Topics discussed:

 

• Introduction
• Agenda
• A little DEIB & History
• Why history matters
• Diversity data & metrics
• Inclusion data & metrics
• A leading indicator
• 2 ways to approach inclusion analytics
• Where to start: 8 steps of DEIB analytics
• What success metrics should be used measuring DEIB
• Self-ID campaigns
• What should we do if we don't have a lot of data
• What additional data sources should be consider
• Common pitfalls we should avoid
• Conclusion

   

 Topics Discussed 

 

• Research Findings
• Inputs into research
• 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?
• How do other companies decide what content to use?
• 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?

 

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.

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

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

Who is RedThread

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

Our journey to understand purpose

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stacia Garr:
Okay, I'll keep going.

Purpose vs everything else

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

Understanding purpose businesses

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

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

Mission statement vs purpose

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

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

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Great question.

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

Understand purpose businesses

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

Introduction Purpose has gone mainstream

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

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

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

Employees expect businesses to act

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

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

Introduction Purpose = good business

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

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

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

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

Speaker 4:
Yeah.

Purpose as a self reinforcing system

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

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

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

What that means for HR

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

In summary: Attract, Enable, Develop, Retain

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

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

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

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

Connecting organizational purpose vs employee purpose

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

Stacia Garr:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Speaker 1:
Definitely. I will.

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

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

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

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

Tight parallels between purpose, IT and D&I

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

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, absolutely.

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

Speaker 1:
Okay.

Why purpose now

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

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

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

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

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

Health orgs only?

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

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

Will purpose remain a thing after the pandemic

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 2:
Awesome. Thank you.

How can I help my organization focus on purpose

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

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

Stacia Garr:
Alrighty.

Conclusion

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

Speaker 1:
Thank you. Bye bye.

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

 

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.

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.

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

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

Defining DEIB

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

DEIB became a bigger priority in 2020

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

The role and types of DEIB Tech

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

DEIB Tech market in 2021

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

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

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

Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yes. Thank you Staica.

Speaker 1:
Not for me. Very straightforward.

A more steady evolution

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

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

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

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

Regulation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 1:
Okay. Thank you.

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

A growing market

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

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

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

People Analytics for DEIB has arrived

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

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, let's do it.

What should users consider before buying new DEIB Tech?

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

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

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

Benefits & risk of DEIB Tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 4:
I love that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can analytics be leveraged as part of DEIB Tech?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stacia Garr:

Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

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

How we help and what we do

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

What's the deal?

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

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

Questions that started our research

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

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

What did we find?

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

The differences do matter

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

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

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

Stacia Garr:
Yeah.

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah.

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

Speaker 1:
Uh huh

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, Great thanks!

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

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

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

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

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Right.

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

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
For sure.

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

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

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

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

Speaker 2:
Exactly.

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

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

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Hmm. That's interesting.

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

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

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forward-thinking orgs are reconciling skills & competencies by…

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are people relating skills & competencies to capabilities?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Okay.

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

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

Speaker 7:
Pleasure.

How can skills be assessed for proficiency levels?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 6:
You get all the good ones

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

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

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

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

Stacia Garr:

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

What system works best?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

 

 

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr:

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

Stacia Garr:

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

Stacia Garr:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Stacia Garr:

Thank you. Well, shall we dive in?

Steve Arntz:

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

Stacia Garr:

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

Book Clubs are having a moment

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

What can Book Clubs provide

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Best group discussion you have ever been a part of

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

Speaker 1 ready?

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 1:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Speaker 2:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Speaker 3:

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

Speaker 3:

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

Steve Arntz:

That's cool. Thank you for sharing.

Speaker 1:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Stacia Garr:

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

Speaker 4:

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

Speaker 2:

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

Stacia Garr:

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

Speaker 5:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

The research and the selection

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Stacia Garr:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Stacia Garr:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Speaker 4:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Stacia Garr:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

Any other thoughts observations before I move on?

Speaker 3:

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

Steve Arntz:

Absolutely.

Speaker 3:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Speaker 3:

Right. Makes sense.

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

Speaker 5:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

How do we connect with one another through reading

Speaker 6:

Hi Steve.

Steve Arntz:

Hi.

Speaker 6:

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

Speaker 6:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Speaker 6:

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

Steve Arntz:

You're welcome, Speaker 6. Thank you.

Stacia Garr:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Stacia Garr:

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

Steve Arntz:

That's awesome.

What do you define as reading

Speaker 6:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Speaker 5:

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

Speaker 5:

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

Group size and participation

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Book diversity and facilitation

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

How to host a Book Club that doesn't suck 

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Speaker 4:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Speaker 6:

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

Stacia Garr:

Yeah.

Steve Arntz:

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

Stacia Garr:

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

Steve Arntz:

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

Conclusion

Stacia Garr:

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

 

 

Q&A Call Video

TRANSCRIPT

Introduction

Stacia Garr (00:00):

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

Stacia Garr (01:09):

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

Stacia Garr (02:03):

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

Stacia Garr (02:49):

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

Stacia Garr (03:42):

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

Speaker 1 (04:33):

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

Stacia Garr (04:47):

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

Stacia Garr (05:01):

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

Speaker 2 (05:04):

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

Stacia Garr (05:14):

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

Stacia Garr (05:34):

Anyone else?

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

Stacia Garr (05:44):

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

Stacia Garr (06:18):

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

Speaker 2 (06:25):

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

Stacia Garr (06:55):

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

Speaker 2 (07:02):

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

Stacia Garr (07:31):

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

Speaker 3 (07:42):

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

Stacia Garr (08:41):

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

Speaker 3 (08:55):

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

Stacia Garr (09:14):

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

Speaker 4 (09:20):

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

Speaker 4 (10:15):

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

Stacia Garr (10:58):

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

Speaker 4 (11:05):

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

Stacia Garr (11:44):

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

Priyanka Mehrotra (11:50):

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

Stacia Garr (12:39):

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

Growth: even in times of crisis

Stacia Garr (12:51):

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

Stacia Garr (13:26):

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

Stacia Garr (14:15):

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

Speaker 3 (15:07):

Can you explain, CAGR?

Stacia Garr (15:08):

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

Stacia Garr (15:23):

Thank you. Any other questions?

A crowded market landscape

Stacia Garr (15:33):

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

Stacia Garr (16:29):

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

Stacia Garr (17:26):

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

Stacia Garr (18:16):

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

Priyanka Mehrotra (18:46):

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

Stacia Garr (19:15):

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

Priyanka Mehrotra (19:26):

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

Stacia Garr (19:38):

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

Differentiating capabilities according to vendors​

Stacia Garr (20:52):

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

Stacia Garr (21:48):

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

Stacia Garr (23:14):

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

Speaker 3 (23:20):

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

Stacia Garr (23:54):

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

Speaker 1 (23:59):

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

Stacia Garr (24:36):

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

Speaker 1 (25:13):

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

Stacia Garr (25:35):

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

Stacia Garr (26:36):

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

Speaker 1 (27:47):

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

Stacia Garr (28:27):

Yeah. Great. Any other comments or thoughts?

Vendors responded to customer needs

Stacia Garr (28:40):

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

Stacia Garr (29:39):

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

Stacia Garr (30:30):

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

Stacia Garr (31:14):

Priyanka did I miss, anything there?

Priyanka Mehrotra (31:16):

Nope.

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

Stacia Garr (31:19):

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

Stacia Garr (32:07):

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

Stacia Garr (32:57):

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

Stacia Garr (33:53):

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

Stacia Garr (34:51):

Okay.

Stacia Garr (34:56):

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

Stacia Garr (35:40):

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

Stacia Garr (36:31):

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

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

Stacia Garr (36:58):

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

Stacia Garr (37:45):

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

Stacia Garr (38:32):

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

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

Stacia Garr (39:22):

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

Stacia Garr (40:21):

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

Stacia Garr (41:22):

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

Priyanka Mehrotra (41:57):

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

Stacia Garr (43:12):

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

Stacia Garr (43:19):

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

Speaker 5 (43:31):

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

Stacia Garr (44:13):

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

Stacia Garr (45:06):

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

Speaker 5 (45:57):

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

Stacia Garr (46:13):

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

Speaker 5 (47:03):

Okay. Thank you.

Stacia Garr (47:09):

Any other questions?

Stacia Garr (47:15):

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

Stacia Garr (47:31):

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

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

Stacia Garr (48:00):

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

Stacia Garr (48:20):

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

Stacia Garr (49:19):

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

Stacia Garr (50:15):

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

Priyanka Mehrotra (51:31):

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

Conclusion

Stacia Garr (52:22):

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