Jardine Matheson Ltd

Peter Attfield

If you are a Learning and/or Talent professional, you certainly don’t need me to tell you that HR tech has exploded in recent years. You’ve all seen the stats on HR Tech investment from HR commentators like Josh Bersin, you’ve seen the various “magic quadrants” from the likes of Gartner and others- and if you are anything like me you will receive 20-30 emails a week from vendors telling you why you need to deploy their latest tech platforms.Seemingly we are all spoilt for choice! But of course, therein lies the problem…

Most large organisations already have a set of core HR applications – some legacy, some new. Some organisations go the route of trying to find one HCM vendor and then use all their “bolt-on” integrated applications for areas like Recruitment, Learning or Talent Management. Others (like Jardines) have taken more of a best of breed approach and integrate multiple systems to address different needs across the employee lifecycle. Either way, these decisions require significant investment, timeand resilience to implement, change management and user education and are usually multi-year commitments to a chosen strategy and direction.

It is easy to become excited about the plethora of new HR tech options that are available, it is also easy to think “I would love to have that…” but it is less likely, in my experience,that this then turns into a decision to rethink or start to tinker with the current HR tech stack. Most of us have our energy vested in trying to optimise what we have, to improve the end user experience, to eke out that last ounce of productivity and efficiency gain and to continue to justify HR tech investment overdigital investments for the more customer facing functions. You won’t be surprised to learn that of the 20-30 HR Tech emails I receive every week I generally read none of them!

"Most of us have our energy vested in trying to optimise what we have, to improve the end user experience, to eke out that last ounce of productivity and efficiency gain and to continue to justify HR tech investment overdigital investments for the more customer facing functions."

I expect some of you reading this article are saying by now that I am clearly a dinosaur who is presiding over an HR tech strategy stuck in the past. Actually no! Jardines has thought carefully about how we want to modernise our HR processes and systems, howour employees should experience our HR systems, how we want to leverage our scale across a diverse conglomerate etc. We have a modern tech stack like many other big MNC’s – a core HRMS, ATS, Flexible Benefits platform, an LXP (& LMS), a Talent Marketplace and Colleague Volunteering platform being piloted. And coming soon a modern employee listening platformand some middleware to help uswith data flows and user management across these platforms. Enough to be excited about and to optimise as I have suggested above!

I would like to conclude with a few comments about our approach to tech in the Learning area. We chose 2 years ago to implement the Edcast LXP platform. Launched across Jardines, it is the place we go to “Create, Share & Learn”. It has evolved to become more of an employee experience platform than an LXP. We use it as the gateway into a plethora of internal and external resources - latest news, Group internal communications, access into learning programmes and digital learning libraries, our new Talent Marketplace and Volunteering platform, corporate and HR policies, a place for communities with common interests to gather and share and much more. A great example of stretching the standard use case of one piece of HR tech to both enhance our employee experience, and to (at least in the eyes of the users) simplify our overall HR tech landscape.

Maybe it isn’t for the faint hearted…but it is certainly fun!