Welcome back

Happy 2014!

It's good to be back as it were, after a couple of weeks of running old posts, not writing much of anything new, and more or less laying low and attempting to keep warm. I did learn at least one new phrase over the holidays, 'Polar Vortex', although it is assuredly one I could have done without.

Prior to the holidays kicking off, as I was scrolling back through the 2013 blog archives to find what I thought were some of the better and most representative posts to re-publish it during the last two weeks it struck me (finally) as to what this blog is really about, or perhaps said better, what topics and subjects about which I am actually interested in learning, sharing, and offering opinions on.  For me, 2013 was mostly about three main subject areas:

1. Advances in robot technology and the increasing automation of the workplace and of other technologies (like self-driving cars, Google Glass, etc.).

2. Macro economic, demographic, and societal trends that impact our organizations and our professional lives. Things like the aging of the workforce and the true or possibly not true skills gap that gets bandied about from time to time.

3. How data is changing work, the practice of HR and management, and even our personal lives as well. In that vein, my single favorite post from 2013 was the one about the trucking company that is combining operational data from the trucks themselves with ‘softer’ HR data to make managerial interventions.

There are some other things mixed in there for sure, like sports and HR and the occasional rant/take on the (tiresome) ‘Company culture is more important that anything’ meme that will never seem to go away. And I will (naturally) use this blog to help promote those things that do keep the lights on, like the HR Technology Conference, HRevolution, the HR Happy Hour Show, and other miscellaneous things I will be doing in 2014. But for the most part the blog will remain about what I think are the most interesting and most important ideas and topics that affect the way we work and the way we interact with technology to do that work.

Since this blog, or most anyone's personal blog for that matter, is just an outlet and a hobby more or less, it naturally is going to reflect my interests, Whether or not anyone else finds them interesting is another matter. My sense from a cursory scan of site traffic over the years suggests that there are at least a few of you out there, but your numbers certainly aren't growing too much!

But regardless of traffic or comments or social shares, I personally still find writing on the blog to be fun, challenging, and beneficial. And I do want to thank everyone that has visited in the past and that will stop by in 2014.

As always, I welcome comments, ideas, suggestions, etc. I will note, and this is is mainly for the PR types that might see this, I am really not that interested in running guest posts from people I have never met, publishing your client’s infographics about anything, or writing about anything that is ‘under embargo’.

Ok, that is it  - have a fantastic, successful, and fun 2014 everyone!

REPRISE: Human Resources when there are fewer humans around

Note: The blog is taking some well-deserved rest for the next two weeks (that is code for I am pretty much out of decent ideas, and I doubt most folks are spending their holidays reading blogs anyway), and will be re-running some of best, or at least most interesting posts from 2013. Maybe you missed these the first time around or maybe you didn't really miss them, but either way they are presented for your consideration. Thanks to everyone who stopped by in 2013!

The below post is another take, one a little more 'HR-centric' of the topic I talked about the most in 2013 - the continual and increasing encroachment and pressure that technology and automation is having on the workplace - rendering more and more of us if not obsolete, at least significantly less relevant. The piece originally ran in May 2013.
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Human Resources when there are fewer humans around 

The below chart (or a version of it) has been making the rounds plenty in the last year or so as the American economy rebounds and seemingly continues to strengthen coming out of the financial crisis and ensuing recession of the late aughts.

It shows how despite corporate profits, expressed as a percentage of GDP, continuing to set records, that those record profits have not (taken in aggregate), translated into lots of new jobs, as the labor participation rate shows.

Source - FRED 

As the chart pretty clearly shows, aggregate corporate profits (the red line), after plunging to a low at about the middle of the recession, late 2008, have rebounded considerably, and now are at all-time record levels as a percentage of GDP.

The employment rate however, after taking an equally dramatic fall throughout the entire recession, finally stabilized at a far lower level than pre-recession, and despite, (or some might argue what has been the primary driver of), rising corporate profits is showing no signs of regaining its former levels of around 62%.

Profits are up, way up even, yet corporations are achieving these profits with far fewer workers than before, (and paying them less, generally. We could also factor in wage growth or lack thereof to make that point at well).

There are lots of reasons for this - technological progress, increased automation, continuing reliance on relatively cheaper foreign labor, diminishing influence of labor unions, the aging of the workforce, etc. but the bottom line seems to be an ever-growing bottom line with fewer and fewer actual people needed to make that happen.

No doubt if you are one of the workers in the 'right' kind of job, you are probably doing pretty well or are on the way to doing pretty well. But if you are one of the people that might be in a field that has simply figured out to continue to drive profits without as many people, then things could be looking kind of grim.

Where does all this leave you as an HR/Talent pro?

A lot depend on the company/industry you are in. But in aggregate, certainly, when there are fewer and fewer 'humans' in the workforce, then corporations will figure out they need fewer and fewer Human Resources people to help look after them all. I have talked with a few HR leaders lately that are seeing both the size of their labor forces hold steady and their HR/EE ratios holding an extremely high levels.

Advice?

Make sure you are spending a decent chunk of your time and energy on things that are truly additive - technology that will help employees generate new ideas and innovations, marketing and recruiting strategies that will let you land more than your share of the best talent at the expense of your competitors, and even in an 'addition-by-subtraction' way, elimination of silly rules, policies, or processes that in any way get in the way of employee performance.

And you could spend some time figuring out what kinds of planning, services, training, development, and team building activities that 'resources' like our pal Baxter needs and you might ride this out a little longer.

Have a great week!

PODCAST: HR Happy Hour 174 - Oracle HCM World Preview - Modern HR

HR Happy Hour 174 - Oracle HCM World Preview: Modern HR

Recorded Thursday December 19, 2013

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane sat down with Gretchen Alarcon, Vice President of Oracle HCM Strategy for Oracle, for an interesting and fun conversation about some of the most important challenges facing the modern HR leader and the organization as we head into 2014, as well as how advances in HCM technologies are helping organizations to meet those challenges, and to offer some ideas about what some of the most intriguing HR and workplace technologies will have in store for us in the future.

Additionally, Gretchen gave us a preview of the upcoming and inaugural Oracle HCM World event to be held February 4-6, 2014 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. At Oracle HCM World, there will be over 100 sessions featuring HR leaders, industry experts, and recognized thought leaders sharing their insights and experiences - all designed to help attendees improve emplopyee enagement, to provide new strategies for talent attraction, development, and retention, and to support professional networking and knowledge sharing.

You can listent to the show on the show page here, or using the widget player below. Addtionally for you smartphone addicts, you can get the show on Apple's iTunes or for Android devices, using an app called Stitcher Radio. In both cases just search for "HR Happy Hour" to download the show and to subscribe to the podcast.

More Business Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane on BlogTalkRadio

 

It was a fun and enlightening conversation with Gretchen, and many thanks to her and the Oracle HCM team for joining us this week.

Note: This is the final show of 2013 - thanks as always for listening and Happy Holidays and we will see you in 2014! 

The most interesting companies in HR Tech #1 - Glassdoor

Note: It's time for a new, semi-occasional series here at the blog, especially since 'Job Titles of the Future' seems to have hit a bit of a dry patch. This time I am going to stay a little closer to a topic I am at least slightly more familiar with, the landscape of HR Technology solution providers. With 'The most interesting companies' series, I aim to highlight some of the cool and well, interesting things that HR tech companies are doing, particularly in areas that you may not be familiar with. As with every semi-occasional series on the blog, it will last as long as I find it interesting to write. And one more thing, none of the posts in this series are sponsored and I am not being compensated in any way for featuring any specific company.

Onward...

For the first 'most interesting' company, I submit Glassdoor.

Sure, you know Glassdoor as the home of the most extensive and thorough data source for company reviews submitted by employees, and a go-to source for job seekers to learn more about potential employers. And of course you know about Glassdoor's well-regarded and widely publicized lists and rankings, the best known being their Top 50 Places to Work list that was released earlier this week.

But what you may not know is that beyond their position as the de-facto home on the internet for a significant portion of what constitutes most organizations 'employer brand', Glassdoor has steadily been building additional tools and capabilities for employers to participate in proactive employer brand management, candidate engagement, accompanied by recruiting insights and analytics that are making Glassdoor an increasingly important and influential HR tech provider.

And Glassdoor provides many of these advanced company analytics for free, and so far over 16,000 companies have created free employer accounts to take advantage of the data and the insights. (See images on the right for example).Click to enlarge

Traffic to Glassdoor.com is ridiculously large, and the unique, valuable, and not reproducible asset of the millions of candidate and employee data points that form the backbone of the site make for an incredibly powerful, and yes, interesting combination, and at some level, makes Glassdoor one of the few (maybe the only) threats to 500-lb recruiting solutions provider LinkedIn.

Bottom line, 'normal' people go to LinkedIn every once in a while, when want to start looking for a job and think they had better polish up their profile. But they go to Glassdoor once they actually are immersed in the process, researching companies, prepping for interviews, trying to assess if the salary offers they received are fair. That is a huge distinction and one that Glassdoor is leveraging more and more each year.

Recently, Glassdoor announced a $50M funding round and according to the press release the funding will "use the capital to expand its team, accelerate international expansion, and further invest in products for job seekers and employers on mobile and desktop."

Click to enlarge

Glassdoor is already an extremely well known and well positioned player in the recruiting and talent management space and with additional funding, new products, an increasing global footprint, and the insane amounts of data and insight that can be mined from its data on over 300,000 companies it stands to become one of the most interesting (yes, I used that word again), HR tech companies to watch in 2014.

Have a great weekend everyone!

So where are the jetpacks?

A couple of days ago I shared on Twitter the link for the 2014 HR Technology Conference call for speaking proposals page. Soon thereafter a couple of folks more or less called me out, questioning the fairly long lead time between when the speaking proposals are due and the actual dates of the conference (about 9 months all told). The objections or complaints were basically along the lines of that since the HR Tech industry is moving and innovating so quickly that having such a long interval between when speaking proposals are due in and when the conference will take place means that many new developments and innovations will go missing from the show.

While I admit that nine months seems like a long lead time, and without going in to the mundane details of the steps involved for proposal review, potential speaker interviews and re-interviews, program balancing, agenda and content development, and oh yeah, actually finalizing and promoting the agenda so that we can market and sell conference tickets, and all the time that these activities require, I'd rather take another approach to explain to the folks that think that 9 months is too long, and really anyone who has bought into the notion that the enterprise and HR technology industries are moving that quickly why they are a little off-base.

The truth is while the HR tech industry is innovating and progressing, it is generally not making quantum leaps in capability and efficacy in such narrow and discrete time frames as short as a few months. We could leave the call for proposals for HR Tech open until the day before the show and I would expect that 90% of the submissions would be largely the same types of sessions we see in January.

The larger, more established providers are working off of development roadmaps that are largely laid out at least a year out into the future, and perhaps even longer. The smaller, more innovative companies also need at least a year to get their product built, figure out just what the hell they are doing, convince a few real customers to use their product, and then get someone outside the Valley to notice them. Big client-side projects that form the basis for many of the case studies and HR executive-led sessions that we like to showcase at the show themselves often last the better part of a year, (and sometimes longer).

And even with all these incredible advances we have seen in HR tech in the last few years, (the move to the Cloud, video recruiting, social referral programs, mobile learning technology, iPad-based talent management, open web candidate sourcing, predictive workforce analytics tools, ACA compliance business intelligence, and on and on), many, many organizations and HR departments are still pushing paper, keying and re-keying the same data into multiple systems, and executing processes and transactions in much the same way as they were 10 years ago. The truth is it is still the exceptional HR organization and HR leader that wants or demands (and can secure) the very latest, most cutting-edge technology solutions for their organizations.

We have come a really, really long way in HR technology, but there is still a long, long way to go.

And for that reason, and a few others, it is a really exciting time to be in HR and in the HR Technology space. And that is also why I am really confident at next year's HR Tech Conference (the discussion about speaking proposals for Tech is what launched this little mini-rant), attendees will see the very best and latest developments, and hear presentations from their HR peers about how HR tech is helping drive their businesses. 

But make no mistake about it, this is a long game. A game that is changing for sure, but probably not as quickly as you think and perhaps not as rapidly as some folks would have you believe.

Take a close look at all the 'HR Tech 2014 Predictions' pieces you can find in the next few weeks. Then do a quick search and read a few of the same for 2013 and 2012. There will be lots of overlap. 

And that is ok. And expected. These things often take longer than we expect.

We were promised jetpacks, right?

And one last thing, mainly for a couple of folks that might care, if indeed some incredibly interesting and disruptive development in HR tech happened from out of the blue sometime between when the HR Tech Conference agenda is finalized and the actual show in October, I would find a way to make sure it was included at the event.