Events

Introduction

The conversation about skills has exploded in the past year from an almost hypothetical discussion about how to plan for digital transformation to a very real one in which hard decisions have had to be made about what skills were needed to keep businesses intact.

As organizations pivot to different ways of working, it will be even more important that they have a good understanding of the skills and knowledge employees have now, and the skills the organization will need in the future.

As part of our ongoing research on skills, we are focusing our first study on a question we have heard a lot:

What is the difference between skills and competencies, and why does it matter?

What we saw in the literature

To answer that question, we began with a review of the competencies literature. Four themes emerged in response to this question:

1. Definitional Chaos. There is little agreement about the definitions of “skills” and “competencies.”
2. Agreement on Goals and Benefits. There is considerable agreement about the goals and benefits of any skills or competencies effort.
3. Competencies Support Performance Management. In some parts of the literature – mainly written for HR audiences – competencies are clearly linked to how a job is performed.
4. Skills Leverage Tech. Organizations derive practical value from skills platforms that leverage huge amounts of data.

Definitional chaos

There is very little agreement in the literature about the definitions of “skills” and “competencies.” In some articles, the terms are used interchangeably. In others, skills are listed as one component of competencies – for example, “a competency is a measurable pattern of knowledge, skills, abilities, behaviors, and other characteristics.”¹

Often a distinction is made in the granularity of skills vs. competencies, with skills being more granular – although one article suggested the opposite.² Sometimes competencies are contextualized for a specific job or role (more on this below). The definitions and distinctions vary widely from author to author and audience to audience.

To further confuse the matter, when we compared skills databases to competency models many of the same terms showed up in both places. For example, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s MOSAIC Competencies framework and the U.S. Department of Labor-sponsored Career OneStop Skills Matcher tool both list items like, “Accounting,” “Client Engagement/Change Management,” and “Project Management.” OPM calls these items competencies; DOL calls them skills.

The same confusion plays out in the private sector. Some excellent vendors focus on skills; others on competencies – but if you look at their databases and lists of terms, there is considerable overlap.³

Agreement on goals and benefits

Given how inconsistently the terms “skills” and “competencies” are used, there is surprising agreement in the literature on the ultimate goal of a skills or competency effort: Organizations need to be able to identify what they (and their people) can do now and what they must be able to do in the future. They need to be able to use that information to plan and prepare for the future – to align talent with business goals. Job-seekers (internal and external) need to understand what’s expected of them and what they are good at vs. what organizations need them to be good at.⁴

Both competency models and skills frameworks attempt to facilitate these discovery and planning processes.

There is also agreement on the benefits of skills frameworks and competency models. Organizations can use skills and/or competencies to:

• Use the same terminology to talk about what employees should be able to do
• Understand what employees can do vs. what they need to be able to do
• Fill key positions quickly and effectively
• Target employee development to close key gaps
• Help employees understand their gaps and options⁵

Most of the literature also agrees that there is no standard, universal set of skills or competencies that all organizations need. Organizations need to identify their competitive advantage, then tailor the models they are using to focus on the key skills/competencies that drive that advantage.

Competencies support performance management

In some of the literature, competencies were clearly linked to the performance of specific jobs or roles. In these cases, skills specified what a person can do, whereas competencies specified not only what but how the task or activity should be accomplished.⁶ They answered questions like, “How does an individual perform this job successfully?” and “How does an individual behave in the workplace to achieve a desired result?”⁷

This part of the literature is particularly helpful for leaders concerned with performance management, as it provides standards against which to measure behaviors and results. Skills tend to be decoupled from the performance of any specific job, making skills frameworks less relevant to performance management.

Skills leverage tech

Skills databases and competency frameworks are built and managed very differently. Developing a competency framework tends to be a top-down exercise run by a few people in the organization. It often involves intensive human effort to complete observations, job analyses, interviews, surveys, and document reviews.⁸

By contrast, skills databases tend to be built from the bottom up, using advanced computing power to glean skills information from job postings, resumes, HR repositories, and other data sources.⁹

Because they leverage technology to pull in and leverage massive amounts of information about employees, skills offerings tend to provide users with tens of thousands of skills options to choose from. This huge menu of options allows users to be far more granular in choosing and describing what they can do. This granularity lends flexibility and transferability, as it is easier to see how a particular skill might apply in different functional areas or organizations.

Thoughts on the topic

Regardless of terminology, we see enormous potential for vendors that help organizations answer the question, “what can we do, and what do we need to be able to do?” using the massive amounts of data now available about employees and their abilities.

Tech solutions have made it possible for many more organizations to start answering this question by automating many of the processes involved. The pace of change in today’s world will only increase the demand for organizations to maintain a very up-to-date understanding of what they can do and what they need to do. Any tech or methods that can shine a light on this question will bring huge value in the near, medium, and long term.

What caught our attention:

Of the literature we reviewed, several sources stood out to us. Each contained information that we found useful and/or intriguing. Although much of the competencies literature was written 5-10 years ago, it is particularly helpful to review in light of the question, “what’s the difference between skills and competencies?” Interestingly, many of the more recent articles on competencies were primarily written by vendors trying to clarify how their competency offerings fit in the skills marketplace.¹⁰ We learned from these perspectives and encourage you to do the same.

Policy, Data, Oversight: Assessment & Selection – Competencies

United States Office of Personnel Management  |  opm.gov, 2020

“Competencies specify the "how" of performing job tasks, or what the person needs to do the job successfully.”

 Highlights:

• OPM’s Multipurpose Occupational Systems Analysis Inventory (MOSAIC) methodology for collecting occupational information has been used to build one of the most comprehensive competency databases available, covering over 200 U.S. federal government occupations.
• The MOSAIC information has been used to develop competency models for a range of occupations, including cybersecurity, grants management, IT program management, and executive leadership.
• All MOSAIC information is available in downloadable Excel spreadsheets or PDFs for public use.

How Ericsson aligned its people with its transformation strategy

Simon London and Bina Chaurasia  |  McKinsey & Company, Jan 2016

“[W]e literally took every single function in the company and all of its roles, mapped out the stages of each job, and laid out the competence needed for each one. That took a couple years.”

 Highlights:

• A major shift in strategy led telecom giant Ericsson to change skills, technology, and processes on a global scale.
• This shift also required an overhaul of the HR team, strategy, and processes.
• The company completed a massive, years-long competency modeling exercise but reports that now every position in the company is mapped out.

The essential components of a successful L&D strategy

Jacqueline Brassey, Lisa Christensen, and Nick van Dam  |  McKinsey & Company, February 2019

“At the heart of this process is a comprehensive competency or capability model based on the organization’s strategic direction.”

Highlights:

• This article puts competency management in the context of L&D’s responsibility to develop employees in line with organizational strategy and goals.
• Once a strategic direction is set for the organization, it is critical to verify whether employees are equipped to deliver on that strategy.
• To make this verification, this article recommends taking a deliberate, systematic approach to capability assessment, starting with a comprehensive competency model.

What’s the Difference Between Skills and Competencies?

Sarah Beckett  |  HRSG, March 2018

“In some ways, a skill and a competency are similar. On a basic level, they both identify an ability that an individual has acquired through training and experience.”

Highlights:

• • Skills define “what” an individual can do. Competencies define “how” they perform a job successfully.
  • Competencies = Skills + Knowledge + Abilities
  • Competencies improve HR processes by introducing consistency, visibility, structure, progression and coordination.
  • Competency management software solutions can ease much of the burden of using competencies to define job success.

Additional readings

1. “Competency Frameworks: Core Competencies & Soft Skills,” Randstad, 2019.
2. "Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills," Indeed, 2020.
3. "Return on Leadership – Competencies that Generate Growth," Egon Zehnder International and McKinsey & Company, 2011.
4. O*Net Resource Center, O*Net, 2010.
5. "Competency Management at Its Most Competent," Deloitte and DDI, 2015.

In the face of a global pandemic, a critical social justice movement, and significant natural disasters, we’ve all done our best to manage our workloads, our employees, our home lives, our finances, and our health. As in all situations, some folks have done it better than others.

We wanted to understand what responsive managers and organizations did in the last 6 months – and how those practices are different from before the pandemic. But even more importantly, we wanted to understand:

• What types of management practices do the most effective managers use?
• How has HR supported those most effective managers?
• What lessons can we take from this as we design our organizations and support our managers while moving into 2021?

This research is a culmination of more than a year of research, with new survey data collected and interviews conducted in September and October 2020, to ensure a focus on the manager and organizational behaviors critical to the events of 2020.

We all know managers have had additional responsibilities put on them over the last 6 months: They are no longer “just” managers who also coach. In many organizations, they have taken on the roles of dramatic reprioritizer of work, checker on mental health and well-being, and facilitator of social justice conversations. To say it’s been a hard period of time is an understatement.

Given the shifts in managers’ responsibilities, we held a roundtable to brainstorm and understand the answers to some critical questions:

• How, exactly, do managers need to evolve their approach to better support their employees?
• Given that, what is the role of organizations in enabling managers?
• How should organizations do this when budgets may be constricting?

During the roundtable, which was attended by more than 30 leaders, we divided the attendees into 4 groups in which each group discussed different questions around what responsive managers and organizations can do in the current times to enable employees. In the mindmap at the end of this article, we provide a detailed overview of the points discussed.

But, as you all know, we like to focus on what’s most interesting. Below are our key takeaways from the session.

Key Takeaways from the Discussion

• Keep personalizing: For years, we’ve seen a shift toward personalized employee experiences. The pandemic has put that into hyperdrive, as everyone is faced with their own set of unique and different challenges. Attendees called out the importance of managers understanding individual communication preferences, work schedules, work environments etc.. Additionally, some leaders suggested that managers need to bring about a mindset shift from managing a team to leading a team. People leaders should get to know their team on an individual level in order to understand their needs.
• Build a scaffolding to enable lower-risk decisions: This refers to having explicit margins of error in place when it comes to decisions (e.g., if sales drop by 15%, we will stop this experiment). This can help clarify decision making rights, normalize failure, and de-risk decision making. A real-life example shared by a company included implementing a DACI (driver, approver, contributor, informed) framework which helps clarify the decision making process, improve accountability, and allow them to track how decision making has transformed or shifted during times of change.
• Democratize information: While not a novel idea, it was promising to hear several participants share how their managers and leaders are increasingly being open to sharing more information and context around actions being taken. Frequent 1:1s, check-ins, feedbacks, and pulse surveys were mentioned as some of the common methods being leveraged to increase transparency and enable trust.
• Build trust not toadies: Managers that are trusted by their team and are thus successful in being responsive to their team’s needs share common characteristics such as humility, admitting mistakes, forgiving others, and just being more human overall. One of the best ideas shared was that managers should play the role similar to a can of WD-40 oil, helping their teams smooth over their mistakes and fix them, instead of holding grudges. These ideas clearly point to a shift towards a new management style, one that is empathetic and more human.

We are extremely grateful to the attendees who enriched the conversation by sharing their thoughtful ideas and experiences. As always, we welcome any feedback or suggestions from you at [email protected]

Mindmap of Responsive Managers Roundtable Conversation

Note: This is a live document. Click the window and use your cursor to explore. If you have additional thoughts, please share a comment with us at [email protected].

The flurry of significant events in 2020 have built a sense of urgency to act for the greater good of humankind. As a result, we’ve seen innumerable organizations rise to the occasion — acting with a greater and broader purpose, serving many stakeholders, not just shareholders. We wanted to understand better what is happening now, what we can learn from purpose-driven organizations’ approaches in the past, and what HR’s role is in making organizations purpose-driven.

Click on the image below to get the full infographic. As always, we would love your feedback. If you have thoughts, please share in the comments section below!

 

The flurry of significant events in 2020 have built a sense of urgency to act for the greater good of humankind. As a result, we’ve seen innumerable organizations rise to the occasion — acting with a greater and broader purpose, serving many stakeholders, not just shareholders.

We wanted to understand better what is happening now, what we can learn from purpose-driven organizations’ approaches in the past, and what HR’s role is in making organizations purpose-driven. To that end, this report answers 4 questions:

• What is purpose, and how does it differ from other related terms (e.g., mission, vision)?
• What is HR’s role in creating a purpose-driven organization? What can it control and influence?
• What does the employee experience look like at a purpose-driven organization?
• What are some of the purpose-driven practices we’ve seen in response to significant current events?

This research is the culmination of more than 6 months of research, with updates and insights specifically targeted at organizations managing through COVID-19 and the social justice movements of 2020.

 

 

I couldn’t sleep last night. 

I kept reflecting on a conversation I had yesterday about school reopening and women’s workforce participation. I had said:

“In the next 10 days, we’re going to see a gigantic clash between family needs and women’s needs as professionals – and I’m pretty sure the latter one is going to lose out. We’re going to lose 20 years of women’s advancement as women have to make decisions that reduce their workforce participation to support at-home learning and childcare.”

Many others have raised the alarm on this, as reflected in truly excellent articles out there on the topic such as here,¹ here,² here,³ and here.⁴

However, as someone who researches what HR can do to improve how organizations manage and enable people, I feel a certain obligation to further underscore what’s happening and what HR might be able to do … RIGHT NOW.  

What’s happening

We know that:

Women are bearing the economic brunt of this pandemic, whether it be in lost jobs or handling childcare.

As a result, there’ll be a long-term consequence on their earnings and careers. Here are a few important statistics:

• Nearly 11 million jobs in the US held by women disappeared from February to May, erasing a decade of job gains by women in the labor force⁵
• In 2020, female unemployment reached double digits for the first time since 1948; the June unemployment rate for Latinas was 15.3% and for Black women it was 14%; for white men: 9%⁶
• About 8% of women who have been laid off have zero chance of being called back to the workforce, as compared with 6.4% of men; 4% expect to be called back but probably won’t be⁷
• Women are providing around 70% of the childcare during business hours, spending 40% more time watching their children than fathers in couples in which the parents are married and working full time⁸

As we look to the beginning of the school year, the overwhelming refrain seems to be that people need a very different setup from what they had last spring. As an interviewee in USA Today said:

“We can’t spend another school year or even another month doing things the way that we did it between March and June.”

Mara Geronemus, former big law firm lawyer now in private practice⁹ 

This is echoed by data, which show the drawbacks of the last school year and the need for a different approach:

• 73% of teachers felt successful teaching remotely during the pandemic, down from 96% during normal periods¹⁰
• 64% of parents were concerned about their children falling behind in school as a result of the pandemic¹¹
• Two-thirds of parents have changed their childcare since March; yet, as of June, 47% of parents said they’ll need to change their childcare arrangement again within the next 3 months – and an additional 30% anticipated within the next 6 months¹²

Given this, we’ll likely see some significant changes to work arrangements – with the exact changes becoming increasingly clear over the next 2 weeks as more schools announce their plans.

Whatever the changes are, it looks as though distance learning will be a part of them for the foreseeable future – and that will have significant repercussions for workers:

• Only 19% of parents prefer their children to return to school in-person full-time this year
• 75% of the 20 largest school districts are expected to be teaching fully online in the fall¹³
• More than 60% of working parents believe that carrying out distance learning from home will place an extremely difficult burden on their family¹⁴
• 22% of parents are unlikely to return to their same work situation or are unsure if they’ll return at all¹⁵

As in the spring, this burden is likely to disproportionately fall on women:

• Women in the UK were 47% more likely than men with children to have permanently lost or quit their jobs since February 2020 – a trend we can expect to continue in the US this fall¹⁶
• Of senior leaders who said that distance learning from home will place an extremely difficult burden, mothers are more than 1.5 times more likely to report they don’t intend to stay at their current employer for at least the next 12 months as compared with fathers¹⁷
• When women leave the workforce, they can expect to lose up to 3-4 times their annual salary for each year out of the workforce – which obviously compounds over the course of a career¹⁸

In summary:

The decisions that women and their families make over the next few weeks will have dramatic consequences for those women’s careers and, in turn, companies’ abilities to retain women throughout their organizations.

What HR can do

This is obviously a systemic problem, which should be addressed from a broader perspective. However, given this is unlikely to happen – especially not in the next few weeks – organizations need to put in place practices that will help women stay in the workplace while still caring for their children. Here are a few things HR can do right now to help:

• Support caregivers
• Adjust current talent practices to support flexibility
• Redesign future talent practices to create on-ramps back into the company

Support caregivers

As the good folks at Mercer mentioned in a webinar today,¹⁹ employers can support caregivers in 3 primary ways (see Figure 1):

• Flexibility at work
• Flexibility from work
• Caregiving benefits

Flexibility is absolutely critical to enabling employees to do their work and to ensuring retention of them. For example, a recent study showed that 92% of employees who strongly agree their “organization provides needed flexibility to work from home with children at home” intend to stay at their organization for the next year – compared to just 66% of employees who strongly disagreed with that statement.²⁰

The ability for parents to control when, where, how, what type of work, and with whom they work is very important to enabling them to work during this pandemic.

This type of flexibility could include schedule sharing, reduced schedules, or supplementing current work with additional resources to lessen the workload. Also, as noted, it’s also incredibly important to provide parents with additional leave and time–off during this pandemic to meet their families’ needs, similar to what Microsoft did with giving workers 12 weeks of parental leave due to school disruptions.²¹

There’s one additional type of flexibility, though, that’s important to consider and isn’t called out in Figure 1 – flexibility on role if an employee’s home situation requires them to have a different situation from before. Many articles are rife with examples of people having to make a choice between quitting and working in a situation from which they could contract COVID and bring it home to a health-compromised family member. Given the number of women in essential roles, this is a situation that has especially impacted them. With the current situation, leaders have an opportunity to reimagine how work gets done and being more flexible about who does it.

While a lot has been written about the first 2 types of flexibility (and I strongly recommend you listen to the Mercer webcast), I’d like to focus on the topic of benefits – especially childcare benefits –  as that seems to have the greatest opportunity for reimagination.

Just 6% of employers offered subsidized childcare at the beginning of 2020, with 19% of employers making emergency or backup childcare services available to employees.²²

According to a Care.com survey,²³ the most common employer-offered childcare resources are:

• In-center backup care options
• Access to paid platforms to find care
• In-home care options
• Cash subsidies for care
• Onsite childcare

The first 4 bulleted items are ones that companies can contract with external vendors to offer immediately. Also, in this era of “learning pods,” companies such as Swing Education are offering teachers to small groups of children,²⁴ which is something that companies could subsidize immediately.

The last bulleted option, onsite childcare, is one worth considering, though it can take more time to implement.

It’s an approach that’s served Patagonia especially well over the years, enabling the company to have a 100% retention rate of mothers.²⁵ This benefit has also been offered for a long time by Google as well as Cisco.²⁶ Of course onsite childcare would have to adhere to health guidelines, but it could represent an opportunity to “not waste a crisis” by providing a benefit that would help keep employees – especially women – in the workforce, but that could have long-term benefits by supporting parents in the workplace.

Interestingly, another Care.com²⁷ survey shows that respondents would trade many other benefits to get more childcare assistance, showing that offering this type of benefit isn’t necessarily a zero-sum game (see Figure 2).

I’m sure there are other benefits or types of flexibility you can think of to support women in the workplace – what suggestions do you have?  

Adjust current PM practices to support flexible remote working

While different talent practices have to come together to support flexible working, performance management (PM) – given its impact on promotion and compensation – is a critical one. We wrote about this topic extensively in our report, The Double-Double Shift: Supporting Women’s Performance Management During a Pandemic.

In that study, we identified 10 specific things organizations need to focus on to improve PM for women. We put those items into the 3 buckets of culture, capability of managers, and clarity (see Figure 3).

Of this list of 10, the most important ones right now are ensuring that employees have absolute clarity on the expectations of them and that managers are focused on outcomes – not inputs (such as time available electronically, speed of email response, etc.).

I’ve focused here on the role of PM in supporting women, but I know other talent management practices could help, too. Share what you’ve seen below:

Redesign future talent practices to create on-ramps back into the company

I hate to admit defeat before a good battle is fought, but in this case, I think it’s fair to say this: We are likely to lose a lot of good women from the workforce before COVID-19 is done – even if we implement all the practices above. The question then becomes:

How will we plan to bring these women back into the workforce in the future?

We know that it can be very difficult for mothers to return to the workforce.²⁸ If organizations want to get mothers back, they’ll have to design for them. Some ways to do this include the following (see linked HBR article for more details on most of these):²⁹

• Create returnships – These are opportunities that are 8 weeks to 6 months in length and allow returnees to refresh their skills and the organization to evaluate the candidates for permanent roles
• Hire returnees into permanent positions, with support – Provide returnees targeted coaching and mentoring to support them in the transition back to work
• Host events to welcome candidates – For example, Bloomberg offers a “Returner Circle” program, a 1-2 day event for preapproved applicants to learn about careers, receive coaching, and conduct exploratory interviews³⁰
• Provide benefits aside from just cash – As you can imagine, flexibility and childcare benefits will likely remain key
• Seek out talent sources that feature mothers – As we learned in our D&I tech research, a number of technology platforms can connect mothers to companies, such as The Mom Project and Mom Source Network, that can help create on-ramps for professional women into jobs

What other ideas do you have for how to help women come back to the workforce? Share them below: 

A personal call to action

I dislike the question, “What keeps you up at night?,” but I must say, this topic keeps me up at night. We need more women in leadership, for the sake of the success of our organizations, our societies, as well as women ourselves.

We are in a critical moment: The practices leaders put in place right now can help us avoid “losing” a generation of women leaders.

I hope that some of these suggestions help move you forward in thinking about how you will retain and promote women in your workforce.

If, for some reason, you’re not in a place to take action on the suggestions above, there’s at least one thing you can do:

Ask the mothers in your life how they are doing as they approach school reopening. Find out what they’re thinking, what they’re struggling with – and see if you can help in some way. And even if you can’t help, at least try to empathize.

In the conversation I had yesterday – the one that prompted me to write this blog – it helped just to hear that other person say (upon learning that I will be homeschooling my kids):

“That sounds tough. I’m sure it will turn a 12-hour day into a 16-hour day.”

I felt seen and heard. 

Which, when one is managing kids, home, and work all at the same time, is more than I feel like I get some days. And that’s enough to keep me – and many other women – going to the next day, and the one after that.

SAP announced that it plans to take Qualtrics public at some nebulous date in the near future. This is after SAP spent $8 billion in cash to acquire the company in late 2018, just days before Qualtrics was due to IPO.

Why sell (some of) Qualtrics?

This is rare. Buying and selling companies on short-ish timeframes is usually the domain of private equity firms. But even those firms are typically operating on 3-5 year time horizons, after making significant changes to the company. SAP is selling Qualtrics after 18 months – and the only meaningful change we can see is a significant increase in Qualtrics’ revenue.

Three plausible reasons we can think of for the IPO are:

• Financial
• Change in leadership
• Post-acquisition blues

Today, a lot of ink has been spilled about the potential financial upside of selling Qualtrics – this article and podcast from Tech Crunch are especially good. Essentially, Tech Crunch is saying that, with Qualtrics’ run rate of ~$800 million in annual revenue, SAP could reasonably expect a 17.3 times revenue valuation of Qualtrics – putting it at about $13.8 billion on an IPO.

Therefore, even with the eye-popping cash investment of $8 billion, SAP could stand to make a lot of cash just for having bought and held Qualtrics for 18 months (kind of like if you bought a house in 2009 and sold it last year, but on an even shorter timeframe). SAP will remain the majority stakeholder in Qualtrics (at what percentage, we do not know), so it won’t be getting all that cash – but the potential IPO still represents a significant cashflow infusion to its business.

This is all great and good, but we have to ask – Why does SAP want to sell Qualtrics now?

Financial

The first reason could be that SAP wants the cash. In today’s earnings call, the company mentioned a significant focus on cashflow in the midst of the pandemic (who is not looking at cashflow?!?). Selling part of Qualtrics generates a significant cash bunker for SAP.

It may also be that SAP thinks that we’re in for a significant long-term economic downturn, but that cloud-based businesses are still highly valued, so this is a good time to sell if they are ever going to. They may also, as they said, want to invest in other "strategic initiatives" (like S4/Hana), so are looking to free up some money.

No matter the reason, SAP can get a lot of cash – and everyone likes cash when the economy is tight.

Change in leadership

Another reason could be a lack of leadership alignment. When SAP bought Qualtrics, it was very much a meeting of the minds between Ryan Smith, Qualtrics’ founder, and Bill McDermott, SAP’s CEO. Since McDermott left SAP last October for ServiceNow, there’s been volatility at the top: SAP moved into a co-CEO model with Christian Klein and Jennifer Morgan, with Morgan moving on this past April.

It’s possible that the vision shared by Smith and McDermott for Qualtrics was fundamentally different than what has come to pass in the Klein era. Smith clearly still has a strong vision for Qualtrics, as reinforced by the fact that he’ll become the largest individual owner of the company (though, as stated above, SAP will be the largest institutional owner).

Post-acquisition blues

Finally, it may be that the realities of post-acquisition integration were just a harder road than anyone wanted to hoe. We all know that most acquisitions fail, and ones with significant cultural differences, even more so. SAP is a large, traditional organization. Qualtrics is a cloud-based start-up, with a very different culture. Those types of differences can lead to difficulties in everything, from alignment around customer integration to how they manage the partnership landscape to software and services integration.

While I don’t know the details of what has happened, as analysts we can say that the integration of Qualtrics into core SAP SuccessFactors’ offerings has been slower than we would have expected, given SAP’s overriding focus on creating a “human experience platform.”

Bottom line

Throughout the last 18 months, Qualtrics has remained remarkably independent – a point Smith reinforced in the earnings call today. It may make more sense to cut Qualtrics loose now instead of forcing a post-acquisition integration that may not have been working as some in top leadership seats hope.

What now?

SAP reinforced that it’ll remain the majority owner of Qualtrics, and that it intends to continue investing in the “human experience platform,” marrying operational data with experience data (which it neatly calls X+O data). SAP also stated that it’ll remain Qualtrics’ primary R&D partner, which will benefit both organizations. Qualtrics may especially benefit, as there are some innovative start-ups in SAP’s start-up ecosystem. Therefore, we still expect to see a tight and beneficial relationship there, and hope that SAP is able to leverage some of the innovation Qualtrics can offer.

Near term for Qualtrics

The IPO of Qualtrics will allow it to operate more independently, which may allow it to get back into important partnerships with either Oracle or Workday (depending on how close the relationship remains with SAP). It should also allow it to revert to its start-up cultural roots, in terms of how it attracts and retains talent, and how it operates on a day-to-day basis.

Qualtrics’ partnership with SAP’s sales teams likely fueled some of its strong growth over the past 18 months, so the company may face some headwinds as it transitions back to its own salesforce. That said, Qualtrics developed a strong set of COVID-19 resources for customers and has cited those offerings as part of its success in the last few months. Qualtrics is likely to continue building on those successes as, unfortunately, the need for COVID-19 support is unlikely to go away soon.

Further, as we have noted in blogs across the last year, employee experience is a hot market. It’s now even hotter than before, with so many CEOs and senior leaders recently seeing the importance of understanding employee sentiment in light of the pandemic. Qualtrics is a market leader in this space. Even though it won’t have SAP directly behind it anymore, based on today’s earnings call, it seems that Qualtrics will retain some significant cash from this IPO to fuel its future growth. Therefore, we expect to see it continue to do very well in the future.

Net-net: This seems like a good, though unusual, deal for all.

Women are having a different work experience during the current COVID-19 pandemic, which is something leaders need to take into account as they update performance management practices. This infographic summarizes our report on this topic, The Double-Double Shift: Supporting Women's Performance Management During a Pandemic.

Click on the image below to get the full infographic. As always, we would love your feedback. If you have thoughts, please share your comments in the Feedback section on the right!

 

As leaders, one of the things we most want to create is an environment in which the people who work with us – regardless of who they are – have equal opportunities to advance. Yet, collectively, we're failing at this. Though women and men enter the workforce in equal numbers and are equally competent, on average, men hold more managerial positions (62%) than women (38%). While a variety of reasons may exist for these different percentages, one factor flies under the radar in many organizations, even though we know it influences both promotion and compensation decisions: performance management (PM).

Our research on performance management revealed, like so many others have found before us, that men and women have different experiences with it, resulting in women experiencing systemic inequality. This is despite changes to make PM more “modern.”

Before COVID-19 was even a thing, we undertook a holistic study of women and performance management to understand:

• Are the changes to modern performance management practices resulting in women and men having the same experience?
• And, if not, then what are the differences and what can organizations do about them?

The resulting study, Leveling the Field: Making Performance Management Work for Women, was ready for publication in mid-March – just as COVID-19 took over everyone’s worlds. Instead of publishing a study that would get drowned out in the craziness of the times, we held on to it. But then we decided we could – and must – adapt what we learned in Leveling the Field to fit our current moment.

The result is The Double-Double Shift: Supporting Women’s Performance Management During a Pandemic, which presents a very realistic look at how the COVID-19 global pandemic is impacting the ways women are perceived during this new work-from-home environment, as well as the additional challenges they now face. In this second study, we focus on questions such as:

• How might the unconscious biases women already face worsen in – and be mitigated by – a long-term work-from-home environment?
• Given what we know about how to make PM more equitable for women, how might we alter our practices in this current environment to level the playing field?
• How can leaders address these challenges now, before less effective practices solidify in this new working environment?

We are publishing both studies together, as we think they each represent timely and useful insights for our readers. The Double-Double Shift is very targeted at what is happening right now, pulling some of the most relevant information from Leveling the Field, and augmenting it with COVID-19 and work-from-home specific details. Leveling the Field is our original report, and has a lot more overall details and suggestions to consider. We think readers will find value in reading both, and leveraging the self-check assessments and “getting started” suggestions.

Please reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions, comments, or suggestions. If you would like an infographic summary of Leveling the Field, click here.

If you would like an infographic summary of The Double-Double Shift, click here.

Before COVID-19 was even a thing, we undertook a holistic study of women and performance management (PM), to understand a few key things:

• Are the changes to modern PM practices resulting in women and men having the same experience?
• And, if not, then what are the differences and what can organizations do about them?

The resulting study, Leveling the Field: Making Performance Management Work for Women, was ready for publication in mid-March – just as COVID-19 took over everyone’s worlds. Instead of publishing a study that would get drowned out in the craziness of the times, we held on to it. But then we decided we could – and must – adapt what we learned in Leveling the Field to fit our current moment.

The result is a sister report, The Double-Double Shift: Supporting Women’s Performance Management During a Pandemic, which presents a very realistic look at how the COVID-19 global pandemic is impacting the ways women are perceived during this new work-from-home environment, as well as the additional challenges they now face.

Many of the leading modern PM practices just need to be amplified and augmented to create a more level playing field. Organizations don’t have to reinvent modern PM to make it fairer; they just need to make it the best version of itself.

Please reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions, comments, or suggestions.