Resilience in HR Tech with David Perring

Unlock the secrets behind the resilience of HR technology investments and the ever-evolving landscape of HR with our guest, David Perring, Chief Insights Officer at Fosway Group.

Join us as David reveals why a significant majority of organizations have continually increased their HR tech spend since 2015, even in the face of fluctuating headcounts and global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

We dive deep into the current uncertainty brought on by AI advancements and discuss why HR teams must invest in their expertise to keep up with the fast-paced changes in the workplace. Despite all the investments, why does satisfaction with HR systems remain low? David offers his expert analysis and possible solutions.

David and Bill also reflect on the latest trends and innovations shaping the future of work. From enhancing employee experience to mastering talent and analytics, we explore what’s on the horizon for HR professionals. The episode wraps up with a heartwarming exchange of gratitude, leaving us all excited about the potential of meeting in person soon. Don’t forget to subscribe to the HR Chat Show for your regular dose of insights and updates in the ever-changing world of HR.



We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.

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Challenges and Trends in HR

Speaker 1 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show , one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros , talent execs , tech enthusiasts and business leaders . For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work , subscribe to the show , follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom . And visit HRGazettecom .

Speaker 2 0:25

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show . Hello listeners , this is your host today , bill Bannam , and joining me on the show today is none other than David Pering , chief Insights Officer over at the Fosway Group . David has been an HR pro for over 30 years and over that time he has always been at the forefront of innovation and has retained a strong sense of optimism , energy and passion for transforming organizational learning and performance . As Chief Insights Officer for Fosway Group , he independently explores the experiences of practitioners and suppliers to understand the realities of what's happening in corporate learning , talent development and HR . David , it's my pleasure to welcome you to the show today .

Speaker 3 1:11

Thanks very much , Bruce . Very kind of you to invite me on .

Speaker 2 1:13

Really appreciate it . So , beyond my reintroduction there , David , why don't you start by taking a couple of minutes and introducing yourself , telling our listeners all about you and what you get up to ? Yeah ?

Speaker 3 1:23

so I think I have one of the luckiest jobs in the world because I get to talk to HR , introducing yourself , telling our listeners all about you and what you get up to . Yeah , so I I think I have one of the luckiest jobs in the world because I get to talk to hr professionals about what's really working with what they're doing in hr for their people , be that across any step of the employee life cycle , from recruitment to performance to um , learning and succession and employee listening across the whole gamut and off-boarding , all those sorts of things . So really , I get just to hear what was working around their systems , what's not . We get to do surveys with them and it's a very privileged position because you get to hear the sort of walks and all stories and I feel very lucky because it enables me then to try and help distill for everybody else . And this is what we do .

Speaker 3 2:08

Maybe some advisory work is try and help people navigate in their context all the complexity of policy and strategy and solution choices that maybe bring things to life in terms of people's day-to-day work , just for their , for their workers , their employees , and that's what I think I really get involved in . I really get involved in . That really gives me a buzz . Um , it's just being surrounded by people who are a lot smarter than you .

Speaker 2 2:33

It's , uh , it's , a great joy well , I don't know about a lot smarter than you , but they're definitely a lot better looking than you . David , it's good to have such a handsome devil on the on the show today . Uh , what a shame . Listeners , it's audio , only you're missing out .

Speaker 2 2:50

I'm sure that's a blessing for everybody concerned so , um , david fosway , have been surveying the hr community for a long time , for about the last decade or so . What are the key trends you've been seeing over that time and what's the what's the long view of where HR is at today ?

Speaker 3 3:13

Yeah , I think one way to think about the long view is , to some extent , what are people doing with their money ? And I think the sort of the long-term view maybe isn't any surprise really in that actually people are spending a lot of money on HR tech and actually that whole sense of investing in HR technology is incredibly resilient . If you go back to the first time we did the survey in 2015 , all the way through to last year we're actually running on this year's very imminently . So the one thing that has been consistent is people typically saying or 70% to 75% of people saying typically that they're going to increase their spend on HR tech and that has just been part of the reality the sense of actually you cannot be a highly functioning HR team without good tech surrounding you . That does cause other problems in other places , but ultimately that's one of the key trends .

Speaker 3 4:16

The other thing is just in terms of HR headcount . Pretty much until COVID , the on balance , when you ask people , are you increasing or decreasing your headcount in HR ? Up until COVID , pretty much the trend was we are decreasing our headcount and then that headcount went for a really big dip over the COVID pandemic and then we saw immediately after COVID and things loosening up , people almost overcompensating , recruiting again trying to build their way back to maybe the teams they had before the pandemic , and what we're seeing now is this sense of actually maybe the headwinds are starting to buy and the uncertainty about the impact of AI in the future has started to change the trajectory of that graph from being actually , yeah , we're still looking to grow , but that the people who are looking to decrease their headcount is starting to reach those sort of numbers that we saw pre-pandemic . So I think the sense of if you thought your career was safe in HR , if you're a good HR practitioner , probably yes , but the trend is not necessarily to grow HR headcount in the future . I can't see it expanding either .

Speaker 3 5:13

The other thing that we see is just HR investing in their own expertise . The world of work is changing so fast , it is so dynamic , that trying to keep ahead or keeping on top of the critical trends what that means in terms of employee experience is really growing fast . But equally , as I said earlier on the sense of satisfaction around HR systems , it's pretty low only 33% that their solutions are fit for modern workforce , and so there's still a lot of work to be done and people are looking at the employee experience that's again one of the key trends over the last five years in particular as being something that people are really focusing on as an HR team , be that learning , talent , ability , analytics . Those are the three highlights for investment pretty consistently over the last four or five years and that probably takes us to that sense of , yeah , the long-term trends tech , tech , tech , employee experience , tech and um , growing my expertise okay , thank you very much .

Speaker 2 6:14

If we could focus on right now , then , david , uh , what is what is your research in corporate ? All the corporate conversations that you're having all the time ? What are they telling you ? What's going on ?

Speaker 3 6:27

Okay , the thing that stands out and maybe this feels like a group thing , but it feels as though it's a really significant wave is the focus on skills availability , talent availability we hear from our respondents to our survey that it is the number one business challenge and that beats profitability , customer success and workforce agility as being the top . It is the number one thing that HR pick out , and what that sort of translates into is 94% of organisations saying that they aren't able to get the talent that they need , and one of the reasons , and maybe one of the catalysts around that , is that only 69% say they have significant skills gaps . So there's a dearth of skills and environment which is highly volatile , highly changing . The pace of innovation is incredibly fast and the skills comes out pretty much , or being a skills powered organization comes up as being probably the top theme across everything that we speak to organizations about , and I'm not sure if that's just the way it has been balanced in terms of recent conversations because of attendances at a few conferences , but that seems to be where things are .

Speaker 3 7:49

And the other side of that is AI . Everyone is exploring , everyone is starting . A handful less than 10% think that they're advanced in using AI to raise their game around their organization . That's where people are really focusing , but very few have made a great deal of progress with AI . It's an emerging force that is going to be incredibly disruptive for us all , but that's where probably the top conversations are .

Speaker 2 8:21

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast . If you enjoy the audio content we produce , you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette . Learn more at hrgazettecom . And now back to the show . See , this is why we got David on the the show . Listeners , he knows his stuff , david . How well are hr systems landscape solving the problems of people's success and employee engagement ? Then how ? How close are we to having solutions that are that are fit for modern times ?

Speaker 3 8:54

yeah , there's still a lot of legacy solutions out there and I think that creates a drag in the industry within what people are able to do . Expectations take a while to deliver because of that sort of legacy install base and , as I said , 33% right , it's such a third of organizations think their solutions are fit for the modern workforce . Actually , that means to some extent that everybody else doesn't think it's fair . Otherwise they just be positive and say , yeah , this really works for us . Um , the trend over the last five years is for the , the gap between those who are deeply dissatisfied , who maybe sit on the fence and say maybe and no and yes , that gap between those who are deeply dissatisfied , who maybe sit on the fence and say maybe and no and yes , that gap between those who are negative and positive has closed significantly and I think we've sort of reached an area where people went from loathing maybe in about 2018 , to maybe sort of a modicum of intolerance , if I can use that phrase . But ultimately , things are closing and I think the positive trend around this is that if you projected where things are going by the time we get to 2030 , we should see a balance of people who are much happier with their HR systems . Now most people buy their platforms on a three to five year cycle , so maybe we're in that process of dumping the solutions that we didn't felt felt work for us , but also the pace of innovation within those systems is going fast as well .

Speaker 3 10:23

But I think , despite things closing , it is quite a hard chasm to bridge and one of the challenges maybe the first challenge around that is most hr processes are designed for hr first first , so we probably shouldn't be surprised when they don't generate the engagement that we expect from our workers . My perspective is that we need to be much more focused on being employee first and we need to take that stance around some of our traditional processes if we want to create the people experience that our people want and I probably could try and throw in a few examples , but I think it's just if you thought about your own experience , even being within HR , of things that we do to people rather than things that we empower for people . I think there's so many for your own critique . The second point I think around this and maybe this is part of the challenge as we sort of think about why this may be a little bit hard to bridge is that one of the counter swings I think we see around this is the sort of growing focus on human first and human in the loop , our ability to have a strong sense , almost a feel , for our organization , their energy , their enthusiasms .

Speaker 3 11:50

A lot of the focus around HR systems has been so much on optimizing work on people processes , rather than really understanding our people , that actually maybe we've under invested in that culture view , understanding how our culture , how the behaviors of our people , understanding how they feel , how we can maybe create more connected individuals , especially in our sort of remote working environment , and people who feel as though they belong in our organisation . I'm not sure if we've quite done enough work there to connect that side of HR with our sense of the organisation feel , and I use that feel because I think it's about that emotional intelligence about our organization . So I think those things aren't necessarily transparent , insightful and delegated enough and I think that may be something that evolves a lot more um , as we look out . But I think at the moment we're probably not solving enough of the employee engagement side still , even though it's quite a strong part of the market . So those are the things I pick out probably as the top two . Those are the ones I'd focus on .

Speaker 2 13:10

I understand that you're pretty passionate about skills and the importance of skills in the employee lifecycle , the importance of skills in in the employee life cycle . Um , where do you stand on skills-based hiring compared to what I'm going to call more traditional hiring based on ? You know , past experience , but what are your thoughts around that ?

Speaker 3 13:27

I I think we've we've got some challenges in being sort of one dimensional around our view of people and I'll go back to the thing I said around sort of that sense of is skills enough ? I'm not sure if it necessarily is . It is the hottest topic . It seems to be the way of us navigating work , understanding what skills people have in order to understand what they can do .

Speaker 3 13:56

I think we have to be careful about abstracting skills too much from the work and the aspirations and the roles that we want people to perform . So I think if you want to understand , if somebody can do the work you want them to do , you can get them to show you Okay . So maybe that's going a little bit more down . A view of an assessment center in a , which maybe is a difficult thing to do in the virtual world , but actually with the advances that we're making around virtual environments , actually we've got so much more opportunity to understand people's behaviors in addition to their skills and how they problem solve and how they present themselves in a way that just doing a skills assessment I don't really gives us a view of the whole human and I'm not sure if it's going to do that for a while .

Speaker 2 14:47

Okay , very good , david . We are almost out of time already , really , I know right when did that go . We'll just have to get you back on . But before we wrap up for today , David , how can our folks connect with and learn more about you ?

Speaker 3 15:03

Yeah , so I think from an organisational point of view , just go to our website , wwwfosswaycom . Our research is free to download . We have trends around the marketplace . We do profiles of different sectors , be that learning , be that talent acquisition , be that talent people , success , talent management and also cloud HR . If people understand what's happening in the marketplace , we make those reports freely available . We also publish our HR realities , ta realities and digital learning realities surveys in infographics so you can flick through those and see what inspires you , or just reach out to me on LinkedIn .

Virtual Coffee and Gratitude Exchange

Speaker 3 15:42

I'm always happy to make a new friend , to have a virtual coffee .

Speaker 2 15:46

Perfect . Well , that just leaves me to say for today . David Perring , you lovely human being , I hope to get to meet you in person very soon , but before we get to that point , thank you very much for being my guest . Thanks , phil .

Speaker 1 16:00

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show . If you enjoyed this episode , why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work ? Subscribe to the show , follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom .