Talent & Tech Asia Summit 2024
Q&A with HR, work and tech guru John Sumser

Q&A with HR, work and tech guru John Sumser

 

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HR is moving fast. And never more so than in this most disruptive of years when work practices have been turned on their head.

John Sumser, principal analyst for HRExaminer – and respected mind on where HR, work and tech intersect – makes sense of some of the head-spinning changes that digitisation is foisting upon the HR landscape.

The following are selected excerpts from his Q&A interview at People Matters TechHR India 2020.

What are some of the learnings from 2020 so far?

The first thing we learned is that hard and fast policies are very fragile and that our view of what is or isn’t permanent was flimsy. We changed seemingly permanent things overnight. We need to remember how to do that.

The second thing we learned is that fast answers, without really understanding the problem, are deadly. The third thing we learned is that the bare minimum is more minimum than we thought.

The fourth thing is that much of our quantitative understanding was rooted in measuring the wrong things. And the fifth thing we learned is the value of scenario planning. Never bet on just one future again.

How do you think employers need to re-look at deploying AI in the post-COVID world?

First, what makes you think there will be a post-COVID world? What if this is just the first pandemic of many hundreds? What if the economic disruption engenders decades-long social unrest?

Then, we are going to have to rethink what and how we measure things. All of the things that machine learning was able to predict depended on consistent historical data. We don't have any of that. We don't have any idea of which of the old data is still relevant. 

For the time being, we will see a lot of NLP (natural language processing) instances. Job applications will skyrocket … and … employee questions will multiply. That means getting systems in place that can reliably answer questions. This, of course, involves inventorying and cleaning up the existing policies, procedures, and data,

Right now though, we should be focusing on small things that ensure business continuity and slowly expand to bigger ideas.

What HR tech investments are necessary for companies to thrive in the next normal?

It's funny. Most people don’t understand that data cleaning, core analytics, and requirements definitions are the most important part of any technology investment. Even though things are really busy, this is the time to get the whole house in order. Put the recruiting team on it. They're not doing much right now.

Compensation management is becoming a critical function. There will be a ton of variation in wages (pay cuts, hazardous duty pay, market differentials, inflation) accompanied by a shift in the workforce composition (employee, contingent, contractor, gig worker).

There are also a lot of fundamental questions to ask about privacy, time tracking, compensation, communications infrastructure, and new performance standards. We haven't begun to understand the problem because it isn’t finished.

Do you see a new tech infrastructure in the making for organisations after COVID-19?

Again, I think you're assuming that there is an ‘after’. Many things are changing in HR and the change is far from complete.

I expect human network tools that will identify conversations that are necessary for the health of the company. I expect to see offerings that monitor the health of the organisation. You might even wonder if HR will become the ‘department of individual and organisational health’.

Parts of this article were first published on the People Matter website.

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