WSR September 14 by IHRIM Publication

September 2014

The Official Journal of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management

IHRIM.ORG

From Workforce Management to Predictive Analytics, HR Technology Drives High-Performing Organizations.

See HR Outsourcing/ASP Buyerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Guide on Page 28

Contents

Volume 5, Number 4 • September 2014

features

HR Outsourcing/ASP Buyer’s Guide

Page 28

columns From the Editors

Scott Bolman, lead editor Shawn Fitzgerald, editor Jeff Higgins, editor

Change Management

Real Change Management #1 – HR Organization in the Cross Hairs By Ian Ruddle, Lake Bend Partners, Inc.

Workforce Planning is Essential to High-Performing Organizations

By Peter Louch, Vemo

Video is a Sound Employee Engagement Investment By Vern Hanzlik, Qumu

This article outlines what a pragmatic and operational workforce planning process should look like – as well as predictive tools that help organizations measure and respond to their workforce gaps. Using this model and tools, high-performance organizations can use workforce planning to ensure that they have the required talent to drive business objectives.

Social Media in the Workplace – Are We Nearly There?

Multidimensional Workforce

By Tarik Taman, Infor To truly generate value, social technologies must integrate seamlessly with business processes to make working within a collaborative platform as common as sending an email and, eventually, replacing it altogether. There is little doubt that social business technology is poised to change the way people work, leaving us all to one day marvel at the way things used to be.

Thoughts While Thinking

Editors, editorial advisors and other thought leaders describe their biggest surprise over the years regarding HR technology

Executive Interview – Part One

By Jason Main, AsureForce and Jeff Root, AsureSpace

Jason Averbook, Appirio Sandy Fisher, Clarkson University Janet Marler, University of Albany State University of New York

Organizations that approach mobility and technology trends proactively and effectively can turn their largest expenditures – labor, real estate and technology – into strategic operational advantages with enhanced workplace and workforce productivity, and improved collaboration and engagement.

Tech Notes

Seven Key Tips for Successful HR System Evaluations in 2015

Watch and Learn from Top Tech CEOs By Sean Jones

Workplace Scheduling Technologies Help Organizations Rock Around the Clock

By John A. Hinojos, HRIP, HRchitect Conducting a successful system evaluation is not yet a science, but by following the steps in this article it can become more objective. Keeping an eye on the ultimate goal and success of the system at the company can eliminate some of the hype and hysteria traditionally surrounding this process.

Beyond Forecasting: Using Predictive Analytics to Enhance Organizational Performance

The Back Story

Looking for the LBD* of Human Capital Management Software By Katherine Jones, Ph.D., Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP

By Min Park, Mercer Predictive analytics can hone in on the best investments for better retaining a workforce and driving organizational performance. Through statistical modeling, it is possible to seek out which of the many possible factors most influence the workforce’s decisions to stay or quit, develop a strategy, and then act on it.

Why Traditional Human Capital Management Isn’t Cutting It – Context-Aware HR Technology is the Key to Maximize Workforce Productivity 21 By Morné Swart, SumTotal Systems, LLC Bringing data together from separate systems for one holistic view of information about employees ensures that organizations can maintain compliance, and facilitate a higher-performing organization, one that optimizes the return on their investment in their most important asset – their workforce.

Human Resources and the Wisdom of the Crowd

By Wes Wu, Appirio The idea of crowdsourcing as a consumer concept is quite palatable for most people. But, applied to HR, crowdsourcing seems like an extreme proposition. Whether HR uses the crowd to answer HR questions or provide employee feedback, crowdsourced HR can be the most efficient way for employees to get answers to the information they need.

Workforce Solutions Review (ISSN 2154-6975) is published bi-monthly for the International Association for Human Resource Information Management by Futura Publishing LLC, 20505 Live Oak St., Leander, TX 78641-9273. Subscription rates can be found at www.ihrimpublications.com. Please send address corrections to Workforce Solutions Review at the address above. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Volume 5, Number 4 • September 2014

Workforce Solutions Review is a publication of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management, whose mission is to be the leading professional association for knowledge, education and solutions supporting human capital management. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the editors, the IHRIM board of directors or the membership.

MARK BENNETT, Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, CA USA mark.bennett@oracle.com

NAOMI LEE BLOOM, Managing Partner, Bloom & Wallace, Fort Myers, FL USA naomibloom@mindspring.com

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Managing Editor SCOTT BOLMAN, Principal, HR Effectiveness Consulting, Mercer, Chicago, IL USA Scott.bolman@mercer.com

Co-managing Editor SHAWN FITZGERALD, PMP, SPHR, HRIP, Director, Talent Acquisition, DeVry Education Group, Chicago, IL USA sfitzgerald@devrygroup.com

ERIK BERGGREN, VP, Customer Results & Global Research, Success Factors, San Mateo, CA USA eberggren@successfactors.com JOSH BERSIN, Principal and Founder, Bersin by Deloitte, Oakland, CA USA jbersin@bersin.com

YVETTE CAMERON, Research Director, HCM Technologies, Gartner, Littleton, CO Yvette.Cameron@gartner.com LEW CONNER, Executive Director, Higher Education User Group, Gilbert, AZ USA lconner@heug.org ELENA M. ORDÓÑEZ DEL CAMPO, Senior VP Globalization Services, SAP AG, Frankfurt, Germany elena.ordonez@sap.com

Past Managing Editor

LARRY DUNIVAN, SVP Products and Technology, Ceridian larry.dunivan@ceridian.com

ED COLBY, Managing Principal and Technology Evangelist, PRO HCM Solutions, Chapel Hill, NC USA, edcolbync@gmail.com

GARY DURBIN, Chief Technology Officer, SynchSource, Oakland, CA USA hacker@synchsource.com

Academic Editor KAREN BEAMAN, Founder/CEO, Jeitosa Group International, San Francisco, CA USA karen.beaman@jeitosa.com

Associate Editors

Dr. CHARLES H. FAY, Professor, School of Management & Labor Relations, Rutgers University, Highland Park, NJ USA cfay@smlr.rutgers.edu DR. URSULA CHRISTINA FELLBERG, Owner & Managing Director, UCF-StrategieBeraterin, Munich, Germany ucfell@mac.com

LEXY MARTIN, Vice President, Research & Analytics, CedarCrestone, Alpharetta, GA USA alexia.martin@cedarcrestone.com BRIAN RETZLAFF, Head of IT for HR, Legal & Communications, ING US Insurance Americas, Atlanta, GA USA brian.retzlaff@us.ing.com LISA ROWAN, Program Director, HR, Learning & Talent Strategies, IDC, Framingham, MA USA lrowan@idc.com Dr. DANIEL SULLIVAN, Professor of International Business, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware USA sullivad@lerner.udel.edu MARK SMITH, CEO, Chief Research Officer, and Founder of Ventana Research, San Ramon, CA USA mark.smith@ventanaresearch.com DAVE ULRICH, Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI USA dou@umich.edu DR. MARY YOUNG, Principal Researcher, Human Capital, The Conference Board, New York, NY USA mary.young@conference-board.org

IHRIM BOARD OF DIRECTORS Officers Chairman of the Board KEVIN CARLSON, Ph.D., Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Vice Chair DAMON LOVETT, HRIP, KnowledgeSource HR

ALSEN HSEIN, President,Take5 People Limited, Shanghai, PRC Alsen@take5people.com

Chief Financial Officer JEREMY AMES, HRIP, Hive Tech HR

DAVID GABRIEL, Ed.D., Global Reach Leadership, Berkeley, CA davidcgabriel@gmail.com

CARL C. HOFFMANN, Director, Human Capital Management & Performance LLC, Chapel Hill, NC USA cc_hoffmann@yahoo.com

Secretary BOB LUPP, HRIP, Penn State University

ROBERT C. GREENE, Channels Account Executive and Sales Training Manager, Ascentis, San Mateo, CA USA rcgreene@mindspring.com

JIM HOLINCHECK, Vice President, Services Strategy & Marketing, Workday, Inc. james.holincheck@workday.com

JEFF HIGGINS, CEO, Human Capital Management Institute, Marina Del Rey, CA USA jeff.higgins@hcminst.com

CATHERINE ANN HONEY, VP, Customer Services, Radius Worldwide catherine.honey@comcast.net

Directors

DR. KATHERINE JONES, HCM Research, Bersin by Deloitte, San Mateo, CA USA kathjones@deloitte.com

JOYCE BROWN, HRIP, Brink’s Inc.

ERIK ALVARADO, Associate Director, Global HRIS SD&D, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals erik.alvarado@boehringer-ingelheim.com

ERIC LESSER, Research Director, IBM Institute for Business Value, Boston, MA USA elesser@us.ibm.com BRUNO QUERENET, Senior Manager, HR Systems and Operations, Intuitive Surgical, Sunnyvale, CA USA Bruno.querenet@intusurg.com MICHAEL RUDNICK, Principal Consultant, KnowledgeSource Consulting, New York, New York USA Michael.rudnick@gmail.com FREDDYE SILVERMAN, VP Eastern Region, Jeitosa Group International, Baltimore, MD USA freddye.silverman@jeitosa.com

SYNCO JONKEREN, VP, HCM Applications Product Development & Management, EMEA, The Netherlands synco.jonkeren@oracle.com

IHRIM Executive Director TODD MANN DAVID BROOK, HRIP, Southern California Permanente MARIO ELLIS, HRIP, St. Luke’s Health System GARY MORLOCK, HRIP, Qualcomm, Inc. JIM PETTIT, HRIP, CareFusion

MICHAEL J. KAVANAGH, Professor Emeritus of Management, State University of Albany (SUNY), Albany, NY USA mickey.kavanagh@gmail.com

SHERRY TIMMERMAN, Apex Performance Consultants Ltd

BOB KAUNERT, Principal, Towers Watson, Philadelphia, PA USA robert.kaunert@towerswatson.com

PUBLISHING INFORMATION

BILL KUTIK, Technology Columnist, Human Resource Executive, Westport, CT USA bkutik@earthlink.net

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

DAVID LUDLOW, Global VP, HCM Solutions, SAP, Palo Alto, CA David.ludlow@sap.com

CECILE ALPER-LEROUX, VP Product Strategy and Development, Ultimate Software, Weston, FL cecile_leroux@ultimatesoftware.com

RHONDA P. MARCUCCI, CPA, Consultant for GruppoMarcucci, Chicago, IL USA rhonda@gruppomarcucci-usa.com

IHRIM Past Chair NOV OMANA, HRIP, Collective HR Solutions, LLC

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

TOM FAULKNER, Publisher, Futura Publishing LLC, Austin, TX USA, tomf@futurapublishing.com PATTY HUBER, Advertising Manager, Austin, TX USA phuber2@austin.rr.com

From the Editors Scott Bolman, Lead Editor In addition to his consulting role at Mercer, Scott Bolman is currently the managing editor for IHRIM’s Workforce Solutions Review. With over 20 years of HR experience, his areas of expertise include HR strategic planning, technology strategy, HR service delivery models, shared services design and implementation, business process outsourcing (BPO), process analysis, and vendor evaluation. He can be reached at Scott.Bolman@mercer.com. Shawn Fitzgerald, Editor Shawn Fitzgerald is a global HR leader with expertise in workforce technology, talent acquisition, talent management, HR transformation, and change management. She has experience transforming the HR function within organizations and focusing on the areas of people, process and technology to align HR strategy with organizational strategy. She is currently the director, Talent Acquisition for DeVry Education Group where she is focused on recruiting skilled medical faculty to the DeVry Medical Institutions. She has an undergraduate and MBA from Dominican University, holds the PMP, SPHR, and HRIP certifications, is an associate editor for the IHRIM Workforce Solutions Review, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. She can be reached at sfitzgerald@devrygroup.com. Jeff Higgins, Editor Jeff Higgins is the CEO of the Human Capital Management Institute, a driving force in workforce analytics helping companies transform data into intelligence via workforce planning and predictive analytics. With his unique experience as a senior HR executive and former CFO, he helps organizations rapidly advance their analytics and workforce planning journey to unlock billions of dollars in workforce ROI. He is a founding member of the Workforce Intelligence Consortium and a member of the SHRM Global Standards Committee on human capital. He can be reached at jeff.higgins@hcminst.com. How do “High-Performing” organizations leverage HR technology? What is the impact of HR technology on creating a “highperformance” organization? These were our original questions when we began our planning for this issue of Workforce Solutions Review (WSR). We’ve put together quite a few points of view, and included some practical examples that shed light on these important questions. But first, given timing of this issue, there are a fair number of you who are reading this while attending the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. And quite logically, most of the authors in this issue will also be in attendance. My advice – seek them out and introduce yourself. It’s always good to establish a connection with some of the experts in our space. A quick “thank you” to my two associate editors, Jeff Higgins and Shawn Fitzgerald. Finding and getting commitment from the number of authors required to put out each issue is not easy, and both Jeff and Shawn were instrumental in making sure this issue stayed on deadline. In addition, I want to give a big “shout-out” to the former managing editor of WSR, Ed Colby, who will continue to support each issue by securing a “From our Advisors” column, as well as continuing to edit “The Back Story” column. Ed has been great to work with over the last several years and I’m looking forward to our continued collaboration. Our first feature article, “Workforce Planning is Essential to High-Performing Organizations” by Peter Louch, outlines what a pragmatic and operational workforce planning process should look like. Using the model and tools he describes, high-performance organizations can use workforce planning to ensure that they have

the talent for optimal business performance. Tarik Taman asks the question, “Social Media in the Workplace – Are We Nearly There?” Tarik discusses how social technologies must integrate seamlessly with business processes to make working within a collaborative platform as common as sending an email. There is little doubt that social business technology is poised to change the way people work forever. Our next selection is “Workplace Scheduling Technologies Help Organizations Rock Around the Clock” by Jason Main and Jeff Root. Jeff and Jason promote the idea that organizations which approach mobility and technology trends proactively can turn their largest expenditures – labor, real estate and technology – into strategic operational advantages with enhanced workplace and workforce productivity, as well as improved collaboration and engagement. John Hinojos gives us “Seven Key Tips for Successful HR System Evaluations in 2015.” John lets us in on his experience in HR system selection and gives us tips on how to make your evaluation as objective as possible. Keeping an eye on the ultimate goal and success of the system at your company can eliminate some of the hype and hysteria traditionally surrounding this process. In “Beyond Forecasting: Using Predictive Analytics to Enhance Organizational Performance,” Min Park describes a practical example of predictive analytics in action. Using predictive analytics, your organization can hone in on the best investments for retaining your workforce and driving organizational performance. Through statistical modeling, it is possible to seek out which factors most influence the workforce’s decisions to stay or quit, develop a strategy, and then act on it. Morné Swart tells us “Why Traditional Human Capital Management Isn’t Cutting It: Context-Aware HR Technology is the Key to Maximize Workforce Productivity.” Morné lets us in on the leading practice of bringing data together from separate systems for one holistic view of information about employees. This ensures that organizations can maintain compliance and optimize the return-oninvestment in their most important asset – their workforce. Our last feature article, “Human Resources and the Wisdom of the Crowd” is by Wes Wu. He observes that while the idea of crowdsourcing as a consumer concept is quite palatable for most people, when it gets applied to HR, crowdsourcing seems like an extreme proposition. Whether HR uses the crowd to answer HR questions or provide employee feedback, crowdsourcing can be the most efficient way for employees to get answers to the information they need. In addition to our feature articles, we have a number of shorter segments for those who have just a bit of time before that next appointment. First, take a look at “Real Change Management #1 – HR Organization in the Cross Hairs” by Ian Ruddle, and “Video is a Sound Employee Engagement Investment” by Vern Hanzlik. For some quick sound bites, check out “Thoughts While Thinking,” where some of our industry’s leading thinkers describe their biggest surprises over the years regarding HR technology. You won’t want to miss our “Executive Interview” with Jason Averbook, Sandy Fisher and Janet Marler. Not surprisingly, we had to break this into two parts given the content covered during this interview. Part Two will be published in the next issue of WSR. This interview is followed by Tech Notes, which provides a look at what top tech CEOs see in the years to come. Finally, we provide you with the “The Back Story” where Katherine Jones dishes on “Looking for the LBD* of Human Capital Management Software.” (You’ll have to read the article to get the definition of this new acronym, “LBD.”) I hope you enjoy this issue of Workforce Solutions Review. As always, let us know how we’re doing. You can reach me at scott.bolman@mercer.com. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Feature Overcoming Traditional Barriers to Workforce Planning Workforce planning has topped the wish list of HR executives for years, but it has consistently been one of the most difficult programs to launch within HR. There are myriad reasons, but the most common are:

Workforce Planning is Essential to High-Performing Organizations By Peter Louch, Vemo

n today’s talent-based economy, the workforce itself is arguably the most important tangible asset of most organizations. Despite its importance, this asset is often not carefully planned, measured or optimized. This means that many organizations are not sufficiently aware of the current or future workforce gaps that will limit execution of business strategy. Yet at the same time, boards of directors, CEOs and chief human resources officers will frequently declare that workforce planning and datadriven decision-making is a top priority for their organizations. While it is difficult to understand this apparent gap between intent and execution, the most obvious cause is a lack of consistent objectives regarding the outputs of workforce planning, and a lack of consistent process by which organizations conduct workforce planning and predictive modeling. Organizations need an approach that moves workforce planning from the domain of “futurists,” where only a few people live, to the domain of operational effectiveness, where management is accustomed to spending its time and energy. This article outlines what a pragmatic and operational workforce planning process should look like – as well as predictive tools that help organizations measure and respond to their workforce gaps. Using this model and tools, high-performance organizations can use workforce planning to ensure that they have the required talent to drive business objectives.

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

• Time frame – Many managers are focused on executing current-year results, but workforce planning has typically addressed a longer time frame and doesn’t show immediate gains that can help meet this year’s results. • Data integrity concerns when “getting out of the gate” – Managers are reluctant to review future plans when they feel that they can’t get a proper view of current head count. • Control – Some managers have gut feelings and don’t want to reference data without a compelling data story. There is no opportunity to shift this stance until managers experience the actual pain that could have been avoided through workforce planning. • Detail – Organizations have a hard time settling on the appropriate level of granularity of workforce planning, or their job taxonomy. It’s generally understood that a workforce plan has to distinguish one type of job from the next, but is it sufficient to look at broad labor categories, narrower job families, individual jobs, or actual skillsets? So many organizations get into self-imposed delays in rolling out their planning program by trying to find the perfect level at which to plan. From a planning perspective, however, if organizations could start by planning out high-level job categories, this is a great start, and may be enough. • Forecasting – Traditional forecasting methods are poor at predicting the actual individuals at risk for turnover and retirement, and, thus, are not sufficiently actionable. Two recent trends serve to moderate – and sometimes even eliminate – these potential roadblocks. The first is a broad-scale acceptance of data-driven decision-making that is infusing the culture of organizations and making workforce planning inherently more attractive. The second involves recent advances in predictive analytics and modeling technology. These advances provide more compelling near-term actionable information about granular employee-level supply risk, while simultaneously helping with demand-based scenario planning. Coupled together,

these trends have a profound ability to move workforce planning from a “nice-to-have” status to a critical program for high-performance organizations. Diagram 1 outlines a workforce planning process that combines end-user-based demand planning with predictive supply analytics.

Diagram 1. Workforce Planning Process.

Following the workforce planning activities outlined in the diagram results in these benefits: • Aligns strategic planning with head count and talent planning; • Creates a clear view of talent demand and supply issues by expense area, reporting relationship, and by location; • Provides managers easy-to-use reports and tools to determine the impact of their talent decisions and prioritizes future workforce investments; • Provides leaders the right metrics – identifying talent risk before it impacts business objectives; • Helps control unplanned talent costs and highlights issues that limit employee productivity; • Builds competitive advantage through planned versus reactive talent management; and, • Gives business leaders consistent reporting of results to quantify measurable and meaningful outcomes. The concepts of planned versus reactive risk management, and developing the right metrics are perhaps the most crucial levers to drive support for workforce planning. By shifting workforce planning from a top-down strategic exercise that is only geared towards provoking thought about the future to an operational exercise designed to manage talent risk, workforce planning becomes a concrete activity with specific financial implications. By providing metrics to quantify the risk, it provides something even more concrete for leaders to manage.

Demand Planning Within the demand planning component of workforce planning, an organization determines the head count it needs in each job role for each organizational unit. Traditionally, a single person has conducted this work or a center of expertise has created plans and reports for internal customers. However, the future is inherently uncertain. According to Peter Cappelli in his research on workforce planning, “The error rate in the U.S. on a one-year forecast of demand at the stock keeping unit (SKU) code or individual product level, for example, is over 30 percent” (“A Supply Chain Approach to Workforce Planning,” Organizational Dynamics). Considering this uncertainty, centrally-generated reports and plans are interesting, but understandably have not resulted in the business gaining long-term adoption of the plans, or the workforce planning process. There are two keys to moving beyond this demand planning impasse. The first is cultural. Organizations should avoid confusing planning with the plan, and should value planning as much, if not more, than the actual plan. The plan will not happen. The future is far too uncertain. Planning, however, is a competency that helps managers deal with such uncertainty more quickly and effectively. The second key is to move from top-down planning to bottom-up planning, which requires technology that allows end users to evaluate various factors and define talent demand for their business area. This bottom-up planning can be rolled up for various corporate-wide outputs such as the corporate workforce plan, the budget feed, the real estate plan, the reforecast, and more. But, it also can be conducted as needed as part of a frequent recalibration of talent needs based on the state of the business. According to Quinn Thompson, global director of Talent Acquisition and Diversity at International Paper on the shift to user-defined input driving their workforce planning process: “It starts with the benefits created by a center of excellence (CoE), but is based on software that allows end users to create their own workforce plans and end-customers to leverage predictive analytics for their customized gap analyses.” A lower-performance organization will have managers decide in a vacuum on their need for talent. In this setting, the industry experience of managers and the amount of data available to make the decision defines the quality of the output. In a high-performance organization, managers are guided through the decision-making process. For example, a manager may be led through a decision tree based on strategic objectives and job criticality. Alternately, a manager may be provided with demand drivers and conduct what-if scenarios that help determine the appropriate number of workers for the workload based on a combination of historical staffing levels and productivity objectives. In the ideal situation, a manager could be provided a www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

detailed proforma demand plan that describes the staffing level for job roles based upon how the organization typically staffs against work volumes and other demand drivers. Then the manager can be led through decisionmaking to ask questions such as: • Do we typically staff against demand correctly? Specifically, do we hire too soon, too late, too much, too little – because knowing how the business is likely to behave in its staffing approach does not mean it’s the correct approach. It’s just a great starting point of the decision-making – and not the end, as there may be a need to not only know, but also optimize staffing levels. • When we examine our business strategies and look at the specific ways we want to create value, does that describe certain roles that should be staffed up? • Conversely, when we look at those strategies, are there certain staff areas that are relatively low risk for understaffing? Because it is not possible to staff everything generously, where can we “understaff” with minimal risk to the business? In summary, a technology-enabled bottom-up approach to demand planning creates a more accurate plan and enables a planning culture where managers use data to make staffing decisions – and are more equipped to evaluate how changes to business objectives and environment should impact staffing levels.

Internal Supply Analysis Within the internal supply analysis component of workforce planning, an organization evaluates whether it has the supply internally to meet its demand. On a quantitative basis, the process is to evaluate talent supply by job role after attrition: turnover, retirement and internal job movement. On a qualitative basis, it is important to also look at capability and performance, even within jobs that are fully staffed. To derive a supply forecast, a lower performance organization will simply carry forward historical turnover rates or use industry benchmarks. This approach is not sufficiently actionable – at best it is only interesting data to consider as part of workforce planning; at worst, it is incorrect. A high-performance organization will use predictive analytics to identify the risk of turnover, retirement, and workforce mobility of specific individuals. Machine learning statistics packages allow an organization to conduct complex multivariate analysis that incorporates employee demographics, employer actions and workplace conditions, and external economic conditions. Diagram 2 illustrates some of the factors that can be used for predicting turnover, retirement and mobility, as well as the rough importance of such factors in predictive studies.

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

Diagram 2. Drivers of Attrition.

An accurate internal supply forecast can thus be aggregated by any dimension and provide a much clearer line of sight into supply risks that need to be closed to fully meet talent demand requirements. Knowing which individuals are at highest risk for turnover provides an organization the lead-time to address future workforce gaps with minimal disruption to the business, enabling the following outcomes: • Creation of targeted replacement planning and knowledge transfer for critical roles; • Understanding which talent gaps are largest, highest priority and/or most difficult to fill externally; • Proactive sourcing by the recruiting function based on prioritization of gaps; • Road map of future open positions that can be filled through promotions and developmental assignments; and, • Managed attrition programs that avoid costly workforce reductions for job roles that have a reduced staffing requirement. As with demand planning, technology is a key enabler for internal supply analysis, since it provides a forecast of attrition and movement risk on an employee-by-employee basis. Furthermore, this approach helps organizations that are not currently proficient at demand planning to move towards proficiency by highlighting problems that require consideration of the importance of that problem, i.e., the demand. For example, if a certain employee is known as highly likely to turnover, a manager can ask what’s the risk to my work unit of this likely turnover event? Will we still get the required work completed? If the answer is no, is it because of the necessity of the role or the performance of the individual? If the answer is yes, is it because we are overstaffed in this role? Can we eliminate the role with the likely turnover event and hire for a more critical need? In short, reviewing turnover, retirement, and movement risks helps this hypothetical manager conduct demand planning

on a micro level, and with the right tools and training, the manager will improve talent decision-making.

roles, and will manage those risks through individual action planning measures.

Gap Analysis and Action Planning

Summary

Within the gap analysis and action-planning component of workforce planning, an organization evaluates its gaps and determines what actions it can take to close those gaps. Traditionally, those actions consisted of recruiting, development and transition, but with modern predictive technology, an organization can also model the prospective impact of potential interventions in HR policies and talent management actions. A lower performance organization may not understand its gaps, except in the most qualitative sense. This organization can have qualitative action-planning discussions that educate leaders about some workforce risks, but cannot quantify those risks or change any organizational behaviors based on these gaps. A proficient organization can combine its demand planning and internal supply analysis as described above and gain a much clearer picture of the size, type, and timing of gaps between demand and supply. These gaps will lead to a high-quality directional recruitment plan and will highlight areas where an organization may wish to beef up its developmental programs where there are large and consistent gaps. This gap analysis will also highlight where there are job roles that are subject to career transition in one part of the business (demand less than supply) and requiring recruitment in another part of the business (demand greater than supply), so that an organization can reallocate resources and avoid some of the costly cycles of staffing up and down. Each of these responses to the demand-supply gap represents valuable organizational action-planning to address gaps, but do not go as far as making specific interventions to change and control the demand-supply gaps. A high-performance organization will build upon the specific quantitative plan for build-buy-lease as discussed for a proficient organization and will also use technology to conduct what-if analysis to evaluate specific management interventions. The organization will understand how a number of factors drive retention, engagement and organizational performance, including: • Pay strategy and annual merit increase; • Career ladders and working structures; and, • Promotions, lateral transfers and reorgs.

There is now an approach for high-performance organizations to develop and sustain high-quality workforce planning programs, and break down the traditional barriers to effective workforce planning. The organization must foster a data-driven planning culture and be willing to value the planning process as much as the actual plan. The managers who participate in this planning process will then be better equipped to make decisions as business results and forecasts change – and more skilled at simulating how changes in business objectives and conditions require different talent sets. The organization must also invest in workforce planning technology that supports predictive supply analytics, bottom-up demand planning, employeelevel action-planning, and summarization of gaps. By taking this approach, a high performance organization will be able to conduct gap analysis on the work unit, business unit, and on the organization as a whole. At the work unit level, managers will be better at planning and responding to changes in the business. Managers will also be able to make data-driven decisions that move gradually from blanket HR policies to targeted HR interventions based on the importance of a role or the performance of the individual. Business units and the total organization will also reap the benefits of the workforce planning program. Finance and real estate will have the information needed to construct their budgets. Human Resources will be able to make better high-level decisions about recruitment, development, redeployment, and transition programs. And, senior leadership will be able to monitor the people health of the organization and the organizational capacity to meet present and future business objectives.

By understanding these relationships, a high-performance organization can seek to close gaps not only through the traditional means of build-buy-lease, but also achieve higher retention and performance by optimizing its workforce policies around those desired outcomes. This organization will not only be creating the appropriate plans to address gaps between its forecasted demand and supply, but will be selectively addressing potential retention and performance risks of critical resources and

About the Author Peter Louch is the founder and CEO of Vemo, a software and services organization that is pioneering the new way to do workforce planning. As founder of Vemo, he works with customer executive teams and ensures that Vemo’s road map for technology and services are geared to provide simple and elegant solutions to the most complex and highest-impact customer problems. Louch also works with select global customers and industry leaders to provide consulting/advisory services and build requirements for complex engagements. Prior to Vemo, he led the Talent Value Management practice area of Right Management Consultants and The Empower Group, divisions of Manpower. He has also held successive sales and leadership positions with the Advertising & Communications division of TMP Worldwide. He graduated with high honors from University of California at Berkeley with a degree in Astrophysics. He can be reached at peter.louch@vemoworkforce.com. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Feature

Social Media in the Workplace – Are We Nearly There? By Tarik Taman, Infor Since Facebook was invented a decade ago, it has attracted a billion users worldwide. Twitter now reports 200 million users who send 400 million tweets every day. Compounded by record IPO valuations well into the billions, there is little doubt that the social media way of life is here to stay. While it may seem like social media is still relatively new, it has already moved through a number of stages in its evolution. Only a few years ago, when its popularity amongst consumers was soaring, its role in a business environment was at best confused, and at worst extremely negative. In the years that followed, the business software industry merely fanned the flames of these perceptions, adding social networking applications alongside systems with no real agenda or purpose. Conversation was perpetuated, but there was zero business value or impact on employee performance. The value of social networking in a business environment started to be seen as forward-thinking and predominantly consumer-facing. Businesses embraced its role as a marketing tool – incorporating blogging, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube into marketing programs. Much of this was focused on capitalizing on the huge audiences these platforms attracted and campaigns were often focused on exploiting them as additional outlets to reach audiences. In the wake of this shift, the role of social media in business suddenly resonated as valid – but its role had been monopolized almost entirely by the chief marketing officer. Other functions within a business – including Human Resources – remained largely immune to the charms of social media. Negative connotations of Facebook as a workplace distraction prevailed, and many managers were unable to make the mental shift from consumer products, asking you to “like” them on their Facebook page, to the role of social media in running a production plant. That is…until very recently.

Revelations for a Revolution The disastrous early examples of social technology within

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the business environment highlighted that for social media to be valuable in this environment, it has to be used collaboratively. Instead of social conversations persisting in parallel with the task in hand, it must be an integral part of that task, or the business application in use. And, while marketing programs had used social media successfully, the majority of campaigns were focused on platforms as channels and few exploited the capabilities of social media to support multi-way conversations. In light of these lessons and in the hands of other departments, it soon became apparent that social media could be used to engage and empower employees to make more informed decisions, which, in turn, can address problems, reduce procurement costs, boost productivity, facilitate better customer relationships, and drive high performance. The lines between emerging technologies and ones that have become so firmly entrenched that they are now thought of as “traditional” (like email or even instant messaging) are blurring, expanding and continually changing. This evolution has brought the social media conversation to a pivotal point, which is what role, if any, social media has to play in the way employees interact with each other in a business environment. Dubious is probably the best word to describe the reactions of many executives when the subject comes up. Many struggle to see the value and worry that it might actually cause harm. They already find it difficult to keep employees from posting personal Facebook or Twitter updates during work hours. Why would they provide yet another vehicle for wasting time? While it’s easy to understand why companies want to approach social media with caution, there’s also considerable risk in dismissing it altogether. Misperceptions about what these technologies mean could cause businesses to miss out on a major opportunity to reinvent the way their employees work together – and generate potentially game-changing benefits in the process. The key is to apply the concepts of social media in ways that have inherent value in a business environment.

How does it Work? To develop the concept of social business technologies, it’s helpful to build a picture of how those technologies are actually being used by employees to simplify processes. One of the most critical points to understand is that with social business technology, a collaborative platform is embedded within critical organizational systems, like enterprise resource planning (ERP) or supply chain management (SCM) systems. Access is not limited to individuals who typically interact with those systems, but is extended across the enterprise, making the platform a company’s primary vehicle for all employee interaction. Documents, videos, photos, plans and, most importantly, conversations are all captured, organized, searchable and auditable. Employees can easily share and find information and also have information come to them, through both automatic notifications and business intelligence that is displayed directly on desktops or mobile devices and based on their specific roles or responsibilities. For example, Company X has just won a contract to take over management of all networks for a major retailer. Joe

Smith is managing the transition and has 10 members on his team. Using the collaborative platform provided through his company’s social business technology, Joe can create a group, with controlled access, where all the conversations and information for this project can reside. One of the first steps is to finalize contracts with suppliers. Joe and his team can hold conversations about various vendors, with information about existing vendors’ invoices, performance ratings, etc., displayed automatically within their collaborative environment. The team can also post vendor contracts to the site and have its legal team review, comment on, and approve them. Later in the project, when additional staff needs to be hired to meet the contract requirements, HR can get input on job descriptions and résumés. And, if the customer agrees to publicity, the PR team can get approval on the press release and share information about coverage. And, when one of Joe’s key managers leaves suddenly in the middle of the project to take another job, there will be no need to try to piece together the work she has done; it will all be stored on the collaborative social business platform. Social business let’s many people touch the same project, stay informed, and keep the right people apprised of movement. As shown above, companies are now looking at social business initiatives because of their potential to drive bottomline benefits, such as: • Increasing employee productivity – The words productivity and social media aren’t often put together in a positive way, but helping people work more efficiently is one of the major promises of social business technology. Reducing email loads, putting information where people can find it easily, and allowing employees to collaborate in context (of data, conversation trails, project plans, etc.) should indeed make them more productive – and improve overall performance in the process. • Retaining vital corporate knowledge – Social business allows companies to take advantage of information that is currently lost through technologies like email and instant messaging. This information represents the “why” and the “how” of the qualities that make a company what it is, and can hold the key to uncovering game-changing opportunities. • Attracting and retaining top talent – Expectations for technology have changed, most markedly for employees just entering the workforce, but also for those with decades of work experience. People have come to take for granted the technology they use in their personal lives, and they now expect business software to deliver the same fun, intuitive, easy-to-use experience. Social business and other technologies like mobility, analytics, and the overall user experience allow companies to meet these higher expectations. Metrics in this area, which most often falls under the rather broad umbrella of “employee satisfaction,” are starting to show hard evidence of its benefits. • Improving decision-making – Social business technologies make collaboration among employees easy, but they also deliver information that aids decision-making

in ways that tools like email or instant messaging simply cannot.

Social Onboarding and the New Hire Process It’s no surprise that effective onboarding is critical to the success of a new hire. According to the Human Capital Institute, 46 percent of new hires don’t last 18 months and 39 percent didn’t complete their first milestone on time. These stats can be attributed to an unorganized process to get employees up to speed – from a lack of clear direction, to inadequate tools, to an absent manager. Now, with tools for social business being implemented throughout the enterprise, organizations can quickly link employees together and speed the time that a new hire is assimilated into the new culture, give them a platform to get questions quickly answered, and allow them to easily access documents. In addition, through an internal social network, new employees can meet other new hires, people in their new department and connect with important contacts through their own online community. Advanced social tools have given many companies the opportunity to link together projects with status updates and develop a group to leverage for knowledge, questions, etc. This quick and streamlined process makes a new hire quickly feel like a part of the team, which could aid in overall retention at an organization and more enhanced productivity. Logistically speaking, social business tools for onboarding can help link together the internal HR team to confirm paperwork, connect with IT on email addresses and any needed personal technology such as a tablet, laptop or mobile, have the office manager set them up in a cubicle, and ensure that they will be ready to go with any learning tools/sessions the company might require of its teams. This ensures that everyone receives status updates, no one is left out in the process, and you can quickly go back and see who was responsible for a specific part of the process. These process improvements, coupled with the value of having new employees become productive, integrated members of the business faster, generate real benefits for organizations.

Integrating Social Collaboration into the Learning Process Human Resources departments at forward-looking organizations are also starting to rethink their approach to learning, putting new emphasis on collaborative strategies, rather than relying exclusively on traditional, formal training that is organized into structured classes. This technique, called social learning, is a process that adopts a learner-centered attitude and pull – not push – techniques to broaden access to critical resources. In addition, social learning appeals to the way the Millennial generation employees tend to work and live. But, that doesn’t mean you should throw away formal training techniques. On the contrary, it’s the perfect time to enhance your learning program in ways that open it up to your entire organization. By adding social collaboration to their HR program, organizations will be ready for the emerging paradigm shift in organizational learning and evolve from static training to a dynamic learning model. This will also empower employees www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

to seek and contribute knowledge by using pictures, videos, documents, wikis, or any other type of data that clarifies and advances institutional learning. Your employees will be able to contribute information to an active knowledge base that other employees can refer to for up-to-the-minute knowledge. As a result, everybody goes to work armed with the most current, accurate, relevant information. This real-time access to knowledge enables employees to become more efficient, as they are not wasting time searching for the most up-to-date information, or duplicating efforts.

Implementing a Plan With any new technology, there is a learning curve for how to implement and use it most effectively. There are, however, some factors that are critical to consider when evaluating this technology. To maximize the benefits of any social business initiative, look for technology that will allow you to: • Integrate systems across your business, regardless of origin. Most companies have highly complex technology landscapes, with systems and the information they store sitting in silos. Until recently, this problem was incredibly difficult to solve, requiring complex customizations and integrations to make disparate applications work together. However, technology has evolved that makes integrating systems straightforward and simple, allowing them to connect in a way that makes them work together without being dependent on each other. • Embed social business within organizational systems. The biggest benefits of social business come from making it an integral part of employees’ work environments and allowing them to collaborate right alongside the critical information that resides in your systems, whether that is an unpaid invoice or a detailed product launch plan. Collaborative tools that simply sit on top of core organizational systems are more likely to create additional information silos and duplicated effort, rather than increased productivity. • Find information quickly and easily through powerful enterprise search capabilities. As many businesses have come to realize, having more information doesn’t necessarily translate into better performance. With the amount of data available to companies growing exponentially, the goal is transitioning from getting access to information to being able to quickly find the right information. Social business technologies must incorporate powerful, organized, and structured search capabilities to address this issue. • Deliver information directly and automatically to users. In addition to making it easy for users to find information, also look for technology that lets information come to your employees through what is known as “contextual intelligence.” A concept that might have sounded like magic a few years ago, this technology delivers customized, pre-analyzed key performance indicators (KPIs) directly and automatically to those who need them. This capability allows decisions to be made in context of supporting data, with employees collaborating based on up-to-the-minute information.

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Social Business in Action Leading companies are already reaping the benefits of social business. Take a leading manufacturer of frac sand for the oil and gas industry, for instance. The company, which has grown exponentially over the past five years, needed a solution that would reduce downtime in production and enable staff to make good business decisions as quickly as possible. To achieve this, the company invested in a social business platform that enables employees to form communities to help with business initiatives and share thoughts and feedback similar to how they would via their own personal social networks, thus increasing both productivity and employee satisfaction. As real-time information from enterprise applications flows directly into the system, employees no longer have to waste time searching for data on their own or switching between applications. So, instead of waiting for an assistant to bring the company’s CFO an expense report, an alert can be sent via the social business platform, and the report can be approved right then and there, without opening the expense management application. This technology has had a dramatic impact on the way this company’s employees communicate and collaborate across departments. With the platform, the accounting team, for instance, can provide instant feedback on spending decisions, rather than waiting for an end of month report. This insight helps project teams stay on budget, as they are alerted when limits are reached. These are just a few ways that social business has improved business operations.

A Meaningful Makeover Social media has forever changed the way people interact, and its influence will only continue to grow. While the concepts that social media has given us hold great potential for the business world, building a successful social business strategy must consist of more than simply tacking a Facebook-like collaborative platform onto existing organizational systems. To truly generate value, social technologies must integrate seamlessly with business processes to make working within a collaborative platform as common as sending an email and, eventually, replacing it altogether. The results can be transformative, with the biggest benefits coming from the ability to harness corporate knowledge and drive high performance in ways that are simply not possible with the tools most companies employ today. Although the future of social business technology is still being written, there is little doubt that it is poised to change the way people work, leaving us all to one day marvel at the way things used to be.

About the Author As the general manager of Human Capital Management (HCM) and Cloud Enterprise Resource Management at Infor, Tarik Taman is responsible for converging Lawson, Workbrain, and Enwisen products to deliver a differentiated, end-to-end HCM solution. Prior to Infor, Taman was the CEO at Quantum Retail Technology, Inc. He also served as the vice president of EMEA for Oracle Corporation and Retek, Inc. He can be reached at Tarik.taman@infor.com.

Feature of U.S. consumers currently own smartphones, according to Nielsen’s Digital Consumer Report – anytime, anywhere indeed.

Keeping Engagement Goals On Task

Workplace Scheduling Technologies Help Organizations Rock Around the Clock By Jason Main, AsureForce and Jeff Root, AsureSpace In the not-too-distant past, work was something done almost exclusively at the office or place of business during scheduled hours or standard hours of operation. Hourly or shift workers who had questions or requests regarding their schedules or time off either tracked down their manager or an HR contact while they were on-site, or they left voicemail or email messages and waited for replies. Office workers with extra work stayed late and/or came in on weekends because all of their work resided on the office network, accessible only via their assigned PC in their office or cubicle. Now, with the growing prevalence and advancements in mobile technologies, mobile networks, and cloud solutions, an increasing number of work and work-related functions are no longer anchored to a central location or standard hours. Although some types of jobs and work functions inherently require a physical presence, a growing number of workplace solutions are no longer constrained to the network in the office, and employees can access these technologies from their own laptops, tablets or smart phones – any time and from almost anywhere. Just consider these statistics. A 2013 Forrester study reported “anytime, anywhere workers” in the U.S. and Europe grew from 15 percent to 29 percent of employees between 2011 and 2012, and IDC projects that 1.3 billion workers worldwide will be mobile by 2015. Forrester also projects 905 million tablets will be in use for work and home globally by 2017, and Silicon India recently projected the number of active cell phones will reach 7.3 billion in 2014. Two-thirds

Workforce and workspace scheduling solutions are rapidly evolving to adapt to and leverage the way today’s workforce uses and interacts with mobile technologies, which have dramatically changed when and how work is done. Empowered with greater access and improved flexibility and agility, these systems enable employees to be more productive, collaborative, and engaged. For employers, workplace scheduling technologies provide rich data to support better business decisions, identify opportunities for efficiencies, manage top operational costs, and attract and retain top talent. These tools also help to support employee engagement, which is critical in a time when engagement levels are running low. According to Gallup’s 2013 employee engagement survey, less than one-third of U.S. employees are engaged in their work, more than half are disengaged and 18 percent are actively disengaged. These numbers clearly indicate that the majority of today’s employers have their work cut out for them. According to Aon Hewitt’s 2013 employee engagement study, “The companies that get engagement right can enjoy a surplus of competitive advantage in talent strategy and business results that is hard for others to replicate.” Engagement, empowerment, agility, and productivity are key elements for employers that aspire to build a high-performing workplace. In fact, today’s advanced time and labor management (TLM) scheduling systems can be used to entice, and nearly require, employees to be more engaged, not just show up on-site and punch in like the “old days.” For example, managers can inform employees of shift openings via text alerts that enable employees to bid on the openings from their smartphones. A 2011 study published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior found that hourly employees who are provided with schedule control as a form of flexible work practice were more engaged and satisfied with their schedules, and perceived their supervisors as more supportive. Today’s systems help organizations and their employees make the best use of their time, location, and technologies so that both sides can operate in-sync.

Workforce Scheduling – Get with the Times If you think workforce mobility trends only apply to staff who are able to do their work off-site, guess again. Most onsite staff these days – factory workers, patient care staff, retail staff, construction workers, etc. – own mobile devices, tablets, laptops, and other technology that they use to plan and organize all aspects of their lives. In fact, most people these days have become accustomed to expect that the information they need can be found online and they often question processes and questions that are not available electronically. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

The Employee Coverage dashboard, located on the product home screen, gives the administrator or manager insight into the current shift coverage. It also allows these users to manage people that are scheduled versus actually punched in.

Equipped with increasingly powerful mobile devices and networks, today’s employees want access to work-related tools wherever and whenever they need them. Time and labor management (TLM) is no longer a system of paper time cards, schedules posted on bulletin boards, and paid time off (PTO) or scheduling availability forms dropped off in the manager’s inbox. Workforce scheduling/TLM solutions are adapting to the times. Increasingly, today’s TLM technology is in the cloud, where employees and managers can access it whenever needed. Work schedules are posted online for staff to access at their convenience. Workers can submit their upcoming availability and block off their unavailable dates/times online, and they can search and sign up for shift openings if they want to pick up extra time. They also can check their PTO availability online, submit PTO requests and track the status – all in realtime. Simple apps enable smartphones to serve as mobile time clocks, with facial recognition and geolocation technologies that verify field staff members’ identities and location – simply by taking and submitting a “selfie.” This emerging technology is especially useful for organizations with hourly staff who work off-site. It provides employees with a quick and convenient way to clock in and out, while providing organizations with an effective way to verify staff members’ identities and whereabouts in order to manage time fraud among staff in the field. These scheduling tools empower employees and support engagement by providing them with the convenience and access they not only need, but also that they have come to expect in this age of mobile technology. In fact, as Millennials and the next generation enter the workforce, organizations that want to attract and retain these young workers will be increasingly challenged to provide solutions that address the ways they interact with technology and their expectations for flexibility. In addition to supporting employees, workforce scheduling technology advancements also provide employers with effective tools and robust, real-time data to plan and manage

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personnel costs and make informed decisions with confidence and agility. Visual schedule dashboards enable managers to see, in a glance, who is on the clock and who is late or absent. For schedule planning, they can easily see who is available and who is not. Workforce scheduling systems also can help supervisors control personnel costs, such as overtime and potentially costly compliance errors. They can set scheduling parameters to limit how much time, in advance of their shift, that employees can punch in, or prevent employees from signing up for extra shifts that would put them into overtime. And, keep in mind that busy managers may be anytime, anywhere workers too. Cloud-based solutions can be useful tools for providing them with flexibility to plan and organize schedules, review and respond to scheduling requests, analyze time and attendance trends, and other scheduling responsibilities at their convenience. Better scheduling also may enable managers to decrease full-time employees (FTEs), optimize existing staff, or repurpose talent to areas with more need. Organizations that have effective workforce scheduling tools and systems in place to support flexibility, access, and empowerment can reap the benefits of a more engaged and productive workforce.

Workplace Scheduling – Balancing Time & Space Gallup’s employee engagement survey found that remote employees are slightly more engaged. While this topic needs to be explored for further details, the initial findings show that employees with some level of flexibility are more engaged in their work. Other studies have shown that providing the flexibility to work when and where employees want is becoming a critical component to attracting and retaining top talent. A Harris Interactive 2012 study found that one in three employees rank the ability to work from home higher than perks such as company cars, so a flex-work strategy is essential for any forwardthinking company. A PriceWaterhouseCooper report on Millennials indicates these younger workers expect work/life balance and they prefer electronic communication over faceto-face or phone interaction. And, slightly older “Sandwich Generation” workers are seeking more flexibility and work/ life balance to care for both their children and their parents.

These trends toward flexibility also are being driven by technology. Today’s workers are no longer at the mercy of a landline and PC at their desk. Their smartphone and mobile devices enable them move more freely throughout the office, spend more time in the field with customers and vendors, or simply get away from typical office distractions without missing a beat with their work.

These and other factors are affecting the workplace and leading many organizations to consider new approaches to office design to make better use of space (note: business travel, off-site meetings, vacations, leaves of absence, teleworkers, and other factors can result in workspace utilization rates of less than 40 percent) and provide workers with flex-work options to support engagement, retention and recruiting. While a flexible workplace frees workers from full-time work at their assigned workstations and enables them to work from almost anywhere in the field, the office remains a central hub for collaboration, connection and engagement. The key is providing agile workers with tools so they can do their jobs remotely while also ensuring they can continue to visit the office, when needed, so they can remain engaged with the organization at all levels. Some progressive organizations are moving from assigned workspaces to shared space models by adopting “office hoteling” or “hot desking” strategies for staff who can work mostly off-site and therefore do not need a “permanent home” in the office. If the space is made available on a first come, first served basis – users must search for an open spot when they arrive and hope they find an open space and a desirable location – problems may arise if employee can’t find an available space to work, if they waste productive time trying to hunt down an opening, or if they aren’t able to organize and plan meetings just like their co-workers who are based on-site. These issues can lead to disengagement and reduced productivity. Remember, the office remains a central hub of teamwork and collaboration. Mobile staff members still need convenient access to the office to maintain connection and engagement. They may need a reliable system that ensures they will always have a place to work for drop-in visits. And, they need to be able to easily find and reserve it so they don’t waste time hunting for an open spot to work. A welcoming and accessible environment helps to encourage and promote drop-in visits and the proper balance of home/office time so employees remain engaged with their supervisors, team members, other work colleagues and the organization, in general. Cloud-based workspace scheduling systems and mobile apps enable remote staff access from mobile devices or laptops prior to their visits so they can easily find an open spot and hit the ground running, rather than spending time trying to hunt down an open space when they drop in. These systems can also help employees locate team members with whom they need to work so they can reserve adjacent or nearby space. On-site kiosks can help workers find their reserved space upon arrival or make ad hoc reservations. Touch panel displays also are helpful for finding open space on-the-spot. Meeting room and resource scheduling systems can be offered in the same fashion so that on- and off-site staff members alike are able to easily and efficiently plan and organize meetings by accessing the systems whenever needed. As technology continues to drive a highly mobile workforce that is no longer limited to the confines of the workplace walls and standard business hours, progressive business leaders are seeking dynamic solutions for rapidly evolving workplace trends to make their organizations more flexible, agile and adaptable. Organizations that approach mobility and technol-

Cloud Benefits for Workplace Solutions The cloud plays a key role in delivering global, mobile, and highly talented workforces the information they need when and where they need it to make decisions, manage initiatives and drive meaningful business growth. Cloud access also frees workers from the constraints of office-based networks, and removes many disruptions and barriers that can limit employee productivity and leave mobile workers feeling isolated and disengaged. For HR professionals, cloud solutions can minimize or eliminate the delays and frustrations of waiting for support from corporate IT, which may be overstretched due to a scarcity of skilled workers and are assigning low priority to HR in relation to the organization’s perceived mission-critical IT functions. Additionally, cloud-based offerings allow organizations to rely on their solution vendors to manage upgrades, compliance requirements and software maintenance so the organizations can focus their resources on business-critical initiatives. Software-as-a-Service models also offer predictable monthly expenditures versus unplanned technology upgrades, and some vendors organize customer forums that enable participants to share best practices and provide product feedback. ogy trends proactively and effectively can turn their largest expenditures – labor, real estate and technology – into strategic operational advantages with enhanced workplace and workforce productivity, and improved collaboration and engagement.

About the Authors Jason Main, vice president of Product Management, AsureForce, joined Asure Software in 2008 and has held numerous positions, primarily in development and product management. His desire for process improvement and his drive to solve company issues led him to obtain his Six Sigma Black Belt in 2012. Prior to Asure, he held key development roles at Kenexa Corporation and Nestor Traffic Systems. He is a decorated veteran of the U.S. Air Force, where he held numerous leadership positions. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Louisiana State University. He can be reached at jmain@asuresoftware.com. Jeff Roof, vice president of Product Management, AsureSpace, has more than 20 years of technology product management experience. He joined Asure Software in July 2012 as part of the company’s acquisition of PeopleCube. Using his creative problem-solving skills, he leads Asure’s product management team to develop new software solutions and maximize existing Asure offerings for customers around the world. Prior to PeopleCube, he served in product management and leadership roles at Meeting Maker, Inc., CMICompetitive Solutions and also served as CEO of RedESoft Systems, an IT consulting firm. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Michigan Technological University, Houghton. He can be reached at jroof@asuresoftware.com. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

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Seven Key Tips for Successful HR System Evaluations in 2015 By John A. Hinojos, HRIP, HRchitect In the mid-1970’s, the idea of using technology in Human Resources was just beginning and in a few years there would be the release of the first computerized system for HR. While it was elementary and basic, our systems have continued to grow and expand in complexity. Also in the mid-1970’s, there was a song written by Peter Allen called “Everything Old Is New Again.” That could not be truer when it comes to evaluating and selecting HR technology in the current world. During our careers most of us have been involved with an HR software evaluation in one way or another. However, as the industry delivery models have changed to be more focused on Software-as-a -Service (SaaS), many of the original processes we learned are slightly different today. System evaluation and selection is not a process done daily. There can be years since the last time this skillset was required and many elements of the process could have changed in that time. It is always best to refresh your knowledge base before embarking on such a project. Recently, there has been much activity on IHRIM CORE on the topic of software evaluation, and also at the recent IHRIM Conference about the processes to follow. When selecting new software the following steps can help guide this complicated process:

Seven Key Tips for a Successful Evaluation 1. Have a Strategy and a Plan “One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. Then, said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.” – Alice in Wonderland

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If the company does not have a valid strategy and method by which all component parts will fit together, it makes no difference what software is being chosen. However, without a valid plan the odds are that the chosen software may not perform adequately and the process will be repeated again soon. Human capital management (HCM) strategy is a step many companies still do not complete, but the impact of not creating and monitoring this can be critical to all future analysis for HR technology. Creating a strategy is fairly complex, and could require a separate article. But here is a good overview. The first step is conducting discovery sessions. These will differ from the discovery conducted during the system evaluation, as the focus here is more about the “what” and not the “how.” In addition to conducting discovery sessions with all disciplines of HR, also include key top executives and non-HR stakeholders. One of the most difficult components to obtain at this time will be the future direction and plans for the company. Remember, this will be a strategy to assist every area of the organization and not only HR. It is important to understand which technology is currently used and what the terms of the contracts are for each. Conduct working sessions where currently-used technology is analyzed to see if the technology will be able to move the company forward, as well as accommodate any future changes in corporate direction. From all these pieces, create the current state and desired future state, which includes a timeline for technology acquisition by year and quarter. Do not get too granular – keep the focus on the big picture. If there are multiple options being considered, discuss all options and recommend one. Be sure to vet the strategy with all those who were included in the discovery process to assure their thoughts are being represented. Once everyone agrees to the strategy direction, a presentation must be created to “sell” the strategy to senior management. Keep the presentation at the 50,000-foot level and discuss the process involved without the detail. If there are multiple options, briefly discuss each, but focus on the option being recommended. Depending on the company, a high-level cost analysis may be needed, but should be revised when requesting the funding during the budgeting cycle. Recommended • If one doesn’t exist, the creation, maintenance, and execution of a human capital strategy is needed. • Get away from voluminous text documents often used with high-level presentations to convey the actual strategy to top management. • Use collaborative software to create the strategy instead of sending the documents though email. 2. Have the Correct Resources Assembling the correct team is vital. There should be a Core Team, Extended Team, and a Demo Team. Some mem-

bers will be on all teams. The hardest part here is getting the time commitment. In past years, staff availability has been strained and often an evaluation project is begun without knowing if team members have the bandwidth to provide meaningful and timely input. Core Team members are those key functional people who will be involved with the entire process, and who will also be involved with making the final purchase recommendation to management. The Core Team should adequately represent all the areas within the company impacted by the new system. Extended Team includes all members from the core team, and also members from all disciplines within the company impacted by the new system. While this will definitely include functional HR areas, it should also include some selected staff members who work in stakeholder or front-line types of positions. These are important to get the system adoption needed after implementation. Demo Team usually contains everyone in the Extended Team, but they may include subject matter experts (SMEs) from various areas impacted by the new system. These SMEs normally attend the demo portions which will impact them the most, but do not always attend the full demo. Use External Resources. If there is budget, consider using a consultant to assist in the full process or pieces of the process. They are most effective during strategy development, discovery, vendor list creation, requirements match to vendors, and demo. Used effectively, this resource can save a lot of research time, as they usually have extensive knowledge of both the vendors and templates to move the process forward. They can also be utilized in getting vendor references, contract suggestions, and other due diligence. Recommended • Inclusion of stakeholders. Systems are being used more by non-HR staff. Important to know what they need. • Using a temp service to back-fill some of the company staff members who will be needed near full-time on the evaluation. • Using a consultant for the areas where you most need their assistance. 3. Have Good Requirements It is important to include all functional areas that use the system in the discovery sessions. Discovery sessions will elicit all of the requirements needed for the system. This time the focus will be on the “how” things are being done. Focus on any significant or unique process that may need to be accommodated in the new system. Interviews should be done with each functional area and usually require a minimum of one hour. During the interview, the important issue is to gather facts, not debate what is being said. If the current system contains a functionality, and it is perceived as not working, then the functionality does not work. Once the discovery interviews are completed, create a requirements document. Requirements should be brief, but completely understandable. Each requirement should also be given a priority. It is best to keep the priorities simple

and minimal, and consensus should rule. Global requirements and nuance should always be considered. Even if the company is not global today, the evaluation is selecting for the future, and it takes only one decision before the company could need global functionality. The requirements should always consider if a function can be done globally, so the final system selected will be scalable to any future corporate changes. Recommended • Focusing on only those processes that are unique and not items which will be met by all vendors. • Using collaboration software in the creation of requirements. • Keeping the priorities to a minimum, not overcomplicating things. 4. Focus on Leading Edge Technology Use Not all companies will use newer technologies in the same manner. These technologies can include some of the more advanced forms of direct access, mobile technology, and social media. It can be hard to thoroughly understand how employees may use the newer technology, but do not underestimate the technology-savvy of the employees. They could be running a little Web business after hours from home. If considering mobile, make sure everyone understands how the mobile version will work. Is it an app or just a duplication of the screen on a mobile device? Many features that work on a big screen can be difficult and cumbersome on a mobile device. Be aware of how you will actually use the features. While the new system should include all the latest technology innovations, focus on the technologies that fit best within the corporate culture. These are the ones that will be immediately critical. In addition to new technologies, understand which browsers the target system will support. Previously, it was only important to understand the browsers supported, but now the actual versions supported must also be known. It is possible to choose a system that supports approved corporate browsers, but does not support the version being used. Adoption in this case can be spotty. Knowing the actual user experience under each browser type is another issue. Functionality can vary from browser to browser. Make sure functionality is viewed under each browser to understand how each will be used. Recommended • Understand what newer technologies are supported. • Are mobile features supported via an app? • Know which browser versions are actually supported. 5. Use Decision Drivers There are few (ideally three to five) elements which will drive the final decision. You do not want to make your final decision based on only the system demo. There are many different decision drivers, but usually they use one or a combination of items such as: www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Vendor Viability

Technology

Functionality

Configurability

Usability

Scalability

ROI

Service and Support

Ease of Integration

Business Segmentation

Operational Effectiveness

Global

Once the key three to five drivers are chosen, each is assigned a percentage weighting, which totals up to 100 percent. When making any decision – which vendors to include, who will demo, or vendor of choice –always come back to the decision drivers to see how each vendor would rank within each driver. By doing this, the focus of the decision process will be more objective. Usually functionality and usability are on the list and sometimes are combined. They usually comprise the largest percentage amounts. Recommended • Have the decision drivers be the focal point of a final decision and do not use the impressions from the demo. 6. Understanding How the Vendors Fit Your Requirement Once requirements are developed, a method is needed to assess which vendors are the best fit and will be invited to demo. Historically, this is where you would issue a huge, multi-page RFP (request for proposal) with hundreds of questions for the vendor to fill out. Some companies still require these; always check internally with Purchasing, IT, or Legal if any specific process is required. Remember to keep any request for information (RFI) and/or RFP as short as possible. The longer the document, the more likely the vendor will pass on responding to the request. Usually the vendor will be given two to three weeks to respond. The object here is to bring the list down to no more than three vendors to demo their system. Recommended • Create a brief RFP focusing on unique processing needs. • Some SaaS vendors may not reply to an RFP, but will send you their standard product questions with their answers. • Require high-level system cost. Do not expect any specific numbers on interfaces or implementation at this time. • Score the responses using a weighted numeric scale. 7. Keeping Control of the Demo and Selection By the time this step is reached, each of the vendors being asked to demo should be a good fit for the company. But, which is the best fit? All vendors like to show the components of their system they feel will outshine the competition; however, during the demo, the team needs to see like features and functionality

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to make a valid decision. To do this, it is advisable to have a “demo script” for all the vendors to follow. The script should be divided into functionality sections with an agenda that has start and stop times for each function. This will allow for invitations to the functional SMEs to attend specific areas of the demo. Items can reflect singular questions from the RFP or a combination of questions. Each question should be written in a clear and concise manner. Each question should be allocated no less than two minutes – ideally, three to four minutes per question. After the demo, all should score the demo script. With the number of questions and consecutive demos, it is possible to begin confusing the vendors. A weighted average for each question should be calculated. This gives more importance to the items, which are more critical for the team. Each functional area should also have a total of the weighted score. Using the score from the demo and a discussion about which vendor matches the decision drivers the best, the team should select one vendor with an alternate in case contracts cannot be agreed upon with the vendor of choice. Recommended • Don’t expect the vendor to customize too much of the demo to company specifics. Assess if the item can be done. • Demos should be between four to seven hours for each vendor, depending on features being included. • Follow-up focused Web demos can be done to do a “deeper dive” into a specific area. • If possible, do the demos back-to-back and with the same team members attending all demos. Be sure to give the entire process enough time based on the availability of the team members and other initiatives being done at the company. Usually this process, on a fast track, will take around 12 weeks. Some can be done a little shorter, but there is a larger drain on the team time. Make sure enough time is allocated. It is an important decision and should not be hurried. Conducting a successful system evaluation is not yet a science, but by following the above steps it can become more objective. Keeping an eye on the ultimate goal and success of the system at the company can eliminate some of the hype and hysteria traditionally surrounding this process. Success is possible.

About the Author John A. Hinojos is currently vice president of Consulting Services for HRchitect Inc. He holds an HRIP certification, and has been awarded the Summit Award, Chairman’s Award, and Ambassadors Award from IHRIM. He has served on the IHRIM Board of Directors and is currently president of IHRIM – Southern California and president of HRIM Foundation. He has been involved with HR and HR systems for over 30 years. He is also a frequent presenter on system fundamentals, evaluation and global. He can be reached at JHinojos@HRchitect.com.

Feature

Beyond Forecasting:

Using Predictive Analytics to Enhance Organizational Performance By Min Park, Mercer When employees quit, it’s costly. Aside from the general stresses created in a work environment, there are costs related to productivity, recruiting, and training. There can be other more subtle costs too. For example, high voluntary turnover levels at call centers can negatively impact customer service levels. Poor customer service can, in turn, have broader consequences to an organization’s brand and performance. To this end, organizations are implementing countless efforts aimed at improving employee engagement and retention, whether it’s promoting a healthy working environment, providing compensation programs that differentiate, creating more valuable benefits packages, etc. But how do we know which of their practices really work, and works best for their own employees? What retention efforts or programs will truly “move the needle,” and should be the focus of an organization’s investments? To start addressing these questions, organizations might seek out evidence of success of various programs, for instance, by exploring turnover data tracked in HR information systems – the record of choices that employees have made to stay or quit over time. Using such data to forecast turnover levels is one good way that an organization can start to track, measure, and manage its efforts to improve employee retention. But, organizations don’t need to stop there. Predictive

models can do more than simply forecast. They can tell a rich story and pinpoint actions related to the employee life cycle. Organizations can read the information in a predictive model once it’s built, and gain insights into the impact of the various predictors, whether it’s around compensation levels, distances from home to work, history of performance ratings, supervisory relationships, and other individual attributes or organizational variables. These insights can be used to inform what practices most effectively improve results through a clear, data-driven grasp of which employee- and employer-driven factors most greatly influence retention. Described another way, we can take predictive analytics one step further to hone in on the best investments for better retaining a workforce and driving organizational performance. Through statistical modeling, it is possible to seek out which of the many possible factors most influence the workforce’s decisions to stay or quit, develop a strategy, and then act on it. Human Resources at a large financial services firm, FinCo, did exactly this for its call center employees. The Fortune 500 company has been recognized as a top employer and brand in many locations, and it is crucial to its business that it retains its customer-facing employees who contribute to and maintain a high level of service. With this goal in mind, FinCo built predictive turnover models for its call centers, drawing on historical personnel data from its HR systems to understand what factors are causally connected to higher or lower probabilities of quitting. The results revealed clear links and actionable insights around compensation, career development, experience levels, mobility, and work-life balance as its key drivers of retention. It pointed to specific policy actions and tradeoffs around these topics, helping to reinforce and refine current efforts in these areas with greater impact and precision, ultimately, to improve call center performance and branding.

Through statistical modeling, it is possible to seek out which of the many possible factors most influence the workforce’s decisions to stay or quit, develop a strategy, and then act on it. The Objective FinCo’s study set out to pinpoint the right set of actions to target the most effective ways to improve retention – to find ways to make employees happier and more engaged at www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

work – through data and statistical modeling insights. Looking across five years of historical data, predictive statistical models were developed for call center employees – modeling their likelihoods of quitting within the following month, and also within the following year. The objective was not to forecast turnover rates or head counts. Instead, these turnover models were developed to study and understand which predictors lead to the greatest increases and decreases in the probabilities of its employees quitting, and by how much. The objective was to find the highest-torque methods for reducing employee turnover. Reducing call center turnover is important for this company for similar reasons as it may be at any other highperformance organization. It would help realize gains in productivity and boost organizational performance through a more stable, experienced, and engaged customer-facing workforce. Human Resources practitioners have long estimated that costs associated with employee turnover can range up to a substantial portion of an employee’s salary. At this organization, it was estimated that for every employee retained, it could realize a savings of approximately 25 percent of the employee’s first-year salary through productivity gains, as well as from avoiding costs associated with recruiting, onboarding, and training of replacement hires. This organization set out to gain insights – from large amounts of archived data – in efforts to build a better place to work place for its employees, while also improving its own organizational performance.

Three broad categories of data were collected and examined as predictors of turnover in its model: individual attributes, organizational factors, and external influences. What factors were examined, and where was the data sourced from? Three broad categories of data were collected and examined as predictors of turnover in its model: individual attributes, organizational factors, and external influences. These categories were selected based on Mercer’s research and experience that links them as the common sources for causal factors leading to employment outcomes. Individual attributes include things about the employees work history such as age, tenure, career level, promotion, and so on. Organizational factors include things about each individual’s internal work environment such as their organizational segment, or recent turnover rate at their call center site. External influences include characteristics about the outside market or geography in which individuals reside,

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such as local area unemployment rates. Control variables are included as well, though typically not reported (such as time period, or other demographic factors). With the exception of data around external influences, all data were sourced from FinCo’s HRIS systems where data for all employees who had worked at its call centers had been accumulating for numerous years.

Ceteris paribus – “all else equal” – X leads to Y The statistical technique used – multiple regression – allows the models to examine most, if not all, of these factors simultaneously. This means that inferences can be isolated to each individual predictor when explaining its impact on an outcome. For example, it allows for inferences such as “if an employee is promoted within the past year (the predictor - X), he or she has a 30 percent lower probability of quitting within the next year (the outcome - Y) – holding all other factors constant.” Put another way, it allows for causal inferences. In this example, if you have two individuals with similar qualities and experiences, and the only material difference observed is that one was promoted and the other was not, the promotee, because he or she was promoted, has a lower chance of quitting (30 percent less). In other words, promotions reduce an individual’s likelihood of choosing to quit.

Example Findings and Emerging Policy Questions These longitudinal models produced a constellation of evidence pointing to a set of clear themes for what mattered most to this organization’s call center employees’ decisions to quit or not. Here we explore a couple of the findings as examples, and the policy and practice questions they raised. 1. Realizing opportunities to improve individuals’ organizational commitment Finding: The longer an employee has been with the organization, the less likely they are to quit, all else equal. Each additional year of tenure led to incrementally substantial decreases in exit probabilities. Emerging questions: Are there programs or incentives in place that encourage employees to stay longer? What additional efforts could the organization invest in to help new hires better adjust to their new environment? 2. Managing factors influencing work-life balance and flexibility Finding: Employees who have taken a small amount of unplanned time-off, paid or unpaid, are twice as likely to stay, all else equal. Employees who take unplanned absences were relatively few and far between, however, simply allowing this flexibility has enormous returns on their choice to stay. Along with some additional pieces of evidence from the models, this finding

validated results from another independent study of its employee perceptions around the benefits of favorable work-life balance conditions on retention. Emerging questions: How can this organization continue allowing for some unplanned time-off, within tolerance of its business operations, and communicate it effectively to increase employees’ awareness of flexibility? Overall, how can a company identify alternative solutions to further enhance its support of employees’ work-life balance needs? This set of modeling results – along with others – raised key questions and prioritizations. Specifically, around how to leverage and better communicate existing opportunities surrounding “work-life balance,” “total rewards,” and “career progression,” especially to those who are “lesstenured,” and “part-time” employees who in general, tend to be more likely to quit. FinCo was now armed with the quantitative data and evidence to socialize and carry out a meaningful dialog with key stakeholders aimed at developing a focused action plan for reducing turnover.

Table 1. Example of key forces influencing FinCo’s call center employees’ chances of staying or quitting.

Results are Unique to Your Organization These findings are completely unique to FinCo. These types of findings are unique at any organization. Among the dozens of factors examined, the ones that will matter most for turnover decisions in your organization will be different from another’s depending on how your business structured, how it is run, and its intrinsic cultural and organizational values. For example, in this case, we observed that organizational commitment, work-life flexibility, rewards, and career progression are some of the primary driving forces in call center employees’ decisions to stay or leave at FinCo. While many may be able to relate to these findings – and some organizations may even be similar – for many other organizations, these are surprisingly not

the primary driving forces behind turnover. In other organizations, compensation factors may be greatly outweighed by other observable factors such as long-term career path opportunities, the type of work, workplace diversity, or the nature of supervisory relationships dynamics, etc. It’s not to say that these other factors don’t matter at FinCo either. It’s a question of identifying and measuring what has greater influence on individuals’ employment choices. Predictive analytics will reveal a set of findings that are true to your organization and yours alone. It will reveal which observed and recorded facts have the greatest bearing on the outcome uniquely within your business. It will point to a prioritized action plan that is most effective for only your organization.

Measuring and Monitoring Should also be Unique Benchmarks are useful in many contexts, but they’re not always enough. They are often keys to someone else’s success, and when it comes to managing internal dynamics and outcomes within your business, the relevant measure (and actions) should be unique to you. It’s possible to go beyond what others are measuring and look inside to determine what the right drivers are. Beyond prioritized action plans, predictive analytics will also pinpoint the right metrics to monitor, i.e., unique to your organization, and tell a compelling story: metrics that can be clearly structured around – and relevant to – the problem statements at hand. What are the right metrics? Consider the following examples around the issue of turnover: 1. Monitoring of leading indicators – Creating and monitoring metrics and individual attributes that are leading indicators (key predictors) of your turnover, in addition to monitoring turnover rates so that you can detect early warning signs of elevated turnover and act on it before it becomes worse; 2. Tracking hot spots – Identifying and tracking “Top-5” and “Bottom-5” lists of turnover levels and changers; examine their characteristics – in terms of the leading indicators for turnover – and gaining visibility into improvement areas and areas of potential concern to prevent future snowball effects; 3. Creating risk lists – Producing “high-risk” employee list reports using the leading indicators of turnover, perhaps filtered by performance or potential ratings, and use discretion to appropriately target key interventions; or, 4. Creating internal benchmarks (highlighting sites with higher than expected turnover levels) – Using predictive models to establish rate-ofturnover targets for each organizational entity or site: highlighting where voluntary turnover is substantially www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

above expectation and monitoring by month how each site’s turnover rate compares to the expected turnover rate and determining corrective actions as needed. Each of these examples takes advantage of predictive modeling results, feeding them back into dashboard designs to enable a view of the system of effects that leads to employment outcomes, such as turnover, and most importantly, are unique to your organization. Doing so provides more meaningful insights that will greatly enhance the workforce intelligence that is made available in support of driving organizational change.

Driving Change Organizational change is not easy. Conducting advanced analytics may only be half of the battle, and some might even argue that it’s the easier half. Data-driven findings can challenge current people practices in place, and as a result, they can initially be met with resistance. Socialization of analytical insights can be a challenge. To drive change with this data, knowing the audience, and knowing your data are critical. Analyses can always examine more factors, and data will never be perfect, so understanding where there are potential gaps and pitfalls is crucial. Study their implications and be ready to talk about them with senior leaders. Insightful analytics and good story-telling is often the first step in driving change, especially as organizations grow larger and become more complex. Carrying dialog around findings, developing buy-in from leaders and decision-makers – gaining credibility and building positive relational capital – is so important to successfully achieving data-driven actions and results. For large organizations, this is easier said than done. Data can be met with significant resistance if it goes against the grain of recent actions or beliefs. It is crucial to understand and navigate the internal landscape of an organization to successfully use data to drive change.

Key Takeaways 1. Use predictive analytics to drive organizational intelligence and performance. Reveal workforce dynamics and drivers of employment outcomes – use this to start the dialog around truly evidence-based policy actions and practices. 2. Findings are unique to your organization. Don’t cut and paste results from other organizations.

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What’s important to Company ABC or Competitor XYZ may be less relevant to your business and organizational culture. 3. Be patient, stick with it. It can take years to build the right metrics and analytics into a workforce management process. 4. Use what you have and combine multiple sources of information. Leverage what data you and your organization have been collecting already; start with what you have and what you’re already measuring, and look for evidence across multiple sources of information. 5. Know your data, your audience, and the internal landscape. Understand and navigate the internal dynamics within your organization to successfully use data for driving change. Seek out a business or other well-connected leaders within your organization to promote, facilitate, and lend credibility to your findings. Since conducting this study, FinCo has launched into a socialization effort with its leadership to refine its policies and practices aimed at dramatically reducing turnover. Furthermore, it realized the value of this approach and will mobilize resources and business data to continue applying predictive analytics to an expanded set of data. FinCo’s vision is to surface deep insights into – and quantify – the relationships between human capital factors and business performance outcomes. Such insights will empower HR to work with their senior leadership in developing, honing, and carrying out talent strategies that will optimize its organizational effectiveness and bottom-line performance.

About the Author Min Park is a senior associate with Mercer’s Workforce Analytics and Planning team. She is a statistician by training, who is interested in harnessing vast amounts of data to solve talent and workforce related issues. She advises clients on how to build and shape their future workforce by pinpointing and prioritizing their most effective human capital management strategies – through analytics and qualitative research. With more than eight years working with Mercer, and a graduate degree in statistics, she has deep expertise in human capital strategy and measurement. She can be reached at min.park@mercer.com.

Feature accept hard-to-use, impersonal HR solutions that don’t fulfill their promise. They know that their workforce is the foundation of their competitive advantage and are demanding technology that puts people, not some pre-determined process, at the center. They want, and need, HR technology that delivers easily accessible, relevant information to the individual at the time and place they need it and in the context of the task at hand.

Easy-to-Use is the Price of Admission

Why Traditional Human Capital Management Isn’t Cutting It Context-Aware HR Technology is the Key to Maximize Workforce Productivity By Morné Swart, SumTotal Systems, LLC An organization’s people are a CEO’s top priority1 and one of the primary forces driving the rapid growth of HR technology adoption.2 As people have become a main focus for organizations, ahead of operational excellence and even innovation, HR technology’s role has increased dramatically. Human Resources leaders look to technology to help their employees become more productive in their current jobs and better prepared for future roles.

The Unfulfilled Promise of HR technology Most HR technology buyers don’t achieve even half the benefits they expected when they selected the technology,3 and two out of three people don’t think HR technology helps them do their jobs better.4 The issue is that most of this technology is created as if people are to be, and act, the same. Consider the terminology many vendors use – human capital management (HCM) – as if the same technology we use to track and record physical assets is right for our people. Human capital management technology was designed to enable the efficient distribution of one-sizefits-all HR solutions to people in an organization who are anything but “one size.” As a result of today’s specialized jobs and increasingly diverse workforce, the time for cookie-cutter technology has long passed. Human Resources leaders will no longer

A recent trend in HR technology has vendors touting “consumer-grade user interfaces” as having solved these issues. According to Deloitte,5 “Poor user engagement with enterprise applications is the/a leading reason enterprise software fails to deliver the desired business results for organizations.” The problem is that easy-to-use software needs to be more than just a slick user interface. It needs to provide immediate value to them – the end users.

Focusing on People Instead of Process Human Resources technology usually puts process, not people, front and center. This technology often promises increased productivity and engagement, but it’s usually built around automating and centralizing key tasks and functions. While this is an important aspect to HR technology, it’s insufficient for creating real value. Putting a new user interface on process-oriented software is like putting lipstick on a pig (that’s bad; we checked). “Without rules or workflow engines, users are left to perform the same inefficient tasks, just through a new front-end.”6 Take mobile for instance. Many vendors provide an app or some functionality on mobile devices, but most are slimmed-down versions of what is available in their fullproduct versions, with functionality focused on basic task automation. These vendors explain that if employees want to perform more complex tasks, they’ll wait until they’re at their desk. But, many employees don’t sit at a computer all day. These employees deserve to have fully cross-functional tools available on-demand, wherever they are. Putting people before processes requires that a solution work well at a desk and on mobile devices – and even access content offline. Putting people at the center also helps organizations maintain compliance. For example, integrating an organization’s HR technology with the location-aware capabilities of today’s mobile devices can ensure that non-exempt employees don’t access training and other content while away from their work location and off the clock.

Context is the Key To get real value from your HR technology, people must see personal value in it. That means their experience needs www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

to be personalized – the information and recommendations they receive and the actions they take must all be relevant and helpful to them. “Almost none of the enterprise systems have considered how to incorporate the experience of users in the context of their broader roles and functions,” Deloitte explained. “Improving user engagement with enterprise applications requires understanding users’ behavior and roles – how professionals in various job functions use these systems on a daily basis.” Context-aware software combines situational and environmental information with other information to proactively offer enriched, usable content, functions and experiences.7 By leveraging a broad range of information about an individual to hyper-personalize the user experience, context-aware software creates significantly greater enduser value. Consider the technology tools one uses in their day-to-day routine. For example, they might use Facebook to communicate with their friends and family. Facebook is somewhat notorious for using any information a person shares on its platform to target advertisements presented to that individual. Its software is contextually aware. As another example, consider Yelp. It takes information about a person, similar users, and businesses they may be interested in, and uses that information to provide personalized recommendations. Yelp’s software is context aware. And Amazon.com has literally millions of products that one could buy on its website, but it uses information about its products, user profiles, buyer histories, and recommendations to present only the few things the company thinks each individual should buy. Amazon’s software is context aware. According to Fast Company, “In the coming years, there will be a shift toward what is now known as contextual computing. Within a decade, contextual computing will be the dominant paradigm in technology. Even office productivity will move to such a model. By combining a task with

Context

With HR technology, integrated cross-functional data can provide context for actions in the system and allow focused and targeted recommendations and advice. Think about Amazon.com or other consumer websites that offer suggestions of products based on the item you are searching and information they already have about you. In the workplace, imagine you’ve taken on a new project or task you’ve never done before, and your HR technology provides you with information and recommendations to help with that specific activity. That’s how powerful context can be. broad and relevant sets of data about us and the context in which we live, contextual computing will generate relevant options for us.” “Context provides the key ingredient in improving outcomes,” explained R. “Ray” Wang, the principal analyst, founder and chairman of Constellation Research,

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Inc. “Context provides the relevancy required for not only anticipation, but also prediction. For example, offering a premium channel upsell to an upset cable customer when their cable is down may not be the wisest idea.”

The New Wave of HR Technology While the average HCM solution can provide some context, it’s usually very little and often built around no more than one data dimension. For example, many learning management systems can tie competencies to learning activities. That works fine when employees are only using learning to develop against specific competencies. But, what about an issue that is more task-related or involves a combination of factors? And what about situations that require actions that live outside of formally catalogued learning, like forming a new social connection or providing an employee with a new incentive?

Data Drives Context Providing contextual, relevant information is impossible without data. The value and relevancy of the information improves significantly as the accuracy, quantity, and diversity of the available data elements increase. This data provides the context that has a direct impact on the results. Context built on one data element is likely to have minimal value, and that quickly decreases over time. This is why, with more input, applications like Pandora get better at providing you with content you like. They’re figuring you out. The more you use the application, the more data is collected about your likes, dislikes, music genres and more. The data is continually combined and analyzed to develop a holistic view of you as an individual. With this information, Pandora can not only suggest songs or artists that you have already listened to, but predict new music you may never have found on your own. Organizations collect a lot of data about their people. In fact, many HR departments have more than three separate systems containing workforce information and even more operational systems that hold data on what their people are trying to accomplish and how they are performing. But, even with all that information, most lack the holistic view of their people that is needed for context because the data is housed in multiple internal and external systems. In an attempt to bring data together, some organizations seek out HR systems consolidations – buying and implementing everything from one vendor – but these are expensive and risky propositions. Additionally, most organically built out-of-the-box solutions ignore the fact that you already have systems in place that you can’t easily abandon. Human Resources Information Systems consolidation isn’t the only way to integrate HR systems and information. Master data management (MDM) technology exists today that can process, consolidate, and standardize data from separate systems into a single model. As a paradigm shift evolves in the HR technology industry, integration, master data management, and cross-functional process orchestration are becoming core disciplines.

The Value of a Single Source of Truth Organizations with leading-edge data management practices are 68 percent more satisfied with the quality of their business decisions. They also generate twice as much revenue and have four times lower operating costs than average-performing organizations. Source: Aberdeen Group, “Master Data Management in 2013: Bridging the Gap to Best-in-class Performance.”

Human Resources technology that enables organizations to merge, blend, and modify data from any system or third-party applications is key to delivering context-aware information. Once a virtual system of record is established, the intelligence that HR leaders can derive from their data will become exponentially robust as more quality data is collected over time. With full access and visibility into your workforce, this level of contextual awareness provides relevant information and recommendations at the right time, giving the workforce what they need, when they need it. For example, context-aware HR technology can: • Tell individuals which development activities will prepare them for that job they’ve been coveting, instead of forcing them into a one-size-fits-all development program or leaving employees to figure it out on their own. With today’s constantly changing business needs and increasingly complicated labor regulations, organizations must think of learning and development as a core function of workforce management. • Help managers schedule people based on who will be most effective for a particular shift or project instead of selecting based solely on availability. In highly-regulated industries like finance and manufacturing, many employees need specific certifications to fill a position. By integrating workforce and learning management systems and removing the data from silos, managers are able to easily maintain compliance and make sure they are scheduling the right person with the right qualifications at the point of need. • Provide people with a specific action to improve performance before they miss a target and connect people in the organization who have knowledge others may need to get a task done well. • Give organizations a robust amount of meaningful data to help make larger business decisions – like whether they’d be better off opening that new office in Beijing or Shanghai. • Deliver hyper-personalized information and recommendations to people at the point of need and move the entire performance bell curve of your organizations to the right (that’s better; we checked that one too).

Create Real Value with HR Technology By 2015, Gartner expects context to be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Internet. A great user experience is about more than just a pretty UI. It’s about providing software that is easy to use, adds significant immediate value to the end user, and is easily accessed where the user is already working, even if that means other external systems or technologies. The future of HCM solutions is context-aware experiences made possible by tools that people use because they want to, not because they have to, and helps people be better at their job and expand their talent.

Context-aware HR technology allows for pervasive workforce management for employees across the board with a variety of tasks and needs. Bringing data together from separate systems for one holistic view of information about employees ensures that organizations can maintain compliance, and facilitate a higher-performing organization, one that optimizes the return on their investment in their most important asset – their workforce.

Endnotes 1 The Conference Board, “CEO Challenge 2013.” 2 Bersin By Deloitte, “Managing Talent Through Technology: HCM Buying Trends in 2013.” 3 Panorama Consulting, 2012. 4 Penn Schoen Berland, 2012. 5 Deloitte, “Enterprise Software: Why the User Experience Matters.” 6 Deloitte, “The New Heights of User Engagement.” 7 Gartner, “2013 Hype Cycle for Big Data: Context-Enriched Services.”

About the Author Morné Swart, is vice president, Global Product Strategy and Transformational Leader, at SumTotal Systems, LLC. He has been responsible for leading innovation and driving product strategy with more than 20 years of experience in enterprise-wide HR technology products and services. He has a passion for building higher-performing organizations by optimizing the effectiveness of people, process, information, and technology. He can be reached at mpswart@sumtotalsystems.com. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Feature

Human Resources and the Wisdom of the Crowd

be primarily a service organization. Moreover, HR tends to hide behind compliance and regulatory reasons to maintain control over HR conversations, in case an employee is given the wrong information. Still, another reason cited is the privacy concern when employees have HR-related inquiries. Yet, fundamentally, HR exists to provide answers to employees and managers who need information. Employees need access to information and feedback about their jobs. This article will explore how HR can use crowdsourcing to gain efficiency and effectiveness through two use cases: provide employees better responses in service delivery inquiries, and transform the talent management function within HR.

By Wes Wu, Appirio Consumer technology is one of the most beloved technology developments of the last decade, and many consumer technologies in use today are not only mobile, but use the power of the crowd to help us make decisions in our daily lives. Consumers love any app on their tablets and phones that allows them to easily figure out what’s good and what’s not. When they go looking for a restaurant, the first thing they do is log on to Yelp and sort the results by overall user rating. When shopping on Amazon. com for any particular product, the first thing people do is skip the product features and go straight to the user reviews. In either case, consumers assume that the wisdom of the crowds will work, and the best choice will avail itself if our needs are presented correctly through searches and filters. If at first a consumer likes how one product looks, but later finds it has a user rating of 3.5 stars while another is a 4.5 star product, who are they to argue with a few hundred people who have actually used both products? Such people spare no words in telling other anonymous strangers what they liked, what they didn’t like, what to eat and what to avoid. They are the friends with great advice that we have never met. The idea of crowdsourcing as a consumer concept is quite palatable for most people. But, applied to HR, crowdsourcing seems like an extreme proposition. The idea of rating systems in crowdsourcing is prevalent on both consumer applications and in HR, although the convergence of the two spaces tends to frighten HR departments. Allowing employees and managers to provide input so that others can locate information is a notion that does not come easily to the corporate function that is perceived to

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

Employees need access to information and feedback about their jobs. Crowdsourcing HR Service Delivery For almost two decades, HR has been implementing traditional HR service delivery models complete with traditional call centers. People, in their personal and consumer lives, might call their cell phone provider’s telephone call center on the same device they are accessing Amazon and Yelp mobile applications, yet experience completely different levels of service from the vendors. With the cell phone provider call center, they will be on hold for 30 minutes, while on Amazon, they have their orders fulfilled with a literal press of a button. At the call center, they log a case, explain the whole thing, and then it all goes away after waiting on hold for half an hour. All the while, that consumer is wishing he or she could have performed the entire transaction online, or better yet on a mobile device. Human Resources’ service delivery needs to be like Amazon and Yelp, instead of the all-too-familiar call center experience. Many organizations have some form of enterprise social media or network behind the corporate

firewalls that can be leveraged to create real-time and more effective communications between HR and employees. Why can’t employees ask a question on a social corporate intranet and allow HR and multiple other employees (crowds) to provide us with the insights we want? Imagine a simple health care provider inquiry that is commonly answered by HR call centers: Question: Can my domestic partner be covered under our health care benefits? Answer 1: (Employee) Yes, that changed for us a few years ago. You should be good to go! Answer 2: (HR) Yes, ACME Brands are fully supportive of any domestic partner arrangement. Here’s a link to the policy… Answer 3: (Employee) I asked this question last year. You can enroll your domestic partner as you would a spouse in the enrollment process. Answer 4: (Employee) I’m not sure what the policy is, but there is an established group on social that might discuss some of these issues (link here). As consumers, we find that that this sort of social interaction provides a much greater level of clarity than simply asking a question. Because of the crowd (a crowd can be as small as four persons), the answers provided may span a variety of contexts and experiences, most of them meaningful in different ways. Human Resources routinely does a highly proficient job of providing the right answers and appropriate documentation, but can become hampered when faced with providing additional information that may compromise its role of an official communications device of the company. Nevertheless, in the vast majority of our experience with many clients, non-HR employees (the crowd) seldom intentionally provide bad or wrong answers. If someone does not know, he or she is not going to fake expertise in order to answer a question. In the workplace, employees’ decisions about what to discuss contributes to the perception of their capabilities and professional suitability for their role – and research shows that employees will actively cultivate their workplace identities.1 Providing misinformation or wrong information puts an employee’s credibility at risk. What’s important to realize is that social inquiries presented to HR allow users not only to get the appropriate answer to their question, but the context from other employees as well and, perhaps, even create additional engagement. Question: “What’s our vacation policy?” Answer: “3 Weeks! (link).” This allows HR to focus on less tactical issues around managing routine inquiries and case management and increasing activities that are more central to the business. Moderating social interactions within the corporate crowd is still essential, but is much less effort than directly answering each inquiry, and provides simi-

lar quality results. Modern tools that also allow HR or the employee to identify the correct or “best” answer also helps to ensure that correct information is provided.

In principle, crowdsourcing provides a simple and elegant solution. In practice, several objections frequently arise. Common Objections to Crowd HR Service Delivery In principle, crowdsourcing provides a simple and elegant solution. In practice, several objections frequently arise. First, how does HR know that there won’t be five different answers, and how does HR differentiate what the right answer is? More and more technologies that do Q&A, e.g., Yahoo Answers or Quora, have the ability to indicate what was the right or best answer to a question. If response accuracy can be controlled through the employee, yet contains a safeguard that allows an HR community manager to override the answer when it contravenes a policy or compliance issue, then any compliance problem has been circumvented. Human Resources has now marked the right answer, and anyone who searches to access the question later will have the answer. Such a technique represents one of the benefits to crowdsourced HR service delivery. Searchable Q&A threads become available for all employees as a curated and tested knowledge base. Another concern is how HR ensures that there is no bad behavior, including inappropriate comments, “flaming” against other employees, and any other undesirable communications. Again, the overwhelming majority of our experience indicates that employees are able to segregate the communications that they put on their personal Facebook pages and what they do in the workplace social environment. For example, Colorado employees that will tell everyone on Facebook that they have great pot brownies at home will also know that such a post is completely inappropriate in the workplace. Those same employees will self-censor when they want to make an insensitive joke in response to a gender change inquiry. Employees have come to rely on boundaries to delineate their professional and personal domains.2 In an effort to ensure that professional relationships are advantageously situated, employee “bad behavior” is much less prevalent in professional settings.3 Even though common sense suggests that there will be some bad behavior every now and then, workplace communities have been particularly diligent about self-policing. Communities will courteously inform other members www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

of inappropriate behavior, and they do so quickly before HR even has the chance, or the duty, to intervene. So long as social policies are clearly deployed, the crowd community can be relied upon to set boundaries and correct most inappropriate behavior. Lastly, HR may feel like it is relinquishing control when allowing users to crowdsource activities outside of the normally prescribed HR processes. In fact, it does not have to. Crowdsourcing environments can craft ways for HR to stay in touch while, at the same time, getting and giving better data. If the person asking the question simply adds “#HR” to a post, HR can either be informed automatically, or the #HR tag could even automatically create a case in the case management system that denotes it as a tracked inquiry. Human Resources’ ability to maintain a level of involvement and manage interactions is still very high when comparing social crowdsourcing techniques to traditional methods. On another level, HR actually gains control by creating more time to spend on strategic activities, rather than being a “hall monitor” for social conversations. Social HR service delivery nevertheless requires both HR and managers to trust their employees. Our company has noticed that baby boomer and Generation X demographics tend to treat HR inquiries with a bit more privacy and decorum, while Generation Y and younger demographics might not see a problem publicly asking “who is a good physical therapist for the hurt back they got falling in a drunken stupor on Saturday.” Communication methods and expectations are changing rapidly, and HR service delivery channels should be conscientious in adapting to the increasing diversity of the workplace environment.

Crowdsourcing Talent Management As mentioned earlier, most people are crowdsourcers, even though they don’t realize it. A typical consumer has probably shopped on Amazon.com and used the crowdsourced ratings system to assess a product. The consuming public has gotten used to giving and receiving ratings, and that those systems are part of a larger ecosystem where the crowd will contribute to form an average opinion of any product. Consumer rating systems are so pervasive on mobile devices that it is difficult to find a place where ratings are lacking and consumers have become so accustomed to crowd-based review systems that they are frequently and completely dependent on them for the simple act of figuring out where to eat dinner or which widget to buy. They so firmly believe in the wisdom of the crowd because hundreds of people simply can’t be wrong and the law of averages will ultimately play out. Crowd mentality using rating systems in the consumer domain is so strong that the next logical evolution is bringing this into the workplace and HR practices, as talent comes to expect a similar consumer-like experience at work. Crowdsourcing can help solve some fundamental prob-

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

lems in talent management. Effectiveness in performance reviews is an area HR has been struggling with for decades – everyone hates the performance review, and employees and managers alike find little value in them. In principle, the performance review process could create a valuable dialogue, while in practice HR analysts are reduced to coming up with a magic number that they can correlate to other activities like succession and compensation. If HR didn’t need concrete and quantitative data inputs to be used in other processes, they would abandon the performance review as well. Crowd-based feedback solves annual review problems by democratizing performance management and ultimately extending the manager’s ability to make the right decisions by having a broader and deeper understanding of the employee’s capabilities.4

Given real-time feedback, employees might actually know what they should be working on in real-time. Common Objections to Crowd Talent Management As with crowdsourced service delivery there are similar concerns regarding talent management; the talent process contains more than just feedback. Traditional performance reviews are loaded with a parking lot for all the development activities that must happen within the year. Goals, development plans, and sit-down evaluation meetings should and could still happen, but the value of real-time feedback from the crowd provides the value of immediate insight and action. Given real-time feedback, employees might actually know what they should be working on in real-time. They would know what their strengths are and what they should work toward improving. They would have a clearer picture of how their work contributes to the organization’s success each day, instead of as an afterthought each year. Research shows that the feedback employees receive from their professional contracts trigger shifts in professional choices. Such feedback often includes strong and clear expectations for professional behavior and actions.5 Secondly, HR often seems skeptical of an employee’s ability to accept change. Yet, the flip side of such skepticism is the quality of information that is used to rate performance. There are still privacy issues, and some raters may not want to provide unfavorable feedback. When it comes to raters who are reluctant to provide adverse judgments of their peers, there is really no reason why

security could not exist to leave the rater field as optional. Or, it could be made so that only the employees and their direct managers can see the feedback. Company culture could also be a driver since most employees truly do value constructive, relevant feedback. Employees could be specifically allowed to request feedback at any time from any person, or make it so easy that everyone simply logs in to their phone at the end of meetings and presentations and takes 45 seconds to provide feedback. This ongoing feedback can be similar to 360-degree feedback, but occurs in real-time and in real situations to provide employees with actionable improvement areas. Lastly, HR will argue that transparency in employee ratings and feedback works against privacy standards and will increase toxic forms of competition in the workplace. If absolutely necessary, feedback and ratings could be secured so as to be visible only by the feedback recipient and his/her direct supervisor. Regarding competition, HR may wish to become more conversant in gamification, which has been shown to increase productivity, as each employee seeks to be at the top of any leaderboard (or at least not at the bottom of it). Yet, ultimately, it’s not transparency or competition that will make a huge difference to any organization, but the fact that real-time feedback allows employees to understand how their daily work can be improved. Crowd-based employee ratings and performance processes must be simple to administer, provide real value to the employee, allow HR to keep its goals and competency frameworks, and link to other processes like succession. While there may be generational differences, employees increasingly want to see 4.3 stars next to their names and understand collectively what they are doing right, receive guidance on correcting what they are doing wrong, and gain insight in how others feel about their work. And, next year when the crowd rates them at 4.4, employees will feel a better sense of achievement than that annual performance review with a score that everyone will soon forget.

The Workplace Consumer Consumer technologies continue to move into the workplace. As habits change outside of the workplace, expectations change within it. Even though HR has traditionally been a conservative function, opportunities for expanding

effectiveness and employee engagement through crowdsourcing abound. Human Resources will be challenged to overcome perceived obstacles and reimagine programs that have existed for decades without significant change. But, just as consumers have moved from shopping at malls to the Internet and now to their phones, employees will demand more effective solutions to their HR problems. Whether HR uses the crowd to answer HR questions or provide employee feedback, crowdsourced HR can be the most efficient way for employees to get answers to the information they need.

Endnotes 1 M.R Leary & R.M. Kowalski, “Impression management: A literature review and two-component framework,” Psychological Bulletin, 107: 34-47, 1990. 2 N.P Rothbard & L. Ramarajan, Checking your identities at the door: Positive relationships between non-work and work identities, and L.M. Roberts & J.E. Dutton (Eds.), Exploring positive identities and organizations: Building a theoretical and research foundation, 125148, New York: Routledge, 2009. 3 K.W. Phillips, N.P. Rothbard, & T.L. Dumas, “To disclose or not to disclose? Status distance and self disclosure in diverse environments,” Academy of Management Review, 34: 710-732, 2009. 4 E. Mosley, “Culture of Collaboration: What does crowdsourcing mean for HR?” Leadership Excellence, 30(10), 9-10, 2013. 5 M.G. Pratt, K.W. Rockmann & J.B. Kaufmann, “Capitalizing on diversity: Interpersonal congruence in small work groups,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 47: 296-324, 2006.

About the Author Wes Wu is a managing consultant and director of Research & Insights at Appirio. He provides clients with strategic advice around HR technology and service delivery and leads Appirio’s research initiatives. He can be reached at wes.wu@appirio.com.

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

2014 Outsourcing/ASP Buyers Guide The 2014 Outsourcing/ASP Buyers Guide will serve as a valuable reference tool. For your convenience, the guide has two sections: a Categorical Listing and an Alphabetical listing. In the Categorical Listing, companies are listed under the product and service categories of their choice. For information on a specific company and its products and/or service, please refer to the Alphabetical Company Listing. While a listing in this guide does not constitute an endorsement by IHRIM, it does indicate that these companies are interested in serving the needs of HRIS professionals. We hope this Buyer’s Guide will assist you in your 2014 purchasing decisions.

Product Categories

Outsourcing

Benefits Administration EBenefits Solutions Data Warehousing Vemo Human Capital Asset Management Vemo Talent Management First Advantage

Paid Advertising

Application Service Providers (ASP)

Benefits Decusoft EBenefits Solutions Compensation Decusoft Compliance WorkForce Software Consulting Vemo Payroll EBenefits Solutions Recruiting/Retention Vemo Self-Service (Employee & Manager) WorkForce Software Time & Attendance WorkForce Software Workforce Management WorkForce Software

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

2014 Outsourcing/ASP Buyers Guide

Alphabetical Company Listing* *Systems and applications referred to in this section are trademarked, registered, or in progress. These names should not be used generically.

Decusoft 70 Hilltop Rd. Ste 1003 Ramsey, NJ 07446 Karie Johnson 201-258-1414 201-785-0774 Karie.Johnson@Decusoft.com www.Decusoft.com Is administering compensation with a talent management suite leaving a bad taste in your mouth? COMPOSE by Decusoft is a specialized compensation management software solution that handles any level of variable compensation complexity, reduces your total cost of compensation administration and integrates with existing HR solutions. A solution worth savoring. See ad on Inside Front Cover.

EBenefits Solutions 600 Grant Street Pittsburgh, PA 15219 Jeff Massetti 412-215-4668 jmassetti@ebenefits.com www.ebenefits.com EBenefits manages all core and voluntary benefit programs and other payroll deduction programs. Our platform provides real-time benefits information for administrators and employees. Its secure single sign-on system gives employees access to their benefits anytime and anywhere. And it frees up Human Resources to focus more time on strategic initiatives. See ad on page 41.

WorkForce Software

First Advantage 1 Concourse Parkway NE, Suite 200 Atlanta GA Shari Hubbert 866.400.3238 solutions@fadv.com http://fadv.com As the trusted partner of over 45,000 organizations worldwide, we at First Advantage provide easy-to-understand background checks so you can confidently make decisions about prospective employees, and contractors. Now in 26 locations, 12 countries, First Advantage conducts over 23 million international background screens annually. Trusted Knowledge. Exceptional People.

38705 Seven Mile Road, Suite 300 Livonia, MI 48152 Sales Department 877-4-WFORCE 734-542-0635 info@workforcesoftware.com www.workforcesoftware.com WorkForce Software is the leader of complete, easy-to-use workforce management solutions. Its EmpCenter suite enables strategic HR by automating and streamlining interactions between the employer and its workforce, enabling organizations to better manage payroll and processing costs, help ensure compliance with labor regulations, and increase productivity and satisfaction of employees.

Vemo 187 Amity Street Brooklyn, NY 11201 James Brown 605-212-2777 646-219-4531 james.brown@vemoworkforce.com vemoworkforce.com Vemo ensures the talent strategy is aligned with your business by incorporating the latest technologies through our cloud-based SaaS solution. Predictive Supply Analytics with Demand Planning will provide a solid blueprint to accurately forecast supply and demand needs - guaranteeing your business has the right people at the right time and at the right cost. See ad on Inside Back Cover.

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Change Management Real Change Management – HR Organization in the Cross Hairs By Ian Ruddle, Lake Bend Partners, Inc. So, you’re the new chief human resources officer (CHRO)? Congratulations! How much do you really know about the organization you just joined? Let’s check the possible legacy scenarios. Did you replace the tenured history professor? (Apologies to professors of history – when I was an operations VP at Citibank back in the early 1980s, the leading background for an HR head was academic). Not known for breaking the status quo, you can probably guarantee nothing much has been done to enhance the employee’s experience. Forcing transformation and change is not in the DNA. Or, was your predecessor in position less than five years? Do you know why they left? What reason was given for their departure? Wasn’t able to get it done? “Didn’t get along with the C-suite?” Maybe over time the organization itself has built up a systemic lethargy to understanding how to support its employee and executive constituents. There’s a simple continuum to describe the stages of an HR organization in the way it supports its constituents the three M’s – Maintain, Manage, Mature. Where does your organization currently fit? Maintain – If you call your HR department “Personnel,” then you probably subscribe to the “pay & benefits” maintenance. Perhaps you also have a token annual review and feedback process. This does not do much for employee morale and encouraging the best employees to stay. Manage – In addition to the “pay & benefits” attributes, you find rigorous annual performance review process, peer and upward feedback loops; a centralized customer service center with automated self-help and Web-based access to all personal information; and some career pathing, performance, and succession planning. Mature – Adds an overlay of career and compensa-

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tion modeling, enhanced hiring practices, and enhanced workflow techniques to reduce mundane paper flow. This stage uses predictive analytics to aid business planning and help form closer ties between HR (now business partners) and the line businesses.

Let’s take a look at what you heard from the CEO when you joined the company. Any of these ring a bell? With each bullet point, comes an increased level of frustration: • Our talent pool is poor and there’s no succession plan. • I can’t get the reports I want – accurately. • We are losing good people. • The board thinks HR is too expensive. • We are getting too many complaints. And finally, in exasperation, the worst one of all: • I don’t want to hear it – outsource it.

There’s a simple continuum to describe the stages of an HR organization in the way it supports its constituents - the three M’s – Maintain, Manage, Mature. So where do you go from here? Finding out what has happened in the past and what you have now can be time-consuming. It takes about three to four months to get a grip on what’s important, what to address first and who would be affected (less time, if experienced advisory help is hired to help you where to look). Of course, there are separate and independent solutions for all of the issues mentioned above. The larger questions are what solutions make the most sense for investment, and what’s the impact on the organization, both in transition and after the fact? You need to know the answers before developing a strategy for change. For a starting point, in any corporation there are six areas of focus within the CHRO’s purview that need to be investigated in order to develop a meaningful strategy for change. Employees – Your best and most vocal sounding board. You will get the quickest feedback from

the employees. When was the last time an employee survey was conducted? What were the findings? What changes have been made since? Executives – Apart from the guidance you got from the CEO, it’s wise to get the thoughts from the line business heads who are “at the sharp end” of the business. They don’t always have the same agenda as the CEO. If you plan any changes, the change management plan has to accommodate them. Remember, they may end up in your steering committee in the future. What are their issues? Do they feel that they get the right support from the CHRO organization? Business Partners – The phrase describing the new attributes of the legacy HR generalists. By definition, their role has morphed into more of a relationship manager in synch with the heads of the business units. So, have they successfully engaged at the senior level? Do they really understand the business? Are they accepted by the line business heads as equals with a seat at the table? Customer Service Center (CSC) – This where all transaction inquiries go, e.g., pay and benefit inquiries, new hire processing and termination. Typical structure for a CSC is to handle 85 percent of all inquiries, or via automated Web access, with the overspill going to tagged specialists. If any basic transactions are being handled by small units out in the field, then there’s room for improvement. How would you describe your service levels? Where are the complaints? Technology Operations – There is a baseline assumption that there is an accurate, up-to-date IT system holding all the necessary data that is needed to manage the human assets. If not, you have an immediate inhibitor to success. It doesn’t matter if it is in-house, outsourced or in the cloud. It does matter, however, if the employees and executives can’t get access to their own information through a Web-type device. What’s the situation? Specialist Centers – Sometimes called centers of excellence, although I know a couple of CEOs who want to know who came up with that name! These groups, by definition, contain specialists in the fields of compensation, benefits, legal, recruiting, etc. These groups should be focusing only on planning and policy. The transaction end of the specialist areas should be handled by project teams attached to the customer service center. Are the comp and benefits plans competitive? How effective is your recruiting process? Are you managing risk and money when terminating? Have you delineated the roles and responsibilities for the most efficient operation?

Use the weekly 30-second ride in the elevator with the CEO as a “how am I doing?” check. If your firm subscribes to the “Maintain” philosophy, some of the definitions mentioned above may not make sense to you, and will likely have more limited options available for change unless there is a clear understanding from the executives that it’s time to step up investment in their human assets. For example, if the technology support platform is over six to seven years old, it is unlikely to have the necessary flexibility in the Web access capabilities for employees or executives. If you are one of the 70 percent of Fortune 200 firms that subscribe to the “Manage” philosophy, your chances are increased of being able to affect an impact. If you are in the “Mature” state, you are already on your way to the right philosophy so maybe your sphere of influence needs to continue the path in an upward direction. The key is to develop a strategy that incorporates a sensible approach to matching solutions with the business issues and delivering them in a staged, controlled manner, with a well-communicated change management plan that is, most importantly, visibly and vocally supported by the CEO from the top-down. One last tip – Use the weekly 30-second ride in the elevator with the CEO as a “how am I doing?” check.

About the Author Ian Ruddle is a seasoned management consultant with over 40 years of experience in HCM and IT operations, encompassing both corporate and consulting environments. He is an experienced HCM transformational change agent with a proven track record of completing global, large-scale, multi-year business system deployments. In addition to his time with Deloitte Consulting and Coopers & Lybrand LLP, Ruddle held executive management positions with Citibank and American Express. He is currently the managing director of Lake Bend Partners, Inc., a New York-based advisory services firm specializing in reducing the anxiety of the CHRO when undergoing extreme structural change. He can be reached at iruddle@gmail.com.

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Multidimensional Workforce Video is a Sound Employee Engagement Investment By Vern Hanzlik, Qumu Corporation IHRIM Workforce Solutions Review recently published a feature by CedarCrestone with the results of its most recent annual HR Systems Survey1 seeking to understand how adoption of HR technologies creates value. Two of the survey’s findings highlighted by CedarCrestone’s vice president Lexy Martin caught my attention: • For every two percent improvement in employee satisfaction, companies can expect a one percent reduction in turnover; and, • Employee replacement costs are currently estimated at US$40k per employee. If you are an enterprise with 10,000 employees and 10 percent turnover, investment in HR technologies can reduce those costs by US$400,000. And, the Bureau of National Affairs found that U.S. businesses lose approximately US $11 billion annually due to employee turnover, while recruiting costs run about 1.5 times the annual salary being offered.2 You can do the math to figure out the loss at your own company, but regardless of the number, it’s clear that investing in HR technologies will drive down employee turnover and associated costs. With the improving economy, attracting and retaining the best employees is once again a pressing issue for today’s businesses. High turnover and the loss of valuable employees not only costs hard dollars in terms of lost productivity and training costs, but there are other “soft”

You can do the math to figure out the loss at your own company, but regardless of the number, it’s clear that investing in HR technologies will drive down employee turnover and associated costs 32

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

impacts caused by the distraction of a revolving employee door and lower morale among remaining workers. Employees choose to leave for a variety of reasons, but the truth is that very few of them leave due to unavoidable life events. Most employees quit for reasons that are under the control of the employer: a perception of limited growth opportunities, a company culture where they don’t feel trusted or valued, relationships with bosses or co-workers that are frustrating, or the feeling that their talents, opinions and contributions are not meaningful. Today’s savviest businesses are finding innovative ways to drive employee engagement, and one of the most rapidly growing technologies to foster employee communications is with video.

Driving Compelling Employee Engagement with Video Why video? Well to start with, it’s impactful. A study by 3M and the University of Minnesota found that just one minute of video equates to 1.8 million words, simply because the brain processes visuals exponentially faster than it processes text. You will find that today’s young, talented, and energetic workforce has grown up with video. They are comfortable using it, they like experimenting with different avenues to use video, and they want to commit their skills and talent to innovative and forward-thinking companies. Video is social, personal and interactive. According to a recent study by Ragan Communications, 71 percent of businesses are using video to drive communications with their employees, and 72 percent of those companies plan to increase their video use in the coming year. These companies are finding that video is personal, instant, high-impact, authentic, and easily accessible from a variety of devices. It can be used to drive collaboration among workers in far-flung offices, train new employees, share knowledge, and foster communications among company leaders and employees. It’s Personal – It’s difficult for leaders of large organizations to engage at a personal level with all employees, let alone the ones in their physical location. Many times, employees may know executives by name only, and miss out on the knowledge and passion these leaders bring to the company. An update by email can come across as static and cold, not that most busy employees have the time or inclination to sit and read a wall of text on their screen. But, communicating regularly with employees by

video is more social, personal and interactive. It enables leaders to share their personality and their enthusiasm, while also sharing relevant and important information. Through video, employees understand, at a more personal level, who these company leaders are and are able to more quickly adopt the “culture” and passion at the heart of the company. And, today’s enterprise video platform technology supports live, two-way communications, including audience polling, Q&A and incorporating conversation feeds, which supports company leaders in talking with employees instead of at them. In fact, the Ragan survey found that live-streaming events are the most popular form of employee-focused videos. Nearly half of those companies utilizing live streaming found that connecting employees with senior executives was, by far, the greatest benefit of those efforts.

Engaged employees who feel they have a voice in the company are more motivated and productive, and produce superior work. It’s Empowering – Engaged employees who feel they have a voice in the company are more motivated and productive, and produce superior work. Integrating video into your organization gives employees an easy way to create, share and distribute their skills, opinions, ideas, and knowledge to colleagues, management and the wider organization. Video amplifies that important employee voice, not only by helping to ensure that employees are motivated and engaged, but it also benefits the entire organization by encouraging and empowering employees to work together to deliver solutions that drive the business forward. Any field engineer knows the frustration of trying to describe a customer’s technical issue in order to find resolution. Instead, that same employee can quickly capture the problem on video via a smartphone, share it with a mentor, and walk through a solution in minutes. As older employees move toward retirement, their valuable institutional knowledge can be lost forever. Some estimates have found that lost knowledge walking out the door with a departing employee can cost up to half their yearly salary – with the figure growing by 10 percent for each year of employment.3 But, that institutional knowledge can be captured in a searchable information library by using video. Today’s enterprise videos have the ability to quickly hone into a key word or phrase to find a video

segment pertaining to a particular topic or question. It’s Collaborative and Drives Productivity – In today’s global economy, employees don’t all gather at one building for the work day – you have far-flung offices in different time zones. Anytime you can bring employees together, it facilitates closer working and communications between and among colleagues – and boosts employee engagement. Video enables your dispersed workforce to collaborate effectively. Why make employees suffer through a buggy, static-filled conference call as they try and discuss a diagram on a whiteboard? Broadcasting a meeting is easily done via a service such as Skype. But, what about team members unavailable for the meeting due to disparate time zones, travel or vacation schedules? With video, one team can capture their discussion on video, highlighting visuals or white-boarding concepts, and those unable to attend the meeting can still view the video whenever they wish, and even add comment and provide feedback. The meeting can also be archived so others can leverage the knowledge by viewing the entire meeting or by searching for portions of the meeting around certain key words. If a team has uncovered a flaw in a product design or solved a vexing problem, why draft a long email or technical white paper? Instead, a video can be recorded on the spot – even on a smartphone – that captures the solution or maps out an idea, and it can be shared securely with team members. It’s Flexible and Mobile – On any given day, your employees may be in a satellite office, at an airport, working from home, or a client site. They need a communications tool that can be accessed from their device of choice – whether it’s a desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet. Today’s enterprise video platforms are secure and can stream the video to just about any device. On-demand video content can be created and then accessed at an employee’s convenience, no matter where they are. If they’re at an airport waiting for a flight, they can access an executive update, webcast or live-streamed discussion or event. If a company executive is delivering a conference keynote or the company is being showcased at an event, all employees can be part of it via a live stream. And, that

On-demand video content can be created and then accessed at an employee’s convenience, no matter where they are. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

content can even be archived for future reference. Video is the ideal engagement and communication solution for today’s on-the-go employees. It’s Secure – If you send out sensitive company information to employees via an email, you may have lost control of that information. It can be printed and lost, or forwarded along to others outside the company. Today’s enterprise video platform solutions are highly secure, with parameters that can be set to share the video internally only, externally, by certain individuals or groups, or not at all. Videos can even delete themselves automatically after being viewed. And, this security extends to video that is created or accessed on a mobile device. All employees want to feel valued for their contributions and have the ability to grow within an organization. It’s important for business leaders to invest in their workforce by leveraging modern technology such as video.

It’s important for business leaders to invest in their workforce by leveraging modern technology such as video.

Today’s enterprise video platforms not only help anyone create professional, impactful videos, they enable you to distribute, control, and measure their impact securely and effectively. Businesses embracing video are seeing big returns on investment through heightened employee engagement. When it comes to attracting, retaining and engaging with employees, video is a sound technology investment.

Endnotes 1 http://www.ihrimpublications.com/ WSR_Online_Archives/Lexy_Martin-WSR_May14.pdf 2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2012/12/14/ study-explores-drivers-of-employee-engagement/ 3 http://www.employeeretentionstrategies.com/ strategies/turnover/hidden-cost/

About the Author Vern Hanzlik is executive vice president and general manager at Qumu. He has spent the last 20 years building and growing enterprise software and service companies such as TEAM Informatics, Stellent and Sajan Software before joining Qumu in 2012. He holds a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Business Administration from University of Wisconsin-Stout. He can be reached at vern.hanzlik@qumu.com.

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September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

Thoughts While Thinking For this issue of WSR, we thought it would be interesting for our readers to read what some of our editors, editorial advisors and other thought leaders have to say in answer to this question:

What has been your biggest surprise over the years regarding HR technology? After 17 years of surveying organizations for the SierraCedar (previously CedarCrestone) HR Systems Survey (http://www.sierra-cedar.com/annual-survey/#toggleid-1) on the state of HR technology adoption around the world, it continues to come as a surprise to me that organizations are not further along in adopting two sets of technologies. The first is employee and manager self-service and the second is workforce analytics. For both, there are compelling value propositions – the first contributing cost efficiency and the second contributing strategic outcomes of revenue and other financial metric growth. Lexy Martin, vice president, Research and Analytics, CedarCrestone

In emerging markets we see local telecommunication companies bypass building traditional wired-based infrastructure in favor of developing wireless and mobile solutions. Unfortunately, we are not seeing HR technology vendors outside of niche solutions bypass traditional Web-based transactional systems and moving directly to mobile solutions with consumer oriented UX. With the explosion of smartphone and tablet usage at work and at home, HR technology vendors are missing the next wave of user engagement. Michael Krupa, partner and CIO – Talent, Mercer

My biggest surprise, should I say disappointment, over the years with HR technology is how little progress we’ve made with regard to establishing standards and integrating disparate systems. We are no further along in easily and seamlessly being able to integrate HCM systems with various outsourced payroll engines or other point solutions than we were in the 1980s. What have we done for 35 years? We’ve added flashy UIs, configurable business processes, and mobile and social access, but it’s all within the borders of a single vendor. Yet systems don’t live alone. They function within a system architecture that supports the entire global enterprise. HR-XML has tried to make some progress in at least establishing standards, but most vendors I know pay them only lip service. Certainly the system integrators aren’t interested in changes

here; they make big money in building the same interfaces over and over again for client after client. It’s high time we addressed one of the biggest challenges in our industry. We need to do it for the sake of our customers who have to live with these ongoing challenges long after the vendors have been paid and the consultants have all gone. Karen Beaman, founder and CEO, Jeitosa Group International

While the trend is headed in the right direction, data shows that less than 20 percent of companies are allowing managers direct access to HR-related systems/ tools. Most organizations who have rolled out some form of manager access are doing it for basic transactional reasons – not for providing complete transparency into all aspects of people-related data, such as salary ranges or job-level market data. If HR truly wants to get to the point where “HR Systems” become “Business Systems,” it starts with giving managers direct access to the real-time data and corresponding insights, while addressing the change management implications that come with providing full transparency. Kim Seals, senior partner and leader, Global Talent Technology Solutions, Mercer

In the approximate 40-year life span of HR technology, I’ve never seen such an extended period of unchallenged market leadership as Workday has enjoyed. It’s the first time I know of that one vendor has created a disruptive technology that caught the market’s fancy (for good reason) and has had so little direct competition for almost seven years. Unheard of…! Freddye Silverman, vice president, Eastern Region, Jeitosa Group International

Many organizations talk about the importance of employee engagement, but put little effort into building a superior technology-enabled employee experience. When it takes employees numerous steps to enroll in benefits or when employees cannot navigate on your portal to change their direct deposit, frustration ensues and engagement suffers. Many areas that impact employee engagement are complex and it’s difficult to move the needle upward, but making “being an employee” easier, needs to receive some respect. Shawn Fitzgerald, director, Talent Acquisition, DeVry Education Group and editor, Workforce Solutions Review www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Taking a look back just a couple of years ago, we have seen a real paradigm shift in the availability and use of HR technology. This shift is enabling HR to move from its traditional role, tracking employee information, paying them and administering benefits, to being part of running the business with the enablement of strong talent management processes and the advent of new social collaboration processes. This has been made possible by the use of cloud solutions. Within this context, I am finding innovation to support the staffing processes particularly exciting. It is making the work of recruiters move away from just browsing through résumés to proactively building pipelines, going out fishing for potential candidates, and communicating with them on a scale not available a couple of years ago. Bruno Querenet, senior manager, Systems and Operations, Intuitive Surgical

suggest that either all of this automation and information technology is not really helping HR to make better decisions, or that HR has failed to not only innovate but even to change. Automating an inefficient, poor process still leaves the poor process, just a more efficient poor process. Take the process of hiring and recruiting. Human Resources, even with all of the data from SaaS-based applicant tracking, video interviewing and powerful Web search capabilities, still relies on the hiring manager to make the hiring decision and recent studies still support the same conclusions that have existed since before the Internet, that hiring managers tend to decide in the first one minute of the interview if they like the candidate and often base their hiring decisions on emotion, gut feel and who they like. So what is the value of all of this amazing technology and powerful data if it is ultimately only going to be used to make the same poor quality decisions that HR and organizations have always made? I think the true test is if HR is up to the task of fundamentally changing the way most HR and workforce decisions are made. Only then will HR truly be able to leverage the power of the world’s great talent management and information solution ever created, the Internet. Jeff Higgins, founder and CEO of the Human Capital Management Institute

The advances in technology over the last three decades have been astounding, and yet HR is still doing most processes and making most decisions the same way they always have, just with more automation and, of course, more data. Those tired old processes and decision-making methods haven’t really changed at all, which might

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September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

Executive Interview WSR: Welcome to this issue of the IHRIM Workforce Solutions Review. This interview is focused on strategic HR and the role that HR technology has in strategic HR from an academic and practitioner perspective. We welcome three thought leaders to this discussion, Sandy Fisher, Janet Marler and Jason Averbook. Let’s start off first with introductions from each of you. Jason, will you start? Jason: I am the chief business innovation officer at Appirio. I’ve spent the last 20 years or so in the HR technology space with a company that I started, Knowledge Infusion, as well as with PeopleSoft and Ceridian. It is great to be here, and I look forward to the discussion. Sandy: I am the associate professor of Organizational Studies at Clarkson University. I’ve been there for about 12 years; before that, I was a human resource consultant in the Washington, DC area at Personnel Decisions Research Institute. My research focuses on HR technology, but also looks at contingent work, such as contractors, different varieties of contingent workers, and the value they bring to organizations. I also study issues surrounding training. Janet: I am an associate professor of Management at the School of Business, University of Albany State University of New York. I teach courses and do research in strategic HR and technology, and I also do research in the areas of compensation strategy, and like Sandy, in alternative and flexible employment relationships. I am an associate editor for the International Journal of Human Resource Management, and I am on editorial boards of Human Resource Management Review, Human Resource Management, and the Academy of Management Perspectives. Sandy and I were organizing chairs for the Fifth International Electronic Human Resource Management Conference that was held July 31, 2014 in New York City. WSR: Let’s start off with how each of you define strategic HR, and why that is your definition? Sandy: In an academic sense, there are some standard definitions of strategic HR, and the one that we used in our paper that generated interest in us doing this interview is stated as an interdependent bundle of

Part One

planned or emergent human resource activities that are intended to achieve positive organizational outcomes. You can also look at it in terms of the overall alignment with business strategies; to what extent are HR or HR activities designed to actually achieve whatever it is that the business strategy is set out to do. In research studies we have looked at the interim steps for strategy, the positive behaviors or attitudes that are linked to organizational performance, which include things like employee turnover, satisfaction, organizational citizenship and the actions that build human capital through development and succession planning activities. To summarize, the main piece is those bundles of activities that are really aligned and intended to improve overall business performance. Janet: We also look at this notion of value or competitive advantage associated with strategic HR. Organizations are striving to achieve competitive advantage, which means that they are trying to have resources and capabilities that allow their company to produce superior levels of profitability and cash flow. That is the additional bar; it’s not just organizational outcome, but companies are all seeking to be more successful than their competitors. Jason: When I think of human resources, I think about just what it says, that we are thinking about how to leverage people to drive business outcomes. What was said previously about alignments and business and strategic outcomes are all spot on. This equates to the entire workforce, employees, managers, contractors, contingent labor, and crowdsourcing, along with the tasks of how work gets done and how to build a supply chain-like capability with your people. For me, this is strategic HR. Trying to break old-school HR words like recruiting, retention, performance, learning, but truly trying to say how to get the right people in the right place at the right time doing the right tasks is the role of strategic HR. The secondary component then is how to enable the transformation to strategic; that is where processing technology comes into play. WSR: Sandy and Janet, could you talk about your research on the connection between strategic HR and HR technology? www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Sandy: Our study examined research studies that started off with the assumption that e-HRM or HR technology can help an organization be more strategic or can help HR in an organization be more strategic. We’ve noticed similar claims on many vendor websites at the time we got started working on this question. We identified studies that were looking at different elements of this topic and what we actually found was almost no data that supported the claim that HR technology enables strategic HR. We didn’t find that the opposite view was true though. It wasn’t that people were saying that it’s not strategic; it’s just that there wasn’t any actual empirical evidence that there were links to the things we were talking about – the financial performance, the productivity, etc. We examined questions, such as does e-HRM affect HRM’s alignment with business strategy, and found that it really didn’t. We saw a little bit of evidence that there were some positive managerial perceptions of that, but little evidence that was actually linking or at least showing that HR technology would help improve strategic outcomes. We used an approach called evidence-based research, which just looks at the data that is out there; there’s a systematic way of trying to draw conclusions from that. It certainly doesn’t mean that there isn’t a link. It’s just that there wasn’t any evidence in the published research at that time, and even when we did an update a couple years later, we still didn’t see any clear empirical evidence of that relationship. WSR: Sandy or Janet, do you believe there is a link between HR technology and an organization moving to strategic HR? Janet: I was just going to say something along those lines. We both feel that it’s not that we don’t believe there’s a link; we just didn’t see it in our research. That’s most likely because HR strategy in organizations can come first and drive the HR technology decisions in a very purposeful manner. The issue is that there is often a missing link or a missing couple of links between provisioning of technology and proper execution, adoption and seeing the results from technology. Janet: Related to the whole idea of competitive advantage, as we see organizations trending towards adopting the same type of HR systems, and with SaaS vendors making things less customizable, if everybody is using the exact same system, it makes it very difficult to have any kind of competitive advantage over other

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

companies. So organizations need to start looking at how the technology is used and analytics may be the path that will help them better use their data in ways that other organizations are not. WSR: Jason, we definitely want to give you a chance here; let’s hear your take on this topic. Jason: To me, there’s a huge tie between HR technology and strategic HR. I think that the challenge is that most organizations haven’t implemented or deployed the technology in a way to gain that result. Once again, if we go back to strategic HR and define it the way we’re talking about, basically strategic HR is a function that leverages data, and this is not any different than what was said earlier. For the most part, the way we viewed HR technology up until this point is to support transactions, but we never really understood the data that’s generated out of those systems and the value of the data. As we look at data and data science and the direction that those areas are going, we’re going to see a renaissance in data. We’ll stop measuring HR by looking at HR in the mirror and asking, “What’s my time-to-fill or what’s my cost-per-hire?” Instead, we’ll start to measure HR’s impact on the business and that’s where we’ll start to see the tie between technology and successful HR. I think the glory days are ahead when it comes to seeing the link between technology and the HR function, and going forward, we’ll start to see more use cases and better correlations between what technologies can do to empower the transformation. The more that HR technology people think of the technology as something that’s going to help them versus technology that’s going to help the business, we’ll be stuck. In the past, we’ve looked for HR technology to make HR’s job easier, and that’s really the thing that’s caused most issues; we should think of HR technology as something that’s actually going to align back to the business.The reason that we haven’t seen the connection is because we’ve been doing HR technology for ourselves and we haven’t been doing HR technology for the organization. Janet: That’s what we were seeing too; we should really turn the question around and ask what impact does HR have on the technology, how is HR driving the technology in service of making the organization better – helping the HR organization serve the organization better to achieve organizational goals. WSR: How can vendors do a better job of helping orga-

nizations find that connection? Sandy: In terms of vendors, it would be helpful for vendors to act as consultants by describing how organizations can better use their own data to answer important questions about the workforce. Some automating of analytics reports is obviously going to be useful to the extent that we’re asking repeated questions over time, but HR staff really needs to have the skills to interpret and communicate those results and plan interventions to act on the data. I am not thinking that vendors would do all of that, but certainly in terms of being able to ask the right questions and interpret the results appropriately is an area where vendors might be able to provide more support. Janet: Organizations can partner with vendors and learn as much as they can about the different options, but at the end of the day, they need to understand their own business well, and have a good plan for using what’s out there to deliver on the promises of technology. WSR: That’s a good point, and Jason, you’ve been doing a lot of work over the last 10-15 years from both the vendor side, as well as the consultant side. How can vendors do a better job to support organizations more effectively, and is it really the vendors problem and lack of technology, or is it helping HR understand

how to use it? Jason: Software vendors can help organizations to stay on top of technology trends, make the technology as easy to use as possible, make it work on whatever devices and the latest tools that consumers use today, and make sure that they’re developing the technology in a way where the data can be consumed and extracted from the system in an easy way. Someone’s going to say that’s not supporting the HR organization, and I think that’s exactly right. The vendors of today are mostly delivering software as a service. That doesn’t mean they’re delivering consulting as a service. It doesn’t mean they’re delivering strategy as a service. It doesn’t mean they’re delivering HR as a service. It doesn’t mean they’re delivering business process outsourcing as a service. The reality is they’re delivering software as a service, and organizations need to understand this and realize that all the other things that organizations need to be successful aren’t going to come from a technology vendor, but are going to come from others either internal or external. WSR: Thanks to all of you for sharing your thoughts with our readers. We look forward to your comments in Part Two of this interview in our next issue.

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Tech Notes Watch and Learn from Top Tech CEOs By Sean Jones Unless you have been living under a rock since the turn of the 21st century, you are undoubtedly aware of the importance of technological innovation in today’s society. Individuals, businesses, and entire economies now rely upon technological innovation to power the success of industries around the world. Unlike generations before, technological innovation today occurs at lightning speed. Developing and releasing new apps, software, and cloudbased services is just the tip of the iceberg. Good companies need to figure out the need for these services before the need arises. Development has to be forward thinking, and once it is released, a service needs to remain flexible to adapt before it is outdated and useless. The individuals at the head of some of the world’s top tech firms are the ones guiding the mission of these new apps and services. Some of these CEOs have helped shape the technological world we live in today. Others are new to the game and are shaping the future of tech. Regardless of their role, the following individuals represent the knowledge and forethought the tech industry needs today and in the future. Watch and learn from these top CEOs:

Jeff Bezos – Amazon Most people do not think of Amazon right off the bat when they envision technological advancements, but times are changing. As the world’s largest online retailer, the online retailing giant has a lot happening in 2014, and Bezos is the man pulling all the strings. In addition to the introduction of Sunday deliveries on shipments and testing drones for home delivery, Amazon has rolled out its Netflix rival (Amazon Prime Instant Video). This is a long way from when Amazon went online in 1995 as a money-losing startup online bookstore selling books online. However, Amazon’s biggest move since the Kindle eBook reader, has been the recent release of its new Amazon Fire Phone. Bezos, with his customer-centric focus on business, has made Amazon one of the most highly respected brands in America and around the world. We don’t expect you to take our word for it though. Amazon stock, while down in 2014 likely due to the standoff with publishing house Hachette, is still up an amazing 423 percent over the last five years.

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

According to Business Insider, citing a survey from YouGov BrandIndex, Amazon was the most highly regarded brand in the U.S. in 2013. The YouGov survey interviewed over one million individuals.

Evan Spiegel – Snapchat Forget FaceTime and boring text messages, the kids these days are all using Snapchat. Evan Spiegel is a cofounder and current CEO of Snapchat, the startup chat service that conquered all comers in 2013. Launched in July 2011, the service was released during the same calendar year as Facebook’s Poke app, and stomped the billion dollar competitor’s offering into the ground. Snapchat is an app that allows users to take photos, record videos, add text, create drawings, and send them to a specified group of recipients. These sent items, including photographs and videos are known as “Snaps.” Snapchat users also have the ability to set a time limit for how long recipients can view their Snaps typically ranging from 1 to 10 seconds, after which, the Snaps are hidden from the recipient’s device and, according to Snapchat, deleted from the company’s servers. In fact, according to Mashable, more college students in 2014 are more engaged in Snapchat rather than Facebook. This is a significant development because the college student market used to be one of the strengths of Facebook. Of course, even such a successful new company as Snapchat has had its ups and downs. There is an ongoing lawsuit between Spiegel (and other co-founders) and an ousted friend, reminiscent perhaps of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook – not to mention a recent security breach that left the information of 4.6 million users open to data thieves. However, Snapchat managed to secure $110 million in two rounds of financing to power its future growth. In a nod to his hotheaded determination to build a unique product that stays out of the hands of larger tech firms, Spiegel rejected reported buyout bids from Facebook ($3 billion) and Google ($4 billion).

Leslie Harris – Center for Democracy & Technology The firm Leslie Harris works for won’t provide you with the next great technological advancement, but it will protect you from the potential pitfalls of the next great technological advancement, and all the ones that follow. Technology is exceptional, but it can also sometimes infringe on the rights and liberties of individual citizens. Harris is the CEO and president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an organization that is responsible for protecting your rights as an individual when you surf the Web, shop

online, and use popular apps. The CDT’s mission states that the organization “is a champion of global online civil liberties and human rights, driving policy outcomes that keep the Internet open, innovative, and free.” As a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization, the Center for Democracy and Technology supports its mission through backing business legislation and tech tools that defend the Internet privacy of citizens and advocate against surveillance. Among her many accomplishments, Harris had a guiding hand in the creation of the Global Network Initiative. This movement brought together other tech giants, notably Microsoft and Google, and human rights groups to protect your privacy online and fight for the freedom of expression. An activist and politician at heart, Leslie Harris is often seen testifying before Congress about pressing issues of cybersecurity and Internet freedom. They say when you have a passion for what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.

It also means that he has undeniably learned a great deal throughout his career, not to mention a 30-plus year friendship with the late Steve Jobs of Apple. CNBC recently included Ellison in The List, the news network’s determination of the top 25 people who have had the “most profound impact on business and finance since 1989.” Ellison understood early on that businesses were following a trend of focusing on connecting people to each other and to brands through new mediums. Thus, Oracle rode the Internet wave to success. In fact, Oracle’s first clients are thought to be the Central Intelligence Agency and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Ellison teaches us to continually grow

and expand, that being competitive is an extremely valuable trait, and to be ahead of your competition through envisioning the future.

About the Author Sean Jones is a business writer with a primary focus on the technological sector, particularly mobile technology. He has covered startup social networking sites and provided engaging content for numerous tech companies, with an interest for topics like cloud computing, hosted services, and mobile productivity.

One solution bringing it all together

Larry Ellison – Oracle Oracle, originally founded in 1977 and renamed Oracle in 1982, is the tried and true tech industry leader in relational database software. Oracle Corporation has played a major role in characterizing the big data and commercial computing spaces, and its products are used by every single one of the world’s 100 largest public companies. Oracle has now grown so large that many subset companies have sprung up to support its mission. Oracle resellers like Tekstream Solutions provide businesses with the ability to outsource content management and business solution consulting without having to bring someone in-house. They partner with Oracle and assist in deciding best solutions for clients. Larry Ellison has been the CEO of Oracle since 1977, which makes him the longest running founder/CEO to ever grace the technology industry.

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Get started with a demonstration. Call 1-866-353-0984 or email info@ebenefits.com. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

The Back Story Looking for the LBD* of Human Capital Management Software By Katherine Jones, Ph.D. Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP The boom is back. The software acquisition boom, that is. More organizations are looking at investing in human capital management (HCM) software – and putting their money where their proverbial mouth is. Fifty-four percent of organizations are considering purchasing a new HRIS or talent management technology in the next 18 months; ninety percent of those are replacing the existing solutions used today.1 And, like the need for a little black dress* in every woman’s wardrobe, organizations would be hard-pressed to manage without solid HCM technology in their environments. It’s basic. Why now? There are many reasons. Human Resources investments slid to a virtual standstill during the recession; installed software is getting long in the tooth (47 percent of participating companies in my research have used their current HRMS/HRIS for more than seven years)2 and newer technology is on the market that can meet HR’s two top goals of a better user experience and providing the analytics needed to drive business decisions. Fortunately, we are moving into fall – the time of HR technology conferences, which allow potential buyers to see many of the newest, shiniest objects in the HR tech world. Despite the much-hyped “consumerization” movement (making business applications as easy to use and delightful as online shopping experiences), the products that are used to manage talent today – no matter their origins – look far more alike than they are differentiated. Functionally, they virtually all do the same things, many in the same ways – demonstrating the commoditization of HR and talent management, as it were. But, let’s start with that very point – the user experience – and look at the differentiators in HCM software today.

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

1. It Ain’t Easy ‘til it’s Easy: 2014 is the year of cleaner, simpler interfaces in that widgets morphed into “tiles” – primarily used for navigation. All of this leads to the possibility of creating a more personalized work environment with one-click movements to relevant data that has replaced icons, tabs, and drop-down menus as a means to move users to the functions of choice. The distance (in clicks) to get to the functions is increasingly shorter (a key feature in usability). Meanwhile, tablet interfaces supporting swiping and pinching as navigational means have changed the way in which users interact with the software environment. With the increased number of mobile devices now in the workplace, vendors are addressing (some at a furious pace) the consistency of the interfaces that they are presenting across business functions, often designing for mobile first.

2014 is the year of cleaner, simpler interfaces in that widgets morphed into “tiles” – primarily used for navigation. 2. Integration Matters: Many of the solution providers created their talent management suites through acquisitions. The combined “suite” is often not as integrated as most buyers would like; it is often apparent when the user moves from one module to the next – some, in fact, still have the prior solution’s names in them. Today, the smoothest user experience is often provided by companies that created their products indigenously from the ground-up (they call this “unified”), although those providers may not have the total solution set in terms of modules delivered, and are hustling to catch up. Some companies, however, that acquired key functionality immediately invested in developing that commonality of experience and data representation throughout all of the different applications, no matter what their origins were.

HRIS/HRMS

The greatest software on earth won’t do a thing if it cannot be implemented to deliver the functionality that you expected when you bought it.

1. Improved analytics and reporting 2. Improved end-user experience 3. I ntegration with or consolidation with other business management products 4. Cloud-based technology 5. Cost efficiencies/savings Talent Management Applications 1. Improved end-user experience 2. I ntegration with or consolidation with other business management products

3. The Depth and Breadth of Embedded Analytics: We see three tiers of analytics solutions in talent management software today. One is the module-by-module provision of the data that you would expect – time-tohire, counts of likely successors by position, numbers enrolling in courses, etc. – plus the capability for ad-hoc reporting. Second, we see solutions that have an additional module specifically for reporting or analytics. In this case, the buyer needs a separate product, and that product collects data from the other modules to provide synthesized reporting, generally through dashboards. Third, and becoming far more widely accepted as the norm, is the provision of embedded analytics in each module with rich cross-functional reporting and predictive capabilities. Some companies provide all of these, some blessedly few. You need analytic capabilities. Shop wisely. So, let’s do a bit of assessment here – a lexical “try before you buy” perhaps. We have basically the same functionality in different skin tones, vendors’ differentiators leap-frogging on a daily basis, while organizations face the very real business requirement of improved business productivity of the workforce, likely globally. The prettiest, most feature-rich, most integrated software in the world won’t do a thing if your employees won’t use it. The greatest software on earth won’t do a thing if it cannot be implemented to deliver the functionality that you expected when you bought it. (The dress may be darling, but it has to fit.) Let’s look at the software conundrum differently. Buyers told us what their criteria for software replacement is (see Figure 1).

3. Improved analytics and reporting 4. Cloud-based technology 5. Adaptability, customization or ease of configuration Figure 1. Top-5 Buyers’ Criteria for New Software Purchases: HRIS and Talent Management Applications. Source: Bersin by Deloitte, 2014.

Consistent, aren’t they? What might HCM solutions look like in order to meet this wish list? Let’s take those criteria and look at software through another filter (see Figure 2). Rather like the requirements for that little black dress, last year’s styles are outmoded. Human capital management software, still managing all the functional necessities, has moved from a static system of record-keeping, transactions and tactical support, to an employee-centric system of engagement and agility.

Figure 2. Upping the Ante to Systems of Engagement. Source: Bersin by Deloitte, 2014.

As you look around at the major HCM software events in the next few months, look beyond the functions and even the cloud (as a given, it almost goes without saying). Look for flexibility and agility, look for enhanced user experiences. Look for the software equivalent of that classy little black dress – basic black, in style, and always engaging.

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • September 2014

Endnotes

Hanging the dress in the closet is not the answer . . . it has to be used to get the value out of the investment. Now, let’s look beyond shopping for new HCM attire. Software, like many wardrobe purchases, may never get the use anticipated. With little use, the expected business impacts won’t occur. Preparing for and managing the “people” change is foremost; careful planning for implementation and rollout is critical. Training on the new software cannot be ignored – and needs to be ongoing as new employees continually get introduced to the software over time. Organizations we talked to say user adoption is the measure of success for them, but often fail to ascertain the extent of real use within the organization as a whole. High-performing organizations avoid this through thorough planning, continual employee communication, timely training, and early identification of the criteria they will use to measure the success of the project.3 Hanging the dress in the closet is not the answer (remember when unused software was called “shelfware”); it has to be used to get the value out of the investment. The most successful implementations are those in which all of the business, project management, and change management issues are addressed in the early stages, and often readdressed throughout the project. In many cases, the changes being made in the organization will likely not happen again for close to a decade, because organizations simply do not have the appetite to make technology changes any more frequently. Like the LBD, select wisely, accessorize carefully, and wear it well.

September 2014 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

1 Katherine Jones, Ph.D., “Investments in Human Capital Management Systems 2014: What Technology Users Have and What They Will Buy in the Year Ahead,” Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP, April 2014. 2 Ibid. 3 Katherine Jones, “Deploying HCM Technologies: Making Change Work,” Bersin by Deloitte, June 2014.

About the Author Dr. Katherine Jones is a vice president, focusing on human capital management (HCM) technology research at Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP. She analyzes the underlying technologies and services that support the management of a global workforce, including HR, hiring and performance management and workforce planning. Jones is a veteran in enterprise workforce and talent management applications and a recognized expert in cloud computing. Prior to joining Bersin by Deloitte, she was a research director at the Aberdeen Group for eight years where she established Aberdeen’s HCM practice, focusing on research and consulting services in HR, talent acquisition, workforce management, ERP and midmarket companies. Later, she was the director of Marketing for NetSuite Inc., a cloud-based ERP company. She has written on many areas of talent management, technology and business practices. With over 300 works published to date, she is also a frequent speaker in the U.S. and abroad. Prior to a high-technology career, Jones was a university dean, involved in academic administration, research and teaching. She has a master’s degree and a doctorate from Cornell University. She can be reached at kathjones@deloitte.com.

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