HR Vision Podcast #10 – The practicality of HR Tech ft. Dan Reader

Ivo:
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the HR Vision podcast. I'm your host, Ivo. And every week I'm going to have a conversation that matters about HR. This week, I have with me Dan Reader. Welcome, Dan. How are you?

Dan:
I'm good mate, everything is well. How is it going?

Ivo:
I'm doing great. Thanks. Dan is an implementation consultant at FourVision. And today we're going to talk about the consultancy life and HR Tech, learn from his expertize and the do's and don'ts of all this.

So then, are you ready?

Dan:
I think as ready as I'm going to be. Let's do this.

Ivo:
Fair enough. All right. As I do every time. Yeah. Just tell us a bit about yourself. You know who you are, you're a bit of your professional background. Go for it.

Dan:
Yeah. So you've already covered my name. I don't know if you can tell by the Game of Thrones accent, but I'm from the north of England. I've lived up here pretty much my whole life, really. Based around Manchester. I've been working with Dynamics for about ten years now in some shape or form.

I started off. This is making me feel a lot older than I actually am. Yeah. I started off working back in the days of AX 4.0 and CRM 2011 and then migrated over to AX 2012 and worked with that quite a few years before making the jump from a to D365. Around the time when I started working with AX12, I started doing HR implementations with an end-user and then migrated over to working in consultancy by HR.

Yeah, I've sort of been around the block a little bit. I've worked with like Finance and Operations to some degree. And a lot of supporting capacities, work in support with CRM. And then I finally settled on a specialty of HR about five years ago, pretty much ever since. I've done some bits and pieces with other D365 applications, so a little bit of customer service and a big chunk Business Central.

Ivo:
All right. And did HR happen to you, or you sort of did data and software as like, studies and then HR came naturally? Or how did that went?

Dan:
So I was working as a bit of a general I.T. support consultant, when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and then migrated over to working in as a business analyst. And again, I was working with the whole shebang of AX12. So everything from purchase ledgers, sales ledgers, finance ledgers. And the project came on our list to work with HR, I've gotten into AX12. And I just kind of, I don't know what it was about it, it just, something about it clicked when I was kind of going through that one of their requirements and gaps and quite enjoyed working with them. I quite enjoyed the functionality and it was coming from a very, very heavy IT background. When you go in to then work with HR, there's something that they do have in common within a business where it's two departments that don't really have a profit center that you can see normally. You know, IT was always very much, just ate money because it just had to spend all this money on licenses and bits and pieces, and no one ever really saw the outcome as far as finance was concerned, because, you know, no one cares when everything works. They just don't. And HR was kind of the same thing because, you know, you sat around thinking, well, there's loads of things that this department does and there's loads of outputs that benefit the business or could benefit the business.

And again, they're just sort of left on the sidelines. I had a little bit of solidarity with them because of that. And then, yeah, that process is quite true everywhere. It's just something that I find speaks to me quite well.

Ivo:
OK, so it's sort of a of a feeling that. It's an area that needs help, that needs a bit more humanity to it or something like that.

Dan:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's just one of those departments where the business doesn't see the benefits that they offer and things like D365 helpes give the business the visibility of the profit and the benefits that a good HR solution has.

You know, there's so much that even the CEOs and your financial stakeholders and shareholders in the business won't realize that HR can do, and they won't realize that bringing HR to your table can improve your business exponentially with very, very little effort. So, yeah, and it's quite nice to get to help people shine a little bit. It's a nice feeling, it's probably the nicest thing about being a consultant, really.

Ivo:
Cool. Why do you think is that? I believe nowadays there's this common sense that people are a valuable asset and companies are investing more and more in people, but that not always translates into the systems that the people use, right. You want to care about the people, but like in a personal way, but not on the tools that they use every day to improve their worklives. Why do you think that happens?

Dan:
I think it goes back to the very, very old school way of thinking where people just viewed HR, and you can blame a lot of media representation of this. If you think back to any TV show that the person is always sort of, all they really care about is just holding people's personal data, there's no real benefit to them in a lot of instances. Not the mindset that most people have, because, I mean, you could talk to me or you about manufacturing processes, and we wouldn't really know the ins and outs of that operation because you don't see the this thing. Some materials go into a building and a finished product comes out the other end and HR is kind of similar in the way you just get no visibility of the benefits of them holding good data against you and how you can access it.

It's so rare that you can take on any project where employees actually have access to an employee self-service before you move to D365. So as an employee you've got zero knowledge of what data your companies are: A. holding against you; and B. what you can do to improve yourself with that. Twice, employee retention has changed dramatically in the last 10 or 15 years. You know, the days of just having a job and getting a pay rise every year until you retire for doing the exact same job. It doesn't really exist anymore, unfortunately. So, you know, people are looking to go into the business more, especially younger people go in having a clear line of sight and what they want to accomplish while they're at that business. And then if they can't accomplish anything more. Moving on, so at this point, we need to talk to HR because these are the people that can help out with that. They can control your data. They can manage your line managers. They can see how you do it in the positional hierarchy. They can manage reviews, salary uplifts. There's so much data in the system that most businesses just completely overlook. Like a line manager will know what his employee is earning, but their line manager won't. You know, there's no visibility across the organization. What people are earning, what ratio people are on. So the pay rises are just given ad nauseum. There's very, very little control in businesses for really how to improve the lives of your employees without something like a good HR solution like D365, because you've just got no visibility on it.

Like if I want to move up a grade in a company. If your company's compensation structure has no gradings. How do you how do you improve your employees, how what do your employees strive towards and what can you gain?

Ivo:
That's interesting.

Do you do you think. Just a thought came across my mind, do you think having a system like that for for HR, for managing people, for managing people information actually exposes a bit more of the company, you know, to their own employees. And that can be detrimental to, you know, to the business management or whatever that is. Do you think it can be something like that sometimes?

Dan:
It's a give and take. You have to have that trust in: A. your line managers; and B. you have to have the trust in the employees. Obviously, the employees never have visibility in the compensation plans for the organization. They're going to know what they earn and line manager, which is going to know what they and what the rest`of the team earn. Or having that data somewhere in the system. It just makes changes so much easier, giving a line manager ability to request a compensation increase for the employees. It's just about having trust in your organization. And it's something that even outside of H.R. I think businesses are having to come to terms with now, especially, and I hate using this term, but that new way of working since COVID. People are going to have to trust people a lot more when they work remotely and just have the confidence in their line managers and the heads of departments to make the decisions and manage their budgets way better than they did before. I think as long as you've given people that trust, it's then up to them to either prove you're right or wrong.

Ivo:
All right. Yeah, no, it's very interesting. Just a curious way of thinking about things and the first time we actually discuss it like that. But it's very interesting.

So you've been a consultant for for some time. You've seen a lot of things, I guess a lot of examples of must must do's or must don'ts. So, from your experience, like what is it like to be a consultant in HR? What do you think is a must have for someone that is a consultant?

Dan:
I don't know. I think every consultant would probably give you a different answer to this.

Ivo:
For sure.

Dan:
Whatever answer you get is always going to be horrendously biased. Obviously, like a baseline knowledge of the product is always good to have, it's always beneficial. And my personal, sort of best trait you could have is just be personable. If you've got a good bedside manner. If you've got good interpersonal skills, because at the end of the day, if you see all the time where people are very technical and horrendously knowledgeable, go into a client, especially with the departments like HR. A lot of these guys have never been exposed to technical business process people or anything in the past. Whereas if you got like a finance department, they are almost expecting someone to come in and start spouting technobabble and they're expecting, they'll know what you're talking about and that's all fine.

A lot of the time in these bigger projects, especially if it's a wider finance operations project, the HR department might potentially be a bit worried because it's always that feeling that someone's coming in to tell you how to do your job. And I get it like, you know, I'm sure we've all been there. When you're an end-user and someone like a consultant comes in and rocks up in a pinstripe suit or something, and he's saying "Tell me how you do you do your job." and you're immediately on the backbook, and you think "I'm going to get in trouble if I say something wrong with this guy." So I think if you can just... Putting people at ease is always the first thing to do. And I think just have a good bedside manner. If you're a people person, you can do consulting.

I'm not going to ever stand up and say that I'm the most knowledgeable person in Microsoft HR partners. Unfortunately, no. I'd love to be. But yeah, I think I'm very personable and I think that's something that clients like. And I think people will forgive if you don't know every single thing about the problem, because it's very, very difficult to know every single area of something, especially when you look outside of D365 HR and how HR links in with Finance & Ops and the finance side of things. People will forgive you if you can say, OK, I'm going to go away and I'll get that answer for you. People like it, they want to deal with someone that you want to give them a consultant that they feel like they can open up to. They feel like they can tell them all their processes, because the end of the day it only helps the project. They tell you the maximum amount of information. It just makes everything smoother. And part of that is just making people feel comfortable.

Ivo:
I think that's a very important point. More than I think what you mentioned earlier, like what the finance minded audience expects is different than a HR minded audience expects right? So you should fit your discourse, let's say, or your people skills for purpose. You're probably going to be a bit more technical for IT, for financial people than than you are for H.R.. And that's a very, very interesting point.

So you must have found challenges before, when implementing in a lot of companies. Do you have common challenges that that you feel are maybe change management, I guess, you know, change change the idea. Getting some people to change the way they do their job is probably the hardest thing, I would say.

Dan:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Getting people to agree to new processes or changes to a process is always... A difficult thing to do, especially when somebody's been doing that job for a long time, but it's just a case of guiding them to the new way of thinking. So there's obviously a big gap in the process, it's just... And again, it comes back to people skills and the way that you kind of talk to them about that process. And if you go in and just go with a very technical sense of "What you're doing is wrong", and this is why they're immediately just going to hate this person and I'm just going to make his life hell for the next six to eight months. Whereas if you can kind of give them alternatives and walk them through that process is better. That's always, always a big win for any project.

I guess it depends, really. I mean, one big blocker is always introduced in HR till the wider business, it's like I was saying earlier. You know. Especially when you're integrating HR with Finance and Operations, all of a sudden you've got your HR department tha thave been inside of finance saying "OK, we're going to control people's financial dimensions." and that's going to be derivative to your workflow in finance. And our financial dimensions are going to control your financial dimensions from now on. [The people from] finance are normally immediately kuje "No, no, it doesn't. No, we control it all. This is ours, and you go back downstairs where you belong.". So that's always a big blocker, because you've almost initiated; you feel like you've initiated like a company wide battle at some point in time when people are all of a sudden having to deal with another department that they didn't have to think about before. But it's always one of those challenges, that it rides itself out eventually. And normally people are pretty agreeable in the end. And as long as you can make people see the benefits in the changes. That's, yeah it's never too much of a challenge.

Ivo:
Did you ever you ever have a case where actually you were like midway through it and you have the finance department saying "No, we can't deal with this."?

Dan:
Yeah. I don't know if you know this or not. Like English, people are stubborn mate. The term 'cut your nose up to spite your face' was invented because of the English. You know, it can be... but again, it goes off like having respect for the departments. So if you are a five. And I'm sure at that time I didn't think about it like this. But, you know, I guess if you're the head of the finance department and you're obviously aware of HR, but you don't know the benefits of that department, you don't know what their ingoings and outgoings are. And all you think is "OK, they just stole people's personal data.". If you've got no knowledge of the sort of the profits and the benefits of that department, it's completely understandable for you to be sort of defensive about having potentially an impact in the data lifecycle of your employee or your business, you know?

Most problems are easily worked out. Problems with people you can deal with. Problems of processes are always more more difficult.

Ivo:
Do you think from what you're saying, it seems sometimes or a lot of times, departments like HR we need a new tool or it needs to integrate a new tool to HR or something. And it seems like a lot of times the departments don't talk to each other. They arrive to the table. They arrive to to the phase, to an implementation stage and to get the requirements that that they need. And they are not fully aware of the implications that the systems can actually have for other departments, like the example you said with Finance & Operations. That happens a lot?

Dan:
Oh, God yeah. It depends on different businesses. But I feel like a lot of times, since the recession kicked off 15 years ago, that a lot of departments started to silo information. Because it basically gave away that it's there so they can say "OK, we can use this to save us if the business ever starts looking to cut people. We have got all this data here and we can use that as an advantage." Most of the time, it's not done in a in a negative light. I think people just get busy. You know, it's a very busy department. You just get tunnel vision. I'm sure we both have it in our lives. You know, when you've got so much going on. You do just get tunnelvision, and you don't think about; and you don't see the woods through the trees, you know? I got my big example years ago, during an HR implementation, and their IT department... so their HR department were onboarding employees, inputting all their personal details, name. They were typing out the work email address, work, phone numbers. They were all assigned to them. And then that was sent back to the line manager of the employee. They then have to type a different form and log it with IT, who would then add them to the Active Directory and settle the email address and access to different platforms. And that will, you know, that can be added. This could do all of this automated, pretty much all of you know.

So when you've got somebody having to waste a day, a week, or three hours a day, creating new employees and finding out when people are terminated and the line manager having to type these new starter forms. And that's when you get issues within the wider business where people are saying "Oh, I can't be bothered typing up another one of these new starter forms. I'll just get people to share a login.". And that's when you end up with bigger issues. So it's stuff like that, it does have a knock-on effect. And even you think, OK, it's just a it's just a minor thing. But I get it. If you are a line manager in an office somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Do you have hours a day to be typing or multiple new starter requests? And retype in the same information because that's when you get data inconsistencies between the two, you know, and all that stuff. It just sometimes takes a step back or someone external to come in and say, listen, you could do this and it will save you so much time.

Ivo:
Absolutely. That's that's a great point. Yeah, I think it's a good segue to the next question that I have, which is regarding HR tech in general, you already gave some great examples of how it can help you. How it can help HR professionals and IT and even Finance. But in broad terms, what what would you consider to be like the importance of HR Tech?

Dan:
Oh, I mean, immediately just going back to that last example, just having HR being starting point for employees. The actual core starting point, rather than H.R. and IT and God knows who else. All having different parts, have it all at HR and use HR tech to integrate Azure AD, to create an account there and create an email address. Storing bits of information on the job to control what level of access they'll need to different things. And then your department can use that information to build up their different access to different things and grant licenses. That alone is a massive difference.

Dynamics 365, or Office 365 is making that a lot easier nowadays, especially with more and more applications opting Office licensing structure. Yeah, you'd that it's so much easier to just use your domain login for everything, you know, you don't have to have so many different logins for 20 different applications.

Ivo:
Indeed.

Dan:
And you got a different username for each one. And because none of the systems talk to each other. So that's been, and you still got people that are blown away by that alone, just having... "So, listen, you don't have to remember every password anymore. It is just the one for everything.". You would think people don't forget those passwords if you just got one.

Ivo:
Yeah, they do!

Dan:
Yeah. It's a big win, and it's stuff like that, that gives; And again, there's always trust attached to this. But giving line managers more ability to put in termination requests or new position requests for their team, workflow that to their line managers and HR for approval just cuts down a lot of the busy work and a lot of paperwork that HR has to deal with. As long as they've got the trust in the system, that the information that is being supplied is good. And they can check it all as an audit trail to who's requested it and who's approved it. It's fantastic and just streamlines the operations so much, it's even though they just seem like tiny things, it's marginal gains, do you know?

Ivo:
Indeed, that's that's a that's a great point as well. Now, going back to the root cause of, you know, they all seem very, very good reasons for people to shift and to invest in HR tech. So why is it not happening? Why don't we see like a big trend or we still see a lot of people; a lot of companies using the way they always they always knew like spreadsheets and all that. So I think it's changing, we see that in our own business. But why do you think is that people don't want to take a step further, or do they just want to keep working as they always knew how to do it?

Dan:
Yeah, maybe. I think it's a mixture of all things are told. It's the anxiety of moving forward. It's the great unknown of sort of exposing yourself as a department to the business. You're almost putting yourself on a bit of a pedestal really. So people don't like that. Historically, and I might accidentally annoy most of all listening. But there always used to be that stereotype of HR as being, you know, one little old lady that just kind of input people's addresses on spreadsheets all day. And again, people don't understand it is way more than that, it's so much more than that. From a business perspective, you need to invest like 80 grand in a HR solution and you don't know what HR does and you don't know what the benefits are of having that system.

I mean, if I didn't have that knowledge, I wouldn't want to spend that money. So it's just about making sure that really people are more aware of what's going on in the business. You know, if you take the time and really sit down and think "What is HR, what do they do?". It doesn't take a genius to sort of very quickly realize the benefits of having a streamlined HR department. I think that one of the good things about such a big upturn last year during the pandemic, like it just got crazy. I mean, like you said, it got crazy busy. And I think people did come to that realization that the sort of a downtime and things getting quiet, it gave people that restbite to almost stick their head out of sound and go "OK, we've got this downtime going and we've now got this big remote working push. So they will immediately turn around to HR and go "What do we do about all these home workers?", And this is the thing. It's like, well, we can't run on spreadsheets anymore because we don't have everyone.

So yes, it's almost a forceful push to some of them. And I am sympathetic to that, because obviously it's always nice to make the choice to to improve your solutions. But if you're being dragged kicking and screaming because of a global pandemic, it's not ideal. But yeah, I think that's been like a big push. And I feel like most businesses, the management is behind HR. It doesn't feel like anyone's fighting with the wider business, especially on my projects at the moment. Everyone seems to be fairly united in the front to move forward and streamline operations where we can. Which is good. And I think in the long run it's gonna be great.

Ivo:
Yes, absolutely. One thing that we we didn't talk before about your background. I understood is that you always worked with Microsoft applications, or did you play around with other applications?

Dan:
I worked with a lot of random bespoke ones. Back in my old school, when I was beginning in IT, it was literally just the be all and end all of everything and everything from email setup to creating accounts and using somewhat random bespoke systems and bits and pieces. But I kind of preferred working with AX at the time just because it was they made a little bit more sense. The systems we were using were all; and again, I'm showing my age here really bad. But they were all sort of command based system that was very "Well, I don't like this.", you know, using the mouse to control your system. It's not a good thing. But yeah. So then I started to work with AX, and then did somewhat with CRM, did a little bit of work in that field. And then I wanted to go back to actually AX again, started specializing in AX as a business analyst. And I've just kind of been doing that ever since.

Ivo:
All right. No, I was asking because. Yeah, I was about to ask you regarding Microsoft itself, already shared some of the, you know, the main advantages that they have, the fact that they have so many applications that integrate seamless together. So you have one login to use loads of applications that can do different things for you, not only in HR, but finance, operations and all that. Would you say that that's the main advantage, you know, working with Microsoft or do you see other?

Dan:
Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head, really? I mean, the thing I always thought about when I was younger and probably a lot more immature than I am now. It's Microsoft. You can get to say: "We have a Microsoft solution in our business.". Everyone knows Microsoft, as you know, it's used by like ninety nine percent of the computers on the planet. It is the most successful computer platform ever. It's a massive kind of powerhouse of a machine that you have in your fingertips. So why wouldn't you want that, what would you do if you're going to get a system on, you get a system that's designed by the most successful computer software company in history. They're obviously doing something right.

Ivo:
I guess, I think that's a great question to ask yourself. Why would you not want that? Right. And so with so much expertize as well, and the legacy that it's you can't really compare it to a lot of companies, actually.

Dan:
And you get consultants like us as well, so we can come and... Yeah. You don't get people like us with other kind of brands, that's specific.

Ivo:
All right. That's that's a fair one! Yeah, they're talking about the bit, the future of HR. Obviously, you worked with these systems for a long time. You've seen new trends, new functionalities coming up. So, you know, looking at the future, do you see any trends on HR technology? What what are you most excited about, if any?

Dan:
I think a lot of companies have already adopted it by this point. But those that haven't, are really going to have to have a push into getting more power through like employee self-service than line manager self-service. Things like annual reviews, that's going to have to be more managed by the employee and the line managers themselves, rather than rolled out and pushed onto people by HR. And they're just going to have a lot more trust in the user base to do these things themselves, you know, because they just don't have the visibility that they do anymore. You know, people are working remotely. And I think for a lot of companies, it's not going to be completely remote forever, but certainly a good percentage of time working remotely. Yeah, people need to... I think it's going to be a big upturn in the amount of accessibility the businesses allow their employees to have through employee self-service. Definitely. I think that's going to be the big one in the next 12 months, because that's really a knock on effect to everything, because you can't really...

If you've got a very, very good kind of compensation matrix in place. What good is that if you're not going to allow your own managers to utilize it? What's the point in being able to report on ratios and where people say in the hierarchy, if you can't give that information to your line managers, if they don't have the ability to request position changes and new positions for that team? So that I think is going to be a big push in the next 12 months.

Ivo:
That's a very interesting take. You seem like a very practical guy, because I was expecting that you would talk, you know, about the mixed reality and, you know, those kind of automation or AI, or something like that. And you're just making sense for people, like what what what we need right now for people and that you think is going to come in the next 12 months. So I appreciate that.

Dan:
I don't know whether it's a good thing or not. I always kind of think on the base client level rather than that. I think that's just generally my kind of background in the functional side of things. I don't know whether it's a good answer or a bad answer.

Ivo:
Any answer is a good answer, you know. I think it's very practical. I think people actually can understand and relate to that. I can as an employee, for example, I'm not an HR expert. I'm not even close. But but I feel exactly what you're saying. I think it is going to be important that that employees have a bit more power because they're working remotely, because this is changing right now and it's going to keep evolving and changing in the next twelve months. So I think it's very it's a very practical answer.

Dan:
Yeah. You need to know where your employees are going to need to know what they're doing. And HR holds that information. So the more important information you can give the business, the better. And obviously, you've got resources like Power BI, and those can all be integrated into the platform really well. So all that data is, if you're not utilizing the data that you've got. Why not at this point? You know, why don't you know where your employees are? That will be the big question. I think most people are going to be asking HR departments in the next 12 months.

You can know what and where. And as an employee, who do I work for, and where are they? Stuff like that.

Ivo:
Very practical answer, I really enjoy that. Sort of a last challenge, let's say. Yeah, if you have anything, you know, as a consultant, at the height of your expertize, I just need to mention that for people listening that didn't see the snippets on the video on LinkedIn actually then doesn't look as old as he might give.

Dan:
I'm from the north of England, mate. My people do not have a long lifespan. Yeah it's no good!

Ivo:
Well, Dan is looking very healthy. So you guys listening. Don't don't worry about that.

OK, so the last challenge is: If you had one thing to say about the way HR recruiters or HR professionals, anywhere from your expertize, what would it be?

Dan:
Don't do drugs.

Ivo:
OK. OK, that's that's sensible!

Dan:
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I guess just have trust in your employees, you know, trust the processes. That's always a good thing to do. People like to feel like they trust it as well.

So if you're giving your employees that trust and that power, with the promise of please don't let it down. People like to have power over their own data. People want to know that they're not just working at a dead end job. If you can give them anything that says, you know, listen, you you're working towards something or you're part of this team or, you know, this is your line manager, you've got clear line of sight. If you want to arrange a one-to-one, you can. Even like daft little features, like employee feedback.

You know, you can give anyone your business feedback. It's a really good feature. You can you can build your own certifications in the system. And you should let people do that. You should let people take the time to build their own goals and build up their own performance, journals and note things that they're doing and things that they want to do. Because at the end of the day, it only benefits your business. That's all it is going to do. That's the end of the day. You might get the odd person put in a shitty selfie as their employee profile picture. But it's a risk that you have to take, unfortunately, for everyone who will again, that does that, you're going to have a hundred that you've got a load of data on. So if you ever need someone in your organization that's a plumber and can speak French.

If people are filled in a lot of language certifications and noticed any plumbing qualifications they have, you've got that data at your fingertips. You know, it's it's a good thing to trust your employees with this.

Ivo:
Perfect way to end this up here. Thank you. Dan, this was great. I hope you enjoyed it, too.

Dan:
Cool, I bet I'm not invited on again I'm sure.

Ivo:
Probably you will! But that's you know, as long as it keeps helping with your life expectancy, let's say, you know, since you have a shorter one, maybe we need to have you more often, as you know.

Dan:
I'm getting on!

Ivo:
All right, everyone, thanks so much for listening. And we'll see you next time.