PODCAST: #HRHappyHour 225 - Kronos and Workforce Management

HR Happy Hour #225 - Kronos and Workforce Management

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guests: Jim Kizielewicz, Chief Marketing Office, Kronos

Recorded Monday November 16, 2015

LISTEN HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show while Trish was off keynoting an HR conference in Dubai (fun!), Steve attended Kronos Works 2015, the annual customer and user conference for Kronos, a leading provider of workforce management technologies.

Chances are pretty good that at some time in your career you have interacted with Kronos' workforce management technologies - as their solutions for time and attendance, workforce scheduling, absence management and more have been implemented by tens of thousands of organizations worldwide.

At Kronos Works, Steve sat down with Kronos' CMO, Jim Kizielewicz (who also has about 7 other big jobs at Kronos, you can listen for more details), about some of the most important topics affecting workforce management today. Kronos, since it touches thousands of organizations and millions of employees (most of them hourly workers), each day is in a unique position to help shape the dynamic and conversation around the workforce and the increasingly importance of scheduling to employee engagement and organizational performance. We also talked about the continued move to the cloud and how it benefits HR organizations and leaders.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or using the widget player below, (email and RSS subscribers click through).

This was a really interesting and fun event. Thanks to Kronos for having meut at the event, and also thanks to Jim for taking the time to be a part of the HR Happy Hour Show.

And don't forget the HR Happy Hour Show is available on iTunes, and on all the major podcast player apps for iOS and Android - just search for 'HR Happy Hour' to find and subscribe to the show and you will never miss a new episode. Finally, many thanks to our show sponsor, Equifax Workforce Solutions, the leader in HR solutions for compliance, ACA, analytics and more.

CHART OF THE DAY: In a world of infinite choice, we choose very little

How many apps do you have installed on your smart phone? 50, 60, maybe more?

How many TV channels does your cable or satellite TV subscription offer? A couple hundred, give or take?

How many websites are there on the internet? Way, way too many to count I bet. Probably something in the order of tens of millions at least.

So after thinking about those questions, let's ask another set of questions. How many apps, websites, and TV channels do you regularly use/visit/consume? What it the number of these apps, etc. that tend to dominate your time and attention?

Take a look at the chart below, taken from a recent presentation given by business strategist Michael Wolf at a recent Wall St. Journal conference, for some insights into these questions, and then as you have come to demand, some FREE commentary from me after the data.

Interesting data, let's unpack it a little here and see what it might mean for HR/Talent/anyone trying to get attention in a busy world. 

The average person uses 27 apps in a month, but about 80% of that time is spent in only 5 apps. I will offer up my top 5 - Gmail, Twitter, Zite (a news aggregator), Feedly (an RSS feed reader), and The Score (a sports news and scores app). But whatever your Top 5 apps may be, chances are good they dominate your time on your phone to a significant extent.

This same self-selected narrowing of almost endless choices also is seen with the general internet, and with TV content. We have tons of options, almost too many, yet we end up gravitating and focusing on those very few choices we seem to enjoy and identify with the most. And again, those lists are pretty small. 

What should this data make us think about in more general terms as we try to pry precious attention and eyeballs towards our bright shiny new things?

1. We choose very little, but the 'pie' is so big, even a tiny sliver is huge. With the continued growth of market penetration of smart phones, broadband connections, and wifi everywhere - more and more time is being spent online in all of its forms. Your app or website or internet show or podcast doesn't have to break into anyone's Top 5 to still be a huge success. You just have to identify, target, and create value for that small group that will be open and ready for your message. The HR Happy Hour Show that Trish McFarlane and I do is a great example of this. We may not be 'Serial', but we have a fantastic and growing audience of HR and HR tech fans and have built a really cool thing.

2. Habits are really hard to change. You, me, everyone - we check the same 5 apps, the same 8 websites, watch the same 10 TV channels week after week after week. If you can't easily get folks to change their consumption habits then you have to find a way to better integrate with these habits. No one hates email more than me, but I still spend more time in email every day than I care to, and I still get plenty of news and information from this old habit. So it makes sense to focus at least some on getting your message better read in email or in one of the other 'Top' apps today (LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, Snapchat, etc.), instead of creating something brand new that requires users to adopt a new habit. 

3. Don't 'break' things that are working. Once you have an audience, or a set of fans/followers etc., you have to be careful not to mess around or experiment too much all at one time. It is hard enough to initially earn the attention of the audience you seek, it is even harder to have to try and earn them a second time. As your audience grows you want to be sure you are growing along with them, but not leaving them behind if that makes sense. I'd like to run 'Ranked' posts every day, but if I did I am pretty sure I would drive away just about everyone who I have spent 7 or 8 years trying to connect with. But the occasional Tom Cruise or Ranked post is fine I think.

No one has time for all the choices that are now available to us on our phones, the web, and our TVs. That doesn't mean there is not any room or any opportunity for something new to break through, it just means that the ideas that can break through are rarer than ever, and the people that can conjure up these ideas are more valuable than ever.

Ok that's it, I am out. Go back to the sites/apps you really enjoy. 

Have a great week!

Revolutionary HR Tech: Part 4 - What does culture look like? - #HRevolution

Note: For the rest of this week, (or longer if I can't manage to get it all done in time), I am going to run a short series of four posts inspired by a session at last weekend's HRevolution event in St. Louis that I facilitated along with the fantastic Mike Krupa. 

In the session, we asked four teams of attendees to imagine, envision, describe, and articulate a new (or at least new to them), kind of revolutionary HR technology solution that would improve or enhance some aspect of HR, talent management, recruiting, strategy, etc.

The teams were each given a context to work in that roughly correspond to the major sub-types of HR technology tools today: Administration, Talent Management, Culture/Brand, and finally Insight/Analytics. The teams came up with some really clever and thought-provoking ideas in a really short time, and I thought it would be fun to share them (as best as I can recall them), here and try to keep the HRevolution discussions on this topic moving forward. We will consolidate all 4 revolutionary HR tech ideas into one paper that we will post here and on theHRevolution site as well.

Ok, let's hit the fourth and final HR tech idea - from the 'Culture' team, an idea for a new technology that I will call 'Culture is a Mirror'.

'Culture is a Mirror.'

That is the title/slogan/concept that the Culture team came up with when thinking about organizational culture, and what a revolutionary HR technology that could help the organization understand, define, and reinforce its culture would be based upon.

Their idea was that culture exists as a reflection of what people do, what they say, how they interact with each other, (and the outside world), and only by holding up a proverbial mirror to these actions and interactions can we begin to assess and interpret an amorphous idea like 'culture'.

So what might this kind of revolutionary tool, this 'mirror' for culture be able to do? Here are a few ideas, and my apologies to the 'Culture' team if I have left out (or invented) some of these:

1. Scan/review internal communications for things like tone, language choices, emojis, exclamation points, used of ALL CAPS, etc. to take a measure of the nature of internal exchanges and how people 'talk' to one another

2. Review existing 'culture' measurements against business performance and individual achievement. Things like engagement surveys, pulse surveys, participation in volunteer days, time and attendance trends, etc. The mirror would hold these measurements up in a way that allows the organization to compare if what it 'feels' about culture is actually reflected in actions and data. 

3. Incorporate recruiting data and analytics (both internal and against peer companies), to reflect and compare whether or not the internal ideas and beliefs about culture are holding true when viewed through and external lens. It seems like often what the organization believes about its own culture does not always hold up, or at least fails to get completely and properly communicated to candidates and the public. The Culture Mirror tool would present the organization a way to compare these perceptions about culture, and make recommendations to take remedial actions as needed.

4. Finally, and perhaps the most interesting idea that the 'Culture' team came up with, the Culture Mirror tool would be highly visual, using a Pinterest or Instagram-like design and interface to help 'show' these ideas around culture, perception of culture, and what the 'mirror' sees when examining all the factors that combine to create culture. Are people smiling at work? Are they dressing in bright colors, or all in black? Do they seem happy when they walk in to the office, or are they trudging along, staring at the floor? The Culture team wants a technology that brings the idea of culture to life, in a highly visual way.

What do you think? Sound wild? I love the idea.

Actually, I love all four ideas that came out of the 'Building Revolutionary HR Tech' session. It is amazing what can happen when smart, engaged, and interesting people can do when there are very few limits to what they can imagine.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the session - it was loads of fun for me too!

Final note: Big, big thanks to our HRevolution 2015 sponsors - Globoforce, Quantum Workplace, and The Arland Group. 

Revolutionary HR Tech: Part 3 - Beyond Workforce Planning - #HRevolution

Note: For the rest of this week, (or longer if I can't manage to get it all done in time), I am going to run a short series of four posts inspired by a session at last weekend's HRevolution event in St. Louis that I facilitated along with the fantastic Mike Krupa. 

In the session, we asked four teams of attendees to imagine, envision, describe, and articulate a new (or at least new to them), kind of revolutionary HR technology solution that would improve or enhance some aspect of HR, talent management, recruiting, strategy, etc.

The teams were each given a context to work in that roughly correspond to the major sub-types of HR technology tools today: Administration, Talent Management, Culture/Brand, and finally Insight/Analytics. The teams came up with some really clever and thought-provoking ideas in a really short time, and I thought it would be fun to share them (as best as I can recall them), here and try to keep the HRevolution discussions on this topic moving forward. We will consolidate all 4 revolutionary HR tech ideas into one paper that we will post here and on theHRevolution site as well.

Ok, let's hit the third HR tech idea - from the 'Insights' team, an idea for a new technology that I will call 'Beyond Workforce Planning.'

For a while now HR technologies to support workforce planning have existed, so the category itself is not a new idea. But at HRevolution the 'Insights' team took a revolutionary approach to envision what truly transformative workforce planning technology might look like one day. Here are some of the capabilities and features of a 'next-gen' workforce planning technology as imagined at HRevolution:

1. Continuously updated and dynamic - most workforce planning tools rely on point-in-time scenario planning and a defined set of assumptions that result in a kind of static or fixed result. A revolutionary workforce planning approach would be be continually evolving as inputs to the plan change, external factors update, and the technology itself 'learns' how business and people conditions impact the workforce plan.

2. Deeper integration with talent acquisition technology - while many workforce planning technologies that exist today can and do 'talk' to the ATS for example, the Insights team imagined a more robust level of integration where assumptions on time to fill and expected labor costs could be enhanced or even replaced by actual data from the ATS and other recruiting technologies. These too should be continuously adapted to reflect current market conditions and the overall results and recruiting outcomes the company is experiencing.

3. A window to the outside world - I think the most interesting aspect of the Insight team's ideas for a more modern, revolutionary workforce planning technology was their idea for a tool that could leverage a more expansive set of external data points and measurements as inputs and influencers on the workforce plan. No organization, and no workforce plan and strategy exists in a vacuum: things as disparate as macro-economic trends, weather conditions and forecasts, politics, demographic shifts, increases or decreases in competition - these and numerous other factors all play a role in how the organization will perform, and the human capital needed to fuel that performance. What if the revolutionary workforce planning tool could overlay these kinds of data elements and trends on top of the more traditional elements like expected sales growth, retention rates, and expected compensation increases? In addition, this modern workforce planning tool could run sophisticated analyses to inform the HR analyst just which external data elements are most correlated, and possibly predictive of workforce needs, capacity, and costs. It would be really cool I think to have workforce planning and the outside, external world mashed up in order to make better HR decisions.

Ok, now the vendors who make Workforce Planning tools can chime in below in the comments and tell me that we are all crazy at HRevolution. And we just might be.

So that is the third Revolutionary HR tech idea, stay tuned for the final installment of the series to see what the Culture team cooked up.

Final note: Big, big thanks to our HRevolution 2015 sponsors - Globoforce, Quantum Workplace, and The Arland Group. 

Revolutionary HR Tech: Part 2 - The Cult of High Potential - #HRevolution

Note: For the rest of this week, (or longer if I can't manage to get it all done in time), I am going to run a short series of four posts inspired by a session at last weekend's HRevolution event in St. Louis that I facilitated along with the fantastic Mike Krupa. 

In the session, we asked four teams of attendees to imagine, envision, describe, and articulate a new (or at least new to them), kind of revolutionary HR technology solution that would improve or enhance some aspect of HR, talent management, recruiting, strategy, etc.

The teams were each given a context to work in that roughly correspond to the major sub-types of HR technology tools today: Administration, Talent Management, Culture/Brand, and finally Insight/Analytics. The teams came up with some really clever and thought-provoking ideas in a really short time, and I thought it would be fun to share them (as best as I can recall them), here and try to keep the HRevolution discussions on this topic moving forward. We will consolidate all 4 revolutionary HR tech ideas into one paper that we will post here and on theHRevolution site as well.

Ok, let's hit the first HR tech idea - from the 'Talent' team, an idea for a new technology that I will call 'Higher and Higher Potential Identification.'

First off, while this team had the most amusing on stage pitch for their idea, I am going to take the liberty of skipping over the 'religious' (and funny), overlay to their idea and focus on the real talent management issue that the 'Talent' team correctly and at least initially landed on that was the focus of their Revolutionary HR Tech.

And that issue is one that just about every HR/Talent professional has had to wrestle with at some point - how to help managers and other leaders, (and HR itself), get better at the identification and cultivation of so-called 'High Potential' employees. On 99% of the 9-box grids that HR or Talent Management technology providers have rolled out, the two axes that form the grid upon which employees are plotted are 'performance' and 'potential'. And while the argument on how or even if to determine 'performance' is a never-ending and voluminous debate, the 'potential' side of the equation seems to get less attention and consideration.

So the 'Talent' team's essential idea was a technology solution, which would have several elements - assessments, analysis of interactions, identification of profile traits that might be suggestive, and even a wearable piece of technology that would help to build up a kind of 'potential' score for each employee. This potential score would be tied to additional opportunities and developmental exercises as the employee's potential score continued to grow, to the point in time where they (hopefully), maximize their potential in their organization and role. Other, external metrics like business performance, engagement indicators, even practical data sets like attendance and health care claims could be compared to these potential measurements to determine if active and intentional interventions to increase and finally maximize employee contributions based on their greatest potential would be worthwhile.

It was a pretty big, audacious idea (especially in that the Talent team only had 20 minutes to conjure it), and I think it is one that has been really neglected in the HR Technology space.

Could we actually build a technology that would truly be successful at assessing and cultivating potential? I am not sure, but if we could, it would certainly be a Revolutionary HR Technology.

So that is the second idea, stay tuned in the next few days for what the Culture, and Insights teams cooked up.

Final note: Big, big thanks to our HRevolution 2015 sponsors - Globoforce, Quantum Workplace, and The Arland Group.