You would think now would be the time for HR technology to support every part of your organization. In the wake of COVID-19, workplace technology should:
- Connect your entire organization
- Aid and enhance collaboration in and across business units
- Gather and process the most critical information from every aspect of your operations
- Efficiently and effectively keep the gears turning for your organization and your customers
Instead, leaders I speak with are not confident their companies can provide the support that employees need to stay resilient, healthy, and engaged. But it’s not just me who’s hearing this. A recent survey by PwC found that:
- Two-thirds of CFOs feel they can re-establish a safe physical work environment
- Only 47% are confident they can manage employee well-being and morale
Simply put, we are largely unprepared to meet the psychological needs necessary for a fulfilled and productive workforce today.
The problem is that HR tech has always been built primarily as a leadership tool to measure and manage the workforce. Not surprisingly, this is an uninspired reason for employees and front-line managers to feel authentically valued and cared for. HR leaders, in fact, largely demur when I ask them this pivotal question:
How effective is your HR technology with front-line managers and employees themselves? Does it support the very people it’s supposed to be helping?
For a long time, a strong economy has allowed us to be content with accepting employee experience programs as important in principle — and aspirational in practice. That luxury is gone:
- COVID-19 has sparked an urgent need to deeply support employees at the most fundamental levels.
- Now is the time to take stock and establish solutions that are grounded in the evidence of what supports well-being, authentic engagement, and productive collaboration.
How to Identify Deficient Solutions
HR tech vendors often purport to use psychological science in their approach. But they fail to follow through in practice. The truth is that very few HR solutions deployed today are built on verified science, despite robust claims that they are. Here is an example of a suspect claim, made by one of the leading employee experience players on the market:
“People science is the study of all aspects of the employee experience, the organizational context, the culture, the impact of leadership, and puts that all together in scientific ways that you can extract out of it what is most motivating to people.”
Such statements are dense with buzzwords (“employee experience,” “organizational context,” “culture,” “leadership”). But on closer reading, they are void of substance. These approaches do, however, lean on one fact: For a non-scientific HR tech buyer, accepting the science of how the programs work has always been an article of faith.
Which is sad and ironic. Even for a layperson, it’s actually fairly simple to evaluate whether your HR tech is built on authentic science that can build resilience, motivation, well-being, and performance — or isn’t.
Guidelines for Finding HR Tech That Authentically Cares
Authentic employee experience technology is built from validated science with proven impact. It puts demonstrated psychological principles of employee well-being and engagement first, instead of making technology features and analytic tools the headline.
Let me describe what I mean by that, and more specifically, how as an example, you can see validity in a program built on Self-Determination Theory, the leading scientific model worldwide for engagement:
- True psychological models have a point of view. They speak fundamental truths about human needs and core experiences upfront that help you understand and act. In Self-Determination Theory, we emphasize the critical role of universal psychological needs as the drivers of well-being. Everything — tech included — must support that model. In our work, that science drives what we measure, how variables are weighted and reported, and what prescriptive actions are recommended for change. Why? Because the psychology of well-being and engagement is an evidence-based science, not a data analysis problem or matter of opinion. If a business doesn’t value using a proven scientific framework for measurement and change, all the tech in the world won’t help.
Currently, most HR tech falls short of this standard. Even software that cites its ability to identify “insights” and “drivers” are doing so based on simple mathematical correlations — not proven psychology with established models. Without guiding science, math will just as likely lead to the wrong conclusions as the right ones. We need to discard unvalidated systems for psychological health with the same kind of common-sense speed we discard unproven medical science.
- Authentic psychological models have an independent, scientific evidence base. Here’s one simple question to ask of your HR tech solution: Can the vendor produce independent research published in a peer-reviewed journal validating the model is effective? “Independent” means the research was not done by the vendor. Published in a “peer-reviewed journal” means the research method and results were reviewed and verified by a panel of experts on the subject matter.
This has been the standard of all science, including psychology, for decades. In Self-Determination Theory, there are several hundred, if not thousands, of these kinds of valid published studies. By comparison, I would be surprised if most leading HR tech vendors could produce even one study that meets this baseline standard. Considering just this fact, it should not be a surprise that most employee experience approaches have been ineffective.
These simple due diligence guidelines will help you vet the psychological science in your employee engagement tech. More important, they speak to an important and necessary reframing of HR tech itself.
The definition of technology is “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.”
As such, we have been defining tech too narrowly — as electronic bits and bytes that even common sense tells us is insufficient for addressing the needs and capacity of people. Let’s commit — right now — to more broadly embrace the science part of the definition and make true psychological science the foundation of our HR tech.
To be honest, I don’t think we really have a choice anymore. Our people and our organizations have always deserved this kind of caring approach from the technology we use to support them. Now, more than ever, they need it.
Latest posts by Scott Rigby (see all)
- Support the Fundamental Human Needs of Your Employees — and Everyone Benefits - September 6, 2020
- How COVID-19 Reveals The Flaws In Underperforming HR Tech - May 26, 2020
