It began as a question by a journalist at an event organised by a human resources software company, but became a quintessential example of how crucial, yet frustrating, managing people can be.
When an exasperated editor explained his frustrations at managing his newspaper’s employees before moving away from that role, Workday’s Gina Sheibley replied: “You don’t miss being a manager, do you?”
It was a moment of levity from the HR software firm’s chief communications officer during a panel discussion about skills and the role of AI.
As the saying goes, software has eaten the world, including how companies and “people leaders” manage their people. This is the new way of talking about HR.
Like everything, AI is supercharging the HR industry and the way companies can manage, grow, upskill or redeploy their employees.
After the former manager (let’s call him Hans) ranted about his former problems, Sheibley said: “Do you have a question?” — eliciting more laughs.
Hans didn’t, it seemed, but his frustrations boiled over at this panel during Workday Rising, an annual conference I attended for the second time.
The big theme, which is hard to disagree with, was the ongoing trend called the skills-based economy. Traditional hiring practices have focused on qualifications, but also which school or university employees went to.
In the case of Rolls-Royce, career advancement often revolved around “who you knew”. So-called development gigs “have always existed” but the opportunities were restricted, said Sharon Etheridge, its head of people services strategy and transformation.
By focusing on the skills of the employee (the skills they want to learn) instead of the traditional hiring criteria, “people are not the last job they did, or the last job title. Skills enable you to see more of a person in the round,” she said.
As Rolls-Royce evolved, she said the carmaker used this skills focus “to design the new organisation, particularly in engineering and safety. The design has worked because we know the skills of those people.”
In the past Rolls-Royce was a “complicated and old-fashioned company”, and it was a matter of “who you knew” to get work gigs. “Now that it is open to all it is a real game changer,” she said, adding that the technology also takes out bias when choosing candidates.
“If they are great talent, you don’t want to lose them,” said Etheridge, an electrical engineer who become responsible for HR at the grand old dame of carmakers. “But you will probably lose them if you aren’t helping them grow.”
A skills-based philosophy is “just a different way of thinking of hiring”, says Ashley Goldsmith, Workday chief people officer. It focuses on what skills and abilities people have, not what their previous jobs were. “You have a much larger talent pool because you don’t have a limitation if people came from a specific school or specific job title”.
This way of thinking is also helpful as a so-called “return path” for how people get back into the workforce after a gap, such as maternity leave.
AI can streamline and improve the work experience for employees, said Volker Schrank, vice-president of global employee experience and HR technology at food giant Mondelez. He said the firm has 91,000 employees in numerous countries, some with only one person based there, and it therefore needs a sophisticated HR system.
“Generative AI and AI are helping find solutions,” he said, but not by throwing AI at every problem. “That’s so 2023,” he joked. But he warned that changes are already happening at a breakneck pace. “The speed of AI is so fast. If you don’t start, it’s hard to catch up. If you are not there, you will get into trouble.”
Pierre Ramery, vice-president of IT global business solutions at Aliaxis, which provides water infrastructure, said: “now is not too late”. The software industry has been doing traditional AI for a long time, but “gen AI is a huge change”, he said. “We are anticipating it will be very destructive.”
He described AI as “like a new tool”, which can sometimes be a “good solve”, while sometimes it is not appropriate. “You need to focus on the value you want to generate. Otherwise, it’s just a gimmick.”
As Schrank said, your strategy needs to be clear about what you want to achieve and what is the use case. “Is AI the hammer for the nail or do you need a screwdriver? If you have a hammer, you see a nail everywhere.”
After all, as Workday’s CEO Carl Eschenbach said, “technology does not drive change, it takes people to drive change”.
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za.
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