How often have we heard the sentence “we should treat people like adults”? How often have we seen policies that regulate pretty much everything in that same organization, short of when you can take a bathroom break? ?

This is any I advocate for data-driven decisions. In the absence of data, we rely on anecdotes. Unfortunately, the human brain retains positive or negative anecdotes when workplace events tend to happen more on a bell curve / normal distribution. So, when we don’t have the data readily available, and everything we can recollect is on the extreme ends of the spectrum, it is only human to want to over-regulate. So, the next time you see a policy that doesn’t make sense, ask for the data that led to the creation of the policy.

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