TecHRseries Interview with Doron Youngerwood, Director of Marketing At SysAid

Evolving HR Tech Trends and new innovations in HR Tools have led to increased expectations from the HR department. Doron Youngerwood, Director of Marketing at SysAid joins us to share his thoughts on these dynamics.

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Tell us about yourself Doron! What have been some of your biggest learnings and takeaways from your journey as a tech product marketer?

The biggest takeaway throughout my 16-year career has been the absolute need to evolve, as a technology product marketer, at the same fast pace that technology advances – in order to support constantly changing end-user requirements.

My job is to take complicated ideas, concepts, and products and then find a way to make them interesting and unique, and communicate that message to customers.

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When it comes to innovations in HR Tech today, what are some of the biggest lags you are seeing between what B2B users need more of and how platforms are redefining their product offering?

There are increasing business and employee expectations of the HR department. For example, the reason employees expect so much of the HR department is based on employees’ personal life experiences of consumer-world service and support. In addition, outdated HR processes that are too manually intensive (and potentially unstructured) can result in work delays, errors, and increased costs.

To meet the need of employees’ ever-increasing expectations, HR technology providers are enhancing self-service capabilities to better support employees, by providing a single place for them to “do everything HR” themselves (when self-help is possible). For example, checking annual leave entitlements or participating in HR workflows like authorizing a team member’s pay raise.

In addition, the automation and artificial intelligence (AI) trend is starting to make waves, and will provide huge value to employees – as well as to HR departments. I’m sure there’s a fair amount of skepticism amongst the readers, but watch this space! Things are progressing quickly.

How do you see innovations in HR tech impact how B2B companies and teams will function in the future?

I’m really excited about the role of self-service, advanced automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) for HR in the near future, and the way it will vastly improve HR service scalability, so that the level of employee service is not fully dependent on head count; as well as the ability to create a real consumer-grade employee experience.

Let me elaborate:

Employees expect the same type of experiences in their working environment as they get in their personal lives. Providing self-service capabilities to enable employees to find the right information in less time and in a secure manner helps to build momentum step by step.

As for automation and AI, anything that can help reduce the amount of time HR professionals spend on administrative tasks is critical if organizations wish to remain competitive in today’s global economy. And so, automation and AI can free up a significant amount of high-volume, low-value tasks, so that HR departments will be able to focus more on strategic planning at an organizational level and driving business impact.

Could you share your thoughts on leading/game-changing HR tech apps or platforms that you feel are set to create new benchmarks for the industry?

I look forward to seeing the impact of chatbots for HR departments and how this will dramatically enhance employee experiences. When done well, chatbots can help employees to quickly get service and support, and support HR staff knowledge and capabilities.

A manager could access his or her direct report’s information via a chatbot and perform HR business transactions without accessing the core HR application. Chatbots can also perform certain transactions as part of a workflow. For example, it can allow a manager to approve vacation requests.

We’d love to know a little about SysAid’s upcoming (and new!) Workflow Designer tool? How did the idea for this come about?

Workflow Designer gives HR departments the power to easily build and modify workflows in order to drive business impact across more areas of your organization.

Why should you care? Let’s take employee onboarding as an example of a complex workflow that spans multiple functions and systems. You might assume onboarding is HR’s job, but it actually takes many departments to get new hires up and running. They need a laptop and phone from the IT department, a desk from Facilities, a badge from Security, benefit information from HR, payroll services from Finance, and so on.

In short, onboarding is an enterprise-wide activity. It traditionally required many emails, texts, and walks down the hall to make sure new hires had what they needed to be productive.

Generally speaking, employees don’t care what it takes to deliver these services on the back end, or which teams are involved. Instead they want an intuitive, straightforward user experience that sets the tone for how they will interact with their new company.

This is why SysAid built Workflow Designer. The drag-and-drop UI gives users the agility to design or modify workflows on the fly, e.g. onboarding, offboarding, and everything in between! These workflows  increase HR rep productivity, saves time and resources and create new efficiencies.

Could you share some innovative examples of how tech companies/B2B organizations have used or use HR technology to redefine their work culture or HR process?

One great example of an organization that’s doing some innovative things is a company called Richards Building Supply. They’re a US wholesale distributor in the building supply industry, and operate in more than 60 locations across 12 states.

Rolling out self-service, for example, dramatically reduced the number of requests coming through the phone, email, or drop-in. In fact, 85% of all requests were eventually handled through the self-service portal.

The automation of workflows, e.g. automating the employee onboarding process, helped to free up valuable time for Chelsea Snowden, the HR Director for Richards, which meant she was now able to address broader strategic organizational challenges and opportunities.

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What according to you are the top 3 HR Tech Trends that will re-define 2020?

The top trends in 2020 are advanced automation, more powerful self-service capabilities, and the mainstream adoption of HR Service Management (HRSM) tools. HRSM solutions are usually marketed as HR knowledge base and self-service portal solutions with an integrated case management application. However, the breadth and depth of common functions available within the solution vary widely.

HRSM has a significant impact on operational efficiency and the employee experience, and it is gaining momentum as HR departments seek to modernize the employee service experience.

In fact, according to Gartner, HRSM will help reduce HR administrative costs by up to 30% (Gartner, Market Guide for Integrated HR Service Management Solutions March 2019).