Events

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

 

Stacia Garr:

Great. So thank you everyone for coming today. We are going to get started with this call on choosing learning tech. So for those of you, I don't know, I'm Stacia Garr I'm co-founder and principal analyst with RedThread, and we are human capital research advisory analyst firm. I'm joined today by Heather Gilmartin Adams. Wanna say, hi, Heather.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Good morning.

Stacia Garr:

And we are, Heather is actually going to do the majority of the talking today. Just to quick housekeeping before we dive in these calls are pretty informal. The whole point is to have the informal discussion around a given topic and really to answer questions either that you all have, or that folks have submitted to us in advance. This is based on some of our most recent research on choosing learning tech and Heather's actually in the middle of writing a report on it.

Stacia Garr:

So your active participation in questions is certainly appreciated. As I mentioned a moment ago, we do record these calls and so they will be posted to our website for RedThread research members to be able to access after the call. So just know that whenever you're you're sharing any information again, to the informal component of this, we do like to just give it an opportunity to share into networks. So please be, feel free to say your name and where you're from. And if you want to be connected with folks after the call, you know, we can certainly take care of that. Okay. So with that Heather, can you move to the next slide.

Stacia Garr:

Thank you. So for those of you who may only know a little bit about us, we're RedThread Research, we are human capital research membership focused on five areas, learning and career performance in play experience, people, analytics and diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging. And then, and that's looking at both the practices and the technologies within those spaces. We, as I mentioned, just recently moved to a research membership that folks can purchase directly on our site or for teams or enterprise, you can purchase through contract. But we also do advisory as well as events. So that's enough about us and who we are and what we do. Let's move on to the next slide, Heather.

How can orgs best choose learning tech to help meet business goals?

 

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

So as Stacia mentioned, we've been looking at learning tech for a long, long time for years. We haven't though specifically focused on this question of choosing learning tech and we realized in 2020, we did an update of our learning vendor landscape survey. And we realized there is so much more out there even in 2020 than there was in 2018. And this kind of prompts a question, how do buyers make sense of all of it. And how do you think about choosing learning tech strategically and holistically in ways that work for your organization? And so that's kind of why we decided to kick off this research. We've done a number of interviews we've done a lit review thus far, but we're kind of in the middle of it.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

And so I'm excited to have this conversation with you all today because it'll inform our thinking on the topic as well. So just to give you a little bit of background, the research question that we've come up with is how can we best use learning tech to help meet business goals and sort of some sub-questions that we're looking into are around, what questions are most important to consider, who should be involved, and how can org think about what they already have versus what they might want to acquire somehow? So that's sort of broadly what we're, what we're looking at. What was really interesting was that as we started to have conversations and dive into the literature on it, this question became obvious that this question, the answer is changing. So when I had a couple of initial calls with some practitioners and thought leaders in this space, I asked them, what does choosing learning tech mean? And they basically just laughed, because it means different things to different people. And so if you guys are willing, as Stacia mentioned, we like to keep these informal and conversational. I'd love to hear from you either in the chat or feel free to unmute and talk for you, what does choosing learning tech mean?

What does choosing learning tech mean?

 

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

I have ideas about this that I'll share but I wanted to give you guys an opportunity to weigh in.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Participant from call text said tech that supports and facilitates learning and organization. Oh, I love the breath of that definition.

Stacia Garr:

And just kind of following on from, participant from call text's point. And that may seem terribly obvious, but, you know, I think that the point, and I don't want to steal your thunder Heather, but I think the point is, is that in the past, what it tended to mean was choosing LMS. Because that was the definition of what learning tech was.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of reflected in the literature, right? There's a lot of this is going on. I'll show you guys the next slide. So this was a word cloud of the lit review that we did. And it might be a little bit hard to see the only two specific tech names that show up in the lit review. So that showed up in the literature enough to warrant making it onto the word cloud where LXP and LMS. And I think that's just a testament to the fact that for a long, long time choosing learning tech meant choosing the LMS or and you know, maybe if you were really forward-thinking choosing an LXP. Participant from call text said in our case tech that enables colleagues to enhance the learning activity enhances the experience of learning attracts learning engagement. Yeah, exactly. So there are all these other things, and participant from call text says seconds those points and would add a vehicle to retain and attract top talent. That's really interesting.

Stacia Garr:

It seems like that would be obvious, right. That's part of what we're trying to do here, but for so many years, that just hasn't been a focus that hasn't even been an outcome. So for those of you who, I don't know I tend to do most of our research on people, analytics and measurement and the like, and the disconnect between the learning world and pretty much the rest of the talent world is just remarkable. Whereas, you know, in, in so many other things we're doing with talent, you're absolutely right, I mean, you know, it's, how do we attract and retain top talent? How do we make sure that we're, you know, engaging these people, et cetera, et cetera, and with learning, it is, well, how many hours did they complete a learning and did they get to the end of the course? And it just, it's almost like they exist in two different worlds, which has been an interesting learning for me.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah. I think the learning world has a bit of catching up to do, data-wise.

Stacia Garr:

Yeah. But it, you know, it's starting, so that's exactly. Yeah.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

It really is. It really is. Oh, participant from call text said tech that enables learning and learning needs could be anything doesn't have to be specific learning tech. Yes. I love that point. So one of the things that we've seen a lot in the last year is leveraging platforms that somebody else that somebody not a learning and development pays for in the organization. Right. So learning is latching onto integrations with Slack and teams and even email sometimes and project management software. So yeah. Leveraging any tech that people are using wherever they are, we're meeting them where they are with learning and not creating specific, you know, learning tech to do that. Yeah. Love that point.

Initial finding

 

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

So you guys are kind of you've already touched on this. But yeah, so one of the initial findings from this research thus far is that L and D needs to be thinking about much more than LMS and LXP's.

And this is actually a model that Dani Johnson, one of our co-founders came up with a while ago. Now it's been maybe a year or two. But it's only now that we're seeing sort of broader thinking in line with this model, ie: that, that L and D needs to take responsibility for not just providing, learning in an LMS, but for helping employees plan their careers and discover content and learning opportunities and consume development opportunities, wherever they are, and experiment with new skills and knowledge and connect with others in the organization and even outside the organization to further their developments and L and D needs to take responsibility for helping employees perform better on the job. Those are sort of the six behaviors that L and D employee behaviors that L and D needs to be thinking about how to enable.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

And, then there are two other behaviors that are kind of admin around managing and creating, learning opportunities and analyzing those learning opportunities so that we can improve. And so the circles on the model are behaviors that L and D either needs to do themselves or support employees, the boxes underneath are all different types of functionalities offered by different technologies. And as you can see, LMS and LXP are just one box each, and there are, I think, 30 boxes on this slide. And and so basically what that means is that there's just so much more out there. And you know, learning has been historically focused on a very small percentage of the functionalities and the technology that we really should be thinking about. And it was interesting when I was talking to Christopher Lind, who is a great, if you guys aren't following him on LinkedIn, you should he's an amazing thought leader in the learning tech space. And what he said is I get it. Like I get it, that people are focused on, had been focused on LMSs and LXP's historically, because there are a lot of them out there. And there is a lot to consider even within that tiny slice of the learning tech world. But we've got to broaden our horizons, basically what he said. Stacia do you have to add on that? Or are there any questions on this model or on this, this general idea, this initial finding.

Stacia Garr:

I'll maybe add, while, folks are thinking about if they have any questions. I think, you know, kind of building on the point I made just a moment ago, a few things that I think are exciting here is, is under analyzed. You know, we are seeing a rise in non-traditional learning players come into the analytics space here. So, you know, we saw a partnership announced between PeopleFluent and Visier a few weeks ago. And I think we're going to see more of that type of work coming through. So at the moment in our people analytics tech study, the only two analytics players we see are Watershed and M level.

Stacia Garr:

And so you know, it's, it's, it's fun to see some other folks starting to take this more seriously. The other thing that I think is interesting is, you know, we've got perform and performance tracking here, but you and I have had some really interesting conversations recently that have kind of bridge that performance tracking with coaching, and understanding you know, kind of how we can have those two concepts really feed each other, and then how that can potentially connect to performance management. So, you know, one of our hypothesis and things we've been talking about for really, since Dani and I started the firm, was that the areas of learning performance management engagement are all coming together ever more closely. And I think we're seeing that show up certainly in terms of the specific learning tech, but then also in how it's connecting to other areas too.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah.

Stacia Garr:

I'm just going to broaden the partnerships that need to happen from L and D to the rest of the organization. And quite frankly, what the broader tech stack needs to look like.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah. Yeah.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Cause that's one thing that we don't touch on a whole lot yet is the linkages to the other tech, right. So learning tech doesn't exist and absolutely should not exist in a bubble. And so if we're thinking about learning tech, you're thinking not only about how do those pieces interact with each other, but how do they interact with the rest of the tech in the word? Yeah.

How can L&D identify the most important learning tech needs/gaps?

 

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Participant from call text (Speaker 1) said, love this model. I've been using it for a year or so to get a handle on learning tech inventory and determining gaps. I'm curious, one of the questions I'm skipping ahead, but one of the questions that we had was how do you think strategically about identifying what tech you need in an organization? And so you said determined gaps. So if you're willing to unmute and share with us either now, or when we get to that question, we'd love to hear from you.

Speaker 1:

So I'm new to role, has only been like a year and change, but I stumbled across the the article that you guys have published, I guess, back in September or whatever last year. I started, I latched on to that model and have really, we've been going through understanding what our inventory is and the tech and the learning space, but also across the company to show those gaps and then trying to work with our L and D side of things. So I sit in an HR operations group separate from our learning groups. So we have a new CLO. So I've been working understand where the new vision and strategy is going to go from there, so that this way we can kind of help them understand how we can take the technology side of things and learning, help that map and help enable their strategy moving forward. And then that's going to help us start to identify where those gaps might be and help prioritize those. So we can start to look for additional technologies that might be able to help them in there, in that space. I'm not sure if that helped answer your question.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah, that's great. I love it.

Stacia Garr:

And I think that's interesting. You just, you mentioned that you, you report into basically HR operations, not into learning. And so just a question for you kind of back to what Heather and I were riffing on a few moments ago, which is, are you also looking at how all this tech connects into your broader HR tech ecosystem?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I have a link right into our IT folks. So I'm making sure that's kind of what I was getting at before in terms of that's one of the things I love out of the article is don't compete with IT, like work with them because I have a very small group and trying to maintain and oversee all these learning systems versus having IT, do it for their systems. Yeah, I'm kinda tied to the hip with my IT rep to make sure that, you know, we're leveraging whatever they're doing, you know, we're looking at, I think the new Microsoft Veeva was just announced, but that's something to be from a tech IT perspective, not necessarily L and D. So I'm trying to see if we can kind of jump on their coattails with that and leverage the systems that they're bringing in as opposed to bringing in like learning specific systems.

Speaker 1:

Cause you know, it's better not to compete with them because we've seen that with we have Microsoft Yammer and we were bringing in like a social learning platform and Yammer came out first and it took off better than our social learning platform. So it's, you know, again, like we're competing. So that's why no one's going to this one. So, you know, trying to minimize that competition moving forward as well, because IT is going to be ahead of us for the most part, a good number of technology. So that's kind of where I'm focused.

Stacia Garr:

And I think the point to that is, is that the technology that IT is buying is most likely going to be work tech that they're already going to be in. And so this idea of trying to siphon them off from something else to do something just for L and D and it'd be outside of their day to day.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. I want to try and get us more towards like, how do you do stuff in the flow of work, as opposed to let me stop my work, go find something and some other system, and then come back and work. Right.

Stacia Garr :

Exactly.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah. That's fantastic. We'd love to hear how it goes. Kind of, it sounds like you're in the, at the beginning slash middle.

Speaker 1:

The early stages. Yeah. But yeah, no, definitely let you guys know.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah.

Additional initial findings

 

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

And that actually kind of links to some of the other initial findings that we have, which is linking texts as Speaker 1 is doing, which is fantastic. When you take decisions to business strategy is recognized as a good idea in the literature, at least we're not seeing that they're seeing there's this gap in the literature because there are a lot of articles on you need to link your learning tech to strategy. And there are a lot of articles on here's how to choose a good LMS or here's how to choose great VR software or here's how to choose a great micro learning platform. But there's, there's this like gap in terms of how to operationalize a strategy holistically before you get to the tactics of, you know, specific platforms that you're going to choose. So that's actually kind of why we're writing this, this particular paper in the first place is, is to kind of fill that gap. And then, and then to Speaker 1's point as well, you need to know what you already have before you start thinking about what else to acquire. Otherwise you're just chasing after the latest, shiny thing and not giving thought to sort of how it fits in or how it's going to meet an actual need.

Do you ever experiment with tech prior to choosing or just leverage RFP responses to make a decision?

 

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

The next one was, do you ever experiment with tech prior to choosing or just leverage RFP responses to make a decision? So I think my opinion on this is as much testing as you can possibly do before you buy the better. So if you can only get demos, then make sure you have a really good couple of use cases that you want the vendor to walk you through in the demo. If you can get a test account and play around with it yourself, even better just leveraging. So one of the, one of the big issues that both vendors and some of the tech thought learning tech thought leaders see with RFPs is that they've become a little bit of a check, the box exercise and, and some vendors will, if the RFP is not super, super detailed and clear, then sometimes vendors will say, yes, we can do this.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

And they can do maybe a version of this, but it's not the version that you need that will meet your needs. And that comes up particularly with integrations, you know? So, so a lot of times an RFP, the line item will be do you do integrations? And the vendor will say yes, and then you'll come to implementation time. And the integrations that you actually need, it turns out, Oh, that vendor, that's not what we meant by integrations. And so the more that you can play around with things before you purchase the better, Stacia.

Stacia Garr:

Yeah. I would add that. Well, a few things, one is, so often the integrations are just, or via API or a flat file CSV upload, and that's in many instances that works fine, but for if it's a specific need it very well may not. But, I think the bigger point here is that it goes back to why, why would we talk about the need for strategy to drive tech decisions versus the other way around is, you know, if you go in and you say, you know, this tech can do all these things, like let's figure out how to use them all. So we get the most value out of our investment. You often end up with a whole bunch of features and functionalities that you just may not need. And even like worse for my position as an analyst, it drives the wrong behaviors in the vendors because the vendors are just looking to check the boxes on the RFP so that they can get in the conversation.

Stacia Garr:

But if, instead you go to a vendor and say, we're trying to achieve this thing how might you help us achieve it? Or here's what we think we need, help us see what we may not, you know, it's much more of that dialogue and it's, you know, RFPs are fine for an initial rough cut. But it's, I think you need to be a lot more specific about it and you're not going to get that only from an RFP. And quite frankly, you're not going to get it only just from experimenting as well. You know, it's that beginning, that relationship with the vendor, having that conversation about what it is that you need. And then also understanding from the customers who may have had similar needs, have they been able to meet them? So that's the other thing that wasn't on this question, but I think is important for folks to do is, you know, go and talk to other customers who are, will surface references and who have ideally been in a situation similar to yours and understand did this vendor actually meet your needs or do they work with you to meet those needs? And what did that process look like?

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah.

How to get peer feedback about vendor relationships and capabilities?

 

Speaker 2:

Thank you. I want to ask you, I am also not so long in this line of work. So I was interested to ask you, so how would you recommend that I go about and ask other people about their experiences, because sometimes it's, for me, it seems a bit intrusive to like to ping people on LinkedIn and say, I can see that, I saw you somewhere using the same technology. Do you have any experiences? I'm sorry if this is like a very obvious question, but I'm also interested to hear, so what, would be your advice on this?

Stacia Garr:

Yeah, so I would start with the vendor. Usually the vendor will have a series of preference customers who have already said that they're happy to talk to potential new customers, and be specific with the vendor about what you want to talk about so that they can find the right person. Yeah. I am looking for someone else who has implemented at this scale with, you know, these types of capabilities and on this timeline as an example. So that's one way. A second way can be if you don't want to kind of go directly through the vendor is a lot of vendors have their own conferences and events. Even now, you know, there's just tons of virtual events and you can either find folks I mean, obviously whenever we go back to in-person, you can just kind of, a lot of times there'll be sessions that are dedicated to a particular topic, and it's easy to kind of bump into people, but even now you can look at who's speaking at those events, because usually if they're speaking there, have you already know that they've waved the flag and said, I'm willing to talk about this vendor.

Stacia Garr:

Sometimes also they have these pretty, pretty sophisticated like networking spaces within the technology right now. And you can go in and just pose a question like to the room, which is actually an advantage of it being virtual versus in person. And get people's perspective. A third way can also be, you know, you mentioned not wanting to cold bump into people in LinkedIn, but a lot of these organizations, a lot of these vendors will have their own LinkedIn groups and where it's kind of acceptable to go in and say, Hey, I'm thinking about implementing, you know, Degree. What's been your experience? And then the fourth way is if you do find someone it might be beneficial just to find keynote, good old fashioned networking, find that mutual connection who might be able to make the introduction for you. I mentioned that one last, because I feel like that's the most obvious of all of them. But I think all of those are ways that you can, you can get to folks who have used the tech.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much. Yes, some very neat ideas. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Let's see participant from call text said, that's a really important point, Stacia. I work in a sales function for a vendor, and certainly from my point of view, if a potential new client approached me with an issue they have, or goal they're looking to achieve, rather than a generic sales inquiry, the demo or platform we provide is going to be way more effective for all parties. And it's really interesting. So we were working with a large tech company on just helping them, helping them figure out their like rating matrix their rubric for an LXP that they were looking at. And we help them. They did a great job thinking through some of the use cases that that they wanted in their demos. And they got really specific, like, okay, we have a person just become a new manager and they need to do this, this and this.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

And how would you, how would you help them do that? And we have an admin who needs to do this, this and this in the backend of the system and how would you help them do this? And so they came up with a couple of demos and they sent them to the vendor ahead of time. And it was really enlightening for them to see the differences in the approaches with the vendors. You know, one of the vendors came back and the vendor seemed to understand exactly the use case, walked them through exactly how the person would do that. Like really gave them a good sense of what it would be like for that person to have that experience. And then the other vendor kind of came back with here's why we're great, you know, and it was an incredibly enlightening experience for the buyer.

What is more frequent: do teams adapt to the technology they have in shaping their agenda, or do they buy technology? 

 

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Right. All right. So the next question is what's more frequent. Do teams more adapt to the technology they have in shaping their agenda or do they buy technology? So this is interesting. It goes back to the question about, should using strategy to drive tech decisions. Right? So I think just to hammer on the point that any technology decision or any technology purchase that's made, not in service of a specific business goal is probably not going to serve you well in the long run. But I think another interesting angle to this question is what we were talking about earlier. Do we leverage existing systems to meet our business goals or do we buy technology to meet those goals? And I think with that Yammer example was great, right? That was a case where we need, it was really a better idea to leverage what you already had. And so I think, I think there's for me, there's a two part answer to this question, is the strategy driving your tech decisions? And are you very aware that you actually need to buy something? Or can you leverage once, you know, your business decision or be your business goal, then you can say, okay, do we have the tech to, to meet that goal? Or do we actually need to buy?

Stacia Garr:

Yeah. And I think an area where I see an opportunity to potentially adapt existing technology is when you're moving into a new space and you're just trying to create an MVP and to understand what might work. So, you know, you might be looking to experiment within just one, one part of an organization and say, okay, we're going to just, you know, it's going to potentially be ugly, but we're going to use this, this existing tech that we have and make some adjustments and just see could it potentially provide the value that we're looking for and, and do that in a low investment type of way. And then moving on, you know, after you get a little bit of a sense of how might play out, you know, in reality, in terms of if it fits the needs, if users would use this type of approach, etc. Then you can kind of step back and say, okay, well, we got the ideas, right, but like, is this actually the right tech or not?

Stacia Garr:

So I think that can be a good opportunity to leverage existing tech. The other area that we're actually really strongly pushing thinking about adapting current technology is with diversity equity and inclusion, and belonging. So we have seen a dramatic increase in the percentage of DEIB or I'm sorry, vendors offering DEIB solutions. And a lot of people don't know that their vendors are doing this. And so we saw, I think it's an 87% increase over two years ago of percentage of vendors who are offering DEIB as a feature. And so I think push going ahead and looking at what your vendor has to offer, whether you're looking at DEIB or you're looking at learning and seeing, you know, does the latest instance of this actually have what I need or have they, you know, if it's a true SAS software, you're going to get the updates no matter what. So have they made an update I don't know about, and it's already there. And I could leverage it to do the thing that I'm trying to do. So I think those are good examples of when to look to your current tech to see if it fits the need before you go and look outside the organization.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah. That's a great point actually. And I've seen it, not just in DEIB, but in sort of learning more broadly, adding for example, talent mobility type features have become really popular skills

Stacia Garr:

Or lightweight performance, I think we've seen.

How should L&D be thinking about tech integrations?

 

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff that maybe your vendor has rolled out and it wasn't the original reason you bought the platform. And so you're not really thinking about it that way. Yeah, I love that. All right. The next question is how should L and D be thinking about tech integration? So we kind of already touched on this or talked about it a lot. So for me, there are two really important elements to think about. When you're thinking about integrations, one is the user experience and one is how you're using the data that your different systems are producing. So one of the things that we're seeing is a movement away in sort of learning tech purchasing broadly. We're moving away from trying to find one platform that does it all and toward a recognition that there are lots and lots of vendors out there.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

And some of them are really great at this. And some of them are really great at this. And some of them were really great at this. And so how do we create an ecosystem that pieces all of those best in class technologies together. And that's where integrations become really, really important. Right. And so when you're thinking about that, the things that you want to ask vendors about are, can you fit into my existing ecosystem, such that my users can't really tell, and probably don't even know that they're going on to a different system from whatever central access point I've decided they should go to for learning. And similarly, can the data that your platform is producing or collecting, can you put this data in whatever I've decided is my central repository where I want to store and access and compare all of the data that I have.

Most frequent integrations

 

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

So, for me, those are the two big, big elements to think about when you're thinking about tech integrations. I'd be very curious though what you all think and what questions you kind of follow up questions you have. Can you give any examples of most frequent integrations? So a lot of times, especially in enterprises there will be, you know, a central HRS system and a central LMS system. And so those probably are already integrated. And what I'm thinking about is if you're going to add on another piece of tech, let's say you decide that you need a micro learning platform for whatever reason. And so what your micro learning platform would be need to do is integrate with that LMS and potentially even with the HRS. Does that answer your question?

Speaker 2:

Sorry. It might be quicker like this. So yeah, basically, one of my let's say parts of my job was to work on integration between HRS and LMS that we are having. And I'm also interested to see maybe to ask you as well, too because there is now we see a big emphasis on the webinar delivering platforms when it comes to Adobe Connect I don't know, Zoom as well. But then also some teams and I was interested to see, so maybe to see what other intuitions there could be, because yeah, this is I'm fairly new. So this is something that my organization needs, but it could be something else as well. So that's what I wanted to, yeah, mostly HRS. Yes. It's a central system. But then it comes like Teams would have to have a special integration with, for example, our LMS to, for example, enable good let's say webinar, attendance I think that Zoom has some good APIs when it comes to that. I'm not sure for Teams. But yeah, so that's the background of my question.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah. So I would, I would kind of go back to the have your strategy, drive your choices theme that we've been going with. So I hesitate to say like, oh, all organizations are doing these integrations, or, oh, you need to think about this integration because maybe that's not right for your organization. I would it seems to me like you want to figure out what technologies you need and then figure out how to integrate them all all together. And I'd be thinking about it.

Stacia Garr:

But I do think, I mean, so as Heather mentioned, you're going to integrate your HRS, you know, whatever your human capital management system is most likely to, if nothing else, so that you can have the system of record data that you need about folks. And then I think the other area is, you know, when you, when your thinking about most, likely any of your performance activities, you're going to want an integration back to your learning resources to, you know, for instance, people are, have identified that they need to be better at presentations just to pick something you know, there people can then get directed to the resources that help them understand how do I deliver a better presentation. We're also seeing kind of a rise in the connection between learning need, like this learning needs identified through things like performance and experiences.

Stacia Garr:

And so those experiences could be coaching. They could be mentorship, they could be internal talent marketplaces that kind of thing, but we're, we're starting to see folks think about how do we bring those connections to bed together. So that folks don't just have a learning need that's been identified, but actually have a way to get there. That's not just content. So I think those are some other areas to potentially think about your integrations. But I would go back to Heather's point, you know, the ultimate question is what is the learning experience or the learning culture that you're trying to create, and then what would be the technology that can enable that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Thank you. I mean it maybe goes back of course, to the previous question, because yeah, only now that was the question that I think I submitted. So it really is about, for example are you aware at any point what is really that you're trying to accomplish on a, let's say through to three years period, or I don't know how long, I don't know. So for many of the contracts with the vendors, how long do they last really? But I would say that it's more long term when, especially when it comes to a bigger organization. So that's why I asked the question and when it comes to integration, it's what you said earlier as well. So people I think when there's promise a lot of things in general, but when it comes to specifics and really accomplishing some things, then I don't see that a lot of stuff is possible. It requires some custom development, which is like, need funds for that. And it's not something that you budgeted for. So I think that's why I asked for most frequent funds. So I can maybe see what could be possible expenditure. I mean, it's even better if you can announce something that you'll need something. So that's why I asked, thank you. Maybe linking too many stuff now.

Stacia Garr:

I think that's good. But one thing just to add on there is make sure that you ask your vendor, the vendors that you're considering at the beginning, what type of support they give for implementation and for basically making these integrations and other potentially more customized aspects of the implementation work. So in our people analytics, tech study, for example, we found 40% of vendors offer that support as part of their subscription and do not have a year one additional cost for that, 60% do not. But, you know, you may find that that offering of support is the thing that tips you one way or the other, and also can be indicative of the vendors perspective on one, you know, the extent to which they're kind of software first versus software to generate leads for consulting, two the extent to which they think you'll need support long-term so a lot of them say, look, we get that.

Stacia Garr:

You're gonna need some help getting set up, but we don't expect you to need long-term support because the technology is mostly self-sustaining once you get implemented. And so we're not gonna, we're not gonna charge for the upfront because we want you to be successful and we don't think you're going to need it longer term. So we're not going to charge for that either that can give you a sense of one budget, but then also what you need, what you should expect from them longer term in their overall philosophy. So I would check into that at the beginning, start of the process.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Heather Gilmartin Adams (40:58):

One sort of tangential thought to that. It sounded also in your question, like because you said you're new to the space you were feeling like I need to know, just kind of what's out there and what my options are so that I can maybe think about how to build them in, in the future, or maybe budget for them. And actually that's a really good point that's come up in a couple of our interviews is learning leaders need to have at least a decent enough sense of what's on offer in market. So that when they're in a meeting and they hear a business challenge, they know kind of whether there's a technology that can assist with that or not. And so I just kind of building up that awareness is in fact a great thing that you're trying to do. And if you're interested, we have a tool on our website that you can play around with that kind of shows you what the vendors in the space are doing. All right. So that was actually the last question.

Stacia Garr:

Before we go to this, are there other questions that folks have that we didn't cover live today? And I just put a link to the tool in the in the chat

Stacia Garr:

Okay. So it sounds like there's nobody who's going to speak now, so we'll forever hold our peace Heather.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Right. So, yeah. Do you want to speak to this Stacia?

Conclusion

 

Stacia Garr:

Two weeks from today. Our next Q and A call is going to be on employee engagement and experience tech. So I know at least one person here mentioned Microsoft Veeva. I wrote a pretty long blog on Microsoft Veeva when that announcement came out. So that will be one of many things that we talk about. In general, we're going to be talking about what this market looks like based on our people, analytics, technology research, and aware where people sit, what they do. What we see as some of the differences in the different vendors and how one might want to approach the space. So it'll be like this, it'll be free flowing discussion. But Priyanka Mehrotra who's on our team and is actually leading this research. She and I will be on together and we will share our thoughts and take your questions. It's going to be fun. So cool. Well, I think with that, want to just say thank you to everyone for your participation and whether it be a chat or voice or, or however you chose to participate. And for anybody who's listening after to the recording, please go ahead and feel free to reach out to us with any questions or anybody who's here today. If you have more questions, let us know. And we look forward to seeing you on another Q and A call soon.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:

Yeah. Thank you everyone. It's a great conversation today.

Stacia Garr:

Yeah. Thank you. Take care.

About 2 years ago, as part of our research on learning tech ecosystems we conducted an in-depth lit review on how to create such an ecosystem. We were looking for thoughtful, credible insights on how orgs, vendors, and thought leaders were approaching the question of how to build truly effective learning tech ecosystems that meet org and employee needs. Given how many vendors we'd seen offering point solutions rather than all-encompassing platforms, we were surprised at the dearth of credible sources on the topic.

In more recent research, we noted that learning tech is booming—with more vendors, more customers, more users, more functionalities, and more choice than ever before.¹ Some of this growth is due to COVID-19: Learning tech got a shot in the arm during the pandemic as orgs scrambled to pivot their businesses—and the learning strategies that support them—to keep up with the massive changes occurring in their environments.

And, while some growth in learning tech was already happening (or forecasted) even before the pandemic, the upheavals of the past year have made this question much more urgent—and critical:

How should orgs be thinking about creating their learning tech ecosystems?

In other words, with so many learning tech options and so many ways to fit the pieces together, how can orgs choose tech to build the ecosystem that’s right for them?

So we decided to look at the literature again. We wanted to see if, in the past 2 years, articles on learning tech ecosystems have started pushing the thinking beyond the pedestrian. As it turns out, in some areas the thinking has moved forward—for example around learning budgets—but the advice in the literature is still largely fragmented and tactical.

Themes from the Literature

We reviewed the current literature on the topic of choosing learning tech to identify any models, frameworks, or thought leadership on creating learning tech ecosystems. The text of the 40 articles we reviewed resulted in the following word cloud (see Figure 1).

The word cloud highlights one of our early observations during this research:

The meaning behind “choosing learning tech” is changing.

Notice in Figure 1 that LMS and LXP are the only types of learning tech mentioned enough times in the literature to show up in the word cloud. This reflects the historic meaning of “choosing learning tech.” This phrase used to mean choosing the best LMS—or, if you were really forward-leaning, LXP—for your org. But there’s so much more to the universe of learning tech—a fact that shows up in some of the other words in Figure 1 like data, digital, experiment, change, and perform. That wasn't the case when we did the last lit review 2 years ago.

This shift towards an awareness of the wider learning tech universe is reflected in the 5 themes we identified from the literature:

• Learning budgets are shifting toward tech
• Don’t let the tail wag the dog: learning tech decisions should be made in service of business and learning strategies
• Advice in the literature is fragmented and tactical
• Choosing learning tech doesn’t (necessarily) mean buying learning tech
• L&D teams need technologists

Let’s dive into these 5 themes in more detail.

Learning budgets are shifting toward tech

By Q1’2020, most L&D budgets for the year had been set. As the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on the scene, a few orgs decided to increase their overall learning budgets to invest more than originally planned in employee development. Many more orgs, however, decided to simply shift existing funds from planned in-person training to expand virtual and online development opportunities—all of which is supported or delivered by learning tech.

Overall, orgs significantly increased their usage of online and collaborative modalities, with considerable increases in 3 types of tech tools in particular:²

The shifting trend toward tech is here to stay: As illustrated in Figure 2, in 2021, almost three-fourths (73%) of learning professionals expect to do less instructor-led training (ILT), and almost four-fifths (79%) anticipate doing more online learning.³

Tech decisions must serve strategy

Don’t let the tail wag the dog: Tech decisions should be made in service of business and learning strategies.

A prominent theme in the literature is linking tech decisions to strategy. Many articles we reviewed emphasized the importance of understanding what your org is trying to achieve before deciding what tech is needed. Otherwise learning leaders risk investing in tech they don’t need and probably won’t use.

We particularly appreciated the point by two authors, Nan Guo and Bülent Gögdün, that in some orgs:

“… What goes wrong is the wasteful spending to signal innovativeness without solving a real problem.”⁴

Bottom line: While it may be tempting to experiment with new technologies, it's important to remember that novelty doesn't necessarily solve business problems. Instead, learning leaders must clearly identify what they want to achieve through employee development—what business results they seek to support—and look for the tech solution(s) that can help realize those goals.

Advice in the literature—Fragmented & tactical

The literature contains many, many articles on how to choose specific types of learning tech—an LXP, an LMS, or the latest VR tech, for example.⁵ As we saw in the word cloud above, LMSs and LXPs are far more represented than any other type of learning tech.

Where the literature falls short: Most articles don’t account for the incredible range of available tech that can be leveraged for learning—or how to fit the various pieces together into a cohesive ecosystem⁶ which evolves over time. Although some helpful checklists (provided by vendors) exist to help buyers think through various aspects of a learning tech purchase, most of these checklists focus on each vendor’s area of expertise.⁷

We see an opportunity to write about more holistic approaches to choosing learning tech.

These specific, tactical articles are very helpful—if you already know what tech you need. But there's not much in the literature for those leaders who need to step back, identify needs, and take a more holistic approaches to choosing learning tech.

Choosing learning tech doesn’t (necessarily) mean buying learning tech

Some articles in our lit review noted the importance of understanding the full capabilities of the tech already in-house. According to one source, 89% of orgs already use at least 3 learning tech platforms.⁸

89% of orgs already use at least 3 learning tech platforms—and most platforms aren’t being fully leveraged.

There’s a good chance that in-house platforms offer features and functionalities that could support learning needs—and which aren’t currently being used. This situation often arises because a platform is purchased to meet one need (or set of needs) and only certain functionalities are turned on to meet those needs, even though the platform has more to offer. In other cases, vendors add functionalities during platform updates.

Some orgs also have the in-house capability to build systems, processes, and / or platforms to meet learning objectives.

So, before making any additional purchases, it’s critical to understand what features already exist—or could be built in-house—and how they might be leveraged. Considering all the different ways to acquire tech—not just buying—can help learning leaders make the most effective, cost-efficient learning tech decisions.

L&D teams need dedicated learning technologists

The fact that most orgs already have multiple learning tech solutions makes any learning tech decision more complex. L&D leaders must not only ask what already exists—as discussed in the previous section—but also how any new tech would integrate with existing systems.

Enter the learning technologist!

Learning technologists have unique skills—amounting increasingly to full-time jobs and, in some orgs, entire teams—that allow them to:

• Truly understand the learning tech that’s available in the market
• Envision how learning tech might help solve an org’s specific business challenges
• Figure out how all the different pieces of tech can be leveraged and assembled / integrated together

Traci Cantu, then-director of learning technology at Whole Foods, emphasized in a podcast that learning tech bridges the worlds of HR, IT, operations, and learning.⁹ It’s helpful to have team members dedicated to understanding and navigating this nexus.

Or, as another article put it, in the L&D orgs of the future:

“Learning technologists will design and implement the right technology stack with the right mix of tools—from traditional learning management systems (LMSs) to modern learning experience platforms (LXPs)—and fit-for-purpose learning apps.”¹⁰

Next, we take a closer look at some of the key articles we discovered in our lit review.

Sources That Caught Our Attention

Several articles—and one podcast—in the literature illuminated key considerations about choosing learning tech. The sources below contain insights we found both intriguing and helpful. We learned from their perspectives and encourage you to do the same.

Three Steps to Turn Your Company into a Learning Powerhouse

Andrew Dyer, Susanne Dyrchs, J. Puckett, Hans-Paul Buerkner, Allison Bailey, and Zhdan Shakirov | BCG, November 2020

This article outlines how to put learning at the forefront of the org. It includes tech as 1 factor to consider, situating tech decisions within the overall learning and business strategies.

“Does your company have the necessary infrastructure—the tools and technology—to measure, support, and continuously improve the learning ecosystem?”

Highlights:

• The 5 domains that make learning ecosystems successful are:
  • A refined strategy
  • A mature learning org
  • High-quality offerings (library of content)
  • Enablers / infrastructure to support delivery
  • “Learnscape integration”—a community of providers inside and outside the org
• The authors developed a set of questions to evaluate these 5 domains, including learning tech in the “enablers” domain
• CEOs must measure learning capabilities against KPIs
• Orgs must assuage leaders’ fear of investing in employee development only to lose those people to other teams or even other orgs entirely

Workplace Learning Report: Skill Building in the New World of Work

LinkedIn Learning, 2021

This comprehensive article on the state of learning in the workplace highlights a number of key trends that resulted from or were accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The section on L&D budgets is particularly relevant for this research on choosing learning tech.

64% of L&D pros globally agree was the moment learning shifted from a “nice to have” to a “need to have.”

Highlights:

• L&D has gained a lasting seat at the C-suite table as CEOs continue to prioritize learning; as a result, L&D budgets are likely to continue increasing
• The pivot from instructor-led training to virtual / online learning is here to stay—as reflected in learning budgets, which are allocating far more to tech than previously: 79% of L&D pros expect to spend more on online training in 2021
• Upskilling, reskilling, and internal mobility are top priorities for orgs and L&D in 2021
• Resilience and digital fluency are the most important skills cited by L&D leaders

Navigating the Corporate Training Market During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ken Taylor | Training Industry, April 2020

This article offers a great snapshot of the state of learning tech at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It reflects much of the uncertainty in the market and offers advice to vendors about how to best serve L&D teams struggling to pivot quickly.

TrainingIndustry.com has seen an 8.6% increase in web traffic over the past few weeks , with an 8,135% increase in topics related to remote learning, virtual instructor-led training (vILT), and leading through adversity and change.

Highlights:

• Although some learning tech spending was put on hold in the early days of the pandemic, as of April 2020, orgs appeared ready to increase spending on learning tech
• Prepandemic:
  • 89% of companies surveyed already had more than 3 learning tech solutions in place, and almost a quarter (23%) had 9 solutions
  • More than 20% of companies planned to increase their investments in learning management systems (LMSs), eLearning, digital content solutions, social / collaboration tools, and delivery platforms
  • Two-thirds of companies felt they were ready to introduce new training tech
• While the pandemic enabled greater spending on tech, “old problems still exist”; orgs still need to cultivate a strong L&D strategy

A review of L&D budget allocations in 2020

Rocco Brudno | Coassemble & Brandon Hall Group, November 2020

This article describes the changes in L&D budgets in 2020, including helpful statistics on overall budget shifts as well as data on how learning tech priorities change based on on org size.

The majority of businesses didn’t shrink their L&D budgets in 2020 but rather shifted, and in some cases, expanded them.

Highlights:

• The majority of L&D budgets did not decrease and, in fact, some increased in 2020
• 83% of small businesses and 97% of large businesses that responded to this article’s survey reported the use of an LMS, and almost one-half of businesses said they keep their LMS for more than 4 years
• Almost one-half of businesses surveyed didn't know how much their LMS costs per learner annually
• In addition to LMSs, video platforms and authoring tools were the most valued learning tech solutions among survey respondents, while microlearning and coaching / mentoring solutions were also seen as valuable

Navigating the Purchasing Minefield

Christopher Lind and Jordan Fladell | Learning Tech Talks, February 2020

This frank and fun podcast illuminates many of the landmines in the learning tech purchasing process, and provides helpful, practical insights to learning leaders about how to avoid or mitigate those challenges.

You need to know in detail what L&D must support, what your learning tech systems already can do, and what they can't. And where they can't—that's where you say, “We need X new tech.” Then you have your case built and your internal stakeholders onboard.

Highlights:

• The RFP process is currently broken—it’s a check-the-box exercise that just encourages L&D leaders to chase features
• L&D leaders need to clearly understand the business challenges most important to their org—and select learning tech that can help solve those issues
• Learning leaders must set a scope for their due diligence searches to avoid being overwhelmed by the choices out there
• Selecting the right learning tech includes understanding whether a new tech can integrate with existing systems exactly as your org needs them to

Additional Reading Recommendations

• Why It’s Time to Bring Learning to the C-Suite, BCG / Dyer, A., Dyrchs, S., Bailey, A., Buerkner, H., and Puckett, J., 2020.
• Designing a learning technology ecosystem, Elucidat / Greany, S., 2020.
• Demand More from Your Corporate Learning Budget in 2021, Forbes.com / Guo, N., and Gogdun, B., 2021.
• Making the Best Technology Purchasing Decisions , Shaelynn Farnsworth, 2018.
• SHRM: Some Industries Boost Training in New Technology, Equipment During Pandemic, SHRM / Gurchiek, K., 2020.

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr:
All right. So we're going to go ahead and get started. We did have a smaller acceptance for today. So maybe just be us, but that's great. So really for the sake of the recording, cause I know most of you here I'm Stacia Garr, I'm co-founder of RedThread Research were a human capital research advisory membership, and we focus on a range of things, including most relevant for today, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and HR technology. So what we're going to do today is to just give a few of the findings from the research, and then I'm going to let Priyanka do quite a bit of that. And then we're going to answer either the questions that you have here, or we also have a few questions that were submitted in advance. For folks who are maybe new to this conversation, this is a conversation. It is very informal. And the idea is really just to give a chance to to get your questions answered or to have a good discussion about this topic of DEIB technology. Okay. Priyanka, do you want to move on?

Defining DEIB

Priyanka:
Well, okay then I'll move ahead with just setting the stage up. So what I want you to do very quickly was just share a few definitions of how we define our concepts, these concepts of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. And I'll just give everybody about 20 seconds to read them because they're slightly longer for me to read them on for everybody. So if you want to just stick a second and then we'll move ahead with this.

DEIB became a bigger priority in 2020

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And moving on. So just setting the stage of why you're talking about DEIB this year, of course we know DEIB became a very crucial topic in 2020 for various reasons. COVID-19, BLM movement, social justice movements, natural disasters, everything just kind of made the DEIB so crucial in 2020, and we have this data here from Glassdoor, which showed us that there's been such an immense rise in DEIB job openings in summer 2020 and 250%. That's crazy. And we can see the lines moving right after social justice movement gained momentum in the summer of 2020. And as we can see, like in December 2020, it's just completely shot up higher than it had ever been before. So when you think about the role of DEIB tech, there are a few things why we think it's so crucial and what is it that it can actually do.

The role and types of DEIB Tech

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So a few things that we wanted to highlight, what is it that it can do for us? And it can uncover bias in policies, practices, and programs. It can help us identify gaps between goals and actions. It can make recommendations on what are the steps that leaders and organizations should do next, and it can analyze data and information for greater insights. So keeping these things in mind and looking at the technology that vendors are offering in this market, there were a few things that we noticed about the types of tech that we typically tend to see in the market. We decided we divided them into three types that we majorly see. We have the DEIB focused vendors where their primary business is focusing on DEIB. That's how they go to market. Then we see the DEIB feature venders their primary business might not be DEIB.

DEIB Tech market in 2021

Priyanka Mehrotra:
They might be going to market with something else, but they do have features and additional capabilities that directly address DEIB. And then we have the DEIB friendly vendors who maybe going through market for totally different reasons, such as the recruiting software, but they, for example, they might have artificial intelligence that can be used for DEIB purposes as well. So looking at the DEIB market in 2020, 2021, what are the major trends that we saw during our study, one we saw an overall growth in the market. We saw a major increase in HR tech vendors in general offering DEIB features that part of the solution. So the DEIB feature vendors that I just mentioned before. We saw a major increase in the number of vendors who are offering these capabilities as opposed to DEIB friendly or DEIB focused vendors.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
We saw greater focus on inclusion and the impact of AI on mitigating bias. So we've traditionally focused on diversity for so long, but inclusion really came into being in 2020 and 2021. Last, we saw evolution of emphasis from gender to race and ethnicity. So during hashtag me too movement, that was a lot of focus on gender. In 2020 we saw that shift towards race and ethnicity really come into its own. And people analytics for DEIB has arrived that's what we saw in a big way in our findings. And so I'm just going to touch on all these points at a very high level.

Stacia Garr:
Sorry. Do we want to ask if anybody has a high level question on any of those five before we dive in?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yes. Thank you Staica.

Speaker 1:
Not for me. Very straightforward.

A more steady evolution

Speaker 2:
Question Priyanka. So you say there was a shift from gender to ethnicity and race. You refer to the, me too, as a, as a, let's say a movement or a trend. We have the Black Lives Matter. Is, is this like really sensitive to societal evolutions? Is that what you see and might change again? I mean next year, if another topic comes on the political agenda or is it a more steady evolution?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think I would say it's been a more steady evolution. We definitely continue seeing gender as a very important part of what DEIB tech vendors are providing as part of their offerings. But we also started seeing some Venders include race and ethnicity as part of, for example, the service that they're providing for that customer. So race becomes a part of it and intersectionality became quite important and became quite common. We started to see more and more vendors offering that in the way that the customers can slice the data and see how they can create groups. So for example, I know Visier offers a cohort analysis in which you can create any type of groups, right. And you can create groups that have different attributes and you can compare them. So, so we started seeing more and more vendors really bringing those capabilities into their solutions. Stacia, did you want to add anything?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, so I think I mean gender has been a common focus largely because it's something that is you can focus on globally. There aren't as many differences in terms of what you can study or look at as race. I would say though that this, the movements of this summer, and I wouldn't call them political movements. I mean, I think they're very much social movements, at least in the United States. They were response to what was happening. That doesn't mean that there wasn't already, in there certainly is a deep problem that was existing. But I think, but it was a reaction. I will say though, and I've been kind of contemplating this and I don't have any data to prove it, but I, wonder if there was a greater willingness to focus on race, which has been a very difficult topic, certainly in the United States, a greater willingness to focus on it because it was immediately following the pandemic where we had kind of in, in some ways, softened ourselves up to say, we don't have all the answers and our executives, our leaders were saying we don't have all the answers.

Stacia Garr:
And they'd kind of gotten into a habit of, of saying that for three months. And then we have these massive protests in, in this movement. And so I think that there was just a greater willingness than we've ever seen for people to say, Hey, you know, maybe what we thought was happening, wasn't happening, maybe what we thought, you know, that we were more inclusive and yet it seems like maybe we weren't. And so I think there was that greater openness, but I think, you know, your, your question Speaker 2 kind of says, okay, well you, if we focus on race and ethnicity here in 2020 and 2021 and maybe 2022, is there going to be something else in 2023? I mean, I think potentially, but I think that that opening of the aperture to focus on more diverse groups and folks who haven't had that spotlight, if you will, on their experience is probably a good thing. I think we're going to see in general, more of that opening of the aperture.

Regulation

Speaker 1:
And actually on that topic. Can I ask a quick question in terms of the role that you see regulation playing in this, obviously in the UK with gender pay gap reporting, obviously, you know, drives a requirement and adoption and awareness in the market. We're starting to see, you know, the emergence of regulation taking place in some markets, but specifically in the US do you guys have a particular view on the likelihood of the emergence and proliferation of regulation?

Stacia Garr:
I would say don't have a particular point of view. I may think that we're, we have seen regulation in general it has, we have seen movement. So I think that, you know, that there's one aspect of it that can certainly be positive. Obviously though, you know, regulation can be a very heavy instrument to use for some of this. So I don't know that I have a particularly strong perspective. But I do think that the, the opposite in the regulation or, or, you know, fear of legal repercussions has had a chilling effect for decades on this space. And so I think that there's a way to think about that, that kind of cuts that way, too, in terms of, you know, how could we actually be encouraging these behaviors in a way that isn't, what's the carrot in this, as opposed to just the stick. But all that said, I think that a lot of this is just, is being driven by employees and, and by customer demand, you know, you look at Edelman Trust Barometer, and what they say in terms of what they expect of leaders to do. And, you know, they say, I think it's 67% of America, or maybe I think actually it's 72% of Americans expect their CEOs to take action on societal issues, particularly related to diversity. So I think that that represents just a bigger shift in, in the society.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. And actually you touched upon something which is going to be a follow-up question, which is really about the complexities of the US legal system, about a liability, once you identify a problem, and that is a hurdle or an obstacle to organizations wanting to better understand where they may have bias, let's describe it as that and the risk that, that creates legally around exposure and liability. I didn't know if you guys have a view on that, is that, that as a, stifling factor and adoption.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, we do. And I'm going to let Speaker 3 go though, because I know he also a strong perspective here

Speaker 3:
I have a perspective, which is sort of changing the piece, which is around what you're suggesting Speaker 1, which is the SEC disclosure regulation change. The SEC disclosure regulation change means that a investor could sue a company if there is any material loss due to some kind of harassment social injustice element coming out. So, you know, we find out that X, Y, Z company has been underrepresenting or underpaying or in any way, shape or form disadvantages, a group their share price goes down. If an investor holds that and that, that hasn't been disclosed, that hasn't been kind of presented, then they can potentially say, you should have known this was a material problem. You didn't, you didn't disclose it. I'm going to sue you for nondisclosure. It hasn't happened yet.

Speaker 1:
It's almost like double stick. Then there's a stick waiting for you. If you identify a problem, there's a stick waiting for your, you died.

Speaker 3:
Yes. Yeah. And people are working at which side of that. They want to be on. It's a good thing.

Speaker 1:
The biggest stick. Okay. Thank you, Speaker 3. I appreciate it.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And then I think the other component of this is folks are weighing the reputational risk with the legal risk. So kind of beyond the risks that Speaker 4 was talking about, but, you know, there's so many organizations who have just been on the wrong side of it because consumers are now taking action. You know, we're, we're seeing broader social action against organizations who are not responding to this. So I, you know, I've been, I feel like I've been saying this for a few years, but I feel like there's almost a grace period right now in the eyes of the consumer where it's like, okay, you know, tech's probably not going to have a great balance of men and women. Right. Okay. Like, let's acknowledge that, but let's do something about it. And I mean, my guess is that if in five years, if we haven't done something about it, consumers will hold companies to much greater account. Whereas right now it's kind of an acknowledged reality that I think that maybe the consumer will be, or customer will be a little bit less likely to hold people account for it, if there's action.

Speaker 1:
Okay. Thank you.

Stacia Garr:
All right. Priyanka you want to keep going?

A growing market

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah. Okay. So real quick, we can touch upon all these key findings that we have here? So a growing market, we saw the overall market size grow to over 300 million since 2019, the total number of vendors went up 296 from 106 that we had identified in 2019. Similarly, the compound growth rate grew by almost 60% since 2019. So a significant growth definitely more solutions with DEIB features.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So like I mentioned, we saw more and more technology, HR tech vendors who had not traditionally been in the space or had been going to market with a different value proposition, adding DEIB features or capabilities to them. So we saw an increase of 10% of DEIB features, right? As DEIB friendly venders, we saw a decrease of almost 9% and similarly DEIB focused vendors, we saw barely a growth of 1%. So definitely there's, there's a shift in mindset of a lot of vendors who traditionally have not had not been thinking about DEIB in a very specific manner, but adding now DEIB specific feature capabilities and going to customers to allow them to meet these needs and challenges.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So another key finding of course, was the growth the shift in focus towards inclusion. So in 2019, we know intrusion was still a priority for leaders, but very few were actually measuring it. And now as a researcher, I, when I looked back at the Sylvia, I wish that we had asked people how they were actually measuring inclusion, because I'm really curious to find that out, but it's still great to know that it used, the inclusion is the top measure of success. When we asked vendors how customers measure their success from, from using the solution they said that the increase in inclusion is the top measure. And this has gone from being fourth in rank in 2019. So that's, that's a significant shift that you're seeing.

People Analytics for DEIB has arrived

Priyanka Mehrotra:
The next key finding was of course, my favorite one, which is people analytics for DEIB has arrived. You know, we've been talking about analytics for DEIB for such a long time, and it was great to see an increase of almost 20% which as a, as a primary challenge in vendor, among vendors, who we're looking to solve DEIB related challenges to analytics for their customers. Again, I think this is a very significant finding. We saw a number of analytics, people, analytics vendors who have added DEIB features and capabilities. It goes back to our point of seeing a rise in the DEIB feature venders. So really coming into this field of providing analytics and using that for, for DEIB challenges. So with that, we've covered the key findings and we'll move on to the questions. Stacia, Ready?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, let's do it.

What should users consider before buying new DEIB Tech?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
All right. So the first question we received was what should users consider before buying new DEIB tech?

Stacia Garr:
I think it's like any other tech, right? So, what is your overall goal that you're trying to achieve? What's your overall strategy, that you're working towards and, where does the technology potentially fit within it and how does it reinforce and enable other practices? So, you know, I think that is, that is always question number one. Question number two is around, I think the level of expertise of the vendor instead of supporting this type of work. So there are some vendors who've been focused on DEIB for a long time and can help guide folks through some of the legal intricacies. Like we just discussed in some other aspects. There's some who are relatively new to this and, and, you know, innovation is always welcome. But, but that may be what you're getting more than kind of the expertise.

Stacia Garr:
And so we think there needs to be a match between what the organization needs and the support it needs and what the vendor is able to provide. And then I think, you know, third is always kind of where what's the match between the vendor themselves and in the organization. He knows some organizations are smaller and, and thus, you know, maybe more nimble, other organizations are larger and perhaps it better able to scale. So again, what are your organization's needs? And what's the ability to absorb that type of culture and, really status of the vendor. So those would be my top three.

Benefits & risk of DEIB Tech

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah. And I would add to it. So a few things that we had highlighted in our report is as with any technology, you really have to understand what are some of the benefits of using it, but also some at the same time, what are the risks that come with it? And of course DEIB technology being, being in the space that it plays, and it's really, really important that users before they adopt it, understand some of the benefits of doing that. So just at a very high level, just going through some of the benefits that we see of using DEIB technologies, of course, providing equal opportunities for everybody raising awareness and real time, enabling individual actions, as well as on a broader level, providing insights in critical decision-making moments, creating more consistent processes, measuring and monitoring impacts of efforts to analytics, of course, and signaling importance as well as building trust and confidence.

Priyanka:
So those are things, of course they're not exhaustive, but some of the really important benefits that somebody can reap out of DEIB technology provided it's done correctly and applied in a thoughtful manner. And of course, these come with their own sets of risks, such as legal and reputational risks, like Stacia talked about being seen bias and data. And now of course, people who create those technologies, the biases can creep in from that as well. They maybe don't end up being excused themselves. It may also lead to big brother fears, unintended consequences may in fact, end up damaging employee trust and creating a disconnect between people and processes. And again, similar to benefits, of course, that are additional risks, then I'm sure we haven't listed here, but just some key things to keep in mind before looking at purchasing such tech.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think Stacia already covered this, like really being thoughtful about where you are in your journey. What is your level of understanding of the DEIB issues? What are the specific goals that you're wanting to solve for and how much support will you need from the vendors similar to what Stacia said, whether it's big enough to support your organization needs, do you have international headquarters? Will they be able to provide you support at all hours of the day? So all those things, I just think that to keep in mind when going to the market, and of course, another thing that we really want to highlight is auditing in-house techs or a lot of companies, or a lot of vendors may already have DEIB tech features and capabilities like we mentioned, and your customers may be using them for something totally different. So for example, Workday and SAP, need to be that we piloted all have recently introduced really crucial DEIB features that people, the customers who are already leveraging these technologies for some other purpose, might be able to use for DEIB as well.

Speaker 1:
Well, ask a related question. And it's more about, you know, corporate adoption and who's championing adoption of those technologies within the organizations. So, you know, if you think about the range of DEIB technologies, whether it's a pay equity solution or whether it's a solution that deals with using AI to remove unconscious bias from, you know, the, the talent acquisition process, you know, it can obviously serve specific functions within HR broadly, right? So, you know, you could be serving a solution that takes out bias in the recruitment process to someone in the talent team, you know, pay equity could go to a reward specialist then obviously separately, you've got DNI specialists now come into organizations where we look, when we look at where organizations have truly champion and adopted these technologies, what's that pattern look like? Is it very fragmented based upon, you know, kind of specific functional focus or is it, HR departments taking a more broad view of how these technologies knit together to solve a problem? Does anyone have a view on that?

Stacia Garr:
I'll jump in and then I'd love to hear other folks' perspective as well, but in general, right now, it's still pretty highly fragmented. I would say generally speaking, the exception to that is when you have a CEO who, or, you know, C suite executive, who's very strongly driving this. And then in that instance, you may have, you know a DEIB council or some sort of centralized group, you know, basically often a kind of a tiger team that's been tasked with figuring out how do we solve this problem and what are the, all the different ways that we could approach it. So when that happens and that's when we'll just tend to see a centralized approach, but otherwise right now it does often tend to be, to be centralized. Priyanka and I actually next week are kicking off a report on DEIB and analytics.

Stacia Garr:
And, and one of our key questions there is kind of what does that partnership look like and who should be driving? What part of that focus, because, you know, there certainly is an onus on whoever's leading DEIB, but a lot of times they're just not in the, in the depth, in the weeds enough to kind of know where this tech sits, what it could do and how it could tie back. So I think that there really is a good question around ownership that that needs to be solved, but to your, to your direct questions cut. I think that it, it depends, but is mostly fragmented.

Speaker 1:
Do you know, what's really interesting about that. Of course, it's really about where the money is in the organization. So I asked the question because, you know, we ask ours have you know, an excellent DNI specialist. That's really helping drive awareness and a change in our practices across the organization. But, you know, she doesn't have much budget, right. Yet we've got large talent teams that do hold large budgets because they're out there working with recruiters. And, you know, so it's also about finding where the dollars are to support these initiatives within organizations. And I think that is also fragmented as well, right?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, it is. Now I think the thing that's interesting is I think that there can be almost a immediate reaction to say, well, we should have kind of some centralized group that's driving this because that would create greater order, et cetera. But, you know, diversity is one of those things where, you know, if not everyone in the organization is participating where everyone is a part of the solution, you know, then, then it's not going to work. So that centralized model that we use in so many other things, I think doesn't necessarily work. So I think that part of the question is, is how do we heighten the overall awareness? So that the talent leaders who do own that budget are saying, Hey, wait, we have a role here. What could we be doing? And taking a lead, what do others think?

Speaker 2:
Yeah. Well, what I see here in the Benelux is that if it's centralized and it's because there's a clear nonfinancial risks for the company. So if the CEO or there's executive takes ownership or wants to be a sponsor, then it's because there's a real threat because there's value in it. And it's like Priyanka said, you know, in five years customers will hold companies accountable for that. And I see in some industries, companies moving faster, banks, I serve a lot of banks. They for instance, are very much aware of their nonfinancial risks and their reputation also due to the financial crisis, etc. So they're sort of heading that movement now quite unexpectedly, I would say. But it really depends on, I think the value they can see from it or the risks they see from not doing it.

Speaker 2:
And then whenever it becomes relevant, then all of a sudden it does get on the agenda of everyone. If I talk with, with companies about, you know, HR and a big serving, all of a sudden in every company, we get the DNI responsible on the table. All of a sudden this is a person with teeth, whereas before it was a person with posters, let's say, now it's become a person on your team. It's like the data protection officer, the DNI person. Yeah. It gets more and more powered.

Stacia Garr:
Think I might borrow that from posters to teeth.

Speaker 4:
I love that.

Stacia Garr:
Speaker 4, you're going to add something.

Speaker 4:
I love Speaker 1's questions. I think it's quite, it's quite fascinating and sharing something that we were seeing we're in the analytics space. So there's some element of centralized understanding of opportunities, scale challenge. So we have a lot of people, people like leaders working with the DEI leaders that kind of go, well, where are we? What do we need to do? What are the opportunities? And then one of the big things they're looking at is like, what can the CEO say as a forward looking statement, as somewhere we're going to try and hit. So you need analytics, horsepower, you need DEI sponsorship, you need the executive, but to your point, Speaker 1, that the DEI lead doesn't have the money to go and buy a technology that will help tell an acquisition.

Speaker 4:
They kind of need brought into the conversation to say, you know, our funnel is actually our biggest problem, or our attention is our biggest problem. Like the, the analytics is kind of at the hub of that, which problem piece of the problem space to be solved first, but DNI doesn't have the budget without analytics. People are often, you know, fixing different pieces of the bus with different technologies because they're trying to help.

Speaker 1:
And you know what, that's a really interesting point. Now, I, you know, this, this is almost like a, you know, you know, when you get told in school, there's no dumb question, but you know, that there really is. I worry that this is one of those. And I just, whenever I think about this topic, I think about cause and effect, and I think, you know, from what I've encountered, there's lots of solutions that are looking at analyzing the effect, but it's really about how do you then tackle the cause. And actually when you start,

Speaker 1:
And obviously that's a very complex answer because there's, it's multi-dimensional, but, and so of course you, there isn't one solution that helps you to drive that change. It's about culture is about process, about lots of different things. So, you know, the reality is you will probably string together a number of solutions that will help you tackle cores. But again, how do you knit those together? How do you measure the extent of that response as being effective or not effective? And so I just, you know, to me that that's an open area or an open question of how do we tie cause and effect together and how do we help organizations understand that better?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I don't think that's a silly question at all. I think, you know that's kinda the question at the, at the heart of all of this, you know when, before anyone implements one of these solutions, you know, one of the things that I talked to them about is, you know, what's success look like? You know, what's the needle you're trying to move. So is it, is it different behaviors? Is it actually representation? I actually tried to discourage the latter because it just takes so long to measure. You know, ultimately of course, that's, that's what most are focused on and hoping for, but but being, you know, clear what, what those measures are, and then you know, to the extent that you can being scientific about it. So, you know, adjusting the job descriptions. Let's say somebody wants to use tech steel or something like that.

Stacia Garr:
You know, do we see any meaningful impact on, on just, you know, the, the number of applicants? Okay, well, let's do it. That's kind of one thing that we, we can measure you know, then interviews, lights, you know, making sure that we have diverse candidates on there as well as diverse interviewers now. Okay. Measuring those behaviors, does that result in any, you know, higher percentage of, of hires, of diverse backgrounds, ect. So I think, you know, being purposeful about the way that you're approaching it, and then being very clear on, on the behavior or the kind of intermediary outcome that you are trying to drive long before you get to representation. I think that can be, can be helpful in understanding that cause and effect much better. But I think, you know, like so many of the things that we do in the analytics space, it's basically a series of ongoing experiments that we're running and trying to see which things are, are impacting what, and then continuing to stick with those things. Once we find some areas of success. But they're great questions, Speaker 1.

Stacia Garr:
Anybody else have questions? I know we've got some other folks on the line who haven't spoken up, want to make sure we give you an opportunity or you can put things in chat too, if you are in a non-talking mood or you know, for whatever reason. All right Priyanka. Why don't we move on? What other questions did we get?

How can analytics be leveraged as part of DEIB Tech?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, so I was going to say it almost sounded like a perfect segue to our next question, which is about leveraging analytics as part of DEIB teck and how that can be done.

Stacia Garr:
Oh, well, I feel like I've kind of gave an answer just now. So I'd love to hear, I mean, we've got a couple of folks from analytics vendors on here. So maybe I'd love to hear a little bit of your guys's you know, quick view of how you've seen folks leveraging analytics and most effectively. So Speaker 3, do you want to maybe lead off?

Speaker 3:
I am on mute. My, my little microphone button was not paying attention to me. The thing that we've seen kind of consistently is that that analytics has driven the strategy. Just to share a story of a large food manufacturer you work with. They'd had a diversity program underway on the hiring side of things for a really long time, but their representation wasn't moving. And it was when they engage with the analytics team. They're like, well, that's because we're hiring people and they're leaving as fast. And then they dug underneath the data to find out as a, why are people leaving so fast? I mean, I've had like an, a subsequent question around the tech. I see a lot of focus going into, Oh, diversity is a problem. We just gotta hire differently. It will be fine, which I think is a natural instinctive reaction.

Speaker 3:
I also don't think it works. So I always think of an organization as an ecosystem. One thing that's true about ecosystem, there are new levers, there are shapes and influences. So the analytics helps by understanding if I move this, what else moves? It's not, I'll move this and only this, cause it's not an engine, it's an ecosystem. If I move this, what else moves do I end up with more exits? Do I end up with mobility? And so, you know, I think the analytics helps by really understanding where are the two or three places to Speaker 1's point? Like where do you put the technology and the dollars to actually move the needle? And that's, that's what we're seeing. And again, we've got a number of customer stories that are, they're doing some good stuff on that. That's, that's our perspective.

Stacia Garr:
Thanks Speaker 3. Anyone else have any other any other thoughts they want to share?

Speaker 4:
Hi, this is Speaker 4. Just a quick question, I guess, to the group. I recently read a report that I thought was really interesting. I've had a lot of conversations with clients about diversity equity inclusion, and oftentimes it's focused on hiring, Oh, we just need to hire more people. And that's probably the hardest way to move the needle. And recently saw a report that talks about internal labor market analysis. So to your point, Ian, looking at the impact that you will have from all three things, so hiring promotion and then, you know, retaining folks as well. Just curious if that's been a part of the conversation. So first doing the analysis of are you hemorrhaging people, are you promoting people and what's the effect there, and then also the impact of hiring so that companies are looking at it across the board, as they seek to have a more diversified workforce, how they're actually going to accomplish that. I feel like technology allows, you know, more companies to kind of pinpoint on each one of those things. And trust me, I understand that within my work, that information lives in four to five different systems. And that's usually the problem that none of these systems talk to each other. But just curious to hear from you all, if, if you've seen that come up now more than often than before?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I'll take a first whack and then let others jump in. So I think so as Priyanka had mentioned a little bit ago, the top success measure that we're hearing folks hold vendors accountable to now is inclusion. Whereas two years ago it was the hiring to the diversity of the talent pipeline. And I think that that's a, a reflection, two things. So one is to your point, that recognition and Speaker 3's point as well, that you can't only hire your way out of this problem. You have to actually be able to retain people. And, and that means that you need to be focusing on inclusion. The second thing is I think that with everything that happened in 2020, one, we saw a lot of organizations obviously pull back on hiring. And so it wouldn't have made sense for hiring to be in the pipeline to be the metric that folks were focusing on.

Stacia Garr:
And then too, with the social justice movements, I think the awareness that inclusion was not working for everyone in the way that maybe people thought it was a heightened people's awareness that they needed to be focusing on inclusion. So I think that we're seeing that shift. The question is though, and Priyanka also mentioned this, is how do you measure inclusion? You know, you mentioned internal talent markets, is…you know, people's or access to some of those opportunities and their ability to move within an organization, a measure of inclusion, potentially. You know, there is people's perception of their inclusion as measured by and engaged, you know, maybe on an engagement store or dedicated inclusion and belonging study. Yes. You know, so, I think that right now there's this grand exploration of all the different ways we might measure inclusion and think about holding ourselves accountable for it. And there's certainly no one definition of what it is, but there is a heightened awareness over two years ago, for sure that we need to be focused there. How about others?

Speaker 4:
It's a really interesting perspective because I do, I definitely agree, but working with clients, I'm hearing them talk about inclusion from the perspective of what's happening within our organization and less so as they're thinking about talent acquisition. And so trying to understand how we move the needle to get clients, to think about this from a technology standpoint, from an analytics, because I feel like that's the most positive impact that we can have. To say it's not necessarily for them, it still isn't necessarily about inclusion. It's how does the diversity landscape within the organization, how does our diverse workforce mean that we're actually hitting a marker? So for example, let's say that Dell has a 2030 initiative where they want to hire 40%. They want their workforce to be 40% women in senior leadership. That's still the kind of data points that you're seeing out in the sphere.

Speaker 4:
And so while they're having conversations about inclusion from a workforce perspective, there is still this idea of how do we diversify our workforce. And I feel like, yes, it's hiring, but it's also promotion. And it's also, what's the experience that's happening within your organization. So people aren't leaving because what I'm also hearing from a lot of clients is that their diverse workforce is leaving in droves. And as they are going through the talent acquisition process, they're having more diverse candidates decide to not move forward with the process. So in one case, a client said it's now 50% of their diverse candidates that are declining an offer at that stage.

Speaker 4:
I feel like the analytics is a part of it because I feel like there is a piece of not understanding what's happening in your organization. That then feeds the top of the funnel. Because if you understand how things aren't working for your people, then the way that you're talking to new audiences and how you're adjusting the culture of your organization, not just from a diversity perspective, but the entire culture then begins to shift and I'll get off my soap box.

Stacia Garr:
It's great. It's great. Yeah. I mean, I think that for the most progressive organizations from a DEI perspective I think they've figured this out. So in my head I'm thinking of like a General Mills, right? Like General Mills is kind of an, it isn't a non traditionally diverse location. But they've been focused on diversity for years and years and years. And it is part of their conversation when they're having people go through the interview process and then when they're onboarding new candidates, it's just kind of in, in the water, if you will. And so, you know, the folks like, General Mills understand this connection. I think that you're talking about, you know, we actually have to have an inclusive environment and we have to go talk about it to our candidates.

Stacia Garr:
And that has to be part of why they may want to join. I think, you know they are definitely in kind of the top level of maturity when it comes to this. And so I think that we're starting to see an awareness as I said, of, of the importance of inclusion broadly, I think that we're probably talking about the top 20%, 25% who are making that connection between, okay, we actually now have a much more inclusive culture. We at least can talk about inclusion in our culture in a meaningful way and tie that back to talent acquisition. So that would be my observation is, you know, we're still talking about probably 75% of companies who are not doing it, what do others think or have seen.

Speaker 4:
I have a couple of stories from clients are doing exactly what Speaker 4 is talking about. Again, it was driven by the same notion that Dell is putting out a number that, you know, they're making a public statement to Speaker 1's point around what's different now is that people are having to be transparent about their progress and then sort of validated on that progress. So, you know, the driver was, if we're going to put out a number, how do we know we're going to get there? So they looked at the internal path. They recognized that their representation overall was good, but it was not at managing, you know, supervisor managerial director levels. And so the very first decision they took was actually to change the opportunity for progress inside the business, before they look to do anything external, they recognize that if people coming in we're not seeing team lead supervisors that represented them, that was not likely to be a successful strategy. So they've actually chosen to change. And this is, this was three different organizations I talked to, they, they all focused on that internal mobility aspect first because they saw what was going on in their data. So I actually think there's, you know, potentially a very, very interesting study on like, how do you move the needle?

Stacia Garr:
That'll be after DEIB and analytics. Does anybody else have any questions on this one?

Speaker 5:
I do have a question around, have you done any work on sort of mapping the maturity of organizations, so on the client side, in terms of where they are on that journey and does it influence the type of vendors they're choosing, whether it's those that have got kind of completely focused on DEIB or those that have just got their established elsewhere in their organization, but have features and functionality?

Stacia Garr:
Hmm, that's a great question. We have not, when I was at Berson, I ran a big study on DNI maturity when we did a big maturity model. And did all of the things that you're supposed to do in terms of, you know, testing the impact on financial results in the like. What was kind of interesting at that time though, was that actually was the beginning of my interest in DNI tech, because when I asked people what tech they were using, they're like do you mean e-learning, it's like, no, that's not what I'm talking about. But so at that point, we certainly didn't see it. And I haven't run another maturity study to look at this, but I would say that, and this is just completely off the cuff. So excuse me, be the messiness of the thoughts, but I think that when we first see organizations looking into this, it's often a point solution.

Stacia Garr:
So, for instance, Textio is a, is a good example because it's a very clear use case. It's clear who the owner is. It's a, you know, a recruiter, a talent acquisition organization. Okay. We're going to fix our job descriptions. Okay, this is something we can pretty easily get our head around it's well scoped, etc. I would say that organizations who are newer to this space are more likely to buy something like that because it's very clear and the business case is clear. I think that the more sophisticated organizations, they're probably using that, and they're also, you know, looking at the more sophisticated beginning their, their analytics journey. So they may be looking at some of the more sophisticated analytics tools, like, like a Visier. But you know, they may not be doing some of the more sophisticated analytics.

Stacia Garr:
I think that then assuming that they've been able to use that technology to identify where their real challenges are, then we'll start to see kind of a more nuanced and sophisticated buyer of some of the other technologies. So they might be looking at you know, some things like organizational network analysis. So how are, you know, different populations connected within the organization, and how does that reflect inclusion? So you can kind of see how they would build in terms of their understanding and their willingness to go into some of the more nuanced aspects of the tech and what it can do. That's again, just kind of off the cuff of my thinking on what we would see. But I'm certainly curious to hear what others would think.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think maybe I can just add something to that point, is that one of the questions that we did ask in our survey of the vendors was, what is your customer organization size. And what we typically have tended to see, I don't have the numbers here, but I can share it with you later, is that more majority of our vendors reported customers who were smaller, had small number of employees. So under a thousand, I wanna say, so it doesn't necessarily reflect the majority, but of course, I think what it does show is maybe that smaller organizations are more open and willing to try these technologies for DEIB purposes than maybe more established and enterprise size organizations. So that might be something helpful.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. But I think what's interesting about that. Priyanka is, is we saw an increase in what was it, the organizations that were five to 10,000 over a couple of years ago. And so I think that we're seeing an increase, in certainly size and I think that it reflects the maturity of the solutions and probably a maturity of some of these organizations as well.

Speaker 1:
Would you mind if I ask a related question? Obviously sitting here in the UK I have a little bit of a sort of restricted view generally from effort by country, you know, what are the markets that really adopting this? I get a sense. So US are significant adopters, as well as the UK. Are there other hotspots around the globe where certain markets are really gravitating towards deploying these types of technologies?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. So I definitely say Canada Australia, New Zealand as well I would say Northern Europe. So Speaker 2 was here from, from Benelux. We're seeing, focus there. I'm just trying to think here.

Speaker 1:
That's a fairly typical pattern actually, isn't it. When we think about technology adoption, Scandinavian countries, Benelux countries, UK, US, and Australia is fairly typical. Okay, thank you.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I will say though, when we did a DEIB strategy report in one thing I was surprised in that research was the extent to which some Asian countries have been focused here. So you know, that is an area where I think that there is potential to their concerns are different. But there was more traction there than I would've guessed. Just kind of thinking about it without having done the research.

Stacia Garr:
I see, we've got just a couple of couple minutes left. Any other questions on this one? And Priyanka, do we have another question?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, actually we did receive an interesting one. This is the final one.

Stacia Garr:

Okay.

Stand alone solution vs add-on to an existing HR Tech platform?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So is it better to integrate a standalone solution with others, such as learning, ATS, etc. or find an add-on to an existing HR tech platform?

Stacia Garr:
We had the answer to this one. We could just call it a day and be all good.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
My instinct as a researcher is to say it depends.

Stacia Garr:
Yup. I agree. So do you want to give your thoughts Priyanka and then I can add on?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, I think like touching on what I had said earlier, you know, you already may have DEIB technology in solutions that you're using for something else. So it very well depends on what your use cases, what are the challenges that you're specifically looking to solve for? And what technologies already exist in your ecosystem. So if you're a Workday user, you already have that in your organization, it probably makes sense to go ahead and use their DEIB features and capabilities similarly with ADP. So I think versus like, if you have something very specific, it was just like, we've been talking more Texio for a bit. If that's something that you need to add to your recruiting efforts, then you need to look at a point solution that meets those very, very specific niche needs that your organization might have. What do you think Stacia?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think it just depends on where you are. And the other thing is you also may try something and find that it doesn't work. You know, you may try the, the Workday solution and find that that's not meeting your needs, and then you go and you find something else. So I think it just kinda depends on what those needs are and what you have available and the extent to which it meets,

Speaker 2:
If I may, I don't know how the situation is west, but here it looks, we don't even document more than gender. So I have these organizations now asking whether we can map, you know, all the different dimensions, necessity, sexual orientation, religion, etc., outside of an HCM, also due to GDPR issues. Because in the existing solutions, the best you get is a binary gender indication, even just binary. So there is nothing about the gender spectrum or whatever. So there is clearly a need, but I see organizations really being puzzled with finding solutions on how to satisfy the needs, because they were assuming that they had the data, but actually they don't

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I think what we tend to see here in the US is, is folks asking for voluntarily, and if it's voluntarily given, then then being able to include it. But to be honest, I think that this is an area I need to understand more for, for GDPR, because I don't actually, I mean, to me, my gut, when I hear about mapping outside of the HRS, it's like, Ooh, I'm not sure, but I think that that is completely rooted in gut. Does anybody else know kind of about the legal implications of that?

Speaker 4:
Wherever you're, if you're holding it, you're holding it. It's like, if you're the owner, you're the owner a hundred GDPR, that's more a case of what's your standing relative to the data. So if, if you can't, you'd have to, yeah. You can't really hand off that to a third party and say like, Oh, we're no longer the owner that third party is acting as an owner for you. You would, you would have to, like, I don't really see loopholes in terms of a business not being designated the owner of that data, if it's about their people. What I have seen some people do is try and do aggregation. So it's not a record on the employee. It's a, it's a extrapolation from the data. So we get a percentage, female, a percentage of race, but I'm not putting female against this specific employee. So I'm not, it's not on the person, therefore you're not got that same level of liability for it. But it's awkward. It's just awkward. And then typically your right Speaker 2, typically in Europe they don't track race and ethnicity for many, many strong reasons, which is different in the US. In the US you have to categorize somebody into five different standardized buckets of, of race for EOC reporting. So there's actually really different reporting frameworks in both places.

Stacia Garr:
Cool. Well, I see we are at time. So I want to just say thank you all for a robust discussion. Really appreciate everybody's participation and thoughts, and obviously, you know, this is area, that we're continuing to research and to work on. And so, you know, if you have other areas of interest or things that you think, Hey, this is something that, that is really I'm hearing a lot from my clients or my customers, or whereas just top of mind for us as an organization we definitely would love to hear about it. So you can drop me an emali at [email protected] or Priyanka, just Priyanka at the same place, or if you can't remember either of those [email protected]. And and we would love to hear from you. So with that gonna say, thank you so much. And until the next time that we all come together, we hope that you do well and stay safe.

 

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr:
Okay, now we are recording. So we're going to go ahead and get started now for those of you, I have not met I'm Stacia Garr I'm Co-Founder and Principal Analyst with RedThread. We have with us today for this Q&A call Heather Gilmartin Adams. And she is the one who has done much of the research here. So it's a good thing that she's on here. So for those of you who have not attended one of these Q&A calls before they tend to be pretty informal affairs. The whole point is for us just to give a quick overview of what we've learned in the research, and then to respond to questions that have either been submitted in advance or two questions that folks have here today. And so we really try to encourage this to be a discussion because, if we wanted to do a webinar, we do a webinar really is a Q&A call, to kind of have that discussion. That's the whole point. Heather, do you wanna go to the next slide?

How we help and what we do

Stacia Garr:
So for those of you who may not know who we are, I assume most of you do, but we are a human capital research membership, focused on a range of things most important for today, learning and career but also do performance and play experience, DNI in people analytics and then HR technologies. The work that we do, you can find on our website, which we have there at the top, which is a research membership. We also do advisory education. We have podcasts now, and actually we are as of next Wednesday, launching our new official RedThread podcast, and the first season is called the Skills Obsession. So that is probably going to be relevant for, for all of you here today. So so with that, I think Heather, let's move on to the next slide and I'll turn it over to you. So skills and competencies, so Heather, what's the deal?

What's the deal?

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. So we started this research mid-fall last year and came into it kind of thinking there's all this stuff out here about skills and competencies in particularly the skills conversation as many of you are probably aware has been heating up for the last couple of years and it's become something that's, you know, more from, from sort of a OneNote conversation about robots taking our jobs and how are we going to deal with automation to a much broader conversation about you know, planning for the future, ensuring that employees are developing toward the future.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
How do we know what skills we have in the future? How do we know what skills we have so that we can identify the gaps so that we can fill those gaps. And then also a really big piece around agility, right? So organizational agility and being able to prepare, equip employees, equip the workforce to pivot to quickly changing environments. And so that was sort of the impetus for our research. We saw that the conversation was heating up and decided to look into it and ended up realizing that there was this, this conversation about skills, skills and competencies, and why what are the differences between them and why, why are those differences important and to whom? So it turned out that there was a lot of discussion and a lot of confusion, frankly, in organizations about what are skills, what are competencies, and then floating around there also, you know, what our capabilities and how are, how are they all different and how do you fit them together?

Questions that started our research

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And so, we decided to start our research there and we started asking questions like, what are the difference between skills and competencies, do the differences matter and to whom, how are organizations reconciling skills and competencies. And importantly, we kind of came into this research with an assumption and a hypothesis that the answer for all organizations was to blend the skills and competencies that the differences really didn't matter. And that the, the conversations about how do we define the, how do we define the terms? And how do we help our employees understand the differences between the two that we really kind of assumed that those didn't matter and that the conversation really needed to focus on just the question of what do we have now, doesn't matter what you can call it. What can our organization do now, and what can our organization do?

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
What does our organization need to be doing in the future? It turned out actually that we were wrong about that. The differences do matter, in certain circumstances to certain people. And so that's kind of what I wanted to share with you at first, what we found is that both skills and competencies do answer two very critical questions. What can our workforce do now and what will our workforce need to be able to do in the future? But they don't, they answered them from slightly different perspectives and with strictly slightly different strengths.

What did we find?

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And it turns out that those slight differences do matter to those of us trying to get skills, to sort of reconcile skills and competencies in our organizations. So so people who are in HR or who are in learning and development, who perhaps see that, okay, my organization has perhaps just as an example perhaps a legacy competency framework that we've been using for performance management. And now we're, we're incorporating a skills platform and how do we get those two things to work together? It turns out then that these differences are really, really important to people who are trying to answer those questions. They're not, the differences are not so important to employees or leaders who really just want to know, what do you need me to do? Like where do I need to go to get my development or my learning, or, or my performance management, what system do I need to go to? And what do you need, what information do you need me to put into it? And I don't really care what you call it is kind of the perspective that employees and leaders have.

The differences do matter

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
However, like I said, to those of us trying to reconcile them in our organizations, it turns out that these differences that you see on the slides, on this slide become pretty important. And two that I would call out are that skills are a little bit more granular, whereas competencies tend to be a bit broader and that's important because it, it, the granularity of skills often makes them more transferable across functions or even across industries than competencies, which tend to be more tied to how I do a particular job in a particular context. Also one thing that we found was that skills tend to be owned by the employee. You know, I, I, as the employee, I'm responsible for, for completing my skills profile and for keeping that updated as a way of marketing myself internally to the organization. So that maybe I can be noticed for, for gig work or for side projects or developmental opportunities like that. Whereas competencies do still tend to be owned by HR, meaning that the frameworks are the definitions and the frameworks are decided, written and updated by, by someone in HR.

Stacia Garr:
Sorry, sorry, Heather, maybe let's pause there and see if anybody has any questions or thoughts on this one. Does this align with how you're seeing this difference between skills and competencies? Is there anything in here that's surprising.

Speaker 1:
I think what's interesting to me is with IEEE and open skills network once calling them rich competency definitions, and one's calling them rich skill descriptors, and they mean, their doing the same thing to standardize the transfer of this information from tech platforms and tech platform. So they wanted to use a single data standard from a technology perspective, regardless of what you want to call it, pick the cap of what they're calling them.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah.

Stacia Garr:
And it seems inevitable though, right? You have to fix something, some word that we have used in the past, that roughly aligns, even if it comes with a bunch of baggage.

Speaker 1:
Uh huh

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, Great thanks!

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. It's interesting. I think one of the things that came out of this research, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, is the importance of at least deciding within your organization, how you're going to call things. And then, you know, hopefully the idea is that eventually it'll, it'll become sort of a cross-organizational or industry standard. Hopefully those two and IEEE and will reconcile themselves at some point. But that's also one of the powers of of skills ontology is, is that you don't have to have quite as much rigor in your definitions. If you're, if you're a technology is able to kind of group things, regardless of labels, any other questions on this or comments, observations?

Speaker 2:
I think that ownership aspect what's what's the, what's kind of interesting. So, right now we have, let's say functional and core competencies, and we want to move into that skills area. And our thought was that maybe we can actually make the functions, the owner of those kinds of skills, because also we are of course, trying to see, okay, how can we, how can we manage that big universe? Right. And this is where I really liked this thinking about ownership, right? Because I think now in the future, yes, we as HR or we as a corporation, we will, we will still own the competencies. But to be honest for skills, I would really love, love for the functions to actually take this over, because it's actually getting too granular. And also in terms of updating, right, I mean, skills you need to update every year, or maybe even, let's say within the year and for competencies, I think of course you also need to update it, but they are, as you are pointing out, there are far more aesthetic. So I found this a very nice trick of forethought.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah, that's great. And one of the things, the powers of a lot of the skills platforms is that they're continually updating you know, if you're messaging to employees that it's, beneficial to them to keep their profiles updated, then you can kind of rely on the skills that are in your system to be, to be continually updated.

Speaker 1:
And we touched on this a little bit yesterday, in terms of the, is it the skill that's being, what's being updated? Is it the proficiency level evidence of something you've done with that skill? It's not necessarily adding a binary net new skill every day or every week or every month.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Right.

Speaker 1:
And that's always where the devil is right, in the nuances of that.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
For sure.

Speaker 1:
I'm not sure how Speaker 2 you pronounce your first name, but I think that's exactly the kind of conversation who owns the dynamic nature of that.

Speaker 2:
Exactly, exactly. That is actually right. I mean, we've had, let's say all our experiences in the past with, for instance, we've used Taleo in the past, right. We switched to Workday and in Taleo, we had a thing called talent profile. And of course we always ask people to fill out those those kinds of talent profiles.

Speaker 2:
But to be honest, if you are trying to push this from a, from a corporate point of view, your impact is of course limited, but once you push it down to the businesses and to the functions, then you actually see those let's say populations really putting in their, their skills and competencies and development plans and those kinds of things. So, but I think that's a, that's a great slide to think about. Okay. How do you want to structure your governance around that.

Speaker 1:
And that's an HR department that will let go of that control because they want to own it?

Speaker 2:
Exactly.

Speaker 3:
Yeah. I would like to add one more point it's about competence has been steady. I think competencies as well as skills that are quite dynamic, just because, you know the behaviors change all the time and the situation that people working they're changing really fast. So, you know, positioning competencies aesthetic for me sounds a bit problematic, but other than that, it looks pretty good. So thanks for this summary.

Speaker 4:
Yeah. All right. I actually had the same comment. I was looking at this slide and I think the one that I feel like the, ,it shouldn't be split the way it is, is the skills and competencies for dynamic and study, because I feel like both skills and competencies, can actually go by both descriptions so we can have skills being dynamic can be convenient, continually updating them, and they can also be static at every point in time. So maybe not, not quite split the way everything else is kind of laid out.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Hmm. That's interesting.

Stacia Garr:
Maybe, maybe to kind of dig in a little bit there. I feel like we haven't necessarily picked on the point around enabled and maintained by tech and versus manually built change, which is immediately above. And I think that nature is actually kind of what's driving that comment or that bullet around dynamic versus static, because if something is manually built, it is by its very nature going to be more static.

Stacia Garr:
Just because we don't have, you know, time and energy and the like; versus what we're seeing with skills, which is this continual updating this whole concept of an ontology versus the taxonomy that we've used in the past. And so I think for at least as we looked at it and what we heard in the interviews, that's kind of what drove that distinction.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah.

Speaker 5:
Yeah. And then I think we're still, you know, the, the whole industry, you know, in HR and learning and development were still struggling with their definition of competencies. There is no, you know, generally, you know, overall agreement on how we define competence, right. So that is why, you know, when we come from different point of understanding and defining the thing, then definitely we will have far different descriptors for that. So, yeah, depending on their context, probably we'll go with static or dynamic. My preference will go for dynamic for both, just because of the nature. You know, people are evolving all the time, but I don't understand for the assessment perspective, you probably need to have something in a static mode so that you can, you would be able to assess and do revelation.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. Yeah. And actually there's no agreed definition for skills either, or for a lot of the other terms.

Speaker 1:
And maybe that's, that seems to be where we're all focusing on, right. Is the description of what the skill is from our kind of dictionary perspective, but then what people are able to do. If I, I can be always improving my critical thinking, but that's more of a strategic competency. And I forget who it was, who said, strategy can be fairly static, but how you execute that can be really dynamic. And so the definition of problem solving or critical thinking is not going to change at the same rate of how you do cloud engineering, whether it's with Amazon or Azure or whatever those things are going to be in definition, more dynamic from version 10 to version 11. And it's, it's the proficiency of the person. And so I, I don't know if there's a way to describe that or kind of summarize that, that there's this, the definition, that's one thing. And as a scale definition could be static because it's something that's not changing gap accounting doesn't change every week. That's just not the technical static skill or set of skills, but something else could be very rapidly changing.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. I think as we're talking, I think one clarification that I, that I'm realizing in my head is that yeah, these, these definitions are not, or these descriptions

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Are not actually meant to describe the word skill or the word competency they're meant to describe sort of how skills frameworks or skills platforms show up or are used today and how competency frameworks show up and are used in organizations today. Speaker 1, if you're not familiar with…

Speaker 6:
Maybe if I, if I may just, just to be a little bit provocative, it's interesting because we, we, we've been discussing about this, this slide now for about 10 minutes, but we don't have an agreement and everyone is somehow, you know, bringing its own, I know, vision on definition. I just would like to have maybe a provocative thought on that. How, how it sounds so great upskilling race killing it wouldn't be so trendy to say upcompetency recompetency, for me this has to do not really with the content but it sounds to me, again, an older type of let's call it marketing, marketing, you know terminology that in a certain sense, we need to come up in order to be able then to define the different products that where we ask for sheeting today. But this is totally, this is totally you know provocative. So then we would probably learn by listening to you and going to the next slide.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yes. Thank you. I actually, yeah, we were, Stacia and I were back channeling a little bit about, Hey, let's let maybe move on to the next slide. So thank you for that Speaker 6 I think you're right though. There is a decent, there is a marketing angle to this, right? The, some of the skills platforms are just trying to distinguish themselves in the market. That's just a frank element of this.

Speaker 2:
Yeah. And thanks to, you know, for actually making, making that comment. I think that's a very good one because I mean, right now I'm talking, I think it's three or two or three or four different vendors for a competency and skill framework. And of course, as you say, I mean, skills are trendy. They are, they are of course trying to push it. Right. But at the end of the day, I think it's, it's it's really hard to make your, your choice as a company. So thanks for that thought. Nice one!

Forward-thinking orgs are reconciling skills & competencies by…

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yep. All right. So what the research found then is that organizations are reconciling as so, as you mentioned, Speaker 6 there are lots of organizations are grappling with this, right? We have, we have competencies. We are thinking about adding skills. How do we bring, how do we put those two together? And we found in the research that there are three things that organizations are doing to, to help, help them work, work well together. And it doesn't necessarily mean that they're making them the same thing, or that they're bringing them into the same system. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they, don't the things that they're doing to help them work better together are first leveraging their strengths. So understanding a lot of what we just talked about on the previous slide and using that to to tackle whatever business challenges or whatever people challenges are, are most pressing for their organizations.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
So the four that we, the four business challenges that sort of popped up the most in our interviews and round tables were employee development, career mobility, performance management, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. It turns out that both skills and competencies have strengths that they can offer to help, to help with those business challenges. And I didn't I don't want to dive into exactly how that happens, but we do have an infographic on our website that, that briefly describes how skills and competencies can support each of those business challenges. So we'll drop that into the chat here during the Q&A. The second thing that organizations are doing are considering, and using as much data available as possible. So, there are, you know, there's a ton of data available in a skills database.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
There's a ton of data available in competencies frameworks, there are also, there's a lot of data outside of that in you know, like LinkedIn and GitHub and job descriptions and all of these other sources that are both internal to the organization and external to the organization. And they're really forward thinking organizations are, mapping all of that out and seeing, okay, how can we, how can we bring this data together, and leverage it as best as possible. So one, just as an example, that data doesn't all have to live in the same system necessarily. Although there are lots of vendors now who are, who are doing a really cool job at bringing as much data as possible together into the same system. But one organization, for example had a lot of skills data in their skills platform, but the skills platform for some technical reasons, wasn't able to capture proficiency information and they wanted proficiency information.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And so they kept that in a spreadsheet that was available to all employees. And so that wasn't, that's not like their ideal or long-term solution, but it was a solution that allowed them to see everything that they wanted to, at least in the short term. And then the third, and this kind of gets to a lot of what we were talking about. The third thing that organizations are doing are as crafting clear and consistent messaging. So even as we are, are grappling with the distinctions and the definitions, and how are we going to bring all these things together? How are we going to conceptually bring the things together? How are we going to bring the data together? The messaging to employees and leaders needs to be a lot more simple than that. And so what we're seeing, what we've seen is that some organizations, these are just three messaging strategies that we know that there are more, but the, I think these are really good examples.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Some organizations are just saying, we're going to call everything skills, even if they're actually more competencies. And we're going to think about them as competencies within HR, we're going to talk to employees about, about their skills. And, that works well for some organizations, particularly if, if for whatever reason competencies has kind of a bad name in the organization, as you know, sometimes, competencies, just the word, the term has a negative connotation in some organizations. And so those organizations do well by calling everything skills, then some organizations do make it, they, they make clear definitional distinctions. So Johnson and Johnson for example, is one organization we talked to and they talk about competencies at a functional level and skills at a specific job level. And they very clearly say, no, we talked about competencies here and skills here.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And, and that helps employees understand, okay, this is when I use competencies. This is when I use skills and managers: this is when I use competencies, this is when I use skills. This is how skills ladder up to competencies. And, they make it sort of very clear when employees should do what. And then another approach is not use any terminology at all, and just talk about, Hey, what can you do? What do you need? Leaders, what do you need to be able to do, and have them talk through what they need to be able to do, and then kind of categorize back on the back end, if you need to the. The biggest, biggest learning there though is just to be just pick something and be consistent.

How are people relating skills & competencies to capabilities?

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
So then this is, you know, the Q&A part of the Q&A, or well the Q part of the Q&A. So these were the questions that we had submitted. The first was how are people relating skills and competencies to capabilities? So kind of going back to what we were just saying about clear and consistent messaging, it differs from organization to organization, depending on what they've chosen for their messaging. Broadly speaking capabilities tend to be talked about as sort of the biggest umbrella and often you'll see skills and competencies as part of the definition of capabilities. Capabilities being the most broad descriptor of what we can do is that, does that jive with what the rest of you are seeing? Any sort of comments on that?

Speaker 5:
I think capabilities is about, more about ability to learn and perform in the future rather than in the moment. So you have skills, competencies and capability for growth, yes. For performance today, as well for growth. At least this is the type of description that we, I use and my colleagues use in our discussions and difference between skills and competencies and capabilities.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
That's interesting. Thank you. Other insights on that,

Speaker 2:
I would tend to agree with that, right. I mean, that capabilities is somehow, let's say a little bit of a higher level. Maybe it just, I mean, maybe I would say that this would coincident with like 70% of the list of the literature that I have read over the last three or four. I think what, what I really liked about your research is that you are pointing out that this might be interesting for HR employees to engage in. And I think this is what was really nice to read because we also have, I mean, I cannot even recall how many hours we've had yet at the trying to distinguish this, but I think also I believe that yes, that may be interesting for us, but for our end to our employees and leaders, I mean, yeah. I mean, they, they might really get, okay, I need this for development, or I need this for hiring or whatever. But let's say for this, for those granular differences, I think, yeah, that is that's not too much of an interest for them. I think that was, that was a great point that you made there.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Oh, thanks. Yeah. It was interesting. You, you mentioned reading articles that was what we found the, the literature that is less focused for an HR audience tended to just sort of use all of the terms as synonyms, right. So you would see sentences that said skills, competencies, capabilities, abilities, knowledge, you know, and they were just using them all interchangeably. Whereas when you do get into the literature, that's more focused on an HR audience. That's when you start seeing distinctions being made. Other, any other sort of questions or insights or comments on this question of how are people relating skills and competencies to capabilities. Okay.

Speaker 1:
I think the capability question is that tends to broker the gap between HR and business or it invites that conversation. It's not necessarily always had or well-defined, but as we start using that, and it's, I've started to see it somewhat confused with the, the interchange of capacity, which is kind of forward planning, but are you capable to do what the business needs to do today? So it can be both now and forward-looking, but the capacity to take on new projects in the future, I think is more, as we think about the kind of operating model or supply chain of skills to take on new R and D or innovation or pivot to new lines of business that's capacity as well as capability. That's interesting.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Okay.

Speaker 7:
One thing I just want to add as for the competency and capability, those tend to be talked about both at the individual level and at the organization level. I don't think that's true as much for skills. It's usually tied to like individuals, but people talk about, you know, we have these organizational capabilities or organizational competencies, and then, you know, in the next breath they'll be talking about individual competencies and,

Speaker 2:
Hmm. That's a great insight. Yeah. Thanks, Speaker 7.

Speaker 7:
Pleasure.

How can skills be assessed for proficiency levels?

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
So the next question was how can skills be assessed for proficiency levels? So this was not something that we included in this report that just came out. And so we've done, we'd done a bit of looking into it. It's something that we plan on looking into a little bit more. So I'll just give kind of a, an initial swag and would love to hear your comments as well. So what we're seeing thus far is that there are some really cool vendors doing some cool stuff to use latent data or data exhausts data that's, that's created sort of in the course of doing business to infer proficiency levels for skills, but we're seeing it happened mostly on the technical skills side.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
So for example, there's a company that they work with a lot of healthcare organizations and so they plug their platform or they plug their tech into the employee electronic health records system. And whenever a nurse logs procedure, it infers that that nurse is skilled in that procedure and is getting more skilled in that procedure. Another example is a company that sits on top of project management software, like Jira or Asana. And whenever you complete a task in the, project management software, it will give you sort of credit for having the skills that are associated with that task. And then the more, you do that skill or the more you do that type of task the more it assesses, it gives you credit for proficiency.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And then that particular software also we'll send a note to the people, the other people associated with that task and ask them to kind of give feedback on your, your skill level at that task. So, so there's some really interesting approaches. So far though, like I said, they're not getting into, Speaker 1 is what you were saying, that the more durable skills or the softer skills, the human skills, whatever you want to call it we're seeing it more on sort of the, the things that are really hard and observable. What are you guys seeing?

Speaker 7:
The other thing I'll add to that is there are some systems also that look at like social data and email, and then they basically identify topics and then tie that to skills and proficiency levels. So if they see you're getting a lot of inbound email on a topic, they'll equate that to a skill and say, you must be you know, you must be very proficient because a lot of people ask you about this.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
That's interesting. Do you, can you share the names of who we should be looking at for that kind of thing?

Speaker 7:
Well, I think Microsoft Viva is taking that approach. And then the other one I am aware of is Starmind Starmind. is doing it well, and actually Viva too. It looks like more of a knowledge management kind of place, or they turn that into like expert location. So you're looking for people with expertise on this topic, and it'll, it'll just show you a list and, Viva at least in a demo of it. It, it does the, it'll look at your organizational content on that topic and give you a list of that as well.

Stacia Garr:
I think Speaker 2 to your, your question in chat around basically data privacy these, from what we've seen organizations are handling this in a couple of different ways. One is by allowing folks to either opt in or opt out of having this information collected on them. The second is by also providing information back to them that could be useful. So, you know, in this example of saying, you know, you, we think your, your top skills and proficiencies are our competencies are X, Y, or Z. Or you're looking for some help with X, Y, or Z. Here's some folks who might be able to help you. And so making sure that that information doesn't just live behind, you know, the, the wall with HR or with a certain subset of leaders, but actually is much more accessible to others. There's some really good research that Accenture did, I guess now about 18 months ago that showed that folks open this to having information about them collected through digital exhaust. Their openness is much higher if they get some value in return for that information being collected.

Speaker 2:
Oh, great. Thanks. Thanks much. I think it's really important to us. I think as we are embarking on this, I mean, I'm residing in Germany and I am, I can already envision that from those conversations with our Vox councils on GDPR. But I think once of course, you give this in opt in and opt out option and of course, making that kind of value proposition, as you say, I think that's a, that's a really promising no, thanks. That's, that's great input. Thanks a lot.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah and I think, you know, in general, so I do most of our data analytics research and in general, we see these things much more slowly adopted in Europe, obviously because of GDPR, but you know, here in California, we've got the CCPA and we've got some other things potentially going down the bike as well. So I have seen a dramatic increase in the carefulness of vendors in terms of thinking about everyone now thinks about, okay, well, how are we going to get this through GDPR? And or how is it going to be GDPR compliant and how will we get it through the works councils? It is much less likely, I think then, you know, three to five years ago where people would just say, well, you know, we'll just focus on the American market or the New Zealand Australian market, and, you know, whatever for Europe we'll deal with it when we, when we need to.

Stacia Garr:
But the tenor has shifted so dramatically that there's just a much higher degree of awareness and we're starting to see technologies get through the works councils that we thought again, like three years ago. Wouldn't so things like organizational network analysis based on passive data collection. So based on digital exhaust, we're seeing that start to get through with much higher frequency in the last 18 months or so. So I think that there is a future here for some of this work in Europe, but there, it may take longer than in the U S and there certainly will have to be all those accommodations.

Speaker 4:
If I may, I, I surely share, of course Speaker 2, being of course in Europe, but what is extraordinary here is if I think that, you know, a couple of years back, and unfortunately I've been around now for a while, but it was, it was simply saw out somehow to just surface and manage, you know, the skills. How many times we said, we exactly don't know what type of human capital we have. And this is probably because there was a certain stringent company tenancy system that was, you know, driven by the organization without effectively surfacing the talent, the real talent, most of the time, the real talents are the secondary maybe job of people and not maybe the job description they haven't been hired for. So what I found extraordinary is this is for sure going to unleash skills that we are even not aware of.

Speaker 4:
Second point is more, how are we going to us as the proficiency for that? That's to me the validation point, it's something that, of course it's still an open and open evolution again, because of course it can go from how many likes, do I get from my, you know, teammates, if I just say that I'm a good singer or properly, you know, proficiency validation that then can be, of course use it also at the benefit of the employee, because somehow, you know, we don't need anymore. I don't know, validation authority that will tell me how good I am with Excel, but this could also become a vehicle for my whole evolution in skills development. So this is absolutely for me you know, extraordinary, of course we will see, but with regulation, something that that will come next for now the ability to unleash this, this is what I believe we should, we should continue to talk about.

Does a learning platform need to have skills and competencies defined before adding an internal marketplace solution?

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Very cool. All right. Next question is, does a learning platform need to have all skills and competencies defined before adding an internal marketplace solution? So, Stacia and I were talking about this yesterday, and there's sort of a principle answer and then a logistical answer, or a tech, a tech bounded answer. So the principle answer is no. We don't think so. Depending on what your goal is for the internal marketplace, if you're looking to help people connect with one another on specific topics or even if you're trying to help them find you know, gigs or opportunities that can be done with you know, either partially defined skills and competencies, or you know you could launch that kind of thing and just have it be a place for people to connect. Stacia. Do you want to, you had a good point, you had a good thought on that. Do you want to elaborate on that at all?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I mean, I just think that it is, you said it just depends on what your purpose is and having an internal talent marketplace. And so if you're trying, for instance, to increase people's networks and their access to other folks as a result of the internal talent marketplace, as one thing, you know, if you're, if you really are much more concerned about getting skills built and less about measuring them and is the analytics person that of course makes my heart go, but there's also reality. If, if that's the case, then, then, you know, I don't think that you need to have all of this mapped out. I mean, I think we can sometimes get in our own ways as we're trying to kind of get all the details versus just having a minimal viable product that we can use for folks.

Stacia Garr:
But I think to, to Heather's point, you know, from a lot of the tech vendors are requiring that you have this mapped from, at the beginning obviously there's more power and longterm power, particularly if you think about trying to having big data set from which to train your algorithms and to refine what you're trying to do. There's a huge need to have it all mapped in, in the beginning, but you know, we all live in the real world. And so I would say it's not necessary. But it is certainly desirable.

Speaker 6:
Can I ask a slightly different question? Can a learning platform have all skills and competencies defined?

Speaker 6:
The answer's no, I don't think that's a problem that you can solve completely for anything more than a moment in time.

Stacia Garr:
I think that's the beauty of some of the automation and the technical capabilities is that they can get a lot closer to defining a much broader percentage of the skills and competencies that are out there given the technical capabilities and the machine learning that we have in the deep learning, ect…ect… But I think you're absolutely right, Speaker 6, like, are we going to be able to identify every skill in the entire world? Absolutely not.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. I think that's a great point, Speaker 1 and I, and I think with a little bit of a foot in each camp, really, as a skills kind of advocate, but also on the other side, I mean, I'm defining them as, as one thing. I think the precision of surfacing, the nouns that we them with is what a lot of the AI is doing. So they're not defining them. They're just cataloging the nouns that we're using to evolve or described skills and resumes and profiles. And that's not defining them as listing vocabulary. And, and so I think those, it goes back to the previous question, defining proficiency of the skills. That's a whole different that's a whole different beast. So I think that the precision is actually important in how you ask or answer that question.

Speaker 6:
Yeah. I think that definition would like to suggest you have to name it and then you have to scale it. So you have to say, what is what is highly proficient versus, you know, beginner or whatever your scale is. And then I think the other element of it is the context in which that can be demonstrated. And I, yeah, I think just getting the first two, just the definition, just the name and the scale has proven to be pretty difficult. And then when you layer in the context of, you know, what's data analysis for an accountant versus you know, for a product manager or project manager but yes, the tech or the tech is very good at getting that salt, you know, partially salt and you know, it'll get better

Speaker 1:
And you, and you used the word Stacia purpose, right? It depends what your purpose for the marketplace is, which if you take the other side of that, it depends on what your purpose for being in the marketplace is if I have aspirations that are not based on my skill set, but I am incredibly motivated to go do customer service. That's not how I entered the company, but that's what I want to go do. That's more purpose than skillset. And so there are opportunities in the marketplace to connect in that way. Because motivation is a, is a huge factor in performance and desire to learn in some of those static competencies, but are, I want to develop and grow but I have an aptitude for, and that's, that's where I want to put my, my purpose. So, yeah, I think, I think the question's been answered is they don't have to have them all, but the marketplace needs to be looking needs to be able to facilitate non skill based kind of collaboration or connection or promotion or competence giving in those aspects.

Speaker 2:
Because if it is skills only, that's not good either. I mean, I think you and I have talked about women will apply for jobs where they have a super high percentage of skill fit. And even if the tool tells them, you're a 90% fit, that might not be enough of a competence factor, whereas my gender will apply for jobs that were 60% fit for. And so there's other elements of de biasing the marketplace based on some of those kind of social things that we know.

Speaker 2:
And I think that, that other point that you just mentioned, Speaker 1, I think it's also something that, that I did not yet have on my radar, but I think you're very right. I mean, if those marketplaces of course are looking to what skills I mean, that's, that's of course also a very biased view towards things because oftentimes your competencies are far more important than let's say to, to actually go and embrace a new solution.

Speaker 2:
Right. I mean, I started in finance and to be honest, when I moved to HR, I had none of the skills that they did that, you know, is actually required in HR. I mean, they were basically hiring me based on competencies, right. So if I know going to that internal marketplace, I apply for that HR position. I think I'd be filled out immediately. Because I just don't have it. I think that's a, that's a, that's a great point that you are making, and I did not have that on my radar screen yet.

Speaker 1:
That's how many of us have ended up in this field, Speaker 2. Including myself.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It could be because as you say, Speaker 1, I mean, it's important is what motivates you, right. What's driving you where you want to develop, how you want to learn, how you take on change, all those kinds of things, right?

Speaker 6:
Yeah. I mean, by far the most common hiring criteria is your experience doing the exact job we're hiring you for which, you know, it doesn't really explicitly relate to the, the skills or to the potential.

Speaker 1:
And also to the desire, you know, I think that's the danger we get ourselves into with some of these things is the algorithm is going to assume, you're going to want to do the thing that's like what you've always done as you just said, Speaker 6, and we know how many of us go into a new job wanting to do exactly what we just did in our last job or a new gig. You know what I mean? That's, that's pretty rare. So you know, it, I know we didn't explicitly talk about this, but, you know, in addition to data ethics concerns that I have with some of this, my, my concern is are forcing people into a box that is not the box they want to be in moving forward. And so we have to make sure that these systems enable, you know, folks to not just say this or, or have captured, but this is what they were good at, but these are the things they want to become good at and make sure that we're using assistance to provide those opportunities. Should we move on?

How do you maintain the skills & competencies models that workers orgs are using today?

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
How do you maintain the skills and competencies models that workers orgs are using today?

Speaker 6:
You get all the good ones

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
So we touched on this a little bit actually in terms of manual maintenance versus tech maintenance. And I think that's perhaps the most relevant difference, right? Is how do you maintain these? Well, right now it seems that skills frameworks, are more heavily based on tech and therefore more dynamic and more continually updated competencies are maintained largely manually by someone in HR, but as we've discussed, like it doesn't have to be that way. It is just currently the way things are set up. Insights on that?

Speaker 2:
Yeah. I can, I can actually only talk to what competencies I think, because they are, let's say fewer numbers and they are owned by us as a, as a corporation. I mean, I'm referring them every couple of years and typically, I mean, if you're not making changes to the overall, let's say naming of the competencies, we do actually sometimes update the behavioral anchors that we, that we put in place. For instance, if we want to make this more inclusive if you want this more digital, more learning oriented, you know, then, then we might also want to tweak some, some of those things down, but for four skills, I would be interested to hear from the group, because this is probably one to move to. And, and I guess that's the bigger maintenance activity.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. One of the things that came out of the research was this question of, okay, if you're going to, if you have a skills platform that requires employees to input their data in order for it to be maintained and updated. So it relies on employees to say what skills they have and sometimes give, give an estimate of how, of their proficiency level in that, in that skill. And sometimes then it requires even the manager to go in and verify that skill in that proficiency level. So then, then it's a question of sort of change management and motivation and how do you, how do you get people to, how do you incentivize people to to, to do all those things, to provide that information? And one of the things that, and we've touched on this a little bit in this conversation is the importance of sort of demonstrating the benefit of, of doing so.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
So Stacia mentioned this a little bit in, in when she was talking about the opt in opt out. But it turns out just in general showing the what's in it for me. So sort of helping employees see view their skills profile as a marketing tool for themselves, right. Sort of the way that they would use LinkedIn more broadly. But if they, if they use that as a way to demonstrate to the organization, the skills that they have and the opportunities that they would like to take advantage of the sort of there has to be, there has to be a sort of a cultural element built into it around this. This is what's, this is, this is how you grow in the organization is by marketing your skills and making yourself available for opportunities. That was one of the really, really interesting things that we found when we were talking to people.

Stacia Garr:

Great we have just 4 minutes left. So are there any questions we didn't get to that folks want to try to slide in here before we call it good for today?

What system works best?

Speaker 2:
Sorry if I take some time here. I mean you're, your research is really great that you're saying, okay, skills and competencies, our hypothesis did not work out. Right. We need both. What I'd be interested to hear from the group here is, I mean, how do you think about this working out system wise? Right. Because to be honest for us, we are working with Workday, right. And I think if now, if I take this competency and skill approach and say, okay, they are both relevant. I mean, I just have a big concern that our employees are getting confused because they're all, those are different elements. And yes, of course I can explain it, but I think still to be honest, I already have a different position. That's a setting that kind of internally in HR. So I just wonder what the group could contribute there.

Stacia Garr:
Any thoughts, anybody involved in both things?

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. I mean, I'll take a shot. So I think to, to put a little bit more nuance into the findings of the research some organizations are just saying we're going wholesale with skills. I think it was important for us to to highlight that that's not the only route and that for lots of organizations, maybe that don't have a platform like Workday that meshing the two together in a way that makes sense for their organization was what we wanted. That was what we wanted to highlight. It is the case that, you know some of the people that we talked to are making a wholesale push to go towards skills. What they're, what they're encountering though, is some resistance in their organizations to the people sort of standing up and say, Hey, we have this competencies framework. Like, why aren't we using that? And why do we need to replace it with skills? And so then it's a sort of a change management and messaging play.

Speaker 1:
That's a great point, Heather, I meant, or observation in my experience, a lot of those people who are like, Hey, hold on, that's a job. Well, my job is to build that competency framework. And you're about to steam roller it reinvent it, but that's my job. I'm an IO psychologist. I've got a PhD in writing that stuff. So how do I know let's get into the detail, let's have the argument about skills versus competencies and all of that, which would be of a three point scale or a seven point scale, and just take years. And it never goes anywhere. It's, it's unbelievable.

Speaker 3:
I will try to answer the question for Speaker 2. In my experience working with organizations, you know, there were some cases when definitely, you know there was like skills profile, but then there were organizational competencies and they were applicable to everyone within the company.

Speaker 3:
And let's say, the company says, in order to be successful within our business, you need to be able to develop it, to have those type of competencies. And they are, you know, and again, we spoke about that before it could be individual competencies or organizational competencies. So if you look from the perspective of our organization, you know, the question is, you know, why and what we are doing you know, let's say skills profile or competencies, frameworks, and then how do you apply them? What are their overall goal of the competency framework? Is it performance only for specific you know line of business, or it is related to the whole business? In my case that I described to you, there was distinction between skills profiles, and then organizational competencies for everyone to be successful within this organization, it could be, you know, cultural leadership and so on and so forth. So it definitely depends on the task that you are trying to achieve and on their solution that you are trying to find. So my, my 2 cents,

Speaker 2:
No, thanks. Thanks, Speaker 3. That is great input. Thanks much.

Conclusion

Stacia Garr:
Well, I think we are, we are at time and, and Speaker 2 let me know that the invitation did actually say 9:30. We usually only go an hour, so I think we're gonna cut it off there. And if you were planning on 90 minutes, you'll have an extra 30 back in your day. But I want to say thank you very much to everyone for the energy and the sharing of thoughts. And this is exactly what we want from these sessions. This is just the first of what will be many work pieces of work on skills this year. As I mentioned at the beginning, we are putting out the podcast starting next week on the skills obsession, and then we will be doing a number of different pieces this year on skills. So skills vendors is going to be one of them.

Stacia Garr:
And, and we're going to look at that from both the learning and the people analytics side. And we have a number of other ideas skills and diversity, equity inclusion, and belonging being one, and skills and mobility. We've written about both of them separately, but not together. So those are just a few of the ideas that we have for the year. So if anything particularly resonates, let us know. And in the meantime just keep on coming back. I think actually Heather had the slide that just shows our next Q&A call is in two weeks. You don't need to show it, but it's on DNI tech. And so if you're able to join us for that, that would be great. And if not, we will see you on another Q&A call in the future. Thank you so much for the time today, everyone.

 

 

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr:

Alright. Well, if we're going to go ahead and get started. So we want to first say thanks to everybody for joining today for this first Q and A call here in February. For anybody that I don't know who may watch the recording later, because I think I know everybody who's here today. I am, Stacia Garr Co-Founder of RedThread Research, and today we're doing a little bit of a different type of Q and A call in that we have a guest who's going to be leading the conversation with me and that Steve Arntz in I'll let him introduce himself in just a minute more properly. But the conversation today is around book clubs. And part of the reason that we we've actually been wanting to do this conversation with Steve for a long time. And part of the reason for that is that we've seen book clubs start to, to rise in popularity.

Stacia Garr:

And we have some hypothesis about why that is many of them related to the pandemic, but we think that this is kind of an interesting way to think about connectivity and learning and really kind of the social aspects, and fulfilling social needs that people have right now. So we have invited Stephen, he's going to tell us all about book clubs and everything he's learned as he's launched his company Campfire, and hopefully we'll come out of this knowing a lot more. And also, I think we were talking about maybe seeing if there is some appetite for starting a book club. So with that, for those of you who don't know who RedThread is, I want to go ahead and just remind you, we are a human capital research advisory membership, and we're focused on a range of things most relevant for today, learning and career, but a whole bunch of other things, as well as you see here.

Stacia Garr:

And so folks can check us out on redthreadresearch.com. So with that want to go ahead and let Steve introduce himself. And actually Steve is going to get to do much of the sharing, but like I said I want to express my appreciation to Steve for being here. He has a lot going on including a brand new baby. So we're excited that he made a little bit of time for us today. And we're also just in general, grateful for the friendship and the partnership with Steve. As we were launching the RedThread membership, he helped us do a lot of the thinking around it. And we're just very thankful for that. So, okay, Steve, over to you.

Steve Arntz:

Thank you. Stacia a very kind introduction. I do have a little baby girl born December 8th. And so that's been very exciting, good change for us. We had two boys before that and six and a half years, and then we had a little baby girl and Founder of Campfire and Campfire started as a book clubs company. But one thing I want everybody to know is that we don't, we don't really service corporate book clubs in the same way that we used to we're we have now pivoted towards just building man effective manager training basically. And it uses a lot of the same mechanics from book clubs, but as we share the research and the thoughts that I'll share today about book clubs, just know that that's not really our core business. It might have a slight bias to it cause I do love book clubs.

Steve Arntz:

But hopefully I can share it in a, in a more, less biased way than you might hear from a vendor. Who's trying to sell you a software and things like that. So I really appreciate Stacia having me here today. And I don't know how much more of an intro you'd like Stacia? I spent five years in the talent management space working on a suite, a platform called bridge, which was talent performance, career development, learning management, all of those things. So stuff that the RedThread audiences is very interested in and so spent a lot of time with talent leaders in the space. And so that's why I've really enjoyed so much the association friendship and relationship with RedThread, and Stacia and Dani.

Stacia Garr:

Thank you. Well, shall we dive in?

Steve Arntz:

Sure. Yeah, that'd be great. Let me, so I'll share my screen now.

Stacia Garr:

So one thing I should say, cause I don't know that Steve's been on, on one of these calls in the past, but these are highly interactive. He has some slides, but we're a small group and the whole point here is to have a conversation. So you jump in, I do have at the kind of end of what he's prepared, a few slides that have been submitted or a few questions, excuse me, they are on slides that have been submitted, but just jump in like this is a conversation,

Book Clubs are having a moment

Steve Arntz:

Love it so much. And I have slide six. I'll kind of force you to talk a little bit more, but jump in in any slide and that, that's awesome. That's very welcome in my mind. Very different than typical webinars. Webinars are kind of hard to try that energy sometimes because you're just talking to a, a wall sometimes. So as Stacia mentioned, book clubs are having a moment a little bit. There's some evidence of that here. You can see all of, I mean, I just grabbed a few when I searched news yesterday to get some more new stuff, it's just tons of stuff out there. I really liked this one. I changed the search parameters to just be in the last week and you can see stuff from different news sources. Literati is a great little company that does book clubs for kids, as well as for adults now raised $40 million for their business.

Steve Arntz:

You've got all of these different things happening around book clubs. I actually got this in the mail advertising a book club in a box and then I love Simon Sinek and he hosted his own book club at the B towards kind of the beginning of the pandemic saw that as an opportunity and a moment to help people to connect, which was really cool. I stopped searching for stress results because there were just so many articles on the social isolation side. The number I was able to find is that 42% of people are still working remotely at this point in the pandemic. It's predicted to be down to 21, 22% by the end of the year. I think that's probably optimistic. On the stress side of things, what we're seeing is just a dramatic increase in antidepressant prescriptions and all of these different indicators of a mental health challenge that we're having.

What can Book Clubs provide

Steve Arntz:

And, you know, it's, it's probably a little bit I don't know, ambitious to say that a book club could really dramatically impact these really meaningfully challenging hard things. But book clubs do provide a little bit of an antidote to those things. So an article from HBR talked about how it can provide calm. So if you just take a break in your day, read for six minutes, it can reduce stress by 68%. And so I've, I've worked that into my day to where I take reading breaks between meetings. If I have time between meetings, one of the common things that you can do is just go scroll your LinkedIn feed. I've replaced that with just grabbing the book that I'm reading, reading a couple pages and getting back to work and it helps to center me and bring that calm. And then the connection side, I love this quote by Patti Digh, the shortest distance between two people is a story.

Steve Arntz:

People read so that they can connect. They have a common place to now share a conversation. And so they can take this book and have a conversation with each other, but also with the author and it provides that opportunity for connection. And so that's what I, what I think is kind of behind this book club movement is people need both of these things desperately at the moment. And so we we've seen them in, in corporate as well. And so this is that first place to have a little bit of a conversation. And so I like to give people a chance to just sit and think, even though it's awkward on calls, but just think for a minute, I'll be quiet. I promise I'm not going to try to fill the awkward space about the bestest group discussion you've ever been a part of. Just, just sit and think for a minute, see if you can come up with something.

Best group discussion you have ever been a part of

Steve Arntz:

Because the group is so small. Is there anybody that has a group discussion that's come to mind that would be willing to come off mute and share?

Steve Arntz:

Speaker 1 ready?

Speaker 1:

There's several that come to mind. And as we said when I started when we were starting, I am in a book club. So that one comes to mind. I've been with that group for a long, long time. It's a meditation studies group. And so during the pandemic, we switched to book club because it was just something else that we could do. But how did it make me feel? And that thought made me think of my past. And so the feeling of connectedness, the feeling of talking about something that's in common and in our club, we, we sort of collectively choose, you know, someone puts out a list. And so we've, we've had some investment in what, what it is that we're talking about. But it made me think about my past when I was a facilitator and I would travel around to different offices.

Speaker 1:

And so I was the stranger, it was their home ground and the feeling of having a really robust conversation about who they were, what they were doing, which troubles they were having, you know, what we're going to talk about as I was teaching the class, all those things was the feeling of being connected and being helpful and working to together towards solving the problem. And so whether you get it through a book club or a facilitated workshop or a business meeting, it's really to me, I think that sort of productivity feeling like we're doing something important, working together, sharing like a common ground, a common reason for being there.

Steve Arntz:

That's amazing. Thank you for sharing. I love that. Does anyone else have anything that comes to mind?

Speaker 2:

Well just the, the thing that you did before with just being quiet, it just reminded me when I was in college, the program I was in we'd have lectures once a week, but then mostly it was like 20 or so people in seminar rooms and one of my seminar leads was a Quaker. So she's used to sitting in church for like two or three hours, just like silence until somebody had something to say. So she, it was very jarring at first, but she would like pose a question to the group and then she was just happy to sit there until somebody had something to say. And it's just there is a you know, there is a social and a brain process that happens when there's silence because, you know, somebody will get uncomfortable and to jump in and have something to say. So just as a, as a technique to kind of get people to open up and start a discussion, I just felt, it just reminded me of that.

Steve Arntz:

Awesome. Thanks for sharing. A group discussion that comes to mind is actually I was at a, I was at a dinner in San Diego, with someone, who's on the call here was actually there with me. And we had an hour long discussion around one question, which was, what's the one thing that we could change about ourselves that would make all the difference in our marriages to our spouses. And we sat for an hour talking and that was that's the group discussion that came to mind for me. And the reason that it came to mind is because there was safety, psychological safety is a big, massive component of book clubs and discussions that we have.

Steve Arntz:

And we were able to talk about, I think, like you mentioned, of meaningful change in wanting to improve and do better and all of those sorts of things. So is there anyone else that has something that's come to mind? I'm going to take the Quaker technique again, be quiet.

Speaker 3:

I'll chime in, and I have one other to throw in there. This is a runner up to the, to the discussions I had with Steve, because that one was obviously the best one, but in, in the other group discussion I had, it was, it, it was differing opinions and but it was intentionally. So, so when the group was formed to have the discussion, it was the understanding that, Hey, here's this book that, that it was political. This is where I lean in. It's kind of more of a historical, let's all weigh in on it.

Speaker 3:

And like, so everyone read it and gave their opinions on it, but it was all from different perspectives, all with the intent to understand what the other was saying. So it was more like it was, cause it was literally trying to build connectedness and understanding around something that, that it could be more difficult you know, with, with polarization. So that was having that, that intentional, you know, psychological safety going into it. Everyone knew that, that they, they, they were one was going to be actively listening and trying to understand from the other perspective, instead of kind of waiting for their turn to speak. And so that's kind of what, what was my runner up to one of the best conversations I've had as well.

Steve Arntz:

That's cool. Thank you for sharing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. I had one more, just what Chris was saying, and I'm doing it as we talk. One thing that I'm noticing for sure, as we're digital talking about it, the, the, the idea of the go round, right. You know, one person talks and then in the classroom when we're digital, it's, it's different, but it still happens the same that as one person talks, then the next one says, Oh, that makes me think of something in the next person. And I'm surprised by that happening on digital, but I think it's to what you were saying that we're psychologically safe in, within a a well-grounded or parametered discussion you know, we're here for a purpose to do it. So please speak. And I find, and I'm curious if others are, are also, like, I just would have never expected us to be so comfortable getting into those kinds of conversations. Look, I'm pointing at Speaker 3 he's right here on my screen that because people just want to talk, people want to have that shared experience and they want to be able to express then as people share more and more, the safety becomes more and more. So I, I find that super fascinating.

Steve Arntz:

I love that. I love that so much. And you, you called attention to the fact that we're all remote now and this environment, like I'm surprised it works in this environment. It makes me think of an idea. It's a little meta now, because you said you know, an idea, it makes you think of an idea. And,

Steve Arntz:

And you're talking about remote distributed teams and groups. And what's been fascinating to me is to challenge ourselves as a team at campfire. How is it better because of the pandemic? What can we learn from the pandemic that'll help us to to do better than we did when we were all in person and one of those ways. So here's something that's a little off script is that as we've learned about how to help people to create psychological safety and connection in groups that are distributed and sometimes large, one of the techniques is we have people move back and forth between zoom and Slack or Microsoft teams, depending on the tool that they're using. And as a facilitator, we'll, we'll prompt with a question we'll put that into Slack or teams, and we'll have everybody quietly type the response to the question. And then they create these threaded discussions very quietly.

Steve Arntz:

It's, it's like a loan together as a, a way to phrase it type of a technique. And what's fascinating about it is just as one example, we had the question who is the best manager you've ever had. We were talking about manager effectiveness. So we put that into the chat and we were able to have 20 people respond with a paragraph about the best manager they've ever had. And then we all quietly read those responses and reacted to those responses. And in a matter of seven minutes, we had had a go around discussion. Like you're talking about Speaker 1, that typically would have lasted a full 45, maybe a whole hour, just for the one question. And so there are some ways that the pandemic that the remote remote tools that we're using have made things easier and better to create that safety, that connection, help people to have these discussions. So I appreciate that comment for just a number of reasons.

Stacia Garr:

I think you see someone on our team smiling, because that's what we do in our round tables.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. We started doing it in. So Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 are both familiar with that technique because we started doing in our round tables.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. We can all write faster than any of us.

Stacia Garr:

Well, and we're in an era where inclusion is just mattering more and more and more as it should. And it's, it's a much more inclusive technique because as you can tell, I like to talk, but it type it's all about, we all have the same amount of space to fill, and then we all can read together. And so everybody has that same voice at that point, which is really cool. So, and Speaker 4 taught us that technique, by the way, she facilitated several books for our team and has done a magical job of, of getting us to connect other thoughts. It looks like Speaker 5 turned her video on, I don't know if that's, because she's wanting to share, don't want to put you on the spot.

Speaker 5:

I wasn't planning on sharing, but I can yeah, you made me think I do, we call it a book club. It'd be more accurate to call it a podcast club because the most we can get In as a podcast throughout the week. But the, yeah, so, so I get together with a group of girlfriends every week, virtually. And we just, we just talk, you know, we go anywhere from discussing the, the merits and flaws of capitalism to talking about our weeks and checking our, you know, like this last week, some of us have had some uncomfortable situations. So we wanted to check our instincts and kind of check ourselves on that. But I always walk away feeling alive. That's, that's always kind of the it's invigorating. It makes me feel alive. There's something about that connection, but also just that expression of yourself as well in a group that accepts that and wants to participate with you as a, as a thinker, as a person. That's just really, yeah. I just keep on thinking every time I walk away, I feel more alive.

Steve Arntz:

That's awesome. I love that. I'm interested in people's thoughts about why a book or a podcast or a piece of content can bring people together. Speaker 3 mentioned earlier about how you can get people from different political viewpoints, for example, to somehow have a, a discussion that can be, you know, friendly, amicable, even if their viewpoints differ, because they are kind of centered on this piece of content. And so I think that there's something to that with what you're talking about, Speaker 5 as well of having a place to start is something that's very, very powerful regardless of whether you agree with the piece of content or not, it brings you together and you can start that discussion and then those discussions end up helping you to feel, I like how you put it alive. With your permission, I'll go back to the deck here and share some more things.

Steve Arntz:

So, you know, our, our brand is purposeful. This is the only time you'll see our brand, but we believe that Campfires are a bit of a symbol of what it means to connect. If you think about group discussions, they sometimes model the way a campfire is built. You have to collaborate to find pieces of things to burn and stick in the center. And then this, the fire starts really hot, and there's an intensity to it that keeps you apart. And then you start to cook things over the fire, and then the fire dwindles, and you have to get an even closer to warm your hands by the fire. And that closeness, that, that change in closeness brings people together and the discussions that are had and those types of things. And I think it helps us to think about how we might model those discussions in our organizations as well.

The research and the selection

Steve Arntz:

We did a lot of research on book clubs, and I don't know if it would be research that would pass the bar of RedThread research. They're phenomenal researchers, and we are kind of product researchers, which is a different bar. But I want to share with you some of the research that we did first, we did some secondary research and I love Davina Morgan Witts. And she's done phenomenal work in researching this from a consumer side and surveyed 5,000 book clubs. This report is incredible. If you want to download it, if you need some insights into how to maybe leverage this for your organizations, this is a great resource. She talks about books selection in her research. And so there's just tons of books. I think the most common mechanic for choosing a book for a book club is basically to just look at the New York times bestseller list.

Steve Arntz:

Somebody picks one off of it that they like, maybe they're going to be the facilitator and they just show up and say, Hey everybody, do you want to read this book? They might pick two or three, and there's a voting mechanic on it. One of the things that Davina found in her research is that book, selection matters quite a lot. And the biggest thing that matters is that everyone is excited and willing to read the book which, you know, seems obvious, right? But I think that people often think that, you know, just choosing one of the bestseller books, people will just show up and they'll, they'll read because they're in the book club. What we found is that if you, if you give people several options, then that helps what helps even more is if the group can decide together on a purpose for reading a book and then select together a book that fits that purpose.

Steve Arntz:

So specifically when we're working in our organizations as talent leaders helping people to identify those problems and challenges, and then choosing a book that will help them to solve that challenge is, is very helpful. And so we worked with a marketing team that read the book Upstream. And the reason they chose Upstream is because they were trying to figure out ways to be more creative and solve problems in advance of those problems, existing, sometimes preventative maintenance type things. And because the team chose that book together, 85% of the participants read the book. Whereas in their previous book club attempts only twenty-five percent of the people had read the books. And so having that shared purpose can be really meaningful and choosing the book and then moving through the content together. What did Davina find that is important about a book? So the, the key indicators of whether a book is great for a group is it gets people talking.

Steve Arntz:

It's well-written. We like to add to that a little bit of, for, for talent leaders specifically, and in our organizations it's well-written and it is research backed. I think a lot of times we can pick kind of the pop business, the pop psychology books, they're fun to read. They create great conversations. I wouldn't say that they're bad to choose. What's even better is one that's well written and well-researched, it's enjoyable to read. An example of that Shawn Achor wrote a book called The Happiness Advantage, and he's he's a psychologist from Harvard, who's studied positive psychology, done a lot of great research and work. And he also writes books that are fun to read. And so it checks a little bit more of the boxes for us that might be a really meaningful book for a club to choose. Stacia, it looked like maybe it came off mute, so I wanted to see if you had something.

Stacia Garr:

Oh, I was just going to exclamation point the Shawn Achor book. I love his work also. Adam Grant's work in terms of being easy to read, but also research based.

Steve Arntz:

Absolutely. And Adam Grant came out with a book yesterday, or it's this week. I can't wait. Okay.

Stacia Garr:

Yeah. Recently I thought it was a couple of weeks ago, but yeah.

Steve Arntz:

Okay. It's the power of knowing what you don't know is what it's about. And I'm really excited to read that book. So does anyone else have thoughts on, on that book selection.

Speaker 4:

On the, on the note of research backed, it was interesting. So, so just as background for the rest of you, I I did a couple of book clubs with the Campfire team the internal book. So we did a sort of internal book club, and it was very interesting to know that there was a lot of energy around the first two books cause they were very, very relevant to what we were, what the team was trying to do. And then the third book we chose was not research backed. It was more sort of anecdotal and a little bit more of a pop psychology, and it wasn't particularly relevant to what was going on for the team at the time. And it, it, it was really interesting to note just how the energy dropped in terms of being in terms of wanting to participate in that book club.

Steve Arntz:

And Speaker 4 is being generous, we cut it off early eight chapters in, and we're just like, nah, forget it. I'm doing this. And, and I think that's actually a useful thing to know, like if a book's not working for a team bail on it, pick something else, you know, this is a powerful mechanic and it can be powerful in both good and bad ways because you're bringing people together to discuss and, and over a topic that needs to be relevant, interesting research backed, going to provide meaningful results for these teams. So,

Stacia Garr:

And it really just goes back to adult learning principles, right? We, we need things that we're going to use in our lives. And if, if we don't, aren't getting it, we're not going to spend the time.

Steve Arntz:

And that's not to say that they all have to be research backed. And I agree with that Stacia for sure. We're currently working with a company that's reading the book, I am Malala, and they're doing that to have an example of one of their values, which is do good. And so they have this value do good in their organization. They're trying to build culture. The purpose is, is not to change behavior or take action necessarily it's to bring people together around a story, get them to have conversations about what it means to do good in the context of their company. And so, you know, narrative and memoir can be a powerful mechanic for that, but you just have to be purposeful about what you're choosing for what reasons, if it's behavior change, choose something, research backed for sure. If it's conversations that you want to generate, you might be able to get away with choosing stories and narratives and memoirs and that sort of thing to help start the conversation.

Steve Arntz:

Any other thoughts observations before I move on?

Speaker 3:

Is it alright, if I pepper you with a quick question, Steve?

Steve Arntz:

Absolutely.

Speaker 3:

I'm curious, cause you know, one of the things I thought of actually as I remembered a group shortly after high school and college, where they gathered around you know, fiction books and literature, and that actually brought them together and they would and one of the books that came to mind was one called Islandia, which was, you know, kind of kind of mysterious kind of fantasy type book, but it was very cerebral and everyone was trying to figure out what it means and they all share the perspectives and what they thought was what, and that was part of the, the intrigue and the interest there. So my question is is just, have you seen like fiction books play a part in this and do you see maybe a combination of a hybrid between books that are, are intentional to kind of create purpose and culture? And then some are just, just the enjoyment factor to create connectedness?

Steve Arntz:

I think fiction is very powerful and can be a real positive experience. There's a strategy team that we worked with that read Ender's game together. And I think that there's a lot of strategic principles in that book. I don't know if you've read Orson Scott Card's book. I I think that when you choose fiction, it's even more important that everyone has said, yes, I want to read this book. I think that you know, that's, that's the place where you might find the most drop-off in a business setting. And so if people aren't committed to reading that book and they don't have purpose behind it, you're going to find a really low participation rate in terms of number of people who are actually going to complete the book. And so, you know, I think there's value. I think that stories bring people together. I think that, that they build empathy. You can relate to characters and you can start to learn from different perspectives, but it's just really important that people are all committed at that point to saying yes, yes, yes. We're all excited about this book that will create a lot of energy and a lot more success.

Speaker 3:

Right. Makes sense.

Picking the right book for your team: "What book could we read together that would help us the most right now, as a team?"

Speaker 5:

Hey Steve, can I ask another question? Sure. This is awesome by the way. So I just started a unofficial book club where I work. And so I did a little survey and asked people sort of what are, what are like the high level topics that people would like to talk about. I'm wondering how you've seen, like, what are the best methods you've seen for getting people to agree to what the purpose is or what the book is because I I'd like to get as many people excited about reading as possible.

Steve Arntz:

I love it. So we have a survey for choosing a book that we've used with customers and the survey is, is eerily similar to an engagement survey that you might use as a talent leader. And what's fascinating is that choosing a book for a specific team can be a safer, sometimes more interesting way to find the problem on that team than using your traditional kind of talent management engagement survey that you might use with like a provider like Glint, or, you know, these different providers that have these engagement surveys. When you get a leader with you, let's say a team of six, eight, 10 to say, Hey, like what book could we read together that would help us the most right now, as a team, somehow that's a safer question than like, what's the problem with our team right now? Can you guys take the survey?

Steve Arntz:

I want to check against these eight factors about where we need the most help as a team right now and magically you as a leader, get to see what the team thinks is the biggest problem. And so there's a roundabout way of answering your question, Speaker 5, but you can use similar approaches that you might use for an engagement survey to say like, Hey, what's the problem on our team? What's the thing that would bring us the most benefit. What's the opportunity on our team? If we could do this, just this one thing really, really well, what would that be? And if you tie that back to using books to kind of choose a that thing, it becomes a very safe way to find those opportunities, problems, threats to the team that you might want to surface. And then it's a lot safer way to then go and address it because now it's not you the leader saying, Hey, I think we need to solve this problem.

Steve Arntz:

It's the team saying we need to solve this problem together. And we've chosen this book. We've chosen a guide to help us through the problem. That's not our leader. It's not the leader now lecturing on how to give feedback. It's maybe you know, a research back book on feedback, giving a lecture on how to give feedback and then the leader being able to help support that conversation in a direction that helps solve that problem. So I don't know if I'm answering your question fully Speaker 5, but like, I think you're doing the right thing by identifying, you know, questions that you can ask and seeing how, how the group can give input into the book that they might want to read. And you might also think about how you can tie that to the problems, opportunities, threats for teams, that'll help them to solve the most urgent problems in the context of your business. So

How do we connect with one another through reading

Speaker 6:

Hi Steve.

Steve Arntz:

Hi.

Speaker 6:

Hi. This is, this is good. Thank you. So I was just listening to these because I joined these because I've been one of the people that never really liked book clubs. I have, I've been an avid reader since I was young, but I read for that enjoyment of just isolating myself and sitting with a good book. So for me, trying to be part of a good club, kind of defeats the purpose. Like I don't want the pressure of read three chapters before you come. And then we have to talk about what we read. It almost feels like school. So I never really was interested in a book club until I joined my first book club this month. And the reason is because we had a trivia with the organization, we had a trivia game and it was sort of like a jeopardy kind and informal networking get together virtually.

Speaker 6:

And then we got to talk about this book and there was a lot of good conversation and just people talking about different books that they had read and some of the perspectives and the team is working on health equity. And so then it ended up spinning off from two months ago into a book club where somebody, you know, started it, picked the book and told everybody, you know, if you're interested, we're going to read this. And for me, the reason why I joined it is because it brought up two things for me is I wanted to read more this year. And that's also a book that I want to read because I'm learning, I'm going to learn so much about that book. And then I'm going to talk to people who make it reading that book, which is not a really a fiction reading that book by myself. It will be hard work and you will probably be harder than talking about it with people. So for me, that made the decision easy. Is that, what am I going to get from these? And then what support am I going to get from that group? So I can see the way the statistics you shared at the beginning. I can see why it's going up because I've never been a book club fan. And I find myself joining one and joining this call because I wanted to learn more about that. So

Steve Arntz:

Thank you for sharing Speaker 6 and I have, I have a suggestion for you about a book club to try in the future. Based on your feedback. One of the, my favorite experiences with a book club was one there, there were some women on LinkedIn who posted about wanting to have a book club and I commented on the post and said, it looks like I'm the only, I'm the only male would you guys be willing to let me join anyway, is that okay? And they said, we'd love to have you. And I was thrilled. And so there were a dozen women and me and we show up for lunch at a place and they asked my thoughts. What do you think about choosing a book? And I hadn't gotten into book clubs yet. And I said, well, I, I don't like book clubs very much.

Steve Arntz:

I just wanted to meet other women in the workforce here. And I was excited to learn from all of them and get a new perspective. And, and they said, well, what do you think we should read? And I said, well, I think we were all reading, right? Like, let's go around the room and say the books that we're already reading. And so everybody went around the table and talked about the books they were reading. And I said, well, like, let's just not stop reading the books. We're already reading. Let's meet again in a week around the lunch table. And let's just bring all the insights that we have from the things we're already reading. And what was fantastic about it was that the first person shared about the book, they were reading the insight they gained. And then somebody was like, that relates to my book and they started to share and, and shared an insight there.

Steve Arntz:

And then someone else. And then by the time we were done, all 12 or 13, people had connected every bit. Like these books, all connected, like we're all connected. These books, all of these are connected. There's this like, as we've, as we've been cataloging, all these books for our customers and things, we've been finding that like through the taxonomy we've created and the way that we've created relationships between these books, they're all connected. And so Speaker 6, something that you can do, who, you know, is one that loves to just read what you're reading. You can have a book club with other people who just like to read and then find the connections between the things that you're reading.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. That sounds so much like me right now. What you just described. I love it. Thank you so much for sharing that because I think that's been my struggle with reading. It's like, I read good books. I get excited, but it's like, I can't talk about it with anybody because nobody, I don't know anybody else read it, but I would love to also hear what other people are reading and what they are getting from me, as opposed to putting the pressure on me, to do some reading and come answer some questions about the reading. So thank you.

Steve Arntz:

You're welcome, Speaker 6. Thank you.

Stacia Garr:

I think the thing that's amazing about that is it's kind of the rethinking of what a book club could mean. Right? Historically, it's just been this idea that we, we read one book, everyone reads the same thing, like what Speaker 6 was, was saying. And and that puts a lot of, a lot of pressure. But if instead, it's, you know, whether it's with what Speaker 5 was talking about about the podcast or, or whatever, but then maybe bring some content, some thoughts on some interesting content that you have consumed in the last, you know, week, month, whatever, and share that. And then kind of build a conversation around that. So, I mean, the, the book is just one of many, you know, content mechanisms really. And so this idea of expanding it into a different approach, I think is really attractive.

Steve Arntz:

That's awesome. Stacia thanks. And you can do that by topic. You can say everybody reads something about feedback. Everybody reads something about communication. Everybody reads something about performance management and we'll all come together and share those things. Or you can do it kind of the anti topic of like read something off the beaten path, something that's not in our normal literature, our normal, you know, canon of, of our discipline and then bring those collisions back to the group. And there's just so many different ways that you can choose these books, the content, the topics, but the important thing is that you create purpose around the discussion. And then when people come together, they can have those meaningful interactions.

Stacia Garr:

Yeah, it's interesting. My my master's, my first master's degree was from the London school of Economics and the British approach is very much so like that they call it, you read a degree, not that you like take a degree with predefined things that are in the curriculum. They literally, I remember the first day I got a syllabus that was like this thick, and it was just like, here are the 10 topics we're going to cover in this, this course. And here are all the books we know about in, on these different topics, but you could use else, just read three or four of them and come to class and have something to say. And I remember feeling just completely unhinged, like, what is this going to be like these conversations. I was incredibly nervous and they were some of the best conversations I've ever had because there were so many different perspectives and connections like, like we're talking about. So I think we have to be willing to be a little bit afraid potentially of the lack of structure, because I think the structure will appear.

Steve Arntz:

That's awesome.

What do you define as reading

Speaker 6:

Well, I have one more point that I was going to make about your suggestion of topic. I think it also aligns with, because I think for awhile, I beat myself up because I felt like I wasn't reading. Like I wasn't reading enough, but then I realized I've been going through a phase where all I'm reading is articles. So I'm not reading books as I'm used to, but I've been reading like lots of articles online and research articles. So I think when you, when you make it by topic, it kind of gives people room to be flexible. You know, are you going to pick a book? Are you going to pick an article? Is it a podcast? you listen to, you know, just what have you consumed in the last, whatever you define that you want to talk about? .

Steve Arntz:

Oh, man, two things I want to call attention to first off is the, the term book guilt. Everybody has it. Speaker 6, we all have book guilt. People often ask me if you read all those books behind you and like, what do you think is my response usually? And it's because the answer is no. Like, no, we like to be surrounded by books. We don't read all of them. It's still great to be surrounded by them. We all have book guilt. The next thing is I got to spend some time with the head of the New York public library in New York at one point and asked that person what do you define as reading? And he said, what do you mean? And I, I said like, you know, is, is an audio book reading. And I was there with a friend who I had basically like tried to make feel guilty because he didn't like to read books.

Steve Arntz:

He liked to listen to books. And I said, that's not reading. And so I was asking to kind of prove my point to this friend in front of, you know, the head of the New York public library. And he said, Oh, we, we constitute any consumption of content as reading. You want to look through a picture book, that's reading. You want to listen to a podcast, an audio book that's reading. So I think that what you've just called attention to Speaker 6, is that we need to kind of redefine that for ourselves as well. I've just a kind of interacting with a piece of content that can challenge your perspective, change your view. Any kind of content is great. It's reading, let's, let's call it what it is. So it sounds like somebody came off mute and maybe wanted to share something.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, Steve, I was going to have the same conversation with my Grandma. So she loves physical books and I love audio books. And she, she said, you're not reading.

Speaker 5:

And I said, I said to her, Grandma, if you go back, you know, 1500 years, you know, the printing press wasn't invented. So how did they, how did they transmit ideas through stories? It was orally passed down. So actually I'm doing the authentic way. Anyway, that's my response to your argument.

Group size and participation

Steve Arntz:

If you guys ever want to, if you ever want to see notes on books that are comprehensive and helpful, you'll look at Speaker 5's notes. He's got some pretty intense notes on these audio books that he reads that if you were to read them, maybe you wouldn't even have to read the book because they're so great. I'm going to keep going, talk about group size. So, you know, in a corporate setting, in whatever setting we're having these book clubs, what's the right size for our group. So Davina did some research, eight to 12 is the sweet spot in the consumer area in this remote world that we're in, in the pandemic. Like we found that four to eight is sometimes even better, creates a lot of space for people to have discussions. And it's kind of hard to create the psychological safety and all the conditions needed for a really great vibrant discussion when you get too large.

Steve Arntz:

But I think that it's really about, can you create space for people to share? And there's a lot of interesting dynamics tools that you've, that we've learned, you know, the threaded discussions, like we've talked about that Speaker 4 mentioned you using the roundtable discussions. There's a lot of different ways that you can create that safety in that space for conversation. But the research that she has suggests that eight to 12 is where the highest engagement level occurs. Really quick notes on this. We like to use the phrase, include all the verts introverts extroverts, ambiverts. You've got, if you've been in a book club, you've noticed people who like to talk a lot, like to hear themselves. And then you've noticed people who are just really quiet.

Steve Arntz:

How can you create an inclusive, inclusive environment? The biggest killer of a book club is having an extrovert that's just way too far in terms of how much they want to share. And so if there's somebody who's just always wanting to share, everybody likes to check out and maybe not come back. And so she had done some research on the types of people that get kicked out of book clubs as well in these just kind of private social book clubs. And it's the extrovert that most often gets invited to leave. And so as a facilitator, you can manage those personalities. And then again, like with zoom and with Slack and with teams and all these tools that we have, we have ways to create inclusive environments where people can all be heard and all share regardless of personality. So these are some of the other things she researched.

Book diversity and facilitation

Steve Arntz:

If you want to look into the research, I won't read them all to you. There's a whole bunch of different that go into having a good and effective book club. These are the three that I've decided to focus on. So frequency in a corporate setting every other week seems to be the best from what we found in the private book club setting, it's monthly, usually monthly tends to get people to lose interest in a corporate setting. And weekly tends to get people to say, I'm too busy for that. And so there's this balance somewhere into every two to three weeks or so to be able to have those conversations book diversity is something I'm pretty passionate about at this point. I filled my, my Amazon cart with books about six months ago, and I got to checkout and I had eight books in my cart, and I looked through all of them.

Steve Arntz:

And for whatever reason realized that they were all white male authors. And I was a little bit frustrated with myself and I dumped the whole cart and I went back and found books by people of color and by women. And I think I filled the entire cart with that and said, I am going to, from this day, make sure when I buy books, half of them are from women, people of color and maybe half are from white male authors at, at worst. And I'm going to try to diversify my bookshelf. So I think that this is something we need to be very conscious of in our books in a corporate setting, but in life, generally, these are the perspectives we're challenging ourselves with. I love this book. I don't know why it came to mind, but Invisible Women.

Steve Arntz:

And it's a, it's a research backed book on data bias in a world. designed for men and reading through the, just the first chapter of it, it, it brought tears to my eyes, a thinking like just how much more I need to do to, to challenge my own perspectives and to bring more diverse perspectives into my bookshelf. It's a, it's a space. I control that. And so, you know, I can create a diverse space there. And so think about that as you're bringing books into the workplace especially in, in challenging your teams with these new perspectives and then facilitating makes a huge difference. What we found is that a really, truly great facilitator can create space and bring people into a room if you're not a truly great facilitator. The research even suggests that it might be better to like not try to facilitate, but to just maybe move people through activities and not try to speak and instruct and facilitate because you can actually do more damage as a bad facilitator.

Steve Arntz:

And so, you know, just kind of being self-aware, am I a truly great facilitator, or am I someone who just needs to bring people together around a topic, pose a few questions and be quiet, that can be better in, in many cases than trying to kind of control the room if you will. And then we did our own research. These are all the people we talked to. We've talked to three times as many companies at this point. And all of these companies we talked to about their corporate book clubs. So companies are doing this, it's a, it's a wide-scale mechanic, like a lot of reasons for that. Sometimes these in fact, the most common reason that surprised us was I'm doing this because I don't have a leadership opportunity in my organization. And so I needed to create one for myself. And so I needed to stand up and say, Hey, I'm having a book club who wants to join and then people join.

Steve Arntz:

And then I get to help create structure and meaning in this group and facilitate a discussion and they get to stand up and say, Hey, look, I can be a leader. And that was a really interesting thing. And so, you know, rather than having to have that happen organically, how can we create those opportunities for people, those leadership opportunities and help them to identify something that's a problem to solve, and then maybe organize a book club around that and lead those, those groups together is really meaningful and cool thing. So we basically just started with tell us about your book club. And we got a bunch of stickies, did our qualitative research, and then we organized the stickies and we found out, you know, why are you doing this? And like I said there's learning and development good for the work environment.

Steve Arntz:

And then there, the opportunity to lead improve my leadership skills. We found out why they fail. Maybe they chose the wrong book. We found out about scheduling. So people were meeting, you know, one meeting per book, monthly meeting, one book per quarter. We learned about facilitation tactics, pacing, group selection, book selection. And I'm not gonna spend too much time on all of this. People were using Slack and in tools like Teams and things to help keep the conversation going between sessions. A lot of the effectiveness comes from, you know, are we doing this for a reason or not? And so many of the book clubs were not purposeful other than, yeah, we just need something fun to do in a way to connect. If you can add another layer of purpose, you'll get the fun and connection because the mechanic is fun and it helps you to connect, but doing it with a purpose helps to to amplify magnify those benefits of fun and connection as well.

How to host a Book Club that doesn't suck 

Steve Arntz:

Plus people will stay engaged. The place where attendance was the greatest was when there was an engaged facilitator. And so the facilitator cared, followed up whether or not they were truly magnificent at creating space in a discussion was less important than whether they were engaged in caring about the thing happening and making sure everybody knew it was important. And so, you know, I did a webinar that was how to host a corporate book club that doesn't suck. And so this was the slide in that webinar. Okay. Just tell me how to run one that doesn't suck. And this is one that isn't great. You pick the latest best seller. So I just go to the New York times bestseller list, pick one in the top 10. That looks interesting to me, ask if everybody wants to read it with me, and then I invite everyone to join.

Steve Arntz:

I put bold on everyone because inviting everyone can be good. I think that in the, in the case where I said that the company is reading, I am Malala together. It's because it's a corporate value it's because they all need to get a perspective and an opinion on what it means to do good in the workplace. If, if that's not the purpose, then you might consider a different invite list. There's a book by Priya Parker called The Art of Gathering. That's fantastic. And, and she emphasizes the importance of who you don't include. And so there are powerful and meaningful book clubs where women get together to develop a perspective on how to be strong women in the workplace. And so maybe they exclude men from that book club and that's okay. But be purposeful about that invite list and think about who you want to join based on the purpose of the discussion that you're trying to have the most common question is what did you think about the book?

Steve Arntz:

And that's the quickest way to get off, off purpose and topic? You might have somebody who lands specifically on what that purpose was. And I would call that luck. It's better to ask a purposeful question that brings people into the room. One of my favorite examples of questions is when that Speaker 4 came up with, for our book club and we were reading the book How to Be an Antiracist after the, the events that occurred in the spring of last year. And the question that she asked the group was when was a time that you felt more than, or less than someone else. And can you share that? And we all thought for probably about five minutes and then shared those experiences about when we felt more than, or less than someone else. That is a much better question than what did you think about the book?

Steve Arntz:

It is on purpose, it's on message with the book. And it brings everybody together into a meaningful discussion that they're kind of United around as opposed to just a free for all around. What did you think? And then, you know, the fire dies in these cases. One that's great is when you declare double purpose. So we are reading how to be an anti-racist so that we can develop our own unique perspectives about the world that we live in, and we can bring that to our work and we can challenge ourselves to do and be better. That's a better purpose than well, we're just, we want to read together, you know, we want to connect with each other. Selecting a book together. We've talked about this already. I feel like you've gotten some insights on how to host meaningful discussions, capturing insights and taking action if the purpose aligns with that. So, you know, some, sometimes it is because we're trying to take action, trying to make change.

Steve Arntz:

We want to be more creative as a team was an example I used. Sometimes it's just because we want to connect. And so you might not want to take notes and take action in those cases. So here, just refresh your gathered with purpose, find or be a great host, owning the space, thinking about the technology and tools that you have available and how you can leverage them, how it can be better than in-person is always my challenge for people. And then include all of the personalities be inclusive in your efforts with these things. So before we jump into the questions on I'll, I'll just stop, pause, see if there's any other thoughts or questions before we talk about the two questions that were in the slides.

Speaker 4:

This is going back a while, but to your point about how this can be better, how it can be better virtually than in person. One of the things that I didn't really think about until just today is that we're all sitting in our own homes in our own already safe spaces which might influence it, could help people feel more comfortable speaking up. There's I noticed with one of, one of my colleagues that she, she considers herself a sort of a private person that doesn't share much. But she, she and I ended up talking about some really personal stuff over zoom that I don't think we would have talked about had we been in the same room physically? And so, so I think it's really interesting in book clubs, particularly in, when you're thinking about safe spaces that nobody is a guest in anyone else's space in this environment, they're already in their own, their own space.

Steve Arntz:

I think there's some powerful ways we can emphasize or amplify that a little bit as well. Everybody thinks I'm in this perfect space, right? It's a color-coded bookshelf, right? And I think that there's a barrier I can break down now and I'll do it right now by showing you the rest of my space. I'm tucked in the corner on a folding table that I got from Costco. That's really cheap and crappy so that I can project this perfect space to you because I own a company that is centered around books and connections. And so I need this backdrop, right. But where am I really well I'm in my basement. There's a TV over there. Books. There's some chairs. There's like a little mattress there that guests sleep on. Sometimes when they come, I've got this white board there, it's really just like this shower board that I bought from home Depot.

Steve Arntz:

And you can see my kids' drawings all over it. And then you can see my closet. That's overflowing with a mess. And I've got like this really crappy parking space here that we haven't replaced. And then here's my desk. This is my real desk. This is where I work a Snickers wrapper. Cause I didn't have time yesterday to eat a good lunch. And I've got this nice elevator desk, like this is a $700 desk. Why am I not sitting at that desk? Well, because I need you guys to think that I'm, you know, a credible CEO of a book space company. Right.

Speaker 6:

I almost feel like what you just showed us is the prop.

Stacia Garr:

Yeah.

Steve Arntz:

Yeah. It's awesome. Right. and so I think like what you mentioned, Speaker 4 is awesome and powerful. And I think when I've done, what I just did with other people it's, it's broken down barriers and created safety and like, yeah, this is my space. This is who I am. What's your status?

Stacia Garr:

Building on Speaker 4's point, one other thing that potentially is a benefit of this virtual environment is you don't have some of the, I think maybe the weird it's not necessarily weird, but the social dynamics that go along like, Oh, I'm going to the book club with Speaker 4, or I don't know anybody at this book club and who am I going to sit next to? And like, what that, what's that going to be? Right. You don't have to deal with kind of that. And I think that for some people particularly kind of, some of us we're introverted folks that can, that can be enough. That would keep me from going to a book club. I'd be like, yeah, I read it, but I don't need to go do that.

Steve Arntz:

I love that so much. And it's it begs questions for me about, do we ask people to turn on their cameras? Do we ask people to come off mute? What are the norms that we want to create there? And I am one who's like anxious when everybody's not on video. Right. And I've over time, gotten more comfortable with the fact that what you just mentioned, like it's safe now to come because I can, I can turn off my video. I can go on mute. I can just listen. Maybe I'm not feeling it today, but I do want, I do want to be there, but I don't want to have to participate today. I'm having a tough day, but I want to listen. Right. And so I think that we need to be careful with those norms and create the right safe space around that. And then, and then we get the benefits that you're talking about, but being able to show up, even if I'm not at my best today or whatever. And then there are, are ways to bring people in when you do need to, so you might say, Hey, we're going to go into breakout rooms and every is going to be in pairs. I would invite everybody to come off mute and turn on their video, at least for this moment. And then when we get back together in the large group, you know, mute it and turn it back off and we can be safe again, that sort of thing. So lots of things to think about in that regard.

Conclusion

Stacia Garr:

Yeah. Well, I know we are at time. Well you, you basically answered all the questions, so that's why I didn't push us to go to the questions. So so I think we, we took care of that. I want to first say thank you to everyone who came today. I think we, this was something that I didn't know much about and have learned a ton from Steve and I hope you did, as well. And then just want to be sure to say thank you so much to Steve for spending some time educating us all. I think we all have learned a lot. We've kind of talked about Dani and me if maybe if we want to start a RedThread book club, but Steve, your comments about like the purpose and why we would do it made me think, okay, well we need to spend a little more time on this and discuss it a bit more. So I think maybe I'll take that as an action item for our team in, see if that's something that we want to do. And then for those of you who are on the line, who are not with RedThread, we'll, we'll reach out and see if you want to want to join. And once we have a clear sense of our purpose, so it seems like that's step number one. Cool. Well, thank you everybody. And have a great rest of your day.

 

 

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr (00:00):

Okay. So once again thanks everybody for joining us today. We are going to be talking about people analytics technology here in our first, really our first kind of people analytics focus session of 2021. This is based on research that Priyanka and I did across really the last two years, but more specifically, the study that we published at the beginning of December on the people analytics tech market has, they said this is designed to be highly interactive and a discussion. We do record just so you know, and we put the recording up on our site for our red thread members so that they can view this in the future. So if there's anything that you really, really don't want anybody else to hear maybe hold that back, but otherwise we hope that it is an open and engaging discussion.

Stacia Garr (01:09):

So for those of you who don't know who we are I think most of you do because you're here and you found this, but we're red thread research where a human capital research membership we're focused on a number of practices most relevant obviously for today is people analytics and HR tech, but we also cover DEIB, employee experience, performance learning and career. And and we offer our research through a membership and then we also do advisory services and events and all sorts of good stuff. So that is us. All right. So as I said, this study is based on what we did across the last year, had incredible support and participation from our vendor community, and some of who are on the phone today. And we we published this, as I said in December, 2020. It's kind of funny. I keep on tripping over 2020, 2021, but that was it.

Stacia Garr (02:03):

And so here's the high-level findings of what we found in the people analytics tech market study. First is that we saw some pretty incredible growth in the market. And I will give you all some specific numbers around that second, we saw a much more thoughtful approach to differentiating capabilities in this year's study. So in 20, in the 2019 study, we spent quite a bit of time kind of talking to folks about, Hey, y'all are saying the same thing. Could you maybe be a little bit crisper on what it is that you're offering to your customers? And we were so thankful that we actually saw that happen with with vendors last year and being much more specific about this is what we do, this, how we do it. This is who we work with which, which I think was really refreshing.

Stacia Garr (02:49):

A third thing was kind of vendors responding to customer needs. And we'll talk a little bit more about specifically what that meant, but in general, it meant responding to the pandemic. As well, as the social justice movements of 2019. For us we saw ease of use and user-friendliness remaining high on customer's list of needs. And that was important because we feel like back to this differentiating capabilities topic, a lot of vendors say, Oh, we are easy to use. We are user-friendly. But when we talk to customers broadly and we did a poll of, I think, what was it Priyanka, 150 some-odd customers participate in the poll. And so they said, Hey, look, this is actually still a differentiating feature. So even though everyone is saying that they do it, that isn't necessarily the case. And then finally people analytics practitioners are the key users.

Stacia Garr (03:42):

I actually pulled this slide out because I didn't want to spend too much time talking about it today. But the headline here is, is that in the 2019 study the vendors broadly said that people analytics, practitioners were their key users, about 76% of them said that. And then here, when we moved to 2020 and kind of given everything that happened, that number actually jumped about 20 percentage points up to 96%. So almost every vendor is now saying in our study, it's now saying that people analytics practitioners are there key user. So that's a pretty big shift in terms of what we were hearing. I'll stop there. Cause as I said, this is interactive. Any general questions about this before I share a little bit of additional details or anything that you want to spend a little bit more time talking about?

Speaker 1 (04:33):

I had a question about you, you mentioned there's a approach to differentiating capabilities. Perhaps you're going to delve into that a little bit more, but curious what approaches you've seen. So far.

Stacia Garr (04:47):

Yeah, we, we have a site on that. So we'll talk about that one a little bit more we'll make, and then please, you know, if we don't get to what you're looking for, go ahead and ask some more questions once we get to that slide.

Stacia Garr (05:01):

It looks like you might've just come off of mute.

Speaker 2 (05:04):

Yeah. I was just going to confirm the, the year. So you mentioned going 2019 and then 2020 is this something that was conducted in 2020?

Stacia Garr (05:14):

Yes. 2020. Yeah. So we published a study in 2019 which was kind of the foundational study. It was two actually studies, a very big, very long. And then the 2020 study we did, we tried to kind of condense and focus more on the highlights, but yeah, the, what we're sharing today is based on 2020.

Stacia Garr (05:34):

Anyone else?

To what extent did your org continue existing / make new investments in people analytics tech in 2020?​

Stacia Garr (05:44):

Well then for those of you who are practitioners online, we would just love to kind of understand what perspective you're coming from around the amount of existing or new investment you made with people analytics in 2020. So we just have to kind of hear, did you make any new investments? Did you continue investments? Did you expand them? What was kind of your approach?

Stacia Garr (06:18):

Or if you're a vendor maybe share kind of what you sell broadly with, with your, with your customers?

Speaker 2 (06:25):

From a company perspective, I would say in 2020, my company at that time I was doing data analytics, people analytics for HR, and we did make a good amount of investment in expanding our capability. We didn't change what we're using, but we sort of brought in capacity and, and, and the scope of use.

Stacia Garr (06:55):

And when you say you broaden your capacity, kind of what, what roughly did you go from and what did you go to?

Speaker 2 (07:02):

So we moved, we moved a lot of the backend storage and workings into the cube make for easier access because of a lot of data and a lot of use. We were moving a lot of data on projects onto the database. So we had to make changes at the backend so that performance is not compromised.

Stacia Garr (07:31):

Okay. Makes sense. Thank you. Anyone else want to share what they did in 2020 or what they saw their customers do?

Speaker 3 (07:42):

Thank you for, I mean, for explanation on behalf of the demeanor, let's say in Turkey, so I'm in the last year was a tremendous for companies to session for great tools. So the difference between the main region and the North America is we having access to great tools. So they actually, they wanted to invest, but, you know, there is a blur line between half to find out how to get access to this. So roughly there are great potential. And I mean, my company and I'm a researcher, but a lot of companies reached to me and asking how we can get access to this source. So there's a huge increase, I mean, the willingness, but you should create a good connection with other regions like me.

Stacia Garr (08:41):

Okay. So just to recap what I think I heard, it sounds like there's a lot of interest and enthusiasm around this, but not necessarily a lot of investment quite yet. And from what you saw is that fair to say?

Speaker 3 (08:55):

For sure, because, you know Yeah. Are like behind of the technology, you know, so we did pride a funny some technology here, but the difference is I in the local market, you should know how the culture of to get access to this market, but there's a great potential insight.

Stacia Garr (09:14):

Okay, great. Thank you. Anyone else want to share?

Speaker 4 (09:20):

So we work to support customers with transitions and we saw quite a lot of change just due to events. So we saw HR suddenly become very operational again. So some of the longer term projects have been parked and everyone was operationally running around, certainly in the UK seeking data to try and get through things like furlough, to understand that you said there was more of a request for staff, but it wasn't a tool was strategic. It was very reactionary, which I understand. And we saw many of the longer term aspects of HR teams put on furlough in lots of businesses as well. So it's almost like a bit of a pause in some of the strategic projects, but other companies maybe I think we'll come out of this realizing they couldn't very…they couldn't lay their hands on the data to even do the reaction we stuff very well.

Speaker 4 (10:15):

So, but it still feels I can. The UK, every time someone starts to put their head above the parapet to try and get to something more longer term, suddenly we're locked down again and HR running around like headless chickens, trying to deal with things internally. So we, we, we've just seen number of our longer-term projects. And again, you know, regardless of whether they're very analytical based keep getting kicked back as operational reaction becomes sort of the main thing at the moment. We're hoping things settle down and people actually learn some of the lessons of what they really need in place. So that's what we've seen through 2020 and the first month of 2021 so far.

Stacia Garr (10:58):

Yeah. And I imagine that the current severe lockdown has made it even even more signified.

Speaker 4 (11:05):

Yeah. I think everyone came out, you know, if you don't know what happened in the UK, we literally went back to work for one day and then got locked down so I can keep on going in expecting to sort of hit January and maybe things be a bit better or some people were, and then we were locked down and lots of people are homeschooling and stuff here as well, which is just sort of means that people are barely keeping the wheels on the car at the moment, rather than doing anything else. So, so we've just found that a number of times through the last year, but I think there is a non-independent that people realize, you know, more of the strategic importance, they just can't get there yet.

Stacia Garr (11:44):

Yep. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. Anyone else want to share?

Priyanka Mehrotra (11:50):

I would just jump into HSA and say that from windows also aligns with what was just said to a point, because if you remember, when we started talking to vendors early on in the year, last year, they, a lot of them told us that their longer term contracts were starting to get put on hold as the people are going into lockdown and considering their budgets. And then later on in the hell, are we heard from some vendors, specifically employee engagement, experience vendors, starting to say that they're starting to see some contracts come back and get renewed. But I think that was specifically for those particular vendors because companies wanted to do those particular things really to employee engagement, keep a pulse on pulse, check on how employees are doing. So I think those, those investments probably saw a rebound versus compared to what Speaker 4 was saying, the longer term strategic investments, I think.

Stacia Garr (12:39):

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, maybe we might need to check in with our engagement vendors now to see what's happening too, because so much of the world has gone back into a hard lockdown. And so it'd be interesting to see if it's mirroring what we saw immediately, you know, last March, April may, or if it's a different situation. Yeah. Great point.

Growth: even in times of crisis

Stacia Garr (12:51):

Okay. I'm going to go ahead and move you, move us along and show you all a little bit of some of the data from this study. So just kind of the high level and building off what Priyanka said, we did still see quite a bit of growth last year even in times of crisis. And so this is this is our market sizing efforts based on the revenue numbers that vendors share with us during the study.

Stacia Garr (13:26):

And you can see here that we, we still saw a pretty impressive 35% growth rate from, from roughly 2019 to 2020. Should be clear here, you guys, I'm sure. Facet math and saying, Hey, wait, that doesn't look like 35%. The differences is the 35% is actually calculated on the revenue that we revenue numbers we actually have. Whereas this is an estimate kind of taking into account all the parts of the market on the left hand side of the slide that all the parts of the market that we know exist, but we may not have had revenue numbers for. But anyway, nonetheless, no matter how you cut it, it's still quite impressive, quite significant growth in the market across the last year and continuing you know, the overall strong growth that we've seen in the market.

Stacia Garr (14:15):

We've got 55% CAGR (Compund Annual Growth Rate) for the last four years. So and, and, you know, just to kind of pause, I think, you know, a lot of this has been driven as Priyanka said by, you know, some of the engagement vendors also by some of what we call the multi-source analysis vendors. So, so folks like Vizier cruncher, I know we've got some busier folks on the line today who have, have been in those more in those larger, more strategic organizations and who, where the situation in, in the expectation of data being available, you know, maybe resulted an expansion of the capabilities and the offerings within those organizations. So, so still saw kind of a healthy growth from that sector as well.

Speaker 3 (15:07):

Can you explain, CAGR?

Stacia Garr (15:08):

Oh, I'm sorry. Compound annual growth rate. So instead of just kind of doing growth rate for year to year, it's the compounded growth across the four-year period.

Stacia Garr (15:23):

Thank you. Any other questions?

A crowded market landscape

Stacia Garr (15:33):

Okay. so this is our market landscape two by two. And one thing that's important to note is that unlike some other analyst firms are two by two and our two by two, up into the right is not necessarily better. This is really just trying to help folks understand what the market landscape looks like. And a lot of the vendors who are in each of the different quadrants offer different capabilities and they kind of play together well. So if you think about the folks who are on the left upper side, so the accumulated analytics group, they would generally play pretty well with the folks over here in the upper, right. And they would be kind of part of the overall integrated tech stack. Same thing with the folks down here on the lower right and targeted analytics. Those tend to be engagement vendors and, you know, they would play well with some of the vendors up here in the upper, right, who are, again like there's multi-source analysis platforms.

Stacia Garr (16:29):

The way that this vendor, this two by two is organized is on the X axis. We talk about the type of, or frequency in the finale axis and do this is gonna be the frequency with which somebody might be using these tools. So you kind of go from a quarterly or monthly analysis over here on the left-hand side over all the way to on the right hand side, it might be a daily or even hourly type of analysis, or are folks accessing it critically accessing it more frequently. And then on the data integrator versus creator side in a creator on the bottom is they're actually, you know, primarily survey tools, but basically pulling in creating data directly. Whereas on the top we have integrator tools which are those that are pulling in data from other sources. And part of the reason that we do it this way is one to help folks understand what some of the relative complexity might be for implementation.

Stacia Garr (17:26):

So for instance, down here on the data creators side an engagement tool is a relatively easy rollout. Whereas on the data integrator tool, it could be more complex because you're pulling in data from more sources and having to deal with, with everything involved in that obviously, you know, these different tools here at the top are very heavily focused on making that simpler. And that's a real often a real strength of theirs. But, but it's still, there is a higher level of complexity in general. In the middle we have vendors who are doing both. And so this is kind of one of the big shifts that we saw this year, which is the number of vendors who are kind of in this middle section. So really kind of, let's say from jigs, so on down here to the two, just above the x-axis that, that space is really compressed.

Stacia Garr (18:16):

Meaning a lot more vendors are in that space now. And then we had a lot of vendors who kind of showed up and are now there that we didn't have in, in 2019. And the reason for that is, you know, we've been talking as others about the importance of bringing in more data sources in order to get a more holistic understanding of what's happening. And so we're starting to see vendors who are both, you know, surveying employees for instance, but then also integrating data from different sources. Priyanka, did I miss anything on that?

Priyanka Mehrotra (18:46):

I think the only other point to add is that we saw a lot more vendors shift towards the right this year. So a lot more of we saw vendors improve their capability to providing data more frequently and also seeing users access that data more frequently. So we had a few, one vendors that shifted towards the right, and we had some engagement and experienced vendors who also shifted more towards the right. So that's, that's another difference that we saw from last year.

Stacia Garr (19:15):

Yeah. What questions do you guys have on this? Do you all have, if any?

Priyanka Mehrotra (19:26):

Oh, it looks like we have a question in the chat. How should, how should one understand when a window like Visier and work, they show up more than once in this chart.

Stacia Garr (19:38):

Yeah. So the let's take Visier as an example. So Vizier has an analytics platform or an analytics offering, excuse me, in addition to a workforce planning offering. And so with this group of vendors over here in the accumulated analytics are the ones who are kind of most likely to show up twice. And that's because they have a distinct workforce planning offering. That's separate from the others. Workday is a different case in that Workday has kind of three different analytics products. So they have a their, their Prism product, which is appear in the upper, right. They have their overall people analytics product, which is is kind of available. It does. So with Prism, you can pull in data from external sources with, with people analytics, you cannot and then they have their HCM analytics product, which basically provides a analytics on top of just their HCM data. So each of these kind of represents a different product offering for those different vendors.

Differentiating capabilities according to vendors​

Stacia Garr (20:52):

Okay. well we'll go ahead and keep moving then. So there was a question earlier about the differentiating capabilities according to the vendors and wanted it to kind of highlight what we saw as the differences. So in 2019, we saw that folks were saying things like ease of use customizable short time to implement scalable and flexible is their primary differentiators. And as I said, we were clear in our in our 2019 report that, you know, if everyone's saying the same things, they're not really differentiators. And so folks were quite a bit better in clarifying what their different capabilities were here. In 2020, we heard quite a bit more about domain expertise. So saying, you know, we bring this specific set of capabilities from a knowledge perspective or an industry or a sector or a geography perspective to bear on this particular problem aligned to that, the methodology and science.

Stacia Garr (21:48):

So we saw a lot more people kind of talking about if they had it, the underlying scientific basis on which their analysis was based. And that I think was really I helpful thing for, for vendors or for customers because it helps them understand, Hey, this, this is where this is coming from. This is why it's sound. This is, I think also important when we're thinking about things like AI or machine learning and helping people understand, you know, a little bit more of what's underneath the hood, as it were. Actionability was something that we heard a lot of vendors increasingly focus on. How do we actually go from the, the information to insight and that insight to action. And that I think is something that vendor sync that some vendors are differentiating here. There's a huge amount of opportunities still within that particular item. And then finally we did here still scalable and flexible and, and for some vendors that, that really is still true. Some of them are more scalable and flexible than others. And we didn't hear that. You can see it's kind of number four there. We didn't hear it quite as broadly as we did in 2019, which I think is, is good because it's a little bit more accurate, I think in terms of what's actually out there. Priyanka, did I miss anything there?

Stacia Garr (23:14):

Okay. Any questions on this? I know we had a question earlier,

Speaker 3 (23:20):

Actually. It's not a question. I mean, I just want to add, I mean, some mentions, let's say maybe we have more microservices. I mean, next year, because the people are just some go goes growing increasingly. And we have a lot of maybe microservices in this field because, you know, even we can give wide employee experience in many collaborative tools. So I think for this year we had immediate expertise.

Stacia Garr (23:54):

Yeah, no, I think that's a good point.

Speaker 1 (23:59):

I asked the question before, so thank you for sharing this. I think it makes sense as this market matures you it gets a little bit more specialized, I would say. So domain expertise and the methodology and science and some of the social science research that is so fundamental to HR and people analytics should make more of a hopefully, you know, the make a presence in, in the applications or the dashboards.

Stacia Garr (24:36):

Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was having a really interesting conversation with a people analytics practitioners this morning, actually about this, but this, this need for getting more of our you know, IO psychology and kind of general psychology, quite frankly insights into, into some of these tools and, and how important that is. It is broadly, but also particularly around the skills conversation that we're hearing come up a lot more with people, analytics technologies because, you know, with all of this, we're, we're looking at people. And so that, that strong basis in that science is an important aspect.

Speaker 1 (25:13):

Yeah. That's very true. I think because when it comes to actionability, that's one of the issues you really cannot be very prescriptive when it comes to people it's much more nuanced than let's say a sales application or a finance application.

Stacia Garr (25:35):

Yeah. I agree. And I disagree in that. I think that there is an opportunity for many solutions to one, Change level of expectation of kind of the type of the way people will interact with the system. So, so right now, in general, there is an underlying assumption that the user of these people analytics technologies will have the time energy inclination, whatever to go and kind of do some of the digging to find the most interesting insights. But the thing is, is particularly as we start to expand our base beyond our people, analytics practitioners, and maybe some are savvy HR leaders and obviously the data savvy HR leaders is a small percentage of those folks. I think that there's more of a need to kind of bubble up what some of the, what may be happening?

Stacia Garr (26:36):

So for instance, just to choose an example, if we know if we have a high, we may have a hypothesis, you know, black women are less…are staying at the organization for a shorter period of time than other, another population. Right now in a lot of these systems, you have to have that hypothesis and go digging for it. You have to cut by it. And in, even in the ones where that isn't the case where they might show that they don't necessarily show you what you could do. So, you know, maybe we need to look at compensation. We need to look at levels of engagement, their sense of inclusion, et cetera, et cetera, that group sense of inclusion. I think that there's an opportunity for the technology to make suggestions about this might be what's causing it, or this might be what you could do, not necessarily because it's right, because it may not be right, but what we all know that it's easier to react to something than it is to necessarily come up with the idea a whole hog new on our own. And so I think there's an opportunity to kind of show what could be happening, what could be done in the instant, in the hope that it will drive more action,

Speaker 1 (27:47):

One hundred percent agree. I think you know, full disclosure, we, we take all of our users up to that point, meaning showcasing what the the causes are, so that when the decision-makers are able to see what are the possible levers or the drivers that I need to focus on, I think that's the fundamental role of an analytics application, right. You really need to get there. And as you said, there, depending on the cause whether it is a promotion rate or compensation or something else it's up to them, the HR business partner or the business leader to take the required action.

Stacia Garr (28:27):

Yeah. Great. Any other comments or thoughts?

Vendors responded to customer needs

Stacia Garr (28:40):

All right, let's keep going then. Okay. So the other, the other kind of high level findings that we'd shared with vendors for needing to respond to customers, and they did it in, in five ways. First was it focusing on employee engagement experience kind of already touched on that point? Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. So we saw particularly after the social justice movements of last summer an uptick in the focus on DEIB. That though I think is and, and we actually just published, what was it Tuesday Priyanka this week has been so long Tuesday our DEIB tech study. And, and we talk about this in that study as well, because it kind of goes both ways, but we saw an increased focus on that on people analytics. But we think there's actually quite a bit more room to focus on this topic within people analytics, and we're planning to study that here in Q1.

Stacia Garr (29:39):

But, but that was the second, second high theme. Third is getting the basics, right. So I, I pulled the specific slide out on this point, but really what we saw was a focus from our customers saying that their vendors were kind of focusing on some of the core elements, things like surveys, filtering, et cetera, that would enable them to use this solutions effectively. But some of the more sophisticated things like what we were just talking about we saw less effectiveness from, from vendors the fourth one being integrating and analyzing data from multiple sources. So, you know, just to kind of level set HRIS is, is the thing that everybody integrates with. I think it's 90% of vendors integrate agent with HRIS data. But then it kind of really starts to drop off in terms of some of the other talent solutions that are out there.

Stacia Garr (30:30):

And also some of the other technology, so sales or finance or other work cloud technology. So it's still something that focus folks are focused on, but it's just not as high as HRIS, but we did see kind of a greater focus on this in the last year. And then as I already highlighted people, analytics practitioners saw a much bigger focus on that audience. And less of a focus on some of the other audiences though, that said, we did see that when vendors were talking about what they were going to do moving forward. Most of them said that they were primarily going to focus on business leaders and C-suite leaders and that they going to focus on managers much more in the future.

Stacia Garr (31:14):

Priyanka did I miss, anything there?

Priyanka Mehrotra (31:16):

Nope.

What should users keep in mind before buying new people analytics tech?

Stacia Garr (31:19):

All right. So now we're gonna jump into the questions that we received from folks in advance of this call. And this was the first one, which was what should folks be keeping in mind before buying new people, analytics tech? And this was like a perfectly planted question because we wrote about this in this study. And so what we found in this study was this folk need to focus on first identifying your needs. If you're, if you're a buyer, you know, what is it, what's the problem that you're actually trying to solve? And these are the five challenges that we've heard from vendors that they were trying to solve for their customers. And so we would advise, you know, figure out what really is the underlying challenge that you're looking for and can this vendor actually meet those challenges?

Stacia Garr (32:07):

You know, we see some vendors who are really great at, for instance, in play engagement experience, but they may be kind of more of a tech platform first and may not be focused as much on enabling action. Kind of underneath that too, is that we saw about a 60, 40 breakdown between the percentage of vendors who say that they have consulting included with their platform or some level of consulting to help get you off the ground and to give you support throughout the year. So that was about 60% of vendors and then 40% said they, any consulting is kind of add-on beyond, beyond what they're doing. So it was just important to know what your, what your needs are and whether the vendor can realistically meet your highest priority needs. Second looking beyond the basics. So I'm going to just build this real quick.

Stacia Garr (32:57):

So these are some of the, the kind of additional capabilities that we saw that vendors can offer in some of the new areas that they're, that they're looking into. So for instance, machine learning for, for deep learning about 40% of vendors are doing that about a third. Are you looking at digital exhaust? About 26% are looking at advanced NLP, and that is important to distinguish a lot of vendors say that they offer NLP, but advanced NLP allows you to take into account things like your, your organization's culture and maybe specific language that you use within your, within your organization. It can allow you to group together prescriptive comments. So not just this is what's happening, but this is what we should do. And to understand that. So there's kind of a lot more nuanced underneath NLP than a lot of vendors will say, they'll say, Oh yeah, we've got an NLP.

Stacia Garr (33:53):

We can, you know, group your comments. You're fine. But there's quite a bit more that can be done than that. And then finally we're starting to see the use of voice channels as a, as a thing that folks are experimenting with. And so using that, for instance, to allow folks to either submit video or to do recordings of things that they'd like changed or better, et cetera. And then potentially as we start to see more more information about or the more ability to kind of bring in digital conversations, maybe meetings, et cetera that might be another way that folks are potentially using this in the future. Any other questions or any questions on this?

Stacia Garr (34:51):

Okay.

Stacia Garr (34:56):

And then it's kind of gets at that understanding vendor support and services I had highlighted a moment ago. So, so you can kind of see here that the data that I, that I mentioned about, you know, I actually think I flipped it, but so 60% of vendors say that they do not provide any sort of consulting services as part of their annual subscription and about 40% roughly so that they do. So understanding that level of, of support, and then also the frequency of customer check-ins by the vendor. So how, how engaged is the vendor and asking you what you need about 60% of vendors are doing that monthly. But you can see that, you know, 17% are quarterly and 15% are only at twice a year in terms of checking in and providing support. So you can understand what it is that you need.

Stacia Garr (35:40):

And then the final thing we mentioned is in terms of folks who are thinking about buying, they need to think about is, is clarifying the ethics expectations. There's a wide range of levels of support that vendors expect to have to provide when it comes to ethics. And you can see here that, and also, I should say it also varies by the type of category for, so for instance, multi-source analysis platforms as a group, as a category, scored the lowest on the amount of, kind of support that they give around ethics compared to, let's say, in play engagement platforms, which are amongst the highest. So you need to understand kind of what your organization's stance is on data ethics, and to make sure that it's either aligned with what your vendor is offering or that you're able to kind of guide your vendor in a way that is aligned to what your organization prioritizes.

Stacia Garr (36:31):

Okay. So I'm going to stop there. That was all in the considerations of what to think about before buying new people, analytics, tech, does anybody have any questions or thoughts or things that you're thinking about when it comes to buying tech that maybe we didn't cover?

Which people analytics tech vendors are focusing on addressing the needs of business and people leaders?

Stacia Garr (36:58):

Well, we'll move on to the next question. Okay. So which people, analytics, tech vendors are focused on addressing the needs of business and people leaders. So this is, I'm Just going to share this data here as a starting point. So vendors are generally planning to invest in non HR users. So what we have on the left-hand side is the current end users. And you can see kind of the, the groups, so business and C-suite people, managers and employees, and in red, we have 2020 data and in purple 2019 data. So you can see, for instance, right now about 55% of our vendors said that they're highly focused on business and C-suite leaders.

Stacia Garr (37:45):

And then on the right hand side, you can see what they said, where they plan to in the, the groups that they think will use their solution more frequently in three years. So you can see, again, 80% of solutions expect business and C-suite leaders to use their solution more in three years than today. So that means that they're planning to build for those folks. So you can see again, you know, business and C-suite leaders and then people managers, and then finally employees are the areas that are expected to see growth in. And we had a whole bunch of other populations on here, including people HR practitioners, HR, business partners, HR leaders, et cetera. Those either held steady, or actually they, they said they didn't expect to see more growth or more use of those the solution by those groups in the future.

Stacia Garr (38:32):

So these are the three that we saw the growth. So in general rule of thumb is, is people, vendors are planning to go after particularly business and C-suite leaders and people managers more in the future. In terms of the specific, you know, vendors, I think we've got, you know, whatever it is, 50 some odd vendors in this study, I hesitate to call out individual vendors and kind of a list. But I think, you know, if folks have a specific question around specific category, happy to answer that one offline. But I think the general expectation should be that, you know, roughly half of them today are focused on business and C-suite leaders and people managers, and that in the future, it's going to be quite a bit more.

How are people analytics tech vendors helping customers with their DEIB challenges?

Stacia Garr (39:22):

Next question we got was how are people, analytics, tech vendors, helping customers with their DEI B challenges? And so for this one, I don't think we put together some data. But I can tell you there, there are a few ways and Priyanka, please jump in here because I'm sure I will…because we just published this study this week. I might, might not have my talk track straight here. But so, so there are a number of ways, you know, one of them is just through, through kind of your, your pure analytics of, of what's happening for these different groups. So this might be looking at retention rates. It might be looking at promotion rates, representation, et cetera, with, with different populations within the group within the organization, excuse me. We are attending to in really until last summer the big focus was on gender for a lot of organizations we've since then seen a big shift to, to race as you would expect.

Stacia Garr (40:21):

But I think we're going to start to see some other demographics come in as well. And so sorry. I see you need to jump off, the recording and slides are only available to RedThread members. So the live event is what's available to anybody, but the recording and slides are available to red thread members. Thanks for the question. In terms of kind of some other ways that we're seeing people, analytics, tech vendors help, you know, one big area has been around organizational network analysis. And so that has been looking at the networks of different populations and understanding where we might be seeing some populations who are maybe not as well connected or included within the organization as others. That's one way that we're seeing it. Certainly other ways we're seeing it are looking at things like within talent acquisition, kind of what what might be happening to different candidates in terms of them dropping out of the pipeline or what actually interestingly might be happening with interviewers.

Stacia Garr (41:22):

So do certain interviewers tend to have a bias towards selecting one type of person or another? So I think they're, they're just a number of different use cases. I mean, in the, in the people that are in the DEIB tech study that we just published, we basically have vendors across all four areas of the talent life cycle. So talent, acquisition engagement, and retention, advancement development, and then people analytics, but fundamentally all those solutions are in, most of them, not all, most of them are or some sort of analytics solution Priyanka, what did I miss? Because I'm sure I missed a bunch.

Priyanka Mehrotra (41:57):

I would just add a thing that we saw the same, a lot more vendors. Talk about inclusion and belonging. So for example, and we mentioned this an our DEIB report, like 40, for example has in its solution tries to capture belonging through its survey for candidate experience as an employee experiences and has that built in, into its culture and hiring tool that they offer to their customers. You know, similarly Workday had released their Vibe, which is their inclusion and belonging index. And some of the employee engagement experience when results are starting to talk about inclusion quite a bit more. So PeakOn for example, that's another example that we had shared in our DEIB study that is working with customers to really understand the different experiences of the underrepresented groups inside the workforce. I think the other thing that we talk about is looking at retention rates and I know leadership among different groups, for example, Visier allows cohort analysis of different groups to see how different groups are progressing through the development and looking at their career progression and where they're falling off in the leadership cycle.

Stacia Garr (43:12):

So I think those, those were some of the examples that really stood out this time in our study.

Stacia Garr (43:19):

What are you all seeing? Are you seeing the technology being applied in different ways or different use cases where you would hope to use?

Speaker 5 (43:31):

Yeah. That that's interesting from the perspective of the survey, because I was thinking about it that I know there was a lot of requests from, from the company I was doing last year. I know that was a big focus for us, was being able to look at the data and, and performance, just like what you just explained, being able to look at that, but I didn't feel like we got that. We're able to get that. That was a request we made to our vendors. I didn't feel like we were able to get that. So are you saying that you saw a lot of requests or are you saying that a lot of the analytics companies have this capability already?

Stacia Garr (44:13):

A number of them, I'm not sure I would go with a lot of them. So a number of them have that capability, for instance, Priyanka just mentioned Visier. Visier has that capability. Workday launched in November I want to say maybe that timing might not be quite right, but their Vibe index which allows for it. She mentioned PeakOn, which is an engagement provider. They allow for a pretty robust DEIB analysis. So a number of them do that, that said kind of, if we think about what we saw in our DEIB tech report that we just published one of the big shifts was that we saw a lot more of what we call DEIB feature vendors. And so those are vendors who do other things, but have recently added DEIB features to their offering and that number Priyanka.

Stacia Garr (45:06):

Do you remember the exact percentage increase we saw, but it's big. My recollection and maybe Priyanka, you can look it up while I'm talking about. My recollection is it was an increase of 136% is what's the number that sticks in my head. So we're seeing a lot of existing vendors add on DEIB features. And what I expect to still see that here in 2021, because the DEIB energy is still very much so there. And I think that given a lot of the commitments that were made by companies in 2020, they're going to be asked, there's going to be some accountability. I think quite a bit more than there has been before in 2021 as to what they've done. And then analytics component of that is fundamental to being able to answer that question.

Speaker 5 (45:57):

Right. So I have one more question. So this research that you did was based on existing vendors, did you also notice a lot of new entry in terms of tech companies that are bringing new technologies for D&I?

Stacia Garr (46:13):

In general, we have. So we had been seeing a significant growth rate of new vendors into the space, both people, analytics and DEIB for, you know, years, but we have seen a bit of a slowdown and we think that was related to the, you know, the financial impact of COVID in 2020. That may shift here in 2021, now that we have a vaccine and kind of a perceived way forward, we also see broadly VC investment in this space is still really high and really growing. So my gut is that it will probably pick up here in 2021, but we did in general, see a slowing of the pace of new vendors in 2020.

Speaker 5 (47:03):

Okay. Thank you.

Stacia Garr (47:09):

Any other questions?

Stacia Garr (47:15):

One thing I realized I did not say, but should have said is compensation analytics is obviously a really big space here. I kind of think of it as like obvious, but it's not necessarily.

Stacia Garr (47:31):

For people who are newer to the space, but the compensation side of, of this has been particularly driven by, by places like the UK who are requiring gender compensation report outs and the like, and, and then that has a ripple effect because if you're gonna do it from large multinational companies, for many of them, if you're gonna do it in one place, you should probably do it in all places. And so we're seeing that broadly across people analytics. So I just should have, I should have mentioned that earlier.

How can people analytics practitioners discern which emerging tools and trends will gain long-term adoption?

Stacia Garr (48:00):

Okay. so this was kind of an interesting question. So how can people, analytics, practitioners discern which emerging tools and trends will gain long term adoption. Now, if I really truly knew the answer to that, I can just shut down red thread and call it good.

Stacia Garr (48:20):

Cause I spend my life as was Priyanka trying to think about this night. I don't necessarily know the answer, but here's how I would start to think about it. One, is it solving a real problem that organizations have? I think that it's really easy for us in people analytics. I include myself in this to say, Oh, we can do this really cool thing. And then to go searching for a problem, you know, a hammer in search of a nail. And sometimes that nail is not really the nail that needs to be hit for the business. And so I think, you know, where I would start is, is a really, truly a problem for the business. Not just something that people analytics or even HR is excited to solve. So that's, that's thing. Number one thing. Number two is, can we actually solve it? And so by this, I mean, is it a problem that we, that is not so complex that we can solve?

Stacia Garr (49:19):

So for instance, I had a great conversation with someone a few days ago where we were talking about skills and now I believe that there, that skills has the potential to be a really powerful thing. But this practitioner was saying, look, I think this is all just hype. Like this whole skills thing is overblown because people are much more than their current skills. There's their potential, there's their interests there's, you know, their lives, the rest of the things that are happening that can impact their performance and skills themselves are really hard and complex. And so if you are trying to solve the skills question, like the level of complexity is so great that I don't think you can get there. I don't know that I have an answer to that point, but the, but the point around the level of complexity and the fact that we're trying to measure things that are very human and influenced by other things that we can't necessarily measure, because we can't measure every single thing about a person.

Stacia Garr (50:15):

I think it does beg the question is, you know, in this example is skills a trend or will it be something that actually gets baked into our organizations and drive long term? So, like I said, first thing, is it solving a real problem? Second thing, is it a, is it a problem that we actually can solve? And then I think third, is do we have the reach to, even if we have the right answer to influence the people who can drive action. So for instance, you know, a lot of solutions are trying to get, as we saw more into the hands of C-suite leaders and and people, managers and employees, which is great, but if we develop a solution now or a feature now that requires those people to do something, but they are not, the reach of the solutions are not broad enough to actually get that information into those people's hands. It's going to end up being a trend that fails a fad that fails. Now it may be that in five years, it comes back and we've got the broader reach and we can get to those people. But if we can't get the right information to the right hand to the right people to make the right decisions, then I think it tends to fail. So that's, that's my thinking on it. Priyanka, do you have anything to add?

Priyanka Mehrotra (51:31):

I think I would just reiterate the first point that you made about the business challenges, I think and that also ties to what the employees need. You know, one of the things that we are hoping to see in, we expect to see for this year is people analytics really move into the development space. And I think that's really crucial from the employee side, as well as from the business side as well. And we know from, from 2020, one of the biggest challenges that businesses and employees face was shifting to this new paradigm of working and suddenly everybody did, needed to learn new things while working remotely. And people analytics really saw an opportunity to come into play over there. So I think marrying those two things really finding out what is it that employees need aligning that with the business needs. I think that's very real see the trends and long-term adoption of what people analytics can really do.

Conclusion

Stacia Garr (52:22):

Great. I see that some folks are having to jump. So I think that's probably a good place to, to end. There was one more question, but I think we'll just stand right there. The overview is available on the site for folks who are not members. The full study is available for folks who are members and also the tool, which gives information on all the vendors who are in this study. A kind of lightweight version is available on the site for everyone and a heavyweight version that has a lot more details on it is available again to RedThread members. So thanks so much for spending some of your time with us today. I know everyone is really busy and so we appreciate that you did. And if you have any follow-up questions, feel free to reach out to Priyanka or me. You can certainly get us at [email protected]. That's probably the easiest way. All right. Thanks so much everybody. Thank you!

 

DEIB Tech: Its Time Has Come

Global pandemic. Protests. Elections. Riots. (And whatever else happens between when we publish this article and you read it.)

Needless to say, the last year has been rough. It laid bare our differences in stark relief. Showed how events impact diverse people differently. Perhaps it caused you some measure of disgust, despair, or even depression. At a minimum, it likely contributed to exhaustion.

But, at the same time, the last year has also revealed our underlying humanity. The extent to which we care about other people. The depth at which we hold our beliefs about our country. The potential we have when we work together (hello, COVID-19 vaccine!).

Given all this, there's never been a greater need for a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB)—both in our society and in our organizations. We have a need to understand each other and to work together, more than ever before.

Organizations throughout the world have recognized this, from top leaders to DEIB leaders to managers and employees. It’s for this reason companies are talking about DEIB more in their earnings reports than ever before (see Figure 1¹) and why the number of DEIB job openings has skyrocketed (see Figure 2²).

The thing is this: Organizations can't just talk about DEIB and hire people to lead it. That's a good start, but it’s not enough. Organizations need to change their systems, practices, and behaviors. The change cannot just rely on individuals—it has to be baked into how the organization operates.

This is where DEIB technology can help, as it has the potential to build in practices, behaviors, insights, and recommendations that address bias. It can also provide insights about what is actually happening with people (versus relying on anecdote-based understanding) at the moment of critical decision-making about talent.

DEIB tech is no longer a brand new market—but still many have not heard of it. With that in mind, let’s do a quick review of where this market came from and why it's now ready to meet this moment.

Tripping down memory lane

When we first began studying the D&I tech market in 2018, the #MeToo movement had thrust diversity and inclusion in the workspace under a spotlight. Stories and accounts of workplace discrimination, harassment, and unethical behaviors toward women in the workplace led numerous businesses to pledge to change their policies and take action.³ As a result, organizations began to feel a greater need for systemwide solutions.

In 2018, we launched our first research study on this topic, and we published a comprehensive report, Diversity & Inclusion Technology: The Rise of a Transformative Market, in February 2019. The study included a list of all the D&I vendors (105) we identified and was accompanied by a detailed vendor landscape tool (with 2 updates since). As we shared in our initial report, tech can play a transformative role.

Today, we’ve expanded the topic’s breadth to now span diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging—increasing our coverage to 196 vendors (and counting!). And while we cover the market trends and changes extensively in this report, the complete list of all the vendors and the details around their capabilities are included in our online tool.

We believed in 2019 that tech may be the missing link which—along with a combination of strategies, goals, practices, policies, and behaviors—could bring about systemic changes for DEIB.

Fast forward to today

We (still) find ourselves in the midst of health, social, and economic crises. 2020 was not an easy year for anyone, but it especially impacted diverse people in many significant ways, including:

• Women left the workforce in record numbers
• Lower-income earners saw their jobs evaporate
• The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others disproportionately impacted the Black community

The rise of the Black Lives Matter (#BLM) movement in the U.S. and around the world has forced people to pay greater attention to issues surrounding racial diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. As a result, businesses are increasingly expected to take a stand on social justice issues, remain true to their values, and treat their workforce in an equitable manner.⁴

Many companies have responded by making pledges or promises in support of the #BLM movement.⁵  A large number of them have focused on increasing diversity levels within the companies, both at the employee and leadership levels (for examples of such corporate pledges, see Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging: Creating a Holistic Approach for 2021).

As the pressure to follow through on these promises increases, leaders must develop strategies to achieve them—and we believe that DEIB tech represents one of the critical components of the process (see Figure 3 further down). Sophisticated tech—such as artificial intelligence (AI), deep machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and organizational network analysis (ONA)—can help leaders manage DEIB better and more easily, and are increasingly becoming more accepted as essential tools for people practices.⁶

Orgs that are serious about implementing systemic change and seeking to achieve a lasting impact should look to DEIB tech for capabilities that enable them.

Specifically, DEIB tech can help:

• Improve the org’s understanding of and complexities surrounding DEIB
• Promote objective decision-making
• Flag and mitigate bias
• Ensure equal access to opportunities for all within the org
• Create transparency and accountability
• Scale DEIB efforts throughout the org

We believe that leaders must have a clear understanding of the DEIB tech available (internally and externally), and how it can help them achieve their business’s goals.

Through this report, we aim to achieve 4 things:

1. Help leaders understand the role of DEIB tech
2. Provide insights on the state of the DEIB tech market
3. Highlight the talent areas focused on by vendors
4. Guide leaders who may be looking to make tech investments

Key Findings

1. 3 major shifts punctuate the current DEIB tech market. To start, in 2017-2018, when the #MeToo movement was at its height, leaders were especially focused on gender; in 2020-21, the emphasis has evolved to include a focus on race and ethnicity. Next, and as a result of the first shift, the social justice movements and conversations around discriminatory workplace policies and behaviors have led to greater attention to inclusion than ever before. Finally, the role and impact of AI on mitigating bias to enhance DEIB has come front and center, and is being more readily addressed.
2. The broader HR tech world is responding to these market shifts. The number of HR tech vendors offering features or functionalities that cater to DEIB as part of their solutions has increased by 136% since 2019. We believe this reflects a growing need among organizations for HR tech solutions that incorporate a DEIB lens into all areas of talent.
3. The DEIB tech market is hotter than ever. The total number of vendors in the market increased by 87% as we identified a total of 196 vendors in the market for 2021, as compared with the 105 that we included in our research in 2019. The overall market size is $313 million, having grown at a CAGR of 59% since our last study in 2019.
4. People analytics for DEIB has arrived. Lack of analytics and insights on DEIB is the primary challenge that the majority of vendors are helping their customers solve for. Data and analytics are becoming more important for DEIB as organizations measure and track their efforts.⁷ As a result, a number of solutions providing DEIB analytics capabilities is growing (28% in 2021 vs 26% in 2019).
5. Smaller organizations and knowledge industries remain the main customers of DEIB tech. The largest customer category is small organizations (those with fewer than 1,000 employees), who represent almost 30% of all DEIB vendor customers. However, these small organizations represent a smaller percentage of DEIB vendor customers in 2021 than in 2019, and there was an increase in the percentage of customer organizations in the 10,000-50,000 employee range. As companies recover from the events of 2020, we expect to see orgs of all sizes increase their use of DEIB tech.

DEIB Tech: So Critical Now

Before we dive into the latest about DEIB tech, we need to establish a foundation here for some of the terms and concepts we use. We also offer a brief explanation of why DEIB tech is important to your organization.

Let’s take a step back and define our overall terms. Readers of our previous report will notice that we’ve evolved our terminology from “diversity and inclusion” (D&I) to “diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging” (DEIB). The events of 2020 resulted in a focus on conversations around the workplace experiences of diverse and underrepresented people.

Specifically, they shed light on the uneven playing field that many individuals are faced with, as well as how it impacts their sense of belonging and being part of an organization. Due to this, we’ve seen a rise among both orgs and vendors that consider equity and belonging as part of their holistic understanding of this issue, and are including them as part of their programs and offerings.

What is DEIB?

Figure 3 features our definitions for the DEIB abbreviation—diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

Now that we’ve defined the terms, it’s time to understand why DEIB is so important.

The great divide: Why is DEIB important NOW?

The events of 2020 have resulted in a sense of urgency and accelerated conversations about DEIB. And we’re seeing an unprecedented and greater willingness among leaders to engage and push for change. So, while cultural injustices have happened throughout our global history, why does there seem to be a greater push to change things now?

A key factor: Underrepresented people have been impacted disproportionately by the health and economic crises brought about by COVID-19—inequalities that have shined a discriminating spotlight on the many differences that continue to exist in our social structures.

For example: Job losses hit Black workers in far greater numbers than for Whites. Both Black men and women saw their unemployment rates go up to more than 16%, while White men saw theirs rise to a comparatively lower number of 12.8%, in April 2020.⁸ This gap didn’t improve once businesses reopened and companies began rehiring later in the year. While by August the unemployment rate for White workers was down to 7%, for Black workers it was much higher at 13% and the gap even larger.⁹

Additionally, as a result of the events of summer 2020, #BLM movement, and the following protests, many employees found themselves navigating difficult conversations around these issues at the workplace. Leaders, on their end, found themselves facing greater expectations to provide “safe spaces” for employees to do that, and have more open and honest discussions with them.¹⁰

Companies are under increasing pressure today to act on issues around discrimination and systemic racism. Leaders must seize this opportunity to make good on their claims and enable meaningful change to happen. And designing an overall approach to DEIB is a really good place to start.

Leveraging DEIB tech as part of an overall approach

Given the heightening expectations of DEIB that orgs are facing, leaders need to design a holistic approach to DEIB which includes all people practices and impacts all stakeholders. As we learned in our recent research,¹¹ when designing their new DEIB approach, orgs must do 6 key things:

1. Clarify their purpose or reason for doing it
2. Establish goals
3. Develop a strategy to meet those goals
4. Identify critical levers and activities that impact those goals
5. Leverage technology
6. Use data, analytics, and metrics to embed accountability and transparency

Technology forms a core part of a holistic DEIB approach. The next section explores what DEIB tech can offer. For more details on the other components of a holistic DEIB approach, please refer to our report, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging: Creating A Holistic Approach For 2021.

What is DEIB tech?

When we talk about DEIB tech, we’re referring to …

… Enterprise software that provides insights, or alters processes or practices, at the individual or organizational level, in support of an organization’s efforts to become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, and to enable belonging.

For the purpose of our ongoing research, we focus on tech that impacts decisions related to people. While there are other types of technology, such as those focusing on accessibility for people with a range of abilities and disabilities, these aren’t covered in our report as they don’t impact people decisions directly.

When we think about DEIB tech, we identify 3 types of vendors:

• DEIB focus vendors. The primary business for these vendors is helping orgs address their DEIB challenges. An example: a vendor whose product focuses only on reducing unconscious bias during hiring.
• DEIB feature vendors. These offer features or functionalities that cater specifically to DEIB needs, but their primary business focus includes more than DEIB. An example: a recruiting software vendor whose product can make all resume names / identifying info “blind” to minimize unconscious bias.
• DEIB friendly vendors. While these vendors neither address DEIB as their primary focus nor market themselves specifically as doing so, their included features or functionalities could positively impact such efforts in organizations. An example: a recruiting software vendor using AI to recommend appropriate candidates to hiring managers.

Essentially, DEIB tech should impact people decisions in a manner that helps orgs meet their DEIB goals. It should help transform fundamental and structural qualities of the systems that are in place in order to bring about lasting change. The key point here is that it must help drive systemic change in the organizations.

DEIB tech must impact people decisions by transforming fundamental and structural qualities of the systems in place in order to drive systemic change in the organization.

Some of the ways DEIB tech can do this is by:

• Uncovering existing policies, practices, and programs that may be biased, discriminatory (in reality, if not in design), or in conflict with the company strategy, and which need to be changed
• Identifying existing gaps between goals and the actions taken to meet them
• Measuring and tracking progress toward those goals
• Analyzing data and information for greater insights, and identifying areas of interest
• Making recommendations on next steps
• Scaling these efforts and the impact of these activities for the benefit of the entire organization

Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals around what DEIB tech is and why it’s important for orgs, let’s dive into this market.

State Of The DEIB TECH Market

Since we published our first report on the DEIB market, we’ve published 2 additional updates (here and here) that feature several new vendors as well as our overview on the market itself. In addition, regular conversations with vendors and users of these technologies allow us to keep a pulse on the DEIB tech market changes over time.

Four ongoing trends caught our attention and results from our recent vendor survey confirmed these findings. Overall, the DEIB tech market is:

1. Experiencing 3 big shifts in its approach to DEIB
2. Hot and growing with more vendors offering DEIB capabilities than ever before
3. Largely comprised of customers from small orgs and knowledge sector industries
4. Getting serious about analytics

Let’s examine these market trends in more detail.

3 big shifts

Our research and conversations reveal that the events of 2020 significantly impacted how organizations are thinking and approaching DEIB. Specifically, we find the following 3 big shifts that play a role in this market’s evolution:

1. Focus shift from gender to race
2. Stronger spotlight on inclusion
3. Impact and role of AI at the forefront

Focus shift from gender to race

The #MeToo movement in 2017-2018 brought conversations about sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace under a spotlight. Similarly, the twin crises of COVID-19 and the social justice movements in 2020 highlighted discussions about workplace discrimination—with the focus now shifted from gender to race. The events of 2020 have had a disproportionately greater impact on diverse and underrepresented people. And, as conversations around DEIB have increased and demanded attention, there’s more emphasis around the issue of ending systemic racism.

Our interviews with DEIB leaders revealed a greater openness among orgs to have honest conversations about race than ever before: To a large extent, this is due to the expectations that people have. Eighty percent of the U.S. population want brands to help solve society’s problems, while 71% trust their employer to do what’s right on systemic racism and racial injustice.¹²

DEIB tech providers also noticed this shift. Our findings revealed that vendors:

• Added specific questions regarding race in their surveys and analytics
• Offer resources that cover issues about racial injustice
• Provide capabilities that allow users to measure and compare employee experiences through a race lens

A stronger spotlight on inclusion

As we mention in our report Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging: Creating A Holistic Approach For 2021, our research showed that the pandemic and #BLM movement led to an expansion of DEIB efforts by orgs. In particular, remote work, the disproportional effect of COVID-19 on certain populations, and uneven caregiving responsibilities all threatened to disrupt ongoing efforts to keep employees engaged and connected. Many organizations evolved their efforts to meet those challenges: Some revisited their policies and practices around employee lifecycles and updated them to meet these changing needs.

One such example comes from Ph.Creative, a brand agency that updated its strategy to better focus on inclusion.

Solution providers, too, have noticed this growing focus and are responding to it. For example, we’ve seen a significant rise in the number of vendors focused on employee engagement and development (43% in 2021 vs 31% in 2019). These activities, including employee experience, learning, career management, and wellbeing, drive and impact inclusion. Several vendors we spoke with shared that they’re offering products to help customers:

• Check the overall employee pulse and wellbeing
• Ensure continued engagement even in remote environments
• Enable flexibility to meet the differing needs of their workforce

Economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic also impacted this market. Budget cuts and low spending meant that talent acquisition (TA), and as a result diversity hiring, didn’t receive as much focus as it has in recent years. Organizations became more focused on retaining their existing workforce by ensuring they remain safe, engaged, and connected.

Finally, the racial injustice movements and conversations brought to the forefront that Black employees don’t feel a sense of inclusion or belonging at the workplace.¹³ People in general are more aware of a racial divide now as a result of the events of 2020: This has been instrumental in orgs realizing that they need to do more to ensure their diverse employees feel included.

Impact & role of AI at the forefront of DEIB

As the impact  and role of AI on DEIB has increasingly made news over the past few years,¹⁴ users as well as solution providers have been working to better understand the problems and address the resultant issues.

AI: The impact

While AI can identify and ferret out instances of existing bias in current systems and policies, it can also perpetuate it, for example, in job descriptions, hiring or promotion practices, or workplace communications. A main reason why: The data used to train algorithms is biased to begin with and, without correction, the algorithms simply replicate those biases. This can be due to such algorithms having been trained on a data sample that’s based on an over- or underrepresented population—thereby rewarding or penalizing other groups.

While AI can identify and ferret out instances of existing bias in current systems and policies, it can also perpetuate it.

Another big reason: The training data contains human biases and inequities reflective of those who created it. As a result, technology developers are increasingly adapting approaches that ensure the training data used for machine learning algorithms is free from human bias through stress testing and experimentation.¹⁵

AI: The role

While the impact of using biased algorithms has become clear, the role AI can play to mitigate existing biases has also received greater attention. The key point for users: The technology is used for the right problem and not seen as a cure-all.

For example, an AI interviewing software would be of little help to an org looking to increase its diverse candidate hiring if very few diverse candidates have been applying for roles to begin with. In this instance, the organization should consider why diverse candidates aren’t applying. It might be a sourcing problem. It might be a job description problem. It might be an employer brand problem. (There are tech solutions for all those problems.) Whatever the problem is, the AI interviewing software won’t help. The algorithm must be directed at the right problem.

In sum: 3 big shifts

These 3 shifts together can propose what may come as the DEIB tech market matures. They also offer hope that the words and pledges made by orgs in 2021 will be followed by respective actions as the understanding and focus around these 3 issues grow.

DEIB market growth

The market grew in 2 important ways in the last few years: both the number of vendors and market size as measured by revenue increased.

DEIB growth: Vendors

The overall number of vendors in the market (as identified by us) increased from 105 in 2019 to 196 in 2021. That’s an increase of 87%.

At first glance, you might think this increase may be due to the addition of new vendors. In fact, our research revealed, however, that many established vendors, not previously offering any DEIB functionality, have added new features / functionalities that customers can now use specifically for DEIB purposes. When we compared the total number of DEIB feature vendors in 2021 vs 2019, we saw an increase of 136%.

Our research revealed that 40% of vendors fall under our DEIB feature category in 2021, as compared with 30% in 2019. DEIB friendly vendors comprise a smaller percentage of the market than they did in 2019, while the percentage of DEIB focus vendors remained mostly unchanged at 32% (see Figure 7).

As shown in Figure 7, we believe these changes are a reflection of 2 interrelated developments.

• In the last few years, a large number of DEIB friendly vendors added or developed features that cater more specifically to DEIB needs—thus, they’re now counted as DEIB feature vendors.
• New vendors are finding more value in offering solutions with a DEIB lens embedded in their talent areas of focus, rather than only addressing specific DEIB challenges (i.e., an ONA or learning solution that’s able to provide insights on employee networks or learning, respectively, which can be broken down and analyzed by gender and race).

DEIB growth: Market

While many industries suffered setbacks with investments and contracts on hold during the pandemic, the DEIB tech market grew considerably. We had initially estimated the overall market size to be $100 million in 2018. However, our research this year turned up even more vendors that existed in 2018, so we have revised our 2018 overall market size to $124 million (see Figure 8). 

We estimate the overall market size to be $313 million, with a 2-year CAGR of 59% (and a 4-year CAGR of 82%) for the overall market. This growth is commendable, given 2020 was a year when almost all orgs looked to limit their spending and avoid unnecessary new investments.

We estimate the overall market size for DEIB technology market to be $313 million, with a 2-year CAGR of 59%.

Much of this growth was driven by the renewed calls for commitments to DEIB, once the #BLM movement gained momentum in the latter half of 2020. Given that we expect internal and external stakeholders to increasingly demand that orgs “walk the talk” in 2021, we expect demand (and thus market growth) to remain strong in the near future.

Customers of DEIB tech

When we looked at the customers of DEIB tech, two main findings caught our attention.

1. In general, small businesses comprise a greater percentage of DEIB tech than large orgs
2. Customers from technology, financial, and healthcare / life science industries have increased

Customer size

A real opportunity exists for the largest organizations to leverage DEIB tech. When we calculate the mean for customer sizes, we find that almost 30% of DEIB tech customers are small orgs with less than 1,000 employees. This is a lower number than in 2019 (see Figure 9) and likely represents a maturing of the market, since we see vendors increasingly selling to larger enterprises, notably organizations in the 10,000-50,000 employee range. That said, for the largest organizations—those with more than 50,000 employees—we haven't seen any notable movement in the percentage of them becoming DEIB customers.

This relatively low level of subscription to these technologies represents a real opportunity for the largest organizations because, as our research indicates, they're the ones which can use the help most, for 2 reasons:

1. Trust in large orgs is low. This is especially telling when compared with small businesses. A September 2020 Edelman study found that 43% of Americans trust large corporations to do the right thing in responding to issues of systemic racism and racial justice, as compared with 62% trusting small businesses. Corporations, in general, are believed to care less for their employees and share too little of their success with them.¹⁶ In addition, several recent instances of employers monitoring or tracking employee activity without their knowledge have appeared in the media.¹⁷ Employee fears of privacy invasion became more serious once the majority of the workforce shifted to remote work during the pandemic.¹⁸
2. High expectations exist for large orgs to do the right thing and take meaningful actions on DEIB. Seventy-seven percent of Americans state that it’s deeply important for companies to respond to racial injustice to earn or keep their trust.¹⁹ And while words matter, actions that lead to change matter even more. This was made clear when several leaders of large corporations received criticisms and backlash from consumers and media for their public stances in support of the #BLM movement: People saw them as stating empty words and pointed out the leaders’ failures to address discrimination within their own companies.

As the largest organizations look to put real money in 2021 behind the statements they made during #BLM, we expect to see them turn to tech more to help them address the systemic challenges they have with DEIB.

Industries

When we look at DEIB customers by industry, as expected, we see that technology and financial services / banking / insurance comprise an even larger portion of DEIB tech customers than they did in 2019 (see Figure 11). Also, customers from healthcare, pharmaceuticals, life science, and chemical industries increased by almost 3%. Although this may not seem like much, our conversations with vendors revealed a growing interest from these 4 industries.

Again, we believe the COVID-19 crisis played a role as it highlighted the need for organizations to support underrepresented and diverse groups, which comprise a significant percentage of healthcare workers.²⁰

Customers from the knowledge sector, including technology, financial, banking, and insurance industries, grew by almost 10% for each of them. This isn't too surprising as the technology industry tends to be more open to using tech to solve challenges. Also, given that the technology industry has been under the spotlight for its lack of progress when it comes to diversity in the recent years,^21,22 this is a welcome sign. Although DEIB tech is not a silver bullet, combined with a comprehensive strategy and practical goals, it can help enable continuous positive change.

Analytics takes centerstage

“ turn data into information, and information
into insight.”²³

This phrase is certainly gaining traction in the DEIB tech market. Over the past 2 years, we’ve noticed a growing emphasis on using analytics and insights to understand DEIB—and our survey findings confirm this. Fifty-two percent of vendors listed it as the primary challenge their solutions are helping customers solve in 2021, as compared with 33% in 2019 (see Figure 12).

52% of vendors listed analytics as the primary challenge their solutions are helping customers solve in 2021 (as compared with 33% in 2019).

As we mentioned in our recent report, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging: Creating A Holistic Approach For 2021, identifying, analyzing, and democratizing DEIB data is becoming a critical focus among forward-thinking organizations. Leaders are now trying to:

• Understand the experiences of diverse populations
• Identify and understand networks among different groups
• Analyze these data for deeper insights
• Build greater accountability

In response, DEIB tech vendors are also building on their capabilities to help orgs enact and scale these efforts. Twenty-eight percent of vendors cater to analytics as a talent management area in 2021, as compared with 26% in 2019.

This brings us to our next section on the different areas of talent management that vendors target.

Talent Areas Vendors Focused On

The talent areas served by DEIB tech vendors have shifted considerably during the last 2 years (see Figure 13). As you may notice, the distribution is more evenly spread across the 4 talent categories today than it was previously. The biggest difference: The percentage of solutions that focus on talent acquisition, which declined to 29% in 2021 from 43% in 2019.

We believe this shift is due to at least 2 reasons:

• A significant number of (both new and old) vendors focused just on employees have introduced features that enable them to serve DEIB needs—thus, now making them a DEIB “feature” vendor, whereas, before, they may not have been in the market at all.
• The economic uncertainty brought on by COVID-19 has resulted in much lower levels of hiring, potentially decreasing the number of vendors focusing on DEIB in talent acquisition.

Let’s look at each of these talent areas in more detail.

Talent acquisition

About 30% of the 196 vendors identified in our research focus on talent acquisition (TA). Of those, 25 participated in our survey, with 60% of them offering solutions that help customers with candidate sourcing and selection (see Figure 14).

Readers of our previous report will note that we broadened our TA category this year to include new subcategories for onboarding, employment branding, and labor market analysis. This is because we noticed a rise in new capabilities and products among several vendors. Each of these subcategories have within them several areas that solutions focus on. For example, vendors under candidate selection offer capabilities that help customers create blind assessments, match diverse candidates to job descriptions, and / or help reduce bias during the selection processes. Similarly, a solution helping customers with sourcing candidates can do so by accessing diverse pools or changing job descriptions to reduce bias.

While we haven’t listed all of the different types of capabilities that vendors offer under each TA subcategory, readers can access a complete list of all TA vendors and find which capabilities they offer through our DEIB tech tool.

One of the ways DEIB technology can help customers improve their candidate selection process is by helping them match candidates to job descriptions, as we illustrate with the following story.

Development / advancement

The number of solutions that target development / advancement as a talent category significantly increased from 19% in 2019 to 26% in 2021. We believe this growth is due to the changing needs of the orgs. As we mentioned earlier, due to the shift to remote work and a slowdown in hiring new talent, orgs have shifted their focus to developing their existing workforce.

The largest subcategories within this area are leadership development (LD) and learning (L&D). Of the survey participant vendors that target development / advancement, 50% of them focus on these 2 subcategories (see Figure 16). New subcategories in this area for our 2021 study include recognition, talent mobility, and compensation / total rewards.

A significant finding this year is the number solutions that focus on LD. Readers of our previous report may recall this: Even though a big diversity challenge was representation at different levels of leadership, we identified only 16% of tech solutions that targeted this particular subcategory. In 2021, that number rose to 26%.

One of the ways DEIB tech vendors help organizations enable LD is by providing insights on leaders’ behaviors. The ability to provide insights on leadership behaviors and communication patterns became especially crucial once the pandemic hit and employees began working remotely. An example from McKesson, a healthcare company, provides an example of how important such insights can be.

Solutions can help customers in many ways under the different subcategories in this talent area, including:

• Orgs looking for vendors that help with L&D will find such capabilities as delivering training within existing employee workflows, offering virtual reality training, and helping design civil conversations.
• Vendors focused on mentorship and career management offer capabilities, such as enabling diverse talent to search for mentors, providing networking opportunities, or personalized career pathing.

For a full list of vendors that focus on development / advancement and the capabilities they offer, please visit our DEIB tech tool.

Engagement / retention

Seventeen percent of all DEIB tech vendors focus on engagement / retention. Of the survey participants that target this talent area, 75% are currently focused on 3 subcategories: employee experience, employee engagement, and employee voice. By employee voice, we mean how an employee communicates or speaks to the organization. (See Figure 17.)

New subcategories in this year’s study include employee wellbeing and employee engagement. We added employee engagement so that we could differentiate between solutions that help customers understand the unique experiences of employees and perceptions versus those that help customers with initiatives to improve employees’ engagement levels with their work.

Some of the newest additions in this category include:

• Capabilities that focus on employee voice, by allowing anonymous reporting and confidential conversations around sexual harassment.
• Vendors focused on employee experience to help customers understand diverse groups’ work experiences and to ask questions to better understand employee inclusion.

For a full list of vendors that focus on engagement / retention and the capabilities they offer, please visit our DEIB tech tool.

Analytics

As we mentioned earlier, analytics is a growing focus among DEIB tech providers. Of the survey participants which selected analytics as a talent area of focus, 57% offer capabilities for analysis and monitoring of DEIB activities by conducting representation / KPI analyses, enabling pay equity analyses, assessing network inclusion, analyzing TA processes, and providing DEIB dashboards (see Figure 18).

Our survey also revealed that the number of solutions helping customers calculate the business case for D&I initiatives rose significantly to 30% in 2021 from 17% in 2019. This is most likely due to a growing need for DEIB leaders to quantify the impact of DEIB on business, and show the value of their initiatives and investments by tying them clearly to business outcomes.

The number of solutions that conduct ERG management and analysis also increased slightly to 13% in 2021 from 10% in 2019.

The number of solutions helping customers calculate the business case for D&I initiatives rose 13%, from 17% in 2019 to 30% in 2021.

For a full list of vendors that focus on analytics and the capabilities they offer, please visit our DEIB tech tool.

Moving forward, we expect that DEIB tech vendors will continue to improve their capabilities while also growing and developing new ones—to meet the unique and changing needs of the market. Buyers and potential investors need to be aware of these capabilities and use the success stories from other forward-thinking organizations to understand how to leverage these technologies for their own purposes. Additionally, other equally important considerations exist for you to keep in mind before investing in DEIB tech.

In our next section, we cover some of the crucial considerations that potential buyers should be aware of.

What Buyers Should Consider Before Investing

While it’s important to understand the market and the different talent areas of focus, leaders interested in DEIB tech must keep a few critical considerations in mind before making any investments:

• Be aware of the benefits and the risks of using DEIB tech
• Be clear about your own needs
• Audit existing in-house tech that can potentially be leveraged for DEIB purposes

Understand the benefits & risks of using DEIB tech

Organizations must be aware of both the benefits and risks associated with DEIB tech before purchasing it (see Figure 20).

Identify your organization’s needs

Once the benefits and risks are understood, DEIB leaders must reflect on their organization’s needs. As a DEIB leader, you can do this by:

• Understanding your organization’s DEIB journey
• Identifying if the vendor can meet your needs for support
• Determining whether any additional services besides the tech may be required

Your organization’s need for a particular type of tech will depend to some extent on:

• Where you are in your DEIB journey
• What your level of understanding of DEIB issues is
• What your specific goals are

Different leaders and organizations are at various stages in their journey to understand and embrace DEIB. When it comes to selecting DEIB tech, orgs first need to be clear on what they want to accomplish, where they currently stand, and what remains to be done.

“The tool allows everyone to begin their DEIB’s learning journey from where they are—curated content is delivered in weekly snippets that don't feel overwhelming.”

A small technology company for a DEIB focus vendor

Another critical factor to take into account is the amount of support your organization might need from the vendor. One way to gauge if the vendor can meet your needs is by looking at the vendor’s size and whether it has the in-house expertise needed.

Currently, most vendors are relatively small, with almost 70% employing fewer than 50 people (see Figure 21). These small vendors might be better suited for organizations with less complex needs (e.g., smaller, limited number of locations / geographies). For orgs with global operations looking to roll out initiatives on a wider scale, larger vendors might be better able to meet your needs. That said, vendor size is clearly not a direct determinant of capability, so it's critical to fully understand the vendor’s offerings.

“ Still very small team—needs more manpower—is not a global solution.”

A midsize financial company for a DEIB focus vendor

Your organization may also require additional expertise or services beyond tech, such as consulting services, or access to resources or communities. From our survey, 42% of vendors offer additional services beyond their tech (see Figure 22). Orgs just starting on their DEIB journey can leverage such solutions to better understand the complexities of the issues around DEIB or to seek additional customer support if needed.

Of the 42% of vendors which provide additional services, about one-third offer services for the assessment and diagnosis of your current state and D&I maturity (see Figure 23). These solutions can be leveraged by orgs looking to expand or reenergize their DEIB efforts, and are in need of insights on where they currently stand.

Almost 30% of those which provide additional services, offer training and resources around D&I learning, which can be of particular use to those looking to solve challenges like unconscious bias. About 40% of vendors help customers manage companywide efforts around DEIB or can help you develop a strategy—ideal for orgs that are just beginning on their DEIB journey and need some extra support (See Figure 23).

“ is a great way to assess where a company stands in their D&I understanding, commitment and strategy, and provides the feature to track and measure D&I activities to develop a roadmap to achieve the desired outcomes to support the organization's goals and objectives.”

A small professional services company for a DEIB focus vendor

In the following checklist, we offer some key questions to help you better understand your organization’s needs. Use these questions as a checklist when beginning your DEIB tech selection to determine where you currently stand regarding your DEIB needs and to kick start your discussions on technology selection.

Auditing in-house tech

As we mentioned earlier, many vendors have added DEIB features to their products in the last 2 years. Given this development, your organization may already have some capability in this area. Thus, your org may already have a “feature” or “friendly” technology that can be leveraged for DEIB purposes.

Your organization may already have a “feature” or “friendly” technology in-house that can be leveraged for DEIB purposes.

For example, some of the new vendors in our study are people analytics tech solutions that have developed DEIB features—allowing users to analyze different cohorts, genders, or groups of employees to understand their levels of engagement, development, and overall experience. Orgs with existing people analytics solutions may find such capabilities embedded in the technology.

Another example of existing tech that has developed DEIB features is HRIS / HCM tech solutions, such as Workday, SAP, and ADP:

• In 2020, Workday launched its Value Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity (VIBE) Central, a dashboard that brings together a company's diversity and inclusion data, best practices content, and reporting. The company also launched the VIBE Index, a metric that allows users to gauge their performance.²⁷
• SAP (via SuccessFactors) offers users the capability to monitor recruitment and management position data for women and underrepresented people, attrition and retention rates, and supplier diversity statistics.
• ADP offers a pay equity tool within its HCM suites.

The following checklist includes a few key questions to consider when auditing existing in-house technology. Compare your results with the list of available tech in the market to help you narrow your choices.

What’s Next

Given the findings from our study, we offer a few trends that we expect to see in the coming 12-18 months.

1. Continued integration of DEIB tech into all areas of talent
We expect to see more HR tech vendors add DEIB features / functionalities to their solutions and, thus, address a wider range of talent areas. And, while we did see a shift away from a heavy focus on TA and toward more solutions addressing more areas, we expect to see this trend continue and grow. Moving forward, more orgs will be looking to address all talent management activities, such as recognition, performance management, and talent mobility, through a DEIB lens.

2. More focus on inclusion and belonging
Recent research reveals that 52% of people choose culture as the primary reason to work at a company.²⁸ The recent addition of D&I ratings and demographic information for companies on Glassdoor also reflects the growing importance that job seekers place on these issues when considering new roles. We expect to see more orgs leverage DEIB tech to measure and improve their inclusion and belonging.

3. Greater expectations to drive DEIB actions
As orgs feel the pressure to take a stand, and act against systemic racism and gender discrimination, they’ll no longer be satisfied with technologies that only go so far as providing data on the current state of DEIB and identifying gaps. DEIB tech must be able to:

• Make recommendations, and highlight and prioritize specific actions for leaders
• Connect these actions to business outcomes
• Offer scenarios for how it may impact the org if those actions aren’t implemented

4. More accountability and transparency at all levels
Related to the point on actionability, we also expect to see tech drive greater accountability and ownership for DEIB at both the individual and organizational levels. Democratization of insights on actions around DEIB can encourage individual employees and leaders to take greater responsibility and ownership to monitor and change their behaviors accordingly. Tech can help employees and leaders understand how their daily actions may affect DEIB outcomes and make appropriate recommendations.

Conclusion

The events of 2020 have shifted the emphasis for organizations to act on DEIB from “need to do in the near future” to “need to do it right now.” The call for orgs to act on these issues and the urgency to show results have never been greater. The tech market is responding to these changes, as is evident from the growing DEIB market and capabilities: It’s time for organizations to step up and do their part, too.

DEIB tech can play a crucial role in helping org move the needle, provided it's leveraged thoughtfully. Today's buyer has more tech choices than ever before, which also comes with greater associated risks. However, leaders must remember that DEIB tech is only one part of the entire process—and, without proper alignment with the overall purpose, a comprehensive strategy, and a degree of accountability and transparency, technology in itself won't be able to bring about any lasting or meaningful change.

Appendix 1: Methodology

We launched our study in summer 2020, with a vendor survey that ran from June-August 2020. A total of 45 vendors completed our survey: One vendor offers 2 DEIB-focused solutions and another vendor offers 3 solutions—thereby, bringing the total number of solutions in our study to 48.

Once we collected the data, we reached out to vendors for reviews, clarifications, and to collect any missing data. We combined this with publicly available data on vendors that we found through our own research, bringing the total number of identified vendors to 196. We conducted our analysis in November 2020 and the report was written during December 2020-January 2021.

For this report, we added a customer poll, so that we could better understand the challenges and areas that DEIB tech is being used for, and user satisfaction levels with the vendors. We also created a robust evergreen DEIB tech tool, which serves as the repository of vendor-specific information. This new tool includes updated data and info on every vendor that participated in the research, including their capabilities and customer NPS scores.

Vendor Demographics

The majority of vendors (80%) that participated in our study have their headquarters in North America. Of the remaining, 16% are based in Europe, and 4% in Asia-Pacific or Australia (see Figure 24).

In 2021, the majority of investments in DEIB tech came from 5 industries—technology, financial / banking / insurance, healthcare, professional services, and pharmaceutical / chemical / life sciences (see Figure 25).

 

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Dani Johnson (00:00):

You don't want anybody in the world to hear what you're going to say, then, then we when we record so that we can provide this to a wider audience to our members. And so yeah, feel free to feel free to share, but please keep it friendly, especially after yesterday. So welcome to our first Q & A call of the year, which is coaching. I've been waiting to do this call for a while now. We've stationed and Heather and I have all had spots on coaching for about six months because we're seeing so much go on in this space. And so we're pretty excited to talk about it. And we're really thankful for those of you who submitted questions which will get us something to talk about here. Just a couple of things before we jump into your questions, this is RedThread.

Dani Johnson (00:50):

If you don't know us, then you should get to know us. We're awesome people. We're a research and advisory firm and we focus on these things. Our latest offering is a membership that we kicked off last fall. It gives you access to all the research. It gives you access to some analyst hours and makes sure that you're staying on top of everything that we're doing. So if you want more information about that, contact us and we'll be happy to share it.

Coaching & Mentoring: Differences?

Dani Johnson (01:14):

So a couple of things to start with, one of the questions that we always get is what is the difference between coaching and mentoring? And I forgot to put the source on this, but this is actually from Kent State University. Coaching is more performance driven, designed to, to improve the professionals on the job performance. If you think about executives, that may be a completely different skillset than somebody on the front line, but coaching is for performance to help people perform better on their job.

Dani Johnson (01:42):

Whereas mentoring seems to be a little deeper and a little broader, it's more development driven looking not just at the professional's current job function, but actually beyond that. And so it takes a much more holistic view or what would you like to do, you know, where would you like to go? Where are your skills? Have you, can I contact for you those types of things going on? So before I sort of, before we move past this slide, I'd love your thoughts on these two definitions. They seem to be the most common out there, but in your organizations, are you using different ones?

Speaker 1 (02:13):

You know, it's interesting I've coached different people on performance, but I've also coach different people on their development career. So for me, I didn't really look at it differently. It just depending what their needs were.

Dani Johnson (02:34):

Yeah. I think that's really fair. And, and quite frankly, I hadn't really considered the differences. And so until we started looking into the organizations vendors often, well, until we started looking at it a little differently vendors and organizations sometimes really separate those two things. And sometimes they're the same. What are other people saying or how are defining coaching and mentoring differently or are you?

Speaker 2 (03:02):

And we are. I'm just looking up. Cause, cause we're actually rolling out a program next week called developing a coaching mindset. So I have that. I have like kind of three things on the side of their vendor. It's a Venn diagram of mentoring, coaching, and feedback. Because I think people get those kind of confused with one another. And so you know, for mentoring what we're saying, we're positioning it as more of a longer tail engagement with somebody where it's focused on, you know, kind of helping somebody through, whether it's, whether it's a performance or development thing. Whereas coaching is more goal oriented and has a shorter kind of life cycle, if you will, where it's really focused on a specific goal or task that you're trying to get people through. So I'm actually, I'm just looking at my notes to see what my definition, is in it, excuse me, when I find it, I'll put it in, I'll put it in the chat just to share. But what, what we're saying is when we talk about coaching here a lot of people do confuse it with mentoring and they any kind of are using it interchangeably. So, so part of our educational program that we're rolling out next week is it's trying to get that delineation between the two. And when you, as a manager are putting on your coaching hat versus when you're either putting on a mentoring hat or recommending somebody to a mentor who is more of an expert in a specific field of study or specialty,

Dani Johnson (04:34):

That's really interesting. So, so you're looking at it as sort of longevity, like sell this immediate home versus longer term. The other thing that struck me about what you said is well, the question that I had was are they often the same people? Are you focusing on the manager, given that you're rolling out this thing as a manager that is doing the coaching and the mentoring?

Speaker 2 (04:55):

I think it's, we're coaching or we're educating managers on how to have more coaching conversations and, and be more of a facilitator in asking open-ended questions to help people drive the answers themselves rather than you being directive and giving it to them. And I think that's the nuance of a mentor. And I was just looking at my notes here where, you know, what, what you're saying is a coach asks open-ended questions to drive job performance, whereas a mentor answer answers, direct questions based on prior experience to support development. So I think a coach is more open-ended they may know the answer, but they're not going to give it to you right off the bat, whereas a mentor it's, it's much more let's cut to the chase and get you to know quicker proficiency.

Dani Johnson (05:39):

That's really interesting. So you're also looking at it in terms the manner in which it's still delivered. That's interesting.

Speaker 2 (05:44):

Yeah, we're trying to, yeah. We're, we're trying to start with the manager and then a manager. If they recognize a coaching opportunity, they would go into coaching mode. Or if they, if they've recognized, Hey, this person really needs some additional support or that support of an expert, they may, you know, which may not be, you know, if I'm a manager and I'm like, and there are people asking me about finances, you know, maybe you should go find a mentor who really specializes in finances. It may not be me as a coach. I mean, a manager coach. It may be me pointing someone to a resource that they might connect with to help them through.

Dani Johnson (06:14):

Okay. Others.

Stacia Garr (06:21):

Okay. Can I, can I share something in here? Oops, sorry. You go first.

Speaker 3 (06:25):

Oh, no, I you know, I am three days into a new role with a company called coach hub. And so this is really an opportunity for me to learn from you all. But it's very interesting to hear Kelly, you know, kind of how you've been thinking about those three different pieces for coach hubs specifically right now, our focus is on leadership development coaching but democratizing that capability across organizations and not so that it's not just an elite you know, kind of opportunity. And that being very similar to what you described goal-oriented although not necessarily short term where a coach can help an individual, whether they're leading others or even an individual contributor or you know, someone that's got high potential to help them understand where their areas of opportunity might be and just decide what they would like to focus on on a long-term basis for growth. And then kind of see how they're doing and measure that over time.

Dani Johnson (07:55):

Yeah. I think that's an interesting observation. Debbie, congratulations on your new role as you, as we go into the next slide, that's one of the things that we're seeing is it's coaching really is being scaled at a level that we haven't seen before. So that's a really interesting observation. Any other comments on this one before we, we click over?

Stacia Garr (08:13):

I just want to add something. Yeah. And, and, or a question maybe for the group, which is, you know, I do a lot of our work on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. And a lot of times we see sponsorship kind of being in the mix here of coaching, mentorship, and sponsorship. And so I'm wondering if you all are thinking about that kind of in this, this cluster of concepts, or if that in your organizations tends to kind of live over within the diversity and inclusion group where it's not something that you're focused on at all.

Speaker 2 (08:51):

I'll just, I'll jump in and just say it's being, it's being brought up more of kind of organic grassroots topic from our employee resource groups specifically from the women's network and, and black employee networks. And, you know, so they're bringing it up as, Hey, you need to find a sponsor. You need to find an advocate, kind of create your own board of directors, et cetera. We haven't taken an ethic, so I sit at the corporate level and we haven't taken it on as a specific discrete project with resources and programs around it. In my, like how I view it is that's all part of social learning, what I would bucket under social learning. So to me, social learnings, you know, that peer learning that includes, you know, your mentors, your coach, your expert, your advocates, your sponsors. And so that's how I categorize it, at least in my brain, but we haven't created a specific program around it. That's putting it in people's development plans or, or even compensating people for, for being a sponsor,

Stacia Garr (10:01):

Any others or any thoughts on this?

Speaker 4 (10:05):

Just one thing I mentioned, just a flavor of coaching that hasn't been mentioned is because we see it along with our clients with like process roll out. So if you're implementing agile or project management or six Sigma or something like that, there's typically a coaching component. I think it fits the definition. You have, it is performance driven. But it's not strictly like you know, your manager is your, is also your coach. It's a, it's a separate role.

Dani Johnson (10:34):

Okay, cool.

Speaker 5 (10:35):

It's definitely a separate for coaches and it has been quite a firm as we're trying to position the term coach within different roles. We've developed internal coaching as well as professional coach. So the target disease is very much in developing, not an individual, but it can be teams or it can be organization as well. And it's differentiating the role and this case because you can learn and demonstrate coaching skills without being a coach per se. So that's quite a key difference as well.

Dani Johnson (11:22):

So it sounds like, you're building it into the culture. So it's not just, it's not just a role that somebody has, you're actually building it deep into the culture so that everybody has that skill.

Coaching & Mentoring: What We See

Dani Johnson (11:38):

All right. Let's switch over to some of the things that we've seen in the last little while, which is why we're talking about this. Cause I would like to research it a little bit deeper this year. The first thing is that we're just seeing more of an emphasis than we ever had before. So it's existed forever.

Dani Johnson (11:54):

I mean, yes. And since we all use the apprenticeship model but there seems to be much more of an emphasis on it. And with that, we're seeing it being pushed down to the lower levels. It's not just for senior leadership or executives anymore. It's actually being pushed down quite far in the organization. And we're seeing vendors like better up and others that are providing an offering that allows this to happen at a much more scalable level. And then we're seeing more of it and I wrote this slide, so Stacia please jump in, but we're seeing more and more handled by the L&D functions. It's, it's being considered part of the learning process rather than a standalone thing. Some of it's still exists in executive development and leadership development, but a lot of it is being wrapped into just L&D Hey, you know, coaching is part of what we do to learn in this organization.

Dani Johnson (12:45):

So like how do we, how do we integrate it into the culture? So it's part of how we learn versus a separate standalone thing to peoples feel special. And it costs a lot of money in order to implement in the organization. And then we're also seeing more emphasis on different kinds of coaching. So we talked about integrating it into the, and we'll talk about these a little bit further because some of the questions that were submitted, sort of talk to these, but we're seeing different types of it. So peer to peer coaching, manager coaching, external coaching, all of these different types of technology, technological coaching coaches on the shoulder, the technology we're seeing a lot of those sort of being handled differently in organizations that you've seen before. It used to be, you got a coach from the outside, you brought it in, you sat it in front of this EO and they talked and they figured out what you needed and then pick up everything was magically better.

Dani Johnson (13:39):

We're actually seeing, you know, as organizations are starting to figure out how to scale this, all these different ways of doing it, we haven't necessarily seen it before. We're also seeing different topics of coaching, so used to be just performance coaching. But in the last couple of months, things like financial coaching, financial wellbeing coaching, we've seen wellbeing coaching, we've seen health coaching. And so a lot of these things are being offered as benefits to organizations, to help with burnout, to help with stress, to make sure that that we're taking care of the whole employee, which I think is really interesting. And then the last one is we're also seeing just a ton of tech. And we'll talk about that in a little bit that is enabling some of this stuff. So let me talk, well, let's stop again on this slide. What are, what are we missing? What else are you all seeing when it comes to coaching and mentoring? Or do you have comments on anything on the slide?

Speaker 1 (14:34):

Yeah, I'm interested in more either discussion on the tech side. That's kind of an area where I got interested in, in it last year with the app from noom and, and and then I have seen it a little bit work with reemphasizing some of the learnings you take away from a, say a class or whatever, and then reform some of those learnings automatically whether by text or email so that, you know, all the things you forgot in the class you remember, and then you start practicing them. So I'm interested in that cause I'm I'm wanting to pilot something next quarter in our company around that. So anything around that would be interesting.

Dani Johnson (15:28):

Okay. Yeah. We'll, we'll definitely hit that question. We've got some data and some slides that'll, that'll help understand that space a little bit better. What else?

Speaker 3 (15:38):

Yeah, just to kind of follow on that, I happened to have spent a lot of years in the space of learning analytics. And you know, one of the things that I know from that time is that the effective application of what's learned in any program is largely driven by the support that they get on their job. And it's always been a tremendous challenge for organizations because they have to first give visibility to the managers into, you know, that program and what is expected. And then the manager has to have the time and attention to be able to follow along. And that's always been a challenge. And so, you know, I see, you know, with the tech companies you know, part of the opportunity is to help elevate your return across your learning investment. You know, with kind of supplementing that with having a coach, be able to support your people to actually apply those skills and make actual behavior change.

Dani Johnson (16:50):

And I think that speaks to kind of maybe why L&D is taking a lead on integrating some of this into the organization because we are seeing it sort of be a carry on from the formal learning experience in ways that we haven't seen before. Kelly mentioned that something that may be missing from this is non-human coaching and I've lumped that into tech. We'll talk about some tech.

Speaker 2 (17:13):

Okay. When I looked at tech, I was thinking for some reason in my brain, I was thinking re-skilling people like moving people from one position to another and that the distance thinking technical people. So if that's it, if that's what that means, then yes, that's great. And then the other point that I put in was it's also being outsourced, which I don't know if that's something that you would capture under different kinds of coaching, because it's obviously it's going to take me a lot longer to get the culture, to adopt coaching as part of a mindset and, and practice. Whereas like you mentioned some external lots And lots of people are cropping up in this space to provide that coaching service for us. So, and that's definitely something that we're rolling out this year for us at our companies.

Dani Johnson (17:59):

Outsourcing it? Interesting. That's interesting.

Speaker 2 (18:02):

Yeah. Cause our, our theory is that you can to really understand what coaching is. You need to experience it for yourself. So we're rolling it out to our people managers first.

Stacia Garr (18:17):

One thing I wanted to add here, Dani, cause you were talking about more of an emphasis than before and why that's happening is maybe just kind of a little bit of a zoom out. And we think about the changes that have happened with performance management and the focus on kind of a much more continuous focus on conversations and, and ongoing conversations and the like you know, when we were at burst and we used to talk about the competitive assessment model of performance management and the coaching and development model of, of performance. And I think, you know, we've now seen just the complete domination of the coaching and development model of performance. And so that's then cascading down into, well, how do we make sure that managers can have those conversations or the entire organization can, can support in these conversations? So I think that's another reason why we're seeing this just so much more broadly than we did, you know, even five years ago.

Dani Johnson (19:06):

To that point, Stacia, I also think we're seeing the expectations of the employees change. So they're in a lot of cases they're forcing these conversations where they didn't force them before. And the messaging from the organization is you should be having these conversations with your manager which again, sort of forces it or encourages it in ways we haven't seen. Yeah, absolutely. Other thoughts on this, what else? Or what else are you all seeing that we, that we missed?

Stacia Garr (19:36):

Okay.

Speaker 5 (19:37):

Maybe not that you missed, but definitely, you know, having a coaching accessible to nearly everyone in the organization is definitely something that is happening.

Dani Johnson (19:50):

Yeah. Yeah. I definitely think so. We are doing a podcast on skills and we had a really interesting conversation yesterday about sort of the equalization that, that, that organizations are trying to do, offering opportunities to everybody in all levels of the organization where it used to be just reserved for, for those that they were investing in in quotes, that's in quotes for those of you who are not watching. I think that's, I think that's really interesting that coaching is sort of following that as well. It's it's following employees all the way to the bottom of the organization, not just being held at the top.

Speaker 5 (20:26):

With something that is still not completely clear, I think, you know, in, in behind the term coaching, what do we mean by coaching? I think that quite various understanding underlying what coaching is.

Why is the coaching and mentoring conversation important right now?

Dani Johnson (20:41):

Yeah, yeah. I think you're right. We, we throw out some definitions that are fairly common at the beginning, but every organization of handled it differently. Yep. Yeah. All right. Let's get to your questions. The first question we got is why is the coaching and mentoring conversation so important right now? And I want to, I want, before I, before we take a stab at that, I'd love to open it up to you all. Why do you think this coaching and mentoring conversation is so important right now? And maybe, maybe I'll start by throwing out a couple of reasons. I think the first one is we've seen the workplace radically changed in the last nine months. And some of the connections that we used to have with peers and with the organization have been lost or diminished just because of the way that we're working with with folks now.

Dani Johnson (21:36):

And so even though we saw sort of a wrap up to coaching and mentoring before it has become a very, very important thing, particularly with respect to managers and how they connect the individuals back to the organization. So I think one of the reasons is just, just the, just the environment that we're in has, has forced us to think a little bit more about how we are coaching and how we are mentoring individuals and how are we getting to know them given that we don't see them every day. We're not meeting in the, in the break room, et cetera. So I think that's one of the reasons do, do people have other ideas,

Speaker 1 (22:10):

You know, job roles and skills are just rapidly changing. So what you may have graduated and come in with over the years tends to really drastically change now. And, and so I think people in some people are, I wouldn't call them lost, but you know, don't really understand all their options and are struggling to, you know, kind of develop their own career paths. And so they need some support from others that may be, can give them some guidance, ask those right questions, because if you don't, they tend to languish in the same position for years and tend to become obsolete almost in their job roles.

Dani Johnson (22:54):

I think it's a really interesting point. We're doing some research right now on mobility and I'm actually writing the final paper right now. And one of the things that we've realized is that most of the organizations that we talked to said, well, I don't know, you know, we, we want high employee ownership of their own careers, but none of the systems and processes that are in place to support high employee ownership of their own careers. And so I think what you're sort of alluding to is that exact thing, they need help to figure out what their options are and they need the connections of their managers and other people to figure out how to get from point a to point B if we really want them to own their careers. Other thoughts?

Speaker 2 (23:31):

So two things for me with coaching, I agree with what Stacia was saying earlier in terms of a lot of companies have moved to continuous performance management and being able to coach in the moment, give feedback in the moment.

Speaker 2 (23:46):

So to me, that coaching aspect of it, I think it's, it has become more important for managers to kind of play that role and really recognize what their role is in, in that kind of new framework. So for us, that's why we're, we're talking about it is to, you know, help drive high performance and get to that high performance culture, which is which coaching is a cornerstone. For mentoring, for me, what I was thinking is, you know, there's, there's a lot of experts internally that aren't being tapped and a lot of knowledge that's about to potentially walk out the door. And so I think mentoring and especially having kind of a formalized program around mentoring that helps people to connect with one another in an easy way, really helps get to that knowledge transfer from one generation to the next potentially, or even a generation upwards. Right. So I think mentoring is just a good,

Dani Johnson (24:44):

Oh no, we lost, you lost your sound.

Speaker 1 (24:51):

Follow on to some of the discussion. Maybe you had earlier around coaching and asking questions. You know managers in the past, I find you know, when I started as a manager, I thought I needed to be the smartest person in the room, and I needed to tell people what to do. And over the years I realized that's really not the right formula, especially when you have really smart people working with you. And so being a coach and asking the questions and being more facilitative I've become a lot better in that area. And I think, you know, other managers should emulate that type of behavior where they're asking questions and empowering their people versus telling them what to do. And I think you know, our employees of today are asking for that.

Dani Johnson (25:49):

I think that's a good observation.

Speaker 5 (25:52):

Yes. I would agree. I think under there's as well as the complexity of the environments we are in now more than ever, but usually, you know, it's getting things are getting more complex and there's not someone having the answers you're looking for and when they expertise are as well, you know, very deep and complex you need people to be able to come up with novel solutions to problems and coaching can really help to tap into people's own potential and expertise, and not only for their own growth, but as well to help them develop their own and new solution again for the individuals, but as well for the teams in terms of a team coaching, for example. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:44):

I agree.

Who are the main recipients of coaching, and what are the trends on that?

Dani Johnson (26:48):

Let's just in the, in the interest of time, let's move on to the next question, which are, who are the main recipients of coaching and what are the trends on that? I think we've already talked mostly about this in the introductory area, mentoring and coaching, unfortunately still resides at the top of the organization. It just does. But we're seeing it, we're seeing it creep down more and more, and we're seeing technology enable that and make sure that it is, I think you called it democratized, which I'm assuming, you know, it takes advantage of those within the organization to, to make it happen. But then again, there are vendors that we'll talk about in a second that are doing all kinds of things to make that scalable and approachable, even for people on even the frontline level. Any other thoughts on this question?

Speaker 4 (27:36):

Yeah, I think you hit the I mean, executives, we also see a lot with new people leaders get some kind of coaching intervention, but like you talked about, it's just getting pushed into more and more places in the organization and the more and more it's getting democratized use your time for sure.

Dani Johnson (27:55):

Be a lot less sort of thing as well. It's not as formal and stayed and kind of yeah. Formal as it used to be. It seems to be creeping into all kinds of places, which I find.

Speaker 1 (28:08):

Yeah. The other thing is, I mean, the recipients, you know, executives tended to be the ones with who are receiving it and they still are today. In our company, we tend to outsource to, you know, high end coaches for our executives. But we can't do that for everybody in the company. So that's why we're looking for ways to make it more affordable to give everybody the opportunity, maybe not, you know, valet you know velvet glove treatment, but some access to some type of coaching for everyone. Yeah. I think also you know, the younger generations perspective is a lot more around PR personalized experience in general. And so the appeal for them is, you know, a high focus on development of course, in their careers. And so I think that also plays a role in organizations being motivated to expand upon who is the recipient of coaching, especially now, as you mentioned earlier just given the environment, the concern over mental wellbeing you know, kind of supporting a diverse culture and, and all of those factors are kind of leading organizations to start thinking about how do we, you know, better support our people.

How can technology enable coaching conversations for performance and engagement?

Dani Johnson (29:41):

Yeah, I like that A lot. All right. Let's move on to the next question, which is how can technology enable coaching conversations, board performance, and engagement. So this is a question that it seems like most of you have around the technology behind and Heather Gillmartin has done a ton of work on our technology landscape or learning technology landscape, which encompasses a lot of these things. And so I've included three, three slides from that discussion. Heather, if you wouldn't mind walking through it, that would be very,

Heather Gilmartin (30:17):

So basically they're, we've seen tons into, as you guys know that we've seen tons of tech providers jump into the space too, as we've talked about democratized coaching in various ways. And they're kind of some, some of the providers do things like just match employees with a human coach, others do more of kind of a coach, Oh, I think this is jumping to the next slide. But yeah, yeah, but basically, yeah, so we're seeing just, just lots and lots of new functionality coming up and basically three different types of coaching that are coming out. So the first is, as I mentioned, if you can go.

Dani Johnson (31:05):

Would you mind if I just stop on this side for one second. I think one of the really interesting things is if you look at some of the, so the nameplates on this slide, you wouldn't necessarily consider them coaching softwares. So some of them you've got your traditional ones like river and Kronos is in there and Everwise. Ones that you would, would associate with traditional coaching. But when we asked them, Hey, do you do some sort of coaching? Every single one of these vendors popped up. And so we're seeing it, we're seeing new entrance for sure, but we're also seeing some of the old guard say, Oh, this is becoming a really important thing. And so we need to add this, this functionality somewhere in here, so that we're covering that part of our learning.

Stacia Garr (31:45):

I would, I would also add some who are kind of crossing over from what would be their traditional area to include nudges that are designed to help with coaching. So you think about Humu, you know, they're an engagement platform fundamentally, but you know, they're real different from other engagement platforms is, is the nudges and the way that they're trying to get people to change their behavior. I think actually I think that one's a really interesting one.

Dani Johnson (32:09):

I'm glad you brought them up. Stacia because they are an engagement platform. That's how they, that's what they say, but the way that they're doing it as they're nudging, both the manager and the individual at the same time, Hey, Susie, doesn't speak up in meetings, Susie, you need to speak up in meetings. But at the same time saying to the manager, Susie, doesn't speak up in meetings, do what you can to focus, needs to speak up. And so it sort of hits it from both sides, which is a different way of doing it. But yeah, so, so coaching is sort of being a station mentioned that's being implemented or integrated all of these other things that we wouldn't necessarily consider coaching in the past. Okay. Sorry, go ahead.

Heather Gilmartin (32:45):

No yeah, I think if you can go onto the next slide. So some, as we, as we talked about some vendors pair, a pair of humans, human with human interaction. And I think this is obviously this is not going to go away because there's certain kinds of, there's certain conversations and types of conversations that you can't have with with technology. And so the, the, the interesting thing that's happening here is that these platforms are allowing scale or they're, they're allowing that matching at scale which is something that traditional coaches we're not, we're not able to do. Right. just as, as, you know, sort of a single coach or a coaching consultancy type organization would not be able to sort of reach out into the organization and say, Hey, these people should talk and these people should talk and these people should talk. So that's really the power of, of these kinds of matching platforms.

Dani Johnson (33:51):

Yeah. And this, this one, particularly like these, the brands that just that you're seeing on the screen are ones that pair external coaches with internal people. And so they're not necessarily using the peer to peer, they're actually matching external to internal, which is the most traditional way that we think about coaching, which as has everybody here on the phone has mentioned is definitely not the only way to do it. And we're seeing much more internal coaching and culture building than we've seen before.

Heather Gilmartin (34:16):

Yeah. And then the, the other type of coaching is sort of a coach on the shoulder, sort of you know, examples might be a Fitbit. That's telling you, you know, how you're doing in your performance. Your, you know, how, how you're, how you're doing it on a moment to moment basis. Another might be you know, a platform that sits on top of email and, and gives you feedback on how, on the language that you're using with your teams. The one, that's the one that pops to mind, my husband just got like a golf simulator and it gives them all kinds of really great feedback on like, was his club head open or closed. And what I love about about these platforms and Dani, you mentioned, mentioned sort of put, you know, pushing down the information to the people that can take action on it.

Heather Gilmartin (35:10):

What I, what, so for me, you know, if you think about coaching, you think about a coach. And I think I might've been Kelly that mentioned this, or maybe it was Debbie that mentioned this early on, right. That you're asking, you're asking open-ended questions and you're helping people get to their own solutions to a problem. That's sort of the fundamental ethos of what a coach is. And I initially had this assumption that only a human could do that. And what I realized, especially, especially by watching this golf software, which is weird, but was that, that in simply providing the data back to the person, to whom it is most relevant, that is sort of prompting the same type of 10 prompts, the same type of self-reflection and, and iteration and practice that, that yields really good improvement that that's sort of what a coach is for. So I would say you know, it's not, obviously it can't solve all problems, but I think this, this, these types of technologies are really, really powerful in prompting behavior change in the people who are most interested in doing so with facts.

Dani Johnson (36:25):

I think a lot of these solutions are super elegant. So Cultivate, as Heather mentioned, it sits on top of your email and sort of reads your email for the last six months and helps you understand how you interact with your teams. So it can provide famous tribe.ai has all kinds of functionalities, but one of the things it does is it listens in meetings to tell you how much you talk versus how much you've listened to the questions that you answered. Cogito I think Stacia knows a little bit more about, but it does something similar. And it's geared toward sales folks and you're on mute, but yeah, sales folks and especially customer service representatives, make sure that they're, they're gaining these skills as they go along as a part of the work. And then if you haven't checked out, Mursion, it's one of my favorites, part of it's.

Dani Johnson (37:09):

I just like the people over there. But they they're using avatars and situations. I remember when they first briefed me, they basically got on the phone and they said, okay, we're going to put you in this situation. Then it was a coaching situation where I was supposed to coach an employee instead of just using the technology, they actually have an actor or someone that sits behind. So it's a combination of this technology versus, you know, expertise on the backend to sort of make it better and clearer, but it reads your facial expressions. It measures your pauses. It helps you understand how you're reacting, how are you being perceived to somebody on the other end, which technology isn't quite good enough to do. But we also don't see a lot of that kind of role-playing happening with the real live mentors. And we definitely don't have the data that goes across different people in those same situations. So we don't know what's going on if we're not using a software like this. So I think these are incredibly fascinating. I've had several conversations with organizations that say, if there's not a person involved in it, can't be real coaching. But I'm kind of in Heather's boat. I think these types of softwares can offer just all kinds of data that people can add on that, that make it incredibly scalable for your organization. So we've talked about trying to remember if we.

Heather Gilmartin (38:31):

Kelly, what is Bravely?

Speaker 2 (38:32):

So briefly is kind of up and coming On the market for coaching. So, you know, when I think of BetterUp there, probably like top shelf, right? Bravely is more of an emerging platform that does connect people to external coaches. That's actually who we're going forward with. So we're, we're planning on rolling this out next month. Or also, I'm also trying to bring in cultivate as an AI coaching system as well. So so Bravely is much more accessible when you think in terms of cost per person per month. And it's unlimited coaching that you can provide for people, right? And they really try to align with the key moments that matter and the mostly around probably the performance management cycle, right? So they see a spike during goal setting, career development planning. But they're kind of pitch really is to make it more accessible to all employees.

Speaker 2 (39:29):

And how I've been positioning this since I'm doing kind of like human one-on-one coaching and AI coaching is, you know, I think about like a coach can tell you the things that you should be doing and all of us know probably what we should be doing, whether it's for our health or fitness or whatever, like you mentioned a Fitbit, but an AI is actually catching you in your behavior and it's passively listening and it's being able to show you those blind spots. Right. So, so that's how I'm trying to position it. You know, here is, you know, we're bringing in this whole coaching kind of philosophy and approach and, you know, one-on-one coach, you know, work with them and then you take it away and you, you know, you forget it potentially the AI can really help you catch whether or not you're actually applying it. So, so for me, it kind of marrying those two. And it's funny, DanI, that you mentioned Mursion as VR. That's another thing that we're planning on bringing in later on this year to practice with them, inclusion and diversity type things. I don't think it's probably what we're planning on doing. Isn't as sophisticated as being able to read facial expressions and things like that, which I think is pretty fascinating, but yeah, that's, it's very cool to see, you know, these kind of put together we're doing the right things. I'm happy. Like that makes me happy.

Dani Johnson (40:45):

Two questions for you, Kelly, first of all, you don't know Bravely, if you wouldn't mind facilitating an introduction?

Speaker 2 (40:52):

Yeah. They've been, they've been fantastic with us. Yep.

Dani Johnson (40:56):

That's the first and then the second is toward the end of the year. Can we check in again?

Speaker 2 (41:01):

Dani you can call me anytime, but yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, yeah, cause I'm not really struggling right now and maybe we'll get to challenges and things. And I think I submitted a question on the confidentiality aspect of coaching. Cause that is one where I'm putting a pretty big investment in this. So how am I going to prove, am I going to prove it out right now? Like I'm, I am really struggling with thinking how we're going to do that, but yeah, there you go.

How can we prove coaching is having an impact?​

Dani Johnson (41:28):

There's a question for your question. Thank you. This is the question, that's the question for all of L&D it's a question for all pretty much everything that we invest in as far as people. And I think it's a really good question. I know Stacia probably has an opinion on this. She's our people analytics person. Do you want to take a stab at it first Stacia and then I'll follow up with a little bit?

Stacia Garr (41:54):

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think like anything we need to be clear in the beginning, what, what we're trying to impact, right. So are we trying to impact that, that employees feel like they get better feedback or that we trying to impact actual performance metrics? You know, what, what is it that we're trying to impact and, and starting with a baseline before we, we begin the intervention and then measuring over time. I think, you know, obviously the, the challenges is that many of the things that we're trying to impact can be qualitative. And so that can be hard to measure. But what I have tended to see organizations doing more of is, is things just like my manager gives me actionable feedback, or I understand the feedback that my manager wants me to, to do, or they actions they want me to take.

Stacia Garr (42:41):

And then doing that as, as a baseline and then you know, basically happening, good old experiment, you know, control group in an, in another group that you're trying to see if the intervention actually made a difference. So that's what I've tended to see on this. Because I think, you know, just a like, you know, do I like bravely, you know, the smiles shades is just, it's not gonna, it's not gonna be so helpful. One thing I have heard of though actually in regard to one of these vendors, I'm not going to say who it, who it was was that but it was one of these coaching vendors was then it's important to make sure you understand that along the longevity of the engagement. So was talking with one organization that said, Hey, look, when we asked how people felt about this vendor, the initial response was actually great.

Stacia Garr (43:33):

But then when we correlated that against some of those metrics that I just mentioned around people feeling that their manager gave them great feedback, or even their manager's assessment of the employees change in performance. They found that those who had done, I think it was three or fewer coaching engagements. They actually, they actually performed force on all those outcomes. But when they had gotten up to a threshold of, I think it was six or more of those interactions, they performed dramatically better. And so kind of having that sense of the longevity and the potential impact in doing a bit of a deeper dive on the analytics of what's happening with people could make a pretty big difference. So what they did is they went back to the vendor and they said, Hey, you know, w the three up to three is not acceptable. You need to be able to ensure that we're getting at least six reps with each of the people who are engaging with the coaching platform, blah, blah, blah. And they changed their whole approach based on that analysis of, of what was actually happening. So I think, you know, if you need to kind of be thoughtful in terms of what may truly be driving, changing behaviors and over what time period.

Dani Johnson (44:41):

Yeah. Kind of, kind of tag onto that. I know L&D particularly, but HR in general has a tendency to go after the, the all important ROI. I don't, this particular thing lends itself to very well to an ROI. I don't actually think anything does, but particularly this one first of all, because it's too easy to gain. And secondly, because the ROI is a lot of times, as Stacia mentioned intangible and qualitative versus quantitative. And so understanding that the behaviors that you want at the end, and then looking for ways to create actionable metrics rather than dead metrics like an ROI, we don't want to know how we did. We want to know what we need to change in order to continue to, to drive those behaviors is a much deeper problem and much harder to sell, but that actually gets you where you want to go.

Dani Johnson (45:32):

I think the other thing to maybe take into account is understanding what the expectations are from the organization. So what, what do they mean by having an impact? What are they trying to change? How, how, what kinds of metrics that they like to see that are going to help them get where they are? And so a lot of it is communication and making sure you're on the same page, but a lot of it is also relationship making sure that you're constantly checking in with them, making sure that any other thoughts here on this one, has anyone else tried this?

Speaker 5 (46:07):

Maybe there's also, you know, the beginning of the coaching, the contractual realization part where you decide and I'm with the coach, but with the managers as well. And maybe with someone with the HR for example, doing a, quite a PR what we call in France, quite we partied sessions where you have the coachee, the coach, the manager on someone from the HR where you, you, you discuss what would be the objectives of the coaching and you discuss upfront what could be the KPIs, so that you've got your reference points to come to otherwise, you know, it's going to be very subjective and it is in the subjective part of it is. So you want to objectify something, you, you need to have two reference points to see the difference. You know, even if it's in perception from the coach and the manager, do you do perceive that changes happened? How can you see that? What has been demonstrated? So it's qualitative, but observable. So in some way, you, you, you can see the manifestation of changes.

Dani Johnson (47:13):

I think that's a really interesting point now that we've been talking sort of meta what the organization gets out of it, but you should always take it down to the individual level as well, and figure out what those metrics are. Those KPIs that you're trying to hit and have that conversation to make sure that it's at its meaning.

Speaker 5 (47:29):

That's a starting Point. I think, you know,

Dani Johnson (47:31):

Particularly where a lot of organizations are implementing coaching specifically for engagement really, really important thing. Thanks for bringing that up.

Speaker 2 (47:40):

I think that's where I'm struggling though, is getting down to that personal individual level cause right. So I have people analytics team who's really annoyed at me for bringing in a vendor that will allow us to get individual data because of the confidentiality, because we want to be able to say, okay, the managers who have higher engagement scores, you know, on our annual survey report have done these things, you know, and we're kind of locked out of being able to see and less people opt in. And so that's one of the things I'm going to be discussing is if somebody, if the people who are participating in it, if they want to opt in to let us know that they're actually using the service or not.

How do we tackle the issue of confidentiality and privacy?

Speaker 2 (48:20):

So I think it's just, you know, culturally it's, it seemed very different, you know, from, in our folks, in APJ area, they, they see it as am I being punished? Is that why you need a coach? Right. So they don't want people to know it, you know? So I think there's so much around this that we just haven't, we haven't fully been able to crack yet. So I can take the aggregate and be pretty happy with being able to see, you know, return users, activations re you know, things like that to see whether or not it's actually working, but in terms of getting down to, is this really helping a person become a better manager? And if I'm gonna be able to get that?

Dani Johnson (48:58):

A really interesting point flipped over to the next question, which I think was also yours. How do we tackle the issue? Of course. Yeah, no, it's a really good question. Are others dealing with this?

Speaker 5 (49:12):

But definitely I think the confidentiality issue is key. But it's a question of distinguishing, isn't it? What is being shared between the coach, if we're talking about the human coach or, you know, other kinds of data, but in, in what happens in the interaction during the interactions between the coach and the coachee. So, and this is absolutely confidential. Otherwise it's going to impact the quality of the conversation themselves on the progress, because if you know that at any time or any point what you are to shared, you know, and if even more, if it's sensitive and if it's sensitive that there isn't, it's all very likely that it's going to have an impact on you and your performance. So the most sensitive, the more confidential it has to be. But if you agree from the beginning, you know, on, on some KPIs with the managers, you you're, you've got two different things, isn't it? The KPIs is something that it's, it's the ROE somehow the expectations of engaging into the coaching. So that's, what is maybe the agreement that you can get some that done, not in the content of what has been shared doing the parties.

Dani Johnson (50:43):

Yeah, I think, I think this is a really interesting question because the organization is providing the service and so they need some data to show that it's working or not working. We've seen that addressed in a couple of ways. Some organizations are choosing external coaches for this very reason. Like they want, they want that confidentiality to be in place. And so they're less worried about getting the data, then they are making sure that the individual has a sounding board or some, someone to go to, to talk about things that may be difficult to talk about with a manager and an internal mentor. So for example, if somebody, if your organization isn't really good with you moving on or moving to a different position, it's much easier to talk about an external person than an internal person, because you're worried about job security and all kinds of other things.

Dani Johnson (51:24):

The other thing that we're seeing is for some of these vendors that are like the coaches on the shoulder there is an opt in, and the reason that there is an opt-in is because they get enough good information to help them themselves, that they're okay. Sharing that at least at an aggregate at an aggregate level going up. So for example, cultivate, I'll just use them as an example, cause they're a top of mind right now. They, they aggregate information based on a set of competencies or skills that they're trying to build with and managers. And so instead of looking at the individual and saying, this person, you know, is bad at this, they, they kind of take a look at all of the information across everybody, and it is an opt-in, it's absolutely an opt-in, but those managers are willing to opt in to share their data.

Dani Johnson (52:10):

If there are five or more people that sort of go into that, that bucket because they want the information out so bad, that information is very helpful to them to become a better manager. And so it's a, it's a trade-off. And so I think a lot of times it is sort of looking at that trade-off, it's not, it's, it's the way that we communicate in the way that we message about what we're doing here. Hey, we're only using this information for, you know, the better measure of society in general, versus to captivate you when, when we know that something's wrong with you specifically. And it really, really depends on the trust that the organization has with its employees. And that can be a hard pill to swallow in some organizations. Other thoughts on this?

Stacia Garr (52:50):

I would just add in here, you know, the kind of the other option is to do dedicated, you know, match pairing, study focused just on this and just on the specific questions you want to understand, you know, did you, did you practice, or did you focus on these things through your coaching practice, you know, XYZ things asking the same question of the employee, you know, did your manager improve at these things? Did you feel like you got what you needed in, in limiting it? And so you're not getting the data from bravely or from whoever, but you're getting it directly from them. And, and, and at least even if you're not even if it's confidential, so you're still at least getting the pairings. Even if you don't know exactly who the pairings are, if you need to address that level of confidentiality.

Dani Johnson (53:41):

Yeah. Any other thoughts there? All right. We obviously did not get to all the questions left but this has been a really, really good conversation. And we'll be talking about this more this year. We'll be looking into coaching and mentoring and how it's changing and what we can do to implement it better to organizations. So thank you so much for the initial call. We'll be putting out a recording for those of you who are members of red thread. And as always, if you have questions or additional insights, please feel free to reach out and contact us would love to have a chat. Thank you all. Thanks everyone.

Stacia Garr (54:20):

Have a good rest of your day and a good new year. Thank you. Happy new year to everyone!

Q&A Call Video

Transcript

Introduction/What Are You Seeing?

Dani Johnson (00:00):

Okay. So I think we're recording. Let's just check that really fast. Yeah. Okay, great. Great. So we got that whole conversation right there on tape, I think it'll be riveting for those listening later. But welcome to our last Q and A call of the year where we're going to be talking about 2021 trends. Some of the things that we've seen this year, and some of the things that we have a really good feeling are going to drip over into next year. And I'm here with Stacia Garr we're co-founders and principal analyst of RedThread Research. And I have a dog barking under my desk. So if you hear it, that's what that is just a brief introduction to RedThread. If you're not familiar with us, we are a human capital research membership firm, and we focus on things like learning and career and performance and people analytics, diversity and inclusion has been big for us this year. And all of the technology associated with any of those things. We also cover pretty in depth. Especially this time of year, we get a lot of, we get a lot of pieces out on learning technology.

Stacia Garr (01:07):

Yep. And just to put a finer point on that. So we just launched the formal membership here in December for folks who don't know there's still quite a lot of content available for, for those who are maybe not quite yet ready to become a member. But the idea is, is to kind of formalize the membership and also allow us to do research that's not sponsored. So it's gonna allow us to expand the breadth and the type of research that we do here in 2021.

Dani Johnson (01:39):

Awesome. So today we're going to talk about 2021 trends. We're going to want to start with a question for those of you who are out there. We obviously don't know everything and we say that regularly. We would love to understand what you're saying, what you think trends will be in the upcoming year. So you can either use the chat we're big on chat for introverts, but also if you have, if you just, we've given everybody permission to talk. So let's just have a conversation about some of the trends that we're seeing out there.

Speaker 1 (02:19):

This is Speaker 1. My favorite topics are the digital learning, of course. So if everything's online, if everyone's working from home, if everyone is now needing to be sort of working remotely and independently you know, that affects the tools and technologies that affects performance and goals. What skills and strengths do you need now compared to before? So much of that just goes under, you know, the large heading of digital. And then also like you mentioned, the I liked how you included the phrase belonging in your diversity and inclusion, and so kind of that engagement piece. So, you know, how do people connect in 2021 when you're digital?

Stacia Garr (03:17):

Great. Yeah, and we we actually had a big debate about that internally because we were, you know, the move seems to be to DEI diversity, equity and inclusion. And, you know, I think that belonging piece is really important and we're like, well, it's, you know, four letter for four words, is that too much for an acronym? And we just said, you know what, we're just gonna, it's, it's everything. So we're, we're doing all four.

Dani Johnson (03:43):

I think you hit on a couple of really good ones, Jackie, and some of the things that we're seeing, so learning obviously is expanding quite a bit. And then, and then obviously the diversity and inclusion we've seen sort of ramp this year as well. What are others seeing?

Speaker 2 (04:06):

Hi, this is Speaker 2. Can you hear me? So I knew you know, at my organization, a lot of our current work is really focused on on skills and just, you know, kind of individualizing learning experiences for people so that they are able to improve specific skills that they want in relation to their job or future roles. So that that's something that, you know, I foresee us being focused on next year is personalization. And then how do we help people acquire new skills, right. That they're gonna need and kind of keep up with the evolving change of, of, of their roles within the organization.

Dani Johnson (05:08):

Yeah, I think you're right. So I think we've seen that discussion go on for a while now. And I think we're at the point where it's actually gonna do some good, this whole idea of skills. One more, one more comment before we move on in chat says continuing performance management, and what skills of the future look like, how they'll evolve and how do we prepare people for them. So kind of along with what's he saying skills. Anything else before we move on?

The 10 Big Trends

Trend 1: DEIB Critical To All People Practices

Dani Johnson (05:44):

All right. So Stacia and I recently put together our research roadmap for the coming year, and we're seeing basically 10 big trends and they've kind of fall in buckets. So we want to talk through these trends very quickly before we get to the questions, we had a lot of really good questions that were submitted this time. So the first one that we're seeing is DEIB be critical to all people practices. And I'm going to actually let Stacia talk about that one first.

Stacia Garr (06:09):

Yeah. So I think for those of you, who've seen research that I've done in the past on DEIB our recent strategy report that just came out a couple of weeks ago, the integration of DEIB into everything else that we do is something that we've been talking about for a long time, but it feels like now we're seeing that catch up everywhere else. Which is really exciting whether that's from a, you know, just a general practices and awareness perspective, but also from the tech we're going to be publishing our DEIB tech report the second week of January. And so we're going to talk a lot about some of the changes that have happened there, but I think the most remarkable one and this is a little preview for you all, is that we've actually seen the market size increase by three times since when we did the study in 2019, we published in January, 2019, so two years ago.

Stacia Garr (07:07):

And we think that that just incredible market growth reflects the fact that people are looking to integrate across all the different practices and interested in how tech can be used to, to accelerate that. I know we've got a question a little bit more deeply on, on the tech side of this. So I won't jump to that too much right now, but we just are seeing this show up much more broadly has felt like for a number of years, we were kind of saying this was important and now we're seeing people reflect it back to us, which is really exciting.

Dani Johnson (07:36):

Yeah. And I've been surprised at how much it's creeped into some of the other discussions like skills and, and mobility, for example, it's, it's becoming an imperative to pay attention to an all these other areas.

Trend 2: Managers as connectors

Dani Johnson (07:47):

Same thing we're seeing is a managers as connectors.

Stacia Garr (07:51):

Yeah. So this one is in my space as well. So for those of you who follow our stuff, you may have seen that we did a big study on managers that came out in mid October and what we did there was, it was so cool. Like we do a lot of research and I think all of it's cool, but like this piece was really cool because we had done a snapshot of organizational and manager behaviors actually this time last year, literally actually I remember we closed the survey on December 17th, so literally a year ago. And then, so it was right before the pandemic started. And then we were able to do a comparison of what was happening with managers and their behaviors during the pandemic. So we've rerun the survey in September and October of this year. And one of the shifts that we saw, well, we actually saw two big shifts in that study.

Stacia Garr (08:39):

One was that the amount of autonomy that individual employees felt they had went up as you would expect with what happened with the pandemic. But then second, they said that managers were much more open to new ideas, which was, which was really good. And what you would hope for. The challenge we saw was that pretty much every other support, whether it be through the manager or through the organization, every other support that employees received went down. And so as you think about moving into our, you know, whatever this, this new reality is going to look like, we know that a big portion of it is going to be a higher percentage of workers who are remote. And because of that their managers are going to be even more important than in the past. And in many ways the managers are going to be the connector to the organization in a way that wasn't necessarily as true in an office setting. And so we think that as we look to the future, the question is, is how, what, you know, better understanding that shift for managers and how managers can help connect employees more broadly into the organization is going to be a big theme for this year.

Dani Johnson (09:40):

The other part of that is a lot of times managers, we haven't talked to one organization where, to who is like, Oh yeah, our managers just kill it. They're awesome. A lot of managers don't have the skills that they need in order to do some of the things that Stacy was talking about. And so we've seen a big uptick in the conversations around performance management and learning and mobility and all of these things where managers are, or managers are a part of those discussions as well, where we haven't necessarily seen that in the past. So instead of sort of a standalone thing, we're actually seeing managers integrated more into these different things as well.

Trend 3: Mobility is a focus

Dani Johnson (10:14):

Third one is mobility. Mobility is definitely a focus. I think part of this is because of some of the things that have happened this year with respect to large swaths of organizations being furloughed hand their skills not being needed right at this very minute, we're seeing this a lot, especially with frontline workers. And so mobility has really become a focus we're in the middle of a research project, actually, we're done with the research part and we're in the writing portion of mobility right now. And one of the really interesting things is the switch in the past mobility has mostly been used for retention and for engagement purposes. And now we're seeing organizations also include things like need making sure that we've got the skills in the right place, making sure that we have the right skills. And so moving people around to develop those skills, et cetera. The other thing that we're seeing where it comes to mobility is a lot of our vendor friends have come to us and said, Hey, we've got this new mobility project or product. They would really like you to see and give us feedback on. So it's not just the learning leaders and the business, the people leaders that are seeing this it's also is the vendors that are recognizing that this is a thing and will probably continue to be a thing into the future.

Dani Johnson (11:28):

Any, any comments on that Stacia? Any thoughts?

Stacia Garr (11:31):

Well, I think, you know, it, it ties into some of the other things that you're going to mention here, but, but you know, the focus on skills and kind of, you know, skills, not in isolation, but skills is kind of part of an enablement of other things that are really important

Dani Johnson (11:44):

For sure. And if you've seen a theme so far with just these three it's that some of those walls between some of the silos we've seen within the people practices are really breaking. And we're having to have wider discussions across the organization about how we deal with people on how we help people rather than staying within our talent acquisition and our learning and our performance silos.

Trend 4: Definition of "learning" expands

Dani Johnson (12:05):

The next one is the definition of learning expands. And we've been talking about this one for a while now, but in the past six to seven months, we've seen this really sort of accelerate. We're no longer just talking about courses and we're no longer just talking about the LMS. We're actually defining, learning very broadly. What does it take in order to help people plan? How do we helping people discover what they need? How do we help people experiment? What's our, what's our take on failure in the organization and how can we get people to learn from them? All of these things sort of wrap around this idea of learning, which we're sort of moving toward employee development, because we think that's a more inclusive term. How are we, how are we developing people in our organization to get not just them where they want to go, but where to get the organization where it needs to go. And we think we'll continue to see that through this year and probably beyond that.

Trend 5: Not just skills, skills as an enabler

Dani Johnson (12:58):

And then the final one, a couple of you have mentioned already is skills. We've actually been following the skills conversation for years. Like we started, we started listening about four years ago and I've had regular conversations with companies like Deloitte and Microsoft to kind of understand how they're viewing it and what they're doing and what they see as important. One of the things that we find really interesting about the last six months is we're not just talking about skills, we're talking about skills as an enabler. And so until the, the, the COVID crisis gathering skills and figuring out a skills data was more of a a conversation that we were having with ourselves rather than figuring out what to do with that information to help actually enable things in the organization. And so some of the things that we've seen over the last little while is we can barely have a conversation about mobility without also talking about skills.

Dani Johnson (13:52):

We can't, we seem to be running into diversity, inclusion, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging all the time when we're talking about skills. So all of these things where we're talking about, you know, giving people opportunities to develop these skills and moving people in the organization to develop these skills, have that diversity and inclusion component associated with them. And the same thing with data, why are we collecting this data? Where's this data going, what's it going to do, et cetera. And so we think the conversation is shifting from skills and re-skilling, and the whole sort of philosophical discussion that we've been having for four years on skills. We think it's finally firming up a little bit and we're using skills as an enabler. We're going to do the skill thing, but why are we going to do these, the skill thing we're going to do it for very specific reasons within the organization? Any thoughts, there Stacia?

Stacia Garr (14:39):

Yeah. And I think that, that this also ties in really well to this you know, the, the heating up of the market around, you know, specifics skills and specific needs that organizations have moving forward. And so we're starting, I feel like we're starting to see a lot more specificity and it ties into actually our next trend here, but a lot more specificity around what are the skills that we need, not just like, Oh, the, the, you know, like top 10 general skills we need in 2021. But like, as an organization, as we're actually doing our planning, what are the, what are the skills into what extent do we need them in order to do X, Y or Z thing? So it just feels like it's kind of gone from being up here in the sky and a little bit ephemeral to a lot more concrete around what we're trying to do.

Dani Johnson (15:25):

Yeah. I think you're right. And I think it's also changed the way that organizations are thinking about their people. So up until about six months ago, we were talking mostly about, okay, how do we get the skills? And a lot of times the question was we buy them. But, but since, since there's a shortage of pretty much everything right now we're seeing organizations say, okay, well, how do we develop these skills, and what people need to develop these skills and all of those kinds of conversations have come in that, that weren't there before that I think makes the skills discussion much more interesting and much more concrete and much more actionable.

Trend 6: Data as a crucial element of success

Dani Johnson (15:55):

Data as a crucial element of success.

Stacia Garr (16:01):

Yeah. And so, and so this ties in really well, you know, it's fun cause Dani and I kind of, we have our swim lanes to a certain extent, but they often intersection and the skills conversation is actually one of the biggest examples of how they've been intersecting. So so Dani has been doing a lot of work on kind of skills from a learning perspective and what's happening there. And then I've been doing a lot of work in understanding skills from a data perspective. And, and what's fascinating, isn't in so many organizations, those too late to parallel paths remain parallel and they're, they are not intersecting. And so a big thing that we're going to talk about this year is, is how should they be intersecting? Cause there clearly is talking about the same skills, the same people, the same need in the organization, but it's just tends to happen in two different parts of the organization.

Stacia Garr (16:48):

And so skills is a great example of that with, with data. But I think there's a lot of others. For, again, for those of you who follow what we do, we just publish the people analytics tech study last week. And in that we talked a lot about kind of just a range of, of capabilities that that technologies are now offering folks. And I think the underlying message though from 2020 was that tech, or I'm sorry, that people analytics and then the tech that enables it is more important than ever, you know, as we saw workers go into to leave the office and work from home, there was this incredible sense from leaders that we don't necessarily know what's happening. We don't know what's happening necessarily from an engagement perspective or what's working or what people need. And so we saw the role of people, analytics just really shine this year.

Stacia Garr (17:37):

And I expect that shine not to come off, if you will. You know, I think that now that people have kind of seen the value of it, they're not going to be willing to relinquish it. And so we see that particularly for employee engagement and experience, but we're also seeing that more broadly as we start to see different platforms that can bring in a whole lot of different information and to give us a much more nuanced understanding of what's happening for people, what helps them achieve success and also what are some of the warning signs that we should be looking for? So I just think that we're going to continue to see 2021 as a year to bring in data and to start to really do this analysis with the idea that it will really begin to impact business outcomes in a very large and meaningful way in 2022.

Dani Johnson (18:20):

Yeah. I think one of the outcomes of that too will be that all of the people practices are going to have to start thinking differently about how they do their job, because if you think about it up until fairly recently we've all used our gut to determine whether we hire somebody or, you know, where we move people or all of those things have been largely, you know, how someone's performing has been largely based on gut, but with some of the things that we've seen this year with, with data and technology, we have a much more unbiased view that helps us make decisions better, but also that we can push down to individuals to help them make, make decisions better, which I'm pretty excited about.

Stacia Garr (18:55):

Yeah. And it, and it connects back to the point around DEIB being integrated with everything. You know, that's one of the biggest opportunities is this connection between DEIB and data and people analytics using it to make less biased decisions, help us understand where bias may exist in organizations and to flag that in critical moments of decision-making. We're gonna dig into that topic in Q1. Because I think I've, to be honest, I've been just trying to get there is Dani now for the last three or four months, and we just had other things on the agenda that had to get finished up. But for me, I think that's a huge topic for 2021

Trend 7: Humanizing of human resources

Dani Johnson (19:32):

Humanizing of human resources. I think this is a really interesting one to talk about right after we talked about data. Sometimes we think of data as sort of non-human and cold and exacting. But what we're seeing is that some of this data is being used to actually humanize human resources a little bit more. I think we're also seeing it, this idea of humanization, when we think about kind of how we've addressed this crisis versus how we addressed the last crisis, it's pretty different. So in 2008, a bunch of people got laid off. We didn't, we were more concerned about the world in the economy and the business. And we were about those people this time around, it seems a little bit different. And I don't know if it's because of, because COVID is a really personal thing, or maybe I'm hoping we've evolved as the human race just a little bit, but we are starting to understand that, that the human part of human resources is a really, really important thing. So we've talked about that with the DEIB, we've talked about it with managers and making sure that they connect people, talked about it with that data and how it helps us become more human by making better decisions and less biased decisions. But we think in general, sort of the humanizing of human resources and the experience associated with working we'll continue along that path.

Dani Johnson (20:45):

Any thoughts there Stacia?

Stacia Garr (20:49):

No.

Dani Johnson (20:49):

Apologies for putting you on the spot there.

Trend 8: Purposeful, holistic employee experience

Dani Johnson (20:53):

Purposeful holistic employee experience.

Stacia Garr (20:58):

Yeah. So again, this year we spent a lot of time talking about purpose and the role of purpose and organizations and, and the and how we've seen that kind of tying back to what Dani just said, seeing that really show up in the midst of this pandemic. And, and we expect that to continue in the purpose research, we talked about, you know, it's this just a fad, this whole focus on purpose. And we think not for a whole bunch of reasons that I could go into, but I think that, that, that this focus on connecting having a clear organizational purpose and enabling employees to connect their own purpose to it is going to continue tied into that is this idea again, of this holistic employee experience. And I think there are actually two ways to read holistic. One is you know, is actually Jackie mentioned at the beginning, there has been this big shift to digital.

Stacia Garr (21:49):

And before the pandemic, I felt like we were talking about kind of the digital workplace and then the, you know, in-person workplace and with the pandemic, we've really seen those to integrate and have to think about kind of this more holistic perspective of what does an employee experience mean. Now, when you, when you layer in purpose into that, I think you're not just talking about kind of the nuts and bolts of an employee experience, but really about how does all of that come together and enable an individual to achieve their purpose and enable the organization to achieve the purpose. Their purpose is we think as we look to 2021, we're going to start to see, we are already seeing all of those things kind of meld together in a way that I think is much more holistic and much more, again, human than what we've seen in the past. So not just a digital experience, not just an in-person experience, but really all purposeful holistic employee experience.

Stacia Garr (22:41):

Dani, did you have anything you want to add there?

Dani Johnson (22:42):

Yeah, I think again, that, that data is helping us provide that really personal experience to individuals. And so it's, we're not doing, we're not putting in people in personas anymore. We're not talking about job roles anymore. We're talking about providing that employee experience. That's really personal to the individual and we're able to do that because of some of the advances we've seen in data and technology,

Trend 9: Building networks, changing work

Dani Johnson (23:02):

Building networks and changing work. And I'm going to let, Stacia start on this one too.

Stacia Garr (23:06):

Yeah. So one of the outcomes of the pandemic and people working remotely is that and we know this from a number of the organizational network analysis vendors is that we are seeing people strengthened their immediate network and their immediate relationships with the people that they work with on the day-to-day, but their weaker connections are dying away. And that is problematic for a couple of reasons on the individual level. We know that diverse people tend to have led to be in lower power networks and so, and have weaker connections to higher power networks. So if we think about kind of all the benefits of diversity and all the need to accelerate the, the rise of diverse individuals in the organization that weakening of those networks is a challenge. And then secondly, for the organization, we know that if we have less diversity, we have less of all sorts of other benefits including critically innovation.

Stacia Garr (24:02):

And so, as we think about kind of longterm moving in this new world of, of how we're going to work together you know, there will be a larger percentage of the workforce who are remote. So we've got a real nut to crack we think around how do we make sure that people are still building networks, still making connections? You know, we talked about managers as connectors and that's great, but we all know that that cannot be the only, or the strong, you know, just the it needs to be one of many strong connections. And so we think there's a conversation here around how do we make sure that people are being connected in ways that are meaningful, that allowed them to grow, that allowed them to get access to the opportunities they need with an overall benefit to the whole organization.

Dani Johnson (24:42):

And I think the other part of that, that trend that we're seeing is the changing of work we're seeing work, adjust to accommodate remote better than it ever has before. And the whole world is talking about this right now. So we're not going to address it too much right now, but it will probably, it will most likely, it'll definitely creep into some of the things that we write about because it literally having a remote workforce. And some of the things that have happened this year literally changed the way that we work.

Trend 10: Acceleration…of everything

Dani Johnson (25:07):

And our final one is the acceleration of pretty much everything. So just an example of this, we had a conversation with an organization that was trying to implement an LXP, a learning experience platform at the beginning of the year. And they had this year and a half long plan, and they were going to roll it out to different parts of the organization at different times, et cetera, et cetera.

Dani Johnson (25:28):

And then COVID hit and they were, they had everybody online within three weeks. So one of the things that we think will take a lot of time don't necessarily take the time we think they will. And we're seeing this in pretty much everything. So diversity and inclusion has stepped up, but this year learning has stepped up this year. And the importance of managers has stepped up pretty much everything on this slide has, has been accelerated at least a little bit by COVID in some of that, the DEIB challenges with that we've seen this year, and we don't necessarily think that's going to slow down now that we know that we can get stupid work out of the way and do things faster. And we think it's probably going to continue. Any thoughts there Stacia?

Stacia Garr (26:11):

No, I agree. I think I'd love to hear what other people think though, now that we've kind of laid out our 10 for 2021,

Dani Johnson (26:19):

Any thoughts on this and please feel free to use the the chat as well.

Speaker 1 (26:29):

This is Speaker 1 again, I love the example that you just gave where under previous project planning, that's a year, year and a half, but under crisis it's three weeks. Like that's amazing. It'd be interesting to follow up with them in a year to see, you know, and how's it going now? You know, did it, did it all fall into place just like you expected?

Dani Johnson (26:50):

Yeah, no, I think you're right, Jackie. And we definitely will. I'd love to, I'd love to understand kind of what happens with that organization. I think sometimes we're afraid to introduce change into an organization because we're afraid of the pushback when everybody's sort of rallied around one, cause things tend to go smoother. And so it'll be interesting to see how much change we can continue to push without sort of that, that unifying challenge and bolt says, I love the holistic employee experience, huge topic for us.

Speaker 1 (27:20):

Yeah.

Dani Johnson (27:22):

Any other thoughts here before we move on to your questions or anything we missed or anything we missed?

Stacia Garr (27:27):

We have plenty of contenders who almost made this list.

Dani Johnson (27:39):

Okay. Please continue to comment and share Stacia and I are big on making sure that everyone understands that we don't know everything and how we learn and how we develop and how we make this. The most useful thing possible is to integrate other people's ideas and thoughts and questions. So the questions that we got we got a good chunk of questions we chose about eight of them.

Are there any "usual" trends that override disruption?

Dani Johnson (28:00):

The first one is, are there any usual trends that override disruption? Which we thought it was a really interesting question and we actually put it at the front because we wanted to talk a little bit about it. Just kind of going back to the trends that we've talked about. Some of the things that have been ramping for years now is diversity and inclusion. The DEIB has been ramping for years, the learning trend, it used to be not that that important within organizations and now has become very important, not just to individuals, but also to senior leaders. Data has been ramping for a really long time as well. So we think some of these definitely overrides sort of the crisis that we're in, which means they probably have a longer, their trajectory is still going up. Stacia anything to other,

Stacia Garr (28:46):

Yeah. I think employee experience and purpose. I think that that's another one, you know, again, back to our purpose research you know, we talked about how the business round table made their change to the statement on the purpose of a corporation in August, 2019. So that was clearly before this. And you know, the business round table doesn't do anything until it let's just say they're not the fastest moving most on the cutting edge of, of stating these types of changes. So I think they were really kind of an indication of a long lead up to this focus on broader purpose in stakeholder capitalism. So we think that one and then that integration with employee experience again, was something that we were seeing before this. So I'd just underscore that one too, right?

Stacia Garr (29:32):

Any thoughts from, from you all, are there trends that you've seen sort of accelerated by COVID, but maybe were in place before?

Speaker 3 (29:48):

This is Speaker 3. I have seen a lot more interest in how do we communicate, not just what programs are in place for DEIB, but how do we effectively communicate and connect all of our staff to these initiatives? So before it was a lot of people would just be doing it or not a lot, but some people would be working on it. But now we see more people, I should say more executives than at the board level of the companies that I'm working with are connecting and wanting to make sure that their entire company knows their role in DEIB.

Dani Johnson (30:25):

Yeah. I really like that example. I think that's sort of a perfect example of what we're talking about here. DEIB, we've been, we've all been given it sort of we've, we've been talking about it for years, but now it goes clear up to the board level of Stacia was telling me before this call that we've never seen a higher need for, what did you call them Stacia? The Chief Inclusion Officers?

Stacia Garr (30:46):

Chief Diversity Officers.

Dani Johnson (30:49):

Officers at the top of the organization who are actually giving some real time and effort and consequently budget to, to some of these things that we've been trying to solve for years with volunteer panels and things like that.

Stacia Garr (31:01):

Yeah. Yeah. Just to kind of, to jump on that, you know, we've we published this DEIB strategy report, and one of the things we talked about there was the executives are more open to the DEIB topic more broadly, and I have this is totally a thought experiment, but I'm going to share it with you guys. Cause I think it's kind of interesting. I wonder if part of the reason for the greater openness and the greater desire to move the needle here is that we, by when the social justice movement started this summer at that point we were depending on where you were roughly around three months into the COVID crisis. And I think that through COVID a lot of executives got a whole lot more comfortable with being able to say we don't necessarily know all the answers, this is hard.

Stacia Garr (31:52):

We're doing our best. We're, you know, a much more compassionate, empathetic, open, and potentially vulnerable leadership approach than what we would have seen, you know, six months prior. And so I wonder if some of this greater openness and some of this greater desire to actually maybe properly fix some of the DEIB challenges we have was a result of leaders already kind of having just gone through this, you know, very challenging initial experience with, with COVID and having already adopted kind of a more empathetic posture. So we'll, we'll see if that's kind of a long-term change and if that continues to play out. But I do have a strong hunch that that may have contributed to this greater level of openness.

Speaker 2 (32:38):

Hi, this is Speaker 2, Stacia. Just to kind of jump off of what you were saying. I've noticed in the organization that I am in very heavy involvement, like up to the CEO receiving, you know, emails and messages, even like you know, senior VP leader of leaders, of business units, holding all day conferences and just kind of having their face and their thoughts and out there. Which I think is really interesting because that, that's sort of the first time I'm seeing this embrace by senior leaders all the way up to the CEO being very vocal about this topic.

Stacia Garr (33:25):

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, that that's something we heard from a lot of folks when we did the interviews for that study. And I think it reflects this broader shift that we've seen actually in the in the Edelman trust barometer, where they talk about they, they Edelman focus on within the U S but, you know, by and large us consumers expect companies to do something about social justice and about diversity equity, inclusion, belonging in their organizations. And I think that is actually then translating to action. There was a really cool data point and I need to see if there's an updated one where it said that in Q1. So just before the kind of the pandemic really got going the just 4% of S&P 500 companies talked about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging on their earnings calls with investors. And in Q2, that number shot up to 40%. And so I think, you know, there is this heightened awareness that DEIB can have such big impacts on the organizations. And so there is a that greater executive embrace as you mentioned, Speaker 2.

Speaker 2 (34:36):

Yeah. And I think even just showing vulnerability in terms of like, you know, we don't have the answers, we want to work on finding solutions. And you know, we, it's important to keep talking about it and keep the dialogue open. So I think just, you know, whereas before it, might've kind of been not addressed or kind of swept under the rug, like we don't need to address this. I find that leaders are now getting at the forefront of it and addressing things that you know, incidents of social injustice that might happen and say, you know, this is unfortunate. We don't have the answers, but, you know, feel free to reach out if you want to talk about it. So,

Stacia Garr (35:23):

Yeah, definitely. And Marlene, I see your comment. I'll see if I can find the study and send it out to you all. It was RBC. Did the, did the research.

Dani Johnson (35:36):

just to wrap this one, someone says that he and his organization, they're seeing more interest in visual collaboration and digital workspaces as people move as people, as more people work from home. And I think that's, I think that's awesome, first of all. And secondly, I think it's needed we've seen more acceptance of some of the things that we use as well. We use a tool called Miro and we've been able to take that into a couple of organizations and introduce them to something like that that allows you to still do some of those sort of hands-on group activities that need to be done in order to get the work done and in a digital way. So we're thinking, that's fantastic.

How are organizations putting their 2020 DEIB commitments into action?

Dani Johnson (36:11):

The next couple of questions have to do with DEIB. So we'll continue that conversation. How are organizations putting their 2020, their DEIB commitments into action in 2021? And do you have examples?

Stacia Garr (36:25):

Yeah. So, and, and I'd love other folks comments and thoughts here, but I'll kind of kick us off here. You know, one of the things we saw was immediately after the murder of George Floyd that a lot of organizations made kind of very public commitments with regard to what they were going to do with DEIB. So, you know, for instance, we saw like you know, Adidas saying that they were going to fill 30% of their open positions at Adidas and Reebok with lacquer or Latino or Latina candidates. IBM said they were not going to offer or research facial recognition technology because of potential human rights abuses. We saw Facebook and a whole bunch of other organizations talk about the number of black and Latinx employees that were going to bring into the organization.

Stacia Garr (37:20):

They said they were going to double them. And then there were a whole bunch of organizations that pledged to make large contributions to you know, black lives matter, NAACP ACLU, et cetera, et cetera. So, so we saw a lot of immediate action right after, and then I feel like some of the changes that came down or that I feel like then what has happened is organizations have begun to go away. Do some of the hard work mentioned, you know even in, in, I think there was an article in the wall street journal in July that said the chief diversity officer was the hottest job right now in the market. And, and the number of DEIB professionals I've personally seen, just move has been pretty astounding and used to, and it feels like there's a DEIB role at pretty much every company that wasn't there three months ago.

Stacia Garr (38:07):

So I think right now organizations are starting to do the work of putting more people, more investment into their organizations. But what that's going to translate to on the other side is I think still an open question, you know, there's and then I think there's also a question of how they're going to talk about it because there are a lot of changes that organizations will make, particularly as their results and their, their mix of talent and their focus on accelerating particular types of talent that may not get into the news. It may not be, I'm almost certain, it's not going to be the thing that they put into their CSR ESG reporting. And so I think that there's going to be kind of a dance that organizations have to do as they try to demonstrate that they're walking, you know, that they're walking the talk but do it in a way that one, their legal teams feel comfortable with. Cause that's been a big, you know, throttle on DEIB efforts as well as the publication of what's happening with them. So what their, their legal teams are comfortable with and then also what they feel like kind of furthers their, their talent brand. So I think that there are things that are happening, particularly with regard to talent acquisition, and then also talent mobility. But I think it's going to take a little bit of time for us to see them.

Stacia Garr (39:22):

Do I see your comment if the compensation for DEIB roles will improve? I think, I think it will. And I think it already has begun because the talent market is so tight right now for DEIB roles. So I think that's a good call out.

Dani Johnson (39:34):

I think someone actually surfaced a couple of good questions too. So there's the one, she says, one thing that comes to mind as we talk about one so much focus on moving digital and to DEIB is the need to keep in mind the portion of the workforce that can not work digitally. How are they being supported and included in opportunities, et cetera. So really good question. One of the things that I think we're seeing is some of the technology is allowing us to address some of the challenges with the DEIB, even though those are frontline workers and cannot work digitally. And so even that, well, the aspect of digital that affects them as different, but we're still using some of those digital tools to make sure that we're taking care of them. The other thing that we're seeing just no past, and I think this pretty predates COVID two is more of a focus on frontline workers. So a lot of learning tech and tech in general has been focused on exempt workers, people that work in an office. We've seen that shift a little bit as new tools come out and new awareness comes out of, you know, as organizations realize the value of those workers and understand the need for them to grow and develop as well.

Dani Johnson (40:44):

Any other thoughts or questions on this question? All right.

What are the top 3 DEIB goals that are contributing to DEIB tech buying?

Dani Johnson (40:52):

Let's move on to the second DEIB question, which is what are the top three DEIB goals that are contributing to DEIB tech buying?

Stacia Garr (41:01):

Yeah, so And the pet study, we talk a bit about this. So, so the kind of the top three areas that we saw as a, as an area of focus were employee engagement and experience DEIB analysis and monitoring. And that was a big shift, like a few when we did the study last year that was much lower. So that was number two that showed up number two. And then the third one was performance management when we, when we looked at kind of the, the analytics side. And so when we're thinking about kind of the DEIB intersection here, a lot of it is understanding, you know, amongst those three kind of really critical areas, what's happening with people. What are, what do we need to understand about our different populations and and how their experiences are then influencing their the kind of what's going to happen with the talent pipeline overall.

Stacia Garr (42:00):

So we know that representation numbers are backwards looking. And so now I feel like we're starting to see people trying to use the tech to get a little bit farther back into what's happening and to be able to address things a lot faster, but so, so engagement and experience. Certainly like I said, performance management, because that contributes to our ability to advance people in our understanding of how people are performing and their perceptions of what's happening differently. And then the, I should say from the PAT study the learning and development being the third, third one and the understanding of how those learning experiences are different for different populations.

Dani Johnson (42:40):

Great. Any other thoughts on this question? Okay, let's move to the next one.

How are organizations defining mobility?

Dani Johnson (42:48):

How organizations defining mobility. So one of our, the trends that we mentioned earlier, and one of the things that we've seen craziness around is this idea of mobility, moving people in the organization to different parts of the organization. For some reasons, a couple of the biggest reasons that we see the first and I think probably the oldest is we moved people around organizations to, to retain them, to, to give them experience for sure, but to retain them and engage them as part of that larger employee engagement thing that's happening right now. The other thing that we're seeing since COVID is the, the need to move people around the organization to put the right skills in the right places at the right time. So as large parts of organizations have, have become unnecessary, especially given sort of the situation that we're in, we're seeing organizations really ramp up the skilling three skilling and the development to take tangential skills and turn them into the skills that they need in the organization right now.

Dani Johnson (43:49):

So a large communications organization, for example, had to sort of either furlough all of their retail, or it had to retrain them to, to handle some of the online stuff that was coming in at a greater pace, because some of those retail stores were out of commission. And so that's just one example of the way that we've seen organizations sort of think about mobility differently. Another thing that we're seeing is mobility used to mean moving from one job to another job from one role to another role. And that is also sort of being redefined. It's much more of a, I don't want to, I'm not sure how we're going to say this yet in the research, but it's much more of a, sort of a psychological move. So mobility doesn't necessarily mean picking up and moving somewhere, even though a lot of organizations are still thinking about it, that way mobility actually means working out of wherever you are and getting new experiences and new opportunities while maybe still having your home base, where it was before.

Dani Johnson (44:42):

And we're seeing that manifest itself in things like talent open talent, marketplaces. Some people call them gig economies within the organizations. So they're trying out gigs for two or three weeks. We're seeing it in terms of rotations. So you still belong to a central place. But you have the opportunity to experience some new things. In the military, they call them details and they can be up to a year long. And so this idea of mobility is changing to be much more sort of cerebral than it is physical, which I think is really, really interesting. The research that we have coming out in a little bit, sort of talks about how different organizations handle that differently. We have the latter model, which is moving people up, are really defined the latter on, you know, what your put your next step is. We have the lattice model, which has been talked about for 15 years, which is moving people around to give them more breadth.

Dani Johnson (45:28):

We have the agency model, which is what a lot of consulting firms use, which is organizing the people around the work instead of organizing the work around a predefined organization of people. And then we're also seeing quite a bit of organizations start to talk about external workers. So retiree pools and gig workers and contractors and consultants, and those type of people paying attention to them as part of your talent pool and helping the organization understand what skills they have so that they can also be mobilized within different parts of the organization. So we did this study five years ago. We did it again this time I've learned a lot and things have changed quite a bit about about mobility, but those are the biggest things. People are thinking about it more cerebrally than they have in the past. And we're probably including more, more talent pools and, and, and paying attention to skills that skills data to help people get where they need to go. So I'm gonna stop right there for a second. Any questions about mobility?

Stacia Garr (46:29):

You know, I'll just add, as you were talking. I wonder if like, with some of the changes that we've seen with the workforce, like we know we've seen a large percentage of women go out of the workforce, it's like three to one and we've seen other changes around you know, younger workers. And, and I just wonder if all of that will get connected here into mobility, you know, thinking about those different talent pools differently. And, and also, I mean, it seems funny, but we've kind of stopped talking about the whole, you know, baby boomers leaving the workforce, but it's, it's still happening in very great numbers. And so I wonder if this will all kind of end up coming together, particularly as, you know, as we get a vaccine and as potentially the market starts to take off again.

Dani Johnson (47:20):

Yeah, no, I think that's an interesting thought. And as, as walls in organizations continue to become more transparent and permeable as well. When you retire, you don't necessarily retire. You are put into, you know, you're a lot of people still consult with the organizations that they retire from. And so what does that mean for, for the skills that we thought we were going to lose, but maybe we're not losing and the way that people want to move. The other thing that we're seeing that's really interesting is success has to be redefined in this new, in this new sort of way. Not everybody is going to be CEO. We had one organization actually say that not everybody is going to be CEO. And so how do we help people have the best experience and get the best types of experiences that they want and learn what they want to learn while they're here and be okay if they step out of the organization for a while, knowing that we want to keep that relationship good so that they can come back later. So it's, it seems to be that we're rethinking it and we're not necessarily thinking of ownership anymore, but rather relationship, which I think is a pretty healthy way to think about it.

Dani Johnson (48:20):

All right. Any other thoughts here before we move to the next question?

What are the most important questions that HR leaders are trying to answer with data?

Dani Johnson (48:26):

What are the most important questions that HR leaders are trying to answer with data?

Stacia Garr (48:32):

Yeah, I think I kinda touched on this one earlier. But you know, from our, from our PAT study, like I said, it was in playing engagement experience, D&I performance management and learning and development. And so I think what all of that really points to is trying to understand the employee experience much better and to be able to understand, you know, what's going to happen in terms of our talent retention in terms of, you know, what we're gonna need from a skills perspective what we're gonna need from a new talent perspective versus maybe some of these other talent pools. So we're seeing, seeing kind of a focus there, but most immediately the focus has been how are people doing during COVID. And I think that's gonna continue. One thing that didn't actually show up in the PAT study though, that I also am hearing about anecdotally is that focus on wellbeing and burnout. It wasn't in the study. But I think that in something that we're going to hear more about, particularly quite frankly, as we get into February, you know, and for many, many people, the vaccine is still three, four months off. And it just starts to feel hard you know, a long winter, et cetera. So That's what I think.

How important will attention to the remote work be?

Dani Johnson (49:50):

How important will attention to the remote worker be? Pretty important for the next year. I, and I think it will continue to be important. I think I'm hoping there. One of the things that comes out of COVID is enough time understanding how it feels to work remotely, that we have a lot more sympathy, empathy, and impetus to change the way that we work with with our remote counterparts. This one is always really interesting to me cause I've worked remotely for 15 years. Our entire organization is completely remote. We have people working for us that we've never met face-to-face. And so it's, it's an interesting mindset shift to, to take into account remote workers. But I I'm hoping that this has given us enough empathy to sort of think about it differently, moving on. And I think with that, some of the technology that is surfacing per someone's comment to help us do this better is getting better. It's getting better and it's allowing us to do completely different things. We're not just putting the live experience online now. We're actually doing completely different things that may even be very, say a little bit better than, than in-person in some cases. What do you think Stacia?

Stacia Garr (51:06):

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I think we're going to the big challenge. I think one of the big challenges of 2021 is going to be, how do we balance when, which, when people are going back to the office, which people go back to the office, which ones maybe don't and with what frequency, and then, you know, when we've all been remote to any more level playing field in some ways. And so as we manage those in office and remote relationships, how do we make sure that we remain inclusive for those who are remote?

Dani Johnson (51:38):

Any thoughts on this one? All right.

Dani Johnson (51:46):

The next one is when things settle down, will purpose still be a thing.

When things settle down will purpose still be a thing?

Stacia Garr (51:49):

So I think you were going to jump in, I saw you come off mute.

Speaker 1 (51:53):

Oh, I was just gonna say one of the phrases I've heard different people saying to you is others have been remote, just like you gave in your example, it's not new to everyone. So I would hope in 2021, those that are well-experienced with working remotely and keeping engaged and keeping on track can, you know, have the bandwidth to reach out to the ones that are struggling. So maybe like like you said, a level playing field because it's not a new thing. It's just new to everybody all at the same time this year for obvious reasons.

Dani Johnson (52:30):

I think that's a really good point. So back to the purpose question, when things settle down, will purpose still be a thing?

Stacia Garr (52:40):

Yes. As I, as I said before, the purpose was, it was a train that had been coming. And I think it's going to still be here when, when this is all said and done. Now you go back to why organizations, you know, clarify their purpose, you know often a part of it is providing clarity in terms of why we're doing what we do in the face of a lot of other changes. So, you know, some of those changes are technology. So as we have more AI and we have more machine learning, a lot of people have been asking before COVID, you know, what is it that makes us human? What's our unique human contribution. And part of that is aligned to purpose is, is understanding what it is that we uniquely do. You know, the gig economy the ability to work from anywhere enhanced by our increased remote capabilities makes us ask questions about, you know, well, why would I join this organization?

Stacia Garr (53:37):

What do I get, what am I contributing by joining this organization? And having a clear sense of purpose helps answer that question. So I think that there's all sorts of reasons that purpose will continue to be a thing. I think the bigger question though, is we'll the organizations who have clarified or reinforce their purpose through COVID remain as committed to it. Well, we still see the level of commitment that we've seen and, you know, it's easy for, for healthcare organizations, you know, we've, we have this purpose podcast that we're that we're putting out right now. And we've had, for instance, Medtronic and Johnson and Johnson on there, and it's easy for easier for them to clearly articulate their purpose, but will other organizations continue to do so. And I think that for some of them who really are clear on this and believe in, it absolutely will. You know, another interviewee was Rachel Fichter at S&P Global, and, you know, that's a financial services firm, and yet they have a very clear sense of purpose. So I think it'll be interesting to see if there's some drop-off but I think that the fundamental reason for a focus on purpose will not shift.

Dani Johnson (54:50):

I think just because of time, we're going to leave it there. We've gone a little bit over what we usually schedule for a Q and A, we really appreciate everybody who has participated, and we really appreciate those that sent these questions in, because that makes our life much easier. When do we have questions in the Q and A session. This we'll be providing a transcript and a recording to, to those who are members on the site. And if any of you have any follow-up questions or would like to discuss any of these further, or have ideas that weren't shared today, please, please, please reach out your questions and your comments make us smarter. Thank you so much.

Stacia Garr (55:23):

Thank You. Happy holidays!

As part of our ongoing research on skills and competencies, we recently gathered leaders for the second roundtable on skills. This session focused on the question of finding and using skills data. Some of the questions we discussed were:

• Why is skills data “hot” or important right now?
• How does skills data differ from competency data?
• What sources of skills data are orgs using?
• How are orgs using skills data?
• What do you imagine skills tech will enable orgs to do in the future?

Mindmap of Finding & Using Skills Data roundtable

The mindmap below outlines the conversations we heard as part of this roundtable.

Key takeaways

We had an engaging, energetic conversation that helped us better understand how skills data is being used in orgs, the challenges associated with skills data, and some possibilities for the future. Here are 5 key takeaways.

Skills connect work and talent

Leaders agreed there is an increasingly core connection between work and talent. Particularly since the pandemic began, orgs find themselves needing to pivot quickly to respond to rapidly evolving environments.

Agility has become a survival imperative, which means it’s critical for orgs to be able to put the right people in the right places…fast.

Skills are the way orgs can figure out who the “right people” are. With insight into who has what skills – and where those skills are needed – orgs can quickly move key resources to the places and projects they’re needed most. Some leaders noted that skills apply not only to individuals, but also to teams.

Skills data sources are everywhere

When we asked leaders to name some sources of skills data, the answers flooded in. We counted at least 15 types of skill data sources, including job descriptions, talent profiles, job histories, education history, certifications, social profiles like LinkedIn, collaboration sites like GitHub, productivity software like Asana and Jira, and even communications platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack, or email.

One challenge is that most of these sources are currently not well integrated, making it difficult for orgs to identify all the potentially relevant skills an employee has. Skills data remains siloed or, in some cases, hidden. In one example, a leader pointed out that an employee might develop skills through volunteer experience – but those skills may never be reported in their skills profile at work.

Partly due to this fractioned information, leaders still struggle to understand what skills exist in their org. This makes evaluation and planning difficult. As one leader pointed out, “Without a baseline of where we are now, it’s hard to understand if upskilling efforts are effective.” It’s also hard to know what skills to develop.

Think carefully about use cases

There remains real confusion in orgs about skills vs. competencies. Leaders reported they sometimes struggle to clearly articulate the differences between the two to others in their orgs. This confusion can create resistance to change.

A few participants reported they tackle this challenge by identifying use cases for skills vs. competencies. They ask, "In what situations might skills be appropriate? In what situations might competencies be better?"

In response to these questions, many leaders agreed that competencies may be most appropriate in cases where it’s critical to understand proficiency – for example, in talent acquisition and performance management. By contrast, skills may be more appropriate when the goal is agility, mobility, or employee development.

Skills verification and proficiency rating remain difficult

Many skills platforms currently offer a skills tracking functionality that indicates whether a person has a skill or not. Often this data is self-reported, selected in the platform by the employee.

Some leaders want to complement this self-reported, yes/no data with more meaty, contextual information. They want to know whether the employee really has the reported skill (skill verification) and how well the employee can perform the skill (proficiency rating). They noted that self-reported data introduces the risk that individuals may under- or over-estimate their own skills. They also highlighted the potential diversity, equity, and inclusion implications of self-reporting, as some populations tend to consistently under- or over-report their skills. Skills verification and proficiency ratings could help reduce these reporting biases as well as give leaders better data for resource planning.

A few leaders voiced concern that current methods of skills verification may ask too much of employees. If too many requirements are put on users, they may stop reporting their skills altogether. They wondered: Can we find ways to verify skills, measure proficiency, and provide a simple, fun, and easy user experience for the average employee?

Tech can help make skills fun and easy

Leaders imagined that in the future, skills tech will be so fun and easy to use that it will become part of everyone’s job to be transparent about their skills and development goals.

Generational or tenure-related challenges may hinder widespread adoption of skills, however. Whereas younger or less experienced employees may be motivated to report their skills and to use skills platforms to build social communities, employees closer to retirement may see less incentive to do so. It will be important to make skills fun, easy, and clearly beneficial to all employees if skills tech is to be widely adopted.

Some orgs have successfully demonstrated the benefits of skills by pre-populating employees’ skill profiles, then asking employees to review and approve or update their profiles. With this approach, employees see an immediate and concrete benefit: the recommended learning opportunities the system generates based on the gaps in their profile.

Data integration, analytics, and reporting are other areas leaders highlighted for the future of skills tech. Currently, some platforms pull together data from a variety of disparate sources. Building on this capability, leaders would like to see all available data in one place, with robust reporting and analytics support. They also envision more adaptability to specific use cases, more tailored reporting in response to specific inquiries, and more efficient aggregation and sorting.

A special thanks

This session helped us more clearly understand the ways skills data is being identified and used in orgs, the challenges associated with using this data, and the hopes leaders have for the future of skills data in their orgs. 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].