Zack Johnson – HR Tech 2022 Series – New Players Entering the HR Technology Sector

Connect with Zack Johnson:

• 

Connect with Dwight:

• 
• dwight.brown@salary.com

Connect with David:

• 
• 
• david.turetsky@salary.com

Podcast Manager, Karissa Harris:

• HRDataLabs@salary.com

 

Production by Affogato Media

Resources:

• Visier
• HR Data Labs Season 5 Episode 19
• HR Data Labs Season 5 Episode 17

• “What’s really interesting, and kind of surprising, is that the rest of the world has become obsessed with work. . . . I don’t think the HR community has realized quite how much that means other vendors that aren’t traditionally HR vendors are going to take a very, very big interest in the space.”
• “Fast forward five, six years from now and I think some [newer HR companies] are going to be much bigger and they’re going to attack some of those niche areas [that others haven’t gone after].”

Announcer: 0:02

Here's an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology. Invite cross industry experts from inside and outside HR. Mix in what's happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record, pour their discussions into a beaker, mix thoroughly. And voila, you get the HR Data Labs podcast, where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate and even irreverent, that count on each episode challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real world problems. Now, here's your host, David Turetsky.

 

David Turetsky: 0:46

Hello, and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Turetsky. Like always, we find the most fascinating people to talk to you about the worlds of HR data analytics, technology and process. Today we have with us our friend, Zack Johnson, from Visier! Zack.

 

Zack Johnson: 1:02

Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

 

David Turetsky: 1:04

We're really excited to have you again! And I think people might know that Zack was here with us at last year's HR Tech. And last year, we learned something new and different about you. What's one thing that no one knows about, Zack?

 

Zack Johnson: 1:21

If I'm by myself and I'm going to pick a movie to watch? Probably rom com

 

David Turetsky: 1:25

Yeah, yeah, really?

 

Zack Johnson: 1:26

Yeah. I love genre films but rom coms are fun, man and make you feel good.

 

David Turetsky: 1:30

Like Harry Met Sally or Yeah, yeah, Forget Paris.

 

Zack Johnson: 1:35

Like, but like, like Prime like something really bad. Like Like, not always like a great rom com. Okay, there's like some you can just throw on just makes you feel good, you

 

David Turetsky: 1:43

I do. But having gone through or going through know? right now a really terrible part of my romantic life.

 

Zack Johnson: 1:51

Oh, no.

 

David Turetsky: 1:51

I will say that romantic comedies are definitely not where I want to start. I go with horror movies right now.

 

Zack Johnson: 1:57

So horror movies are my other back up. I was gonna say like, watch Hereditary or something. I just love genre film, you know.

 

David Turetsky: 2:01

Yeah, I've been watching a lot of Stephen King stuff, too.

 

Zack Johnson: 2:04

Definitely.

 

David Turetsky: 2:05

Yeah, he really scares the crap out of me.

 

Zack Johnson: 2:07

Me too.

 

David Turetsky: 2:08

So the topic we're choosing to talk with Zach today is 2022 what we learned in the world of HR analytics, and what surprised you about it? And then we'll talk about what your predictions are for 2023. But let's start with thinking about the world in 2022. What surprised you and what didn't surprise you? In the world of HR analytics in 2022?

 

Zack Johnson: 2:33

Sure. And so I'll preface by saying I got a really interesting vantage point in the market because I got to basically spend really deep time with virtually every vendor and see what they're thinking about for the future and how they're thinking about strategy. And what's really interesting and is kind of surprising, is the rest of the world has become obsessed with work. Like the amount of press on work right now is astounding. It's like in everything all the time. I don't care if it's quiet quitting, great resignation, whatever. I don't think the HR community here, particularly the vendors, have realized quite how much that means other vendors that aren't traditional HR vendors are going to take a very, very big interest in the space over the next couple of years.

 

David Turetsky: 3:17

And ask what's broken? And why can't these people fix it?

 

Zack Johnson: 3:20

And buy stuff and invest in stuff. And there's a lot of keys to the kingdom here that will be transformative for things beyond traditional HR. But it's going to come from here in a lot of ways. And I see some people starting to notice, but the enemies are kind of at the gates, you can watch it, it's kind of cool.

 

David Turetsky: 3:40

Well, and that means because the enemies are gonna be at the gates that we may see different players here next year. And so you're, you're basically you're starting with your prediction for 2023, which is that the people that are coming to the HR Technology Conference may actually be very different next year.

 

Zack Johnson: 3:55

It'd be very different. We can already see it this year, right? Like Fidelity has a booth. Like typically, there's like, you know, you have your talent management spend, you've got like your benefits and insurance and all that. And then you have comp, starting to see it bleed more and more over because all of them are becoming technology players.

 

David Turetsky: 4:10

Yeah.

 

Zack Johnson: 4:10

And so it's, it's an exciting time, but it's also really big, really well funded, and capitalized organizations who sell differently, compete differently, think about the world differently. We're going to start to be here. And that's, I think, really exciting, because it's the future of management and how we work together. But it's also like, kind of used to the same people. And I think it might be a little scary in some ways too.

 

David Turetsky: 4:33

Well you used the word legitimacy, right? And so maybe we'll actually have different customers show up. Maybe we'll actually have maybe not CEOs, but maybe we'll have COOs or maybe we'll have CIOs or maybe we'll have beyond the HR technology world maybe we'll have CFOs come and take this seriously.

 

Zack Johnson: 4:54

Oh and investors. Institutional investors so like think like, you know, your Black Rocks or like your hedge funds, all those. You're gonna be able to predict tax revenue for like, by municipality like that's, that's the byproduct of people analytics. Is like, understanding, because actually there's one thing I was told that I can't unsee, which is like, there's trillions of dollars spent to understand the consumer. Yeah, like just like two companies alone are $2 trillion worth of money. The only thing really equivalent to consumer spend is like work spend like payroll and all the things that go around it.

 

David Turetsky: 5:24

Because you don't get consumer spend without work spend.

 

Zack Johnson: 5:26

Exactly! It's I mean, it's just like, it's an ecosystem, right? That is a very, under, it's an immature market. And so the amount of money that's kind of pouring and interest, and it's gonna transform stuff, I'll give you an example, one of the ones that I love to think of like, how can really radical change happen? Like, like credit scores, credit scores are based on your past spending activity? Is that like a great predictor of the future? Like, I can show you what someone's career path is likely to be in the range of earning over their career, right? Yeah, that could fundamentally change personal lending, or like some of the daily wallet stuff could totally change, just like personal payment.

 

David Turetsky: 6:03

Yeah. But what's fascinating about that, because I've been in that space. And I've looked at having to then be held to a standard that is part of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. So this, when you start talking about being able to blend factors together about people, that's when you get treated like you're a credit reporting agency like and Experian, or Equifax, or some of the others. And so when HR analytics start bleeding into that world, then we get regulated, or we'll start to get regulated, which will also then change the players because people won't want to be regulated. And they'll kind of stay away from or others will be like, no problem, we'll take it on. We already do stuff like this.

 

Zack Johnson: 6:46

It's the same thing with benefits. So there's, in the benefits world, there's been a ton of spend on analytics, it's mostly services based customers want analytics applications, they're constantly asking for it, those companies want to sell their latest applications. But he got to hop over the HIPAA hurdle, depending on what you want to show, right?

 

David Turetsky: 7:00

That's right.

 

Zack Johnson: 7:01

And so there's money to be made there. There's problems to solve, it will happen. It's just who, when, what level of maturity.

 

David Turetsky: 7:09

But but what your point was, was that the revenue will drive the interest.

 

Zack Johnson: 7:14

Absolutely.

 

David Turetsky: 7:14

And the exposure of the opportunity brings those other players in who go well, do I care about that, you know, that's going to be a price to pay, but look at all the potential for that new market that's being exposed. If I'm an early entrant into that new market, I become the new Visa, MasterCard for those those new metrics and that new market.

 

Zack Johnson: 7:34

There's new competitive modes. And like, one of the things that's really exciting is like, you know, we've been doing the people analytics thing for a while. And there's so many new vendors here. And it's really exciting. One company doesn't make a market, like it's awesome that people all just chasing after the same stuff. But fast forward five, six years. So now I think some of those companies are gonna be much bigger and attack some of those niche areas where like, one can't go after all of them. That's really exciting for consumers, I think, because like, there's just, there's unlimited questions to answer about people.

 

David Turetsky: 8:01

Yeah. And they may find a niche, like you were mentioning before, maybe it was before we were talking on air. But you were mentioning before about, you know, look at different payroll and HR companies, they have a niche because they service different markets, some service small market, some service mid size market, some service the higher and some service them all, right? I think what you're saying is, is that because the entrants are coming in, they might find a niche may not be size, it may be something else. Maybe it's industry, and they exploit that industry, give legitimacy to people analytics in that industry. And then it starts to add more when the next industry hits, or the next group hits.

 

Zack Johnson: 8:43

Absolutely. I'll give you an example with an experiment we've done. So we're a huge fan of bringing in operational data and like outcomes data on top of people data. It's obviously been interesting, right?

 

David Turetsky: 8:53

Yeah.

 

Zack Johnson: 8:53

My favorite is JIRA data. So it's productivity of developers. So in our own org, we have this deployed, when we lose a developer, it triggers like a like a readout, that shows our work that we have, like workforce planning, it productivity plans to and it shows the impact on story points in JIRA when someone leaves, who's most likely to leave next given proximity to a whole bunch of things around them, and what that actually means for the output of the organization. And how can you shift people around to make it work better?

 

David Turetsky: 9:22

Oh, it's definitely affecting the velocity of the team.

 

Zack Johnson: 9:25

Oh, totally.

 

David Turetsky: 9:25

And it's gonna affect the code quality, any unit tests that weren't done or whatever.

 

Zack Johnson: 9:30

Well. And what's cool, though, is like, that's a totally different product than selling people analytics to HR. Like, it's just totally different. It's a lot of the same data. But the use case is very narrow around a person who has a lot of money to spend with really serious talent issues, but you think it was like a management problem.

 

David Turetsky: 9:44

Yeah, but well, but in that specific instance, you're talking about very important management of resources that are extremely expensive. And so if there is a way for you to find out by

 

Zack Johnson: 9:53

Yeah. using the JIRA data, who might be, you know, if if X, Y or Z left the organization, what would their impact to code quality be? And to productivity be? And that's revenue right there, right? I mean, when new releases are, are delayed because people leave, that screws, the entire company's revenue. Do the same thing with pipelines from Salesforce.

 

David Turetsky: 10:19

Oh, yeah.

 

Zack Johnson: 10:20

So you can literally say, what's the actual what's my actual Q4, because everyone's been in the scenario where you have a rep and like they might leave and it's Q4 and you're like, but if they leave what happens? And you actually can look and see like, oh, I have nothing in stage four or higher, that's going to actually get hit by this. And you time that transition.

 

David Turetsky: 10:33

And you could do that analysis, I think on any production job.

 

Zack Johnson: 10:37

Exactly.

 

David Turetsky: 10:38

Whether you're talking about investment banking, whether you're talking about manufacturing, whether you're talking about, you mentioned sales. It, it can all be done because you can collect the data, and do the analytics and see what the impact to the company is. Now, at that point, though, Zack, what we're talking about is we're talking about business analytics. It's not really people analytics anymore, but it comes down to people, but it's not what we've been traditionally talking about as people analytics.

 

Zack Johnson: 11:02

And we kind of started out before we hopped on the air, where I don't love the term people analytics. It's not wrong. It's just like, it's the person is the core analytical object.

 

David Turetsky: 11:11

Sure.

 

Zack Johnson: 11:11

But really, it's future management, that's where it's going.

 

David Turetsky: 11:15

Well it's business!

 

Zack Johnson: 11:16

Which is like, kind of spend all our money on people like it sort of make sense to measure how we work together. Like every problem is solved by people working together. If we're gonna, if we're gonna solve, like, really big problems, try to get better at it.

 

David Turetsky: 11:36

And we've been trying for so many years, why do we still suck at it, though?

 

Zack Johnson: 11:41

Well, for one, people are people, you know, and we're messy, and we're hard to measure. And like, no matter how much you measure, there's still going to be crazy stuff that you can't expect. And so that's one of those things that's funny. Whenever I have like, my favorite rebuttal to smash on people analytics is like, well, what if and it's like, they go really deep on like, making the decision just off the numbers. And like, the next step is always pick up the phone and talk to a person, right? Like, it's intuition plus data that's magical. But no, I think it's actually a network problem. That's where the complexity comes from. The more people you have working together, it's, each person you add, adds quadratically more relationships to your network, and just the complexity ramps, and we're not given tools to help us understand very quickly, how like, interaction is because a company is not a real thing. A company is the average of everyone's, that's the average of everyone's thoughts of what the company does their beliefs about it, the beliefs about the momentum, and then a bunch of promises they make to other organizations, at any given moment, right? It's it's a network problem. And it's a it's a heuristic problem.

 

David Turetsky: 12:42

Well, we always try and say that companies are families. They're definitely not families. But I would never treat my family the way some companies have treated me. And also, look at how we work together. Yes, we spend a lot of time together, it doesn't mean we're a family, it means maybe we should be nice to each other. But in a way, as you're saying, we're artificially put together. We're given a purpose. That purpose translates to revenue or, or whatever. I mean, if we're talking nonprofit, it's different. But let's just talk on the for profit side. We are given a target, it has to be hit, we organize, self organize sometimes, or we're told how to organize. And then we either hit it or we don't. And measuring it along the way and the effectiveness of it gives us the ability to make changes and tack, and be able to be better about it next time. Right?

 

Zack Johnson: 13:32

Yeah, it's like, we don't do it fast enough. That's the problem. And like, what I mean by that is, like, think about so people analytics can totally be used for evil. And it can also be used for good I tend to believe and like really hope it's mostly good, right? Because I've chosen to spend so much time on this. The career experience is unfair, because you get one shot, right? Like you get your first job. Hopefully your boss is a good manager, you learn from them. You get like one life. That's why mentorship so powerful, is because you learn from your mentees right, like it's amazing, right. And so the learning curve is so steep, and it takes so long and like, it takes a while to figure out when when a decision is going wrong. Like we're very, we're still very reactive. We have all the data to start to be like like, for instance, I want to double my sales team. Does that mean I'm likely to double the business? You can look at every company has ever tried it and like no, it's not gonna work because of all these reasons. Right?

 

David Turetsky: 14:26

Right.

 

Zack Johnson: 14:27

All that data is there and whether you're an individual employee navigating your career, a manager just figuring out how a team works, a manager of managers, which is really messy, investor investing in a company or whatever, I think like, I guess kinda accelerate everything. It's really gonna accelerate.

 

Announcer: 14:42

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David Turetsky: 14:54

But how do they learn about it? How do they really learn? How do they use the results? The outputs? Are they listening? Are they making decisions based on the data? Or are they learning from other people's mistakes? Maybe their own? Maybe others? Are they learning?

 

Zack Johnson: 15:10

I mean, like it's your this is, what's the word? It's a? That's like a, that's an epistemological, rhetorical question, right? Like,

 

David Turetsky: 15:18

Yeah!

 

Zack Johnson: 15:19

that's just knowledge. That's how we create knowledge.

 

David Turetsky: 15:20

Right.

 

Zack Johnson: 15:20

I'll say this. So I'll give you an example of some of the things I think you're gonna see everywhere. When I started my week, basically, work happens through like email, calendar, Slack, and like whatever your like operational choice is. How internally focused versus externally focused is my team this week? If I notice we're getting more and more internally focused as weeks go on, I have a really serious problem with my sales organization. That's one metric. All it is, is it tells me kind

 

David Turetsky: 15:40

Yes. of what conversation to have. It's not fancy simulation. It's not benchmarking, like much, much other than against itself, right? Or like, hey, Zack, we noticed you're twice as busy as all the other VPS are at Visier. You need to talk to someone and get some help, or you're gonna burn out. And also you're probably not doing a very good job, right? But like, there's all I think it's the little nuggets are gonna become something you just can't live without. And I think there's going to be because it kind of goes down to three categories, right? There's like, I call them like, nudges, warnings, and then you're gonna have like planning and simulation. And I think planning and simulation is where a lot of that people analytics adoption challenges are. It's like, we're gonna do a big thing to answer a big question and gonna roll it out, right? The nudges and warnings pace is going to be just, it's gonna be ubiquitous in day to day work, like I think, five years from now. But are you talking about actionable analytics? Are you talking about descriptive statistics, like turnover rates, or headcount or time to hire?

 

Zack Johnson: 16:40

No, like actionable stuff. So like, for instance, like, if I'm meeting with an employee in the week, it'll say, hey, this person is actually twice as likely to quit the rest of the team, we noticed that you just had to propose a new time. Are you sure? Like that kind of stuff I think it's going to be huge. And it's, I mean, it's driven by descriptive statistics, but it's at the point where you should actually think about it for a second.

 

David Turetsky: 16:58

Well, is it the interpretation of all those descriptors that, or some of those descriptive statistics, into ways of us being able to understand the patterns that lead to certain outcomes? Like you said, like, there's a probability if you don't, if you reschedule with that employee that they're gonna leave? Because you haven't talked to them in a while, we've seen that people who constantly get rescheduled feel a certain way? And that's why I'm talking about learning. Are people understanding the signals that you're trying to tell them in these bits? Or are they just taking the advice and going with it?

 

Zack Johnson: 17:39

You ever see Army of Darkness?

 

David Turetsky: 17:40

Yes.

 

Zack Johnson: 17:41

You know, and Ash gets sent back in time, and it's like the modern man, but it's like, I don't know anything about chemistry or physics to actually help like the evolution of mankind, I think most people are going to just get used to getting it, and they're not gonna think about the stuff behind it.

 

David Turetsky: 17:54

Just like they got used to the iPad, when Apple didn't tell them really, how to use it, or what to do with it.

 

Zack Johnson: 17:59

Like, to be honest, think about the consumer web. Do I understand how all the consumer web works? No way. It's an economy. It's not a market, right? I think you're gonna see, this space will eventually become more of an economy than a market. And I think you're gonna have way varying levels of sophistication of user in all the different persona types. But I don't know, it'll be interesting to see.

 

David Turetsky: 18:22

But that gives HR the opportunity to become the steward of not data, but of better outcomes, because they could go to that manager and say, hey, you know, we see that you've been getting some hints about some things and they're pretty consistent. And we know that you've been following the paths that they've laid for you. Do you get why? I mean, being a steward of better behavior, instead of just constantly being a traffic cop for why didn't you do your performance evaluation?

 

Zack Johnson: 18:52

Totally.

 

David Turetsky: 18:53

Because your performance evaluation completion percentage is low. That's the stuff that we get in trouble for.

 

Zack Johnson: 19:00

everyone has in common here, is like people get into HR because they love and believe in people. They think people can be great. And what's cool is I'm hoping that if we build the stuff the right way, and we build it with love and care, we're going to make that easier to scale. Because right now, your experience at a company is reliant on having a great manager, it's relying on having someone who cares about you, it's relying on having someone who looks like you take you under their wing, right? I'm really hoping that this can broaden the access to the things that help people be as successful as they want to be. And as they can be. And I think it's gonna get us there. I hopefully do.

 

David Turetsky: 19:45

So, Zack, what's your prediction for 2023? Where HR analytics, people analytics, business analytics is gonna go.

 

Zack Johnson: 19:54

I mean, I'm a little biased on the embedded side, but I think just like just watching everybody replatforming analytics. Like customers want it. Its buying criteria and usage criteria, videos are getting more sophisticated. So like, I think you're gonna see a lot of Google analytics products like in everyone's suite and you're gonna see other new vendors. For HR in general, not just people analytics, I'd say just consolidation. It is gonna, like, it's already been some pretty serious consolidation, but like, it's gonna be a buyers market. And I think you're gonna see, like, the categories have never been so murky as this year, and I think that they're just gonna get murkier, before it gets clearer over the next 24 months.

 

David Turetsky: 20:28

It's definitely possible. I definitely agree with you. Let me ask you a stupid question.

 

Zack Johnson: 20:33

Sure.

 

David Turetsky: 20:34

How about standardizations in analytics, and I don't mean, standardizing on a platform. I mean, standardizing on standards. Like SHRM published standards, you know, eight or nine years ago, of how you calculate things, but I'm talking about data standards so we can have interplay between different companies. And, you know, granted data companies exist. Analytics companies exist, being able to send data back and forth, not necessarily just API's, but like, I don't know if you remember there was the HR open, I guess it used to be called HR XML. Is that possible?

 

Zack Johnson: 21:10

I hope so. Because I think it's, it's just good for the market. And it's good. It's good for the end user. And it's good for the creators, like, like, good for vendors. I think there's always a downside to whatever the standard is, and there's always gonna be the smartest person in the room who's like, I hate that thing. I want to do my own. And like, that's okay.

 

David Turetsky: 21:26

Right.

 

Zack Johnson: 21:26

You know, I hope one happens around skills, because I think skills are gonna really change how we think about work and plan work. And that'll be really cool. We measure retention 75 plus different ways.

 

David Turetsky: 21:38

Yeah, I know. And it's configurable on top of that!

 

Zack Johnson: 21:41

Yeah on top of it. But you know, you know what, I think all of our customers in the same data model, basically, but it takes a lot of work to get them there. But I know, there's a lot of advantages to it. I think I think we'll step more in that direction. I don't think we'll make as much progress as everyone wants.

 

David Turetsky: 21:54

Well, 2023 is only a few months away, and we can't solve for world peace all in one year. So

 

Zack Johnson: 21:59

I know, right?

 

David Turetsky: 22:00

We'll talk about that again in 2024. Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, Man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go to Salary.com/HRDLconsulting to schedule your FREE 30 minute call today. Zack, thank you so much for being here on the HR Data Labs podcast. We really appreciate it. You're awesome. We appreciate everything Visier does for the space. And hopefully we'll be able to have you again next year.

 

Zack Johnson: 22:40

Wouldn't I miss it for the world, man! Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being a brilliant steward. And just like always fun, this is the highlight of the event for me. So

 

David Turetsky: 22:47

Thank you.

 

Zack Johnson: 22:47

really appreciate the talk.

 

David Turetsky: 22:48

Cool. Thank you. Take care and stay safe.

 

Announcer: 22:51

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