Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER May 4, 2015 NEWS 11 on the horizon right now. But every HR department should be looking at social media and websites such as Glassdoor, which allows current and former employees to rate workplaces. A smaller organization might only have three reviews on Glass- door, she said — let's say two are nice and one is a reference to nepotism. "What do I do with this?'" said Giffen. "Reputations can be made or broken in the social media space, so you have to be mindful of how conversations take place." Even if an organization doesn't have a social media policy, and isn't active on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, it doesn't mean it gets a pass on the genre — because people are using it to talk about your company, she said. HR technology But social media isn't the only hot issue in technology right now. There is still plenty happening on the HR technology front and one of the front-burner issues is improving ease of use for employ- ees when it comes to self-service, said Heather Briant, senior vice- president of people at Cineplex Entertainment. "Employees get approval for and book vacations on their smartphones, they can look at their pay slips, that kind of thing," she said. "Ease of use seems to be more important to our employees than social media." Hendry pointed out many firms are handicapped by the lack of a good human resource informa- tion system (HRIS) and it can lim- it what HR is able to accomplish. Buy-in can be a major issue, said Edgar — and he proposed an interesting way to have senior leadership invest in human re- sources technology: Stop calling it HR technology. "It dawned on me the other day that I should start to talk about it as a people system because it's the one system we'll implement that everyone will touch, everyone gets value from," he said. "Whereas, it feels to me as if many of the executives, unless you take them aside and beat them around the head a bit, they think about this as benefitting HR. ey don't realize it will benefit the en- tire organization." HR metrics 'vogue' topic e conversation then turned to HR metrics, which Hendry called a "vogue" topic of conversation. But is it getting the attention it truly deserves? "We — being HR — seem to have been slow on the uptick. Technology has been doing it for a long time, finance has done it forever," he said. "Is it getting at- tention at the executive level, not just within the HR profession, that we should be doing it?" e consensus seemed to be that there is tepid interest in the numbers. Briant said she has yet to have any executive, including the CEO, ask for anything more than a turnover or headcount report. "There are 300 different HR metrics and I have yet to find very many — fewer than 10 — that will change anything in a meaningful way in the organization." Sabapathy said other execu- tives know HR can generate lots of data and metrics but they often just don't care. "ey don't really believe it can bring — yet — the kind of data and insight that will make a big difference in the business," he said. "We were doing a whole score- card spreadsheet with all kind of metrics. I stopped it because I found no one really looked at it because it they didn't know how it fit with a people strategy and didn't understand what it meant relative to success in their function. "I know we felt self-satisfied that we had this big stack of ana- lytics, but they weren't numbers business leaders believed drove value in the business." Instead, Sabapathy shifted the focus to the key things the busi- ness was trying to accomplish. For example, high on the list was a performance coaching system. "OK, so if that's important, we're going to measure two things — frequency and quality, and we'll report on that," he said. Also on the agenda was boost- ing employee engagement, said Sabapathy. "We went deeper and figured out if we improved our score in two focus areas, it would have the biggest impact on our engage- ment. Leaders across the business pay attention to these measures as they're part of our enterprise ob- jectives ," he said. Dunne said human resources is good at providing the core met- rics, most of which generally drive payroll. "at data is generally high in- tegrity — things like turnover, in- ternal promotion rates and FTEs (full-time employees)," she said. "en there's a whole capabil- ity around labour analytics. So if you're looking at the 6,000 people who work in the stores (at Indigo), what is the right mix of full-time to part-time? Should we be a min- imum wage employer? Should we have a different approach to compensation? "(It's about) being able to sup- port those kinds of analytics — but that's true analytics as op- posed to dashboard reporting." e qualitative data that can add the most value typically isn't buried inside an HRIS, said Dunne — such as key drivers of engagement. ere has also been a shift to- wards predictive analytics, said Edgar. "e big question is how you can use the data — with the world changing so quickly, how relevant is it? What sorts of things have been going on in the past that we should be thinking about? How can we use that to predict the future? I think that's the shift," he said. ROUNDTABLE < pg. 10 "ey don't believe it can bring the kind of data that will make a big difference."

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