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HR Tech - Test before you Buy - read the full article about Tech HR trends, Human Resources and Recruitment, Staffing, Payroll from Tom Haak on Qualified.One
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for many years the hr tech landscape was controlled by a few major suppliers but as digitalization explodes across the employee experience are we starting to see real choice in hr tech for leaders and teams to not just buy but to use in the workplace welcome to talking hr trends with natal and tom im natal dank and im tom hack and we explore the latest hot topics and business issues impacting the people side of organizations stick around to the end for our practical top tip and if you find this discussion valuable please subscribe so tom we were named world leading hr tech influences recently and it made me think we havent dedicated a whole episode to this topic yet so lets do exactly that right now and i think the best place to start is by asking you well what gets you most excited about hr tech at the moment so if you look at the hr tech landscape and you look where the money is spent hr core systems yes probably the most money yeah hr recruitment applicant tracking systems and the like most money there im not super interested in those areas but i think to be honest many developments are happening there as well especially in the the the core systems and the big providers that are integrating solutions so i think thats an interesting area new developments getting integrated in solutions provided by suppliers as microsoft linkedin and others so i think that is an interesting development because the innovation often takes place here and there we see the cool things that gets me excited yes but in the end the experience of employees and managers they want a smooth experience well technology is sometimes annoying so thats a long answer to your question so one im excited about the opportunities of the big players integrating innovative solutions yeah im also excited by tooling hr tech that really helps people to do their job better yeah so thats really not focused on process optimization but hr tech that is there to help people to do that job better and in some ways help people move away from the idea of hr being all about process and actually its about tools to help you get the job done which is really exciting yeah um and indeed i saw that a small player pecan got bought quite recently so thats yeah a good example of taking in that innovation into a bigger system thats kind of what gets me most excited as well is the the primarily positive influence that the smaller hr tech suppliers are having um on the experience that weve got at in the workplace and in particular i likened it to this democratization of data so if i think about my role over the years often we will contract it in to one main supplier that then would run this huge annual employee engagement survey we then have to wait something like three months for them to sort of release the results and then cascade them down our two hours and across the organization and they really controlled the whole process now it feels like with the touch of the button you can do a pulse survey and you can use the data real time to make decisions and i think that is really exciting can you talk us through some examples of how youre seeing hr leaders and teams use hr tech in a good way one remark to what you were saying is is it also data people can use yes and thats sometimes a question mark if you look in the consumer domain for example you look at an application like strava i dont know whether you know strava but many runners and cyclists are using it so people are gathering their own data running data then they can use it and compare themselves to others how fast have other people run on this stretch hey if they can do it that fast like well in the workplace ive not seen many solutions that do similar things what can i learn from the data of other people to do my job better so thats the opportunity i would say what i like i like many i like solutions in in the learning domain and one example i might have mentioned it before but that i like that a lot is software that monitors what you are doing in conversations is tracking the conversation and is starting to give you uh feedback and suggestions while you are doing it yeah and that is in the flow of work its technology is is an important element because technology looks at my phase it looks at the way im talking it so it combines things and then it can compare that data to best-in-class world-class type of conversation said tom well tom and natal youre doing okay but if we look at what what the great people are doing well you can still learn some things that actually makes me think of one that i quite like where a company started to connect sort of learning opportunities so a video to watch someone to talk to a little workshop to go to two key moments that matter or when people had problems so and they even connected it to the hris system so a manager might need to go and give feedback to someone the next day it comes up in in an email youve got to go and do this conversation or do you want to learn how to do that oh yes please and you would click on the learning i think thats a fantastic example yeah one other area i like a lot is organizational network analysis its all technology but with technology of today yes you can do and mapping who is connected to whom in new york i think the networks yeah exactly who is helping whom its not its used maybe not enough because there are so many opportunities if you utilize it how are your leaders behaving where is the talent in the organization where are the skill gaps you know if youre all going to this person it means that that skill is very needed how do we develop it elsewhere those kind of things yeah definitely so one thing about hr tech uh it makes me think about a conversation i had recently with a good friend and she uh gets caught up quite a lot about from hr leaders around what tech should i buy because shes run a lot of these projects before and whenever she has this conversation she says well why why do you want to buy the hr tech you know what problem are you trying to solve and its quite alarming that a lot of them cant answer that question so whats your advice uh to help people not rush into the shiny new toy and really think about how do they use hr tech in the right way yeah its one of our key messages in this series is always start with your organizational issues yeah yeah its not about uh we have we have to use all this technology start with your your your big orgasm so thats but on the other side what i sometimes see hr yeah be very hesitant also because still they are maybe looking for the ultimate solu what is the ultimate solution what is the ultimate architecture what can we use everywhere and i think so thats tip number two and and thats thats your tip all the time work in an agile way experiment try it exactly its exactly if youre if you look for the one the ultimate solution world surprise surprise its not there it doesnt exist exactly it doesnt exist you can never be truly happy with one piece of tech can you theres always going to be pros and cons exactly yeah yeah yeah but hr should not yeah way too much experiment try it if someone wants something thats good news i would say yeah and if if they cannot answer the question okay why do i need it yeah yeah thats not not not what you know its not good is it yeah so lets make that our practical top tip today tom so test before you buy and this can be so simple uh a team i know did this using cardboard cutouts so what they did is they had this great idea for a piece of tech but before they went anywhere near actually investing or mocking that up they thought well lets test this using cardboard cutouts so they had cut pieces of cardboard and they would put pictures on the pieces of cardboard and then they would sit with employees and they would see what happened you know did the employee click on the link that they wanted them to did the employee want to actually find out more and use this tool to help them did it help the employees solve a problem and only once they got a good positive outcome to that initial prototype and test that was really cheap and cheerful did they then go and investigate using this piece of tech and only then look at actually signing the contract so test before you buy we cant encourage you enough to do that thanks so much for your time today tom always great to speak with you and this is talking hr trends with natal and tom if you found this discussion valuable please subscribe thank you
Tom Haak: HR Tech - Test before you Buy - Human Resources