HR can be a profit centre in the cognitive era

In a nutshell: professional, insightful, interesting, worthwhile. I’m talking about the conference I attended last week, Open HR & the cognitive era, which was packed with both content and people - thank you IBM for both an excellent summit and for driving the HR agenda forward.

I thought it’d be useful to share my own take outs from the sessions - a little summarised perhaps but always with the intent of (hopefully) delivering some benefits for those not able to attend.

Firstly, I’d like to mention David Kelly who discussed re-imagining HR and changing existing models. “HR can be a profit centre” is one of the key points I took out from the opening.

“HR can be a profit centre”

We are producing too much data to see patterns without the help of machines. Luckily, the machines are coming (!) and enabling systems to work together is part of ‘Open HR’ where previously, it has been about the processes in HR.

This is now being turned on its head and the focus is shifting to skills/capabilities. We can’t operate in isolation in HR and we need to consider the full employee/worker experience (including prospective employees) remembering that all other departments also have an impact on the employee’s experience.

There are a number of cognitive areas where the maturation of machines will help and IBM have just the thing in Watson, which can even replace people (in some roles). The example of the extra teaching assistant to help answer questions from students was impressive. Jill (they called her ‘Jill Watson’) scored fantastically well from the students who didn’t know it was ‘just’ Watson the IBM machine that answered. This highlights just how much potential there is in what is to come.

‘Cognitive’ will augment what people can do and as Watson learns it can develop from helping with analysing to recommending options to, as a final step, action - although I hope and trust that a human will always be in control of final decisions, whether directly or in-directly.

We can also think about personalised learning where each individual is offered the knowledge in the best way for them. Systems learn our behaviour and guide us to our own preferences.

Hearing real cases is always valuable and I heard from Lloyds, Shell, Imperial Brands and the MoD with great interest. Their stories included the topics of skill shortages, talent and change.

‘10% deficit of knowledge workers’ McKinsey

There were many examples of the shortage of skills presented (I hope I remember the one from McKinsey correctly) with perhaps the most interesting comment coming from the MoD who said “we are now in an arms race for skills”. Together it all painted a picture of change.

In some regards, the old workforce trends just don’t work any longer as a guide for the future. Change is coming. We need to look at what skills are required going forward and hearing about gamification as part of the recruitment process is, in my mind, positive.

“Drive the change: Change comes from within, respect the past, be opportunistic and over-engage.”

When hired, it is important to understand your employees better, and surveys can help with this - even if you get 35,000 comments to open ended questions! The first time it took 17 trainees on the graduate scheme 2 weeks to go through it but there is technology to help. And with this much data it’s about focusing on the priorities, not just where it shows ‘red’.

One project to re-organise and upskill one part of the workforce highlighted the need for the change to be driven by the senior team in the business unit – it was not an HR project but couldn’t be done without HR. The work included stakeholder feedback, competency based interviews and IBM Kenexa psychometrics to determine capability and development levels. The recommendations were:

• ensure senior sponsorship,
• be realistic about resources and
• communication is everything.

A glimpse of the future is for employees to pick their manager. By being transparent and sharing information on manager performance this is possible - personally I can’t wait. Also, working with a research partner is great and remember to get your senior team to understand you.

I think we are seeing customer centric thinking finding its way into HR (slowly, but still). “Look for the ‘Moments that matter’, find them in the same way IKEA have the hot dog / ice cream at the perfect time” is one example of this.

Alike doesn’t necessarily mean the same

Moving to cognitive learning we will have learner expectations focusing on the ‘me’. Know/Understand/Engage/Anticipate ‘me’ and how one learns best - this is when ‘alike’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘the same’. Furthermore, we can have cognitive search, and this can be accessible, personalised and relevant. This not only enables better performance at lower cost (faster for the company), it also delivers the opportunity for a much improved career growth. And from what I have heard elsewhere, only 20% of tomorrow’s skills exist today so both cognitive learning and search can help significantly in our preparations for tomorrow. 

I enjoyed the panel I went to especially as it started off with a passionate exchange. The topic of continuous listening (turning your employees voice into action) got challenged from within the panel within minutes. It was all for the good though and proved to be brilliant as there was final agreement that continuous listening should be a two-way process. So, we went from listening to conversation – continuous conversation. And these conversations will no longer be the same for everyone. With the help of systems, we will be enabled to have more individual conversations. Also, we need to think about conversations as a ‘stay or go’ conversation, the organisations are no longer holding all the power. Remember to have conversations throughout the employment lifecycle. Especially as it will be harder to engage with employees in the ‘gig economy’.

There were calls for a proper certification for HR, with clear skills. I heard the need for human behaviour, business acumen and analytics. 

Before finishing off the day with an excellent interview with Martina Navratilova we heard how cognitive technology will transform HR. There are 4 technologies the CHRO need to address: Cloud / Internet of Things / Mobile / Cognitive.

The open ended question was “why don’t we take the approach of mobile first in every process?” The prediction is that cognitive is the big future and will augment human capability.

Seeing the Watson proof of concept was indeed fascinating, and on the day before the referendum highly topical (personality insights for Cameron & Farage). With just over a week since the outcome, it would now be interesting to see what personality insights we could discover about Gove…

The potential of Cognitive Insight is going to enable the re-imagining of HR 

Finally hearing from a very relaxed Martina Navratilova was great and a clever link with IBM and data given Wimbledon (and tennis in general) is full of data capture to measure success. I enjoyed hearing her views on diversity, ‘diversity is essential’, and her best non-tech coaching tip - “stay in the moment” and “go with your first instinct”.

Thanks for your attention.

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Martin is a multi award-winning Strategic Workforce Planning, Workforce Planning, Workforce Management and People Analytics expert with a breadth of practical experience which includes operational, training, consulting, software design, solution delivery and advisory roles.

If you want to learn more,

• sign up for his training in Strategic Workforce Planning
• follow his writing on his personal blog on Oest.co.uk and
• follow or connect with him on LinkedIn

Martin has worked across a diverse range of industries and brands, both in the UK and internationally, in finance, construction, retail, healthcare, telecoms and in the public, non-profit and private sector. He has managed workforce budgets from 500 FTE to 50,000 FTE / £2.5billion and workforce programmes for less than 100 FTE and over 100,000 FTE: in transformation, growth, cost reduction and restructuring.

Martin and his award winning project at the Metropolitan Police is featured in the book "The Power of People" published June 2017 by Jonathan Ferrar, Nigel Genome, Sheri Feinzig

Please feel free to get in touch if you are looking to transform your HR function into one which is more strategic and evidence based. And if you want to add the strategic organisational capability of Strategic Workforce Planning to your organisation, reach out.

Awards: 

Winner Individual Achievement Awards, People Analytics 2016, Tucana 

2nd runner up Judges Award - Workforce Analytics Excellence Awards 2016

1st runner up Peoples Award - Workforce Analytics Excellence Awards 2016

SWP Achievement Award - MOPAC / Met Police Commissioner 2015

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Keywords: Workforce Strategy, Strategic Workforce Planning, Workforce Planning, HR Analytics, People Analytics, Workforce Analytics, Predictive Analytics, Metrics, HR, Human Resources, Future, Managing Uncertainty, Evidence based, Evidence led, 

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