Events

Over the summer, I wrote about how Microsoft could be getting into the talent management system (TMS) business via its acquisition of GitHub. In many ways, that piece was designed to be a thought-provoker more than a clear perspective on Microsoft’s direction. However, last week’s announcement that LinkedIn acquired Glint, an employee voice / engagement platform, makes it is clearer than ever that Microsoft is setting out to disrupt the talent management systems market.

How do we know this? Well, even if we take the most traditional view of talent management technology (meaning it is comprised of, at a minimum, recruiting, learning, and performance management technology), we can see that Microsoft now checks all those boxes, and then some:

*Recruiting: LinkedIn

*Learning: Lynda.com

*Performance Management: Glint's nascent PM offering

*Employee Engagement / Voice: Glint

As I discussed at HR Tech this year (research report forthcoming later this fall), the traditional talent management system approach isn’t working for many customers – 30%* of buyers reported that the technology meets their needs half of the time or less. Nearly 50%* of buyers specifically called out a gap between the capabilities offered and what they need. In conversations with HR practitioners, the big gap I’ve heard is that the systems are not truly designed for end-users – meaning, the workers in an organization.

Well, if there is any organization that has technology deeply integrated into workers’ daily tasks, it is Microsoft. The Microsoft acquisitions listed above provide the company with talent management technology offerings, while the existing Office 365 (O365) provides the access to workers. The combination of the two provides a unique way to manage and enable people while they are doing work in the systems they already use every single day.

Let’s spend just a few moments talking about Glint’s role in this, specifically. The logic of the Glint acquisition comes from three things. First, Glint has significant data and expertise in understanding what drives employee engagement and satisfaction. While important, this, in my mind, was the necessary but not sufficient component of the deal.

Second, Glint’s sentiment analysis and the associated machine learning / AI that drives it is farther along than many others in the space. It’s important to note,  that I am more focused on the power of Glint’s data (and connections between it), than on the fact that Glint has heretofore collected that data via surveys (of varying length). I think the future of employee voice and engagement measurement will have less to do with surveys and much more to do with using advanced technologies to interpret tone and sentiment from existing text and data. Glint’s knowledge and capabilities in sentiment analysis and the relationship between it and engagement is one of the most important things that Microsoft is buying. Microsoft has already done a lot of work in the sentiment analysis space as well, and the combination of their existing insights with those from Glint could arguably build one of the most powerful data sets available today on the relationship between engagement and the associated text-expressed sentiments.

Finally, Glint was already developing a next-generation performance management system (which completes the traditional talent management system offering for Microsoft). We know that the quality of feedback and conversations are drivers of employee engagement, so it makes sense in many ways to create a system that both enables the conversations and measures the impact of them.

Microsoft, via LinkedIn, will be able to take advantage of all three of those capabilities, as it attempts to build a next-generation talent management (talent enablement?) system. I could foresee a world where Microsoft enables organizations to analyze the relationship between different types of work activities (using O365 tools) and the impact on performance or engagement. Another offering might be to deliver relevant learning content (via Lynda.com) directly in the flow of work (again, via O365), based on what people are working on or their engagement levels. We are already seeing this type of integration being done between LinkedIn and a resume writing tool in Word – there are all sorts of additional ways to marry these products.

Now, of course, all of these examples would require significant technology integrations, which we all know are harder than they look and take longer than expected. Further, there are many potential risks associated with relying on the technology to do some of this work. Finally, all acquisitions take time to integrate, and Microsoft / LinkedIn have done a fair number of them recently, which may slow down the steady march to a next-generation solution.

All that said, I think it is safe to say that the “talent management” systems of the future are likely to look very different from what we’ve seen in the past.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the talent management system market, the Glint acquisition or where you think Microsoft is going with this series of acquisitions.

Nine months into 2018, smack dab in the middle of fall conference season events, so it seems like a good time to pull up and reflect on what I’ve been hearing from the road. I have three new trends to add to the list, and three that I think are still especially relevant right now.

There are a few new trends I would add to the list from March, and these include:

1. Talent management strategy – more necessary now than ever. In some research I led years ago, we found that organizations with a clear talent strategy outperform those without one. With the substantial amount of information, initiatives, and opportunities for organizations to navigate today, the need for a talent strategy seems greater than ever. Yet, if my anecdotal evidence is any indication – a minority of companies have invested in developing one. As organizations start to look forward to 2019, now could be a great time to plan to make one.
2. Employee voice – listening is just the beginning. I have seen some impressive employee listening technologies – and some strong examples of company’s successes with these technologies – in the last six months. LinkedIn’s acquisition this week of Glint (I will post my thoughts on that later this week) only underscores the criticality of this space. That said, I think that employee listening technologies that primarily rely on surveys (be they pulse or longer-form) are just the beginning. The next step is to think through how we enable the workers who contribute to those insights the capability to do something with that information. We are working on new work on this topic (called the responsive organization research), so stay tuned.
3. HR organizational structure – a new vision is necessary. I don’t know if it is because Dani Johnson worked with Dave Ulrich at RBL Group or what, but for some reason, I’ve been asked a lot in the last few months about my opinion on modern HR org structures. My answer is generally yes, I think they need to evolve – but I haven’t seen a great model yet for what they should look like next. In general, I’m a fan of getting closer to the business units HR serves so as to make more strategic decisions closer to them. However, I haven’t seen many models that do this in a significant way that departs from the current HR business partner approach (let me know if you have one!). I definitely see the old COE model, where talent management was often siloed off (and often disconnected from learning), as not being terribly relevant any more. We don’t have an answer on this one – but for those of you who feel like this is a problem for your organization, I wanted you to know I am hearing it from a lot of your fellow practitioners, too!

Of the trends I wrote about back in March, three remain a consistent trend in all of my conversations:

Diversity and inclusion – now core HR responsibilities

D&I, as a topic is EVERYWHERE. As many of you know, we wrote a report on D&I technology, which is part of the reason I’m talking with folks about it so much. Even beyond that specific topic, though, I am especially hearing folks talk about the following:

• Gender. Many organizations are choosing to primarily focus their D&I efforts on gender this year, at least in part, because they can positively impact 50% of the population and gender is a diversity characteristic that is similar across all cultures. We are working on some new research on the topic of women and their organizational networks and behaviors, which will help advance this topic.
• Legal risk. In many conversations – especially those around D&I data – many organizations are asking how to manage the legal risk of becoming aware of D&I problems on which they previously had no insight. One person I spoke with in the last month said that when this question was posed to a group of CEOs, half of them said they couldn’t focus on D&I data because of the legal risk and the other half said that the first half simply needed to find a less conservative general counsel! All joking aside, the answer is more complex than this, though, and is worth a deeper conversation.
• Power dynamics. It is not possible to solve the challenge of women’s equal inclusion without addressing the question of who is in the “in-group” versus the “out-group” and the associated power dynamics. While I’ve heard some really good ideas about how to address pay equity, female promotion rates, etc., this question of how to address power dynamics to make women’s inclusion systemic is one that is still open for me.
• A new era in people data – with great power comes great responsibility. So if D&I is super white hot, this topic is just white hot. I may have some recency bias on this one, as I have been to three people data-related conferences in the last three weeks, but the opportunities in people data are huge and the field has come incredibly far in just the last three years. For example, at last week’s People Analytics and Future of Work Conference, the stories told by leaders from organizations such as JP Morgan Chase, USAA, Pfizer, Western Digital and others absolutely blow away what was commonplace just a few years ago, especially when it comes to organizational network analysis (ONA). At this week’s Connected Commons event, Michael Arena told a story of phenomenal transformation using ONA to drive wide-spread network-owned innovation at General Motors – you can read more about it in his book, Adaptive Space. This topic deserves its own post, but let’s just say that this is definitely a space to keep watching.

Converging people practices

…but they need to create business results (not just a common employee experience). We keep hearing about this convergence – particularly between, but not limited to, performance management and learning – in our conversations with organizations, but we have also seen it reflected in the vendor space. If you’ve been following our newsletter, you will see the huge number of acquisitions: LTG bought Peoplefluent, Degreed bought Pathgather, Saba (which had already bought Halogen) bought Lumesse, YouEarnedIt (a recognition company) bought Highground (performance management), and – as previously mentioned – LinkedIn bought Glint. Many of these vendors used to play in different spaces, but are now coming together to create new visions of what it means to manage and enable talent. This trend is only going to accelerate in the coming months.

I’m going to be talking about these topics in a lot more detail on October 25 in Los Angeles at an event being hosted for talent management consultants by The Predictive Index – I invite you to join me and share your thoughts on what you are seeing, too! If you can’t make it, please share your thoughts in the comments section.