Events

Event Overview

As I wrote about in our article, "The Fight Over Employee Experience Is Finally Here," we expected the Workday team to come out swinging at their annual Workday Rising event. And, wow, did they ever.

Not only did Workday put a heavy focus on employee experience, which they're calling “People Experience” (more on that below), but they also made a wide range of other announcements, including the limited availability of Workday People Analytics, Skills Cloud, and Talent Marketplace.

Before we dive into the details below, here is my main takeaway:

Workday announced products that required them to stretch (People Analytics and Skills Cloud, in particular) at Rising 2018 and we were able to see the fruition of their efforts at Rising 2019, including some early customer stories.

Product announcements & enhancements

While we would like to see more customer testimonials – especially from end-users themselves, not just those responsible for purchasing decisions – we applaud Workday for its diligence in working toward the innovative products they promised last year.

People experience

With that said, let’s move on to some of the key announcements, starting with Workday People Experience (see Figure 1), which is a new user experience (UX). In its description, it's very similar to the new UX that SAP SuccessFactors announced recently – in that it integrates into one location conversational AI, robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning, nudges, and predictions to try to get people higher-quality information more efficiently. Workday People Experience provides information ranging from career development guidance to personalized answers to HR and payroll questions, from both within Workday and external systems.

Figure 1: Workday’s People Experience UX | Source: Workday, 2019.

The biggest differentiator I could discern between the People Experience UX and the one announced by SAP SuccessFactors in September is that Workday seems to have more significantly embraced a critical employee experience concept: journey maps.

The value in using journey maps is that they can identify critical "moments that matter" for specific types of employees and create a standard (and scalable) way of managing (and then improving) those experiences. The result is a much more employee-centric approach to designing software.

Workday identified a number of specific journeys for different employee profiles and used them to create personalized recommendations within Workday People Experience. For example, if a parent is returning to work after welcoming a new child into their family, there are likely a specific set of steps they should go through, such as informing the insurance company, filing leave claims appropriately, etc. Similarly, if someone is recently promoted, there are specific and standardized onboarding and training tasks that need to be completed, which People Experience can recommend. This information automatically populates for those employees within Workday, making it easier for employees to find critical information.

The other addition in the area of employee experience was the announcement of a partnership between Workday and Medallia to allow for the integration of customer experience data with employee data within Workday.

There is clearly value in the integration of these two data sets (see our research on the connection between employee experience and customer experience) and think that this partnership further enables organizations to manage their customer and employee experiences in closer concert and more effectively. It also gives Workday an answer to SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics, with Qualtrics being another major player in the customer experience space.

People analytics

Let’s move on to Workday’s People Analytics (see Figure 2), initially announced at last year’s Rising event. This solution, which integrates the 2018 Stories.bi acquisition, leverages that technology’s ability to identify patterns within data, process those insights using machine learning, and then highlight the most critical “stories” in natural language. The range of topics covered includes hiring, organization composition, diversity and inclusion, talent and performance, and retention and attrition. Workday People Analytics has limited availability with the Workday 33 release; at Rising, Workday announced a number of customers using it.

Figure 2: Workday People Analytics Solution | Source: Workday, 2019.

As we have discussed in our People Analytics Technology research,

One of the areas many solutions struggle with is in telling clear and compelling stories with the data, and this is something the People Analytics solution is clearly targeting.

This should really help the HR business partners and other leaders who are less quantitatively-focused to grasp new trends quickly. That said, I didn’t get much sense from the RIsing demo of how the more quantitative folks will be able to manipulate the data. I presume the assumption is that customers will use Workday Prism to do that more sophisticated analysis – but I didn’t see an in-depth demo of how to do that at Rising, so we will have to leave that one for another post. Overall, though, this announcement represents progress for Workday on the beguiling people analytics front.

People skills

Let’s move on to Skills Cloud, which is another solution Workday announced last year and brought into production this year.

The idea is that Skills Cloud will “mine” employees’ skills by looking at employees’ job descriptions, any internal online profiles, feedback on their performance, and any other work experiences, and then infuse these skills across the entire platform, including talent planning, talent marketplace, career hub, learning, recruiting, performance enablement, compensation, and people analytics.

This information can then be used to better understand the skills within the workforce and to make more strategic decisions (see screenshot in Figure 3) via the Skills Insight analysis tool. Workday says they have more than 200 customers live on the Skills Cloud.

Figure 3: Workday Skills Insights | Source: Workday, 2019.

As many of you know, we care deeply about skills and are planning to write several pieces of research on this topic in 2020. We love that Workday is making skills such a core part of their overall platform and see huge potential for what they are doing. That said, we have a few concerns:

• Data quality. Many of the data sources Workday is using can be inadequate reflections of someone’s overall skills. We know that employees can change / augment their skills, but we worry that they will not, and that the skills data will not be as robust as it needs to be to make critical strategic decisions.
• Data bias. We know from numerous studies that women and under-represented minorities tend to under-report their skills, while majority populations often over-report their skills. We worry that these types of algorithms will perpetuate biases about people’s skills (or lack thereof).

Neither of these items are show-stoppers, as Workday clearly has to start somewhere when it comes to documenting skills. However, for folks using the technology in its earliest stages, we think these 2 items are something of which to be mindful.

People management

Finally, let’s turn to the Talent Marketplace (see picture in Figure 4), which is a single location that includes internal opportunities that are matched to employees’ skills and interests. Importantly, the solution alerts employees to those opportunities, versus employees having to look for them. The idea is that employees can more easily find internal opportunities that will help them grow, and hence stay at an organization longer.

Figure 4: Workday’s Talent Marketplace | Source: Workday, 2019.

We tend to see internal marketplaces positioned as part of an organization’s learning and development strategy, where the “gigs” give employees a chance to augment their existing work with opportunities that align to their career aspirations. Interestingly, at Rising, Workday positioned Talent Marketplace as a way for organizations to compete against external organizations who could also be sharing new opportunities with an organization’s employees. So, it is not just an internal gig-work marketplace, but also an internal job board that automatically alerts employees to opportunities.

Wrap up

In the course of my conversations with other analysts, we had two questions with internal marketplaces we think have currently gone unanswered:

• What if an employee wants to develop skills they either do not have or are currently weak on? Does the solution allow for them to indicate this, or will the algorithm only suggest things aligned with their current capabilities? And further, will this solution allow them to connect with managers who are willing to coach them, especially since they won’t be a fully committed resource?
• Is there a way to pay people for doing this extra work? Presumably, if it is possible this work would have been given to a contractor, to whom an organization would pay to do it. If the work is going to an internal employee, is there a way to compensate them for it?

Ok, that was more than 2 questions. 🙂 We think there’s great opportunities for internal marketplaces but think there are still some details to get sorted out.

All of these announcements together create a compelling case for why Workday is the competitor to beat when it comes to creating a unified and personalized employee experience.

Many of these solutions are in limited availability, so the market has yet to tell us of the impact — hopefully we will hear that at Rising 2021. Workday is clearly pushing forward with a lot of innovations and we look forward to hearing from end-user customers on how these changes are helping them meet their people and business needs more effectively.

As the year comes to a close, we’ve taken a bit of reflection time to think about some of the trends we’ve seen this year. While there's been a lot of hype about some of the big ones (AI anyone?), we think some of the most impactful ones are simple realizations or subtle shifts in mindsets that people leaders make.

One that has particularly caught our eye – the importance of connecting for learning.

The Importance of Connecting

Connecting has a prominent place in our Learning Model (see Figure 1). It's well-understood that all learning doesn’t happen in the classroom and people learn from one another¹. What types of opportunities we give our employees to do this type of connecting can have a significant impact on how successful they are.

Figure 1: Learning Model | Source: RedThread Research, 2019.

Through our discussions with both leaders and solution providers this year, we’ve identified 3 things that lead us to believe that Connecting is gaining prominence.

Thing 1: Enabling performance, not just managing it

In the fall of this year, we wrapped an extensive study on performance management (PM). The goal of this study was to understand which of the “new” practices were having an impact on business outcomes. Not surprisingly, one of the more noticeable group of practices all had to do with people development or learning. Two practices particularly caught our eye.

First, organizations are encouraging much more frequent development conversations between managers and employees. Whereas performance discussions used to happen once per year, most of the organizations we spoke with encouraged monthly or quarterly check-ins that didn’t just discuss performance, but also career aspirations and potential development experiences.

These conversations are the epitome of connecting – allowing managers to share expertise, employees to ask questions, and them both to talk about development and course correction where necessary. As performance discussions are well-established in most organizations, increasing the cadence and changing up the expected agenda has been minimally invasive and, according to the leaders we spoke with, pretty impactful.

Secondly more organizations are enabling peer-to-peer feedback and recognition. Peers are often less intimidating and often have a better idea of what is going on in the team, which means their feedback can often be more timely, more focused, and more engaging than manager feedback.

Thing 2: The rise of coaching & mentoring

One of the most exciting trends we’ve seen this year for developing people is the rise of coaching and mentoring. In the past, coaching and mentoring has been focused mainly on leaders – senior leaders really – and has been used to correct troubling behaviors or prepare promising leaders for the next step in their careers.

That seems to be changing. Organizations are understanding the value of a coaching or mentoring relationship and are implementing programs at much broader scales. For example, organizations are:

• Including coaching and mentoring activities in larger development initiatives, including new-hire training, leadership development, and level-up programs
• Leveraging technologies to be able to scale coaching and mentoring to make it more accessible to more employees – these technologies range from simple matching software to full-on use of AI and automation, and everything in between
• Offering external mentoring as a benefit – we've seen this work particularly well for younger employees trying to navigate early career moves

We’re thrilled that coaching and mentoring are gaining traction; organizations are beginning to realize the importance of one-to-one connections for employee development and the value of leveraging internal expertise.

Thing 3: Structured collaborative learning

Yep, we said it. In a world that is touting the necessity, efficiency, and beauty of micro and self-directed learning, we’ve seen an ever so slight resurgence of more structured, collaborative types of programs. We’re not saying that the majority of training is going to (or should) return to the classroom. Rather, we recognize that organizations may have gone too far, and that we’re starting to see them self-correct a little bit to ensure that opportunities for Connecting exist.

Organizations are remembering that there's value in struggling through a learning experience together. And that some insights only come from listening to those with experience and expertise. And that when people connect, storytelling can motivate and inspire. And that there are some things that are just better taught through discussion, brainstorming, and collaboration.

Interestingly, while technology has largely been associated with the self-directed and micro types of learning until now, we’re seeing it being used more broadly in helping with the structured, collaborative learning as well. We finally seem to be figuring out how to replicate or improve upon the best parts of in-person collaboration and learning.

So, while these may seem like small things – more conversations with managers, more mentoring and coaching, and a realization that there's value in structured collaborative learning – we think they constitute a trend: one that will make our workplaces more human-focused, and frankly, probably more pleasant. Thoughts?

With the all the recent talk on challenges organizations face when it comes to their frontline workforce (i.e., turnover, reskilling, and empowerment), how organizations manage those on the frontlines and their performance has become a critical issue. You may encounter these frontline people directly at coffee shops, a customer service help line, or indirectly through the products you currently buy or use. So, their performance matters.

Culture Is Key for Frontline Workers

In our recent report, Frontline Workers: Creating a Performance-Driven Culture, we explored the nuances of performance management (PM) for frontline workers and examined the specific practices that organizations use to help them perform better.

This research is a continuation of our recent study, The Makings of Modern Performance Management. We conducted a thorough lit review of roughly 40 academic and business articles, reports, and book chapters, along with a quantitative survey of 623 respondents (more than half being frontline workers). From all of this, we found some interesting insights on culture and frontline workers’ performance:

• Frontline workers are generally more satisfied with their PM experience, as compared with other workers, especially when it comes to having clear goals and expectations
• Frontline workers feel they have less autonomy, and don't feel that their managers enable the same degree of autonomy as their desk and knowledge worker counterparts
• Of the 3 levers that organizations can use to drive employee engagement and organizational performance, culture provides the greatest opportunity

Overall, we found culture to be a key performance lever for frontline workers, particularly because having a strong culture helps organizations address some of their biggest challenges with this segment of the workforce.

In fact, a study of blue-collar workers showed that those in supportive organizational cultures – which promote people’s strengths, capabilities, and functioning – performed 27% better than those in unsupportive cultures.¹ They were also 89% more innovative and 79% more committed to the organization. This means that organizations can use culture as a lever to better performance, greater innovation, and stronger commitment.

Specifically, an organization’s focus on providing a fair and consistent evaluation process, its ability to provide a broad range of feedback, and its focus on developing skills that'll serve individuals and help the business strategy in the future, all help to mitigate some of the challenges which organizations often face.

Learn More

For more information on each of these practices in high-performing organizations and examples of companies that create a performance-driven culture, we encourage you to download and read the full report.

What specific practices create a performance-driven culture for frontline workers? A lot has been said about the importance of frontline workers, but few organizations truly understand how to best manage their performance and where to begin.

RedThread Research’s study, Frontline Workers: Creating a Performance-Driven Culture, explores the nuances of performance management for frontline workers and examines the specific practices that high-performing organizations use to help them perform better.

The power of how we experience a company, brand, or product is often in the hands of a select group of people. Your perception of the product and how well it was made influences your satisfaction with it.

Frontline workers influence our experience as customers.

As markets become more aggressive, as companies offer abundant choices, and as customers become more informed – organizations are relying more heavily on customer experience as a competitive advantage. Frontline workers are at the center of this intensifying spotlight: They’re no longer just cogs in a machine – they’re crucial players in the growth engine.

However, organizations face challenges when it comes to their frontline workforce. In fact, our initial literature review identified 3 main issues:

• Turnover
• Reskilling
• Empowering workers

Bottom line: The performance of those on the frontlines matters and companies are taking notice. Organizations find themselves asking: How can we ensure that our frontline workers are engaged, skilled, and have what they need in order to meet the needs of our customers?

To provide a bit of clarity on this question, we took a deeper look at the practices that organizations use to help their people perform. This research is a continuation of our recent study, The Makings of Modern Performance Management. This report provides more insights into the differences and opportunities between frontline workers’ performance and other types of workers. Specifically, this report addresses:

• Differences between frontline workers and other types of workers in how they experience performance practices
• 3 areas of focus to use culture as a performance lever
• 7 practices that high-performing organizations use to create a performance-driven culture
• Ideas and relevant tips to bring these practices to life in your organization

We encourage you to download and read the full report by clicking the image below.

Earlier this year, we began to explore the concept of employee experience. Since then, we talked to more than 20 organizations to understand their approach to employee experience and identify leading practices. Now, this is the 3rd in a series of 4 articles highlighting our findings.

Throughout our research, we identified 4 levers of employee experience to create sustainable results. This article focuses on one of the employee experience levers – articulated accountability – and is just an excerpt from the main report, The Four Levers of Employee Experience to Create Sustainable Results.

Who's Responsible for Employee Experience?

We wanted to find out, once and for all: Who's responsible for employee experience? Is it HR, marketing, operations, or technology?

In our quest to understand who’s accountable, we found a wide variety of opinions. Some people think HR is responsible because it concerns people. Others think it’s a coordinated effort across organizational functions.

Even though organizations hold differing opinions as to who is responsible for employee experience, one thing is true in progressive organizations: HR still holds many of the cards when it comes to employee experience.

Hands down, most of the people we talked to believe that, because HR is already privy to employee feedback and talent management practices, it should serve as the hub for employee experience. This means that, as a hub, it serves as a speaker of the house of representatives, like in government. And as an employee experience speaker of the house, it acts as a leader: It upholds standards, coordinates efforts, maintains order, and tracks progress.

So, this isn't much of a surprise, given that HR has historically taken on the people-advocate role. But what’s interesting is that, in progressive organizations, accountability doesn’t just begin and end with HR. Instead, they define accountability as being either distributed across functions or centralized to a specific manager or team – and they further define what that means for the employee experience.

“As a company, we have 6 company level objectives. And one of them is around employees and enabling them to do their best work every day. Our goal is to ensure that at least 85% of our employees are having a level 4 or 5 employee experience.”

Greg Pryor, VP of People and Performance Evangelist, Workday

Distributed accountability: Leaders are responsible for strategy & large-scale issues

In distributed accountability, leaders are responsible for the employee experience strategy and vision. This is a plan of action designed to achieve the best and most appropriate experience for the organization. It also includes organizationwide interventions, which are often necessary to address employee feedback.

In progressive organizations, we often found that senior leaders in HR, and especially those in executive positions, play a key role in tackling these macrolevel aspects of employee experience.

Leaders in HR – working closely with leaders across functions – hold a powerful role in developing a strategic vision for employee experience. They are responsible for understanding the big picture of employee experience and developing a coherent strategy at the upper echelons of the organization. This isn't to say that they operate in a top-down manner. If you recall the speaker of the house example, these senior leaders uphold standards, coordinate efforts, maintain order, and track progress. They also play a key role in conveying the strategy’s value to the organization and setting the overall tone.

Senior leaders, especially those in VP positions or higher from a wide variety of functions (not just HR), are also responsible for addressing large-scale issues quickly and effectively (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Distributed Accountability for Large-Scale Employee Experience Issues | Source: RedThread Research, 2019.

To do so, senior leaders uphold the employee experience strategy while seeking to understand employee and customer feedback. They collaborate with other leaders across functions to successfully address large-scale employee experience issues. They also establish and communicate clear escalation procedures for employee and customer feedback.

In progressive organizations, cross-functional senior leaders hold a special place in employee experience because they have the power to successfully address any organizationwide issues pertaining to their areas of expertise. Thus, having clear escalation procedures – in which people know which issues to escalate, how to communicate them, and to whom – for any organizational issues that arise at the local level is crucial.

“It’s important to detail the business rules to make your VOC program actionable and impactful. For example, if you get a detractor, how fast do you need to respond? Who needs to respond? When does it get escalated? Addressing a detractor quickly – while you still have a chance to fix the situation – is very important.”

Chris Hummel, Chief Marketing Officer, United Rentals

Centralized accountability: Individual contributors & direct managers are responsible for feedback

In centralized accountability, individual contributors and junior leaders – more specifically frontline or direct managers – play a significant role in sharing and responding to feedback (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Centralized Accountability for Experience Feedback | Source: RedThread Research, 2019.

For experience efforts to work, individual contributors, especially those on the frontlines, must share meaningful feedback. In fact, individual contributors in progressive organizations share feedback frequently and effectively in a variety of ways (e.g., surveys, team huddles, one-on-one conversations). They also serve as mediators of information between what they hear from customers and the organization. They shed light on what truly matters to customers and to them as employees.

“The relationship between frontline facing employees and customers is so important. I call it contagious: how they feel and how they show up translates to the customer experience.”

Chris Albertson, SVP Client Feedback and Experience, LPL Financial

We also found that feedback (from both employees and customers) plays a key role in experience if direct managers do something about it. Thus, direct managers are also accountable at the local level. In progressive organizations, they're highly responsive to both employee and customer feedback. Responsive managers actively seek to understand feedback, and react quickly and effectively to it. They enjoy ample decision-making rights to address issues as they come up. They also have the authority to rally employees and make decisions.

For more on this and other levers of employee experience – and examples of how companies have brought them to life – we encourage you to download and read the full report by clicking the image below.