In discussion with Remuneration Management expert Alison Kennedy – Part 2

This is the second in a five-part series of podcast interviews with Alison Kennedy, Executive HR and Remuneration expert, in conversation with Arishma Singh of Pivot Software.

In this segment we are talking about the key HR issues facing organisations today and the role technology plays in the workplace, from an HR standpoint.

Arishma: What are the key HR issues faced by organisations today?

Alison: I think the biggest part is as a HR group is being relevant to the business but to each other, so you know one area or specialty of HR should not be run down the road without considering the impacts and issues that it is going to create with other parts of HR. I don’t think HR should operate in silos or specialty. I think they should all be walking down the road together and building the core skill or experience or expertise across the board as a group and the more they can interact with each other, the more successes they will have, in that a business from a practitioner HR point of view. I think if you are thinking from the other side and talking about the business itself, for HR I think it’s about your ability to go beyond HR. You know the business don’t have time to spend playing around in our industry. The business is what they are doing. So, if they are making computers, or if they are providing financial services, or if they are printing newspapers, whatever their core business is, is what should be important to you.

I think generically, it's always doing more with less. I think over the coming years ahead, we are going to see HR more focused, downsize a bit further, the years of overwhelming growth and everyone’s a specialist, or the joint fun of having a HR team explode, I think those days are over. I think the necessity of businesses being very smart with the way they spend their money on non-business area is critical. And, I think HR needs to respond to that appropriately. So, technology is really about streamlining as much as you can, and getting faster at providing those backend services that help a business stay operational and help them run. You need to be more and more online, you need to be more and more electronic and less paperwork driven and HR needs to just be running full sprint away from the history of personnel and paperwork as much as they can.

Arishma: Can we as HR professionals or HR processes do without software? Or is it a necessary evil?

Alison: I think returning to paperwork is evil! I don’t think you can say software is a necessary evil. I think it’s very clearly the way businesses have developed and evolved and are becoming more streamlined and saving money, saving costs. You absolutely should be applying software where you can and having removing paper work from anything. So, I think there absolutely is no HR future without software.

Arishma: What about those that see themselves as Excel whizz? What would you say to them?

Alison: I think people who are Excel whizzes, should absolutely be the ones jumping onboard with software. Their mind is already tuned to a process style of approach, or a systematic approach to data, to understanding data and the way data interacts with each other within Excel spreadsheets, or having spreadsheets talk to each other. So, you know as a Excel enthusiast myself, I was very attached to my spreadsheets in the old days but I find technology is now just a new way to be excited about data. The data-mining you can do when you have technology or software based systems to hold the information is so much more fun than the old ways of playing with spreadsheets. But those HR people who have that skill-sets, they are the ones who should be on those teams of implementing software and they would be the ones looking at processes and figuring out what they are going to do with their big data need.

In the next segment of the series, Alison talks about why buying HR software may seem difficult but doesn't have to be, and how to find a great partnership with a supplier. Click here to read the next segment.