Agility Unleashed

Agility Unleashed, bought to you by Sage - The Chief HR Officer

April 12, 2021 Sage Season 1 Episode 2
Agility Unleashed
Agility Unleashed, bought to you by Sage - The Chief HR Officer
Show Notes Transcript

This is “Agility Unleashed”, brought to you by Sage – a series of podcasts to help Britain’s businesses pick their way out of the pandemic. Each week we take a look forward through the eyes of a single business function; and in this show, it’s the Chief Human Resources Officer or CHRO. 

Furloughing staff, working from home, employee engagement in uncertain times and handling the HR implications of pivoting the business model – all these are challenges which fall squarely on the CHRO’s shoulders.

We’ll take a look at them in the company of a team of business and technology experts. I’m joined by Karen Morris-Lanz, HR Director of Digital and Systems Transformation at University of Warwick; David Kelly, EMEA General Manager at Workforce Management solution, Deputy, and Mark Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Kimble, the professional services software suite.

And because we like to be cutting edge, even in lockdown, we recorded this entire podcast in Virtual Reality – with all my guests mingling on a virtual sofa, even though they were stuck in their living rooms. You can see some clips of the VR experience in the accompanying video. One caveat: it does mean the sound quality is occasionally glitchy, but it’s no worse than a Zoom call – and let’s face it, every HR professional has done plenty of those recently!

This is “Agility Unleashed”, brought to you by Sage – a series of podcasts to help Britain’s businesses pick their way out of the pandemic. Each week we take a look forward through the eyes of a single business function; and in this show, it’s the Chief Human Resources Officer or CHRO. 

Furloughing staff, working from home, employee engagement in uncertain times and handling the HR implications of pivoting the business model – all these are challenges which fall squarely on the CHRO’s shoulders.

We’ll take a look at them in the company of a team of business and technology experts. I’m joined by Karen Morris-Lanz, HR Director of Digital and Systems Transformation at University of Warwick; David Kelly, EMEA General Manager at Workforce Management solution, Deputy, and Mark Robinson, co-founder and CEO of Kimble, the professional services software suite.

And because we like to be cutting edge, even in lockdown, we recorded this entire podcast in Virtual Reality – with all my guests mingling on a virtual sofa, even though they were stuck in their living rooms. You can see some clips of the VR experience in the accompanying video. One caveat: it does mean the sound quality is occasionally glitchy, but it’s no worse than a Zoom call – and let’s face it, every HR professional has done plenty of those recently!

We’ll begin with Karen – I asked her what she does at the University of Warwick.

 

 

NS  0:00

Karen, I'd like to start with you. You are HR Director of Digital and Systems Transformation at the University of Warwick but you also have a bunch of heritage in the private sector as well. Tell me what you do at the University of Warwick.

 

KM

It's a new role. And my role is really to look at how people interact with technology and how we move forward with our people to get the most engagement with technology and change.

 

NS

Now, as an HR specialist, you must have looked at COVID through the HR lens. COVID has been extraordinary for the HR role, hasn't it? They've not had a day off, they've not been able to hold back. It's been extraordinarily busy, what with everything from furloughing to virtual working and the legislation around that. What's it been like from your perspective?

 

KM

I started in Warwick in February of this year and then moved straight into digitalizing the whole of the HR department in two weeks. So what does that mean? It means getting rid of every piece of paper making sure that we've got everything aligned, ready to go remote, pushing people out the door because people didn't want to leave because they felt it was impossible to do things that quickly, and we've just proved that we can and we've done it. And it's been the most incredible journey of how to have a burning platform to change. And the burning platform was given to us, and we’ve changed. And I'm just really proud of all the people that I work with for being able to do that because it's been a very difficult year.

 

NS

I hope we'll find that’s the same experience across the board. Hello to David Kelly, EMEA General Manager at Deputy. Now, Deputy is a workforce management solution – take me through that.

 

DK  1:37

That's it, Nick. Yeah, we've got a simple mission to simplify shift work – so to marry up all of the capability of your people with all of the demand that you experience from your customers and your core operation. And I've spent the last 15, 20 years now working in similar sort of roles for different workforce, HR and operations, SaaS applications.

 



 

NS  1:58

Whenever I meet somebody who does a SaaS HR product, I think to myself, ‘You've got lots of data to hand, your customers are HR and management professionals, you understand the trends at the moment.’ What are you seeing in the data?

 

DK  2:13

It's been a year like no other, as you would expect, so there's little that we can look at historically and sort of use to forecast accurately for the next 12 to 18 months. I mean, it was a seismic shift in March of last year. And it's been extremely choppy for the vast majority of industries. And though some of the core industries that we support like hospitality have been hugely affected with massive downgrade in number of hours, number of shifts worked, number of businesses that have been able to trade, we've also seen incredible creativity and pivots into new subjects by out of legacy business models and into things that would work, like, for example, hotel chains who've offered their available space during the working day for professionals who aren't able to work from home for whatever reason, lots of businesses that set up click and collect offerings.

 

NS

Lovely, thank you. And we've got to say hello also to Mark Robinson. Mark is co-founder of Kimble Apps and, correct me if I'm wrong, but Kimble Apps has a rapidly growing and increasing suite of applications.

 

MR  3:16

Yeah, I mean, we aim at the professional services market, so our customers are generally people like management consultancies, IT services companies, accounting firms, those sorts of organizations. So anything where people is their major asset. Our software actually manages the end-to-end process of running those organizations. So particularly at the moment, it's been very key to people because obviously they want to know where their workforce is at and what it’s doing.

 

NS

Karen and Mark, both of you particularly, said that this was a…Karen, you used the word “a burning platform” and Mark, you said that professional services firms have nudged forward into a different way of assessing their people. So I kind of want to turn to that burning platform. Has COVID changed life for the HR professional forever? Is this a complete transformation?

 



 

KM  3:59

I think COVID has changed life for everybody, but we just haven't really realized how much yet. Certainly from an HR professional’s point of view, I don't think that we ever realized what was coming, so we've had ten years’ worth of normal change happen in 12 months. And that means people having to adapt to becoming virtual, that means checking out what skills change should have happened during that time, and it's happened now in a very short space of time. So you've either got people who have got the skills or people that haven't, so we've got skills gaps. And it's just thrown us all into a much quicker journey to technology than we could ever have imagined. So will there be some backlash of that? How do we engage with people in a virtual world? How long is this going to go on for? So yes, I think COVID has changed us all – some of it for the better, in terms of the balance between technology and people, but some of it is a worrying trend for mental health, we're very aware of people's well-being. But I think in the world of work, some people are now going, ‘I've been on furlough now for 12 months. What happens to me?’ So what do we do with those people, and how debilitating it must be to have not worked for a year.

 

DK

What HR has been focusing on a lot over the course of the last three to five years, as you say, everything has been accelerated, so a lot of the things that were in the sort of medium to long term box became suddenly absolutely critical and needed to be done in a really short period of time. But the businesses that I talked about before who have been able to pivot and are the ones who have been really agile are the ones who have their skills taxonomy really well indexed. And a lot of businesses don't know what they've got and think about people from a headcount unit perspective, rather than the overall full skills capability of the organization, and I think that's been one of the interesting things that HR has had to deal with through COVID. 

 

MR

I think it's a trend that's been happening for a long time. I'm old enough – you probably can't see in the VR – but I'm old enough to remember the ‘70s and ‘80s and there's a guy called Alvin Toffler, who wrote a book called Future Shock. And even then, he was talking about the idea of electronic offices, the idea that we'd be working from home, better work-life balance, and it's really been about acceleration. And one of my prospects is actually a company who works with logistics, so they provide software for companies who want to start shopping online and building that out. And they actually said to me that nothing's changed. The trend that was happening that more and more of their customers wanted to sell their products on the internet, but what this has done is actually accelerated their business by three years. People who were saying, ‘No, I think, actually, we're gonna stay in the shopping mall for a bit longer’ have all said, ‘Actually, we need your software now. But actually we're not going back to the mall.’ So I think it's a trend that's been happening, it's just that we've accelerated it.

 



 

KM  6:48

And with that has come this big skills gap because you've only got a very short space of time to move these people forward. A lot of people, though, are taking the opportunity to upskill, and I think that's one of the trends that I've seen – a lot of people realize it's their skills bag and they, only they are responsible for it, and, therefore, they're taking a big opportunity to learn. And I think that's really important at the moment, to actually grab new skills while you can.

 

NS

We've talked skills, we've talked well-being – I'm glad that that was on the list. I think also the other bit of this remote working piece is the discussion about are we going to go back to the office or not? And what I want to ask you guys is: what is HR’s role in that? Because engagement, motivation and aligning people to a business's vision and mission and values, that's in HR’s pot, isn't it? So how can HR professionals handle this new world and try and keep everyone on the same team?

 

KM

Wow. Well, that is the biggest question out there at the moment, I think. I think it is about making sure that people are engaged and making sure they're not lonely. And it is finding people the right balance and the right space to be able to come together. I think we've learned that people actually do like other people much more than we ever thought that they did, you know? Even when you're walking the dog now, you want to say hello to somebody because it's a real person in the real world. But also it's now in my mind all about outcomes. It doesn't matter when you work; it's about what you produce when you produce it. And it's actually therefore specifying roles more clearly to understand what it is we're expecting from that role, so we can judge the outcome, not when somebody's doing it or where they're doing it from, because no longer will people be working nine to five.  I mean, we've had people working with children at their desks, you know, and they're managing to manage their jobs, but fundamentally they're only able to do that because we've given them the flexibility. We can't take the flexibility back off people now because they don't want that. They like the flexibility. And it's the right thing to do. So then we need to be able to specify what we're expecting from people.

 



 

DK  9:01

You constantly see the pendulum swing back and forth on stuff like this, and I think the real answer from an HR perspective at the moment is that the right answer is about the personalization of the employee experience. And that has to be relevant to the industry, the job goals, the strategy, the job family that you're talking about. I mean, there are roles that will be appropriate for remote working and there will be roles where you really need to come together and innovate because that's a human requirement and output for the type of job that you perform. So I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all answer. And I think, again, that HR was fully on the way to figuring out digitally how to personalize the employee experience – and again, that's another thing now that has been accelerated as a result of COVID. One of the things I think is really interesting and difficult to do at distance, though, is just the everyday human coaching, leadership development and support that managers can give to their own employees within their line. It's perfectly functional to do it through Zoom or whatever platform, but really the behavioral development piece is something that I think sits much better as a face-to-face human interaction. So, yeah, I think it will, it will depend very much on what it is that the business is trying to achieve. And, as ever, the more HR can link to the actual business strategy and set up policy accordingly, the better they’ll be off.

 

NS

Mark, that must resonate for you because your clients are professional services firms, they sell their brainpower, their thinking. That's about getting people around a table, isn't it?

 

MR  10:29

Yeah, but I think it’s been a trend, as I say, that's been going for a while. I think where our customers are typically asking us is they have pools of resources at least within their own country but also globally, and the challenge particularly in resource management has been where are those skills first of all and which countries they’re in. Can we leverage them? We've seen people coming to us now and saying COVID’s made them realize how much information they have, how they can sort of move on a sixpence and move people around, leverage skills in other countries, and that's been the big challenge. But I think a lot of things in the media assume that before 2020 we all went to work wearing bowler hats and umbrellas and kind of clocked in at nine o'clock and left at 5:30. And I think that it's not all or nothing; I think it's been like this for a long time, and we’re producing systems and processes to do that. And I think, you know, a lot of times people think about technology as being the solution to all of this and they don't think enough about the processes that they need to get right. And I think what we're seeing with COVID and people working remotely more is actually thinking about the roles that people do, but also the processes they need to work better with to collaborate. And then we've got the systems and the technology now to support that. But it's kind of that way around. And there's a danger that what we've all done by jumping to Zoom is we’re taking technology first rather than understanding what the problem is we need to solve and the processes we need to have to solve those and then get the technology to help enable us.

 



 

KM  11:46

Some of those have been fundamental even without technology – like trust is a fundamental thing but trust is more difficult to build online than it is face-to-face. So we’ve got to be careful what we're rolling out too, very much so, because we're reacting at speed, we need to be careful that we're not reacting too quickly and going down the wrong route. That's what I always worry about.

 

NS

Mark, I really want to pick up on this point you made about the connection between people, processes and technology because, the fact remains, tech is only sort of half the story. So just take me through this process piece. Is thinking about your processes the doorway to making a lot more tech work for a lot more people in a changing world?

 

MR

Absolutely. And I think a lot of times what we forget is the reason we have processes the way we do is because of the limitations of the technology that we had at the time. People generally work in very much siloed way of working – you know, you have a department that works in one area and they hand it off to another area, another department. And that just gets completely amplified when you’re suddenly in an environment where everybody's remote. And what we've been trying with technology is to look at those processes without thinking about the technology first. Too many times I speak to prospects or customers where they're kind of saying, ‘Show me how your new system will support what I do today.’ And it's actually the wrong way about doing it because they've got technology that does that. What they need to be doing is, ‘What is the 2B process? How do I need to operate, say, in this new world? And therefore, then, how can technology help me do it?’

 

DK

Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think the way to start this type of proposition is really core design thinking propositions around how do we, you know, have empathy for the actual user who is doing the work and make sure that we're making it easier for them to facilitate what they need to get done at speed. And if the application doesn't do that and doesn't make the individual's life easier, then it's probably done the wrong way. 

 

NS

We hinted earlier at the seismic changes for the talent market presented by COVID, so what's that going to mean? The next year is going to be perhaps more challenging than last year in that respect.

 



 

KM  13:41

Without a shadow of a doubt. I mean, at Warwick we look at attracting the best brains in the world to come to us, and now they are all over the world, but there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to go with being able to do this remote working that everybody's really craving for now. Like the tax infrastructure – I think there's 12 countries now where you can apply to have a remote working visa for a year, so you can stay in your country, but some of those are going to be a tremendously important way of attracting talent, so you don't actually have to have people come to your country. But there are implications of that – that’s world change. That isn't just one or two companies changing; it's like saying, ‘Well, OK, this is the skill that I need, and somebody happens to possess it, is currently working out of Peru and doesn't want to come to the UK.’ And we're finding that, you know, and I think that's probably given us a global view quicker than we would have ever expected.

 

NS

So that means that companies have the benefit of potentially a global workforce but also have to make themselves attractive to a global workforce. You're up against everything else in the world. 

 

KM

Absolutely. So when we're looking at it from a people's point of view, do people want to move? So we do have to have a diverse attraction point to be globally acceptable. So we have to understand more now than I think we've ever had to understand what is culturally acceptable – and we don't just mean that culturally acceptable to a UK lens.

 

DK

For me, I think, overall, I mean, the demand for world-class talent will remain. And I think there's a slight misunderstanding just because unemployment has risen that there's a greater accessibility to it – there isn't really. You still have to perform the same significant attraction mechanisms and brand development to persuade somebody within the knowledge worker environment that their career and their development will be better off in one location than another. What's interesting for me, actually, at the other end of the scale within the shift worker market, which is obviously the market that we serve, we did a survey recently of 1400 shift workers within hospitality, retail and healthcare and 89 per cent of those shift workers said that career development was important or really important to them. And I think those are the types of roles where historically that workforce has been perhaps slightly forgotten when it comes to communication and development and engagement. And I think it's incumbent on technologies like us to make sure that we do a better job of making sure that those people recognize that they can have a career, that they can improve their skills. And the more really that you can as a fast-growth business communicate that career development and learning is much more of a buffet than it is a served dinner, the better off your workforce will be in the long term.

 

KM

That’s a good way of looking at it.

 



 

MR  16:29

I think in terms of what I’d add to that in terms of tech is, I think, what one time people think that say Brexit, for example, that we're going to see an eroding of maybe standards in terms of some of the benefits and so on that people get. But my experience is almost, for work, the opposite. I mean, even if you have to attract top talent, then you don't go to the lowest common denominator, you go to the highest common denominator. An example you would have is, you know, we have a global workforce, the UK has provision for say parent rights and so on after childbirth, for example. That's what we'll see, that organizations increasingly will start to offer benefits that maybe are far in excess of whatever their local country would be, and purely because they've got to attract top talent.

 

NS

Fabulous, guys, thank you. The pandemic will end, right? So smart companies are thinking how do they position themselves, whatever the future looks like. Broadly speaking, what should HR professionals be thinking about?

 

KM

I think HR professionals need to remember where their roots came from – and we came from being welfare officers. And I think welfare is the most important piece. What technology will give us is information about people, so we can manage their welfare and we can develop the right environment to help people thrive. And I think the next challenge is, how do we help people thrive and work through this next phase of humanity?

 

NS

David? 

 

DK

Yeah, I'd agree with that, Karen. I think overall it's probably business agility, isn't it, that is on everybody's mind. So we don't know how long this will last, we don't know what type of macro-economic headwind we will have, but for sure, now that we've experienced this, I think the overall change in risk profile that people will have will see workforces become a lot more agile in set up. As I say, if it does accelerate the priority that HR has to offer a more individualized and personalized work experience to the relevant job families that they have, then that for me is a good outcome of COVID from an HR perspective.

 

MR

I would agree with that. I mean, I’ll just throw one more thing into the mix. I think we're going to see an increased focus on the way that personal data is looked at. I think these rumours about COVID passports, health, being able to move and so on is going to be predetermined by that. You know, we've already seen it in our own business with GDPR. And we'll see, I think, increasing trend for that over the next couple of years, and I think where HR has to come is to try to manage the ability of technology to store that data with the ability to actually access that data and who accesses the data, and I think that's going to be the next big battleground for people to be fighting on, and what happens or not happens on that front.

 

NS  18:52

David, I want to get back to this piece about corporate resilience, because it seems to me that HR has a role to play. You expressed it from the employee’s point of view, but HR is going to be looking at the bets that a company is prepared to take, its ability to cope with challenging times.

 

DK

Yeah, I mean, I think the core requirement is for HR to support the overall business strategy and to help strategy manage the relative risk as it relates to the CapEx that any business can sustain for their future cashflow. So, from that perspective, I think it will be incumbent on HR to look at different ways of working that might provide access to skills that are not necessarily on the payroll but that are required through different means, be it gig economy, be it outsource, contingent workforce, whatever. But I think one of the core issues that HR will have to deal with will be the structure of the workforce to be able to withstand anything similar to what we just experienced.

 

NS

And technology is going to be a big part of that as well. So let me ask you to get your kind of crystal ball out for the future of HR tech. What does that look like? Mark, I'm going to come to you first.

 

MR

Well, I think it's, as I said earlier, it's an acceleration of what we're already seeing. I mean, I think in recruitment, for example, you know, LinkedIn has been playing a part. People don't get phoned up quite as often to, to ask if they’re interested in a job; they self-serve it. And I think generally technology is about self-serving. But ultimately, systems like ours is all about collaboration with remote workforces anyway and tools like we're using today – how do you make that experience more rich for people and use it with existing technology to make it easy to use?

 

DK

I’d agree with all of that. I mean, I think principally three areas of ongoing acceleration. One will be the use of social applications in the workforce, whatever it is you use within your consumer world available to you as the principal means to share information and to collaborate internally within the workforce. I think there will be a whole heap of innovation within the learning and development space, probably environments like this for onboarding, training and other purposes. And then the really interesting thing, I think, within the HR tech market most recently has been the Microsoft Viva announcement and the bringing together of everything around employee experience through the same interface. So that will be very interesting to see how the science of workforce management comes together with the pure workflow operation.

 

NS

Karen?

 



 

KM  21:12

It's difficult, isn't it, to think about what might be in the future. But I also think that HR is…needs to be a bit more on-demand, so that you have a response to something instantly. And I think that's something that we probably need to really think about: how can we become HR on demand at the right time and pushing the right buttons? And even if that's bite-sized advice online at the point in time when people need it, I think that's where perhaps technology could help with those solutions very quickly rather than having to wait for things.

 

NS

That's really interesting, because one of the criticisms that was leveled at HR in the old days was that it was a checkbox exercise, right? You know what I mean. The HR was there to go, ‘This is what people are entitled to, this is who sits where’, and all that sort of thing. And yet our conversation entirely today has been about wellbeing, it's all those sort of very human bits of the function. And that's hard to do on demand, that, isn't it?

 

KM  22:16

You're making out that HR is a responsibility of no one but it's the responsibility of everyone; it's not just HR as a professional’s responsibility. We're here to facilitate managers managing well and managing the environment well, as well as giving the infrastructure to the business to manage its people well.  So, you know, when I'm thinking HR on demand, I mean the kind of tools that people might need. ‘I've got to have a difficult conversation now with somebody.’ Rather than HR having a difficult conversation, the manager’s having a difficult conversation. So where is the instant, ‘Don't forget this, don't forget that’?  That's the kind of on-demand that I was visualizing, then, because I think it isn't just a department’s responsibility to respond; each and every manager in your organization makes the culture of your organization because of how they do something and what they say, but we need to be able to be there at the right spot in time when somebody needs us.

 

DK

For that straight type of request to policy that Karen was referencing there, I think there has been some great work that a lot of the larger FTSE100 have done, particularly the banks, like use of AI as a chat bot and response mechanism. It used to be kind of the preserve of the HR VP but it's not what they should be doing; it's not the high value stuff that they should be focusing on. So if we can take that administrative burden and automate that experience, not to an exclusive extent but a lot of the way, then that will free up time for more high value stuff.

 

NS
Let me put that to Mark as well, because so Karen's question was a really valid one. It’s: can tech bring HR closer to the broader management community who are actually the culture of a company? Is that something that tech can do?

 



 

MR  24:00

It is, but I think you’ve still got to have a willingness for people want to delegate decisions. I mean, what I've seen in the pandemic is that there's a limited talent pool outside to bring in at a senior level. The problem with that is that the senior people can end up being the ones who make all the decisions. As you get bigger, there's more decisions to make. You get that sort of bottleneck decision making. And what HR has to do is try to help those people to recognize they need to delegate that decision making process better and have systems that can support that, whether it's augmented intelligence and so on. And I think we've seen with the pandemic that because everybody can be on Zoom all the time, it's almost easier to get your boss on or your boss's boss on Zoom to look at something. And we've almost gone backwards, I think, in some cases, and it's actually making sure that we use this opportunity to go back to at least to where we were but hopefully move forward and change the way people work.

 

NS

Guys, I'm hugely grateful for your time. We're recording right now in February 2021 in what is yet another lockdown. It's a year since the pandemic began. My final question to you is if we could teleport you back, what advice would you give to the you of a year ago? Karen, go for it.

 

KM

Trust your instincts.  I did actually in January 2020 buy some facemasks because I saw it coming, but I didn't know how badly and I did give some face masks and my sister who's a GP because she didn't have any. But I think trust my instincts more. And I think I've learnt that your instincts are the most important thing you have. So just to trust your instincts.

 

NS

David?

 

DK

Gosh, I mean, first of all, I would say, deep breaths because this is going to last longer than you think it is. You know, in the March timeframe, I thought, ‘Oh, this might be few weeks, maybe a couple of months’ at the outset. But other than that, I think it's empathy, really, from a leadership perspective that's allowed us to get through it. And again, it's another positive outcome from a terrible situation that I think real human characteristics of leadership are having to come to the fore right now. It's not a command-and-control environment; you need to provide clear communication, be as understanding as you can for the difficulties that everybody has and just make sure that the organization is flexing around the often very difficult situations that everybody is dealing with.

 

MR
January 2020: I would get on Airbnb. I would book a big house in New Zealand and take the whole family there!

 

KM
That’s the best answer yet, definitely.

 

That’s been ‘Agility Unleashed’, brought to you by Sage; and thank you for listening. Thank you also to my guests, Karen Morris-Lanz of the University of Warwick; David Kelly from Deputy, and Mark Robinson of Kimble. If you haven’t experienced VR yet, do check out the video for a pretty good idea of what they look like,

In our next show, it’s where the buck stops – the CEO. For the CEO role, the pandemic has meant sleepless nights and big decisions. I’ll be asking: what now, and what have we learned? See you then.