When Will Digital Disruption Show Up in Your Neighborhood?

Yesterday I got an email offer to attend the webcast, "How to Market 'Analytics' without Scaring HR with the 'A' Word."

You know what that tells me? HR is already developing a reputation for avoiding digital changes. One of the goals of the webinar is, "DON'T Scare them [HR] with complex number models."

For Pete's sake.

How is this turn of events possible when such a high percentage of companies have incorporated analytical reports when purchasing transactional HR software for talent management, benefits, compensation and Total Rewards?

One reason is that HR has used a careful, incremental mentality when adapting these changes, building a comfort level one step at a time. But on the business side, customers have been demanding that a full range of high touch purchase and service levels be available online and your line departments have been racing to provide them. Today's pressure to compete in the marketplace is undermining incrementalism, forcing line managers to learn how to lead without traditional comfort levels.

Throughout business, the pressure to adapt analytic and other digital practices is gathering toward a tsunami level, confusing  pretty much ALL decision makers due to universal inexperience with the new practices. Nonetheless, HR needs to participate in this impending "disruption" as a full and equal partner.

If the river's already flowing, how and where do we jump in? Here are a couple of thoughts that should help us launch.

There are a lot of emotional barriers to making the digital changes, barriers that we will have to face up to, along with -- don't kid yourself -- your C-Suite and line executives. McKinsey gives a great overview in, "Digital strategy: The four fights you have to win." The article takes about seven minutes to finish and will provide you with insights that build your confidence for venturing deeper into analytics. In addition, the article educates you on what your team members in line positions are facing.

When it comes to a talent strategy, the new details may seem hard to envision without in-depth technological expertise. Jobs introduced into a company to accelerate the pace of technological change is a valuable thing to know and a good place to start. Insight into these job titles and roles is provided in McKinsey's "Ten red flags signaling your analytics program will fail."

When will you be expected to be an expert? There's no telling, but I'm thinking that performance management may be one of the first HR targets as the tsunami hits. After all, information provided by the new analytics should be able to inform the definition and assessment of performance more easily and quickly than ever before. And on the competency side, behaviors like technological abilities, openness to change and so on, are growing in their importance to your company's business results.

And if you don't scare easily? You may be up for disruption of performance management's well-known weaknesses. The new digital environment will create a cultural rationale for real innovation . . . and may inspire revolution.

Margaret O'Hanlon, CCP brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm, re:Think Consulting, provides market pay information and designs base salary structures, incentive plans, career paths and their implementation plans. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. A former Board member for the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA), Margaret coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at https://gumroad.com/l/everythingiscommunication.

Comments

[William Ernst]

After reading countless articles about the need for programming skills in various industries, I decided my 2019 new years resolution is to learn Python. Other than Excel formulas, I have no programming experience (I'm certain REAL programmers will shake their heads if they ever read this).

Hopefully with time, patience, and a sturdy wall to sustain head banging, I can convince our HR department to at least give narrative-derived performance assessments a try.

Check out this publication on a new intersection for HR and IT:

Speer, A. (2018) Quantifying with words: An investigation of the validity of narrative-derived performance scores. PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY, 1 - 35.

[Margaret O'Hanlon]

Hi William. Thanks for the article. I will chase it down. In the meantime, I'll pass along my husband's encouragement -- he thinks Python is fun!