Successful tech for HR leaders: less hassle, more habit

I’ve been eating, sleeping and breathing HR technology in the past few weeks in the run up to the launch of the new Tech Space on The People Space. And what’s become clear is that more vendors are listening to what HR wants and developing tech with a consumer-type interface, that is simple to use, cost-effective and easy to bolt onto existing systems. 

Given research of 751 HR leaders and 1,510 employees across the UK, US and Australia by Reward Gateway shows that 'doing more with less by streamlining/unifying HR technology' has increased in importance since the pandemic, this is good news. Plus, employees who said their company has handled COVID-19 well indicated they believed this was a result of their employer having the right workplace tools and technologies in place. And when you add in the fact this same research said 71% of HR leaders have found 2020 to be the most stressful year in their career and that 59% of HR leaders think their employees are more stressed (and there is little sign that 2021 is going to be less stressful for most), I think tech providers are in for a bumper year.

For, HR technology can help to make life easier, removing mundane tasks, improving the employee experience and helping identify patterns in data that flag up unwanted behaviour or increasing disengagement early so you can address it quickly. 

But HR tech can also be unwieldy, expensive and – we’ve all been there – frustrating! So the successful vendors will be those with the right tech that really addresses today’s HR challenges. Tech that is less hassle for the employee and HR team. Tech that is so easy to use – and so useful – that it becomes habitual.

An HR director's wishlist: the top 10 things HR wants from technology

Says former chief people officer Martin Kirke, who now advises HR directors and tech investors, in an article for The People Space: “With all this exciting stuff it’s easy to forget that most of us in HR spend most of our time working with old antiquated systems that are unlikely to be replaced any time soon. That’s why investors like solutions which can be bolted on to sort, filter and display data more effectively and integrate data from different systems.” 

Martin and I have had a number of conversations about the good, the bad and the ugly of tech (or as he says in this earlier article for The People Space, the ‘scary’ of tech). We agree that technology can be a force for good in HR if used properly, and we are not the only ones. Investment in HR tech startups is rising year-on-year, with everything from referrals to recruitment, wearables to wellbeing and operations to organisational network analysis gaining interest from investors. 

But, as Martin says, we need to be wary. HR needs to be at the forefront of protecting employees and, of course, data transparency is the big issue. Finding patterns in data that can offer great insights is one thing. Surveillance, such as monitoring staff through software that takes screenshots, is quite another.

Venture capitalist Nauta Capital puts it succinctly: “It’s clear that modern HR departments have gone through a period of transformation. But while technology powers the tools, HR still remains to be about humans. Indeed, the new wave of HR startups have not only developed solutions modernising human resources but they have found ways to enable a more interconnected ecosystem that’s human-centric.” 

To develop this human-centric interconnected ecosystem you need people who get HR’s challenges. People who can put themselves into the employee’s shoes. People who can communicate in HR and business, not tech, speak. 

I interviewed five such people for the Tech Space to get their perspectives on challenges ranging from remote working to HR digitalisation, and from employee wellbeing and inclusion to identifying changing behaviour through patterns in data – and I asked them how technology can help address these challenges. Here are some snippets:

Is the COVID pandemic the catalyst for full HR digitalisation?

This is a question I ask Michael Reiserer, MD of EASY Software, given that the pandemic has really been the catalyst for so much of the accelerated change we are seeing in work. According to research by EASY just before the pandemic hit, 40% of leaders believed their lack of digitalisation in HR was a competitive disadvantage for them while 36% said it resulted in a less than optimal relationship with their employees. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter that it was affecting talent retention. 

In other words, failure to keep pace with digitalisation is making HR vulnerable to significant risks. With 42% saying this failure affects business agility and 47% that it has reduced efficiency, I have to ask why it has taken a pandemic to kickstart HR’s digitalisation?

Healthy habits, healthy workforce

There is no doubt employee wellbeing is the number one issue on HR leaders’ minds today. And there is a lot of tech out there purporting to help in this area. But, as Martin Kirke notes, he does not want to see any more wellness solutions that send him pictures of “stereotyped employees all young and fit working out at home”. Where’s the inclusion? 

One of the problems, as Mercer partner and UK growth leader Nick McClelland tells me, is that many of the wellbeing approaches we have seen have been like “throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks” rather than considered strategies that take individuals’ needs and personality types into account. The result is that wellbeing becomes a tickbox and people’s behaviour does not change.

Treating people as individuals is key to effectiveness when it comes to behaviour change. And if you need any more evidence that individual personality traits make all the difference, there's a peer-reviewed study out today, Who complies with COVID-19 transmission mitigation behavioural guidelines? carried out by academics at Warwick Business School in the UK, Emlyon Business School in France, and Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University in Texas. They used data from 8,548 people and examined their ‘big five’ personality traits – extraversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness – to see how this was associated with their response to COVID-19 guidelines. People who were more conscientious were 31% more like to follow the guidelines, those more intellectually curious and open to experience were 19% more likely to follow them, while more agreeable people who valued cooperation were 17% more likely to comply. But extroverts were 7% less likely to follow the rules than introverts, particularly among men. 

The moral of the story? Different personality traits need to be considered to encourage more effective compliance with COVID-19 guidelines.

Nick talks about this as the ‘individualisation’ of wellbeing, as opposed to the personalisation we have long seen in benefits. By using habit loops, community and gamification, wellbeing strategies can start to make a real difference to sustainable behaviour change, he says. 

Mentoring: the answer to so many challenges, not least diversity and inclusion 

Talking about diversity and inclusion, this is another of the top three challenges for business today. According to research firm Gartner, diversity and inclusion (D&I) has been the number one talent priority for CEOs for the past two years, yet a 2020 survey by the company found nearly 90% of HR leaders feel their organisation has been ineffective or flat at increasing diversity representation. Nearly two-thirds of talent management leaders characterise their organisations’ successors as 0-10% racially or ethnically diverse. Furthermore, 69% of talent management leaders report their organisations’ successors as 0%-10% women from diverse and racial or ethnic backgrounds.

One way of improving this diversity is mentoring. I’ve been interviewing mentors and mentees recently for a project for the UK’s CIPD and the benefits come across so clearly. It seems a no brainer to me. But a key challenge businesses find with mentoring is scaling it up. Too often it is available to the so-called ‘top talent’ or particular groups. This is a perfect example of where technology helps, enabling initiatives to be offered to all. And how much better if that tech can be set up in 24 hours, has an onboarding questionnaire of just two pages and is fully customisable? Enter mentoring app PushFar, which has an open source app connecting individuals to mentors across the world for free – but which also, helpfully, has a corporate offer as well. I spoke to Ed Johnson, co-founder and CEO of mentoring app PushFar to find out more.

Identify your unknown unknowns and protect your organisation 

One of the most interesting new areas of tech in my opinion is organisational network analysis (ONA). Did you know that, by analysing communication flows in your organisation, you can spot issues such as increasing employee anxiety, for example? FACT360 co-founder Paddy Lawton tells me that its technology has been inspired by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park in World War II. In a nutshell, it’s all about machine learning finding anomalies in communication flows that spots things you have no idea about (the unknown unknowns). All without human bias. The uses are numerous, from identifying the real influencers in the organisation to – perhaps the most interesting for HR – acting as an early warning system for bad, or indeed, fraudulent behaviour. It’s a fascinating area and I am intrigued to see how organisations will adopt it.

Lockdown is not long term 

Now we are back in lockdown here in the UK the novelty, if you can call it that, has worn off. There is plenty of evidence about the impact lockdown and homeworking is having on people’s mental and physical health. The Lancet Commission says that mental health disorders are on the rise in every single country in the world and they will cost the global economy $16 trillion by 2030. 

There is also conflicting evidence about people’s productivity, though I have to say every HR director I have spoken to has said they have seen at least equal, if not improved, productivity. But what is clear is that not everyone is necessarily suited to working from home, whether they want to do it or not. 

Martin Goodwill, head of psychometric assessment company Great People Inside, has produced some research into the traits and characteristics of a successful homeworking employee versus a successful homeworking manager, and what makes a successful team leader in this context. You can find out more in my interview here.

If you want to keep up-to-date with what’s going on in the digital HR world, why not sign up to The People Space’s fortnightly free newsletter? To give you a taster, here’s what we have coming up in the next few weeks: Christopher Cornue, former chief strategy and innovation officer at Navicent (one of the premier teaching hospitals in the United States), on innovation and leading in disruptive times; Michele Hamill, CHRO at the world’s largest independent spend-management company JAGGAER, on the leadership qualities needed to guide through tough times; interviews with six CHROs on the impact of their COVID policies six months on: Brian Kropp from Gartner talks to me about why businesses should get involved in socio-political issues… and much more. Don’t miss it!