Julie is live at the 2023 HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. On this episode of The People Purpose Podcast, Chas and Julie discuss key themes they're seeing around HR Technology based on sessions at the conference. Plus, find out what impact HR technology has on finding and retaining talent.
Julie is live at the 2023 HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. On this episode of The People Purpose Podcast, Chas and Julie discuss key themes they're seeing around HR Technology based on sessions at the conference. Plus, find out what impact HR technology has on finding and retaining talent.
You hello, and welcome to the people purpose podcast, the show that explores all the ins and outs of the challenges and opportunities, HR, people, managers, and all people face at work every day. I'm here, Julie Develin with my co host
Chas Fields:Chas Fields. Julie, why are you whispering?
Julie Develin:Do I sound like I'm whispering? Because I'm in a perfect segue. I'm in a very, very big room and I don't want to I don't know. I feel like everybody's listening to me which they are. But that's okay. It's I'm echoey I guess. So. I guess I'm trying not to talk too low. Is is it okay.
Chas Fields:Yeah, I think so. Luckily, we have a great producer that can figure this out after the fact. That's really
Julie Develin:I can I can speak louder. Is that better?
Chas Fields:Yeah, that's fine. No, I I just thought it was funny because you came in like you were gonna I don't know. Well,
Julie Develin:I don't know. Like I said a minute like a really, really big room and I'm, I'm echoey so
Chas Fields:it's perfect. It's perfect. It's perfect. Angels. Tell me something good.
Julie Develin:Something good. Gosh, when is this episode gonna hit? I'm not really
Chas Fields:sure days. Two days.
Julie Develin:Okay, go Phillies. I mean, that's my something good a lot. But right now it is something good. They took the first game. So you know, we'll see if this stays evergreen, as a good thing. But so that's my something good today.
Chas Fields:I love it. I have to something good. Is that okay? Good. We do. And I this will be a shorter episode. But I have to to something good. So the first one is got some family time last week and taught my son a little bit about, you know, fallen soldiers. We support a foundation as a family and did some things that went up to the foundation and spent some time up there. And, you know, it was a great teaching moment, if you will, I don't know how much he grasped yet. You know, he's still pretty young, but it was it was really cool. And my second one, and I'm going to embarrass you on this is my co host, Julie Devlin got top 100 She is a top 100 HR influencer. Oh yeah, our friends over at engagingly. Now I know how much this means to you, Julie? No. The reason I'm saying it is we're super proud of you. It's awesome. Keep up the good work. You know, job security, I guess. I don't know. But that is because you have been a road warrior. And Ambassador, a HR inspire, you know, I'm super proud of you. And thank you.
Julie Develin:Thank you. So thank you, and, you know, takes a village so everything. I humbly you know, I was I was shocked. That's cool.
Chas Fields:And they notify you, by the way, how did it like you just get an email
Julie Develin:tag, they tag the tag everybody on LinkedIn. And then you see that you see that you're on there? So here we are.
Chas Fields:Yeah. Julie, will you tell us about the business stat of the day?
Julie Develin:Alright, so Chas the business statof the day, according to PwC. See, 58% of people they surveyed believe that finding and keeping talent motivates adopting HR technologies. They also found that almost 60% of teams state that finding attracting and retaining talent is the main reason for using HR technology. So I think that you know, that's a pretty interesting
Chas Fields:stat. You Yes, yes, it is. It's really interesting. Because there's two, there's two perspectives, and maybe some middle ground, maybe there's three in this one. You have a lot of people who believe that building a culture, attracting and retaining talent or whatever is a like, it has nothing to do with technology, right? Like that's one camp, then there's kind of the middle ground? Well, yeah, tech enables us a little bit and you know, we use it, but we also focus on the people side of things. And then there's the people who are so heavily invested in their tech stack and technology because they, I don't necessarily know the reason whether it's whether it's you want to tap into the next generation, or you want to maintain some sort of level of connectedness, if you will. And tech is usually the easiest way to do it. And it's really hard, right? So it's, you know, for the people who don't necessarily use personal tech on their mobile device or whatever they, you know, there's that limit that limited connection, if you will, right. I'm in the middle ground. I think it matters. I think tech matters. I think people matter. And I think the people side of things matter. It's very blended. But I think more finite Lee, we are tied to technology. And sometimes being so inundated with the amount of information we consume on our phones or whatever tech that we're utilizing, it sometimes hinders us from feeling that connectedness. But I do believe that the HR technology or HCM technology is an absolute critical part in attracting and retaining talent. It has to be Yeah, but no paper resumes anymore. Truly, maybe they are I
Julie Develin:don't know, you'd be you'd be surprised how many organizations I see that where people are still using paper and manual processes and all of that. So that's another whole other conversation. I guess that's probably a pretty good segue into what we're talking about today. And what this episode is, and this is me here in Las Vegas at the HR tech conference, the annual HR tech conference, and you know that the HR tech conference is the largest gathering of HR tech vendors. enthusiast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all of it. And I think that what I thought that would be interesting to do today is to, for us to highlight some of the most key themes that we're seeing at this year's conference, based on some of the sessions that have happened and are going to happen. So does that sound good to you?
Chas Fields:Yeah, I'm sorry, I couldn't be there. This is year two in a row, by the way that I'm not there with you. Last year, I was speaking in Wyoming at Wyoming Sherman, you were there. This year. I'm speaking obviously, I'm not there today. But I leave to go to Wisconsin Sherm to speak up there, I'd already made the commitment. But, you know, last year, we kind of did an interview style, like, Okay, what's the feeling? What's the vibe, what are you seeing? What are you doing that will come out gradually. But I think what's important is the themes are very different, based on what you shared with me than what it would be for Sherm national conference. Right? Some of it overlaps. Some of it does overlap, but I do. I do want to hear what you're saying. And of course, I'm gonna have a lot of questions. So why don't you just take us into an appoint one? Jules?
Julie Develin:Yeah, point one. Okay. So when we're talking about this HR tech conference, when I tell you that AI talk is everywhere AI talk is this, this prompted me, Chas to do a little bit of research. And because, you know, we've been using AI for many, many years. But when the first AI has been came into existence, do you want to guess the year the first AI came in? It was it was the early 1950s. And apparently, this was coined by a guy named Alan Turing. And, you know, it's interesting though, this research that I did Googling, right, Googling, the roots of AI can be traced back to the early 1900s, when philosophers and mathematicians began to explore the possibility of creating machines that could think so this has been something that's been around for a long, long time, in the 70s. In the 70s, and 80s, there was this shift towards what's called connectionist AI. And that was also known as neural networks, which are inspired, inspired by the brain. And, you know, they were able to learn from data and adapt to new situations. But here's the thing. In recent years, the research, the AI research has been so prevalent, and it's been fast. And it's really pervading conversations, not just in HR, but so many other industries. And, you know, when we talk about new AI techniques, like deep learning, and, you know, image recognition, that kind of stuff, that that's, that's all part of it. And that's all part of the talk here at this conference, HR tech. So, you know, I think that it's important Chas, for us to simply simplify things that are complicated sometimes, because I know that I know that especially in HR, we hear about data, we hear about all these things that we shouldn't be doing, et cetera. We're like, well, where the heck do we start? Well, let me let me make ease your mind a little bit. Ai, you're using AI in a wide range of applications today. Like search engines, right? Ai, it's used to rank search results, and also to provide personalized recommendations. And I think we've mentioned that before. Yep. What are some other things, you know, social media,
Chas Fields:right? Social media is usually usually top of mind. It a lot of times people look at it and say well, the algorithm that's that's a portion of it, right? That's a portion of it. I've been doing some work behind the scenes here UKG with AI and some of the things that are on the cusp of our product and prescription related information. This is kind of the stuff that happens in social media. Now. I'm not comparing our product is so to media but this idea of providing content or even something as simple as suggest a new friend or target advertising, I don't know if share this with you, Julie, but one of my best friends from from college works in advertising and how they deal with targeting ad space to you based on, you know, specific IP address, maybe you like something, maybe you you know, we're on a web page and click to another web page, and then all of a sudden you start seeing ads on on things this is, you know, it's it's pretty, pretty impeccable and also pretty creatively designed in the sense that it's there to help you or offer
Julie Develin:Would you say it's also intelligent?
Chas Fields:Oh, sometimes sometimes too intelligent, you know, where now you have to go in and be like, yeah, no, this is not relevant to me. So why am I looking at this? You know, so there's, it's, it's a dual sided coin, where sometimes it's really, really helpful. And then other times, you know, remove out whatever it is. Yeah.
Julie Develin:Yeah. So so that here's the thing, you know, AI, it's also used in healthcare, it's used in manufacturing, you know, it's used to diagnose diseases and when we're talking about it, but we're talking about it in terms of HR and the overwhelming nature of the amount of conversation and sessions that there are here at this conference. I just want to read a couple of them. There are literally probably 75 or so sessions that have AI in the title,
Chas Fields:like building. Yes, 75 sessions,
Julie Develin:probably more, probably more. Did you hear maybe, maybe less? No, no, no, but I'm really I'm really, I'm really good. I used artificial intelligence to
Chas Fields:figure Oh, okay.
Julie Develin:So so yeah, so building a healthy, productive AI fueled culture, right. That's a pre conference workshop here, growing with people first practices in the new age of AI, you know, three powerful ways to make, you know, managers love performance management via AI, how AI will transform the market forever, you know, AI in action, elevating HR with generative AI how AI video and avatars will change the way we learn and work driving better health outcomes with AI and empathy, navigating the risks and opportunities of generative ai, ai and HR implications opportunities, it goes on and on and on. It can be it can be overwhelming, it's really overwhelming. So I you know, so the question becomes Chas, what can we do to overcome this overwhelming aspect? And I think there's a couple of things that we in HR can do. Yep. And starts with education. There are so many resources out there available online, to help you learn about AI and the potential implications that can have with HR applications. And, and also, it can help you to determine, you know, which kind of AI resources you should be using, right? I think, go ahead.
Chas Fields:No, no, I You're spot on. This, this kind of goes back to anything that we normally say, right, we have our assumptions of what something is. And whether that's the right or wrong assumption, it doesn't hurt for us to go back and review or understand our assumptions. And in the AI term has been around for a while, like, we've had 8 million people using AI in our product since 2015. Like it is not new, for UKG. Utilizing AI in the product. Same thing with social media, right, let's take it from a personal perspective, we have all of these things that are happening around our social media, or the different platforms that we use that leverage AI. And it's like, we make the assumption that we know what it is or what it's doing. Now that it's evolving, we have to educate right now, you know, not everybody knows the exact impact of AI, I had this discussion with someone who is at a high level at a company that understands AI really, really well. And I don't necessarily know that that we fully grasp what AI can do. But it's important for us, like you said, to go and learn what those things are. I liked the other piece of students goes beyond HR, this goes to really all roles. But you do have some people who are more seasoned in leveraging artificial intelligence. Right? What was that experience? Like? How do you learn from others? What was good? What was bad? What are the better practices or best practices around? You know, there is so much that we have to take into account before we just start saying, Oh, well, it's AI? Is it or do we need to have a little bit more in depth conversation? What else can we do?
Julie Develin:We can we can start small with things and not in recognize that we can't implement AI in all areas of HR. You know, at once I think about this and I think about the conversations that I have about how many HR folks still have manual processes and then I think Well, how do we get how do we get to a point? How do we get to step 10? Here, when we're still on step two, it's like, you have to make sure you can't just, you know, do have AI and have everything in place. Before, you know, you can't, it's basically you can't, you have to walk before you can run. But anyway, I think that this is a topic that's going to be more prevalent in the days ahead. And I'll probably do future podcast episodes on just this topic alone. But I want to I want to talk about another thing that is really, really important here at the HR tech conference, which is, how to choose the right software, how to choose the right HR software company. And, you know, I think that helping people find the right software is helping people find the right HR tech for the organization. But it's not just finding the right tech, it's also knowing what tech you have currently and how that can be improved. What are your What are your thoughts there?
Chas Fields:Yeah, this is a this is a tough one we actually created you and I and the advisors a while back created a buyer's guide, right? You know, from our experiences and how we shared those experiences in the buyer side, we'll make sure to put that link in our bio, of the episode or the description of the episode, where I find this the most intriguing is at a conference, you have people speaking on a stage about this. And I wonder if they're sponsored or not doesn't matter. It's neither here nor there. I would much rather go to some of the networking groups. And the people who are in positions like me, doesn't even necessarily have to be the same industry. Right? Helpful. Don't get me wrong. But I love the idea of you know what, Julie, let's assume that you were in construction, like I was ages ago. And I come to you, and you're also in construction? Hey, what's your experience like tracking this? How do you handle this? What? What is an efficient way? Or What product are you using to efficiently run your HCM processes? Right, great. What was setup? Like? What was that experience? Like? How's your customer service experience? You know, what does the organization do for you, beyond, you know, the go live date, those to me are more critical, because I'm having a face to face conversation with a peer who understands me, what my role is, what my responsibility is, and the people that I serve. Right? So on the flip side, at a conference like that, where people are talking about their buyer experience, whether it's sponsored or not, you still get some insight into whatever product that is, right. So it's kind of it's kind of like a free demo, if you will, or a free hey, here's what's happening. Here's what you can be aware of Go ahead.
Julie Develin:Yeah, I think it can get overwhelming here too, because there's so many different things to see things to do. And hey, it's also in Las Vegas. And there's there's lights and cameras and action everywhere here. So yeah. All you add all of this, all of that in, you know, it just it can lead to that overwhelming aspect, which is interesting. Like it's something that I wanted to mention here, because I think that it's important, you know, HR people are overworked, overwhelmed as it is. And now they're being tasked to go to the conference and figure it out. A lot of people that come to this conference are sent here by upper leadership, and saying, Hey, go find the tech that we need, we need now. That's a double edged sword, because at least the least leadership is saying, Oh, we understand that you need the tech. But you know, the and then oh, by the way, you have 1000 Other projects on top of that. So I think I think that's something that organizations need to need to look at. So yeah, go ahead.
Chas Fields:No, I was gonna say in scalability, too, right. So you as HR, one of the things that you need to be aware of knowing that you're you're overworked stress, burnout, whatever it is, when it comes to selecting a tech that you really have to focus on the processes that take the most time, right and find a solution that is going to eliminate those for you. The reality of it is the stuff that you are churning and burning on all of the time. There is a lot of good technology out there that can really really help you. You know, so it's, it's also one of the things that I think where we get confused when it comes to selecting HR tech is that there's perfection waiting for you. Like if I buy this, it's going perfect.
Julie Develin:I tell I thought that's what I thought
Chas Fields:it's, it's okay to think that right? It's okay to think that but I also like manage your expectations a little bit like what in your life, in general is perfect, right? Like that's, that's where I'm at. It's like what, hold on, hold on. Let's take a step back here. Now. It doesn't mean that there when you go through The selection process that there aren't things that are really going to help you, and thus inspire you to do new things, try new things, you know, shape your business in a new way. Tech is a critical foundation of that. But we also have to manage our own expectations with this, you know, and be like, Okay, if we're gonna buy this new software, we can't always do it the way that it's always been done. We ourselves have to think about how do we get rid of the manual processes? How can we be more efficient? Get going back to the network groups? What is your experience been like? And how did you overcome it? Versus Okay, splash? Everything's gonna be perfect, right?
Julie Develin:Yeah, no, no, it's definitely not, you know, there's another session here that I want to discuss. And it's called HR tech snap next Battlefront manager effectiveness. And when I when I saw this, it reminded me of a study that I read by Gartner, what basically Gartner was saying says that leadership and manager effectiveness is going to be the number one priority for HR teams in 2023. And this was this was, you know, obviously, a few months ago, but you know, the role that managers play in helping employees and the business really, you know, navigate so many different nuances of the business, and so many different things like scheduling, etc. You know, how can HR technology really help to improve manager effectiveness? And just like you said, when you say, Oh, well, if you put a system in place, it's like, oh, everything's gonna be perfect at that point. I think managers think that too. There's a huge learning, there's a learning curve, and that learning curve takes time. And that learning curve, it takes effort on the part of everybody to come together and learn how to utilize the system. So I mean, what do you do you think that HR is next Tech Battlefront? Is manager effectiveness? Or do you think it's just long overdue?
Chas Fields:Both? Yeah, both? It's hard for me, you know, I, you know, in my ivory tower, if you will, we've been focusing on manager effectiveness at UKG for a decade, longer than probably right. You know, you do we do surveys, we do scoring, we do all of these things that essentially hold managers accountable to be a great manager. Right, that, that to me. Now, not every company is that way, right? Not every company is that way. On the flip side, we've talked about this at length in past episodes, where we expect a lot from managers, right. And most importantly, if we are not teaching them, the ways to be effective, or the ways to be better, or the ways to make sure that our people feel connected, or pick a topic that happens in business, right kind of one, we released the episode today, on on the Halloween, right? Like, the things that HR just kind of rolls their eyes about right? Like, oh, no, we did this again. We have to make sure that going back to the AI piece and educating and we can't expect managers to know everything. But it's equally important to at least educate them on the things that we want them to know moving forward as a business as a structure, and to be effective. Right? And let's let's be clear, effective does not mean you're going to like the change, right? Effective does not mean that that you are Oh rah rah all of the time and everything is so happy and go lucky. Effective means we're doing what's right for the business. So the business reinvest for us. And we take like you often talk about being a good organizational citizen. cool part about it is truly HR Technology helps us do all of this really well and at a fast pace. And now with the AI piece really poking its head out now. I think we're gonna see a lot of cool things happen over the next couple years with our workforces.
Julie Develin:Yeah, I do, too. The rapid pace of technology, the rapid change, all of that kind of stuff, all of the new tools that's available. Again, HR tech conference every year just gets bigger and bigger. You know, last year, we were the only one that had a pre conference workshop. And then this year now there are three, right, and there's over 600 people registered for this workshop.
Chas Fields:Are you running that workshop? I am awesome. I'm excited for you. That'll be so fun. Thank you. So Jules, yeah, HR tech 2023. What did you find your purpose in
Julie Develin:AI all the time. And my purpose my purpose, obviously, honestly is a little bit personal is that I need to keep educating and re educating myself on AI and the implications because it's, it's it gets to be overwhelming for me. Yeah,
Chas Fields:I agree. I think macro economically AI This is my purpose macro economically as we educate ourselves more and more. It's going to force us out of the box to be more creative, right? So that is that is something that I think is really, really cool. So many people would say, oh, that's scary. Now we just we need to be ready for big changes, right? Go listen to my change management episode, we need to be ready for big changes our episode.
Julie Develin:So maybe we'll circle back on a change episode.
Chas Fields:Maybe, maybe, maybe so. We'll leave. We'll leave you with this. Julie. You're headed to London. Sorry, I couldn't be there again. But people purpose podcast goes to Google Next in London this week. So be on the lookout for that that's going to drop on 1023. A few reminders before. Don't forget to like and subscribe and use the hashtag evil purpose pod on social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. Hey, check out the latest blogs and research from the workforce Institute at UKG by visiting workforce institute.org Go Julie go so proud of you. Congratulations. Thank you you've done and your accomplishments. Hey, Joe. I appreciate you. Thanks for listening. Bye