The impact of Core HR platforms on Employee Recruitment & Workforce Agility

[00:00:00] Hey everyone, got a real treat today on the podcast with someone I'd describe as an SAP

[00:00:09] legend, Steve Hunt. He's one of our top experts around HR tech, future of work, so much more.

[00:00:15] I love talking to Steve because he always opens my mind. He gets me thinking about things

[00:00:20] and that's what I'm hoping to accomplish today as well. So thanks for joining the podcast

[00:00:25] and sharing all your knowledge today, Steve. Welcome. In this podcast, I'm known for focusing on core HR, time, and payroll, but I'm having a lot more conversations with people, and it's really become important to consider core HR in the conversations around jobs and skills. Whereas you and I have had this conversation where people tend to think of core HR technology and talent management solutions. But the platform that those things live on is a Core HR system. And how Core HR systems are designed has a massive impact on what you can do when it comes to rethinking employee experience. The biggest thing that impacts employee experience is the job itself.

[00:03:01] How jobs are designed, how people are managed,

[00:03:05] and how much money companies invest in people. I started my career with on premise technology as a lot of other people did, and that was really, really administrative, right? It really wasn't HR person sitting there, and then there's kind of been an evolution over time, right? You moved to self service, and now we're having even more conversations around AI and things like that, but you make a good point that your core HR foundation

[00:04:23] is very, very important,

[00:04:24] and you can't do some of these things

[00:04:26] with an outdated core HR system, different apps and devices to talk to each other. If you're in on-prem, it's like you don't have access to that HR equivalent of Bluetooth technology. You can build APIs and connections, but they're already manualed over very hard and it really limits the flexibility and adaptability of what companies can do.

[00:05:41] As work is changing and workforces is changing,

[00:05:44] we really need to push the envelope on

[00:05:46] rethinking things like job design, the SAP project was to build a write ABAP code. Actually, the funny thing is that I still remember this it was an interface file. I literally spent probably two months. I was working with a more senior developer sitting there and I was writing code. The whole point of the code was for me to go and write this code, pull data out into internal tables in

[00:07:03] ABAP and then take that,

[00:07:05] build it out, and then get a flat file out that I'm the most excited about in terms of really transforming employee experience and organizations manage that SAP has is the business technology platform. People think, oh, BTP, you know that. And it's because people don't realize what that enables. That enables companies to, one, rapidly build

[00:08:20] new tools to support employees in ways that would take forever on old systems.

[00:08:25] And it also is enabling us to link HR and non-HR systems together in a way your core HR system tied into this larger interoperable platform. I think that ability to do things quickly is really enabled by moving into the Cloud. Then there's even more powerful ones like when you start looking at the ability to tie together your core HR system.

[00:09:45] This is a story from a few years ago, was tied to their payroll system, he knew it was accurate. It was up to date, because that data has to be up to date. But then he could go in and he actually found the picture of the employee and he showed it to my friend on the phone and said, and he goes, yeah, that was the guy. And then he sent him because that system was then connected,

[00:11:00] payroll connected to the employee profile,

[00:11:02] which was also connected to the employee recognition system.

[00:11:05] He sent a note to that employee on the moment. So they had some really intense Greece regulations, right? Where you have to send all of this data to the government, right? And so they were able to very quickly put together a BTP application, you know, take this out and send it. And so to me, that was another one where it really enabled agility because they were using Employee Central and also our time tracking where they had this time data,

[00:12:22] but then, you know, they needed to take it,

[00:12:25] send it out and comply with this legislation.

[00:12:27] You know, what you be really effective or they can not even show up at all.

[00:13:42] And they can all happen in 24 hours, often based on how they're treated.

[00:14:44] about finding ways to get all this stuff into the cloud and interconnected. There are a couple specific examples.

[00:14:47] I want to look at there's three specific areas though,

[00:14:54] where I really, if I could dream of where

[00:14:59] HR technology focused on that I think And so if you look at this, this ability to one, the sort of hybrid remote work models having methods where people can work in different locations and there's all sorts of compliance and there's different regulations and the ability to employ people.

[00:16:23] So for example, one of our customers, they a lot of frontline service work is everyone is paid exactly the same and it's all based on hourly rates as though that they all provided the exact same value organization. Now any person who's ever encountered service employees know that some service employees are more effective than others. We've

[00:17:43] all had that experience. But in a equitable and rewarding pay structures. You can't do that if you don't have technology that can support a much more complicated set of pay. Yeah, and this is another example where I think we look

[00:19:03] at this and how can and this every day. Right. Yeah. You know, the schedule. Right. And so employees will accept that as part of the jobs, but really trying to find a way to give employees more control over their schedule and their time.

[00:20:21] So that, you know, they can say, hey, I want to take a couple hours off on Wednesday,

[00:20:25] but I'll take a the more that we create more flexible, core HR technology that enables us to allow people to work differently in terms of where they work, it allows people to be paid differently in terms of like recognition at a more finer and grained level for

[00:21:42] the contributions they make. And it allows people to have more

[00:21:45] control over their own life in terms of getting people that actually care, people that are contributing, and so much more too. Right? Yeah. So all right, well, let's switch gears a little bit. I wanna cover one more topic at least. I know in the news I keep hearing about re-skilling people,

[00:23:03] right, on the company side,

[00:23:05] we're seeing restructuring and changes. people are doing now and good at in their current job, in their current job design, but also what their other strengths are that they bring, build to the table, right? I think you probably talked somewhat about this with the whole skills management thing. How do you see that? Yeah, and I can say this is interesting. One of the big discussions actually in the book, Talent Tectonics, I was talking about why we need better HR technology

[00:24:21] is to enable large companies to act like small ones.

[00:24:24] Companies need to be more agile

[00:24:25] because the world's changing faster. bigger and bigger, they become very sort of rigid and bureaucratic, not because they want to per se, but because you know suddenly the workforce costs are massive and how do you manage that and how do you maintain that. So what's happening is with skills management there's two things that are happening. One is the

[00:25:40] pace of skills are changing faster and faster and faster because of

[00:25:43] digitalization. Companies are increasingly saying we have to get better where basically an organization that runs more like a small company, where it's like we don't tell people what to do based on their job title, we match people with what to do based on what the company needs, what they're able to do, what they want to do, and it becomes people moving around a lot and people splitting their time across different tasks and dynamic teams and all this stuff, much more agile organization.

[00:27:01] Well, that's what everyone wants.

[00:27:03] But the problem is that are trying to manage, that are managing that sort of a workforce. I remember talking to one about these new skills management solutions that allow people to get gig work and move around and chase their skills. And actually several customers have told me, they said, we'd never turn that on. That would create absolute chaos in our company.

[00:28:21] You know, and because people are here to do something

[00:28:25] and we pay them to do certain tasks

[00:28:28] based on their skills, and to some degree, how much you're paid may change

[00:29:41] based on which skill you're using.

[00:29:45] And so, and sometimes, creating labor shortages, we've got to get much more efficient at using people. But the big barrier to it actually is interesting. It's not the skills management solutions. I think they're where they need to be to do this right now, to know which employees could do it, to be able to move around and match

[00:31:02] them. It's the core HR systems that order to get the most out of all these really cool and innovative things that are going on in the talent world. Not just with SAP, but even other partners or other things that people are building, right?

[00:32:21] All the AI stuff that's going on and automation.

[00:32:25] I think to really take advantage of that,

[00:32:27] you do have to have a strong core in that than we have been in the past. And that's where I think it's a way of approaching innovation in core HR systems that I don't think we've thought about in the past. I don't think people have thought about how does this system impact our ability to rapidly move people around in the organization in different roles or doing different things and maybe with different pay levels over time. That's not the way we historically thought.

[00:33:42] And agreed, I mean, you know, like there's a whole

[00:33:46] different way of looking at things.