Technology and the 12 Talent Reports

A large insurance company had built a highly structured process to identify, evaluate, and develop leadership talent. Each year a series of steps were conducted to produce 12 detailed reports providing different views of the talent across the company. The reports were works of art from a design perspective, using colors and shapes to convey different relationships among the data. The reports were part of an extensive talent review process culminating in a day-long leadership board session discussing current and future leaders. So, it was no surprise when the HR leadership team reacted negatively to learning that a new HR technology system implemented by the IT department could not replicate the reports. An emergency session with the technology vendor was called to figure out how to retain these critical 12 talent reports.

“We need your system to duplicate these reports before the review process starts next month!”, the HR team stated. The vendor replied, “We cannot create these exact reports in such a short time frame without extensive and costly custom development.” The company's IT team then said, “We do not have a budget for this; surely there must be a workaround.” “No,” said the HR team. “The board expects to see these reports just as they are!” The vendor offered a suggestion, “We cannot create the exact reports but perhaps we can create something that still supports how the reports are used to guide talent decisions.” The HR team was skeptical but agreed to bring in a few senior business leaders for a conversation.

The business leaders were asked to talk through their experience with using each of the 12 reports. What data did they look at, how did they talk about the information, and what decisions did it influence? To the shock of the HR team, the leaders shared, “We really only look at three of the reports.” When asked about the others, they said, “We almost never use them.” When the HR leaders asked, “Why didn't you tell us?”, they answered, “You never asked and the reports don't bother us since we just ignore them.” When the vendor outlined how the technology could present the data from three reports they did use into a single dashboard, the leaders answered, “Thanks, that will be a lot easier.” They then thanked the HR and IT teams for simplifying a complicated process.

This story illustrates two important points. First, improving employee experience is not just about designing and deploying processes and tools. It is about understanding how employees use processes and tools. Elegant processes and impressive technology mean little if employees do not use them or feel they are difficult and inefficient. Second, the biggest barrier to change is people. This is not because people cannot change. As discussed in Chapter 3, people are really good at change. It is because people may not see the value in change. The talent tectonic forces of digitalization and demographics are increasing pressure on companies to rethink the employee experience in their organizations. Technology enables companies to radically reshape employee experience. But having access to technology does not guarantee companies will make the changes necessary to effectively adapt to a future that will be different from the past.

Before organizations will use technology to do things differently, leaders in the organization must understand the value of changing what they are doing now. This requires that the people leading an employee experience change effort meet four conditions:

• Knowing where to focus. Changing what matters most and not being distracted by things that are nice but not necessary.
• Possessing expertise and influence. Having the knowledge to effectively guide the change process and enough credibility as an expert in employee experience so that others listen to their advice.
• Understanding available technology. Knowing how to use work technology to implement and support the change.
• Gaining Support and Cooperation. Getting positive participation from leaders, managers, and employees who play a role in supporting, creating, and adapting to new forms of employee experience.

Knowing What to Change

Making meaningful improvements to employee experiences can require significant time and resources. It is important to focus on areas that will deliver the greatest positive returns on investment. Three things should be considered when deciding where to focus efforts: the nature of challenges facing the company, the relative impact of employee experience for different jobs, and the current level of employee experience associated with different events.

Expertise and Influence

Managing employee experience requires using a combination of expertise related to employee psychology, work technology, business strategy, and employment regulations to create agile and effective organizations. This is the domain of HR in most organizations, but in many companies HR professionals suffer from a lack of leadership credibility. This reflects a broader issue plaguing the field of HR: HR struggles to get respect as a profession.⁴ The lack of respect for HR expertise extends to the most senior levels with a significant number of companies appointing people to the role of chief human resource officer (CHRO) who have no prior HR experience. By contrast, virtually no company appoints people to the CFO or CIO roles without deep financial or IT experience.⁵ The practice of hiring CHROs without HR backgrounds appears to be declining, but the fact it happens shows how little some CEOs and corporate boards value the importance of HR knowledge. Why is this and how can it be changed? The answer requires understanding why HR expertise matters and why it is perceived as being unimportant.

Throughout my career I have heard people say things like “I don't care about HR” or “HR is irrelevant.” Whenever I hear this, I wonder, “Do you care whether employees execute on your business strategies?” HR is about a lot more than following employment regulations and paying employees on time. It is about creating methods to predict and change human behavior to support business goals. This requires addressing highly complicated problems such as the following:

• Restructuring organizations to account for shifting skill requirements, labor markets, and technologies that are transforming the nature of work.
• Finding ways to attract highly specialized talent from diverse sources around the world.
• Predicting how people will perform in jobs that involve doing things they have never done before.
• Recognizing high-performing employees without making lower-performing employees feel underappreciated.
• Helping people change their behavior and develop skills to meet new business demands.
• Overcoming implicit cultural stereotypes to create inclusive, supportive organizations.
• Finding ways to effectively manage talent while complying with a constantly changing set of complex employment regulations.

Doing these sorts of things in an efficient, effective, and sustainable manner requires a combination of business insight, technological savvy, psychological knowledge, administrative excellence, legal awareness, and change management savoir faire. Many people do not realize how much knowledge goes into creating HR practices that deliver positive employee experiences and support business objectives. Nor do they appreciate what it takes to stay on top of the technological, cultural, and economic forces that constantly reshape the nature of HR. The problem is that HR professionals struggle to communicate their expertise in an effective manner. As a result, many people think HR is simpler than it actually is. HR professionals must be bolder in owning their professional expertise. This is not about overwhelming people with HR theories and minutia. It is about engaging business leaders in a collaborative manner that clearly conveys, “I know a lot more about attracting, developing, motivating, and retaining people than you.” This includes constructively educating leaders when their actions indicate a lack of understanding related to creating effective employee experiences.

The reasons we need HR departments are similar to the reasons we need financial departments. If someone asked why companies force leaders to track budgets and money under the guidance of a centralized finance department, people might respond that finance is a specialized area of expertise. It is unrealistic to expect leaders to create effective accounting and budgeting processes on their own. Furthermore, financial resources aren't owned by leaders. They are owned by the company. Leaders are just allowed to use them. As such, the organization needs centralized processes to ensure managers are using financial resources appropriately. These are the same reasons why companies need HR departments. HR is a specialized area of expertise. Most leaders do not fully understand how to effectively hire, evaluate, motivate, and develop employees. Nor do leaders own the talent in their departments. They are just allowed to manage them. At one level, human resources are the same as financial resources: an expensive, highly flexible, powerful resource that is critical to supporting business needs, but also a highly sensitive resource that must be managed appropriately to be effective.

When it is done well, the role of HR involves engaging business leaders to define and implement methods that balance the needs of the company, and the experiences employees want and in many cases demand. Many HR professionals in the past failed to take ownership for this role. Instead of focusing on effective use of people, they focused on tasks associated with meeting employment requirements and regulations. In their defense, before we had modern payroll and compliance technology these things took a lot of work and very bad things happen when they go wrong. But as a result of these past practices, HR is often seen as being more about managing administrative processes and avoiding risks, and less about addressing business needs through creating better employee experiences. This view of HR as an administrative function also permeates the self-identity of many HR professionals. This was illustrated when I worked with a company that was automating its hiring processes. During a project meeting, the CHRO was informed that some HR professionals were worried about losing their jobs as a result of the technology. They wondered what they would do when they no longer had to manually screen candidates, process new hire paperwork, and enroll employees in the payroll system. The CHRO was surprised people were clinging to tasks that she viewed as somewhat mundane parts of HR.ⁱ In response, she asked how often these HR people had conversations with the employees they supported. She was told that HR talked to employees only when there were problems that needed to be fixed. This led to expanding the project to include changing the role expectations of HR professionals. Going forward, each HR professional was expected to talk to every employee they supported at least once a year about how the company could help them be more successful. These proactive conversations led to a variety of positive changes, including retaining several high-performing employees who were about to leave the organization because of work issues that no one had ever asked them about.

The best way the field of HR can earn respect as a strategic profession is to develop expertise in techniques for creating effective employee experiences and use this expertise to drive demonstrable business results.⁶ This requires overcoming perceptions of HR as a profession of administrative experts focused on compliance. When necessary, HR professionals must constructively challenge business leaders to stop managing people based on outdated or misguided beliefs and assumptions. Gaining respect also requires showing how the company can improve business outcomes by shaping and changing employee experiences. It is easy to show the costs associated with employees but difficult to quantify the value they provide. Nevertheless, HR professionals must find ways to demonstrate the financial value of their work if they want to be recognized as being business relevant.

Understanding Available Technology

Early in my career a senior HR practitioner advised that technology should not drive process design. Work processes, he said, should reflect what makes sense for employees and the organization regardless of the features found in work technology systems. After years designing technology-enabled processes and witnessing how internet, mobile, and social technology have changed work, I can confidently state this advice was wrong. In fact, it is not even possible to follow. Designing a work process without considering the technology that will support it is like designing a building without considering what materials will be used to build it. As the fable of the three little pigs tells us, the technology we use to build things—whether it is straw, sticks, bricks, or bytes—has significant long-term consequences on the ultimate outcome of our efforts. Technology places constraints on process design, but technology also enables creating processes that were not previously possible. Consider the inter-relationship between technology and performance management. For years people complained about the ineffectiveness of annual performance appraisals. Given how much people disliked annual reviews, one might ask why these processes were ever created in the first place? Did someone think it was a good idea to design a process that encouraged managers and employees to try to fit a year's worth of assessment, feedback, and development discussion into a single conversation? The reason companies created the traditional annual performance appraisal was probably because it was all they could do given the technology available at the time. Imagine this conversation occurring in the late 20th century:

Business leader:	We need a method to communicate job objectives, coach employee performance, and guide decisions related to development and compensation. This method must be applied across thousands of employees located in multiple regions. It cannot take too much time, and the only technology you have to do it is paper and pencils. What process do you recommend?
HR professional:	Given these constraints, the best we can do is this annual performance appraisal rating form. Everyone will hate it, but it is all we can do with the technology we have.

It seems unlikely anyone would have created the old annual performance appraisal process if they had access to online, mobile, and social technology. Now that these technologies are readily available, companies are redesigning performance management to emphasize ongoing conversations instead of annual reviews. Similar examples can be found for virtually every aspect of work. Advances in staffing technology have replaced time-intensive, manual, résumé-review processes with automated methods that find and screen candidates using online data collection and scoring algorithms. Advances in online social learning and simulation technology are leading companies to radically modify or totally eliminate costly classroom training courses that many employees viewed as a poor use of time. Advances in mobile technology are reshaping how we communicate to employees, provide feedback, and hold coaching conversations. The question is not whether you will use technology to improve employee experience. The question is which technology will you use and how can you maximize its capabilities to support the needs of your company. We design processes based on what we believe is possible and technology defines what we believe is possible. The more we understand the capabilities of work technology the more effective we become at finding new ways to improve employee experience.

Work technology is a powerful tool for improving employee experience, but like all tools it only works if used in the right way. The best technology applications that help people do things that are difficult or tedious or that enable people to do things in line with our natural preferences. Staffing technologyⁱⁱ is a great example of automating tedious and often difficult tasks associated with searching for jobs and sorting through applications. Social learning technologyⁱⁱⁱ is an example of technology supporting people's natural preferences. The most natural way for people to learn is through apprenticeship-type learning relationships where novice employees work with more skilled employees. The problem with the apprenticeship approach is it does not scale very well. By contrast, classroom type training courses can be scaled across a large number of people. But there is nothing natural about sitting through classes to learn things. What we want is more knowledgeable people to coach us on what to do so we can do it ourselves. This is what social learning technology enables. A reason staffing and social learning technology have been so successful is they leverage strengths and mitigate weaknesses that are inherent to being human. Once people understand what this technology does, they want to use it. And once they use it, they don't want to go back to the old way of doing things.

The worst technologies force us to do things that feel inefficient or impersonal. You have experienced this feeling if you have ever been stuck on hold pressing numbers on phone routing system when what you want is to talk to an actual person. Automation implemented to save administrative support costs for companies often does it at the expense of employee experience. I refer to this technology as “solutions that raise the blood pressure of thousands of employees at scale.” Automation is not efficient if it makes the people who are required to use it feel like they are wasting their time. Technology also becomes problematic when it does things that should be done by people. Despite advances in AI, technology will never be more human than actual humans. Machines cannot care about people's emotional needs or take moral responsibility for decisions that affect people's lives such as eliminating jobs, hiring candidates, or allocating compensation. Technology is a poor substitute for humans when it comes to treating people with compassion, understanding, sensitivity, and empathy. A lot of critical moments that affect employee experience involve these sorts of interactions (e.g., hiring decisions, coaching conversations, providing recognition and support). Technology can and should play a role in supporting these conversations and decisions, but they must be performed by people to be fully effective.

The work technology used to improve the employee experience should also be viewed as something that constantly evolves. Managing work technology is more like tending a garden than building a house. It continuously grows or it decays. Technology either evolves to support the changing needs of the companies and employees it serves, or it becomes outdated and constraining to the very people it is intended to help. As a general rule, any work process designed more than three years ago is out of date simply because there are things that are technologically possible now that were not possible when the process was designed. That does not mean every process needs to be changed every three years, but every process should be critically examined on a regular basis considering recent technological innovations. It helps to have people in the organization who have a strong understanding of work technology and can spot technological innovations that can be used to improve the employee experience in the company. In a hyper digitalized world, technology also becomes a major tool for driving change. Consider the example set by consumer technology. When consumer application providers such as Apple, Google, or Microsoft change their technology they don't put users through a change management program. They simply change the apps and users adapt. Similarly, if work technology is easy to use and performs a function that employees understand and believe is valuable then employees will simply use it. The technology creates the change.

Despite all this technological progress, the perennial workforce challenges companies were facing 50 years ago are the same challenges they face today. Technology has given us the ability to find, hire and collaborate with colleagues on the other side of the world, but managers still struggle to fill positions and employees still complain about managers who do not set clear goals and provide supportive feedback. The technology available to address these perennial challenges is steadily improving, but getting to the next level of employee experience requires asking the right questions about how to use new technology applications. This is not about asking technology-centric questions such as “How can we use work experience platforms or machine learning technologies in our company?” It is about asking employee-centric questions such as “Is there a way to conduct organizational restructurings so they do not negatively affect employee productivity by making better use of work experience platforms?” or “Could we reduce gender inequity in pay practices by leveraging the capabilities of machine learning technology?” Only by asking the right questions will we succeed in building technology-enabled solutions that solve the employee experience challenges that matter the most to companies and the people who work in them.

Gaining Support and Cooperation

One of my favorite cartoons about work shows an executive looking at a downtrodden employee and telling them, “You do have good ideas, but we don't do things in this company just because they happen to be a good idea.” This cartoon is funny because many of us can relate to being that employee. The talent tectonic forces of digitization and demographics are creating multiple reasons and many ways for companies to improve the nature of work. But the fact something is possible and valuable to do does not mean companies will do it. Technological advances rarely lead to large-scale innovation in work practices without some sort of triggering event (e.g., most companies did not adopt remote work until it was forced upon them by a pandemic). Efforts to improve employee experiences in companies tend to occur in a somewhat reactive manner in response to external threats. React and respond is one way to change, but it is rarely the most efficient and effective. A better approach is to proactively use technology to improve the employee experience by enlisting cooperation from senior leaders, middle managers, and frontline employees. Each of these groups has a different perspective on change and each plays a different role in transforming employee experience. But what they all have in common is the human tendency to view change more in terms of avoiding risks than realizing opportunities.⁷