HR This Week/AC 2015 - Interview with Mike Walsh

hi I'm Liz Bernier I'm with Canadian HR reporter and HR this week and I'm at the HRP a conference in downtown Toronto I'm with Mike Walsh who just finished his keynote speech on how the cloud will disrupt the future of business technology hi Mike alright thanks for sitting down with me today that's my pleasure okay so can you tell us a little bit about your session for the viewers at home in some ways i was speaking less about the future of the cloud and technology as opposed to the future of people as a futurist i

actually fine i do less and less work looking at the far future and more looking at the present because the biggest forces are changing the way we live the way we work the way we think about managing people actually comes down to shift in behavior so I what I've had to do for the audience was to chunk down some of the big changes we're seeing in the business world today and to a few really actionable questions and points that they can then take for and could you tell us what some of those big ones are what it is of course so I broken down to five ideas the first is

wasn't it take to engage the next generation of employees secondly how do we create a sustained a high performance culture thirdly how does the cloud actually challenged us to rethink the idea in the structure of the company fourthly how do we reconsider innovation not just based on what we see in Silicon Valley but really taking account of global context particular China and India and finally we've heard a lot about big data but how does data change

the way that we can become more effective leaders okay can we draw into that last once a little bit more could you tell me more about that I you know there's been a lot of hype about big data and I think sometimes in the rush to talk about data and analytics and all the IT vendors trying to sell people data-driven suites we lose what that means for us is HR leaders and what I really spoke about in the presentation was that you know the first step is that understanding to live in a data-driven Enterprise means that we can't just

think about what's happening in our own silo I mean it's not enough just to measure the performance or engagement or if people are happy or not we've got to try to find a way to link data from even things like assessment through to the real performance from in the enterprise systems I mean how do our criteria that we use to hire people translate with a sales person in their revenue targets once I think we start the linked data from around the business we can start to really change our perspective what that means for the future of talent manager

but the other side of that is as leaders we have to learn also to use data to be more persuasive and use it to demand a stronger influence on management okay so what sort of changes do you see happening with productivity performance as we move into more cloud technology I think the worst case scenario for with any technology whether it's the cloud or anything else is that it merely replicates the old business process at a different price to me the

real value of the cloud is when it starts to challenge the way we think about our organizations and with any new technology the minute you start to see more the transactional elements becoming automated then the challenges on us to ask themselves how do we and our teams elevate what we do how do you be more strategic some mighty vendors say like there will be no HR department the future will be software that's really short-sighted because yes to be aspects of HR that won't exist in the future because they'll either be outsourced tour automated but still it takes people

to understand people and the role of HR is going to be more importantly future not less as technology takes away the things that really are the least important part of the function today well thank you so much Mike I really appreciate you taking the time out today my pleasure