Podcast: Technology In The Workplace - Integrating Systems

HR.com Live! Podcast on the new age of automation in the workplace

Have you had any doubts about getting technology to work in your organization? Modernization and tech shouldn’t give you any problems right?

In this episode, Dr. Heidi Scott sits down with guest expert Lars Hyland to talk about the new age of automation in the workplace. Lars Hyland is the Chief Learning Officer at Totara Learning. He brings over twenty-eight years of experience in the design and implementation of large-scale workplace learning programs and performance improvement solutions. He has worked with a large number of widely recognized international organizations in most sectors. He also has expertise and experience working within the higher education sector including the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.

Read the highlights of their conversation to learn about what modern changes mean for today’s business and HR departments and the importance of giving your employees support when incorporating technology into the workplace:

When you think of the new HR leader today and tomorrow, what must we be mindful of when we consider our age of automation and the impact that’s having on our work and the workforce? What are some things that you think we need to be paying attention to? 

Well, I think we're in interesting times both in terms of technology and its impact on society. It's affecting us right the way through everything we do both personally and in the workplace and politically. I think that we all need to recognize the deep impact that this digital technology that we largely take for granted, and our social use of it, is pervading the workplace in deeper and more fundamental ways. 

So as you mentioned, you know automation is really a critical part of the organization’s agenda. It’s that very senior level of agenda that is to reprogram and almost create a fresh operating system, if you like, for their organization to benefit from the technology. This agenda is also to help their people take advantage of that technology effectively. 

I think one of the things that I see is, due to automation, due to our culture and rapid sense of change, that there's almost a sense of urgency as professionals in our organizations to move fast and to adapt quickly. I mean how many times do you talk with people and you say, “How are you doing?” They never say, “Oh, I'm bored. I'm going so slow. There's not enough to do.” So, it's always met with, “Hey, I’m crazy busy.” So as we think about that, I’d love to get your thoughts on how you recommend we best respond in this sense of urgency to adapt?

It’s a wonderful opportunity to learn new skills ourselves as learning professionals or HR professionals. The digital agenda is very much affecting our ways of working. We need to be on top of it to advise how others will be affected in their own practices. So, you know, I think that that pressure to understand it can be compared to my anxieties.

I think amongst a lot of us, there’s a lot of complexity to grasp new concepts, new approaches, which I think we should look at positively. We should see that as a great opportunity to connect actually with other departments across our organizations, especially large organizations that are grappling with the same sort of digital issues and the digitals for the concepts that they have to handle.

There's a strong connectivity there that I think we can sort of draw on. But one of the points that we all need to address is that we’re at that Tipping Point. I think for organizations where you can no longer rely on these legacy practices, we’re being forced to change, and if your organization doesn't change well the competitor down the road is definitely going to do that or even knock down the road on the other side of the world.

So, you know, there is a bit of a race on I think to harness it properly. I think there's plenty of people out there that are using this technology and trying to grasp it, but it's by no means a lost race if you like.I think there’s plenty of opportunity for organizations of all sizes to leverage the technologies that are available to them now.

You know, that's interesting and I think you and I share the commonality of being a little bit of a learning nerd. I mean I’m self-proclaimed, and there are many of us out there that you know, we're constantly watching the technology horizon for “What is?,” “What is to come?,” “What do we need to do to that?,” “How do we respond?” In that mindset, when you think about technology and as we consider technology, what are the things that you would encourage us to pay most attention to? 

Well, I think there's some, I mean, I have done several talks around how technology comes into organizations especially in HR. That's one of the practices I think that is really overdue, a rethink in terms of how you go about choosing a technology package that will fit your organization. The big challenge here is that phrase-- fit your organization, because what you might know about your organization now, the horizon for that knowledge is shrinking. You know, in six months’ time the organization’s going to need to be quite different from what they are currently and that creates a big challenge when it comes to selecting the tools and the process or defining the processes in the workplace for now.

So one of the recommendations that I tend to make is that one of the key aspects of any decision needs to be around flexibility and being able to think deeply about how your organization and your people, primarily your people but also the technology that your people use to get things done and to be effective, “Are they flexible?,” “Malleable?,” “Are they under your control?,” “Are you able to make those changes to meet those changing business needs?,” because there's a heck of a lot of uncertainty out there so you can't know it upfront. 

So the one thing that you can do to reduce business risk is to adopt technology that has that degree of control and flexibility. Then you can shift with the tides a lot more than you perhaps can currently with certain tools and technology, which may be quite simple to use. They may have a reasonable level of flexibility, but if if you don't have some tangible control over that, both in terms of how to leverage what's available in front of you and knowledge, and adopt/ Requiring those skills to leverage it effectively is key, but also actually not being hamstrung and not being in a situation where you literally cannot change the direction or the use of your tools because in the organization it no longer is fit-for-purpose.

I don’t know, Heidi, if you’ve been seeing this. I’ve seen it several, well many times, and organizations making those decisions and then six months, sort of 18 months down the line, you may find yourself just with a platform or a toolset that your people just aren't using. They don't adopt it and therefore the business value doesn't translate, doesn't come through. 

I certainly have seen that. I think you bring up an interesting concept that the term that was popping in my head is shelf life. What's the shelf life of a system or a platform, but more importantly to your point, even the tools that we consider out there, “Okay, what's new?” Might be a new bell or whistle, but is it really going to equate to helping our folks learn better or more deeply and have it stick and transform behavior and help them do their jobs better? So I think that that's an interesting concept. 

I think we all know that what makes things effective and what makes things work is how people interact with these tools and how they interact with each other. I think we're in an interesting time where we can look afresh at what motivates people in the workplace more effectively. 

So what are some of those aspects? When you think about motivating people, inspiring your employees, what are some of those aspects that fit this?

Well, there's some long-standing research actually, which was popularized actually a decade ago, or approaching a decade ago, by Daniel Pink in his book Drive, which you may be familiar with. I'm sure many people listening to this will be, but it’s definitely worth a re-read if you've got it on your bookshelf, and if you haven't, do take a closer look because packaged together, I think a lot of research that points to what really motivates people in the workplace. 

So it’s not just your pay packet and your bonus structure. That was clear, you know. There are hygiene factors around that clearly for any organization.. What matters to people in the workplace, especially organizations which are more or less commander control and more networked in their orientation and more porous, not people who have just full employees but you know who have linkages with organizations that are contractors or as part of an extended enterprise concept. How does an organization have coherence and it needs that through its people? So those underlying motivators, there's three of them that were articulated, mastery being one of them. Mastery being your ability to acquire skills, have skills, and behaviors that you can then put to work towards a purpose. 

Purpose is another one of those motivators in an organization, as a group of people and processes and workflows that coalesces around a purpose. Clearly, there's a shareholder purpose but there's also you know producing a product or service that is going out into the world. Having a shared sense of purpose seems to be what has always been important, but it seems to be increasingly important for people in the workplace especially as you talk to younger folk coming in. There's a lot more mobility in the workplace now, not least because you can work for organizations anywhere, anytime, depending on the nature of what you're doing, but the ability to move in and out of different organizations. It’s more fluid than it's ever been. 

So that's mastery. There's purpose and then there's autonomy and I guess that movement in and out of organizations is demonstrating that the people do like to feel in control in what they do and to have some space, some ability to show you the initiative in their role. So those three things, if an organization ignores those, then you’re probably looking at an organization that's not particularly functional, you know.  It could be quite dysfunctional in its ability to perform well, but if all of those three things are aligned and supporting the individual but also work across teams and works across the entire organization, then I think you'll be looking at an organization that's performing exceptionally and we'll be able to compete in the environment we find ourselves now, which is fraught without curve balls and also a much more accelerated pressure to innovate, and you need your people to do that. Technology obviously assists because you need people to be able to innovate much more effectively and rapidly than ever before.

I mean you’re right on and it’s fascinating. Yes, that book was written quite some time ago. When we talk about the rapid change in our culture, there are principles of providing mastery and purpose and autonomy to our people. I mean, I don’t see that changing. How we do that may change. Those are some great principles you’ve highlighted for us.

I also think that this plays into the technology decisions that people will be making going forward. I think we're already seeing trends across the whole sort of HR talent and then we'll focus on the sort of Learning and Development experience where commonly separated tools or activities are now becoming more integrated or there's an opportunity to integrate them more tightly. By doing that if you can integrate, for example, your learning management activity, or your Performance Management, there’s actually a lot of opportunity to have a quite powerful cross-support between Performance Management and the learning that you make available to people across an organization.

Likewise engagement, I think ,clearly needs to be interwoven with this performance management, and with learning opportunities too. So if you can get all three there, and if you've got the three legs of the stool, then your organization is going to have a very strong platform on which to build-up.

As we look at our learning platform, our people, and tools and technology, our learning ecosystem starts to really come together. That integrated picture is the landscape of how we are producing and maintaining and growing our people. Since this is all about learning and the new HR leader, tell us what’s on your bookshelf that I want on my bookshelf? What are you reading?

In contrast to what we're saying behind me, the blank walls. I have a very large bookshelf at home for books so it was a difficult choice to make. But there's one that probably many people won't have come across which isn't a business book, but I've got some business books to recommend as well, but there's an author called Neal Stephenson.  He wrote a book called The Diamond Age. 

It is a sort of a look into the future, so it's science fiction oriented. I’ve stressed that it is well written, and it's something I think you’d give it a try. The key thing about that book is it's actually subtitled A Young Girl’s Primer, which tells a story about how a young person learns in the future. It's incredibly prescient really in terms of how the interaction works with an individual and how that individual is interacting with technology .

It's astonishing how much of that is becoming available in terms of artificial intelligence support, coaching, mentoring tools, the ability to communicate like we are at a distance, just today, just learning more about whole deep fake video technology that enables people to be anyone they want to be and actually in a very realistic way. 

That was all predicted in this book, which is probably now fifteen years ago. Most importantly is the story in which someone learns using this technology which I found very useful in being able to parlay that into today and it's become more and more prescient. So I'd recommend that first and foremost as there's a left-field book for us to explore.

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	Dr. Heidi Scott, Chief Learning Officer, HR.com
	Lars Hyland, Chief Learning Officer, Totara Learning