Events

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

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

*Recruiting: LinkedIn

*Learning: Lynda.com

*Performance Management: Glint's nascent PM offering

*Employee Engagement / Voice: Glint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diversity and inclusion – now core HR responsibilities

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

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

Converging people practices

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

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

I've spent the last 6 months doing a pro bono project with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

The IFRC is an incredible organization that does a lot of good in the world. They are a federation of 191 independently operating national societies, and, in total, direct the efforts of over 11 million volunteers. It's big. And it's complex. And .after working with them for six months, it's difficult for me to have sympathy for learning leaders who say that they "can't" do something because of internal complexities.

The goal of this small project with the IFRC was to get a baseline on how their national societies learn. They want to change the definition of "learn" from something that happens in the classroom to something that happens continuously, wherever staff and volunteers are. We began the effort with a survey and some analysis, and then the internal team heading up the effort hosted representatives from about 30 national societies in Geneva last week. The singular goal was to figure out how to further learning throughout the federation.

The thing is, while the IFRC doesn't have many of the usual trappings that we associate with learning and development, they are fundamentally a learning organization – an organization that learns. While they have challenges like all organizations do, they are unfettered by some of the things that keeps for-profit organizations stagnant. And because of this, they're continually learning and adjusting. And while I have been talking about it for well over 5 years now, this group taught me new things about what it means to be a learning organization:

1. Flexibility is key. I was supposed to present findings to representatives from about 15 national societies on Monday morning in Geneva, Switzerland. Unfortunately, I read the agenda wrong and bought a ticket that didn't get me to Geneva until 2pm on Monday, about 3 hours after I was supposed to speak. Fred, my contact with the IFRC, listened to my panicked call, and then worked some magic on his side to rearrange some things. He did it calmly – seeking a solution to the problem instead of focusing on the cause (which I fully admit, was me).

I couldn't help but think as I got of the phone with him how much stress in our organizations could be relieved if we could all learn a little bit of flexibility. Is forgetting the page numbers on a presentation really the end of the world, or are we all going to live through it? Can we instead use things that don't go 100% right as experiences for learning and growth? I did. I vow never to buy another plane ticket without double-checking my schedule.

2. Learning is largely about bravery. Because of the decentralized nature of the IFRC, our initial timeline for data collection and analysis was extended by several weeks, which meant that it was almost impossible to review high-level findings with leadership before we shared them with the larger group. IFRC leaders encouraged the sharing of data with the larger group, and then went further by allowing me to share it with a group of about 30 chief learning officers from around the globe to see if we could find commonalities and make suggestions that may help the IFRC.

It's brave to be that vulnerable. It's also how we learn. We try things we don't know how to do, we share uncomfortable information about ourselves with others, we allow others to learn in messy, scary, ways.

3. Desire is really important. I sat in a room last Monday with representatives from national societies that included Afghanistan, China, and North Korea, among many others. These people came together to find solutions that will help their staff and volunteers learn better. They spoke different languages. There was a lot of translation going on. There was questioning and clarification and a true desire to seek understanding. The goal was more important than nationality or one person's opinion, or the larger conflicts going on in the world.

I wonder how many other leaders are as anxious as these were in helping their workers understand what it will take to make a difference in their organizations. I also wonder how many L&D functions work as hard as the internal learning group at IFRC does to help inspire leaders to care about learning in the first place. And, I wonder what would happen if we all cared that much.

This project was unlike any other project I have ever done. It fundamentally changed me. I'm better for having done it and better for having met these people. And we're just at the beginning. I'm sure as we continue with this project, they'll continue to teach me what it means to be a learning organization and what it means to have impact in the world.

If you want to help, you can donate to the Red Cross here, and if you want to help with this project specifically, contact me. I know people 🙂

As organizations try to compete in the current hot talent market, many have focused increasingly on listening to employees, in an effort to create a better “employee experience.”

As organizations try to compete in the current hot talent market, many have focused increasingly on listening to employees, in an effort to create a better “employee experience.” Companies are using a variety of tactics, such as design thinking and agile development methods, as well as new tools, such as employee listening and pulse survey technologies (vendors include Glint, TinyPulse, and Waggl, among others), to create programs and experiences that are much more holistic, consistent, and responsive to employees. This is good. But it isn’t enough.

How do we know this? Well, despite all these efforts, half of U.S. workers are looking for a new job. Further, employee engagement rates are extremely low and sickness and stress rates are very high. So clearly, though our organizations are listening, they are not responding adequately.

There are many reasons why this might be the case, but at least part of the reason is that the plethora of information available to organizations is not matched by a similar capacity to understand it. Put bluntly, there is too much information and not enough insight, decision-making, and action.

Instead of pinning the blame for this on one small part of the organization – HR – it is wiser to ask, why is there such a mis-match between information givers and information consumers? The reason for this lies in organizations’ historical approach to hierarchy and decision-making. In many organizations, the information from many people comes up, a few people make decisions, and then those decisions are pushed back down. Except for when they do not, because there are too many bottlenecks or lack of attention at the top.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  While tools can help with some greater insights into how organizations should respond, they are not enough. The tools can’t themselves do the actual responding.

Instead, we need to redesign how we approach information-sharing and decision-making in the first place to allow more people in the organization to access and take action on the collected information. This requires a re-thinking of practices and processes, and, perhaps even more crucially, our organizational cultures. It is only by doing this that we can enable the same number of people to take action on the information as those who provided it in the same place.

We’ve been doing some new research on all of this and more, and I will be debuting our new insights at the PeopleFWD 2018 Conference on October 18 in the Bay Area. I’d love it if you came along to hear what we’ve seen and to give us your feedback.

This event is being sponsored by the folks over at CPP – The Myers-Briggs Company. The agenda is targeted at both HR and business leaders – novel concept! Patty McCord (formerly of Netflix) as well as speakers from The Conference Board, SAP, Kellogg Company, M Square Consulting, and the University of Colorado will all be speaking. Come join me for an engaging day of learning.

I have been a fan of the learning experience platform (LXP) since before the phrase was coined.

My first introduction to the concept was actually by Chris McCarthy, the current CEO of Degreed. He introduced me to a new software that made completely different assumptions about how learning in organizations should occur, and it aligned a lot closer with my own viewpoint than anything I had seen prior. At the time, Degreed was a small, 30-person company who were out to change the world. Based on my recent conversations with them, they’re still out to change the world; they just want to do it faster.

A merger between Degreed and Pathgather certainly accelerates things. Degreed and Pathgather are both top players in the LXP space. Merging their slightly different, but complementary offerings is good for them, but it’s also good for the overall market. The LXP is no longer a fad. The segment will continue to grow as this type of platform becomes less of an oddity. We’re already seeing organizations begin to budget differently, allowing for these types of non-LMS solutions to round out their learning tech stacks.

The fact of this merger confirms several things about the future learning technology market.

• There is a large appetite for a better development experience. Many of the orgs we talk to that have either adopted an LXP or are considering adopting an LXP do it because their employees are demanding that better experience. A full-on push model where L&D decides how, when, where, and what employees will learn is becoming a thing of the past as organizations move to more open models that allow for more employee control.
• Degreed, Pathgather, and Cornerstone’s LXP offering have identified skills, not roles, as the building block of the career. This aligns with the general sentiment we’re hearing in companies. A focus on skills allow individuals and companies the ability to pivot more easily to meet external market needs.
• LXPs send a strong message that all content is not organized into courses. Employees learn everywhere, all the time, and in a lot of different ways. The L&D person’s job has changed from generating content to creating an environment where content can be found, absorbed, and aligned to skills being developed in the org already.

In addition, this merger follows a trend we’re seeing in the marketplace: the convergence of human capital silos. Human capital technologies have, until recently, addressed learning, performance, and careers separately. Even HCM suites have them as different modules and solutions. Lately, that seems to be changing. we’re seeing more performance modules being introduced into learning technologies and vice versa. Organizations are beginning to think more holistically about the tenure and development of their employees.

While Degreed hasn’t come right out and said it, their recent moves put them in a great position to create a holistic solution. They’re already focused on skills and learning; they’re gathering and consolidating information around skills and possible career paths; and with Pathgather, they’ve now got capabilities around goals as well. A solution that provided a holistic way to look at learning, performance, and careers is compelling. More compelling still is the data that would come as a result to that solution, which would enable their customers to make much better and more timely decisions about people.

Is it going to happen? I’m sending positive vibes to the universe. Check back in 9 months and I’ll let you know if I was right.

I guess it’s true: having $42 million dollars really does burn a hole in one’s pocket.

Or at least this was the case with Degreed, who, fresh off its March Series C funding round, purchased “frenemy” Pathgather last week. These two companies (plus EdCast, which has now been relegated to third-wheel status), have furiously competed for years, while at the same time building up the new product category that we now call the Learning Experience Platform (LXP). And now, they’ve dropped the enemy part of their relationship and become “more than just friends.”

If you’re just getting caught up on this acquisition, you can read the basics in the company’s press release and thoughts on what it means for the overall category by folks such as Josh Bersin, David James Clark IV, Ave Rio, and Bersin by Deloitte. I don’t want to duplicate others’ work, so instead focus here on how this acquisition could create opportunities for Degreed in the talent management space.

As many of you know, Degreed shifted in the last year to a much bigger mission: enabling people and organizations to more effectively build, measure, and communicate the skills people need. This shift, plus the Pathgather acquisition, could open up opportunities for Degreed in the following areas:

• Performance management: Performance management is hot right now, and Degreed’s updated mission fits right in with the modern coaching and development-focused approach. With the acquisition of Pathgather, Degreed has a head start on many of the technology vendors looking to jump into this market. Think about it: Pathgather has a way to set goals within its system and Degreed already has a tool that allows manager and self-assessment of skills (with some exciting skills verification offerings coming down the pike). Blend the capabilities from both companies together, add in a feature that enables continuous conversations and a rating (not everyone’s going to abolish them) and… BAM you have a performance management offering. Ok, we all know it is harder than that, but you get my point – many of the pieces are there. And speaking of being there, so, too, are competitors Cornerstone and Bridge, which each have a performance management offering. So, adding this capability would allow Degreed to better compete against them.
• Coaching / Mentoring: Another, adjacent, opportunity would be for Degreed to expand its reach into coaching. There is a host of new coaching technologies (BetterUp, Pluma, Sounding Board, etc.) that are trying to use technology to more effectively connect individuals to coaches – Degreed could enter into some sort of partnership with them. Perhaps an even better opportunity, given the new data that the Pathgather acquisition will provide, would be for Degreed to move into the mentoring space. Degreed is getting more and more insight into who knows what and to what extent, and creating more formalized opportunities for mentoring and coaching would also align with Degreed’s mission. Companies like Chronus, River, and Everwise already offer this, but Degreed could help employees tie their coaching / mentoring discussions together with timely and relevant content (based on insights from Degreed’s now-extended data set).
• Career Management: And speaking of data, I could see this acquisition accelerating Degreed’s foray into career management. Degreed wants to understand the skills people need and when they need them. The Pathgather acquisition will provide more data on people’s skills and learning habits, making their existing data set more robust. Thinking forward, though, I wonder if an acquisition of a career management technology might be a wise move. More granular information similar to that provided in offerings such as Visier’s recently released Career Journeys, Fuel50, RallyTeam (oops, Workday just bought them) Cornerstone’s succession tool, or the one that PageUp People has had in place for years, would make the data from the current acquisition even more powerful.

So, these are some really exciting potential talent management-related opportunities that result from this acquisition.

There are, of course, some concerns to flag, too. First, as we all know, acquisitions take up a lot of time. In this instance, we have two teams with very strong perspectives coming together and I bet (and hope) that there will be many meaningful discussions and passionate debates on topics ranging from product direction to user experience to overall strategy. The end product will hopefully be better, but no matter what, these discussions take time. And remember, the failure rate of acquisitions is somewhere between 70% and 90%.

Second, Degreed will need both to integrate Pathgather and continue to compete in its super hot LXP market. In terms of competition, there is EdCast, which I can only imagine will remind its current and prospective customers that it is the only dominant LXP not busy with an integration (take that, third-wheel status!), and will therefore be able to give “undivided” attention to customers. Then, there are the learning providers (Cornerstone, Skillsoft’s Percipio, Fuse, Valamis, etc.) who are already competing in this space, but also offer other capabilities. Further, it’s possible that the large HCM players (SAP, Oracle and Workday) will get into this space, since a market growing at 200% year-over-year won’t go unnoticed (some thanks for having slogged all these years to create a new market, eh?).

Third – and related to the second point – I really like that Degreed had turned its focus toward skills verification, but that is already a hot market, too. Vendors such as LinkedIn, HiQ Labs, ProFinda, TeamFit, and EdCast are competing here. Degreed will have to figure out how to execute its skills verification technology and compete with incumbent players, while also managing the integration.

So, to wrap this up, I see a huge amount of potential in Degreed and Pathgather tying the knot. This opens up lots of new opportunities for Degreed, as long as they can manage the concerns. The teams on both side of this acquisition have proven themselves to be extremely smart and tenacious, so it should be a good show. I, for one, will be tuning in regularly to see what happens.

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any companies mentioned and no plans to initiate any positions. We have no information beyond what is publicly available on Degreed’s intentions and are not receiving compensation for this post.

Through the first, second, third, and even to this point in the fourth industrial revolution, organizations have focused on efficiency – doing more with less, faster.

In fact, with the advent of the assembly line, humans became a part of the system – acting much like machines and performing tasks in a prescribed way.

That isn’t all bad. This focus on efficiency has yielded some incredible productivity gains in the last century, and with those gains, a lot of innovation and prosperity. Unfortunately, productivity growth is slowing and has been slowing for the last decade. There is only so much a system can be standardized or automated. Which means that how we think about the next century will necessarily be different than how we thought about the last one.

Interestingly, the focus on efficiency and automation doesn’t leverage the uniquely human characteristics that put us on top of the food chain in the first place. We believe organizations that tend to be more forward-thinking and/or evolved leverage humans in ways other organizations do not.

Why do we think this? In the last month, we’ve spent some time in the psychology research trying to figure out what makes a human a human – what unique (or infinitely more developed) characteristics are responsible for our success as a species. It turns out, being a human is pretty great. The opposable thumbs are a bonus for sure, but research indicates that there are other, perhaps more important traits. Also of note, while conversations about AI and robots replacing humans abound, the traits that make humans uniquely “human” are things that robots cannot do either (yet, anyway).

So what are these human traits? Our initial lit review points to four:

• Storytelling and Episodic Memory. Humans tell stories. They have developed “episodic memory,” or what some refer to as time travel memory. This memory is essential to our “humanness” because it doesn’t just help us recall dates and events, but how we feel about those events and what we learned from those events. Marketing functions are making great strides in utilizing storytelling to evoke memories and feelings that motivate us. Human capital functions should do the same.
• Picturing a different future. Humans have the ability to imagine things that never have been, and because of that, we are better able to change our circumstances. What’s more, we have a greater ability to innovate and create. While chimps react to their environments and robots iterate, humans can dream futures for themselves that currently don’t exist, and then work toward them.
• Collaborating. While other animals collaborate, humans collaborate far longer than it is beneficial to them personally. Altruism is mostly a human trait. Humans have an innate desire to share information, help their fellow humans, and work together toward something greater, even if they personally won’t see the benefit.
• Using tools. While other species use tools, humans perfect the art. We use tools to change our physical space, but we also use tools to change our mental spaces – tools for learning and creating things that don’t exist.

So. Let us know if you’re effectively leveraging humans in your organization. Tell us we’re crazy. Your feedback makes us smarter.

Last week, Microsoft acquired GitHub, a software development / code-sharing platform with a community of 28 million developers, for $7.5 billion.

Beyond all the obvious “synergistic benefits,” there are some less apparent but, for our talent management space, much more intriguing potential opportunities, which lead me to ask:

Does Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, when combined with LinkedIn, herald the era of a new type of talent management system?

Stay with me on this one.

As this article points out so well, Microsoft now owns two vertical networks (LinkedIn: professionals (generally speaking); GitHub: software developers). Using LinkedIn data today, an organization could have insight into people’s networks (so who knows whom), the skills / knowledge of the people in those networks (so who knows what), and what people are learning in those networks (so who is learning what, via Lynda’s online learning capabilities). If you look at GitHub, there are even better insights on someone’s skills (as the network assesses developers’ code, versus the generic endorsements of someone’s skills on LinkedIn) and the types of projects they work on. Further, GitHub is used to actually get work done – which means that any learning recommendations, communication suggestions, etc. could actually be done in the flow of work.

So, what could this new type of talent management system look like? Gone would be the days of talent management systems acquiring data from other places about employees’ knowledge, skills, and connections – and requiring people to go to that separate system to “manage” people. Rather, this next generation of systems would likely be fully integrated into those other systems (e.g., LinkedIn and GitHub) that people already work in. The existing talent management data is what would be “sucked in” to those new systems. I would imagine this new technology would include new features such as:

• More credentialing (à la the approach currently being pioneered at Degreed) to better understand who truly has what skills and to what extent
• More tools to enable people to signal their reputation more clearly (badging, blogging, upvoting, etc.) and career intentions (prioritized skills / knowledge to acquire next, desired next career steps, willingness to move, etc.)
• Greater ability to combine feedback on work product (e.g., code, for GitHub) with other performance enablement activities(pulling together that information for check-ins, integrated learning)
• Deeper network insights to understand skills and knowledge across an organization, information flows, points of collaborative overload, succession readiness, etc.
• A hundred other features that we haven’t been dreamed up yet, plus many of the ones already in existing talent management systems…

This new combination of data and capabilities would enable a much deeper understanding of people, information, the network, and how work is getting done. Further, this new system could enable personalized and curated learning in the flow of work, provide feedback on work in the moment, and enable people to have better and more timely conversations about the work, people’s capabilities, and their career trajectories. Is this not the nirvana that talent management systems have been trying to achieve for more than a decade?

The good folks over at Starr Conspiracy point out in this thoughtful report that the talent management systems market is ripe for disruption and posit that either the incumbents must innovate or the myriad new employee engagement providers will add capability to expand more effectively into the talent management space. This combination of acquisitions points to a third way forward: that non-talent management-centric software systems may come together in interesting ways to re-envision what talent management systems will be in the future.

Of course, none of this is to say that building the next-generation talent management system is Microsoft’s intent (quite unlikely), that the vision I’ve laid out will come to pass (even more unlikely, especially given how bad people are at predicting the future), or that the existing talent management systems will become obsolete in the near future (nigh impossible). But this set of acquisitions should get everyone’s mind moving on the value proposition of talent management systems in the future and how we should all be thinking about them differently.

What do you think? We will be kicking off a new talent management systems report later this month, so would love to hear your thoughts.

In particular, if you’re a talent management system vendor, let’s make sure we talk soon! If you’re a talent management system buyer, let me know what is on your mind in terms of what you’re looking for in future systems. I can be reached at stacia at redthreadresearch.com.

Earlier this week I spoke at UNLEASH 2018, an HR technology show in Las Vegas run by the folks who used to be known as HR Tech World.

I enjoy shows like this because they give me a chance to check the pulse of the HR technology market. My sense after this week? The market is flooded with heady enthusiasm and has a need for hearty skepticism.

Let me explain what I mean, starting with the enthusiasm part. Everywhere on the expo floor, software vendors confidently described new offerings that feature artificial intelligence (AI), bots, natural language processing (NLP), and the like. Speakers such as Mo Gawdat talked about the vast potential of new technologies. Kathleen Hogan, the head of HR at Microsoft, painted a vision for how culture and technology can transform a company. Josh Bersin discussed the substantial venture-backed investments into HR technology over the last few years and the resulting boom in technology offerings. The Aria was positively humming with all the potential.

Yet, I couldn’t help but feel that so much of it was intellectual – or heady – enthusiasm. It was almost as if people were excited by future possibilities simply because they exist. (Over-simplified) examples of the conversations I heard included:

• HR buyer: “Can you analyze our data to better predict when someone might leave?” Vendor: “NO PROBLEM! Our machine learning algorithm will learn over time exactly when someone might be ready to leave.”
• HR buyer: “Can you use our data to tell me exactly what employees are thinking and feeling?” Vendor: “MOST DEFINITELY! We’ve got sentiment analysis that will look at all employee communications to do this!”
• HR buyer: “Can you help us better understand our employees?” Vendor: “Absolutely! We can compile all your data sources and give you a single score that will tell you everything you need to know about them.”

But the question that was not so clearly articulated at the show was this:

Should we be doing these things at all?

This gets us into the hearty skepticism bit. Under the frothy layer of enthusiasm for all the technological advancements, are questions that should exist in all of our hearts: what makes us human? And as we outsource more to machines, what are we losing? And what are the ethical, moral, and social implications of all this technological possibility?

Some hearty skepticism finally became apparent during Rachel Botsman’s keynote discussion on trust and technology, where she warned the audience of putting too much trust into algorithms, ratings, and machines at the expense of human decision-making and gut. Rachel shared that there is a pilot underway in China to create a single “Citizen Trust Score” that would allow people to rate each other in an “effort to enhance ‘trust’ nationwide and build a culture of ‘sincerity.’” As Orwellian and morally repugnant as that sounds, where, exactly, is the line between that and my third bullet point above (which, to be fair was an extrapolation of some of the conversations I overheard)?

In the onstage Q&A, I asked Rachel what she thought was the next ethical frontier with regards to technology and trust. Her answer: virtual reality. She posits that as bots are able to better imitate us – and especially our best characteristics – real questions will arise with regard to how people interact with each other – and each other’s bots. She gave the example of if her bot was able to do much of what she could do – but without any bad days or personal issues – would her employer (or even her friends!) want to keep engaging with her, or would they instead prefer her bot? In short, is what is human in her more important than what is convenient or expedient for others? She (and I!) would certainly hope so.

I heard some of this hearty skepticism expressed in the hallways and the sidebar conversations of the conference. People asking what are the implications if large percentages of jobs are outsourced to bots? Should there be an employment tax for bots? Should there be a universal basic income? How should we think about developing the skills and capabilities of people who are in the 70% of jobs that Kathleen Hogan said will disappear?

Some of this is overblown worry – I believe that most of this technology will augment people’s work, not replace it – but some of it is not, particularly as we think about the ethics of how data are used. And, to be clear, I am in no way saying that technological advancement is bad. What I am saying, though, is that in the midst of all this change, HR leaders and vendors need to remember to have a conversation about what should or should not be done to our fellow humans. We need to balance that heady technological enthusiasm with the hearts, compassion, empathy, and skepticism within each of us.

Let me start by saying that I have argued the other side of the case I’m about to make.

Also, I see great value in just-in-time learning, feedback in the moment, and the ability to access the exact piece of information you need at the exact moment you need it. Digitizing and chunking content that we used to put into two- or three-day workshops is wonderful, and, with the use of technology, allows us to build really personalized development experiences for employees. I think it’s great for developing skills and improving performance.

I do wonder, however, about the broad stroke with which the idea of “snackable” learning is discussed and applied. Is there a place for it? Absolutely. Have we relied on courses only for too long? For sure. Is making something shorter the key to solving all employee development problems? Nope.

In the past, we needed employees to complete certain tasks in a certain way in order to increase the efficiency of our organizations. Today, business is moving so fast that we need them to think outside the box, be agile, and improve the system as they go. We need them to think critically. And often, to teach employees to do this, long form works better. Some things need to be presented in context. Sometimes a story works better than bullet points. And sometimes we should encourage employees to spend an hour thinking rather than surfacing an answer immediately.

Ironically, instead of a long form blog about this topic, I’m going to provide a bulleted list reasons that long-form may be a good addition to the L&D quiver of tools:

• Jeff Bezos says so. In his 2018 annual letter, Jeff Bezos reiterated his rule that PowerPoint is banned from executive meetings. He maintains that “narrative structure” is more effective because stories inspire, bullet points don’t. Instead of presentations, he asks “presenters” to craft a six-page narrative (no bullets and real sentences). The team spends 30 minutes reading in silence and then they discuss.
• “Snackable” often creates soundbites and echo chambers instead of real learning. So personal example here: I posted an article and quoted a stat this week about organizations that measure learning impact. I didn’t quote it correctly, which gave the impression that the stat was global, not local to India. One person corrected me (bless him). Everyone else shared it. There is opportunity for deeper context and higher precision in long form that isn’t available in the soundbite.
• There is a case to be made for “effortful” learning. Mary Slaughter and David Rock from the NeuroLeadership Institute wrote an article in Fast Company this week about achieving “desirable difficulty”. They posit that the brain needs to feel some discomfort when it’s learning, much like your muscles need to feel some level of discomfort when you’re training. Long form often requires more effort.
• Executives prefer long form for business insights. A study done last year by Forbes and Deloitte lists the top two preferred formats of executives for business insights as feature-length articles and reports, and business books. Interestingly, while they are very pressed for time, the C-Suite prefers longer forms for learning. Bruce Rogers, Chief Insights Officer at Forbes Media says: “CXOs need to think and act strategically, which is why they more often opt for longer pieces that take them from hypothesis, through case studies, to conclusion, and are based on credible data.”

I’m interested in your thoughts – how often are you incorporating long form into your employee development plans, and/or are you seeing a resurgence?