You Don’t Have the Same 24hrs as Beyonce, So Get the Most Out of Your Time with HR Tech (Oops, Did I Think That Out Loud #45)

“We just don’t have time for this right now” is a common theme in HR. It feels like no matter how hard HR teams work, the work is never done, and some projects get pushed out further and further. While technology promises to alleviate some of the team’s workload, reality can often be different—the more technology you plug in, the more work your team takes on.

This is incredibly counterintuitive. So, where and when does it stop?

We've been approaching HR tech from the wrong angle for the past 5-10 years. You see, while tech is often designed with the ideal end state of “machine doing the work for humans” in mind, the truth is that when it comes to HR tech, the human can never really be out of the loop. This is why you often see a disconnect between an HR Tech business case vs. actual ROIs from projects. This is also why the more tech you plug in, the more work it feels like you are doing (even though the technology promised you the opposite).

Instead of continuing the tech purchase patterns like Ouroboros, where we keep buying things in hopes it will fix the last thing, here is my take on a four-step process that will get tech to do the work for you and free up some time in your day for the other stuff.

1. Go Back to the Basics

Like literally back to the basics, start by grabbing a piece of blank paper and set a timer for ~2 hours. In that time, do this:

• Imagine you have no HR tech solutions, and your IT team only provides MS365, G-Suite, or [insert your choice here] solutions.
• Consider the HR stuff you still need to do even with this limited toolset.
• Assume there are no restrictions on the number of people you can hire on your team to do everything you listed above.
• Now, think about how you would complete tasks like creating job requisitions, onboarding new employees, managing performance, etc. Remember, HR-specific technology does not exist in this scenario.
• Look at that list, and now think about your actual people resources and highlight the activities you want them to focus on.
• Look at the list of activities that are not highlighted, look at your existing HR Tech stack, and determine if your current technologies can adequately complete all of these activities and if you have any gaps or overlaps in technology.

Congratulations, you just did a mini-tech audit.

Once you have figured out which parts of your current stack are doing what they were intended to do and which parts may be redundant or missing, you can decide whether to supplement or remove the redundancies.

Allocate sufficient resources for the maintenance and continuous improvement tasks needed for your tech stack. No SaaS solution is ever truly “set it and forget it”; they all require periodic minor maintenance.

2. Get Your Data Architecture and Pipeline Right

This is the part where I think we don’t pay enough attention to during implementation and kick ourselves for later. At a high level, this step is relatively simple:

• Figure out what you are looking to accomplish strategically as a function.
• Determine the data/information you need to help you achieve and maintain your goals.
• Figure out if and how that data is collected and stored
• Determine if additional data needs to be injected during the process to achieve the outcomes

Most people understand the above. The hard part is doing it during implementation when you are usually on a time crunch to get the system in place, and the effort needed to review and design data elements becomes secondary. I advise allocating enough time and resources to do this work because, believe it or not, most of the ROI in your investment business case depends on how well the data architecture and pipeline are done. How will you know it worked if you can’t even measure it?

3. Setup People Analytics to Inform and Support

Yes, predictive analytics is cool. Also, yes, most of us will consider it a win to get headcount and turnover numbers right. The thing about analytics is that 80% of the questions your PA team will get can be answered with less than 20% of the metrics in your repository. So, while it is great to have 20+ different ways of looking at turnover and even predicting it, your business mostly wants to know how many people left last month and if it’s critical.

If you have the time and resources, then yes, absolutely go all out. However, if your team is strapped for time and resources as is, I would focus your PA team and effort in two areas: 1) how to keep the business informed with as little human intervention as possible, 2) how to get the data to support your planned future initiatives and activities. The goal here is to get back your time, so for every headcount question unasked and every historical trend tracked, you are freeing up your capacity to do something else.

4. Have AI Take Over the Boring Stuff

Nobody needs to answer the same question, send out the same link/form, or do anything on a daily repetition. If you notice a pattern of activities that just aren’t ending but require the same response/action each time, I highly recommend looking into AI and automation solutions to take over these things for you. There are solutions where you just tell it how you would like it to respond or what you would need it to do, and it will take over from there. Tech is there to help and not do more work, and for any activities in HR that you can document in a Word or PDF file, tech can take over and do them for you (and yes, you can also review the outputs afterward if you wish).

So, while we don’t all have the same 24 hours as Beyonce, that doesn’t mean we can’t make the most out of our 24 hours with some design thinking and many intentional technology purchases and choices.