The ‘Quest’ to Revolutionize HR Tech

The ‘Quest’ to Revolutionize HR Tech

Hosts: Steve Boese & Trish Steed

Guest: Hubert Winter, Senior Director at Quest Diagnostics

Today we are continuing our conversations from Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas. Steve and Trish met with Hubert Winter to talk about their HR journey with Oracle Cloud HCM.

– HR technology journey at Quest Diagnostics

– Scheduling challenges and how to overcome them

– Employees reactions to the Oracle Cloud HCM platform

– The future of AI in HR

Thank you for your continued support of the show and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

Transcript follows:

Steve 0:29
Welcome to the HR Happy Hour podcast. My name’s Steve Boese. I’m with Trish Steed. Trish, how are you?

Trish 0:34
I’m doing fantastic. We’re here live at CloudWorld, and it could not be better.

Steve 0:38
It is fantastic to be back at Oracle CloudWorld here in Las Vegas, and we’re having a great time talking with Oracle folks, talking with Oracle customers, getting the latest and greatest in innovation in HR technology, and Oracle has helped us out immeasurably by connecting us with some of their wonderful customers, one of whom is sitting with us today. He is Hubert Winter from Quest Diagnostics. Hubert is a Senior Director at Quest where he has been since 2020. He’s responsible for HR Technology at the company, including the Oracle Cloud HCM system that serves their 50,000 employees. That’s more than our small firm, Trish, by 49,000 and some. Hubert, welcome to the show. Hubert, great to see you. How are you?

Hubert Winter 0:38
These guys are too funny. By the way, 50,000 is no longer correct. We acquired a company in Canada, so we are now International. So to say, fantastic. Six and a half 1000 people in Canada. So it’s more like going to 60.

Steve 1:40
It sounds like then back at the office, you’ll have a job to do, making sure we integrate those 6000 plus folks into the HR system.

Hubert Winter 1:47
It’s the technical aspect of a merchant position. On the other hand, it’s also a cultural thing. Yeah, it’s really these two you have to be very mindful about them, and you bring other people on board. There is anxiety, there is different processes. And my colleagues in HR, they want to have everything in one system, because the processes should be the same, supported by one system. But this cannot happen by tomorrow. And that’s the difficult thing to explain to people, that it cannot be happening to tomorrow.

Steve 2:22
You mentioned Quest has 56,000, now employees around the world, maybe for folks who don’t know, not like myself, who does know. And I’ll tell my story in a second. What quest does. What’s the business of Quest Diagnostics?

Hubert Winter 2:36
Mostly, we are known in the US as a testing company. So if you have a blood test done, there are two companies. We are not talking about the other company. We’re only talking about Quest Diagnostics today. Yeah, right. And so whatever it is, doctors prescribe our tests. You go, either there get blood drawn or come to one of our patient service centers. And if I can continue a little bit like this, then, if you think of the specimen, so the blood sample that then is being transported by logistics team into one of our labs, then tested there, and the results provided back to our customers, clients.

Steve 3:22
So it’s a service that many people encounter, you know, maybe on an annual basis when they get a physical, or when they have some other need for testing. And I recently, Trish, I’ll tell you this story. I don’t think I’ve shared this with you, and you Bert as well. I recently was a customer of quest. I had to have a blood test for various you know, just because some superhuman feats of strength I had exhibited, and they wanted to make sure nothing untoward was going on, I’m sure, but, but I had a wonderful experience, like, I’m one of those people. I think there are many right who needle phobic, don’t like the sight of blood, especially your own right, all of it. And I can’t tell you how wonderful. And I think I told this story at least to one person before we knew we were meeting with you were today. So I’m not making this up for the show, since you were to see our what a wonderful experience I had. The person who is administering, doing the blood drawing there was so professional. The whole thing happened and was over before I even realized it, like before I could even really be afraid and be a scaredy cat. So, remarkable professionals, you know, in the interaction I had with them, Hubert, and that’s not by accident, certainly, right? Recruiting, training, building a culture that to serve people, I think that’s real. Shout out to quest. So that’s my quest story.

Hubert Winter 4:37
Thank you for that. So, when you work for Quest once a year, we are being tested, as if you want to be tested, we have a program for all of our employees, which is called blueprint for wellness. And if you fulfill three out of five criteria, then you get a discount on. Your healthcare premium, which is very nice, yeah. And I mean, I work for the company now since July 2020, and I mean, I learned a lot about healthcare because I come from financial services. So this was very new. And the most interesting word for me was one of these criteria is the belly button circumference. So where you measured that you’re not too big, you know, it’s 40 inches for men, but only 35 for women. You know, interesting.

Steve 5:33
Make a note of that.

Trish 5:34
I love knowing that spot you should measure.

Steve 5:38
I want to do a whole show on the belly button circumference.

Trish 5:42
Come back and do that show?

Hubert Winter 5:45
Keep in mind, because of my German heritage, so for me, when I hear something like this, that’s just interesting.

Steve 5:54
I wouldn’t be surprised if in German, there’s like one word that actually stands for belly button circumference, and it has like 37 letters, right?

Trish 6:01
He has a whole bit where he always gives these long words that describe one thing.

Steve 6:07
Hubert, we’ll talk about our favorite Bundesliga teams after the show, please. So we’re here. We’re at CloudWorld. Hubert, you mentioned Quest Diagnostics, 50,000 plus and growing employees in the US and now internationally, been with Oracle Cloud HCM for a while, right? Started, you know, rolling out HR benefits and such. I’d love for you to give us a little bit of the story of the HR technology journey at Quest, kind of the background, maybe a little bit of the impact as well, if you can share that.

Hubert Winter 6:37
Absolutely, as the whole journey started before I started with the company. And very often, when you hear these stories, it doesn’t start nice when you implement a new system coming from the old system. And it’s difficult, you know, but I mean now I think we are in a pretty good place. We are having our core HR system for all of our employees. We are running us payroll bi weekly. We have us benefits, performance management, goals, talent management, all of that on the Oracle Cloud Platform. We also moved partially to the new Redwood UI, so we just moved to the HR HelpDesk from the prior UI now in Redwood, and it’s an interesting undertaking. So for me, I mean, yes, I have a technical background, so I love doing things, but as a specifically with the HR help desk, I think we can help a lot of our employees, because, I mean, no one has time to call a service center. So what we are thinking also with our new Help Desk is an opportunity so that people can help themselves more and get more answers more quickly, and that is where I hope that Oracle AI can really help us. I mean, we all know that benefit policy documents are usually pretty big. No one understands them, and then you get suddenly, on your pay stub, the amount you see it how much you have to pay, but it’s difficult upfront to know.

Hubert Winter 8:23
So I think what Oracle now suggests, with having a context sensitive help, with the help of an AI agent that you can talk to and ask that is really something, which I think is fascinating. It’s just the other question, how many employees will really like it, because they will know they talk to a machine, and is that awkward to them? Because many of our employees, they like to call the service sector, as you, we have 30% 40% of our tickets are really via phone. There’s not as you the other ones, they go online, create an HR Help Desk request, but there’s really a lot of calling. And I mean, yes, on the one hand, you have to have the right staff for answering the questions. But it’s also this personal note with AI, you don’t have that anymore, but if you ever did an AI conversation? It’s pretty interesting what AI answers and how it answers. You have to be open for that. It’s something new, I think, but definitely a way to go. But with so many employees, some will like it, some will not like it. So it’s something where we have to see where we go. But with everything we do, every technology that’s coming in you provides change. So another area is scheduling.

Steve 9:49
It’s certainly got to be a major area of concern, right? And request locations with all the technicians, right and the staff, and I mean knowing when you’re going to work. And. How much like you’re likely to earn in a given pay period is a big deal. I’d love for you to talk a little about some of the scheduling challenges and how you’re trying to trying to help meet them.

Hubert Winter 10:09
What we are currently doing is a we are an early adopter program with Oracle on their new scheduling system, which is for me, always exciting, because I like to do new stuff. Changes for me important. And so the scheduling tool based on what a person can do their competencies, what’s how they call it? We could also call it skills, and then see where they work, which location, and then you have a workload, it combines the two and provides an optimized schedule out of it, which is for us, very, very important, because in lot of our areas, we still do it, sometimes on a whiteboard, sometimes with a spreadsheet, but we are also having systems that help us with that. But really, optimization is something which should kick in a little bit later. If you think of you just mentioned you made an appointment I did maybe we are 150% overstaffed in one patient service center, but understaffed in another one, so we could swap them, and that’s something which we hope to do with this new tool. It will take a while, absolutely. But, I mean, at least what I saw so far, it’s pretty nice to implement, because we have all our core data already, so the people are there, so there’s no integration, because most people, they spend a lot of time on integrating into another system, and then we have absence management that’s integrated. And mostly people come to your to these patient service centers, usually always the same day, the same hours. It’s more the scheduling around, let’s say, when they have a PTO day or have to call out. So this is something we have to try out. I don’t know how our employee will feel about it. Whether we can offer Self Scheduling, I honestly think we will not offer that, but at least if you have to call out because of an emergency, child is sick, cannot go to school, so you have to call out now, you have to call your manager in future, we hope to do that with the System Managers informed, and the system can then also suggest there is this other person who can come in and work on the shift for you. That’s really the idea. And I have really big hopes in that.

Trish 12:35
Yeah, I know. Thank you for sharing that, and I’m going to be excited to hear how that plays out over the next, you know, couple years, as you’re getting the employee’s reactions. I mean, you’re using quite a bit of the Oracle solutions. It sounds like what has been the response, because it’s Oracle is very innovative company. They’re always kind of upping their game in terms of, you know, generative AI building in AI across the product line. What has been the initial reaction of your employees as they’re interacting with the Oracle systems that they’re currently using?

Hubert Winter 13:09
I would say, overall, pretty good. Sometimes we also make mistakes on our side. Let’s say so. For example, when the system was originally implemented, there was the idea we have to have position management, because we like to have position management. You may have heard that from a lot of people. We just made the decision, okay, it was wrong. Let’s take it off, because it was just confusing for managers, and so we took it out. Now we don’t have position management anymore. Workforce planning is done differently without position management, but most of our supervisors and managers, when they created a new requisition, they didn’t replace the person and put them into the same position. We created more or less the same amount of positions that we had in new hires, and that is not helpful, then it’s just a bureaucratic overhead, and doesn’t help anyone. So sometimes I also think you have to admit you made a mistake when you introduced something, and you have to take it out again. And there will be still some people who will say, but we need it, but they will be the minority, because if you do your homework, ask a lot of people what they think, then you get the right feedback, but still, there will always be some Oh, why did we do that?

Trish 14:31
Thank you for sharing that. Because I don’t think we talk about that very often. And for HR leaders, or just other talent leaders who are listening, or maybe even C suite executives, I think that you’re right. You have to be willing to say, once in a while, oh, this might not have been the best move for us. Really great product, not or maybe we’re not ready, or whatever the situation is. So it’s good to hear that that does happen and it’s okay, and then you just moved on and worked with the product differently. So I appreciate you sharing that.

Hubert Winter 14:59
The other important thing is also, what we do lately is more focus groups, as you for example, since I’m started there, I have a customer advisory board, supervisors, managers that try out new things, new processes, and really like a focus group, you ask them questions without train them, so you give them a user guide, and then ask, so can you do that now? And what do you think? And they’re pretty open, in their opinion. That’s really very helpful. And never roll out anything to 50,000 people at the same time. Try it as a smaller group, and then.

Steve 15:38
That’s a really important point. And when not emphasized enough, probably, when we talk about HR technology more broadly, right? It’s often, especially in large organizations, you’ve got to do these targeted pilot programs and focus group driven programs, even conference room pilots that are really for brand new technology before you just can’t drop something new on 50,000 people simultaneously and expect them all to a adopt it, expect it all to work perfectly the first time, and get the outcomes you want. You’ve got to take a more measured approach and intentional approach you. But last thing, we only have a couple more minutes with you here at CloudWorld, which is a fantastic event, huge event. Is there any one thing you’re saying, Oh, I’m looking forward to this, or maybe, maybe it’s already happened. Maybe it’s this podcast, I don’t know. Is there one thing you say, Hey, I was excited to come to CloudWorld. And here’s the reason.

Hubert Winter 16:25
It was definitely this, because perfect, know what it will be. But I mean, it was really cool being with you guys here. The other thing as I mean, whatever I hear about artificial intelligence is really exciting. Yeah. I mean, yes, we are all bit scared about that the robots will take over the world, right? You know that that’s because we know that from science fiction movies. But on the other hand, there’s so much work that they can do these future digital agents that we don’t like to do. And so why not allowing them to do this work?

Steve 16:59
Yeah, fantastic stuff. Hubert Winter from Quest Diagnostics. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been great fun to meet you. Great fun to talk to you. When you need your blood tested, go to Quest. That’s my personal recommendation. I might go again. Just such a great experience. Yeah, it’s fine.

Trish 17:18
Hubert, where can people connect with you? Is it LinkedIn or website be best?

Hubert Winter 17:23
LinkedIn. And by the way, we also offer home test kits so you can test at home.

Trish 17:27
Steve’s gonna be don’t tell him he’ll be testing at home every week. Write that down.

Steve 17:32
Fantastic stuff. Quest Diagnostic, great story, great company. So great to meet you. Hubert, this has been really fun today. Trish, but great experience today at CloudWorld and more to come. This has been the HR Happy Hour show, catch all the show archives at hrhappyhour.net, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai