By Kathy Miedema
Technology has changed our behavior and expectations, both as consumers and employees. I recently had the privilege of discussing those changes with two leading Oracle strategists: Jeremy Ashley, group vice president of applications user experience; and Gretchen Alarcon, group vice president of HCM product strategy. What follows are excerpts.
Q: What social changes are you seeing?
Ashley: Technology is becoming so convenient that it’s actually causing behavioral changes. People don’t just expect something; they assume that an experience is going to be a particular way.
Here’s a new trend that never existed before: As soon as you wake up in morning, you start your workday. People around the world pick up a phone first thing in the morning, check the news, check sports scores, and check email. They want to get that orientation. We used to wait until we went into work.
Alarcon: There’s so much access to technology now. There’s no tolerance for business software to behave differently. It used to be that a company would have proprietary systems, and nobody minded that they were specific to the company. Now, an employee expects the enterprise system to look and act the same as a consumer system.
Ashley: Agreed—and when it isn’t what we expect, that’s when you get disappointment.
Q: How do changing consumer expectations translate to the business world?
Ashley: This is not just about Gretchen’s HCM [human capital management] software space. It applies to all business processes. We’re asking a lot of the same questions at work as we always have: What is my day like? When is my first meeting? What information do I need to do my job? But the way we get responses is changing.
With self-service applications, for example, people want to be in and out quickly and seamlessly. We should be able to text, “How many hours do I have for vacation?” and get a quick answer. There’s no actual front end to that type of interaction; it has a reduced user interface. It’s also fast and easy.
Alarcon: One thing that has changed is the approach to the job. I used to joke during meetings and say, “Now I’m putting on my manager hat. I’m talking to you as a manager.” You used to have that in software, too. Now there’s a blend of roles, and you’re still you regardless of what you’re trying to do.
The work that HR does is still focused on finding the best employee for the work we need to do, in the right timeframe, for the money we are willing to pay. And the “job hats” HR is being asked to wear haven’t shifted a lot, but HR pros are expecting to have information served up to them rather than their having to look for information. If something hasn’t changed, you don’t need a weekly headcount report. If something changes, you may need to take action immediately. You need a user experience that pushes that information to you when you need it.
Q: What do these expectations mean for the future of work?
Ashley: Traditional applications with forms place much of the burden on the user to go around, navigate, fill in things. It’s just data entry. Any time we’re doing that, we’re not adding value to the company. We want products to minimize all the work that the system should be doing. The value is in the humans, what experience they have, the knowledge they have—what the system can’t provide. How do we magnify their contributions?
Enterprise tools should support the contributions employees make, not just use them as part of a system.
Alarcon: The more an employee or manager doesn’t have to think about the system, the better. When the system gets in the way, you start to hear about something being broken. Let’s remove data entry. We don’t need to do that.
Day-to-day transactions should be simple. They should be pushed to you: “Here is information. What would you like to correct?”
If it’s time to think about successors or allocate compensation, we want the people using the system to be deeply engaged and we want the system to give them a lot of guidance. This is something they don’t do a lot, but when they do, it really matters to them, and the system needs to be intuitive, guide them, get them to decisions that they are comfortable with, because these decisions have a big impact on the organization.
Q: What role does mobility play?
Alarcon: I don’t think there’s been a customer in the last five years where we haven’t talked about mobile. But the actual uptake and rollout have been very slow. Part of that is around how to put employee data on a mobile device. For example, if an hourly worker is using a personal cellphone to do training during his off time, does the company pay for that?
We’re continuing to invest heavily in making it easier to use mobile because we think employees want to engage that way, but how an employee engages—it will be awhile before companies figure out how to do that.
Ashley: In thinking about mobile devices and levels of security, I’ll use the metaphor of a mailbox: There are certain things that anyone can do, such as put a letter in. That’s easy. But only the postal carrier has a key to get into the mailbox and pick up the mail.
We need to understand the difference. We don’t want everything open or closed. But technology, in this case mobile technology, gives us more options.
Q: What is Oracle doing to meet this challenge?
Ashley: We want to make the experience as thin as possible. If you get a text about someone’s salary, you can click on it, but you’re asked for your thumbprint so that the information opens in a special browser. An authentication code gets you to exactly the information you need, on your smartphone.
The text, thumbprint, 4-digit code—the goal of all this is to allow people to go from intent to action as quickly as possible so that they don’t lose interest on the way. This is user experience, and it must be designed to make resistance low, so that tasks can be done easily and securely.
Alarcon: We want to get information to users at a time when they’re most likely to take an action, and give them the easiest way to respond.
For example, you are most likely to want to give feedback about a meeting right after the meeting. If you’re walking up to your car to drive to the next meeting, it’s fresh in your mind, but you have to drive. So the system can say, “Do you want to give feedback?” and capture your response in something like a chatbot. Or if you are at home with your family on a Sunday afternoon looking up your benefits, the system might understand and say, “Do you need to update?”
Technology lets us pay attention to when people are using the system and how.
As we start to personalize an experience with recruiting, the system might say: “I see that you’re looking at some roles. Are you ready to apply?”
There are pieces we’re doing now and pieces on the vision side in driving information to the user. We’re spending a lot more time and effort on this.
Ashley: We’re humans and we like convenience. We’re exploring emerging technology in our user experience designs to help the system understand when it can send information, and when it will be most successful in getting an employee to interact and engage.
Related resources:
Oracle HCM Cloud Release 12 a powerhouse of contemporary design
See Oracle HCM Cloud user experience at Oracle OpenWorld
HR App Design Challenge: Appeal to Five Different Generations
from WordPress https://reviewandbonuss.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/ashley-alarcon-on-how-social-human-changes-are-changing-application-user-expectations/
No comments:
Post a Comment