6min chapter

At Work with The Ready cover image

The Future of HR: Building Your Capabilities Pt. 2 - From Levels 3 to 5...And Beyond!

At Work with The Ready

CHAPTER

The Importance of Data Literacy and Automation

There's so much administration in HR that is just like sand in the gears. I think AI potentially takes care of everything from like creation of templates to use for performance plans or for giving feedback. Jack and I have been talking about knowledge management, which can be known and housed by AI based on whatever question you ask. Like every piece of governance has pretty revolutionary potential if it was pulled together with a large language model such as 'GPS' And we're looking forward to seeing how this plays out at our clients over the coming years.

00:00
Speaker 2
And like fixing bugs and improving things along the way as you were talking there, just made me think about how we talk about transformation with organizations in that there's never a state where you are just done and wipe your hands and walk away and like we did the thing. Weird transform. No. Yeah, that's not, that's not a thing. What we were always trying to do with our clients is help build the capacity so that they can change themselves indefinitely into the future because the world is always changing and something that you have created for a moment in time right now is not necessarily going to be fit for purpose 10 years from now or five years from now or six months from now. If it's going to require probably not a ton of constant attention, but you can't just put it in a drawer and expect it to work forever.
Speaker 1
It's interesting because what you mentioned about the continuous improvement of this and the capacity required for that. That's one of the reasons that this capability is much more critical going from levels three to level five because honestly, if you try to do that kind of continuous improvement from a level one place in terms of your operating model and your capabilities, your people probably won't have the capacity for it in terms of time and energy and bandwidth because they're too busy doing persistent work in the ways that they always have. So it really is something that only opens up, I would say and becomes possible as we have the ability to simplify process and shed or debt and start to automate.
Speaker 2
So we've talked about two of the three capabilities. So let's jump into that last one, which is data literacy and automation. Meg, I am very, very curious about this one. Please give us the high level and then we'll dive
Speaker 1
into it. So this is like what everyone is talking about. I was just telling Sam that every dinner party I end up at everyone is talking about chat GPT and AI. So right. Obviously this question of automation and data literacy, which is what is underneath the ability to automate and also one of the things that automation gives you. So this really comes down to two separate sets of skills. The first is the ability to actually design things that will pick up data and that will give you metrics that you can evaluate them with. So it's sort of designing a process and thinking about what would success look like, what would be looking for as indicators of pain points. And then it's the actual process of taking that data from the ecosystem of tools and processes you have around you and interpreting it. And as you get stronger and stronger at it, the data ecosystem actually starts to help you with that interpretation and that it predicts things and it points to bottlenecks. If you look underneath this, this requires a lot of process literacy and a different approach to how you make decisions and how you think about signal. So it's exciting stuff. And again, it's pretty varsity. It's sort of 2.0. Absolutely, everyone is thinking about this and a level one team and a level two team would also probably be wanting to work this capability. But it really becomes more and more possible once you have the mission based teams capability too. That's exciting. You know, you talk to a lot of people. What do you think? What do you think? What do you see as some of the big potential wins of automation within HR at this moment, which is June 2023. So many things. So many things. Okay, I don't even really know where to start. There's so much administration in HR that is just like sand in the gears that I think AI potentially takes care of. And that's everything from like creation of templates to use for performance plans or for giving feedback or for creating training modules or for doing internal communications or, you know, choose your adventure there where it's like those things often just to get to a first draft are hours and hours and revs and revs of socialization. And I think that a lot of that stuff can potentially be automated. I think there's a huge amount of upside in terms of workflow automation. So you look at traditional HR systems and like LMSs and ATSs and like the amount of manual reporting manual data entry, like daisy chaining together of those systems because they don't talk to each other. I think all of that shifts fairly quickly. I think there is a tremendous upside, which actually Jack and I have been talking about recently just in terms of knowledge management. So in complex systems, it's just incredibly hard. I might say it's impossible to successfully have like the golden source of information because it's just like you can't keep up with the cataloging of everything that everyone is making and doing and knowing all the time. And I think that with a large language model, the idea that basically like the brain of the organization can be known and housed by AI and then pulled based on whatever question the user actually has is like pretty revolutionary. Like imagine if like every piece of governance and role and OS guide and from all of history at the ready were available in that way where you could just be like what role was Sam holding in 2016 or like what's our travel policy or like when our reviews do like that is where we're headed. And when you think about the fact that like we are going to be able to type that into something and get a correct answer versus how that generally goes now in systems. First of all, it's just going to be better. And second of all, HR feels a ton of that shit and they should be able to just not.

Get the Snipd
podcast app

Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.
App store bannerPlay store banner

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode