Terry Gerton
It’s not news to say that there’s a lot going on in the federal HR space. Lots of changes in folks status, lots of changes in HR policy from this administration, but also real challenges in the HR staffing itself. So as agencies are thinking about how to manage in this space, what are the biggest risks for legacy infrastructure?
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Rick Hammell
The biggest risk, I think, is really looking at how organizations have set up HR: Rules are constantly changing, especially with the current administration that you’re seeing, and really understanding what’s a strong foundation for their the rules, regulations and how to make sure they can set up rules that can last through that transition. I think the one thing that we were finding more and more is that technology is evolving, and so a lot of technology has legacy information. I just had a call with a client and they’re implementing new technology within payroll, and they’re realizing that with a lot of the rules and regulations coming with, you know, leave in particular states, where they’re seeing that when it comes to visa or ID verification, like I-9s, a lot of the legacy platforms don’t have that infrastructure already put in place. So they’re needing to have structures that are going to allow them to evolve and be up to date with new rules and regulations.
Terry Gerton
I didn’t really expect you to go straight to rules and regulations, but let’s follow up on that, because you have written that reframing regulation as a strategic advantage is a way to think about driving change. So tell me more about that concept and what HR teams today should be thinking about.
Rick Hammell
Well, I think that right now, we live in — I like to call it the popcorn generation. We want things very quickly. And so as HR, if we’re looking to recruit talent, we’re looking to retain talent, we need to have technology that’s going to allow us to be at the forefront of that as well. So as we think about rules and regulations, I talked about leave policies, maternity leave, paternity leave. A lot of states are starting to implement some of those things to ensure that their citizens are the residents are actually protected. So employers are having to implement that, and they have to have technology to do that. The rules are very complicated. They’re not as black and white as we like them to be, and so technology allows them to be proactive, allows them to make sure they’re fully compliant in those regards. Technology, though — if you look at technology 10 years ago and technology that’s coming out today, things like AI, look at automation — those are things that are allowing companies to really be at the forefront of how they’re managing these things, to stay compliant, but allow them also to retain that talent, or attract that talent, knowing that they’re working for an employer that can actually offer these benefits and actually can show them and have transparency behind them.
Terry Gerton
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A lot of people spend a lot of time complaining about compliance requirements, especially in HR, but you’re an advocate of saying that if you start from the compliance requirement, you can really drive policy change and technology change. Tell me more.
Rick Hammell
I think this absolutely is correct. I think when you’re looking at technology, technology is really there to make things a lot more simplistic. It’s not really there to, you know, drive manual processes. And I think that if you think of HR, you think of kind of legacy processes and procedures. That’s what it was. It was more manual processes. Technology now, you can get things done a lot faster. And so when we talk about rules and regulations, the change in minimum wage, the updates of statutory requirements in particular states, or even using I-9s, for example. I’m going to date myself a little bit here, but do you remember when you completed I-9s in a paper format and provided a copy of your ID to your employer? Now you can use E-Verify and actually do that and stay fully compliant. A lot of employers in the past, for example, using the I-9, they were worried about fines and regulations, but they were not compliant; they were not maintaining those records completely. But using technology like E-Verify allows them to, one, reduce the risk of noncompliance, to make sure that they’ve got the information that they had in front of them, and also constantly reminds them when things are out of date or expiring, which was the biggest pain point for a lot of employers. So automation and technology really allows organizations to, you know, one, not focus on the administrative work would be more strategic in their business, because they know that what they’re doing with technology is going to keep them fully compliant.
Terry Gerton
I’m speaking with Rick Hammell. He’s the founder and CEO of Globalli. All right. Well, let’s talk about some of the technology, then. What are the most promising HR technologies that agencies can use to do more with less? If they have less HR staff, they have more work to do. What are the technologies that you recommend that help them stay ahead of the curve?
Rick Hammell
Well, I’m always going to be a little biased – they can definitely take a look at Globalli. That’s what they can look at. But there are really good platforms out there, depending on what they’re looking to manage from an HR perspective. Workday is a really good one, HiBob is another good one where they’ve got some automation and they’re constantly looking at investing and making sure they’re staying up to date with how companies can actually streamline their HR administration or payroll administration within their platforms. At Globalli, our focus is, how do we make things a lot more simplistic? Whether you are a CEO that has five employees, or you’re a CEO that has 200,000 employees, we want you to be able to streamline that through automation compliance. We can think about the localization piece of it as well. So when you’re in states like California, when the second spoken language is Spanish, how do you make sure that you localize that as much as possible, so that employees can provide that information in their local language and feel comfortable in benefit administration or providing information to them to make sure that the company stays compliant. Other things that you want to look at is the automation of payroll. Payroll rules and regulations are very complicated, and so one thing that I will always say is, you know, when you look at the United States, you don’t look at it as one country – you look at it as 50 countries, because the rules and regulations are individually separate. And so what you want to do is have technologies that allow them to streamline that. Another thing that I will say is that you want to look at technology that’s really emphasizing AI, and when I say AI, I’m not referring to a chatbot. When I say AI, I’m looking at automation, looking at ways that you can do comparison reporting or things that can spot check for you to make sure that you’re doing things the right way. There’s a lot of great technology out there. I’m not going to say that’s ChatGPT. What I will say, though, is that HR is technology that I have that has AI as the foundation of their platform, I think that is really important, because it allows them to really spot check information and get information readily complete in a matter of minutes versus days.
Terry Gerton
There’s so much concern about AI deployed in the HR space, replacing a human in terms of making determinations about an individual and their eligibility. But there’s also, you know, a hope that AI can help you manage some of this better. So from an HR professional’s perspective, where is the boundary on what is a good use of AI in HR and what is maybe a questionable use?
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Rick Hammell
I will say that AI is really supposed to be used as an enabler. It’s supposed to be used as a tool. You have to have humans make the final decision. There’s so many variables when you throw information into AI, but it’s really there to help streamline that. So I think that you can have AI sort out your reporting, flag anomalies, spot check your work. But at the end of the day, a human has to make the decision. You do not want AI to determine if someone’s eligible for hire or to determine if their performance review is good enough for a performance increase. Because there are some discriminatory practices that you do absolutely, unfortunately, feed into AI. So you do need to still have a human eye on that. But I think AI really allows you, as an enabler, to allow you to get things done a lot faster. I just had a customer who I spoke with the other day who said to me – we were asking them for payroll information, hire information, how many countries are their employees in – and it took them almost two weeks to get that information to us. We actually finally got all the information, and we uploaded it, and we showed them within a click of a button, we were able to get that done for them a lot faster. We were able to pull that information, give them the reports that they need – that’s actually why we won that customer. But AI allowed us, you know, what took them two weeks, we got it done in seconds. So AI can be a really powerful tool for payroll, for HR, if it’s used the right way. But to your point, humans have to have the final say.
Terry Gerton
One of the things that federal agencies have always struggled with is strategic workforce planning. That’s going to be even a bigger issue in the next few months, as agencies get through this big layoff and force-reduction period and try to figure out what they need to accomplish their goals going forward. From a technologist’s perspective, are there technologies, are there tools that you would recommend that agencies begin with to begin that strategic workforce planning process?
Rick Hammell
We’ve got a partnership with Workday, and Workday actually has a really good workforce planning module within their platform. It really allows companies to look at the rules and regulations – one, to make sure they’re fully compliant if they have to do any layoffs, but two, what that looks like when you’re doing any type of reduction. So what are the gaps now, how that possibly impacts your business? AI can actually be used for that as well, to see what the actual impact could be if you remove certain roles based on your KPIs that you tied out as well. You also want to look at a number of performance management platforms that really allow you to kind of see that as well. So if you build your KPIs into those platforms and you remove some of those tasks, it should show you the impact to that as well. I think it’s really important that when you’re planning any type of reduction, and we know that in the U.S. government right now that’s happening, you need to understand that that also means that you have to adjust some of your goals and your KPIs. If you have planned that you’re going to get X amount of work done or hitting certain critical goals with a certain amount of staff, if you’re reducing 20% to 30% of your team, you do understand that that’s going to either extend out your KPIs or you’re just not going to accomplish them. And so making sure that you’re having very real conversations internally and understanding the consequences of those terminations, I think that’s really important. And sometimes we think, over here, oh, we’re just reducing budgets, but we still need to hit our KPIs. And most companies who do that don’t ever hit their KPIs because they don’t actually plan realistically what can actually be done in the capacity that actually happens with that. One thing that I’ll also mention as well is that you do need to take a step back. You do realize when you do any type of workforce planning reductions, you do also have to realize that you’re also going to have attrition as well. Employees are going to leave the organization when they don’t feel comfortable. And so when you think about that, you can see that some of the blogs right now, especially the U.S. government, you can see where they’re saying, hey, I’m not comfortable, or I don’t know if I’m going to stay in this role. The government or any employer has to really take a step back and say, if I’m going to reduce it by 25% realistically, am I going to lose 30% and what do I need to do to backfill? And we also know that, as employers, backfilling employees, or re-hiring employees, or hiring employees, there’s a cost associated with that as well. So you need to balance all of that in your factor of any type of employee reduction, because it’s inevitably going to happen. There’s a lot of data behind that as well.
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