Announcement: The Health & Benefits Leadership Conference

Quick break from the regularly scheduled nonsense compelling content on the blog to share some information and a special discount offer for the upcoming 4th Annual Health & Benefits Leadership Conference that will take place March 30 - April 1, 2016 at the fabulous Aria resort in Las Vegas.

This event has grown into what I think is the premier conference for corporate leaders that oversee benefits, wellness, and the overall well being (health, financial, physical, emotional), of their employees. 

Don't believe me? 

Take a guick look at the agenda for the conference here. You will see dozens of sessions covering the most important, relevant, and cutting-edge topics in health, benefits, and wellness today. From current issues with health care and employer-sponsored benefits to financial wellness to important issues around work/life balance, and more - the Health & Benefits Leadership Conference offers HR and benefits leaders a tremendous opportunity to learn, network, and raise their understanding of the most important issues and potential solutions for their benefits challenges.

Just some of the health and benefits thought leaders that will be speaking at the conference include Alexandra Drane, Ron Leopold, Jennifer Benz, Carol Harnett, Fran Melmed and many more.

And your humble correspondent, (me), will once again serve as host of the wildly popular 'Ideas and Innovators' session where health and benefits innovators and provocateurs will share their most challenging and cutting-edge ideas in a fast-paced and fun format.

And more that 70 providers of services and technology, including some of the most innovative companies in the world, will be on hand in the Expo hall, where benefits pros can see, touch, and learn more about the latest technology solutions that can enhance and support their organizational benefits and wellness programs.

If you are a benefits or wellness pro, this is one event that you don't want to miss, and to make it a little easier for you to attend, blog readers can use the registration discount code BOESE16  to get an additional $75 off the current rate. Just go to www.benefitsconf.com and click on 'Register'.

Hope to see lots of readers out at the event, if you see me, make sure to day hi! 

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. 

Revolutionary HR Tech: Part 1 - Clean Data for All - #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 the HRevolution site as well.

Ok, let's hit the first HR tech idea - from the 'Administration' team, a tool called 'Oscar.'

The idea: Every HR tech project plan starts or has near the start, a step called 'Clean up the data.' And that step is miserable. Over time and with growth, most companies possess numerous systems for HR and workforce processes and functions. And with the growth of an organization's systems footprint, the challenge to keep data not just in synch across systems, but to ensure the data is 'clean' (accurate, up to date, correctly formatted, validated, etc.), becomes daunting.

While the Admin team is aware that there are some existing HR technology solutions that help integrate HR data across systems, the team felt like simple file-transfer type information from System 'A' to System 'B' is not good enough. After all, if the Employee's date of birth is not correct in System 'A', then sending over that bad piece of data to System 'B' does nothing to help with the real issue - inaccurate employee and workplace data that can lead to a myriad of downstream problems.

So that is were 'Oscar' comes in. 

Oscar is a tool that would sit over an organization's existing HR technology solutions and would serve to monitor, audit, validate, and clean, (or at least raise exceptions as needed), the core elements of the organization's HR data set. Think employee names, dates of birth, employee ID numbers, locations, salary, hours, and many more potentially. These kinds of data elements usually exists in multiple platforms, systems, and can be acted upon in numerous ways, which often results in data getting out of alignment, or 'dirty'. Oscar would learn where to look for these conditions, and raise alerts to the needed administrators, HR analysts, managers, and employees as needed to ensure action is taken before 'bad' data gets propagated.

Think of it as a kind of an HR-based identity theft monitoring tool that instead of being on the lookout for a gang of shady credit-card spoofing thieves, instead is constantly waiting patiently and vigilantly for bad HR data to raise it's ugly head, and to take action to stamp it down.

I think this is a cool idea, and definitely one that HR pros, especially in larger organizations would love.

Would it be complicated to build? Sure.

Does it, or elements of it, probably exist in other tools already? Maybe.

But is it a 'revolutionary' idea for HR tech? Most definitely.

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

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

Notes from the road #19 - Red eye diaries edition

Submitted, or at least started to try and submit, from the new and improved Delta Sky Club in SFO while awaiting a redeye flight from SFO - JFK.  

Here are, for your consideration, a series of slightly disjointed and possible incoherent observations of the red eye flight and the kinds of travelers that find themselves on an 11:45PM - 6:32 AM trip across this great land.

1. Taking a red eye flight is 100% a terrible, horrible, no good, stupid idea. Whatever rationalizations you have worked through that led you to this grim place will all prove to be entirely empty. You will not 'get a lot done the next day' because you will be too tired. You will not score any points with the people back at the office, because they don't give a hoot about you. And you will only tick off your family that you were rushing home to see due to the fact that by about 7:15PM the next night you will be asleep in your Barcalounger.  The red eye flight is an abomination. And yes I am about to board one within the hour.

2. No one, I mean no one on the red eye wants to be there, including the pilots and crew. It is the air travel equivalent of a visit to the DMV at 12:15PM on a Monday. Everyone is angry, tired, hates everyone else for the same reasons they hate themselves for choosing the red eye, and will kill you dead if you so much as make eye contact. It is air travel, which is usually pretty horrific, at its absolute bottom. Thank my lucky stars at least I am in the nice Delta Sky Club and not out in the terminal right about now.

3. You are not going to sleep on the red eye, drop that fantasy right now. It is too crowded, hot, noisy, and altogether unpleasant for most people to get more than 39 minutes of decent sleep on a six hour flight. The one exception? The guy who drops like a rock in the aisle seat of your row, so out of it (and possibly snoring), that you can't get past him to get up and stretch your legs or get to the restroom. I guess you will have to hold it until New York. Awesome.

4. The guy right next to you, inexplicably, will still be working at 11:30PM PT. He will be on the phone as you board. He will not stop texting even after 17 requests to turn off mobile devices. And the second the little chime goes off that indicates you have crossed 10,000 feet he will fire up that ThinkPad and get back online. And he will complain to high heaven if the in-flight Wifi gets a little wonky. He will order black coffee at 2AM. This person is a terrible person. I hope this person is not you.

5. When you finally arrive the next morning you will make a solemn, sober, and serious vow: You will NEVER take another red eye flight again. But of course you know, deep down, that is an empty, empty threat. After a few weeks or months pass by you will be beguiled by the notion of getting home at 9AM instead of 'wasting' an entire day traveling and you will, on your own accord, book another red eye flight sometime soon. You know how I know this is true? I am on another red eye flight next week. We are all silly, silly, stupid people.

Safe travels to anyone out there reading this in an airport, or worse yet, on a plane at 2AM.