Steve Boese on the My Future of Work Podcast with Al Adamsen

hi welcome back in today's discussion I had the great pleasure of talking with Steve Bose Steve as you likely know is the chair of the HR technology conference he's also the president of H3 HR advisors and he's a longtime podcaster among other podcasts he hosts HR happy hour with trist it was super fun talking with Steve he shared a bit about his past what he thinks about the world of HR Tech and the role of generative Ai and he also so shared his perspective and ideas uh in response to my rapid fire questions at the end and suffices to say we are aligned on many fronts so again thank you for being here and please check out our new website that's myfo w.net that stands for my future of work we have a host of resources that you can use to learn more about the future of work and how individuals teams groups and organizations can prepare more consciously and effectively so again thank you for being here and enjoy hi welcome back I'm here with my longtime friend and colleague Steve Bose who's also happens to be the chair of the HR technology conference Steve how you doing Al I'm well thank you so much for having me this is a lot of fun I'm excited to talk to you and I don't know about everyone else listening to this I don't know where I am what city I'm in what's going on next I just got home I got home at 1:30 in the morning last night from an event and uh I had an 8:00 call this morning about another event so yeah it's we're in full swing right now it's first word problems certainly but yeah it's going crazy right now you got a A little gathering a little event coming up so I imagine you're you know preparing for that as am I as are hundreds actually thousands of people so we'll definitely talk about that but before we get into that I want to hear your story as do our listeners you know what you're working on now not only with the HR Tech conference but also in your own Consulting practi and finally talk about the future of work future of hrtech work Tech would' love to get your perspectives and ideas but before we get started you where are you now yeah I'm in Illinois Southern Illinois as we speak and we have our company's H3 HR advisors my partners Trish Ste also Karen Ste works with us as well and Trish and I have been working together a really long time so folks might know us from a lot of the media that we've done over the years so I feel pretty this is like a testament to how old I am now I hate to bring up that fact honestly but we created something called the HR happy hour show back in 2009 and it was so long ago it's now a podcast right which is what we're recording today but it was so long ago this thing that we did which was essentially a podcast I didn't even call it a podcast and I'm not sure even knew that term really all that well in 2009 so folks might know us from that and we've certainly expanded that the media that we do over the years into a network of podcasts and some video shows that we do and some other things but we also do a lot of advisory work in the HR technology Community both on product strategy Market strategy goom Market strategies and certainly content creation among other things and and it's awesome it's fun we get to work with some of the most Innovative companies in this market it's as Al and folks listening to this this Market has exploded over the last 15 years or so right since say the birth of HR happy hour which is almost 15 years ago just in its size level the amount of innovation the level of investment right our friend George Lorac tracks this really closely right all the the billions literally B billion dollars with a B billions that's come into this Market over the last decade or so so it's a dynamic Market it's it's a fun market and I I'll say this out the reason why I like it the reason why I was drawn to it and remain excited about it was from how I got into it I'll tell a real quick story if it's okay with you I came up in Finance and Accounting right as boring as it gets but important right to corporations and organizations as Finance and Accounting guy and I made that subtle move into it Enterprise it right Erp kinds of things right so big Erp systems doing Finance doing procurement procure to pay ordered a cash right all those kinds of things and I had a really great client who I had worked on for a long time undoing procure to pay and I got to tell you bless them but the people who work on accounts payable and accounts payable systems it's not the most exciting thing and it's not the most impactful thing and this particular client was moving from phase one and two which is finance and procurement and procure to pay and all that stuff to HR and payroll that was going to be phase three and four of this big Erp project and we had such a great uh relationship they said we'd love you to stay along right stay on board and help us Implement these HR and payroll systems I didn't know anything about them and I told them that I said I don't know HR and payroll systems I've never done them and they said that's okay our business now you'll we'll all learn together how to do it there were the best client ever in the world that let me the consultant right learn about HRM payroll and then one of the first projects I did there was actually benefits and we did open enrollment online and it was the first time this organization never done it right for their annual open enrollment process to do it online and it was tricky the technology wasn't that awesome quite frankly it was a while ago now but when we got to the individual people in the organization the users or who were the employees right everybody had an open enroll right it was a positive enrollment happened to be and you sat with them and you went I went to workshops and I sat with them one onone literally individually right I must have helped hundred people that first year like enrolling their benefits just me and that person right at a p and you look saw it in their eyes just how important it was to them that their benefits were correct they picked the right medical plan that their family members were covered appropriately that they had signed up for the correct amount of like disability insurance or life insurance for their particular needs and and their situation and how meaningful it was in the real world I'm going talking about at work really right and you didn't get that I never got that from accounting and find and payables and procurement and that was it that was really the hug for me at these Technologies actually have impact and real meaning in people's lives and in the lives of their family members to some extent right in HR and payroll and benefits and things like that so I was hooks I love the technology of course I was became a tech guy but these Technologies in particular that really have a role to play in the well-being Financial well-being emotional well-being professional well-being and develop all the things right I love it I love this space I love the market and I've been fortunate enough for the last 15 years or so to get to do a lot of really fun thing so I apologize for the very long answer Al and listeners as well but I think if you're going to be in Enterprise technology for me it could this is the place to be yeah quite the contrary I never have to apologize particularly for number one it's a very virtuous perspective and stance that you are acknowledging our discipline has and I think it's often times lost to your points oh it's only comp it's only benefits it's only this getting paid promptly is a big deal about to you an adjective in there which would be inappropriate for this this show but you get the idea is that your appreciation speaks to me and certainly speaks to our listeners because we need more people to appreciate the value that not only what we're delivering but the risk of not doing it well and not only does it relate to comp and Ben it relates to everything throughout the employee experience which of course we can talk about when we talk about the evolution of the space but before we go further when you tell that story what year are we talking about Russ so the benefits open enrollment story would have been oh great question I would say probably an 0809 time frame probably that was going on maybe into 2010 early 2010 or something like that it was very typical story that many of the folks who are HR technology uh maybe managers or directors or implementers Consultants would have been familiar with right we're taking an organization from a previous manual paper based process and we're going to automate slash digitize it for the very first time and and so I this particular organization in this particular example was annual benefits open enrollment which was the classic forms brought to the HR department and now was going to to be an online thing and we had it was really the nent years in this particular organization of any kind of uh employee access direct access to their own information in the HR System it's again you we talk about it dates us a little bit about our age but I think with age you get a little bit of perspective right and so you do recall a time right in organizations where looking up I'm holding up my phone for folks who are just listening to the audio looking up your pay slip on your phone was just simply not possible it was not a thing that you could do a very it's a relatively recent development in in Enterprise technology and in HR technology yeah it was in that time period and yeah it was something but the benefits in particular that you can make this you can have this conversation in compensation you can have this conversation in development in succession planning these Technologies help organizations manage their operations manage their businesses serve their customers these Technologies also help people manage their lives right and they have just the amount of impact that they can have especially if done well is quite quite profound and still I tell that I've told that story a number of times but because it resonated with me so much and it still does honestly I want to stick with that time frame because correct me if I'm wrong you said earlier that's roughly the time that you started HR happy hour yeah and so how did that come about yeah that's a funny story as well but by accident like I suppose with a lot of our career arcs right we've had all probably had multiple twists and turns to get us to where we're at right now I was I was working I had I had them met as a client and I I worked for a time at a college in uh Upstate New York Western New York to be more specific and um this college had a graduate degree program in human resource development and they really it was a great program they were covering all the D topics and management topics leadership topics and the various things that that go into I should know all of them I I don't but they they we're the person who is the professor who's the department chair recognized that hey technology is increasingly becoming an important skill set an an expertise uh a requirement for that kind of expertise that HR leaders today and this is again back in 0809 time frame then and even certainly going forward right and she was right we see now in 2023 but HR leaders going forward really need to have a little bit more Acumen around right not just business Acumen which was in Vogue back then right everybody was telling HR people to go get an MBA like everybody in the world was telling HR go get MBA that that was the advice for at least five years maybe more but what's happening in technology Cloud technology was really just starting really starting to catch on in the HR space and certainly the recruiting space and so she approached me because I was running the HR technology inous for this college and she approached me I didn't even know her and she said we want to present a class we want to create a class and offer it in our our master's program in hrd around HR technology will you create this class and teach it and because I wasn't I was so dumb it sounded interesting and exciting to me I said sure I'll do that easy not realizing how hard it would be just because at least back then and it's better now much better now but back then in ' 08 or so or maybe even 07 when I started down this path it probably took me about a year to get it going um there was no textbook really I couldn't find one I found one that was like human resource Information Systems volume three It Was Written in the early 90s maybe or something like that I don't know I couldn't find anything right and maybe I didn't know where to look even right and I said about trying to create content for this course and trying to provide assets and resources for the students like re BAS entally a reading list if you will and so one of the ideas I came up with was why don't I find and connect with experts like yourself people working at the providers or maybe other professors anybody I could think of other HR leaders and I'll record inter interview them and I'll record the interviews and I'll have the students listen to them I was just grasping like for ideas of what to do for content and then so that I said okay I'll do that but then I didn't have any way I was so dumb I didn't really I was just in my office in Western New York I couldn't was going to get on a plane to fly to Silicon Valley or New York City or anywhere else I had to figure out how to record these interviews remotely and so I found this platform which I still use today like all these years later that allowed me to record the interviews like basically a radio show and uh that became the podcast so it was literally just a mechanism for me to record interviews that I was going to use for this class I was teaching in in Human Resources development and sometime after that uh a small but pretty vibrant network of people were who had embraced social media pretty actively but it's social media for work really and for professional development mainly on Twitter back then so this is 809 time frame Twitter was really vibrant HR Twitter was pretty new but growing and the blogging Community was pretty vibrant back then as well I had an HR blog that I started around the same time and we turned that little exercise into basically an online radio show if you will that streamed on blog radio which is still there today I don't do them live anymore but we used to go we used to do them live and stream them Audio Only on Thursday nights at 8 o'clock at night eastern time so since the show was on at night it was the whole idea was get a cocktail or whatever it is you like to do in the evening it's called HR happy hour and we'll hang out for an hour and talk about HR and HR Tech and the world of work and we had guests we had callers and all of those things so we started it back then and it caught on it became fairly popular there we had the advantage of being first movers there really wasn't was one other guy doing a recruiting podcast back then and it was us right and now there's lots right which is great but we started it back then and we've evolved over the years and we've done a lot of things and I think I don't know how many shows we've done on the HR happy hour but on the network we have a network of shows and we have some other folks who publish titles on our Network we're probably at 700 shows or something like that at this point since 2009 so it's loads of fun we just recorded one yesterday y as a matter of fact we were out at Oracle Cloud world is where I was and we sat down with some of the execs from Oracle and recorded So it it's a fun project and we still like doing it fantastic thank you for sharing I love the story behind it and love to hear more about it in the future maybe next month there in Vegas so yeah what we talk about Vegas and the future and all those things will you take us back where did you grow up what did you study any experiences that you had when you were a young person that inspired you to get into finance and turn you HR again where did you grow up yeah it's great I haven't talked about this stuff in ages so I appreciate you asking about it Al I grew up in New Jersey and central New Jersey so it was like I suppose commuter Community to New York City although it was a pretty busy area in its own right but a 30 minute train right away from Manhattan from Penn Station which was fun right especially as a 15 16 year old to get get with your buddies and get on the train to New York and think you were like really like a big shot but I grew up in New Jersey and I think how I got into Finance was majored it in college but I was I'm of that age for sure and maybe parents still do this although I did not do this with my child I I'll say this but maybe parents still do this and it was more like you need to pick a major in school that's going to give you the best employment opportunities or prospects right once you graduate and certainly my dad it was primarily coached me hard into majoring in accounting or Finance whatever I ended up it wasn't accounting technically it was just business finance but that was it I just fell into that too I was like I was a dumb kid right I didn't know and I didn't have any particular calling into the Arts or to a particular science right I didn't nor did I have any special skills so I think it sounded good enough to me to go that route and when I left College when I graduated I went right into the corporate world and my first real job corporate job was a AT&T which is still around but it was a different AT&T back then it was not quite the Monopoly AT&T of your but it was still close for folks who care about this or remember AT&T went through two really big divestures right in their corporate Arc the first one was when all the the regional phone companies is what they were called they were called region Regional Bell operating companies I thought remember the term were spun off by the the government forced AT&T to spin those off so that became your Southern bell which is Bell South and Pacific Bell and Bell Atlantic which now all have different names but at the time those were all divested from AT&T and then a few years later the manufacturing uh a big piece of the manufacturing part of AT&T was spun off into a company which was initially named Lucent Technologies which became Alcatel Lucent and then now I think it's owned by Nokia the part of AT&T I worked for was that part the equipment part of AT&T M equipment manufacturing so think about we were the the part of the company that made the equipment that made things like international calls possible longdistance calls possible even connecting local calls all the if you went to a local phone company anywhere in America honestly almost everywhere in the world but anywhere in America certainly the building was full of AT&T networking equipment and phone switching equipment and that was the part of AT&T I worked in and uh was was like a finance guy there and so uh it was fun but I I much more preferred getting into the IT side which I did shortly thereafter and then work my way into HR technology as I talked a couple of minutes ago tell us about it so you went from Finance to it was that something that you nurtured yourself based on your interest or you were you placed there kindy a little bit it's funny because the technology is so ancient as I think back upon it now because I'm old but much like we hear often in workplaces today right there's this kind of I don't know it I don't know if it's myth but it's largely true right we always talk about oh that next Generation they're they Embrace technology faster they pick it up faster they live with it etc etc they're they warm up to it faster and the older folks no matter what the technology is or what era we're in they're they're slower to adjust and so when I first started in my career AT&T I was just like that I was 22 years old and we had technology that we used right to do the accounting and do the finance and create the reports and create the management presentations Etc and even back then new technology was changing and getting better and advancing and so we I think I learned how to make pie charts on a very early version of PowerPoint or something like that and so we at 22 and 23 you don't care you just want learn new things and I showed some ability or capability using the technology that we had on hand at the time both for creating Financial reports and doing presentations and all the things that were very technical and honestly some of the folks more experiened folks on these teams just weren't either excited to embrace or didn't quite grab on to them as quickly and I was really lucky to have uh a person in our management hierarchy wasn't even my boss he was probably my boss's boss maybe he was a couple levels above us but he was a younger guy himself honestly and didn't care so much about the hierarchy or the seniority which was rare for AT&T and certainly back then he recognized myself and a couple of other folks who are new on the team really took a shine to some of these Technologies and in innovating trying to come up with but race to do things and just kept giving us good assignments oh let's do this oh I've got a big meeting with the big CFO make me these make me a presentation that has blah blah blah and and so we kept getting these really good assignments and a couple of years later AT&T at the time won at the time I don't remember the number let's call it1 billion doar a huge contract to basically build the first cellular phone network in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia they didn't have one cello technology was pretty new right I I didn't have a cell phone myself at the time and so when this contract was one though the sleepy little office in Riad Saudi Arabia which might have had half a dozen people in it all of a sudden had to support a 10 billion doar seven-year contract to basically build right mobile technology as it existed at the time this is like the mid 90s in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia they had to send people there and one of the things that had to be done once we got there and I I did go and one of the things that had to be done when we got there was set of the Enterprise accounting systems Human Resources systems and payroll systems we had to basically do all the it work so that we could support I don't know 10x hiring needs we went from they went from 10 people working in Saudi Arabia to a thousand probably like in six months and just paying all the bills and getting everybody paid and organizing it all and so we had to implement and we did a really big Enterprise resour Erp system implementation in the Ken and it took a year or something like that and I spent another year there as well like just doing other things and helping maintain it and so on and so forth and that's what took me from accounting Finance though into it was this big massive put in an Erp system for the to support this country project that we had in Saudi Arabia I I want to ask you more about that but before I do you said something about the nature of your work changing and your willingness and ability to embrace that new way of working and that served you well in terms of getting that opportunity which in turn Advanced your career correct me if I'm wrong I it's just too tempting not to jump onto that theme and ask you about how AI parallels what you just described as a pie chart and PowerPoint maybe yeah so you know what are your thoughts what do you see happening in the HR work Tech space around AI disrupting the way the work gets done and those embracing it to their benefit and the benefit in turn of the team or organization yeah I think it's pretty that's a great question alen and AI certainly in the HR work Tech space right it's the number one conversation right everyone is having it's if it's not the first thing a company talks about they describing their products it's it's among the top three and it's becoming more and more uh embedded in these HR applications instead of being just bolted on capability here's the thing that's interesting I think unlike the 90s say or even probably later years as well people weren't sitting around at home messing around with PowerPoint or Harvard Graphics or Excel for fun and then going to work and oh I know how to do that stuff right I can I can do a PowerPoint point chart because I just did wi over the weekend interestingly enough with as AI was generative AI especially right it it's most people by now have at least tried it right just for fun almost in their own life or maybe they've worked with a child or or family member who was a student and I read an interesting story the other day how chat GPT usage has biked back up in schools back in session but like public schools in colleges and whatnot but uh but many people now are are getting experience and and handson interaction with Technologies like AI certainly we saw this with social media a few years back right everybody adopted social media in their personal lives before social media and social media Concepts became like a real big part of Enterprise tools where people were already familiar with them right and I think the same thing to a certain extent is happening with geni so I do think that there's less of that reluctance that I describ that I encountered in the mid90s right with people who didn't want to use Excel to do their their monthly profit and LW statement they'd rather use that ledger book right that oldfashioned debit and credit Ledger book thing right which still existed when I started working and because they were it these Technologies were so new to them they were unfamiliar they're perhaps a little bit scary and as we see in Enterprise Tech a lot and we're hearing some of this with AI there's a fear right because there are certain you might read certain stories or hear other people tell stories or read things in the media about oh technology XYZ is here now going to replace workers and reduce jobs or reduce the the hours that you might get whether it's robots Advanced robotics on a manufacturing assembly line or it's an AI tool that's going to help us write a better job description that we're going to post online that's somehow a threat and when we're threatened as humans often when we fight want to fight back we push back I do think the lesson though certainly in my life but the lesson over the Arc of maybe 50 years right of Technology advancing in workplaces is it it those who are open those who are willing to explore to experiment to embrace it to be curious about it in in the longer run certainly you're going to be much better off not only for things like job security potential for advancement opportunities to get better assignments things some of the good things that happen to me because I was willing to embrace technology but also just to be more successful at what you're doing today and I think some of the really interesting and hopefully going to be impactful uh um expressions of AI technology in the HR space are going to help people do just that just to be a little bit better a little bit more efficient maybe if it's even incrementally more efficient but more efficient uh more productive more successful at what they're doing and ultimately uh benefit them and benefit the organization and I do think that uh since as a society I don't know if you've got older relatives aunts parents grandparents whoever it may be think about that person in your life and you think that everyone's got that person for every one of those people who oh they can't figure out how to do X Y and Z there's another one who's you know dming you on Instagram and FaceTiming you and doing all the things right like to toally embrace that lifestyle and I think it's I think the fact that Technology's become so much more part of our everyday lives it's improved our ability to embrace it and adopt it and experiment with it in work places and certainly for me it's it's been a great it's been a great set of experiences I'm still waiting though Al I can't reach it it's behind me I'm waiting for my I have my Oculus VR headset thing I was jump we jumped on that and all of a sudden everybody ran away from it I was hoping that was going to really catch on in our space and so far it hasn't we'll see I'm deserving the same thing and I want to get back to your career Arc but before I do since we're talking about AI I want to get your thoughts on this fear that you brought up as well as the opportunity that's on that same coin arguably and for HR professional specifically you talk about elevated efficiencies which I certainly agree with there is a concern that HR is not only going to get changed radically in terms of how I as a HR business partner for example spend my day in the nature of my work but it might even be the case where you might have had 10 HR business partners now you have five or something like that so the underlying fear if you will is that the discipline is going to shrink what do you think about that do you believe that to be true is there room for maybe the opposite to occur if the nature of that role shifts to be more consultative and and true partnering what are your thoughts there yeah I think the shift out if I had to speculate is probably the more likely outcome and it's tough on these it's a great question though and I don't have this I don't have this data point exactly so I'll just describe it a little bit I was at uh an event a couple weeks ago at ADP who everybody knows ADP and they have a great asset in resource at ADP and this is not a commercial for ADP I don't work for ADP I don't do any ADP but they just have this great group called The ADP Research Institute which I'm sure you're familiar with Al and many listeners probably are they publish lots of research around the world of work because they have so much data about how people are working how they're getting paid how they're moving up and down organizations ET everybody knows at this event though they talked about here's a chart on the ratio the HR ratio which is always talked about in organizations how many HR people do you have per 100 FTE or per 100 employees essentially right and you think over time right that number with tech if technolog is really changing HR to that manner and really threatening jobs you'd see that number come down maybe come down slowly but you'd see it come down it's actually not coming down it's it it plateaued for a while and it actually started going back up again right through the pandemic years and then it's plateaued again at a higher value so long story short is we're not their data and it's really good data right they have data on literally millions of us workers and Global workers as well well this was Us St on specifically describing here that the number of HR people per 100 employees across the wide swath of organizations in America it's not going down it's actually if anything it's going up a little bit right so what does that tell us probably tells us that even though new technologies are being introduced into the profession all kinds of new technologies right the move of HR systems to the cloud right we talked about that earlier doing automation of processes that used to be on paper putting technology in managers and employees hands via self-service right empowering all kinds of people in the organization to do more HR type functions on their own and now the the introduction of more AI Technologies none of those things yet are reducing the average number of HR people in an organization right AC full squ now that doesn't mean that some organizations haven't reduced HR headcount because of Technology like sure it's happened but overall it's not really happening and so that suggests anyway that the introduction of these Technologies is helping to uh maybe Elevate the HR profession to say okay we still need the HR people that we've had before and let's provide an opportunity for them to uh provide more value in the organization particularly in the ways the technology can only take us so far so a good example might be technology say whether we call this AI or not or it's just technology who cares it doesn't matter technology can flag and many of the systems do something like this might flag to a manager hey Al you haven't had a one-on-one meeting with your employee Joe in six weeks you probably ought to check in with this person and know by the way Joe's called at six three times in the last five weeks that's 82% more right than the average for this department you really should have a conversation with and maybe you're out you're busy you're managing 25 people in a retail location or something and didn't notice maybe or you didn't notice it was becoming a pattern the technology helped you and nudged you to go have that conversation technology yet really can't have that conversation for you about how to talk with Al it doesn't know you Al and your employee that employee better hopefully you're able to understand what they're going through a little bit more maybe any specific circumstances in the work environment that may be troubling all the things right we still need you to do those things right and maybe you'll need some coaching from your HR rep to have that conversation as well right and so that person can then help you navigate your way through that conversation so I do think it's a simple example but I do think that's the type of example that we're seeing of how the technology is just supplementing and augmenting our ability to become better managers of people better stewards of the the talent Assets in our organization and the ability to to think a little bit more broadly about about challenges in the organization particularly around biased and things like that where we just we've known they've existed for a really long time we just didn't really have the capability pay transparency and pay Equity is another one where we now were maybe better able to finally attack some of these long-standing problems in organizations we still need the people to attack them but now we've got more and more Technology Solutions to help them right manage these challenges so I see it as a win I'm very optimistic I'm a tech guy I'm very bullish about technology I but I the data at least anyway the ADP data I referenced still tends to indicate that we still need HR it's not as much as we needed it we need it even more yeah I thank you for sharing and I love the way you phrased it in terms of HR business partners and similar roles serving as stewards of the talent within the organization and that brings to mind a recent discussion I had with Dean Carter a former Chief people officer at Patagonia now the chief people and purpose officer at Guild education who talks about a new roles that he created around a talent mobility and Agility uh I believe is the naming convention where their role is to understand the future of work in relation to the roles that currently exist in other words preparing the workforce for the future in a very conscious planful way in partnership with them as opposed to just you know thinking that you have all the answers that there's ongoing discussions both individually and at macro level so that's what I took out of what you just shared there and that's my hope is that yes HR business partners are still needed and they're actually doing higher value high impact work so we'll see there's so many questions that I have for you we've talked about you being AT&T and then you now you're in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and you started the HR happy hour fast forward you became the chair of the HR technology conference and I want to understand how that occurred and I understand that there's going to be some players names that are going to come up for sure and then as you answer that I would love to hear about the introduction of work Tech number one when did you see that naming convention first appear and how do you draw the distinction between HR Tech and work Tech but first on conference how did you get to that stage yeah the conference story is fairly simple I it was probably around 2013 or 14 and I one of those two years I don't remember now even specifically which one it was I had moved on from the teaching and the college stuff I was doing running the HR technology there and I was working it's on my LinkedIn profile so this is no big secret I was working for Oracle I went to work for Oracle which is the the Erp anyway that system I had the most experience with in my career I went to work uh for them and I was part uh of the team that was helping to design and build their early Cloud HR offerings right in the talent management side specifically was where I was what a wonderful team of people and many of them are still there and uh shout out to them because they're doing an amazing job in the space uh the Oracle Cloud HDM product is remarkably Advanced and has had nothing to do with my contributions 10 years ago by the way despite my contributions it's it has come an incredibly long way but I was working for them at the time on product strategy and doing customer support and doing going on the road and helping to talk with customers who were on the Legacy types of products right the old on premise right sweets of products which were certainly in 2013 those companies were still running for big HR and peral implementation certainly anyway right and to help them try to navigate their way forward into to take that Journey with us to the cloud right because we were moving to the cloud for for the first time as well so it was great what a great job and great people I worked with but I that and was still doing the podcast HR happy are was probably and certainly I don't know if was more popular than is now but it was it had become pretty popular and the blog too I was so was doing all the media stuff so I had a bit of a outward facing Persona already in the space but I did have the day job of course working with Oracle and then the atro technology conference which had been around for at that point still probably me close to 20 years it been around a long time was the largest and still is the largest global conference covering all things HR technology and guess hopefully now work Tech as you mentioned Al and I'll talk about that a second I don't know if I have a great answer to that question but that the conference had been founded and helped co-founded anyway and had been shared by Bill cick who's a guy I'm sure you knew Al and many of the folks listening to the show probably knew and he was getting ready to retire right he'd been doing it a long time he was the first and and founding kind of chair of that conference along with the folks at HR executive and uh was ready to step down and they they searched around I don't know how many people they talked to about finding a new person to be the program chair of the conference and I interviewed for it and ultimately accepted the role and have been doing it since then so it's been about 10 years now that I've been the program chair of the conference so it was really a combination of my my background and expertise doing Enterprise it doing HR and payroll systems were teaching on HR and payroll systems and then the media stuff as well which gave me a lot lot of exposure to the market back then and still does quite frankly I still do the podcast like we did back then and and that's been a great that's been great experience for me I'm still doing it and largely working with folks like yourself thought leaders in the industry and experts HR leaders analysts researchers academics right everybody that we find to come on stage and present either present their findings present new research provocative new ideas customer even customer case studies quite frankly out right that's talk about an implementation that a particular company did of an ATS or performance system or a compensation system whatever the case may be and really trying to gather all the best Minds all the best stories all the best insights get them all together for a few days every year in the fall and then I it's I'm fortunate enough that I get to be really heavily involved in it I get to get up on stage and say hey everybody Welcome to hrtech which is fun and it's a really cool thing and I guess the other thing I'll mention uh I didn't do this at the initial when I first started doing doing that job but one of the things I've done over the last few years and I I did this year as well is I'm a big part of what we call the top HR product of the Year process that's jointly sponsored by human resource executive and the HR technology conference so we go out to the HR technology Market the provider community and we solicit give us your best innovation of the last 12 months and submit them and we'll pick 10 or so or 12 or so what we think are the very best expressions of innovation and moving the T technology Mar forward and it's uh exhausting to do all those read all those submissions and do all those demos I spend literally all summer pretty much doing it but we our winners are out there people can look on HR executive online and see who won this year but uh it's a great U process and it gives me honestly a really good vantage point about okay what am I hearing what am I seeing I could be a great example you mentioned this Al about opportunity and development a second ago a few years ago I'll mention since I've talked to about them already a couple times I'll mention them again our friends at Oracle about three years ago submitted a new product that they called The Oracle opportunity Marketplace this was a a capability that allowed uh companies to post both internal jobs like normal jobs in the organization but also to post short-term projects or gigs or simple little activities that the organization might need to be done and they could set up a posting and say what needed to be done for how long what are the skills that we're looking for ETC ET ET right who's who the project manager might be and post that onto a Marketplace and any employee inside the organization could see that opportunity and submit themselves for it if they had a little extra time or a little more bandwidth or more importantly they had a skill that wasn't being utilized in their current role or they had a skill that wasn't being utilized at all or they had a skill they would really try wanted to develop but maybe weren't going to be placed in a full-time role to develop that skill right great idea looked great it worked wonderfully and they won an award for it that year and in the four years since then I think I've demoed about seven more opportunity marketplaces that of other providers have created and I'm not saying they're all following the lead or anything like that but I'm saying is it the the it helps being all that helps me understand hey this is now a thing and if you're a talent management technology company or an organization looking to invest in talent management technology this idea of an opportunity Marketplace or an internal opportunity Marketplace is something you really need to be thinking about right because it's now a really important thing both in the technology Community but also as eviden by how it's helping organizations develop their people and how you're developing your people is really what helps you succeed in the current Marketplace but also helps you retain talent for the that you need for the future Marketplace as well and I don't know that I would get to see all that as early as maybe I get to if I weren't doing this top HR products of the Year process every year number one you do a great job organizing facilitating just doing what you do so on behalf of the community thank you for that appreciate that and Bill created a really high bar for you and you've met it and brought it to another level so kudos to you and the team I love the example that you brought up and I also want to call out and celebrate the fact that given how you've evolved over the years so many vend ERS look at hrtech as the seminal event of the year to Showcase these Innovations so it's driving Innovation is okay I'm going to be in front I'm G defend my dissertation I need to get my homework done I need to do this so I can showcase it in front of the community on this date in in the fall so again just want to call that out and celebrate it I want to take what you just shared and go back to the work Tech HR Tech question and I have a reason you know for it because there is this case where you we have behind me is a book Rob cross Beyond collaboration overload there's another book that he co-wrote with Karen Dylan the micr stress effect and there's other books that and articles and you that point to the fact that we are getting inundated with digital products and getting to this point where potentially it's too much and it's like now in the quote unquote flow of work which sounds great but if everyone's competing to get into to the flow of work you know what does that do to the employee experience and is that going to be more distracting than value added so from my perspective there's a lot of good but there's also this potential risk so what are your thoughts based on your Vantage Point and all the products that you're seeing yeah I I think that's a great question and it's a tricky one because I think of over the last few years I saw I have seen a lot of the traditional HR Tech vendors and or the talent management vendors rewards and recognition space has done a lot of this but even the straight payroll companies have done some of this too is find ways to integrate their capabilities into these flow of work systems that you're talking about Al so right slack or teams or this would be another one probably and try to coexist with them and try to meet people where they're at with this idea particularly in the the through the pandemic are and this at least for not desk spased workers anyway right this idea that everybody's staring at screens all day or on their phone or on a laptop or something and they're in slack all day or they're in teams all day and let's get our tools where they're at because we know they're in slack and in teams all day but I think as you allude to the work of Rob cross and others have certainly suggested that hey we're already overloading people with these digital tools and the it's almost become a meme right like it's the constant pinging and the bells going off and the reminders and slack messages and all the things and if if it's becoming are we defeating the purpose of these HR tools which are really at their core essentially designed to help make people's jobs better easier more productive help them be more successful in their jobs are we trying are we doing too much by having them almost forcing them forcing is not maybe the fair word encouraging them too strongly to be constantly interacting with the HR system right you think about a lot of different careers you've had how much do you really want to be interacting with the HR System an argument can be made you really don't want to be interacting with it all that much you only want to be interacting with it when you really need to or when you choose to and that's a fine line and I think that that HR Tech work Tech thing is on the one hand you could say it's just a semantic construct somebody made up but on the other hand you could say there's actually some meaning there because if I thought about it and I haven't thought about it a lot I'll confess but that the hrtech things mostly what we talk about at the hrtech conference tend to fall intoo largely those classical HR functional silos right so you think of any big HR organization who has a chro that chro is going to have a person reporting to her or him right who's the director of benefits the director the chief learning officer the head whoever is the head of talent opposition whatever their title is right head of learning comp they'll be a comp person right pretty much in most big companies right and so the hrtech solutions I think about often still I hate to say it fall into those silos often right we think oh that's a comp system that's a talent acquisition system that's a performance management system right maybe a cheap Talent officer my responsibility before work Tech right that's a whole different animal right that sits across it's it's more of an operational system right sort of the OS of the organization from an operational perspective right so most typically things like teams and slack but they're certainly not the only ones right uh but I I think often those systems fall into the Crocs though right that the uh the C was probably responsible for owning the relationship with the provider but certainly not going to be typically I don't think responsible for their impact in their usage right in the organization that you know that how and how they're impacting people's lives impacting their productivity impacting their well-being right uh of people are slack messaging their colleagues at all hours of the day 247 right who's owning that right who's in the organization saying I'm not sure that's a great idea right and and I don't know who it is right it it it could be argued it's an HR person it could also be argued it's maybe a chief operating officer or so I think word Tech can be I think some I worry sometimes when industries make up words that are designed to confuse people I'll tell one quick story I know we're probably running long well we're good the people who bothered me a lot and they still bother me a few years ago are the people who said you can't say work life balance anymore you have to say work life integration or work life flow or work life synchronization whatever the word you use you couldn't use balance anymore because that was to it strongly implied there's work and then there's life and there are two different things in you keep them separate blah blah blah blah blah and I got annoyed okay they might they met I get the idea okay people's work in their lives they intersect when they used to but every single person in the world understands what work life balance means the concept we all knew what it meant right everybody knows what it means even people who don't care about this and spend all day thinking about it everybody knows what it BS and then the work life balance people showed up and said we can't use that term anymore that everybody understands what it means we must use some other term and I think they did it just because they just wanted to make up a new term and give TED talks about it or something I don't know what they wanted so I I worry that the work Tech thing like I I just sometimes I think let's not confuse that doesn't have as much meaning to me as HR Tech which I think more people understand what it is right so that's all but and thank you for sharing that as a advisor consultant one of my opportunities to deliver value is to highlight important distinctions if if something's fuzzy if we can make it more clear that's a good thing and particularly if we come in with a certain perspective based on our knowledge of a certain space or something however to your point yeah there's is a point of diminishing marginal returns and if we're doing it for our own sake our own egos that's not a good thing and to your point I can see see some of that creeping in oh here's the model that needs to be used that's not as good as this and all that so I certainly appreciate what you're saying I also go back to this notion however that there might be some worthwhile distinctions uh between the types of Technologies because arguably there's increasing overlap and if there is in fact increasing overlap that's affecting the employee experience can and should there not be more and better governance around how decisions are made how they're implemented maintained enhanced over time that's a question that's something that I look for because at the end of the day to the nature of my question you how are people being impacted they're overloaded there's diminishing returns there so no I certainly and I do think there's an Effectiveness conversation to be had too if I were in an IT role or an HR role in a very big company I'd be really mindful of all the places my employee data resides it speaks to your governance comment out right between my payroll system my core hris system if they're not and often they're not the same even in big companies Talent systems recruiting systems work Tech Systems as we've talked about of collaboration systems Etc I've got information about the person who's only one person right and there's only so many things we can understand about that person or describe about that person or assign to that person or want to know about that person there's only one of them and now I've got the job of making sure that person is reflected properly sufficiently adequately whatever the right term is in all of these places around the Enterprise such that we are giving them access to all the information they need to do their job their access to the resources that they need we're we're honoring their contribution appropriately we're compensating them properly we're connecting them to the resources people resources that they might need all the things we might want to do and we're honoring their well-being too right and it's only one of them and and now when we have their information potentially all across the gamut of systems it's obscenely difficult for large organizations to keep that all straight and each time we introduce a new category and then some new tools right to fit that category that's a challenge that people who stay up all night in and don't get enough sleep and have to worry about and it's all behind it's behind the scenes right and it's certainly something to think about it's the less the less sexy part of this work technology but certainly an important part of it too so I have one more question then I'm going to go into my four rapid fire questions and then I'll give you a chance for uh closing comments so the question I want to ask you and you can take it whatever Direction you want what are your hopes for the future and embedded within that there do you have concerns about the future and obviously AI would be you know top of mine but within the HR Tech space are you bullish and excited are you concerned about anything what are your thoughts there as we start to wrap yeah I'm really bullish I do I'm an optimist I'm a technologist at heart I'm definitely an optimist about this stuff I going back to the very first story I told about my experience with Benefits open enrollment like 15 whatever years ago I do appreciate understand and value and Elevate the impact these technologies have on people's lives I one of the big things we've done you graciously allow me to talk about my podcast and some of my things a little bit on here one of the things Trish and I have done over the last couple of years has made a very concerned effort in our staff in our work to try to raise the voices and the profiles of folks who traditionally have difficulty gaining access to opportunity in the workplace specifically right so whether that's physically disability people with mental challenges people who were formerly incarcerated people who were out of the workplace due to caregiving needs and now trying to reenter the workplace working parents you name it right like we've tried to really shine a light on as many of those stories as we have been able to over the last couple of years and I do think my hope is that the technologies that that basically help run so many of these organizations and help manage people's experiences with the organizations will continue to adapt and evolve and support everyone in the organizations and not just knowledge workers in Silicon Valley or PE remote workers like me perhaps even u i mean everybody people who are on the autism spectrum people who are or or just people who are not disabled in any way but they Frontline workers who are trying to get 20 hours a week and need to know when those hours are going to be because they have child care they have school and they have another job that they're trying to manage what are we doing as an industry a as a group of Technology providers to do everything we can to well certainly support the needs of the organization but Elevate people's lives and support them and help them live better lives and have better more fulfilling uh careers as well or even even if they're not careers even if they're just jobs even they're just gigs what can we

2023-10-14 16:36

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