Empower Smart Workers with Good Systems and Tools

This week in HR, we published a podcast where we interviewed Chad Perrier, MBA, VP of Operations at UDI (Universal Data, Inc.). He said something very powerful, that “if you're hiring smart people, you want to empower them with the tools that they can count on. The right systems enable them to reach the capacities for which you have hired them.”

I remember years ago accepting a position at a new company that I’d never heard of and being very perplexed. They wanted me to manage recruitment in multiple markets from home in Denver, which was 2 hours behind where all the work originated, DC and New York, without any applicant tracking system. It was perplexing because when I asked the President of the department on the phone what kinds of tools I would have at my disposal, which recruiting systems would I have licenses to, he answered none, that they were working off Excel spreadsheets. I lived and breathed in PeopleSoft and Taleo at that point and didn’t suppose there was any other way to do HR.

When I asked, I got the distinct impression that my question in itself was a disqualifier, a knockout (not like out of the park…) and that I was perceived as a little too precious. He must have resented of my expectation that my work should be empowered, rather than unnecessarily tedious.

We all know these kinds of leaders (using the term lightly) – the ones who are happiest when their employees show their commitment by scaling all the unnecessary hurdles to accomplish their work. There are some out there who think that if work isn’t hard, it isn’t work. And while I can appreciate the sentiment as maladroitly stemming from the value of hard work, it’s non sequitur altogether from the value of hard work in its purest sense. We often hear criticisms of hard work, “Work smarter, not harder” and so on. But we don’t really get what that means on the practical level.

Practically speaking, hard work can be smart work and smart work can be hard work. The statement is meant to dialectically provoke aversion to hard work, by separating the two terms as different. It may ring true to most because it’s an over-simplistic false dichotomy…especially in today’s meme culture. I suggest the real metric isn’t even smart or hard work, rather it is engaged work. When one is engaged, one is more apt to relish challenges and to overcome them efficiently (smartly). The smartness factor is then measured by how they overcome the challenges, often with a direct link to the systems and tools provided by the employer to facilitate the work.

So, what is smarter work? What is more engaged work? From a systems aspect, engaged work is really about the symbiosis between the work it takes to complete tasks and the deployment of tools and systems to automate or manage that work. What can leaders do to facilitate smart work? The roadmap is clear: Survey, Evaluate, Consolidate, Implement, and Reassess.

- First, you have to know what systems you are actually using. Survey employees on what systems they use and for what.

- Second, you have to evaluate them for cost-benefit, does it make work easier or does it have dependencies in the rest of the systems value chain?

- Third, consolidate systems. The fewer patches between systems your business has, the better for data quality and employee sanity.

- Fourth, consider solutions and implement them. It’s so important to evolve and you gotta make a decision.

- Finally, continuous improvement has a lot to do with looking back at regular intervals and looking at how previous decisions could be better.

The opportunity here is recognizing how engagement happens and using tools and resources to increase employee engagement AND organizational visibility—this is leveraging technology, a true win-win.

You’re probably already paying for HCM software. Do you know if you leverage it? If you can’t say for sure that you are getting everything you pay for when it comes to your HCMS, let us help. We are physically repelled by the notion that clients get less than just because they don't know what to ask for. We are more than an app. We are way more than a software provider that simply processes transactions for you. We want to help your business thrive.