Whether they call it skilling, reskilling, upskilling or something else, leaders are looking to use skills to help their organizations respond to shifting and unpredictable business environments. Yet, it’s unclear where to start with skills and what tech to use to help manage them. Designed to help HR leaders sort the strategic from the spontaneous, the signal from the squawk of HR tech marketing, in this session you’ll learn: the six elements of a sound skills strategy; who’s who and who does what on the skills tech landscape; how to know what your organization needs; and how to invest in skills technology.

Like so many other areas of work, performance management practices have been on a rollercoaster over the last few years. According to RedThread Research’s most recent study on PM, what employees need from performance management has shifted significantly since before the pandemic. And while everyone in the organization plays a role in creating effective performance management — from leaders to HR, managers, and employees — most organizations are not yet creating effective systems that maximize employee engagement, impact, and retention.

It is no surprise, then, that organizations that are meeting employees’ expectations, and focusing on the right practices and tools, are seeing higher levels of impact: including engagement, manager effectiveness, intent to stay, and eNPS.

In this webinar, Stacia Garr and Priyanka Mehrotra of RedThread will join Quantum Workplace for a Q&A to help listeners understand how to bridge this gap, including:

• What employees’ expectations actually are, post-pandemic
• Five areas organizations should focus on to meet employee expectations and enable engagement and performance
• Practical actions to engage and inspire employees to perform their best

Confused and annoyed by the ever-buzzing noise about learning tech? Join us in this Tech-Consortium-sponsored webinar as we explore the current state of the learning tech market. With over 400 vendors vying for attention, it can be overwhelming to decipher which solutions are the best fit for your organization.

In this webinar, Dani Johnson, co-founder and principal analyst of RedThread Research, will shed light on the market trends, the wide array of tech vendors, and the future direction of the industry. Discover the functionalities that are gaining momentum and learn how to make smarter buying decisions as a leader.

Key Topics to be Covered:

1. Understanding the learning tech market
2. Exploring a wide range of tech vendors and their offerings
3. Insights into the future trajectory of the learning tech landscape
4. Strategies for leaders to make informed and effective buying decisions

Don't miss this opportunity to gain valuable knowledge and navigate the noise in the learning tech space. Register now to secure your spot!

*Note, since I wrote this, UKG acquired Immedis, a global multi-country payroll provider. Since our ThreadHeads tends to focus on payroll not as much as other topics, I didn't cover global payroll much in this blog, though it is obviously an area of focus for UKG.*

A few weeks ago, I attended the spring 2023 UKG Analyst Event in Boston. For those of you who have not been following along on the latest from UKG, you should check out Priyanka Mehrotra's summary of UKG’s 2022 Aspire Analyst Event from last November.

Here’s the TL;DR for this UKG event:

• Continued commitment to its unified, values-aligned vision. UKG demonstrated an aligned approach in some very specific ways, including internal alignment (clear vision, mission, values), data alignment (by way of a single profile and data set for each customer, regardless of platform), the sunsetting of a lot of older products, and the integration of cross-UKG data into the Great Place to Work (GPTW) Hub and the Hub’s inclusion into UKG’s broader selling motion.
• Adjustments to better respond to customers. UKG has made a number of changes to better respond to customers, such as formally expanding UKG Ready to service up to 500 customers and making UKG Pro available to all organizations above that threshold. In addition, UKG is focusing heavily on frontline workers, who are a critical population for its customers. Further, UKG has implemented more than 2,000 customer requests into its software. Finally, they have developed new customer service pods to better meet customers’ needs.
• Investing in innovation. UKG had a lot of announcements on this front. They provided a lot more details on their recently announced strategic alliance with Google Cloud. Further, they shared more details on how FleX, which is a meshing technology underpinning UKG platforms, is enabling them to innovate and stand-up new products quickly. Finally, we heard a lot about UKG’s current use of AI and their plans for generative AI, which leverage both the Google Cloud partnership and FleX.

Note: This blog was publicly available for 48 hours, after which point it became available only to RedThread members. Sign up to become a member at https://members.redthreadresearch.com.

We’ve all heard that managers are disengaged and that performance management doesn’t work. What if those two problems are actually the same problem? And what if the problem isn’t the managers, but rather the system, data, and technology that supports them?

Stacia Garr, co-founder and principal analyst with RedThread Research, tackles those questions head on in Betterwork's latest People Fundamentals webinar.

In this engaging webinar moderated by John Schneider, Chief Marketing Officer at Betterworks, Stacia walks through the key factors that make managers more effective and how HR leaders at all levels can leverage people analytics to better support them.

You’ll learn how to:

• Leverage data within your performance management model, processes and systems to enable manager effectiveness.
• Design and implement meaningful performance management practices to help your managers be more effective.
• Use performance management technology to empower your managers instead of adding to their stress.

A few weeks ago, I attended the Oracle Applications and Industry Analyst Summit in Redwood Shores, CA (blissfully less than 30 minutes from home). This blog summarizes what I think you all would most like to know from the event, but the high-level summary is below:

TL;DR:

• Oracle attributes its growth to new customer acquisition versus a land-and-expand approach from other parts of their business
• Oracle has embarked on significant UX, speed, and responsivity investments that make the product look and feel more consumer-grade
• Oracle is taking a pragmatic and relatively conservative approach to generative AI

New customer acquisition driving growth

Previous Oracle metrics have indicated strong growth and the Oracle team indicated that much of this growth is coming from new customer acquisition (versus a land-and-expand approach from other parts of their business). The session was dotted with examples of customers that transitioned from both SAP and Workday (an interesting contrast from the Workday session in March, where customers’ previous HCM providers went unmentioned). The team also mentioned that a lot of their growth is coming from EMEA and Latin America.

Oracle’s broad messaging around why they are achieving that growth came down to three key points:

• Everything customers need
• Innovation that matters
• Committed to customers’ success

On the first point, Oracle shared a summary image of its portfolio of applications and infrastructure (see Figure 1). I’m sharing it here since I haven’t previously written about Oracle for our ThreadHeads, and some of you may be unfamiliar with the full breadth of Oracle’s offerings.

Figure 1: Oracle’s portfolio of applications and infrastructure | Source: Oracle, 2023.

When asked specifically why they are winning, the team stated they have “clear, non-arguable product and service differentiation.” Specifically, they called out:

• The pace of innovation and adoption
• Oracle ME elevating employee experience
• Mobile-responsive front-end
• “A complete, fully connected candidate journey”
• “Intelligent” automation
• Personalization without customization
• “Native, mature HR HelpDesk and case management”
• Natively developed payroll options, scale, and ability to handle complexity

Further, the team called out that they have invested in the following within Oracle HCM Cloud:

• Strategic integrator (SI) and independent software vendor (ISV) partner ecosystem expansion
• Global payroll
• App and platform extensibility
• Near-zero planned quarterly maintenance downtime
• Employee experience
• A modern platform, including improved security, performance, availability
• Redwood UX experience
• AI/ML and Generative AI

In addition, as many of you may know, Oracle has a very strong industry focus, and they featured many stories from the following industries:

• Healthcare
• Financial services
• Communications and professional services
• Consumer packaged goods and groceries
• Gaming, hospitality, and quick-serve
• Industrial manufacturing and logistics

Finally, the Oracle team talked a lot about customer success, indicating their “reference-ability and advocacy are at an all-time high.” They also specifically called out their customer community and the conversion of customer ideas to product, adding that roughly 80% of their roadmap is sourced through customer collaboration (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Summary of Oracle’s Cloud Customer Connect Community | Source: Oracle, 2023.

My take

Oracle’s primary message is that they are gaining net-new customers and this is a result of greater customer satisfaction. This is interesting, in that Oracle’s strength over the years has not necessarily been customer satisfaction. Oracle is investing in accelerating time to value for customers and providing more resources for them through templates, learning resource centers, and a strong customer community. At the summit, we didn’t see any meaningful numbers such as NPS, though they did have a few happy customers there to speak to us. Given that this is the first Oracle I’ve attended in a long time, I will look forward to future opportunities to better understand and assess customer satisfaction.

UX, Speed, and Responsivity Investments

Oracle has significantly invested in its Redwood design and development system. This is designed to be a modern UX, which the team characterizes as a “collective reinvention of how Oracle customers interact with technology and consume information.” The components of this design system are listed in Figure 3. Oracle indicated that within 9-12 months they will have completed their comprehensive UX upgrade.

Figure 3: Summary of Oracle’s Redwood Design System | Source: Oracle, 2023.

Examples of the new UX are in Figure 4 and samples of the new Redwood pages and flows are in Figure 5.

Figure 4: Examples of the new Redwood UX in Oracle HCM | Source: Oracle, 2023.

Figure 5: Sample New Redwood Pages & Flows | Source: Oracle, 2023.

A consistent theme throughout the discussion on product improvements was product responsivity, availability, and speed. For example:

• Greater responsiveness: With the new UX, Oracle now is leveraging single page applications, meaning there is a micro-application built within a single web page. This makes it highly performant and stable, and results in a more seamless and responsive experience for users.
• Accelerated performance: The team mentioned their speed is 30% faster than previously. This also extends to search (see Figure 6).
• Improved availability: The team stated they now currently have a 99.9% SLA for uptime. The team specifically called out that their 90^th percentile downtime is just 2 hours per quarter. This contrasts with 5-6 years ago when that number was estimated at around 16-17 hours on average, and 24 hours for large customers. It also contrasts favorably to the planned downtime of other major vendors in this area who today require 4 or more hours each week. Expect Oracle to have the average downtime cut to 20 minutes per quarter next year.

Figure 6: Summary of Improvements in Oracle Search | Source: Oracle, 2023.

My take

Most of these improvements are designed to reduce friction in the Oracle user experience. This is a good thing, especially as it relates to consumer-grade UX, speed, and responsivity. Users expect this as table stakes from their Work Tech software and Oracle is making sure it will be present moving forward.

The most notable improvement comes from the improved downtime numbers, which are expected to further improve. Downtime is something most users don’t see unless it meaningfully impacts their day-to-day. Oracle is investing to make sure it doesn’t.

All that said, based on what I saw, it doesn't appear investments are pushing the needle on innovation. As far as I can tell, none of this is going to change how work is done or dramatically simplify it. In the future, I hope to see more from Oracle on this front.

A pragmatic and conservative approach to generative AI

Oracle is taking a highly pragmatic and conservative approach to generative AI. As shown in Figure 7, they see a relatively small overlap between the problems that AI is currently good at solving and those that businesses need to solve today.

Figure 7: Schematic of the overlap between generative AI capabilities and business problems | Source: Oracle, 2023.

The Oracle team’s plan for evolving the use of generative AI is shown in Figure 8. As you can see, their initial focus is on assisted authoring, summarization, and suggestions.

Figure 8: Schematic of how Oracle sees the evolution of generative AI use cases in applications | Source: Oracle, 2023.

The Oracle team sees a virtuous cycle from combining generative AI and existing AI, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9: How Oracle sees generative AI and existing AI working together | Source: Oracle, 2023.

The team plans to continue to invest in their product’s AI competencies by focusing on the below areas:

Figure 10: Summary of Oracle’s AI capabilities focus, now and next | Source: Oracle, 2023.

Finally, Oracle articulated its “radically practical approach to AI” as the following:

• Allow user and use cases to determine technology
• Start with a baseline, simple model; iterate
• Assess potential negative impact and implement guardrails
• Build features for specific use cases; leverage for general AI services
• Validate with real-world data and users in collaboration with customers

My take

Of all the recent analyst briefings I have attended, Oracle was one of the most conservative when it comes to generative and next-gen AI, as particularly illustrated by Figure 7.

While I am always for practicality, this seems like a time to dream, not to allow existing users (who do not understand the tech nearly as well as Oracle’s technologists, I would wager) to drive the discussion on what they should do. To be clear, I am not one to encourage anyone to chase bright and shiny objects – but I am one to encourage people to fundamentally rethink existing work and processes in an effort to simplify and improve. I’d like to see Oracle doing more of that.

One thing I did appreciate, though, was Oracle’s awareness of the need to earn customer trust when it comes to new LLM capabilities and training on traceable data. I’d like to see Oracle be more clear on what these two things mean for them and how we will see them show up to support ethical AI efforts.

Final takeaways

I was pleased to spend time with Oracle’s executives and look forward to additional deep dives on products that are of particular interest to our ThreadHeads, such as their learning and performance products. I am also looking forward to opportunities to get to know more of Oracle’s customers and to better understand the value they get from their Oracle implementations.

Today, Workday announced that VNDLY, a Workday company, will now be known as Workday VNDLY, an extended workforce and vendor management system (VMS) that’s part of Workday’s suite of products.

In this blog, I cover:

• Why contingent workers are especially important today
• What VNDLY is and how it addresses this need
• What the VNDLY acquisition tells us about Workday and its strategy

Why contingent workers are especially important today

With the rise in volatility and uncertainty, leaders are increasingly looking to structure their organizations to be responsive to change. For example, in our study on responsive organizations, we found that 95% of high-responsivity organizations were likely to meet their business goals, compared to just 21% of low-responsivity organizations.

One approach organizations can take to be more responsive is by using contingent workers (contractors, freelancers, temporary workers, project-based workers, 1099’ers, etc.), which allows organizations to more quickly adjust the size and skills of their workforce, given business needs. The use of contingent workers is prevalent, with some large companies estimating that as many as 30% of their workers today are contingent.

The idea of using contingent workers isn’t a new concept. For example, when I was at Deloitte in 2017, we wrote about the rise of “off-balance-sheet workers,” which is yet another term for these workers.

What is new, though, is the extent of the need for these types of workers. This is being driven by a few factors:

• Market volatility. We all know the last few years have been highly volatile and uncertain, and we can reasonably expect at least some degree of this to continue. That volatility is driving varied customer needs and, thus, organizations need different skills to respond. Contingent workers can help organizations adjust quickly.
• The skills gap. As technology accelerates change, organizations require different skills from workers. Current employees can only upskill, and organizations can only hire, so fast. Therefore, accessing contingent talent from outside the existing workforce can help organizations fill the gap in the short term.
• Demographics. Today, there are 9.9 million job openings in the U.S., but only 5.8 million unemployed workers. This mismatch between available talent and job openings is projected to continue, with the BLS expecting the economy to add 8.3 million jobs but only 7.7 million workers between 2021 and 2031. The result will be organizations scrambling for talent to fill gaps.

As a result, organizations will likely increasingly turn to contingent workers to augment their existing “core” employee workforce.

Yet, there are a host of challenges in using contingent workers, such as:

• Legal and regulatory challenges: Organizations can be accused of misclassifying workers or co-employment, which can result in legal action, fines, and other challenges.
• Competitive risk. Due to the more temporary nature of their work, contingent workers may have different confidentiality requirements, potentially exposing organizations to the risk of loss of trade secrets, intellectual property, and organizational knowledge.
• Ownership and accountability. Historically, contingent labor has been managed by procurement rather than HR. As a result, it can be unclear to managers how to get access to contingent workers and how to manage them.
• Clarity around talent available. Given the different status of contingent workers, and the fact that they are usually managed in a different technology system, leaders may not understand the contingent labor force and how to access it effectively in times of need.

As a result of these challenges, many organizations use a VMS (vendor management system), potentially in combination with an MSP (managed service provider) to help them manage their contingent workforce. According to Workday, approximately 70% of organizations leveraging a VMS also use a MSP.

These systems typically are separate from human capital management (HCM) systems and are run by procurement. That said, they have many similarities to HCM systems, such as the ability to source, engage, manage, and pay contingent workers. However, the nuances around what is required to do each of those things is different. For example, with sourcing, there isn’t a direct outreach from the hiring organization, but rather a hiring manager can look at the talent available and then have the MSP reach out directly to that person. Examples of the range of capabilities offered by a VMS are shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

 

Figure 1: Workday VNDLY as an example of a vendor management system (1/2) | Source: Workday, 2023.

 

Figure 2: Workday VNDLY as an example of a vendor management system (2/2) | Source: Workday, 2023.

While a VMS and/or MSP can help with the first two bullets outlined in the list of challenges above, it typically does not help with the second two, around ownership and accountability and clarity around the talent available. This is why it makes sense to combine the insights of a VMS and an HCM system.

Note: This blog was publicly available for 48 hours, after which point it became available only to RedThread members. Sign up to become a member at https://members.redthreadresearch.com.

This morning, at its Viva Summit, Microsoft announced the integration of Copilot into Microsoft Viva and also the formal addition of Glint to the Viva family in July 2023. Microsoft also announced a new “Performance Equation,” via its Work Trend Index Special Report (from the People Science team at Glint), which shows some compelling correlations between engagement and financial performance. (If you need the backstory on all of this, see our previous RedThread articles on Microsoft and Glint here, here, here, and here.)

As I’ve mentioned on social media, I had a chance to participate in today’s keynote panel, so got to peek under the hood before today’s announcement.

Here’s the TL;DR of it all:

• Copilot in Microsoft Viva = LLMs + Microsoft Graph + Viva Apps. Put another way, Copilot in Microsoft Viva applies the power of large language models (LLMs) to data in the Microsoft Graph and Viva apps. Practically speaking, this means that users can now query, in natural language, any Microsoft Viva app, and get a result generated by the LLM from across all the apps.
• “Viva Glint” = Copilot + Glint data + Microsoft behavioral and collaboration data. We’ve known for a while that Glint was moving to Viva, and that by doing so, it would be in the same “family” as Microsoft’s behavioral and collaboration data (provided via Viva Insights). However, it’s one thing to be in the same family – it’s another thing to share data effectively. The addition of Copilot changes the game, as it allows all those data to be accessed easily in an interface that is already well-known by Glint customers.
• Productivity x Engagement = Performance. Microsoft also released a new study (conducted by the People Science team at Glint) that shows why business leaders should care about engagement: because there is a strong relationship between engagement levels in organizations and financial returns. Based on this, they have thus come up with what they are calling the new performance equation: Productivity x Engagement = Performance.

Let’s dive into the details more.

Note: This blog was publicly available for 48 hours, after which point it became available only to RedThread members. Sign up to become a member at https://members.redthreadresearch.com.

People analytics has served as a crucial tool for many leaders to navigate the uncertainty of the past few years. Given its essential role, it is not surprising that this research, our fourth annual study on the people analytics technology market, finds that vendors in this space are thriving.

Yet, the market has changed and matured over the last few years.

Our study into the people analytics technology (PAT) market, based on survey data and vendor briefings and demos conducted in early 2023, resulted in 6 key findings that can help the buyers and makers of the technology understand the market better. We found that:

• The PAT market has continued to grow. The overall PAT market grew to an estimated $5.6 billion in 2022 from $3.1 billion in 2021. It experienced a growth rate of 41% for 2021-22 and a 50% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) for the last 3 years.
• Acquisitions and investments are slowing down. About half of the vendors that said they received funding in 2021 said the same in 2022. In addition, there was almost a 10% decline in those that reported undergoing a merger, acquisition, or some ownership change in 2022, compared to 2021.
• Growth expectations for 2023 are lower than for 2022. Fewer vendors expect over 31% growth for 2023 compared to those that said the same for 2022.
• Vendors are shifting their target customer segments. More vendors served small companies (under 1,000 employees) and mid-sized (1,000 – 10,00 employees) in 2022 compared to 2021.
• Vendors are helping customers address urgent needs. Retention and efficiency were the top 2 outcomes vendors' solutions focused on in 2022.
• Customers are receiving more support, but services cost more. Vendors checked in with their customers more frequently, but they also increasingly charged them for consulting services.

Overall, 2022 was a good year for PAT vendors. We were excited to see the market grow and the vendors become clearer on their value propositions, marketing, and go-to-market approach. Vendors are also optimistic about their ability to deliver on customer needs while being realistic about the future and how the changing economic environment might impact their growth.

Our member-only report dives into each of these findings and provides insights on what they mean for people analytics practitioners and the PAT market. RedThread members also have exclusive access to RedThread’s 2023 People Analytics Technology tool, which will be updated in May, which helps members quickly search and compare information on specific vendors. If you would like to learn more about our membership, please click here.

In addition to the member-only full report, there is also a link to a free executive summary available on our external website, which provides an overview of our findings from the report.

The publication of this report will be followed on May 30, with the release of the second part of the study — the People Analytics Technology Vendor Report. That report will contain a more in-depth look at individual vendors and where they fit in the marketplace.

We will also share our findings at an upcoming webinar on June 29.

This report is made possible by the support of our RedThread Tech Consortium members. We would like to thank our Tech Consortium members for pledging to support high-quality, unbiased HR technology research. If you would like to learn more about our Tech Consortium, please click here.

The people analytics tech market is hot. Our latest study on the market shows that there are more vendors than ever, and the landscape is also changing rapidly. The market for vendors is very competitive, which means it is also confusing for buyers.

Join us for this Tech Consortium-sponsored webinar where Stacia Garr, Co-founder, and Priyanka Mehrotra, Senior Analyst, will unveil key findings from the fourth annual People Analytics Tech study. This includes market trends, a vendor landscape framework, vendor areas of focus, and customer feedback, among others.

Practitioners and vendors will walk away with an understanding of:

• How the market has changed over the last few years
• The different categories of vendors in the market and their capabilities
• Vendors' approach to the current economic environment and how they are adapting to it