Ron Hanscome
Vice President, Analyst
Gartner
What’s the single most dramatic shift you see happening in the HR tech space today?
After two years of marketing frenzy around AI, vendors, consultants, and thought leaders have focused on the employee experience as the theme for the rest of 2019 and 2020. Look forward to many providers positioning their solutions as an “employee experience platform.” While improving employee experience is a worthy objective, HCM applications leaders should be aware that it represents the sum of all touch points a person encounters during their journey through an organization, and involves interactions with many other applications beyond HR. No single HCM application will be able to serve as such a platform for the foreseeable future.
In acquiring and implementing new technologies, what’s the one or two most common mistakes HR organizations make?
The most common and biggest mistake I see is not getting a broad enough perspective from typical employees and managers — project teams tend to think that they can “put on their employee/manager hat” on and properly represent those roles. The issue is that HR and technical project team members tend to have too much intrinsic knowledge about how the solutions work, and are usually not connected enough to the day-to-day interactions of employees with HCM technology. To counter this, involve “typical” employees and managers (and contingent workers if applicable) from requirements gathering through the vendor demonstration and selection steps.
Are there certain strategies that are more effective than others when it comes to getting your workforce to use new HR technologies being put in place?
The most critical strategy needed is to ensure that the new solution satisfies at least one important “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM) requirement for each affected role. This will drive workers to try the new functionality in the hopes of getting value. Along with this, project teams must view the deployment of new HCM tech as a formal sales/marketing campaign which requires investment (people and funding) over a period of time. This includes a rollout plan that involves multiple modes of communication, builds excitement for new capabilities, and highlights experiences of early adopter “champions” to deliver WIIFM examples.
