Welcome to a special episode to kick off The Digital HR Leaders podcast for 2021. In 2020, we learnt that the field of Human Resources is even more important than we thought it was, that People Analytics can save lives and that humans and the organisations they work for can adapt quickly in times of crises.

What do the events of 2020 mean for HR though, as we set sail into 2021? I have been publishing an annual set of predictions since 2014 and the show's producer, Ian Bailie, persuaded me that it would be fun to record a special episode of the podcast framed around my predictions for 2021. As you will hear I managed to turn the tables on Ian at several points in the conversation to get his take on a couple of the trends that are destined to set the agenda in 2021.

You can listen to this week’s episode below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation, Ian and I discuss:

• Whether the future of work has arrived and if so, does it mean we can actually stop talking about the future of work?

• Why People Analytics is set to evolve in 2021 and how it can deliver more value at scale

• How skills, learning and careers are coming together and breaking down traditional silos in HR

• What HR Leaders and professionals can do to prepare for the future

This episode should be an interesting listen for anyone in a Workforce or People Analytics role, as well as HR, Learning and Business Professionals interested in how HR can drive business outcomes and create valuable experiences for employees.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Welcome everyone, firstly, Happy New Year, let's hope 2021 is going to be a much better year than 2020. We are starting off the year with a special episode of the podcast. I am in the hot seat, believe it or not, going through my predictions for HR in 2021. So I am going to turn over the mic to Ian Bailie, our Producer and my colleague at Insight222.

Ian Bailie: Well, thank you David, it is a joy to be interviewing you once again and have you in the hot seat. So as you mentioned, you have done these predictions for 2021. You have also created these predictions for HR for several years now, before we get into your latest batch of predictions, I would love to just challenge you a bit. What has your hit rate been like so far? Do you ever get them right?

David Green: Yeah, well occasionally, perhaps. I presume you have been looking at the data here, so you might fire some stats at me. I think as you said, I have been doing these since 2014 and I think it is probably fair to say that Nostradamus will not be quaking in his celestial boots about my hit rate.

However, predicting the future is quite difficult. I think it was Niels Bohr, who was a Danish physicist, is reputed to have said and I quote “prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future”

I think if 2020 has proved anything, it is difficult and perhaps some would say stupid to try and do so.

You will probably remember back in January last year, we were taking the Insight222 roadshow around San Francisco and New York and I don't think any of us realised it was going to be our last trip of the year, back in January.

So, why do I do it? Well it is a bit of fun. I hope people do see that in each year I have done this, there is a little bit of tongue in cheek about some of this. I do it mainly because it helps me learn. It forces me to absorb what is going on, consider and place my bets, as it were. And the third reason is to kind of prompt discussion, like this.

But yes, as you rightly signposted, that if I go back over the years I have got some right, a lot more wrong and a few might have to go to VAR. I did last year say that Liverpool would win the Premier League, admittedly I have been saying that for 30 years, but I did get that one right.

Ian Bailie:  Well there we go, it had to happen at some point, I guess. Will it happen again in 2021?

David Green:  Oh I think it will.

Ian Bailie: We will have to wait and see on that one.

All right. So let's get back to HR and let's kick off with the first prediction that you have, which was around the future of work. So you said the future of work has arrived and so does this mean we can stop talking about the future of work now?

David Green: Well, one would hope so but again, there is definitely an element of tongue in cheek about this, because I guess there is always a future, so there is always a future of work. It is a bit of a nebulous term, I know we have joked about it in the past, but it is an important topic. At the latest World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs, I think highlighted that there is going to be 97 million new jobs that will be created by 2025 because of technology and 85 million will be displaced by automation. So there is a lot of disruption going on. I think the same World Economic Forum report, highlighted that 50% of all employees will require re-skilling by 2025. So it's this big disruption, whether we call it the fourth industrial revolution, we are in the early stages of it and I guess the pandemic has only exacerbated the situation.

If we think from a podcast perspective and go back to January, you will probably remember Ian, that we recorded an episode in person with Ravin Jesuthasan. He had just co-authored a paper again for the World Economic Forum, on HR 4.0, he was speaking to us and then he was going off to Davos next, to the World Economic Forum, where the future of work has been a key topic for a number of years now. A lot of what Ravin spoke to us about has come to pass this year. Not least was one of his six priorities for HR, was that HR needed to help manage the integration of technology into the workplace. I think that has happened a lot quicker in many cases than people expected.

There was an example earlier in the year, I think with Novartis, they had a two year plan to roll out Teams across the organisation, they did it in two weeks. Satya Nadella, the CEO at Microsoft, was talking about I think it was a quarterly review or quarterly earnings at Microsoft. He talked about how they had seen two years of digital transformation in just two months.

And If we go back to another conversation on the podcast in the last couple of months, Michael Arena said to us that his view is that the pandemic has fast-forwarded the future of work by five to 10 years and I think that really resonated with me and it is certainly what we are hearing a lot from clients we work with at Insight222. You know, we are in the middle of the biggest remote working experiment in history and we are learning new things every day.

So I suppose if we just look at three things that the remote working experiment has really shone through in the last year, one is that people can work remotely and they can be just as productive. I think we are going to talk about that a little bit more later, but those Managers that feel people have to be in front of them to work, I think it has kind of disproved that particular theory.

I think it has also shown that employee preference is right at the top of the list for considerations for most companies when it comes to planning for the post pandemic future and that is good, that is where it should be. But we don't yet know the medium to long-term impact of remote working on innovation and collaboration, again if we reference the podcast with Michael Arena, he talked about those critical bridge connections, those connections that kind of bridge teams together and maybe people that don't collaborate as much together. Those connections are very important for innovation and collaboration, so the long term impact of remote working, hybrid working, we don't know yet.

So I guess, there is lots more to find out on that, I’m afraid I think we will still be using the “future of work” term in one, three, five years time. How does that make you feel, Ian?

Ian Bailie: I love the term, I love the term. Maybe we need a replacement term for it to be more specific because it is a pretty ambiguous term, but yeah, for that reason alone, I am sure it will keep getting used.

So let's think in terms of how this all has impacted HR then. As we have talked about on the podcast, certainly over the last year or so, the pandemic has really thrust HR into the spotlight and we have seen HR step up and have to respond.

So what do you think that means for HR in 2021?

David Green: Yeah, I think the term I used in the article was that “all eyes are on HR” which is a term I borrowed from Katarina Berg, Spotify’s Chief People Officer. But I think it really shows that 2020 of all years was the year that Senior Executives and organisations were looking to HR to help them navigate through the crisis. In many respects, I think HR has stepped up to the plate. I think there are countless examples of how HR has delivered, especially those functions that are well led, that have strong stakeholder equity, that have People Analytics teams and have the ability to do continuous listening and do more pulsing with employees that were either affected by the pandemic, maybe they were critical workers and still having to go into an office or a place of work, or they were suddenly having to work remotely. Whether they are employees or Managers as well, suddenly Managers having to manage remote teams. I think we talked about this before, many observers of the space have said that the CHRO almost played a similar role to that of the CFO in the global financial crisis, it is a pivotal role within the organisation during this crisis and I think that is good.

We have had some powerful examples on the podcast. Renil Kumar from Wipro, talked about how suddenly they had to manage 150,000 remote workers in India alone. Chin Yin Ong from Grab, was on and she told us about how they had been really intentional about helping people collaborate remotely. And then Diane Gherson of course from IBM, or then from IBM, talked about how they had run a company wide jam to understand employee preferences once it was safe to return to the office and she said that people, certainly IBM people really appreciate the office as a place to connect and build out their networks and collaborate together.

So, there is lots of good work that HR is doing. There has been a plethora of studies that I referenced in the article from the likes of Deloitte, Accenture, IBM, The World Economic Forum on the Future of HR, definitely recommend listeners reading those reports. I think there is a lot that you can pull out of those. It is clear that HR has a unique role to play and it is an opportunity, I think, that needs to be grasped with both hands.

One of the big features of the pandemic for me has been how many organisations have prioritised employee wellbeing above everything else, they are right to do so and hopefully that will continue in the future. That employee wellbeing, employee experience, putting the human at the centre of thinking when it comes to business will actually carry on and who better to play that role than HR. I know we are going to talk a little bit about HR skills and capabilities later on and HR still as a profession has a long way to go to do that, but they have stepped up to the plate, in the last year as a function. I am proud to be part of the field and I have got every confidence it will continue to do so.

Ian Bailie: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that we have also seen and you have talked about before as well, is the role of People Analytics in enabling HR to step up. In particular, I think where we have seen organisations that had already built a solid foundation in People Analytics they have really been able to accelerate and support the business through this pandemic because data has just been such a critical component. Whether it is understanding where the virus is and where employees are impacted or understanding employee sentiment, how they feel about the new situation working from home, things like that.

How do you see People Analytics evolving further in 2021? What do you think will happen?

David Green: Well, in all the seven years I have been publishing these predictions, I think I have said that People Analytics will grow significantly in the calendar year that follows. So I am probably starting to be a bit more right about that than maybe I was back in 2014. As you said the People Analytics teams that we work with in Insight222, the vast majority have really stepped up during this crisis and supported HR and the business and the workforce in their response. There have been powerful examples, almost how it saved lives. One of the companies we work with in the US is a pharmaceutical distribution company, their People Analytics team was able to predict within a few days when their distribution warehouse on the East coast of the US was going to shut, because of the virus, because of employees being sick, frankly. But they were able to then put contingency plans in place to make sure that pharmacies and hospitals in that area were supplied with the drugs that they needed. So, you can't get much more of a powerful example than that.

When it comes to re-imagining what work and the workplace will look like post pandemic as well,

People Analytics teams are really at the centre of that and certainly analysing some of the trends that we talked about earlier around collaboration, innovation and productivity, which is always a bit of a nebulous term as well. But understanding how people feel about working from home, what they miss about working from the office and everything else. People Analytics teams are making those insights readable for Executives that have to make decisions about that moving forward.

It is interesting because we have got the data to back up the fact that People Analytics is growing now. So early in the crisis at Insight222, we had some hypotheses that we wanted to test. One of those was that People Analytics was growing. Another was that People Analytics is increasingly focused on business topics and we did a study with 60 global organisations and the report is available to anyone to read. We will also send out the link with the publicity around this particular episode and it is interesting actually, we did that research between April and July so right in the early stages of the pandemic in many respects, and we found that People Analytics teams are growing. Over 50% have grown in the previous 12 months, I want to say over 60% intend to grow in the next 18 to 24 months, so by the end of 2022. We found that interestingly investment in specialised People Analytics technology is also growing as well and I think over 80% said that they are currently using some of those technologies or planned to do so in the next 18 months. So, again, technology is an enabler, it's not People Analytics but it certainly helps. We also found that the top area where People Analytics is adding value is business topics such as sales effectiveness, customer satisfaction, compliance, risk, culture and then the people related topics that follow were topics that I certainly consider, and I think the rest of us consider as being business topics anyway, employee experience, strategic workforce planning, diversity and inclusion. So an interesting shift and not something we would have seen a couple of years ago where I think that most of the work and People Analytics would have been focused around HR topics, so a lot of work around recruitment and attrition and all those things are important, it is when you actually link them to business priorities I think it becomes even more so.

What we have found as well is that this kind of means that there is a shift in how People Analytics teams are organising themselves and that plays to a lot of the work that we do at Insight222 as well. If you look at it in three areas, so the demand engine consultants really working at the front end, working directly with senior stakeholders in the business to identify and prioritise the key topics that the People Analytics should be focused on. Then a solutions engine in the middle with Data Scientists, Analysts, Behavioural Scientists and Stewards that actually govern the use of people data and analytics and technology within your organisation as well, that deliver insights and recommendations. Then a product engine, which I think is something that is quite new in pretty much all organisations except a few, where we have Designers and Product Engineers that are kind of putting the user at the centre and actually thinking, how can we develop analytics products that people will actually use? How can we make them usable? How can we give insights to the people that are actually providing the data, whether it's employees or managers? How can we actually scale these? And how can we actually effect change? Obviously one of the great ways of effecting change is actually making them usable.

So, there is more in the report obviously, but I think we will see more People Analytics teams organising themselves along these lines in 2021.

Ian Bailie: Excellent and I think it is great that we are seeing this rise, certainly in the interest in People Analytics and it just continues to grow. Obviously there is huge impact that those teams can have. Are there any dangers that come with that, that we have seen, as a result of the pandemic? Particularly around, you mentioned this topic, productivity a little bit around governance and ethics as well.

I wrote an article last year with Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, about the risks of some of the scrutiny that is going on around people working from home and a lack of trust and really wanting to understand productivity. Do you see any issues there? How can we get a better handle on making sure that we are not just tracking everything that the employees do and keep a grasp of the ethics behind everything?

David Green: Yeah, you are right and you are very modest because that is a great article that you and Tomas put together.

I have seen some rather sinisterly named tech companies out there, touting around their employee productivity tools.

I am not going to name them on the podcast, but there is a few named in the article.

This is not what People Analytics is about, People Analytics is not about snooping, People Analytics is about providing value and providing value to the workforce as well. For me, ethics is the most important part of People Analytics. It pretty much has been since I got into this space quite a few years ago now, it was a strong focus of the research that I got involved in at IBM when I was there. If we get it wrong, we could set the field back several years and more importantly lose the trust of our employees.

That is not what we want, there is a H in HR and we need to put that to the fore when we are thinking about what People Analytics projects that we should be doing and which ones we shouldn't. So that is why governance features prominently in the operating model that we were just talking through and also as you know yourself Ian, because you led the project. When we set up Insight222 three years ago now, the first co-creation that we did with 15 organisations was to create an ethics charter. An ethics charter to govern the use of people data analytics within the organisation and a big part of that ethics charter and you can certainly speak to it as well, is it is about being transparent. It is about providing value to employees and maybe a good way of looking at it is, if you were asked by an employee in the canteen, or at the moment on Zoom or Teams about the People Analytics projects that you are working on at the moment and you feel that you can't describe a project. Or if you saw the details of that project in the New York Times and that makes you feel uncomfortable, then maybe you shouldn't be doing that project. So I certainly think having an ethics charter in place is really, really important. But we know from research that we have done that less than a third of companies have an ethics charter in place for People Analytics and because the field is developing so fast, because there is so much that we could do, I think it is an important foundational element to build a sustainable capability that delivers value.

So I don't know if there is anything from the ethics charter that you think listeners will be interested in Ian?

Ian Bailie: Well, I think it is just that foundation of trust, I couldn't agree more. And I think what we have seen, we have actually seen a few articles as well in the last six months or so, more in the mainstream press, that are starting to kind of suggest some of the big brother snooping aspects going on and I think some of them justifiably, when you talk about some of the tools that you mentioned that to be honest are a little bit worrying. But actually some, maybe not so much where they are scare-mongering a little bit and I think there is a real risk that if we don't have that transparency and trust in place, that that type of conversation will escalate and overall there will be a larger amount of fear around the type of work that People Analytics teams are doing. I think the ethics charter or something similar is a great way of doing that. I think just always making sure that you are thinking about the employee and putting the individual at the centre of everything that you do and the work ultimately should benefit employees, the business and everyone.

So shifting topics slightly, but kind of building on that theme of productivity, I think the other side of the coin to that, that we have seen, has been around the impact of this last year on wellbeing and risks of burnout as well. Many people have enjoyed the flexibility of working from home and being remote and what that has meant. Others have really struggled with it. I think if you don't have a separate space to work in, certainly when we were in full lockdown and schools weren’t open and you are managing childcare, I think it is a lot for people to manage. And so as we come out of this, hopefully at some point in 2021, and we consider what that hybrid world looks like. I am sure there will be elements of that flexibility that people are looking to retain but what are some of your predictions around how some of that will evolve, particularly when we think about wellbeing and culture and maybe even how we think about the impact on employee experience as well? If we continue that theme of trying to put the individual at the centre of what we are doing.

David Green: Yeah, I think again just to highlight that it does seem that a lot of organisations have been putting employee wellbeing at the centre of their response to the pandemic and there is a hope that that will continue into 2021 as we move hopefully through the vaccine and get back to whatever is next. Clearly things aren't going to go back to the same as they were before, well I certainly don’t think they will. I think companies are going to have to juggle a lot though. I think in many respects, we are still learning, we are learning now, we are going to be learning throughout this year as well. There are a lot of considerations, firstly employee health and safety, that has got to be paramount. We are currently in the throws of another lockdown in the UK at the moment, so even thinking about going into the office at the moment, we can't do that. So, it is impossible to predict in many respects. Also maybe a question is, does HR have to play a role or will it play a role in the rollout of vaccine, particularly in large companies? Are we going to get to a point where people will be freer to move around if they have had the vaccine or not. I mean, who knows. That is getting into all sorts of ethical conversations, which we are not going to cover here.

I am quite lucky, I live in a village, albeit in Kent which is obviously the epi-center of the latest outbreak. My wife doesn't work, my kids have mostly been at school. I have got great broadband, I have got my own office, I can work. It has not been that bad for me in that respect. It is a bit lonely sometimes obviously, imagine if I go back 20 years, I would have been flat sharing in London with three other people, that must be not a great experience to be perfectly honest. So you can understand why people are keen to have the opportunity to go back to the office and obviously as you said Ian, it is much worse if you have got to juggle childcare as well, if the kids aren't at school or you are a single parent. Or even both parents working, so there are all sorts of different things that we need to think about.

The studies out there suggest that we are all working longer hours, certainly not all of us, but the majority of us are working more hours, more evenings, more weekends, we are not taking breaks or taking time off.

We have seen companies who are giving more leave to people. We have seen companies giving Fridays off because they recognise that people are working harder. The home has become the office, so how sustainable is all this in the long term? Probably not that sustainable, as you say. And I think we will start to see the impact in things like burnout and mental health and all these other things we need to be really be paying attention to.

I think where this will play out, so let's say that we are in the world now post vaccine. We are not hearing about any more outbreaks, we're not hearing about new strains and we can potentially go back to the office. I think we will start to view the office with rose tinted glasses. Maybe the commute won't seem as bad as it was because we'll be able to go back and connect with people, have more serendipitous encounters and actually collaborate on stuff.

Some will want a more hybrid existence than they had before and some will be quite happy to work remotely. So I think for companies to manage all those different preferences, but then also think about how we are actually going to deliver on the requirements of the business, it is going to be quite confusing. And I think the more we speak to our employees and listen to them, the more we use analytics to understand the impacts of different types of working on different, important elements, such as collaboration and innovation, the better. Then we can start to shape the future around data, which I think would be a good way of doing it.

Ian Bailie: A quick question on that, what are some of the best examples you have seen of how companies are continuously pulsing their employees and making sure that they are really understanding the views of their employees as things are changing so quickly?

David Green: Well, I think out there, it has been written about in a number of areas, Microsoft actually have a daily pulse. It goes randomly to two and a half thousand employees, I think, it is every day. Also Microsoft and other companies like IBM are looking at different signals to listen to what employees are feeling. They are using those to make decisions and they are communicating that out to people as well, so I think that is important. We had a great article on the myHRfuture blog from Rabobank, around how they have been pulsing their employees regularly during the pandemic, certainly in the early stages of the pandemic, up until about June time. And actually the questions that were being asked were being shaped by what people were saying and that was driving actions and that was driving communication. They were getting some really interesting findings around what people liked and what they didn't like about working from home.

So I think the more you do that, the better, because then you understand how employees feel, you understand the pros and cons of remote working and you start to understand what people like about the office. We had Diane Gherson then from IBM, on the podcast back in September, she talks about the company wide jam they had done to understand what employee preferences would be when they came back to the office. They found some things that really helped them in terms of actually a lot of people, particularly those that are wanting to build their network out within IBM, were looking to progress their career within IBM, were wanting to get back into the office when it was safe to do so. They found that others that were maybe later in career were quite happy to work predominantly remotely. And it is finding things out like that, which can help us as HR professionals, shape how work and workplaces and ways of working will be in the future. So, yeah, there are some good examples out there.

Ian Bailie: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the trends that I am sure you did predict for 2020 was just around the focus on career development and how that is evolving. I think we have had people talking about skills for quite some time, it feels like it has been a hot topic for a while, and yet companies are still grappling with it. IBM is a great example where actually they have been working on it for quite some time and are able to really do a lot with inference of skills and things like that.

What have you seen play out over the last year and how do you think this will evolve further into 2021 around that topic of skills and career progression? Particularly the rise of talent marketplaces that we are now seeing and I guess the rise of talent mobility that has happened, internal talent mobility when we think about how some companies have had to reduce their external recruitment efforts as a result of the pandemic.

David Green: It is interesting, I think there are other studies out there both from inside companies and wider external ones that show that actually hiring internally pays off in terms of it costs less, generally speaking, the type of productivity is obviously a lot shorter, those people understand your culture and already have networks established within those organisations so they can kind of hit the ground running. Clearly recruiting budgets are going to be slashed in lots of organisations going into 2021. So yeah it is interesting and I am certainly going to turn this question back to you Ian, at some point, because I know this is an area that you are very knowledgeable about, but also passionate about as well.

Actually when I did last years predictions skills and learning was separate and we talked about how learning was increasingly shifting towards personalised, on demand, multichannel and that is still the case. It has actually accelerated clearly in 2020 for obvious reasons. In terms of skills, I think I might have borrowed your term of “skills as a new currency” and we were seeing how a lot of strategic workforce planning was moving to a more skills based way of doing it. But I think we are seeing it come together. So skills, careers and learning is kind of coming together and maybe talent marketplaces are the result of that. That is good because that means we are breaking down silos that have been in HR for a long time and I know it is certainly something that Diane referred to when she was on the podcast talking about the work they had done at IBM, which I definitely recommend those listening to check out that episode if you haven't already. IBM have inferred skills of all 350,000 plus employees. Actually 80% of those IBMers had said that that inference was a hundred percent correct, which is staggering and it takes out some of that bias associated with asking people what their own skills are. Plus the way they have linked it with learning and careers is pretty impressive. They are not the only company doing it, we had Novartis and Ericsson on the podcast earlier this year as well and they were talking about how they were moving towards similar ideas and similar programs as well.

So I do think we are going to hear more about talent marketplace, I know the vendors who are in that space are growing very fast. Degreed, who we had on the podcast, I think they hired several hundred more people during the pandemic.

We know Gloat, who is sponsoring the podcast this year, they are growing very fast as well. So it is definitely an area of interest.

I am going to turn it to you Ian, because I know back in your corporate days you essentially created a talent marketplace 1.0 in your company at the time to try to link careers, learning and workforce planning together. What are you seeing and how do you see it panning out in the next 12 months?

Ian Bailie: Yeah, thanks for turning the question back around to me, luckily you did warn me. I think it is really interesting. I think it is a topic that to be honest, when we started looking at it at Cisco, I think it was in the pretty early stages. And I think what made sense to Cisco at that time, because of the business challenges the company was going through, didn't necessarily apply to every other company out there. Whereas now I think more and more, this is becoming a more pressing issue that companies need to be able to really understand the talent that they have inside their company and also really better understand the talent outside. But also when they think about demand, it is the same thing. They need to be able to articulate that better, really be clear around critical roles and emerging skills, all these types of things and again understand what that means for them in terms of their own strategy and how that is going to play out. What they need, but also what the best solution is to get that talent, whether that is building it or to buy it in, to hire it, then where can they find those pools of talent? If those pools of talent don't exist, then they need to build it internally instead and it is the age old workforce planning conversation.

But I think getting that next layer of information really around skills, really understanding the work that people are doing and thinking more about the impact of things like automation and AI and how that is going to shift, not necessarily entire jobs although it will impact whole jobs, but pieces of jobs where those can be automated. And again, how that changes then what that role is going to like in the future and who should be doing that role.

So I think all of this is playing out in real time. I think it is becoming more and more important and the more and more conversations that we have with companies, we are hearing people talk about it more and more.

I think there are a few things that are really challenging with it. One is it is incredibly complex and really difficult. It is very easy to say “we want to know the skills of our workforce” or “we want to have a skill-based workforce planning process” whatever it might be but it is incredibly hard to do.

I think the other thing that is really interesting, you mentioned earlier the fact that last year that skills and learning was separate and now it is all coming together, I think that is great. And I think that is really important because I think we have thought about this historically in silos and so you have had talent acquisition or recruitment, thinking about what they are trying to do with the external hiring problems that they are trying to solve. And a lot of recruitment teams still don't actually do anything to do with internal hiring, some do, but a lot still don't. And so having recruitment think about external talent and internal talent is a shift. Having the learning organisation thinking about it in the way that they are thinking about building skills, but again, if they are just thinking about that in a silo, then it is not connecting to workforce planning. It is not connecting to recruitment, it is not connecting to career and so turning all of this on its head and really saying, what is it that the individuals care about? What is it that the employees think about? They are thinking about their careers and when they think about their careers, they are thinking about the job they are in today in a company. They are thinking about the job they want to do in the future, whenever that might be. They are thinking about short term skills they want to build, they are thinking about longer term skills they want to build, they are thinking about career more generally and they are trying to have those conversations with managers.

And so it touches all aspects of HR and I guess this is where it then becomes really complex because actually there isn't one tool out there that does all of this. That is a question we get asked a lot, what is the best platform to do this with? And unfortunately the answer is, well there are several and it depends on what you are trying to do.

I think if we were building all of this from scratch today, then you would build something very different to the technology landscape that exists out there because of the way that tech has evolved, we have siloed solutions and they have been targeted at siloed HR where the buyer is the Head of Recruitment or the Head of Learning.

And so I think we need to get more sophisticated as an HR organisation in terms of how we think about buying the technology and I think what is great is we are now seeing the tech providers becoming less like point solutions and thinking more across all of the different problems that they are trying to solve.

So I think it is a really exciting time because I think it is really starting to gain traction and it is one of your predictions that I am pretty confident about that we are going to see play out in 2021.

David Green: Yeah, it is interesting actually because several of the People Analytics teams that we are working with are starting to get responsibility for technology, not necessarily the core HR but certainly these people analytics technologies, if we want to call them that, which would include some of these systems. So they are getting that view and they are asking the data question before the company has bought the technology.

So that is where you can start to link because ultimately what is starting to gel these traditional silos together is data, isn't it? In many respects. It is that skills data that is linking everything together, whether that is for learning, whether that is for careers or whether that is workforce planning.

So it is an interesting time and it kind of links again towards employee experience because what is employee experience? So I guess it is about finding personalised experiences at the right time and the right moment and as an employee, if you are getting recommendations about learning that are actually relevant, then that is a great thing which again helps employee experience and the organisation as well. So yeah, exciting time.

Ian Bailie: Absolutely and I think HR is having to build a new muscle as a result of this. Which is stepping out of those silos. I think we heard Diane talk about how she has thought about bringing different groups together, but I think with that it touches on the skills that HR needs to build as well. One skill that we talk about a lot with the work that we do with myHRfuture, is just the importance of stakeholder management. Of course HR has had to do this before, same with consulting and influencing, of course it has been a core skill but it is probably more important than ever now because of that myriad of different stakeholders, both within HR and outside of HR, that we are seeing various roles in HR now needing to navigate. And I think it is the complexity of that that is actually really difficult and therefore there are new skills that need to be built or a higher proficiency in those skills needs to be built.

So I guess with that, what else do you think HR will need to do to support some of these changes that we are seeing and that we have talked about as 2021 progresses? How can HR keep evolving to adapt and support the business as it needs to?

David Green: We have already said this but it is a really exciting time to be in HR, probably the most exciting time since I got into it in the late 1990s.

The pandemic has really highlighted the importance of the function. So it is almost like, okay good, now where do we go from here?

I know I am preaching to the converted Ian, HR must become more digital, more agile and more data literate and it needs to focus on delivering value to the business and the workforce and those attributes will help it to do so. The good news is that the research we have done says that HR professionals recognise this and they want to develop these skills and if anything it is sometimes their organisations that are holding them back.

We ran the “HR skills of the future” research, I think it was 2019 now, but the six skills that emerged were quite interesting actually because they're still relevant now. Two very much on data topics, people analytics and strategic workforce planning. Two around employee experience, so the digital HR and digital HR technology and design thinking. And then two on change, as you said, consulting and influencing and stakeholder management. So interestingly I actually ran that question to a gathering of 450 HR professionals just a few weeks ago and again, people analytics emerged as number one. There might be a little bit of bias when I am asking the question, I don't know, but even so it is interesting that HR professionals recognise and they want to learn. We know that from the traffic that we get on the podcast and in the Academy as well.

You are obviously more involved in building up the Academy and the thinking around what facets it needs. From your experience what is really resonating with HR professionals and HR leaders about preparing the HR function for the future?

Ian Bailie: Yes I think you are right. I think there is a massive interest around analytics, all of those skills are super important but certainly the hottest topic still seems to be around People Analytics. I think we have talked about this before, we don't expect all HR professionals to become data scientists but there is a foundational level of knowledge which I think is becoming increasingly essential for anyone in HR to really build. Then I think on top of that it is really the practical application of that knowledge. So yes, understanding statistics at a basic level or being able to manipulate dashboards, things like that, those are fundamental skills that are super helpful. But actually, how do you have that data-driven conversation with the business, with a manager? How do you ask the right questions upfront to actually make sure you are really getting to the heart of the problem that you are trying to solve, build a hypothesis, take that to the people analytics team. Again, you don't necessarily need to do the analysis yourself and hopefully you can self-serve some of the information via dashboards and things like that and that's the bit in the middle. Then I think what we are also seeing is a real interest in skills like storytelling.

So it is one thing to get a load of charts or get a load of data, but actually how do you translate that into insights? How do you tell a story back to the business that is going to lead them to take action? And I think with that, we are seeing a lot of companies talk at the moment about building confidence as much as they are building capability. So how can we really build confidence in HR professionals that they feel okay doing this work, that they feel okay having conversations about data and they feel confident having those types of conversations with the business? It's ok that they are probably going to get it wrong a bit too and that is all right, that is how you learn. So I think it is that practical application, I think as much as we are obviously encouraging people to take training courses and do training, a lot of the work that we do with companies is also around helping them put that into practice. How do you really apply that learning?

And that is still just such a fundamental element that we need to build in. So those are some of the main areas that I think are popping up.

David Green: I think it is interesting because it is about people analytics teams and their HR colleagues working together and that might mean, as you said, the first time that you have to present a story using data, it is going to be daunting isn’t it, I guess. But you have to practice, you have to apply it, so having the people analytics leader or consultant in the room with you is going to help there and maybe you do it together. Then maybe next time f you are a HR business partner you lead out on it and stuff like that.

I think what is interesting when I want to speak to HR business partners who either are data savvy or who have taken the time to learn, the feedback that they provide about how it helps them in their day-to-day work is quite astounding really. It is powerful and I think if you are an HR business partner listening to this and you are nervous about taking that step, it is definitely worth doing so. There are plenty of tools out there to help you to do that and you will probably find that your people analytics colleagues are willing to help you to make that step as well.

Ian Bailie: Absolutely and I think it absolutely changes that conversation you can have with that business leader. I think we were talking about workforce planning earlier as well and that is another great example where actually being able to have a much more thoughtful data-driven conversation around the business strategy and what that then means when it comes to the workforce strategy and how you can then source the right data to really bring back to the business, to have a richer conversation about talent. Supply and demand all of these things. Again, it takes additional knowledge to do that, it is a capability building exercise, but then the conversation that comes out of that is so much more valuable for the business and that is ultimately where we are trying to get to.

All right, so let's move on to the last question, because I think you constantly shame me at the end of these podcasts by saying that “your producer will get all mad at you for running too long” And so, I think I should probably heed your usual advice there which is we need to wrap the conversation up.

One last question for you, in your predictions for 2021 in the article, you deliberately left two gaps at the end and crowdsourced the last two predictions.

I am not sure if that is because you just ran out or if you really wanted to hear from your audience. There has been quite a lot of conversation on that LinkedIn post, there has been a lot of great suggestions, so just quickly in the last few minutes, what stood out for you around some of the other suggestions from your audience?

David Green: First thing I want to say is I actually wanted to hear what other people thought, rather than I had run out of ideas. Although they can run out after a while. The first thing to say is I have been blown away by the response actually, the number of people who have taken the time to suggest what trend 11 and trend 12 should be. And not just the number of but the quality of the suggestions as well, so thank you to everyone that has taken the time to participate. Actually by the time this podcast goes out on the 5th of January, I will have had to make the decision around what the additional two are that I am going to add. But I am going to sit on the fence because I haven't made that decision at the moment, there are so many good ideas out there.

So one that really stands out, maybe not surprisingly, is from Dave Ulrich, around guidance. Those of you listening to this on the 5th of January, Dave is actually going to come back on the podcast next week as we really kick off 2021 with a special on the future of HR. And actually Dave’s episode, I think Ian, is still the most listened to episode we have ever had of The Digital HR Leaders podcast.

So his suggestion about guidance is really interesting. Is it about how HR can help guide decision-making in organisations in the areas of talent, leadership and organisation around the outcomes that provide the biggest outcome for the business i.e. if I am going to invest X amount of dollars in talent, if I invest it in these three areas, these are the areas that the data tells me will have the biggest return for the business, for the customers, for the workforce and for other stakeholders in the business. And I think that is where we really want HR to get to. It is almost like the next step for HR is, you talked about dashboards, it is not just about looking at what is happening it is about what could happen and how we can affect what happens by making the right decision.

So I think that area of prediction is, without using a pun, predictive and prediction going together there, I think will be really interesting.

There are loads of good ideas so over the Christmas holiday I will have a mince pie and a glass of red as I make the decision on what those two should be.

Ian Bailie: Nice, very nice, sounds like a tough job ahead of you. Well, thank you David for sharing your thoughts and going into more detail on your predictions for 2021. It has been a pleasure talking through this with you. Any final thoughts before we sign off for this episode?

David Green: Only to really say that, it is not a thought or a prediction, it is just to say I really hope that the vaccine rollout works, that it comes quickly and at some point in 2021 that we will stop hearing about lockdowns and mutant strains and we will start talking about seeing people again, getting together and having those serendipitous encounters at conferences that I really, really miss. So it is just to wish everyone well for 2021, health to you and your family and colleagues and let’s hope we get back to some sort of normality by the end of the year.

Ian Bailie: Absolutely. That is a prediction that I really hope comes true. Thank you very much, David. It has been a pleasure as always.