Virtual walks and free chocolate? What workplace pros say the new office will look like
Working remotely has become a new workplace normal and may continue to be so. Although it may be difficult for younger generations to acclimate to this working situation, there may be some benefits to it as well. Read this blog post to learn more.
The traditional office’s days are numbered; the office of the future will be a “collaboration center” with a mix of skeleton staff and remote workers meeting through virtual team walks and group meals via home-delivered Zoom lunches.
Millennials and Generation Z will have problems networking in the new remote work world with fewer face-to-face meetings; and mental health and well-being benefits will become more important than ever before.
Those were some of the predictions of compensation and benefits professionals at the first virtual gathering of the WorldatWork 2020 Total Resilience conference — a digital substitute for an annual conference that was supposed to be held in Minneapolis this year, but was postponed in response to the global coronavirus crisis.
"The office environment will change,” said panelist Steve Pennacchio, senior vice president of total rewards at Pfizer, during an online session on resilience on Wednesday. “Remote work is here to stay.”
Pennacchio said a number of companies will shut down their office space, which will have serious ramifications for commercial real estate and new entrants into the workforce, who will be at a particular disadvantage because of the limits of networking and source building through remote technology.
He suggested more virtual engagement tactics, including virtual walks or group activities, including having teams eat together with coordinated deliveries of lunches or chocolate. “Nothing hurts with chocolate,” he said. During the conference, which will continue with weekly panels through Sept. 2, organizers also hosted social events, including virtual trivia games and online networking.
Pfizer is investing $1 billion on development of vaccines and treatments for coronavirus, he noted. “Hopefully ours and others will work. The world needs more than one,” he said.
Likewise, Susan Brown, senior director of compensation at Siemens, said her company has focused on four key areas of building a team, culture, management team and employees who can adjust to the new environment through virtual meet-and-greet sessions and lunches where all team members must be present visually.
“The relationship builds with seeing each other,” she said. “The camera on changes the dynamic more than a phone call.”
Brown also noted tremendous innovation around talent management happening during the coronavirus crisis. She said that progressive companies have made a quick shift to focus first on the mental health and well-being of staff as a priority, rather than having an emphasis on business metrics.
“The whole conversation changed to focus on people’s health and safely, how they were feeling and empathetic messaging rather than a focus on business results,” she said.
WorldatWork CEO Scott Cawood, who served as moderator, noted that employers’ responses are being closely watched by staff, and other companies.
“COVID-19 doesn’t define who you are; it actually reveals who you are,” said Cawood, sitting alone on a stage with a white chair and house plant, as panelists called in from around the country.
Kumar Kymal, global head of compensation and benefits at BNY Mellon, said the global financial services firm has 95 percent of staff working remotely.
"Times of crisis and change give us permission to rethink the way we do things, and it's an opportunity to decide what really matters to your organization," Kymal said, noting that the company announced that there will be no layoffs in 2020 to put staff at ease.
Management response should focus on “speed, speed, speed,” he said about responding to challenges under the coronavirus crisis, with special attention to empathetic corporate messaging.
Kymal said at his company, management focused on a new framework to address healthcare concerns globally, with a broad overview of their healthcare plans. Second, management focused on addressing stress and anxiety, particularly with attention to messaging and staff feedback. They also put an increased focus on well-being and resilience strategies, and accelerated a mental health program to allow employees to assess their ability to deal with stress. Finally, BNY Mellon improved social connections for managers to lead better on connecting with various teams.
Looking ahead to the return-to-work phase of the crisis, Kymal said the stakes are high. Challenges include dealing with temperature scans, wearing masks, closed cafeterias and social distancing.
“As we're starting to plan what the return to office looks like, it's clear to us it has the potential to become an awful, awful employee experience,” he said. “We really need to rethink and redesign. What does an office experience look like? That's front and center in my mind.”
SOURCE: Siew, W. (08 July 2020) "Virtual walks and free chocolate? What workplace pros say the new office will look like" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://www.employeebenefitadviser.com/news/what-workplace-pros-say-the-new-office-will-look-like
How to Monitor Your Employees — While Respecting Their Privacy
A recent survey found that 55 percent of millennials that had partaken in the survey plan to leave employers that prioritize profits over people. Read this blog post to learn more.
Even before Covid-19 sent an unprecedented number of people to work from home, employers were ramping up their efforts to monitor employee productivity. A 2018 Gartner report revealed that of 239 large corporations, 50% were monitoring the content of employee emails and social media accounts, along with who they met with and how they utilized their workspaces. A year later an Accenture survey of C-suite executives reported that 62% of their organizations were leveraging new tools to collect data on their employees.
These statistics were gathered before the coronavirus pandemic, which has made working from home a necessity for thousands of companies. With that transition having happened so rapidly, employers are left wondering how much work is actually going on. The fear of productivity losses, mingling with the horror of massively declining revenues, has encouraged many leaders to ramp up their employee monitoring efforts.
There is no shortage of digital tools for employee monitoring — or, as privacy advocates put it, “corporate surveillance.” Multiple services enable stealth monitoring, live video feeds, keyboard tracking, optical character recognition, keystroke recording, or location tracking. One such company, Hubstaff, implements random screen capture that can be customized for each person and set to report “once, twice, or three times per 10 minutes,” if managers so wish. Another company, Teramind, captures all keyboard activity and records “all information to comprehensive logs [that] can be used to formulate a base of user-based behavior analytics.”
Despite the easy availability of options, however, monitoring comes with real risk to the companies that pursue it. Surveillance threatens to erode trust between employers and employees. Accenture found that 52% of employees believe that mishandling of data damages trust — and only 30% of the C-suite executives who were polled reported themselves as “confident” that the data would always be used responsibly. Employees who are now subject to new levels of surveillance report being both “incredibly stressed out” by the constant monitoring and also afraid to speak up, a recipe for not only dissatisfaction but also burnout, both of which — ironically — decrease productivity. Worse, monitoring can invite a backlash: In October of 2019 Google employees went public about spy tools allegedly created to suppress internal dissent.
Tempting as it may be to implement monitoring in the service of protecting productivity, it also stands in stark contrast to recent trends in the corporate world. Many organizations have committed to fostering a better employee experience, with a particular focus on diversity and inclusion. There are not only strong ethical reasons for having one’s eye on that ball, but good bottom line reasons as well. The Deloitte Global Millennial Survey from 2019 found that 55% of millennials plan to leave employers that prioritize profits over people. Retention — which should be a priority for all companies, given the high expense of making and onboarding new hires — becomes difficult and costly for companies that don’t reflect those values. Given the risk of alienating employees coupled with the possibility of error and misapplication of these tools, it is quite likely that, for many, the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.
Even so, some companies will still find it worth the tradeoffs. Justified fear of a collapsing economy reasonably drives employers to monitor their employees to ensure they are being productive and efficient. Indeed, they may even have ethically admirable aims in doing so, such as for the sake of their employees’ health and the health of the country as a whole. Furthermore, if the tools are deployed with the goal of discovering which employees are in need of additional help — more on this below — that may be all the more reason to monitor. But if your business concludes that it ought to monitor employees (for whatever reason), it is important to do so in a way that maximally respects its employees.
Here are six recommendations on how to walk this tightrope.
1. Choose your metrics carefully by involving all relevant stakeholders.
Applying numbers to things is easy, as is making quick judgments based on numeric scores spit out by a piece of software. This leads to both unnecessary surveillance and ill-formed decisions. It’s simply too easy to react to information that, in practice, is irrelevant to productivity, efficiency, and revenue. If you insist on monitoring employees, make sure what you’re tracking is relevant and necessary. Simply monitoring the quantity of emails written or read, for instance, is not a reliable indicator of productivity.
If you want the right metrics, then engage all of the relevant stakeholders in the process to determine those metrics, from hiring managers to supervisors to those who are actually being monitored. With regards to employee engagement it is especially important to reach both experienced and new employees, and that they are able to deliver their input in a setting where there is no fear of reprisal. For instance, they can be in discussion with a supervisor — but preferably not their direct supervisor, who has the authority to fire or promote them.
2. Be transparent with your employees about what you’re monitoring and why.
Part and parcel of respecting someone is that you take the time to openly and honestly communicate with them. Tell your employees what you’re monitoring and why. Give them the opportunity to offer feedback. Share the results of the monitoring with them and, crucially, provide a system by which they can appeal decisions about their career influenced by the data collected.
Transparency increases employee acceptance rates. Gartner found that only 30% of employees were comfortable with their employer monitoring their email. But in the same study, when an employer shared that they would be monitoring and explained why, more than 50% of workers reported being comfortable with it.
3. Offer carrots as well as sticks.
Monitoring or surveillance software is implicitly tied to overseers who are bent on compliance and submission. Oppressive governments, for example, tie surveillance with threats of fines and imprisonment. But you don’t need to pursue monitoring as a method of oppression. You would do better to think about it as a tool by which you can figure out how to help your employees be more productive or reward them for their hustle. That means thinking about what kinds of carrots can be used to motivate and boost relevant numbers, not just sticks to discourage inefficiencies.
4. Accept that very good workers will not always be able to do very good work all the time — especially under present circumstances.
These are unique times and it would be wrong — both ethically and factually — to make decisions about who is and who is not a good employee or a hard worker based on performance under these conditions. Some very hard-working and talented employees may be stretched extraordinarily thin due to a lack of school and child care options, for instance. These are people you want to keep because, in the long run, they provide a tremendous amount of value. Ensure that your supervisors take the time to talk to their supervisees when the numbers aren’t what you want them to be. And again, that conversation should reflect an understanding of the employee’s situation and focus on creative solutions, not threats.
5. Monitor your own systems to ensure that people of color and other vulnerable groups are not disproportionately affected.
Central to any company’s diversity and inclusion effort is a commitment to eliminating any discrimination against traditionally marginalized populations. Precisely because they have been marginalized, those populations tend to occupy more junior roles in an organization — and junior roles often suffer the most scrutiny. This means that there is a risk of disproportionately surveilling the very groups a company’s inclusivity efforts are designed to protect, which invites significant ethical, reputational, and legal risks.
If employee monitoring is being used, it is important that the most junior people are not surveilled to a greater extent than their managers, or at least not to an extent that places special burdens on them. For instance, it would be particularly troublesome if very junior employees received a level of surveillance — say, sentiment analysis or keyboard logging — that only slightly more senior people did not. A policy that says, “This is how we monitor all employees” raises fewer ethical red flags than a policy that says, “This is how we monitor most employees, except for the most junior ones, who undergo a great deal more surveillance.” Equal application of the law, in other words, legitimately blunts the force of charges of discrimination.
6. Decrease monitoring when and where you can.
The impulse to monitor is understandable, especially in these times. But as people return to their offices — and even as some continue to work from home — look for places to pull back monitoring efforts where things are going well. This communicates trust to employees. It also corrects for the tendency to acquire more control than necessary when circumstances are not as severe as they once were.
At the end of the day, your employees are your most valuable assets. They possess institutional knowledge and skills others do not. You’ve invested time and money in them and they are very expensive to replace. Treating them with respect is not only something they deserve — it’s crucial for a company’s retention efforts. If your company does choose to move ahead with surveillance software in this climate, you need to remind yourself that you are not the police. You should be monitoring employees not with a raised baton, but with an outstretched hand.
SOURCE: Blackman, R. (28 May 2020) "How to Monitor Your Employees — While Respecting Their Privacy" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2020/05/how-to-monitor-your-employees-while-respecting-their-privacy
AI helps applicants hone their soft skills
Due to the coronavirus causing many job losses, many are searching for a new place of employment. In competing markets, job candidates may now have to tune their skills and artificial intelligence can help. Read this blog post to learn more.
As millions of workers look for new positions due to the coronavirus pandemic, artificial intelligence can help job candidates fine-tune their interview skills and stand out from the crowd.
HR tech and recruiting company, CareerArc, launched a new interview assessment tool that uses artificial intelligence to highlight candidates’ soft skills, like organization and creativity. The feature, released this week as part of CareerArc Outplacement, helps job seekers learn how to market those traits on their resumes and LinkedIn profiles — which makes it easier for employers to identify the best candidates for open positions, CareerArc executives say.
“The most important thing job seekers can do right now is to use this time to make themselves more marketable, and our coaches are on standby seven days a week to help do just that,” says Yair Riemer, president of career transition services at CareerArc. “With this new assessment, our career coaches can better counsel job seekers to emphasize their unique strengths, while building the confidence they need to find their next opportunity as quickly as possible.”
Since March, more than 22 million people in the United States have been left unemployed in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job seekers are increasingly turning to placement services — Riemer says 99% of CareerArc’s clients are currently unemployed.
The CareerArc assessment starts with having a user record and upload three videos of themselves responding to common interview questions. The software uses psychometric technology, pioneered by experts at University of Southern California and Purdue University, to analyze facial expressions to determine a candidate’s soft skills. Riemer says the software can determine whether a candidate is organized, creative, a formal or informal speaker and whether they communicate assertively or are more laid back.
“Soft skills are harder to learn, and it’s important they align with the job description because they definitely impact job performance,” Riemer says. “Having candidates who are self-aware of how their traits fit the role means [employers] will find someone who can meaningfully contribute to the company.”
Once they have an assessment of their traits, CareerArc places users with one of their career coaches to help decipher the results. The coaches also help candidates use the results to tweak their online presence and application materials.
“Most people don’t know how to highlight or market soft skills; resumes typically focus on hard skills,” Riemer says. “But our coaches are able to pick out keywords that grab the attention of recruiters and employers to help our candidates get noticed. Candidates will also come away more confident, with the skills to talk about their personal strengths.”
Going forward, Riemer says he’d like to extend the software to employers and recruiters so they can use it as part of their candidate evaluation process. He also sees potential for employers to offer the program to their employees as a means of improving their intrapersonal skills as they seek advancement opportunities within the company. CareerArc plans to hear from employers before pursuing either idea.
In the meantime, CareerArc plans to monitor the program’s results as job seekers continue to navigate the COVID-19 crisis.
“With the current job market, job seekers need tools and insights that will help them stand out from the crowd,” CareerArc CEO Robin D. Richards says.
SOURCE: Webster, K. (06 May 2020) "AI helps applicants hone their soft skills" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://www.employeebenefitadviser.com/news/ai-helps-applicants-home-in-on-their-soft-skills
Bots Help Government Tackle COVID-19 Challenges
As many are fighting the battle with various programming software applications, at this time it is helping various agencies with coronavirus data collection. Read this blog post to learn more.
The war against the coronavirus is being fought with science, social distancing, health care … and bots, software applications that run repetitive tasks over the Internet. Public-sector agencies are programming bots to speed the collection and analysis of data about coronavirus infection rates, transform paper-based procurement processes into digital ones, and help employees conduct business when in-person contact is no longer an option.
Robotic Process Automation in the Public Sector
Federal agencies are deploying robotic process automation (RPA) to overcome process or administrative hurdles. The General Services Administration (GSA) used the technology—which automates manual, repetitive tasks through the use of bots—to help track the spread of COVID‑19 in counties across the United States where the GSA has buildings.
Jim Walker, director of public-sector services for UiPath, a New York-based RPA platform provider, said the GSA used bots to gather and update COVID-19 infection data when agency employees became overwhelmed as infection counts rapidly rose. Walker said the GSA has trained about 50 of its employees in the use of RPA to create bots for the agency.
In another case, a government agency in Ireland used RPA to help process the burgeoning number of unemployment benefit claims. When laid-off workers submit an unemployment claim, a bot conducts optical character recognition on data and determines where a person has been employed. When employment and benefits eligibility are confirmed, the bot can deposit benefit funds directly into employee bank accounts.
The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) deployed a bot to check on employees working from home. "Previously, the CMS would send out e-mails to confirm the health and welfare of its remote workers but would receive many thousands of e-mails a day in return," Walker said. "A small CMS team was tasked with reviewing those e-mails and creating regular status reports, but it became hard to keep up."
CMS deployed a bot that automatically checks the databases employees regularly access to perform their work. If an employee hasn't logged on for a specified period of time, the bot triggers a welfare check, Walker said.
Creating and Deploying Bots
Experts say RPA platforms can often be quickly installed. Because many basic RPA bots are of the "no-code" or "low-code" variety—meaning they require little or no software coding skills but rather, they function in drag-and-drop fashion—they often can be created, tested and rolled out in a matter of weeks, depending on the use case.
But experts say RPA platforms still require enterprise-grade security protections and the oversight of a designated team to manage bot development and deployment across the organization.
"If the automation challenge is COVID‑19-related, you don't have months or in some cases even weeks to get automation in place," said Keith Nelson, senior director of public-sector services for Automation Anywhere, an RPA platform provider in Arlington, Va. "Organizations often need immediate relief. In the case of HR, once a bot is created, users often simply have to send an e‑mail with a specified subject line to a certain address to activate it. In many cases, there's no need for any coding."
Automation Anywhere recently partnered with Microsoft to create a bot to help process COVID‑19 case forms for the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. Nelson said the initiative was in response to a directive from the World Health Organization to collect clinical data and case forms for coronavirus patients to identify infection trends more quickly.
Expanding Uses of RPA
Some government agencies have turned to bots to help them with onboarding. In this use, RPA can be programmed to verify a candidate's information, fill in and process new-hire forms, transfer that information into HR databases, send required paperwork to new hires, and help provision equipment such as laptops.
HR and IT functions are using automation for such tasks as creating and distributing remote-working agreements for employees, and transforming emergency funding requests from paper to digital formats.
"Many government agencies didn't have work-from-home agreements or support response agreements until COVID‑19 hit," said Steve Witt, director of public sector for Nintex, a Seattle-based automation and process management company. "Many procurement and other processes had been conducted on paper before, where people would sign forms and hand them off to HR or to a manager."
HR functions are also using no-code automation platforms to quickly create digital forms for such tasks as tracking essential employees coming to and leaving work. For example, to track exposure and risk to employees, the forms might sit on a kiosk at a reception desk and request details about where employees have recently traveled.
"If HR needs to quickly build out a digital form, they can do it without requiring support from IT," Witt said. "That's helpful during the COVID crisis because IT is often scrambling to keep up with the technical-support demands of employees now working from home."
Companies are using RPA with popular collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams, and there are concerns that RPA will replace HR or IT jobs after the COVID‑19 crisis begins to recede. Experts say that, to date, the technology more often has replaced tasks, not entire jobs.
"A government employee might have 50 things to do every day but can only get to 40 of them," Walker said. "If you can automate those 10 tasks with bots, you haven't taken a job away but rather helped that worker do his or her job more efficiently."
SOURCE: Zielinski, D. (27 April 2020) "Bots Help Government Tackle COVID-19 Challenges" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/technology/pages/bots-help-government-tackle-covid19-challenges.aspx
5 ways hiring will feel more, not less, human in 2030
The interviewing process, the hiring process, and the process regarding paperwork are becoming easier with the help of technology. Although technology is creating a more efficient way to complete these processes, it may create a dehumanizing feeling. Read this blog post to learn more about keeping the human touch in the hiring process.
While 2030 may feel like something out of science fiction, recruiting will likely look more human than android. Trends such as using artificial intelligence and cloud technology to curate candidate analytics are on the horizon, experts said. But any new technological trend must be paired with a focus on onboarding, upskilling and reskilling current employees to compliment new talent that all require a human touch.
1. Talent acquisition agendas go strategic
EY Partner and the Americas Leader for People Advisory Services Kim Billeter told HR Dive that HR transformation and technology will be the cornerstone of any organizational transformation.
“HR is going to play a far more important role going forward in the overall visualization and disruption of an organization,” Billeter said.
A recruiter’s job — bringing new talent, and retaining and upscaling that talent — will drive the success of business transformation as a whole, not just the HR function, she said. Billeter helps clients understand how digital transformation includes both digital aspects and embracing human beings. A successful transformation will require hiring talent with hybrid skills, or hard and soft skills. In the coming years, Billeter said companies will use both internal and external recruiters in finding talent for specialty areas.
Recruitment will be “done largely by the internal teams and organizations,” but organizations will also incorporate external niche recruiters to find candidates with very specific skills, she said. For example, a company may have a D&I; executive-level position in the slate. To find the right candidate, they may use a specialty recruiting team to really focus on all aspects of the hiring agenda, Billeter explained.
Sourcing upfront to get niche or digital skills will become essential for recruiters. However, a lot of organizations are realizing that hiring talent with advanced or emerging digital skills can be costly, and they can’t hire them fast enough, Billeter said.
“So, we’re seeing more focus on upscaling and rescaling [existing employees] perhaps than just the puristic talent recruiting,” she said. That’s the “real value for organizations,” she added.
2. Curating candidate analytics happens in the cloud
There will be a focus on not only measuring a candidate’s technical skills but a candidate’s ability to align with a company’s culture, Billeter said.
“Quality-level metrics are a little harder to try to define as it relates to recruiting,” she said. But, “we’re seeing clients wanting to get to those candidate pools in a far more qualified way.”
That can be challenging, though.
“If a company’s strategy is in innovation, how can you measure if the candidate brings innovation?” Billeter said. “That’s where a lot of the next level thinking is coming. Curating a lot of that analytical data as it comes to really qualified candidates, and moving them in a very different way than we’ve done before.”
She said the companies that have been the most successful in implementing technology have done the hard work to “both standardize [and] understand the nuances of the processes.” But there aren’t a lot of organizations that know how to effectively utilize talent acquisition solutions or cloud HCM solutions, which provide methods intended to improve operations and cut expenses, Billeter said. Companies such as ADP are working to create a user-friendly workforce analytics platform intelligence to drill into a candidate’s potential.
One feature of ADP’s DataCloud platform is intelligent recruiting, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
“Organizations say they have a hard time sifting through resumes for candidate relevancy,” Imran Ahmed, director of product marketing at ADP DataCloud, told HR Dive.
The new Storyboard feature uses a combination of machine learning and predictive analytics, along with advice based on ADP’s experience in human resources, Ahmed said, comparing it to Google Analytics.
“Storyboard is the exact same scenario where we’re pushing [insight] to the front of the organization,” he said. “We pull all of this information from various sources of data that we put out, and we actually serve up these recommendations to provide guidance.”
The tool can provide a narrative about human resources business challenges, such as the aging workforce, he said. For example, he said you could find out which positions are retirement eligible and what impact the positions have on the organization — low, medium or high.
Companies can also mimic the profiles of talented past employees to curate desired qualifications for a position, he said. “You can drill down so deep in this information to actually find look-alike employees,” Ahmed said.
In regard to choosing and implementing cloud solutions, Billeter said it’s essential to first solidify the goal of an organization’s transformation. It’s also important to keep in mind that it’s a “business-led transformation not an HR function transformation,” she added.
3. An entry-level hire will be the company’s future CEO
Organizations will still put a big emphasis on hiring for a diversity of ideas, which enhances a company’s culture and leads to profitability, according to Terrance S. Lockett, senior diversity program manager of Campus Advisory at Oracle.
“That’s why it’s critical that we get this diverse talent,” Lockett told HR Dive. But, in his opinion, a trend will be more of a focus on inclusion and equity, and “less about the word of diversity, per se.”
Recruiting diverse populations at the collegiate level will remain important as companies move those candidates up the talent pipeline into leadership roles, instead of looking outside of the organization for top executive talent, he added.
Organizations are focusing on the C-suite and “shaking up the board, shaking up the chart.”
“So it’s going to start from campus to recruiting,” Lockett said. “It’s key now that we get those people with potential because that’s going lead to the next wave of focusing on more internal growth of diversity.” According to the results of a survey by Zapier released on Jan. 27, 2020, millennials and Gen Zers want to stay a job for a significant amount of time, defying myths that younger generations tend to be job-hoppers and thus not worth the investment.
In searching for diverse talent, Lockett said Oracle, a multinational computer technology corporation, has partnered with Historically Black Colleges and Universities to find science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) talent, but the company is also focusing on what he referred to as high diversity institutions (HDIs). For example, an HDI could be a college or university in which the engineering program has a high concentration of women students.
Lockett said that at Arizona State University, 40% or more of their engineering students are women.
4. Adjusting to communication styles becomes the norm
Billeter said a focus on enhancing communication styles for recruiters will grow in importance.
“If someone is very analytical, you’re communicating with them much differently than someone who’s on the more emotional side or more communicative,” she explained. “You’ll have to understand how to engage with them to get a more productive conversation.”
Even if a candidate is more analytical and prefers technology to be present in the interviewing process, like the 24/7 ability to ask questions online through chatbots, there still needs to be personal, one-on-one communication, Billeter said.
“It can’t just be only technology-based,” she said. “The human side of this is going to win the day.”
In addition to online conversations or phone calls, Billeter recommended that if a candidate is based in a location outside an organization’s headquarters, a company representative in that location could meet with them. She also said having “a quality candidate pool based on analytics and curating all of the different experience data” will enhance the delivery model, resulting in moving the process forward more quickly.
5. Candidate, employee and customer messaging merge
This year employers will begin to connect the candidate, employee and customer through one, insync company experience. “We’re seeing the employee and the candidate experience needs to meld into the customer experience because often times employees and or candidates are going to become customers,” Billeter said. “You have to be attracting the talent that’s going to drive your overall business strategy, but most importantly your customer strategy.”
She said chief human resources officers will focus on experience strategy first — one that involves both heightened tech and the human touch.
“The medium with which we meet people is going to be a combination of human as well as technology as well as ... living, feeling and seeing the culture of an organization — all of those things have to come together for it to be a good experience,” Billeter said.
No matter what year it is, candidates consider the quality of the recruitment process and their impressions of the recruiters, according to December 2019 survey results from career site Zety.
“If you can’t get the experience part of this equation right, you are probably going to be an unfortunate loser in the talent game,” Billeter said.
SOURCE: Estrada, S. (09 March 2020) "5 ways hiring will feel more, not less, human in 2030" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://www.hrdive.com/news/5-ways-hiring-will-feel-more-not-less-human-in-2030/573153/
Industrywide Initiative Brings Blockchain to HR
Although many HR professionals would think of a blockchain as an obscure element of technology with very little practical application in their jobs, it can protect those who are involved in exchanging data in digital environments. Read this blog post to learn more.
To many human resource professionals, blockchain may sound like an esoteric technology with little practical application in their jobs. But an ambitious initiative called the Velocity Network Foundation (VNF) shows how blockchain has near-term benefits for both recruiters and job seekers. Experts say the project is one of a growing number of uses for blockchain—in talent acquisition, payroll and data security.
Blockchain technology allows two or more people, businesses or computers that may or may not know each other to safely exchange data in digital environments without having an intermediary validate the transaction.
The VNF is a nonprofit consortium of 15 companies in HR technology and education industries. It was formed to reinvent how the career records of job seekers and students are shared in the global labor market. A blockchain-powered platform streamlines the way work history, professional achievements, skills, talent assessments and educational certifications are verified, stored and shared.
Founding members of the VNF are Aon's Assessment Solutions, Cisive, Cornerstone OnDemand, HireRight, Korn Ferry, National Student Clearinghouse, Randstad, SAP, SumTotal Systems, SHL, Ultimate Software, Unit4, Upwork, Velocity Career Labs and ZipRecruiter.
Benefits for Job Seekers, Recruiters
On the VNF platform, job seekers create and own a verifiable digital record of their career credentials and can share it with others. According to a 2019 global study from Accenture, more than 70 percent of 10,000 surveyed employees said they want to own their work-related data and take it with them when they leave their jobs—and nearly half (48 percent) of C-level executives were open to allowing them to do so.
Experts say portable work records help recruiting teams. Recruiters get easier access to an all-in-one digital collection of employment history and can evaluate candidates more quickly.
Yvette Cameron is co-founder and executive vice president of Velocity Career Labs, a developer of blockchain technology that helped establish the VNF. Cameron said the foundation is initially focused on building a platform that serves as a "public utility layer." The project's second phase will enable network members to build and integrate applications that facilitate the exchange of credentials between job seekers or students and employers and educational institutions. Being open and transparent about the process is key to the foundation's success, she said.
"We wanted to include members from across the industry to solve the challenge of how career records are shared in the labor market because we believed no single vendor or organization could address it," Cameron said. "Taking an industrywide approach means the VNF will be owned by nobody and governed by everybody."
Debasis Dutta, vice president and general manager of product management for vendor SumTotal Systems in Gainesville, Fla., said the network will benefit job seekers and recruiters alike. In a labor market where verifiable skills are increasingly in demand and the relevance of college degrees is shrinking, Dutta said employers need quick, secure access to a job-seeker's skills.
"We're leveraging blockchain to address the problem of job candidates or employees owning their own verifiable career credentials and making the process of checking employment history and skills more efficient for recruiters," Dutta said.
Cameron said blockchain means job candidates no longer have to be at the mercy of their employers' systems to get quick access to information about their work histories. "The goal is to put people back in control of their digital professional credentials in a trusted and verifiable way and fix the underlying data exchange problem we have in the labor market," she said.
Apratim Purakayastha, chief technology officer with the Skillsoft group (which owns SumTotal Systems), said blockchain-inspired approaches like the VNF also can help when creating internal project teams. "Organizations that are constantly bidding for projects often have to assemble project teams with the right skills, and prospective clients want to see proof of those skills," he said. "If verified career credentials can be quickly shared with clients through blockchain, it improves the chance of success in those projects."
Blockchain Gains Traction in HR
HR's use of blockchain is growing incrementally. Research and advisory firm Gartner found that 12 percent of 500 surveyed HR and technology leaders are using blockchain-based solutions in their HR function today and another 23 percent are experimenting with the technology in their area of responsibility. Of the latter group, half are running blockchain-inspired pilot projects in their HR function, the study found.
Matthias Graf, a senior director analyst in Gartner's HR practice, said the top three HR process areas where study respondents reported using or piloting blockchain are in HR analytics and reporting, policies and governance, and workforce planning. But Graf also noted an important distinction between "adoption" and "maturity levels" of the technology within human resources.
"If you take a closer look at where blockchain solutions are most advanced in HR, the picture differs," he said. "The most mature applications can be found in the areas of compensation and benefits, recruiting and employee relations, and labor law."
An example is paying gig workers. Blockchain solutions can facilitate real-time payments, the Gartner study found, bypassing intermediaries like payroll aggregators or banks. Blockchain can make it easier to employ and pay workers in far-flung locations around the globe where the payment infrastructure may be limited, as well as make it more efficient to verify the identity and experience of such workers.
Chris Havrilla, vice president of HR technology and solution provider research for Bersin, Deloitte Consulting in Atlanta, said using blockchain for instant pay can expand access to gig talent and make contract jobs more attractive to top candidates.
Blockchain and Data Privacy Regulations
Companies considering using blockchain often wonder how it aligns with data privacy regulations like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Gartner's study found 40 percent of respondents cited "data security and privacy concerns" as their top worry about using blockchain, followed by 31 percent who cited "integrating blockchain technology with existing technology architectures."
Cameron said no proprietary data or personally identifiable information from users will be stored on the VNF blockchain platform. "Depending on the approach that's taken with blockchain, you can be 100 percent compliant with GDPR," she said. "In our approach, career credentials are owned by the individual and stored privately in a trusted way on their own devices. You decide as a job candidate or student who gets access to those credentials, when and for how long."
SOURCE: Zielinski, D. (27 February 2020) "Industrywide Initiative Brings Blockchain to HR" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/technology/Pages/Industrywide-Initiative-Brings-Blockchain-HR.aspx
Employees are fearful of being replaced by automation
Technological advances are starting to scare employees regarding job security. Although automation is creating a scare, companies are using technology to transform and improve productivity within their organization. Read this blog post to learn more regarding the benefits of automation technology in the workplace.
Automation is transforming businesses and directly impacting bottom lines as a result of improved productivity. But it also raises employees’ concerns about their job security, according to a new study by research firm Forrester and UiPath, a robotic process automation (RPA) software company.
Some 41% of companies say their employees are concerned that their existing digital skills may not match what their job will require in the future, the study finds. However, by training employees, providing them vocational courses, or encouraging them to pursue digital qualifications, companies can help them to overcome fears around automation and embrace it as a productivity-boosting asset.
“We need programs that not only train you to be a better employee at an institution, but advances your digital skills as well,” said Craig Le Clair, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, speaking during a recent webinar. “We need a new form of education and training that can keep pace with the technology, particularly due to automation.”
Companies having their own training programs at work — trying to mimic the kind of experience that you have in traditional education — is a legitimate and important development, because traditional education cannot keep pace with what's going on, Le Clair said.
Companies are increasingly investing in automation — including technology like AI and RPA — and is now the driver of most organizations’ digital transformation strategies. For 66% of companies in the study, RPA software spend is going to increase by at least 5% over the next 12 months. Forrester predicts that the RPA services market will reach $7.7 billion, and eventually balloon to $12 billion by 2023.
The dynamics of the labor market, technical feasibility, and acceptance of the more advanced AI building blocks like deep learning and conversational intelligence are just some of the factors that will determine the pace of workforce automation.
Automation can not only benefit employers, but also employees. Automating repetitive, rule-based tasks enables employees to focus on higher-value activities that require advanced skills and improves employee engagement. The study found that a 5% improvement in employee engagement leads to a 3% increase in revenue, indicating that more engaged employees means higher growth.
“Organizations can view the future of work as a competency, as something that they have a view on and has a distinguishing approach to,” Le Clair said. “This is going to help with recruiting and retention, and help [companies] deal with these transformations that are occurring. It can change the way you serve customers for the better. You can get more of your humans working on the thing that humans do the best, which is carrying on conversations with other humans. [Automation helps you] extract that labor value and move it into the right places.”
SOURCE: Nedlund, E. (12 February 2020) "Employees are fearful of being replaced by automation" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://www.benefitnews.com/news/employees-are-fearful-of-being-replaced-by-automation
Data-Driven Decisions Start with These 4 Questions
With data being considered the new oil, unique advantages are being brought into the business world. Properly using data can result in unimaginable possibilities, but to get the correct answers the right questions must be asked. Read this blog post to learn more about how data is introducing optimized operations and new possibilities with the help of new questions being asked.
Data has become central to how we run our businesses today. In fact, the global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC) projects spending on data and analytics to reach $274.3 billion by 2022. However, much of that money is not being spent wisely. Gartner analyst Nick Heudecker has estimated that as many as 85% of big data projects fail.
A big part of the problem is that numbers that show up on a computer screen take on a special air of authority. Once data are pulled in through massive databases and analyzed through complex analytics software, we rarely ask where it came from, how it’s been modified, or whether it’s fit for the purpose intended.
The truth is that to get useful answers from data, we can’t just take it at face value. We need to learn how to ask thoughtful questions. In particular, we need to know how it was sourced, what models were used to analyze it, and what was left out. Most of all, we need to go beyond using data simply to optimize operations and leverage it to imagine new possibilities.
We can start by asking:
How was the data sourced?
Data, it’s been said, is the plural of anecdote. Real-world events, such as transactions, diagnostics, and other relevant information, are recorded and stored in massive server farms. Yet few bother to ask where the data came from, and unfortunately, the quality and care with which data is gathered can vary widely. In fact, a Gartner study recently found that firms lose an average of $15 million per year due to poor data quality.
Often data is subject to human error, such as when poorly paid and unmotivated retail clerks perform inventory checks. However, even when the data collection process is automated, there are significant sources of error, such as intermittent power outages in cellphone towers or mistakes in the clearing process for financial transactions.
Data that is of poor quality or used in the wrong context can be worse than no data at all. In fact, one study found that 65% of a retailer’s inventory data was inaccurate. Another concern, which has become increasingly important since the EU passed stringent GDPR data standards is whether there was proper consent when the data was collected.
So don’t just assume the data you have is accurate and of good quality. You have to ask where it was sourced from and how it’s been maintained. Increasingly, we need to audit our data transactions with as much care as we do our financial transactions.
How was it analyzed?
Even if data is accurate and well maintained, the quality of analytic models can vary widely. Often models are pulled together from open-source platforms, such as GitHub, and repurposed for a particular task. Before long, everybody forgets where it came from or how it is evaluating a particular data set.
Lapses like these are more common than you’d think and can cause serious damage. Consider the case of two prominent economists who published a working paper that warned that U.S. debt was approaching a critical level. Their work caused a political firestorm but, as it turned out, they had made a simple Excel error that caused them to overstate the effect that debt had on GDP.
As models become more sophisticated and incorporate more sources, we’re also increasingly seeing bigger problems with how models are trained. One of the most common errors is overfitting, which basically means that the more variables you use to create a model, the harder it gets to make it generally valid. In some cases, excess data can result in data leakage, in which training data gets mixed with testing data.
These types of errors can plague even the most sophisticated firms. Amazon and Google, just to name two of the most prominent cases, have recently had highly publicized scandals related to model bias. As we do with data, we need to constantly be asking hard questions of our models. Are they suited to the purpose we’re using them for? Are they taking the right factors into account? Does the output truly reflect what’s going on in the real world?
What doesn’t the data tell us?
Data models, just like humans, tend to base judgments on the information that is most available. Sometimes, the data you don’t have can affect your decision making as much as the data you do have. We commonly associate this type of availability bias with human decisions, but often human designers pass it on to automated systems.
For instance, in the financial industry, those who have extensive credit histories can access credit much easier than those who don’t. The latter, often referred to as “thin-file” clients, can find it difficult to buy a car, rent an apartment, or get a credit card. (One of us, Greg, experienced this problem personally when he returned to the U.S. after 15 years overseas).
Yet a thin file doesn’t necessarily indicate a poor credit risk. Firms often end up turning away potentially profitable customers simply because they lack data on them. Experian recently began to address this problem with its Boost program, which allows consumers to raise their scores by giving them credit for things like regular telecom and utility payments. To date, millions have signed up.
So it’s important to ask hard questions about what your data model might be missing. If you are managing what you measure, you need to ensure that what you are measuring reflects the real world, not just the data that’s easiest to collect.
How can we use data to redesign products and business models?
Over the past decade, we’ve learned how data can help us run our businesses more efficiently. Using data intelligently allows us to automate processes, predict when our machines need maintenance, and serve our customers better. It’s data that enables Amazon to offer same-day shipping.
Data can also become an important part of the product itself. To take one famous example, Netflix has long used smart data analytics to create better programming for less money. This has given the company an important edge over rivals like Disney and WarnerMedia.
Yet where it gets really exciting is when you can use data to completely re-imagine your business. At Experian, where Eric works, they’ve been able to leverage the cloud to shift from only delivering processed data in the form of credit reports to a service that offers its customers real-time access to more granular data that the reports are based on. That may seem like a subtle shift, but it’s become one of the fastest-growing parts of Experian’s business.
It’s been said that data is the new oil, but it’s far more valuable than that. We need to start treating data as more than a passive asset class. If used wisely, it can offer a true competitive edge and take a business in completely new directions. To achieve that, however, you can’t start merely looking for answers. You have to learn how to ask new questions.
SOURCE: Haller, E.; Satell, G. (11 February 2020) "Data-Driven Decisions Start with These 4 Questions" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2020/02/data-driven-decisions-start-with-these-4-questions
How Next-Gen Technology Can Keep HR Data Safe
In 2018, the FBI reported having 350,000 complaints of internet crimes, which is a rise of 23 percent over five years. With an increase in internet crimes, HR departments are turning to security approaches that are powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Read this blog post to learn more about how artificial intelligence is helping companies with cybersecurity.
As hackers grow ever-more inventive and data privacy laws are enacted around the globe, HR leaders are faced with the challenge of protecting and storing sensitive HR data but not curtailing employees' ability to use that data to make timely workforce decisions.
But there may not be enough cybersecurity colleagues to call upon for advice and technical assistance, which compounds those challenges. Approximately 65 percent of companies reported a cybersecurity staff shortage last year, according to the 2019 Cybersecurity Workforce Study conducted by (ISC)2, an international nonprofit association for IT professionals. As a result, more companies are turning to security strategies that don't require human intervention, such as cybersecurity powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that can proactively monitor and neutralize new kinds of cyberthreats.
New Strategies for More-Sophisticated Attacks
Research suggests that concerns over data security are occupying more of HR leaders' time and resources. The 2019-2020 Sierra-Cedar HR Systems Survey found a 17 percent increase from the prior year's survey in the number of respondents deploying cybersecurity strategies, with 70 percent of HR organizations reporting they have and regularly update such a strategy. That's good news, because the FBI reported receiving 350,000 complaints of Internet crimes in 2018, a rise of 23 percent over five years. Those crimes caused an estimated $2.7 billion in financial losses.
Security experts say the loss of sensitive data like payroll information, Social Security numbers and notes from internal investigations or employee assessments has implications far beyond the HR department.
"When HR systems are breached, it goes beyond the personal data stolen, because HR is central to so many processes across the organization," said Corey Williams, vice president of marketing and strategy at Idaptive, a cybersecurity firm in Santa Clara, Calif. "HR systems are the starting point for much of the access employees have throughout the organization. HR data doesn't sit on an island like other data, and when you have vulnerabilities at the HR level, you're exposing the entire enterprise to wider attacks."
AI-powered security tools represent a new approach to combating threats to HR data. While not a cure-all, these technologies can protect against malicious attacks driven by automated malware and have capabilities, such as pattern recognition, that can identify suspicious behavior and block potential problems or threatening online traffic in real time.
To protect against insider threats, whether malicious or from workers not following sound security practices, some AI-based cybersecurity tools can be trained to learn employees' behaviors when using corporate networks. Research shows that such threats are a growing problem. Insiders caused 48 percent of reported data breaches in organizations in 2019, according to a recent benchmark study from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, up from 26 percent of total data breaches in 2015.
More companies are adopting "zero trust" policies that feature a "never trust, always verify" approach to network access or identity authentication and employ tools like multifactor authentication (MFA). MFA is a way to confirm user identities through at least two different factors. In the last year, according to the Sierra-Cedar survey, large organizations increased their use of MFA by 20 percent, and approximately 55 percent of small organizations reported using MFA for HR applications.
Williams said stolen or weak user credentials is still the top cause of data breaches in organizations. "We've seen growing sophistication in the way passwords and credentials get stolen," Williams said. "That includes malware, hackers writing more convincing phishing e-mails that get employees to click on harmful links and other approaches. Companies have found that depending on passwords alone for access is becoming untenable."
Balancing Security with the User Experience
HR leaders have to strike a balance between taking the right data-security measures and ensuring employees can still use HR networks and software in efficient and user-friendly ways—a balance that ideally won't make the workforce feel excessively monitored or handcuffed when using technology.
"Security is often viewed as a teeter-totter, where you are either increasing data security or you are improving the user experience with technology," Williams said. "But it doesn't have to be an either-or scenario."
For example, employees who typically access the same corporate networks or applications in the same fashion likely don't need additional security oversight, but someone accessing that same system from a country he's never been to before and with a different device would need more controls.
"We're seeing more innovation in applying security tools to separate high-risk from low-risk system access," Williams said.
HR leaders also can help enhance security by encouraging their companies to re-evaluate user access policies, experts say. "As people work for a long time in companies, they tend to accumulate access to systems, and that access doesn't necessarily get taken away as they move up or around a company," Williams said. "Employees are often 'over-provisioned' in terms of their access to sensitive data in systems, which can create increased vulnerability for companies." Automated processes tied to the life cycle management of employees can ensure system access is changed or removed as people change roles in a company, he said.
James Graham-Cumming, chief technology officer for Cloudflare, a cybersecurity company in San Francisco, said being more judicious in granting data access is a wise but sometimes overlooked security strategy. "It's not uncommon for CEOs or other senior leaders in a company to have access to all or most corporate systems because they simply feel a need for that access," Graham-Cumming said. "Yet these are more-visible or even public figures who are often targets for hacking. The reality is your C-suite or vice presidents may not need access to all of your systems."
Managing Vendor Risk
Data security and privacy threats can grow as HR functions add more technology platforms to their ecosystems and create more integrations with third-party providers. A recent study by research and advisory firm Gartner found that because human capital management systems are built to integrate with many third-party services—such as LinkedIn, for example—those integrations can expose organizations to risk through "misconfigurations" that result in unintentional data leakage. Depending on the level of integration, problems with security in vendor systems can open the door for attackers, the Gartner study found, as was the case with the retailer Target in 2014.
Security experts say HR leaders should ensure vendors have best-practice data security and privacy protocols in place, such as MFA, in addition to passing an external Service Organization Control, or SOC, 2 audit, which confirms they're in compliance with recommended practices for data security, processing integrity, ensuring privacy and more.
Jared Lucas, chief people officer with the cybersecurity firm MobileIron in San Francisco, said security-related employee training also is more important than ever as malware grows more sophisticated, phishing attacks increase and bad actors use AI-powered methods to hack corporate systems.
"Effective, regularly updated training in what to look for and what to be wary of can close a lot of holes in a company's data security strategy," Lucas said.
SOURCE: Zielinski, D. (10 February 2020) "How Next-Gen Technology Can Keep HR Data Safe" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/technology/pages/next-gen-technology-can-keep-hr-data-safe.aspx
Organizations Will Need Data Analytics to Survive
Did you know: the use of data analytics can improve a company's overall performance. Data analytics can differentiate those companies that are going to be disrupted. Implementing technology is simple, but it is HR's responsibility for managing the technological change. Read this blog post to learn more about why data analytics is becoming a need for organizations.
SEATTLE—HR professionals play a critical role in getting their organizations to use data and analytics strategically to compete more effectively.
Jack Phillips, CEO and co-founder of the Portland, Ore.-based International Institute for Analytics, a research and benchmarking services firm for the analytics industry, urged attendees at the Society for Human Resource Management People Analytics conference on Jan. 14 to get focused on data.
"It's proven that the use of data analytics improves overall company performance," he said. "Organizations invest in many things, but budget dedicated to data and analytics is limited. It needs to be a top priority. The broad use of data and analytics will differentiate the companies [from those] that eventually are disrupted and disappear from the survivors."
And HR is key to the success of winning with data, from sourcing the necessary talent and applying analytics to HR functions to leading change management when adopting a data-driven mindset across the organization.
Implementing the technology is the easy part, Phillips said. Getting your workforce to truly adopt data analytics across the organization is harder. Ultimately HR is responsible for managing that transformational change.
Data Analytics Overview
The data analytics market is in full growth mode, accelerated by the explosion of cloud computing. The technology environment is moving so quickly that it is very hard to keep track of the increasing array and complexity of analytics technology available, Phillips said. But the top-performing companies are investing heavily in data analytics.
"If you are not paying attention through expenditure and [acquisition of] talent you will be behind," he said.
Phillips outlined a maturity model showing the sophistication levels of an organization's approach to analytics. Employers aiming to improve their data analytics function first need to assess where they currently are. Phillips' model includes those at the bottom stages who don't use any data to make business decisions and companies where data analytics may exist in silos without a structure for collaborating across business units.
Most employers likely exist in one of these stages, while many enterprise-level organizations are in the higher aspirational stages where the value of analytics is expressed, or they are data-oriented and use analytics with some internal coordination.
"Only one company we've studied [Amazon] has achieved near perfection as a data-driven company," Phillips said. "You don't come to a meeting without data [at Amazon]. No gut-based decision-making is allowed. Everything is driven by data."
Succeeding with Data
According to Phillips, the key ingredients needed to achieve higher levels of maturity as a data-driven organization include:
- People with data analytics skills.
- Organizational structure, processes and technologies in place for those people.
- Use of the data. "The highest performing companies have superior capabilities on the supply side and business leaders who use the insights that the data analytics teams are providing to drive the business forward," he said.
Another model he presented breaks down the elements that must be in alignment for companies to succeed with their analytics initiatives. "Without alignment, organizations run the risk of poor or limited results," he said. "To make real progress and become a data-driven organization, the capabilities and assets of these five elements must evolve and mature." The five elements are:
Data. It may seem obvious, but to provide meaningful analytics, data must be high quality, organized, reliable, integrated, and accessible. The raw material must be right.
Coordination. Companies must advocate a single and consistent perspective for analytics across the organization.
Leadership. Senior leadership should fully embrace analytics and lead company culture toward data-driven decision-making.
Targets. The organization should prioritize business targets against which it will apply its analytics. "Data and analytics without a targeted reason for it is worthless," he said.
Talent. Organizations require analytical talent that covers a range of skills from accomplished data scientists to rank-and-file employees who embrace being more analytical in how they do their job.
Employers must also understand rapidly emerging analytical techniques and technologies, Phillips said. The widespread adoption of open source tools has resulted in an explosion of analytical methods and techniques, and with the advent of big data, machine learning and cloud computing, creating an effective technology strategy for analytics is a critical ingredient for success.
HR's Role
Human resource professionals play an important part in getting their organizations up to speed and competitive with analytics, including sourcing the right qualified talent—a difficult task in a labor market lacking the requisite skills—and investing in data analytics for its own functions.
"HR lags behind other business functions when it comes to using data analytics," Phillips said. "Sales, marketing and finance tend to outpace other parts of the business."
HR should be assertive with leadership when advising on budget and staffing for data analytics positions and in creating and managing a workplace culture that values innovation.
"The top performing companies treat their data analytics function as a product, with design thinking and intentional product management," Phillips said.
One positive for employers who may be overwhelmed by implementing a data analytics function is that best practices are easily transferable. "There are many things that you can just copy," he said.
SOURCE: Maurer, R. (15 January 2020) "Organizations Will Need Data Analytics to Survive" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/technology/pages/organizations-will-need-data-analytics-to-survive.aspx