HR: What’s On Your Cup Today?

This post was originally posted as a LinkedIn article on February, 5, 2018.

To be honest, I don’t own any of these cups. If I have a cup for everything about HR, I’ll have a shelf-full of HR cups.

Let Me Drop Everything and Work on Your Problem Cup…

This may be a sarcasm for some, but when you work in management, especially HR, there will be plenty of times where we have to drop everything and work on people’s problems. Because, that is what we do! The #MeToo problems were the result of not dropping anything to work on their people’s problems.

HR Manager Because Freakin’ Miracle Worker Isn’t an Official Job Title Cup…

You don’t need to be a miracle worker to be an effective HR professional. You just need to learn to be efficient to allow for more time to deal with people. The organization is made up of people who deal with people internally and externally. That’s a lot of people! As HR Pro, it is our job to make sure that we help all these people throughout their employment life cycle.

HR Technologies

Leverage technologies to help you! HR technologies are great tools to help streamline processes, remove redundancy, gather data that we can crunch and analyze for whatever reports we want to create.

In my opinion, we are having issues with employee engagement and experience because we are allowing technology to remove the “people equation”. HR Technologies were never meant to replace people interactions. They were created to lessen the administrative tasks that were keeping us away from people, be it more time assessing candidates or assisting employees.

You can be Tech Savvy and People Savvy

I chose to work in HR because I get to help people and I get to help the organization grow. Somewhere along the way, I also found myself working on the many HR technologies we work on these days. I saw first-hand why they were needed and having learned HR from the ground up (I started as HR Assistant/Recruiting Coordinator), I knew how essential they were for my efficiency as well as productivity. It gave me time to help employees with their benefits, allowed me time to provide informational interview for students, and helped me tracked our candidates. This also allowed me to grow in HR as I had more time to attend seminars as well as finish my college education since I am not stuck in the office trying to complete tasks from one system to another. As I climbed up in ranks from one organization to another, working for various industries and sizes, I got the opportunity to implement and customized many of these technologies (ATS, HRIS, Payroll, HCM) from mainframe to now cloud based. Everything I know about these technologies were hands-on. The only thing I needed is my HR expertise to help me work side-by-side with the techies. Many of the Project Managers and Software Developers that I worked with had no understanding of HR Compliance. They have no understanding of benefits, payroll, etc. That wasn’t their expertise. What helped me be an effective Project Manager/Client Service Manager was I was able to communicate their needs and frustrations to our techies and helped our techies how to resolve the problems plaguing our clients.

Keep Calm and Focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Cup…

We are now getting into the whole AI realm. Depending on who you listen to, it’s targeting HR jobs. I’m not worried, not because I don’t believe in AI, but because I don’t believe AI can truly replace HR.

AI should be treated as another tool. I do believe that AI will help most of the problems we have in executing our job like Talent Management, Workplace Safety, and Total Rewards offering.  However, that will only be possible with the help of HR at the helm.

Like many of the HR technologies in many organizations these days, if HR is not involved in the implementation process, it will fail! AI will only be effective in Talent Management if we’re honest about removing any bias assessment in our processes.

AI will not replace the genuine and authentic human interactions. It’s called artificial for a reason. AI will not solve your employee engagement or experience if you continue to treat them less than people. Organizations will still employ people to build, maintain, and fix these machines. Therefore, organizations will continue to hire HR pros to deal with the human aspects of things as intended.

#SHRM #HRTribe #AI #HR