Tag: #AmbientHR

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Techtember behind us, Techtober in full swing

Hey everyone – as I wrote here, I am very excited about Techtember and Techtober with all of its  conferences and announcements. And I think so far it did not let us down. We had Workday Rising US (I will only visit Rising EMEA later in November – please join me as I will be on stage) as well as SAP SuccessConnect so far.

Workday Rising

Workday Rising had as I expected a full bouquet of AI announcements. They announced the addition of generative AI across its platform and enhanced other, already built-in AI capabilities. They also opened up a Workday AI Marketplace for partners to add solutions and for customers to take advantage of them. As I was already alluding to in my article here, Workday is finally at the table and fully in the AI game. And at the same time Workday stays true to its security and privacy focus in only allowing it to be on your data and within your tenant structure. So you can harness everything without the worry of exposing data. I believe that is the right balance. Openness and inclusiveness of other data sources to read and feed potentially provides better results (which needs to be proven) but it for sure gets you into more difficult conversations around privacy, security and actually IF you can enable it at all. 

These AI additions will bring massive improvements as well as will make sure that Workday stays ahead of the pack of the current competition – and as there is still no new AI-powered contender start-up at present, it might be able to keep its rank for this wave of tech innovations. Some of the functionalities include the ability to generate job descriptions (which already many solutions do – but again, here you can benefit from privacy, security – as well as consistency across the company), compensation related features – and of course the turbo for your developers the “Developer Co-Pilot” that will turn text into code. I am the most excited about their pipeline on improving UI through conversational UI and Generative AI. I believe we all can agree that the current Workday UI/ UX is everything but modern – and so a refreshed look with the infusion of a more conversational approach powered by Generative AI sounds very promising for Employee Experience, for our end-users that today still need to think in HR terms if they want to get anything done. That could be a game-changer. 

SAP SuccessConnect

And of course, SuccessConnect also featured AI big time. Some interesting announcements – but all in line with a strategy we already knew before – in the AI space were made. The less interesting are the “me too” ones like Job Descriptions and personalized learning recommendations. Let’s see how they compare. More exciting though was Joule – SAPs natural-language, generative AI copilot. What is so far though announced is not much more than what e.g. Workday already offers in their Workday everywhere spaces like Slack and Teams, e.g. approvals, finding information, etc. – but what is exciting about it is the concept that we know already from Microsoft – an App-wide Co-pilot that can span across and help (in the best case in the future) with any kind of (t)ask one might have. It is great that it is focused again on the end-user experience. This is where we need to see more focus from these companies and having them all push in that direction will bring great new ideas and concepts that I am looking forward to test. 

Not least, let me talk about the Talent Intelligence Hub. With the focus on a skills based organization this comes at the right time and is all about skills and how to make the most of it, e.g. uniting skills and other data to create a holistic picture of your workforce, making it easy for employees to build their individual skills portfolio, finding the right candidates quickly, or enabling relevant learning and development – in essence an empowerment for managers and employees to take career and progression into their own hands. We need to see how this plays out, but this sounds very exciting.

On both, we must wait and see how presentation and show compare to reality in your own tenants/ implementations. But for sure the announcements have not let me down. It is a big step forward on the road to a democratised HR experience for Managers and Employees. And this is just the beginning – I believe we are still at the top or just past the top of the hype-cycle for AI and the solutions offered seem already very pragmatic and useful – are already addressing real business problems. – and more is still to come.

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AI infused HR Copilot

In my last post I was referencing that the real and actual business case for AI is not in Search but in the enterprise market. I continue to believe in that and with all announcements that you can see from Microsoft or Google, this becomes more and more apparent. Interestingly though, it seems as if the current enterprise market players are not seeing it or understanding it. Yes, by now (finally) some of them are at least showing some progress in their blogs, but when you read these from Workday or SuccessFactors you see that they still don’t understand the size and impact of the AI wave that is coming their way. 

AI will transform the way we do HR. I do not believe that there is any way this change and impact can be overestimated. Of course, you have the small AI applications as the current enterprise HR software companies bring to the market in the skills, talent or even recruiting space (see also Beamery). But these are not (different than promised) at the core of the solution, at the hart of the platform. These are edge cases where AI provides a very specific job. What I am talking about is an AI first HR platform that actually brings it all together and acts as a connected bridge.

HR Admin powered by AI

Let’s dive into the boring work of HR Administration. Not many people like it but it is still the foundation that not only HR is built on but the whole company. Show me any other enterprise software that is so interconnected and whose data is used to run more business processes than your HR Core Master Data and Organizational Data. You can’t find any. And so, the foundational HR Admin work continues to be at the center and heart of everything we do in HR. But it is still today very transactional and manual. Of course, there have been many improvements over the years and also automation is continuing to help, but a real revolution will only happen with AI. What if instead of a Shared Service Center AI will take care of all transactions. The complexity of 85%+ of all transactions is low to medium and the decision trees are very much rule based to a certain extend. Build an HCM software with AI at its true core and you can eliminate more than 90% of the admin work because AI will do it for you – seamless and in the background. Position movements, promotions, compensation changes, whatever there is, AI can operate it independently. And it won’t only do it for you if you trigger it, e.g. someone starts a promotion and the admin steps to follow are then taken on by the AI – no, with the vast knowledge of the organization, its rules and how it functions, AI can and will provide proactive guidance.

Your personalised AI HR Concierge

In the recent years we have more and more transformed the HR Business Partner role (and yes, I am on purpose talking about the role as I still see too many so-called Business Partners that continue to do HR Manager work) into a strategic, workforce guidance and consultative space. This role will continue to exist and add more and more value in our complex world – but also AI supported. However, the less strategic work can and will be completely transferred into AI. And with that, we are actually bringing back something that Managers and Employees mis, what we took from them: personalized services. AI can provide a personalized HR Concierge service to every employee in the company, including Managers. It will know you and your function and your career path and the typical company career paths, required skills, your existing skills, the gap, ways to close this gap, etc. – the knowledge is almost endless and with that knowledge, the HR Concierge can help any employee to find the right career path, the right training but also can help in many other situation – may it be a benefits question or may it be explaining your pay-slip. And it will free up human colleagues to be available for the more sensitive aspects of HR which will of course continue to exist. Our function will never be without human interaction!

And for Managers, the support will even be bigger. Managers will have an AI HR Manager that can help them manage the HR side of their team, make them aware of opportunities and gaps in their teams, make them aware of risks and issues, as well as help them get their teams into the future based on company strategy and objectives set. AI at the center of a reimagined HCM system will be so powerful and transformative that the current HCM systems and its capabilities will look like a calculator compared to 2023 Excel with Copilot – because this is what it will be, your HR Copilot.

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Ambient HR – putting it into practice

Already a few years back I was dreaming of Ambient HR (Link). Back then it was a nice idea, an ambition which was not possible to make reality – but now, three years later this looks different. Ambient HR is what the next step in HR Tech can be and should be.

Recap

Let’s recap quickly – what is Ambient HR. Ambient HR starts off with the idea that the HR function is a supporting function that needs to enable the business to work. It has no reason to be on its own, make its own agenda or strategy. It needs to be an enabler – and as such, it needs to stay very close to the business. This is true for strategy, for policies, for anything HR stands for – and this also includes HR Technology. Josh Bersin is seeing it in a similar way when he talks about “Systems of Work” and where the HR Technology sector should head to.

Ambient HR Technology is seamlessly integrated into the daily work routine of an employee or people manager. It is not an add on, a separate system and interface that a people manager or employee needs to log on to, it is not a system where a people manager needs to find its way around and what needs to get done – it is rather integrated into the regular workflow.

How to make it happen? – the foundation

Well, when I first wrote about it, I wasn’t sure when this will be feasible. Now I am happy that we are almost there and can actually put it into practice. It is not yet anything that comes off the shelf, but the ingredients are there and can be mixed in the right way to make it happen.

What do you need? – first and foremost you need a strong HR back office system . something like a Workday or SuccessFactors or Oracle Human Resources – or if you have a smaller company one of the more new and niche softwares like ADP Vantage or Cornerstone. These will not only provide you with the back office infrastructure – meaning the database, but also with the additional “services” you need to make Ambient HR happen. This is something that was not present in the legacy, monolithic ERP based HCM systems.

You need AI – but don’t worry, this is one of the integrated services. AI a few years back meant that you needed to have special Data Scientists and AI engineers that programmed specific solutions just for you – or that you had to search for the right and fitting add-on to your system. – Just to find out that it doesn’t work so seamlessly. Believe me been there – done that, failed. But now AI is integrated into a Workday or a SuccessFactors (and others). The only thing you need is to enable it and to have data, clean and vast amounts of data. This is where it still gets a bit tricky (a) because you need to have clean employee data for all your employees (this also means that they can be categorised) and (b) best is if you can compare and benchmark with 3rd party data. This is where GDPR and data privacy come into play and will complicate things still. But it is doable.

The AI will support you significantly on Data Analytics. This is the next steps on your way to make it happen. Through AI and Data Mining your back office system is learning what is “going well”, what is “not going well” in your workforce and provide support on these topics to bring them to action. As an example: With AI and Data Analytics, your back-office system can identify who might be at risk of leaving the firm and can let the People Manager know – or it can identify who’s salary is inadequate based on tenure, performance evaluation as well as comparison with similar roles.

The Integration

This is one part of making Ambient HR happen. The second one is as important. Until now, all intelligence is within the HR system – and people managers, employees would have to sign on to it, look through the intelligent data and take the right action. This is still clunky and takes away the focus from what needs to get done.

The Integration is key now. The question is: What is your company wide system of productivity? What is it that your company uses to get work done? – is it Salesforce? Is it Slack? Is it Microsoft Teams? – whatever it is, this needs to be the place where HR Tech and the People Manager or Employee meet. Utilising that same interface and platform where anyway a big portion of your Employees and People Managers are busy on a regular basis.

Using this, the next step is the integration – where another (not so) new technology comes into play: bots. Bots that are integrated in your productivity platform and that build the bridge between this platform and your back-office HR system. These productivity platforms know already who you are, what your job is and what you need to get done – they can use all of this information to legitimate you towards the HR back-office system and provide you with a slick interface – in fact, no interface – but a bot (or multiple bots) that will make it easy for you.

These bots should (a) be reachable for every Employee and (b) approach Employees and People Managers as well. Let’s take the above example – your HR back-office system identifies that one of your direct reports is underpaid. It can reach out to you via the bot in your productivity system, check when you have the next 1:1 meeting scheduled with this direct report and let you know in advance via a message that you should review pay – it can even let you know how much of an increase you should action. – and if you are happy with the proposal, you can just reply to the bot after your conversation with your employee and trigger the necessary actions – no need for you to log onto your HR system, no need to dig deep into an uncommon interface. The necessary action is done without additional effort from you as a People Manager.

From here

This is not rocket science – and some companies are already there. Especially productivity platforms like MS Teams are ready for this and HR 3rd party providers are building out the bots.

A nice example is jibble – a time tracking App – that allows you to clock in/ out via bot in Teams and other productivity suits. This is where we need to get to – this is bringing HR ambiently into the workplace – and making it relevant and fluent to use for the workforce.

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Ambient HR – the next revolution of HR Technology

In today’s world, the challenges and requirements towards HR are manifold and changing on an almost daily basis: Customer expectations, our social and cultural environment, technology – everything is changing more fast paced than ever. And that of course has a big impact on companies well. HR has to find the right answers to this changing environment – of course. But today I would like to write about a very old topic that is still very much present in our daily business and HR lives: The actual connection between HR and the business – or in more concrete terms, the connection between the people or line managers (at all levels) and what HR has to offer them to support.
There are many different areas of potential connections of course, and one specific connection that is especially frustrating and truly very rarely working seamless. The administrative pieces of people manager work.
I believe we all as HR professionals understand and advocate for people managers to be the owner of the people relationships and people management – and this ownership means that they should manage their teams and employees end-to-end. This actual accountability is today not really a big debate anymore. It is understood and accepted – but the debate starts where the act of actual management of people, the conversations, decisions, recommendations have to be turned into action – the act of initiating a pay raise after the conversation with your employee, the act of initiating recruitment after you have reached agreement with your manager about that role. This is where it often gets clunky.
Of course, modern HR systems like Workday or SuccessFactors make it easier than ever before and also very often straight forward. But: As a people manager you still have to:

  • Log-on to the system
  • Find the right process/ action
  • Understand what needs to be done
  • Fill in all required information (hopefully you have them or know where/ how to find them)
  • Send the request off… and wait

This does not feel right in today’s world. And this is where Ambient HR as an idea comes to live.
HR processes should only be there for two reasons:
(a) to support the business in what it needs to achieve
(b) to adhere to local legal regulations
(b) is something we cannot really change. But (a) is something where HR technology and processes need to seriously upgrade to toady’s technology possibilities. I imagine Ambient HR as a way to overlay the actual work that people managers are doing with the required HR actions. Let’s take the above cases.
A pay increase for example, should be initiated based on a conversation between people manager and employee. Ambient HR is connected to all systems people managers use in their daily work and so also to the calendar account. It notices that the people manager has set a career conversation with his/ her employee and automatically does two things:
(1) before the conversation happens, it pops up on the people managers computer and asks what this career conversation is about (e.g. new job, performance improvement, promotion, etc.) and based on the people manager’s choice, provides on the spot, just in time support (e.g. what needs to be taken into consideration, how the process works, how long it takes, what exactly needs to be done by the people manager  – all in context of the employee the manager is seeing) and recommendation (e.g. how high a pay raise could maximum be).
(2) after the conversation, the people manager receives the next pop-up window, asking for action with a pre-completed form based on the employee the manager has seen as well as the choices the people manager took in the first step (e.g. it is a promotion conversation). The manager just has to review and send off. All work done.
With such an integration, the administrative part for the people manager’ job to set in action what he/ she has discussed or decided to do becomes a simple, not time consuming and effective process. And similar integrations are possible with other systems at work like Time & Attendance, like your Sales System, etc. – and because of AI, contextual information and actions are easy to realise – it is like Google Now for work. Ambient HR is immersive in your day-to-day activities, not a nasty add-on, but an integral part of how you work – you don’t have to remember what, when how – it will tell you. And it will learn throughout your work day to be better every time it supports you.
Of course, you need to trust this system as it has access to all your data – but hey, you trust Google or Amazon or Facebook at home with your private data and at work such a system already houses your most sensitive data: people data. So why shouldn’t you trust it to listen in to your daily activities as a people manager?
Ambient HR is the future of HR Technology and it needs to start today.