Steve 0:00 It’s officially spooky season, but work shouldn’t feel a nightmare. If yours feels haunted by burnout and disengagement, try Workhuman. Workhuman’s number-one rated employee recognition platform connects work cultures through gratitude. Employees thank each other for great work and redeem those thanks for millions of items and experiences, keeping them engaged and productive. But here's the coolest part: these recognition messages contain rich data. Workhuman's AI mines it to identify quiet leaders, match mentors, and reveal team skills, enabling smarter talent decisions that generate guaranteed ROI. It’s good for people and good for business. All treats, no tricks. Visit workhuman.com to learn more. Workhuman, a proud supporter of the Happy Hour Podcast Network. Thanks for joining us! Steve 1:04 Welcome to the HR HappyHour show. My name is Steed Boese. I'm with Trish Steed, once again. Trish 1:09 I'm back again, look who's back. It's the end of what day two for us here at Oracle AI World? Steve 1:19 How many times do you think people have said Cloud World by mistake today? Maybe 3000 times? Trish 1:25 Probably, I thought I would, but I haven't. I don't know. AI world. That's what everyone's talking about. And you come here and you find out what's really going on. Steve 1:33 Yeah, it makes sense. And that's the energy here too, right? It's so massive, it's vibrant. There's a buzz, and it's, it's probably, you know, I said on the one of the other shows 87% due to AI, right? And I guess that makes sense, right? In the moment we're in. Trish 1:50 And the operationalization of it is what's important, right? Because we hear a lot about AI on the news, or maybe, you know, on the internet, and people don't understand how it's going to impact their lives and their business. And here is where you come to find that. Steve 2:04 Yeah, yeah. Hey. One of the best things about coming to AI world every year is that we get to meet a lot of cool people and have some of them on the podcast. And we have one here with us right now. She is Amanda Duval-Norwood. She's the CHRO at Harper College. Amanda. Welcome. Thank you very much. How are you? Amanda Duval-Norwood 2:20 I'm great. How about yourself? Steve 2:21 I am fantastic. I have heard a couple things about you. One is, this is your first podcast appearance, so congratulations and welcome you. We'll have, we have a gift for that, don't we to for first timers? We'll have to think about that. Trish 2:33 We'll send you a first timer's gift. Steve 2:35 Well, it's great to see you. So hey, tell us about yourself a little bit, and then let's learn more about Harper College? Amanda Duval-Norwood 2:41 Sure. So I am the Chief Human Resources Officer for Harper. We have about 25,000 students that are across a couple of campuses in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, and we are the second largest community college in the state. So almost there. Amanda Duval-Norwood 3:00 What do we got to do to do to get to be number one? Amanda Duval-Norwood 3:08 You have to get rid of the College of DuPage, which is a real effort to take them down. Trish 3:13 Steve is in Illinois, he'll make this happen! Amanda Duval-Norwood 3:13 We also have another 8000 community education students, and so we're not just looking at students, you know, to come and earn a two year degree transfer to another four year university. We also, as our president, likes to say we are the community's college, and so we want people on our campus. And so that helps me in the HR arena to hire really cool people, to work with students, to work with community members. We are always looking for what's bigger and better that's out there. This is my 28th year in human resources. Steve 3:50 So have you been in mostly in higher ed? Amanda Duval-Norwood 3:52 I've been mostly in higher ed. So I started off in healthcare. I worked at hospitals and senior living communities, but back in 2011 I went to a large public university down in Texas, and I thought that higher education was just a really big campus with 60,000 students and 5000 employees. But I've also got to spend some time on small private colleges campuses, and then Harper is my first community college. I was born and raised in the Harper district, and so I really felt like I was coming home when I graduated from high school 30 years ago, I was actually enrolled to attend classes there, and at the last minute, decided to go to a different community college. So I am a community college product, which I'm very, very proud of. But I felt like three years ago, somebody was knocking on my head saying, I can't tell you to apply to this job, but apply to this job, and everything just lined up. And so it's just a really cool feeling to have when something like that happens to you. And immediately, when I walked on campus, there was this family atmosphere. I have 12 employees. Steve 5:07 Sorry to interrupt you, do you have a residential component for students? Amanda Duval-Norwood 5:11 There's nobody on campus; and so we support the like far northwest suburbs: Schaumburg, Palatine, Barrington, there's five different counties that actually feed into us, and so large, large populations that are coming to our campus, either to, you know, earn that degree. We even have, like, our dual credit program has exploded, so students who are staying at their high school will now be able to earn a degree, and the same day they graduate from high school, they're going to graduate from Harper and have that Associate's degree. And whether they choose to come and earn another certificate or take more degree programs or transfer to another four year, they have that opportunity. We also have a university center on campus. Six colleges and universities across the state of Illinois hold classes. So if I want to take classes from DePaul or UIC, Northern Illinois, Southern Illinois, I don't have to go anywhere. Steve 6:16 Shoutout to the Slukies. Amanda Duval-Norwood 6:17 I'm not an alum, but that's okay. But how nice is that I don't have to if I don't have that opportunity to, you know, go and stay at a residential campus, I still get that experience. I'm still able to finish up what I need to do. Trish 6:36 Well, I love your passion, and thank you for sharing kind of that full circle moment. I always like to find out what got people into HR. Amanda Duval-Norwood 6:44 It was an accident for me. So I had originally signed up at Harper to be a dental hygienist. So Harper has the largest dental hygiene program in the state of Illinois, the oldest as well. And when I look back on it and thought, Gosh, I could have spent 30 years looking at people's teeth, but sometimes that's like HR, like pulling teeth for people. So there is a little bit of similarity there. But yeah, I just decided that that wasn't the path that I wanted to follow, and started taking some business classes. And the employer that I had at the time said, Oh, you took an HR class. We have an opening in HR com and work in HR and I said, Great. And here I am. Trish 7:27 I think that's how it happens for a lot of the people we talk to, myself included, it's you don't dream of being an HR professional from the time you're six, but it's good to know that you can take some of the skills that you're developing your entire time through school, right? Not just high school, but through community college, and then now you're leading HR. Can you tell us a little bit you mentioned briefly you have a team of 12. What are your employee population like? Is that primarily people that are full time? Are they part time? Professors that come in? What does that look like for yourself? Amanda Duval-Norwood 7:59 We have about 2200 employees across campus. That is about 1400 full time, anything from custodial and grounds all the way up to a tenured professor. And then we have another 800 adjunct faculty who may come and teach one class and never teach for us again. And then we have some who have been around for 25 years and just love teaching for us. And so it's a pretty good mix of employees across campus. Trish 8:29 I love it. So one of the things we know you were doing here at Oracle AI World is you were leading a session, right? You're part of a session called from first steps to sustainment to AI agents, a panel on Oracle Cloud growth, yes. So maybe just give us a little bit of background. How long have you been a customer here at Oracle, and what are you using to, you know, help all of these, not just the employees, but your entire community, share in Harper? Amanda Duval-Norwood 8:56 So Harper has actually been a customer of Oracle for decades. So we were on the old EBS. Steve 9:03 Shout it out, version 10.45? Amanda Duval-Norwood 9:13 I kind of lucked out there, but later live with HCM and ERP and SCM back in 2021 so imagine doing an implementation during covid. And so when I joined campus in June of 2022 that's all I heard about. I heard about how miserable it was. I heard about the long hours. And I said, well, guess what? It's not over. And so I was brought in to really make that change. You know, what can we do to improve? We turned on this system just enough to make things work. We like to joke that we bought a Cadillac and didn't buy the wheels. We didn't buy the steering wheel. And so slowly but surely, we've been adding those. So in November 2023, we went live with recruiting and Journeys. Years, and that was a very quick nine month implementation. And we took a different approach. Instead of saying to everybody across campus, here's what we've done now, learn it, we've said, hey, guess what? We're making these changes, and we need you as a champion and you as a champion, and we want you on board with us. And so hearing from the very beginning what it would mean to lose the papers, lose the you know, you don't have to run around campus and find somebody's signature to get a position approved, to get it posted. If you missed that Wednesday morning deadline, you don't have to wait another week. Our positions are now getting posted within hours of being inputted into the system, the Journeys, the onboarding piece, there's no more packet of information that you're going to get in a PDF and say, Here, print all these all off and then either scan them and send it back to you or bring them in on your first day. And so all that pre work that employees can do beforehand, then sets them off on the right foot. They're coming in, and they're like, Yep, I'm ready to learn my new job. I don't have to go and sit for six hours in HR and sign my life away. Everything is a task, and they're able to get through all of that. Since then, we've spent probably the last 18 months what I like to call optimizing and so looking at buying the tires for our Cadillac, and looking at buying our steering wheel for the Cadillac, and saying, Okay, what can we do to make sure that, out of that the whole HCM suite, do we have everything turned on? You know, if we own it, is it sitting on a shelf collecting dust, which, of course, we don't want to do. We're their taxpayers. Pay our salary, right? Steve 11:44 There's not a huge amount of extra money laying around right for MIT spend over there. Amanda Duval-Norwood 11:50 So, you know, we have partnered with a consulting group, Baker Tilly, to help us out to recognize a lot of the work that we needed to go back and say, Well, you know, time and labor looks really good, but did you know you could do this? Or also looking at what were we keeping track of on paper still? So we have six unions across our campus, and so I get to the fun job of working with them as well. We have a police union, we have one for civilians and we have one for sworn officers. So same union, two different units, two different collective bargaining agreements, both of them earning comp time. So in one computer in the whole campus, everybody is recording comp time. We will go live with comp time and Oracle by the end of the year. So how nice that police officer who maybe wants to take a day off can then go out and see exactly what they have in their bank and not have to call or not have to track down that person who maybe is on vacation for a week. And so those are some of the things that we've been able to discover. The other thing that we went live with a couple months ago was FDI, which is really cool. So fusion data intelligence, okay, so that is there, you know, I open it up, I get to see my dashboard of reports, really pretty pie charts, you know what, and I can drill down. I have access to the whole campus. And so when somebody says, What does it look like? I'm like, Well, I can only show you so much, because, you know, the security that was huge for us. We wanted to make sure that somebody from financial aid wasn't going to log in and see the health careers area information. So we spent a lot of time making sure that those parameters were set up and secure for us, but now we have to figure out a way to teach people how to use that information. We can ask them, hey every Monday morning, go in and open up your reports, and they're going to go, oh, this is so cute, you know, like what? But what do you want me to do with that? So, you know, putting in some tasks, or if we're coming to our monthly administrators meeting, you know, I want you to look at this report, and I want you to answer these questions, and everybody needs to come with that information, and let's talk about it for a few minutes. So as we continue to add more things on, we need to make sure that we're also asking people to use it, so we don't want to go through the pain points of implementing something and then say, Oh, well, it's really just for HR. It's not, it's for the whole entire campus. Steve 14:29 And there's a bit of hand holding perhaps you're having to do, right? And sort of carrying people along, try to give them that what's in it. For me angle too. I've spent some time in higher ed myself, and I think for people who haven't worked in higher ed. It's, it's a little bit shocking, because I was new to it where, like, at some point, I guess everybody's new. But just how challenging it could be. I don't know if you do like the shared government's model at your school, yeah. So getting decisions made, especially for change efforts, super challenging. And then once even you could get decisions made, because there's a lot of very collaborative decision making in higher ed, lots of committees, right? It's very little of an executive, even a CHRO, relatively little, right? Saying, Okay, this is what we're doing. Everybody, line up. It's, it's hard to pull that stuff off in higher ed. So, yeah, it can be tough. They the, I think the dental hygiene analogy was after, you know, because that's sometimes it's to bring people along is challenging. Amanda Duval-Norwood 15:28 It is yes, and when you get it past one area in shared governance, you probably still have five or six other steps to make a change. And so we're fortunate that we have an IT shared governance committee that is fully aware of everything that we're trying to do with this. So when I'm sitting explaining about our next project, there's representatives from everybody across campus so that I don't have to take my road, my show on the road, and I don't have to give the same speech 20 times. The expectation is they're going to hear it in that meeting, and they're going to bring it back to bring it back to their group, and they're going to say, yep, HR has another round of releases. HR is going to go live with this. We're putting information out in our weekly newsletter, just whatever communication we can, so that nobody says nobody told me about like we've never heard that before in HR. But that's that constant communication is key to us to get our work done. Trish 16:25 I love all the creative ways that you're bringing this information to all of the cohorts that are important and needing to know, right, especially in a very disparate sort of situation. I also am really glad you mentioned the unions we did an interview with another gentleman, another customer, who has he's a little bit further down the path in terms of using some of these things and the results that you can get from partnering with Oracle, not just on productivity, but on safety, on security, on data privacy, on retention. I mean, it's really eye opening when you think about everything that you sort of have the keys to the city, right? So you're just now trying to make sure everyone's on board. Are you getting any feedback from the users yet on some of these things that you're using, such as Journeys or some of the others, how does that look? Amanda Duval-Norwood 17:16 Yeah, you know, I hear more from the supervisors when it comes to Journeys, because they have that capability to go in and look to see, is there anything outstanding? Is there something that we're still waiting for? And so we've given them that permission, which is really nice, because if they're they say, Oh, well, you have an extra hour today. Is there HR training that you need to do that's still out there? They're looking for the green check marks to make sure that everything is checked off and they're ready to go and they don't get that like, nasty gram, hey, Susie, you know you still have to do this. And so old school HR was always like, well, HR is supposed to tell us what to do. Yeah, we've kind of changed the mindset on that. We're not going to tell you what to do. We're going to give you a list, and you're a responsible adult, and you can go out there and you can see what's out there. Now, if there is something that's pretty important, like, we need your tax form, or we need your benefits forms, yes, we're going to do the white glove and we're going to say, come on to HR, and we'll help you with that. But for the most part, people hate filling out those forms they're not excited about. Here's your sexual harassment prevention training and your diversity equity inclusion training. But you know, we we say, here it is, here's your reminder, here's the link to do it, do it. And that's worked really, really well for us and our president, Dr. Avis Proctor, and she is just a phenomenal to work with. One of her favorite words is digital transformation. So what are we doing to continue to enhance what, what our product does for us on campus? And so every decision, every conversation that we have, of you know, what's next? What can we do better in Journeys? What can we think about, you know, next year for open enrollment, for benefits, we're thinking about that digital transformation. And it's always about what's in it for the employee. You know, HR kind of comes second to that. What's what? What would make hr's job better? No, it's what's in it for the employee. Trish 19:22 You know what though, I want to sort of piggyback on that idea, because what you're talking about, though, and I don't know if you're quantifying it in this way, but it's such a huge time savings, both for me as the employee, but also for HR and also for the supervisors. Ultimately, you mentioned briefly the dashboards. Are you measuring some of that time saved, or how are you looking at maybe some of the metrics around just being more efficient? Amanda Duval-Norwood 19:47 We haven't gotten that far yet. Okay, so it's turned on more to come. We actually would like to get our trustees involved in that. So we have a very active board of trustees on campus. They're very, very. Tech savvy, they're data driven, and so we would like to know what they want as well. So you know when we meet on a monthly basis or even a quarterly check in, is there some sort of report that we can run or ask a particular area to highlight something? And so we want to make sure that they're getting that information as well. Steve 20:22 Yeah, it's really interesting. I have not, I don't get a chance to talk about higher ed as much, right? And I did spend, I don't know now how many years it was, a number of years it was not, it was in a four year school, and I was working, you know, staff, and I did some adjunct work there too. But I just recall, and I won't put Harper College on the spot here. I won't ask Amanda this, but I remember that one of the things I had to do is it was in an EBS system to configure back then, was job requisition approvals, right? We had the recruiting module, and so how many who has to say yes? Or it was digitally, right? It was online approval to get the job approved and posted on on the career site. And there were certain jobs, I'm not kidding you, 12 or 13 people a job, rec, had to pass through that all it was sequential to we weren't that sophisticated back then in the technology. You couldn't really do parallel routing and things like that. So this thing, and sometimes you'd have to go back and look, okay, where is it? Oh, it's seven out of 12. Out of 12. Steps in. It's seven out of or eight out of 13 and and you think, like, what the heck is going on here? But there was a lot of, lot of fiefdoms, at least, to the place where I was, where they're controlling. It was unique to, I felt it was unique to higher ed. I don't know if it is honestly, but it seemed to me it was unique. Trish 21:42 Probably, I mean, I was an EBS customer as well, and we thought it was the best thing, because compared to working off of Excel spreadsheets and pivot tables and, you know, all of those. So I think it's just as you go through, what was most important to me in becoming a customer at Oracle was the trust I needed data I could trust. I needed, the security I could trust for my employees. And you mentioned payroll, I mean, it's those, those basic things, benefits, payroll, that once you don't have to worry about that as much, then some of those things, like processes, that there's always room for improvement. And I think now I remember being the first time I heard about fusion. I literally wanted to cry. I was at an HR tech conference, and, you know, Oracle was on the big stage, and I was just, I went and called my boss, and I'm like, Oh, we have to have fusion. Like, this is ridiculous. So it's, for me, it's inspiring to hear. You know, it's only 15 years later, and you're really starting, just at the precipice of getting all of this really great value. So I'm really excited for you. And as someone who's been in the industry yourself 28 years, could you maybe just give us a little overview of like, how has, how have you seen technology just really revolutionized the way that you do work? Amanda Duval-Norwood 22:56 Yeah, and I think that is dependent on the size of the school, the location of the school. So before joining Harper, I was at a small private in Michigan, and I was still using the spreadsheets for recruiting, you know. Trish 23:10 If anyone's listening and they're still on spreadsheet, they're not alone, they're not I know, yeah, people think they're behind. No, can't catch up. It's true. It's the people are still using these things. Amanda Duval-Norwood 23:21 It is. And, you know, when it's a small campus and it works and there's a focus somewhere else, they'll get to it eventually, you know, and Steve 23:29 It's often not a priority, right? From from a you from an institution standpoint, right? Amanda Duval-Norwood 23:34 Yes, because the student side of the house is always going to be number one. Yeah. What are we doing for students with their progress reports, with their financial aid. Are they getting that information right now? At Harper, we're in a spot where HCM, ERP, SCM, we're looking at EPM now to do some work after the first of the year, because that's kind of that centerpiece that's going to tie everything together for us. We're trying to get everything done that we possibly can, because we're thinking 2, 3, 4, 5, years down the road, student is going to come to our campus, and then all the focus is going to be on them, and we're going to just sit back and go, Yep, we're good. We got everything that we want right now. And so that when you talk about what's next in technology, it's everything. You know, my I have a new boss on campus, and I warned him I'm like, you probably shouldn't send me to Oracle anymore, because I come back with pages and pages of this wish list. And I have two co workers that are here with me at the conference, and they're both IT people and that always, you know, it has a different vision than HR. And I saw them around lunchtime, and they said, Oh, they're not going to like us when we get back to the office. We have all these ideas. Trish 24:50 You're sort of like, you're banded together, you're going to go back and sort of, you know, hit it from both angles. Yeah, I think too, we've heard from other IT professionals here and. It's all about the people. At the end of the day, it's all about employees making things easier, more accessible, doing it in a way that's safe and secure, and once you get that established you've mentioned earlier, like not necessarily having everything turned on, right, every HR, professional probably listening can relate to that, right? Or you take a new job and you're inheriting some new system, and not everything's working, correct? So I love the fact that you're like, it's everything we need everything, and then we'll just figure it out as we go along. Amanda Duval-Norwood 25:30 Yes, so yes, an analogy we have used with the redwood changes since the first of the year is we're going to turn on all the lights in the house, and then we're going to turn off the ones in the rooms that we're not using right now. So rather than trying to figure out which lights to turn on, you know, and we said, If we turn it on and we leave that light on and realize it's not quite working the way that we want it to do, then it's easier for us to turn it off and say, never mind. Come back. We'll let you know when this is up and running. Trish 26:01 Can that just be the lesson for anyone listening? That is such that's great, big, huge takeaway. I've never thought of it that way. Yeah, I learned something every time I do one of these shows. That's a huge takeaway. Steve 26:14 Amanda, this has been super fun. I'm glad you indulged me a little bit. I told my one higher ed story. I've got, actually more than one, but that's the one I tell a lot. Anything left for you this week? Anything you're looking forward to, either inside or outside the conference, like Vegas thing, a conference thing, what's left on your plate this week? Amanda Duval-Norwood 26:31 I'm excited about the presentation tomorrow afternoon. It's always nice to talk to somebody who's just starting out, because I didn't get to do the starting out. I walked in, you know, in like, the fifth inning of a baseball game, and we're not quite to the ninth inning yet, but I am ready to soak up more AI stuff, because if I could go back and next week, turn on every AI agent that's out there in HCM, I'm going to do it. You know, we've been we've embraced AI on our campus. We've adopted it. We have policies already in place around it. And so why not? You know that person who says, well, I need to write a job description. Can I do it? And I'm like, No, go out. Use the AI agent that's in there. We did use it for performance reviews this past year. How did it go? It went very well. You know that that group that has like 100 reviews to do, and they're kind of cookie cutter, like Amanda, did a great job this year. They were able to personalize some things. And I really hope the employees felt that they didn't know that we were using the AI in it, but then they, some of them figured out that they could use it themselves. So that goal setting is turned on, and they're like, I'm just an HR front desk person. What's my goal? Well, what do you want to do? You know, put it in there. It'll be written nicely. It's gonna be easy for us to track for you. So I want to see more and that. So I'm hoping the next, you know, day and a half, I'll be able to make a longer list of all my wishes that I want, and it'll be exciting back on campus. Trish 28:10 Great stuff. I think Harper College brought in the right home run. . Amanda Duval-Norwood 28:13 Aw, thank you! Steve 28:17 You're on the way to becoming the largest community college in Illinois, I don't know. Maybe we do, I don't know, but for now, we don't. Amanda Duval-Norwood 28:27 We definitely want to be the trend setter that's out there, and we see it in what we're doing for our employees. We see what we're doing for our students, the programs that we're bringing in, the grants that we're bringing in. It's just a really awesome place to be. Steve 28:41 Great. Awesome stuff. Amanda, great to meet you. It's Amanda Duval Norwood from Harper College and CHRO. Great stuff. Trish, this has been super fun tonight. We're wrapping up our day today, great conversations with great customers and more to come. So it's been a great day. Trish 28:55 I have learned so much from each episode. We enjoyed it. So thank you for all the learning. Obviously, you can't see my my paper here. I've taken tons of notes so. Steve 29:05 Okay, that's it, from Oracle AI world today. Go to HRHappyHour.net for all the show archives and more. Tell a friend. Subscribe all the things. My name is Steed Boese, for Trish Steed, for our guest, Amanda Duval Norwood, this has been the HR Happy Hour show. We will see you next time. And bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai