Q&A Call: Analytics for DEIB

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The 2 dimensions of content
A new model for learning content
L&D's focus changes by content categories
Four trends in learning content
What are the main challenges orgs face?
How do I help my employees find the right content?
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What new kinds of learning methods (& content) are we seeing?
How are companies tracking which content is being used?
Are there new techniques for virtually "studying" learner behavior to really understand how they use content in the flow?

Categories: Learning and Skills

Tags: Content Study, Member Only, Q and A Call, Tune In

Q&A Call-Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) & Analytics

Posted on Monday, May 17th, 2021 at 7:58 PM

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr:
Wonderful. So thank you all so much for joining us today. For those of you whom I don't know, I'm Stacia Garr. I am co-founder of RedThread Research. And I'll tell you a little bit about us before we get started, but in the meantime, I want to give my co-host today, Priyanka Mehrotra chance to introduce herself Priyanka.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Thank you, Stacia. Hi everybody. I'm research lead at RedThread and along with Stacia, we've been working on DEIB and people analytics for over the last two years. And we're very excited to talk about this kind of study that we have going on right now. Welcome.

Stacia Garr:
And so for those of you who haven't been to a Q&A call or haven't been in a while, here's roughly how we do it. This is very conversational. Yes, obviously we have slides, but the point is to answer your questions, you know, find out what you're most interested in with the research and the like. We'll be communicating primarily through chat or through Q&A, both of those are enabled and we can see both of those. If you want to do Q&A, so everybody doesn't know your question, that's fine. If you want to share in chat, that's great as well. Like I said, we are recording this call. And so we will be posting this to the RedThread site after today. So that folks who are RedThread members will also be able to view it.

Stacia Garr:
So in speaking of RedThread and members, we are a human capital research membership focused on a range of topics, including people, analytics, learning, and skills, performance, DEIB and employee experience in HR technology. As Priyanka mentioned, this study that we're working on, and we're going to talk about today is a really nice culmination of a number of different areas that we've been doing research on. So we've been extremely excited to get to it. It feels like the study we've been trying to get to for at least three quarters. So we're excited to do that.

Defining DEIB

Stacia Garr:
So I'm going to begin with just a little bit of level setting. So for those of you who maybe haven't been following our work. We talk about this space collectively as DEIB. So I know a lot of organizations use just DEI. Some use just DIB.

Stacia Garr:
We decided to put them all together to be inclusive. Because we think that all of these concepts are important, but you can see here on this slide, our definitions for each of these areas, and how would we see them as being a little bit distinct from each other.

Why DEIB & Analytics

Stacia Garr:
Now, I mentioned that this study is kind of the culmination of a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and I should say and clarify that this is an active study under process. That's one of the things that we do with the Q&A calls is that we get started on some research and then we will conduct a number of ways to interact with folks. Sometimes it's a roundtable, as you may have seen. We've actually got one on this topic coming up on, correct me if I'm wrong, Priyanka, May 27th, I think is the date for that, but the Q&A calls are a chance to kind of engage on a different level to understand what people are thinking about and getting initial reactions to the work that we've been doing.

Stacia Garr:
But, so why are we doing this study? One is when we launched RedThread, we started off with a focus on DNI technology. This is what we called it. Now we're calling it to DEIB technology. And then very shortly after that, we did a study on people analytics technology, which many of you who are here may be familiar with. And within DEIB tech, there was an analytics component. And we were seeing on the people analytics tech focus on DEIB, but we hadn't really kind of brought these concepts together. And then when we went out and we looked at the literature, which Priyanka is going to talk about, we found that there weren't a lot of folks who are talking about how do DEIB and analytics work together. What's that partnership look like? What are the metrics we should be looking at and how should we be making those decisions?

Stacia Garr:
So we started to think about all of these things. So, you know, those were kind of the underlying concepts of why we started this journey.

Why are we studying it now?

Stacia Garr:
But then there is I think a question about like, why now, like, why didn't we do it three quarters ago if we've been studying this topic for a few years. And I think there are a few things. First is we've seen a greater expectation from consumers to take action. And so if we look at things like Edelman's Trust Barometer particularly after the social justice movements of last summer, consumers are expecting organizations to make steps, yes, on social justice, but on DNI more broadly. They also are expecting organizations not just to do that externally, but to do that internally, to get their own DNI house in order.

Stacia Garr:
So that's one, one reason. The second is obviously the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on diverse employees combined with the social justice movements that I just mentioned. So we've done quite a lot of work particularly focused on the impact of the pandemic on women. We have also written about the impact of the pandemic on people of color. And so we know that those populations have been some of those that have borne the brunt of this the most. And so there's some of the ones that if we look to come out of the pandemic, we need to be focusing on the most as well. And then the third reason, again, back to this, why now is we're seeing these new SEC human capital reporting guidelines that went into place last November really starting to come into to be a factor for organization.

Stacia Garr:
So analytics teams are being asked to provide more detail on human capital metrics and often that is including diversity data. And we expect that right now. And I was very intentional in that language. Right now it's a lot of representation data usually a bit beyond what they have to report for the EEOC, not necessarily a lot beyond that, but we expect that to change, particularly as investors start to increasingly understand the impact that we've seen in research of strong diversity and inclusion on organizations, on their financial outcomes. We think that there's going to be more investor pressure to provide more data and insights as it relates to the DEIB.

People Analytics for DEIB has arrived

Stacia Garr:
So those all get to kind of this, this why now all of this is reinforced by the study that we did on the DEIB tech that came out just at the beginning of this year, January of 2021.

Stacia Garr:
And the big finding from this study was that when we asked vendors, what problems our customers were trying to solve, that issue of DNI analytics and insights went to the top. It was number four in 2019. The last time we published that study and in 2021, it was number one, it was 19% increase in the importance of addressing this lack of DNI insights and analytics. So we know that this is been something that we've seen reflected in the data. We're seeing it in the popular press, and we as analysts have seen it as being incredibly important. So that's why we're doing this now. Priyanka.

Why it's so hard

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Interesting. So let's take a moment to understand why it's so hard to do this, and we're going to talk about what were studying in through this research, but just want you to take a moment to understand why it's been so hard and what have been some of the challenges that DEIB leaders, people analytics leaders, and organizations have been facing. And I mean, this often has to do with three things as they come to our mind, the first being that there's a Gulf between the DEIB leaders and people analytics leaders that tends to exist within organizations. And what we mean by that is that there are few things that go under this, one is that DEIB leaders and people, analytics leaders often not always, but often report to different departments or heads or senior leaders. So for example, DEIB might be reporting into CEOS a lot of the times.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And in fact, I recently came across a research that was conducted on about 500 senior diversity leaders out of which 40% have said that they were reporting into CEOs. And what we typically tend to see with people, analytics leaders on the other hand is that they're often either reporting to the CHRO or talent acquisition leaders, or talent management leaders, or even a centralized analytics team. So one of these, the gulf I was talking about is that the reporting structure might be different for them. The other has to do a little bit about the backgrounds that these two tend to come from. So again, not all, but years of DEIB teams often came from backgrounds such as social justice or diversity focus backgrounds. Whereas people analytics leaders often tend to come from data science, computer science, math, statistics background.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Additionally we often see the DEIB leaders, might find themselves focused on activities that may not have a lot to do with data. So for example, setting up employee resource groups or managing DEIB events or collaborating with local communities. Whereas we see analytics leaders really deeply ingrained in the data side of the organizational things that they're doing but only coming in as participants when it comes to DEIB and having little knowledge about all the curies and the approaches that go behind those initiatives as when it comes to DEIB. The second reason why we think this is so hard is that there tends to be a lack of clarity around data and how to use it. And this goes back to the point that Stacia was making, but, you know, up to now, we've been seeing a lot of use of DEIB data has been for reporting purposes.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And while we are starting to see a shift in how leaders are starting to think about this data, these are still early stages. And there are a lot of questions about, you know, what data they should be collecting, how they should be using it. What are the types of analysis that they should be running? And I think a related reason, which is our third reason under this, why it's so hard is that there's a lack of clarity around how DEIB leaders, DEIB tech venders fit into all this. So Stacia, mentioned our DEIB tech study that we ran, that we published earlier this year, and we saw an immense growth in the number of DEIB tech vendors that are coming up in the space. But along with it, we have questions and concerns from leaders. When they're asking me questions, such as when should we bring in these tech vendors, how should they fit into the broader strategies?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So all of these reasons kind of convoluted to making this practice of bringing DEIB and analytics together, something that's challenging for organizations in they're struggling to understand how would they get started on it and actually be successful on it. And these are the factors that actually fed into our thinking on what we should study when it comes to this topic.

What we are researching

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So if you go into the next slide, we'll just quickly talk about some of the overarching questions or teams that we're looking at through the study. So the first one that we're looking at is how should the DEIB and people analytics partner. So rethink this is sort of foundational to what organizations should be doing when it comes to this, because without a successful partnership, this work can not be done. The second area that we're looking to understand is what are the important data and metrics for DEIB?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So, like I said, there's a lack of clarity around what is it that they should be doing? What is foundational, what is table stakes? And then as organizations mature, what are some of the more novel and non-traditional things that organizations should be looking at. And then third is about the role of vendors and techs. So looking at, you know, one of the different types of technologies that organizations are using. What are the people analytics technologies? What are the DEIB technologies? When should they come in and work as a partner and in general, what is the role that vendors should play in all this? So those are some of the overarching teams or questions, if you will, that we are looking at to understand from this study.

What the literature says

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And what we did when we launched this study was we began with a literature review and which we published last month on our website.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And we did a very exhaustive, neutral journey, where we analyzed over 50 articles, business journals, academic papers, and we found a few key findings that kind of reaffirmed our thinking around this topic as well. And kind of solidified our questions that we thought we should be asking. So I just cover some of our key findings from our literature review. The first of course that we were expecting to find was, and we did find was the, the need for analytics and analytics for DEIB is more important than ever. And, you know, given all that we've experienced in 2020, COVID19, the social justice movements, it's no surprise that really starting to look at how we can use data and metrics and analysis to support this push for the DEIB that we're starting to see from organizations. And, you know, just for an example, if you look at some of the commitments and goals that all the big organizations have put out over the last year, whether it's Facebook or Target or Starbucks, they all have these lofty goals of reaching 20% to 30% increasing their representation by X percent in the next few years are tying diversity to performance reviews.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And then you look at those goals. It's very clear that none of this can be done without data and analytics without measuring where you are and where you're going and what needs to be done. So clearly people analytics is going to play an extremely critical part of doing anything related to DEIB moving forward. The second finding that we came across was the DEIB analytics is more than diversity metrics. So we found several articles that truly try to push the thinking beyond just looking at representation data, and thinking about inclusion, thinking about the different experiences that different groups of employees are having in the organization, thinking about belonging and what that means in the organizational context, thinking about the existing processes and how they can be made more equitable and working with people analytics leaders to really understand how can they use the existing data to think about some of these processes and kind of push forward their DEIB agenda on these things.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
The third finding that we came across was around using predictive analytics for DEIB to help plan for the future. And the articles that talked about this mainly spoke about using this and harnessing this power of predictive analytics to really avoid issues from becoming into potential problems in the future and planning for planning well ahead and avoiding certain challenges that may come up in the future. So for instance two examples come to my mind that we came across during this literature review. One was of Walmart using modeling and forecasting techniques to really answer questions around like, what could happen if we keep doing this, or how can we arrive at our desired goal much faster and using those insights from that data to really review the DEIB goals and connect regularly, to understand how, what is the progress that they're making towards them.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
The other example that we found was from International Paper, which uses predictive analytics to understand their expansion rate compatibility. And what that means is using data on past behavior, family dynamics cultural agility, global accuracy, to understand and forecast which employees would fare better in a global move if they were to be placed in international settings. So these were some of our top three findings. And I just want to touch on some really interesting ones as well. And this one was my favorite, which was around using quantitative data individual stories and experiences are an important piece of the puzzle and no work on when it comes to DEIB can be compete without taking those into account? No amount of statistics can capture what it feels like to be the only ruling on a team or to be the only black member on the team.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And so we think that qualitative data and quantitative data forms an extremely important part of doing analytics for DEIB. And finally, another key finding that we found of course, was around, you know, making sure that you're addressing issues of privacy and ethics. So aggregating data, sharing data with employees, being transparent about what is being collected and what is the purpose that that data is being used for. So, like I said, all of these findings kind of reaffirmed our thinking around what is it that we need to study in this area. And like Stacia mentioned, and our lit review confirmed it, that there's a lot written on how and why this needs to be done and very little on how organizations are actually doing it or what they should be thinking about. And that's what's was what our aim was when it came to launching the study. And that's what we've been trying to find out through our interviews. And I'll pass it on to Stacia to talk about some of our initial findings now.

Initial findings: Building a strong DEIB & People Analytics partnership

Stacia Garr:
Great, thank you, Priyanka. And I know we've had some really good questions come in through chat, keep those coming. We will try and addresses questions once we get here into the question section. So some of the initial findings and I should clarify, we've done, what is it Priyanka about 15 interviews at this point on our way to roughly 30? So we're about halfway through our interviews. So these are very initial, so we're just going to share some of the things we have been hearing. So we've been grouping the research into two areas, the first being that DEIB and people analytics partnership, and then the second one being metrics. So focused on the partnership aspect first. The first point is around the importance of the data oriented diversity leader. So we've heard a real, and this isn't surprising, but I think it's just worth underscoring. We've heard a real difference in the interviews when people said I've got a diversity leader who really gets it, who gets the importance of this work, who supports what we do, who actively helps us think through the metrics and analytics that we should be focused on, et cetera, et cetera. That's kind of been one, one story.

Stacia Garr:
The other story has been well, I'm the people analytics leader, and I know this is important. And I've, you know, done my best so far and figured out what I think is important, but I'm kind of worried, waiting on a diversity leader to get here, to help, or in some instances, this is what I've done. And we've just hired a diversity leader because as I'm sure many of you have seen, there's just been this incredible slew of hiring of DEIB leaders since last summer. And so it's actually notable how many folks are like, well, our DEIB leader just started in September or they just started in January and now we're finally starting to get traction. But the importance of that partnership in the diversity leader being data oriented was remarkable. Second, and I kind of just alluded to this a little bit, but people analytics leaders taking the lead on data. We are actually, so I think many of you may know we're doing this study, but we're also doing a study on DEIB and skills and the skills kind of side of that is the learning team.

Stacia Garr:
And what has been remarkably similar about these two studies is how the DEIB teams in the past have either been responsible for this work or they have or the work hasn't been done quite frankly. And now as DEIB has become increasingly main stream, these corporate functions. So in this instance, people analytics, but in the other study, learning these corporate functions are kind of taking back or taking over the aspects of this work that they have expertise in. So for for people analytics, it's, you know, we know how to do the data analysis. We know how to get common definitions for the data. We know how to do, you know, basic representation analysis. Like we know how to do all this stuff and because we're already doing it in all these other ways. And we have the, the source of truth dataset, ideally you know, we, we are the ones who should be doing it and then putting it into the dashboards that we're already providing to leaders.

Stacia Garr:
So this just makes sense for it to be part of this, this group. Of course though, there is a side of this, which is around selection of metrics around problem identification, hypothesis identification, and I'll get to that more on the next slide. But the big thing is just this idea that people analytics, this is firmly now in our remit, and we need to go with it. The third point, and this seems maybe obvious, but is the importance of the alignment between the two. So we've heard a lot of instances where there are either, you know, Priyanka set up the, the challenge that we see with reporting relationships. And so we're seeing when it's really effective, DEIB and people analytics reporting into the same leader is one instance if that doesn't happen, we're seeing kind of pretty formalized, dotted line relationships between people on each of the teams.

Stacia Garr:
So a DEIB team member who is, you know, sort of informally connected to the people analytics team or vice versa. The point being that there has to be a strong level of communication between the two, because DEIB is basically the, the subject matter expert when it comes to the sorts of data and analysis that let me rephrase come to the questions that should be answered. And then the people analytics team is the expert when it comes to the data and analysis that can be done. So there has to be that clear alignment. Moving, I'm sorry. Priyanka, did you have something to add there?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think I would just underscore the point on the alignment. I think what you said was exactly right, like having that either direct line or reporting into the same head or having that dotted line, what it does is it makes sure that both the leaders are aligned on priorities through those communications and constant check-ins, and they're aligned on priorities and goals that are connected to the overall business strategy. And I think that also gets to the point about there being trust between the two of them. And I remember you spoke about that, that the DEIB leader, as well as the people analytics leaders have to trust each other, that they know what they're doing and that this is the right data, or this is the right approach that they're going to be taking and work together as a partner on those priorities and goals.

Metrics that matter

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, great point. So if we move on to the, the metrics aspect, and I know that there, there are plenty of questions in here. And so we'll, we'll start to work our way through them now in terms of metrics, what we saw is that, and this is just consistent across pretty much every interview that we did. You need the foundation and that foundation is basic diversity representation metrics. And I say basic, but it's a little bit less than just basic because it also includes intersectionality. So meaning that you, aren't just looking at, what is the experience of black employees, or what is the experience of Hispanic employees, but you're looking at what's the experience of black women, for instance and, and that sort of basic representation data is something that everyone said you need to just get your hands on from the very beginning there was a question in here in the chat, and I'm going to go ahead and grab it now around approaches and measurement at a global scale, especially regarding ethnicity. And we actually have a really fascinating conversation yesterday with the global fortune 100 organization. And what they were saying to us is one, and this is something we've heard consistently. One that ethnicity is something that tends to primarily be measured here in the United States. There is some measurement of it in places like South Africa, in some Asia, but almost more of a country approach within Asia. And then some in Brazil, because she made the point that a lot of people in Brazil don't necessarily identify as Hispanic, though they do identify as Latino or Latinas. And so when then, but then obviously within Europe, there is no ethnicity data that's being collected. So we think, you know, the point is, is that they are, what she said was that they worked with kind of local representatives to make sure that they were getting the right information so that they could be culturally appropriate in all these different locations.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. the other component of this is we heard a lot in discussions about doing self ID campaigns. And so, you know, that because there's obviously sensitivity in terms of what information you can collect on ethnicity particularly in the EU, it wasn't as much focused on ethnicity there, but it could be focused on things like disability or on LGBTQ status or some of these other types of information that you might want to be collecting on folks in using as part of your kind of foundational diversity representation analysis. So we've heard that quite a bit. The government collection data often is, you know, initially collected by the companies, but, you know, not necessarily in all instances but yeah, looking at what's what's externally available and then also using that potentially to help inform your benchmarking strategy so that you can be comparing apples to apples. If you're looking at what external data is out there is an important thing to consider too.

Stacia Garr:
So diversity representation, metrics being foundational. Second looking at inclusion and equity. And so the way that I have been framing, this is almost like a model. Well, you know, that's part of what we do. So in an initial model is like diversity of representation is, is kind of step one. Step two is what we're calling kind of inclusion and equity one Datto, which is basically looking at things like engagement data by representation, information. So engagement and inclusion, potentially inclusion, indices and other belonging metrics that may be being captured and looking at those by by diversity representation numbers, and also including intersectionality, like I just mentioned. That's kind of inclusion one Datto, inclusion two Datto, which is what we're seeing some of the more sophisticated companies look at is saying, okay, we've identified for instance, that we have a problem with, or we we have, you know, variances with black women in this area.

Stacia Garr:
Why might that be happening, maybe black women in finance, just to pick something, why might that be happening? And then actually, and this is where it's really important to have that strong relationship with the DEI team and pulling in hypothesis on what may be happening. So sure it could be compensation, but maybe instead it's, you know time to promotion rates, which obviously also impacts compensation, but this is a slightly different issue. It might be the, that these people are being brought in from outside, maybe because there's been a diversity effort for the last few years and these people aren't getting they're from outside and they're not getting effectively connected into the network. So it's kind of an opportunity for the people analytics leader to work with the DEI leaders and increasingly the HR business partners to understand what could be happening here and how can we actually design a study to truly understand using some more sophisticated analytical approaches.

Stacia Garr:
So that's kind of the inclusion and equity two Datto approach that we're seeing. And then the third is the importance of understanding employee voice. And so this is, I would say it's kind of related to both inclusion, one Datto and two Datto, but it's a little bit different because it's not just employee engagement and experience, but it's, you know, what other things are employees feeling? So we've seen a rise in for instance, in harassment technology this come available particularly after me too. So are we looking at that and are we taking that seriously? And are we looking at other ways that employees might be not being heard in the organization? So this is kind of in the inclusion two Datto type of capability, but if we're looking at, for instance metadata that on who's going to what meetings are certain populations being included at the same, you know rate as others in terms of important meetings or are they being connected with others via Slack or Teams or whatever. So there's kind of all this more sophisticated analysis we can see are these people's voices literally being heard to the same extent as other groups, voices. Priyanka, did you have anything to add there?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, I think one interesting example that comes to my mind. I think we heard this from a couple of interviewees was using wellbeing data, and I think that might fall under inclusion 2.0, as well as we're starting to understand it is looking at wellbeing data for underrepresented groups and seeing how is that different and getting to that feeling of belonging and inclusion for those groups as well. And I think also what, another thing that we heard from a couple of interviewees, what guests to employ voice is quantitative data. So we heard about focus groups and collecting stories. I believe from one of the vendors that they're doing that, and that I think was a very interesting add to the data that organizations already have and, you know, like creating environments where underrepresented groups and people are comfortable enough to speak up and collecting that data. In addition to all the surveys and pulses and metadata that they might be already collecting.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Great point. Great point. Okay. So that's the kind of presentation sections such as it was today. We're going to go to your questions and there've been a number of questions that have come in through chat. So I'm going to go to the chat questions first and then come back to the questions that were submitted in advance.

How do you get HR to use analytics to drive change?

Stacia Garr:
So one person asked about how other organizations are getting HR to use analytics, to drive change with DEIB strategies. And this question, I love it because it kind of hits on, on all the challenges, right? You have at least three different groups. So you mentioned we've got HR, we've got people analytics, and we've got DEIB strategies. And the magic fourth group that didn't get mentioned is legal because legal is in all of these conversations. So how are organizations actually, you know, making this happen?

Stacia Garr:
So I think we've heard a few things. One is it depends on the maturity of the organization and the maturity across all of those different groups. So does your organization, for instance, have a strong HRBP organization, which has strong connections to business leaders and does the organization have a strong DEI leader and what is their influence in the organization? How sophisticated and mature is the people analytics function in their ability to kind of imbibe and respond to requests when it comes to this. And then also, what is the risk profile of the general counsel? Are they, you know, we talked to one organization kind of more of a tech enabled organization. I would say tech enabled retail organization, where they said, we got to fix this, do what you need to do all the way to an organization where it's like, we don't want to share anything.

Stacia Garr:
No, data's going to anybody except for a very small few. And so all of that makes an impact on to your, this question, how do you get HR to use analytics to drive change? And so I think the key is figure out where your strengths are, where the maturity is. So if the maturity is for instance, with HR business partners and they have a strong, strong relationship with the business, you know, use your, hopefully you have at least a initially small people analytics team, if not kind of a more sophisticated one to start with providing that initial foundational data, you know, here's, here's where we have differences here's in the experiences of different groups. So start with that, that education and then working with HR business partners to understand what are the levers that we could pull in these different businesses to start to drive change, where is their appetite for this to do something different? Priyanka, do you have something to add?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, I think I would just add to that education piece that you mentioned, because I remember one of the interviews that we recently spoke to a very large company. They mentioned that they're working with their vendor as a partner to broadly educate senior leadership and HR teams to not just use the data, but also understand and interpret that data. So, one, I think the role of vendor can be crucial if the vendor is willing to work with you as a partner in education and educating them. I think the other one, which might contradict my point actually, was that one of the leaders that we spoke to mentioned that they had set in place a learning requirement for people, for senior leaders before they could get access to the data. And it kind of backfired because nobody wanted to take that learning, but what it help them understand was that they needed to approach it in a different way that this was not going to work. It was clear to them that they could not force this learning course on them before giving them access to the data or getting them to use analytics, but they needed to figure out a different approach. So that, that was kind of a failing when approach that they kind of worked through. So I think those two are some of the interesting examples that come to my mind.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And I think that the point is experimentation, you know, to what you just said, you know, that, that organization figured out that, you know, kind of a one hour long learning on how to use DEIB data didn't work. But so they said, okay, well, how can we actually use the dashboards and the data to teach? And how do we do it in a way that maybe we don't give everybody everything at once, but we roll it out in a way that kind of through the rollout process, we're actually educating people on what it is certainly that they need to know, but also how they might use it. And this is, I think also where either vendors or people analytics teams can really come in with potential suggestions that are embedded within the dashboards and in the offerings to help people say, okay, well, given this, what, what might I do? And those suggestions obviously should be based on the data.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Exactly.

Stacia Garr:
Okay. We're getting some more questions in here. That's great.

Which groups or identities to prioritize as they're all important

Stacia Garr:
So there was a question about, and we've kind of addressed this, but I want to come back to it, but there's its about understanding which groups or identities to prioritize as they're all important. I think that's, that's absolutely true. What we have seen organizations do though, is just kind of just similar to what we do with all people, analytics data, or really ideally, you know, our HR efforts is to say, okay, where's the business need here? Where's the need the greatest. And you know, that you can do once you have that representation data and you can kind of overlay what's important to the business in terms of business goals and strategy. And then where are the biggest gaps in that data? But using those two as initial ways to make a decision about what to prioritize, and then the overlay on that is who is going to be open to trying something new.

Stacia Garr:
So we've, you know, we heard, for instance in one of these organizations, they were talking about how most of their metrics are, you know, externally facing, and that's what leaders care about and any of the internal stuff that can actually maybe help you make decisions about actions to take, they were less interested. And so we asked that leader, we said, well, how do you find the interested leader? Like you've got great insights. How do you find the interested leader? And you know, some of it had to do with finding people who felt personally connected to DEIB and felt, you know, whether that was through their own experience or through someone that they loved. We can't tell you how many people, how many to be Frank, how many white men have said, I care about this because of the experience my wife has had, or I care about this because I'm a dad of two girls. Like, it's almost, it's remarkable how many times we've heard that. So find those people who have that connection. And then secondly hopefully people who have that connection to DEIB, but then also have influence over their peers. They're respected by their peers and using them giving them an opportunity to kind of shine and be the exemplar of the changes that are possible. Then that's the other way that I think about prioritizing.

Impact and accelerating the integration of DEIB & People Analytics

Stacia Garr:
Okay. another question here, does architect, the alignment of career planning, pathing and skills, capabilities, and experience have a role in this arena and impact on accelerating the integration of the DEIB and people analytics more broadly. So yes, yes. So I mentioned that we're doing a study on DEIB and skills. These two studies are running in parallel. That study is really trying to understand what are the skills that contribute to a culture of DEIB. So that's one component, but the other angle on skills and DEIB is using skills to potentially address any biases that may be happening. So under understanding of people's skill sets and what they want to achieve and using that to help us with people, better understanding career path opportunities, better understanding things like availability of opportunities to internal talent marketplace and that kind of thing. So I think that there is very clearly an overlap between particularly understanding skills, data, and leveling the playing field for diverse populations. So I think this a really important thing. We're seeing people just beginning to talk about this. But it's not I think its something that's going to have to be driven from the learning side of the house, because we're not, we're not really hearing anything on the people analytics side of the house on this, but we think it's an area of opportunity.

What are some of the challenges to building a partnership between DEIB & People Analytics?

Stacia Garr:
Okay. I'm going to turn to some of these questions that we received. We're going to go with this one first Priyanka about the challenges to building a partnership between DEIB and people analytics. Do you want to talk about that one?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, sure. So I think we already touched upon some of these things when we spoke about our initial findings. So I think one of the biggest challenges that we've heard, especially as it pertains to people, analytics leaders is when DEIB leaders don't believe in data or don't come from that data background and are not open to receiving that data or looking beyond data for reporting purposes. So I think that's one of the main challenges that we heard coming in from people analytics leaders. The other one has been about lack of our missing a data culture in your organization and resistance to changing that mindset of really going with the data and being open to experimenting on middle and trying to find out what is, what is it that they can do and what is it that can be done with this data?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And just a general lack of data literacy and awareness. And there are ways that we can, that organizations can work work on this. As we've talked about, the people analytic leaders tech can take a lead, the vendors can come into play as a partner in spreading that education broadly across the organization. But in general, I think so CDO is not believing in data and a lack of data culture in the organizations would be, I think the top two ones that we've heard. And I think connected one to that is lack of support from the leadership in general. And you know exactly to your point, what you said earlier, we've seen a lot of push come from people who are personally impacted by it, or see it around them have experienced it. But if that is missing at the top then there's a general lack of support for this kind of work that, that, that can be challenging in building this kind of partnership between DEIB and people analytics. What else would you add to this?

Stacia Garr:
We mentioned it a little bit earlier, but the issue of trust, I think in general is comes through. So maybe a little bit less with the relationship between DEIB and people analytics, but certainly with HR in the broader organization. Somebody we interviewed recently talked about how the HR organization didn't want DEIB and people analytics to release data broadly because they were afraid of getting called out or others knowing something that HR didn't and this idea of we have kind of an adversarial relationship. We own the data, we should know everything, and then we can control and communicate it. That is problematic. And you know, the mindset needs to shift to more of a more eyes on the data are better than fewer we're in this together. We're gonna figure out solutions together. We're going to distribute decision-making to make things better at scale, et cetera. And that mindset shift is very hard. And so that's not necessarily something just between DEIB and people analytics, but it requires a strong perspective between those leaders to then go, wow, and kind of push this broader agenda of, we need to share data so we can make change so we can measure what's happening. And people will know if we're making progress and if we're not, then we can make changes that will drive that progress.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that also speaks to something that we heard about fear of data being released without the context. And we heard a lot of people analytics leaders talk about how the other ones who take the lead when it comes to framing the data in the right context and putting that communication in that right frame before it's published externally or internally. And it's been interesting to see that it's the people analytics leaders who are taking the lead on this when it comes to communicating the data and putting that right context of DEIB to work.

What is the role of legal?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, definitely. Cool. Let's move on to the next question. What is the role of legal? All of our folks, whether they're people analytics leaders or DEIB leaders sort of chuckle when we get to this question, because they're like, Oh, legal. So, you know, obviously the role of legal is to keep all of us out of trouble. You know, this is sensitive data, it's important to treat it with the due respect, et cetera. So I don't want to underscore that or, or undermine that, excuse me. That said what we also have heard is that there is great variance in what you can do based on the risk profile of your general counsel. And a lot of times what happens is the general counsel needs just education. You know, their job is to find the problems and there are always going to be concerns when it comes to DEIB data.

Stacia Garr:
And so the question is how can we work with general counsel to reduce the risk to a level that makes it acceptable and, or to make it clear that this level of risk is acceptable versus the risk of us not doing anything? So, and I think part of that is also helping them understand how others might get to this data. If the organization isn't controlling the message to some extent. So for instance, we had one interviewee who's general counsel said, I don't want you to publish anything, not nothing out there. And the people analytics leader went back and said, look with this set of data, we are, that we provide to the government. Employees can legally request the right to this data to have access to this data. So all it's going to take is a smart employee asking this question to get this information out, by contrast, we could share it and we could put some context around it. We could put clarity around what we're trying to do, and we could head that off. So there's this risk that already exists out there. And actually by releasing the data in this way, we are reducing that risk. The general council eventually agreed, right? So it's about thinking through sometimes very creatively. How do we work with legal to help them understand the appropriate level of risk Priyanka? What else did we hear?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think one of the best advice that we heard come out of our interviewees was don't look at legal as compliance. You get them as a partner. So like the way you partner with the DEIB, or if you're a DEIP leader the way you partner with people analytic. Work with legal as a partner, because they are the ones who are going to help you put the data, the right context, made sure that you're being able to continue sharing that data. And just in general, they're going to be helpful along the way. So I don't see them as putting barriers to the work that you do, but actually supporting you just by pushing you to be more clear about it, by being more intentional about it. And by thinking about it from all perspectives.

What is the role of vendors?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. That was a good, that was a great point. Yeah. Cool. I'm gonna keep us moving so we can get through a few more of these. So what's the role of vendors? So there were, I think there are a few, one is vendors can broadly educate folks about data. We've already talked about that. Second, depending on the vendor they can certainly enable self-service for the access to the data, which is, which is a powerful one. Third vendors can help get up to speed quickly for small teams. So particularly if it's a vendor that the people analytics team is already using and they have a DEIB offering. So think like what Visier offers or what Workday offers in the context or cruncher in the context of their overall offering. Those are, those are ways that they can that they can, they can support.

Stacia Garr:
That said, we have heard from a number of people, analytics leaders, deep frustration with some of these vendors, because they're like the DEIB leader just went to the vendor. Like they didn't even talk to us about what data we could offer or the capabilities we have. Like we were just completely cut out of the loop. And then when the data that they had was different than the data that we have, senior executives came and were frustrated and said, get it right, et cetera, et cetera, you can kind of see where that whole train goes. And so, you know, there's an opportunity that vendors can offer some really good things, but it's really important to make sure that you have that alignment and clarity on first the data set itself and what's going to be used. But then two, how it's going to be leveraged back in the organization is, are the insights, the vendors producing, going to be integrated into existing dashboards or reports that leaders are already getting, what's going to happen. You can't have the vendor out here as an island is the point. They can really help you, but they can't be an island over here when all your other data stuff is over here.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think the only thing I would add too, is that they can also help share data broadly where it's appropriate. So one of the questions that we had asked our venders in our people analytics tech survey last year was, do you share insights collected on employees for themselves to help them take actions on them. And majority of the vendors said that they do. So I think that's another place, another area where vendors can enable organizations to help employees gain value out of the data that is being collected on them. And I think more and more organizations are starting to do that, especially when it comes to things like their sense of belonging and inclusion to better understand, okay, where is it that they are lacking in what is it that they, maybe the kind of behaviors that they should be working on to enable that culture of belonging and help people feel like they're included part of the teams. So I think that is another rule that vendors can play in helping just sharing that data and providing that access to those insights that that organizations are collecting on employees.

What analytics are being used for DEIB?

Stacia Garr:
Yep. Great. Okay. Next question. We received, what are some of the types of analytics being used for DEIB? So we've, we talked about some of these particularly kind of the, the basic representation data the representation data applied to engagement or inclusion and belonging, indices, that's some of the more kind of common analysis that we're seeing we're increasingly seeing in terms of more novel approaches, we're increasingly seeing the use of ONA. So particularly to understand the strength of networks of diverse groups and how those might differ. So for instance, looking at maybe looking at the networks of women and how these differ from men, particularly by seniority and organizations, we actually wrote a study on that a couple of years ago on women networks and technology. We also see them using ONA to understand if there are kind of hidden stars in the organization.

Stacia Garr:
So people who senior leaders may not know could be high potentials or be making an outsize impact on the organization, but who are highly connected within their network kind of indicating that, that outsize impact and then using that to help with potential hypo identification practices and in putting people into leadership development programs and the like so there's, those are a couple of ways we've seen ONA. We're also seeing more use of natural language processing and used in this kind of gets at that qualitative data aspect that Priyanka mentioned at the very beginning from the lit review. So using that to identify themes within certainly within engagement or belonging in our inclusion indices but also using that when we are looking at performance reviews looking at to what extent are certain groups may be having certain types of themes or texts being written about them that others are not. So for an example of this might be again, kind of going back to some of the research we've seen in women versus men. Women's feedback often tends to be more about their behaviors. Whereas men's feedback often tends to be more about their actual outcomes for business impact. So those are the types of differences that you might be able to use NLPM. Priyanka, what else have we seen?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Something that was very interesting was tying wellbeing data DIN data. So seeing that, cutting it across, slicing it to see how different groups underrepresented groups, different cohorts might be fairing when it comes to wellbeing. I think the other thing that stuck with me that was pretty interesting and you've just heard that from one company was, they were, they were doing was counting high-fives on a watch on the watch with internal communications back from that they have to understand allyship and sponsorship amongst employees and managers and senior leaders. That was something interesting. That'd be hard as well.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, so we we've actually seen that also. We saw it with high fives in this research, but also I've seen it with recognition platforms. So like a work human or an achievers Work Human themselves have actually done some analysis to see if there are differences by demographic background in terms of who recognizes whom and at what amount, cause I do like points or, you know, dollar amounts associated with recognition. And the theory there being that those recognitions are much less you put less thought into them than you do a performance review. So they may reveal biases that exist a bit more. And they do show differences by all the demographic groups that you might expect. So anyway, I see we've just got two minutes. So I just wanna see here. I want to go to the question that is in the chat, cause I think this is, this is a really good one.

Evidence of accountability via reward, accelerating progress or being effective in general

Stacia Garr:
And this is about, have we seen evidence of accountability via rewards, accelerating progress or being effective in general? So this is such a hot topic right now because we see all these organizations now coming out and saying, you've got to tie DEIB numbers to some sort of accountability metrics in order to get people's attention. There was when I first started doing research in this space and like 2013, that was like the thing, the thing that everyone was trying to get to and the 2013 version of myself would probably be cheering this hugely. The 2021 version of myself is not so sure. And particularly given some of the things we've heard in these interviews. The the reason for that is well, while tying metrics to accountability can be really powerful and it absolutely can.

Stacia Garr:
What it can also do is get people to focus on the wrong thing. And right now people are really worried as they should be that as they proliferate the DEIB data, that people will see it as a quota or a target, and that is illegal. And so there is a real concern about people misinterpreting what is trying to happen and kind of going after the wrong things. And the accountability makes that even more, more public. I think that if done well, accountability is a good thing. So if, for instance, you're tying to behaviors that we know drive certain types of outcomes. I think that the accountability can be a good thing. The devil is in the details on the measurement, of course. But I guess I would say my perspective is that it can be good, but use it with caution.

Stacia Garr:
I have not seen any holistic research studies that look at this. And even if we did, I would be concerned about like what correlation and causation researchy things. So that's it, if you want to talk more about it, I'd love to talk more about it. I think it's an important topic, but that's kind of my off the cuff.

Conclusion

Stacia Garr:
We're at time. So I'm just gonna real quick flip through to our last thing, which is next Q&A call. Maybe not relevant for folks here, but for anybody who maybe is watching the video, it is on learning content. So we did a study to understand how do we deliver the right content at the right place, right time, right person right modality, et cetera. And we're going to be discussing some of our early findings from that. That study will be coming out itself in mid-June. So that one will be further along than this study. So if you're interested, I'm sure it'll be really great. It'll be with Dani Johnson and Heather Gilmartin Adams. All right. Thank you to everybody so much for the time today. Thank you, Priyanka for your co-host on this session. And we look forward to seeing everybody again soon. Have a good rest of your day.

Categories: Diversity-Equity-Inclusion-and-Belonging, People Analytics

Tags: Member Only, Q and A Call, Tune In

Q&A Call-Career Mobility

Posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2021 at 10:46 AM

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Dani Johnson:
Okay. I think we are going to get started. So again, my name is Dani Johnson. I'm a co-founder and principal analyst at RedThread Research. And we started looking at mobility years and years and years ago. But about six months ago we got into it pretty deeply. We did a lit review, we did a few roundtables and we wrote up kind of what we found on career mobility. It's changed drastically in the last little while, and it turns out that there are different ways to do it depending on kind of what you're trying to get done. So we're going to start with just a very, very brief overview of some of the things that we found in the research, and then we'll get to the questions that you all have. And the questions that were submitted beforehand for the people that will be watching this later. So with that, let's just start with who we are. We are Redthread Research. We do research on all kinds of things, human and capital. We also do some advisory work and some education, and we have a brand new membership for those that are interested in looking at our other research, the areas that we cover, are people, analytics, learning, and skills performance employee experience. We're doing a lot of work right now on DEIB. And then we cover the HR technology space pretty well.

What is Mobility?

Dani Johnson:
So let's start with what mobility is and what mobility isn't. Years ago and for a really long time up until fairly recently, we've thought about mobility as moving a person from one job to another job. And in some of the interviews that we conducted, we also found that mobility also meant moving a person from one location to another location. So it's basically a way to relocate skills within your organization, whether that's physically or whether that's changing a job role. A lot of it had to do about the movement itself. And what we found was recently, particularly with COVID, it it's much more about mindset. So one of the biggest things that we've found is that mobility is now a mindset it's about enabling opportunities. So employees can participate in opportunities that benefit both themselves in their own careers, as well as the organization to get the organization where it needs to go.

Dani Johnson:
The second thing we found, and this has been percolating for some years, is organizations and employees are starting to think beyond roles. So instead of just moving a person into a new role, employees are often taking on and have the opportunity to take on part-time or gig work at the side of their day job. So that they can develop the skills that they want and going the direction that they want and develop the networks that they want. So it's not just about moving from one role to another anymore. It's a lot about part-time work or gig work or a side job on top of what they're already doing. And then the final thing that we found is that it's really important to provide freedom for growth. That's one of the main reasons that organizations are investing in this employees are given the flexibility to experiment and to learn and to grow.

Dani Johnson:
And that's part of the larger employee experience discussion that that tends to be going on. So that's how we think about mindset these days. It's not so much about moving from one role to another, although that still can be a part of it in a lot of organizations, it's much more about the mindset that we have about our careers and about the careers of our employees within those organizations.

Main approaches to mobility

Dani Johnson:
What we found as we talked to all these people and did all of the research, we found that there are basically five main approaches to addressing mobility. The first one is Ladder. This one has been around since the industrial revolution and probably way before that. This one involves employees moving from one role to the next. It generally goes in an upward direction and it's generally within a silo or a function.

Dani Johnson:
So some organizations work really well with the ladder structure. It works for them as they are trying to build expertise. It's by no means an outdated model. It's just the most traditional and the oldest model. The second one that we've been talking about for the last 15 years or so is this idea of a Lattice. Employees can move up and around and down and sometimes inside and outside of the organization, depending on the needs of the organization, as well as depending on the desires of the individual. This was put in place to help with the fact that that the organizations have to respond more quickly to their environments, but also because employees are gaining and expecting more freedom within that organization to move around and see what they want. The third one is Agency. This has been around for a while as well, mostly in professional services firms and creative firms, but we're seeing it sort of expand to other types of organizations as well.

Dani Johnson:
And this is where some of the gig work and the jobs, some of those smaller jobs come into place. In this one when employees move around the organization based on their skills and their knowledge and their preference. So really good example of this is I worked for Deloitte for five or six years. And while I was in Deloitte, there wasn't necessarily a very strong path upward. It was much more about developing the skills that you want and the networks that you want so that you can move around and use those skills and develop new skills in gigs. So I was with you know, people are with the project for a small amount of time, and then they move on to another project based on what they want as well as what the organization needs for those skills. The fourth one is Outside in. Workers with specific skills are brought into the organization to accomplish certain projects or pieces of work.

Dani Johnson:
We are seeing this more, as organizations are trying to develop the skills internally while still maintaining momentum. So they'll go out and purchase skills or bring people in for contracts to do specific things as they are developing the skills internally to move out. And then finally Reset, and this is one that sort of sits across all of them, and I'll show you a picture in a minute that describes that. But employees are re-skilled and deployed into new roles based on the organization's needs and strategies. So when COVID hit a whole bunch of people on the frontline, for example, were in the retail stores and since retail stores shut down, many companies found a way to use those reskill the retail workers had in other parts of the organization. So they noticed that their call centers, for example, the calls coming into their call centers went way up and they realized that the skills that the retail folks had could very easily translate to a different part of the organization.

Dani Johnson:
So they upskilled them a little bit and were able to use them across both. So those are the five main approaches to mobility.

Dani Johnson:
And now we're going to go into your questions. So some of the questions that came in will help us walk through some of the rest of the research.

How is mobility changing in orgs and what are the trends that you're seeing?

Dani Johnson:
So the first question is how is mobility changing in organizations and what are the trends that you're seeing? That is a fantastic question. And it actually ended up being part of the report that we wrote. So there are basically five mobility trends. The first one is that we're seeing much more experimentation people aren't as afraid to try things. And I think that is, again, a product of the COVID mess, I guess, that we find ourselves in, but organizations really are embracing new ways of supporting mobility, especially mobility, the way that we've defined it, which is more of a mindset then than the physical movement from one role to another.

Dani Johnson:
The second thing that we've heard a lot is the talk of leveling, the playing field. And so we've done some research on the DEIB and one of the biggest pieces of research in there that's really sort of hit me is that movement within organizations is based on the networks that you have. And if you don't have the right networks, then you're missing key information that isn't written down anywhere, and that you may not know, that may prevent you from moving from one place to another. And so there's a lot of talk about using mobility. You know, leaders are talking about using mobility to open up more opportunities to more people they're making that more transparent. And again, this has been accelerated by COVID because we'd had to write a bunch of things down because not everybody is sitting in the same place anymore. But mobility is really being used as a way to develop skills and provide people opportunities to develop networks that they hadn't had before.

Dani Johnson:
We love that. The third one is that there are more opportunities for employees period. So before you used to have to be tapped on the shoulder and told that you're in a leadership program to move up in the organization with some of the focus that organizations are putting on developing skills and tracking some of those skills and at least keeping a better sense of what people can do. There are more opportunities open to employees. Not only that there's more transparency with respect to the roles that are available within the organization, both those permanent roles, the more traditional ones, as well as the gig work. So a lot of people are putting into place talent marketplaces, for example, that are really helping people find things that they're interested in and also helping work get done that may have previously been outsourced. There's more data, which means that there are better decisions.

Dani Johnson:
This goes back to some of the things that we were talking about, the project marketplace, keeping better track of skills, keeping better track of employees and what they want, period. More data about employees capabilities can help orgs make better decisions about mobility within their organization. So succession planning has changed. It's no longer about a succession pipeline where you're putting somebody in at the bottom and they pop out the top. It's much more likely that somebody in a completely different part of the organization can move into a role in another part of the organization because of the skills that they have and the visibility that the organization has with respect to those skills. And then finally, and this kind of goes through the last three that we've talked about, tech enablement. There's been an uptick in the number of skills and the sophistication of mobility tech offerings.

Dani Johnson:
So last summer, when COVID hit, we had five vendors within a five week period say, Hey, we really want to show you what we're thinking about with respect to mobility. And so COVID definitely accelerated it, but obviously technology doesn't appear overnight. So those companies had been thinking about it for quite a while, and it, it all just sort of got accelerated with, with the COVID thing. So there's much more tech available to help organizations implement mobility in much more interesting ways. So again, as we go through this, please feel free to type in any questions as we go through. I'm going to go onto the next one, but we can always come back and address some of these trends if you have specific questions related to them.

What is the main reason orgs are thinking about mobility?

Dani Johnson:
The second question we got is what's the main reason that organizations are talking about mobility. This was a really interesting thing. You would think that it would be panic. If I were running a company, it would probably be panic. I'm panicked because I don't have the skills I need, or they're not in the right areas, especially with what we experienced last year. But when we asked this question point blank to organizations, it was really interesting. We got a lot of really different answers. And so as we sort of coded our interviews and started thinking about them with respect to the five models that we saw, we noticed that very specific things that they were trying to do aligned better with one of the models. And so hands down the thing that we heard most was, oh, well, we provide this as an opportunity to retain our employees and engage them a little bit more.

Dani Johnson:
So they're seeing mobility, you know, broadly as a way to engage people more with their work and with the organization so that they can retain them. Other things that we heard was development and skill building. We also heard moving skills to where they're needed in the organization. We heard succession, we did hear succession, particularly in those organizations that focus on a ladder type approach. And then we also heard reinvention and adaptation. So we need to change what we're doing. Therefore, we need people to move around the organization so that we can get there much more quickly. And as this chart shows this was one of the sort of big ahas for us is depending on what you're trying to do, one of these models may be more appropriate for you. And also keep in mind that when we're talking about more appropriate for you, it may not be for the entire organization. It may be for a particular function or a particular specialty.

How are managers and employees being prepared to this new mindset?

Dani Johnson:
Another question, how are managers and employees being prepared to this new mindset? I think the employees are already there. We're talking about mobility, broadly. Employees are already there. Managers have a little bit of a harder time because there tends to be. And we asked this question specifically too. There tends to be talent hoarding. You find a good person and the last thing you want to do is let them be developed and move on to somewhere else in the organization. But we've seen some really interesting things with respect to that. So managers are held accountable for developing their people. And a couple of organizations we talked to that was a prerogative. And so if their people weren't developing and moving onto something else, then they were penalized in some way or they didn't advance as far as they wanted.

Dani Johnson:
We saw bonuses offered for employees that had advanced. And another thing that I thought was really interesting is some organizations just build it into their culture. So I worked at Ford Motor Company for the first part of my career, and one of the things that was very clear is you didn't stay in a role more than two and a half to three years. If you did that, then you were stagnant and you were not very valuable to the organization you were seen as not valuable. And so the movement around the organization is built into the culture and the way that they do things to make sure that mobility continues and is a stable part of, of what they do.

How to align goals with approaches

Dani Johnson:
So, as you can see from this chart, if you're using a ladder type model may be most appropriate if you're trying to develop skills, or if you're working on succession. If you're using a lattice type goal, most of the people that we've talked to, we're doing it for retention and engagement and maybe a little bit development and skills. If you're doing the agency model, the main reason that they had that in place was moving skills to where they're needed in the organization. Outside in the main goal is moving skills to where they're needed and then adaptation. So we saw a lot of people bringing people in from the outside, if they needed those skills very quickly to move their organization in a different direction Then finally reset the main reasons for that and what are moving skills to where they're needed in the organization. And then as well as reinvention and adaptation, we've got all these wonderful people. What do we do with them, if we just tweak their skills a little bit, or if we want to, if they want to develop their skills, they would be a perfect match for this area over here.

How has COVID effected mobility?

Dani Johnson:
All right, let's go on to the next question that was submitted. And again, if you all have questions that you'd like to submit as we go through, feel free. How has COVID affected mobility? This one's a big one. We've been talking about mobility for the last 15 years at least. Guest 1, who actually is on the line here wrote a book at least 20 years ago, probably 25 or 30 years ago. Talking about mobility, how we move people around the organization. Interestingly, I think COVID was like a shock of blue goo. It's a swift spiritual kick to head that changes your reality forever. It was something that was jarring and quick and made people really consider what they were doing in a different light. And so, as I mentioned earlier, it definitely accelerated the technology that we've seen, but it has also accelerated the conversation that we've seen in organizations. So even now as the world, some of the world is starting to get back to normal. These conversations about mobility are continuing and they're continuing in a completely different way. So we're not hearing as much about succession plans. We're hearing much more about hybrid workplaces and what that means for careers. It has fundamentally changed the way that we've addressed mobility, and I think it will continue to mold it and to modify it as we, as we keep on going

Remote mobile teaming, organizational issues, and special attributes of team members

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Dani, we had a couple of questions come in the Q&A. I can read them for you. First one, remote mobile teaming organizational issues and special attributes of team members. I'll put that in the chat.

Dani Johnson:
I'm going to just open it up so I can see it remote mobile teaming, organizational issues, and special attributes of team members. Yeah. one of the outcomes, and I think it was sort of a subset of mobility before, but one of the outcomes of having more information about skills and having more availability of mobility, if that makes sense, as an open mindset to people moving around the organization is the ability to create teams differently than we have in the past. So before we created the teams that were permanent and recreated them in a way that was basically I don't want to say static, but it was basically based on what we know you can do based on a role that you've had before, but because of the way COVID happened. And because we've had to think about people and their skills, not necessarily people and their roles, some of the organizational issues around putting team members together has, has changed drastically.

Dani Johnson:
The other thing that I think is really interesting is as the world went mobile, as you know, we figured out how to do everything online. Teams can be created that are not cold located anymore, and that's not news for our team. We've been mobile for, I've been mobile for 15 years and love it. We'll never trade it in. But we've had to figure out how to work with people over long distances. And we have the technology to do that. It's just that there has been a lot of discomfort with it. And as sort of COVID hit us and as we continue to figure out what we're going to do next, some of those challenges have gone away. And so it's much easier to build and maintain mobile teams. And it's also much easier to create them.

How does work from home impact career mobility and should it?

Dani Johnson:
All right, I've got the Q&A open Heather, so I'll just hit the next question. How does work from home impact career mobility and should it. I don't think it should. I mean, there are certain circumstances and certain jobs that obviously have to be done at work. I don't want my surgeon to work from home. But there are many jobs that we didn't think could be mobile that absolutely can be mobile. And so I think the world has sort of mostly shifted to that. I still talk to organizations that are like, Oh, I can't wait until we get, can get everybody back in the office. But if you look at some of the big tech companies, for example, they're like, yeah, we're gonna make this, you know, standard forever. Or we're at least going to look at a hybrid model to figure out, you know, how we can continue this.

Dani Johnson:
I read a really interesting article the other day on, and I will, I will find the link and put it in the readout for this. But it basically said, you know, career mobility is going to be hurt because people are going to continue to work from home. They can't build the networks that they need, they don't get the face time they need. There are these concerns, but I think the last year has taught us how to overcome them. And so if organizations are dedicated to institutionalizing those things, I think they're very easy to get around and we can continue to think about career mobility differently. Again, obviously there are things that we need to do face-to-face, but I think at the least a lot of the jobs that we've always considered in office jobs can be done in a hybrid model.

How do orgs know which approach to use

Dani Johnson:
And the next question, managers are supposed to be coaches, managers, think they're doing this. Employees don't agree. Do you see this gap? Oh, wow. This is a question for probably a different roundtable we're actually doing. So we just barely kicked off a topic on coaches and skills actually. And I think it kind of combines those two things. Managers definitely are supposed to be coaches. I think that's gotten a little bit more complicated as people have started to work from home. It's definitely a gap. I'm not sure how much of it has to do with mobility though. I think it has more to do with probably culture. Why don't you contact me separately? We're just starting this this research on coaching. And I would love to sort of get your thoughts. You obviously have some things to say about this.

Dani Johnson:
I just want to read a couple of things from the chat. The first thing managers need to be to do, to be better coaches and shut up and listen more. It's good advice. Many managers think they're coaching when they're actually just giving advice. That is absolutely true.

How do orgs know which approach to use

Dani Johnson:
Okay. So let's go onto the next question. How do organizations know which approach to use. Kind of based on the slide a few before? I think it takes a little bit of searching.

Dani Johnson:
There's no right answer, I guess is what I'm saying here, what we found and what we were hoping to find is that there was a right answer. You know, this mobility model is going to work for you in this circumstance. What we found was that's not true. The closest we could get was the graph that you're seeing right here, which is the majority of organizations that we talked to, who are doing things in this way, tend to be doing it for these reasons. And this is very logical, but we've also talked to many organizations that are doing things completely differently because they have to, for regulatory reasons, for example, or because their people are in a different part of the world or whatever it is. And so how do you figure out which one is the right one for you? You do a lot of questioning and a lot of asking of both the business leaders and what they need, but also the employees and what they need.

Dani Johnson:
And then you have to figure out exactly what your business goals are and how, what you do is going to affect those business goals. So for example, if retention is really big thing, because talent is really important to you, then putting something into place that may be a little bit more flexible is going to be really important. So it's a lattice model. If you're lacking the skills that you need, you've got a couple of options to kind of figure out what you're going to do. You could use an agency model and open up your structure so that you can move people around a little bit more. If you can use an outside in model, which is basically borrowing talent, or you, can you move people from one part of the organization to another, on a more permanent basis. So I think it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. And it takes a lot of soul searching and a lot of conversations to make sure that you've got it right. Also, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, it isn't necessarily to define a mobility strategy for your entire organization. Different organizations have different needs. A sales department may have very different goals than our research and development department. And so figuring out what those are and developing a local mobility strategy is useful to a lot of the organizations that we talk to.

Approaches in relationship

Dani Johnson:
Okay. All right. So I want to talk a little bit about this with respect to the question that was just asked as well. So when we put these five models on a two by two, what we figured out is that there are basically four things to consider two things to consider with two things to consider. The first one is the question is, are you working with roles or are you working with skills? So a lot of organizations that we're talking to are still really focused on the role, and that's not a bad thing, it's just a thing. So moving people from one role to the next role is how they organize the work in their organization. The other end of that spectrum is some organizations are starting to talk about skills. Some people have been there for years, but more organizations are starting to talk about skills.

Dani Johnson:
We move the people around the work. So the agency model, for examples, moves the people around with the work. Here's a piece of work that needs to be done. We can organize the people around that. Whereas if you're working in a role structure, then you're moving the work around the people. This is the structure we have in place, and we're putting the work in one end and it's going down the conveyor belt and at the end it's done. So that's the first question. The other question is low employee ownership or high employee ownership. Do you, or can you offer your employees a lot of ownership in their own careers or are you in a really structured industry or is expertise in a certain deep expertise in an area super important. And so the employee ownership isn't necessarily as high.

Dani Johnson:
And the other end of that spectrum is obviously high employee ownership. So the low employee ownership may be things like surgery. You don't want your surgeon to spend, you know, a rotation in the marketing department necessarily, unless, unless they're gonna build their career in that way. And so figuring out what you need and what your organization needs is basically based on these two questions, are we worried about roles? Are we worried about skills and how much flexibility can we offer our employees when it comes to their career? There is, there are definitely some industries and careers that you sort of start in, and that's kind of what you're going to do. Doctors, CPAs, those types of things to develop deep expertise. And so the employee ownership of where am I going to go, and what am I going to do is not as important in a lot of organizations where we're seeing more and more of these organizations.

Dani Johnson:
High employee ownership is definitely a thing because they want to keep their people engaged. So chat speaker 2 says organizations like Accenture and Fuel 50, have created talent mobility channels that leave far beyond the enterprise. Do you see this inside out and potentially act inside like a sabbatical as a trend? I think this is a really interesting question. And we also, we almost included an inside out model in the approaches to relationship. We saw a bunch of organizations that are doing exactly that they're doing inside out. The one place that we saw that made just a ton of sense is, you know, these big law firms that bring in brand new law graduates, what they do is they, you know, lend them to the DA's office for a couple of years. So they get lots and lots of trial experience. And it also helps the DA out.

Dani Johnson:
So it's a mutually beneficial agreement, but it's an inside out, we're taking these skills and we're lending them to somebody else. And then we're getting the benefit back into our organization. Another place that we're seeing is there's actually a group of companies in the Southern part of the US that are doing this. They're actually trading amongst themselves. We see this in supply chains quite a bit. So for example, I worked in automotive. We saw people that worked for one of the big three, for example, do a rotation in one of the suppliers and as a part of that chain to get more expertise on what they were doing, but also to borrow the talent to that, to build the relationship and make it stronger and make the work a little bit easier. So I definitely think it's an interesting place to place to go. That the reason that we didn't include it here is because most of the time when we see that it's for development purposes only, so it's not necessarily a career move on the part of the organization. They're not trying to do anything except build those skills in more depth. But when I think it's a really, really, really interesting question.

Owning your career

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Chat speaker 1 just made the comment that every company website says you own your career, but very few teach employees how to own their career or provide the support that's needed to help them to, to enable them to own their careers.

Dani Johnson:
Yeah. This is actually one thing that we saw five years ago when we did this research. Chat speaker 1 is absolutely right. So the talent acquisition department is the sales arm of the organization for getting employees into the company. And they're like, yes, we develop people away. You know, we want you to have all these great experiences. And then they come in the door and work has to get done. And so managers don't necessarily focus on it and there isn't good information out there. And you know, the opportunities that you're given for learning are basically to do your job better and to make sure that the company is compliant. And so the the ball gets dropped between the vision, which talent acquisition sets and the reality. We've seen that kind of shift as well. We're seeing a little bit more interesting solutions to that one organization that we talked to basically said, Hey, we have, we have 10,000 employees and you're likely not going to be CEO, sorry, but what we can do is we can build this relationship with you and give you opportunities to develop and grow.

Dani Johnson:
And as long as this is a mutually beneficial relationship for both of us, let's continue it. And when it's not, Hey, let's stay friends because maybe you can recommend somebody to us, or maybe we can put you somewhere where you want to be. And so thinking outside the boundaries of the organization tends to be the way that, that we're kind of hurdling that it's not so much. My dad worked for the same company for 35 years and got the gold watch. That's none of us, that's not going to be us. And so we have to figure out as organizations, how to let go of that and, and make the boundaries of our organizations a little bit and more flexible.

What's the relationship between skills & mobility?

Dani Johnson:
Okay. Any other questions here? Okay. I think we have one more question. What's between skills and mobility. This is also a very good question. We addressed it a little bit earlier. There connected, in both of the roundtables that we did for mobility, it was very clear that you couldn't talk about mobility without talking about skills. Even if you're in a very traditional ladder type organization, how you move up through, the ranks is based on the skills that you develop and how useful you are to get to that organization. And so mobility and skills are linked like crazy. And the really cool thing that we're seeing is some of this technology is enabling us to get a much better view of what skills people have. Not just the classes that they've taken, but we have a much better view of what people are doing in their free time.

Dani Johnson:
And a lot of organizations are looking into things like, you know, how much of your posting on GitHub and you know, how elegant is your code that I can see that's already out there. People are using LinkedIn profiles to get a better sense of what skills are one organization that we talked to. It was a vendor working with a healthcare organization. This is one of my favorite examples is they actually tap into the system that does the medical coding to see how many times nurses are performing certain things. And they attribute that to the, to how skilled that nurses. And so it's not just, you know, rate yourself on a scale from one to five anymore, or using some really different ways of determining what those skills are. And a lot of it the Holy grail, in my opinion, is figuring out what people are actually doing inside and outside of their work lives to, to develop those skills.

Dani Johnson:
A lot of people have leadership opportunities in their private lives, for example, for nonprofits or community areas that aren't necessarily taken into account when we make decisions about mobility. But those things are starting to be surfaced. Employees are recognizing that it helps them if the organization understands what their skills are and organizations are understanding that there's all kinds of information out there that they don't have that could, that could help them find, you know, just a gem of a person for a particular role or opportunity within the organization, if they would just open their minds to accepting more of this kind of data. Any other questions on that?

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
We had a clarification question about, Dani are you using skills as inclusive of skills capability and experiences.

Dani Johnson:
We just barely had this conversation yesterday, internally skills is interesting. I have sat on the conversation of skills for four years and not written anything until recently because it's just a mess. It's a complete mess. Nobody understands the difference between skills and capabilities or competencies. Everybody defines them differently. Some people have competency models and skills models. Heather actually did a report on this earlier that a study on this earlier this year if you want to read kind of what we found in the literature and how we sort of solidified it in our heads, skills is oftentimes seen as more granular than, than competencies. Capabilities are generally used to describe what an organization can do and not what an individual can do. And experiences are generally used to develop skills, to develop skills or as proof that you have that skill. So that's probably how I would define those three things plus competencies. But again, depending on the organization, you're in the nomenclature could be completely different. But that's how we're defining it currently.

Conclusion

Dani Johnson:
Any other questions? Okay. for more information on the research that we talked about here feel free to jump on our website. We have a couple of things that are available to everybody, and then a couple of things that are available to our members. We did a premise and a pretty deep lit review on this. We also did an infographic that's available to everybody. And then that report is available to members. And as always, if any of you have any questions, please feel free to contact us directly. We love talking. We love people challenging what we talk about, because it helps make us better. One more question, where does psychological safety fit? Probably another study. So again, we've got a couple of studies. I mentioned that the talk about psychological safety it's part of our responsiveness research, and it's also part of our diversity and inclusion stuff. So we can point you to anything in our library with respect to that. Right. I think that's it. Thank you everybody for joining. And we'll talk to you next time.

Categories: Experience and Engagement, Learning and Skills

Tags: Member Only, Q and A Call, Tune In

Q&A Call-Purpose-Driven Orgs

Posted on Monday, April 19th, 2021 at 9:53 AM

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

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

Who is RedThread

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

Our journey to understand purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stacia Garr:
Okay, I'll keep going.

Purpose vs everything else

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

Understanding purpose businesses

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

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

Mission statement vs purpose

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

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

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Great question.

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

Understand purpose businesses

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

Introduction Purpose has gone mainstream

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

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

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

Employees expect businesses to act

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

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

Introduction Purpose = good business

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

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

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

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

Speaker 4:
Yeah.

Purpose as a self reinforcing system

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

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

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

What that means for HR

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

In summary: Attract, Enable, Develop, Retain

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

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

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

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

Connecting organizational purpose vs employee purpose

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

Stacia Garr:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Speaker 1:
Definitely. I will.

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

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

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

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

Tight parallels between purpose, IT and D&I

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

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, absolutely.

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

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Why purpose now

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

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

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

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

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

Health orgs only?

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

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

Will purpose remain a thing after the pandemic

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 2:
Awesome. Thank you.

How can I help my organization focus on purpose

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

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

Stacia Garr:
Alrighty.

Conclusion

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

Speaker 1:
Thank you. Bye bye.

Categories: Diversity-Equity-Inclusion-and-Belonging, Experience and Engagement

Tags: Member Only, Q and A Call, Tune In

Q&A Call-People Analytics Tech: Employee Engagement/Experience

Posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2021 at 9:49 PM

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr:
All right. Priyanka, can you help a little bit with if anybody else comes in, because I'm going to go ahead and get us started. Okay. Perfect. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining today. Priyanka and I are excited to share some it's really, this is a work in progress that we are, that we are doing. Literally, we were working on the paper last night and shifting some things around, shifting some more things around this morning. So you're getting to be a part of the process today but what we wanted to do in general with the people analytics tech study that we did last year was to then do kind of deeper dive some through the three biggest areas of focus. And so focus, meaning by size in terms of the number of vendors were in a given space.

Speaker 1:
So that is the employee engagement experience category. It is ONA and then the last one is what we call multi-source analysis platform. So folks like Visier as well as others. So this is the first of our deep dive studies that we're working on. And what we're trying to do is just give a little bit more understanding of what we are seeing within each of these markets. So today is employee engagement and experience. For those of you who don't know us, I think everybody does, but we're RedThread Research a human capital research membership focused on a range of things most relevant for today, people analytics and HR technology. And you can learn more about [email protected]. Okay. So Priyanka, I think you were going to lead us off with some of the things that we see specific to employee engagement experience from the study.

The importance of employee experience

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah. And just to show, so I'm just going to set up the stage a little bit but not spend too much time because I know we already know a lot of this stuff. So just to begin, we know that employee engagement experience became extremely critical in 2020. And this is just one of the many data points that we have from that year that shows that employee experience became so important as part of HR strategy and it increase from almost 50% to 70%, from 2018 to 2020, and moving forward, HR leaders see it becoming even more important. So we know this became really important. It's going to continue being extremely important. So before we actually get down to talking about the technology, we just want you to spend a little bit of time understanding what these two concepts are, employee engagement and experience, and talking a little bit about the differences between them, how we see them and what is the relationship between them.

Differences between the two terms

Priyanka Mehrotra:
So if you just go onto the next slide, Stacia. Thank you. So just to give an overview of how we see these two terms, so employee experience can be seen as what employees perceive through their journey or their own way, perceptions of their interactions with organization. And so in that sense, it has a broad scope employee engagement by comparison is what employees do or behave. And in that sense, we see it having a much narrower scope than employee experience. We can also see employee experience as the cause that impacts or effects employee engagement and as a way results in employee engagement, among many other things, of course.

Relationship between the two

Priyanka Mehrotra:

But just so that we understand employee experience is something that feeds into employee engagement, and this is what we're seeing in the next slide, which is how that relationship moves between the two. So all the organization interactions that employees go through the life cycle journey feeds into what, what is what we see as employee experience, what we understand as employee experience for these employees and that ultimately results in how engaged they are with their workplace. So having set up these two terms and just expand that a little bit, I just want to open it up to anybody for any thoughts or feedback about these two topics.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
What do others think?

Speaker 1:
I think it's useful to have them broken out because I think a lot of people are still mixing experience and engagement. I see Speaker 2's hand up.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say the same. It's, it's great to put them side by side. I think I'd be interested to know your thoughts on what the, kind of, what the alongside employee engagement, what are the other kind of key outcomes of input experience that we can use to understand employee experience? Does that make sense? Or do you see engagement as the kind of number one result of good employee experience?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, so I think, you know, and this is part of partly due to you know, a lot the employee experience vendors have come from, and we're going to talk about that in just a second, but you know, the, the other outcomes that we see folks talk about so much as customer experience, you know, the relationship between EX and CX. And so and then, you know, CX driving revenue and other important metrics that we care about.

Stacia Garr:

There was an interesting piece and actually Speaker 1 probably is a little bit closer to it than I am, but the interesting piece that Medallia recently put out talking about how that relationship between EX and CX is not quite as linear as people might think about. There's a bit more nuance when it comes to how those two are connected, but, but to directly answer the question, Speaker 2, I think that CX is the other one that we see people focused on a lot. What are others see or think Speaker 3 I think I see your hand up. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
Hey yeah, I was just going to say, so my title is director of employee experience and I am all HR. And the reason that we titled it as such is because we felt that the holistic all encompassing umbrella is the experience and that every touch point, whether that be an HR policy or recruitment retention, onboarding dealing with alumni from the organization, that that is all kind of part of that experience. And so I definitely look at this and say, yup, that makes sense to me.

Speaker 1:
Well, listening to Speaker 3 talk, I'm also struck by the difference between there's there's things that are measuring people's perceptions of the experience. And then there are things that are actually creating the workflow that provides the experience, and that kind of gets wrapped into the same space. Because if you look at something like a service, now it's positioning itself as the experience platform architects experiences, it doesn't tell you if they're good or bad, it architects experiences, whereas something like a Medallia is going to listen to you like, or that experience sucked. Like they're going to capture that for you. So it gets really easy for me. It gets really easy to get lost in experience as is it a workflow, Is it a measurement of perception? So I think focusing on measurement of perception is helpful.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And one thing I think we wrote about, and we didn't actually include this graphic in this deck, but we wrote about with the Microsoft Viva announcement was exactly your point Speaker 1 that there has historically there's been a technology that has come under the experience banner that has been designed to capture experience. And then you know, a lot of the engagement folks have kind of blended over into the experience because they're not just measuring your engagement, but they're also capturing the, you know, onboarding experience or that it, how do you feel it, you know, 30, 60, 90 days experience, et cetera. And so they're kind of bleeding over, but, but a lot of the language with the exception really of service now can kind of create a new category if you will, was around capturing experience, not influencing experience.

Stacia Garr:
What I think in, and we wrote about with Microsoft Viva as being, I think pretty, pretty transformational is that you're now going to both be able to understand the broader experience because you're able to look into all these different Microsoft products that we're all using, like right now, literally with PowerPoint and then potentially be able to to change that experience and measure it. And so I think, you know, we at RedThread try to stay away from the, like, this is such a big deal kind of language because most of the time it's not. But I do think that has the potential to, because it opens the aperture of what experience actually is even beyond what service now is doing. Quite a bit. I think that that has the potential, but I think you're well to start to come back to where we started, I think it's appropriate to acknowledge that there is experience measurement and then there's actual experience. And they're not the same thing.

Stacia Garr:
Any other thoughts on that?

Stacia Garr:
I know we have a number of folks who are not on camera. Feel free to go ahead and still kind of raise your hand and we can get you in. Also we promote everybody to panelists, so you can be on camera if you want, because obviously it's a, a dialogue that we have here. Okay. Priyanka I'll let you move on.

Areas of focus for people analytics vendors

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Moving to the next slide. So now we're going to talk a little bit about the technology and what we have seen in specific to terms of people analytics technology. So those of you familiar with our work know that we do this annual people analytics study every year and as Stacia mentioned in both years we have see that employee experience has been the biggest category of vendors and just looking at the numbers on the vendors that focus on these two areas as their primary talent areas of focus. We can see how this has shifted over the past one year as well. So in 2019, for example, we had 43% vendors say that can employee experience was that binary area focus. And that jumped to 60%, sorry, 50, 58%. In 2020 and similarly employee engagement also went up from 60 to 67%. So again, we saw organizations shift their focus in these areas and we saw vendors match those areas as well, and they really stepped up to meet the needs of the customers.

Engagement/Experience customers are mostly happy

Priyanka Mehrotra:
And the following slide will show that customers in general have been mostly happy with the vendors. So we had a customer feedback poll that we ran along with our vendor survey. And this average NPS score that you see here is the score that is only for the category of employee engagement and experienced vendors. And coincidentally, it was also the category that received the most number of customer responses. So we had about 16 employee engagement experience vendors, and 12 of them received over five customer responses, which was great compared to other categories and also the highest and best score. So an average score of 61, which is pretty great and just put it in a little bit of context. Enterprise software in general tends to have an average score of 40. So this is pretty high compared to that. So that is our findings from are people analytics study.

Stacia Garr:
Correct me if I'm wrong, this is slightly lower than the average overall for all of them.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yes. Yes. The overall people analytics study, we had an average score of 67, so slightly lower, but still, almost there.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah.

Stacia Garr:
And then I think it's, it's probably, we're saying back on, on the last slide. Oops, sorry. Here some of this, some of them we've been in these numbers was due to more vendors being in the study. But I think also a lot of people, I think Speaker 1, you, you mentioned this have just glommed on to the employee experience language. And so some of his jump may have been what was happening in 2020 and everyone said, I'm an employee experience vendor now. So I think that's important to acknowledge, but, but it kind of comes back to the point where Priyanka started, which is this concept has just taken off so much. You know, and Speaker 3 I think you mentioned this idea of in play experience being kind of the culmination of all the different things that we've done in the past. And so, you know, I expect it will continue to get energy, but it's important that part of the reason we put the definitions right in here to actually understand what we're talking about versus some of the other, other processes. But I just wanted to highlight, I think that some of this growth has just focused to being enthusiastic about the term, shall we say?

Backgrounds of employee engagement vendors

Stacia Garr:
Okay. So one of the things we did here for the first time is we wanted to actually talk a little bit more specifically about the vendors that are in the space and where they came from because that influences their bent in terms of the offers that the offerings that they give. And so Priyanka did this really cool thing. She's letting me present it, but she's the brains on this. One of looking at what kinds of backgrounds these different vendors, and she broke it into three groups at the top and the orange in the Venn diagram is employee engagement native. So like they started out as an employee engagement vendor, like that has been their bread and butter. On the lower left, we've got those who have some of a professional services background. And you can see here, we've got a Willis Towers, Watson, and then a vendor called Qlearsite kind of it's it's in between the two.

Stacia Garr:
We'll talk about that in a moment. And then on the lower, right, we have these vendors who are driving employee engagement by other talent areas. And so I think that I'll just kind of give, give a little bit more detail on each of these and then we can discuss any of the individual vendors that you all like. But so what we see here with the employee engagement natives that I think is interesting is so we've got Peakon, we've got Perceptyx and Glint, those are the, just those in the orange what's interesting here though, is two of those three, right. Have been acquired. Right. So now Peakon is with Workday and Glints, obviously part of LinkedIn and you know, Perceptyx, they have PE backing.

Stacia Garr:
So, you know,

Stacia Garr:
That puts you on a path. I'm not saying that they're, I don't have any insight on what they're doing, but that puts you on a path I'm seeing Speaker 1 nodding his head firstly.

Speaker 1:
It's just a matter of time.

Stacia Garr:
I did not say that.

Stacia Garr:
We've got Culture Amp who is, you know, one of our over on the lower, right. And we talk about them kind of being part of this driving engagement just on that same subject. So there, you know, I don't even know what series they are on, but they're a unicorn. They've got, you know, tons of investment in them. So something will happen one way or the other there. The blue area, since I've kind of gone to the lower, right. Is we say driving engagement by other areas. So you might say Culture Amp, like they've, you know, they're pretty, pretty engagement. But the reason we put them there as they did the acquisition of Sugata I guess about two years ago now which was a performance management vendor and a big part of their focus is now pushing quite a bit more into the manager and coaching side.

Stacia Garr:
So they, we just actually learned that they're doing a partnership with a vendor that's pretty popular here in the Bay area called Life Learning Labs, I think is what it's called. And they're creating kind of little micro learning bursts that are getting put into their solution to support the performance and engagement work. So that's why we've kind of said that we've see them as being a little bit more on the moving into this blue blue section and then the others who are in that blue section Betterworks. They bought a vendor that you all may be familiar with called Hyphen which was kind of in the continuous pulse survey space. That was, I think again also about two years ago Reflektive bought a vendor, they've been in engagement as well as performance, but they also bought a vendor called Shape Analytics.

Stacia Garr:
And then they themselves recently got acquired by LTG. And so that's going to pull them kind of more broadly into the talent space. Well, so while they're still still kind of swimming here or there, that's them. And then Fortay their their initial approaches talent acquisition but they kind of take this broader, broader look at talent acquisition and engagement as being related. And so they are packaging that together. But so again, you know, we're kind of putting this together because we think that having the, the background and where these vendors are and what they're doing can help consumers understand, okay, this is, this is their natural bet just to round out. And then I'll, I'll pause for comments over on the left, on the professional services side. So Willis Towers, Watson they've got a pretty robust engagement solution that we got briefed on this year that we hadn't seen before.

Stacia Garr:
And they've got a lot of clients using it. It's as you would expect reasonably tightly coupled with professional services offerings. But it can be bought standalone is my recollection. Yeah. Okay. And then Qlearsite, we have them kind of on the bubble because they were started by a bunch of former IBMers. And so the look and feel of their reports and a lot of their thinking kind of comes from that professional services background, but they are definitely a SAS company. So that's why we've got them on the bubble. So anyway, a few questions for you. One is this useful, this is the first time we've tried to think about this this way. So is it useful? Two, if it's at least a little bit useful, which you'll probably say, cause you all are very kind, how could we make this better?

Stacia Garr:
And three, are there any other questions you have? Yeah. Speaker 4?

Speaker 4:
Yes, of course. It's very useful. The reason being is exactly what you said at the very beginning with the top bubble who's sponsoring them where they came from, who they're, like you just said for the last one who their originator employees founders are speaks to probably what to expect from them. They're probably not going to be so different and varied. I don't recognize any of these names. So I need to know the generation that came before because I'm familiar with those ones. It's super interesting how fast things are moving.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah. Great points. Thank you. How about others?

Speaker 1:
I love the breakdown. I'm curious on how they're actually like, it feels like they're all going to go towards that bottom right bubble in terms of their development paths. Like my perception is the classic survey vendor is basically limited in scope now because things like Culture Amp and the others have taken the survey and they generated a, you know, no, do this or no, try this, or no, think this, on top of the survey. So I feel like the whole lot, you know, in the professional services background, there was a person saying, Hey, your survey says X, you should do Y. When you get to the Culture Amp site, it's like your survey says X here's three AI driven suggestions of what you could do. Like let me less than professional services. So I think it is really, really interesting because it understands the background. I feel like everyone's going to be driving to that bottom right corner.

Stacia Garr:
Hmm. Yeah. That's an interesting point Speaker 1. And what that also brought to mind for me is the point that I made about acquisition, right? Like Peakon and Glint via acquisition effectively had the capability to drive through other talent areas because of that. And Perceptyx is building a performance and recognition solutions. So, yeah, so that's really good points. Speaker 3 I thought I saw your hand up. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
I don't know if it's the previous life of accounting. The CPA in me that looked at this and thought, and now what I kind of want an Excel spreadsheet or a grid that says you know, here's what it was, here's what it is. Here's what it does. Here's what it might merge with. And I think it went from, I looked at this, I spent two minutes looking at it. I thought that's interesting, but to take that from, that's interesting too, now this is useful and I can action something from it. It would need a bit more for me. So it really depends on what your purpose is. If it's a, you know, an information piece. Yeah. I look at it and I, I thought it was informative, but I wouldn't do anything with this information.

Stacia Garr:
That's helpful. Yeah. Yeah. I think on the report we have quite a bit more kind of detailed as you would expect in a report, but I think what that makes me think of is Priyanka. Maybe there's a you know, given this as if you were looking at this vendor asking these types of questions or something like that, that would push people with okay. Do not toss this point. That's interesting. But what do I then go do with this? Yeah. Super helpful.

Speaker 3:
So what, now what?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Priyanka and I were talking about this, and she's like, but we haven't finished writing this. I'm like, this is the perfect time to get feedback. Let's throw it out there. So thank you. I know we've had some folks join since we started. You will see that I've promoted you to panelist. The reason for that is so that if you want to show your video and participate actively in the conversation by a video, you can, if you want to not be on video, but still participate, please do. And we do have chat. So please go ahead and put anything you want in there. Wait, I think there are people in chat. Sorry. I totally missed that. Okay. So let's see here.

Speaker 5:
Hi. yeah, maybe just a questions to you to help understand what are some of those criteria is that some firms on this, this I'm asking you because from the professional services background they might be a few more firms who might know me offer such services like the likes of Concentric and probably many more. Right. so yeah, maybe what are some of those criteria that might help to give some context? I don't know.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. So the criteria is they have to be in our study. And so to be in our study, that means that vendors have to go through a pretty exhaustive vendor survey and they then do a 75 to 90 minute briefing with Priyanka and me. And then ideally they also will send a survey to their customers so we can get a sense of their customer satisfaction. So the, I guess we know that this isn't necessarily totally exhaustive, even though we have 60 plus vendors in the overall study. But if you know, folks who we should consider putting in or who would want to participate, please share, share who they are. We'd like to make it better. Thanks.

Backgrounds of employee experience vendors

Stacia Garr:
Any other comments or thoughts on this one? We have a couple more for you all. Okay. All right. Let's, we'll keep going. So we did the same thing with our friends in the employee experience space. And so the way that we separated this was focused on engagement and Ex or focused on CX. I think as you guys, as you all would expect given kind of the nature of our work, we didn't have any who are only focused on CX cause then why would they be in a people analytics, tech study? But so right now but there's a ton of folks who are focused on both CX and EX, and those are the folks who were in the middle. So yeah. Confirmit, Ennova, Macorva, Medallia, Press Ganey via the SMB acquisition last year, Qualtrics Questback and SMG. And so that means that they are all pretty actively working most likely with the operation side of the house on collecting customer experience data, and then also working with HR, collecting employee experience data. Moving over to the other, oops, yeah Speaker 1.

Stacia Garr:
Looking at this particular set. This is one other, the structure that strikes me, there's a whole set that do passive detection and there's a whole set of do active detection. I think actually delineating on that is quite interesting from a market perspective. So something like well, Yva's has got both, Microsoft is mostly passive, things like Questback and Confirmit are pure survey based. And that is that's going to be a dividing line and how this plays out over time.

Priyanka Mehrotra:
If you can tell me how to show that.

Stacia Garr:
We've got these folks here, so we'll get to, I completely agree, because we are, so we have been discussing this at nauseum of how to divide these folks up. Cause you're right, right. So exactly, as you said, you know, Medallia and some of these others, you know, Yva, Worklytics, clearly they are the, the challenge. And so let me, let me maybe step back. We, I find it interesting and I want to know if you will find it interesting that the, all these CX folks jumping into EX or kind of making a lot more noise about EX, a lot of them have been here for awhile. But like for instance you know, one of the things that we learned last year was just how active Confirmit is in our space. And part of the reason that we were, I use it, they were a CX vendor.

Stacia Garr:
Part of the reason that it wasn't as obvious they were EX vendor is they white label, a ton of stuff, but they're actually the underlying platform in a lot of other platforms, it turns out. And that was something new that we learned. You know the combination like with Press Ganey, who only focuses on healthcare, on patient scores, which are CX and and what nurses and doctors and others think is totally fascinating. All of that really influences how they approach this market. Right? So that was part of the reason that we thought to look at that, you know, to call out those who do CX and EX. On the engagement and EX side, you know, these are folks who have very firmly made the transition, not just because there's some who we put Glint on the other side. Cause like, you know, if you look at, for instance, Glints marketing, 85% of what they talked about is just pure employee engagement. The folks who are here are very much, so some engagement, some experience like really evenly divided. And so we thought that, you know, kind of that combination of engagement of EX, whereas the other folks are clearly eat, just EX plus CX. We thought that was interesting, but maybe it's not that interesting. I don't know. Well, what do you, what do you all think?

Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think I don't, I don't disagree with this breakdown is that the, the question in terms of, you know, the Press Ganey is, and the Medallia's of the world are looking to link experience to an end state outcome. Like there's no point in measuring experiences for experience sake. There was never an point in measuring engagement for engagement's sake. It was always, how is this driving something we care about? But I don't, I think that the bubbles help, cause it's like, this is a vendor who's going to have some sense of how experience relates up to customers, et cetera, customer experience. And they can measure those two things together. They've got that kind of understanding and expertise, whereas the others are detecting things about employees from the floor of their work. So I don't even know, I don't know if it's a useful distinction.

Speaker 1:
I just it's. It is. It's very distinctive and how the information is captured is not the purpose is, as I think is really clear, but the how of that capture is where there needs call that or not. I don't know. It's something that strikes me as a really big change in how we are listening to employees, whether we're listening to them and giving them a chance to, you know, actively express what they want because we're filling in a survey or we're literally just scraping their communications paths and time and response frequency and detecting stuff from that. Like they're very distinct processes. So yeah. I don't know how you build that into the model, but as I've been watching this space evolve, that whole passive thing is quite distinctive.

Stacia Garr:
Yup. Great. Anyone else have thoughts?

Speaker 1:
Yeah. I wonder if maybe there's a, for the sake of this year, there's almost an asterix that we put on some on the ones who are passive, you know, or passive primarily or something like that. And then in next year, maybe it'll, it'll be a little bit clearer. I think as a researcher, there's always this period where you see things changing, but there's not quite change to fully articulate it, like as a thing. And I think that we're there. Like we know it's a thing, but like it's not clear where the chips fall yet, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.

Stacia Garr:
Okay. That's, that's all super helpful. So, but to, to Speaker 1's point, you know, Yva and Worklytics over here, and Microsoft Viva, which is obviously a combination of a whole bunch of different products, those are all looking at passive data sources over here on the left. And on the right Medallia is, Qualtrics has some, I don't think Questback has any, I don't think, did Ennova how any passive data do you remember Priyanka?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Not much.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Confirmit, not no Macorva I don't think so. Yeah. So that's kind of the distinction on this chart.

Backgrounds of "no" survey vendors

Stacia Garr:
Okay. So then moving to our last one. So these are, these are folks that are, have kind of traditionally swim in, in what feels like slightly different lanes, but are now much more clearly saying we're in the engagement space via non survey methods.

Stacia Garr:
So the home for, for some of, for the ones on the left that's organization view, they do, it's pretty sophisticated, actually extremely sophisticated text analysis to understand, you know, themes, perceptions, et cetera on the far right, we've got Swoop Analytics, which under the hood does ONA. If you look on the top of it, it actually, doesn't, it's not as obvious as for some of the others, like let's say a Polinode, which is very clearly pure ONA but they do ONA to understand engagement and then R Squared is really, they do a combination of these two to understand engagement as well as some other outcomes. So you know, again, kind of back to the point of earlier, is there another chart that's just, you know, scraping of communication data, that's the non survey approach on here potentially on that might be another way that we could think about this. But the idea is trying to open the aperture of folks a little bit to say, you know, look, engagement by and large has meant survey historically. And it's moving forward is not going it's already not totally only meaning survey, but in some instances it's meaning no survey and it's these other approaches as well.

Stacia Garr:
Any thoughts or questions on this one, Or how does that make you all feel like that's a pretty big shift, right? From asking people the questions that we know they do engagement to looking at just their data. Speaker 3?

Speaker 3:
It almost feels like performance management five years ago. Right. I was like, this is the traditional approach. We do this thing. And it goes in this document and we share feedback and surveys are the same thing. It's this formal approach. And we gather feedback and we share the results and we do something about it. So I think it's, it's great to see it moving in this direction. I guess I'm new to these particular vendors. Can do you, can you tell a little bit more, but what they're actually analyzing? Like what data is it that they're getting access to and then producing an output from

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Priyanka, do you want to take a first swing or do you want me to?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, so it's primarily for Organization View it's employee text data and that can be in any form that is already collected by the company. So it may be survey texted, or from a survey that a company, might have run and pulling from there. It might be some other form of feedback that the company might be might've collected. So they don't actually collect the data. All they do is they take the employed text data provided by a company and run their sophisticated text analysis on it. R Squared does mainly thought communication, text analysis or communications data created by employees whether it's a communications tool or emails, jobs, things like that. That's what they analyze. They also do ONA and similar to Swoop both of them do organizational network analysis by looking at collaboration data. So who is collaborating with who looking at that data, that the networks that they're creating being themselves. And Swoop in particular has integrations with Yammer and Facebook workplace. So they collect a lot of employee data from those communications platforms and tools, particularly.

Speaker 3:
Thank you.

Stacia Garr:
And in particular, R Squared claims to have a pretty high level of accuracy when it comes to turnover predicting turnover I don't remember if they made any claims on engagement. I don't recall that they did, but but they are certainly selling this in, in the engagement space. Yeah it's very, this is kind of very on the edge of things. And so, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of data ethics and privacy implications and all the rest of that go along with this. Yeah Speaker 4?

Speaker 4:
You just said it. So the technologies are catching up to be able to do this. And then can you just summarize, like how many years have these companies been in business doing this one, a thing, you know, which came first, was it the business plan or the technology so that you can, and then what you just said and there's ethics and other considerations for the future?

Speaker 1:
Yeah. So R Squared I think is about three years old. They came out of a different industry. They were, Oh, I think security, I think like internet security is my recollection, but don't 100% hold me to that. But definitely a background in folks who had a different, who had expertise that could be applied to this space in, in a different way. It's kind of the point. And so on that one, which, which came first, I think they saw a problem and they said, Hey, we've developed texts somewhat similar that could address this problem, but they didn't come there. They're part of a group of vendors or vendor leaders who don't have the HR backgrounds who don't, you know, I think there's, there's a lot of within our industry, a lot of almost unwritten rules of, you know, what's okay and what's not.

Stacia Garr:
And so they're, they're part of a group of folks who are coming in and without knowledge of those rules, which is good and bad, like I'm in many instances, I'm all for breaking the rules. Like let's try things, let's experiment, let's do the rest of that. But I think that some of the, the concerns that our industry has tended to abide by you know, they're getting communicated, but I will say there's others who are in that group. And I'm not saying this particularly about R Square, but in general, I see these vendors get educated, which is like one of the coolest things that we get to do. We get to see them come in and be like, could I do this thing? And then they talk to people like us and then a whole bunch of customers who were like, yeah, maybe not quite that way.

Speaker 1:
And then about 18 months later, they're like data ethics and security are really important. Like, yes, yes they are. So I think, you know, even though this is kind of a long way of getting to what I think your question is like, you know, are they aware of these things? Are they taking these things into account? The industry and customers are educating them. So like none of these vendors can run any farther than a significant group of customers we'll let them run when it comes to things that are on the cutting edge and what I have typically seen as vendors just kind of get pulled back when customers are just like, well, we're not going to do that. Like I get that, you could do that, but we're just not going to do so, Speaker 1?

Speaker 1:
I'm just curious on how on how ONA gets into the experience category. But I think, I wonder if that is your question, cause you highlighted it on the edge and listening to you and thinking about it. I can see that it is and I think that it isn't. So I'm quite curious on to, you know what led you to including it, but as an edge category, because I think that would be instructive

Stacia Garr:
Priyanka?

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah. So I think more than experience, I would say they're leaning towards engagement right now, the way that they're doing it is looking at collaboration data to see how engaged an employee is by looking at their interaction levels, their communication levels, things like that. So for example, one of the use cases that Swoop highlighted for us was that they use data from Yammer, for a customer to see what was the level of interaction and communication during a webcast event for a company that had just shifted to remote working and that they use sort of like a standard to say that okay employees are really engaged because they're messaging and they're really on Yammer and our Yammer is going to berserk because of the amount of communications that it's listening. So that's how they're looking at engagement in this nontraditional sense.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.

Stacia Garr:
I think this is at least for me, it's some of these vendors those who say they're doing engagement, like it makes me uncomfortable. Cause like I have a very clear in my mind definition, like as a social scientist of what engagement means and that it is, but I also recognize that that's very like 2005, right? Determine engagement has just been trod over by everyone, I mean anything. And so as we think about this market I think that we just have to recognize that the way folks are thinking about engagement is different and what's most important is for the customer to understand what that means, because that may be, that may be great for them. You know? So some of the things that the ONA vendors in particular are good at is when, you know, one company acquires another figuring out where, how are people interacting and connected to each other. And, and what's important to keep in place what's important to strengthen et cetera. And that's a form of engagement, you know, how people are connected to each other. So I think we just have to kind of, as I tell my daughter have a little flex brain here, even though it might make us a little bit uncomfortable.

Are we seeing shifts in how to maintain employee engagement/experience with more hybrid work model?

Stacia Garr:
Okay. So we have roughly 10 minutes left and we did get some questions. So we'll go ahead and pop those up. I will say many of these questions, we don't necessarily have the answers to, so this is very much so a discussion, but since they were submitted, we wanted to make sure that we brought them up. Okay. Are we seeing shifts in how to maintain employee engagement experience with more, with more hybrid work model? So I would say that we're certainly seen shifts in measurement of employee engagement and experience. And we saw a lot of folks try a whole bunch of different things over the course of the last year. So whether that's, you know, the collaboration discussion or kind of more open collaboration and open communication about what's happening in the organization you know, I think we saw kind of the burst of happy hours and connectivity, and then it feels like that's kind of died off a bit.

Stacia Garr:
So I think this is still an open question that people are trying to figure out. And then I think also they're trying to figure out what is it going to look like when you have a subset of employees who are in the office during a certain period of time versus others? So I think right now we're seeing a lot of experimentation, a lot of ideation, but obviously most people are not back in the office yet, or they're not really back in that hybrid environment yet. So I don't think we've seen any, anything definitive. That's kind of my, my sense. How about others? Or maybe let me change the question. Have any of you all seen anything cool that you're like, Oh yeah, that could really work. Or that's something that I think is I haven't seen before. I know there's a lot of you on the phone, so feel free to come off, mute. Speaker 5. You came off.

Speaker 6:
So I don't know if it's something I would consider like super innovative as much as it's something that I hope sticks, but it's this notion of bringing the employee experience to the employee wherever they are. And I think before, if you want it to be a part of the culture of a company, particularly a large organization or one, that's a small kind of tight knit startup, you have to be with those people. And it's not to say, you have to be like, there is a hard requirement. It's more you miss out on so much of the institutional knowledge and comradery and kind of connection building that is really helpful. But I think the pandemic caused a lot of companies and people to think about how do we meet that, how do we take all that investment we've made in snacks and table and pool tables and stuff, and bring that to the home because we can't give everyone a pool table. And so I like the trend of meeting people, kind of what that experience at home and little things, you know, I've seen little stuff like just sending people, Postmates gift cards or Uber eats gift cards to grab lunch because we used to have catered lunch on Fridays or something. You know, it's sending them gift baskets saying, just thinking of you, you know, I saw one and it's something I got actually at two years ago, but it's something that is completely applicable now, which is, it was a succulent that said life would SUC without you. Adorable. Like it was the card made my day more than the actual succulent. But I think that that organizations are making people feel valued in many ways. But one of the things that I think is really working is just those unexpected delighters. And I hope that's something that continues because I think that's something that makes work feel much more personal. Despite not being able to have that intimacy or that closeness of physicality.

Stacia Garr:
I love that. Yeah, Speaker 3.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, it definitely has seen some creativity in our teams. We just released a big project. And so the VP of the, our technology group ordered hats with the name of the project on them for the entire team to surprise the person who had spearheaded it. And so now every time there's a meeting for that project. And so getting creative in, in the box of your zoom meeting or your teams meeting and what people can actually see and participate in. So I've seen a lot of that. I think the extension of that is supporting the whole person versus the employee. And what we've seen is what I've been calling for the last year, uninvited authenticity into people's homes has allowed us to open that conversation to now. I no longer just support you getting your work done, but I support you managing your entire life so that you can get your work done. And so I, I definitely think that there's been a switch there on the focus and I'd love to see that continue for sure.

Stacia Garr:
Great. Yeah. I love that.

Stacia Garr:
Anyone else.

How can people preserve serendipity and watercooler talk remotely?

Stacia Garr:
Great. Thank you. Well, I think that one ties in actually pretty well to this, this next one, around this concept of how do we preserve serendipity and watercooler chats remotely? So I've seen a few technologies that are trying to do this. So things where, for instance, you can kind of effectively walk into the coffee shop if you will, or walk into the office. And it's kind of a virtual environment that kind of looks like it and you just, you know, like sit yourself down to work, right. And you're there. And then people can see who else is in the space. And, and if you wanted to like, just bump into someone, you just move your little avatar up to them. And then in that instance, both your cameras go on and you're talking. And so by going to basically into this space, you acknowledged that I'm open to these serendipitous interactions, but you're still getting work done while, you know, in between these different interactions. So that's one thing that I've seen folks do that it seems like it has some potential at least. I'm wondering, have you all seen anything else?

Speaker 2:
I think we've certainly seen that exact use case Stacia being used really, really well at events as well. So the kind of breakout rooms at events where you can go up to different vendors and speak to them in that kind of similarly serendipitous setting that's yeah. Seems like a really exciting use case to be able to deploy that within the organization

Speaker 8:
As well. So yeah. Very cool.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
The other software I've seen is donut.com, D O N U T a and instead of moving your avatar is, and it being on you to initiate it actually initiates for you. So it randomly starts setting you up for 10 minute meetings. And I think that to me is much more of a watercooler experience. Cause you don't know who you're going to run into. But it does allow for that continuous watercooler chat, which is kind of cool.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. That's a great suggestion.

Speaker 2:
I think you can set up a similar thing on, on Slack as well to do that right. That you can kind of set that up across the organization or whoever's in the Slack different Slack channels and it'll automatically bumped them together, which is really cool as well. Yeah.

Stacia Garr:
Cool. Yeah. Is that just a bot in Slack?

Speaker 2:
Yeah, exactly.

Given there are so many useful & varied solutions, how are companies creating a seamless experience?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Cool. All right. Then let's go ahead. Given there are so many useful and varied solutions, how are companies creating a seamless employee experience? Well, that is multi-billion dollar question. So I mean, I guess kind of stepping back, kidding that I think that we spend a lot of time talking about the importance of it, of a tech ecosystem and, and having a clear perspective on what the employee experience needs to be and then your tech ecosystem matching that need, or that experience you're trying to create. I think that you know, that's obviously the 30,000 foot level. Then there's as we get further down, you know, how are you making sure that these different technologies are integrating together? I think that is, there are a number of ways to approach it.

Stacia Garr:
I think every vendor has some way that they claim kind of makes it so that it's seamless and easy. And so for some of them, it absolutely is. I think that one of the things we've, you know, Vizier is doing some work on this and I think it's meaningful, there are some vendors who have been really working to kind of create their ecosystems where they do clearly work together well. And they've put an effort, extra effort. And so potentially thinking about if you love one system and seeing who's kind of already in their partner ecosystem, who might fill your techniques as a way to begin your pyritization efforts. I think that can help with creating this seamless employee experience. But I think that, you know, this is obviously a very complex challenge that folks are facing and unfortunately given that complexity, it kind of depends on the individual situation. Anybody have anything to add to that?

Speaker 7:
Well, one thing that is happening and probably will continue to be a trend, is this stuff showing up in the work tech. So being, having the experience show up in Slack, Teams, and Viva so that it, even though behind the scenes platforms, there can be many, many of them, but you know, they're creating apps so that they, you know, show up in the flow of work. Yeah.

Stacia Garr:
Great. Speaker 2?

Difficulties between people analytics & employee experience?

Speaker 2:
It's kind of similar to Speaker 1's previous categorization comment. But I wondered if you'd seen or sensed any difficulties in terms of the customer within the organization between people analytics and employee experience when the two teams or departments are distinct. So how did EX vendors manage when those two teams aren't necessarily working very well together and who are they selling to primarily and what are the kind of challenges there?

Stacia Garr:
I think that the first first thing is, is what kind of EX vendor is it right? Is it, is it a service now or is it a, you know, a Medallia cause they obviously their primary customers are going be different folks. And then, you know, in terms of kind of what does that look like together? Our advice is always to run it through people analytics just because you're looking to, they've got a pulse on so much other data that you wouldn't necessarily want that to be just stuck in one part of the organization. So even if, you know, to use your example, Speaker 2, the engagement and the people analytics folks are maybe not playing as nicely together as they should. Ultimately people analytics I think is kind of the source of truth or will be over time. And so if I'm a vendor, that's where I would be trying to drive the focus. You know, obviously you work with whatever customers you're working with, but I'm trying to kind of keep that focus over on the people analytics team would be my thought.

Speaker 1:
Just a quick kind of pile on to the conversation. One thing I think if you're an EX vendor and your EX people are not connected to your PA people you're likely to orchestrate things that don't count. Like one of the things we're seeing, especially with the Medallia relationship is the data tells you the, where it makes sense to listen. If you just think about experiences, experience, like you can listen everywhere. I see a lot sort of back to this question is like, how are companies creating the experiences? Like half of them are wondering around like wondering where to start. I don't think we've got the answer of how yet. I think we're still questing on a how to start. And I'm one of the things we're seeing specifically with the PA team is like, okay, well, which populations do we have, no do we have kind of materials signals that there is a, there's a reason to go, listen, we're not just listening for listening sake. So is it onboarding, is it promotions? Is it new managers? Is it all these different places like that? The situational data starts to tell you where it's important to listen. I cannot see you being successful without that really good understanding of the dynamics in your business. So otherwise you're going to put listening and for listening sake and yeah, you know, people get what you get, you get the Alice in Wonderland outcome. Like where are we going? I don't know. It doesn't matter.

Stacia Garr:
Okay.

Speaker 1:
So yeah, it's a great question because it's often not the people on the EX team that should be making the experience process. So they have to be integral to the how and why and where, there's personal view and what we're seeing, what we're seeing from the conversations we were in.

Stacia Garr:
Cool. Thank you.

Speaker 2:
Awesome. Thank you.

Conclusion

Stacia Garr:
All right. So we are just at a time there was one question, but I don't, we're not going to cover that one. So I just want to plug our next Q&A is going to be on the purpose, purpose driven organizations work that we did. So for those, you know, we did an entire year of study, first research and this podcast series, which we just wrapped up on organizational purpose. And so we're going to do Q&A session on that. So if that's of interest, that's April 15th there's two other events I wanted to flag for you all. If you have interest in attending one, maybe not as relevant for this audience, but potentially is on learning content. So how do you think about learning content?

Stacia Garr:
What content different audiences need, when they need it, why they need it, how to deliver it, et cetera. So if you have learning folks or yourself for learning folk, that cares about that. We're going to do a roundtable on that on April 13th. And then the other one, which probably is more relevant to this audience is a roundtable on DEIB. So diversity equity, inclusion, belonging, and skills. So we just kicked off a study where we're going to be looking at what are the skills that an organization needs to be more diverse, equitable, and focused on inclusion and belonging. And how do we think about those groups of skills? How do we think about how we drive that change across organizations? So that'll be around table that we are doing on April 22nd.

Stacia Garr:
So if you all have interested in that one we'd love to have you participate. And then I will give a plug for one more piece of research we have going, which is on DEIB and Analytics. So we are looking for research interviews for that. We will have a roundtable because we've got a lot going on right now. We're kind of pacing that one a little bit slower. So they'll probably be in May. But looking at the intersection between diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and analytics, and how we make it stronger, better look at the data we need, et cetera. So lots of stuff going on around here. So thank you all so much for coming today and always appreciate the really active participation from everyone in the conversation and hope that we see you on another one very soon. Take care.

Categories: Experience and Engagement

Tags: Member Only, Q and A Call, Tune In

Q&A Call: Choosing Learning Tech

Posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2021 at 10:46 AM

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.

Categories: Learning and Skills

Tags: Member Only, Q and A Call, Tune In

Q&A Call: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging Technology

Posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2021 at 4:04 PM

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.

Categories: Diversity-Equity-Inclusion-and-Belonging, HR Technology

Tags: Member Only, Q and A Call, Tune In

Events

Topics Discussed

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Defining DEIB

Why DEIB & Analytics

Why are we studying it now?

People Analytics for DEIB has arrived

Why it's so hard

What we are researching

What the literature says

Initial findings: Building a strong DEIB & People Analytics partnership

Metrics that matter

How do you get HR to use analytics to drive change?

Which groups or identities to prioritize as they're all important

Impact and accelerating the integration of DEIB & People Analytics

What are some of the challenges to building a partnership between DEIB & People Analytics?

What is the role of legal?

What is the role of vendors?

What analytics are being used for DEIB?

Evidence of accountability via reward, accelerating progress or being effective in general

Conclusion

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

What is Mobility?

Main approaches to mobility

How is mobility changing in orgs and what are the trends that you're seeing?

What is the main reason orgs are thinking about mobility?

How are managers and employees being prepared to this new mindset?

How to align goals with approaches

How has COVID effected mobility?

Remote mobile teaming, organizational issues, and special attributes of team members

How does work from home impact career mobility and should it?

How do orgs know which approach to use

How do orgs know which approach to use

Approaches in relationship

Owning your career

What's the relationship between skills & mobility?

Conclusion

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Who is RedThread

Our journey to understand purpose

Purpose vs everything else

Understanding purpose businesses

Mission statement vs purpose

Understand purpose businesses

Introduction Purpose has gone mainstream

Employees expect businesses to act

Introduction Purpose = good business

Purpose as a self reinforcing system

What that means for HR

In summary: Attract, Enable, Develop, Retain

Connecting organizational purpose vs employee purpose

Tight parallels between purpose, IT and D&I

Why purpose now

Health orgs only?

Will purpose remain a thing after the pandemic

How can I help my organization focus on purpose

Conclusion

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

The importance of employee experience

Differences between the two terms

Relationship between the two

Areas of focus for people analytics vendors

Engagement/Experience customers are mostly happy

Backgrounds of employee engagement vendors

Backgrounds of employee experience vendors

Backgrounds of "no" survey vendors

Are we seeing shifts in how to maintain employee engagement/experience with more hybrid work model?

How can people preserve serendipity and watercooler talk remotely?

Given there are so many useful & varied solutions, how are companies creating a seamless experience?

Difficulties between people analytics & employee experience?

Conclusion

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

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