From the Editor

The pandemic is still and will stay for some time at the forefront of the news, leading states, companies, communities, families or individuals to adapt and invent new ways of living and working.

In this issue, we continue to explore the effect of Covid19 on the role of HR, on the employee experience, on all of us, leaders of a function, HR, which has been asked to guide companies as they navigate through this pandemic. We will also take a look at intemporal aspects of our function, such as where we get information, how to select systems, or how to think about personal growth in a world requiring agility and flexibility.

With Kathi Enderes, from the Josh Bersin Academy, we get into the 10 key lessons learned from responses to a survey administered by the Josh Bersin Academy in the middle of 2020. Unsurprisingly, people-focused practices drove the highest business impact.

John Macy and Dennis Hill, from the consortium DeHR, are advocating for the use of blockchain to protect data, taking as a case study the effort required to protect privacy amidst the recently launched campaign to vaccinate against Covid19.

Karen Adams, from Appriss Insights, is highlighting the need, now that we are all dependent on video conferencing solutions, to pay attention to their security. Breaches have led to unwanted attendance, inappropriate content shared or other significant disruption. Karen is suggesting actions to address those security issues.

Katherine Jones, an independent consultant, is observing, based on figures provided by HRIS vendors, that HR organizations are facing two major challenges at the same time: access new, modern functionality by implementing a new HRIS while trying to accommodate the new world of virtual work. She suggests breaking down the enormity of the tasks into smaller, addressable steps.

Melissa Dobbins, from Career.Space, is helping us come back to the fundamentals of HR Technology implementation: it’s value is not the ‘what’, it’s the ‘why’. We may very well need to adopt new technologies to respond to the challenges of Covid19, but we need, more than ever, to be focused, specific, and be clear on the “why” a specific technology in order to be meaningful for the organization we serve.

Rhonda Marcucci, from Gallagher, is sharing with us the results from the last Gallagher HR Technology Pulse Survey, looking at its key learnings for small and medium size businesses. Our economy is vastly dependent on the vitality of those SMBs. With just one or two HR people who have to do it all by themselves, how can they leverage technology? Where do they invest? How do they do it?. Rhonda’s findings are enlightening. If you are one of those HR folks, this article may have nuggets for you.

Bennett Reddin, from Joynd, and Asanka Abeysinghe, from WSO2 Inc,are introducing the notion of “cellular enterprise” to respond to the challenge of being agile under turbulent times. Teams would be organically created, as cells, to focus on different aspects of the software life cycle, from requirements, to development, to integration or testing, introducing a new form of agility where the traditional practices would have called for a large project team and roles under a rigid structure.

The last two articles are from members of the editorial committee.

Jeff Higgins, from the Human Capital Management Institute (HCMI), and Bob Greene, from Ascentis, guide us on how to respond to the recent revisions of Regulation S-K by the SEC, regulations requiring new HCM disclosures for any organization publicly traded on any US securities exchange, and which deems human capital material to their operations.

Bruno Querenet, from Denali Therapeutics, highlights the three components of a simple framework to think about employee growth, a key enabler of success in this troubled time.

This selection of articles shows how much the pandemic is disrupting the HR function and the breath of what we should consider to address it.

We hope that you will find this content useful. Let us know!

Bruno Querenet Onfroy de Breville
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Bruno Querenet is a senior director, People Solutions at Splunk. He has deployed numerous HR solutions enabling companies and their HR teams to leverage the benefits of HR technology. Prior to joining HR, he gained business experience through roles in manufacturing, R&D, marketing, and IT. He can be reached at [email protected].

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