We talk a lot about the technology for human capital management. Amidst all the understandable hubbub, you’d think we’d find a panacea in the state of the art in technology for HCM. Today’s technology for HCM is indeed a marvel, after all, in its capabilities and in the promise it holds. It’s a promise not only for highly engaged people leaders looking to use the latest and greatest cloud software, but also for HR departments that could really just use some help in solving for basic needs.
The idea that HR departments today can succeed with the help of highly capable technology alone is tempting to believe. In a way, that’s because it’s half true. Yes, it’s a welcome relief to automate operational processes. Yes, it’s a wonder to see real-time, easily accessible, full-view information about your workforce. Important as all this is, however, you still need people and the expertise they can bring to bear to solve complex HCM-related challenges.
Says Megan Coen, vice president of HR services at isolved and my guest on this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast, “It’s really exciting to be at a company that is looking at HR so holistically, because technology is a really critical piece of the puzzle to help businesses, but it is not the only piece. There are the people components, as well.”
Interestingly, the evidence out there seems to support the idea that most organizations are pursuing success in HR with a broad brush. In its Third-Annual HR Leaders Report, “Power Moves: What 500 HR Leaders Are Doing Now, Next,” 83 percent of respondents to isolved’s 2023 survey said their HR team is considered a strategic part of the business.
This is encouraging. Ever since I fell into HCM the better part of two decades ago, the drumbeat year in and year out has been that we must help secure a seat for HR at the table of organizational leadership.
“The HR function has really gone through such an amazing transformation, just in the time that I’ve been in the profession,” Megan says. Many HR departments have turned things around from being “a very paper focused function, a policy-focused function, into making it a strategic asset for the business.”
How has this happened? Has the mantra finally worked? Are we actually getting somewhere?
We don’t have to answer these questions conclusively. But a big part of success is probably the help of experts in change management, HCM strategy and all other things higher-level when it comes to HR. Airdrop a hungry people leader into an HR department, and that person will get somewhere with great technology. But whoever it is will get there faster, and beyond, with the help of experts from the outside looking in.
“For organizations that haven’t reached that elevated place in their HR maturity yet,” Megan said, “the most important thing that they need to keep in mind, is the change management piece.” To me, it seems to be part of a sound rationale behind why isolved calls HR outsourcing by a different name: HR augmentation.
Megan shared the story of an HR assessment she conducted in a previous role. Her recounting is better than mine, so you’ll have to listen to the recording, but here’s the gist:
The client was experiencing recruiting-related issues. Identifying that there was no application tracking system in place, she recommended one. “And that seemed like an easy win,” she said. But the client informed her that they had in fact implemented an ATS a year prior, but later pulled its deployment. Why?
As it turned out, though the organization had executive buy-in for the new ATS, the managers who were supposed to use it, didn’t. Waiting for password resets, not remembering how to get into the system, and other logistical hiccups were enough for managers at that organization to ignore the new ATS and simply email candidates, instead.
It’s easy to imagine how this might not have occurred had capable HR advisors been on hand to help at the outset. In a way unsurprising, of all the reasons respondents to isolved’s aforementioned survey gave for planning to switch HCM platforms, the highest number, 23 percent, pointed to service issues.
Megan brought a much-needed perspective to the podcast and shared additional war stories. She did a great job in laying out how isolved combines “the right blend” of technology and services, as she put it. You owe it to yourself to give this episode a view.
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Transcript:
Brent Skinner 00:00
Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to this the latest episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast. And with me today, I have a very special guest from one of my very favorite companies isolved. Her name is Megan Coen, and she is VP of HR services. Welcome, Megan.
Megan Coen 00:23
Thank you very much, Brent. I’m so happy to be here.
Brent Skinner 00:26
Oh, the pleasure is all mine. We’re so happy to have you here on the podcast. And we have a really, really exciting, interesting topic today. That that I don’t think is talked enough about in podcasts. It’s all about HR services. We talk so much about technology, in this in this podcast in in the space in general with the influencers and the analysts, of which I’m one. But we don’t talk about the services enough. And so, I’m really looking forward to diving into that with you today. First of all, I’m all tongue tied, first of all,
Megan Coen 01:02
It’s okay Brent, don’t be nervous.
Brent Skinner 01:05
Yeah, it’s funny that the host is a nervous one today, anyway, would you please maybe yeah, just introduce our audience to you know, just some of your background, what kind of led you to the role you’re in? That sort of thing? I think it’d be very helpful.
Megan Coen 01:21
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I’ve been in the HR profession for a little over 15 years now. And that has been, you know, mixture of internal roles for about half of my career, you know, working my way up, you know, through the HR generalist HR business partner kind of HR manager track, often at, you know, small dynamic tech startups, I happen to live and work in California. So, there’s a lot of very unique industry here, you know, around tech around biotech, that I’ve gotten a chance to work with very closely. And then in the more recent half of my career, I made the switch over to the consulting side. And I really loved that transition. Because as you know, as an HR consultant, you get to see a breadth of problems that you don’t get to experience if you stay at one company for five years of your career. So, it really kind of helps to accelerate your, you know, exposure to different challenges, different business experiences, different industries. And once I kind of caught that consulting been there, there was really no going back for me. So, you know, I’ve been at isolved Since 2021, leading the HR consulting kind of outsourcing solutions here, you know, here at isolved. And I do think I agree with you, it’s really exciting to be at a company that is looking at HR so holistically, because technology is a really critical, you know, piece of the puzzle to help businesses but it is not the only piece there’s people components as well.
Brent Skinner 02:54
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a great segue to sort of the perfect tee up question, we have to sort of start this conversation today. But just to kind of swoop out for a second here, and just kind of set the table I was looking at. And I saw his most recent report about people, leaders, and it’s called the power moves with 500 HR leaders are doing now. And next. It’s the third annual HR leaders report from you guys. And by the way, I read these all the time, they’re very in depth, and they’re very informative. What really struck me is that 83% of HR leaders, this, I believe it’s director level and above, I have to go back to my notes. And we’ll include this in the blog intro that comes with every one of these podcasts. But 83% of HR leaders believe that indeed, they indeed believe that they are seen as strategic by organizational leadership in their organizations, which is really, really I mean, that’s encouraging. We’ve talked about this, on and on and on for many years. Maybe it’s working? Well. I think it’s working. I like to keep talking about it. And it’s working. And they also say, though, that one of the things that they’re really looking to do in the coming year, is it we’re already almost halfway through the year. It’s amazing, isn’t it? That they really want one of their priorities is looking into outsourcing some of that HR function. And I guess it’s a really good segue here. Because, you know, we talk so much in the industry about technology, this and technology that what are some of the other things you touched? You touched on this briefly, and maybe you could dive into a little bit more, but what are some of the other things HR departments starting their journey to HCM maturity, which is where I think a lot of these organizations feel like they’re moving toward what are some of the other things that they might need?
Megan Coen 04:53
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, I was so excited to see that statistic as well. You know, I think that You know, the HR function has really gone through such an amazing transformation, just in the, you know, in the short time, relatively speaking that I’ve been in the profession, really turning it from, you know, a very paper focused function, you know, pop, you know, policy focused function into a strategic asset for the business. And I think that, you know, for organizations that haven’t reached that, that place in their HR maturity yet, for me, the most important thing that they need to keep in mind, is the change management piece. And this is something that, you know, my group from a strategic consulting perspective helps clients with often because, you know, it’s very easy for HR to be so in the weeds, that you don’t pause to step back and think about the strategy and the process for rolling out the changes that are necessary to reach those upper levels of you know, HCM maturity, and it, we can almost take it for granted sometimes, because, you know, we’re in HR, we’re in it every day, we’re reading the trends reports, we’re, you know, seeing the white papers, and we know that there’s value in, you know, these technology pieces, but we have a part of our role is to make sure that we’re bringing others along, in that in that journey. And I do actually have a very relevant example from a few years ago, with a client that I was doing an HR assessment for. Yeah, yeah. So I want I love an HR assessment, it’s bread and butter, you know, it’s really how I started my consulting career. And it’s nice, because, you know, it’s, it’s like CSI, right? Get let’s see how this happened. And you know, forensics, yeah, right. Forensics, right. And I, you know, I love, law and order. So I, I enjoyed getting into that nitty gritty. And for this particular client, as we worked through the assessment, you know, at the size that they were at, they were, they were, you know, kind of pushing 150 employees and kind of pushing, so they were reaching a stage where they really needed to get some technologies and processes in place, if they were going to keep scaling the way that they were going to. And I identified, you know, with them that they didn’t have an applicant tracking system, and they didn’t have an ATS. And that seemed like an easy win, right? You know, right front and center, you know, the volume that you’re hiring, the way that you’re scaling, this would be a great win for the organization. Have you ever thought about it? And they actually said, we implemented one a year ago, and we had to pull it out. And I was like, I have questions.
Brent Skinner 07:44
I do too.
Megan Coen 07:47
Right? What happened? Right, was it? Was it a tool? You know, was it not the right tool? Did you not have, you know, executive support, you know, what, what was the problem? And when we really dug into it, it it the tool was fine. You know, it had been signed off on everyone at the sort of top had agreed on the value and why this was important. But the managers that needed to adopt it weren’t on board. They weren’t on board. And for them, it was as simple as I had to wait for a password to get reset. I didn’t remember how to get in, and it was faster for me to just email you. Wow, it was a simple, it was as simple as that. Right. But, but because they hadn’t anticipated the needs of their managers and kind of brought them along in the change process. They if that issue got ahead of them, and it ended up kind of tainting the experience of the technology for some key managers that weren’t willing to be changed advocates because they hadn’t been engaged early enough in the process. And so, you know, we, we talked about how to address that, you know, for next time, right, communicating your vision, you know, using more data to kind of, you know, show the value and also maybe getting some champions since they knew they had resistant managers. So, change management critical part.
Brent Skinner 09:15
That’s a really illustrative story. I mean, yeah, I mean, it’s, thank you for sharing it really frames and, you know, and there’s all sorts of just instances of this kind of thing happening all across the fruited plain, I guess we could say. It really, you know, so this makes me think, you know, my mind is my the wheels are turning now because I’m thinking, Okay, we have a lot of solution providers in this space with a lot of wisdom. There’s a lot of great technology in the space and isolved has a great solution. We’ve spoken with plenty of customers that use it. What is I saw have sort of grants, philosophy or maybe strategy? And you don’t have to answer this question completely because we’re boiling the ocean here. But what is what is the sort of the rationale, maybe that’s a better word, the rationale behind having the HR services, because I can see some real synergies here and some positive stuff, to have that HR services arm that’s working sort of, you know, in complementing, let’s say, the technology stack, what, what’s the philosophy there?
Megan Coen 10:35
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think it’s a, it’s a few things. I use this. I overuse analogies. I love talking about soup, pods and airplanes, so bear with me. But you know, for me, buying really great technology is awesome. You’ve bought the airplane, who’s gonna pilot? Who is the crew? Who are we transport? Right? technology alone doesn’t solve a problem, right? It’s a vehicle to solve that problem. But the problem is, you’re trying to get from point A to point B, right? It’s not in and of itself, the destination, it’s just a tool. So from, you know, from Microsoft’s perspective, and you know, certainly from mine, there are a ton of organizations out there, both that have formal HR, and that don’t have very formally charter, that could really use, you know, a co pilot, where they could really use, you know, a crew member, some way to kind of what we call augment their existing team with a fractional HR resource to help them right to help them pilot, you know, this great plane that they’ve been invested in. And so, you know, we’ve, we’ve built an incredible team, I’m very, very proud of them, you know, we’ve got, we’ve got over 50 professionals that are experts in HR, you know, benefits, payroll, we’re helping, you know, over 1200 customers, you know, all over the United States. And, you know, we focus in a in a couple of areas, from a philosophical standpoint, we have our consulting solution, which is really where we focus in HR consultant work, and I will talk more about that in a moment. We also have our outsourcing solutions. So we do what we call managed benefits, you could think of that as benefits administration, where we were really the ones taking the work on for the client, you know, helping enroll people in, you know, carrier websites, you know, doing data management in the system, we have a similar solution that we call manage payroll, payroll, outsourcing, where we can really be the doers, and kind of take that work for you. And then, and then in our consulting side, you know, we’re, we are advisors, so the way that I like to describe that is sort of think of HR in three buckets. You know, there’s the administrative work of HR, you know, processing a background check, you know, doing data entry, setting an offer letter, that administrative piece still sits with our clients, and then we focus in the really compliance and strategic areas. So your compliance might be, you know, gosh, I want to hire this person, Am I doing it correctly? You know, I want to performance manage this person or exit them? Am I doing that correctly, they need to leave, you know, we need a policy, we need a handbook that real bread and butter HR compliance work. And then, you know, the strategy piece looks different for every client. Right, you know, that example around applicant tracking, you know, is a great one. And that’s a very strategic focus that we would have in our team. And we do HR assessments for clients all the time in that strategic space.
Brent Skinner 13:46
Interesting, interesting. You know, it’s a question that I think a lot of us have in the spaces, we hear so much about the change management and the strategy. And all of that I’m looping sort of lumping those together for the sake of this question, but or observation, I think, is that you gave a really good example of what that actually looks like. Because if it sounds in us, oftentimes, it sounds sort of like a, like a catch catchy term, you know, but what does it actually entail? Okay, it was do some change management. Okay. What does that mean? You said he does kind of like CSI, forensics, you going in there figuring out what, figuring out what makes that organization tick, so to speak, and then coming up with recommendations and helping them align their various people in ways they might be misaligned. Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, now, you were mentioning that so I can imagine that, you know, a lot of let me put it this way. And there’s a lot of vendors out there. They have a great technology, right and you hear all sorts of stories and we won’t name any names obviously because is just about every vendor has them. But you’re the stories where there was a, you know, something was sold, you know, and it was, and I’ve looked at a lot of these, and I happen to know that a lot of these are good systems, but they were sold, and then it was somehow implemented wrong or the or the buyer misunderstood what they were getting. And it just seems to snowball from there and it can look, it can make it look like the technology is bad, we may very well be, let’s say even just good enough, you know, I have this little theory that, that if your technology is good enough, especially in HCM, then, you know, that that, you know, if you’re if your technology is not good enough, then you have even bigger problems, and maybe you’re not going to be competing much longer in this space. But if your technology is good enough, then then there’s all sorts of other things that that are almost become more important, and that are going to going to result in more customers, more happy customers, what are your thoughts about that?
Megan Coen 16:11
You know, for me, for me, it gets back to the you know, that that airplane analogy, right? You, you know, if you put bad data and you know, bad processes into a good technology, you’re gonna get a bad outcome. And, and that may be you know, I don’t mean to say that a process is bad, or that the way you’ve been doing something all along isn’t organization is necessarily bad. But I don’t think there’s an HR person on the planet that wouldn’t say, Oh, we’ve got some improvements. Here’s a couple of things that we could, you know, shore up and kind of improve. For me, you know, one of the reasons I love doing HR consulting, in a software company like isolved, is because we have the ability to not only be HR experts, but also to be technology experts in our tool. So, you know, for us, that’s a core tenet of the consulting work that we do is helping our clients maximize their investment in the technology that they’ve purchased, and really get the most out of it. And that might mean, you know, optimizing its configuration in a way they’d never thought before using a feature that they hadn’t thought of before. You know, a really common example actually happens for us all the time is, you know, we’ll have a client go, Hey, I’m getting, you know, workers comp audit, I need to, I need to pull a bunch of data together, help, what do I do? And we can show them? Okay, well, this is this is the report that you pull an ISIL, this is how we collect that data in the system and make it available for you to do oh, gosh, you’re not actually tracking this data, as you as well as you could be, let’s help you set up a process. So that next year, when this happens, again, you can be confident that that data is available, it’s reliable, and you can get it out in a timely way. And that sounds like such a small thing. But for you know, for an organization, or for an HR team that’s already stretched very thin, and is just trying to do as much as they can with their limited resources, you know, saving 30 minutes that week can be a really big deal. And, and that’s one interaction in you know, 100 interactions that we’ll have with a client over the course of a year, right?
Brent Skinner 18:28
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That every single time savings is precious, you know. And, and, absolutely, that results in productivity gains. And, and I like to think, like to talk about, you know, what are the productivity gains, while you know, this person is, has that much more mental whitespace to actually think strategically, right? You mentioned, you know, I also like analogies and metaphors, and sometimes they can take analogies, you know, too far, like, you know, hey, hey, just, you know, abandon that analogy. Now, Brent come on.
Megan Coen 19:04
You start to stretch the metaphor a little bit right.
Brent Skinner 19:08
But the airplane thing is so good. You’re right, because, you know, you could make an airplane, that’s, you know, that’s especially easy, like, exceedingly easy to fly, right. But you still need it still needs to be sort of enticing for somebody to actually fly it. So, you know, so, you know, this side of have a true set it and forget it, HR system, which I, you know, I don’t even know if that’s even possible. You there’s okay, there’s a state of the art of technology, right? I think maybe you could potentially, even today, or you know, theoretically, probably not today actually having looked at the landscape, but at some point in the future, we could possibly create an HR system that’s fully autonomous, right. But it makes me wonder whether we’d, there would still be instances there will be, you know, these sorts of opportunities, we call them opportunities where, look, this is how you can make the system better, like that, you know, capturing the data story that you just shared. You know, one of the things that I hear about is autonomous pay, which, when I first heard about it, and I realized what it meant, I was really excited. Because I heard it a couple times, sometimes I’m slow. And I was like, well, autonomous pay, what does that mean? And then all of a sudden, it dawned on me, oh, yeah, like the autonomous cars that Google has, you know, autonomous pay, where it’s in a system where you actually don’t need any people tending it, tending to it, you know, just runs on its own. But this this conversation today is making me really, really question whether two things whether we’ll ever get to the point where we’ll have, you know, that autonomous autopilot, there’s the airplane analogy, good actually. System. And but deep more deeply, whether that’s a good objective anyway, is that the goal we want?
Megan Coen 21:11
Yeah, I completely agree. You know, I think that there’s a ton of opportunity for technology to simplify compliance, right, and to simplify, you know, processes eliminate man hours by making things more efficient, right. But there’s always going to be a human element to having humans in your business. Yeah. And I mean, that, you know, the, the chain, and the change management story, you know, that I shared with you at the beginning is a great example, where just throwing a technology out there and go, and we’re good, right? We’ve solved this problem with technology, it undervalues the human aspect of us interacting with these technologies on a daily basis, you know, needing them to add value to our lives and time back in our day. And then what, you know, what are we going to do with that time afterwards? So I’m so glad that, you know, our survey, shared such a high number of HR professionals that feel like HR is being viewed as a more strategic asset, because I view that as the future of HR, you know, the future of HR is not data entry, you know, or, or coming up with looking up what the policy is for New Jersey, right? That’s, that’s not the future of HR, the future of HR is, how are we going to be business leaders and lead our organizations into the future? And leverage those technologies and those people assets as effectively as?
Brent Skinner 22:38
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, let’s talk about what strategic HR can look like. Because I’m sure that you’ve, you’ve sort of, you’ve sort of observed firsthand a few sort of examples of this, you know, so you go in, you help an organization maximize the efficiency, the new kind of efficiencies that are sort of in their in the system. Now they have more time to breathe, you know, to take a deep breath. Think for a second, right, because they’re not just you know, like, all reactive all this stuff coming at me. That’s operational one. And now I can think, what are some of the things that you’ve been able to sort of help organizations do from a strategic standpoint in in in in their HCM?
Megan Coen 23:31
Yeah, absolutely. You know, so for, for starters, I’m going to tell another story, because I love a good story.
Brent Skinner 23:37
I love stories too.
Megan Coen 23:39
Very, you know, kind of early in my HR career, when I first I was a new manager, I was like a little baby manager, I had one intern that, you know, I had responsibility over and I was so proud of myself, you know, that I achieved that in my career. And my, my leader at the time, gave me some incredible advice that really stuck with me, which was Good leaders know how to delegate. Yeah, Good leaders know how to delegate. There’s only so much time that you have in your day, there’s only so much that you personally can do. You need to find your resources, figure out who the right person to delegate to is. And so for us, you know, when I think about what are the benefits of working with isolved HR services, to meet our clients that are utilizing us the most effectively has learned how to delegate to us correctly. Right. And, and, you know, for me, we work with clients that look all different types of ways. You know, we’ve got senior HR leaders that need to delegate compliance support, you know, our one of our larger customers is well over 1000 employees and they’re in 36 states. And they and they have an HR team of three Oh, Well, well below the recommended ratio of about 1.4 to 1200, you know, employees, thankfully, all in the US, so it’s a little bit less to me, you know, there’s no international complications, but they lean on us for proactive, you know, support around HR compliance, because they just can’t keep up, you know, without using us as help. But we also work with teams who have, you know, newer HR folks in there, you know, folks who are newer in their career, that are looking for strategic guidance, and, you know, change management support and, and, you know, validation that their thought process on how they want to implement something is makes sense. And that, you know, another HR professional, with a lot of years behind them agrees that that’s the right way to do it, you know, but we also work with office managers, and you know, payroll managers who are wearing the HR hat or owners, you know, who realized that they, you know, that they don’t know, what they don’t know, and that that’s opening up risk for their businesses. So, you know, HR problems, don’t go away, just because you don’t have a really formal HR team, those problems are still there.
Brent Skinner 26:12
Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but you get excited about a lot of things.
Megan Coen 26:16
I know I touched on a lot of things.
Brent Skinner 26:18
Well, you know, we, this term didn’t originate with us, it’s been out there, but this idea of accidental HR people. Yeah, and, you know, a lot of small companies that have grown to a certain size, they, you know, they’ve sort of, it’s almost like the, the, the not SRAP, at all, but it’s like that, that, what’s the what’s the, the residual stuff, but as they hire more people, they realize, oh, there’s a few, there’s all this stuff that I gotta take care of, in order to make sure I’m employing people correctly. You know, just like I’m dotting the I’s and crossing the t’s. And, and people take that on, sometimes it’d be, you know, you know, the, the Comptroller, maybe when it comes to payroll, or it might be, you know, maybe even the founder, you know, and in sometimes the you know, they’ll get to a point where they realize, okay, we need to hire somebody to take over this function. And then at that, that inflection point, there’s a, hopefully, you know, they’re savvy enough to understand that they need technology for it to they’re not, they’re not just bringing somebody on to kind of just, you know, roll this rock up the hill every week or whatever, right? And so it can be interesting. And then there’s some times, you know, we’ve actually looked at what I saw deployments were, or isolved. Engagements was called it. I don’t know if HR services was involved, but there’s, there’s one, it’s called, we actually published a case study vignette on this right at home, Long Island, North Shore, and that I’m not even going to try to pronounce his name right now, because he has a very difficult name starts with a Z but great guy, he’s talented, don’t, don’t worry, I won’t tell him. He may see this podcast, but anyway, I’ll figure it out when we when we post, but in any event, he’s the owner, it’s a franchise, it’s, you know, helping senior citizens at their home providing those types of services and, and he was really extolling the so he was sort of an accidental HR person, that was a not so accidental dental people leader. And so he actually works directly in the Eisav system, he has an HR person helping him he’s a franchise owner. So he’s not an HR person, but he’s working in the ice off system. And it’s helping them him to be more efficient. And so you can focus on people leadership. And again, I don’t know, if HR services is involved, there probably would only help to, you know, prove to improve that positivity even more but, but that’s a great example of this kind of, you know, it’s HR is so much more than that operational piece, and getting away from that operational piece, getting something in place with some sort of a combination of technology, and people who understand it and understand what HR is all about. That, to me seems to be the key to sort of, you know, HR, let’s use a crazy word emancipating itself. You know, it’s this, this this administrative tedium.
Megan Coen 29:31
Yeah, yeah. I and that gets back to what I was saying earlier, right, where it’s, it is so easy to be in the weeds, with HR and feel like you’re just going from one fire to another fire or to another fire. But you know, for me, you know, another thing that HR really needs to maintain is perspective, right? You’re not going to boil the ocean in a day. You’re not going to solve every problem that this organization has tomorrow, but If you’re thoughtful about it, you can find your where’s your low hanging fruit? Right? Where is where can you make the biggest value with the least resistance. And that could be something as simple as we need to get all of our employees the ability to ask for time off on their phones, right? Cisco simple. And that can have such a huge impact on the organization. And once you’ve got wins, right, once you have shown your credibility as a problem solver for the business, that builds the goodwill to make bigger changes, people will be along with you, because they’ll remember that you solved that critical problem for them. And if you have to find those things, right, you got to find your big rocks to put in first and then fill it in with sand. Another analogy with the rocks, right?
Brent Skinner 30:57
Well, what I love about that is that the spining, the small wins to build credibility, and it fits right into what I really liked about what I solved, says it’s helping HR people figure out those next steps. You know, it’s not, it’s not thinking about, yeah, there’s a journey, there’s a destination, and that’s inspirational, but, but at the same time, making it seem achievable by finding those next steps to, to really move in your journey into full HCM maturity, which is out of that red reactionary sort of operational. Just you know, that whatever you want to call it, you know, it’s just massive. And, you know, and just not being able to think to being able to think and having a vision, and in providing that full sort of strategic value that, that I’m not to go full circle here. But getting back to this, this, this, this positive sort of trend in the industry, where we’re seeing people are, it seems like people are figuring this out.
Megan Coen 32:07
Think of the two I think so too. And I think the Trends survey shows that and that just makes me excited for the future of HR consulting. And I’m glad I’m glad I’m where I am. Because I want to keep you know, having my team support customers through that transformational journey and watching ISIL do it too, right. We’re a company too
Brent Skinner 32:25
Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I’m certainly a plenty of people are really excited and happy to see you where you are. You’re doing great work over there, and I solved it. And thank you so much, Megan, for joining us at this podcast today. This has been a fascinating topic. I can’t wait to go live with this episode and, and just thank you so much.
Megan Coen 32:46
I appreciate your time very, very much and I’ll see you next time.
Brent Skinner 32:49
Yeah, absolutely. Bye.
Megan Coen 32:51
Bye Brent.