In a same-day delivery world, does waiting two weeks to get paid make sense?

I am a big fan of Amazon Prime and its subsidiary Zappos which take a very similar approach to package delivery. On either Amazon or Zappos, one or two clicks to find the item you want, one click to order, (at least for Amazon), and boom - a day or at the most two days later the goods are at the door.

But even next day delivery isn't going to be good enough for these eCommerce leaders, the game is moving towards same-day delivery, at least for the larger markets. Whether these same-day deliveries will be facilitated by the usual shipping companies like FedEx and UPS, managed via centralized drop-off/pick-up locations and lockers, or even executed by Jeff Bezos' armada of flying drones, one thing is for certain - consumers are going to receive (and demand) goods even faster than ever before.

And it is not just package delivery where consumers expectations for speed are increasing. Who wants to wait 7-10 business days for concert or sports tickets to be printed and mailed? We just have a code on our iPhones scanned at the turnstile. Don't want to walk tediously through the aisles of the grocery store? Fire up an app, make a few selections, (or just tap 'Send me my usual order') and an hour or so later you are swimming in Ritz crackers, Campbell's soup, and Mountain Dew. Heck, even the drive-through at the Starbucks is not enough of a time saver, soon the Starbucks app and some GPS location chicanery will have your order waiting for you the instant you pull in to the lot, (and it will be paid for too).

I could go on and on like this, but you know the point - technology is making it possible to deliver goods and services and experiences of every type faster and faster - to the point where many of them are almost now 'on-demand' and in almost real time. And that is what we, the consumer, wants and demands. 

While these trends are influencing all manner of enterprise and business technologies, call them consumerization of IT if you like, one area where the 'instant access' kind of paradigm has not really made any headway in HR tech is in the area of payroll - specifically in hourly payroll where most workers have to wait days if not weeks to actually get paid for the hours they have worked. 

The main reason is the typical corporate payroll cycle for hourly workers - most often paid on a bi-weekly basis, one week or so after the two-week reporting period concludes. Hours logged on the first day of a cycle might not actually show up in a paycheck for something like 18 or 19 days. And that is kind of a drag for workers that might be living paycheck-to-paycheck to make ends meet. This kind of problem, workers having financial obligations that do not usually wait for the corporate payroll cycle to complete has led to the rise of the Payday loan indusry, where people can get loans/advances on their paychecks from third-parties, usually at ridiculously high interest rates. Workers do get early access to their pay, but at such a high cost that for many it just starts a cycle of debt and fees.

A new startup called ActiveHours is attempting to end the need for these kind nasty Payday lending practices with a platform modeled after a simple principle: Employees are entitled to the pay for the hours they have worked immediately after those hours are recorded. Here's how it works from a recent review in TechCrunch:

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has come up with a radical new way to charge for its mobile payment service that flips the lending model on its head. Activehours is selling a service that lets its customers get paid for the hours they work, without charging any interest on the payments that its clients receive. Users simply take a picture of their time sheet and specify how much money they would like to get paid from their earnings up to that point in the pay cycle.

The service means hourly workers can get paid as they go, enabling them to spend their wages however and whenever they see fit. Activehours only receives a service charge which is determined by the user themselves. The company has no set fees, nor does it charge interest on the money it disburses to customers.

Pretty simple, and kind of radical too. Employees take a picture of their time sheet, get verified by ActiveHours, then get essentially a free draw on their bi-weekly net pay at any time during the pay cycle, without have to pay the exorbitant kinds of fees and rates that the Payday lenders have typically demanded.

ActiveHours only gets paid through user-decided service charges, (a model while extremely worker-friendy, is certainly not sustainable, but still), and the employees can get at their earnings as they work, not only after some corporate-payroll calendar tells them they can.

Here is the money quote from ActiveHours founder Ram Palaniappan:

“Every year, more than $1 trillion of hourly pay is held back for two weeks because of the way pay cycles work today. Yet, more than half of hourly workers in the U.S. live paycheck-to-paycheck or borrow money to stay afloat,” said Ram Palaniappan, Activehours founder in a statement. “It doesn’t make sense to incur overdraft fees or take out payday loans when your workplace owes you money. If you work everyday, why can’t you get your pay every day?”

Kind of a good question, and one that ActiveHours is setting about trying to answer. 

Note: I have never talked with anyone at ActiveHours and this is not a sponsored post in any way, I just think it is a cool idea.

Media and Consumer Tech Trend #2 - The End of Complexity

Last week the analyst firm Gartner issued an interesting press release sharing their '10 consumer macro trends shaping the technology, media and service provider markets over the next 10 years', and on Monday I blogged about one of the trends Gartner called out, the importance of understanding the customer profile as you create products and services, and perhaps more importantly, as you make decisions on hiring and promotion into leadership roles.

Today I want to hit upon another of the Gartner consumer media and tech trends, the one titled 'The Death of Complexity'. For some context, here is the take from Gartner on how in the consumer media and tech space, complexity can often be seen as a negative:

The Death of Complexity

The consumer market is becoming progressively less tolerant of complexity. Although consumers tend to buy products with ever-richer features, they often prefer those that are simple and intuitive. The ability to provide appealing and intuitive user interfaces has become a critical point of differentiation among competing technology providers. As technology becomes more complex, vendors need to invest more in keeping the user interface simple and intuitive. (Providers) therefore need to focus on simplifying technology, pricing, brand messaging, and feedback and interaction, and consider offering chargeable help services for consumers challenged by installing and configuring new equipment and services in their homes.

I know what you are thinking, that is such a no-brainer kind of viewpoint that it should not even have made a list of trends or predictions. I mean, who doesn't want simpler, easier, and more accessible technology?

Well mostly everyone, I think.

We continue to want more and more capability from our technologies while simultaneously demanding that they become easier and easier to use. And that is perfectly fine, in fact, these increasing demands and requirements are what often spur fantastic innovations and solutions. But when the 'I want the product to be simpler' desire involves giving up capability that we feel like we have a right to or that we can't do without, well then often the simple becomes the complex.

So the technology solution providers, both in the consumer space and those that build technologies designed to support enterprise users, (also becoming increasingly harder to distinguish), are challenged to balance the simplicity vs. capability ledger all the time. And while achieving the correct balance is certainly tricky, the ones that manage it most effectively are likely to stay one step ahead of the competition.

But here's the thing about simplicity, it seems to me that everyone is in favor of simpler and easier to use technologies for a little while. Until something new comes along. Something that does that 'one more thing' or has the one extra bell or whistle. And then the simple solution we loved for so long start to look, well maybe a little too simple.

Right up until the point where the tools we have can't do something that the other guy's tools can.

Media and Consumer Tech Trend #1 - Know your profile

Last week the analyst firm Gartner issued an interesting press release sharing their '10 consumer macro trends shaping the technology, media and service provider markets over the next 10 years'. The piece is worth taking a look through, even if you are (probably rightly), skeptical of any person or firm's ability to accurately or even semi-accurately being able to predict where consumer or even enterprise technologies are heading in the next decade. While we all know (or should know), that while the future of technology is likely to be dramatically different than today, we tend to plan for it in ways that are more like simple extension of the present.

But still, one trend that seems to be holding truer and truer with each passing day is the tendency and emphasis that consumer and public technologies will increasingly influence, shape, and create expectations for ease of use and flexibility for the next generation of enterprise technologies.  We have all heard the story by now - employees want enterprise solutions as fast, fun, nice to look at, and that can run on all their preferred devices, just like the solutions they use in their private and social lives. So if nothing else but for some awareness, designers and implementers of enterprise technologies should be aware of developments in the consumer technology space, as these drivers will have more and more impact on the solutions that are eventually deployed in the workplace.

So while certainly understanding that the Gartner predictions like any predictions, should be taken only at face value, I wanted to call a couple of them out this week on the blog, and offer a take or two of my own about how they might or should influence what happens in the workplace, either with the technologies themselves, or with the talent management processes surrounding the people that build these technologies.

Today, I call your attention to Gartner consumer tech and media trend #3: (below is from the Gartner release, and text in bold is my emphasis)):

Women Wanted: Unlocking Gender Opportunities

The consumer technology market is trending toward the production and marketing of more female-friendly technology products targeted at the market's single biggest demographic: women. Women are underrepresented in key job roles within the technology and media sectors. This is clearly a missed opportunity given that women typically control from 70 to 80 percent of household spending, including big-ticket items such as computers, cars and houses. T&SPs should conduct a gender audit and invest, if necessary, in recruiting suitable talent to redress underrepresentation of genders in key decision-making and creative roles

I thought this prediction was really interesting for two reasons. One, the more obvious observation that in certain markets, women drive the purchase and decision making processes to a significant extent. And two, and more compelling to HR and Talent professionals, that often women (and I think this angle can be extrapolated to any other demographic that dominates in a customer segment), do not have equal or even adequate representation in the companies and in the job roles meant to be making the decisions about what products and services to offer these customers, many or most of which are women.

From the talent management perspective this observation raises some important questions. How much does the talent inside the company need to look, think, and relate to its customers in order to build products that really resonate? And does an element of 'does this candidate understand our customers', (or at least is he/she likely to be able to understand them?),  need to be factored in to the more classic screening processes that focus on hard and more demonstrable skills and experiences.

I mean, upon closer inspection it seems kind of obvious - if you are building a product aimed at a particular market, (or at least one that is adopted by a specific market), how much do the people you hire to make the important decisions about that product need to be able to identify and relate?

Or is this just another example of a 10-year prediction we will all forget about in a years time? 

Consumerization, Technology, and HR

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show, (a weekly live internet radio show and podcast that I have been hosting since 2009), the conversation is going to be about Consumerization - specifically how the demands on Human Resources and HR Technology professionals are changing, largely influenced by developments in the consumer and personal technology markets.

Thinking about consumer technology and trends naturally forces one to consider the larger world in which our organizations reside, and how things like globalization, changing demographics, and even political and social unrest all contribute to and impact the workplace. The employees that work for us also live in the real world as well, and as the lines between work and personal time continue to move, shift, and cross; thinking a little more deeply about these environmental forces and how they shape workplaces is not only fascinating, but critical.

And when thinking about 'Consumerization' in the workplace, some other questions come to mind:

Who hasn't felt at times that the tools and technologies that are available at work are in many ways less appealing and effective than what we use in our personal lives?

How many folks carry around multiple mobile devices, one for 'work' that tends to be more basic and utilitarian, (and controlled by IT); and an iPhone or Droid to for 'fun' only to conclude the 'fun' device and its collection of carefully and personally selected applications create an incredibly powerful mobile computing powerhouse.

Finally, what consumer trends can be safely ignored, (for now), by HR professionals, and which ones should you make sure you don't miss?

Our guest on the Happy Hour tonight to talk about these ideas will be Yvette Cameron from Constellation Research. Yvette brings a wealth of experience and perspective as a business, technology, and Human Resources leader and will be sure to inform, challenge, and hopefully inspire.

The show will be live tonight, December 8, 2011 from 8PM - 9PM ET. You can listen live on the show page here - or using the widget player below:

Listen to internet radio with Steve Boese on Blog Talk Radio

Also, if you'd like to participate more actively with the show, you are invited to call in live on 646-378-1086, and follow the backchannel conversation on Twitter - just track the hastag #HRHappyHour.

It will be a fun and interesting conversation and I hope you will join us!