Last week I attended the HR Forum organised by Richmond Events.
Over the course of two days, I sat down with around twenty HR Directors, Chief People Officers and business leaders in a series of pre-arranged meetings.
On the face of it, we were there to talk about HR technology. But something struck me. Very few of those conversations were actually about technology. Instead, they became conversations about confidence.
That wasn’t a surprise. I’d been noticing the same pattern for several months, but spending two days with HR leaders from organisations across different sectors reinforced something I’d been thinking about for a while.
It isn’t the technology itself that’s causing organisations to pause.
It’s everything happening around it.
Hardly a week goes by without another headline about economic uncertainty, rising employment costs, geopolitical instability or slowing business confidence. We’ve all seen the statistics. Businesses are becoming more cautious about investment. Recruitment has slowed. Every pound of expenditure is being scrutinised more closely than ever before.
But what does that actually mean for HR leaders?
From where I’m sitting, it means they’re being asked to solve a difficult equation.
Improve the employee experience.
Embrace AI.
Give managers better insight.
Support organisational growth.
Retain key talent.
Reduce administration.
Do all of that with tighter budgets, leaner teams and greater pressure to demonstrate value.
That’s not an easy balancing act. The instinct in times like these is understandable. Delay major investment until the picture becomes clearer. The challenge is that certainty rarely arrives.
One thing I’ve found fascinating over the last year is how the conversation has changed.
Five years ago, people wanted to know what the software could do. And over those two days I found myself coming to the same conclusion again and again. Organisations aren’t delaying because they doubt modern HR technology. They’re delaying because they’re worried about the project.
Today, they want to understand the risk.
How much will it really cost?
How long will it actually take?
What happens if the scope changes?
How much pressure will it place on an already stretched HR team?
They’re all sensible questions.
What that tells me is that organisations haven’t stopped believing in transformation. They’re simply evaluating it through a different lens. In an uncertain environment, the consequences of making the wrong decision feel greater than ever.
But while organisations are waiting for certainty, something else is happening.
HR teams continue living with technology that no longer supports the business they’re trying to build. Some are working around the limitations of systems they’ve simply outgrown. Others are relying on disconnected applications or manual processes because replacing them feels like a risk they can’t justify right now.
The irony is that the very pressures causing organisations to delay investment are the same pressures making better technology more important than ever.
When every pound matters, inefficiency matters.
When resources are stretched, manual processes matter.
When attracting and retaining great people becomes harder, employee experience matters.
Waiting doesn’t pause those challenges. It simply means living with them for longer.
One thing I’ve learnt from working with growing organisations is that transformation isn’t something that happens alongside the day job.
It happens while the day job continues.
The HR Director isn’t just leading HR.
They’re supporting managers, overseeing recruitment, dealing with employee relations, reviewing payroll, answering operational questions and somehow still finding time to think strategically.
The Finance Director isn’t trying to stop investment.
They’re trying to protect the business from unnecessary risk.
The Managing Director isn’t asking for a three-year transformation programme.
They’re asking whether the investment will genuinely help the business move forward.
Those aren’t technology challenges. They’re simply the realities of running a growing business.
One conversation from last year perfectly summed this up.
The organisation employed around 65 people. They'd reached the point where their existing HR platform was beginning to hold them back. It had been the right solution for a stage in their journey, but the business had evolved and the technology hadn’t kept pace.
The HR team were spending too much time working around the system instead of working with it.
Reporting was becoming harder. Processes remained manual. Delivering the employee experience they wanted was becoming increasingly difficult.
Yet despite recognising those challenges, they’d already convinced themselves that moving to a modern HR platform wasn’t the right step for an organisation of their size.
“We’re too small.”
“It’ll be too expensive.”
“It’ll take too long.”
“It’s designed for much bigger organisations.”
Those are assumptions I hear surprisingly often.
What changed wasn’t the business need.
It was the conversation.
Instead of talking about functionality, we talked about certainty.
A fixed scope.
A fixed price.
A fixed timeline.
Those weren’t just commercial commitments. They created confidence.
Because certainty changes the conversation.
An implementation approach built around proven best practice rather than unnecessary complexity. Instead of worrying about what might happen, we were discussing exactly what would happen.
Twelve weeks later they were live.
What changed wasn’t the technology. It wasn’t even the business case. It was the level of confidence they had in the journey. Once uncertainty reduced, the decision became much easier.
It struck me that what we’d really created wasn’t simply a successful implementation.
We’d created certainty.
Increasingly I’ve found myself thinking that this is what organisations are really buying.
Not software. Not implementation services. Certainty.
Today, they’re using SuccessFactors across a workforce of around 65 employees. More importantly, their HR team are spending less time overcoming the limitations of technology and more time focusing on the people and business strategy they’re there to deliver.
That’s what I’ve always believed good technology should do. It shouldn’t be a story. It should quietly remove the barriers that stop people doing their best work
One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that technology projects rarely fail because of technology.
Projects struggle because uncertainty grows faster than confidence.
Scope changes.
Priorities shift.
Budgets move.
People become distracted.
Risk increases.
Remove enough of that uncertainty and something interesting happens.
Confidence grows.
Decisions become easier.
Projects move forward.
I’ve never met an HR leader who wants to spend more time manipulating spreadsheets, chasing information across disconnected systems or manually completing administrative tasks.
They want to coach managers.
Develop people.
Strengthen capability.
Support growth.
Shape culture.
The right technology simply creates the space for those things to happen.
Which brings me back to the conversations I had at the HR Forum.
Almost every discussion came back to confidence. Not because HR leaders don’t understand the value of technology. Not because they lack ambition. Because they’re trying to make responsible decisions in an unpredictable world.
I completely understand that.
But I’ve also started to wonder whether we’re framing the question in the wrong way. The question isn’t:
“Is now the right time to invest?” It’s: “What happens if we don’t?”
Every month spent waiting is another month living with processes that consume valuable time, systems that no longer reflect how the organisation operates and technology that limits, rather than enables, your people.
It’s another month asking HR teams to work harder when what they really need are better tools.
When leaders feel uncertain, delaying investment feels like the safest option. Psychologically, that makes complete sense. But if every organisation reaches the same conclusion, something interesting happens.
Businesses don’t simply delay projects.
They delay capability.
They delay better decision making.
They delay creating the foundations they’ll need when confidence returns.
History tells us there will be an upturn. The organisations that benefit most won’t necessarily be those that waited for certainty. They’ll be the ones that used this period to quietly prepare for what comes next.
When growth returns, they’ll already have the right foundations in place. Their HR teams won’t be embarking on transformation.
Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question.
They’ll already have created the certainty they needed to move forward.
Instead of asking, “when will certainty return?”
Maybe we should be asking, “How can we create enough certainty to move forward now?”
Because waiting for certainty may be the biggest risk of all. Perhaps certainty isn’t something we wait for. Perhaps it’s something we create.
Contact us to start a conversation, or register for our next live SAP SuccessFactors demo.