Automation in HR is Key to Digital Transformation: Q&A with Olivier Blum of Schneider Electric
“New tools and technologies are enabling us to automate processes, improve HR outcomes and provide a better employee experience – and with data analytics, we’re making better decisions overall.”
Human resources are continually changing and have shifted its focus from staff management to strategic human resource planning over the past few decades. New technological developments have made it possible for organizations of all sizes to improve the affordability, simplicity, and availability of HR automation services. In this highly informative HR Talk Interview, Olivier Blum, Chief Human Resources Officer at Schneider Electric, explains why upskilling and knowledge sharing will build a solid foundation for digital innovation in HR.
As an illustrious, award-winning HR practitioner, Olivier leads the HR team at Schneider Electric based on the three founding principles: diversity, high performance, and innovation. He talks about Schneider Electric’s people strategy for digital transformation and how automation in HR will define the success of HR teams.
He also answers questions on:
- How has the role of HR evolved over the years?
- How will the digitization of HR impact business outcomes at the company?
- How can HR implement AI to the benefit of employees?
Key takeaways from this interview on the impact of technology in the workplace:
- Find out which growing skills gaps need to be addressed for new generations
- Learn what Schneider Electric’s strategy looks like to future-proof its workforce
- Trends to follow in the digitization and AI space for 2020
Here’s what Olivier shares on the future of automation in HR and why digital innovation is necessary today:
Oliver, to set the stage, tell us about your career path so far and what your role in Schneider Electric entails.
**I’ve had a rather unconventional path to my current role as the global chief HR officer at Schneider Electric.** I started out at the company as a marketing engineer in the early 90’s. Since then, I’ve held a variety of positions throughout the company from engineering to sales and strategy, and I’ve had the privilege of working in different countries, including France, China, and India. These varied experiences at the company over the last 25 years have reinforced my belief that people are a company’s greatest asset, and I’m grateful to be in the position I am today to support that.
How has the role of HR evolved over the years?
More and more, HR is being recognized as core to business strategy and has evolved into a consultative role. It’s no longer just about onboarding and benefits. Companies are giving HR a seat at the table when it comes to key decisions, such as mergers and acquisitions or real estate purchases. Today, successful HR leaders are those with the financial and business acumen to advise on these matters and solve problems from a talent perspective.
I’ve also seen a shift over the past 20 towards a more balanced relationship between employees and employers, which is forcing companies to think differently about how they engage with their employees and to re-evaluate culture, leadership style, and the workplace experience in order to be an attractive employer to the new generation of workers. It’s why I believe we should be focused on a people strategy over an HR strategy.
**HR has evolved to be much more digitally-driven as well. New tools and technologies are enabling us to automate processes, improve HR outcomes and provide a better employee experience – and with data analytics, we’re making better decisions overall.**
With all this in mind, I think the most valuable HR skills today are business acumen, a strong appetite for digital innovation and being comfortable with data.
Learn More: Is Automation and HR Tech Replacing HR?
Against the backdrop of industry 4.0, what are the growing skills gaps you have observed over the years as new generations enter the workforce?
There are five generations in the workforce at Schneider today, spanning Baby Boomers to Gen-Z. The median age is getting one year older each year so we’re dealing with the question of how we manage our workforce for the future and ensure that we’re hiring folks with the right skills, while upskilling current employees and preserving the knowledge of workers entering retirement.
We’ve identified the most important technical capabilities to our business now and in the future, such as analytics, edge computing, and 3D printing and are working to build training and learning programs around them and to prioritize these skills in hiring. But it’s not just technical expertise that’s important.
In order to accelerate our digital journey, we need to foster a digital culture and ensure employees are taking advantage of tools and processes that allow them to be more productive and satisfied, whether it’s being comfortable using chatbots to adjusting to a more mobile, connected working style. Partnering with IT has been essential to mapping our workforce’s skills and planning digital training efforts.
What tools and techniques are in place at Schneider Electric to manage knowledge sharing as older generations retire? How can HR teams prepare organizations for seamless upskilling and knowledge sharing processes?
Many employees in our baby boomer population have been with us for a long time and have invaluable legacy knowledge. Giving them opportunities to grow and upskill is important but transferring their expertise to our newer workforce is almost more vital. One of the ways we’re encouraging this is through mentoring programs. Older employees who have a wealth of historical knowledge are working closely with newer entry-level workforce, which benefits both parties.
Another example of what we’ve done is within our field services organization where we have a lot of legacy employees with invaluable customer relationships and product expertise who are ready to retire. We’re partnering with them to create training programs while also upskilling them for digital because a lot of these educational programs now run on applications and platforms that they’re not accustomed to using, like tablets or VR headsets for example.
Another thing we’re doing to ease the generational gap is to be more flexible and accommodating to workers who are looking to retire. We don’t want to lose these people; they’re great assets to the company. By allowing them to work part-time or otherwise exit in a phased process, we can often retain them longer and buy us more time for appropriate knowledge transfer and staffing.
Learn More: Analyzing the Impact of Technology in the Workplace: Q&A with Jill Goldstein of Accenture
As an enterprise energy management and automation company, Schneider Electric has focused on adjusting its people strategy to support its ongoing digital innovation efforts. What are the lessons learned in this process? How will the digitization of HR impact business outcomes at the company?
This is a big priority for Schneider. Ultimately, our strategic intent is to find ways to work more intelligently and efficiently. In order to compete in today’s economy, we need to shift our portfolio of businesses to digital and our employees need to be able to drive this transformation.
We have already applied digital transformation within our human resources organization, taking measures applicable to performance, career development, incentives, departmental feedback, and other processes. **In the process of digitization, we have accumulated a large volume of employee data with which we have developed predictive models to help us better understand our employees and evaluate high-potential talent.** This has provided a reliable foundation for decision-making in our talent retention and training, which has contributed directly to our culture of digital innovation at Schneider Electric.
We have a come a long way but there is always more that can be done. Before investing, it’s important to focus on initiatives or products that truly create value for the specific problems you are trying to solve. Many legacy companies are still struggling to adopt digital systems and develop an analytical approach. This is a long journey that doesn’t need to be taken alone. Companies should not be afraid to work with both established digital HR partners and niche newcomers on the market. When building the digital HR foundation, my biggest advice is to work with partners that offer open APIs. Don’t over-invest in the foundation; work with top-notch smaller companies who have great expertise to build out your HR technology stack. Take a cue from IT and roll out digital HR projects in sprints; constantly test ideas and don’t be afraid to fail. Remember that HR is about the employee experience, which should always be seamless. Rather than just digitizing the current process, apply design thinking and focus on revamping your end to end process and workflow.
Lastly, I’ve learned that change management is key. Having the latest technology doesn’t mean anything unless employees have undergone the appropriate shift in mindset and are empowered by the different ways of working.
What are the ways in which HR can create heat maps of employees’ knowledge/skills and create new opportunities for upskilling, training and peer-driven knowledge-share?
As I mentioned previously, HR/IT collaboration is very important for this. We’re training digital experts to lead transformation and help prepare the workforce for industry 4.0.
**We’ve developed a Digital Citizen Framework with three personas based on digital proficiency against which we have been mapping our “white collar” employee population.** The training program operates in “mode 1” and “mode 2”, so it focuses on today, but also prepares for tomorrow. We started with the 2,000 leaders at Schneider Electric who have already demonstrated their commitment to training sessions. This created the much-needed momentum. Since then, over 38,000 people have participated in awareness and training sessions.
Learn More: The Age of AI is Here: How to Automate Your HR Team
Can you tell us about Schneider’s strategy to future-proof its workforce, achieve generational balance, diversity and cultivate a digital-first culture?
This is all wrapped up in our company culture which consists of three keywords: meaningful, inclusive and empower.
- We provide jobs that bring energy and efficiency to enable life, progress, and sustainability for all. Employees are very passionate about our mission and we focus on initiatives that ensure this mission is seen and felt every day throughout our organization, around the world.
- We create an environment that is diversified, inclusive and equitable and welcome people from all walks of life, and we provide equal opportunities for everyone, everywhere. Our inclusive policies have earned the company top recognition, such as being listed in the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index for the second year in a row.
- We empower our people to make the most of their energy and breed a culture of innovation. We want our employees to feel empowered to use their best judgment, to operate at their maximum capability, to feel personally fulfilled and of course, to have fun.
All three of these elements work together to guide our people strategy so that we’re equipping our employees with the skills they need today and tomorrow, that they feel inspired to support us in our digital transformation journey, and that everyone has the opportunity to be successful, no matter who they are.
How can HR implement AI to the benefit of employees?
**Automation and AI hold a lot of promise for the HR organization. There are multiple ways that these can be use across employee lifecycle and we see potential in every stage, with the most obvious applications in recruitment, learning and development, rewards and retention.**
For example, leverage AI to improve efficiency of internal candidate screening to improve employee job mobility. This makes the recruiters’ lives easier, but it also ensures we’re hiring someone who is the best fit and who will stay.
**Evaluate applicants against employees who are successful and high performing in the roles today. This way, we can predict an applicant’s fit based on their skills and abilities rather than what their resume says they have done before. ** We are excited about the power of this type of technology to identify nontraditional candidates who may have not had the exact experience in a function before breaking in, thus driving more diversity in the organization.
Can you give us a sneak-peek into the upcoming innovative HR projects that you are most excited about?
We are very excited about the recent rollout of a pilot project called Open Talent Market. It’s an AI-driven internal job posting platform that matches employees and managers to positions and projects, even remote ones. Open Talent Market helps solve many HR pain points for us. For one, it encourages internal mobility for our employees which allows us to retain talent who otherwise may have left because they weren’t feeling challenged or happy in their current role. **Enabling employees to work on new projects also helps with the upskilling initiative and broadens our workforce’s cross-functional capabilities, while upholding our culture of empowerment.**
It also helps ease the challenges associated with talent shortages and competition. Managers and project leads are often not aware of the interests and capabilities that already exist in the workforce and will automatically go the route of hiring or outsourcing, which takes additional time and resources. Now we have a way to build a community of employees who are willing and eager to be considered for projects and other roles, and the power of AI makes it so managers can find the best candidates, faster.
As we head towards 2020, which are the key trends you are keen on tracking in this space?
I am super passionate about diversity and inclusion, and obviously, this continues to be a hot topic in the HR space. Over the last few years, we’ve dedicated ourselves to shifting our understanding of diversity and inclusion and creating policies that support it. While our D&I journey started with gender diversity, one of our key pillars in our global strategy today is inclusion for all diversities, and we’re deliberate around five areas: gender, generation, nationality/ethnicity, LGBTQ+ and disability. Rather than focus on one area at a time, we take an intersectional approach to D&I. This means that we are aware of the way characteristics such as race, disability, gender, and/or socioeconomic background might interplay and account for this in our policies.
**When I think about what’s next for D&I, the biggest opportunity for improvement is inclusion.** It is not enough to have the right mix of people; we also want our employees to feel like they belong and are accepted for who they are. We don’t want our D&I strategy to be limited to “checking all of the boxes,” we want to nurture a company culture where everyone feels safe and included. Continuing to find new ways to make inclusion impact everything we do at Schneider Electric is a key priority of mine heading into 2020.
Neha: Thank you, Olivier, for sharing your valuable insights on the future of automation in HR. We hope to talk to you again soon.
About Olivier Blum:
Olivier Blum serves as Chief Human Resources Officer and Executive Vice-President of Global Human Resources at Schneider Electric where he leads a people philosophy underpinned by diversity, high performance, and innovation. He was honored with CHRO of the Year 2019 at the 24th Annual Director of Human Resources Awards organized by Cadremploi, Morgan Phillips Hudson, Le Figaro Décideurs and Fyte. He began his career at Schneider Electric in 1993 as Marketing Engineer then moved to the France Commercial organization where he has held various positions from Sales Engineer to Vice-Director of Country Sales. In 2003, he moved to China to hold position of Final Low Voltage Activity Director then was nominated head of Strategy and Marketing Director for overall China in 2006. In 2008, he was appointed Managing Director & Country President of Schneider Electric India. End of 2012, he was appointed Executive Vice President of the Retail Division, before assuming the global CHRO role in 2014. Mr. Blum is a Postgraduate in Business, Administrative and Financial studies from Ecole de Management, Grenoble.
About Schneider Electric:
Schneider Electric is leading the digital transformation of energy management and automation in homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure, and industries. With a presence in over 100 countries, Schneider Electric collaborates with a large global ecosystem of partners, integrators and the developer community on its open IoT platform EcoStruxure to deliver real-time control and operational efficiency. Schneider Electric is guided by the belief that the challenges of increased urbanization, industrialization, and climate change can be overcome through innovation. The energy future is more electric, more digitized, more decarbonized, and more decentralized – and Schneider Electric’s technologies and investments enable these trends.
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