As with AI, going digital begins with the mind

Even with the plethora of articles and research about technology and how it has impacted and improved our lives, the usual fears continue to linger in people’s minds – fears of the new and the unknown, ‘what if I can’t keep up?’, ‘what if it takes my job away?’, and so on.

Yet there’s nothing new about these fears, and history shows us that people are well able to reinvent themselves amid changing times. In a study by the economists at Deloitte, they examined census data that went all the way back to the 1800s, and came through with a key insight – “Machines will take on more repetitive and laborious tasks, but seem no closer to eliminating the need for human labour than at any time in the last 150 years.”

For our latest interview focusing on HR tech, HRD has on board Aviva Singapore, one of our Employers of Choice for 2017 and a top performing company in terms of communication strategy and career progression. HRD chatted with People Function Director Anuradha Purbey about how her team and the Group as a whole are going digital by honing in on learning, to make employees see that technology can be their best friend instead of their worst nightmare.

Could you begin by telling us how technology has impacted your job and your team’s jobs in recent times?
Technology has really helped simplify our jobs when it comes to repetitive tasks. It has created a lot more time [for us] to focus on business partnering, to do some higher value-added roles and make contributions to the business, instead of spending a lot of time analysing data, pulling reports, which can now happen through technology.

The other thing that technology has helped us do is to increase reach. People are getting busier and they have many more choices in terms of how they want to spend their time. So while we have to train our employees, people now prefer more of the real-time, on-the-go type of training – you know, being at the airport, waiting to catch a flight, I have 15 minutes, I have time and I just want to go through something; or, I’m an advisor, I’m sitting at a coffee shop, I’m seeing a customer in half an hour, and I want to understand or refresh my memory on a product feature.

Technology has helped us by making learning more accessible and more real-time. So it’s available when I need it, instead of [for example], I can’t attend a training session, and therefore I’m deprived of the knowledge that I would have picked up, or not have access to the knowledge I need.

What are some of the software/technology that you are using to make learning on-the-go available?
We do two things:

1. We have come up with a mobile app that is available to around 500 advisors. We’ve loaded product content onto this app, along with other sales tools that will be helpful for our advisors to service our customers better.
2. GROW – this is a learning content platform; on it we’ve got more than 500 content pieces that employees can go in and learn whenever they have the time.

As for what our Aviva Group [as a whole] is doing – as an example, a lot of our leaders go on training. So instead of sending PowerPoint presentations and other things, there are apps that are created, for leaders to login and there are training materials, live blogs, user experiences. Everything’s shared via these apps.

In line with all of that, could you give us an overview of your L&D strategy and how technology has been integrated into it?
There’s a lot of work that we are doing with our employees to help build their digital [skills] – it’s starting off with mindsets, rather than technology.

When we started to think about the digital, I think the obvious question that people ask would that be of uncertainty around digital; say, if I adapt to the digital, will my job go away? That’s the first question.

Our hypothesis is that roles will get realigned, capabilities will change, and new jobs will emerge. But if people are future-proofing themselves, it is not necessary that everyone is going to lose their jobs; it’s just that they’ll be doing different things.

What we’ve started to do is something called the digital mindset shift. We run this series, and we’ve done about four of them.

We start off with ‘sensitising’ our people that technology has already invaded our lives. For example, we asked them, ‘when was the last time you went to a bank branch?’, or ‘when you go and look for your next holiday, do you go and look at all the websites which give you various features, and you go to the customer comments [section]?’ So we are actually using technology to make our lives easier.

Then we start to get them feel a bit more comfortable about it – how Dominos, for example, is experimenting with drones for pizza delivery. I saw a video of a self-driving car delivering a pizza in one of the cities in the US. So we get the people to see these videos. And then we got a drone to the office for this series, and we got the drone to deliver a gift to someone sitting in one end of the room.

So in a very fun way, we are getting people to appreciate the fact that technology has already invaded our world, and [think] how you can make your technology your best friend, because best friends are there for you when you need them the most. So that’s the kind of analogy [we have] in terms of humanizing technology when it comes to mindset shifting.

We talk a lot in HR about making smarter decisions thanks to big data and data analytics. How are your company and team doing in this area?
For HR work, we have Workday, our HRMS. The starting point to going digital is making sure that we have access to accurate data…the people, demographic, compensation details, grades, leaves, all sorts of things are housed in this [Workday] system.

And then we use the data to come up with some predictive models, like attrition; I can pull data from Workday and predict with 70% accuracy who are the employees who are likely to leave the company.

For example, for our new hire failure rate, which looks at employees who leave us within 12 months of joining, we can already predict with reasonable accuracy the typical profile of a ‘leaver’. We’re refining the accuracy levels with more data, and the idea is to be better prepared to have the right conversation.

So we use analytics to drive the right conversations, so that we can take meaningful actions, to prevent the outcome, which in this case would be people leaving Aviva, especially within the first 12 months of joining the company.

Based on your experiences, how would you advise HR practitioners to embrace HR technology-related disruption instead of fearing them?
We need to accept that change is happening all around us, and the fact that technology has already invaded our lives – be it social media, or the way we do banking, or online retailing. If we draw confidence from the fact that technology has made things easier for us, then [next] it’s to have the confidence that it will also make it easier for us at our workplace.

As a result, we need to keep in mind that we need to use technology to ensure that we stay relevant. And to stay relevant, it is important to find out where we can leverage technology. Sometimes the problem is, people look at technology and say, ‘oh this is the newest and latest fad, and therefore we need to adopt it’.

But what we’re doing in Aviva is saying, ‘what is the key outcome that we want to drive using technology?’ And we identify what makes the most sense for our customers, employees, and our business, and then find a way to deploy the technology. And when you see the results, it adds so much value – the outcome – to the decision making process, to the end goal. Suddenly, it becomes so much more meaningful.

If we can find some world business areas where technology can make an impact, and if we get it right, you’d feel so much more confident about the use of technology that you would want to use it again and again.