Events

L&D's DEIB commitments are growing

As we head further from the catalytic events of summer 2020, it’s heartening to see that organizations are continuing to ramp up efforts on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). For example, the Association for Talent Development (ATD) reported that 39% of organizations have introduced DEIB programs in the past 2 years. And organizations appear committed to continuing this trend: A study by Traliant and WBR Insights reported that 79% of organizations planned to allocate more budget and / or resources to DEIB in 2022 compared to 2021.

Like their broader organizations, L&D functions are doing more to foster DEIB. LinkedIn Learning’s 2 most recent annual workplace learning reports (2022 and 2021) indicate that L&D functions plan to deploy more DEIB programs in 2022 compared to 2021. In addition, more L&D functions said they own or share responsibility for DEIB efforts in their organizations (Figure 1).

Figure 1: L&D commitments to DEIB efforts  |  Sources: LinkedIn Learning Workplace Learning Reports, 2021 and 2022

These growing commitments make a lot of sense: L&D functions should be more involved in DEIB efforts. With their broad and cross-functional reach and their ability to influence expectations for the ways people work and interact with one another, L&D functions are uniquely positioned to drive the kind of deep and widespread culture change that DEIB requires. As Emma Birchall, Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Ericsson, put it:

You can’t overstate the importance of L&D in DEIB. L&D is the part of the organization that translates the business strategy into signals to individuals and teams about how they execute on the strategy.

Moreover, improving DEIB is (or should be) an enterprise effort. In our experience, DEIB efforts that are seen as 1 group’s job face an uphill battle. DEIB culture change isn’t something that can be achieved if only 1 team, no matter how dedicated and capable, is committed to it.

As L&D functions continue to become more deeply embedded in their organizations’ DEIB efforts, partnering with teams across the organization—especially DEIB teams—will be key. We touch on this idea of partnership throughout this paper.

3 reasons L&D isn’t more effective on improving DEIB (yet)

Despite the growing sense that L&D functions can and should do more to improve the DEIB cultures in their organizations, many are not contributing as effectively as they could. We see 3 reasons for this:

1. Lack of organizational DEIB policy / guidance. Many of the leaders we talked to said they were waiting for an organizational DEIB strategy to be developed before they started incorporating DEIB into employee development experiences.
2. Defaulting to training. In many organizations, it’s assumed that training is all L&D functions do (or should do). This can lead to an over-focus on DEIB training as a strategy for effecting change. There’s a good deal of research indicating that one-off, compliance-focused diversity training alone does not improve DEIB in organizations. The article “Why Diversity Programs Fail,” by F. Dobbin and A. Kalev, gives a good overview of why this may be.
3. L&D’s own blind spots. In the learning survey that we conducted in December 2021, about 75% of L&D respondents were white (Figure 2). This lack of diversity may make it difficult for L&D functions to recognize their own biases. For example, in our survey, 50% of L&D pros who identified as white said their L&D function proactively applies a DEIB lens to learning opportunities. Only 36% of those who did not identify as white agreed with the same statement.

Figure 2: RedThread learning survey L&D respondents by race / ethnicity (n=288) | Source: RedThread Research, 2021. See appendix for survey methodology and respondent demographics.

Jeffrey M., Senior Manager for Organizational & Leadership Development at a commercial space company, articulated the challenges associated with a lack of diversity within L&D functions in this way:

If you don’t have like me, or someone Latino or Asian on the team, then there’s a certain lack of diversity of thought that’s built into the development opportunities that are offered.

Fortunately, these challenges aren’t insurmountable. There’s a lot that L&D functions can do—starting now—to more effectively drive DEIB cultures in their organizations. That’s the focus of this study.

Focus on learning equity

In our lit review on DEIB & learning, we identified 4 main areas L&D functions consider when approaching DEIB (Figure 3):

1. Delivering DEIB training. L&D functions deliver training on topics like unconscious bias, with a focus on making the training more effective and “stickier."
2. Making all training more DEIB. L&D functions adapt the language, visuals, physical and virtual spaces, etc., for all trainings to make them more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
3. Developing employees’ DEIB skills. L&D functions identify the skills that will drive a DEIB culture in their organizations and focus on enabling employees to develop those key skills.
4. Focusing on learning equity. L&D functions take a systemic approach to DEIB in employee development. They make the systems and processes of employee development more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Figure 3: 4 ways L&D can improve DEIB in their organizations | Source: RedThread Research, 2022.

Our research focused on this 4th approach: learning equity. We chose this focus largely because much has been written on the first 3 approaches, but learning equity is a relatively new concept for organizations. This systemic approach was described by Kate Shaw, Director of Learning at Airbnb:

DEIB has to be not just a piece of what you do, but woven throughout everything you do.

In addition, there’s a correlation between a systemic focus on DEIB and high performance. In our learning survey, 61% of L&D pros in high-performing organizations said their L&D function proactively applies a DEIB lens to employee development, versus 36% of L&D pros in the rest of our dataset.

3 elements of learning equity

Our research indicates that organizations are making development opportunities more diverse, equitable, and inclusive by paying attention to 3 specific aspects of employee development (Figure 4):

Figure 4: The 3 elements of learning equity | Source: RedThread Research, 2022.

• Discovery is how employees find out about development opportunities. Employees use a range of formal and informal methods to get information about the opportunities available to them
• Access is which employees can take advantage of a development opportunity if they want to. Employees’ access to many development opportunities is determined by the organization, often based on an employee’s role, skills, job function, job level, or management status.
• Participation refers to which employees actually participate in the development opportunities they have access to.

L&D functions should assess Discovery, Access, and Participation in their organizations to identify where systems and processes may be inequitable or hamper diversity and inclusivity. With a more nuanced understanding of where the gaps are, they can take more targeted actions to close those gaps and improve learning equity.

Discovery

Discovery is a critical component of learning, as it’s what connects employees to the opportunities they need. Some of the ways employees discover opportunities to learn and grow include:

• Informational emails from the organization
• Newsletters
• Assigned or required training
• Searching / browsing on the internet, intranet, LMS, LXP, or other learning platform
• Automated recommendations from learning systems
• Recommendations from senior leaders, managers, peers, or colleagues

Even when several of these methods are available to employees, some groups of people face consistent and systemic barriers to discovering opportunities.

For example, many L&D functions rely on email to share info about development opportunities. But if a large portion of the workforce doesn’t have an email address or can’t easily check their work email regularly, then defaulting to email isn’t an equitable or inclusive method for Discovery. As one roundtable participant put it:

It's inequitable if L&D sends an email about a development opportunity and 30% of your workforce doesn't use email.

We also know—for example, through research we did on DEIB skills—that information about opportunities often flows through informal channels. Some opportunities, like job rotations or special assignments, are open only to those who know about them.

Interestingly, our research found that high-performing organizations make opportunities more transparent (Figure 5). About 81% of employees in high-performing organizations reported their organizations are transparent about the development opportunities that are available, compared to 61% of employees in other organizations.

Figure 5: Respondents who agree their organization is transparent about the development opportunities available to employees, to a significant or very great extent, by business performance (n=1521) | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.

L&D functions can make employee development more equitable and inclusive by making all opportunities explicit and transparent to everyone. With this transparency, employees can find and take advantage of the learning that’s right for them.

Making Discovery more equitable and inclusive

This research uncovered a number of challenges associated with Discovery, as well as some effective ways that L&D functions are addressing those challenges.

Challenge 1: Organizations make access to opportunities too narrow

Historically, organizations make development opportunities available only to employees with an immediate or obvious need. In general, this choice applies not just to costly opportunities, but even to the ones that are free or inexpensive.

This narrow focus limits Discovery: Employees are told only about the opportunities that the organization feels they need, rather than having the choice, freedom, and equity to determine their own career path.

Action: Increase transparency about what’s available

To the extent possible, L&D functions can make Discovery more equitable and inclusive by becoming much more transparent about all the development opportunities that are available.

For example, they might:

• Remove limitations based on role, function, seniority, etc. from what’s visible / searchable in the LMS or LXP
• Review any matching or recommendation algorithms to ensure they’re equitable and inclusive
• Communicate directly with employees rather than relying on managers to disseminate information about opportunities
• If there are different newsletters or email distribution lists for different target audiences, publish those lists and allow employees to opt into them
• Implement a talent marketplace to make projects, gigs, rotations, jobs, mentoring opportunities, etc. more explicit and discoverable by anyone in the organization. This doesn’t necessarily mean implementing a new tech tool: It can be done in a low-tech / low-cost way with spreadsheets, or it can be an add-on to existing learning or HR systems

Making opportunities visible to everyone, even if not everyone gets Access to them, at least enables employees to see more options—to envision different paths they might pursue.

Challenge 2: Different groups of employees use different methods to discover opportunities

Part of what drives inequities in Discovery is the simple fact that not everyone accesses information in the same way.

In our research, we saw some of the largest and most consistent differences in Discovery between frontline and not-frontline workers. Frontline employees often experience challenges using some of the most common methods that L&D functions rely on to share information about opportunities (e.g., email).

Action: Tailor Discovery method by employee group

Leaders said they put a lot of effort into understanding how different groups of employees discover info about development opportunities. Two specific ideas for uncovering these differences are:

• Experiment with different channels. Do some A/B testing. Try putting the same message in different communications channels (e.g., email, chat, intranet, etc.). Track open rates and clicks by employee group and by channel to find out who’s accessing the message where. Reach out to the IT team for information from systems the L&D function can’t pull data from.
• Ask for feedback. Many learning leaders said they value their relationships with Employee Resource Group (ERG) leaders and DEIB team members in part because these individuals can provide insight into how certain employee groups find information about development opportunities.

Mike Murphy, Director of Inclusion and Community Programs at CFA Institute, talked about the importance of having data to identify obstacles to Discovery:

Let’s say I've reached the entire 70-person marketing team but only 12 of the huge IT team. You have to have the data and then ask: What was the obstacle? What's keeping me from getting that message to all the places they are?

With a more nuanced understanding of how different groups of employees acquire information about development opportunities, L&D functions can adjust their efforts to utilize the channels that target audiences rely on the most.

Action: Cast a wide communications net

Another approach is for L&D functions to communicate more, and more widely. Many leaders talked about the need to overcommunicate. They suggested:

• Repeat messaging multiple times in multiple channels
• Leverage influencers in the organization—such as ERG leaders—to get the word out about development opportunities
• Don’t assume tech is best: Think broadly about all the communications channels available. Sometimes paper flyers in a break room are most effective

Leaders emphasized the importance of trying multiple ways of sharing info about development opportunities to increase the chances that all employees will find what they need.

Challenge 3: Some employees have more time and ability to find opportunities

To be sure, employees have a responsibility for their own learning—and part of that responsibility is finding relevant development opportunities.

However, it’s also true that employees’ ability to find opportunities can differ based on the strength of their networks, how much time they can spend looking for opportunities on the clock, their position within the organization, their location, their tech capabilities, and more. Some employees are more privileged in their ability to Discover opportunities than others.

Action: Make Discovery easier for all

L&D functions can make Discovery more equitable and inclusive by making it more automatic and embedded in employees’ work. Some specific ideas include:

• Embed information about opportunities into the places employees do their work—such as chat, browsers, intranet homepages, point of sale systems, time clock systems, etc.
• Incorporate information about opportunities into processes that all employees go through, such as performance and development conversations, onboarding, required / compliance training, or open enrollment for benefits. All these events offer touchpoints where employees could potentially share information about their skills and interests and receive information about opportunities.
• Use tech to match employees with opportunities based on their skills, abilities, experiences, and desires. The recommendation engines in many learning tech systems, especially LXPs, are intended to surface relevant opportunities for employees.

One company makes Discovery easier by asking employees, as part of their regular development planning process, to identify and write down the skills they’d like to work on. This information is fed into the LXP so that it can make recommendations based on those skills.

Real-World Thread: Making Discovery a 2-Way Street

Ericsson, a multinational networking and telecommunications company, has over 100,000 employees around the world. Unsurprisingly, these employees have very different development needs and goals.

To address the challenge of enabling such a varied population to discover development opportunities, Ericsson is taking the burden of Discovery off the employee’s shoulders as much as possible.

To do this, the company is implementing a skills-based learning tech ecosystem that will match employees with opportunities based on their skills signature.

CLO Vidya Krishnan described:

The ecosystem should be intelligent enough that you don’t have to find the opportunities. They find you. It’s a 2-way street.

The skills signature will comprehensively and holistically describe not only what an employee can do now, but what they want to do in the future. This will allow matching algorithms to surface highly relevant opportunities to employees of all kinds.

Access

Access to employee development refers to who can take advantage of a development opportunity if they want to. Access is determined by things like:

• Nominations for select programs
• Logins / permissions to view / consume certain courses in an LMS or LXP
• Manager approval to participate in development opportunities
• Technology (access to computer, tablet, mobile, good internet, etc.)
• Technical capability / tech savvy
• Cost (particularly the ability to pay for opportunities that are then reimbursed)
• Time zone
• Language

In the past few years, some organizations have been working to make Access more inclusive. For example, RedThread's research on coaching found they’re offering coaching in various forms to more employees. They’re also opening courses to more participants (which, in many cases, became possible as in-person courses were put online during the pandemic) or removing restrictions on inexpensive or free content.

Valarie Williams-Foy, Organizational & Staff Development Lead at the University of London, described how the university opens Access to all employees:

We were founded on the value of access, as we were the first university in the UK to allow women. We allow anyone to register for any development opportunity.

In high-performing organizations, more respondents agree that employees have equal Access to development opportunities (compared to employees in other organizations). Figure 6 illustrates this difference: In high-performing organizations, 84% of employees agree employees have equal Access, compared to 58% of employees in other organizations.

Figure 6: Respondents who report people in their organization have equal access to development opportunities, to a significant or very great extent, by business performance (n=1521) | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.

Of the 3 aspects of learning equity, Access is the one with the biggest power differential between employees and organizations. No matter how hard some employees try, they may not be given Access to certain opportunities. This means it’s especially incumbent on organizations to ensure the Access they do provide is as equitable and inclusive as possible.

Making Access more equitable and inclusive

L&D functions are taking targeted actions to address 3 challenges associated with making Access to development opportunities more equitable and inclusive.

Challenge 1: The way skills / abilities are defined, prioritized, and measured may cause Access to be inequitable

In many organizations, there are assumptions and implicit biases that influence how skills and abilities are defined for various tasks and roles. If these assumptions are not reviewed, identified, and addressed, then the criteria used to measure skills and match employees with opportunities may be inherently inequitable.

Action: Make decisions about Access transparent and equitable

As with many DEIB efforts, simply bringing transparency to decisions can help improve equity around who gets Access to development opportunities. To make decisions more transparent, L&D functions can do the following:

• Establish and publicize standardized criteria for any nomination-based opportunities. Criteria can be based on, for example, employees’ current and needed skills, tenure / experience, and career desires. Leaders in this research noted that it’s important to review nominations to ensure they adhere to the criteria.
• Review and revise any underlying or foundational documentation—for example, skills or competency definitions—that might inform decisions about Access to development. This effort can ensure the inputs to decisions about Access are themselves as unbiased and inclusive as possible. It’s likely that some of this documentation lives outside the L&D function, so partnering with other functions is critical here.
• Consider removing human decisions altogether. It’s possible to implement tools or matching processes that can automatically give employees Access to content and opportunities. For example, some internship, apprenticeship, and rotational schemes simply assign people to teams or projects, rather than managers selecting people for their teams.

We particularly like the idea of removing human decisions where possible. In our experience, automatic matches (rather than manager selection) can add more diversity of thought to a team—since nobody is selected for “fit”—and are often more successful than managers or employees might expect.

Challenge 2: Legacy systems, processes, and assumptions can make Access inequitable

Most organizations have legacy systems and processes like HiPo nomination schemes or manager approvals for many opportunities that might limit Access for certain people.

In some cases, for example, managers are reluctant to approve employees’ requests to participate in development opportunities. Often this reluctance is driven by a belief that their teams won’t be able to meet targets if they spend work time learning—or, if the opportunity is a rotation or gig, a fear of losing the employee down the line. In other cases, employees aren’t given Access to courses because the courses aren’t deemed relevant to their work or their career path.

All these legacy systems create potential biases in Access that prevent certain employees from benefitting from some (often highly valuable) development opportunities.

Action: Track Access metrics and step in when something isn’t right

L&D functions can make some of these legacy systems more equitable and inclusive largely by shining a spotlight on who has Access to what, so that inequities become more obvious. To do this, L&D functions can track Access metrics, identify gaps, and step in when something doesn’t look right.

For example, one leader shared that for a HiPo program he ran, he noticed only 9% of nominees were women—when women made up 38% of the target audience for the program. He used this data to get buy-in to rewrite the nomination criteria for the program. The number of women nominees rose shortly thereafter.

Other leaders shared similar stories and emphasized that they couldn’t have intervened or made changes without data. They track access metrics such as:

• Nomination numbers for select programs / opportunities
• Amount spent per employee on development
• Number of employees with access to mentor or sponsorship programs
• Number of employees who have regular career conversations with their managers

These metrics can be sliced and analyzed by categories like frontline status, gender identity, age, seniority, job level, or race / ethnicity (in some countries). Which data cuts are most important will depend on which employee groups are underrepresented in your organization.

Challenge 3: Logistical and operational barriers can make Access inequitable

Logistical and operational factors like timing, language, tech, and cost can all be barriers to Access. For some employees, particularly those on the front line, it can be difficult to Access development opportunities while on the clock. For others, being in the “wrong” time zone or speaking the “wrong” language might prevent them from accessing development opportunities.

When it comes to online and remote learning, tech access is a big issue for some organizations. Some employees may not have the right device(s) or a strong enough internet connection. Some may not be able to afford better internet if they’re working from home, for example.

And affordability is an issue not only for employees but for companies: It can be expensive for organizations to open up access to more employees.

Action: Collaborate to identify and address common barriers to Access

L&D functions should identify and eliminate as many common barriers to Access as possible. In many cases, this means working with leadership, IT, HR, and other teams to make changes.

To address the time challenge, one approach is to try formats or methods that do not require employees to step away from their work for extended periods of time. Some leaders are experimenting with microlearning, for example, so that employees can access development in short snippets. To address some of the other challenges, L&D functions might:

• Provide devices to all employees
• Offer learning stipends and / or prepay for outside opportunities rather than providing reimbursement
• Offer learning methods that allow for flexible schedules
• Allow local teams to tailor or translate language
• Offer events at times that work globally, or multiple access times
• Open opportunities that have little or no marginal cost per employee to all employees, whether or not the opportunities are directly related to their role

These logistical and operational barriers were cited again and again in the course of this research—yet they may not be entirely within the L&D function’s control to fix. In these cases, having strong relationships with other functions can help pay for and provision some of the solutions suggested here.

Real-World Thread: Tracking Access metrics to improve learning equity

South Africa is 1 of a handful of countries with strict reporting requirements on companies’ training spend. Organizations are required to track and report how much they spend to train different groups of employees. These reports prompt companies to show that they have provided equal training opportunities to all employees.

At one major bank in South Africa, the head of learning solutions points out that this reporting isn’t just a check-the-box exercise. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s good for business because it helps increase the quality of all employees at the bank.

The bank tracks Access metrics like how much money is invested in training people from disadvantaged groups. Reports are broken down by job grade, race, gender, and disability status. The reporting requirements have been tightened in recent years to prevent companies from favoring training spend on certain job levels. These tighter requirements complicate the reporting, but ensure a fair distribution of investment across employees at all levels in the organization. Now, reporting targets are set by job grade and job band to drive equity in investment.

Each year, the company spends a percentage of payroll to develop a certain band of employees, with the goal of developing a strong, diverse pipeline of employees moving into job bands and job functions that currently have less representation.

Participation

Participation refers to which and how many employees actually take advantage of the development opportunities available to them. Our past research found that employees participate in employee development by doing 6 things:

• Planning their development and careers
• Discovering opportunities (as discussed above)
• Consuming learning content and experiences
• Experimenting with knowledge and skills
• Connecting with others for learning
• Performing better on the job, and learning while doing it

Participation in development opportunities encompasses all 6 of these behaviors, and there’s a wide variety of methods that employees can use to engage in them. The research we did on learning methods found 66 learning methods, and we’re sure there are more.

High-performing organizations enable more Participation in employee development (Figure 7). For this discussion of learning equity, we broke down our survey respondents’ answers by age, frontline status, gender identity, and race / ethnicity. Across all groups, more employees in high-performing organizations reported their organizations enable them to participate in these 6 employee development behaviors, compared to employees in other organizations. As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats.

Figure 7: Respondents who agree their organization enables them to engage in each learning behavior, to a significant or very great extent, by business performance (n=1530). Similar percentages were found when we looked at these 6 behaviors by employee group. | Source: RedThread Research, 2021.

Still, we know that Participation in most organizations isn’t as equitable or inclusive as it could be: Most organizations have groups of employees who aren’t participating in development as much as they could or should. The challenge for L&D functions is to find those groups of people, figure out why they’re not participating, and fix what’s causing those inequities.

Making Participation more equitable and inclusive

We discovered 3 primary challenges associated with Participation, as well as targeted actions that L&D functions can take to address those challenges.

Challenge 1: L&D functions need better insights on Participation

To make Participation as diverse, equitable, and inclusive as possible, L&D functions must understand where the inequities in Participation in their organizations are and what’s driving those differences.

Data is critical to gaining that understanding with some level of detail and nuance. Without data, actions might be well-intentioned and seem reasonable, but potentially lead in the wrong direction.

Action: Analyze Participation data to identify and address inequities

Data about Participation tends to be more readily available than data about Discovery or Access. Most L&D functions track Participation rates: “butts in seats” is one of L&D’s most well-established metrics. If demographic data is available, L&D functions can use it to slice and dice their Participation data to see where there are differences, and to understand who’s taking advantage of which opportunities.

L&D functions can analyze available data to answer questions about Participation such as:

• How do Participation rates vary by gender, ethnicity, age, frontline status, or other demographics that matter to our organization?
• What differences in Participation show up if we look at various intersectional identities?
• Are different groups of employees participating in different types of opportunities—for example, required training vs. stretch or rotational assignments? Who and why?
• Are some groups of employees spending more time on development opportunities than others? Who and why?
• Do some groups of employees participate in a greater range of development opportunities than others? Who and why?
• Do some groups of employees have stronger connections to more senior or more influential people in the organization who can help them grow? Who and why?

Tania Tiippana, an OD consultant working with a multinational manufacturing company, emphasized the importance of gathering data from all employee groups:

I asked, “Do we have data about how things are working in South Korea? In Poland?” We didn’t. So we did a global needs analysis and tracked participation by gender, location, and so on to find the gaps.

Although the answers to the above questions won’t make Participation more diverse, equitable, and inclusive by themselves, they can help L&D functions prioritize and decide where to take action.

Challenge 2: Messaging about opportunities may exclude certain employee groups

The language and visuals used to market development opportunities matter a lot—they’re often what makes the first impression about an opportunity to an employee. If employees perceive that an opportunity is not inclusive of “people like me,” they may choose not to participate.

Many L&D functions are discovering the various ways their organization’s messaging about opportunities isn’t inclusive, from gendered language to images that only show people of particular ages or ethnicities.

Action: Ensure messaging is DEIB

L&D functions appreciate that messaging should be inclusive and applicable to a broad base of employees. We heard of many efforts in L&D functions to broaden the language they used to describe opportunities, particularly ensuring that the language and visuals represented their organization’s employee population. Specifically, L&D functions were:

• Including broad representation of different genders, ages, races / ethnicities, and worker types (manufacturing, office, retail, etc.) in visuals and language, aligned with the demographics of their workforce
• Ensuring language does not exclude certain groups of employees—for example, using highly competitive language or analogies that only certain people understand (such as sports metaphors)
• Implementing processes to regularly review all messaging through a DEIB lens

A number of leaders recommended partnering with the DEIB team to assess how inclusive the messaging for development opportunities is. Many DEIB teams offer fairness audits. They can review messaging and outreach strategies, and make recommendations for improvements.

Challenge 3: Some opportunities aren’t designed inclusively

Sometimes an opportunity might be inequitable or exclusive because it’s not well-designed for certain groups of people. Participant demographics can also be a source of exclusion. If there are no members of underrepresented groups participating in the opportunity—or in the roles an employee might attain through a particular development path—employees considering the opportunity might be less likely to start down that path.

Action: Incorporate diverse perspectives when developing opportunities

One of our favorite insights from this research is that no matter how much we think through something, it's likely to be biased if only a few people are doing the thinking.

Leaders advised doing one simple thing to reduce this bias: Bring more people into the process. There are 2 main ways to do this:

1. Add perspectives to the L&D function itself. There are lots of ways to bring in new perspectives: permanent hires, special projects, rotations, gigs, internships, apprenticeships, and more. One leader advocated for recruiting people from underrepresented groups to L&D early in their careers, so that there’s a pipeline of more diverse L&D thinkers and leaders into the future.
2. Ask for feedback. Many, many leaders talked about how they solicit feedback from lots of people in their organizations. They ask for input from ERG leaders, the DEIB team, and focus groups / interviews of employees who are representative of the organization’s employee population.

Based on these diverse perspectives, L&D functions can make changes to things like the format of an opportunity, who participates, or even what opportunities are offered.

Action: Get intentional about demographics

Demographics matter for Participation. But they matter in different ways for different opportunities. Sometimes it makes sense to intentionally build diversity into the participant pool of an opportunity, so that no matter who looks at the opportunity they see someone participating who looks like them. Other times there’s a need to craft development opportunities solely for members of specific underrepresented groups.

The common thread is intentionality. Leaving demographics to chance is where bias and inequity can creep in. This intentionality can also help ensure there is a pipeline of employees from underrepresented groups ready to move into more senior / more visible positions, so that employees coming after can picture themselves on similar paths.

Real-World Thread: Building diverse cohorts

A multinational aerospace corporation has an L&D function that is strongly committed to ensuring diversity within the cohorts that participate in their leadership development programs. There are 3 levels of programs for aspiring, new, and current leaders.

The L&D function believes that if everyone in a cohort looks and thinks the same way, they’re going to get less value from the program. So they scrutinize the demographics of each cohort and ensure each one has diverse representation.

Kevin B., a former DEIB leader at this company and participant in the new leader program, believes that the value he got from the program derived largely from his interactions with other participants. He reflected:

If you have a homogeneous, cookie cutter class, you’re not going to learn a lot. In my cohort, I made tremendous friends with a couple of guys from the UK. I even had someone from the Saudi royal family in my class, which was amazing.

Kevin noted that in some cases it can be helpful to do the opposite—to bring together members from 1 underrepresented group. But in general and for most topics, he believes diverse cohorts learn better from one another.

Wrapping Up

We’ve come away from this research convinced that improving learning equity is one of the best ways L&D functions can contribute to the DEIB efforts in their organizations. Figure 8 summarizes the challenges associated with the 3 elements of learning equity (Discovery, Access, and Participation) and some actions L&D functions can take to address each challenge.

Figure 8: Summary of challenges and actions for the 3 elements of learning equity | Source: RedThread Research, 2022.

Looking forward, we expect L&D functions will continue to make strides to improve DEIB in their organizations—and we think those strides should be focused on learning equity. We hope the ideas in this paper have given L&D functions some concrete ideas about the steps they can take to move their organizations toward employee development that is more diverse, equitable, and inclusive for all.

Note: for Appendices, including study demographics, research methodology, and contributors please download the PDF report.

We attended the Workhuman Live conference from May 16-19 which took place in Atlanta, Georgia. With about 1,800 people in attendance, it was the biggest in-person event we have attended so far this year. Besides the joy of meeting old friends and making new ones, the conference filled us with a sense of optimism and positivity around the future of work. Overall, the event was all about bringing “humanity” back into work.

Key takeaways

Connections are more important than ever

In keeping with its tradition of making the conference relevant and real, Workhuman made sure that this year one of the key messages was around something we all missed during the pandemic¾deep human connections. We heard a lot about the importance of building and managing connections. For example, Dan Heath spoke about the importance of connections during his keynote as he emphasized the role they play in creating moments that matter and in elevating experience. The conference itself was designed to facilitate conversations among attendees by helping them connect, share ideas, and spark conversations through “braindates” that could be set up via the app.

This was also emphasized by Workhuman through their own existing product, the Conversations tool, which is part of their Workhuman Cloud suite (Figure 1). The tool is designed to encourage conversations and check-ins between employees, managers, peers, and coaches to facilitate performance development. The check-ins can be prompted by anyone and are supported by feedback that can be requested by employees anytime. With the company increasingly leaning into the performance management space, it was great to see it emphasize the positive impact such tools can have as shared by one of their customers ¾IBM. Since launching Workhuman, leaders at IBM have watched feedback requests and responses increase 5x what they were before. We expect to see Workhuman do more work on this front in the future.

Figure 1: Conversations by Workhuman cloud | Source: Workhuman, 2022

Care is integral to performance

Keeping in line with the overall theme of humanity, self-care, and being considerate of others’ needs was a topic that came up often during the different sessions. Whether it was the honest conversation and stories shared by Simone Biles or Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote, we were pleased to see emphasis laid on breaking down old practices and behaviors if they no longer served the purpose for which they were designed.

Talking about her journey and her appearance at the 2021 Olympics Simone Biles, in conversation with Workhuman CHRO, Steve Pemberton, emphasized the importance of well-being, mental health, and performing for yourself. The message was extremely relevant at a time when a large portion of the workforce has found themselves struggling with mental health related challenges in the workplace.

Care is also about being considerate of other peoples’ differences and putting in place systems that account for those differences rather than discriminate based on them. Malcolm Gladwell spoke about the need to do away with systems and policies that are there just because “this is how we have always done them.” Instead, he emphasized the need to consider the different abilities and skills that people can bring to the table and harnessing them in ways that benefit everyone.

DEIB is essential for hybrid work

With a lot of talk about hybrid work came a lot of discussion about the need for organizations to be inclusive and fair. One of the sessions was led by McKinsey and discussed the dangers of forcing employees to return to offices as the majority of employees prefer some form of hybrid work according to their latest research. The speakers talked about the need to be inclusive when it comes to designing return to office policies by providing work-life support, showing respect and concern for well-being, and fostering collaboration among team members.

Particularly interesting was the session by Josh Levs, where he spoke about how the workplace and society fail men when it comes to practices around paternal leave and caregiving. In an extremely moving talk, Levs spoke about his own personal struggle of becoming a new father and working in a place that did not afford him, as a man, any time off to care for his newborn. The session highlighted the need for a shift in thinking around the notion of society expecting women to be the primary caregiver because of the adverse impact it has on their role in the workplace and ultimately slows business growth. This was especially relevant for a few reasons. Many working mothers found their caregiving responsibilities increase severalfold during the pandemic, leading them to quit the workforce. Additionally, the current national baby formula crisis is putting extra strain on the physical and mental health of already overburdened working mothers who are often expected to be the primary and (in many cases) sole provider of childcare.

What we liked most

The educational nature of the content. There was a very good mix of analysts, customers, non-customers, and vendor partners in attendance, and there was something for everyone. Workhuman Live has a history of bringing together thoughtful leaders and this year was no exception. There was a lot to learn about not just creating better workplaces but also about how to be better towards each other as humans and most importantly, towards ourselves.

The vibe. As we said earlier this was a conference that celebrated humanity. While Workhuman demos and solution briefings were provided along with some customer success stories, the conference was less about selling and talking about the success of the solution and more about creating better experiences for everyone. Each day began with a mindfulness and meditation session to improve awareness and connection. The conference area was peppered with stations such as Gratitude bar, Book café, photo stations and much more.

Seeing old friends. This one is a bit personal, but wow, was it great to see a lot of folks we’ve missed for the last 2+ years. Getting to connect like this really reminded us how wonderful our HR community is and how lucky we are to do the work we do.

Overall, this was a fantastic event. We look forward to the next Workhuman Live.

I spent the last two days in Texas with the Perceptyx team and approximately 200 of their customers. Held at the Hyatt Lost Pines resort, about 30 minutes outside of Austin, the event was an enthusiastic celebration of being together again and of Perceptyx’s successes over the last few years. The team also made sure event attendees got a good dose of Texan culture, bringing in longhorn steers, a top-notch country western band (complete with line dancing lessons), and wonderful Tex-Mex food.

While I live-Tweeted the opening keynotes from CEO John Borland, CTO Sham Telang, and their external keynote presenter Seth Mattison, I thought it could be useful for you all if I do a quick round-up of key takeaways from the event. Here are the top highlights:

• Significant growth since pre-pandemic
• Excellent customer stories
• Compelling vision around the product roadmap

Significant growth since pre-pandemic

In the opening session, Borland expressed his thanks to customers both for attending the event (approximately 80-90% indicated via a show of hands that this was their first post-pandemic event) and for their support during the pandemic. He has good reason to be thankful: Since before the pandemic, Perceptyx experienced a 260% growth in revenue and a 150% growth in the number of customers. Further, many of those customers are blue-chip companies, as was shown in their slide of customers in attendance at the event.

It appears that Perceptyx has been able to manage that growth effectively, given that they reported a Net Promoter Score© (NPS) of 74, which is higher than the people analytics tech industry average of 59.

Excellent customer stories

Given that NPS, it is not surprising there were a plethora of strong customer stories on display at the event. Some of the most notable came from the main stage, where the following organizations presented:

• Abbvie, S&P Global, and Advocate Aurora Health had Dr. Bethany Dohleman (Director, Human Capital Research), Kate Brown (VP, Culture and Engagement), Meghan O’Brien (People Project Lead), and Rebecca Daisley, PhD (Director of Talent Management) present on “How to Future-Proof Your Organization.”

Key Insight: Flexibility and agility are key to transformation.

• AB InBev had Valerie DuBois (Global Director, Employee Experience) present on “The Secret to Empowering and Influencing Your Leaders.”

Key insight: By putting data in the hands of managers, you can create ownership of understanding and solving the people problems orgs face.

• UC Health, where Matthew Gosney (VP of Organizational Development) and Ashley Bruning (Chief Nursing Officer) presented “Create an Employee Voice Strategy Built for Impact.”

Key insight: The conversation is the relationship. (Oh, and Colorado is drop-dead beautiful.)

• WPP (the largest advertising agency holding company) had Judy Jackson (Global Head of Culture) talk about “Getting Comfortable (and Brave) with the Uncomfortable.”

Key insight: Meetings are like plays – you need to know your audience and which actor will best deliver which line. Sometimes, if you are part of an under-represented population, the right “actor” to present sensitive race / ethnicity data is someone from the majority population.

All of those sessions will be available on replay later, and I suggest you have a listen to them, if you have the chance.

I also had a chance to attend a few breakout sessions, and especially enjoyed the following ones:

• Ahold Delhaize had Shanna Daugherty (Global Manager Associate Development) present “An ‘Ecosystem’ Listening Model for A Disparate Workforce.”

Key insight: A comprehensive listening strategy will allow you to create meaningful insights, such as measuring the link between employee experience and store performance and the impact of leadership development programs.

• Boeing had Kristin Saboe, PhD (Senior Manager, Employee Listening, Research, and Talent Strategy) and Frank Zemek (Employee Relations Specialist, Employee Engagement Survey) present “Innovative Approaches to Continuous Listening & Acting at Scale.”

Key insight: Enabling employees to launch their own surveys can unleash incredible power in orgs, but needs to still have some centralized management so as to stay legally compliant, make sure audiences aren’t over-surveyed, and stakeholders are appropriately engaged. It also scares the heck out of a lot of practitioners (judging from the questions in the room).

Compelling vision around the product roadmap

In the morning, Sham Telang, CTO, shared the product roadmap. He indicated that Perceptyx is trying to solve the problems of:

• Fragmented data
• Disjointed user experience
• Missing linkage between employee experience, behaviors, and actions
• Manual reporting and analytics

The way Perceptyx is trying to address this is by offering four distinct product and platform capabilities – Monitor, Listen, Enable, and Activate (see Figure 2) – under one umbrella (see Figure 3). The idea is that the four products, Ask, Sense, Dialogue, and Develop, will enable a holistic listening strategy for organizations.

Figure 1: Perceptyx’s Monitor, Listen, Enable, Activate Framework | Source: Perceptyx, 2022.

Figure 2: Perceptyx’s Four Products, Ask, Sense, Dialogue, and Develop | Source: Perceptyx, 2022.

As many of you know, Perceptyx recently acquired three companies, CultureIQ, Waggl, and Cultivate. This new 4-product strategy heavily incorporates those latter two acquisitions, specifically:

• Ask – This is the traditional Perceptyx employee experience and engagement product, which can include big annual census surveys or other special-focus surveys (e.g., DEIB, Covid-19).
• Sense – This is the traditional Perceptyx lifecycle and pulse survey product, but it will have some of Cultivate’s passive listening capabilities integrated into it moving forward.
• Dialogue – This is the Waggl acquisition, which can enable crowdsourcing, conversations, pairing and voting (using conjoint analysis techniques). Perceptyx is positioning this as a way to accelerate action planning after using the Ask or Sense products by immediately engaging the organization in crowd-sourced ideation and discussions about how to move forward (see Figure 4).
• Develop – This is the Cultivate acquisition paired with the traditional Perceptyx 360 offering (see Figure 5). The initial offering will be combining that 360 information with feedback on employees’ behaviors, derived from their digital exhaust, to provide insight into their “blind spots.” For example, if someone indicated in a 360 that their manager doesn’t recognize them enough, but the manager thinks they do recognize enough, then Cultivate can then flag for that manager when they are recognizing their employee less often than usual or less than their colleagues.

I’m not sure where or in what ways CultureIQ is incorporated into this product strategy.

Figure 3: Summary of Dialogue Product Capabilities | Source: Perceptyx, 2022.

Figure 4: Summary of Develop Product Plans | Source: Perceptyx, 2022.

A number of other updates were also mentioned:

• Listening Home – This is designed to be a one-stop-shop for finding all of this listening data and for developing action plans on it (see Figure 6). It will include an “In the flow of work” bot (presumably based on Cultivate) to provide nudges, coaching with recommendations, etc.
• Seamless HCM integration – Today, Perceptyx integrates HCM data via flat files. Beginning in Q3, they will have integrations with all the major players (Workday, SuccessFactors, and Oracle).
• Upgraded UX for Analyze dashboards – This was just released prior to the conference, and actually generated a spontaneous cheer in the room, indicating folks’ enthusiasm. The new UX has a better look and feel, improved underlying infrastructure, and faster performance.
• ML/NLP-powered dashboards – Coming in Q4, Perceptyx plans to improve its ability to use machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to highlight sentiment and insights from the data. These will first roll out to their Engagement, D&I, Attrition, and Benchmark surveys.
• Standardized widgets for dashboard creation / configurable dashboards – Billed as “coming soon,” Perceptyx is enabling customers to use standardized widgets to create custom dashboards. They are also offering more out-of-the-box dashboards, which customers can configure. In conversations with customers, this enhancement was one of the ones that excited them most.

Figure 5: Summary of Listening Home Plans | Source: Perceptyx, 2022.

Final thoughts

Perceptyx has significant momentum and a clear vision for being a one-stop-shop for employee listening. As one of the (dwindling number of) independent vendors left in the space, they are able to focus on customers’ needs exclusively, without being distracted by the demands of a larger organization that may have other primary objectives. Perceptyx is driven by its vision, mission, and values (see Figure 7), which have a strong emphasis on succeeding “together” with customers. That customer-centricity came through strongly in many of the conversations I had with customers at the event.

The next thing will be for Perceptyx to deliver on their product vision by effectively integrating its acquisitions. While Waggl was the acquisition customers seemed to most intuitively understand – this may be because it’s an older acquisition so Perceptyx could more effectively message how it fits in – I am most excited by the opportunity for Cultivate to help Perceptyx differentiate itself more from its competitors. The underlying AI, which will power sentiment analysis, collaboration analysis, and targeted nudges, has the potential to truly change how employees and leaders understand themselves and their teams. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next year has in store for Perceptyx.

Figure 6: Percepty’x Mission, Vision, and Values | Source: Perceptyx, 2022.

Early May saw the Learning Technologies conference take place (in person!) in London. Typically held in February / March, it was postponed this year to May due to COVID. The event drew a crowd of learning leaders–mostly from North America and Europe—to discuss all things learning tech.

It was my first in-person conference since the pandemic started, and man was it fantastic. There really is something about connecting face-to-face (not through screens) that makes me, at least, feel more alive and connected.

Key Takeaways

Here are my 5 biggest takeaways from the experience.

DEIB & Learning was a running theme

It was clear that Donald Taylor and the event team intentionally wove diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) into the conference program. The speaker lineup, for example, was clearly crafted to include people with a range of different backgrounds and perspectives.

And in the opening keynote, author and speaker Matthew Syed talked extensively about the value of cognitive diversity. I appreciated his emphasis that the more complex the problem or situation, the more diverse perspectives might help reveal innovative solutions. He also illustrated how cognitive diversity and demographic diversity are not the same, but are often correlated.

That said, the panel on diversity, inclusion, and learning wasn't particularly well-attended. Perhaps 30 or 40 people showed up, whereas other sessions drew well over 200 attendees. To be fair, the panel was scheduled at the end of Day 2, when many people were already leaving to catch planes and trains. Perhaps some people wanted to attend but couldn't.

Speakers emphasized growth mindset and partnering outside the L&D function

In addition to DEIB, during the 2 days of the conference we heard a lot about growth mindset and the importance of partnering outside the L&D function.

Growth mindset, a term coined by child psychologist and Stanford professor Carol Dweck, has made its way into the L&D ethos in recent years. Fundamentally, it's the belief (mindset) that talents can be developed, rather than being innate gifts we're either born with or not. This year's Learning Technologies conference featured lots of talk about the importance of fostering a growth mindset in organizations. There's a growing understanding that growth mindset can help build learning cultures and foster things like collaboration and innovation.

Another theme that wove its way into many other presentations was partnering with teams outside the L&D function. Speakers talked mostly about working with other talent / HR teams, but some mentioned legal, IT, procurement, and other functions. Overall, I was thrilled to see an emphasis on reaching out and partnering. L&D functions are finally looking up and around, thinking about how to break down the silos that have existed for so long in so many organizations.

Participants were most interested in skills and learning analytics

The sessions that were most heavily attended had to do with 2 things:

1. Learning analytics and learning impact. There were 2 sessions in particular that focused on learning analytics and measuring impact. Learning leaders seem to be moving away from the long-held conviction that, to be of any value, learning analytics must prove a direct, causal link between learning activities and business outcomes. That conviction has, I believe, held L&D functions back from trying to measure anything other than "bums in seats" and "smile sheets." So I was thrilled that the presenters at Learning Technologies focused on how to identify correlations (not causation) between learning activities and outcomes the organization as a whole cares about. They talked about relating learning activities to outcomes like employee engagement, diversity and inclusion, production efficiency, strategic priorities, or even sales. One of the speakers, Peter Manniche Riber, showed a slide titled, "Alternatives to the Happy Sheet" that might have been the most-photographed slide of the conference.
2. Skills. Based on session content and the questions asked during Q&As, most organizations are still at the very beginning of their skills journeys; nobody has it figured out. L&D functions are grappling with the question: What skills do we have in our workforce, and what skills will we need in the future? They're interested in systems, processes, and tech that can help them map the current and needed skills in their organizations. One of the most interesting tidbits about skills came up during Day 2's opening keynote, when Marco Dondi of McKinsey & Company shared research that identified 56 distinct elements of talent (DELTAs): skills and abilities that will be key to work in the future.

People were happy to connect in person

I wasn't the only one thrilled to be in person with people again. Learning Technologies draws many loyal attendees—I talked to at least 10 people who've come every year for a decade—and participants were incredibly excited to see old friends and colleagues after a 2-year hiatus.

Talking to the conference organizers, I was struck at the thought that was put into enabling people to connect in meaningful ways. Breaks were 45 minutes long—longer than many other conferences I've attended—to allow people to have good conversations. There were lots and lots and lots of evening networking events and parties. And in true European fashion, wine was served at lunch. It was clear to me that the conference organizers know exactly how people derive value from the conference—and it often doesn't have to do with the speaker lineup.

Skills & mobility tech vendors were missing from the exhibition hall

Finally, it was interesting to note that a number of key skills and internal mobility vendors didn't have booths in the expo hall. Instead, I saw lots of LMSs, LXPs, microlearning platforms, coaching offerings, and content providers.

I should note that some of the vendors who did have booths are doing some really interesting things with skills. They're incorporating skills data into their products and using skills to, for example, make tailored content and learning recommendations. But in these cases, skills tended to be part of the offering rather than the offering.

The mix of vendors who were in the expo hall isn't surprising; it's pretty standard for most learning tech conferences. Still, given how important skills tech and talent marketplaces are within learning tech right now—and given the interest in skills expressed by conference attendees—I was surprised not to see at least a few of the bigger players.

Wrapping Up

The next Learning Technologies event is their Autumn Forum, a 1-day follow-up to the May conference that'll be held in October 2022. The Autumn Forum is included in the price of the May conference ticket, and attendees told me they like the opportunity to reconvene after less than a year. It helps keep ideas fresh.

Next year's conference has already been scheduled for 3-4 May, 2023. I have to say that, weather-wise, London in May is much more pleasant than London in February. Shifting the timing of the conference is perhaps one of the silver linings of COVID. I look forward to next year.

Last week, Visier announced its acquisition of the assets of Yva.ai (pronounced ee-vah, like the alien robot in Wall-E), an AI-driven collaboration analytics vendor. This is interesting news in our space because of what it says about:

• The shifting use cases in the PAT market
• The rising importance of continuous, passive data analytics
• The continued consolidation of people analytics tech

This blog took a little while longer to write than usual because there’s a lot to say about these two different technologies and the shifts within the market. In the below, we cover the following:

1. Overview of Visier and Yva.ai
2. Background on Multi-source Analysis Platforms (MSAPs) and shifting people analytics tech use cases
3. What is a collaboration analytics tool?
4. What is Yva.ai?
5. Why did Visier acquire the assets of Yva.ai?

If you aren’t looking for any background on the space, feel free to skip bullets 2 and 3.

Overview of Visier and Yva.ai

Let’s begin with a quick review of who is who (see Figure 1). Visier is what we call a “multi-source analysis platform” (MSAP), meaning it connects data from existing HR systems (e.g., HRIS, LMS / LXP, TM) and other operational systems (e.g., sales or customer data) and enables robust analysis and distribution. Yva.ai is a collaboration analytics tool that combines data from corporate tools, such as Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, and other collaboration tools, and enhances it with weekly sourced peer-to-peer feedback.

Figure 1: Overview of Visier and Yva.ai | Source: RedThread Research, 2022.

Background on Multi-source Analysis Platforms (MSAPs)

Before we get to more specifics on Visier and Yva.ai, let’s first talk about what MSAPs are and their current opportunities and limitations. As mentioned above, MSAPs allow companies to integrate data from existing HR and other operational systems, analyze that data, and distribute insights about it at appropriate levels of security throughout the organization. These insights are used by people analytics and HR leaders, and, increasingly by business leaders, managers, and individual employees.

There is an incredible amount of power in this type of system. By bringing together disparate data, these systems can create a single, integrated source of data truth, which can then be used to answer critical questions about what is happening with the workforce. Our research shows that effectively using integrated people analytics data can help impact businesses in terms of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, as we wrote about in our report, Unlocking the Hidden C-suite Superpower: People Analytics. These types of significant business outcomes are typically the result of people analytics teams working to help answer strategic business questions, with the support of the CHRO and senior business leaders, who make the final decision.

Yet, the people analytics team is only so big in any organization and can only answer so many questions themselves. By putting data into the hands of more business leaders, managers, and employees, organizations could enable more people to make better, data-backed decisions about people, and thus better enable those organizations (and people!) to thrive. This is the dream that many of us in people analytics have for the future.

Shifting PAT Use Cases

Putting data in the hands of the masses is not just a dream for vendors – in fact, it is a necessity for their future. As shown in Figure 2 (a sneak peek into next week’s release of the People Analytics Tech study), we’ve found that the use cases for people analytics tech are changing. Specifically, as people analytics teams increase in sophistication, they use vendors – especially MSAPs – to integrate increasingly complex data. At some point, though, some of the people analytics teams will take this holistic, integrated data set out of the multi-source analysis platform and put it into a centralized data lake, doing less of their work in the platform. This allows those PA teams to do more sophisticated research and analysis.

Yet, that doesn’t mean MSAPs are no longer important – in fact, it is just the opposite. This is when these systems can become the most valuable. As the data become richer and more continuous (meaning they change and update on a continuous basis), they have increased value in terms of helping business leaders, managers, and employees make better decisions. MSAPs are superb at scaling and sharing data and insights across complex enterprises. Further, given the time that it takes organizations to adopt new technologies, it is just at this point (between Phase 2 and Phase 3 in Figure 2) that these technologies start to be adopted at the scale necessary to drive meaningful insights across the business.

Figure 2: A Shift in Use Cases for PAT Systems | Source: RedThread Research, 2022.

However, for MSAPs, there is a stumbling block in achieving this dream of ubiquitous use: The data these systems integrate often doesn’t change frequently enough to entice senior business leaders, managers, or individual employees to want to look at it continuously (e.g., daily). (Sorry friends, I know some of you will disagree. However, our research shows that 17% and 8% of MSAPs are accessed daily by people managers and employees, respectively. And, to be honest, I think there might be some inflation in those numbers.)

This is not the fault of these solutions. It is, instead, due to the nature of the data they pull in; for example, promotions only happen a few times per year, engagement data are still only collected annually or semi-annually in many organizations, and learning data may not be as robust or relevant as everyone hopes. This is a problem that MSAPs must solve if they are going to get to the next level of adoption across their non-HR / people analytics end users.

And so, with that understanding of what is happening for MSAPs, let’s turn to the other partner in this acquisition: Yva.ai, a collaboration analytics tool.

What is a collaboration analytics tool?

A collaboration analytics tool allows leaders to bring together passive data that are generated through employees’ daily interactions with each other – think Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, and other collaboration tools – and generate insights from those data.

There are some real benefits to these types of tools. For example,

• Analysis of these data can be highly predictive of burnout, turnover, etc., so this can help leaders identify and address challenges earlier
• These data do not have to be collected actively (e.g., via a survey), so employees don’t have to be disturbed / leaders don’t have to wait to ask employees how they are doing
• These data can be delivered back to employees to give them heightened self-awareness

Yet, as you can imagine, there are also some concerns with these types of tools:

• There may be concerns of “Big Brother” monitoring, which can erode trust, if it is not made clear what data are being collected and analyzed. Many tools require employees to opt in – not opt out – which can help address this concern. Also, companies can control the level at which data are reported, so information isn’t necessarily tied to individual employees.(Note: We wrote separately about some of these issues in this blog about Cultivate when it was acquired by Perceptyx.)
• Managers may not use these insights appropriately if they don’t understand that they are predictions, not certainties. Further, some managers may use this information to target specific individuals if they already suspect that they are planning to leave. This can be addressed by controlling the level at which managers can receive these data / insights (e.g., not reporting on fewer than 5 employees) or rolling these capabilities out slowly so as to train / enable managers appropriately.

Despite these concerns, it is important to recognize that using collaboration analytics will increasingly become the norm, especially in locales not restricted by GDPR. There is simply so much power in these data that it is unlikely they will remain ignored for much longer.

What is Yva.ai?

Yva.ai is a collaboration analytics tool and was a spinoff from ABBYY, an AI company that helps customers with their digital transformations. Until last week, Yva.ai focused on helping customers understand employee dissatisfaction by combining active and passive employee data and using it to understand employee well-being. It also uses AI models to help companies predict resignations and address the issues that might be driving them.

Figure 3: Yva.ai Sample Burnout Evaluation Report | Source: Yva.ai, 2020.

Some of the differentiators for Yva.ai include:

• Helps companies avoid employee resignation by detecting and addressing burnout early
• Predicts employee resignations within a week with 94.5% accuracy, within 5 weeks with 88% accuracy, and within 3-6 months with 70% accuracy
• Combines active data collected from weekly micro surveys with passive collaboration data
• Enhanced data security for passive data analysis that only looks for semantic signals and destroys the contents after analyses
• Offers smart feedback capabilities: The system can identify employees who should be asked about whom and when, based on passive data collection

When we conducted our review of Yva.ai a few months ago, some of the things that most excited us about the tool included:

• Personal dashboards for employees based on data collected on and from them that allows them to compare their data against organizational level data and share insights with others
• The increased focus on data anonymization, employee privacy, and security by aggregating data, allowing employees to opt-in and opt-out of data collection when they want, and ensuring customers either self-host their data on the cloud or on-premise
• Additional frequent listening capabilities through pulses and micro surveys for companies that only have annual or quarterly engagement surveys

Finally, a few other things of note about the company:

• Organizational network analysis capabilities allow understanding of who works with whom across office collaboration tools such as Slack, Teams, Jira, etc.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to analyze anonymized text data collected from office collaboration tools such as Slack, Teams, Jira, etc.
• Diversity metrics are built-in as a core module, available throughout the entire platform
• Smallest unit at which it reports data is a group of 5 individuals

Why did Visier acquire the assets of Yva.ai?

The primary reasons Visier bought the assets of Yva.ai include:

• The ability to connect what people are doing to outcomes
• The creation of sticky, continuous insights for non-HR / people analytics users
• The underlying AI and NLP technology

Connecting how work is done to outcomes

The headline reason for this acquisition is that it will allow Visier to connect insights on how people are working to the outcomes they produce. This should allow companies to better understand their employees and make better decisions. As Visier CEO Ryan Wong stated:

“Collaboration analytics reveals new insights into how people and teams work together. It enables us to go from understanding “who” and “what” to answering questions about “how” people work best… Now, our customers will have a 360-degree view of what their employees do, how they feel and how they work together. The Visier People Cloud’s outcome-focused insights give leaders the guidance they need to make better decisions. Ultimately, it’s our belief that the companies that best understand their employees will be the ones that thrive in the future of work.”

Creation of sticky, continuous insights for non-HR / people analytics users

As mentioned above, many MSAPs are looking to engage non-HR / people analytics leaders more. The acquisition of a tool like Yva.ai helps Visier address this challenge. Collaboration data can tell users something meaningful about their workforce (or themselves) on a daily (or weekly basis). Again, CEO Ryan Wong identified this as a primary objective for the acquisition

“Leaders can use this combination of active and passive listening capabilities to gain deeper insight beyond individual workers and focus on relationships within networks of people, and the overall wellness of their teams. With this knowledge, managers gain a better understanding of team dynamics and employee well-being. But beyond the leadership benefits, these insights also empower every worker. Employees can gain a deeper understanding of where they are spending their time and who they are working with, and uncover pathways to improving their interactions, collaboration and performance.”

The underlying AI and NLP technology

Yva.ai has some of the most sophisticated AI and NLP technology available on the market right now. With the vast amounts of data available at its disposal, Visier will certainly find interesting ways to deploy that technology. Our hope is that they will use it to simplify the process of finding insights for business leaders, people managers, and employees.

Additional thoughts

One of the interesting things about this deal is that it is an acquisition of the assets of Yva.ai, not of the company as an entire entity. This is typically a strategy acquiring companies use to reduce risk and potential losses, as it enables them to cherry-pick which parts of the company they want, often leaving undesirable portions (like liabilities). We don’t know why Visier chose this approach as opposed to a traditional acquisition strategy.

One of the implications of an asset acquisition, though, is that Visier did not automatically bring over all the employees from Yva.ai. They did, however, hire more than 30 Yva.ai engineers and data scientists, the majority of its global workforce. This additional headcount should strengthen Visier’s tech capabilities, in a time when it is really hard to hire engineers.

Some of the questions we still have about this acquisition are:

1. Cultures: This is Visier’s first acquisition, so it is just building its muscle at integrating outside technology and teams into its organization. This deal will bring in a portion of the Yva.ai team, many of whom have been working at the cutting edge of AI and machine learning technology, and in different locales than Vancouver-based Visier. There may be a very different set of cultural expectations between these teams.
2. Leadership: It’s not clear what role Yva.ai’s CEO, David Yang, will have within Visier. However, he has clearly been the visionary behind Yva.ai’s tech, and we wonder what will happen to that vision and Yva’s execution capabilities if he leaves or does not remain in a position of product leadership.
3. Data privacy and ethics: Traditionally, Yva.ai has used an opt-in model for its data. We wonder how that will work as Visier tries to tie those data to the rest of its data – and what happens to them if / when employees opt out. And how that then impacts the value proposition for business leaders and people managers?

Moving forward

The collaboration analysis tool market will continue to grow as more companies realize the power of data they are already sitting on and become more accustomed to using it. That said, we expect to see many of the vendors in this space entering into partnership agreements or getting purchased, as these data and the associated analysis are fundamentally more powerful if they are connected to other types of data. Therefore, expect to see some action with some of the other vendors in this space such as Glickon, Network Perspective, RSquared, Swoop Analytics, and Worklytics.

Workday’s annual Innovation Summit was on April 14, and it was a mix of updates on the business and insights into what will come next. (Sorry for the late update — #childcarewoes) It was wonderful to be back in person for an analyst day (so many hugs!) and to share the types of things that only get said over a glass of wine or dinner.

Starting at the 30,000-foot level… here are my key takeaways from the day:

• Rapid revenue growth: Workday is planning to grow its revenue from $5 billion to $10 billion in the next 4 years and plans to do so by increasing customer wallet share, “winning” the office of the CFO with an industry approach, growing internationally and within medium-sized organizations.
• Greater openness: To achieve these objectives, Workday is evolving its historical tagline of “The Power of One” to “The Power to Adapt,” – which means a more open cloud ecosystem and more acquisitions and partnerships.
• More EX: Workday is doubling down on employee experience, meaning better UX design, a more holistic approach to employee experience, and a greater focus on employee-centric topics (skills, engagement, and DEIB).

Rapid revenue growth

Like many other HR tech vendors in 2021, Workday experienced strong growth last year – 22% for its FY22 (which ended January 2022). Co-CEO and Chairman, Aneel Bhusri said this is the strongest growth Workday has experienced in the last 4-5 years. The customer numbers they shared for the last year (as of January 2022) are:

• All Workday customers: 9,500+
• Workday Adaptive Planning: 5,900+
• Workday Recruiting: 3,100+
• ​Workday Human Capital Management: 4,050+
• Workday Time Tracking: 2,775+
• Workday Payroll: 2,625+
• Workday Learning: 1,975+
• Workday Financial Management: 1,300+
• Workday Procurement: 1,100+
• Workday Prism Analytics: 925+
• Workday People Analytics: 500+
• Workday Strategic Sourcing: 400+

Executives put forth a much bigger goal for the future: 20% growth YOY until they hit $10 billion in revenue, which they forecast to happen in 4 years. This means that while it took Workday 16 years to get to its first $5 billion in revenue, executives now expect to double its income in a quarter of that time.

To do this, Workday executives want to be the leader in HCM across industries and a leader in financial-services-based industries. Specifically, they are looking to do the following:

• Increase customer wallet share. This means extending Workday's offerings into other organizational silos (e.g., from Finance to HR) and strengthening their standing with CIOs. This strategy seems to be working so far, given that 40% of new ACV comes from Workday's existing customer base, up 20% from a few years ago.
• Win the Office of the CFO with an industry approach. Workday recognizes that it needs a deeper industry approach, particularly for finance. They had 1,300 FINS customers in FY22, up 22% YOY, reflecting about 1,500 deployments across core finance products in FY22. (See the image below.)
• Grow internationally. Workday is looking to extend its international footprint, particularly in the UK, Germany, France, and Australia.
• Move into the medium enterprise (500-3,500 employees). To expand further into medium-sized enterprises, Workday is simplifying and streamlining the go-live process. Specifically, it developed Workday Launch (1,400 customers last year), making Workday 35-40% less expensive to deploy and shortened deployment timelines by 35-50%. Last year, new ACV growth from medium enterprises was more than 40% YOY.

Image 1: Workday's Industry Strategy, Source: Workday | 2022

“The Power of One”: Now “The Power to Adapt”

Workday's tagline, “The Power of One” (referring to their integrated, single platform and data model), has been a mantra at the company for forever.

Therefore, my ears perked up when Patricia Harris, SVP of Solution Marketing, said, “’The Power of One’ is now about ‘The Power to Adapt.’ We are not on an island. CIOs need to take advantage of these multi-cloud architectures.” Pete Schlampp, Chief Strategy Officer, went even further, talking about how Workday is the “mesher of the enterprise,” weaving together information needed by CIOs, CFOs, and CHROs. The idea is that Workday should be the tool used by all these different functions to make critical business decisions.

Image 2: Workday's Vision for Enterprise Clouds, Source: Workday | 2022

To do this, Workday needs to help organizations have more capacity to use its systems strategically. Therefore, Schlampp talked about how they are focused on eliminating the extra manual processes leftover from legacy systems. And when those processes cannot be removed, Workday needs to become a “drudgery automator,” enabling people to focus on more strategic tasks. (BTW, “drudgery automator” may be my favorite term from the day… but “mesher of the enterprise,” with its similarity to “master of the enterprise,” is a close second.) The September 2021 acquisition of Zimit, a configure price quote (CPQ) solution built specifically for services industries, is an example of a “drudgery automator” and a single-industry focus.

This brings us to the next point – which is how Workday plans to both enable customers to adapt while at the same time adapting themselves to those customers' needs. Executives pointed to a robust build / buy / partner approach, with Schlampp reiterating, “Workday's primary method of innovation is through organic development, and it will always be that way.”

That said, Workday has been heavily acquisitive in the last five years, with acquisitions of companies such as Platfora (2016), Adaptive Insights (2018), Scout (2019), and Peakon, Vndly, and Zimit all in 2021.

From an outsider's perspective, these acquisitions have created tension with the “Power of One” messaging – so perhaps this switch to “The Power to Adapt” is overdue. Regardless, the company remains focused on maintaining as much of its single platform / data model approach as possible. According to Bhusri, Workday “…will go to much greater lengths than anybody to integrate products. That is the focus of the first year of integration and product development after acquisition: Unify data models, security systems, and, workflows (so they flow seamlessly). Inside Workday will always be ‘The Power of One.’”

Workday's vision is to create a unified digital experience, appropriate content in the context of other applications / systems (e.g., VIBE data within Peakon), and what it calls “intelligent interaction routing.” To do this, Workday is focused on three elements:

• Integrate: Custom, Batch Event
• Connect: APIs, Packaged Integrations
• Extend: Custom Apps, Partner Catalog

Image 3: Workday's Enterprise Management Cloud Platform, Source: Workday | 2022

The final element of the focus on adaptation is partnerships, and Workday has increased its focus here to be able to respond to customers’ needs more quickly. Specifically, last year, Workday stood up a separate team to support what is called “Workday Packaged Solutions,” which are solutions custom-built by Workday or partners to quickly respond to changing market dynamics and develop unique industry and line of business solutions, and simplify cross-product orchestration. Notably, the Packaged Solutions team is separate from the core engineering team to not distract that team from continuing its work.

Examples of these solutions include Workday's proof of vaccination solution, ESG analytics, and the VIBE Index, all of which were responses to fast-developing business issues. Today Workday has 15 of these solutions and intends to launch 20 new solutions this year (see Image 3).

Image 4: Workday's Packaged Solutions, Source: Workday | 2022

Beyond HCM: Simplify the Digital Experience, Elevate the Human Experience

Finally, Workday executives talked a lot about employee experience and see their entire platform as coming together to help the organization “Listen, Act, and Analyze” (see image).

Image 5: Workday's Employee Experience Platform, Source: Workday | 2022

To do this, Jeff Gelfuso, Workday's Chief Design Officer, talked about how they need to “make work effortless” by focusing on:

• Workday Engage: Improve the quality and cohesion of the user experience by making it simple and easy to use. (Heavy focus on UX mentioned throughout the day)
• Workday Everywhere: Meet users where they are by bringing their experience to their natural workspaces. (Hello, new mobile-first versions of Workday!)
• Workday Empower: Personalize and automate work through predictive AI/ML so they can focus on the work that matters most. (Drudgery automator)

Following this, Ali Fuller, GM of Employee Experience, talked about the need to simplify the digital experience to elevate the human experience (My response on Twitter: YAS Sister!!). An example of this is the single “Front door” Workday is planning to create for managers which will put all the information they need on a weekly basis in one place (see image).

Image 6: Workday's Vision for “Front Door” Engagement Channels, Source: Workday | 2022

In addition, Workday leaders discussed their employee-centric offerings, such as skills, engagement (Peakon), and VIBE (Valuing Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity) solutions. I've covered these topics in other articles about Workday so that I won’t spend much time on them here.

David Somers, Group GM, Product – Office of the CHRO, shared an incredibly compelling story about how AstraZeneca (AZ) used Workday's Skills Cloud to help develop its COVID-19 vaccine. According to Sommers, AZ was not a significant player in vaccine development but wanted to create a vaccine. They used their Skills Cloud instance to figure out who had vaccine management skills within their organization. AZ spun up a team based on that data to work with the Oxford team. The result was the development of a new vaccine in just 10 months.

Image 7: Workday's Approach to Skills in People Analytics, Source: Workday | 2022

Image 8: Workday's VIBE Belonging Index, Source: Workday | 2022

A few additional notable comments from Co-CEO Aneel Bhusri

There are just a few other things Co-CEO Aneel Bhusri said that I found notable and worth sharing:

• Organizational purpose: At the very start of the day, Bhusri talked about the importance of organizational purpose. Those of you who follow our work will know that purpose is super important to us, too. It sounds to me like Bhusri is being positively influenced by serving on the boards of Walmart and GM: Doug McMillan, CEO of Walmart, and Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, were heavy supporters of the Business Roundtable's updated statement on the purpose of an organization (to focus on all stakeholders, not just shareholders).
• ESG Metrics: Bhusri also talked about how he’s hearing a real buzz around ESG (environmental, social, and governmental) metrics – that CEOs “actually want to talk about it.” ESG is a manifestation of stakeholder theory, so this makes sense, given the focus on organizational purpose. We saw some new examples of ESG analytics within the Workday platform.
• Wellness and engagement: Finally, Bhusri mentioned he is “obsessed” with Peakon (employee engagement data), and he sees that in many other CEOs. Further, CEOs are thinking a lot more about the wellness of their talent – and they are thinking about fitness in terms of health, mental, and financial wellness.

Wrapping up

Workday has big goals, and it will be fascinating to see them expand and stretch to reach them. I hope that in their focus on expanding, they don't forget to invest in the talent management parts of their business. I will look forward to seeing how they progress through this year.

In April 2022, we convened a roundtable for leaders to discuss how L&D functions can make employee development more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. This session was part of our research into what we're calling L&D's DEIB Opportunity. We aim to identify the most effective things that L&D functions can do to support diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) efforts in their organizations.

This readout shares some of the highlights from the session. Thank you to all who participated, shared their experiences, and learned from one another.

L&D's DEIB commitments are growing

To frame the conversation, we shared data from LinkedIn Learning’s 2021 and 2022 Workplace Learning Reports (Figure 1). L&D functions are not only planning more DEIB programs, but they’re taking on more ownership of DEIB efforts.

L&D's DEIB commitments are growing | Source: LinkedIn Learning Workplace Learning Report, 2021 and 2022.

When we asked roundtable participants if they were seeing or experiencing this trend themselves, they agreed. They wrote in the chat things like:

• “Definitely”
• “Absolutely”
• “Without a doubt”

How can L&D functions meet these growing responsibilities?

To answer this question, we focused on how L&D functions can make the systems of employee development in their organizations more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We discussed 4 aspects of employee development:

• Discovery. How do employees find out about development opportunities? How can L&D functions enable different groups to more equitably discover those opportunities?
• Access. Which employees could take advantage of development opportunities if they chose? Who has permission / is nominated to attend? Who has the right tech? How can L&D functions enable different groups to more equitably access development opportunities?
• Participation. Which employees participate in development opportunities? How does participation differ across groups, and why? How can L&D functions enable more equitable participation across groups?
• L&D itself. How might L&D’s systems and processes be biased or inequitable? How might L&D functions address those inequities?

Key takeaways

The roundtable generated a number of insights we thought worth highlighting. Here are our top 5 takeaways. 

To make learning more DEIB, focus on how decisions are made

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ways decisions are made have a huge effect on whether employee development is equitable, inclusive, and accessible across the various groups in an organization. Decisions about who can access certain development opportunities are particularly impactful. One participant shared the following anecdote:

I used to work for a large corporation. Pre-pandemic, we would fly people in for exclusive leadership development programs. The lack of diversity was astounding. The programs are great, but they're often reserved for people who are already privileged. I had to ask myself: Who's approving these attendees? Who's got the budget?

Leaders shared 2 ideas for reducing such biases.

1. Make decisions transparent. One organization implemented decision-making frameworks to help managers and leaders understand the different factors that weighed into their decisions. These frameworks also help leaders explicitly focus on the criteria that align with their values and the organization's values.
2. Make matches, not decisions. Another organization is using skills to remove some decisions entirely. By ensuring every employee has a skills profile (or skills signature), the organization can match employees with specific skills needs and gaps with appropriate development opportunities. The system makes the match, not a leader.

We thought these 2 ideas for reducing bias in decision-making were practical approaches that might apply in many organizations.

Marketing and messaging can include or exclude

A second insight from the group is just how important marketing and messaging are. They influence who learns about what development opportunities and—arguably more important—who decides to take advantage of those opportunities.

A portion of the conversation focused on whether outreach and marketing activities reach the people L&D functions intend them to. As one leader put it:

It's inequitable if L&D sends an email about a development opportunity and 30% of your workforce doesn't use email.

Leaders suggested marketing development opportunities in multiple channels—overcommunicating—and ensuring opportunities are marketed where employees are. For example, a paper flyer in a break room or stand-up meeting might be most effective for reaching front-line employees who do not regularly check email.

In addition, leaders noted that the language, visuals, and tone used in marketing communications about development opportunities can affect whether an employee thinks an opportunity will be relevant and helpful to them. They should be able to see themselves in the opportunity, or they may not choose to participate even if they have access.

Analytics and data can reveal systemic inequities

Leaders in this roundtable emphasized the need to check assumptions about whether development opportunities are as DEIB as L&D functions might hope. Ideally, they said, the demographics of the people who participate in development opportunities should roughly mirror the demographics of the organization's employee population.

Leaders shared that some reasons for differences in participation rates between groups might be:

• Lack of technical access to training (e.g., cannot access learning on mobile phone, do not have a company-provided device, do not have good enough internet access). The ability to pay for tech to access development opportunities is also a potential source of inequity.
• Messaging / marketing doesn’t speak to certain groups
• Certain employees aren't afforded the time to access learning within their work day and cannot / do not want to participate on their own time

Tracking participation in development opportunities over time to see if attendees do, in fact, mirror the population can help reveal possible gaps in marketing / messaging, access, etc. The importance of tracking data over time was articulated by one leader who noted:

We can make plans that we think allow for universal access, but until we check to see whether in fact the result is representative participation, we don’t know whether our approaches are in fact creating equal access.

One leader shared that in her organization, they do A/B testing like marketers. They look to see who's registering for opportunities, who shows up, who consumes content online, etc. They analyze this data by all demographic / diversity statistics that are available.

L&D functions should rely on DEIB resources across the organization

Leaders in this roundtable agreed that as L&D functions take on more of a role in DEIB efforts, they cannot and should not do it alone. There are many resources across an organization that can help L&D functions identify and address inequities in employee development.

For example, the leader whose organization does A/B testing recommended reaching out to the IT team. They can help L&D functions access data about who's clicking where, which employees have company-supported devices, and—in many organizations—aggregated data on how many employees have downloaded accessibility software (screen readers, etc.).

Other leaders noted all that DEIB teams can offer. A number of leaders said the DEIB teams in their organizations do "fairness audits" for business functions to help identify gaps. They can do this for the L&D team, for example by auditing the fairness of L&D's messaging, communications, and learning platforms.

A third resource leaders noted were Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). They recommended involving ERGs in marketing / messaging for development opportunities, assessment of how different opportunities appeal to / impact different groups, and the creation of new opportunities.

Virtual work made some learning more equitable

Leaders noted that when the pandemic forced them to put many in-person, cohort-based development opportunities online, they saw a marked increase in participation rates in these programs. And not only did participation increase, but it often increased in terms of diversity: more diverse employees attended. Leaders attributed this change to a few factors:

• Virtual is easier to attend. Trainings were shorter and didn't require travel or overnights away from home. This meant it was easier for caregivers (who are disproportionately women and members of underrepresented groups) to attend.
• Diversity begets diversity. Leaders reported that in their organizations, as more people saw people like themselves participating in or leading learning, they felt more comfortable participating themselves. As such, they saw an increase in participation from people who'd never attended trainings.

One leader offered a counterpoint to this general trend. After the pandemic started and her organization shifted to remote work, she saw a marked decrease in participation rates. When she asked employees why, they told her that before the pandemic, they only requested to attend training because it got them out of the office. Their experience in-office was toxic; they felt they couldn't express themselves. Working from home, they didn't feel the same need to escape.

 We were grateful for the open and vulnerable discussion during this roundtable. We welcome your suggestions, thoughts, and feedback at [email protected].

Organizations are investing more than ever in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) efforts. We see an opportunity for L&D functions to do the same, beyond simple diversity training. With their influence on culture and reach across the enterprise, L&D functions are well-positioned to improve the DEIB culture in their organizations.

And L&D functions want to do more on DEIB. In LinkedIn Learning’s 2021 Workplace Learning Report, 64% of L&D professionals globally and 73% in North America said DEIB programs were a priority. Our own experience tracks with this trend: RedThread community members are asking more and more about DEIB and learning.

But L&D functions seem to struggle to identify the best ways to help. That’s why we launched a research study focusing on this question:

What are the most impactful things L&D functions can do to help build a robust DEIB culture in their organizations?

To get a grasp on the current DEIB and learning conversation, we reviewed nearly 100 articles, books, podcasts, and reports. We expected, frankly, to find a lot about diversity training and not much else. And, as expected, there was a lot about diversity training. But there were more interesting ideas, too.

This short article summarizes the key ideas we found, including:

• 4 themes from the literature
• 1 hidden gem
• 5 articles that caught our attention
• 6 additional articles to check out if you have time

What we found: 4 themes from the literature

The literature has lots of ideas about DEIB and learning. These ideas fell into 4 themes:

• L&D is tangential to the DEIB conversation
• L&D is focused on improving diversity training
• Developing underrepresented groups is a common DEIB strategy
• L&D functions need to take a hard look at themselves

L&D is tangential to the DEIB conversation

In the literature we reviewed, DEIB or org psych professionals sometimes wrote about diversity training or unconscious bias programs. But not many L&D professionals ventured into the broader DEIB conversation.

Additionally, a few studies we ran across revealed that L&D functions are on the periphery of DEIB efforts. In one survey by i4cp, only 25% of respondents said L&D is “heavily tasked” with efforts to improve diversity and inclusion goals.

Many articles noted that L&D and DEIB teams often do not work together as closely or as effectively as they could. As a result, L&D functions are sometimes left out of key DEIB strategy, goal-setting, and planning decisions. These pieces argued that if L&D functions want to do more on DEIB, they need to partner better with stakeholders across the business. For example, Matthew Daniel, principal at Guild Education, wrote:

"Rather than siloing objectives onto separate teams, CLOs and CDOs can accomplish more by working together, while also measuring and tracking progress at the same time."

Other pieces echoed Daniel’s point about measuring and tracking progress. They suggested that L&D functions should know how success on DEIB is defined, tracked, and measured in their organization. Then, they said, L&D should align the learning strategy to those goals and metrics.

L&D is focused on improving diversity training

We expected to see many articles arguing that compliance-focused, event-based DEIB training doesn’t work. And there were lots of articles about diversity and unconscious bias training. To our surprise, however, these articles took the ineffectiveness of these training programs as a given. They often cited the 2016 article, “Why Diversity Programs Fail,” as proof.

There were 2 broad threads in this portion of the literature:

• Training effectiveness: Ideas about making diversity training more effective in changing employee behavior. For example, articles mentioned using AR / VR simulations to encourage empathy and help employees practice skills.
• Inclusivity: Suggestions for making all training (especially diversity training) more inclusive. For example, the literature suggested soliciting diverse perspectives when designing training and content.

Some articles did explore additional learning methods that might be used to develop employees’ DEIB skills. Of these, many mentioned coaching managers on being more inclusive leaders. Others discussed microlearning and “nudges” that space learning over time. But these articles did not explore ways for L&D functions to improve DEIB outside of creating learning programs.

Developing underrepresented groups is a common DEIB strategy

The literature agreed that organizations should develop individuals from underrepresented groups. As one study by McKinsey pointed out, employees in underrepresented groups report having fewer development opportunities than other employees. Several articles argued that active and intentional support of underrepresented groups could help reduce this gap.

The literature also noted that employees from underrepresented groups are more likely to use and benefit from structured programs. There were many ideas about programs that might enable these employees to develop and advance. Some of the ideas mentioned included:

• Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
• Work-study programs
• Apprenticeships
• Work assignments (e.g., international postings)
• Rotational schemes
• Tuition reimbursement
• Talent marketplaces (to enhance visibility and access to opportunities)
• Intrapreneurship programs
• Communities of practice
• “People advisors” who provide career coaching
• Mentoring and sponsorship
• Coaching

In reviewing this theme, we noticed a disconnect: Many articles pushed for more development of underrepresented groups. But others noted that L&D isn’t heavily responsible for DEIB efforts (as we saw in the first theme of this review).

These threads seem contradictory. If developing underrepresented groups is so important, why isn’t L&D more central to DEIB strategies? The literature didn’t answer this question directly. But it’s interesting to note that many of the above programs aren’t traditionally L&D’s responsibility (e.g., rotations, ERGs). We think that may be the reason so many authors emphasized the need for L&D functions to partner with key stakeholders, as mentioned above.

L&D functions need to take a hard look at themselves

A few articles in the literature asked L&D functions to do some serious self-reflection. They are not the bulk of the literature—not by a long shot. But we are calling them out as a theme because they highlighted an issue with substantial DEIB implications: L&D’s own lack of diversity. These articles—especially the ones from authors Gena Cox and Katy Peters, Ave Rio, and Maria Morukian—noted that most L&D functions are majority white and majority women (except at senior levels). Most L&D professionals hold advanced degrees. That means:

White women with advanced degrees dominate L&D. At more senior levels, white men with advanced degrees do.

According to these articles, non-diverse L&D functions might find it harder to drive DEIB efforts and make employee development more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. For example, some articles noted that a lack of diversity might allow bias to creep into the ways that L&D functions tend to:

• Define, prioritize, and measure skills, aptitude, and abilities
• Use data to make decisions about learning
• Decide which development opportunities to offer
• Choose learning methods to invest in

These articles explored how the L&D function might need to change itself to address potential biases. They are a great start to a broader conversation about all the ways L&D functions can contribute to DEIB efforts in their organizations.

Hidden gem: A systems approach to DEIB and learning

We found a handful of articles that took a systemic view of how L&D functions might influence DEIB. They thought more broadly about how to make learning more equitable and inclusive, rather than just about the programs L&D functions might create.

J.D. Dillon, CEO of learning vendor Axonify, wrote:

"Restoring learning equity requires a fundamental mindset shift. Rather than relying on programs as the basic unit of learning, professionals should adopt a systems approach."

By a “systems approach,” these articles meant looking at things like accessibility and opportunity:

• Who is offered access to development opportunities, and why?
• How might access to development opportunities vary based on an employee’s location, access to tech, or ability to use nonworking hours for development?
• Are learning opportunities easy for all employees to find? Are they widely and effectively marketed to all employees?

We appreciated these prompts to think about how L&D functions can ensure that all employees have equitable access to development opportunities. And we believe a systemic lens will reveal many additional ways that L&D functions can make learning more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We plan to investigate this systemic approach in more depth as part of this research.

What caught our attention

Of the literature we reviewed, several pieces stood out to us. Each of the articles below contained information that we found helpful and / or intriguing. We learned from their perspectives and encourage you to do the same. Click on the titles to go to the full articles.

Advance DEI Using Talent Development Expertise

Ed Hasan and Ifedapo Adeleye

"The biggest opportunities for TD professionals to make a difference lie in three important but often overlooked segments: knowledge management, career and leadership development, and coaching."

This article has detailed, practical advice for L&D professionals who want to do more on DEIB, above and beyond DEIB training. It also has some great examples of what good looks like—and what good doesn’t look like.

Highlights

• Training courses are one part, but not the cornerstone, of a strong DEIB strategy.
• L&D functions can use their knowledge management expertise to make tacit DEIB knowledge more explicit, storable, and shareable.
• Inclusive, equitable employee development programs require DEIB and L&D staff to work together.
• Coaching can build more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplaces by equipping managers with DEIB skills.

L&D’s DEI Blind Spot: Perpetuating Inequity?

Gena Cox and Katy Peters

"What if the L&D professionals who measure achievement of… skills understand the day-to-day experience of only a subset of their colleagues? What if the career progression decisions from those measurements perpetuate some of the same distorted effects that are now evident in educational assessment?"

This article examines how L&D’s potential biases and blind spots might lead to inequitable employee development. It makes a case for a proactive, systemic approach to overcoming those biases.

Highlights

• The L&D profession lacks racial and ethnic diversity, potentially leading to blind spots, biases, and inequity.
• The way skills are currently defined, prioritized, and measured may lead to biased outcomes.
• Overcoming L&D’s blind spots requires a systemic approach that re-examines many long-standing L&D practices, including how skills are defined and how data are used.
• A proactive approach to addressing L&D’s blind spots will help make workplaces more inclusive.

Mapping Exclusion in the Organization

Inga Carboni, Andrew Parker, and Nan S. Langowitz

"Our research made clear that who you know is as important—often more so—than what you know when it comes to rising through the ranks."

Organizational network analysis (ONA) can reveal who knows whom. It can uncover who has access to informal networks and sources of info about development opportunities. Using ONA, L&D functions can also identify marginalized groups who can be invited for specific development.

Highlights

• One study revealed that men’s informal relationships with their male managers could explain nearly 40% of the gender pay gap.
• Women are less likely to be at the center of the networks that matter: knowledge, innovation, and critical decision-making networks.
• L&D functions can impact DEIB by codifying and sharing the networking strategies of people with solid and diverse networks.
• L&D functions can use ONA to assess the effectiveness of specific diversity training and other learning programs.

L&D’s Diversity Dilemma

Ave Rio

"‘Here we are in Taiwan, in Asia, where they were doing training and learning way before the US, and the two major keynoters they got were white guys over 60 from New York,’ Masie said."

This article is packed with quotes from L&D and DEIB experts. These experts explain why L&D functions must reflect the employee population in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, background, etc.

Highlights

• The number of people of color in L&D does not reflect the communities L&D serves.
• L&D functions are often asked to be the ambassadors of organizational culture, which is difficult if they aren’t representative of the workforce.
• Thought leaders in L&D are often older white men, reflecting the people who pioneered the field in the 1960s and 1970s.
• To increase diversity, L&D functions need to be intentionally inclusive about whom they highlight as thought leaders.
• L&D’s role in DEIB must be part of a larger organizational strategy.

Getting the Most from Your Diversity Dollars

Jennifer Garcia-Alonso, Matt Krentz, Claire Tracey, and Miki Tsusaka

"When asked if their company offers support for women from executives and middle managers, 72% of male respondents say yes, compared with only 54% of women."

This report helps companies identify the specific diversity and inclusion initiatives—including learning initiatives—that offer the greatest payoff for gender equity. It breaks initiatives into 4 helpful categories: Proven Measures, Hidden Gems, Baseline Measures, and Overrated Measures.

Highlights

• Proven measures are valued by women and known to be effective by leaders. For example, a proven measure related to L&D is sponsoring women at scale.
• Hidden gems are highly effective initiatives that many organizations should pursue. For example, a hidden gem related to L&D is offering professional development for underrepresented groups.
• Baseline measures are basic steps that all organizations should do, but that don’t have a transformative effect on women’s daily experience. For example, a baseline measure related to L&D is mentoring women.
• Overrated measures are seemingly promising efforts that often do not lead to real cultural change. For example, an overrated measure related to L&D is one-time diversity training sessions.

Additional articles to check out

1. "Are learning equity issues affecting your company?" J.D. Dillon, TD Magazine, 2021.
2. Improving Workplace Culture through Evidence-Based Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Practices, S. Creary, N. Rothbard, and J. Scruggs, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, 2021.
3. "How internal talent marketplaces can help overcome seven common DEI strategy pitfalls," M. Heiskell, D. Kearns-Manolatos, and M. Rawat, Deloitte, 2021.
4. "Assignments are critical tools to achieve workplace gender equity," E. Macke, G. Gall Rosa, S. Gilmartin, and C. Simard, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2022.
5. "How does your company support ‘first-generation professionals’?" M. Burwell and B. Maldonaldo, SHRM, 2022.
6. "Providing performance feedback to support neurodiverse employees," M. Hamdani and S. Biagi, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2022.

One year and 2 weeks ago Microsoft launched their employee experience offering, Viva. We wrote about it back then and explained why it was a big deal for the HR tech market. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it will transition Glint, an employee engagement solution, from LinkedIn (acquired Glint in 2018) to become a core part of Viva. The company is set to bring Glint completely into Viva in 2023.

Keeping up with the momentum from 2021, the HR tech market continues to provide us with a show in 2022.

Just last week we wrote about Perceptyx, another employee engagement and experience vendor, acquiring Cultivate, a digital coaching tool, and further enhancing its listening capabilities. While the news of Glint integrating into Viva is not nearly as surprising and market shifting (Glint was already integrating into one of the Viva modules as a partner and providing joint customers access to their analytics insights), it is still notable for a few reasons, not least of them being that it makes Viva a serious player in the analytics space.

Before we dive into the details of what this means for the customers, to Glint, Microsoft, and the HR tech market, let’s do a quick recap of what is Microsoft Viva.

What is Microsoft Viva?

Built on top of Microsoft 365 and Teams, Viva is an employee experience solution that offers four modules (see Figure 1), which combine existing Microsoft offerings into a single solution:

• • Connections – Creates a “digital campus” where all policy, benefits, communities, and other centralized resources are available.
  • Insights –Provides employees with insights on how they work, and gives managers and leaders information about their teams, burnout risk, after-hours work, etc
  • Topics – Leverages Project Cortex to identify knowledge and experts across the organization, generating topic cards, topic pages, and knowledge centers (including people – not just information) for others to access – a “Wikipedia of people and information” for the org.

• Learning – Integrates LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com), Microsoft Learn, and other external sources (including LMSs or LXPs such as Cornerstone and Skillsoft) into a single location within Microsoft.

Figure 1: Summary of Microsoft Viva | Source: Glint, 2021.

When Microsoft launched Viva 1 year ago, Glint was integrating into the “Insights” module of their offering as a partner. It was providing analytics, based on combined data from Viva and Glint to the users by via Power BI dashboards in Viva for Microsoft customers and pulling Viva data into their own dashboards for Glint customers. In the near future, Glint will be completely integrated into the core Viva offering, meaning customers should be able to access insights in the tools where they work, i.e., Teams.

Let’s break this down and find out what it means for everyone involved.

What does it mean for the customers?

Overall, this should be good news for both Glint and Microsoft customers for a few reasons.

• Customers should be able to access employee insights more seamlessly. Currently, customers need to have both Viva insights and Glint, in order to access insights based on a combination of employee perception (Glint) and behavioral data (Viva insights) through dashboards in Viva or Glint. Once Glint is integrated into Viva, customers should allow users to receive these insights more easily and quickly.
• The annual engagement survey from Microsoft will be moved over to Glint and called “Employee Signals” to reflect a more continuous, always-on listening approach. This should allow Microsoft customers to capture employee perception and behavioral data holistically all in one place, without needing to add any additional vendors.
• The integration will provide users with a stronger set of capabilities that provide them with feedback, recommendations, and action items within the productivity tool they already work in, thus, enabling leaders to respond to needs in a timely manner.

What does it mean for Glint?

According to Microsoft, existing Glint customers will be able to continue to use the current Glint offering delivered by LinkedIn. New new customers can purchase the existing Glint service on a standalone basis through LinkedIn or bundled with Viva through Microsoft for now.

Glint will continue to benefit of combining passive data with their perception data and providing valuable insights to their customers around engagement, well-being, and burnout. Specifically, it will help Glint with:

• Access to rich passive continuous behavioral data that will deepen their insights on employees and managers. For example, we expect Glint should now be able to access metrics around learning sources and knowledge topics being accessed (through Topics and Learning modules). The possibilities of how those metrics can be used, such as to understand DEIB, performance management, learning and development, are huge.
• Having a greater impact on their customers. Once fully integrated, Microsoft HR customers should be able to access the deeper analytics side of the product provided by Glint, while managers and leaders should be able to receive recommendations and feedback in the apps they use. This should result in more action taking, wider action adoption, and greater impact in general among the customers.

What does it mean for Microsoft Viva?

Given than Glint was already integrating into Viva’s Insights module, a complete integration into the entire suite makes complete sense for Microsoft. Overall, it does a few things for Viva.

• Equips Microsoft with enhanced employee listening. By rolling their engagement survey into Glint, Microsoft will be able to leverage Glint’s impressive employee listening capabilities for its customers through its various surveys.
• It provides more value for potential customers. Viva just became a whole lot more appealing to existing and potential customers who might have been considering adding Glint to their people analytics ecosystem.
• Adds a more focused approach to supporting managers and employee development. Glint has long been building its capabilities to build a product that empowers managers to engage and develop their employees through feedback and recommendations. As part of Viva, these capabilities should make the solution more attractive to leaders.

What does it mean for the people analytics and employee experience tech market?

There are 2 big implications of this move for the tech market.

• At its inception, Microsoft Viva was essentially a modern take on the intranet, with the addition of analytics. With a complete integration of Glint and its focus on supporting managers and employees by providing them data-based insights and recommendations, Viva should be able to become a serious player in the people analytics space.
• The rise of employee engagement and experience vendors that are able to bring in rich passive data to supplement employee perception data. Perceptyx and Viva have built into their products an impressive suite of capabilities that are able to provide a more complete picture of not just what the employees are feeling, but when and why they are feeling it, and what they can do to improve or address any challenges as quickly as they arise.

The future

We will have to wait another year to see what the final integration looks like. It will be interesting to see if insights from Glint will be connected with those from Ally.io, an OKR (objectives and key results) tool, acquired by Microsoft in 2021 that is integrated into Viva, and how they will be delivered to the users, especially given that Glint has a performance management product as well.

Glint has always applied a thoughtful approach to its product and the organizational needs it should help address. Given that, it’s safe to say that Microsoft Viva will benefit significantly from making Glint a part of it. We look forward to seeing the final product.

This morning, Perceptyx, an employee engagement and experience provider, announced it acquired Cultivate, an employee listening tech vendor. This acquisition is representative of a broader shift we’ve been talking about within the employee engagement and experience market. As such, we’ll cover what is happening in this space and then dive into the specifics of this acquisition. 

Evolutions in the Employee Engagement & Experience Market 

As we mentioned in our 2021 study, People Analytics Tech: Deep Dive into Employee Engagement & Experience, vendors in the employee engagement and experience space offer capabilities that enable customers to do four things:  

Figure 1: Role Played by PAT in Employee Engagement & Experience | Source: RedThread Research, 2021/2022.

The first item, “Collect and analyze perception data directly from employees,” and the last item, “Highlight areas of concern and recommend actions to users,” is where employee engagement and experience vendors have typically focused. We’ve seen these vendors increasingly dip into the other two items over the last few years. 

In addition to this evolution, the employee engagement and experience market has been converging with others. As we wrote in our summary of Peakon’s 6-month integration into Workday, the following areas have been coming together for years: 

• Employee engagement/experience 
• Performance management 
• Recognition 
• People data integration
  

When you look at the intersection points of all these areas and vendors, you get a chart that looks something like Figure 2 (note, we are in the process of conducting our 2022 People Analytics Tech study, so the vendors’ names will be updated shortly).  

Figure 2: Vendors in the Engagement / Experience, Performance Management, Recognition, and People Data Integration Spaces | RedThread Research, 2021.

As we said before, we are seeing so much overlap because vendors and customers realize that it is no longer realistic to separate these concepts. How do you understand engagement without also understanding performance feedback? And how do you give performance feedback without also giving recognition? And how do you understand any of this without solid people analytics? 

Given this backdrop, let’s turn to this acquisition.  

Who is Cultivate?  

Cultivate is an AI-powered coaching platform that absorbs data from other systems – such as email – and provides feedback to managers about how they are communicating with their team members. It uses a combination of data and insights to make managers aware of behaviors and suggest ways to change them. For example, a manager may get a prompt telling her that she is sending less than 5% of emails to her team after work hours—which is good—but that prompt may also identify the individuals to whom she is sending after-hours emails. In our 2021 study, Coaching Tech Landscape: Humans and Robots, we call Cultivate a “coach on the shoulder.” 

Some of the things we like most Cultivate include (check them out in our PAT tool):  

• The use of AI to make specific individualized suggestions on how to improve digital behaviors and relationships 
• Personalized nudges delivered before specific events, such as 1:1s, via email or chat, instead of requiring managers to access dashboards 
• Partnered with Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) and mapped HBP’s library of leadership content to Cultivate signals, to pair suggestions and opportunities with HBR’s bite-size learning content on how to take action
  

Why did Perceptyx buy Cultivate?  

It may not be immediately apparent why an employee engagement and experience vendor bought a vendor that’s a “coach on the shoulder,” but there are two really smart reasons for this buy: 

1. The underlying technology 
2. Building out and augmenting Perceptyx’s overall product offering
   

Cultivate has some of the most sophisticated NLP and AI capabilities on the market to understand employee tone, sentiment, and behaviors. This capability can be integrated throughout Perceptyx’s offering. This will widen and strengthen Perceptyx’s ability to deliver insights on qualitative data.  

Further, this underlying technology will allow Perceptyx to better offer the other two items in Figure 1:  

• Collect and analyze passive data on interactions/work/environment 
• Integrate and analyze different data that drive employee engagement and experience
  

Specifically, Cultivate will enable Perceptyx to move from offering point-in-time perception data to truly “ubiquitous” listening by ingesting passive data on employees’ interactions, looking for patterns, and providing employees with feedback. Incorporating these data into Perceptyx’s overall data analytic capabilities will make the solution more robust. It can start to give the why around employee engagement and experience, not just the what. 

Finally, this acquisition – along with the July 2021 acquisitions of Waggl and CultureIQ – enables Perceptyx to better build out its comprehensive employee engagement and experience offering.  

As shown in Figure 3, they now offer: 

• Ask: Employee surveys (the historical Perceptyx survey product) 
• Sense: Lifecycle surveys (again, historical Perceptyx) and always-on listening (Cultivate) 
• Dialogue: Crowdsourced idea-generation and voting (Waggl)  
• Develop: Multi-rater feedback (historical Perceptyx) and recommendations (Cultivate via HBR mapping)
  

All of this is anchored by the Perceptyx People Insights Platform, which provides a single location to understand and understand all these different insight “channels.” It also provides a way to prioritize the following steps and act.  

Figure 3: Perceptyx’s Product Offering | Perceptyx, 2022.

Comments/Concerns/Questions 

We are fortunate to know both companies very well and are very positive about this acquisition. We have long thought a lot of Joe Freed, CEO of Cultivate, his team, and the technology they’ve built, and are pleased to see them align with Perceptyx, another company we respect immensely. This acquisition will round out Perceptyx’s offerings while enabling the Cultivate team to maximize their impact in the market significantly. We think this is a very sound decision for all and will provide some significant benefits to customers. 

That said, I would likely as soon stop breathing as stop having concerns and questions. Given that, here’s what we are going to be watching: 

• Ethics and monitoring: We all know there’s a fear out there of extensive monitoring by companies – especially with so many people working from home – and lots of people are searching for monitoring tools. 
  

(Just Google “big brother monitoring” and see what the autofill provides. Don’t worry; I will wait here – go do it. Oh, you also found “big brother monitoring tool free download”? So surprising!)   

Now, Cultivate has historically avoided this issue by making their tool opt-in – so employees have the choice of whether they leverage the software – and ensuring that only employees get individualized data and recommendations. Companies and managers only get high-level summaries of what is happening. So far, this seems to be working – our understanding is that, to date, Cultivate has seen less than 5% of folks either opt not to participate or opt-out once they have participated.  

Perceptyx will have to continue to hold that line on opt-in and privacy with this acquisition, and they have indicated to us that they plan to do so. Further, there will be questions about how passive data should be combined with engagement data. The ethics and privacy considerations around these questions are not necessarily defined, let alone answered. This will be something for Perceptyx to work through in tight concert with their customers in the coming months. 

• Acquisitions everywhere:  Perceptyx has acquired three companies in nine months, which is a rapid clip for any company, let alone one that has fewer than 500 employees. Perceptyx is aware of the challenges this can create and is rapidly integrating its acquisitions and reconfiguring teams. Hence, there aren’t historical Perceptyx and new acquisition teams, just new teams. Even so, the frequent evolution of teams, additions of new people, combinations of cultures, etc., will be challenging, and making everyone work together well will be a constant effort for months to come. 
  

• Slowing evolution to PM and recognition offerings:  As mentioned in Figure 2, we see vendors increasingly adding performance, recognition, and learning to their engagement offerings as customers look for less fragmented solutions and easier data integration across core talent management activities. We understand that Perceptyx was also headed down this path before these acquisitions and that these events will slow down their addition of these offerings. On the one hand, this will allow Perceptyx to focus more specifically on employee engagement and experience – on the other hand; it may prevent them from keeping up with some of their competitors. We will watch how these acquisitions impact their customer growth rates and satisfaction.  

Despite these concerns and questions, the bottom line on this acquisition is that it is a good thing. Congratulations to the Cultivate and Perceptyx teams on an exciting new future ahead of them!