HR teams say they continue to rely on manual workarounds despite new HCM systems
HR teams are still running Excel workarounds inside six-figure HCM investments. That's not an implementation failure — it's a messaging failure vendors keep ignoring.
The news
A new report from Strada finds that HR teams are still relying heavily on manual workarounds even after investing in modern HCM systems. Poor implementation is the cited culprit — workers aren’t using the tools, and confidence in the platforms is low. HR Dive has the summary.
My take
I’m not surprised by this data. I am annoyed by how the industry will respond to it.
The default reaction from HCM vendors when adoption numbers look like this is to blame the customer. “Change management.” “Executive sponsorship.” “They didn’t follow our implementation playbook.” And there’s some truth there — poor rollouts are real. But vendors have been reciting that explanation for fifteen years, and the workarounds are still everywhere. At some point, the pattern stops being a customer failure and starts being a product-and-messaging failure.
Here’s what I actually see: HCM vendors spend enormous energy marketing the purchase and almost none marketing the outcome after go-live. The sales motion is built around total platform value, configurability, and integration breadth. The narrative is transformation. Then the contract is signed, implementation is handed to a partner, and the vendor’s marketing machine moves on to the next prospect.
The buyer, meanwhile, is six months post-launch and still exporting headcount data to a spreadsheet because the reporting module doesn’t match how their HRBP team actually works.
This is a positioning problem as much as a product problem. Vendors who lead with “end-to-end transformation” without a credible adoption story are essentially promising a destination they don’t have a map for. The category players who are gaining ground — and you see this in how companies like Rippling frame their motion, and increasingly how mid-market HCM challengers are differentiating — are the ones building adoption and time-to-value into the pitch from day one, not treating it as a post-sale afterthought.
The vendors who win the next wave of HCM deals won’t be the ones with the longest feature list. They’ll be the ones who can prove the system actually gets used.
The so-what
I’d tell my clients on both sides of this equation to sit with that Strada number a little uncomfortably. If you’re marketing an HCM platform, your buyer has almost certainly been burned before — they’ve signed the deal, survived the implementation, and watched adoption crater. That prior experience is now your biggest sales objection, and if your messaging doesn’t acknowledge it directly, you’re selling to a skeptic while pretending they’re a blank slate. If you’re evaluating HCM systems, stop letting vendors skip past the adoption question in the demo — ask them what percentage of customers are using the modules you’re buying, twelve months after go-live. The gap between what HCM vendors promise in the pitch and what HR teams actually run on is not a technology problem — it’s a credibility problem, and it’s one vendors are actively choosing not to solve in their messaging.