Bonus Episode: How to Develop the HR Skills of the Future (Panel discussion from PAFOW with RJ Milnor, Heather Whiteman and Ian Bailie)

HR doesn't just need to do digital, it needs to be digital, it simply has to. Put another way, HR must become more digital and analytical to deliver greater business value. This episode is a break from our usual format. It features a panel discussion which took place at the recent People Analytics and Future of Work conference in San Francisco.

The discussion was titled HR skills of the future and how to develop them. It features Heather Whiteman, who lectures on people analytics at UC Berkeley, having spent six years previously as Global Head of People Strategy, Analytics, Learning and Operations at GE Digital. RJ Milnor who is the Global Head of People Analytics at Uber and is a previous guest on the show, and Ian Bailie, Managing Director of myHRfuture who previously held various roles at Cisco around Workforce Planning, People Analytics and Talent Acquisition operations, and I am the moderator.

You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

The topics the panel and I talk about are:

• The skills business leaders and CHRO’s are increasingly needing from their HR professionals

• The evolution in learning and how it has been delivered to HR

• The ways to help HR professionals feel more comfortable and confident having data-driven conversations

• How HR professionals can strike a balance in developing both soft and hard skills

This episode is a must listen for CHRO’s, Chief Learning Officers, Heads of Organisational Design, those working in a workforce planning or people analytics role, and indeed anyone interested in the skills HR professionals require now and in the future.

A huge thank you goes out to Al Adamsen and the team at PAFOW for allowing us to create this podcast from the panel discussion. People Analytics and the Future of Work, which is affectionately known as PAFOW, is a conference taking place in four cities in 2020: San Francisco, Sydney, London on the 29th to 30th of April and New York on the 17th to 18th of November. I will be co-chairing the conference with Al. If you would like to come along, to find out more please head over to pafow.net.

Interview Transcript 

David Green: What we are going to talk about is HR skills for the future and how to develop them, in our work at Insight222 we are working with people analytics leaders in North America and in Europe and I would say probably the most common thing that they ask us about and a challenge that they talk about is up skilling the rest of HR to be more data driven and more digital. So it will be interesting when we talk through the panel now to see whether those skills come up, I have a sense that they might. We have got a great panel here, we have got three people who have all been practitioners, leaders within big organisations at different times but they are now all doing something different.

So RJ Milnor, who is on the far right, is the Global Head of People Analytics at Uber and previously held similar roles at McKesson and Chevron. The first thing that struck me when I met RJ is the amount of work that he had put in to developing a community of practice at Chevron, which he then did at McKesson as well, all to try and help people both within the people analytics field and adjacent to it to actually become more familiar and more literate with this.

Heather Whiteman who is now senior lecturer at UC Berkeley where she teaches a course in people analytics, and we will definitely ask you about that. Previous to that Heather was Head of People Analytics, Head of People Strategy, and a number of other roles at GE digital.

When she started at GE digital they were a company of 200 people and by the time she left there was 26,000, and she did it mostly on her own from a people analytics perspective for a long time.

Then Ian Bailie, my colleague at Insight222 but he is also the creator and leader of the myHRfuture platform. He previously worked at Cisco where he had a variety of roles around people planning, talent acquisition operations, but also he helped develop a tool within Cisco to help career pathing and HR professionals to develop the skills that Cisco needed in the future, but also for the wider Cisco population as well.

So we have got a great panel here to talk through the skills of the future. We are going to start with you Heather, as you have moved into academia with people coming to the courses that you are doing at Berkeley, it would be great to understand if some of these are people currently in HR, what are the new skills that they are wanting to learn.

Heather Whiteman: I teach a couple of different courses, but one that I have been teaching for a number of years is a course that tends to bring in people from the HR field that are only just now realising how important people analytics and analytics in HR is. And one thing about the field is, I make the joke often, that a lot of times individuals in HR ended up there specifically because it was one of the few careers that required no data skills whatsoever to get and then all of a sudden the world changed around them. And so I'm finding that, especially in the world of HR, we are seeing this awakening to the importance and the need for having data skills, but even more than doing the data itself, it is becoming a data translator. A lot of what I focus on when I am trying to educate is not just how to do data, but more importantly, even if you are not the one doing data, how do you understand it? How do you apply it? And beyond all of that how do you think critically about turning business problems into a question that can be answered and then solved by applying analytical thinking and analytical insights. So most of the skills that we focus on there is how to become that data translator and how to become the person who can connect the power of data with what we know and what we do in HR.

David Green: That is great thanks. So RJ looking from the organisations that you have worked for, I know you have only recently joined Uber, but typically as a people analytics leader, what are the skills that you found were almost a barrier to enabling you to be more successful? At Chevron and at McKesson in particular.

RJ Milnor: I think Heather really has it right when she spoke about a data translator or data interpreter. Those kinds of consulting skills how do we take the insight and then make it understandable and then actionable are probably the biggest accelerators, there is some great work from Deloitte and others that talk about that, but also the biggest barriers. So when we think about scaling people analytics and scaling insights across an organisation, whether it's a smaller organisation or a very large organisation, having that data mindset is critical.

I think the question then becomes how do you build a data mindset? So within a people analytics organisation certainly having the deep skills, the core analytic skills that are developing insights are critical, but you need those data translator skills to bring it up to the business.

But it is not a one way street, on the other side in our HR business partner community, certainly in the business side we also need the analytical thinking skills. So some of the work that we did in past organisations and we continue to do now are building those analytical thinking skills, whether it's among HR business partners or a large HR community.

And you can think about that in terms of a business mindset but also a data mindset.

One of the things that I often talk about with my HR peers is that we don't want business partners to be analysts, right? So I don't want people running structural equation models and doing that kind of thing in the field. What I do really want is a strong base of analytical thinking. So what is the problem? Clearly identifying the problem statement, breaking it down in terms of root cause and then coming to the team with a clear understanding of, well, I think this is the problem. I think this might be what's driving it. Here is some data sources I would like to explore and this creates a much stronger partnership between the analytics teams and the HR teams, whether it is COE’s or HR business partners and business leaders in the field it also allows us to interpret the insights much more quickly.

You mentioned COE’s David, when we think about building COE’s or communities of practice, really building the analytical thinking skills in the HR community not just the hardcore analyst skills.

David Green: I think that can be a challenge as in some of the press that we see it is saying that everyone in HR now needs to become a data scientist and as you said that is not the case. They just need to be able to interpret, and as you said, do the framing of the business problems and developing hypotheses that the analytics teams can then go away and investigate and prioritise the most important things of course.

Ian slightly wider than people analytics obviously. We did some work last year at myHRfuture and we actually did a study of HR professionals around the skills that they wanted to learn. It would be great if you walk through some of those.

Ian Bailie: So we ran some research just over a year ago where we went out and said what did HR professionals feel are the skills they wanted to learn?

Where did they feel they had the biggest knowledge gaps? When you think about traditionally where HR has come from and where aspirationally they wanted to get to. We saw there were six skills that came out as the priorities, people analytics, not surprisingly was one of them but we also saw topics like strategic workforce planning, digital HR and HR technology and design thinking in HR came out as really high on the list of things they wanted to learn. We then also saw some softer skills like consulting and influencing and stakeholder management come out as well. And I think picking up on what you have both just said, that was really reassuring to me because I think whilst there are newer skills and analytics, historically has not been part of the core skill set, there are newer skills that people need to learn and we need to kind of confront the way that every organisation is becoming more digital. But to do that you need to influence, you need to persuade, you need to be able to really drive change and you need to build credibility. If you are going to get success with your people analytics project or if you are going to get budget for that cool new tool from next door that you want to implement then you need to be able to really build that influence and build credibility and get that through the line with all of those stakeholders. We are seeing now that there are more stakeholders than ever to manage as well and so it has been an interesting journey on understanding that blend of skills that I think are going to be really critical for HR in the future.

David Green: And these skills of course are very different, as I think all of you have alluded to, from what we have traditionally hired for in HR. So what are some of the blockers that actually prevent some of our colleagues, particularly HR Business Partners, to acquire these new skills easily.

Ian you went last last time so I will let you go first this time.

Ian Bailie: One thing that we are hearing a lot of as well is, sure there's a piece around capability, right? So there are new skills and there is new knowledge that people want to acquire but with that also the topic of confidence I think is really important and then also a theme of culture. So how do you drive a culture within an organisation where it is more data-driven or digital? How do you shift that? And that starts at the absolute top. If you are not seeing that being set by the senior leaders then really you are not going to see that change come through. You are not going to see people start to decide that they want to learn the new skills and to change but then allowing people to make mistakes, allowing people to actually practice these new skills and build that confidence as well, I think is really important. It is not just about taking a training course and you are done, you need to then apply those learnings and you need to practice that time and time again to get the confidence to actually have a data driven conversation with a senior leader for example. I think that is a really critical piece as well. So I see those as a couple of the blockers that people need to overcome.

David Green: RJ are there any additional blockers that you have seen? Also what is the responsibility of the people analytics team itself to help their colleagues in HR to acquire some of these skills?

RJ Milnor: That is a great followup question because i think sometimes we overlook our own responsibility in helping.

So there are two things and building off Ian what you said, there is a palpable anxiety among many of us in HR about taking on that data-driven responsibility and it's understandable. There are people that have not relied on that skill set before, they have not built that skill set before and have relied very successfully on a different set of skills. Asking them now to pivot and pivot hard to something different is naturally uncomfortable and I think we need to be empathetic towards that. So that is probably one of the blockers that we are asking people to move very rapidly to something that might be very unfamiliar and Heather to go back to your point, something that they may have very purposefully selected a career not to do and that is hard. Let's just acknowledge that.

The second, I think very fundamentally is that we might be asking ourselves as a HR function the wrong question, or we might be framing the way we add value incorrectly. So if we think of ourselves at different times as being the provider of information or saying, my job is to think through what the span of control is or to provide this information back to my business leader, I think we are framing the way we add value to the business in the wrong way and we are looking at the value we provide in a very small way compared to what it really is.

If we look at the value we provide as helping understand how the business delivers a value through our people. So how are we actually executing business strategy through our workforce?

That is the role of HR and that is the role of the HR business partner then being data-driven, having that business acumen and data acumen, having the consultant mindset, the change mindset, the talent mindset, those things surface very very differently. It is a different conversation and it is a different way of approaching HR. So those are the two barriers.

I would say David, to your question, what role do we play? Well, I think people analytics can play a very powerful role in addressing both of those barriers. First off the very real barrier of anxiety and fear, let us help take that away. That can be done certainly by helping carry some of the burden, but not all of it, people analytics functions exist to do some of the work it can exist to help lift the developmental burden as well.

You mentioned communities of practice that I had the pleasure of developing in some other organisations. How do we then help the rest of the organisation understand what a data mindset looks like. What is data-driven HR which so many organisations, many of which are here, have done so very well. What does that look like? Whether that is training or whether that is simply setting a North star and a guidepost we can play a role in that. The other piece is helping to walk through what good looks like from a consultative standpoint. So being side by side with our HR, HR business partners or HR colleagues and help do that consulting work. I think that helps, that helps reframe the conversation around how do we add value through data in HR.

David Green:  Thank you RJ and Heather, similar question to you if there are actually any blockers left to talk about. Also thinking back to your time at GE digital, obviously you were scaling that organisation quite quickly, did you actually start to hire for some of these skills in the general HR population to support the growth?

Heather Whiteman: Yes so it is funny because I am sitting in a room where if I look to my left I can actually see where, sometimes you go into people analytics and you are sort of on your own and you are trying pretty hard to bring others along but then if you can bring in individuals, there is a gentleman named Chris who is here today. Now he is a full card carrying member of the people analytics community in my opinion but he was really part of another team who saw the power and had the interest and the energy to want to be part of the power of people analytics.

And so then individuals, like others sitting at the table with me were able to build a talent approach, using analytics and then bring others into that journey and let them be part of it. I would say that Chris actually had better numbers than we did on some of our own initiatives that we were running out and that is because it is about really bringing other people in and allowing them to be part of the community.

To the comment about barriers of what we can all do. I think we are all pretty awesome in the people analytics community, but sometimes we treat it as if it is its own thing and that can be a little bit exclusionary to others when really we should be welcoming in the broader, all to be part of utilising analytics, whether they might be calling themselves a people analytics professional or not. I think that can go really far in helping the HR skills come up. That applies to things like technology and other areas too about really being inclusive as to who we include in that along with us.

David Green: So staying with you Heather lets move on now to how people learn and what people can learn?

So looking at the courses that you run at Berkeley, what are some of the skills that you are training or helping people to develop.

Heather Whiteman: So some training I do, I actually was just working on with myHRfuture and the Academy. I am going to say two things that disagree with each other.

One, most of the time I am trying to train people not to be data scientists or even really advanced people analysts, I am trying to teach them how to think like a data minded person. If you have more advanced skills fantastic but if you don't that does not mean you can't leverage them, you can't use tools and other people.

Then in the exact same breath I will also highly recommend that anyone in the HR function, whether people analytics or not, you should be growing some of the more basic data skills. I genuinely believe, and this is where the likes of myHRfuture Academy comes in, every HR person who needs to be data minded should know basic statistics.

Do you need to be able to calculate everything? No. But when somebody else brings you analysis, don't you want to be able to critically evaluate it so you do not just have to accept their word as to whether or not it is right, you can actually check it out and test it. So I think people need to learn and the reason I bring those up is you do learn by hands on, so you do need to play with something like stats so that then when you get there you have had some hands on learning to actually get there and do it.

David Green: Ian, obviously the way people learn is changing and I know that was part of the research that you did as well. You can learn stuff in a classroom which is great but you can also learn on a more continuous basis as well. It would be interesting to hear your viewpoint on the different ways that people want to learn nowadays.

Ian Bailie: We wanted to understand that better with the research. I am a huge fan of continuous learning, I feel like that is kind of how I learn. We are all learning here today. You are learning when you are scrolling your Twitter feed, you are learning by listening to your exceptional podcast. You are learning by doing many of these things and so I think that is exactly how we do learn. I think sometimes we need an intense burst of learning, and that might be classroom based, it might be a formal university certificate. It could be a short video, it could be a long video. It could be any of these different things and then of course ultimately we learn on the job. We put that information that we acquire into practice and then maybe we can read a great article that gives us some more depth. A case study on how a company has also gone and done that and then we have a conversation with a peer and we pick up on that. So I think the fact that we are just going to have to be learning from now on forever and acquiring new skills is just the new reality and how we do that is very different for each individual.

What we learned from the research was just how complex that has become. How people are learning from blogs, from social media, from YouTube, from all these different sources that is something that I think is just going to be more and more the norm now that we just learn in so many different ways. I think if we can we should try to learn a little something every single day.

David Green:  And of course technology is supporting that as well.

Ian Bailie: Yes absolutely. I think it does not really matter what your preference is you are just getting bombarded with that information now. So it is really about how do you find the best sources of that information for you and acquire that in that way, technology is a huge enabler for that. There are many different platforms out there to support that now and that companies are rolling out is helping with that too.

David Green: So RJ following on from that, for your colleagues that you are working with at Uber in the learning department, what sort of challenges is this giving them in terms of HR and HR learning? You can also refer to your time at Chevron too.

RJ Milnor: So I think there are several that we probably all share as a community.

Challenges of speed and scale seem to be fairly common. Of providing the right learning at speed, when people need it. So that is where the topics of micro learning come up, not that there is not a place for courses there certainly are, but balancing the great kind of learning that can happen in a classroom environment with peers, with just in time learning where you need to know this now and need it in two minutes. So providing that quickly but also providing it at scale across a one thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand person organisation so that is certainly one type of challenge.

Curating that, so understanding what type of learning at what moment for whom and that audiences are different. That is where people analytics can play a great role along with our learning and development departments of understanding who are our employee segments, what is the difference in their needs?

So EX plays a huge role in this while the people analytics and learning development provide, for lack of better term, that Netflix queue of learning and development that you may have heard others talk about as well. So those are some of the barriers from a L and D side.

David Green: Okay. I am going to open it up so if people have got questions start putting their hands up. I am just going to ask a very quick fire question to each of you. You have talked about how HR can learn so i am going to ask that now of you guys. Starting with you Heather, what is the one skill that you would like to learn this year?

Heather Whiteman: I want to really increase my storytelling and data visualisation skills to get the impact of what I find out there.

David Green: Well, I saw you present yesterday and your storytelling was perfect.

Heather Whiteman: Thank you. I have been working on it.

David Green:  Ian?

Ian Bailie:  So I'm still obsessed with this whole memory science topic that we explored in your podcast a couple of weeks ago. So just how the brain works I am finding really fascinating.

David Green:  and RJ?

RJ Milnor: Change management. I think that a majority of people analytics ends up boiling down to change management one way or another and formal approaches to that.

David Green: Perfect. You talked a little bit about the personalisation of learning, so Heather are we seeing any of this? You are doing a course in the classroom and that is great because you have got the time and the space to learn but have you seen some augmentation with some of the stuff that Ian was talking about perhaps.

Heather Whiteman: Yes and I think actually Ian and I have talked about this before. I love just in time, I love content that is just on your phone and ready. But I do fundamentally believe that some basics and some certain topics do need a formal learning process because I do not think you will learn enough from doing a just in time in basic statistics to then go on and question something that was given to you, that is something that you need to take a little time to develop so that when it does come up you can understand what you are being presented with.

I think the analogy I have used or an example I have used is that I am scared of the concept of somebody learning about data privacy just in time, that is a scary thought. Please take some time to understand the notions of data privacy and data governance.

So there is a place for formal learning so that you can learnit deep, you can learn it well and then I really think the other more just in time, the bite sized, that is where I think you will find the really engaged, personalised, right amount at your right level, at the right time that you are interested in and that sometimes can even go further because it is so applicable to what you are caring about. So I am a fan of both kind of learning areas.

RJ Milnor: You can almost look at this in three buckets, there are a million other ways to look at this too but this is what struck me in the moment.

There is structured learning whether it is key learning, cultural, compliance, there are things that we want to build into a learning curriculum. There is just in time, which might be more tactical. So I need to do this for this particular job that I am doing. Then there is nudging, which might be more moment based or event based. Somebody may have not done a one- on- one in a month with their directs and they get a nudge, it is time to do a one-on-one and here's how to do a great one-on-one.

So if you combine those three buckets together all of which are going to be data informed in different ways.

The structural learning, it is going to be really informed by what is our culture? Where do we want it to go? What kinds of leaders do we want to develop? What are our talent segments? All of those things. The tactical data informed in a different way, and then the nudging data informed perhaps by passive data collection in a very different way.

All of those together form a really compelling L and D program.

David Green: Well I think we have run out of time unfortunately. It has been a fantastic panel and I think we probably all agree that upskilling HR is an important part of creating sustainable capability with people analytics and having a more data-driven function. So RJ, Heather, Ian, thank you very much.