Events

Introduction

“Black Lives Matter protests moves corporate D&I initiatives center stage”¹

“CIOs double down on D&I to build stronger businesses”²

“Amazon will examine its employee review system after claims of racial bias”³

These are just a few of the headlines published in the last 12 months on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) efforts by companies. Given the growing momentum in the space, especially since the social justice movements of 2020 spread globally, we wanted to better understand how orgs are measuring and monitoring their DEIB efforts via people analytics.

We looked at more than 60 academic and business articles, reports, and books for this literature (lit) review. This article summarizes the themes from the lit:

• Analytics for DEIB is more important than ever
• DEIB analytics is more than diversity metrics
• Predictive analytics for DEIB can help plan for the future
• Don’t forget about qualitative data
• Address issues of privacy and ethics

Much of the literature that we reviewed for this topic focuses on why analytics should be used to support DEIB efforts. However, some shining pieces did go beyond the “why” to discuss how companies can go about collecting and utilizing DEIB data. We take a closer look at these 5 themes in the following sections.

Analytics for DEIB is more important than ever

It's not surprising that we found a large portion of the lit focused on explaining why analytics is important for DEIB. As pointed out by 1 author:

“Research and data must play a role when it comes to implementing D&I strategy that actually moves the needle on equity. If you don’t collect data, it’s hard to diagnose how your company is performing. If you don’t track data, you won’t know how you’re improving.”⁴

Several recent articles call out the urgent need for it, especially now, as the COVID-19 pandemic and social movements have spurred companies to reexamine how they drive equity. If we look at the recent commitments to DEIB made by some of the biggest companies—such as:

• Facebook tying improving employee diversity to executive performance reviews⁵
• Target’s aim of increasing representation of Black team members by 20% by 2023⁶
• Starbucks’ goal of BIPOC representation of at least 30% at all corporate levels, and at least 40% at all retail and manufacturing roles by 2025⁷

—then, we see that not one of these goals can be achieved without access to data and analytics.

DEIB analytics is more than just diversity metrics

While diversity and representation metrics remain foundational to DEIB efforts, we’re pleased to see several articles push orgs to collect and use data beyond representation metrics. One of the ways orgs can go deeper on metrics is by looking at experience data for different groups of the employee population. According to 1 author, orgs need to look at hard data:

“Are they invited to social gatherings? Included in meetings? Receiving proper mentorship? Looking at these interactions—where discrimination, microaggressions and lack of support often creep in—will reveal what’s truly derailing efforts to improve diversity.”⁸

These data can be helpful in measuring inclusion. Existing engagement surveys or specific pulse surveys can ask employees about concerns around inclusion. Question statements can be used by orgs to build an inclusion index and track it over time, including:

• Employees are valued for their differences and their unique contributions
• Employees can voice their opinions without fear of retribution or rejection
• People are rewarded fairly according to their job performance and accomplishments
• I have confidence in my company’s grievance procedures

These questions can be supplemented with check-ins, exit interviews, network data and other data to identify existing gaps.

Predictive analytics for DEIB can help plan for the future

Articles that focus on applying predictive analytics for DEIB talk about spotting the right patterns and identifying a potential issue before it turns into a problem. Predictive analytics can be a powerful tool to empower orgs to make smarter decisions about their DEIB efforts.

The lit contains examples of companies that are already using predictive analytics to support DEIB, including:

• Whirlpool—to help steer the company away from a “…myopic focus on intake, while ignoring potential effects of retention risks and advancement challenges for diverse populations.”⁹
• Walmart—to model and forecast techniques to understand the future through such questions as:
  • What could happen?
  • How can we arrive at the destination sooner?

Every quarter, diversity leaders and business leaders meet to review DEIB goals, as well as share insights from the data.¹⁰

• International Paper—to analyze expatriate compatibility: Predictive analytics, based on past behavior, family dynamics, global acumen, and cultural agility, can forecast which employees would fare better with a global move. ¹¹

Don’t forget about qualitative data

While not a recurring theme, we think the reminder about qualitative data is an important point made by some articles that deserves a mention. Very often, when we talk about data and analytics, we instantly think of hard numbers, dashboards, and spreadsheets.

DEIB and analytics leaders might find themselves trying to persuade or convince some stakeholders about the merit of qualitative data—and part of that challenge might require redefining what “data” means for the org.

Individual stories and experiences are an important piece of the puzzle. Interviews with employees can help leaders supplement quantitative data to get a holistic picture. As 1 author stated:

“Statistics don’t capture what it feels like to be the only black team member.”¹²

Some examples of the types of qualitative data that can be used include:

• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Textual analysis of written performance reviews
• Analysis of exit interview notes
• Analysis of hiring memos

However, the lit does offer some limitations to using this data. For example, if companies aren’t consistent or comprehensive in their qualitative analysis, then biases can creep in.

Address issues of privacy and ethics

No discussion about people analytics—especially when it involves sensitive DEIB employee data—can be complete without taking into account issues of privacy and ethics. And we’re glad to see a number of articles point out this issue. As one of the authors said:

“You want to be very careful of how you’re protecting the data and how you’re making sure that your data is being used to make fair and equitable decisions on people.”¹³

So, how can orgs best deal with this issue?

One way to maintain employee privacy is through data aggregation to ensure no one’s data is singled out. However, this could be challenging for small companies that may only have a few people from a particular demographic group.

Data ethics and privacy becomes even more important when collecting passive data on employees. Companies can be more responsible and ethical about collecting such data by:

• Being transparent with employees about the data collected and who will have access to it
• Sharing that data with employees
• Being clear about the types of analysis being run on the data collected on employees and how those data are used

What caught our attention

Of the lit we reviewed, several pieces stood out to us. Each of the pieces below contains information we found useful and / or intriguing. We learned from their perspectives and encourage you to do the same.

The Next Generation of Diversity Metrics: Predictive and Game-Changing Analytics

Brian Baker and Michael Collins (edited by), Diversity Best Practices, 2013

Explains how predictive analytics, when used correctly, can support areas such as retention, development of a leadership pipeline, analysis of leadership and talent gaps, and creating a general talent pipeline.

"Predictive analytics will soon offer the make-or-break evidence needed to support every business case, every new project proposal. For diversity practitioners, predictive analytics offers more: A powerful tool to be smarter about inclusion efforts—which ones to ditch, which ones to double down on, which ones to invent.”

Highlights:

• Link the hiring algorithm with recruitment of candidates from diverse backgrounds to revisit high-potential resumes and analyze retention data
• Shift conversations from reactive debates to proactive consideration
• Use predictive analytics to gain insight into what is reasonably attainable for companies in the future

Strength in Numbers: Using Data to Track Diversity and Inclusion

Marianne Bertrand, Caroline Grossman, Mekala Krishnan, Promarket, The Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, October 2020

Explains how no simple solution is going to cure all DEIB woes. Change needs to be deliberate and transformational, which takes time.

"People arrived at quotas as a panacea, as the silver bullet. And it’s great that it has led to increased representation on boards, but that’s really not had the kind of spillover effects that people had hoped."

Highlights:

• Quotas for executive boards, while not showing any negative effects, aren’t the transformative policy that many thought it would be
• Culture change takes time—anywhere from 5-7 years for change to really start to trickle through the org
• Change the norms: For example, instead of lengthening the maternity leave policy which separates women from the labor force for longer, create a parental leave policy that encourages both parents to take time off, leveling the playing field

Here’s How to Wield Empathy and Data to Build an Inclusive Team

Interview with Ciara Trinidad, Head of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Blend, First Round Review, 2018

Explains that the key to building the strongest, most diverse team is understanding and believing in why you’re doing it. Knowing the reason behind it gives momentum to the initiatives and gets people onboard.

"Discussion gives muscles to data—especially around D&I. Without it, a dashboard is a depository. A dialogue becomes a monologue, which eventually becomes silence."

Highlights:

• Partner with the HR operations specialist to learn what data is stored where; use the fields needed to help create a dashboard that provides a meaningful narrative
• Try different analyses to discover which are the most revealing. Some examples might be:
  • Analyzing hires by month, by team which can show how recruiters are faring against DEIB strategies
  • Analyzing hires by month, by race which can reveal an org’s internal biases
  • Analyzing hires by tenure which can reveal when people leave and why
• Present the data to every person who has a stake in the company in the clearest, most digestible way
• Keep the lines of communication open; consider using your existing talent as your DEIB professionals and pay them for that work

Actionable Diversity and Inclusion Analytics with Philips’ Toby Culshaw

Joe Macy, Gartner, 2019

Provides a case study into how companies can leverage partnerships for DEIB analytics, and making sure how data can be made comprehensive and presented in a way that’s easy to digest.

"Because of the partnerships with internally facing HR analytics and reporting teams, the Talent Intelligence team could access information already available at Philips and avoid starting from scratch to find the needed information. The partnerships also ensured the different teams were on the same page and understood how to impact D&I at Philips."

Highlights:

• Break the project down into 3 smaller phases:
  • Gather internal data to understand the current state by partnering with the HR analytics team
  • Gather external data to understand the feasibility of changing the current state by looking at the markets in which Philips operates
  • Synthesize the internal and external data in a segmented way to drive action
• Present data by creating easy-to-consume materials designed to drive action
• Thoroughly understand the competitive landscape worldwide to find the right talent and understand the feasibility of diversity goals

Delivering On Diversity and Inclusion: How Employers Can Achieve Measurable Results

White Paper, Visier

Encourages orgs to move away from the traditional top-down approach to D&I practices and, instead, empower frontline workers to initiate change. This approach must include data that’s readily understood by all and looks to the future instead of criticizing the present.

“When data can be accessed in a way that facilitates exploration (without the need for a data science degree!), it can help organizations understand where to focus their talent efforts to achieve broader goals.”

Highlights:

• Avoid common data pitfalls, such as measuring diversity as a blanket number and prioritizing reports over insights
• D&I taskforces are more effective than top-down approaches to change
• Unify data from multiple sources, so that users can dig deeper into the data
• Utilize D&I analytics to:
• Compare the org to the most recent EEOC benchmarks
• Clearly communicate changes and diversity through dynamic, real-time visual storytelling
• Demonstrate how D&I initiatives have an impact on business performance metrics
• Understand engagement among diverse employees, and monitor the impact engagement has on turnover and exit patterns

Additional Reading Recommendations

1. “Better People Analytics: Measure Who They Know, Not Just Who They Are,” Harvard Business Review / Paul Leonardi & Noshir Contractor, November-December 2018, https://empowerment.ee/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Better-People-Analytics-Measure-Who-They-Know-Not-Just-Who-They-Are.pdf
2. “15 Ways People Analytics Can Improve Workforce Diversity,” Techfunnel.com / Rosie Harman, August 2020, https://www.techfunnel.com/hr-tech/people-analytics-improve-workforce-diversity/
3. “Why you should apply analytics to your people strategy,” McKinsey & Co., The McKinsey Podcast / Simon London, Bryan Hancock & Bill Schaninger, April 2019, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-you-should-apply-analytics-to-your-people-strategy
4. “Support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with People Analytics,” Human Capital Institute, Nine to Thrive / Phil Willburn, https://forms.workday.com/en-us/webinars/josh-bersin-belonging-diversity-phil-willburn/form.html/dl/3?step=step1_default
5. “4 Things Walmart Learned About Using Data to Drive Diversity,” The APQC Blog / Elissa Tucker, September 2019, https://www.apqc.org/blog/4-things-walmart-learned-about-using-data-drive-diversity
6. "How CEOs and CHROs Can Connect People to Business Strategy", Harvard Business Review Analytics Services, 2017, https://hbr.org/resources/pdfs/comm/visier/HowCEOsandCHROsCanConnect.pdf
7. “Data And Diversity: How Numbers Could Ensure There’s A Genuine Change For The Better,” Forbes.com / HV MacArthur, August 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/hvmacarthur/?sh=58909861a902

Insights on learning content & content management

As part of our ongoing research on learning content, we recently gathered leaders for a research roundtable focused on the latest trends in learning content and content management. The key question in this research is:

How are orgs enabling employees to have the right learning experiences—including accessing the right content, at the right time, in the right format for their needs?

Some of the specific questions we discussed were:

• What makes a great learning content strategy?
• How are orgs deciding what content to prioritize?
• What’s most important to consider about content when choosing and implementing learning tech?
• What metrics should orgs use to evaluate their learning content?

As we'll see below, the key to these questions lies not in the detailed answers but in the overall mindset and approach that forward-thinking L&D orgs are taking toward learning: a mindset of enabling, not providing, learning.

Mindmap of Learning Content Roundtable

The mindmap below outlines the conversations that transpired as part of this roundtable.

Note: This is a live document. Click the window and use your cursor to explore.

Key Takeaways

We had an engaging, energizing conversation—both verbally and in Zoom chat!—that helped us better understand learning content trends, strategy, delivery, and evaluation. Here are the 5 key takeaways:

• L&D continues to move from providing content to enabling development
• Can learning content drive business outcomes and meet employee needs?
• “Pull” strategies can enable employees to access the content they need
• Orgs are using skills to guide content priorities
• Business outcomes should drive decisions about tech and delivery, but it’s often the other way around

L&D continues to move from providing content to enabling development

Looking back on the conversation, an underlying theme was the mindset shift from L&D providing learning to enabling it. This shift is one we’ve written and talked about extensively—and it came up again in this conversation about learning content.

An underlying theme was the mindset shift from L&D providing learning to enabling it.

Given the amount of content out there, the move toward personalization of development experiences, and the sheer variety of people in most orgs, it’s unlikely that L&D knows exactly what development opportunities each individual employee needs.

In this roundtable discussion on learning content, leaders recognized it’s almost impossible for L&D to push the right content to the right people at the right time, in the right format. Instead, they need to enable employees to access the right content at the right time and modality for them. Much of the discussion focused on the different ways leaders and their orgs are thinking about this shift.

Leaders recognized that in order for employees to access the right content at the right time and modality for them, L&D must enable, not provide, learning.

Can learning content drive business outcomes and meet employee needs?

When we asked, “What makes great learning content strategy,” leaders were very clear: Any learning content strategy worth its salt must help solve business challenges. It must drive the development of the capabilities and skills that’ll get the org where it needs to go.

Learning content strategy must drive the development of the capabilities and skills that’ll get the org where it needs to go.

As one leader noted:

“I regularly ask questions about the challenges we’re facing and the outcomes we’re trying to reach. Then I use coaching questions to help leaders and individuals identify their needs. Content is then 1 option or possible way to get to the outcomes.”

And content success must be measured by the things that matter to the business—key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives and key results (OKRs), or other indicators that business leaders care about. One leader in this roundtable highlighted that tracking learning content against business outcomes can be scary—because L&D can’t fully control the results.

That’s why many learning leaders are starting to look for correlations over time between learning content and business metrics, rather than direct causal relationships.

Learning leaders look for correlations over time between learning content and business metrics, rather than direct causal relationships.

Leaders noted that a great learning content strategy not only supports business outcomes, but also—equally—employee development needs. L&D can’t simply push content on topics that L&D or senior leaders have deemed critical—the content must be relevant and helpful to individual employees.

There was, therefore, a perceived tension between supporting business outcomes and employee needs. How can L&D enable employees to access content that drives business outcomes and that’s relevant to individual employees? One way leaders deal with this perceived tension is by helping employees pull the content they need. We explore this idea next.

Pull strategies can enable employees to access the content they need

Leaders largely agreed that one effective way to enable (rather than provide) employee development is to move from a push strategy for learning content to a pull one. Orgs are making content more widely available to more employees so that they can access whatever they need, when they need it.

Orgs are making content more widely available to more employees so they can access whatever they need, when they need it.

Many leaders said their orgs are broadening access to content by purchasing licenses to online content libraries for all (or many) employees. Others are experimenting with (or thinking about) giving individual employees learning budgets that they can draw on to access any content or other development opportunity, regardless of where it is.

However, moving to a model in which L&D enables learning means the org must provide the cultural supports—time, information, infrastructure—to employees so they can pull the learning and development they need. As one leader put it:

“Even if you give people a budget for learning, you have to give them time to invest in their development as well. It is a cultural issue.”

Leaders also linked the shift to a pull strategy to the democratization of learning—making learning and development opportunities available to more and more employees, not just a select few.

Orgs are using skills to guide content priorities

A number of leaders reported that their orgs are starting to use skills to inform employee development decisions at both the organizational and individual levels.

Skills support org-wide L&D planning

Leaders increasingly see skills as a way to inform L&D decisions. They want to know:

• What are the skills the business needs—at the org, team, or department, and individual levels?
• What skills does our workforce currently have?

The answers to these questions can help drive targeted decisions about where to dedicate development resources.

Indeed, many leaders noted that without information about skills, L&D efforts can often be off-target. As one leader put it:

“Without insight into what skills are in demand and what skills people have, L&D tends to push out what we think people need. That’s rarely an effective approach.”

Skills help democratize learning

As orgs make more development opportunities—including content—available to more employees, we previously mentioned that they must provide the support employees need to find and take advantage of those opportunities.

A key element of this support is information about skills:

• The skills individuals have
• The skills they need
• The skills the org needs
• Skills trends in the market (outside the org)

This information enables employees to make more informed decisions about their own development—thus, setting themselves up to be in-demand in the future. As one leader put it:

“We want to know what are the most in-demand skills by role in the market, then provide that information to employees on what skills are increasing in value and what skills are decreasing in value.”

Business outcomes should drive decisions about tech & delivery—but it’s often the other way around

Leaders agreed that, ideally, learning content development starts with business outcomes and goals, which then inform decisions about content, which inform decisions about tech and modalities. They emphasized that having learning tech doesn’t mean you have a well-targeted learning content strategy.

However, leaders noted this ideal flow is often hampered—even sidelined—for these 4 reasons:

1. Buzz. People—in L&D and the business—become focused on buzzwords and the next big tech when, in fact, that tech may not be the best solution for the business challenge at hand
2. Vendor marketing. State-of-the-art demos help obtain buy-in and funding for new tech, making it easier and more urgent to focus on tech than on outcomes
3. Lack of strategic advice. The literature covering new tech rarely addresses the questions:
   • When is this tech useful?
   • When should orgs use it?
   • And when not?
4. Real limitations on modalities. One leader (who works in healthcare) shared that most development opportunities happen during team huddles, during which learning must be delivered only on paper or—perhaps—on a smart phone. Such limitations can shape decisions about delivery through sheer necessity.

Leaders also discussed a related problem: The fact that people often conflate learning content—the information or knowledge itself—with the delivery modality. Some leaders posited that disconnecting the two may help L&D enable development experiences that are more helpful to employees and drive business outcomes. Others, however, see content and delivery modality as intricately and necessarily linked. We plan to explore this conflation question in upcoming interviews.

A Special Thanks

This session helped us more clearly understand what’s really important in learning content—particularly the need for L&D to focus on changing the behaviors that matter to the business and to employees.

Thank you again to those of you who attended and enriched our discussion. And, as always, we welcome your suggestions and feedback at [email protected].

It really comes as no surprise that LinkedIn Learning is jumping on the LXP bandwagon. As organizations have begun the trek from “you’ll learn what I darn-well tell you to learn” to “Look! It’s Netflix for learning!” to, finally, “Let’s help you build skills – it’s good for you and it’s good for the company”, it makes logical sense that LinkedIn would eventually go here. Read their announcement.

Here’s what we know:

It’s free (for some, and for now).

LinkedIn Learning is offering LinkedIn Learning Hub for free to existing LinkedIn Learning Pro product customers for 1 year. We’re assuming this is a way to quickly build market share and allow those orgs that are thinking about dipping their toes in the LXP market to experiment.

This is particularly savvy as organizations are thinking more broadly about learning – no matter how good LinkedIn Learning content is, it’s likely not enough on its own for any organization. LinkedIn Learning Hub gives LinkedIn Learning the chance to offer more value to existing customers by creating a new product in a hot category.

This move may cost LinkedIn a bit of money upfront in customer service and integration unless they have an incredibly easy interface to connect both content, data, and employee information and expect it to be turnkey. But it also provides them with further opportunities to connect with and build relationships with existing customers.

What we’d like to know:

• What will be the cost after the first year?
• What services will LinkedIn Learning add to accommodate their new LXP customers? Even the simplest LXP is significantly more complicated than a content portal.
• Will they leverage customers using the product to further develop the product to better compete with existing platforms?

It’s for learning.

LinkedIn is offering LinkedIn Learning Hub as an addition in LinkedIn Learning. That fact, and the name, “Learning Hub”, lead us to believe that LinkedIn is thinking about this product as firmly planted in the learning space. As such, it can easily find a line item on the L&D budget and also has the opportunity to be a fairly big disrupter to the LXP market.

While this is seems like a logical move, it could also be shortsighted given that other big LXP players (like Degreed or Edcast) are endeavoring to increase their footprint outside of L&D as they realize that “skills” isn’t just a learning problem; it’s a strategic problem that affects almost every people aspect of an organization.

Other players are increasingly emphasizing that learning happens everywhere, and not just as a result of consuming content, to build skills. Other ways of developing skills, most notably through experiences, are being developed and tested. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in the skills discussion, check out our podcast, Workplace Stories: The Skills Obsession.)

What we’d like to know:

• How does the product accommodate (and connect with) other technologies that are increasingly involved in developing/tracking/reporting skills and experiences?

It touts its data.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn Learning Hub is touting data and insights from their Skills Graph, “the world’s most comprehensive skills taxonomy, with 36K+ skills, 24M+ job postings, and the largest professional network of 740M+ members.” LinkedIn has got some fantastic data – one of the very big advantages it has over others playing in this space.

However, how LinkedIn indicates it’ll used use that data is underwhelming. According to their introductory post by their Sr. Director of Product, James Raybould, all that lovely data will be used to “empower customers with richer skills data insights, personalized content, and community-based learning.”

These things are important – but at this point, we don’t see the ability to provide incrementally better recommendations for content as a game changer in the LXP space.

What we’d like to know:

• What do the richer skills data insights look like, and what can LinkedIn Learning Hub do with those insights beyond these basics in the near future?
• How will those insights be leveraged for some of LinkedIn’s other offerings? (e.g., we see how skills information could be really valuable to LinkedIn proper and their support of recruiting).

So far its data appears to be for the adults.

Data and insights about skills are touted as available to L&D functions through the admin portal so they can “identify skills gaps, pin key skills and track trends over time, benchmark themselves against similar companies, get insights on skills interest and learning activity, and track skill trends across content sources.”

One of the really powerful advantages we think LinkedIn has is their history of providing data to the employees themselves – those most empowered and most motivated to do something with it. We’d love to understand what kind of skills data LinkedIn Learning Hub will provide individual employees and how it can enable employees in their careers. With the strong focus many organizations have on employee experience these days, this seems like a no brainer and a pretty big selling point.

What we’d like to know:

• What information will be pushed down to individuals?
• How is this tool designed to help guide employees to new opportunities for growth and career?

It (like everyone else) has a skills taxonomy.

One of the biggest arguments about skills is what to call them and how they relate to each other. Many organizations lack a common language about skills, and one of the biggest frustrations is the lack of consistently between departments, businesses, and even technology. We don't know how to talk about skills. To solve this problem, many organizations either create skills taxonomies or adopt ones and tailor them to their needs so – at least internally – everyone is using the same language.

The LinkedIn Learning Hub's skills taxonomy may help some organizations create the consistency they crave. It also provides a way to more accurately benchmark against industry and/or regional norms for skills and skills development. Many providers of skills frameworks are moving towards ontologies (structures that show concepts and their relationships relationships and adapt to new information) rather than taxonomies (structured, formalized, hierarchical organizations). Although we haven't seen it, we're assuming LinkedIn may lean more toward ontology than pure taxonomy – important to their ability to do more cool stuff later.

What we’d like to know:

• How does the taxonomy stay current and valid given rapid changes most orgs are facing,
• How can it align with taxonomies that have already been adopted by organizations?

It appears to duplicate some of Viva’s offerings.

Less than 3 months ago, Microsoft, LinkedIn Learning’s parent company unveiled its new Employee Experience Platform, Viva. This tool “brings employee engagement, learning, wellbeing, and knowledge discovery directly into the flow of people’s work.” See our take on Viva here.

As a part of that offering, there is a native player for LinkedIn Learning content. Other things it does?

• Identify content that may work for individuals.
• Provide insights to individuals, managers, and leaders
• Connect information and experts across the organization

Clearly, there is overlap. It is unclear how these 2 systems play with each other, if at all. Given the overlap, it appears that there could be some cannibalization. Further, Viva will integrate with other LXPs – rendering LinkedIn Learning Hub even more redundant.

What we’d like to know:

• How does LinkedIn Learning Hub interface with Microsoft’s Viva?
• If orgs have implemented one, is the other necessary?
• Are there plans to create a massive experience platform that uses all data that Microsoft and LinkedIn have? Cuz that would be cool.

To sum up:

LinkedIn Learning Hub is an interesting move by LinkedIn Learning – one that allows it to increase its offering to existing content customers – likely necessary because while content has value, it is increasingly becoming only a small piece of the overall L&D picture. It’s also not a move completely without precedent. Skillsoft purchased SumTotal for the same reason years ago.

Offering it to existing Pro customers for free may increase market share quickly, allowing those experimenting with LXPs for the first time to see if it’s for them, and get them used to a product that will likely increase in functionality and polish in future. It may be a very good move for small and midsize organizations or larger organizations with constrained L&D budgets.

Two final observations: 1) LinkedIn Learning Hub is pretty basic. Nothing about this LXP is extraordinary – yet. That could change. 2) While Viva made one heck of a bang when it hit the market, LinkedIn Learning Hub entered with more of a whisper. Some of our friends at other LXP providers say there isn't yet much disruption to deals in their pipelines. LinkedIn Learning Hub may not yet have the heft of existing options.

We’re very interested in your opinion – what are your thoughts?

 

DEIB & Skills: We Found What We Expected

Our hope (wish? dream?) that we'd overlooked a treasure trove of articles on DEIB and skills did not come to fruition. Instead, as expected, our literature review turned up numerous articles explaining:

• How leaders can become more inclusive
• The role managers can play in promoting DEIB
• The strategies orgs should put in place

But, missing from our lit review: The specific DEIB skills that individuals should or can develop, as well as what role learning can play in the development.

We looked at more than 50 academic and business articles, reports, and books for this lit review. This article summarizes the 5 key themes that emerged from the literature. But before we dive into them, we first want to touch upon a few things that surprised us.

A few things surprised us

We did still find a few interesting nuggets from our literature review, such as:

• While much is written about DEIB-related courses and trainings, very little exists on the skills that foster DEIB and how they can be developed.
• We found 2 reports with in-depth research on the skills that impact DEIB (we share details on these publications below).
• Increasingly, storytelling is becoming more essential for knowledge-sharing and building a culture of trust and collaboration (areas that impact DEIB)—but no existing literature makes the direct connection to DEIB nor sees it as an important skill for it.

5 THEMES FROM OUR LIT REVIEW

In this article, we summarize the key insights we learned:

1. Traditional diversity training doesn’t work
2. People look at DEIB competencies, not skills
3. Skills for DEIB transcend individual roles and orgs
4. DEIB skills should be part of organizational learning
5. DEIB skills are in demand, but we don’t know how to teach them

Traditional diversity training doesn’t work

A recurring theme on this topic is the ineffectiveness of traditional diversity and unconscious bias training. In fact, research has shown that this kind of training may result in awareness among underrepresented groups of the bias-driven barriers that exist within an org while having no effect on the behaviors of the majority represented population.¹

The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two—and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash.

However, there’s considerable research that also focuses on ways orgs can make such training relevant and useful, by making some crucial adjustments to it, such as:

• Being intentional about the outcomes and clearly defining them
• Diversifying the training content
• Removing the assumption that individuals at all hierarchical levels experience DEIB similarly
• Articulating specific and realistic expectations
• Consistently evaluating people to track changes and nudging them to take action

All of these suggestions point toward helping people learn something that they can apply in their work—skills.

People look at DEIB competencies, not skills

We found quite a bit written about competencies that leaders, managers, and employees need to drive meaningful change for DEIB. A common thread among the literature is the need to focus on developing competencies that are both individual- / person-focused, and those that impact the broader team and org. Cultural competency is one of the most frequently referenced areas.

“Cultural competence is the ability to recognize that people have different experiences than you, to understand the social, economic, or political reasons why those experiences are different”²

We found 2 problems with the lit that focused on competencies:

1. There’s no consensus or agreement on what this set of competencies needs to be
2. Competencies by definition are too broad to enable taking action to foster DEIB

We think the focus should instead be on the skills that foster DEIB. As we mention in our article Skills for DEIB: Building The Muscles We Need, skills are applied and, thus, enable action-taking. However, the current lit lacks structured research around the specific skills (or a set of them) that can enable people to take action.

Skills for DEIB transcend individual roles & orgs

Some of the lit we reviewed discussed the difficulty in identifying key skills for DEIB, as compared with the way we identify skills for a specific role or job via a job analysis. Skills that foster DEIB transcend roles and orgs.

Everyone needs DEIB skills if they want to work successfully and effectively with diverse individuals or groups, whether it be within their current org or a future one. It should be noted, however, that some evidence exists in the lit about how certain skills are more crucial at different hierarchical levels.

Some DEIB skills are more crucial at different hierarchical levels.

For example, a staff-level employee might find more value in leveraging their collaboration and communication skills if most of their interactions are with diverse peers or supervisors. On the other hand, an executive trying to implement strategic decisions that might impact diverse groups differently should leverage their active listening and / or storytelling skills.

DEIB skills should be part of organizational learning

As we mention in the beginning of the article, there’s considerable literature on DEIB training, and the role of L&D in delivering, tracking, and measuring its effectiveness. We did come across a few insightful pieces that see the role of learning extend beyond delivering specific trainings. Because DEIB is foundational to everything that happens at work, it, therefore, needs to be an integral part of org-wide learning initiatives.

Because DEIB is foundational to everything that happens at work, it, therefore, needs to be an integral part of org-wide learning initiatives.

L&D has an important role in doing that, and going beyond delivering trainings and courses on DEIB. From ensuring consistent terminology and definitions to assessing and measuring progress in skills development, the learning function can bring their expertise to ensure a lasting and meaningful impact.

By working with the DEIB leaders, the L&D function can effectively identify skills that have a meaningful impact on driving org-wide inclusion efforts—and make development of those DEIB skills a part of an individual’s overall learning and development.

DEIB skills are in demand, but we don’t know how to teach them

Many articles highlight the rise in demand for “soft” skills. The pandemic, widespread protests for social justice, and climate-related disasters have resulted in people becoming aware of certain skills that can help them survive and thrive during times of rapid change.

Some refer to them as “durable skills”—because they’re not perishable like technical skills that can become obsolete if the tech itself is no longer popular or used widely. For example, collaboration and empathy are increasingly seen as critical skills to function effectively in a new environment. Not surprisingly, these soft / durable / humanizing skills (whatever we call them) are also crucial for building inclusive environments and a culture of belonging.

People are becoming aware of certain skills—soft, durable, or humanizing—that can help them survive and thrive during times of rapid change.

The problem, as some authors allude to, lies in the approach to developing these skills for 2 reasons.

The first reason: It’s difficult to teach these skills individually. As one author put it:

“Historically, if employees don’t arrive “naturally endowed” with these skills, they are often left to develop them on the job. How do you teach or develop skills like mental agility, for example?”³

A suggested approach to this problem is grouping interrelated skills into clusters and investing in a family of skills.

“Rather than targeting mental agility in isolation, you might target its cluster by also addressing skills like navigating ambiguity, working with incomplete information, and developing organizational and self-awareness.”⁴

The second reason: It’s difficult to ensure whether these skills are being implemented and practiced by people. Some ideas are suggested in the existing lit to address this, such as:

• Incorporating a microlearning approach and integrating it into the workflow
• Combining learning with coaching
• Using nudges and reminders to apply their new skills and practice them

What Caught Our Attention

Of all the literature we reviewed, a few pieces stood out to us. Each of these pieces contain information that we find useful and / or intriguing. We learned from their perspectives—and encourage you to do the same.

Skills for Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations: A Review and Preliminary Investigation

Rosemary Hays-Thomas, Alyinth Bowen, and Megan Boudreaux | The Psychologist-Manager Journal, 2012

This article offers an academic approach to identifying skills for diversity and how they vary, based on the different hierarchical levels within an org.

"Empathy or the ability to take the role of another may be critical to diversity effectiveness at all levels the organizations. Self-awareness and listening skills are likely to be important at all levels as well."

Highlights:

• Reviews the existing lit on identifying the skills needed for diversity
• Applies a critical incident methodology to develop a broad-based set of diversity attributes
• Lays out a model to help understand what values, knowledge, and skills are most important at different org levels (e.g., staff, middle managers, and executives) for effectiveness in diverse environments
• Highlights the importance of empathy at all levels of the org

Building the Link Between Learning and Inclusion

KeyAnna Schmiedl, interviewed by Deborah Milstein | MIT Sloan Management Review, March 2021

This article provides an example of how DEIB leaders and L&D functions can work together to create learning opportunities that foster a culture of belonging and inclusion among employees. This is an extremely timely article: It provides great examples of how Wayfair is leveraging such a partnership to update its training around inclusion in light of the social justice movements of 2020.

"We’ve … codeveloped ‘culture of inclusion’ trainings with L&D. They had the subject-matter expertise to pinpoint the highly engaging points in the instructor-led, in-person training and recreate those experiences in a different e-learning format."

Highlights:

• People are making the connection that diversity, equity, and inclusion are not a set of initiatives that operate in a silo
• DEI needs to be foundational to everything that happens at work, including learning
• By partnering, DEI leaders and L&D can bring better solutions to people within the org
• The connection between learning and DEIB should be seamless

Skills in Demand, Skills in Decline

Matthew J. Daniel, Susan Hackett | Chief Learning Officer Magazine, December 2020

This article offers insights into which skills are growing in demand and why, as orgs look to build those that’ll enable them to thrive in a new environment. It also provides suggestions on how orgs can approach developing these skills.

"The most notable trend, perhaps, is the volume of perishable skills in declining demand… platform- or organization-specific tools or languages that remain important for some but are increasingly volatile. Fluency in these programs takes a back seat to more durable and stable skills."

Highlights:

• Perishable skills—that focus on specific tools or software, and which are org-specific—are in decline
• Durable skills and stable skills—that are transferable, and which enable people to work in volatile environments—are on the rise
• Orgs can approach the development of such skills by grouping them into clusters
• Orgs need to think about broadening and diversifying the durable skills sets of their people

Risky Business: Why Diversity and Inclusion Matter

Celeste Young and Roger Jones | Victoria University and Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, 2019

This article provides a list of skills identified as critical to support D&I practice and the implementation of activities, based on a workshop conducted at Victoria University in December 2018. While the workshop was specifically designed for emergency management orgs (EMO), the applicability and relevance of these skills to all orgs is obvious and clear.

"Communication as a skill is already widely recognized as crucial for D&I practice, but the nomination of listening and reflective skills indicates the need for the development of specific social skills to enhance inclusion."

Highlights:

• D&I shocks can lead to risks serious enough to threaten the ability of EMOs to perform their functions
• Results from the workshop showed that listening and reflection were rated as the most important skills needed for D&I
• Other needed skills for D&I included being collaborative and analytic, and applied skills such as engagement, negotiation, and being able to manage unconscious bias

Storytelling in Organizations: The Power and Traps of Using Stories to Share Knowledge in Organizations

Deborah Sole, Daniel Gray Wilson | Harvard Graduate School of Education Journal, January 2002

This article explains how storytelling can be extremely effective in building or renewing trust and building a collective vision. While an explicit connection between storytelling as a skill and DEIB is not made in the article, we think it’s an important skill as it drives many components of DEIB, such as building trust, resolving conflicts, and generating emotional connections.

"Storytelling has been used in domains to communicate embedded knowledge, resolve conflict, and simulate problem solving."

Highlights:

• Well-designed, well-told stories can convey both information and emotion
• Storytelling can especially be effective in socializing new members and mending relationships
• Storytelling is a means to share norms and values, develop trust, and generate emotional connections

Additional Reading Recommendations

1. Creating a Competency Model for Diversity and Inclusion Practitioners, The Conference Board / Indira Lahiri, 2008.
2. “What Black Employee Resource Groups Need Right Now,” Harvard Business Review / Aiko Bethea,
3. “Inclusive Workplace Competencies,” Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, 2017.
4. “'Soft’ Skills Are in Demand. Can They Be Taught?” Fortune / Anne Fisher, May 2019.
5. Don’t Give Up on Unconscious Bias Training—Make It Better,” Harvard Business Review / Joelle Emerson, April 2017.

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Nuno Congalves, Global Head of Strategic Capability Building at Mars

DETAILS

“I think that in the future, what will be really necessary in terms of skills are people that talk different languages of skills… talking different languages of different skill sets will be something really, really important.” Why is it significant that become more expert seems so fused with speaking restricted languages? And what does it mean to have ‘intentionality’ about skills? How do you start to really understand the skills needs of an organization you join in COVID? This week, these and many other thorny but critical issues get exposed via our debate with long-time friend and highly accomplished CLO and talent leader Nuno Gonçalves, who is now starting to do at global confectionary, food and pet care giant Mars what he did at  European life sciences player UCB: implement a cross-company, future-focused skills strategy. It’s an excellent conversation with a truly passionate learning ninja who’s thought deeply about these problems.

Find out more about Nuno’s employer Mars

Connect with him on LinkedIn

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Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills. 

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Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr:
Great. Well, we're going to go ahead and get started. So for those of you that I don't know, I am Stacia Garr and I am co-founder of RedThread Research where human capital research and advisory membership. And we're excited to talk to you today about purpose driven organizations. So this is a one of our Q&A calls. So this is pretty informal. And if you have questions, please go ahead and just jump off of mute and ask them as we go along. We do love it if you're able to do camera, just because it's a small group and it makes it a little bit more informal. If you don't feel comfortable with that today, obviously totally understand. You can also use the chat function if that's more your jam today as well.

Who is RedThread

Stacia Garr:
Just quick station identification as it were. As I said, we're RedThread Research. We focus on a range of different topics. We're focused on people, analytics, learning and skills, performance, and employee experience to DEIB and HR technology. This topic of purpose really kind of covers the much broader range of what, you know, it's really kind of a super topic if you will, because it has impacts across all these different areas. If anybody wants to know more about what we do go to redthreadresearch.com.

Our journey to understand purpose

Stacia Garr:
So as I mentioned, this is kind of a super topic for us, and we began this, this journey to purpose. It's actually kind of an interesting origin story in that our team every year comes together and says, you know, what are we going to focus on in the coming year? And a few years ago, I guess about 18 months ago, one of our team members came together, came to this meeting and said, I think we should really focus on organizational purpose. And Dani and I kind of went really like, are you sure?

Stacia Garr:
And you know, just cause we hadn't been here, we'd been hearing some about it, but we weren't, you know, we weren't convinced and this team member made an incredibly compelling case around why purpose was so important in how he was gaining traction and all this other stuff. And this was in September of 2019. So over the course of the next month or so this team member convinced us that this was a great idea. And we decided to start the research in January, 2020. Obviously we had no idea what was going to happen as we moved through 2020 at that point and how, in some ways, prescient this topic of purpose really was. But the reason I share that story is because before we got to the pandemic, there was already a lot of interest in this topic of purpose. There was an I'll talk about this in just a minute, but the focus on the business roundtable on making the purpose of a corporation being much more broad being about stakeholder capitalism, not just about shareholder capitalism and the like, but so we had that already happening, but then the pandemic really kind of accelerated what was happening.

Stacia Garr:
And so we completed a study last fall called the Purpose Driven Organization and it really covered the three bullets that are here on this slide, what is purpose, why it matters, how HR can bring purpose to life and the role of HR tech and enabling purpose. One of the things that happened though, because we were doing this research in the midst of the pandemic is a lot of people were obviously focused on a range of things related to enabling their employees. And we found that we had some really good stories, but not that many great stories of people telling them that story themselves. So we've listened to a lot of podcasts. We did some, we did some interviews, we did a lot of reading of articles, et cetera. And that's what we based a report on, but we wanted to bring it more to life.

Stacia Garr:
And so as a result of that, we did a whole podcast series that kicked off last October and ran until actually just about a month ago where we publish stories of what organizations were doing about organizational purpose. And that podcast is on our website, it's called, is purpose working. And so that was kind of that formed the Genesis of many of the stories that we found with this research. So that was a lot of intro into, into what we did and why we did it.

Stacia Garr:
Let me tell you a little bit more about the study and what we found. So when we talk about organizational purpose, this is our definition of it. So we say it's clear and concise statement that inspires people to deliver value to these multiple stakeholders. And so what I think is interesting here is in our list, as well as in most of the lists that you see, for instance from the business roundtable, shareholders are at the bottom of this list. So they are still an important part, but these other groups are a much more important part than they have been. Historically

Stacia Garr:
I think I saw someone maybe come off of mute. Did someone have a question or a comment on this?

Stacia Garr:
Okay, I'll keep going.

Purpose vs everything else

Stacia Garr:
The other thing that we get asked about is what is purpose compared to everything else? And so the way that we see it is this, that purpose is really about why I, or we do this. Why do we do this thing? This work that we do this focus for the organization, why do we do it? There are a lot of other important concepts, like as we show here, vision, mission, values, and principles but as we see purpose though purposes, the underlying kind of mega trend if you will. And these other factors are components of it. And ways that purpose is actualized, but Purpose is the fundamental key point.

Understanding purpose businesses

Stacia Garr:
Another thing that we learned through the research was about what purpose businesses are. And what I mean by that is there is an easy tendency to think that you know, there's deliberate impact that an organization is making and that's just their primary focus versus kind of market forces. So almost like a profit versus a purpose perspective. And so, but what we find though is, is that purpose actually extends much farther into kind of some of the organizations you might think of as do-good-er organizations then than you might expect. So a charity or pure NGO. Yes, that's, that's very purpose-driven and it is designed for a very deliberate impact, but with even social enterprises, often they can be for profit. And, you know, we've got all these businesses going to the right-hand side that are, that are for-profit.

Stacia Garr:
So one of the big findings that we learned through both the study, as well as through the podcast series was that profit and purpose are not necessarily at odds with each other. In fact, what we heard from, for instance, a venture capitalist, Debra Quazzo, who said, if a business doesn't have a clear purpose, and if its purpose is not big enough to be meaningful and inspiring, then you're probably not going to have a very good business, which I thought was a really powerful thought. So she would talk about how, when she is investing in businesses and startups, that if they didn't have a clear purpose, then, you know, she was probably not going to make the investment because the return just wasn't going to be good enough. And so I feel like that's kind of a different way of thinking about purpose certainly than what I was taught in business school. I was taught, you know, you need to get your return to shareholders and that's all that matters, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that the pendulum has swung back away from that perspective. I'll pause right there. Does anybody have any thoughts or comments on that?

Mission statement vs purpose

Priyanka Mehrotra:
I was just curious how businesses make the distinction between their mission statement and purpose. How has that distinction coming along and what, what did we see in our research on that?

Stacia Garr:
Well, I think practically speaking, I'm going to go back to that slide. Practically speaking, we see them tightly intermingled. So because organizations don't necessarily specifically articulate externally the difference between their purpose and mission, they tend in, people tend to understand what a mission is. I think we see the language being tightly mixed, but if you try to, if you kind of tease it out, you'll see that in many organizations, mission statement they'll have something that is much closer to a purpose statement. Like we do this and like, this is, this is the higher level of what we do. And then kind of the, the double-click down is the mission. Though they may call it all a mission statement. We were trying to pull it apart because the, what we do now in, in the future can change, right? We've seen that happen with lots and lots of organizations. But often the fundamental, underlying purpose of what we do is doesn't change. And so there's of the interesting interplay between the two concepts.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Great question.

Stacia Garr:
Any other questions or thoughts that folks have?

Understand purpose businesses

Stacia Garr:
All right. I'll keep, I'll keep going. And I'll, I'll say usually our Q&A calls. I don't put as much content in them. They're usually much more discussion-based but there weren't a ton of questions in advance of this. And I figured that given that folks may just want to know what we learned about this work. So that's why I put a bit more questions in here, or a bit more slides in here than we usually do. Okay. Stacia Garr:
So 73% of, of people believe companies can increase profits and improve communities. So this is kind of a fundamental belief that we're increasingly seeing, particularly in the United States.

Introduction Purpose has gone mainstream

Stacia Garr:
I've mentioned a few times this, this concept of the, what the Business Roundtable wrote in August of 2019. And the reason that this is important is that the business roundtable, you know, is an organization that a good portion of the fortune 500 are a part of it is part of the way that they kind of communicate where at least American businesses are going and for decades, they've said that the shareholder was primary.

Stacia Garr:
And this really ties back to the work that someone like the folks like Milton Friedman did in the 1970s that said, look, you know, the purpose of a business of a corporation is to return value to shareholders and that's it full stop. What's interesting is two things. One is, is that, you know, like I said, by 2019, the Business Roundtable updated this statement on the purpose of corporation focusing on these concepts of customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and then shareholders. But what's perhaps even more interesting is that this focus on shareholders was in some ways an anomaly in time. So if you look at some of the research and you look at what companies were writing about in the 1930s, forties, fifties, et cetera they were much more focused on the broader good if you will, of the good, the good of the community, et cetera.

Stacia Garr:
And it was only with the introduction of folks like Friedman in the seventies that we saw this very strong movement towards the shareholder. And in some ways that made sense, because it was a lot easier to measure. I'm going to talk about measurement in a few minutes, a lot easier to measure the value that the corporation was creating. If you only have a single stakeholder to whom you're trying to benefit in this case, the shareholder, and it is a lot more complex and messy if we have five different share stakeholders to whom we are trying to deliver value. But I think that it's interesting cause it feels like the pendulum is kind of coming back to what, where things were historically and versus, you know, the, you know, whatever 50 years that it's been very much so focused on on shareholders.

Employees expect businesses to act

Speaker 2:
Part of the reason this shift is that really employees and consumers expectations have shifted. This is some data from the Edelman Trust Barometer, where they were talking about the types of broader societal actions that they want businesses to take. And you can see here that, you know, 80% want brands to help solve society's problems is what this is. 64% want companies to help set an example as to what they should be doing when it comes to diversity. And 71% said that they trust employers to do what is right when it comes to social justice. But what is interesting on that last point was that was is especially true for small businesses.

Stacia Garr:
It was actually not true for large corporations. So they want companies to take action. They want them to do things that are in the better interest of society but they don't necessarily trust large corporations to do so. And this I think is, is part of what's driving so much of the CEO action that we're seeing. Like for instance, I don't know if you all saw today a significant number of CEOs signed onto a advertisement that was run in many major newspapers, talking about voting rights here in the United States, that they supported the broad extension of voting rights. And this is all kind of part of this reaction to employees and consumers expecting brands to take action that has really come about in the last five years, if you look at the data. So we're seeing this, my point is we're seeing this manifest in a lot of different ways. That's just one that happened to have happened today.

Introduction Purpose = good business

Stacia Garr:
The reason that we're seeing this is that purpose is generally seen as being pretty good for businesses. So we saw that for the last financial crisis. So the 2009 financial crisis, 64% of B Corp's were more likely to survive the last financial crisis than just pure for-profit companies. So if a company was a B Corp, it was more likely to survive. And, and I should say, if you don't know what a B Corp is, a B Corp basically has multiple, it has built into its legal structure, that it has an obligation to serve multiple stakeholders. And so it's, it's kind of the codification, if you will, in some ways of a triple bottom line concept, but it's actually built into the legal construct of the organization. For the next one data shows that 67% of consumers are more likely to forgive a mistake made by a purpose driven organizations.

Stacia Garr:
So if consumers think that a company is generally trying to do the thing, but they make a mistake, they're more likely to forgive them. 89% of leaders thinks purpose drives employee satisfaction and 84% of execs think purpose impacts an organization's ability to transform. So, you know, in addition to kind of all the good things that are a result of, of purpose, there's also a lot of data that shows that there's some benefits to doing it as well. I'll go ahead and pause again here. Any questions or comments on any of this?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Okay. I had a comment about the previous slide. So we've seen that employees are of course pushing and expecting more from organizations, but I think we're starting to see that from shareholders two increasingly like for example, I remember reading just a couple of days ago, a story in the news about how big shareholders asked Google, oh sorry Alphabet to look into there program and protections for employees and there also increasingly hearing about shareholders pushing companies to do better on D&I, especially. So I think we're starting to see a lot of movement from that front as well.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I think that's true. And it's in the reason for it, I think is, is this right? Is that if, if you truly believe these numbers that, that, you know, these businesses do better, if they do these things you know, shareholders are what their businesses to succeed and return better investments, no matter what, what the, not, hopefully not, no matter what, but, you know, they, they would encourage them to take these actions as well. Not just some of the traditional ones. Yeah. And I think the, the other component of that is the SEC reporting guidelines. You know, we've talked about that quite a bit. So with those new reporting guidelines on human capital you know, a lot of companies are asking themselves one, what should we report? But two, it just indicates the higher level of interest in human capital data and what people are, what organizations are doing with their people. And so, and that's pushing them to say, you should be doing the right things.

Speaker 4:
Yeah.

Purpose as a self reinforcing system

Stacia Garr:
Okay. So if we go on one of the most interesting things we found from the research was this concept, that purpose is really a self-reinforcing decision. So the point being that you, it is harder to achieve impact if you just have one part of the business focused on purpose. So if, you know, if you just have a corporate social responsibility group over here on the side, focused on purpose but the rest of the business is not it's hard to kind of create the level of impact that you would want to that said organizations that saw and really put purpose front and center to what they did. They basically were able to constantly reinforce that purpose. And it created this nice flywheel effect. So a very practical example of that comes from one of the podcasts that we did, which was with Medtronic.

Stacia Garr:
And so Medtronic is a medical devices company, you know, is in the last year, is the need for ventilators was front and center they increased the ventilators that they produced by something like 200%. I mean, they're just a very purpose driven organization. And just in terms of where the industry is, that they're in. But what was interesting was when we interviewed Jeff Orlando at Medtronic, he talked about how they had a, basically a purpose statement or a purpose charter, if you will that their leader or one of their founders had had written in the 1940s and how that was one, it was like a sacred document that he talked about it like it was almost like a constitution. But second, he talked about how it wasn't a dead document. It was a document that they used to actively help them make decisions about directions that they should go investments they should make with their people, et cetera.

Stacia Garr:
He did make the point that like the constitution, there was a lot of interpretation. So some, there were some strict constitutionalist and some people who are a little bit more flexible, but he said that made the conversation richer and help them make better decisions. And so he said, you know, it was very much so in a situation where that decision, the intentional decisions were a result of the purpose, and then it just continued flowing around. So that's just one example.

What that means for HR

Stacia Garr:
What we did in the study was we looked at this from a perspective of what this means for HR and specifically looked at the different parts of the talent life cycle. So what does this mean from an attraction perspective, enablement, retention, and development.

In summary: Attract, Enable, Develop, Retain

Stacia Garr:
And what we found essentially here is this, first that with attraction attraction in many ways is the most important, because it's all about, do you get people into the organization who aligned with the purpose of the organization?

Stacia Garr:
And so making sure that the elements of purpose and with organization's purpose and how that translates to an individual is present in all aspects of the recruitment phase. The second component of enablement is really about creating the conditions that enabled that focus on purpose. So organizational culture, I just gave that example of what Medtronic does. It's in the culture that anyone can raise their hand and say, well, does this align to our, our purpose or there's no organizational hierarchy around that? There's certainly an element of wellbeing, which is so important right now with regard to, how does our purpose translate to the wellbeing of our employees and then the wellbeing of all those other stakeholders as well. This is specifically focused on employees here, but it's important to note that there's often this broader component and then volunteerism.

Stacia Garr:
So one of the podcast interviews that we did actually, I think it may not have up running, but one of the interviews we did was with Microsoft on their volunteerism program, this idea of enabling people to bring their own purpose to life through the company through volunteer activities. The third component here with development was really interesting in that we saw purpose being woven into the development opportunities that were being given. So, you know, making sure that people understood how they could connect their own purpose to the organization and doing that through, through learning opportunities. We had a great interview with folks from EY who talked about kind of the learning that they did to help people identify their individual purpose and make that connection. Similarly with leadership development, the folks that EY talked about, how they also teach their leaders how to bring out purpose in the, in the folks who work with them and how to kind of bring that element of purpose to their own leadership style.

Stacia Garr:
And then with career planning we saw that at Johnson and Johnson actually, organizations talk an organization that talked about how they set up a specific career planning effort to help people identify their purpose, and then to map it to career opportunities. And so when they were thinking about career opportunities and the language they use to describe them, the element of purpose and what J and J was trying to achieve was a critical component of that. And then finally retention. So we're seeing organizations looking to track the impact of their talent practices that aligned to purpose right now in all transparency, the primary space, we're seeing this as with diversity and inclusion or diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging that's where we're seeing the primary focus on tracking. Yes, we're seeing it within employee engagement, but in terms of the connection back to purpose DEIB is where we we're tending to see it. So, okay. This is the last of, kind of my prepared slides. So are there any questions on this or any comments or thoughts or anything anyone wants to contribute.

Connecting organizational purpose vs employee purpose

Speaker 1:
I will say something. So I work with organizations to improve human performance of the employees on the teams. So when I heard about this webinar from my friend, who is also here and thank you for letting me know I said, because I'm talking about how to find your purpose to and make the right behavior changes through behavior change, how you can improve your performance. And I'm just talking this with the organization. So this was interesting to see how the organizations purpose and the employee purpose. Those two dots are, how those two dots are connected to improve the employee performance. So when you said, yeah, it increases the employee satisfaction in one of the slides. Yeah. I can see that how it impacts the motivation of the employee and belonging to that organization feeling a part of that organization because they're aligning. So it makes it now wait clear in my head, the organizational purpose and the employee purpose, how they must be aligning and close attached to each other.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah.

Stacia Garr:
And this slide explains it very well, too. So.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Well, it's, it's a wonderful question. I did include it down here. Let me just skip down. Here we go. So it did make it in.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. Thank you for putting it up last night when I was registering, I said, I think this is the area I really want to talk a little bit more about.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well, so one of the things in, and I encourage you to to subscribe to the podcast.

Speaker 1:
Definitely. I will.

Stacia Garr:
And listen to that episode from EY because they have this concept of nested purpose, which I thought was really powerful. And the idea was that you have the organizational purpose here, then you have a team purpose and you have the individual purpose. And so in the important, and this is part of the reason that they put such an emphasis on enabling managers to understand purpose is that it's really that, that team purpose that connects people up to the organizational purpose. And so because that organizational purpose can be a little bit esoteric or feel a little bit disconnected, particularly, you know, if it's in their instance, a client service organization, but they don't have a a client service role, right.

Stacia Garr:
So it's like, okay, well, how do I connect? And so what they do is, as they talk about the role of managers in creating that nested purpose and helping individuals find their purpose and connecting it to the work they did. And in the podcast, there was a story that he told about, you know, somebody who is basically think 80% of her job, she didn't really want to do, but 20% she did and how they used the purpose framework to help them understand, okay, this is what I really want to do. And then it happened, there were some shifts that were being made in that person's in terms of what that team needed. And so they were able to help that person actually align and do, you know, pretty close to 80% of the things they want to do. They're still the 20% though, who is not glamorous, but so to, for all of us. And so they were able to make that connection, but via the purpose conversation by via this concept of connecting to the team.

Speaker 2:
I find that really interesting, the organizational, the team and the individual and where it happens is at that team level with those leader conversations or the leader. And because that's where we're actually focused is that to make it so my background is around inclusion and inclusion happens as we often talk about at that team level. And if we focus at that team level, we'll get more traction and it's very much aligned because we're also trying to figure out how do we bring it down to the individual level, but at the same time, it connect those two things, organizational individual level. One question I have is we've actually done a like we've gone into the academic literature around the connection between leadership, business, performance inclusion, et cetera, and figured out like the, the strength of relationships between concepts like belonging and also purpose what we found was it wasn't a lot in the academic literature. There's a lot of confusion around purpose. Yeah. Okay. So, cause we, we dug in and, you know, that was the one area that was more limited than any other areas in order to get to those connections between and then create something more evidence-based around inclusion. Right.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I completely agree. So when we did our work, there was, you know, there's, there's some, some academic work this kind of know high level or whatever, but once you start to try to actually dig in and understand you're right. And so then for us, we then turned to some of the popular, you know, we're business press, or there's also some organizations that are writing about or who are purpose focused, I would say. And so we have some, some things that they've written, but in terms of just really good hard studies, not, not so much. So we this, our study was a qualitative. So based on the research that we reviewed and based on the interviews that we did we would like at some point to do a quantitative study on this we just haven't, haven't gotten there, but but part of the reason is there's, there's a great big hole.

Tight parallels between purpose, IT and D&I

Stacia Garr:
But I think you, you bring out an interesting point and it's one that we've actually talked about a lot not in the research, but kind of in other conversations, which is the incredibly tight parallel between purpose and how organizations are approaching it and D&I. So like what you said like that, you know, D&I happens at the team level purpose happens at the team level level. You look at the broader view of stakeholders. They almost exactly match what we see with, with D&I, you know, thinking about diverse suppliers, thinking about our communities, thinking about our employees, you know, there's just an incredible it's almost like the two are living in these parallel universes and doing the same thing. And so I think that there and we do see some organizations who are, forward-thinking on purpose, also being forward-thinking on D&I, but not all D&I organizations are forward-thinking on D&I are also forward-thinking on purpose and I think that's an opportunity that they're missing. So yeah, so there's, we see those connections too. We haven't explicitly pulled it out in that research.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, absolutely.

Stacia Garr:
Any other questions or thoughts? We've got some more questions in here. Okay.

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Why purpose now

Stacia Garr:
So one of them am an actually I did throw in some slides here to answer this question. So let me go back. Okay. So the question was, what do you see is driving the interest and organizational purpose? So I kind of gave some high, some preface around the data and the like, but as we kind of stepped back and looked at this and our research, we always ask the question why X now? So in this instance, why purpose now? And we had about, I think, five different reasons that we think that purpose is really a thing at the moment. The first one is the rise of new technology. So if you think about all the language around automation and AI, potentially taking people's jobs, et cetera, et cetera I think there's been an underlying discussion of what is it that makes us human, what makes us uniquely people?

Stacia Garr:
And part of that is purpose. You know, this idea that we are trying to achieve something greater than ourselves. And, and that's not something that technology does. So I think that that conversation is heightening or strengthening the discussion around purpose that's one. The second is the rise of the gig economy. So in particularly during the pandemic, there has been a significant focus on what is it that why should I join an organization? Like what, what is happening with my contributions of my work? Because I could just, you know, drive for Uber and get, make some money and call it good. Or I could just be an independent contractor on Upwork and, you know, get the money I need and that's it. But the thing, one of the unique things that an organization offers is the power to achieve something greater together.

Stacia Garr:
And that ties us very directly back to purpose. And one of the questions that are in here is about purpose post pandemic. I think purpose will be more important. Post a pandemic as people have now kind of are slowly bewilderingly coming out of their social isolation and saying, what do I want to do? And what impact do I want to make in this new world? And I think organizations that are clear on that purpose will do much better in terms of attracting the talent that they need. So it gig economy a second one. The third one here is this concept of work as a source of trusted information fulfillment. And so what this comes back to is that, you know, there's a lot of data that shows that unfortunately a lot of our social institutions have been declining. So whether that's our churches, which is why there's a church on here, or there that's our community organizations, whether it's Kowanas or, you know, whatever other organization you might be, a part of people are participating in those less.

Stacia Garr:
And along with that, they also are attending to trust. What have historically been seen as trusted information sources? So, you know, this whole thing about mainstream media versus other, you know, places that people get their news there's highest levels of distrust in the government that there has been in a very long time, but companies people's employers are where people are trusting information from they're trusting that's a high quality source of data and information. And so if you think about, you know, an organization's purpose and being able to say, you know, we do these things and people trust us that I think is part of the reason that connection between the need for a place to trust. And a clear purpose, I think is emphasizing the importance of purpose for a lot of folks. The last two are probably a little bit more obvious.

Stacia Garr:
So the pandemic, obviously, you know, there was a huge focus on doing there has been and continues to be, we are not out of it yet. A huge focus on being giving more, not just looking to, to prosper financially, but do you have any more to humanity and to other people and being more generous and being more human? So we think that ties in very nicely with purpose and then similarly the social justice movements of the last summer this idea that we are not just, you know, corporate entities existing to make money, but that we are there to to have a broader purpose. So those would all be reasons that I think that purpose is a thing right now, in addition to some of the other facts I mentioned.

Health orgs only?

Stacia Garr:
So this was kind of an interesting one. So was purpose something only healthcare and other orgs focus on? I think it's easier for organizations that clearly have kind of a purpose that relates to humankind and making people's lives better. But it is by far not the only type of industry that we see purpose driven organizations in. So in our study we have a long list of organizations. And so like EY right, when we started talking to EY about being on the podcast, I was kind of like really like a consulting firm. Okay. Like, let's see where you all are. And then they have this amazing effort around purpose. You know, we, one of the most well-known organizations, purpose driven organizations is is Patagonia. We didn't talk to them for this piece of research, but we've talked to them for other pieces of research and, you know, they are incredibly purpose-driven to the point where, you know, you can, because their purpose is about, you know, I think improving the home, our home planet as the way that they describe it.

Stacia Garr:
And so it's about, you know, not, not buying things that you don't need, making things that last for a long time giving back to local communities and advocating strongly for the for the environment, et cetera. So they're there, you know, an example of a clothing company that, that has a purpose and, and the list goes on and on there's food companies and Ben and Jerry's is kind of one of the biggest ones. Unilever, you know, consumer packaged goods company. So lots of different industries. I think it just is important to understand what that purpose is, and to clearly articulate in a way that's true to the organization.

Will purpose remain a thing after the pandemic

Stacia Garr:
So I touched on this one a moment ago, so will purpose remain a thing after the pandemic? And I think that it will, through the pandemic has added steam to the focus on purpose. And maybe I'm overly optimistic here, but I don't think we're going to forget the lessons of the last year quickly. And so as people come out of this, as I said, are looking for what's, what do I need next? I think that that topic of purpose, what I'm trying to achieve life is maybe a little bit more fragile than I thought it was. And I should be focused on my contributions. I think that's going to hold true. The other part of this is that I generally really, really try to avoid generational statements. You know, this generation does this, or this generation does that, but in general, when you look at the data, it appears that the younger generations are more purpose-driven than, than older generations. And as we have those more, that those younger generations come into the workforce, I think it will feed this continued interest in purpose. I say that very delicately, knowing that those types of assumptions are a hard thing for a researcher, but by and large, it's what we tend to see. Any, any thoughts or comments on that one from others?

Speaker 2:
I'm curious around the, the industries. Did you, what about financial industries, banks, and stuff? Did you see any of the banks with strong purpose statements and purpose in their organizations?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, one of the strongest ones is Bank of America. Actually, and they talk a lot about a focus on the financial wellness of underrepresented communities and that aspect. So that's one, the other one is in this, in this, this, I think is actually a good example of how purpose is its specific purpose. Isn't broad goodness, let me say. And, and that is for JP Morgan. So JP Morgan is very focused on environmental issues and that's kind of part of their purpose statement. The reason I put a little bit of hesitation on that is that they were actually one of the few who did not sign the advertisements that went out today in the newspaper. And it was very, very prominently called out that they didn't sign it. So you know, so I just want to say purpose is not general. Like we support everything that seems kind of good. It's, it is very specific, but for them it's environmental. Like that's one of the things that they're very focused on.

Speaker 2:
Well, it's interesting. I actually just did a speaking engagement and talked about like pledges yesterday talks about pledges and the CEO's commitments around diversity and how we've been doing it for such a long time and what we say and what we do is, and so there may be some of that as well as like, you know, I don't really need to do this pledge because we're already doing the internal work, which is much more important than the other way around. I'm going to sign something, but I'm not really going to do the internal work around it. So there could be a lot of reasons for, for them not doing it. Unfortunately we go to judgment really quickly, too. Right.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, yeah. We don't know. And that's the thing, is this like, particularly with some of these external reports, you know, you have to, are, they are marketing, unfortunately. I will say though, one of the people that I follow and get kind of the, his daily newsletter is Alan Murray, who is the CEO of fortune magazine and he is very, very strong on the purpose train. And so if you want to kind of stay up-to-date on what people are thinking about with regard to purpose he's a really good one to follow.

Speaker 2:
Awesome. Thank you.

How can I help my organization focus on purpose

Stacia Garr:
Okay. I see we only have two minutes left, so let me keep going here. What's my role as an HR leader in helping my org focus on purpose. So, you know, what I would advise folks is, is to kind of look at those four areas that we talked about with regard to purpose and to step back and say, you know, what, which of these things can I control and which of these things can I influence in the research?

Stacia Garr:
Actually, that's the way that we structured it in, in that long paper is for each of those talent areas. We identified the things that probably is within HR's control and which ones they influence, and then think about how can I infuse purpose in a meaningful way. You know, assuming that we have some understanding of what the organization's purpose is, how can I make sure that there's a connection to the team's purpose and that the leaders know how to think about that and how can, what kind of practices and approaches and daily behaviors, could we encourage that would enable a reflection on purpose? I think that's actually, is it so so before I get to that, are there any other questions in our last couple moments here about purpose that we didn't cover?

Stacia Garr:
Alrighty.

Conclusion

Speaker 2:
Well, cool. We'll then I'll just say that our next Q&A Call is in two weeks. We do these every two weeks, every Thursday at the same time, eight o'clock Pacific. And our next one is on a study that we published a few months ago on career mobility. We held off on this Q&A Call because my business partner, Dani Johnson was out on leave maternity leave for a while. So we were waiting for her to get back. And now she's back. So we're going to talk about a new study, where we identified five different models of career mobility and organizations and how organizations should think about using those different models. So that will be our conversation in a few weeks. And with that, I think I'll go ahead and say, thank you all for your, for your engagement and discussion and questions. And if you want to learn more about this, I strongly recommend going and looking at the podcast. That's on our website. You can get it in all the places that you like podcasts. And then we are hoping to do some more work on purpose here in the latter, half of the year, some more, at least another podcast season. So, all right, with that, thank you very much to everybody. Have a great rest of your day.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. Bye bye.

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Holly Foster:
Okay. Hi there everybody. We'll give everyone a few seconds to dial in and then we'll get started with the webinar. Okay. The numbers increasing, Let's say we'll get to 80 and then get started. Okay. Hi there. And welcome to today's webinar. Managing Better in 2021, Enabling Responsive Managers. My name is Holly Foster. I'm a Senior Customer Success Strategist here at Culture Amp. And I'll be your emcee for today's event. I'm joining you today from the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging. I'd also like to extend respect to all first nations people from everywhere you're joining from today.

House Keeping

Holly Foster:
So we're really excited for our speakers to be sharing some great data and insights today, as well as some real life stories. But before we get into the session, here's a few housekeeping things just to be mindful of. This session will be recorded and the video and slides will be shared afterwards, ask questions using the Q and A function. You can also upvote your favorites. So please be sure to do that. And we'll be stopping at a number of points throughout to answer questions too. So be sure to add them throughout the session, based on the topic at hand, and don't feel like you need to wait until the end. When using the chat function, make sure to update your settings to panelists and attendees so that you can share your learnings and best practice with others, as well as asking questions. Also, we're all about feedback at Culture Amp. So we'll be sharing a link in the chat and in the follow-up email afterwards after the session. And we'd love to hear your thoughts on the session. Now to help get the conversation started, please share your name, company, and one thing that you're really hoping to get from this webinar in the chat now.

Holly Foster:
Next slide, please.

Who is Culture Amp

Holly Foster:
Thank you. So whilst everybody is intro-ing in the chat and before I hand over to today's speakers, we know that many of you on the line, may be customers with us already, and we're so excited to have you join us. And for those who are unfamiliar with Culture Amp, welcome, we're the world's leading employee experience platform, working with culture first organizations to measure and improve their company's employee experience. As you can see on the slide Culture Amp is really built on two core ideas. Firstly, we help you drive the performance and development of your organization, but helping you collect, understand, and most importantly, act on employee feedback in areas like engagement, wellbeing, and DNI. And secondly, for organizations to thrive, we know that it's really important that the employees within it are thriving. So we have culture and performance to drive the development and performance of your people. And most importantly, regardless of if you're focusing on individuals or the entire organization, our platform has really optimized for action. So our intention is to help organizations and the individuals within them to become better versions of themselves and to put that people and culture first when creating a successful business.

Holly Foster:
So onto today's event, next slide, please, we're really excited to be partnering with RedThread Research to bring you today's session. We're also very pleased to have one of our fantastic customers, BDO New Zealand share that point of view. So I'm going to be handing now to Stacia and Phil to introduce themselves, and I'll be back with you throughout the session and at the end for Q and A throughout.

Stacia Garr:
Thanks so much, Holly. Hi everybody. Thank you so much for joining today. I'm Stacia Garr I am Co-founder and Principal Analyst with RedThread Research. And I want to start by first saying thank you for attending. We know that you all are very busy and have many things on your plate, but you took some time out today to learn something new and to develop the folks in your organization. And that's just a commendable and wonderful thing. So thanks so much for being with us. I'm joined by Phil Boyd-Clark. Phil, would you like to introduce yourself?

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Thanks, Stacia. Hi and welcome today. I am genuinely excited to be here and I was really pleased when Holly and Stacia asked me to join, just to talk about some of the journey and some of the things that we've had over the last year in particular. So I'm excited about hopefully sharing some of those.

RedThread Research

Stacia Garr:
So Phil and I wanted to give you both give you all a moment to learn a little bit about where we're from, just to share a bit of our perspective. So, as I said, I'm the Co-founder of RedThread Research. We're a human capital research membership, and we focus on a variety of topics, including employee experience relevant for today, but also performance learning and career people, analytics, DEIB an HR technology. And so what I'm going to be bringing to today's conversation is much of the quantitative insights that we have from a study that we did on how managers have been managing through the pandemic and how the most effective managers have done. And then Phil's going to add a lot of the color and the excitement of what he's seen from his experience over the last few but really over the last year. So Phil, do you want to introduce BDO New Zealand?

BDO New Zealand 

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Sure. So a BDO is an accounting firm for those of you don't know, and we've got a global presence, I'll talk more about New Zealand. So my role is the head of people and capability for BDO in New Zealand, we've got about 800 employees across 15 offices from the top of the country to foreign country and everywhere in between. And we like to think that people are genuinely the heart of our business and that we genuinely just went after to them. So either more around employees or more about people and the experiences within their life as opposed to their job itself. So that's part of what I'm trying to bring to the role. And to BDO New Zealand is actually looking at people for more than more than the numbers that they they deliberate each day and more than a relationship they have with their client. So I'm generally excited about talking about some of the learnings we had in the pandemic and beyond and possibly also address some of the learnings we had in a different crisis that we managed about 10 years ago.

Agenda

Stacia Garr:
Okay, great. Thank you, Phil. So for those of you on the line today, this is our agenda. We're going to begin with some of the key findings from the research that my firm did on, around managing better. That was actually the title of the research that we did. And we're going to share some of the behavior shifts that we saw during the pandemic and the challenges that we saw that managers were faced. And interestingly how those differed by the most effective managers and those managers that were judged by their direct reports as being less effective. We're then going to dive into how managers have been enabled, how these responsive managers have been enabled. And we're going to look at four lenses. And the way that this part is going to work is I'll give a little bit of a touch of the research, and then Phil will bring that to life with his experience.

Stacia Garr:
We'll then pause after each one of those lenses to take your questions. And so I mentioned that because we'd love for your questions to come in on a continuous basis as we go through today's session so that we can address them to the extent that we can right there in the moment, when are fresh in your mind, and then we'll move on to the next lens. So that's going to be our flow we'll then end with a few minutes at the very end for question and answer, all right, with that, let's get started properly.

Overview of research

Stacia Garr:
So I'd like to share just a little bit about the research that we're doing, because it's actually one of the most robust pieces of research that we've ever done. So the study, as I mentioned is called Managing Better. And we built this based off of three different pieces of research.

Stacia Garr:
The first is a piece called the responsive organization study. And what was interesting about that was we actually ran that study in December, 2019. So we didn't know that it was a pre pandemic snapshot, but that's exactly what it ended up being. We then built on that study through the early parts of the pandemic with an understanding of people analytics in particular, and really kind of what was shifting around this topic of how people are managing. We then moved on to this responsive manager study, which ultimately ended up being Managing Better. And we did that where we collected the data in September and October of last year. And so you can see here a little bit of detail, and if I believe folks we'll get the slides afterwards. So you can, if you really want to get into the gory details. But we did a whole bunch of analysis, a large number of interviews over the course of this research.

Stacia Garr:
And so hopefully what we're sharing with you is based on the best sound practice, it's certainly based on the most sound practice that I know how to do. So that's just a little bit of background.

Key findings

Stacia Garr:
So what did we learn in this research? There are a number of things that were pretty interesting. So the first thing, and this is really the good news of the research is that there was a lot more openness to new information among managers during the pandemic. And that would make sense, you know, we were, we were really faced with this reality that none of us had known how to respond to and we needed to be more open to new ideas and approaches. And I think that came through in our data. One thing that's interesting, I think though about Phil's story is he'll share how previous crises have actually informed their ability to respond to the pandemic and how we can kind of learn on a continuous basis from some of these things.

Stacia Garr:
But, but that's one of the things we found in our research. Second point here is that despite that shift in general, we found that there was not nearly enough support provided for managers and employees. And I'll give some data points here in just a moment to illustrate that point. The third point is that the most effective managers have a much greater impact overall, and I'll share some of that information. And then finally the highly effective managers excelled at specific practices within these four lenses that I mentioned.

Positive shift in behavior during pandemic

Stacia Garr:
So if we dig into this in a little bit more detail. I mentioned the positive shifts in the behavior during the pandemic, there are really two that we saw. One around level of openness to receiving new information and level of autonomy. So if we compare kind of what we saw in that 20, 19 to 2020 data we saw in 2019 the numbers that you see here in red, but in 2020, we saw a meaningful shift in these were statistically significant improvements in terms of manager's level of openness to new information and their level of autonomy the employees work. So that was the good news. The not so great news was some of the challenges that managers were facing and really kind of how they, they were facing them. So let me build this for you all.

Top challenges for managers

Stacia Garr:
So what we looked at was we asked managers, what are some of the biggest problems or biggest challenges that you're facing when it comes to managing folks? And what was interesting was the first one increased stress level among employees. And then the bottom two, the reduced connection to employees due to physical isolation and lack of clarity around the future from leadership were actually factors that managers themselves couldn't control. That doesn't mean that they weren't a problem. They absolutely were a problem, but it was interesting that they were things that managers couldn't necessarily control, but the things that they could control a bit more where the, the second and third items, so less time ability to give coaching and guidance or difficulties guiding in employees on top priorities. So the reason I mentioned this is because we saw a difference between how managers perceive these problems based on their effectiveness.

Stacia Garr:
So the most effective managers focused on one side of things, whereas the least effective managers focused on something else. So what were those? Well, if we looked at the really effective managers, you can see it wasn't that they weren't bothered by increased stress levels among employees. But the second two items that I mentioned were the next, most important in terms of things they were facing, but for the least effective managers, they were also worried about the stress levels, but they had a much higher percentage focus on things like reduced connection to employees or lack of clarity around the future, which are things that the managers themselves couldn't control. Whereas the, really the best managers were focused on things like not being able to give coaching and guidance and guiding employees. So what this tells us is that these managers, those most effective managers knew that there were things that they needed to do and that they wanted more organizational support from, but they weren't necessarily getting it by and large across our dataset.

Stacia Garr:
But the managers who were performing the best did say that their organizations were actually also supporting them the best, which was interesting. And you would expect so why does this make a difference? Well, we found that the managers who were most highly effective so that they were their employees were four times more likely to recommend their company to others. They were three times more likely to be highly engaged and they were 10% more likely to intend to stay with their company. Now, the last point, I think is maybe up a little bit for debate. And actually before this, Phil and I had a little had a conversation about this because you know, a lot of folks have stayed within their company if they had a job during the pandemic, you know, I think somebody was calling it sheltering in place at work.

Impact of highly effective managers

Stacia Garr:
You know, you're just not going to go anywhere because you've got a decent job and you're going to just stay and do it. And so just this 10% intend to stay numbers, is that really meaningful? I think that the way that we interpreted it was that, you know, it's a positive sign, but people still have to work to keep these in place, particularly as, you know, organizations are coming out of the pandemic. And as we start to think about a potential, pretty significant talent, a reshake a shakeup with people moving on to new places. So I think that's an important point. I guess I'll, I'll maybe take just a moment there because I've been talking for a little bit. Phil, did you have anything else that you wanted to add here, particularly around that last point?

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah. Just something that I'll draw upon as I go through later on as there's a saying that like many of us have heard before, which is people will join organizations, but they'll leave the manager. And so kind of what I looked at this around is that the research reinforces that point. And as we come out of this pandemic, as we talked about earlier, a lot of people may feel that they're trapped in their job and that they may have gone to the seas or gone to get some different experiences and other places, which is aligned to their, or was aligned to their career aspiration. But because of the pandemic, they've held off doing that. So one of them that we're preparing for and the kind of, one of the things that New Zealand has is, this concept of, overseas experience, a lot of people want to go overseas to gain some experience relatively early in their career before they settle down and have kids and buy houses and all those kind of things. So we're acutely aware a lot of people who ordinarily would have had those experiences, haven't had the the possibility. So as soon as the border starts opening up, we're expecting a great abstained of people to go and grab and gain those experiences. So we're trying to plan for what that looks like and in a year's time or six months time, given we just waiting to see what happens with the border.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it'll be interesting cause you know, I think part of this though, is we knew that people you know, if they go and have those overseas experiences and they do come back and what they'll remember is kind of what this experience was like with BDO. And so you might be looking at, you know, boomerang talent that may be coming back in the future. And, and so, you know, it may feel like a little bit of a impossible struggle at the moment, but it's not, if you think about it kind of the long curve of things.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah. I look at it in two ways. There's good, good attrition, and there's bad attrition. And I define it very differently. One of the business leaders were too and good attrition is when people leave a company with a high degree of respect and admiration for their company, bad attrition has when people leave annoyed, frustrated and resentful towards it. And so it's about giving people great experiences so that when they leave, they are advocates for the firm and advocates for the company. And that's what the highly effective managers are able to achieve. And that's a very powerful part of employment brand.

4 lenses of responsibility

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I love that. I've never heard somebody talk about it that way, but I think that's a great way to think about it. Okay, cool. Well, let's, let's keep this moving. So what did we see in the data when it comes to enabling responsive managers? As I mentioned, we saw what we call four lenses and the first one of those is respect, and we're going to dive into each of these in more detail. But the first one is that foundation of respect in terms of, you know, getting information, soliciting feedback from folks and then providing that psychologically safe environment to work. The second concept, and this is probably my favorite one is this concept of distributed authority. And this means not, you know, kind of holding all the tasks to center and holding all the control to center, but instead enabling and kind of pushing power out to the edges of the organization, if you will. And I think part of the reason this is my favorite one is because it's been the one that I've seen the biggest division. It's been the thing that has made really companies during the pandemic who have been really successful. They've been really good at handling distributed authority and those who have been not successful and have really struggled. They have been really poor at this. So that's one of the reasons it's my favorite. Again, we'll go into these in detail.

Stacia Garr:
The third one is around transparency and growth. And as we thought about this in the study, and as we tested it, we were talking about performance transparency, expectation, transparency, and supporting managers as well as employees through their continued growth. What I love actually about our conversation before this is Phil has a slightly different interpretation or a broader interpretation which I think is really nicely additive. And so we'll get into that in a little bit more.

Stacia Garr:
And then finally trust. And so a lot of times we get asked, well, how is respect different than, than trust? Because it feels like they go very hand in hand. But I think the difference is that respect is just the bare bones of what you need when it comes to the relationship with the employees. But trust is that additional level. There's a a sense of truly valuing employees fostering openness, and the trust to have that open dialogue which is started with psychological safety, but kind of built upon in greater amounts and then connection to community. So this idea that we're in this together, and I think Phil, you've got a really nice example of that.

Respect

Stacia Garr:
So let's dive into these a little bit more detail, and we're going to start here with respect. And as we thought about this from the manager perspective, this is really that the manager truly shows up as the primary enabler of respect for employees. So what does that mean?

Stacia Garr:
When we looked at the areas of effectiveness, the best managers did these things. So some of them, they were using technology to provide suggestions and ideas to the organization. So they were using that for their employees to provide those suggestions and ideas. The employees themselves said that they were encouraged to share their perspectives at work. And again, that, that concept of psychological safety and what we saw was that this was very common amongst the most effective managers. But that in general, these numbers declined from before the pandemic. So you can see the numbers decline. The one that concerned me the most is that last one, that psychological safety reduced so dramatically 17% is just a huge shift for kind of any of these numbers. All of these numbers are significant changes. But 17% is just absolutely massive. And so, you know, as Phil and I were talking about this in preparation, you know, this question of how do you create psychological safety? How do you, you know, gather insights and enable people to really have this foundational conversation was important one. So, Phil, do you want to share your story of what you saw across BDO New Zealand?

BDO New Zealand insights

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yes. Sure. so we, we kind of mentioned earlier BDO genuine believe our people are extremely important to our business and our the heart of our business. And we know we have to support them when the pandemic pandemic hit. We were acutely aware of the need to continue that theme and to show support. So we established that like most organizations did, I covered response team, which included four members of our board, our chief technology officer, our marketing manager, and myself and early on, we made the decision that our primary focus was support our people. And plus behind our people, this is what I'll clients. We met daily and we would agree kind of what initiatives we roll out that day. And then we'd review how we made progress the subsequent day. And I met the people in capability community on a daily basis as well, to ensure that we all are aligned and that we're rolling out initiatives across our different offices.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
One of the initiatives that we rolled out was probably one of the most valuable initiatives was a pulse survey, the COVID response survey, which we administered through Culture Amp. And we rolled that survey out twice during our kind of lockdown one to find out how people are doing. And secondly, to find out how we could support them, better support them. And that was all about and showing that our intention of supporting our people was delivered on. And we wanted to hear from our people around whether we were delivering on our intention. The comments in the survey that people, people wrote on the verbatim comments, but probably the most valuable part of that feedback. Cause we could look in a lot of detail on what they were thinking, what they were feeling and respond to that. And we knew we had to show it, not just that we asked them the point of view that we were then listening to the point of view, but we need to explain what we were doing and how we were doing it, why we're doing it that directly related to the feedback.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
So one very small example, which is on the slide in front of you, is we, when we moved. So New Zealand had at four alert level. So level four, which is extremely strict, we then dropped down to level three and then we've got to live with two. We were able to return to the office and we're able to return to schools that schools needed time to get ready to accept the students. It's one of the concerns that was raised by about 40% of people who have made comments to the survey was about the not being able to return to the office until the kids could go to school. Fair enough. So what we decided to do was to actually only reopen our officers, when schools were open as opposed to when alert levels were. And that was just a very small example of this type of feedback we have in this point report and allowing how people to feel that they had. And we had my understanding what they're going through and we responded accordingly to demonstrate that respect and to show that we were all in this together.

Stacia Garr:
Great. And I think that one of the, the points that you made was around just kind of equipping these leaders with, with the ability to kind of have these conversations. Could you a little bit about that and I've just seen on the chat that there's a few questions about psychological safety. And so could you maybe just give a few more examples there?

Phil Boyd-Clark:
It was really important for us to break down the feedback to a more manageable level. So the overall level we had a huge number of comments and a whole lot of responses, but we could break the information down to, to a team level. And that allowed each partner and the managers within the partners teams to really understand what those individual teams are looking for. In a way that, you know, they wouldn't, the team members wouldn't see the side of their partner directly or to the manager directly, that would kind of be the quieter on. And we could actually really work out what pockets of our wellbeing initiative really needed to to pick, to be in half. So we could work out which officers or which teams needed a bit more support from us going forward. If that allows us to get quite granular and allowed us to actually be in looking at an overall wellbeing kind of initiative response to more tactical responses based on the needs of the teams.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
And that again, allowed us to show that we were listening to people at quite a granular level and responding to the abuse at a very low level. So the example I got there as a high level kind of decision, but there were a lot more initiative to be rolled out, which was spoke to a specific team, the specific partners. So it was very much a useful comment. So the twelve thousand and forty two comments, I and a number of partners read every single one of those comments to really understand what was going on. And we then broke those comments down by teams, to really understand where the main support areas were and that's how we did it basically.

Stacia Garr:
Great. Great. Thank you. Holly, I know we've gotten a lot of questions in chat. Would you mind giving a couple Phil and me so that we can answer?

Holly Foster:
Yeah, for sure. So there are a couple that have got some upvotes, one that I think would be a great next step based on the conversation. So regarding the decline in psychological safety, is this due to the pandemic itself or due to remote working. So if people were working remotely, but not under the circumstances of the pandemic would we still see that same shift?

Stacia Garr:
We didn't test this specifically, but I'll offer an opinion and Phil would love yours as well. You know, I think that the situation of the pandemic resulted in a lot of people having, you know, questions from their leadership. And I think the difference in psychological safety was a subset of leaders at the core organizations were able to be clear, you know, we don't know exactly what's going to happen, but here's what we do know. Here are the types of things that we do know about where the business is going, et cetera. And I think that those organizations that really stepped up in their communications at the beginning were able to create more of that psychological safety, because you know, the implication of a lot of this is we're going to go into financial downturn in my job might be gone, you know?

Stacia Garr:
And, and so that creates a lot of that sense of a lack of safety. And so those organizations that were able to kind of address that as directly as they could, as they literally knew how given the information that they had, I think that they, they did better. You add onto that the remote working environment. And then, you know, that's hard, particularly because so many people were new to it. They hadn't, you know, I've worked remotely for 10 years. I think this is like the thing, right. But if you're brand new and you don't have that trust in this massive thing is happening yeah, I think it's going to create, you know, remote working hasn't a potential implication or a negative impact. It doesn't mean it does overall, but in that particular mix of, of crazy things happening, I think it did.Phil, what do you think?

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah, when I finally answer as a true consultant, it depends, but it depends on, on a number of factors. So uncertainty definitely results on that and a lack of safety from a psychological perspective. So with the pandemic, there was a huge degree of uncertainty and naturally people are gonna feel anxious and cautious, and we've seen that continue to die. So I know Australia, New Zealand have this phenomenon of net lockdowns where we put the gun to lock down and come out of it. And we've found from our perspective that has actually resulted in a greater degree of anxiety for our people then going into a longer lockdown to loss of certainty around the going and from the state refreshing on this date. So I think it's not the pandemic that's it's really caused the anxiety. It's the uncertainty around the pandemic that's caused anxiety and that, and so that the role of what leaders have to do is provide as much certainty as possible.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
From New Zealand perspective, we were very fortunate to have an amazing leader as a prime minister Jacinda. Who had a communication style, that was very clear and that helped a lot of people just focus on what they could control and focus on what they needed to do and how they needed to do it. And I think we had a huge degree of compliance to our our rules and our social distancing guidelines and the lockdown criteria which I think can be attributed to that very clear guidance we had from our government's response. And I think that helped manage that or create a bit of a psychological safety for people in that context. So is it remote working? I don't think so. I think that we get used to remote working because the pandemic itself different provided a bit of context. I thought someone's trying to come into the room.

Stacia Garr:
Okay. Well, let's go ahead and move on

Distributed Authority

Stacia Garr:
So, then if we move to the second lens around distributed authority and what, does this mean? You know, I give a quick overview at the beginning. But really, I think it comes to this idea of one. We trust our people to make decisions and we empower them to do so. So we talked here on this side about guiding principles, providing folks with quality data and insights and helping employees understand and make sure they have the capabilities to make quick decisions in the organization. The way that we actually saw that show up was a few things that were really interesting when we did our interviews. So I'm going to go with the bottom bubble there, which is around clarifying decision-making authority. So we heard stories of people just writing decision logs, having senior leaders, right decision logs, explaining like this is why this decision was made so that people could read it and understand what the thought process was behind it.

Stacia Garr:
We heard a lot of discussions about putting in place frameworks so that people would understand, okay, who's the decision maker who needs to be informed. Who's actually you know, is just a stakeholder that needs to be brought in at certain points in the process. And just some very simple things around just making sure that people understand what is expected of them at different points in order to distribute authority much better. The second point though, I think is also really interesting, which is around enhancing manager, access to engagement, as well as other people data. So this point around giving folks the information they need to understanding what is actually happening with their teams, and then being able to make decisions and make changes based on that information was a critical factor that showed up for us. If we look at what this actually looked like from a data perspective this is what we see.

Stacia Garr:
So some of the top things that the most effective managers did was managing their time to focus on value, added tasks, not administrative burden. So their employees were able to do this. And their manager was able to, to support that. The manager being able to understand the team's engagement with the work and that the employee had a clear, as well as the manager actually had a clear understanding of the decisions I have the authority to make. So we see that, that top one, that ability basically to say, no, I know what the value added tasks are, and I'm going to get rid of this administrative burden was one of the biggest factors here on distributed authority. And we saw again like I said, pretty much all of our numbers went down. But the, the biggest one that, that I think had some obscurity was around that clear understanding of the decisions I have the authority to make. So that's kind of why I spent a little bit of time talking about some of those different decision frameworks that we saw folks do, because those seem to make some of the biggest differences.

BDO New Zealand- our response

Stacia Garr:
Phil, do you want to talk a little bit about what you saw with distributing authority at BDO?

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Probably important to provide a bit of context behind, this so I think many of you may be aware in 2010, 2011 Christchurch when one of our main cities in New Zealand suffered a series of earthquakes. I'm talking thousands of effects. There's two major ones in particular, which completely changed the landscape of the city. And it put the city and the country into an unexpected crisis, this was about 10 years ago. 10 years on, we found ourselves in the fortunate position where we're to leverage the learnings from the Christchurch earthquake and to how we responded to this pandemic. And our Christchurch partners in particular were instrumental. And Warren who was part of our response team as the managing partner of Christchurch was amazing and how he kind of guided the thinking around how best we responded to the pandemic and when. And at the time, and I remember a lot of people were catastrophizing and focusing on uncertainty and focusing aspects they couldn't control.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
And our Christchurch partners and Warren in particular we're able to draw upon their resilience and their learning and guided their pears by providing structure support and a methodical way of responding to the pandemic. And the next slide, I can kind of explain this as company based like as well, good diagram, but we used the four as of of crisis management to kind of respond. So initially we're trying to do everything at once, which was in the responding to the impact, trying to reduce the impact the pandemic was going to have on us and our clients. And, and looking to ensure that we we're ready for whatever else we're thrown at us. When we kind of sat back and thought about it, we actually just started to break it down a bit further and focused on today's problem today, and focus on tomorrow's problem tomorrow, and make haste slowly.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
And that really gave us a pathway and allowed us to be a little bit more tactical, how we responded. A lot of learnings came out of the crisis. And one of the organizations that was born out of the chaos of the earthquakes was the student volunteer army. And basically what that company did was to provide the students who are based a university students based in that city is a huge part of that study is that as the university provided them with permission to help. And so we took that learning and we knew we needed to provide our people with permission to help. So what we did is we there's a lot of information coming out from the government about their responsibility, economic kind of response to the pandemic and all our clients, what that all meant and what it meant for them or what they should do.

Stacia Garr:
So every day we were developing and distributing information to all our people around how we recommended our clients best respond to the support our government was providing. And that gave our people a lot of information and permission to help their clients when they needed, when their clients needed them the most. And we were acutely aware. We are in a very fortunate position where we, our services were undermined and our clients really need us. So we were able to help them. We just find a very cool native approach. But our approach was to develop all the stuff centrally, but all those collateral centrally and then distribute it to our people so that they could be in support our clients. And that gave our people a focus and an inability to function when they could control on what supported the clients.

Stacia Garr:
And Phil, could you talk a little bit about how did that happen? Right. So you mentioned that you're giving your, your partners information every day on what, on the types of conversations they may be having and how they can support their clients. But that seems like you know, you have to first kind of know what the questions are that they might be asking and, you know, to provide that guidance. So can you share a little bit about basically what was kind of the crisis response team that put this together, and then how did you communicate that?

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah, a very good point. So we had so the the crisis response team then formed another team, which is basically looking at kind of how we best support clients. And we, it, as a group of individuals from across the country are here, we're looking at what the government was doing and how the government was responding and what support mechanism the governor was putting around clients basically, or businesses and how we could then support those times. So there's a lot of information from coming from the government and it was coming really fast, really quick. And the government actually said at the beginning we're assuming a high trust model. So the government pumped in billions of dollars into the economy to support businesses, to retain the people and stay afloat. And so our clients need to know how they can best access that information or that funding and the way that made sense for them and was the right thing to do for them and their employees and their clients.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
So it was around trying to make sense of all of that. And there were changes to the scheme, and there was a time when there was additions to the scheme. And then there was when different parts of the country went into different stages of lockdown, there was different changes. So there's a lot of information that we had to very quickly disseminate and then be able to provide information to our clients. And that gave our people a lot of opportunity to engage with the clients, understand their clients and how they can fly through that uncertainty, which has basically gave our people permission to help their clients and something that we've never dealt with before. And our clients never dealt with before. So it was giving them the confidence to have the conversation in a, in a civilized way.

Stacia Garr:
And I'm going to dig on this one just a little bit more, because there's a question kind of closely related to this in the Q and A. And so I'm just going to jump in first, which is, as you thought about the actual communication of this information, you mentioned, there's a lot of information that was coming from the government and you were trying to whittle it down. Were there any particularly effective practices that you use to make it easy for your partners and your teams to quickly understand the key messages and to then communicate them broadly? So, you know, is there any technology that you used or any particular approaches?

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah, everything had to be online for obvious reasons because we're all working from home. And so we had a central hub that was set up specifically for our people to access on certain things and communication from each other's was very clear. So one of the things I was going to talk about that later, and I'll talk about now is our communication strategy initially started with lets start centrally and stem off the communication with everyone. We then realized quite quickly based on feedback receiving from people that actually they wanted to hear from a more local person and more local partners, a not a centralized team. And so we changed our strategy to focus more on each office communicating to be a people in authentic and a meaningful way. And that provided a greater degree of kind of pop up from our people.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
It was showing that we are more adaptable, more responsive, more accessible, and they could see more authentic by that, by the way, in which the messaging was written. So we didn't have a single person in a central office writing and communication with the partners. They had the key themes to write through and the key information disseminate, and they were doing the way that they would normally do it. And so we weren't filtering their message. We were basically enabling them to get out and help their people. And that response was quite powerful to, again, going back to the principle that we learned in 2011, give people permission to help.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Great. Holly, is there a quick question that we could throw in here. T.

Holly Foster:
There is, yes.

Holly Foster:
There is one that's been upvoted quite a lot from a participant. So probably along the same lines or kind of same thread as what we've just been talking about. So perhaps one that you can both address from the research perspective and then also your experience with BDO and it failed, but with manager's openness to the new information that's now available. Have there been any particular types of information that they're most open to

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Initially it was, as they were coming out of the with the information, we were trying to assimilate it, understand it, have a point of view on it and send it out over time. That's changed. So now it's kind of focused more around getting back to what the new normal looks like. And that's where I think our support has changed quite substantially. So if you think about when we first went into lockdown you know, we, in some of our offices, we had a very office bound capture. We hadn't necessarily embraced flexibility. And our people were forced to suddenly do so. And that was a massive adjustment and we need to support our managers in particular, suddenly having to remote manage remotely, which they hadn't sort of done previously. So as time progressed, people's needs changed and based on those needs changing, we had to have our finger on the pulse, and that's why they kept jumping up and down so important for us to have an understanding of what our people are thinking so we can adjust accordingly.

Speaker 4:
And that was the nice learning, the biggest learning for us as we have to consistently understand how best to support our people and the best way of doing that was to communicate with them and have direct feedback from them. So that the surveys we ran with, one part of that we had other mechanisms in, which were utilized to continue to make sure we had a really good health, I think, on the pulse and then responded accordingly. And now our response now is absolutely adjusting and changing and how we're responding to lockdown situations now is fundamentally different to what it was before. Because we've learned a lot and it's just you know, that we need to continue to maintain and provide clarity for our people so that they know what they need to do when they need to do it and how they can do it. So the safety or psychological safety is maintained as best it can be because this pandemic is still creating a lot of uncertainty for people. And that is still having a strain and the stress of a lot of people.

Transparency & Growth

Stacia Garr:
All right, well, let's go ahead and keep moving. The third lens is this one around transparency and growth. And I mentioned what that was at the beginning and in a lot of it was around performance and expectation, transparency, as well as just supporting overall growth. And the specific data that we had here in the, and there's, there's quite a few pieces of data on here was around things like employees receiving database insights on their performance, or getting insights on their current level of contribution. They're also business point about if employees don't know the answer, they know how to find it. And that's part of, kind of this whole growth concept and this idea of of having access as Phil mentioned, certainly online, but also a culture around going in and finding that information online. And what we found here is, you know, the, the best managers particularly focus on that first point around providing employees with database insights on their, their performance.

Stacia Garr:
But they also do a lot around just in making sure not just that they provide the data, but employees actually understand it. So message received, you know, just because I communicate doesn't mean that you actually understood it. So it was kind of both parts of that point. And we saw these numbers drop pretty dramatically from before the pandemic. So you can see those numbers there on the right. I kind of set up that Phil, you had a little bit of a different approach here on, on this one around growth and transparency. So do you want to share what happened with BDo?

Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah, I think during the pandemic we had early on, we made the commitment within that federalized team to protect our people. As I mentioned early on that meant protecting jobs with their livelihoods and everything in between. And pleasingly, we got through, you know, the last 365 days today because tomorrow marks the day we went into lock down a year ago and we got all our people through. And there were, we were asking people to make any sacrifices where, you know, we did a lot to support what the people and that was key for us up front, but the communication was key and extremely important that we had that right. And we knew no single communication was going to be perfect, but our process and journey of communication had to be near perfect. And that was our aim and we didn't get everything right.

Speaker 4:
And we adjusted accordingly because we had those different checks and balances, and we kind of knew how to, how best to respond. Or we actually had an official MS teams, like competition going, which is essentially that the person who got the most likes in MS teams for a particular posts, won with an official competition. And our IT manager who came first, second, third, and fourth. And because he was, it was using bribery with us, with this new puppy that he bought just before lock down and that became a mascot for us. So it was actually quite key to say how people were communicating and that communication allowed us to be very clear to people around what we expected of them and what they needed to do going forward to best support themselves, their peers, their colleagues, their clients, their families.

Speaker 4:
So that kind of just reinforced from my point of view, transparency and the need to communicate really clearly so that people again have be a little ambiguity around what's expected of them. And we were very, a lot of our communication is very open and honest around, we don't know what this will mean. We had no idea what impact of the pandemic was going to have on us when it first hit. We had no idea what impact it was going to have on the economy. But what we did know is what we did well, which was supporting people and supporting our clients. That's where we chose to focus. And that I believe made a big difference to our people because we didn't allow ourselves to catastrophize. We focused ourselves on what we could control and refocus themselves on what we knew we could do really well, which wasn't demand. And again, keep going to that point around, we were very fortunate that our services were in demand and our clients there to help. And we've been there. We were there to help them. And that's what was important. And I believe that's what got us through what was quite a challenge, year, last year.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah. No. And I think though, you, yes, you were very fortunate, but clarity of communication is something everyone can benefit from.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
The honesty around. We don't know. I think it meant a lot to people around, like, we don't know where this is going to land, but this is what we do now. Now I go back to that quote that Warren said right at the onset is solve today's problem today and focus on tomorrow's problem tomorrow. And that was kind of a core theme of all our communications it's yesterday's problem. It's not going to solve it tomorrow is problem. We'll come back to you. And that gave people kind of focus around a reassurance that yeah, we're doing what we can doing and when we can do it and not allowing us to get ahead of ourselves

Stacia Garr:
And some nice mental space too, we're just going to focus here. Yeah. Holly, I know we've gotten lots of great questions. What can we do?

Holly Foster:
Yeah, lots of really good ones. SO thank you for sending them all through. And one that I think really ties nicely to the pillar of transparency and more product growth, the question is for Phil, but Stacia as well, we'd love to hear your kind of thoughts or anything that, I mean, research. But Phil, how did your organization facilitate mentoring and learning and the development to aid the growth of managers throughout last year?

Phil Boyd-Clark:
It's a very, very good question. And as I mentioned earlier, when we moved from level zero, essentially to level four, it was awful. It was a very unfamiliar environment, people to be in their homes, but working from home often with kids running around and trying to juggle that responsibility. So that transition was really hard for a lot of people, but they responded really well. And how we realized we needed to provide better support to our people and actually managing remotely and communicating and all those great things. And so we essentially set up a series, all every other organization that does as well as there's nothing unique, nothing innovative or beyond belief and just webinars for people to attend and actually allowed them to join when the one or two topics that people kind of told us they wanted us to focus on.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
So we had the fortune of having an amazing learning and development leader in our organization who went away and she did amazing work politics, collateral together, real time, and getting people to present in partnership with the, and we had really good uptake. To the point we've actually continued that webinar series, over time. So this year although, you know, we've been very fortunate to have basically 80% of our year outsource any form of lockdown last year. And this year we've continued with that. We have continued with that webinar series monthly, and I think it was last Friday, I presented one in providing feedback. So it was something that we think has really helped people, but it's also recognizing that, you know, learning development doesn't happen to happen. Face-To-Face, you can do it very well there remotely. And I think that's one of the capitalists that most organizations experienced last year, as you know, online learning is a really good platform and you can still be engaged and, and teach people to kind of learn in different ways and respond accordingly and develop new skills. So we did want to know and we did, one of the questions we asked in the survey was a question on, have you learnt new skills during the pandemic? And we had some very favorable responses from that, which was pleasing to see.

Stacia Garr:
And I'll just add from, from our perspective, we've seen an incredible growth in organizations investing in, in L and D platforms during this time. And so I think, you know, your, your point Phil around just bringing more learning, bring more relevant learning to folks has been a huge thing. The other thing though, is we can look to the future. And if we kind of think about the snapshot of the last three months as potentially being a prelude to what comes next is we've seen a greater investment in some of the coaching and mentoring technologies or in peer-to-peer coaching within organizations. So this idea of tapping into the expertise of folks who are within the organization both for the sake of, you know, improving skills, but also we know that people have said they felt more isolated, more disconnected.

Stacia Garr:
They're not growing their networks, et cetera. And so also as a way to kind of combat that particular problem. So, focus on mentoring and focus on coaching from a diversity perspective, also focused on sponsorship during this time.

Trust

Stacia Garr:
So, okay. I know we're we have just 10 minutes left, so let's get to our final, our final lens here, and that is trust. And so I set this up a bit around, it's not, it's not just respect. It is kind of, you know it is a different thing in that it is moving beyond that to a greater connection a greater sense of value employees, openness, and that idea that you're connected to the broader community. And so the way we captured that was this, you know, we're all in this together attitude that really helps employees learn from their mistakes and invest in solving problems together.

Stacia Garr:
And so when we look at the, the numbers around this you can see here some of the specific items on, again, on the left and what managers were doing. So things around helping me learn from my mistakes, that if a manager, if an employee says that their manager did that, they thought their manager is much more likely to be highly effective. Encouraged to share insights learned externally outside the organization. So not believing that, you know, all the learning has to take place here, but actually being encouraged to learn outside the organization and to bring that back. So this idea that you're trusted to figure out what's, what's great and important, and to build on that within our own organization. And then we've got, again, that question about is open to, to new information, which I know we, we addressed to some extent earlier. But we know that that has been kind of one of the biggest factors in, and obviously that's the one of the two that, that did increase with the with the research. So again, kind of Phil turning to you and trust, what did, how did you work to foster that.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
A very simple example. So when the pandemic hit kind of, we knew, well, things are going to change, and as often we view it as a catalyst to change. And when we came out of kind of the lockdowns that we had and the transitioning back, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of other people have a taste of working remotely. A lot of people just want to really well to work remotely and not be able to come to the habit of working from home. And actually we're a little bit reluctant to actually come back and and work in the office a hundred percent of the time. And we've seen that, that appetite for a greater degree of flexible working. And so we wanted to work with our people going forward to learn around what's going to work. What's not going to work and how do we actually take this forward together?

Phil Boyd-Clark:
And that's kind of what we're going to do is not just making assumptions and come up with the framework and say, here's a framework. We wanted to introduce a framework that was going to allow us to learn and evolve when adept with new technologies and try different things. And if they work, let's kind of roll it out further, or just teach people about the experiences and what we did, it doesn't work. And we just put it to the side. So we came up with a framework that was a little bit different, but it basically gives each team permission to decide what flexible working ranges are going to work for the individuals within that team based on the individual circumstances. So it wasn't around the framework saying PNC or HR are going to say yes or no to X, Y, and Z is around the team, controlling it.

Phil Boyd-Clark:
And the focus for the team began by the performance of the team and how they deliver it to their clients. And if they can continue to deliver their clients to exceed, deliver to the clients based on the arrangements they have, then that's a win-win that's a win for them, win for the firm and win for the team and win for the client and no losers. And as moving beyond this kind of concept of being in the office for the sake of being in the office to, to working in the place that you're going to be most effective and, had a good performance. So we introduced this new framework, which we're still rolling out. And we're still learning from, and we need to do about a six month review to understand what's worked, what hasn't worked, but we think we found something that worked for everyone. And it also importantly, what it's about is saying to people. The new normal we've got to change the way in which we deliver to our client,. let's do that together and let's see what you want. And if we could, we can accommodate what you want, but at the same time, and really important point is continued to meet or exceed the needs of the clients.

Stacia Garr:
And the other thing I love about this is it, it is distributing authority, right? You're giving clear principles, helping people understand how to make decisions and, you know, trusting them to do so.

Speaker 4:
And I'm giving them permission to say, is it working or not? So is it based on these four principles? If it's not, if it's not adhering to these four principles, then it gives the team ability to kind of call it out and say, Hey, this is not working for me. So one of the things we've got, we've got a lot of graduates. Who've just started a lot of graduates who just started as we went into lockdown last year. And they are that new they're fresh. And they like, they want to see who they're going to work for and they need a bit of coaching and support. So it became a locked down, those were the first people to want to be back in the office. But a lot of their kind of managers were a little bit more hesitant than we have to say it. They, they want you to be in there. And so it was very much around the grads and the more junior staff was saying, we actually need you to be with us to coach us. So it was about demonstrating respect for each other and each other's needs and adjusting accordingly. And it's about learning from each other.

Wrapping up

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, definitely. Well, we're going to go ahead and just do our wrap up here and then we'll do get the final questions in the last couple of moments. So when Phil and I were talking about some of the takeaways we were hoping folks would get the first here is about, you know, somewhat obvious, but the more you can support managers, the better, they're just such a huge point of leverage in the organization. And if you can give them the tools to do these things, I think that's, that's meaningful and powerful for the organization. Secondly, the role of managers is fundamentally changed and will continue to in the future. So I know there was a question about, you know, kind of post pandemic, what do we see as some of those future skillsets? And I think the ones that we saw people excelling at during the pandemic, you know, the distributing authority, building respect, trust, growth, and transparency, those are fundamentally going to be that those 21st century leadership management skills. And then third don't make assumptions and use data to disprove them. So I think Phil you've given some really nice examples of how, you know, people thought one thing, but then using the data and understanding it found actually that wasn't the case. You know, people manager, the younger employees wanted to be back in the office. They wanted the manager support and, you know, the data prove that so Holly, let's just get the last question or two that we had on the Q and A.

Holly Foster:
Yeah, for sure. We'll try and squeeze a couple in. So is around distributed leadership. So it seems to be a top-down approach. People are empowered by their leaders. And would you say that that's a fair statement and how would you encourage the, this distributed leadership by other ways other than that kind of top-down approach?

Speaker 3:
I'll jump in, cause I had a little bit more time to think about this before Phil. So I think that, you know, When we did this research, we have a lot of thoughts about self-directed teams and all these things that are, you know, powerful and, and kind of far less top down. And we we've found that that without some, if you look at their literature and kind of over time, those teams often do break down unless it's a very special organizational culture. And so I think that to some extent you do have to enable, I don't really love that word empower, but you do have to enable, and you have to give some level of permission for these things to happen. And, but I think that the extent to which you can give people great data, good principles, and understanding of how to make those decisions and they don't get in trouble for making those decisions. Then I think that you can really start to make this much more of a network of people doing great things as opposed to a top-down hierarchy.

Speaker 4:
I think it comes down to competence as well. You know, we, every, every role in organization has a purpose and everyone should be able to work towards that purpose without constantly having to ask them for permission to do so. And I do like that, sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And I say a lot of that kind of happening. And so people are confident in their ability to deliver to the expectations of their role. And I don't, don't wait for permission, just do it and back yourself. And like Holly and Stacia said, don't feel they're gonna get in trouble. They don't beat people up for getting it wrong. When they've all they're trying to do is the right thing based on what they thought they had, but yeah, might want to tie it up from my perspective giving people that permission. So to try things and potentially fail is really important for the gym.

Speaker 1:
That's great. We're one minute too, so we'll probably have to wrap there, but thank you for all of the questions. Really great to see all that in the chat. Yeah, you'll see contact details for Stacia and the wonderful Phil on your screen now do feel free to reach out or connect with them on all of the usual channels and also visit redthreadresearch.com and thanks everybody for joining today.

Stacia Garr:
Thank you all and thanks Culture Amp for the opportunity.

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Guests

Madhura Chakrabarti, Global Head, People Analytics at Syngenta

DETAILS

Dr Madhura Chakrabarti is one of our favorite HR thinkers and doers, so we jumped at the chance to hear of the genuinely pioneering work she’s doing for the 29,000 people who work for her employer Syngenta, a leading Swiss-headquartered science-based agtech company that helps millions of farmers round the world grow safe and nutritious food, while taking care of the planet. Despite COVID, in early December Madhura and her small L&D team launched an innovative cross-company skills framework supported by a new learning platform implementation.

This episode is a great chance to hear about the real practical challenges of creating such a framework and how hard it can be to find the right partner to help, as well as the importance of people analytics in general: you’re really going to hear from the HR data and skills coal face here. Making this experience even better: Madhura’s charm, professionalism and fierce intellect. Truly, some great Workplace Stories this week!

Find out more about Madhura and her work at Syngenta here

Connect with her on LinkedIn

Webinar

Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills. 

Partner

We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

Season Sponsor

Stacia Garr:
Today, we're speaking with Madhura Chakrabarti; she’s the global head of People, Insights and Analytics at Syngenta.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think it was a stretch or a learning even for myself, because when we set out, in complete transparency, my mindset was, Oh, I know what they need, so I'll design it, don’t worry about it. So I could have just gone with it and designed, but it's only after that listening exercise, I realized, Oh, actually there are very distinct needs–and just because I'm interested in data, not everyone is equally interested in data and in a similar way. So we really have to cater to the user's needs.

Stacia Garr:
Madeira is one of the smartest people we know she brings in academic perspective—she’s a PhD, she also has an extensive practitioner perspective, and has married those together in her recent work at Syngenta.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
This is Madhura Chakrabarti, I am the global head of People, Insights and Analytics at Syngenta, based out of Basel, Switzerland.

Stacia Garr:
So Madeira, welcome to Workplace Stories, our RedThread Research podcast; thanks so much for your time and for sharing your insights with our audience today. I'm obviously excited to have you on here—we work together, and it's so cool to get a chance to hear what you're doing today.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Glad to be here, and honored to be here; thanks, Stacia.

Stacia Garr:
We're going to start with some quick questions to introduce you and your work practice to our listeners, and then we're going to go deeper on some questions. We really want to hear your perspective on here about your experience.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Sounds good!

Chris Pirie:
Madhura, can you give us a quick overview of Syngenta—its mission, and its purpose?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
So Syngenta is a 29,000-people company, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. We recently became Syngenta Group as a result of becoming a conglomerate of other companies, and the mission, or what the company does, is really an expert in crop science and seeds. And it provides digital solutions to farmers across the world so that they can make better decisions in their day-to-day lives.

Chris Pirie:
And what is the work that you do? What's your job title and how would you describe what a typical day looks like for you, if there is such a thing?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Good question. I lead the global People Insights and Analytics team, and in very simple terms, because it's a fairly rapid section, our mission is really to understand how we can use data and analytics to make better talent decisions and talent related business decisions. It's a fairly new function; we’ve been roughly here for two, two and a half years. We are still trying to build it out.

Chris Pirie:
And what are the sort of forces at work on Syngenta, and you and your role as well? What problems are you trying to solve?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Short answer is many! But at the start of our journey, we actually had identified three main pillars, the first pillar being strengthening the core of People Analytics, and that really entails things like how do we upskill ourselves—we are a seven-person team, and constantly be at par, be abreast of the latest and the greatest, and technically also constantly upskill ourselves.

The second pillar is around how we scale People Analytics and some of those sub-points or sub-bullets underneath that is the HR upscaling work that we'll be discussing today. The other big part in that second pillar is coming up with a Data Lake; a seven people team cannot really serve the entire company, you need to have a scaled mechanism. So these are kind of the two things that we are focusing on in the second pillar.

And the third pillar is really around embedding people, analytics and business and HR topics, so this is where our actual work like analytics in DNI, or doing a sales effectiveness study, or doing an org network analysis study, all of that comes in underneath this pillar. And it's contingent upon what the business needs and sometimes what HR needs

Chris Pirie:
And then since we're talking about skills generally in this season and specifically today, what are your skills—what are the skills that you need and your team needs to do your work and, and how did you acquire them?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think I would broadly break them up into two. One is more around technical skills, and that's more like table stakes; you cannot do it anything else if you don't have them. And that's more around pure analytics, statistics, construct measurement, survey building, I think I'll go back to mainly graduate school, but of course now LinkedIn Learning and other learning platforms to keep reinventing and re-brushing those skills. The other bucket is really around influencing others and stakeholder management that I feel like I've picked up on the way in the journey by working and just being in different roles and making some career moves. That's how I've picked them up.

Stacia Garr:
So one of the things we've noticed in this podcast series, which we're calling The Skills Obsession, is that there are kind of two groups that are obsessed: one is the learning folks who have made up quite a bit of this podcast series, but then there's also our friends, the people analytics folks. And one of the things I was most excited about with your story is you're actually bringing them together: you are a people analytics leader who's been focused very heavily on the learning aspect of this. So can you give folks a sense of the recent initiative that you focused on with launching a new learning experience platform combined with that HR capabilities initiative?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Sure. So this works spanned quite a bit. I would say almost like 18 months from the very start of it to where we are today. And it really happened in two main categories. One was identifying what should HR as a function be upskilling itself on, so that was a project or an initiative by itself. And that started somewhere around the middle of 2019. We took the first six months—we gathered, we did an agile project team that came together across the globe within HR and determined what are those six capabilities? We actually looked at external research in past internal initiatives, we gathered some quick employee voices and came up with a list of, I think, 25, and then shortlisted and came to six at the end. And we shortlisted based on the fact that it needs to be fit for purpose, right? So all of a sudden, if I say 'AI in HR is important,’ there are a lot of other things that we as a company need to do before we go and start working on AI, right?

So it needs to make sense for Syngenta as a company, HR, as a function—so fit for purpose applicable to all roles in HR, because we didn't really want to go down the route of here are five, four for kanban and here are two for HRBP. So we wanted to have a generic set of six that will apply to the entire function.

And then you also talked about relevance in the next three to five years: you don't want something that might be a hot topic 10 years from now, and at the same time, you don't want something that's really hot right now to somewhere that will still be relevant in the next three to five years. So those are kind of the parameters we use to bring it down to six. And the six were data fluency, the part that I led, then employee experience, agile, tech savviness, partnering, and customer centricity. The first phase of the project, which was around six months, was around determining the skills. And then the next one year we actually spent, or almost eight months or nine months, to develop the framework. So if we were to design something around data fluency, what would that mean?

We did quite a bit of product testing around that, so after we developed the framework, got feedback from a variety of sources, we then designed the pathways. And at the same time—this is where it coincided with the larger learning experience platform launch in the company—we said, let us be pioneers and let us come up with design actual pathways in the platform. So we took our vision of that framework and converted those to actual learning pathways on the platform. And we now have six of these learning pathways: we have many more, but for HR, we have these very six dedicated ones, all built in-house.

Stacia Garr:
Great. So I want to start or dig in a little bit deeper on that first phase around kind of determining those skills. So did you all do any assessment of the level of those skills or capabilities in the organization today when you were making that decision around which, you said a list of 25 to a short list of, of six. So kind of what, what was the baselining and did that influence where you ultimately landed?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
The short answer I would say is we didn't do a survey or an assessment per se for employees, because we also had to always balance it out with other surveys that are going on, and do we really want this to have employees answer, way too much service, right? So there's always that reality that you have to juggle, right?

So I didn't do that, but having said that there definitely, I would say data, not so much quantitative data, but data from what worked in the past. So there were many models that were initiated or launched in the past that didn't quite work or there was feedback around why certain things stuck with the company and certain things never really stuck with people.

So we have that. We also had some external review of the HR function, and there was a lot of qualitative and quantitative data around an external party looking at our function and seeing what are our strengths and what are some of the things that we need to work on.

So we have that data and that very in-depth review from that external party. And then it wasn't a skill assessment, but we did some quick listening exercises where we asked people, what does 'HR 2025’ mean to you, and what are some of the skills that you think we need to develop that we don't have today? So we gathered some of those responses and there were also a bunch of quick polls that we did at various forums. We have something called the ‘One HR Week,’ which is where the entire function comes together virtually, and we have a ton of initiatives around HR and people and development for that whole week. So we gathered some quick data from those different sessions as well around skills.

Stacia Garr:
That absolutely makes sense. And then you mentioned you developed this framework: can you explain to us a little bit more in a detailed way, what that framework was?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Sure. So what we did was, when we were in a position when, once we knew these are the six that we have to work on, and then we identified who's going to be leading, we decided we'll do something called a Yam Jam, which is a Yammer jam, for each of these. Actually we did it for four out of the six capabilities, and we gathered people, we did different sessions and we had specific questions, so two minutes each and everybody had to write in, we had almost 200 to 300 people in aggregate across all sessions give us feedback. /span>

So we gathered a lot of data. For example, for data fluency. I asked the question, what does data fluency mean to you? right, and gathered that feedback. There was another question around, if you were to learn data fluency, what skills would you learn, right, and why would you learn them? So things like that, and what really emerged similar things emerged for other capabilities as well, but I'll focus on the data fluency part as there were three distinct needs of users. One was, I want to understand the data enough so that I want to read the dashboards, I can influence decisions. I can talk about it, I can, I can add value to conversations that are happening about talent, but I don't want to dig my hands dirty or, you know, I don't want to go too deep. So they were very clear, like I really want to know data enough.

So that was one bucket. The second bucket was people who wanted to go a bit deep, but they were, we don't want to do PhDs. So it just makes sure that it's not too deep, but we definitely want to understand what are the data sources we can pull? How can we do some quick analysis to answer a question? So it was almost like a deeper level of the first persona. And the third was where people and to be completely transparent, there weren't a whole lot of them and I almost force-fed them a little bit, that these were people who wanted to go, so people like us in order to develop the people analytics team and make it sustainable. You want technical people: these are people who want to aspire to become data scientists or go deep along with having consulting skills. So it's a very niche skill and the smallest group of all, but those were the three user types or user needs that emerged. And then what we decided was we needed different pathways for these different people. So we went ahead and did a lot of external exercises, listening exercises, where we looked at data fluency: I think I spoke to seven different companies, just understanding what they have done. And there were some really good ideas that came up as to what has made them successful in launching these programs.

So we took those, the internal needs, and then we put together the framework around, let's say for the first set of user needs or first persona, if you were to call it, the name of the person, I think we call them the information consumer—all they want to do is to consume information, not to not do too much of analytics. So for them, we came up with a series of not activities, but it's a mix of, it could be LinkedIn modules talking about why is data fluency important mixed with something like an escape room exercise, where it is about understanding how to use data, how to differentiate anecdotal data from actual data: so more around fundamentals of analytical thinking, and how do you bring that thinking to the table?

Those were just two examples, but around six to seven concrete activities or learning activities that you could be doing, which will address your need for that particular bucket of the first user need or the first persona. And we did that for the second persona. And then we did that for the third persona as well.

Stacia Garr:
Out of curiosity, what did you name those other two personas?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
The third one we named the scientist practitioner. And the second one, I think we are still in the process of finalizing it; we don't have that, but the first and the third are finalized. It was a bit of an exercise.

Stacia Garr:
Well, what I love about what you shared there is that it's something that could apply to any competency, right, or capability; so kind of this bigger picture group, understanding the personas within what these people need to learn and then designing the learning pathways around what their particular needs are that's just replicable across, across anything that we would do.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah, and that's really important. I think it was a stretch or a learning even for myself. Because when we set out, in complete transparency, my mindset was, Oh, I know what they need, so I'll design it, don’t worry about it, so I could have just gone with it—but it's only after that listening exercise, I realized, Oh, actually there are very distinct needs; just because I'm interested in data, not everyone is equally interested in data, and in a similar way. We really have to cater to the user's needs.

Stacia Garr:
So it's not just the absence of the skills or the skills that need to develop, but actually the needs that they have—and within those needs also an underlying motivation that they have to acquire those skills.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Absolutely.

Chris Pirie:
I love the design thinking approach of being customer-centric at the beginning; that’s interesting. I also wonder why six, was that a constraint that you gave yourself? Often good design comes from constraint. And I think a lot of our conversations around these skills and skills frameworks for me revolves around the appropriate level of granularity. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose six?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I don't think there's any magic to that number, but we were very clear, especially when we presented it to our HR leadership team, we were very clear that it shouldn't be a laundry list of, you know, here's these 15 things that we think are important—it has to be realistic and it also has to be achievable. If you want to upskill yourself in all of these, then whatever 12 to 18 months, should be a good enough timeframe.

So I think that was our main lens to look at it. I think we did come to seven, but then two of them could have been easily consolidated. So that's some strong feedback we got from our leadership team. So we then ended up consolidating.

And as you can imagine, a lot of these skills are also overlapping, right? So digital technical savviness. I mean, do you really want to keep it different or is that… I mean, even within the six, to be honest, there's so much data fluency needed in being agile or an employee experience, but there's a lot that you can actually combine. So there was a consolidation exercise, for sure.

Stacia Garr:
And you mentioned, you had gotten feedback to identify these three different personas. Once you had done that and had started working on the learning pathways, did you all also get feedback at that point?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yes. So we did a set of, we call it product testing, when just the framework was done, and it was pretty intense because we recorded all six of the capability leads. We recorded 30 20-minute videos introducing ourselves, why this is important and then the entire framework, and then we had a bunch of 20 to 30 product testers across the globe that actually went through all of those videos and then we had sessions where we came together and they gave us feedback, and we did some quick NPS surveys as well. Like would you recommend this framework to others or would you recommend the skill to others? So a lot of good feedback came from there saying, you know, this is good. This is not going to work for me.

One of the things that people said was there's a lot of commonalities among the six capabilities, so if there's a way to guide me to something else while you're talking about a particular skill, that would be really helpful. So if you're talking about agility and hypothesis building is really important, then tie it to the data fluency pathway because that's how you garner interest in each other.

So a lot of feedback happened there—that was one round of product testing, and then when we actually designed the actual pathway on the platform, we did another round of product testing as well. But to be very honest, I think we got a lot of interest in the first phase; by the time we launched it already coincided with a couple of other big initiatives, so the amount of feedback we received on the platform when we road-tested it was less. But at the same time, now we have launched it as of December 3rd, we launched everything officially across the globe. We are just going to look at the feedback now what happens.

Stacia Garr: Right.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
So, fingers crossed!

Stacia Garr:
I understand that you said that it coincided with a couple of other big initiatives, but it also may be that you got a lot of the big issues out of the way early in the design.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Absolutely, but what I would also tell others were on a similar journey is putting it on the platform is, is a learning by itself. Like when I was literally putting it on the platform, the kind of experiences or the kind of notes I had to put in—because it's not a bunch of LinkedIn modules, right? It has certain activities where you need to sign up; it has a community of practice that you can sign up for, so it's a mixed methods thing. So for some of them, let's say you're scrolling down, you've just gone through a few videos, and then all of a sudden it's an activity that you have to sign up for, but the actual activity will happen in the site that you are in. So how do you change that mindset that, well, this is not a module: you just need to sign up on this activity sheet so that your local HRBP can do this, right?

So because there was such a variety of things that we offered within each pathway, the actual platform experience is also important. And to gather feedback is also very crucial.

Stacia Garr:
Interesting. I want to maybe step back a little bit. So you were the global leader of People Analytics. How did you become involved in this? Like who was it led by an in, why were you a part of this?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
The first phase I was asked to lead the entire initiative, just identifying what the skills are going to be. It was very organic, let's have a project team together, let's have somebody lead it, I think I was in general passionate about the topic. So, it happened very organically and it happened really well.

The second phase, we realized that we need experts in each of these six fields or in these six capabilities, so let's have one person lead one capability and let's have one overall project manager lead the entire thing. So that's how we came together across HR. And I would say it's a mix; three of the six capabilities. So employee experience, agile and data fluency, we had people who actually lead it in their day jobs as well, so it only made sense for them to read these capabilities. The other six, I think it was more of people who were passionate about the topic and, of course, who had the capability to lead it. So it was a mix of your role determining who leads it, plus your passion. But of course, we had very strong sponsorship from our CHRO, who thought this is the top.

Stacia Garr:
One of the things we all know can be difficult is creating that alignment across these different areas of HR and these different teams and you even called out that one of the most important things was making sure there was a connection from one of these sets of capabilities to something else. I could see with there being six teams, it being hard to kind of maintain that connection. So what did you do in terms of maintaining that alignment and communication across these different groups so that you could kind of create this cohesive whole offering for folks?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think we hit an extremely strong project manager who kind of brought us together. I know it seems obvious, but I think her tenacity and her skills—kudos to her, every Tuesday, 8 to 9 or 8 to 9.30am was our meeting, and we had people from across the globe, from New Zealand to us, covering the entire globe. Imagine the difficulty of bringing everyone together, but we all pulled it together. So for a year, every Tuesday, 8 to 9.30am, we met as a team to discuss our progress and then we used Microsoft teams as our platform to collaborate: we had a whole channel dedicated to it and all of the conversation that happened, all the decks we prepared, everything that we revised and the durations, all of that happened on that single platform. So I don't think how we could have managed it just through email or just through, you know, meetings. That platform really helped.

Stacia Garr:
Now kind of turning, you said he launched it on December 3rd: what are you thinking in terms of the measurement? So how are you going to know if this has been successful?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
A couple of things. One is, of course we want to look at the platform, data, the metrics that come with it, so how many people have viewed it? How many people have started a more do which module is more popular, which mode is more popular—are people reading documents or are people watching videos more or are they signing up for activities? So we already have a framework that we have prepared for each of our pathways that we want to track the data; hopefully it’ll go up and not down over time.

We also have developed a dashboard, not just for the HR capabilities, but for the entire learning platform, where at an org level you get to see what are the top most skills that people are aspiring for, what are they signing up for? And you kind of get the business unit wide view or, you know, gender or other demographic view of the data. So that's another piece.

And then to be very honest, there's no death of qualitative feedback. So people will write an email and say, Hey, I couldn't sign up or what's this happening? Or have you considered this resource or that resource? So not everything, but we are trying to capture some of those qualitative feedback as well. So between the dashboard, the platform data and the qualitative feedback, that's our first approach, but I'm sure it will evolve and we have to put in some more. But let's see how we progress in the next two to three months.

Stacia Garr:
The dashboard is really interesting, because it basically is your way of enabling leaders to keep a pulse on, are we improving the skills of that? We've said we want to go out and improve. Was that something you envisioned doing from the beginning?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
We did actually. So what happened was, as I said, the HR capabilities was one part, or one stream; the other much bigger stream was launching the learning platform for the entire company, right? So my team was involved in one of the levers that they call the measurement lever. Of course, the question that was posed to us was how do we measure learning? How do we know this is working? So we came up with this framework of, there’s a bunch of metrics that we can track at an individual level. So me, as an individual learner, I want to know, when do I learn the best or how many courses have I taken in the last one week? Or is there a pattern, do I learn during a particular time of day, or things like that.

Then there's a set of metrics that are relevant for the manager, right, to understand how the team is progressing. Then there's an org level need, where as an organization, we need to understand which corporate functions are really leading the way in learning, or is this a business unit, or if you break it down through different demographic lenses.

And then there's a strategic level of, can we connect learning with metrics that Syngenta as a company is poised to deliver. So for high level metrics like anything to do with crop science or building a better life for farmers, are there things that we can correlate with learning? That's a very high goal—I don't think we are there yet. We are very much in the lower ranks of the pyramid right now. So individual, manager and organization-wide metrics. So in that organization wide leg, we had envisioned that dashboard—that this is what it'll cater to, and this is why we need the dashboard to look at them or look at an org view.

Now, one thing I will say is that we had a lot of debate for the manager rank of the pyramid, because there's a school of thought that believes, yes, managers should have access, because ultimately you want to see where your team is, and how your team is progressing. But then there's also another strong school of thought that said, we don't want managers to know—I don't want my manager to know what courses I took yesterday. So, you know, there was a lot of debate that way. We are not currently feeding anything to the manager, but so right now it's at an individual level, but it might be again, a journey.

Stacia Garr:
And I'm sure also there's a level of comfort that needs to happen with folks in getting this type of data and understanding what might go where, and, and the rest of it, because it may come eventually in place, and I just take whatever I want and my manager can do whatever they want with it, but it doesn't matter.

What I love about what you've shared—lots of things—but one thing is, you know, we hear a lot in our space about the democratization of data, about making it widely available, but we don't see a lot of practical examples. And I think what you've shared is a very practical example of how you've thought through how this data could be useful at the individual level. Certainly some thought on, on how it could be useful at the manager level, even though it's not available, but the thinking there. And kind of that pyramid that you mentioned, I think is really a powerful framework for other people to think through, as they're thinking about their data efforts and data dashboards and the like.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Right, right. I think the other thing I will mention is as we went through that process, we also realized that ideally, it all sounds really good that you have you've thought through it all, but then there are realities around what can the platform deliver, right? So it's not magic that I want 17 metrics around in that individual layer and all 17 are available on the platform. And if it's not available on the platform, are you actually going to feed it individually to the individual? No. right; I mean, you can't do that.

So then we had to tweak our approach to say, what could be an MVP? So let's say we have identified 16 or whatever, 15 things that we want to measure at an individual level; maybe only five or seven of them are available in the platform or are kind of a ballpark available in the platform. So let's have seven as an MVP and let's do the rest in as phase two, so longer term. So then we divided each of those layers; what’s an MVP, what's a nice to have, or can come in future. And that was a good reality check, because otherwise we were on this spree of anything we think will happen and we can make all of this work, but that's not quite it, because you always are constrained with what the technology can provide.

Stacia Garr:
And I know that with some of the particular learning platforms the concept of measurement and kind of the measurement that we bring to some other aspects of our people world—and Chris might hate me for saying this, but they seem to be a bit behind. You know, we, I think that there's kind of been the learning spaces long-term, you know, focus on smile sheets and the like, and the rigor of what we've seen in some of the other aspects of people analytics isn't there.

So can you talk to me a little bit about what that conversation looked like for you all with your vendor ? Hey, you know, this is where we want to go, we can use the things you're providing us, but how did you approach that? What was their receptivity to that conversation? And what do you kind of see moving forward?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I'll try to be as agnostic as possible, but I'll talk in generic terms. So some vendors were very, very rigid about what they have provided or what they will provide; it was a pretty difficult conversation to bring them from what their product to say, actually, our needs are a little different and we have identified these needs—only two of them are kind of matching with what you have, but what is your vision around the rest?

And they just kept going back to what they have, right? Those were actually part of our selection criteria as well. A lot of these conversations happened before we finalized the vendor, whereas a couple of others were definitely much more open, and they also gave us concrete examples of how they shifted their roadmap based on their client feedback. So testing that before finalizing the vendor is really important. And measurement was just one lever, right? There were other levels as well. So there was a process, there was integration with other stuff, things like that. So all of us were part of that discussion, and of course we had to keep it short. That's really important.

Chris Pirie:
As the L&D guy in the conversation. I couldn't agree more that we still seem to be on very foundational activity, tracking-type data and metrics in the learning space and though we're all very, very desperate and anxious to get to the business impact side of things, it feels like we're a long way.

Do you have any examples of things that you wanted to do? The vendors that you spoke to found it difficult to respond to or to your data scientist hat on,and tell me what you wish they could have brought to the table for you?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think the biggest one was in that final layer where we had business outcomes, you know, the top of the pyramid—and that's where I said that we are yet to go there, that’s where we were hoping that we'll get much more insight from the vendors or actual examples, but we didn't quite. So for example, one of the things that I know was pretty ambitious of us, but we wanted to say, ultimately, it helps us sell better to farmers because of the courses that we have taken, right? And I'm putting it in very simplistic terms, but if I take five agronomy courses, do I, as an organization sell more?

So any relationship that we could establish between learning and selling more, or influencing farmers' decisions more, we didn't end up getting anything there. And it's a hard problem—I don't want to say they can’t solve it and look, we have done it, we have done it either. But so I do want to recognize it's a very hard problem and it's so many factors involved, ultimately in the selling decision that you can't really pinpoint to learning, but if there was some way to directly establish relationships between the final outcomes that we're interested in as an organization and learning, that would be a deal breaker, I would say.</span

Stacia Garr:
Just to dive into the data side of that a little bit more, were the vendors able to actually bring in some of that data? Because obviously you'd have to bring in for this example of your sales data for different groups and then be able to kind of slice and dice based on what functions people were in, or what region or whatever, and whether they took the courses. So were they unable to bring in that data, or were they unable to share that so that you all could do that analysis yourself, see, during your Data Lake or in some external tools?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think with regard to those higher level questions about the business outcome relationship, they were just unable to bring in or show us examples. But with others, I think it was more around, yes, we have the data, but right now it's not on the platform, but yes, we think about that. So it was more yes, we can implement it if you want, or we can do it, but right now it’s we are not able to show it on the platform.

But, you know, Stacia, the other thing I'll mention is we also had a learning ‘aha!’ moment here. We thought the more the metrics, the merrier, right. But the vendors actually told us, and some of the external learning we did when we spoke to other companies was, t the end of the day, give the individual just three metrics, and that's what you can drive the maximum impact—don’t bombard them with like 15 metrics that they don't know what to do at every day. If it's changing at some point, I'll be like, okay, I don't care.

So try to consolidate and give them the bare minimum or two to three that you think are important. That way, certain vendors also helped change our thought process. Just because we can think of 15 doesn't mean we have to give 15, right: think about what really matters. And at the end of the day, or rather end of the week, what does an individual want to know about his or her learning path?

Stacia Garr:
I'd like to kind of lift up and think about what you're going to be doing moving forward, kind of taking this experience as an initial example of what could potentially be done. Can you talk about your vision for how people analytics could help with, skills, identification, or verification or talent redeployment in the future?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah, I think again, this could be an hour discussion by itself. A couple of thoughts: one is especially given the experience we had employee listening plays such an important role, understanding your population for which you're building the learning product is critical that we saw our personas and our user needs would not have come up if we had not listened. Right?

So people analytics, and again, to me, people analytics, employee experience, they go hand in hand—it’s not really a different team or different skill set But we can play a really important role in that process of whatever listening we do internally to understand user needs, beat quantitative or qualitative, to gather that data, to mine that data, to help that that's where we come in quite a bit. The second is the sources from which we get information about skills. That's just going to exponentially increase over the years. Internal listening is only one source. You also have, I'm sure the HR employee tracking system, every company has, there’s some amount of information there. Then there is, there are professional networking sites that you can get information on, there are learning platforms that you can get information on. So how do you connect the disparate data sources and come with a consolidated view of what are the skill gaps? What are the skills people are aspiring for? Managing those disparate data sources, analyzing that data. That's where people analytics can play a key role, and of course the end part of it, which is when you have launched a pathway or a learning platform, how do you measure that people are actually learning? So that's the third piece where people analytics is critical, and if organizations don't have people analytics teams in that space, then that would be a red flag. You absolutely need to involve the team there.

Stacia Garr:
You mentioned kind of this exploding or exponentially increasing, I think was the right word, sorts of data around skills. I can see that as potentially an opportunity, but it's also a challenge. So we'd love to hear kind of your thoughts on those different data sources and how folks might want to approach or think about that challenge as they're moving forward.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
The first thing I would say is really, what does the business need? Try to understand the business needs, and where the company is going. So I'm sure digital is top of everyone's mind, and everyone's going through a digital transformation—but what exactly is digital, right? I mean, is it data analytics skills, or is it becoming more technology-savvy? Like for us, farming equipment or farming digitization or technology that supports satellite data.

So trying to understand the business needs is really important—and what's the need, do we really need to up-skill our own population to make it prepared for the next five years? Or, can we do it with interim solutions? There are a lot of vendors these days that look at the current talent pool, the external talent pool, the gig economy talent pool, and a couple of others and they bring together a project team that will suffice for a particular project that you don't have the skills for, right?

We haven't quite implemented that, but we have actually looked into some of those solutions because some of the business needs are very, we need to put a team together next week to start on this project, but we don't really have these skills. So we need to think about what the company needs long-term, but not forget that there are many short-term and medium-term solutions available today, especially given the gig economy structure that we can avail of. That would be my call-out given some of the business problems that have come to my team in the past 1, 1.5 years.

Stacia Garr:
When I ask you, you've mentioned kind of being involved with the broader HR function and specifically with learning as you've done this work. When you think about addressing skills broadly, who else do you think needs to be involved in that conversation?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Meaning, outside of HR?

Stacia Garr:
There could be other groups within HR, I could tell you who I might be thinking of, but I don't want to influence you, but I think both within HR and outside HR.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
So I think beyond learning and analytics, I see HR BPs as a key role, because their insight into what the business is thinking, what are the kinds of daily conversations that happen on the ground: that really helps give us a picture of what are some of the skills that we need to upskill ourselves on, so that we can have a more informed conversation with the businesses.

And also, a lot of companies, their HRBP population tends to be very tactical. So how do we move to being a more strategic input into the business rather than very operational? So, that itself was a good input for us to kind of look at what skills we need to look at in order to change.

Other than that, I think IT in general partnership with them, especially in terms of learning platforms or what do we have, where do we want to go, how can we integrate? That's really important. And I think once we have the solution, or maybe not once we have, but throughout, we need the business leaders at least to sponsor or to support. Some of the best conversations we have had was when we did these learning workshops; as a result of that learning platform launch our very visible business leaders came and addressed us and just talked about learning, and what does learning mean? And we ask them questions like, if you want to have one outcome of learning, what will it be? One of the things that repeatedly came from these business leaders was, I should be able to find what I want to learn easily—that was at the top of their mind.

The other thing, which to me resonated really well with me was people talked about learning can be just going to an orchestra or opera and listening. And to me, that's learning. So, you know, how do you look at learning and the non-work space as well? And people actually consider that very much a learning, but then that has its own measurement problems, because when we were working on the measurement, How do you actually metricize, going to the museum because that's learning?

So that has its own issues. But that was one of our eye-opening moments—when we heard business leaders talk about learning. That also really energized us to think about it in different ways. So that's important to make it successful.

Chris Pirie:
When I look at what's going on in the learning world today, there's two predominant sets of activities. One is very data-driven—the kind of work that you've been doing. How do we codify, how do we automate, how do we track? And then there's another almost, I don't know whether it's on a scale, but at the other end there's how do we build a culture? How do I create a culture where learning in my organization is something that is supported and good and encouraged. As a data person, what do you think about the culture side of things?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah. I mean, that's something we have been really thinking about hard, because this is not an easy problem to solve. And it's almost in every deck that we have created a learning culture, right? I mean, that's there.

I think the launch and the marketing of it is really important—it goes a long way in creating that culture So I would really have almost like a marketing team associated with the launch of the product, and treat it like any other product in the market. And we can see that the stronger the launch, greater the uptake in those areas, so creating that learning culture.

And then also, I think it goes down to the individual leader a lot. So I, as a manager of seven people, how much do I emphasize on development? I could have my own ways of emphasizing—in my team, we have this two-hour session, monthly development sessions. We just talk about one topic that we have either read or something that we need to upskill ourselves, and somebody presents. So I think leaders, it's up to them to create that culture within their team. So that's more of a bottom-up approach and businesses launching it, or business leaders launching it, is more of a top down approach. So between those two, it could be powerful in creating the culture. And constantly measuring it—don’t forget measurement.

Chris Pirie:
At Microsoft, what we used to say is, if it doesn't get measured, it doesn’t get done. That might be the culture link.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah, exactly. And you're talking to a people analytics person, so yes, everything is measurement.

Stacia Garr:
So just starting to wrap up; are there any organizations that you admire in terms of how they're approaching skills today—folks who you've talked to that you think they're doing?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Some interesting work? I think it's the recency effect, Chris, because you mentioned Microsoft, I think some of the work they're doing, and I may be a little biased with my conversations that happened around the HR data fluency skills, so maybe not overall, but I know they have done some really good work and they have a team dedicated to it: there’s some very dedicated efforts around it.

Lloyd's Bank was another organization that we spoke to and they have done some really good work, especially the persona idea, even though their personas are completely different, but that idea actually came from my conversation with them where they had certain personas. And they made it a very fun way of identifying with the persona, and therefore going and learning certain skills because you are that persona.

I was pretty impressed with their work. And I think Unilever in general is always the leader in this, mostly because of all the stuff that I've read, I haven't personally talked to them.

Stacia Garr:
What else should we have asked you about that we didn’t?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
You know, with any initiative when it happens and when it's done, it feels like, Oh, it was wonderful, and this was all planned and everything happened as per plan. But I just want to give people a very realistic picture; there are many times where we just didn't know what we are doing, or if this is even going to launch—or when we had the framework, we had wonderful PowerPoint decks, but we didn't know how reality would look like, but it just so happened that the platform was launching at the same time.

But if that had not launched, I don't know if we would be here today with actual learning pathways, so there are a lot of coincidences. There are a lot of points in time where we didn't know what the next step was and it could have completely fallen flat and not gone anywhere.
So, you know, just keep at it and you just have to make things work as you go; it’s not always very well planned out. A year ago, we didn't know that we will be in this position today where we actually have launched pathways for six of our capabilities.

Stacia Garr:
You've shared a lot of really great information. Some folks might want to follow up and have some other questions: how can people connect with you and your work?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Definitely, you can connect with me on LinkedIn; that would be great.

Stacia Garr:
And then wrapping up, final question: we’ve done quite a bit of work on purpose over the last year, and so we like to ask all of our podcast guests a question about their personal purpose—to really just want to understand why do you do what you do? Why do you do the work you do?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Oh, that's pretty deep. I think there's this inherent need in me personally—that the need for connection with people, that's very strong. But at the same time, I think I also have an affinity for numbers, and so I think part of me is always asking but what's the numbers, what's the evidence, and what's how can you break it down, and how do you know this is true? How do you know this is not true?

So this fascination for facts and fascination for people, I think that's where I found them coming together and people analytics. And that's what I do, and ultimately, if this can make leaders make better decisions about people—if this can help an employee know what to do next in his or her career or what to learn next, you're actually improving somebody's life in the organization.

Stacia Garr:
So you're not just a scientist-practitioner, you're a scientist-humanist, if you will?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
That’s a lovely title.

Chris Pirie:
That should be a job title!

Stacia Garr:
It should be.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Maybe that's what we call our third persona—we’ll tweak it.

Stacia Garr:
Well, thank you, Madhura, this was just wonderful; we appreciate all the really concrete examples and just sharing the details, and helping people see there's no one pathway to getting here, but it is possible.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I really enjoyed the conversation as always, Stacia; thank you, Chris. Good to know you.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah, likewise—thanks so much!

Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr:
Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining. We're going to go ahead and get started. So for those of you whom I have not met, I am Stacia Garr and we are RedThread Research. I'm a, co-founder here with RedThread and I am just thrilled to be hosting this session today with Rajesh Anandan, who is the CEO of Ultranauts. And Ultranauts, you're going to learn all about them in the course of the session and how they have built these, as we described it here in the title of cognitively diverse and highly engaged and empowered teams. Now, before we get started, just want to share with you for those of you who don't know we are RedThread and we are human capital research and advisory membership. And we focus on a range of things, including people analytics, learning, and skills, performance employee experience, HR tech, and most relevant for today diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. So if you have a chance, check us out @redthreadresearch.com. Now just some quick housekeeping for our session today. The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants. And we want you to go ahead and ask questions through the Q&A function. I believe there's also a way to up vote your favorites. So if you see questions that others have mentioned, go ahead and up vote those. You're free to interact with one another in the chat, and you'll just need to make sure that you adjust the settings to include panelists and attendees. Otherwise you'll just be sending messages to the panelists, which is fine, but probably isn't the amount of interaction that you may be hoping for. So just go ahead and, and make that shift. If you have a moment we'd love for you to get started by putting in the chat, your name and your organization, and anything that you're in particular, hoping to learn from today's webinar.

Stacia Garr:
So with that, we'll go ahead and get started. So it is my pleasure to introduce Rajesh Anandan. We've practiced many times before the session, and I hope I hope I didn't mess up. But you know, this webinar really came about as a introduction on LinkedIn through a mutual friend who said you two absolutely must meet each other. Because you know, you have a wonderful story with Ultranauts in the work that you're trying to do, and we have an opportunity to, to help you share that. So with that, I guess would love to start with what is Ultranauts, who are you, what's this company that you've helped build?

Who is Ultranauts: Creating a universal workplace where everyone can thrive

Rajesh Anandan:
Well, Stacia, thanks for hosting the session and glad to share a bit more about what what we've been up to at Ultranauts. So Ultranauts is a onshore software and data quality engineering services firm. We, my co-founder and I started the company eight years ago with a mission to demonstrate that neuro-diversity including autism could be a competitive advantage for business. And our very simple theory of change was to build a world-class business that could create value for clients and be commercially viable and successful. And along the way, reimagine how in organization functions, how a company thinks about talent sources, talent manages teams, develops careers, so that a much wider group of humans could thrive and along, you know, and we're now eight years in and we've learned a lot. And part of our mission of course, is the share what we're learning to make it easier and more effective for other organizations to also embrace your diversity. So I'm always thrilled to have the chance to share some of what we've learned and some of the practices we've developed for our team at Ultranauts.

Stacia Garr:
Great. And why did you do this? So how did you arrive at this decision to build a neuro diverse team? And I'm really, why was it important to you?

Rajesh Anandan:
You know, I I'll spare the retroactively crafted founder story. Cause those things you just can't believe, startup origin stories, that sound like a neat straight line. My co-founder and, Art Shectman you know, we were at school together undergrads at MIT in the early nineties. And you know, when you're in an engineering school, you over-index on other humans who are different. And I think for a lot of us, for the first time we found a space and an environment and a community where it was all fine, we could be whoever we were. And there wasn't need a need to hide parts of who we were for fear of being bullied and things like that. And we didn't have these labels then I don't think I'd heard of autism until much later, but in retrospect, we of course have close friends who are neurodivergent and who we've seen, how they've struggled, trying to navigate a world that was not designed with them in mind and unfairly had to figure out how to function in a society and workplaces.

Rajesh Anandan:
And so fast forward a few decades, I'm dating myself here, but I'd done some research with another friend who runs a due diligence firm and research and consulting firm, Stax's. Looking at a thesis I had around communities of humans who were being overlooked or underestimated because of ableist views and looking for evidence of an over-indexing of attributes that could be strengths in the workplace. And so I was describing some of the findings from this research with Art, my co-founder, and he's been a serial entrepreneur and he was building a software development shop at the time. And he said, you know, some of the profiles sort of traits or attributes you are describing are exactly what I would look for in a quality engineer. And I could never find good quality engineers. And gosh, if you can find me a few folks who have these strengths I've got work that needs to be done.

Rajesh Anandan:
And so that's how we got started. As an experiment, we, you know, went to a couple non-profit advocacy groups for adults on the spectrum, and they were kind enough to humorous and help us craft a job description. We posted that job on grass. It's an advocacy network for autistic adults, and we had 150 applications within three days.

Stacia Garr:
Wow.

Rajesh Anandan:
A third of the applicants had graduate degrees, no one had any sort of work experience that related to the job we needed people to do. So we stumbled through the screening process and identified three of the applicants, trained them up pretty quickly and saw within a few months that they were able to do the job at a very high standard. And that was all the evidence we needed. And we launched Ultranauts then at the time called Ultra Testing as its own firm.

Stacia Garr:
Very interesting. So it sounds like you started with certainly with research, understanding, you know, kind of a little bit about this landscape and then with, as you said, an experiment at the beginning but now, you know, fast forward, how many years ago was that?

Rajesh Anandan:
Eight years ago. Okay.

Stacia Garr:
So now fast forward eight years ago, and I'm sure that, you know, over the course of this time, you've gotten a lot of questions about what it's like to lead a diverse team. We talked about this in our prep session, you know, and what misconceptions people people may have. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, from that start with those three quality engineers to today, what you've seen?

Rajesh Anandan:
So I would say, well, so many things and we'll touch on some of the sort of learnings we've had as a team. During the conversation I would say the most important thing is that if you take any group of humans you will not be able to describe that group accurately with any single statement. And so while our intentions were good and certainly there's evidence of an over-indexing of certain traits, like logical reasoning ability, or visual pattern recognition ability among autistic adults relative to the general population, these are generalizations, you know, it doesn't actually describe any specific individual. And so I think the biggest learning is that the sort of generalizations and these tropes, even if they're well-intentioned are not particularly helpful and keep you from getting to the ground truth that you need to understand in order to develop and design the kind of systems that actually work for everyone. And so you know, I'll, I'll simply say while ableist tropes are bad, clearly. So to our super power tropes or tropes about heightened abilities, and as one of my autistic colleagues shared, you know, in her words, she said, listen, all my life I've had to be exceptional just to be accepted. Like, can I just be accepted?

Stacia Garr:
Hmm. Yeah. Great point. Well, let's, I think that leads nicely into this question that I had for you, which is what is your team actually look like? So let's go to that slide.

The Ultranauts team

Rajesh Anandan:
So today Ultranauts is a team that spread out across 29 States. We've actually been a fully virtual organization from day one. So we've had the luxury of eight years of experimenting and trying different tools and practices to keep our team engaged and connected. And so when COVID started to unfold operationally, nothing changed. We were all already working from home and, you know, maybe my colleague who heads up growth and I traveled didn't travel anymore to events. I mean, that was pretty much the only thing, but we, we, our DNAs as a fully virtual organization so we're fully distributed and incredibly diverse. And so three quarters of our team across the company are autistic, and that's not just our analysts and engineers, it's our quality managers or colleagues and leadership team or head of outreach.

Rajesh Anandan:
And so that's been very intentional because we fundamentally believe that if you can bring together different brain types, different information, processing models, different problem solving styles, different thinking styles, different learning styles, and forge collaborative teams, you could do better. And there's a fair bit of evidence that backs up that assertion that cognitively diverse teams do perform better in terms of solving more complex problems, surfacing more unique insights and driving continuous improvement. And in our case all through the lens of improving software and data quality in highly complex and fast moving domains. And, you know, the one thing I would say is we have adopted this approach because of our fundamental belief that our differences as individuals do actually make us better together. And not because we are trying to create jobs for artistic talent, like that is not while that is a part of what happens because of the nature of what we're doing.

Rajesh Anandan:
The mission is to demonstrate that diversity neuro diversity and which leads to cognitive diversity is in fact an advantage. And so we go out and of course invest differentially in reaching pools of talent who've been left out and marginalized. And so sourcing looks very different for us. And we can talk a bit more about that later, but from the time you apply, everybody's treated the same. You get to work at Ultranauts because we believe you are the best brain for the right job. And not because of anything else. And because of that, you know, we've been able to create an environment where diversity really is embraced and it flourishes.

Diversity

Rajesh Anandan:
And if you could go to the next slide, not only are we cognitively diverse, but arguably we might be the most diverse engineering firm in the world across any dimension, you know, so if we look at gender 40% of our team are cisgender female. 5% are non binary, 5% are trans and other 12% have other gender identities. And so, you know, in a way cis-gender males are certainly not the majority or a plurality.

Stacia Garr:
And can you for, for our audience who may not know what cisgender means, can you explain that?

Rajesh Anandan:
Sure. that would be individuals who identify with the sex of their birth, born a male identify as male. And then in terms of race and ethnicity 28% of our team are people of color. Now, this is an area where we are not reflective of the population the American population. And so we've got work to do but we also think of diversity in terms of socioeconomic status. Three quarters of our team were unemployed or underemployed, nothing to do with their fierce capabilities as professionals and humans and everything to do with the construct of how you know, people get hired and the sort of highly subjective and ineffective tools that are commonly used, which leave out incredibly capable humans from having a fair shot at contributing. And so we've been on this journey to try to change that.

Rajesh Anandan:
And over 40% of our team used to live in poverty. And so we think about diversity across many dimensions. We don't think that point solutions to improve or increase diversity on any one dimension can work. There's certainly no shortage of failed attempts to say, Oh, let's set up a program focused on X group. Because the reason you might need a program for X group is because there are underlying sort of inequities in how the organization functions. Maybe it's in how you recruit, how you develop talent or how you manage, you know, how you build relationships how information is shared all of this stuff. And if you don't get to the root of what's creating unfairness and an uneven playing field, then all these point solutions just don't work. And on the other hand, if you can really take an honest look at what is, what are those underlying causes that are resulting in a workforce that is not diverse on whatever dimension it is and you start to tackle, attack those surgically. Then what you end up with is a diverse work force. As we have, like, we didn't set out to be gender diverse or racially diverse or socioeconomically diverse. We, this is an outcome of the process we've gone through.

Stacia Garr:
And I think one thing to, to call out for folks is that, you know, just to to pick on one of these you've mentioned here that 10% black, the technology industry is historically really it's incredibly difficult or to get that number very high. It seems for I think, many of the reasons that you've mentioned, but just for folks, for point of comparison, I was recently actually looking at at Facebook's numbers here and, you know, they, they at least have been saying, they've been putting a big focus on this. And, and even with that big focus, I think their numbers are like 3%. So even though this is not necessarily where we would want it, it's still, I think, remarkably better than what we tend to see in the tech industry.

Rajesh Anandan:
Yeah. And so part of the challenge is to continuously challenge ourselves. Like good compared to what you know. So when we look at the broader sort of technology industry or kind of engineering fields and we're all quality engineers, it's a low bar and it's meaningless, you know, so it's I think, you know, the only sort of valid comparison is what is it in the general population? Cause everything else, it starts to sound like an excuse, right? Oh, there isn't a pipeline of talent or, well, you know, maybe this particular discipline is doesn't have as many graduates or what have you, by the way, we also looked at our team in terms of academic background. And actually I think almost 30% quarter to 30% of our team. If we look at team members who are performing extremely well don't have a college degree. So, you know, we're seeing bigger efforts around this like Google certificates where we're trying to disrupt that barrier of, if you're not part of the third of the population that have a college degree, then suddenly you're left out of a whole wide range of fields, which makes no sense.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, no completely agree. We actually, we just published a podcast. We did with a gentleman called Matthew Daniel who's with Guild education. And we spent quite a bit of time talking about that exact topic about how this, this issue of college degrees leaves out so much of the workforce. So just kind of moving us on, you know, these numbers are great, but I think a lot of people would want to know, okay, well, what results have you seen so far with your business? So can you talk a little bit about that?

Rajesh Anandan:
Yeah. we've grown at over 50% a year in terms of, you know, growing the business while maintaining a hundred NPS among clients and our clients include a range of leaders in the industries that we work in from, you know AIG, Berkshire, Hathaway, Bloomberg Bank of New York, Mellon, Cigna, Comcast Warner media. We also work with startups. We work with pure technology companies and SAS companies. Slack's been a long time client. And then so commercially, we're professional services firm. So we're growing at a really healthy clip. And we saw the sort of impact of that as COVID started to unfold and companies started to shut down entire business units and shut off contractors and vendors and all this stuff. And we took a hit as well. Looking back a year, Q2 last year, I think for us, as for many organizations was not fun at all.

Performance

Rajesh Anandan:
And we lost a couple bigger accounts, took a real hit to our top line, but we recovered in a quarter and because the services we provide in terms of data quality engineering and software called engineering, are that much better than what's out there. We ended the year having grown our top line by 70%. In the middle of what was arguably incredibly challenging year. And, and we do that because we do this work better. If you could go to the next slide, you know, the nature of what we do is preventative. If we're doing our job, bad stuff, shouldn't happen. You know, your software should launch and release without any critical failures, your machine learning models and predictions, your analytics engine should be accurate and trusted, so bad things don't happen. But there've been a couple of examples where we've been brought in to replace a larger consulting firm, and we had to redo an entire piece of work, or there was a really well defined, measured baseline we were starting from.

Stacia Garr:
So it was possible to compare what we did. And the results we were able to deliver. In one case, a Prudential business unit brought us in to replace an IBM team, doing some fairly technical kind of compliance testing on their software. And we were able to not only use the same sort of automation tools, but actually do the same work so much more effectively that we increased the sort of rate of detection of defects by 56%. I mean, you have to ask, like, what were they doing before? Not only that we were able to actually do it in sprint versus delaying delivery of that platform. And no surprise, we replaced IBM at that business unit and, you know, completed 14, 15 projects. I think in another case we were brought in to replace or in place of CapGemini by an AIG business unit.

Rajesh Anandan:
And CapGemini is a great firm. They were sort of working across that company and this particular CTO didn't want a sort of cookie cutter industry solution. They were building a highly complex underwriting insurance underwriting platform and needed a partner that could have just capable, quality engineers, who not only had the technical skills to build sort of a scalable test automation framework, which sounds like a bunch of garbage, but actually be able to understand the business and what that meant was our quality engineers read through the 500 pages of underwriting logic, and actually understood it and cared enough to also understand the pricing regulations at the state and federal state level that varied by product and synthesize all of that into what to test to answer. The simple question of is this policy quote being delivered, correct, because the stakes are high. And so we've been able to show over and over again that yes, actually we do this better.

Rajesh Anandan:
And because of that, we've been growing as a business. And that's because of not in spite of the diversity of our team.

Inclusion

Rajesh Anandan:
The one other thing I would say, if you go to the next slide is that we think of success, not just in terms of the value we provide to our clients. Obviously we're a business. That's what success is. We would create value in a differentiated way that that helps our clients extract, you know, grow the business, mitigate risk and so on. But we also do think about success in terms of our ability to create an environment where everyone has a fair shot at success and can thrive. And does that in a, in the context of a team where they feel connected and engaged and they feel like they belong. And so we measure loneliness. We created a simple metric that we call our net loneliness score.

Rajesh Anandan:
Think of it like NPS for customer health as a forward-looking indicator of the health of your business. The loneliness score is similar in that it's a forward looking indicator of the health of our team, therefore the health of our business. We have a bot that pulls our team at 5:00 PM local time every day. Every day is a single poll. We cycled through about a dozen of them as a team we've kind of arrived at what those calls are. And each one ties back to a dimension of inclusion or wellbeing that we as a group have decided that it's important for us. And so loneliness is one of them. And we now have data for several years that we are consistently not a lonely group, a whole lot less lonely than the American workforce. You know, I think a few years ago, the surgeon general at the time was sounding the alarm about loneliness being an epidemic in America. And it's only gotten worse and 40% of American workers reported feeling lonely at work before COVID and we are now even more isolated. And before COVID I think 15% of Ultranauts reported feeling lonely at work and during COVID in spite of being surrounded by fear in panic we had the systems in place that actually brought our team even closer. And so, you know, the last quarters loneliness polls were averaging closer to 10% and that's, you know, people responding to that poll saying, I feel lonely at work.

Stacia Garr:
Right. And I think that's remarkable, you know, particularly as you mentioned, you're a remote team from the start. And so you know, that you know, that ability to even improve upon what you, what was happening during the, during COVID I think is really remarkable. One thing I don't think you mentioned at the beginning is how many folks are on your team? How many people work for Ultranaut?

Rajesh Anandan:
So we're still a small firm, you know, we're just south of a hundred people.

Universal workplace

Stacia Garr:
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Just to get folks on the line have a of the scale. Okay. So we've talked about, you've got really strong diversity, you've got really strong business results and other results such as this, so help us understand how do you do this? What does this, what does this look like? What's the workplace design look like?

Universal workplace: Flexible workplace norms

Rajesh Anandan:
So we think of what we're doing or trying to do as creating a universal workplace, which simply is shorthand for applying universal design principles to reimagine and redesign the system that is work top to bottom. And so for us this universal workplace has sort of four dimensions to it. One is building flexibility in as the norm, not as a thing you need to ask for an exception. Certainly having the flexibility to work from an, in an environment that you've been able to design based on your own needs, hugely important for our team. Maybe, you know, it's not for everyone. And you're seeing some of the research come out where it's working from home is super productive for some, but not all for our team in general. You know, many of our teammates may not have even applied if this was not an option, but we think of flexibility across a lot of other dimensions as well.

Rajesh Anandan:
We've moved away from the notion of a FTE, a full-time equivalent as sort of the way to think about units of work and a work week, because it turns out there's really no evidence that suggests that a 40 hour, 50 hour work week is optimally productive for all humans or even most humans or even many humans. And yet this is the construct we're stuck in. And in our case we have incredibly capable team members who would be hyper-productive for some fraction of that time. But if they were forced to work this quote full time week, simply to have a salary or simply to be able to progress in their career, you know, it, it would be unproductive. It might be overwhelming. It would be bad for their health and, and just bad for the team. And so we have created what we call a DTE, a desired time equivalent.

Rajesh Anandan:
So in almost all of our salaried roles you have, and I would say over 85% of our team are in salaried roles. So that's important to you. You can't have any of this stuff without income stability. And that's been a journey for us as a small business, right? And a lead startup we've we've had to work our way to this point where now we feel like we've dealt with some of those core issues around income stability. I would say, you know if you can't, if you don't have that, and you don't have psychological safety as just building blocks, you have nothing. And so, you know, you've got to address those things first because otherwise you don't have a conditions for people to be able to use their bandwidth and their brain cycles to focus on value and work, and instead have all these other fears that, that are playing in the background.

Universal workplace: Transparent decision making

Rajesh Anandan:
So flexibility's important. A second dimension is just transparency. You know, when you bring together people who are this different, who have very different views and experience, and maybe in some cases bad experiences at other workplaces, unfair experiences, it's really important to have as much transparency as you can, in terms of, particularly in terms of decision making, like, you know, one of the polls that we cycle through with this bot is I forget the exact phrasing, but it's like, I understand how decisions are made at this company, particularly those that affect my job. And so you respond on a Likert scale, you know, and that's sort of our proxy for do people feel like they know what's going on and why things happen. And so we've done a lot to create that transparency so that people do feel like they understand why decisions are made and what's being made.

Rajesh Anandan:
We publish our sort of performance dashboard that the leadership team works with and works off of to run the business. There's 40 odd KPIs and it's published. So the whole company sees the same metrics that the leadership team is responding to. Whenever that the leadership team meets, we meet once a week as a group, we publish notes on actions, decisions. So there's transparency. Obviously we don't publish everything. Like if there's some HR stuff happening, but for the most part, it turns out, you know, there's nothing special about what does the leadership team talk about? Cause every organization I've been in, you know this is kind of a pet topic of what, what do they talk about? And at Ultranauts you don't have to worry, or you don't have to wonder about this. It's a waste of brain cycles to wonder, because here it is.

Stacia Garr:
Can I, can I jump in on that? One thing I really like about that is we did some research actually over the course of the pandemic and are continuing to do it, that we called the responsive organization. And two of the components of a responsive organization was distributed authority. And then also growth and transparency. And what I like here is, is that pulling of those really with the obviously the transparency of these metrics and kind of how the business is doing, but then also the, the logic behind these are the decisions we made and sharing that because kind of understanding how decisions are made, helps others make their own decisions and make better decisions aligned with the same principles that the senior leadership team does. So there's something I really like about that.

Rajesh Anandan:
Yeah. And I don't want to, you know overstate the notes. You're absolutely right. Like having providing context for why decisions are made. It's just so important because that's the only way you can have individual actors in a system making good decisions. Otherwise, you know, you need a very hierarchical bureaucracy which is ineffective. And we can certainly do better on that front. You know I would say trying to build those organizational habits where providing the context is just part of what we do, you know, even on the leadership team, like we have a diverse leadership team and we've tried to adopt a habit where the night before the weekly meeting, if you have an agenda, item or topic, you've got to submit it. You know, we use Trello and we're engineers, so this stuff is all this, send it here and it'll populate somewhere and isn't it great.

Universal workplace: Focus on team wellbeing

Rajesh Anandan:
But the format we try to use is first give people a heads up, right? So put the thing on the agenda before the meeting and then provide the context, you know, do you want a discussion? Do you want a decision? Like, what is the purpose of this? And then what is the context, you know, that I need to know in order to have an informed conversation about the decision or about to meet and then you know, wellbeing obviously it's important particularly because we're distributed. It's impossible to know when someone is not doing well. You can't see that someone's not doing well. You might not run into them in the hallway. You won't see them stressed out at their desks. And so it's really important to not only sort of measure wellbeing. Like we have our bot that's getting a pulse check of the team every day.

Rajesh Anandan:
But also de-stigmatize mental health as much as possible, make it okay to take time off. You know, everybody in the company has to go through a part of onboarding is just going through a workshop around managing stress and anxiety. We have access to as a standard for, you know, kind of part of the resources everyone has access to. We have access to a mental health services provider where you can have therapy sessions or counseling sessions. We have a team forum every couple of weeks. That's hosted by a life coach that that we work with. And that's a safe forum for people to just share concerns that they have with a group of peers in a moderated way. A life coach has office hours that you can sign up for one-on-one and all of this stuff around wellbeing, we try to make it provide lots of possible ways you can get help and we try to make it really easy to ask for help, and we try to make it okay that you need help.

Rajesh Anandan:
And kind of diffuse a lot of the stigma around mental health by talking openly about it at a all-staff meeting a couple of months ago, we had a member of the leadership team, very openly share about some of the mental health challenges that they're struggling with to just create the sense among the team that this is, you know, this is okay, and it's okay to share. It's okay to ask for help, but that takes time and creating that sort of the safety, you know, the psychological safety only happens through actions and what the team sees as sort of observes around them and and sees their peers doing, the managers, and leadership team. And that creates the safety and the feeling of safety that allows people to then actually feel safe, to ask for help or call out a mistake.

Universal workplace: Inclusion business practices

Rajesh Anandan:
And then the fourth dimension, I think the most important one here is that for us inclusion is not just a feeling. We've tried to define it for ourselves and then design inclusion into our core business practices. And this is a very different approach from most organizations where there is a defaulting to creating quote workplace accommodations for kind of team members have different needs. And to us that that's a that's not a solution. You know, that's a symptom of the problem and only a bandaid and is not a bad place to start to figure out how you need to change your practices so that that person doesn't need a special accommodation. And so we'll talk a bit more about that, but everything from how we do recruiting, not just for, you know, one group of job applicants just for everyone, or how we provide and think about learning and development, not just for one group, but for everyone and how we run our projects and our teams which we just published a paper on what we call inclusive, agile, which is just a better way to implement agile and scrum better for everyone, not just one group,

Stacia Garr:
Right? Yeah. Well, let's go there because I love the folks I'm sure want to know, you know, how do you approach let's, let's start with recruiting. So what does the talent acquisition and hiring process look like?

Objective recruiting

Rajesh Anandan:
Sure. So if you could go to the next slide there's been a fair bit of research looking at the efficacy of different recruiting techniques in predicting on the job performance. And it turns out doesn't matter, which study, you look at the most common tools that are used, like a resume review, which essentially is looking at previous work experience or a subjective kind of unstructured interview, which is right with bias are just really ineffective. You know, it turns out pattern matching the past is really hard to do, and it doesn't predict the future. And also it then actually calcifies the status quo when you leave people, you know, if someone hadn't had a shot before, they're never going to get a shot. But also we, you know, dramatically overestimate our ability as humans to spot talent. And so the reality is that whether you look at years of work experience or other things that are looking at the past, like reference checks, these have no correlation with, on the job performance.

Rajesh Anandan:
Unstructured interviews are almost useless not as useless as years of work experience. And then when you start getting to structured interviews, you know, asking the same set of questions of every candidate, and then before you start interviews, you have a scoring rubric that defines what a good answer is. So that you're just trying to constrain the natural human bias that will kick in, it's everyone, and there's no way around it. You can't train it out of people but you could try to put some guard rails to minimize it. So structured interviews can be helpful, but most helpful are observing and actually evaluating someone's work and someone's abilities. And so you could call that a job test. And so at Ultranauts, we use job tests for all applicants for all roles, because it's just a better way to more objectively understand if someone's going to be able to do the job. We of course do use interviews, but they're all structured.

Rajesh Anandan:
And they come in toward the middle of the process, not at the beginning where you have no data. And they're focused on really trying to dive deeper into someone's interests and motivations to understand whether that aligns with the core work to be done and the nature of that work. Because we want people who are going to be excited and driven and motivated to do the job they're being hired for. And again, this is not just for, you know, autistic applicants that have to do job tests. You'd never do that with like set of a program where all your female applicants have to do this very different process, right? You just wouldn't do that. You shouldn't do that for any group because if the process can be better, it would be better for everyone. And so the one thing I would say on this is when it comes to job tests it's not only for technical roles.

Rajesh Anandan:
Of course, most people we hire we're hiring for a quality analyst or quality engineer role, but we use job tests for everyone. So we may be the only company in the world that hired a head of growth and sales, where the, you know, applicants had to take job test, because let me tell you if you're, you know, decent in any kind of sales role, surely you can have a convincing conversation, but that says nothing about your ability to, you know, strategically dissect a market opportunity or creatively and quickly get to a senior decision maker. But these are the things you could test. It's easy enough to construct, you know, a test or a simulation that allows you to observe and see how someone's able to do that, which is going to be a whole lot more accurate than asking them questions and getting really convincing answers.

Stacia Garr:
So we had a question come in through chat about potential recruiters reservations around structured interviews. So a sense that they don't have the choice to ask the questions they want to. So is that something you all have encountered? And if so, how have you addressed it?

Rajesh Anandan:
So part of this is you do need to be able to kind of go deep into someone's strengths and interests because really, you know, the whole process is less about finding reasons not to hire someone it's just really to understand what they bring to the table. What are they going to add? What are the strengths that they haven't and do those lineup with the job to be done? I would say, you know, first, even just starting with the job description, like we try to unpack the role into the actual requirements of the job and, you know, work backwards from there. Like what, what are the skills you need or the competencies you need. And then to the extent that has very specific requirements around experience, we fleshed that out. But when you do that, you're able to and then for each of those requirements, how will we validate that requirement?

Rajesh Anandan:
So some of those map back to things where we're trying to validate in an interview, some of those map two things, we're going to validate through a work simulation or a job test. And so the focus of the interview then is to try to drill down on those attributes. We're trying to validate in that interview. And so, yeah, we start with sets of questions, and then the recruiters do have the flexibility to go add questions, but, but they've got to cover a minimum set of common questions because otherwise there isn't, you know, it's much harder to compare across interviewers certainly, or, or even with the same interviewer across across applicants.

Stacia Garr:
Right. Okay. Makes sense. I'm just conscious of time. So I want to make sure we move on because you mentioned learning and career development in, in your approach to that as well. So can we talk a bit about how do you think about that a bit differently than maybe a traditional organization does?

Rajesh Anandan:
Sure. you know, as a professional services firm creating an environment that allows for and supports continuous learning and creates the conditions for accelerated learning are mission critical. Doesn't matter, you know, what skills you come in with 18 months later, those are out of date. So having a kind of engine that's continuously building our capabilities on our team is absolutely missing critical. So everybody who comes into the firm in, you know, in our core delivery team, which is 90% of our employees. So we haven't done this for everyone, but it's covers our core services delivery team all the analysts, all the engineers, all the managers has what we call a learning path that they are currently on and they know what learning path they're going to be doing next and a learning path to simply sort of a micro kind of module that tightly coupled theory and practice and is designed for neuro diversity.

Design for neurodiversity

Rajesh Anandan:
And if you go to the next slide we've sort of been on this journey to redefine how corporate training happens because most corporate training doesn't work. We know that doesn't actually impart skills and then it's particularly unhelpful for learners who are neuro diverse. And thanks to my colleague, Nicole Radziwill, who in addition to running large scale engineering teams and being a data scientist is professor data sciences is near divergent and she's been sort of authoring an architecting, our approach to learning. We call it designed for neuro diversity. It has a few very specific principles, and we apply that to how we create curriculum and learning experiences. And so that's table stakes, but most organizations just put up, you know, a one hour video when you're supposed to learn something. You know, you've got to create learning experiences that are self-paced that are actually designed for engagement.

Rajesh Anandan:
You've got to have hands-on practical exercises coupled with the content in micro modules versus like study this thing for, hours and hours and hours, and then you have one exercise at the end. Like that's not how learning happens. And those activities need to actually tie back to your day job. So it's relevant. So you can actually ingest internalize it. And then some very specific things around how we design for accessibility and kind of different learners. But everybody, you know, on our delivery teams has a learning path that they're on. They know what they're going to do next. And this is framed around what we call a launch pad. It's acute, you know, we're Ultranaut, so everybody's a launchpad, but it's your personalized learning path. And we're at startup, right? We don't have a lot of resources and yet we've made this important enough because it's mission critical that we create this environment around continuous learning. And so everybody who comes in you know, as part of their onboarding has a launch pad that ties to like, where do you want to go? Like, what is the aspiration? What is the role you're trying to work towards and then work backwards from there to where you today, what is the learning path you need to take now? And what's the one you need to take next?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, that's great. Question that came in was round just, you know, there's obviously a lot of technical skills that people need to develop and use. But what about the non-technical skills? So are you, is there kind of a specific thought and effort that you put around your learning and development efforts to enable people to focus on you know, potentially things like active listening or communicating more effectively or something like that that you think is, you know, important so that all of the audiences, all of the diversity in your team can be affect, you know, feel included.

Rajesh Anandan:
So to us, that's not a question of training, it's more a question of systems because, you know, it's like you can have all the workshops you want people go back to their desk and behave exactly the same that they did before. And so, as we think about aligning on the way in which we work and communicate and treat each other we think in systems and tools, right? So very organically from one of our projects emerged a different way of implementing agile and scrum because it turns out while agile was designed to be inclusive. In fact, it is not. And so because on our teams, right, we're running agile scrum teams where we'll be brought in by fortune 500 firms to build test automation, frameworks, or do data quality audits across the enterprise. It's complex technical work, it's moving fast, we've got a wide range of communication preferences.

Rajesh Anandan:
You know, we've got a significant portion of the team with selective mutism and don't speak. We have a significant portion of the team who have auditory processing challenges. We have a significant portion of the team who have severe anxiety or workplace PTSD. And so we're running teams that have all of that stuff going on. And so it's important that the way in which we run and manage teams and manage work and communicate allows everyone to be able to contribute and participate. So very basic things like, you know whenever we have a interaction like a standup meeting or a town hall meeting you can always participate in chat. You can send in your questions or suggestions beforehand. So you don't have to think on the spot, things are transcribed. So if you're having trouble hearing and following along, you don't have to text your brain for that. You can just consume the information in a way that works for you. That's the simple stuff, and it's surprising that this isn't universal, right?

Feedback- My Biodex

Rajesh Anandan:
The more interesting stuff is around things like feedback, you know? So it turns out that the way, most managers are taught actually doesn't really work for most people. So like, you're always taught when you're giving critical feedback, give it in the moment in a live conversation, sandwiched by positive affirming comments. Well, it turns out for our team and I would guess for most people, most teams that's not optimal, you know, it really depends. But then how do you have an effective way to give feedback? If it depends? It depends. It's not an announcement. So we've built in the ability to very quickly look up someone's feedback preferences. So that it's a one single command in Slack to pull up someone's feedback references. If you're about to have a conversation where you're going to share some feedback as a peer or a manager and we've made, you know, we productize that into what we call the Biodex, which came out of a simple kind of thought from a team member a few years ago, who said something like, you know, like it never really figured out how to work with some of the members of my team. I wish humans came with a user manual. And so we said, yes, wouldn't that be nice? And so that's evolved into what we now call the Biodex. It's got 20 odd fields, and these are all things you should know about me about how to work productively together, including my preferences around receiving critical feedback.

Stacia Garr:
I think we have a screenshot of that. Don't we in the deck?

Rajesh Anandan:
Yes. I think if you click maybe to the next.

Rajesh Anandan:
The slide after that.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah.

Rajesh Anandan:
Yeah. So you know, that's the simple bot screen that you can look up if you want to look up someone's feedback preferences. And I would say, you know because of the way in which we work and having these systems and tools and process it also allows us to really surface the strengths people bring. It doesn't constrain us, you know, all of the systems and process and tools simply take away a lot of the stuff that might otherwise be really taxing or alienating, which then frees up a lot more brain cycles in bandwidth for the real work to add value to clients and to innovate in our own practice. And so there's an example of that, certainly the Biodex which is now a bot, and we released it to a group of alpha users because anytime we described this, every team says, Oh my gosh, I want the Biodex.

Rajesh Anandan:
I'm like, yes, yes, we'll get around to it. You know, we're not a software developer, we're not a product firm, but we can cobble together a product. And, another kind of example of just taking what we're doing for ourselves and you know, making that useful to others. And in this case, as an actual service, is a service we launched last year that we call talent bias detection, which essentially is taking all of our capabilities and techniques around auditing data and understanding data called, usually a chief data officer or chief digital officer might bring us in to do an enterprise data quality audit or to build kind of automated quality checks into their information supply chain so you can trust what you're getting on the other side and all of this, the same sort of skills and techniques applied to interrogating the data exhaust being generated throughout the employee life cycle turns out can be incredibly helpful to surface patterns of bias and actually bring a data driven point of view to the conversation around, great you want to improve equity in the workplace? Where do you start? Where do you actually make those investments?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah. And we've talked a lot about that type of work in the DEIB tech research that we've done in and how you that can both help us understand what's happened in the past, but potentially be able to flag when that bias is happening in the moment for folks.

Rajesh Anandan:
Absolutely. And so, you know, simple use case of that is performance reviews. So we're, you know, a couple of engagements we're doing are around essentially building bias detection and running just you know, normally you might run some simple word association and well, we've got 20 different sort of techniques to do that, to really go deep in a much more precise way. And once we do that audit because we're engineers, we're building those quality checks so that they can run automatically every time there's a review cycle and go from sort of surfacing patterns of bias into being able to raise a red flag or an individual performance review that has sort of a high likelihood of bias. So it's much more actionable and kind of real time.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Great. Well, I know we are just about at time, so I'm going to move as just here to the end and want to encourage folks to get in touch either with, with me or with Rajesh. I guess just a final thing you mentioned with this bias, bias identification that you're now doing some work helping other companies, do you want to spend just a moment kind of wrapping us up and telling us about what you're doing there before we let folks go?

Rajesh Anandan:
Sure. You know as you might imagine, it's very sensitive work. And so there's not a lot I can share other than to say, the core problem that we're helping companies with is that, you know, most companies have made very serious commitments to tackling inequity in the workplace across different dimensions, including race. There are a lot of sort of hypotheses around how to do that. And no shortage of advice you can get. But very little evidence in terms of, you know, what actions can have the greatest impact. And so we've narrowed in on a few different aspects of the employee life cycle, like performance reviews, or kind of these employee practices, talent practices, performance review is being one kind of leadership, potential identification being another succession. So, and we're able to go in understand sort of the processes that contribute to that outcome of like a performance review or promotion decision, and then apply a whole range of different techniques, including analyze the actual text looking for over a dozen different types of bias in helping companies build essentially a lexicon of biased words.

Rajesh Anandan:
And, and the reason this is hard to do with sort of an automatic ML tool is it's so company specific, right? And so there's a bit of work to be done in the context of the company taking the time to actually understand the specific processes and nuances in order to start kind of building that talent bias audit of a performance review process. And then from there, honestly, it's fairly straightforward to automate that audit or those bias checks, so that every time you have a review process or every time you've got a, you know, leadership potential discussion, that's got an output of documentation that you can run the same sort of analysis and just spot the red flags. It's never going to answer the question in a yes or no way, but it certainly helps you figure out where to focus.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, definitely. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us and with folks who are listening today and who will listen on recording as well. We really appreciate it and good luck to you and your journey of continuing this work and in sharing it with others. Thank you so much.

Rajesh Anandan:
Stacia thanks so much for having me.

Stacia Garr:
Thank you. Bye-Bye.

 

We read a lot at RedThread—both to directly inform our research and because we’re reading junkies. We also listen to a lot of podcasts. (In fact, in this piece, we use “reading” as shorthand for “consuming content,” regardless of whether we’re consuming a podcast, book, audiobook, or article.)

Part of our mission at RedThread is to accelerate the flow of ideas through the marketplace—and one way we do that is by sharing what we’re doing / thinking as soon as we’re doing it. In that spirit, we want to share what our team members are reading these days.

We’ve divided the list into 4 sections:

• Reading that directly informs our research
• Reading that keeps us up to date in the field
• Reading that broadens our horizons
• Reading that we plan to do

Throughout this post, all titles and images are hyperlinked to the source. Let’s dive in!

Reading That (Directly) Informs Our Research

These books, articles, and podcasts help drive our thinking on the specific topics we’re writing about currently—topics like purpose; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB); people analytics; learning; and skills. Here are our top things to read in this category.

The Enlightened Capitalists

In this book, author James O’Toole gives a fantastic historical perspective on how businesses have approached purpose. We’ve been doing a lot of research on the topic of purpose—individual, team, and organizational—and found this book remarkably enlightening (pun intended). It helped us understand how our collective concept of purpose has changed over time and why purpose is such an important component of a business’s success, now more than ever before.

 

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire

Also supporting our purpose research, this book’s author Rebecca Henderson describes how capitalism is on the verge of destroying the planet and destabilizing society. Capitalism is destabilizing the climate, driving human deaths and mass species extinctions. Wealth is increasingly unevenly distributed and many institutions that have historically provided stability—families, faith traditions, governments—are “crumbling or even vilified.”¹ What can org leaders can do to change the path we’re on? A lot—and this book offers a practical roadmap for how businesses can build a kind of capitalism that works for everyone.

 

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

A number of people recommended this book to us, including Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner at GSV Ventures and one of the guests on our “Is Purpose Working?” podcast season. Isabel Wilkerson writes about the existence of a invisible caste system in America and how that system influences us all. She shows how a rigid hierarchy is embedded in our society and institutions, feeding racist policies and beliefs in ways we often do not see. The book supports the research we’re doing on DEIB.

 

How to Be an Antiracist

This powerful book reshapes the reader’s notions of what it means to be racist. Starting from the idea that there are very few people in the world who think, “Yes! I’m racist!”, author Ibram X. Kendi helps readers understand that racism is fundamentally a problem of systems, policies, and institutions that foster inequity and invite individuals to (sometimes unconsciously) hold beliefs and commit actions that also foster inequity. The book paints a compelling picture of how we can all be antiracist by actively and continuously pushing ourselves, our communities, and our institutions to promote equity. This book supports our research on DEIB.

 

Reading That Keeps Us Up to Date in the Field

We love these sources—none of which, you’ll notice, are books—because they reflect some of the most leading-edge thinking on the topics we care about. If you like RedThread’s research, then you’ll probably find these resources helpful, too.

Articles by Matthew Daniel

Matthew is a longtime learning leader who writes about skills, talent, and learning. One of our favorite quotes:

Ultimately, we in L&D may be robbing our organizations of some of the greatest potential in talent, because they sit in the frontline and they're non-exempt employees—and so they just don't get access to content, or the systems, or the programs, or the mentoring, or the class.²

Matthew is a very forward-leaning thinker in the talent and learning space. He’s a regular contributor to CLO Magazine and posts valuable content regularly to LinkedIn.

Learning Tech Talks

This podcast, hosted by Christopher Lind, gives one of the most comprehensive (and entertaining!) perspectives around on learning tech—vendors, challenges, opportunities, ecosystems, and more. Each episode features a learning tech vendor talking about the problems they’re trying to solve. We like it because it’s not salesy, it’s always informative, and Christopher has an amazing ability to synthesize what’s going on in the space.

 

David Green’s Monthly Roundup of People Analytics Articles

Every month, David Green posts on LinkedIn a summary of the top articles published that month on people analytics and related topics. Each post contains a dozen or more articles, each summarized in at least a paragraph, often with helpful charts and graphics. This single monthly post is a great way for us to keep up to date on what other people are saying in the field.

 

HRTech Weekly Podcast

Stacey Harris and John Sumser at the HR Examiner host a weekly podcast, “HRTech Weekly One Step Closer.” They cover topics ranging from HR tech trends to analysis of tech vendors, recent mergers and acquisitions, and the implications of senior leaders’ movements between orgs. This weekly show is another fantastic way we stay current on others’ thoughts in the field.

 

McKinsey & Company Research on the Future of Work

McKinsey has been publishing a lot on skills, reskilling, upskilling, and the future of work. The company’s findings are well-researched and highly informative. These articles help keep us current on others’ work on the topics of skills and learning—for example:

Learning itself is a skill. Unlocking the mindsets and skills to develop it can boost personal and professional lives and deliver a competitive edge.³

McKinsey Quarterly, August 2020

Reading That Broadens Our Horizons

Curiosity may have killed the cat…but it sure makes us better researchers! We read a lot of stuff that’s not directly related to our research projects or even our areas of focus. These books, podcasts, and Facebook groups (yep) help us stay on our intellectual toes and keep us growing, learning, and thinking.

More: A History of the World Economy from the Iron Age to the Information Age

Author Philip Coggan writes the weekly Bartleby column for The Economist. Here, he’s provided a sweeping history of trade, industry, and growth in the global economy from ancient Rome to the 21^st century. We enjoy his style of putting complex information about management and the world of work in an easy to comprehend and interesting format that’s very appealing.

 

 

Prediction Machines

We’ve been talking about how AI will disrupt our lives and work for some time now—but how, exactly, will that happen? Authors Ajay Agarwal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explore the economic implications of the price of AI, which is declining in a way that’s similar to how the price of computing declined in the 1980s and 1990s. The book was recommended to us to truly understand AI disruption.

 

 

Profiles in Courage

In 1954, then-Senator John F. Kennedy decided to write a book profiling 8 of his predecessors: Senators from history including John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and became a classic on courage in the face of difficulty and pressure. It’s an exceptional view into leadership in different times—with real implications for today.

 

 

The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

This book is an amazing exploration of failure—what it is, what it isn’t, and how failures are part of the journey to successes. Author Dr. Sarah Lewis, an associate professor at Harvard, has a background in art and culture—and uses these lenses in her lyrical, insightful, and practical exploration of the true nature of failure. (Hint: It’s not what we tend to think.)

 

Raising Kids with a Growth Mindset

This resource isn’t a single article or book—it’s a private (though very large) Facebook group of parents learning to live and parent with a growth mindset. Although most of the discussions focus on how to help children, the lessons and insights that group members share are often equally—if not more so—relevant to adults. We’ve found it to be some of the most helpful self-awareness and growth content available anywhere.

Reading That We Plan to Do

You probably won’t be surprised that we have long lists of things we want to read, but haven’t yet. Here are the top few.

The Making of Asian America

Given current events, we think it’s tremendously important to better understand the history of Asian-Americans in our country. Asian immigrants and their descendants have played a major role in U.S. history, but much of this influence has been overlooked or forgotten. This book by Erika Lee, a professor, author, and historian at the University of Minnesota, was recommended to us as a comprehensive, engaging, and fascinating way to learn something we should already know: how Asian-Americans have shaped the history of the United States.

 

The Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere

Looking ahead to post-pandemic life, we’ve recognized that work—like life—will never look the same. In this new environment, employees want to know how to stay connected while maintaining work-life balance; managers want to know how to lead remote teams; and orgs want to know how to enable great work to be done. We’ve heard that this book by Tsedal Neely answers many of these questions. It’s a practical guide for leaders, managers, and teams as they figure out what works best for them and their organizations.

 

You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience

We are looking forward to reading this product of a collaboration between Tarana Burke and Brene Brown—something that combines Brown’s work on vulnerability with Burke’s work on shame resilience. They bring in Black authors, artists, activists, and more to share their stories—resulting in a “stark, potent collection of essays on Black shame and healing” within a space where we can “recognize and process the trauma of white supremacy…be vulnerable and affirm the fullness of Black love and Black life.”⁴

Brave New Work: Book & Podcast

This resource started as a book and has continued on as a podcast about the way we work. Author Aaron Dignan explores the “operating systems” of organizations—the things that comprise organizational culture—and how we can improve the ways we work.

 

 

The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You

There’s increasing research that, to improve performance, employee engagement, and other key metrics, orgs should focus on helping their managers become better managers and leaders. This book by Julie Zhuo is a practical guide designed to do just that. Each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of management—for example, holding effective meetings (and canceling unnecessary ones)—and offers specific advice to new managers learning the ropes.

 

 

More Reading

For more sources related to our current research agenda, check out these lit reviews:

• Learning Content in the 2020s: What the Literature Says
• Choosing Learning Tech: What the Literature Says
• The Changing Perspective on Mobility
• Competencies vs. Skills: What’s the Difference?
• Skilling: 5 Themes in the Conversation
• The Purpose-Driven Org: What the Literature Says

What Are You Reading?

You might have noticed from this article that we love reading. We want to hear from you: What are you reading these days? What questions are you trying to answer for yourself?

Share your favorites with us at [email protected]!