As many as 60 percent of employees who are laid off, fired or quit admit to stealing company data.
Sometimes they download information on their way out the door. Sometimes they email information to a personal email account. And sometimes they simply fail to return a company laptop or other device that contains the data. In the latter case, according to the Ponemon Institute, it costs an average of $50,000 for an employer to replace a stolen computer, with 80 percent of that cost coming from the recovery of sensitive, confidential and proprietary information.
When you put this data together, it becomes increasingly apparent that businesses must take proactive steps to protect their technology and data.
In light of these stats, let me suggest a seven-step plan to recover your devices and the crucial information stored on them after an employee leaves your organization.
Institute a strong electronic communication and technology policy, making clear that all data and equipment belong to the company, and must immediately be forfeited upon the end of employment. Or, better yet, have employee signed an agreement affirming their obligations regarding the confidentiality of your data and confirming the obligation to return everything at the end of employment.
Cut off an employee’s e-access to your network as soon as you have notice that an employee has departed.
Remind employees upon termination or resignation of their absolute duty to return all data and equipment, including laptops, mobile devices and removable storage devices.
To the extent you have the capability, and you have confidence that you have your own backups of the employee’s data, remote wipe any unreturned devices.
If any data or equipment is missing, enlist the aid of an attorney to send a clear message that unless everything is returned immediately, the company will litigate to get it back.
Enlist the aid of a computer forensics expert to determine if, when, and how any data was stolen, and, if so, of what that data consisted.
Sue.
Notice that a lawsuit against the employee is step seven, not step one. In most cases, going to court is the last resort. It is expensive and time consuming.
Yet in many instances it is unavoidable. And depending on the scope of the suspected theft and the data at issue, it may quickly move up the list.
When Alex Smith was hired as the chief human resources officer for the city of Memphis in 2016, she had never previously held a public sector job — one of the reasons she was selected.
City leaders wanted to bring fresh eyes to the team to address the ongoing problem of how to attract and retain the best talent to city jobs. Smith found that many of the city’s human resources processes were still paper-based and data was stored in siloed databases, which added time and confusion to hiring and talent management.
“I knew we needed to automate some of these processes,” said Smith, who previously held private-sector HR jobs with Brightstar Corp. and Target Corp. One of her first suggestions was to implement a cloud-based HR technology system that would streamline hiring and better manage candidates and employee data. After some negotiating, the chief information officer and head of finance agreed, and they adopted a cloud-based human capital management system from workplace software giant Oracle.
“It was a huge win,” Smith said.
The technology eliminated many of the manual tasks like copying addresses into multiple databases and producing monthly trend reports.
“Now I can focus on tasks that matter the most and I can track hiring data in real time,” she said. It also streamlined the candidate experience and helped her expand the city’s social recruiting and brand recognition. “It is helping us to be more proactive in attracting talent,” she said.
A few years ago, this kind of story — of a public sector agency investing in cloud-based HR technology and social recruiting platforms — would have been unusual. The public sector has a reputation for being slow to adopt HR technology to empower workers and streamline HR tasks, said Sean Morris, a principal at Deloitte covering human capital trends in the public sector. “There is a history of under-investing in human capital by government due to limited budgets.”
Public sector HR people also don’t have a seat at the funding table, which means there is no one to champion their cause, said Sean Osborne, vice president of product management for public companies for Acendre, a cloud-based talent management software company that serves the public sector. “We often find that HR doesn’t have the budget or authority to effect real change.”
Even when these agencies have funding for technology upgrades, the siloed nature of government agencies and opposing funding priorities can quickly push HR investments to the end of the line, Smith added. “If HR is competing with the police or fire departments for project funding, police and fire will always win.”
This lag effect is about more than just money. There is also a change management challenge. In government, many senior leaders and IT staff have been in those roles for years and they have a set way of doing their jobs and making decisions. Moving to the cloud is a completely different way of managing technology and data, and there is a lot of resistance to change, especially from employees who fear their jobs will be at risk.
Technology and Talent Are Getting Old
These delays have had a long-term impact on recruiting talent management trends across the public sector. Many public sector agencies still rely on paper-based recruiting and onboarding steps, which are cumbersome and can add weeks to the hiring process. “Millennials and Gen Z don’t understand why it would take that long,” Morris said, noting that the negative experience may cause them to look elsewhere for work. These organizations also lack tools and transparency to effectively support career development, or to use people analytics as part of business and talent decisions. All of this is making it difficult for public sector agencies to attract and retain talent, said Morris. “That has put them in the situation they are in now.”
That situation is a rapidly aging workforce and a recruiting environment that makes it difficult to attract and retain young talent. Data from the Office of Personnel Management shows that less than 7 percent of the federal workforce is millennials, even though they make up 35 percent of the workforce nationwide; and 44 percent of federal workers are over the age of 50, which means they are inching ever closer to retirement with few younger staff ready to take their place.
“If HR is competing with the police or fire departments for project funding, police and fire will always win.”
— Alex Smith, CHRO, City of Memphis
This combination of aging talent and outdated technology is making it difficult for them to compete for young talent, said Daniel Torrens, global public sector HCM strategist for SAP SuccessFactors. “Candidates have a lot of choices today, and public sector organizations haven’t been building their brand or engagement strategies.”
These pressures are forcing public sector agencies to shift their attitude about cloud-based HR technology and to prioritize these transitions as they consider their future talent development and workforce management needs.
“Government CIOs no longer question whether they should move to the cloud, it’s all about, ‘How do we get there,’ ” Torrens said.
That’s good news for vendors. Torrens noted that four years ago, these agencies were still paying off their on-premise solutions and wouldn’t even consider a move to the cloud. But in the past 18 months that has changed. “We are having a lot more conversations about how to build a business case and get funding to adopt the cloud.”
Talent Needs Force the Issue
Fully 81 percent of public sector respondents now consider the cloud to be one of the top three technologies for ROI potential, according to the 2018 SolarWinds “IT Trends Report.” Almost as many (79 percent) see cloud as a top three solution to achieve productivity and efficiency benefits.
To support these interests, many public sector organizations, including government, education and health care, have adopted a cloud-first policy to replace legacy systems and design new more agile service-based solutions, said Sherry Amos, director of market development for education and government at Workday.
HR is also gaining more visibility in decision-making as public organizations acknowledge that talent management is a strategic issue that needs to be addressed. “In the past, finance drove all of these acquisitions,” Amos said. “But HR now has a seat at the table.” This is giving public sector HR leaders an opportunity to shape the future of workforce management and the technologies their organizations will use to support them.
This is where the challenge of moving public sector HR into the cloud shifts to the vendors, Morris said. The decision to move to the cloud is only the first in many steps for public sector clients. “If a vendor wants to support customers in the government cloud space, they have to federalize their tool.”
FedRAMP and Title 5
The majority of government organizations have to meet a very unique set of rules and requirements for adopting any cloud-based solutions, and they rely on vendors to adapt their systems accordingly. These include ensuring all data centers meet FedRAMP, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program requirements, which include an extensive list of rules for security assessment, authorization and continuous monitoring of cloud products and services.
“Meeting FedRAMP is a high barrier to entry in this space,” Osborne said. Vendors also have to adapt their platforms to meet Title 5 rules regarding administrative personnel, which cover issues such as pay schedules, job titles and priority hiring for veterans and people with disabilities. It can take months and a significant financial investment to adapt current HR platforms for a public sector workplace environment.
The majority of civil government organizations have to meet a unique set of rules and requirements for adopting cloud-based solutions.
Vendors also face a ton of pressure to get it right — because if they screw up things like data security it could result in national security risks. “Any time you move a large swath of data to a new environment you have to do your research because no system is foolproof,” Morris said.
The challenges are significant, but the effort to meet regulations and cater to this clientele is clearly worth it. “The federal government is the largest employer in the country,” Osborne said. And since most of these agencies are only just now considering cloud-based HR technology solutions, the commercial opportunities are bountiful. “The time is ripe right now for public sector organizations to move to the cloud,” said Eva Woo, global vice president of solutions management for SAP SuccessFactors.
Public Sector Tipping Point
The enormous sales potential is causing vendors across the HR technology industry to pay closer attention to the needs of public sector clients and to prioritize meeting regulatory requirements and adapting their customer management processes for a public sector environment. That includes adapting their sales and marketing strategies for longer procurement cycles.
“It can take two years just to secure funding and execute procurement,” Amos said. Public sector clients also tend to pursue a phased approach to their transition to the cloud, starting with low-risk systems to demonstrate safety and performance before moving to more mission critical systems that support HR and finance.
Morris noted that SAP and Oracle were among the first HR cloud-based solution providers to embrace public sector clients and their regulatory and procurement needs, though other vendors have been quickly following suit. He believes that the next three to five years will see a flurry of cloud-based HR projects across the public sector, including local and federal government, education, health care, and other agencies that need a better, faster and more transparent HR solution to deal with their recruiting and talent management needs.
Morris encourages vendors to make the continued investments in meeting regulations and to hire people with experience in public sector HR and IT who can help them navigate the complex procurement process. “The public sector is a massive market, but you have to play the long game,” he said. These agencies know they have to make investments in cloud-based HR solutions, but they will need vendors who can help them get there.
Vendors may also need to provide more IT support and education. City of Memphis’ Smith noted that many public agencies don’t have the head count or expertise to manage a cloud transformation on their own, so they will rely on vendors to fill gaps. “Having partners who will support training and change management needed on these projects is very important.”
These clients may have more needs than private sector companies, but the vendors who can support them and prove they understand how the public sector environment works will be will be best positioned to win these clients in the future.
The future of work will be driven by artificial intelligence, and HR is woefully ill equipped to make it happen — at least according to many reports about AI and HR.
IBM, PWC and Deloitte (among others) have all done surveys on AI’s impact on HR in the last 18 months, and the message is clear: companies want AI, but they don’t have the talent, leadership or confidence in their human resources team to make it happen.
IBM predicts that 120 million workers in the world’s 10 largest economies will need to be reskilled in the next few years to adapt to an AI-driven marketplace — and that if companies don’t get started soon they will quickly risk losing their competitive edge. Yet its “Unplug from the past” report found that just 28 percent of CHROs expect their enterprise to address changing workforce demographics with new strategies.
Even if companies are gearing up for an AI reskilling evolution, roughly half of their employees don’t think they can pull it off. A global study by Harris Insights in collaboration with IBM found that while more than 80 percent of employees in the U.S. and UK believe having AI skills will be a competitive advantage for their companies, 42 percent said they don’t believe their HR departments can execute it.
Deloitte’s “2018 Global Human Capital Trends” report showed a similar lack of confidence. It found that while 72 percent of respondents think adopting AI is important for their business, only 31 percent feel ready to address it. And research from PWC shows 63 percent of companies are rethinking the whole role of their human resources department in light of the impact AI will have on the business.
Part of the problem is HR’s historic lack of experience with data and analytics, said David Mallon, chief analyst for Bersin by Deloitte. “Every other part of the organization is accustomed to using data to support decisions, but not HR,” he said. “They lack data fluency.”
HR’s evolving role
But things need to change. If HR leaders want to stay relevant (and employed) they need to start thinking more strategically about their roles, said Chris Havrilla, VP of HR technology at Bersin by Deloitte. “They need to shift their mindset to be more data driven, and to see themselves as human teachers for the machine,” she said.
That starts with a change in culture, where data is used to make decisions about people in the same way other departments use data to track finances or manage the supply chain. “The notion that data should inform people decisions is new for a lot of companies,” she said.
HR also needs to think about how that data will help them reskill the workforce for an AI-driven future, said Amy Wright, managing partner of talent and transformation at IBM.
For example, HR leaders will have to reassess how they deliver training to employees and alert them to their own learning needs. “Employees are used to a personalized approach in their consumer lives and they want that in the workplace,” Wright said.
They don’t want to be given a list of full-length courses that may help them learn new skills. They want short, easy-to-consume learning nuggets that have been curated to teach them exactly what they need to know, when they need to know it. “AI-driven training platforms can deliver that personalization,” Wright said.
AI can also help HR to identify which employees might be best suited to be upskilled for new AI roles, to identify the actual skill gaps they have, and to customize a learning and development path based on others who’ve moved through the organization.
Do something
This transition won’t be easy. It will require HR leaders to upgrade their own skill sets while simultaneously upskilling their workforce and changing how the business functions.
It may sound overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be, according to Wright. The key is to get started. “Don’t feel like you have to build an entire AI roadmap and plan everything out. Just pick a business problem in one unit and pilot a solution,” she said.
Starting small will allow HR to either fail fast or prove the benefits of AI — and their own ability to leverage it — which will help them win over stakeholders and bolster the workforce’s confidence in their ability to navigate this digital transformation.
“HR can be the growth engine of the organization,” Wright said. They just have to prove they can get it done.
It’s not enough for business leaders to merely be “the man (or woman) behind the curtain” anymore.
In a world that’s rapidly becoming more technology driven, managers and executives must put in extra effort to create human relationships with their people — connections that are necessary for any organization to thrive in a complex and competitive marketplace.
The more your business is centered around artificial intelligence, robotics or other digital technologies, the more effort you have to make to be human and to create human relationships, to pry people away from their smartphones, to have face-to-face conversations, to appreciate people and to be honest.
Sure, digital awareness skills and abilities are important, but the more tech-focused we get, the more human leadership there has to be. Otherwise you’re just “behind the curtain.” Plenty of executives lead that way anyway, but in this environment you have to take greater steps to be more real — and effective — than the Wizard of Oz.
These are three behaviors that will help leaders make more meaningful connections with their people.
Be trustworthy and fair. Whether your people see you regularly in person or you stay “behind the curtain,” your team has to be able to trust that what you say is the truth. That doesn’t necessarily mean you always share everything you know, but everything you do say has to be true. If you can’t share an answer to a question or some other information for a legal or strategic reason, then be upfront about that. Don’t make something else up, dance around it or shade the truth. You could say something like: “Because of FCC rules, because of a board vote, because of competitive pressures, I can’t go into this right now, but rest assured we are working on it and at the appropriate time we’ll share everything you need to know and everything you want to know.” When you speak you should tell the truth, and if the truth changes you should go back to your people and explain why.
Be personal and approachable. The second vital behavior for leaders is that even if you stay “behind the curtain” and all anybody sees is the smoke and the floating face of the “wizard,” you still have to figure out how to be personable and approachable. Your people still need to feel that you’re a human being — and that they’re being treated as human beings. That means if you bump into each other in the hallway, you stop, look him or her in the eye and talk directly to that person. Don’t look down at your mobile device, mumble something and keep going. Don’t be that leader who’s going to the penthouse 40 floors up but doesn’t say anything in an elevator full of employees. If you struggle to make human connections with your team, consider holding office hours in the cafeteria two times a month for a few hours and announcing it to your team by offering to chat or answer questions. Maybe just two people will show up the first time. But the next time four people will attend, then eight. Before long you will have made real strides in changing the vibe in your organization.
Provide and acknowledge meaning. This can be a hard one for baby boomers, who, broadly speaking, are often happy just to have a job. But today’s reality is that there are younger generations in the workforce who, while certainly happy to have a job, care more about the values that they hold and the meaning they derive from their work than previous generations have. In this case, the CEO will rarely be the person who regularly acknowledges meaning for low-level employees, but they can still do it periodically. Managers, however, can absolutely help in this regard by building this behavior into their regular interactions with direct reports. These acknowledgments of meaning can take place in performance conversations, weekly catch-ups or conference calls. They could be as simple as saying “Here’s how the work that you’re doing ties to our mission. Here’s how the work that you are doing is enabling our customers to do X, Y and Z. Here’s how what you’re doing, Bob, is moving this project forward exponentially.” Everybody wants to know that what they’re doing is not only important and appreciated, but fits in with the values and the mission of the company.
Increasingly complex times demand dynamic leadership, which calls upon business leaders to step out from behind the curtain and connect with their people on a genuine human level.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly people’s interviewer, colleague and competition. As it burrows its way further into the workplace and different job functions, it holds abilities to take over certain tasks, learn over time and even have conversations. Many of us may not even be aware that who we’re talking to isn’t even a “who” but a “what.”
In 2017, 61 percent of businesses said they implemented AI, compared to 38 percent in 2016, according to the “Outlook on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise 2018” report from Narrative Science, an artificial intelligence company, in collaboration with the National Business Research Institute. In the communication arena, 43 percent of these businesses said they send AI-powered communications to employees.
Many candidates don’t even realize that they’re not speaking to a human, according to Sahil Sahni, co-founder of computer software company AllyO, which uses an AI-enabled chatbot to speak to candidates and answer questions in the recruiting process.
Based off data from AllyO’s applicants, he found that less than 30 percent of candidates think that they’re speaking to something not human. The other 70 percent either did not disclose what they thought or believed there’s a person behind that chatbot.
AllyO does not disclose up front to the candidate that they are not speaking to a human. However, if they were to ask outright if they are speaking to a person or an AI-enabled chatbot, the system discloses that information. “The goal is not to goof anyone here. The goal is to have the best candidate experience. Lying about it is not the best candidate experience,” Sahni said.
In 2017, 61 percent of businesses said they implemented AI, compared to 38 percent in 2016, according to the “Outlook on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise 2018” report from Narrative Science.
Candidates don’t behave differently when speaking to an AI as opposed to a human, Sahni added.
“When you’re a job seeker, it’s not like you’re calling customer service to complain about something. You’re at your best behavior,” he said. “You tend to be a lot more tolerant, you tend to be a lot more respectful, no matter what the process might be.”
Dennis R. Mortensen, CEO and founder of New York-based technology company X.ai, also has access to conversations between people and machine agents, and his team spent the past four years assembling a data set of more than 10 million emails on these dialogues. Their findings have similarly found that people don’t communicate differently just because they’re speaking to a robot.
Giving X.ai’s own personal assistants Amy and Andrew as an example, he said, “It would be very easy to imagine that I will treat them like machines and remove any level of emotion otherwise applied to a traditional conversation with a human, or that the system as a whole would not leave any room for empathy toward the machine. I am happy to say that it is not the case.”
This is not to say that everyone treats a machine with respect. If people tend to be more aggressive or rude with a real person, that same communication style can be seen in how they converse with a machine. The same trend goes with people who are neutral or overly friendly in how they speak to others.
How potential employees actually speak to AI is a different conversation than how potential employees should speak to AI, he added. That is, it’s unclear whether how a person treats a machine says anything about how that person would treat other people, and it’s unclear whether something like a person being rude to a machine agent should impact their job prospects.
“We can certainly agree that we do care if it’s a human recruiting coordinator,” Mortenson said. But machines have no feelings or emotions and cannot be offended, so it would be easy to argue why employers shouldn’t care. Ultimately, “I do think we should care even if it is a machine,” Mortenson said. “I understand why we might care a little bit less, but I don’t think we can just discard that as a signal.”
“In real life there’s a penalty to being an asshole,” Mortensen.
Limits and Capabilities of AI in the Hiring Process
Machine learning allows AI to gain knowledge over time and learn from its interactions, much like a person would. That being said, even though it has the ability to mature in its own way and become more humanlike over time, that still doesn’t make it human, and there are certain questions that a person might have to answer, for example, questions about company culture, according to Sahni.
AI systems are capable of taking this into account. For example, AllyO can recognize when a candidate asks a question that cannot be answered by a machine and brings in a person who can answer that question, Sahni said. This way, the candidate can have a positive experience and not feel like they’ve lost out by not speaking to a real person.
“If the process is objective, AI knocks it out of the park. If the process has any subjectivity to it, AI does really well looping in the hiring team,” he said. “A good AI system typically has human support behind it.”
Much like people themselves, AI has the potential for bias, according to Eric Shangle, director of people operations at AI platform Figure Eight, based in San Francisco. For example, Wired reported in July 2018 that Amazon’s facial recognition software system Rekognition confused many black members of Congress with publicly available mugshots and that facial recognition technology’s problem in detecting darker skin tones is a well-established problem.
One reason why a tool may be biased is training data bias, Shangle said. From the developmental side of machine learning, the creator of a tool must input a data set to train the algorithm, and if it does not use a diverse data set, then an employer using the tool may come across bias blind spots.
“What are the biases of this tool?” is a legitimate question for employers who are looking to purchase a machine learning tool such as facial recognition software, Shangle said. A recruiting tool may, for example, have a bias toward college-educated job seekers.
David Dalka, founder of Chicago-based management consulting company Fearless Revival, agrees that AI has its limits. He has a more traditional view of what recruiting should look like, arguing that companies should invest less in technology and more in human recruiters who work at the company long-term, know the company culture and know what kind of person would be a best fit for the job, rather than look for trendy keywords or job titles in résumés.
“I’m not opposed to AI tools if someone built the full data library of all the factors and stopped focusing trivially on things like job titles,” he said.
He suggested that companies should more carefully consider the attributes that matter in a candidate — Do they read any books? Are they naturally curious? What are their skills and degrees? — and consider how they would weigh these attributes in an AI system. Ultimately AI is simply a tool that analyzes content.
“This idea that some wizard will magically create this black box that will hire the right people without you thinking of these things is a fallacy,” Dalka said.
The unemployment rate may be at a record low, but there are still vast pockets of workers in the United States struggling to find jobs.
Global hotel chain Hyatt Corp. is tapping into one of these talent pools with RiseHY, its new community-hiring program, which uses virtual reality and gaming to introduce young people looking for career opportunities to the hospitality industry.
As part of the initiative, Hyatt hotels around the world have committed to hiring 10,000 “opportunity youth” — people ages 18 to 24 who are neither in school nor working — by 2025. According to data from Brookings Institute, 4.7 million young people fall into this category.
“This program is a labor of love,” says Jessica Schultz, Hyatt’s senior manager of community engagement. Part philanthropy and part talent development, RiseHY was designed to support the community while helping Hyatt fill its talent pipeline. “This is a pool of untapped talent who have skills and ambition,” said Audrey Williams-Lee, vice president of corporate HR and philosophy. “They could be a great fit for our organization.”
Immersive Hotel Tours
However, RiseHY is more than just a targeted recruiting effort.
Audrey Williams-Lee
Opportunity youth often come from disadvantaged neighborhoods and have limited work experience and education. “Hospitality jobs aren’t even on their radar,” Schultz said. When Schultz and Williams-Lee began designing the project, they knew they would need to close that gap and find a way to help young people imagine building a career in hospitality.
To give them a sense of what life would be like working in a hotel, they worked with a vendor to build a virtual reality app, called YouVisit, where candidates can take a virtual guided tour of a hotel, see what workers do and learn what’s required of different roles including room attendants, hostesses, wait staff and concierge. “The virtual reality lets them see what their career path could be, and to think about whether this is a good fit for them,” Williams-Lee said.
Gaming the System
Priyanka Jain
Interested candidates are also invited to complete an online assessment, built by Pymetrics, that uses artificial intelligence to assess a candidate’s skills and attitudes through a series of games and reasoning exercises. The games use neuroscience and reviews of past assessments to measure things like how well candidates multi-task, whether they can filter distractions, and their willingness to take risks, explained Priyanka Jain, head of growth and lead product manager for Pymetrics.
The system then determines where a candidate would be a good fit. “There are no good or bad responses,” Jain said. Rather, it helps the candidates and Hyatt understand where candidates are likely to thrive in the absence of a resume or past job experience.
Jessica Schultz
The virtual reality app and game-based assessments are meant to ease these young people through the early recruiting process, but it is also expected to help increase retention and job satisfaction by ensuring the right people are put into the right roles, said Schultz. “It will create a better flow for our talent funnel.”
Once candidates are selected, they are either hired directly and given a mentor to support them as they ease into the role, or they are placed in a three- to six-month training program developed in partnership with community groups to give them the skills they will need on the job.
Once the training is complete, they may be hired by Hyatt or referred to other hospitality employers. “We aren’t just doing this for Hyatt,” Schultz said. “It’s about helping these kids find careers in hospitality.”
Expanding the program ensures every interested youth has an opportunity to find a job and that Hyatt doesn’t have to slow the program down during low hiring seasons, she added. “We expect to hire at least 10,000 youth, but this program will impact so many more.”
The Innovation award recognizes organizations that have developed an innovative workforce management strategy that addresses a fundamental business issue. Here are the winners for 2018:
Gold: SmartSimple Software Inc.
As SmartSimple Software Inc. found its team growing, they realized an innovative solution was needed to ensure ongoing employee engagement.
Inspired by the time machine from the movie “Back to the Future,” the cloud software provider built its model to manage the flow of incoming issues, ideas and comments, allow discussion and collaboration and finally output the solution, according to the application. It also provides a structure and concrete road map for fostering and developing innovative thought.
Growth in a company can be good, but it also comes with its challenges. SmartSimple began to gain interest from organizations outside of its traditional clients, causing them to move into unexplored territory and causing the company to face a steep learning curve. Because of this, additional talent was recruited to help provide insight into the unknown fields.
“The Flux Capacitor of Innovation is a concentrated dose of the processes and activities that were part of our everyday when we were a smaller organization and innovative thought flourished organically. It has enabled us to carry on our test-and-learn, curiosity-driven, start-up mentality that has brought us to where we are now,” said Alex Wong, director of marketing at SmartSimple.
Before the Flux Capacitor of Innovation was implemented, communication and ideas weren’t being developed past each team or department. The company realized that communication is key and now encourages every person in the company to share their opinions.
“The Flux Capacitor of Innovation changed this entirely because it introduced an element that every department had common ground in working with — our clients,” said Wong. “The feedback mechanisms that inherently feed the top end of the Flux Capacitor funnel foster inter-team collaboration and communication because every department has a stake in managing the client relationship.”
For its efforts to use the Flux Capacitor of Innovation as a structured road map for communication within the company, SmartSimple Software Inc. is the 2018 Optimas Award winner for Innovation.
Silver: NCSoft
Why not start the first day on the job with a game? NCSoft executives realized they needed to up their game where employee onboarding and retention was concerned.
Their onboarding program, NC Launch Onboarding, is a way to make the process more effective and increase employee retention. The site is filled with characters from the company’s games and takes new hires on “quests” to finish items like payroll, playfully referred to as “loot.”
The gaming business knew it needed a change when departments such as IT complained equipment wasn’t being set up on the first day and there wasn’t enough communication between managers and new employees.
The program has succeeded since launching in 2017. Future plans include incorporating more of an employee’s journey into the program, such as leaves of absence and training.
For its efforts to improve its onboarding process with a new platform, NCSoft is the 2018 Optimas Award Silver winner for Innovation.
Bronze: Riverside Healthcare
For its efforts to use its Well in Mind Employee Support Program to provide strong mental wellness to its employees, Riverside Healthcare is the 2018 Optimas Award Bronze winner for Innovation.
Now that companies have finally settled their core systems into the cloud, HR leaders need to get ready for a deluge of innovation.
The agility of the cloud means technology teams can deliver new features and interactions quickly and seamlessly. Cloud-based HR systems also mean vendors can implement new iterations faster and with a lot less hassle.
That is good news for clients, said Dan Staley, principal HR technology leader for PwC in Atlanta. “Vendors used to roll out upgrades every one to two years, now they are coming out quarterly.” That adds value for users, who get access to the latest features as soon as they are ready, and allows vendors to increase the functionality of their products.
This is allowing them to speed road map timelines, and making it easier for larger vendors to acquire best-of-breed smaller firms and integrate them into their suite of tools. “We expect to see vendors taking their products’ capabilities further, faster,” he predicted. That includes embedding more social and collaboration capabilities and adding new reports and dashboards. It will also allow them to integrate data from multiple sources, to support workforce analytics — which is where the real business value will be generated.
HR management systems vendors have been promising predictive analytics for a long time, without much significant progress. Though that could soon change, said Christa Manning, vice president of Solution Provider Research at Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Most platforms are experimenting with machine learning to derive meaningful insights from the masses of employee data they have.”
A Big Year for Big Data
While true predictive analytics for workforce management is still something of a pipe dream, several vendors, including Workday, Visier, Vista, IBM Watson and SAP Successfactors now offer some data analytics capabilities. These tools promise to provide a range of insights into things like whether companies are meeting diversity goals, where they face turnover risks, and training advice for career development.
Many of them are taking advantage of the vast databases stored in the public cloud to hone these systems. The public cloud holds masses of workforce data, which is critical for creating useful algorithms, which in turn are a set of rules the computer uses to analyze the data. “Algorithms need to be trained on large data sets to understand what information is relevant,” Manning pointed out. “They learn from every exchange and get better over time.”
As these algorithms are able to tap more data sets they will be able to offer more targeted insights, Staley predicted. For example, imagine a single system that can review employees’ overtime log sheets, travel spending and their LinkedIn behavior to determine which overworked employees are most likely to quit — then offer HR advice on what they can do to get them to stay. “There are a lot of possibilities for using predictive analytics for making sure your best talent doesn’t leave,” he said.
Analytics tools in the HRMS will also play a role in managing gig workers, according to Cristina Goldt, vice president of HCM products for Workday in Pleasanton, California. Being able to review data regarding all types of workers and projects in a central location will help companies better analyze where and when to hire contractors versus full-timers, who to choose and what to pay them. “They can match skills to different roles, and make their hiring systems more efficient,” she said.
Some vendors, including Workday, are also offering customers the ability to compare their data insights to industry standards to see where they stand. “It makes it possible to benchmark themselves against their peers,” Goldt said.
Are We There Yet?
All of these scenarios are enticing, though the days when business leaders can predict workforce trends through a cursory glance at an analytics dashboard are still well into the future. Unlike other software that is rolled out and ready to use, machine learning takes time and training, and requires access to linked databases with relevant data, Goldt said. “It’s called machine learning for a reason.”
Customers are also still somewhat uncertain about how they will apply analytics in their own organizations. This is partly due to the lack of meaningful case studies, Manning said. “Every vendor is talking about machine learning for HR, but there aren’t a lot of examples yet.”
For companies hearing pitches from their vendors about the magic of workforce analytics, she urged them to “demand live customer references” and real world examples that prove what other companies are doing, how they did it and what results they saw. “Training algorithms requires strong partnerships with vendors who understand the technology as well as how it can deliver actionable information,” she said. This transformation will take time so choosing a vendor you can trust is important.
In most jobs, employees are likely responsible for a lot of different things, no matter what the job description says.
They must communicate certain information and manage certain tasks and resources. Workers definitely have to manage their time and stress levels and measure their responses to requests.
Their job is not to complete a goal plan or fill out a self-evaluation of their performance, engage in learning and development courses, complete an engagement survey or any of the other HR-type tasks employees are frequently asked to do. But to many employees it probably feels like HR thinks that is their job.
And the frustration of being taken out of productivity to complete these tasks is just part of the workload.
The truth is, human resources has struggled for a long time to figure out how to embed these kinds of tasks in day-to-day work of employees so that productivity is uninterrupted. But they have a mountain directly in their way in the form of the HR technology used by many of today’s organizations.
This technology may comprehensively meet the needs of HR, giving them one automated place to track employee goals, completion rates of performance forms and report on employee data. But when it comes to meeting the needs of the people using the technology to get things done, it almost always falls short.
Here’s a secret human resources technology vendors won’t typically tell you: It’s because we purposely built it that way. For a long time, human resources technology was designed to automate processes, enabling users to get from point A to point B. It was designed to be deployed across an entire workforce, driving consistency and scale across departments and teams. And it was designed to meet the needs of one group: human resources.
So, what happened? Over time the workforce changed, the nature of work changed, and the role of technology in our lives became unrecognizable from one year to the next.
Now solutions that focus on processes instead of people, force consistency instead of choice and meet the needs of one stakeholder while remaining disconnected from the rest of the business are quickly becoming obsolete. Consider today’s employee who can get directions from their phone just by asking, or use a voice command to learn about the weather.
Then they come to work and break away from job-related tasks to edit a performance goal in a clunky, outdated system through a series of clicks and menu options that get them there — but without much of a sense as to how or why. Is this sounding familiar?
The focus of enterprise technology is going from business process automation to delivering exceptional employee experiences that connect them to the business in new and meaningful ways. Where the human resources technology of the past was process-centric, rigid and disconnected, it must now become people-centric, flexible and holistic.
As the owners of employee experience and the ultimate stakeholders in whether the workforce is engaged, performing and thriving, business leaders must give their people tools that help not only processes, but people in doing their jobs — wherever their jobs take them, and whatever it is they’re working on.
This is the guiding principle influencing how human resources technology should be designed. An efficient tool must be built to be people-centric, focused on supporting and enhancing how people think, work, and connect. Solutions should also be flexible, with intelligent, adaptable tools that know who individual people are and what they need most in order to be successful.
Above all, they must be holistic and connected, with multiple channels of access, embedded analytics and emerging technologies like machine learning. By creating a comprehensive ecosystem of business solutions and extensions, organizations can ensure alignment with, and visibility to, the business.
The days of human resources as a hindrance to doing great work are over. The new era of HR technology and tools in the hands of employees and leaders is here.
If HR solutions are designed to be truly people-centric, flexible and holistic, businesses can ensure their employees are getting superior experiences and are connected with the business in meaningful ways.
Gabby Burlacu is a human capital management researcher at human resources technology firm SAP SuccessFactors. Comment below or email editors@ workforce.com.
Lie detector tests, have been all over the news lately. Reports suggest that Donald Trump wants to administer these examinations to the entire White House staff to identify the author of the anonymous New York Times op-ed.
There are no laws prohibiting the White House from using polygraph tests in this manner. The federal law that regulates their use in the workplace — the Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988 — does not apply to the government.
For private-sector employers, however, the EPPA imposes strict prohibitions on the use of any device to render a diagnostic opinion as to the honesty or dishonesty of an individual.
It prohibits employers from:
Requiring, requesting, suggesting, or causing an employee or prospective employee to take or submit to any lie detector test.
Using, accepting, referring to, or inquiring about the results of any lie detector test of an employee or prospective employee.
Discharging, disciplining, discriminating against, denying employment or promotion, or threatening to take any such action against an employee or prospective employee for refusing to take a test, on the basis of the results of a test, for filing a complaint, for testifying in any proceeding, or for exercising any rights afforded by the EPPA.
Despite these strict prohibitions, there are limited exceptions when an employer can administer polygraph tests (but not other forms of lie detector tests).
One exception covers prospective employees of armored car and other similar security companies. Another covers prospective employees of companies that manufacture controlled substances.
Of more general application to most employers, the third exception covers employees who are reasonably suspected of involvement in a workplace incident that results in economic loss to the employer and who had access to the property that is the subject of an investigation. Thus, an employer who reasonably believes that an employee has stolen is able to administer a polygraph test to confirm the employee’s culpability.
Even if this exception applies, employers cannot use polygraph tests carte blanche. There are certain key limits on their administration:
Prior to the polygraph examination, the employer must provide to the to-be-examined employee a written notice
explaining the employee’s rights and the limitations imposed, including the prohibited areas of questioning, restrictions on the use of test results, and the employee’s right to file a complaint with the Department of Labor alleging violations of EPPA;
explaining the specific incident or activity being investigated and the basis for the employer’s reasonable suspicion of the employee’s involvement;
reasonably describing the date, time, and place of the examination and the employee’s right to consult with legal counsel or an employee representative before each phase of the test; and
describing the nature and characteristics of the polygraph instrument and examination.
The employee can refuse to take a test, terminate a test at any time, or decline to take a test because of a medical condition.
The results of a test alone cannot be disclosed to anyone other than the employer or employee without their consent.
The polygraph examiner must be licensed, and bonded or insured. Also, the examination is subject to strict conduct standards.
Employers that violate the EPPA are subject to a civil money penalty of $20,521 per violation, in addition to legal and equitable relief such as lost wages and reinstatement, and, in the case of a private civil lawsuit, reasonable costs and attorneys’ fees.
Polygraph tests provide employers a powerful tool to confirm and confront employee certain limited employee issues. Employers must carefully follow the EPPA’s requirements so that a slam-dunk termination does not turn into a sure-fire lawsuit for the employee.
Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.
Their onboarding program, NC Launch Onboarding, is a way to make the process more effective and increase employee retention. The site is filled with characters from the company’s games and takes new hires on “quests” to finish items like payroll, playfully referred to as “loot.”
Bronze: Riverside Healthcare
