The Skills Obsession: Learning the Many Languages of Skills
Posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 at 3:35 AM
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Guests
Nuno Congalves, Global Head of Strategic Capability Building at Mars
DETAILS
“I think that in the future, what will be really necessary in terms of skills are people that talk different languages of skills… talking different languages of different skill sets will be something really, really important.” Why is it significant that become more expert seems so fused with speaking restricted languages? And what does it mean to have ‘intentionality’ about skills? How do you start to really understand the skills needs of an organization you join in COVID? This week, these and many other thorny but critical issues get exposed via our debate with long-time friend and highly accomplished CLO and talent leader Nuno Gonçalves, who is now starting to do at global confectionary, food and pet care giant Mars what he did at European life sciences player UCB: implement a cross-company, future-focused skills strategy. It’s an excellent conversation with a truly passionate learning ninja who’s thought deeply about these problems.
Find out more about Nuno’s employer Mars
Connect with him on LinkedIn
Webinar
Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills.
Partner
We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.
Season Sponsor
We are very grateful to Workday for its exclusive sponsorship of this season of the Workplace Stories by RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.
TRANSCRIPT
Five key quotes:
If we say one of the things that we want to develop is digital commerce—it’s out there, we want to gain more market share on our digital platforms. What does this mean for us? What does this mean in terms of capabilities? And because we are looking at three or five years, we will not get to see it at an individual level; we’re going to see where we are at a job-role level. And we'll be done the same way, what do you need to do to be there in 2023 or 2025, will this job be done the same way or not? Will digital change augment the job, will it become obsolete? Will you be doing a digital branding the same way that you're doing right now, or will it evolve?
Then go out, see how your competitors are doing in terms of digital capabilities. How many people are they hiring? Are they hiring more than the previous years or not. Go see job boards and try to understand where these people go and see where they're hiring them from. So all of that will start to influence what is your supply… and it will start to give you a perspective of what is your demand as well, because if you understand what is your strategy, you understand what are the capabilities that you're going to need, you understand how many people you'll need, you'll have the capabilities and you'll have the volumes. And you know where these people are.
I think we're neglecting one thing that is really important, which is potential. Okay. If you're actually able to crack that code and decipher what potential means to you as a company, I would take, any day, someone that has probably 50% of the skills that I that I need right now, but 80% of the potential that I need than someone that who is a full expert, but will never do anything else but that skill set.
I think for us to be able to really even play the game of what will be the strategy, what the world will look like and all that, it cannot be just what I think the world will look like—you need to educate your decisions and your perspectives of the future. We talk about kind of prescriptive analytics and predictive analytics and all that, and that requires data and quality of data that somehow you need to feed from different systems, or you need to have data that are credible, and you need to be able to have the ability to master those data as well.
We need a lot of people, because this is not something that HR can do from their ivory tower and say, now it's digital and let's do a little bit of a digital dance here, and then everybody has those skills and then it's good. To be there at that table, you need to add value. And our value proposition is, one, we will bring strategic capabilities expertise; second, we need to evolve this predictive analytics, the analytics part, the data and the analytics; and third, we need to understand really well the business and their strategy as well. So this is what I first need to equip my team with, and start already as much as possible piloting some of the support that we need to provide to some of our segments.
I would put my money a lot on that hope, on the people that I have surrounding me. And when I say surrounding me, I say my boss, I say the, you know, the CEO of the organization, because I do believe that because we have that track record of doing the right thing, that we will continue to do the right thing and to become a better organization as we move forward.
Nuno Gonçalves:
Everybody's asking what will be the world in the future. And at a professional level, you need to be prepared for that—so what are the skills or competencies or what are the skills that you'll need one way or the other to succeed?
Dani Johnson:
That was Nuno Gonçalves, the global head of strategic capability building at food and beverage giant Mars.
Nuno Gonçalves:
The interesting thing is that this is not only at an individual level, but we're also seeing this at the HR level, and we're also seeing this with CEOs, where a lot of the strategic documents that I see, a lot of the strategic conversations, has a big part of the capabilities of tomorrow, the capabilities of the future.
Dani Johnson:
Mars is a privately held company with a portfolio of confectionary, food, and pet care products and services. They employ 133,000 people and generate $40 billion in annual sales, they produce some of the world's best love brands, including Dove Extra, M&Ms, Milky Way, Snickers, and they take care of half the world's pets through their pet health services brands.
Nuno has a really interesting perspective on skills, because he's implemented a skills strategy in one organization and is just beginning to implement a new strategy in a different organization.
Nuno Gonçalves:
If I look back to my 20-odd years career in L&D, I think we've been very tactical in L&D; we’ve been very tactical in talent—we’ve been very tactical in HR from my perspective. I think that the world is moving so fast, right? How can we equip ourselves to actually bring this intentionality? How can we keep ourselves to actually be faster?
Dani Johnson:
We think it'll be really interesting for people to hear his experience because he's just at the beginning of his second tour of duty, so to speak, he has some experience in doing it before, but he's applying it in new contexts.
Nuno Gonçalves:
I think this is not something that we can do, like HR can do from their ivory tower, but to be there at that table, you need to add value. And our value proposition is one, we will bring strategic capabilities, expertise; second, we need to evolve this predictive analytics, the analytics part, the data and the analytics. And third, we need to understand really well, the business and their strategy as well.
Dani Johnson:
Here’s our conversation with Nuno Gonçalves.
Dani Johnson:
Hey Nuno, we're thrilled to have you on our podcast, Workplace Stories by RedThread Research.
Nuno Gonçalves:
Well, thanks for having me, Dani; excited to be here!
Dani Johnson:
One of the reasons we wanted to talk to Nuno is because he's at the beginning of the skills journey at his new company, Mars, but he did a really similar tour of duty at UCB. And so we're interested in his perspective, since he's done it before, and because he's just starting again.
So we want to start by just asking you a couple of questions and these are, these are sort of rapid fire and don't require really long responses: the first one is, can you give us a quick overview of Mars, its mission and its purpose?
Nuno Gonçalves:
Mars is a company that has more than a hundred years, a family-owned company, and very purpose-driven. And I know that you guys have had on your last season, focusing on our purpose-driven organizations—Mars is definitely one of them. It's motto it's the world we want tomorrow starts with how we do business today, which actually talks a lot about sustainability and how we look to the future while we know that we need to take action today as well.
Dani Johnson:
Very cool. I think we all sort of recently learned that Mars is a candy company, obviously, but you also deal quite a bit in pet healthcare.
Nuno Gonçalves:
Yeah, we do. Pet care started a few years ago; obviously Mars is known by our candies, our snacks and treats. It's also probably known for our food. And for me, one of my favorites is what we now call Ben’s Originals which is rice—I love rice and it has always been the best rice ever. So it was good just now to be associated with some of the things that I do every day!
Dani Johnson:
Day. I give us an overview of what your work is—what’s your job title and how would you describe what you do?
Nuno Gonçalves:
So, the job title is a little bit of a mouthful; I'm the global head of strategic capabilities building for Mars. Basically what that is, is that we have been working on capabilities building with our Mars University, but what we wanted to do as well is to bring a little bit of what we call ‘intentionality.’ So we want to really understand what are the capabilities of the futures, those that will be strategic for Mars and strategic on how the economy and society will evolve, and how can we build towards that and anticipate the need one way or the other.
So it's an interesting role that combines both things—the identification and the standing of what will be this future of work, future of talent, meaning what will be the capabilities that we'll need to tomorrow, very connected with the strategy of what we call segments—our businesses, our enterprise strategy, kind of translating all that and understanding what are the key strategic capabilities that we will need to win, right? That we will need to play, of course, but the ones that we will need to win moving forward.
And then we have the building side with the Mars University, where we have roughly 11 colleges that try to build the capabilities that we need one way or the other—today, probably more short term. What do we want to do with this position is to anchor everything that we do in terms of capabilities building to our strategy, and probably longer term that will allow us a bit of a leeway to be able to build the capabilities at the level that we need when we need it as well.
Dani Johnson:
I love that; I love those two ideas. First of all, you talked about intentionality, which I think is really key when you were talking about skills and capabilities. And the second thing is you talked about strategy, which I think goes in hand-in-hand with intentionality, but it's great to hear that even your title includes, you know, an illusion to strategy, which isn't always the case with L&D.
Give us a sense of what problems you're trying to solve?
Nuno Gonçalves:
Speed and intentionality. So if we go a little bit toward exactly what we were just talking, I think there's two things is if I look back to my 20 odd years career in L&D, I think I completely agree with you as we've been very tactical in L&D, we've been very tactical in talent, we’ve been very tactical in HR from my perspective. So bringing this intentionality will hopefully move us one level up and bring a lot of purpose to everything that we do.
So that's, that's one thing is, is disconnection intentionality, definitely one of the things that that I'm, I'm looking at and trying to solve the other one is speed. Dani, the world is moving so fast, right? That if we stay in our chairs and really try to, you know, with our businesses and say, this year we will do this for you guys, and it doesn't fit the speed of the businesses. So how can we go faster? Now behind these two very simple words there's a lot of things, right?
So how can we keep ourselves to actually bring this intentionality? How can we equip ourselves to actually be faster? And that's probably, many more things that I'm trying to solve that I'll be happy to talk to you about on this podcast.
Dani Johnson:
That's really interesting. We were talking to Satnam Sagoo this morning, the head of learning at British Red Cross, and she mentioned the same thing; it’s a lot more of a cultural thing than I think a lot of organizations give credit to when it comes to skills.
Last rapid fire question for you: what is the most challenging aspect of your work?
Nuno Gonçalves:
So I would not go on the technical side, I think, you know, it is challenging, kind of, you know, capabilities, what is this and all that.
I think I would choose two things, Dani; one is making sure that we see beyond the obvious. And when I say we, the big we is your organization, right? A lot of my work, as I see it will be, and granted I've been with Mars for 60-90 days, but a lot of my work will be to show that future and storytell, the journey there. So that's probably the most challenging thing is to align on what that future will be as we are doing right now in these first 90 days. And then storytell, storytell, storytell, to the point that we build and co-create that journey together. So I would say that's probably, well, it's the most challenging, but it's also the most exciting, part of the job.
Dani Johnson:
I dig it—I think that's one of the biggest challenges organizations in general have, it's hard to develop a strategy that is going to change so rapidly, and then it's very difficult to identify the skills that you're going to need for that ever-changing strategy. So best of luck to you on solving those problems… they seem very large!
Nuno Gonçalves:
Yeah. And just, if I can: if we're always reactive, we will never be playing a good game, right? So if we're talking about skills, it's not only about skills, but eventually we'll talk a little bit later on this, but I think it's also around potential and how can we prepare for any future that we might eventually have.
Chris Pirie:
Really interested in the storytelling side of things—such a powerful skill for leaders to develop. Do you think your job is to tell stories as a way to recruit the broad organization into the journey to the future?
Nuno Gonçalves:
I think it's a key differentiator between being a Chief Learning Officer that is relatively in a stable environment, or because you're already very mature and you'll continue to tell the story that you've been telling for the past two or three or five years. Right now, we recognize that we have a journey ahead of us, and we can not do this journey alone. And then the only way that we see is, one, is that we co-create, we bring people to create with us and we create that journey together. And we go out there defend that journey excite people for what we're trying to do and hopefully over-deliver because the down part of the storytelling that you may need to make sure that one, you build the excitement, but you also need to make sure that you deliver on that excitement.
Stacia Garr:
Makes a lot of sense. So, this season is called The Skills Obsession, and so we want to spend a bit of time kind of just focusing specifically on skills. But skills is a broad concept; we'd love to hear what does that word mean to you Nuno when, when we say it, and when you think about it in the workplace context?
Nuno Gonçalves:
First thing that I do is that I always adapt to my audience, right, and the interesting thing is that more often than not, people don't really differentiate skills from competencies, from capabilities, from all that, right? So I first try to adapt—and if they do, if they are educated, then it's probably good to clarify. Now I can tell you how I define skills versus competencies versus capabilities, if that's of interest, but in storytelling, if I'm going to talk about capabilities and competencies and how my audience understands our skills, then I'm going to switch skills and that’s it, right?
So you said, okay, on the skills and kind of definition, right? The way that we see it to get today. And I don't think there's one single company or person that has cracked the code, kind of this universal around skills, right? On one side, we see what we call competencies. And competencies for us is a mix between skills, knowledge, and behaviors: knowledge, meaning knowledge about something behavior, obviously everything that you do and you demonstrate skills around your application of the knowledge and how you're mastering that knowledge one way or the other, right, and turning it into a skill.
So for us, skills are within the word competency. And if you have a mix of skills, behaviors, and knowledge on a specific topic and you increase your expertise on that topic, your experience on the topic, your level of competency will rise. So that is at an individual level, right? You have a competency, and a specific competency that has a mix between skills, behaviors, and knowledge. When I see it—and it's a big part of my job—when we see that at an organizational level, we call it capability: basically, if you have a set of people that have similar competencies, which means a similar mix of skills, behaviors, and knowledge on a specific topic, then an organization gains a capability around that topic; it could be a digital capability, for example.
So we differentiate competencies at an individual level, capabilities and organizational levels and when we see individuals inside the competencies, we see skills, knowledge, and behaviors.
Stacia Garr:
That's really helpful. And I think one of the themes that we're starting to see in this podcast is kind of this, this a distinction between individual and the organization and where these concepts of skills and competencies and capabilities sit across those different ones.
Dani Johnson:
Yeah—I was just going to say, Nuno, I think your point is really well taken; most of the organization doesn't care what you call them, they just want to know what they need to do, and so I think it's really insightful that you are distinguishing them on the backend where the sausage is made, but providing sort of a united front to the organization in general.
Stacia Garr:
Kind of building on this; skills have come into the lexicon as a hot concept, particularly in the last 18 months or so. We'd love your take on why you think that's happening; why this focus on skills when we had all these other terms that would seem largely adequate.
Nuno Gonçalves:
I think it's a lot about the uncertainty, Stacia. I think change is there and is probably exponentially felt by all of us with, with this pandemic that rushed and pushed a lot of transformations and a lot of change. And everybody's asking, you know, what will be the world in the future at a professional level? You need to be prepared for the world one way or the other. So what are the skills or competencies—what are the skills that you'll need one way or the other to succeed?
The interesting thing is that this is not only at an individual level, because we've seen some research around kind of new generations that are wanting to question more the skills that they will need in the future, but we are also seeing this at the HR level and we are also seeing this with CEOs where a lot of the strategic documents that I see a lot of the strategic conversations. And I would probably say somewhere between 90 to a 100% of all strategic documents that I see have a big part of the capabilities of tomorrow, the capabilities of the future.
I think everybody's trying to prepare one way or the other for a role during and post COVID. And definitely, I think that's one of the reasons I believe also if we add the second dimension, if you allow me there here, Stacia, is that if we look a little bit back and I'm doing a little bit of research here of the evolution of skills, you start seeing probably somewhere, even before the industrial revolution that people are we're specializing in one particular skill, right, or one particular skill set, right? Because you are a lawyer or you're a banker or one, because the world was much more linear. What we are seeing right now is that the world is becoming much more multiliniear, right?
So there's a lot of different swim lanes, one way or the other. And more than that, I think that in the future what will be really necessary in terms of skills are people that actually talk different languages of skills, and people that understand Art and then understand Technology and people that are HR, but also understand Legal or also understand any other skillset. So talking different languages of different skill sets will be something really, really important in the future from my perspective. I thought that was already a trend that now comes much more reinforced with what we see in terms of the pandemic as well.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I think there's an interesting point in that if you'd look back again to history, a lot of the innovation has come from this intersection between skill sets, as you've said with maybe your lawyer who can also speak technology or whatever it is. But the desire for more innovation, the desire to change mindsets, to meet the real complex challenges we have, I think puts a greater emphasis on exactly what you said—that ability to take one skill set and overlay it with another and to create both new insight and potentially new products and services. So I think that you're onto something there; this demand that we're seeing is reinforcing the importance of what you said.
Chris Pirie:
Yeah. I mean, what I love about what Nuno just said is it made me think that skills in terms of how we talk about them, it's a language—skills is a language.
And I was thinking about the guilds and I was thinking about professions and how over time they evolve their own secret languages. It's kind of like a protective mechanism; you would identify a lawyer or you would identify an engineer by the language and terminology that they use. And so I'm seeing in one sense from Nuno’s description there that skills have functioned in the past to put people into professional boxes. And I wonder if what's going on now is we need to kind of break down some of those silos, and we need to find a common skills language to allow people to connect across the swim lanes as Nuno says. Very interesting stuff.
Nuno Gonçalves:
And Chris we both were with USC a couple of years ago, and there was a story that stayed with me and I think it will stay with me to exactly to what, to your point is that, at that moment I was with UCB, and as you know, one of the things that are very critical for us is cleaning these medical and clinical development, right? The development of drugs and new molecules. You might not know, but it's actually very, very kind of science, not only scientific, but very techie, right? You can see people with virtual reality glasses trying to understand it and you know, how enzymes behave and how you can copulate and put kind of two enzymes together, and all that. One of the people that was there actually said, and he was one of the founders of one, a very important drug that is called Tamiflu, and he said, I would love in my lifespan to actually be able to bring many more drugs so that we become healthier and prosper as humanity. Now, the thing here is that typically we take 10 years to develop a molecule. Can we find a way to actually accelerate that?
Obviously on one side you have all the regulators and all that, but on the other side, there's a lot of medical testing and a lot of trial and error, and what he said was we need to find a way to compute information so quickly into render information so quickly that we accelerate all that process one way or the other. It's not only trial and error.
Then he got to think about it. You know, what is the other industry that actually renders massive amounts of information? And he said, the movie industry—they render tremendous amounts of information one way or the other. So he actually put together people from R and D engineers and all that, and people from the movie industry. And it was so interesting—they could not understand each other, their jargon, the way that they speak and everything, they could not understand each other. So he said it took them a good six months to find a common language. And, you know, what was that common language? Origami, not Latin. That was because origami they could actually mimic what was the shape of a molecule, and the guys could grab that and actually put that in a computer and then start creating the algorithms one way or the other.
So talking the same language helps exponentially; I think it will be one of the key drivers for the future as well. And sorry for the long answer, but I think it was just the perfect story to illustrate what you were saying.
Chris Pirie:
It is a great story, and that was the Center for Converged Bioscience and it was really all about how you get people with different skill sets and disciplines coming together, bringing their own special knowledge and capability to solve a really hard problem. The first problem they had was language, and language around skills. Very, very interesting.
Dani Johnson:
Can I take a tangent off that discussion? You're talking about bringing people with certain skills together. One of the conversations that we've seen, and I actually just had this conversation is, a big theme on supply and demand—the skills discussion with respect to supply and demand. Some skills are in too short of supply and then you see crazy salaries and then some of them are too great in supply and organizations have to let people go. So how do you think we should think about this problem a little bit more holistically—this problem of supply and demand?
Nuno Gonçalves:
I'm not sure if it's how we should, but I'm going to tell you how I'm thinking about it, right, so it might be wrong; you can tell me.
So let me give you an example: so UCB, right, and without disclosing anything, all obviously profits are information—pharma industry is the industry that plans probably with the energy industry, that plants are probably kind of further away, right. We have a 10-year strategy that for us was relatively clear around drug development, R&D, medical go-to market and all that. And it's supporting all that. We had all the financials, scenarios and planning that we also had, because the strategy is an if then scenario. So we knew what were kind of the trigger points of the strategy for UCB. The same thing that we will know for Mars, right? And every single company has the strategy, so go there and actually understand what are the pivotal moments in the trigger moments of that strategy—the ones that will be tremendously important for this company. And then go try to translate that and understand what that means in terms of capabilities or competencies or skills as you want to call it, and go deep on this.
For example: if we say, one of the things that we want to develop is digital commerce, right? It's out there, we want to gain more market share on our digital platforms. What does this mean for us? What does this mean in terms of capabilities? And because we are looking at three or five years, we will not get to see it at an individual level; we’re going to see where we are at a job-role level, right? And we'll be done the same way, what do you need to do to be there in 2023 or 2025, will this job be done the same way or not? Will digital change one way or the other, the job will lead to augment the job, will it become obsolete? Will you be doing a digital branding the same way that you're doing right now, or will it evolve.
Then go out, see how your competitors are doing in terms of digital capabilities. How many people are they hiring? Are they hiring more than the previous years or not. Go see job boards and try to understand where these people go and see where they're hiring them from. So all of that will start to influence what is your supply… and it will start to give you a perspective of what is your demand as well, because if you understand what is your strategy, you understand what are the capabilities that you're going to need, you understand how many people you'll need, you'll have the capabilities and you'll have the volumes. And you know where these people are.
The other question then is what are you going to do about it? Are you going to build these competencies or these capabilities? Are you going to buy these capabilities? Which normally is very attached to what I call your time to competency—if you have a time to competency of 18 months, if you're a gap of competencies is too big, you probably need to go outside. If you can ultimately develop internally, you can eventually do it internally as well.
Dani Johnson:
So talk to me a little bit about that, because along with that discussion, we're hearing a lot about tangential skills. So in the past it's been, do you have the skill, if you do not have this skill—oh no, we don't have this skill or capability. Therefore we need to hire it from the outside because we don't have time based on the strategy that we have.
The pandemic has sort of thrown that into a little bit of question: as organizations have gotten much better at identifying the skills that the individuals have and working with them to sort of up-skill them, which is cheaper, the research shows and sometimes much more effective based on their tangential skills.
One of the examples is a telecommunications company who had to shut down all their retail stores—but when they shut down the retail stores, because of COVID, they had an immediate uptick in customer service needs, and so they took all of those retail employees and basically switched them over to customer service because it took very little time for them to ramp up. So give me a sense for,in your build, buy, borrow, bounce, and I think there was one more that you were talking about . How do tangential skills figure into that?
Nuno Gonçalves:
Yeah, we, we call it transferable skills. Let me give you another example of how we did this, actually. So if we go back to, to UCB and to the farming industry one of the things that he's actually very interesting is when a drug loses the patent, which means you lose protection—and imagine you have a multi-billion dollars drug that loses a patent in the 1st of January, and in some cases, depending on how competitive you use your landscape, that could mean losses of revenue of roughly 70 to 80% in 12 months—so if it’s a $1 billion drug in 12 months, you might be losing 700 million, right? It’s aggressive.
So one of the things that we were seeing, because we knew that there were some drugs on our pipeline that would lose their patent and their protection, we were understanding a little bit of, of what could be the impact and we were trying to understand how could we delay some of these with their, some extensions and all that, but how could we delay as much as possible. Because as you understand, with these numbers, a delay of two weeks represents a significant amount of revenue as well for us.
The other thing is—and we only have this perspective because we were doing this work in parallel with other division—is that we then put together the two projects that we were doing in two different divisions, and then we overlapped and then we say, okay, hold on guys; in this quarter, because we're losing revenue, we're going to have to decrease costs and we're going to have to decrease also the number of people that we have in this unit. At the same time, if everything goes well in our drug development, three months later we're going to need 100 or 200 or 300 people that have a similar skillset to these ones, right?
So probably if we were going to do this exercise a little bit more blind, without doing this analysis, we would probably have to let go of some people or put them somewhere else, and eventually hire others to the other business units. What we then said, listen, if this happens, because this was like three or four years ahead of us, if this happens and if everything goes, goes as planned, then we're going to build and bridge the skill sets from one unit to the other instead of actually letting go excellent talent and having to recruit others that ultimately has a risk of the risks that we know in terms of cultural fit, in terms of performance and so on and so forth.
So that for me is one of the benefits of this intentionality. Remember, in the beginning of the podcast that we were talking about, intentionality is let's make sure that we do things intentionally and then with purpose as well, which is something that Mars is very big on.
Dani Johnson:
So, okay—let me take a tangent off that one as well! In cases like that, where you're basically moving parts of the organization to other parts of the organization and re-skilling them, one of the biggest challenges that organizations are having today is that they don't understand the skills that their employees have, which kind of enables that mobility, it enables all kinds of stuff.
I'm wondering if you have a sense for the type of—and it doesn't have to be your own organization—but the types of data that are being used to discern those skills, rather than just, you know, one company we talked to sent around the spreadsheet and had everybody write their skills down, but I'm imagining there are better ways. How have you done it? Or how have you seen that done before?
Nuno Gonçalves:
I'm battling with this right now, because I think I've seen the most complex and the most simple and the most approaches to all of this and the thing here, Dani, is that the world moves so fast that if you're going to use something that will take you six months to update by the end of that, you actually do that you're already kind of obsolete one way or the other.
So I'm not sure I'm answering your question, but the question that I have in my mind is because I think it's not only about skilling or reskilling; I think we're neglecting one thing that for me is really important, which is potential. Okay. Because for me, if you're actually able to crack that code and decipher what potential means to you as a company, I would take any day someone that has probably 50% of the skills that I that I need right now but 80% of the potential that I need than someone that has is a full expert, but will never do anything else but that skill set one way or the other.
So, yes, I understand that we see kind of different companies and, and skills cloud and talent marketplaces, and making sure that we bridge opportunities with skills that we accredit and we credential the skills one way or the other, which I think is good. I haven't seen by the way, companies doing that in a way that I say, Oh my God, this is really the way, but theoretically it makes a tremendous amount of sense. Can we have people kind of referring or you know making, one way or the other, assessing your performance and making sure that you connect your performance with some of the social confirmation and accreditation of your skills ethic? I think it’s great, and it will be a combination of different ways.
On the other side, I think and I feel that we are neglecting potential. And because we don't know what are the skills that eventually we will need in five years from now, can we keep our organization with a workforce that can deal with anything—doesn't matter if we turn right or left, or if we have COVID-20, 21, 22, have something else happening in the future. So I would say both reskilling and potential; I'm not sure if I've answered your question.
Dani Johnson:
No, you absolutely did. I think a lot of companies are sort of struggling with that idea, which is where a lot of them are talking about some of the competency models and performance data that also feeds into where people go, and how capable they are to fill positions and do tasks in the future.
Chris Pirie:
I love Nuno’s point here about motivation and personal motivation; it’s like a whole other factor that we can sometimes miss if we're just focused on codifying and the structuring of some view or some model of skills.
And also what we know about the skills we have in the organization are typically done through the lens of existing organizational structures like job descriptions and so on and so forth. What I loved in our call this morning with Satnam was where they work with volunteers, and they don't have a lot of data about people they just asked ‘Who has this skill?’ And it turns out that people had not just the skill, but the motivation to apply it. And that was very strong in her case. So I like that idea.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I think you, you raised a good point. There can be in our effort to kind of create structure in, like a can kind of fall down underneath that structure—yet, as kind of the data person here—I feel we need to have some structure, some data, some, some sources for this information. And so I'm wondering if you can talk about either your previous organization or at Mars, how you're thinking about kind of the data side of this, about the identification of skills and, and where do you get that information from and how do you verify or credential it and the like?
Nuno Gonçalves:
Well, two things. One, I'm with you 110%; I think for us to be able to really even play the game of what will be the strategy, what the world will look like and all that, it cannot be just what I think the world will look like—you need to educate your decisions and your perspectives of the future. We talk about kind of prescriptive analytics and predictive analytics and all that, and that requires data and quality of data that somehow you need to feed from different systems, or you need to have data that are credible, and you need to be able to have the ability to master those data as well.
And I'm going to be very transparent here. We are on a journey of data at Mars; we were on a journey of data at UCB. We were in a journey of data before at Sanofi, and I'm probably most of these legacy organizations that let me know, like Mars, that we've been here for a hundred years, we are all in this journey.
My take—and I'm saying this in my domain, I'm not at all on the business of Mars and all that—is that we are very immature on our ability, sometimes even to describe the past on descriptive analytics, right? And this is one of the things that will be strategically important for us in the next 12, 18, 24 months as I'm building that strategy. So this is a little bit of a below the hood for the strategy of Mars, is that our ability to actually move the needle here from this at least being good describing what happened, so that we can start diagnosing what happened so that we can strive to start being much more prescriptive.
That's a journey that we need to do. So right now, I've seen others, I think I've seen people cross-referencing performance systems. And it's not only elements of our performance management systems, but actually business performance systems with HR performance systems. I've seen people doing the credentialing piece. I've seen people just go to LinkedIn and use LinkedIn now, does it make sense or not? So what I'm looking for, and what I'm waiting for, is to something that actually grabs information from different parts of the organization and is able to cross-reference and one way or the other, we start inferring those skills with strong inference, predictable data as well.
And I've seen some companies that are saying that they do this; in true honesty, I haven't tested, I don't know if that's really the case.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. One thing you mentioned a couple of times that I'd like to dive in on a little bit more is you said we're on a journey, and I think that implies learning, yes, but people analytics and some of these other functions. So as you think about kind of the core team, the tiger team as it were, is where who's going to be focused here on skills. Who is that? Who should you, who are you planning to work with? Who do you think you should be working with?
Nuno Gonçalves:
So remember when I said that storytelling was probably a big part of my work? So the way that we see it, and so telling you a little bit of what I was able to see at Mars, right. I came in, I have 11 colleges with me. We are very vertical; we are kind of, every single college in their swim lanes and all that good stuff. So of course, and important stuff, but the question is, are we doing strategic stuff?
So we were, and we are very functionally-driven, because traditionally those academies, those, those university is, are very kind of topic driven, which means, you know, supply chain R&D and all that throughout the entire process and my on-boarding at Mars, I always heard, Oh, we are very, very functionally driven—where is our business? And it's actually a really good provocation, right? Where, where is our business? Because whether we like it or not, strategy comes from the business, and the strategy teams. And that's one of the things that, you know, you ask who we are already approaching and much closer to the strategy teams and to our businesses and believe it or not, they are eager to have us remember every single strategy paper talks about capabilities, building capabilities of the future. And we've been trying—but our organization, one way or the other, we are still not mature enough to have the deep dives and have the expertise to be able to even reinforce our HR strategy of the different segments and enterprise segments. So the business, the customers, we need to be much closer to them one way or the other, but that's a lot of people.
Now we cannot also neglect the functions, because those are the subject matter experts. Those will be the guys that will tell them, you know, if you want to have 12% more market share in digital commerce for one of your products that will increase your revenue by $1.3 billion, if you want to do this, you need to do things differently. You need to have a different skill set. These people, these roles need to have different skill sets. What are these skill sets of the future? How will we do brand planning in the future? How will we be doing brand positioning in the future? What are the biggest changes in skills and in behaviors and all that.
So we need a lot of people, Stacia, because I think this is not something that HR can do from their ivory tower and say, now it's digital and let's, let's do a little bit of a digital dance here, and then, and then everybody has those skills and then it's good. But to be there at that table, Stacia, and this is reinforced the worker says, you need to add value. And our value proposition is one, we will bring strategic capabilities expertise; second, we need to evolve this predictive analytics, the analytics part, the data and the analytics. And third, we need to understand really well the business and their strategy as well. So this is what I first need to equip my team with, and start already as much as possible piloting some of the support that we need to provide to some of our segments.
Dani Johnson:
About a lot of things. And we've sort of raised a lot of challenges that you've sort of come across in your positions. What gives you hope that we'll crack this nut?
Nuno Gonçalves:
It's a very great question. Can I tell you a little bit of a story? I left UCB at the beginning of 2020, so it wasn't good—great timing, right on top of COVID and all that! So I left UCB, and I was looking for other challenges, you know, kind of the second part of my career and what am I going to do? And it was the culmination of 12 intense years of moves from different industries, different companies and different geographies and all this stuff, and it was really good to actually do a little bit of a timeout.
Word travels fast, and I was having different conversations with different people, companies contacting me. And while I was not necessarily ready to jump on the first thing that would show up, I said, you know, listen, I'm going to go where my gut tells me to go—my gut has done good stuff in the past, I kind of tend to go with my gut in some important decisions. And the first conversation that I had with Mars, you know, those kinds of conversations that you get at the end of those conversations, and you get more energized at the end than in the beginning? This is really cool. You know, is it kind of very clear?
And that it kept on happening, happening second conversation, third conversation, fourth conversation. I said, listen, this cannot, you know, it's different people. Something's one way or the other there, is there something in the sauce, there is something in the water in Mars, right? And I decided to join Mars because of people because of how not necessarily how good we are—by the way, I do love the M&Ms, of course—but because it seems to be an organization that has really good people, that has a proven track record to do the right things.
And if you ask me around hope, I would put my money a lot on that hope, on the people that I have surrounding me. And when I say surrounding me, I say my boss, I say the, you know, the CEO of the organization, because I do believe that because we have that track record of doing the right thing, that we will continue to do the right thing and to become a better organization as we move forward.
Dani Johnson:
That was a perfect answer. Thank you for being here today, Nuno, and just a quick question, how can people connect with you and your work?
Nuno Gonçalves:
So I am a relatively shy extrovert, which is an interesting combination, and I tend to downgrade a little bit of what we're doing. And sometimes I'm having conversations with you guys and you guys say, you know, come and talk, and I say, you know, really is it really kind of podcast material? And I don't post enough, but listen, I think if there is interest, I am on Twitter, I am on LinkedIn—reach out. If you want to hear more, kind of give me a nudge; I might lose a little bit of the shyness, and start posting more and sharing more out there. And if you find it interesting, then I'll continue to do that as well.
Dani Johnson:
We'd like to finish with a question that actually ties back to our previous podcasts and some of our other work and that's around purpose. So we want to know why you do what you do—you individually, Nuno, what is it that inspires you to do the work you do?
Nuno Gonçalves:
I'm a little bit on a quest. I think it's evolving, because whenever you're younger, it's probably different as you mature. Back in 2018, I went to Stanford and spent six weeks there; it's a very humbling experience if you haven't done it, right, because you think, you had like 20 years of your career, and you've done good stuff and you know, you're a VP of whatever. And then you go to Stanford, then there's like 200 people and you're kind of the underachiever of those 200, right? And you have people that are driving the GDP of South Asia and all that stuff.
So what that taught me was people were literally trying to change organizations, trying to change the world. And that wasn't so much of a significant shift for me, because I couldn't see beyond my life. And you know when you're climbing a mountain and there's a little bit of a fog, and then you say, Oh, I'm almost at the top. And this is only what I see, and then you, you just pass the fog and then you see, Oh, shoot, there's not only much more mountains, but the mountain is much higher. And I think, I believe that's some of the work that I'm trying to do with startups and with some of the investment funds, I really want to help change the world. I'm not changing the world by myself, but I want to be there. I want to be in the room where we changed the world one way or the other, if I can contribute. That’s more of a philosophical perspective, but that's what I'm trying to do, Stacia.
Stacia Garr:
All of us here are on that effort—change the world through the work that people do in the workplaces that they work in. So thank you for being in the room with everyone here, and everybody who I'm sure is listening to the podcast.
Nuno Gonçalves:
It is my pleasure: thanks guys, thanks so much for having me.
Stacia Garr:
Thanks for listening to the RedThread Research podcast about the near future of people and work practices: please subscribe and rate us on the podcast platform of your choice, and share with your friends and colleagues. You can find additional materials, including our research and research agenda, at www.red threadresearch.com.
Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.
Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.
Q&A Call-Purpose-Driven Orgs
Posted on Monday, April 19th, 2021 at 9:53 AM
Q&A Call Video
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Stacia Garr:
Great. Well, we're going to go ahead and get started. So for those of you that I don't know, I am Stacia Garr and I am co-founder of RedThread Research where human capital research and advisory membership. And we're excited to talk to you today about purpose driven organizations. So this is a one of our Q&A calls. So this is pretty informal. And if you have questions, please go ahead and just jump off of mute and ask them as we go along. We do love it if you're able to do camera, just because it's a small group and it makes it a little bit more informal. If you don't feel comfortable with that today, obviously totally understand. You can also use the chat function if that's more your jam today as well.
Who is RedThread
Stacia Garr:
Just quick station identification as it were. As I said, we're RedThread Research. We focus on a range of different topics. We're focused on people, analytics, learning and skills, performance, and employee experience to DEIB and HR technology. This topic of purpose really kind of covers the much broader range of what, you know, it's really kind of a super topic if you will, because it has impacts across all these different areas. If anybody wants to know more about what we do go to redthreadresearch.com.
Our journey to understand purpose
Stacia Garr:
So as I mentioned, this is kind of a super topic for us, and we began this, this journey to purpose. It's actually kind of an interesting origin story in that our team every year comes together and says, you know, what are we going to focus on in the coming year? And a few years ago, I guess about 18 months ago, one of our team members came together, came to this meeting and said, I think we should really focus on organizational purpose. And Dani and I kind of went really like, are you sure?
Stacia Garr:
And you know, just cause we hadn't been here, we'd been hearing some about it, but we weren't, you know, we weren't convinced and this team member made an incredibly compelling case around why purpose was so important in how he was gaining traction and all this other stuff. And this was in September of 2019. So over the course of the next month or so this team member convinced us that this was a great idea. And we decided to start the research in January, 2020. Obviously we had no idea what was going to happen as we moved through 2020 at that point and how, in some ways, prescient this topic of purpose really was. But the reason I share that story is because before we got to the pandemic, there was already a lot of interest in this topic of purpose. There was an I'll talk about this in just a minute, but the focus on the business roundtable on making the purpose of a corporation being much more broad being about stakeholder capitalism, not just about shareholder capitalism and the like, but so we had that already happening, but then the pandemic really kind of accelerated what was happening.
Stacia Garr:
And so we completed a study last fall called the Purpose Driven Organization and it really covered the three bullets that are here on this slide, what is purpose, why it matters, how HR can bring purpose to life and the role of HR tech and enabling purpose. One of the things that happened though, because we were doing this research in the midst of the pandemic is a lot of people were obviously focused on a range of things related to enabling their employees. And we found that we had some really good stories, but not that many great stories of people telling them that story themselves. So we've listened to a lot of podcasts. We did some, we did some interviews, we did a lot of reading of articles, et cetera. And that's what we based a report on, but we wanted to bring it more to life.
Stacia Garr:
And so as a result of that, we did a whole podcast series that kicked off last October and ran until actually just about a month ago where we publish stories of what organizations were doing about organizational purpose. And that podcast is on our website, it's called, is purpose working. And so that was kind of that formed the Genesis of many of the stories that we found with this research. So that was a lot of intro into, into what we did and why we did it.
Stacia Garr:
Let me tell you a little bit more about the study and what we found. So when we talk about organizational purpose, this is our definition of it. So we say it's clear and concise statement that inspires people to deliver value to these multiple stakeholders. And so what I think is interesting here is in our list, as well as in most of the lists that you see, for instance from the business roundtable, shareholders are at the bottom of this list. So they are still an important part, but these other groups are a much more important part than they have been. Historically
Stacia Garr:
I think I saw someone maybe come off of mute. Did someone have a question or a comment on this?
Stacia Garr:
Okay, I'll keep going.
Purpose vs everything else
Stacia Garr:
The other thing that we get asked about is what is purpose compared to everything else? And so the way that we see it is this, that purpose is really about why I, or we do this. Why do we do this thing? This work that we do this focus for the organization, why do we do it? There are a lot of other important concepts, like as we show here, vision, mission, values, and principles but as we see purpose though purposes, the underlying kind of mega trend if you will. And these other factors are components of it. And ways that purpose is actualized, but Purpose is the fundamental key point.
Understanding purpose businesses
Stacia Garr:
Another thing that we learned through the research was about what purpose businesses are. And what I mean by that is there is an easy tendency to think that you know, there's deliberate impact that an organization is making and that's just their primary focus versus kind of market forces. So almost like a profit versus a purpose perspective. And so, but what we find though is, is that purpose actually extends much farther into kind of some of the organizations you might think of as do-good-er organizations then than you might expect. So a charity or pure NGO. Yes, that's, that's very purpose-driven and it is designed for a very deliberate impact, but with even social enterprises, often they can be for profit. And, you know, we've got all these businesses going to the right-hand side that are, that are for-profit.
Stacia Garr:
So one of the big findings that we learned through both the study, as well as through the podcast series was that profit and purpose are not necessarily at odds with each other. In fact, what we heard from, for instance, a venture capitalist, Debra Quazzo, who said, if a business doesn't have a clear purpose, and if its purpose is not big enough to be meaningful and inspiring, then you're probably not going to have a very good business, which I thought was a really powerful thought. So she would talk about how, when she is investing in businesses and startups, that if they didn't have a clear purpose, then, you know, she was probably not going to make the investment because the return just wasn't going to be good enough. And so I feel like that's kind of a different way of thinking about purpose certainly than what I was taught in business school. I was taught, you know, you need to get your return to shareholders and that's all that matters, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that the pendulum has swung back away from that perspective. I'll pause right there. Does anybody have any thoughts or comments on that?
Mission statement vs purpose
Priyanka Mehrotra:
I was just curious how businesses make the distinction between their mission statement and purpose. How has that distinction coming along and what, what did we see in our research on that?
Stacia Garr:
Well, I think practically speaking, I'm going to go back to that slide. Practically speaking, we see them tightly intermingled. So because organizations don't necessarily specifically articulate externally the difference between their purpose and mission, they tend in, people tend to understand what a mission is. I think we see the language being tightly mixed, but if you try to, if you kind of tease it out, you'll see that in many organizations, mission statement they'll have something that is much closer to a purpose statement. Like we do this and like, this is, this is the higher level of what we do. And then kind of the, the double-click down is the mission. Though they may call it all a mission statement. We were trying to pull it apart because the, what we do now in, in the future can change, right? We've seen that happen with lots and lots of organizations. But often the fundamental, underlying purpose of what we do is doesn't change. And so there's of the interesting interplay between the two concepts.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Great question.
Stacia Garr:
Any other questions or thoughts that folks have?
Understand purpose businesses
Stacia Garr:
All right. I'll keep, I'll keep going. And I'll, I'll say usually our Q&A calls. I don't put as much content in them. They're usually much more discussion-based but there weren't a ton of questions in advance of this. And I figured that given that folks may just want to know what we learned about this work. So that's why I put a bit more questions in here, or a bit more slides in here than we usually do. Okay. Stacia Garr:
So 73% of, of people believe companies can increase profits and improve communities. So this is kind of a fundamental belief that we're increasingly seeing, particularly in the United States.
Introduction Purpose has gone mainstream
Stacia Garr:
I've mentioned a few times this, this concept of the, what the Business Roundtable wrote in August of 2019. And the reason that this is important is that the business roundtable, you know, is an organization that a good portion of the fortune 500 are a part of it is part of the way that they kind of communicate where at least American businesses are going and for decades, they've said that the shareholder was primary.
Stacia Garr:
And this really ties back to the work that someone like the folks like Milton Friedman did in the 1970s that said, look, you know, the purpose of a business of a corporation is to return value to shareholders and that's it full stop. What's interesting is two things. One is, is that, you know, like I said, by 2019, the Business Roundtable updated this statement on the purpose of corporation focusing on these concepts of customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and then shareholders. But what's perhaps even more interesting is that this focus on shareholders was in some ways an anomaly in time. So if you look at some of the research and you look at what companies were writing about in the 1930s, forties, fifties, et cetera they were much more focused on the broader good if you will, of the good, the good of the community, et cetera.
Stacia Garr:
And it was only with the introduction of folks like Friedman in the seventies that we saw this very strong movement towards the shareholder. And in some ways that made sense, because it was a lot easier to measure. I'm going to talk about measurement in a few minutes, a lot easier to measure the value that the corporation was creating. If you only have a single stakeholder to whom you're trying to benefit in this case, the shareholder, and it is a lot more complex and messy if we have five different share stakeholders to whom we are trying to deliver value. But I think that it's interesting cause it feels like the pendulum is kind of coming back to what, where things were historically and versus, you know, the, you know, whatever 50 years that it's been very much so focused on on shareholders.
Employees expect businesses to act
Speaker 2:
Part of the reason this shift is that really employees and consumers expectations have shifted. This is some data from the Edelman Trust Barometer, where they were talking about the types of broader societal actions that they want businesses to take. And you can see here that, you know, 80% want brands to help solve society's problems is what this is. 64% want companies to help set an example as to what they should be doing when it comes to diversity. And 71% said that they trust employers to do what is right when it comes to social justice. But what is interesting on that last point was that was is especially true for small businesses.
Stacia Garr:
It was actually not true for large corporations. So they want companies to take action. They want them to do things that are in the better interest of society but they don't necessarily trust large corporations to do so. And this I think is, is part of what's driving so much of the CEO action that we're seeing. Like for instance, I don't know if you all saw today a significant number of CEOs signed onto a advertisement that was run in many major newspapers, talking about voting rights here in the United States, that they supported the broad extension of voting rights. And this is all kind of part of this reaction to employees and consumers expecting brands to take action that has really come about in the last five years, if you look at the data. So we're seeing this, my point is we're seeing this manifest in a lot of different ways. That's just one that happened to have happened today.
Introduction Purpose = good business
Stacia Garr:
The reason that we're seeing this is that purpose is generally seen as being pretty good for businesses. So we saw that for the last financial crisis. So the 2009 financial crisis, 64% of B Corp's were more likely to survive the last financial crisis than just pure for-profit companies. So if a company was a B Corp, it was more likely to survive. And, and I should say, if you don't know what a B Corp is, a B Corp basically has multiple, it has built into its legal structure, that it has an obligation to serve multiple stakeholders. And so it's, it's kind of the codification, if you will, in some ways of a triple bottom line concept, but it's actually built into the legal construct of the organization. For the next one data shows that 67% of consumers are more likely to forgive a mistake made by a purpose driven organizations.
Stacia Garr:
So if consumers think that a company is generally trying to do the thing, but they make a mistake, they're more likely to forgive them. 89% of leaders thinks purpose drives employee satisfaction and 84% of execs think purpose impacts an organization's ability to transform. So, you know, in addition to kind of all the good things that are a result of, of purpose, there's also a lot of data that shows that there's some benefits to doing it as well. I'll go ahead and pause again here. Any questions or comments on any of this?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Okay. I had a comment about the previous slide. So we've seen that employees are of course pushing and expecting more from organizations, but I think we're starting to see that from shareholders two increasingly like for example, I remember reading just a couple of days ago, a story in the news about how big shareholders asked Google, oh sorry Alphabet to look into there program and protections for employees and there also increasingly hearing about shareholders pushing companies to do better on D&I, especially. So I think we're starting to see a lot of movement from that front as well.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I think that's true. And it's in the reason for it, I think is, is this right? Is that if, if you truly believe these numbers that, that, you know, these businesses do better, if they do these things you know, shareholders are what their businesses to succeed and return better investments, no matter what, what the, not, hopefully not, no matter what, but, you know, they, they would encourage them to take these actions as well. Not just some of the traditional ones. Yeah. And I think the, the other component of that is the SEC reporting guidelines. You know, we've talked about that quite a bit. So with those new reporting guidelines on human capital you know, a lot of companies are asking themselves one, what should we report? But two, it just indicates the higher level of interest in human capital data and what people are, what organizations are doing with their people. And so, and that's pushing them to say, you should be doing the right things.
Speaker 4:
Yeah.
Purpose as a self reinforcing system
Stacia Garr:
Okay. So if we go on one of the most interesting things we found from the research was this concept, that purpose is really a self-reinforcing decision. So the point being that you, it is harder to achieve impact if you just have one part of the business focused on purpose. So if, you know, if you just have a corporate social responsibility group over here on the side, focused on purpose but the rest of the business is not it's hard to kind of create the level of impact that you would want to that said organizations that saw and really put purpose front and center to what they did. They basically were able to constantly reinforce that purpose. And it created this nice flywheel effect. So a very practical example of that comes from one of the podcasts that we did, which was with Medtronic.
Stacia Garr:
And so Medtronic is a medical devices company, you know, is in the last year, is the need for ventilators was front and center they increased the ventilators that they produced by something like 200%. I mean, they're just a very purpose driven organization. And just in terms of where the industry is, that they're in. But what was interesting was when we interviewed Jeff Orlando at Medtronic, he talked about how they had a, basically a purpose statement or a purpose charter, if you will that their leader or one of their founders had had written in the 1940s and how that was one, it was like a sacred document that he talked about it like it was almost like a constitution. But second, he talked about how it wasn't a dead document. It was a document that they used to actively help them make decisions about directions that they should go investments they should make with their people, et cetera.
Stacia Garr:
He did make the point that like the constitution, there was a lot of interpretation. So some, there were some strict constitutionalist and some people who are a little bit more flexible, but he said that made the conversation richer and help them make better decisions. And so he said, you know, it was very much so in a situation where that decision, the intentional decisions were a result of the purpose, and then it just continued flowing around. So that's just one example.
What that means for HR
Stacia Garr:
What we did in the study was we looked at this from a perspective of what this means for HR and specifically looked at the different parts of the talent life cycle. So what does this mean from an attraction perspective, enablement, retention, and development.
In summary: Attract, Enable, Develop, Retain
Stacia Garr:
And what we found essentially here is this, first that with attraction attraction in many ways is the most important, because it's all about, do you get people into the organization who aligned with the purpose of the organization?
Stacia Garr:
And so making sure that the elements of purpose and with organization's purpose and how that translates to an individual is present in all aspects of the recruitment phase. The second component of enablement is really about creating the conditions that enabled that focus on purpose. So organizational culture, I just gave that example of what Medtronic does. It's in the culture that anyone can raise their hand and say, well, does this align to our, our purpose or there's no organizational hierarchy around that? There's certainly an element of wellbeing, which is so important right now with regard to, how does our purpose translate to the wellbeing of our employees and then the wellbeing of all those other stakeholders as well. This is specifically focused on employees here, but it's important to note that there's often this broader component and then volunteerism.
Stacia Garr:
So one of the podcast interviews that we did actually, I think it may not have up running, but one of the interviews we did was with Microsoft on their volunteerism program, this idea of enabling people to bring their own purpose to life through the company through volunteer activities. The third component here with development was really interesting in that we saw purpose being woven into the development opportunities that were being given. So, you know, making sure that people understood how they could connect their own purpose to the organization and doing that through, through learning opportunities. We had a great interview with folks from EY who talked about kind of the learning that they did to help people identify their individual purpose and make that connection. Similarly with leadership development, the folks that EY talked about, how they also teach their leaders how to bring out purpose in the, in the folks who work with them and how to kind of bring that element of purpose to their own leadership style.
Stacia Garr:
And then with career planning we saw that at Johnson and Johnson actually, organizations talk an organization that talked about how they set up a specific career planning effort to help people identify their purpose, and then to map it to career opportunities. And so when they were thinking about career opportunities and the language they use to describe them, the element of purpose and what J and J was trying to achieve was a critical component of that. And then finally retention. So we're seeing organizations looking to track the impact of their talent practices that aligned to purpose right now in all transparency, the primary space, we're seeing this as with diversity and inclusion or diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging that's where we're seeing the primary focus on tracking. Yes, we're seeing it within employee engagement, but in terms of the connection back to purpose DEIB is where we we're tending to see it. So, okay. This is the last of, kind of my prepared slides. So are there any questions on this or any comments or thoughts or anything anyone wants to contribute.
Connecting organizational purpose vs employee purpose
Speaker 1:
I will say something. So I work with organizations to improve human performance of the employees on the teams. So when I heard about this webinar from my friend, who is also here and thank you for letting me know I said, because I'm talking about how to find your purpose to and make the right behavior changes through behavior change, how you can improve your performance. And I'm just talking this with the organization. So this was interesting to see how the organizations purpose and the employee purpose. Those two dots are, how those two dots are connected to improve the employee performance. So when you said, yeah, it increases the employee satisfaction in one of the slides. Yeah. I can see that how it impacts the motivation of the employee and belonging to that organization feeling a part of that organization because they're aligning. So it makes it now wait clear in my head, the organizational purpose and the employee purpose, how they must be aligning and close attached to each other.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah.
Stacia Garr:
And this slide explains it very well, too. So.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Well, it's, it's a wonderful question. I did include it down here. Let me just skip down. Here we go. So it did make it in.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Thank you for putting it up last night when I was registering, I said, I think this is the area I really want to talk a little bit more about.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well, so one of the things in, and I encourage you to to subscribe to the podcast.
Speaker 1:
Definitely. I will.
Stacia Garr:
And listen to that episode from EY because they have this concept of nested purpose, which I thought was really powerful. And the idea was that you have the organizational purpose here, then you have a team purpose and you have the individual purpose. And so in the important, and this is part of the reason that they put such an emphasis on enabling managers to understand purpose is that it's really that, that team purpose that connects people up to the organizational purpose. And so because that organizational purpose can be a little bit esoteric or feel a little bit disconnected, particularly, you know, if it's in their instance, a client service organization, but they don't have a a client service role, right.
Stacia Garr:
So it's like, okay, well, how do I connect? And so what they do is, as they talk about the role of managers in creating that nested purpose and helping individuals find their purpose and connecting it to the work they did. And in the podcast, there was a story that he told about, you know, somebody who is basically think 80% of her job, she didn't really want to do, but 20% she did and how they used the purpose framework to help them understand, okay, this is what I really want to do. And then it happened, there were some shifts that were being made in that person's in terms of what that team needed. And so they were able to help that person actually align and do, you know, pretty close to 80% of the things they want to do. They're still the 20% though, who is not glamorous, but so to, for all of us. And so they were able to make that connection, but via the purpose conversation by via this concept of connecting to the team.
Speaker 2:
I find that really interesting, the organizational, the team and the individual and where it happens is at that team level with those leader conversations or the leader. And because that's where we're actually focused is that to make it so my background is around inclusion and inclusion happens as we often talk about at that team level. And if we focus at that team level, we'll get more traction and it's very much aligned because we're also trying to figure out how do we bring it down to the individual level, but at the same time, it connect those two things, organizational individual level. One question I have is we've actually done a like we've gone into the academic literature around the connection between leadership, business, performance inclusion, et cetera, and figured out like the, the strength of relationships between concepts like belonging and also purpose what we found was it wasn't a lot in the academic literature. There's a lot of confusion around purpose. Yeah. Okay. So, cause we, we dug in and, you know, that was the one area that was more limited than any other areas in order to get to those connections between and then create something more evidence-based around inclusion. Right.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I completely agree. So when we did our work, there was, you know, there's, there's some, some academic work this kind of know high level or whatever, but once you start to try to actually dig in and understand you're right. And so then for us, we then turned to some of the popular, you know, we're business press, or there's also some organizations that are writing about or who are purpose focused, I would say. And so we have some, some things that they've written, but in terms of just really good hard studies, not, not so much. So we this, our study was a qualitative. So based on the research that we reviewed and based on the interviews that we did we would like at some point to do a quantitative study on this we just haven't, haven't gotten there, but but part of the reason is there's, there's a great big hole.
Tight parallels between purpose, IT and D&I
Stacia Garr:
But I think you, you bring out an interesting point and it's one that we've actually talked about a lot not in the research, but kind of in other conversations, which is the incredibly tight parallel between purpose and how organizations are approaching it and D&I. So like what you said like that, you know, D&I happens at the team level purpose happens at the team level level. You look at the broader view of stakeholders. They almost exactly match what we see with, with D&I, you know, thinking about diverse suppliers, thinking about our communities, thinking about our employees, you know, there's just an incredible it's almost like the two are living in these parallel universes and doing the same thing. And so I think that there and we do see some organizations who are, forward-thinking on purpose, also being forward-thinking on D&I, but not all D&I organizations are forward-thinking on D&I are also forward-thinking on purpose and I think that's an opportunity that they're missing. So yeah, so there's, we see those connections too. We haven't explicitly pulled it out in that research.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, absolutely.
Stacia Garr:
Any other questions or thoughts? We've got some more questions in here. Okay.
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Why purpose now
Stacia Garr:
So one of them am an actually I did throw in some slides here to answer this question. So let me go back. Okay. So the question was, what do you see is driving the interest and organizational purpose? So I kind of gave some high, some preface around the data and the like, but as we kind of stepped back and looked at this and our research, we always ask the question why X now? So in this instance, why purpose now? And we had about, I think, five different reasons that we think that purpose is really a thing at the moment. The first one is the rise of new technology. So if you think about all the language around automation and AI, potentially taking people's jobs, et cetera, et cetera I think there's been an underlying discussion of what is it that makes us human, what makes us uniquely people?
Stacia Garr:
And part of that is purpose. You know, this idea that we are trying to achieve something greater than ourselves. And, and that's not something that technology does. So I think that that conversation is heightening or strengthening the discussion around purpose that's one. The second is the rise of the gig economy. So in particularly during the pandemic, there has been a significant focus on what is it that why should I join an organization? Like what, what is happening with my contributions of my work? Because I could just, you know, drive for Uber and get, make some money and call it good. Or I could just be an independent contractor on Upwork and, you know, get the money I need and that's it. But the thing, one of the unique things that an organization offers is the power to achieve something greater together.
Stacia Garr:
And that ties us very directly back to purpose. And one of the questions that are in here is about purpose post pandemic. I think purpose will be more important. Post a pandemic as people have now kind of are slowly bewilderingly coming out of their social isolation and saying, what do I want to do? And what impact do I want to make in this new world? And I think organizations that are clear on that purpose will do much better in terms of attracting the talent that they need. So it gig economy a second one. The third one here is this concept of work as a source of trusted information fulfillment. And so what this comes back to is that, you know, there's a lot of data that shows that unfortunately a lot of our social institutions have been declining. So whether that's our churches, which is why there's a church on here, or there that's our community organizations, whether it's Kowanas or, you know, whatever other organization you might be, a part of people are participating in those less.
Stacia Garr:
And along with that, they also are attending to trust. What have historically been seen as trusted information sources? So, you know, this whole thing about mainstream media versus other, you know, places that people get their news there's highest levels of distrust in the government that there has been in a very long time, but companies people's employers are where people are trusting information from they're trusting that's a high quality source of data and information. And so if you think about, you know, an organization's purpose and being able to say, you know, we do these things and people trust us that I think is part of the reason that connection between the need for a place to trust. And a clear purpose, I think is emphasizing the importance of purpose for a lot of folks. The last two are probably a little bit more obvious.
Stacia Garr:
So the pandemic, obviously, you know, there was a huge focus on doing there has been and continues to be, we are not out of it yet. A huge focus on being giving more, not just looking to, to prosper financially, but do you have any more to humanity and to other people and being more generous and being more human? So we think that ties in very nicely with purpose and then similarly the social justice movements of the last summer this idea that we are not just, you know, corporate entities existing to make money, but that we are there to to have a broader purpose. So those would all be reasons that I think that purpose is a thing right now, in addition to some of the other facts I mentioned.
Health orgs only?
Stacia Garr:
So this was kind of an interesting one. So was purpose something only healthcare and other orgs focus on? I think it's easier for organizations that clearly have kind of a purpose that relates to humankind and making people's lives better. But it is by far not the only type of industry that we see purpose driven organizations in. So in our study we have a long list of organizations. And so like EY right, when we started talking to EY about being on the podcast, I was kind of like really like a consulting firm. Okay. Like, let's see where you all are. And then they have this amazing effort around purpose. You know, we, one of the most well-known organizations, purpose driven organizations is is Patagonia. We didn't talk to them for this piece of research, but we've talked to them for other pieces of research and, you know, they are incredibly purpose-driven to the point where, you know, you can, because their purpose is about, you know, I think improving the home, our home planet as the way that they describe it.
Stacia Garr:
And so it's about, you know, not, not buying things that you don't need, making things that last for a long time giving back to local communities and advocating strongly for the for the environment, et cetera. So they're there, you know, an example of a clothing company that, that has a purpose and, and the list goes on and on there's food companies and Ben and Jerry's is kind of one of the biggest ones. Unilever, you know, consumer packaged goods company. So lots of different industries. I think it just is important to understand what that purpose is, and to clearly articulate in a way that's true to the organization.
Will purpose remain a thing after the pandemic
Stacia Garr:
So I touched on this one a moment ago, so will purpose remain a thing after the pandemic? And I think that it will, through the pandemic has added steam to the focus on purpose. And maybe I'm overly optimistic here, but I don't think we're going to forget the lessons of the last year quickly. And so as people come out of this, as I said, are looking for what's, what do I need next? I think that that topic of purpose, what I'm trying to achieve life is maybe a little bit more fragile than I thought it was. And I should be focused on my contributions. I think that's going to hold true. The other part of this is that I generally really, really try to avoid generational statements. You know, this generation does this, or this generation does that, but in general, when you look at the data, it appears that the younger generations are more purpose-driven than, than older generations. And as we have those more, that those younger generations come into the workforce, I think it will feed this continued interest in purpose. I say that very delicately, knowing that those types of assumptions are a hard thing for a researcher, but by and large, it's what we tend to see. Any, any thoughts or comments on that one from others?
Speaker 2:
I'm curious around the, the industries. Did you, what about financial industries, banks, and stuff? Did you see any of the banks with strong purpose statements and purpose in their organizations?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, one of the strongest ones is Bank of America. Actually, and they talk a lot about a focus on the financial wellness of underrepresented communities and that aspect. So that's one, the other one is in this, in this, this, I think is actually a good example of how purpose is its specific purpose. Isn't broad goodness, let me say. And, and that is for JP Morgan. So JP Morgan is very focused on environmental issues and that's kind of part of their purpose statement. The reason I put a little bit of hesitation on that is that they were actually one of the few who did not sign the advertisements that went out today in the newspaper. And it was very, very prominently called out that they didn't sign it. So you know, so I just want to say purpose is not general. Like we support everything that seems kind of good. It's, it is very specific, but for them it's environmental. Like that's one of the things that they're very focused on.
Speaker 2:
Well, it's interesting. I actually just did a speaking engagement and talked about like pledges yesterday talks about pledges and the CEO's commitments around diversity and how we've been doing it for such a long time and what we say and what we do is, and so there may be some of that as well as like, you know, I don't really need to do this pledge because we're already doing the internal work, which is much more important than the other way around. I'm going to sign something, but I'm not really going to do the internal work around it. So there could be a lot of reasons for, for them not doing it. Unfortunately we go to judgment really quickly, too. Right.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, yeah. We don't know. And that's the thing, is this like, particularly with some of these external reports, you know, you have to, are, they are marketing, unfortunately. I will say though, one of the people that I follow and get kind of the, his daily newsletter is Alan Murray, who is the CEO of fortune magazine and he is very, very strong on the purpose train. And so if you want to kind of stay up-to-date on what people are thinking about with regard to purpose he's a really good one to follow.
Speaker 2:
Awesome. Thank you.
How can I help my organization focus on purpose
Stacia Garr:
Okay. I see we only have two minutes left, so let me keep going here. What's my role as an HR leader in helping my org focus on purpose. So, you know, what I would advise folks is, is to kind of look at those four areas that we talked about with regard to purpose and to step back and say, you know, what, which of these things can I control and which of these things can I influence in the research?
Stacia Garr:
Actually, that's the way that we structured it in, in that long paper is for each of those talent areas. We identified the things that probably is within HR's control and which ones they influence, and then think about how can I infuse purpose in a meaningful way. You know, assuming that we have some understanding of what the organization's purpose is, how can I make sure that there's a connection to the team's purpose and that the leaders know how to think about that and how can, what kind of practices and approaches and daily behaviors, could we encourage that would enable a reflection on purpose? I think that's actually, is it so so before I get to that, are there any other questions in our last couple moments here about purpose that we didn't cover?
Stacia Garr:
Alrighty.
Conclusion
Speaker 2:
Well, cool. We'll then I'll just say that our next Q&A Call is in two weeks. We do these every two weeks, every Thursday at the same time, eight o'clock Pacific. And our next one is on a study that we published a few months ago on career mobility. We held off on this Q&A Call because my business partner, Dani Johnson was out on leave maternity leave for a while. So we were waiting for her to get back. And now she's back. So we're going to talk about a new study, where we identified five different models of career mobility and organizations and how organizations should think about using those different models. So that will be our conversation in a few weeks. And with that, I think I'll go ahead and say, thank you all for your, for your engagement and discussion and questions. And if you want to learn more about this, I strongly recommend going and looking at the podcast. That's on our website. You can get it in all the places that you like podcasts. And then we are hoping to do some more work on purpose here in the latter, half of the year, some more, at least another podcast season. So, all right, with that, thank you very much to everybody. Have a great rest of your day.
Speaker 1:
Thank you. Bye bye.
Managing Better in 2021: Enabling Responsive Managers
Posted on Monday, April 12th, 2021 at 3:13 PM
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Holly Foster:
Okay. Hi there everybody. We'll give everyone a few seconds to dial in and then we'll get started with the webinar. Okay. The numbers increasing, Let's say we'll get to 80 and then get started. Okay. Hi there. And welcome to today's webinar. Managing Better in 2021, Enabling Responsive Managers. My name is Holly Foster. I'm a Senior Customer Success Strategist here at Culture Amp. And I'll be your emcee for today's event. I'm joining you today from the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging. I'd also like to extend respect to all first nations people from everywhere you're joining from today.
House Keeping
Holly Foster:
So we're really excited for our speakers to be sharing some great data and insights today, as well as some real life stories. But before we get into the session, here's a few housekeeping things just to be mindful of. This session will be recorded and the video and slides will be shared afterwards, ask questions using the Q and A function. You can also upvote your favorites. So please be sure to do that. And we'll be stopping at a number of points throughout to answer questions too. So be sure to add them throughout the session, based on the topic at hand, and don't feel like you need to wait until the end. When using the chat function, make sure to update your settings to panelists and attendees so that you can share your learnings and best practice with others, as well as asking questions. Also, we're all about feedback at Culture Amp. So we'll be sharing a link in the chat and in the follow-up email afterwards after the session. And we'd love to hear your thoughts on the session. Now to help get the conversation started, please share your name, company, and one thing that you're really hoping to get from this webinar in the chat now.
Holly Foster:
Next slide, please.
Who is Culture Amp
Holly Foster:
Thank you. So whilst everybody is intro-ing in the chat and before I hand over to today's speakers, we know that many of you on the line, may be customers with us already, and we're so excited to have you join us. And for those who are unfamiliar with Culture Amp, welcome, we're the world's leading employee experience platform, working with culture first organizations to measure and improve their company's employee experience. As you can see on the slide Culture Amp is really built on two core ideas. Firstly, we help you drive the performance and development of your organization, but helping you collect, understand, and most importantly, act on employee feedback in areas like engagement, wellbeing, and DNI. And secondly, for organizations to thrive, we know that it's really important that the employees within it are thriving. So we have culture and performance to drive the development and performance of your people. And most importantly, regardless of if you're focusing on individuals or the entire organization, our platform has really optimized for action. So our intention is to help organizations and the individuals within them to become better versions of themselves and to put that people and culture first when creating a successful business.
Holly Foster:
So onto today's event, next slide, please, we're really excited to be partnering with RedThread Research to bring you today's session. We're also very pleased to have one of our fantastic customers, BDO New Zealand share that point of view. So I'm going to be handing now to Stacia and Phil to introduce themselves, and I'll be back with you throughout the session and at the end for Q and A throughout.
Stacia Garr:
Thanks so much, Holly. Hi everybody. Thank you so much for joining today. I'm Stacia Garr I am Co-founder and Principal Analyst with RedThread Research. And I want to start by first saying thank you for attending. We know that you all are very busy and have many things on your plate, but you took some time out today to learn something new and to develop the folks in your organization. And that's just a commendable and wonderful thing. So thanks so much for being with us. I'm joined by Phil Boyd-Clark. Phil, would you like to introduce yourself?
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Thanks, Stacia. Hi and welcome today. I am genuinely excited to be here and I was really pleased when Holly and Stacia asked me to join, just to talk about some of the journey and some of the things that we've had over the last year in particular. So I'm excited about hopefully sharing some of those.
RedThread Research
Stacia Garr:
So Phil and I wanted to give you both give you all a moment to learn a little bit about where we're from, just to share a bit of our perspective. So, as I said, I'm the Co-founder of RedThread Research. We're a human capital research membership, and we focus on a variety of topics, including employee experience relevant for today, but also performance learning and career people, analytics, DEIB an HR technology. And so what I'm going to be bringing to today's conversation is much of the quantitative insights that we have from a study that we did on how managers have been managing through the pandemic and how the most effective managers have done. And then Phil's going to add a lot of the color and the excitement of what he's seen from his experience over the last few but really over the last year. So Phil, do you want to introduce BDO New Zealand?
BDO New Zealand
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Sure. So a BDO is an accounting firm for those of you don't know, and we've got a global presence, I'll talk more about New Zealand. So my role is the head of people and capability for BDO in New Zealand, we've got about 800 employees across 15 offices from the top of the country to foreign country and everywhere in between. And we like to think that people are genuinely the heart of our business and that we genuinely just went after to them. So either more around employees or more about people and the experiences within their life as opposed to their job itself. So that's part of what I'm trying to bring to the role. And to BDO New Zealand is actually looking at people for more than more than the numbers that they they deliberate each day and more than a relationship they have with their client. So I'm generally excited about talking about some of the learnings we had in the pandemic and beyond and possibly also address some of the learnings we had in a different crisis that we managed about 10 years ago.
Agenda
Stacia Garr:
Okay, great. Thank you, Phil. So for those of you on the line today, this is our agenda. We're going to begin with some of the key findings from the research that my firm did on, around managing better. That was actually the title of the research that we did. And we're going to share some of the behavior shifts that we saw during the pandemic and the challenges that we saw that managers were faced. And interestingly how those differed by the most effective managers and those managers that were judged by their direct reports as being less effective. We're then going to dive into how managers have been enabled, how these responsive managers have been enabled. And we're going to look at four lenses. And the way that this part is going to work is I'll give a little bit of a touch of the research, and then Phil will bring that to life with his experience.
Stacia Garr:
We'll then pause after each one of those lenses to take your questions. And so I mentioned that because we'd love for your questions to come in on a continuous basis as we go through today's session so that we can address them to the extent that we can right there in the moment, when are fresh in your mind, and then we'll move on to the next lens. So that's going to be our flow we'll then end with a few minutes at the very end for question and answer, all right, with that, let's get started properly.
Overview of research
Stacia Garr:
So I'd like to share just a little bit about the research that we're doing, because it's actually one of the most robust pieces of research that we've ever done. So the study, as I mentioned is called Managing Better. And we built this based off of three different pieces of research.
Stacia Garr:
The first is a piece called the responsive organization study. And what was interesting about that was we actually ran that study in December, 2019. So we didn't know that it was a pre pandemic snapshot, but that's exactly what it ended up being. We then built on that study through the early parts of the pandemic with an understanding of people analytics in particular, and really kind of what was shifting around this topic of how people are managing. We then moved on to this responsive manager study, which ultimately ended up being Managing Better. And we did that where we collected the data in September and October of last year. And so you can see here a little bit of detail, and if I believe folks we'll get the slides afterwards. So you can, if you really want to get into the gory details. But we did a whole bunch of analysis, a large number of interviews over the course of this research.
Stacia Garr:
And so hopefully what we're sharing with you is based on the best sound practice, it's certainly based on the most sound practice that I know how to do. So that's just a little bit of background.
Key findings
Stacia Garr:
So what did we learn in this research? There are a number of things that were pretty interesting. So the first thing, and this is really the good news of the research is that there was a lot more openness to new information among managers during the pandemic. And that would make sense, you know, we were, we were really faced with this reality that none of us had known how to respond to and we needed to be more open to new ideas and approaches. And I think that came through in our data. One thing that's interesting, I think though about Phil's story is he'll share how previous crises have actually informed their ability to respond to the pandemic and how we can kind of learn on a continuous basis from some of these things.
Stacia Garr:
But, but that's one of the things we found in our research. Second point here is that despite that shift in general, we found that there was not nearly enough support provided for managers and employees. And I'll give some data points here in just a moment to illustrate that point. The third point is that the most effective managers have a much greater impact overall, and I'll share some of that information. And then finally the highly effective managers excelled at specific practices within these four lenses that I mentioned.
Positive shift in behavior during pandemic
Stacia Garr:
So if we dig into this in a little bit more detail. I mentioned the positive shifts in the behavior during the pandemic, there are really two that we saw. One around level of openness to receiving new information and level of autonomy. So if we compare kind of what we saw in that 20, 19 to 2020 data we saw in 2019 the numbers that you see here in red, but in 2020, we saw a meaningful shift in these were statistically significant improvements in terms of manager's level of openness to new information and their level of autonomy the employees work. So that was the good news. The not so great news was some of the challenges that managers were facing and really kind of how they, they were facing them. So let me build this for you all.
Top challenges for managers
Stacia Garr:
So what we looked at was we asked managers, what are some of the biggest problems or biggest challenges that you're facing when it comes to managing folks? And what was interesting was the first one increased stress level among employees. And then the bottom two, the reduced connection to employees due to physical isolation and lack of clarity around the future from leadership were actually factors that managers themselves couldn't control. That doesn't mean that they weren't a problem. They absolutely were a problem, but it was interesting that they were things that managers couldn't necessarily control, but the things that they could control a bit more where the, the second and third items, so less time ability to give coaching and guidance or difficulties guiding in employees on top priorities. So the reason I mentioned this is because we saw a difference between how managers perceive these problems based on their effectiveness.
Stacia Garr:
So the most effective managers focused on one side of things, whereas the least effective managers focused on something else. So what were those? Well, if we looked at the really effective managers, you can see it wasn't that they weren't bothered by increased stress levels among employees. But the second two items that I mentioned were the next, most important in terms of things they were facing, but for the least effective managers, they were also worried about the stress levels, but they had a much higher percentage focus on things like reduced connection to employees or lack of clarity around the future, which are things that the managers themselves couldn't control. Whereas the, really the best managers were focused on things like not being able to give coaching and guidance and guiding employees. So what this tells us is that these managers, those most effective managers knew that there were things that they needed to do and that they wanted more organizational support from, but they weren't necessarily getting it by and large across our dataset.
Stacia Garr:
But the managers who were performing the best did say that their organizations were actually also supporting them the best, which was interesting. And you would expect so why does this make a difference? Well, we found that the managers who were most highly effective so that they were their employees were four times more likely to recommend their company to others. They were three times more likely to be highly engaged and they were 10% more likely to intend to stay with their company. Now, the last point, I think is maybe up a little bit for debate. And actually before this, Phil and I had a little had a conversation about this because you know, a lot of folks have stayed within their company if they had a job during the pandemic, you know, I think somebody was calling it sheltering in place at work.
Impact of highly effective managers
Stacia Garr:
You know, you're just not going to go anywhere because you've got a decent job and you're going to just stay and do it. And so just this 10% intend to stay numbers, is that really meaningful? I think that the way that we interpreted it was that, you know, it's a positive sign, but people still have to work to keep these in place, particularly as, you know, organizations are coming out of the pandemic. And as we start to think about a potential, pretty significant talent, a reshake a shakeup with people moving on to new places. So I think that's an important point. I guess I'll, I'll maybe take just a moment there because I've been talking for a little bit. Phil, did you have anything else that you wanted to add here, particularly around that last point?
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah. Just something that I'll draw upon as I go through later on as there's a saying that like many of us have heard before, which is people will join organizations, but they'll leave the manager. And so kind of what I looked at this around is that the research reinforces that point. And as we come out of this pandemic, as we talked about earlier, a lot of people may feel that they're trapped in their job and that they may have gone to the seas or gone to get some different experiences and other places, which is aligned to their, or was aligned to their career aspiration. But because of the pandemic, they've held off doing that. So one of them that we're preparing for and the kind of, one of the things that New Zealand has is, this concept of, overseas experience, a lot of people want to go overseas to gain some experience relatively early in their career before they settle down and have kids and buy houses and all those kind of things. So we're acutely aware a lot of people who ordinarily would have had those experiences, haven't had the the possibility. So as soon as the border starts opening up, we're expecting a great abstained of people to go and grab and gain those experiences. So we're trying to plan for what that looks like and in a year's time or six months time, given we just waiting to see what happens with the border.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think it'll be interesting cause you know, I think part of this though, is we knew that people you know, if they go and have those overseas experiences and they do come back and what they'll remember is kind of what this experience was like with BDO. And so you might be looking at, you know, boomerang talent that may be coming back in the future. And, and so, you know, it may feel like a little bit of a impossible struggle at the moment, but it's not, if you think about it kind of the long curve of things.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah. I look at it in two ways. There's good, good attrition, and there's bad attrition. And I define it very differently. One of the business leaders were too and good attrition is when people leave a company with a high degree of respect and admiration for their company, bad attrition has when people leave annoyed, frustrated and resentful towards it. And so it's about giving people great experiences so that when they leave, they are advocates for the firm and advocates for the company. And that's what the highly effective managers are able to achieve. And that's a very powerful part of employment brand.
4 lenses of responsibility
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I love that. I've never heard somebody talk about it that way, but I think that's a great way to think about it. Okay, cool. Well, let's, let's keep this moving. So what did we see in the data when it comes to enabling responsive managers? As I mentioned, we saw what we call four lenses and the first one of those is respect, and we're going to dive into each of these in more detail. But the first one is that foundation of respect in terms of, you know, getting information, soliciting feedback from folks and then providing that psychologically safe environment to work. The second concept, and this is probably my favorite one is this concept of distributed authority. And this means not, you know, kind of holding all the tasks to center and holding all the control to center, but instead enabling and kind of pushing power out to the edges of the organization, if you will. And I think part of the reason this is my favorite one is because it's been the one that I've seen the biggest division. It's been the thing that has made really companies during the pandemic who have been really successful. They've been really good at handling distributed authority and those who have been not successful and have really struggled. They have been really poor at this. So that's one of the reasons it's my favorite. Again, we'll go into these in detail.
Stacia Garr:
The third one is around transparency and growth. And as we thought about this in the study, and as we tested it, we were talking about performance transparency, expectation, transparency, and supporting managers as well as employees through their continued growth. What I love actually about our conversation before this is Phil has a slightly different interpretation or a broader interpretation which I think is really nicely additive. And so we'll get into that in a little bit more.
Stacia Garr:
And then finally trust. And so a lot of times we get asked, well, how is respect different than, than trust? Because it feels like they go very hand in hand. But I think the difference is that respect is just the bare bones of what you need when it comes to the relationship with the employees. But trust is that additional level. There's a a sense of truly valuing employees fostering openness, and the trust to have that open dialogue which is started with psychological safety, but kind of built upon in greater amounts and then connection to community. So this idea that we're in this together, and I think Phil, you've got a really nice example of that.
Respect
Stacia Garr:
So let's dive into these a little bit more detail, and we're going to start here with respect. And as we thought about this from the manager perspective, this is really that the manager truly shows up as the primary enabler of respect for employees. So what does that mean?
Stacia Garr:
When we looked at the areas of effectiveness, the best managers did these things. So some of them, they were using technology to provide suggestions and ideas to the organization. So they were using that for their employees to provide those suggestions and ideas. The employees themselves said that they were encouraged to share their perspectives at work. And again, that, that concept of psychological safety and what we saw was that this was very common amongst the most effective managers. But that in general, these numbers declined from before the pandemic. So you can see the numbers decline. The one that concerned me the most is that last one, that psychological safety reduced so dramatically 17% is just a huge shift for kind of any of these numbers. All of these numbers are significant changes. But 17% is just absolutely massive. And so, you know, as Phil and I were talking about this in preparation, you know, this question of how do you create psychological safety? How do you, you know, gather insights and enable people to really have this foundational conversation was important one. So, Phil, do you want to share your story of what you saw across BDO New Zealand?
BDO New Zealand insights
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yes. Sure. so we, we kind of mentioned earlier BDO genuine believe our people are extremely important to our business and our the heart of our business. And we know we have to support them when the pandemic pandemic hit. We were acutely aware of the need to continue that theme and to show support. So we established that like most organizations did, I covered response team, which included four members of our board, our chief technology officer, our marketing manager, and myself and early on, we made the decision that our primary focus was support our people. And plus behind our people, this is what I'll clients. We met daily and we would agree kind of what initiatives we roll out that day. And then we'd review how we made progress the subsequent day. And I met the people in capability community on a daily basis as well, to ensure that we all are aligned and that we're rolling out initiatives across our different offices.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
One of the initiatives that we rolled out was probably one of the most valuable initiatives was a pulse survey, the COVID response survey, which we administered through Culture Amp. And we rolled that survey out twice during our kind of lockdown one to find out how people are doing. And secondly, to find out how we could support them, better support them. And that was all about and showing that our intention of supporting our people was delivered on. And we wanted to hear from our people around whether we were delivering on our intention. The comments in the survey that people, people wrote on the verbatim comments, but probably the most valuable part of that feedback. Cause we could look in a lot of detail on what they were thinking, what they were feeling and respond to that. And we knew we had to show it, not just that we asked them the point of view that we were then listening to the point of view, but we need to explain what we were doing and how we were doing it, why we're doing it that directly related to the feedback.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
So one very small example, which is on the slide in front of you, is we, when we moved. So New Zealand had at four alert level. So level four, which is extremely strict, we then dropped down to level three and then we've got to live with two. We were able to return to the office and we're able to return to schools that schools needed time to get ready to accept the students. It's one of the concerns that was raised by about 40% of people who have made comments to the survey was about the not being able to return to the office until the kids could go to school. Fair enough. So what we decided to do was to actually only reopen our officers, when schools were open as opposed to when alert levels were. And that was just a very small example of this type of feedback we have in this point report and allowing how people to feel that they had. And we had my understanding what they're going through and we responded accordingly to demonstrate that respect and to show that we were all in this together.
Stacia Garr:
Great. And I think that one of the, the points that you made was around just kind of equipping these leaders with, with the ability to kind of have these conversations. Could you a little bit about that and I've just seen on the chat that there's a few questions about psychological safety. And so could you maybe just give a few more examples there?
Phil Boyd-Clark:
It was really important for us to break down the feedback to a more manageable level. So the overall level we had a huge number of comments and a whole lot of responses, but we could break the information down to, to a team level. And that allowed each partner and the managers within the partners teams to really understand what those individual teams are looking for. In a way that, you know, they wouldn't, the team members wouldn't see the side of their partner directly or to the manager directly, that would kind of be the quieter on. And we could actually really work out what pockets of our wellbeing initiative really needed to to pick, to be in half. So we could work out which officers or which teams needed a bit more support from us going forward. If that allows us to get quite granular and allowed us to actually be in looking at an overall wellbeing kind of initiative response to more tactical responses based on the needs of the teams.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
And that again, allowed us to show that we were listening to people at quite a granular level and responding to the abuse at a very low level. So the example I got there as a high level kind of decision, but there were a lot more initiative to be rolled out, which was spoke to a specific team, the specific partners. So it was very much a useful comment. So the twelve thousand and forty two comments, I and a number of partners read every single one of those comments to really understand what was going on. And we then broke those comments down by teams, to really understand where the main support areas were and that's how we did it basically.
Stacia Garr:
Great. Great. Thank you. Holly, I know we've gotten a lot of questions in chat. Would you mind giving a couple Phil and me so that we can answer?
Holly Foster:
Yeah, for sure. So there are a couple that have got some upvotes, one that I think would be a great next step based on the conversation. So regarding the decline in psychological safety, is this due to the pandemic itself or due to remote working. So if people were working remotely, but not under the circumstances of the pandemic would we still see that same shift?
Stacia Garr:
We didn't test this specifically, but I'll offer an opinion and Phil would love yours as well. You know, I think that the situation of the pandemic resulted in a lot of people having, you know, questions from their leadership. And I think the difference in psychological safety was a subset of leaders at the core organizations were able to be clear, you know, we don't know exactly what's going to happen, but here's what we do know. Here are the types of things that we do know about where the business is going, et cetera. And I think that those organizations that really stepped up in their communications at the beginning were able to create more of that psychological safety, because you know, the implication of a lot of this is we're going to go into financial downturn in my job might be gone, you know?
Stacia Garr:
And, and so that creates a lot of that sense of a lack of safety. And so those organizations that were able to kind of address that as directly as they could, as they literally knew how given the information that they had, I think that they, they did better. You add onto that the remote working environment. And then, you know, that's hard, particularly because so many people were new to it. They hadn't, you know, I've worked remotely for 10 years. I think this is like the thing, right. But if you're brand new and you don't have that trust in this massive thing is happening yeah, I think it's going to create, you know, remote working hasn't a potential implication or a negative impact. It doesn't mean it does overall, but in that particular mix of, of crazy things happening, I think it did.Phil, what do you think?
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah, when I finally answer as a true consultant, it depends, but it depends on, on a number of factors. So uncertainty definitely results on that and a lack of safety from a psychological perspective. So with the pandemic, there was a huge degree of uncertainty and naturally people are gonna feel anxious and cautious, and we've seen that continue to die. So I know Australia, New Zealand have this phenomenon of net lockdowns where we put the gun to lock down and come out of it. And we've found from our perspective that has actually resulted in a greater degree of anxiety for our people then going into a longer lockdown to loss of certainty around the going and from the state refreshing on this date. So I think it's not the pandemic that's it's really caused the anxiety. It's the uncertainty around the pandemic that's caused anxiety and that, and so that the role of what leaders have to do is provide as much certainty as possible.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
From New Zealand perspective, we were very fortunate to have an amazing leader as a prime minister Jacinda. Who had a communication style, that was very clear and that helped a lot of people just focus on what they could control and focus on what they needed to do and how they needed to do it. And I think we had a huge degree of compliance to our our rules and our social distancing guidelines and the lockdown criteria which I think can be attributed to that very clear guidance we had from our government's response. And I think that helped manage that or create a bit of a psychological safety for people in that context. So is it remote working? I don't think so. I think that we get used to remote working because the pandemic itself different provided a bit of context. I thought someone's trying to come into the room.
Stacia Garr:
Okay. Well, let's go ahead and move on
Distributed Authority
Stacia Garr:
So, then if we move to the second lens around distributed authority and what, does this mean? You know, I give a quick overview at the beginning. But really, I think it comes to this idea of one. We trust our people to make decisions and we empower them to do so. So we talked here on this side about guiding principles, providing folks with quality data and insights and helping employees understand and make sure they have the capabilities to make quick decisions in the organization. The way that we actually saw that show up was a few things that were really interesting when we did our interviews. So I'm going to go with the bottom bubble there, which is around clarifying decision-making authority. So we heard stories of people just writing decision logs, having senior leaders, right decision logs, explaining like this is why this decision was made so that people could read it and understand what the thought process was behind it.
Stacia Garr:
We heard a lot of discussions about putting in place frameworks so that people would understand, okay, who's the decision maker who needs to be informed. Who's actually you know, is just a stakeholder that needs to be brought in at certain points in the process. And just some very simple things around just making sure that people understand what is expected of them at different points in order to distribute authority much better. The second point though, I think is also really interesting, which is around enhancing manager, access to engagement, as well as other people data. So this point around giving folks the information they need to understanding what is actually happening with their teams, and then being able to make decisions and make changes based on that information was a critical factor that showed up for us. If we look at what this actually looked like from a data perspective this is what we see.
Stacia Garr:
So some of the top things that the most effective managers did was managing their time to focus on value, added tasks, not administrative burden. So their employees were able to do this. And their manager was able to, to support that. The manager being able to understand the team's engagement with the work and that the employee had a clear, as well as the manager actually had a clear understanding of the decisions I have the authority to make. So we see that, that top one, that ability basically to say, no, I know what the value added tasks are, and I'm going to get rid of this administrative burden was one of the biggest factors here on distributed authority. And we saw again like I said, pretty much all of our numbers went down. But the, the biggest one that, that I think had some obscurity was around that clear understanding of the decisions I have the authority to make. So that's kind of why I spent a little bit of time talking about some of those different decision frameworks that we saw folks do, because those seem to make some of the biggest differences.
BDO New Zealand- our response
Stacia Garr:
Phil, do you want to talk a little bit about what you saw with distributing authority at BDO?
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Probably important to provide a bit of context behind, this so I think many of you may be aware in 2010, 2011 Christchurch when one of our main cities in New Zealand suffered a series of earthquakes. I'm talking thousands of effects. There's two major ones in particular, which completely changed the landscape of the city. And it put the city and the country into an unexpected crisis, this was about 10 years ago. 10 years on, we found ourselves in the fortunate position where we're to leverage the learnings from the Christchurch earthquake and to how we responded to this pandemic. And our Christchurch partners in particular were instrumental. And Warren who was part of our response team as the managing partner of Christchurch was amazing and how he kind of guided the thinking around how best we responded to the pandemic and when. And at the time, and I remember a lot of people were catastrophizing and focusing on uncertainty and focusing aspects they couldn't control.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
And our Christchurch partners and Warren in particular we're able to draw upon their resilience and their learning and guided their pears by providing structure support and a methodical way of responding to the pandemic. And the next slide, I can kind of explain this as company based like as well, good diagram, but we used the four as of of crisis management to kind of respond. So initially we're trying to do everything at once, which was in the responding to the impact, trying to reduce the impact the pandemic was going to have on us and our clients. And, and looking to ensure that we we're ready for whatever else we're thrown at us. When we kind of sat back and thought about it, we actually just started to break it down a bit further and focused on today's problem today, and focus on tomorrow's problem tomorrow, and make haste slowly.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
And that really gave us a pathway and allowed us to be a little bit more tactical, how we responded. A lot of learnings came out of the crisis. And one of the organizations that was born out of the chaos of the earthquakes was the student volunteer army. And basically what that company did was to provide the students who are based a university students based in that city is a huge part of that study is that as the university provided them with permission to help. And so we took that learning and we knew we needed to provide our people with permission to help. So what we did is we there's a lot of information coming out from the government about their responsibility, economic kind of response to the pandemic and all our clients, what that all meant and what it meant for them or what they should do.
Stacia Garr:
So every day we were developing and distributing information to all our people around how we recommended our clients best respond to the support our government was providing. And that gave our people a lot of information and permission to help their clients when they needed, when their clients needed them the most. And we were acutely aware. We are in a very fortunate position where we, our services were undermined and our clients really need us. So we were able to help them. We just find a very cool native approach. But our approach was to develop all the stuff centrally, but all those collateral centrally and then distribute it to our people so that they could be in support our clients. And that gave our people a focus and an inability to function when they could control on what supported the clients.
Stacia Garr:
And Phil, could you talk a little bit about how did that happen? Right. So you mentioned that you're giving your, your partners information every day on what, on the types of conversations they may be having and how they can support their clients. But that seems like you know, you have to first kind of know what the questions are that they might be asking and, you know, to provide that guidance. So can you share a little bit about basically what was kind of the crisis response team that put this together, and then how did you communicate that?
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah, a very good point. So we had so the the crisis response team then formed another team, which is basically looking at kind of how we best support clients. And we, it, as a group of individuals from across the country are here, we're looking at what the government was doing and how the government was responding and what support mechanism the governor was putting around clients basically, or businesses and how we could then support those times. So there's a lot of information from coming from the government and it was coming really fast, really quick. And the government actually said at the beginning we're assuming a high trust model. So the government pumped in billions of dollars into the economy to support businesses, to retain the people and stay afloat. And so our clients need to know how they can best access that information or that funding and the way that made sense for them and was the right thing to do for them and their employees and their clients.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
So it was around trying to make sense of all of that. And there were changes to the scheme, and there was a time when there was additions to the scheme. And then there was when different parts of the country went into different stages of lockdown, there was different changes. So there's a lot of information that we had to very quickly disseminate and then be able to provide information to our clients. And that gave our people a lot of opportunity to engage with the clients, understand their clients and how they can fly through that uncertainty, which has basically gave our people permission to help their clients and something that we've never dealt with before. And our clients never dealt with before. So it was giving them the confidence to have the conversation in a, in a civilized way.
Stacia Garr:
And I'm going to dig on this one just a little bit more, because there's a question kind of closely related to this in the Q and A. And so I'm just going to jump in first, which is, as you thought about the actual communication of this information, you mentioned, there's a lot of information that was coming from the government and you were trying to whittle it down. Were there any particularly effective practices that you use to make it easy for your partners and your teams to quickly understand the key messages and to then communicate them broadly? So, you know, is there any technology that you used or any particular approaches?
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah, everything had to be online for obvious reasons because we're all working from home. And so we had a central hub that was set up specifically for our people to access on certain things and communication from each other's was very clear. So one of the things I was going to talk about that later, and I'll talk about now is our communication strategy initially started with lets start centrally and stem off the communication with everyone. We then realized quite quickly based on feedback receiving from people that actually they wanted to hear from a more local person and more local partners, a not a centralized team. And so we changed our strategy to focus more on each office communicating to be a people in authentic and a meaningful way. And that provided a greater degree of kind of pop up from our people.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
It was showing that we are more adaptable, more responsive, more accessible, and they could see more authentic by that, by the way, in which the messaging was written. So we didn't have a single person in a central office writing and communication with the partners. They had the key themes to write through and the key information disseminate, and they were doing the way that they would normally do it. And so we weren't filtering their message. We were basically enabling them to get out and help their people. And that response was quite powerful to, again, going back to the principle that we learned in 2011, give people permission to help.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Great. Holly, is there a quick question that we could throw in here. T.
Holly Foster:
There is, yes.
Holly Foster:
There is one that's been upvoted quite a lot from a participant. So probably along the same lines or kind of same thread as what we've just been talking about. So perhaps one that you can both address from the research perspective and then also your experience with BDO and it failed, but with manager's openness to the new information that's now available. Have there been any particular types of information that they're most open to
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Initially it was, as they were coming out of the with the information, we were trying to assimilate it, understand it, have a point of view on it and send it out over time. That's changed. So now it's kind of focused more around getting back to what the new normal looks like. And that's where I think our support has changed quite substantially. So if you think about when we first went into lockdown you know, we, in some of our offices, we had a very office bound capture. We hadn't necessarily embraced flexibility. And our people were forced to suddenly do so. And that was a massive adjustment and we need to support our managers in particular, suddenly having to remote manage remotely, which they hadn't sort of done previously. So as time progressed, people's needs changed and based on those needs changing, we had to have our finger on the pulse, and that's why they kept jumping up and down so important for us to have an understanding of what our people are thinking so we can adjust accordingly.
Speaker 4:
And that was the nice learning, the biggest learning for us as we have to consistently understand how best to support our people and the best way of doing that was to communicate with them and have direct feedback from them. So that the surveys we ran with, one part of that we had other mechanisms in, which were utilized to continue to make sure we had a really good health, I think, on the pulse and then responded accordingly. And now our response now is absolutely adjusting and changing and how we're responding to lockdown situations now is fundamentally different to what it was before. Because we've learned a lot and it's just you know, that we need to continue to maintain and provide clarity for our people so that they know what they need to do when they need to do it and how they can do it. So the safety or psychological safety is maintained as best it can be because this pandemic is still creating a lot of uncertainty for people. And that is still having a strain and the stress of a lot of people.
Transparency & Growth
Stacia Garr:
All right, well, let's go ahead and keep moving. The third lens is this one around transparency and growth. And I mentioned what that was at the beginning and in a lot of it was around performance and expectation, transparency, as well as just supporting overall growth. And the specific data that we had here in the, and there's, there's quite a few pieces of data on here was around things like employees receiving database insights on their performance, or getting insights on their current level of contribution. They're also business point about if employees don't know the answer, they know how to find it. And that's part of, kind of this whole growth concept and this idea of of having access as Phil mentioned, certainly online, but also a culture around going in and finding that information online. And what we found here is, you know, the, the best managers particularly focus on that first point around providing employees with database insights on their, their performance.
Stacia Garr:
But they also do a lot around just in making sure not just that they provide the data, but employees actually understand it. So message received, you know, just because I communicate doesn't mean that you actually understood it. So it was kind of both parts of that point. And we saw these numbers drop pretty dramatically from before the pandemic. So you can see those numbers there on the right. I kind of set up that Phil, you had a little bit of a different approach here on, on this one around growth and transparency. So do you want to share what happened with BDo?
Phil Boyd-Clark:
Yeah, I think during the pandemic we had early on, we made the commitment within that federalized team to protect our people. As I mentioned early on that meant protecting jobs with their livelihoods and everything in between. And pleasingly, we got through, you know, the last 365 days today because tomorrow marks the day we went into lock down a year ago and we got all our people through. And there were, we were asking people to make any sacrifices where, you know, we did a lot to support what the people and that was key for us up front, but the communication was key and extremely important that we had that right. And we knew no single communication was going to be perfect, but our process and journey of communication had to be near perfect. And that was our aim and we didn't get everything right.
Speaker 4:
And we adjusted accordingly because we had those different checks and balances, and we kind of knew how to, how best to respond. Or we actually had an official MS teams, like competition going, which is essentially that the person who got the most likes in MS teams for a particular posts, won with an official competition. And our IT manager who came first, second, third, and fourth. And because he was, it was using bribery with us, with this new puppy that he bought just before lock down and that became a mascot for us. So it was actually quite key to say how people were communicating and that communication allowed us to be very clear to people around what we expected of them and what they needed to do going forward to best support themselves, their peers, their colleagues, their clients, their families.
Speaker 4:
So that kind of just reinforced from my point of view, transparency and the need to communicate really clearly so that people again have be a little ambiguity around what's expected of them. And we were very, a lot of our communication is very open and honest around, we don't know what this will mean. We had no idea what impact of the pandemic was going to have on us when it first hit. We had no idea what impact it was going to have on the economy. But what we did know is what we did well, which was supporting people and supporting our clients. That's where we chose to focus. And that I believe made a big difference to our people because we didn't allow ourselves to catastrophize. We focused ourselves on what we could control and refocus themselves on what we knew we could do really well, which wasn't demand. And again, keep going to that point around, we were very fortunate that our services were in demand and our clients there to help. And we've been there. We were there to help them. And that's what was important. And I believe that's what got us through what was quite a challenge, year, last year.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah. No. And I think though, you, yes, you were very fortunate, but clarity of communication is something everyone can benefit from.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
The honesty around. We don't know. I think it meant a lot to people around, like, we don't know where this is going to land, but this is what we do now. Now I go back to that quote that Warren said right at the onset is solve today's problem today and focus on tomorrow's problem tomorrow. And that was kind of a core theme of all our communications it's yesterday's problem. It's not going to solve it tomorrow is problem. We'll come back to you. And that gave people kind of focus around a reassurance that yeah, we're doing what we can doing and when we can do it and not allowing us to get ahead of ourselves
Stacia Garr:
And some nice mental space too, we're just going to focus here. Yeah. Holly, I know we've gotten lots of great questions. What can we do?
Holly Foster:
Yeah, lots of really good ones. SO thank you for sending them all through. And one that I think really ties nicely to the pillar of transparency and more product growth, the question is for Phil, but Stacia as well, we'd love to hear your kind of thoughts or anything that, I mean, research. But Phil, how did your organization facilitate mentoring and learning and the development to aid the growth of managers throughout last year?
Phil Boyd-Clark:
It's a very, very good question. And as I mentioned earlier, when we moved from level zero, essentially to level four, it was awful. It was a very unfamiliar environment, people to be in their homes, but working from home often with kids running around and trying to juggle that responsibility. So that transition was really hard for a lot of people, but they responded really well. And how we realized we needed to provide better support to our people and actually managing remotely and communicating and all those great things. And so we essentially set up a series, all every other organization that does as well as there's nothing unique, nothing innovative or beyond belief and just webinars for people to attend and actually allowed them to join when the one or two topics that people kind of told us they wanted us to focus on.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
So we had the fortune of having an amazing learning and development leader in our organization who went away and she did amazing work politics, collateral together, real time, and getting people to present in partnership with the, and we had really good uptake. To the point we've actually continued that webinar series, over time. So this year although, you know, we've been very fortunate to have basically 80% of our year outsource any form of lockdown last year. And this year we've continued with that. We have continued with that webinar series monthly, and I think it was last Friday, I presented one in providing feedback. So it was something that we think has really helped people, but it's also recognizing that, you know, learning development doesn't happen to happen. Face-To-Face, you can do it very well there remotely. And I think that's one of the capitalists that most organizations experienced last year, as you know, online learning is a really good platform and you can still be engaged and, and teach people to kind of learn in different ways and respond accordingly and develop new skills. So we did want to know and we did, one of the questions we asked in the survey was a question on, have you learnt new skills during the pandemic? And we had some very favorable responses from that, which was pleasing to see.
Stacia Garr:
And I'll just add from, from our perspective, we've seen an incredible growth in organizations investing in, in L and D platforms during this time. And so I think, you know, your, your point Phil around just bringing more learning, bring more relevant learning to folks has been a huge thing. The other thing though, is we can look to the future. And if we kind of think about the snapshot of the last three months as potentially being a prelude to what comes next is we've seen a greater investment in some of the coaching and mentoring technologies or in peer-to-peer coaching within organizations. So this idea of tapping into the expertise of folks who are within the organization both for the sake of, you know, improving skills, but also we know that people have said they felt more isolated, more disconnected.
Stacia Garr:
They're not growing their networks, et cetera. And so also as a way to kind of combat that particular problem. So, focus on mentoring and focus on coaching from a diversity perspective, also focused on sponsorship during this time.
Trust
Stacia Garr:
So, okay. I know we're we have just 10 minutes left, so let's get to our final, our final lens here, and that is trust. And so I set this up a bit around, it's not, it's not just respect. It is kind of, you know it is a different thing in that it is moving beyond that to a greater connection a greater sense of value employees, openness, and that idea that you're connected to the broader community. And so the way we captured that was this, you know, we're all in this together attitude that really helps employees learn from their mistakes and invest in solving problems together.
Stacia Garr:
And so when we look at the, the numbers around this you can see here some of the specific items on, again, on the left and what managers were doing. So things around helping me learn from my mistakes, that if a manager, if an employee says that their manager did that, they thought their manager is much more likely to be highly effective. Encouraged to share insights learned externally outside the organization. So not believing that, you know, all the learning has to take place here, but actually being encouraged to learn outside the organization and to bring that back. So this idea that you're trusted to figure out what's, what's great and important, and to build on that within our own organization. And then we've got, again, that question about is open to, to new information, which I know we, we addressed to some extent earlier. But we know that that has been kind of one of the biggest factors in, and obviously that's the one of the two that, that did increase with the with the research. So again, kind of Phil turning to you and trust, what did, how did you work to foster that.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
A very simple example. So when the pandemic hit kind of, we knew, well, things are going to change, and as often we view it as a catalyst to change. And when we came out of kind of the lockdowns that we had and the transitioning back, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of other people have a taste of working remotely. A lot of people just want to really well to work remotely and not be able to come to the habit of working from home. And actually we're a little bit reluctant to actually come back and and work in the office a hundred percent of the time. And we've seen that, that appetite for a greater degree of flexible working. And so we wanted to work with our people going forward to learn around what's going to work. What's not going to work and how do we actually take this forward together?
Phil Boyd-Clark:
And that's kind of what we're going to do is not just making assumptions and come up with the framework and say, here's a framework. We wanted to introduce a framework that was going to allow us to learn and evolve when adept with new technologies and try different things. And if they work, let's kind of roll it out further, or just teach people about the experiences and what we did, it doesn't work. And we just put it to the side. So we came up with a framework that was a little bit different, but it basically gives each team permission to decide what flexible working ranges are going to work for the individuals within that team based on the individual circumstances. So it wasn't around the framework saying PNC or HR are going to say yes or no to X, Y, and Z is around the team, controlling it.
Phil Boyd-Clark:
And the focus for the team began by the performance of the team and how they deliver it to their clients. And if they can continue to deliver their clients to exceed, deliver to the clients based on the arrangements they have, then that's a win-win that's a win for them, win for the firm and win for the team and win for the client and no losers. And as moving beyond this kind of concept of being in the office for the sake of being in the office to, to working in the place that you're going to be most effective and, had a good performance. So we introduced this new framework, which we're still rolling out. And we're still learning from, and we need to do about a six month review to understand what's worked, what hasn't worked, but we think we found something that worked for everyone. And it also importantly, what it's about is saying to people. The new normal we've got to change the way in which we deliver to our client,. let's do that together and let's see what you want. And if we could, we can accommodate what you want, but at the same time, and really important point is continued to meet or exceed the needs of the clients.
Stacia Garr:
And the other thing I love about this is it, it is distributing authority, right? You're giving clear principles, helping people understand how to make decisions and, you know, trusting them to do so.
Speaker 4:
And I'm giving them permission to say, is it working or not? So is it based on these four principles? If it's not, if it's not adhering to these four principles, then it gives the team ability to kind of call it out and say, Hey, this is not working for me. So one of the things we've got, we've got a lot of graduates. Who've just started a lot of graduates who just started as we went into lockdown last year. And they are that new they're fresh. And they like, they want to see who they're going to work for and they need a bit of coaching and support. So it became a locked down, those were the first people to want to be back in the office. But a lot of their kind of managers were a little bit more hesitant than we have to say it. They, they want you to be in there. And so it was very much around the grads and the more junior staff was saying, we actually need you to be with us to coach us. So it was about demonstrating respect for each other and each other's needs and adjusting accordingly. And it's about learning from each other.
Wrapping up
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, definitely. Well, we're going to go ahead and just do our wrap up here and then we'll do get the final questions in the last couple of moments. So when Phil and I were talking about some of the takeaways we were hoping folks would get the first here is about, you know, somewhat obvious, but the more you can support managers, the better, they're just such a huge point of leverage in the organization. And if you can give them the tools to do these things, I think that's, that's meaningful and powerful for the organization. Secondly, the role of managers is fundamentally changed and will continue to in the future. So I know there was a question about, you know, kind of post pandemic, what do we see as some of those future skillsets? And I think the ones that we saw people excelling at during the pandemic, you know, the distributing authority, building respect, trust, growth, and transparency, those are fundamentally going to be that those 21st century leadership management skills. And then third don't make assumptions and use data to disprove them. So I think Phil you've given some really nice examples of how, you know, people thought one thing, but then using the data and understanding it found actually that wasn't the case. You know, people manager, the younger employees wanted to be back in the office. They wanted the manager support and, you know, the data prove that so Holly, let's just get the last question or two that we had on the Q and A.
Holly Foster:
Yeah, for sure. We'll try and squeeze a couple in. So is around distributed leadership. So it seems to be a top-down approach. People are empowered by their leaders. And would you say that that's a fair statement and how would you encourage the, this distributed leadership by other ways other than that kind of top-down approach?
Speaker 3:
I'll jump in, cause I had a little bit more time to think about this before Phil. So I think that, you know, When we did this research, we have a lot of thoughts about self-directed teams and all these things that are, you know, powerful and, and kind of far less top down. And we we've found that that without some, if you look at their literature and kind of over time, those teams often do break down unless it's a very special organizational culture. And so I think that to some extent you do have to enable, I don't really love that word empower, but you do have to enable, and you have to give some level of permission for these things to happen. And, but I think that the extent to which you can give people great data, good principles, and understanding of how to make those decisions and they don't get in trouble for making those decisions. Then I think that you can really start to make this much more of a network of people doing great things as opposed to a top-down hierarchy.
Speaker 4:
I think it comes down to competence as well. You know, we, every, every role in organization has a purpose and everyone should be able to work towards that purpose without constantly having to ask them for permission to do so. And I do like that, sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And I say a lot of that kind of happening. And so people are confident in their ability to deliver to the expectations of their role. And I don't, don't wait for permission, just do it and back yourself. And like Holly and Stacia said, don't feel they're gonna get in trouble. They don't beat people up for getting it wrong. When they've all they're trying to do is the right thing based on what they thought they had, but yeah, might want to tie it up from my perspective giving people that permission. So to try things and potentially fail is really important for the gym.
Speaker 1:
That's great. We're one minute too, so we'll probably have to wrap there, but thank you for all of the questions. Really great to see all that in the chat. Yeah, you'll see contact details for Stacia and the wonderful Phil on your screen now do feel free to reach out or connect with them on all of the usual channels and also visit redthreadresearch.com and thanks everybody for joining today.
Stacia Garr:
Thank you all and thanks Culture Amp for the opportunity.
The Skills Obsession: The Realities of Building a Tech-Enabled Skills Framework
Posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 at 3:00 AM
Listen
Guests
Madhura Chakrabarti, Global Head, People Analytics at Syngenta
DETAILS
Dr Madhura Chakrabarti is one of our favorite HR thinkers and doers, so we jumped at the chance to hear of the genuinely pioneering work she’s doing for the 29,000 people who work for her employer Syngenta, a leading Swiss-headquartered science-based agtech company that helps millions of farmers round the world grow safe and nutritious food, while taking care of the planet. Despite COVID, in early December Madhura and her small L&D team launched an innovative cross-company skills framework supported by a new learning platform implementation.
This episode is a great chance to hear about the real practical challenges of creating such a framework and how hard it can be to find the right partner to help, as well as the importance of people analytics in general: you’re really going to hear from the HR data and skills coal face here. Making this experience even better: Madhura’s charm, professionalism and fierce intellect. Truly, some great Workplace Stories this week!
Find out more about Madhura and her work at Syngenta here
Connect with her on LinkedIn
Webinar
Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills.
Partner
We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.
Season Sponsor
We are very grateful to Workday for its exclusive sponsorship of this season of the Workplace Stories by RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.
TRANSCRIPT
Five Key Quotes:
I think it was a stretch or a learning even for myself. Because when we set out, in complete transparency, my mindset was, Oh, I know what they need, so I'll design it, don’t worry about it, so I could have just gone with it—but it's only after that listening exercise, I realized, Oh, actually there are very distinct needs; just because I'm interested in data, not everyone is equally interested in data, and in a similar way. We really have to cater to the user's needs.
The six skills we have identified are data fluency, employee experience, agile, tech savviness, partnering, and customer centricity. We said, let us be pioneers and let us come up with design actual pathways in the platform. So we took our vision of that framework and converted those to actual learning pathways on the platform, and we now have six of these learning pathways: we have many more, but for HR, we have these very six dedicated ones, all built in-house.
We were very clear, especially when we presented it to our HR leadership team, that it shouldn't be a laundry list of these 15 things that we think are important—it has to be realistic, and it also has to be achievable. If you want to upskill yourself in all of these, then 12 to 18 months should be a good enough timeframe.
I think we hit an extremely strong project manager who kind of brought us together. For a year, every Tuesday, 8 to 9.30am, we met as a team to discuss our progress and we used Microsoft teams as our platform to collaborate: we had a whole channel dedicated to it and all of the conversation that happened, all the decks we prepared, everything that we revised and the durations, all of that happened on that single platform. I don't think how we could have managed it just through email or just through meetings; that platform really helped.
There's a set of metrics that are relevant for the manager, to understand how the team is progressing. Then there's an org level need, where as an organization, we need to understand which corporate functions are really leading the way in learning, or is this a business unit, or if you break it down through different demographic lenses. And then there's a strategic level of, can we connect learning with metrics that Syngenta as a company is poised to deliver.
Stacia Garr:
Today, we're speaking with Madhura Chakrabarti; she’s the global head of People, Insights and Analytics at Syngenta.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think it was a stretch or a learning even for myself, because when we set out, in complete transparency, my mindset was, Oh, I know what they need, so I'll design it, don’t worry about it. So I could have just gone with it and designed, but it's only after that listening exercise, I realized, Oh, actually there are very distinct needs–and just because I'm interested in data, not everyone is equally interested in data and in a similar way. So we really have to cater to the user's needs.
Stacia Garr:
Madeira is one of the smartest people we know she brings in academic perspective—she’s a PhD, she also has an extensive practitioner perspective, and has married those together in her recent work at Syngenta.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
This is Madhura Chakrabarti, I am the global head of People, Insights and Analytics at Syngenta, based out of Basel, Switzerland.
Stacia Garr:
So Madeira, welcome to Workplace Stories, our RedThread Research podcast; thanks so much for your time and for sharing your insights with our audience today. I'm obviously excited to have you on here—we work together, and it's so cool to get a chance to hear what you're doing today.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Glad to be here, and honored to be here; thanks, Stacia.
Stacia Garr:
We're going to start with some quick questions to introduce you and your work practice to our listeners, and then we're going to go deeper on some questions. We really want to hear your perspective on here about your experience.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Sounds good!
Chris Pirie:
Madhura, can you give us a quick overview of Syngenta—its mission, and its purpose?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
So Syngenta is a 29,000-people company, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. We recently became Syngenta Group as a result of becoming a conglomerate of other companies, and the mission, or what the company does, is really an expert in crop science and seeds. And it provides digital solutions to farmers across the world so that they can make better decisions in their day-to-day lives.
Chris Pirie:
And what is the work that you do? What's your job title and how would you describe what a typical day looks like for you, if there is such a thing?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Good question. I lead the global People Insights and Analytics team, and in very simple terms, because it's a fairly rapid section, our mission is really to understand how we can use data and analytics to make better talent decisions and talent related business decisions. It's a fairly new function; we’ve been roughly here for two, two and a half years. We are still trying to build it out.
Chris Pirie:
And what are the sort of forces at work on Syngenta, and you and your role as well? What problems are you trying to solve?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Short answer is many! But at the start of our journey, we actually had identified three main pillars, the first pillar being strengthening the core of People Analytics, and that really entails things like how do we upskill ourselves—we are a seven-person team, and constantly be at par, be abreast of the latest and the greatest, and technically also constantly upskill ourselves.
The second pillar is around how we scale People Analytics and some of those sub-points or sub-bullets underneath that is the HR upscaling work that we'll be discussing today. The other big part in that second pillar is coming up with a Data Lake; a seven people team cannot really serve the entire company, you need to have a scaled mechanism. So these are kind of the two things that we are focusing on in the second pillar.
And the third pillar is really around embedding people, analytics and business and HR topics, so this is where our actual work like analytics in DNI, or doing a sales effectiveness study, or doing an org network analysis study, all of that comes in underneath this pillar. And it's contingent upon what the business needs and sometimes what HR needs
Chris Pirie:
And then since we're talking about skills generally in this season and specifically today, what are your skills—what are the skills that you need and your team needs to do your work and, and how did you acquire them?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think I would broadly break them up into two. One is more around technical skills, and that's more like table stakes; you cannot do it anything else if you don't have them. And that's more around pure analytics, statistics, construct measurement, survey building, I think I'll go back to mainly graduate school, but of course now LinkedIn Learning and other learning platforms to keep reinventing and re-brushing those skills. The other bucket is really around influencing others and stakeholder management that I feel like I've picked up on the way in the journey by working and just being in different roles and making some career moves. That's how I've picked them up.
Stacia Garr:
So one of the things we've noticed in this podcast series, which we're calling The Skills Obsession, is that there are kind of two groups that are obsessed: one is the learning folks who have made up quite a bit of this podcast series, but then there's also our friends, the people analytics folks. And one of the things I was most excited about with your story is you're actually bringing them together: you are a people analytics leader who's been focused very heavily on the learning aspect of this. So can you give folks a sense of the recent initiative that you focused on with launching a new learning experience platform combined with that HR capabilities initiative?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Sure. So this works spanned quite a bit. I would say almost like 18 months from the very start of it to where we are today. And it really happened in two main categories. One was identifying what should HR as a function be upskilling itself on, so that was a project or an initiative by itself. And that started somewhere around the middle of 2019. We took the first six months—we gathered, we did an agile project team that came together across the globe within HR and determined what are those six capabilities? We actually looked at external research in past internal initiatives, we gathered some quick employee voices and came up with a list of, I think, 25, and then shortlisted and came to six at the end. And we shortlisted based on the fact that it needs to be fit for purpose, right? So all of a sudden, if I say 'AI in HR is important,’ there are a lot of other things that we as a company need to do before we go and start working on AI, right?
So it needs to make sense for Syngenta as a company, HR, as a function—so fit for purpose applicable to all roles in HR, because we didn't really want to go down the route of here are five, four for kanban and here are two for HRBP. So we wanted to have a generic set of six that will apply to the entire function.
And then you also talked about relevance in the next three to five years: you don't want something that might be a hot topic 10 years from now, and at the same time, you don't want something that's really hot right now to somewhere that will still be relevant in the next three to five years. So those are kind of the parameters we use to bring it down to six. And the six were data fluency, the part that I led, then employee experience, agile, tech savviness, partnering, and customer centricity. The first phase of the project, which was around six months, was around determining the skills. And then the next one year we actually spent, or almost eight months or nine months, to develop the framework. So if we were to design something around data fluency, what would that mean?
We did quite a bit of product testing around that, so after we developed the framework, got feedback from a variety of sources, we then designed the pathways. And at the same time—this is where it coincided with the larger learning experience platform launch in the company—we said, let us be pioneers and let us come up with design actual pathways in the platform. So we took our vision of that framework and converted those to actual learning pathways on the platform. And we now have six of these learning pathways: we have many more, but for HR, we have these very six dedicated ones, all built in-house.
Stacia Garr:
Great. So I want to start or dig in a little bit deeper on that first phase around kind of determining those skills. So did you all do any assessment of the level of those skills or capabilities in the organization today when you were making that decision around which, you said a list of 25 to a short list of, of six. So kind of what, what was the baselining and did that influence where you ultimately landed?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
The short answer I would say is we didn't do a survey or an assessment per se for employees, because we also had to always balance it out with other surveys that are going on, and do we really want this to have employees answer, way too much service, right? So there's always that reality that you have to juggle, right?
So I didn't do that, but having said that there definitely, I would say data, not so much quantitative data, but data from what worked in the past. So there were many models that were initiated or launched in the past that didn't quite work or there was feedback around why certain things stuck with the company and certain things never really stuck with people.
So we have that. We also had some external review of the HR function, and there was a lot of qualitative and quantitative data around an external party looking at our function and seeing what are our strengths and what are some of the things that we need to work on.
So we have that data and that very in-depth review from that external party. And then it wasn't a skill assessment, but we did some quick listening exercises where we asked people, what does 'HR 2025’ mean to you, and what are some of the skills that you think we need to develop that we don't have today? So we gathered some of those responses and there were also a bunch of quick polls that we did at various forums. We have something called the ‘One HR Week,’ which is where the entire function comes together virtually, and we have a ton of initiatives around HR and people and development for that whole week. So we gathered some quick data from those different sessions as well around skills.
Stacia Garr:
That absolutely makes sense. And then you mentioned you developed this framework: can you explain to us a little bit more in a detailed way, what that framework was?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Sure. So what we did was, when we were in a position when, once we knew these are the six that we have to work on, and then we identified who's going to be leading, we decided we'll do something called a Yam Jam, which is a Yammer jam, for each of these. Actually we did it for four out of the six capabilities, and we gathered people, we did different sessions and we had specific questions, so two minutes each and everybody had to write in, we had almost 200 to 300 people in aggregate across all sessions give us feedback. /span>
So we gathered a lot of data. For example, for data fluency. I asked the question, what does data fluency mean to you? right, and gathered that feedback. There was another question around, if you were to learn data fluency, what skills would you learn, right, and why would you learn them? So things like that, and what really emerged similar things emerged for other capabilities as well, but I'll focus on the data fluency part as there were three distinct needs of users. One was, I want to understand the data enough so that I want to read the dashboards, I can influence decisions. I can talk about it, I can, I can add value to conversations that are happening about talent, but I don't want to dig my hands dirty or, you know, I don't want to go too deep. So they were very clear, like I really want to know data enough.
So that was one bucket. The second bucket was people who wanted to go a bit deep, but they were, we don't want to do PhDs. So it just makes sure that it's not too deep, but we definitely want to understand what are the data sources we can pull? How can we do some quick analysis to answer a question? So it was almost like a deeper level of the first persona. And the third was where people and to be completely transparent, there weren't a whole lot of them and I almost force-fed them a little bit, that these were people who wanted to go, so people like us in order to develop the people analytics team and make it sustainable. You want technical people: these are people who want to aspire to become data scientists or go deep along with having consulting skills. So it's a very niche skill and the smallest group of all, but those were the three user types or user needs that emerged. And then what we decided was we needed different pathways for these different people. So we went ahead and did a lot of external exercises, listening exercises, where we looked at data fluency: I think I spoke to seven different companies, just understanding what they have done. And there were some really good ideas that came up as to what has made them successful in launching these programs.
So we took those, the internal needs, and then we put together the framework around, let's say for the first set of user needs or first persona, if you were to call it, the name of the person, I think we call them the information consumer—all they want to do is to consume information, not to not do too much of analytics. So for them, we came up with a series of not activities, but it's a mix of, it could be LinkedIn modules talking about why is data fluency important mixed with something like an escape room exercise, where it is about understanding how to use data, how to differentiate anecdotal data from actual data: so more around fundamentals of analytical thinking, and how do you bring that thinking to the table?
Those were just two examples, but around six to seven concrete activities or learning activities that you could be doing, which will address your need for that particular bucket of the first user need or the first persona. And we did that for the second persona. And then we did that for the third persona as well.
Stacia Garr:
Out of curiosity, what did you name those other two personas?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
The third one we named the scientist practitioner. And the second one, I think we are still in the process of finalizing it; we don't have that, but the first and the third are finalized. It was a bit of an exercise.
Stacia Garr:
Well, what I love about what you shared there is that it's something that could apply to any competency, right, or capability; so kind of this bigger picture group, understanding the personas within what these people need to learn and then designing the learning pathways around what their particular needs are that's just replicable across, across anything that we would do.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah, and that's really important. I think it was a stretch or a learning even for myself. Because when we set out, in complete transparency, my mindset was, Oh, I know what they need, so I'll design it, don’t worry about it, so I could have just gone with it—but it's only after that listening exercise, I realized, Oh, actually there are very distinct needs; just because I'm interested in data, not everyone is equally interested in data, and in a similar way. We really have to cater to the user's needs.
Stacia Garr:
So it's not just the absence of the skills or the skills that need to develop, but actually the needs that they have—and within those needs also an underlying motivation that they have to acquire those skills.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Absolutely.
Chris Pirie:
I love the design thinking approach of being customer-centric at the beginning; that’s interesting. I also wonder why six, was that a constraint that you gave yourself? Often good design comes from constraint. And I think a lot of our conversations around these skills and skills frameworks for me revolves around the appropriate level of granularity. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose six?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
I don't think there's any magic to that number, but we were very clear, especially when we presented it to our HR leadership team, we were very clear that it shouldn't be a laundry list of, you know, here's these 15 things that we think are important—it has to be realistic and it also has to be achievable. If you want to upskill yourself in all of these, then whatever 12 to 18 months, should be a good enough timeframe.
So I think that was our main lens to look at it. I think we did come to seven, but then two of them could have been easily consolidated. So that's some strong feedback we got from our leadership team. So we then ended up consolidating.
And as you can imagine, a lot of these skills are also overlapping, right? So digital technical savviness. I mean, do you really want to keep it different or is that… I mean, even within the six, to be honest, there's so much data fluency needed in being agile or an employee experience, but there's a lot that you can actually combine. So there was a consolidation exercise, for sure.
Stacia Garr:
And you mentioned, you had gotten feedback to identify these three different personas. Once you had done that and had started working on the learning pathways, did you all also get feedback at that point?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yes. So we did a set of, we call it product testing, when just the framework was done, and it was pretty intense because we recorded all six of the capability leads. We recorded 30 20-minute videos introducing ourselves, why this is important and then the entire framework, and then we had a bunch of 20 to 30 product testers across the globe that actually went through all of those videos and then we had sessions where we came together and they gave us feedback, and we did some quick NPS surveys as well. Like would you recommend this framework to others or would you recommend the skill to others? So a lot of good feedback came from there saying, you know, this is good. This is not going to work for me.
One of the things that people said was there's a lot of commonalities among the six capabilities, so if there's a way to guide me to something else while you're talking about a particular skill, that would be really helpful. So if you're talking about agility and hypothesis building is really important, then tie it to the data fluency pathway because that's how you garner interest in each other.
So a lot of feedback happened there—that was one round of product testing, and then when we actually designed the actual pathway on the platform, we did another round of product testing as well. But to be very honest, I think we got a lot of interest in the first phase; by the time we launched it already coincided with a couple of other big initiatives, so the amount of feedback we received on the platform when we road-tested it was less. But at the same time, now we have launched it as of December 3rd, we launched everything officially across the globe. We are just going to look at the feedback now what happens.
Stacia Garr: Right.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
So, fingers crossed!
Stacia Garr:
I understand that you said that it coincided with a couple of other big initiatives, but it also may be that you got a lot of the big issues out of the way early in the design.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Absolutely, but what I would also tell others were on a similar journey is putting it on the platform is, is a learning by itself. Like when I was literally putting it on the platform, the kind of experiences or the kind of notes I had to put in—because it's not a bunch of LinkedIn modules, right? It has certain activities where you need to sign up; it has a community of practice that you can sign up for, so it's a mixed methods thing. So for some of them, let's say you're scrolling down, you've just gone through a few videos, and then all of a sudden it's an activity that you have to sign up for, but the actual activity will happen in the site that you are in. So how do you change that mindset that, well, this is not a module: you just need to sign up on this activity sheet so that your local HRBP can do this, right?
So because there was such a variety of things that we offered within each pathway, the actual platform experience is also important. And to gather feedback is also very crucial.
Stacia Garr:
Interesting. I want to maybe step back a little bit. So you were the global leader of People Analytics. How did you become involved in this? Like who was it led by an in, why were you a part of this?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
The first phase I was asked to lead the entire initiative, just identifying what the skills are going to be. It was very organic, let's have a project team together, let's have somebody lead it, I think I was in general passionate about the topic. So, it happened very organically and it happened really well.
The second phase, we realized that we need experts in each of these six fields or in these six capabilities, so let's have one person lead one capability and let's have one overall project manager lead the entire thing. So that's how we came together across HR. And I would say it's a mix; three of the six capabilities. So employee experience, agile and data fluency, we had people who actually lead it in their day jobs as well, so it only made sense for them to read these capabilities. The other six, I think it was more of people who were passionate about the topic and, of course, who had the capability to lead it. So it was a mix of your role determining who leads it, plus your passion. But of course, we had very strong sponsorship from our CHRO, who thought this is the top.
Stacia Garr:
One of the things we all know can be difficult is creating that alignment across these different areas of HR and these different teams and you even called out that one of the most important things was making sure there was a connection from one of these sets of capabilities to something else. I could see with there being six teams, it being hard to kind of maintain that connection. So what did you do in terms of maintaining that alignment and communication across these different groups so that you could kind of create this cohesive whole offering for folks?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think we hit an extremely strong project manager who kind of brought us together. I know it seems obvious, but I think her tenacity and her skills—kudos to her, every Tuesday, 8 to 9 or 8 to 9.30am was our meeting, and we had people from across the globe, from New Zealand to us, covering the entire globe. Imagine the difficulty of bringing everyone together, but we all pulled it together. So for a year, every Tuesday, 8 to 9.30am, we met as a team to discuss our progress and then we used Microsoft teams as our platform to collaborate: we had a whole channel dedicated to it and all of the conversation that happened, all the decks we prepared, everything that we revised and the durations, all of that happened on that single platform. So I don't think how we could have managed it just through email or just through, you know, meetings. That platform really helped.
Stacia Garr:
Now kind of turning, you said he launched it on December 3rd: what are you thinking in terms of the measurement? So how are you going to know if this has been successful?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
A couple of things. One is, of course we want to look at the platform, data, the metrics that come with it, so how many people have viewed it? How many people have started a more do which module is more popular, which mode is more popular—are people reading documents or are people watching videos more or are they signing up for activities? So we already have a framework that we have prepared for each of our pathways that we want to track the data; hopefully it’ll go up and not down over time.
We also have developed a dashboard, not just for the HR capabilities, but for the entire learning platform, where at an org level you get to see what are the top most skills that people are aspiring for, what are they signing up for? And you kind of get the business unit wide view or, you know, gender or other demographic view of the data. So that's another piece.
And then to be very honest, there's no death of qualitative feedback. So people will write an email and say, Hey, I couldn't sign up or what's this happening? Or have you considered this resource or that resource? So not everything, but we are trying to capture some of those qualitative feedback as well. So between the dashboard, the platform data and the qualitative feedback, that's our first approach, but I'm sure it will evolve and we have to put in some more. But let's see how we progress in the next two to three months.
Stacia Garr:
The dashboard is really interesting, because it basically is your way of enabling leaders to keep a pulse on, are we improving the skills of that? We've said we want to go out and improve. Was that something you envisioned doing from the beginning?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
We did actually. So what happened was, as I said, the HR capabilities was one part, or one stream; the other much bigger stream was launching the learning platform for the entire company, right? So my team was involved in one of the levers that they call the measurement lever. Of course, the question that was posed to us was how do we measure learning? How do we know this is working? So we came up with this framework of, there’s a bunch of metrics that we can track at an individual level. So me, as an individual learner, I want to know, when do I learn the best or how many courses have I taken in the last one week? Or is there a pattern, do I learn during a particular time of day, or things like that.
Then there's a set of metrics that are relevant for the manager, right, to understand how the team is progressing. Then there's an org level need, where as an organization, we need to understand which corporate functions are really leading the way in learning, or is this a business unit, or if you break it down through different demographic lenses.
And then there's a strategic level of, can we connect learning with metrics that Syngenta as a company is poised to deliver. So for high level metrics like anything to do with crop science or building a better life for farmers, are there things that we can correlate with learning? That's a very high goal—I don't think we are there yet. We are very much in the lower ranks of the pyramid right now. So individual, manager and organization-wide metrics. So in that organization wide leg, we had envisioned that dashboard—that this is what it'll cater to, and this is why we need the dashboard to look at them or look at an org view.
Now, one thing I will say is that we had a lot of debate for the manager rank of the pyramid, because there's a school of thought that believes, yes, managers should have access, because ultimately you want to see where your team is, and how your team is progressing. But then there's also another strong school of thought that said, we don't want managers to know—I don't want my manager to know what courses I took yesterday. So, you know, there was a lot of debate that way. We are not currently feeding anything to the manager, but so right now it's at an individual level, but it might be again, a journey.
Stacia Garr:
And I'm sure also there's a level of comfort that needs to happen with folks in getting this type of data and understanding what might go where, and, and the rest of it, because it may come eventually in place, and I just take whatever I want and my manager can do whatever they want with it, but it doesn't matter.
What I love about what you've shared—lots of things—but one thing is, you know, we hear a lot in our space about the democratization of data, about making it widely available, but we don't see a lot of practical examples. And I think what you've shared is a very practical example of how you've thought through how this data could be useful at the individual level. Certainly some thought on, on how it could be useful at the manager level, even though it's not available, but the thinking there. And kind of that pyramid that you mentioned, I think is really a powerful framework for other people to think through, as they're thinking about their data efforts and data dashboards and the like.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Right, right. I think the other thing I will mention is as we went through that process, we also realized that ideally, it all sounds really good that you have you've thought through it all, but then there are realities around what can the platform deliver, right? So it's not magic that I want 17 metrics around in that individual layer and all 17 are available on the platform. And if it's not available on the platform, are you actually going to feed it individually to the individual? No. right; I mean, you can't do that.
So then we had to tweak our approach to say, what could be an MVP? So let's say we have identified 16 or whatever, 15 things that we want to measure at an individual level; maybe only five or seven of them are available in the platform or are kind of a ballpark available in the platform. So let's have seven as an MVP and let's do the rest in as phase two, so longer term. So then we divided each of those layers; what’s an MVP, what's a nice to have, or can come in future. And that was a good reality check, because otherwise we were on this spree of anything we think will happen and we can make all of this work, but that's not quite it, because you always are constrained with what the technology can provide.
Stacia Garr:
And I know that with some of the particular learning platforms the concept of measurement and kind of the measurement that we bring to some other aspects of our people world—and Chris might hate me for saying this, but they seem to be a bit behind. You know, we, I think that there's kind of been the learning spaces long-term, you know, focus on smile sheets and the like, and the rigor of what we've seen in some of the other aspects of people analytics isn't there.
So can you talk to me a little bit about what that conversation looked like for you all with your vendor ? Hey, you know, this is where we want to go, we can use the things you're providing us, but how did you approach that? What was their receptivity to that conversation? And what do you kind of see moving forward?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
I'll try to be as agnostic as possible, but I'll talk in generic terms. So some vendors were very, very rigid about what they have provided or what they will provide; it was a pretty difficult conversation to bring them from what their product to say, actually, our needs are a little different and we have identified these needs—only two of them are kind of matching with what you have, but what is your vision around the rest?
And they just kept going back to what they have, right? Those were actually part of our selection criteria as well. A lot of these conversations happened before we finalized the vendor, whereas a couple of others were definitely much more open, and they also gave us concrete examples of how they shifted their roadmap based on their client feedback. So testing that before finalizing the vendor is really important. And measurement was just one lever, right? There were other levels as well. So there was a process, there was integration with other stuff, things like that. So all of us were part of that discussion, and of course we had to keep it short. That's really important.
Chris Pirie:
As the L&D guy in the conversation. I couldn't agree more that we still seem to be on very foundational activity, tracking-type data and metrics in the learning space and though we're all very, very desperate and anxious to get to the business impact side of things, it feels like we're a long way.
Do you have any examples of things that you wanted to do? The vendors that you spoke to found it difficult to respond to or to your data scientist hat on,and tell me what you wish they could have brought to the table for you?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think the biggest one was in that final layer where we had business outcomes, you know, the top of the pyramid—and that's where I said that we are yet to go there, that’s where we were hoping that we'll get much more insight from the vendors or actual examples, but we didn't quite. So for example, one of the things that I know was pretty ambitious of us, but we wanted to say, ultimately, it helps us sell better to farmers because of the courses that we have taken, right? And I'm putting it in very simplistic terms, but if I take five agronomy courses, do I, as an organization sell more?
So any relationship that we could establish between learning and selling more, or influencing farmers' decisions more, we didn't end up getting anything there. And it's a hard problem—I don't want to say they can’t solve it and look, we have done it, we have done it either. But so I do want to recognize it's a very hard problem and it's so many factors involved, ultimately in the selling decision that you can't really pinpoint to learning, but if there was some way to directly establish relationships between the final outcomes that we're interested in as an organization and learning, that would be a deal breaker, I would say.</span
Stacia Garr:
Just to dive into the data side of that a little bit more, were the vendors able to actually bring in some of that data? Because obviously you'd have to bring in for this example of your sales data for different groups and then be able to kind of slice and dice based on what functions people were in, or what region or whatever, and whether they took the courses. So were they unable to bring in that data, or were they unable to share that so that you all could do that analysis yourself, see, during your Data Lake or in some external tools?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think with regard to those higher level questions about the business outcome relationship, they were just unable to bring in or show us examples. But with others, I think it was more around, yes, we have the data, but right now it's not on the platform, but yes, we think about that. So it was more yes, we can implement it if you want, or we can do it, but right now it’s we are not able to show it on the platform.
But, you know, Stacia, the other thing I'll mention is we also had a learning ‘aha!’ moment here. We thought the more the metrics, the merrier, right. But the vendors actually told us, and some of the external learning we did when we spoke to other companies was, t the end of the day, give the individual just three metrics, and that's what you can drive the maximum impact—don’t bombard them with like 15 metrics that they don't know what to do at every day. If it's changing at some point, I'll be like, okay, I don't care.
So try to consolidate and give them the bare minimum or two to three that you think are important. That way, certain vendors also helped change our thought process. Just because we can think of 15 doesn't mean we have to give 15, right: think about what really matters. And at the end of the day, or rather end of the week, what does an individual want to know about his or her learning path?
Stacia Garr:
I'd like to kind of lift up and think about what you're going to be doing moving forward, kind of taking this experience as an initial example of what could potentially be done. Can you talk about your vision for how people analytics could help with, skills, identification, or verification or talent redeployment in the future?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah, I think again, this could be an hour discussion by itself. A couple of thoughts: one is especially given the experience we had employee listening plays such an important role, understanding your population for which you're building the learning product is critical that we saw our personas and our user needs would not have come up if we had not listened. Right?
So people analytics, and again, to me, people analytics, employee experience, they go hand in hand—it’s not really a different team or different skill set But we can play a really important role in that process of whatever listening we do internally to understand user needs, beat quantitative or qualitative, to gather that data, to mine that data, to help that that's where we come in quite a bit. The second is the sources from which we get information about skills. That's just going to exponentially increase over the years. Internal listening is only one source. You also have, I'm sure the HR employee tracking system, every company has, there’s some amount of information there. Then there is, there are professional networking sites that you can get information on, there are learning platforms that you can get information on. So how do you connect the disparate data sources and come with a consolidated view of what are the skill gaps? What are the skills people are aspiring for? Managing those disparate data sources, analyzing that data. That's where people analytics can play a key role, and of course the end part of it, which is when you have launched a pathway or a learning platform, how do you measure that people are actually learning? So that's the third piece where people analytics is critical, and if organizations don't have people analytics teams in that space, then that would be a red flag. You absolutely need to involve the team there.
Stacia Garr:
You mentioned kind of this exploding or exponentially increasing, I think was the right word, sorts of data around skills. I can see that as potentially an opportunity, but it's also a challenge. So we'd love to hear kind of your thoughts on those different data sources and how folks might want to approach or think about that challenge as they're moving forward.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
The first thing I would say is really, what does the business need? Try to understand the business needs, and where the company is going. So I'm sure digital is top of everyone's mind, and everyone's going through a digital transformation—but what exactly is digital, right? I mean, is it data analytics skills, or is it becoming more technology-savvy? Like for us, farming equipment or farming digitization or technology that supports satellite data.
So trying to understand the business needs is really important—and what's the need, do we really need to up-skill our own population to make it prepared for the next five years? Or, can we do it with interim solutions? There are a lot of vendors these days that look at the current talent pool, the external talent pool, the gig economy talent pool, and a couple of others and they bring together a project team that will suffice for a particular project that you don't have the skills for, right?
We haven't quite implemented that, but we have actually looked into some of those solutions because some of the business needs are very, we need to put a team together next week to start on this project, but we don't really have these skills. So we need to think about what the company needs long-term, but not forget that there are many short-term and medium-term solutions available today, especially given the gig economy structure that we can avail of. That would be my call-out given some of the business problems that have come to my team in the past 1, 1.5 years.
Stacia Garr:
When I ask you, you've mentioned kind of being involved with the broader HR function and specifically with learning as you've done this work. When you think about addressing skills broadly, who else do you think needs to be involved in that conversation?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Meaning, outside of HR?
Stacia Garr:
There could be other groups within HR, I could tell you who I might be thinking of, but I don't want to influence you, but I think both within HR and outside HR.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
So I think beyond learning and analytics, I see HR BPs as a key role, because their insight into what the business is thinking, what are the kinds of daily conversations that happen on the ground: that really helps give us a picture of what are some of the skills that we need to upskill ourselves on, so that we can have a more informed conversation with the businesses.
And also, a lot of companies, their HRBP population tends to be very tactical. So how do we move to being a more strategic input into the business rather than very operational? So, that itself was a good input for us to kind of look at what skills we need to look at in order to change.
Other than that, I think IT in general partnership with them, especially in terms of learning platforms or what do we have, where do we want to go, how can we integrate? That's really important. And I think once we have the solution, or maybe not once we have, but throughout, we need the business leaders at least to sponsor or to support. Some of the best conversations we have had was when we did these learning workshops; as a result of that learning platform launch our very visible business leaders came and addressed us and just talked about learning, and what does learning mean? And we ask them questions like, if you want to have one outcome of learning, what will it be? One of the things that repeatedly came from these business leaders was, I should be able to find what I want to learn easily—that was at the top of their mind.
The other thing, which to me resonated really well with me was people talked about learning can be just going to an orchestra or opera and listening. And to me, that's learning. So, you know, how do you look at learning and the non-work space as well? And people actually consider that very much a learning, but then that has its own measurement problems, because when we were working on the measurement, How do you actually metricize, going to the museum because that's learning?
So that has its own issues. But that was one of our eye-opening moments—when we heard business leaders talk about learning. That also really energized us to think about it in different ways. So that's important to make it successful.
Chris Pirie:
When I look at what's going on in the learning world today, there's two predominant sets of activities. One is very data-driven—the kind of work that you've been doing. How do we codify, how do we automate, how do we track? And then there's another almost, I don't know whether it's on a scale, but at the other end there's how do we build a culture? How do I create a culture where learning in my organization is something that is supported and good and encouraged. As a data person, what do you think about the culture side of things?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah. I mean, that's something we have been really thinking about hard, because this is not an easy problem to solve. And it's almost in every deck that we have created a learning culture, right? I mean, that's there.
I think the launch and the marketing of it is really important—it goes a long way in creating that culture So I would really have almost like a marketing team associated with the launch of the product, and treat it like any other product in the market. And we can see that the stronger the launch, greater the uptake in those areas, so creating that learning culture.
And then also, I think it goes down to the individual leader a lot. So I, as a manager of seven people, how much do I emphasize on development? I could have my own ways of emphasizing—in my team, we have this two-hour session, monthly development sessions. We just talk about one topic that we have either read or something that we need to upskill ourselves, and somebody presents. So I think leaders, it's up to them to create that culture within their team. So that's more of a bottom-up approach and businesses launching it, or business leaders launching it, is more of a top down approach. So between those two, it could be powerful in creating the culture. And constantly measuring it—don’t forget measurement.
Chris Pirie:
At Microsoft, what we used to say is, if it doesn't get measured, it doesn’t get done. That might be the culture link.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah, exactly. And you're talking to a people analytics person, so yes, everything is measurement.
Stacia Garr:
So just starting to wrap up; are there any organizations that you admire in terms of how they're approaching skills today—folks who you've talked to that you think they're doing?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Some interesting work? I think it's the recency effect, Chris, because you mentioned Microsoft, I think some of the work they're doing, and I may be a little biased with my conversations that happened around the HR data fluency skills, so maybe not overall, but I know they have done some really good work and they have a team dedicated to it: there’s some very dedicated efforts around it.
Lloyd's Bank was another organization that we spoke to and they have done some really good work, especially the persona idea, even though their personas are completely different, but that idea actually came from my conversation with them where they had certain personas. And they made it a very fun way of identifying with the persona, and therefore going and learning certain skills because you are that persona.
I was pretty impressed with their work. And I think Unilever in general is always the leader in this, mostly because of all the stuff that I've read, I haven't personally talked to them.
Stacia Garr:
What else should we have asked you about that we didn’t?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
You know, with any initiative when it happens and when it's done, it feels like, Oh, it was wonderful, and this was all planned and everything happened as per plan. But I just want to give people a very realistic picture; there are many times where we just didn't know what we are doing, or if this is even going to launch—or when we had the framework, we had wonderful PowerPoint decks, but we didn't know how reality would look like, but it just so happened that the platform was launching at the same time.
But if that had not launched, I don't know if we would be here today with actual learning pathways, so there are a lot of coincidences. There are a lot of points in time where we didn't know what the next step was and it could have completely fallen flat and not gone anywhere.
So, you know, just keep at it and you just have to make things work as you go; it’s not always very well planned out. A year ago, we didn't know that we will be in this position today where we actually have launched pathways for six of our capabilities.
Stacia Garr:
You've shared a lot of really great information. Some folks might want to follow up and have some other questions: how can people connect with you and your work?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Definitely, you can connect with me on LinkedIn; that would be great.
Stacia Garr:
And then wrapping up, final question: we’ve done quite a bit of work on purpose over the last year, and so we like to ask all of our podcast guests a question about their personal purpose—to really just want to understand why do you do what you do? Why do you do the work you do?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Oh, that's pretty deep. I think there's this inherent need in me personally—that the need for connection with people, that's very strong. But at the same time, I think I also have an affinity for numbers, and so I think part of me is always asking but what's the numbers, what's the evidence, and what's how can you break it down, and how do you know this is true? How do you know this is not true?
So this fascination for facts and fascination for people, I think that's where I found them coming together and people analytics. And that's what I do, and ultimately, if this can make leaders make better decisions about people—if this can help an employee know what to do next in his or her career or what to learn next, you're actually improving somebody's life in the organization.
Stacia Garr:
So you're not just a scientist-practitioner, you're a scientist-humanist, if you will?
Madhura Chakrabarti:
That’s a lovely title.
Chris Pirie:
That should be a job title!
Stacia Garr:
It should be.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
Maybe that's what we call our third persona—we’ll tweak it.
Stacia Garr:
Well, thank you, Madhura, this was just wonderful; we appreciate all the really concrete examples and just sharing the details, and helping people see there's no one pathway to getting here, but it is possible.
Madhura Chakrabarti:
I really enjoyed the conversation as always, Stacia; thank you, Chris. Good to know you.
Chris Pirie:
Yeah, likewise—thanks so much!
Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.
Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.
Building Cognitively Diverse, Engaged, and Empowered Teams: A conversation with Ultranauts’ CEO
Posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 at 2:55 AM
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Stacia Garr:
Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining. We're going to go ahead and get started. So for those of you whom I have not met, I am Stacia Garr and we are RedThread Research. I'm a, co-founder here with RedThread and I am just thrilled to be hosting this session today with Rajesh Anandan, who is the CEO of Ultranauts. And Ultranauts, you're going to learn all about them in the course of the session and how they have built these, as we described it here in the title of cognitively diverse and highly engaged and empowered teams. Now, before we get started, just want to share with you for those of you who don't know we are RedThread and we are human capital research and advisory membership. And we focus on a range of things, including people analytics, learning, and skills, performance employee experience, HR tech, and most relevant for today diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. So if you have a chance, check us out @redthreadresearch.com. Now just some quick housekeeping for our session today. The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants. And we want you to go ahead and ask questions through the Q&A function. I believe there's also a way to up vote your favorites. So if you see questions that others have mentioned, go ahead and up vote those. You're free to interact with one another in the chat, and you'll just need to make sure that you adjust the settings to include panelists and attendees. Otherwise you'll just be sending messages to the panelists, which is fine, but probably isn't the amount of interaction that you may be hoping for. So just go ahead and, and make that shift. If you have a moment we'd love for you to get started by putting in the chat, your name and your organization, and anything that you're in particular, hoping to learn from today's webinar.
Stacia Garr:
So with that, we'll go ahead and get started. So it is my pleasure to introduce Rajesh Anandan. We've practiced many times before the session, and I hope I hope I didn't mess up. But you know, this webinar really came about as a introduction on LinkedIn through a mutual friend who said you two absolutely must meet each other. Because you know, you have a wonderful story with Ultranauts in the work that you're trying to do, and we have an opportunity to, to help you share that. So with that, I guess would love to start with what is Ultranauts, who are you, what's this company that you've helped build?
Who is Ultranauts: Creating a universal workplace where everyone can thrive
Rajesh Anandan:
Well, Stacia, thanks for hosting the session and glad to share a bit more about what what we've been up to at Ultranauts. So Ultranauts is a onshore software and data quality engineering services firm. We, my co-founder and I started the company eight years ago with a mission to demonstrate that neuro-diversity including autism could be a competitive advantage for business. And our very simple theory of change was to build a world-class business that could create value for clients and be commercially viable and successful. And along the way, reimagine how in organization functions, how a company thinks about talent sources, talent manages teams, develops careers, so that a much wider group of humans could thrive and along, you know, and we're now eight years in and we've learned a lot. And part of our mission of course, is the share what we're learning to make it easier and more effective for other organizations to also embrace your diversity. So I'm always thrilled to have the chance to share some of what we've learned and some of the practices we've developed for our team at Ultranauts.
Stacia Garr:
Great. And why did you do this? So how did you arrive at this decision to build a neuro diverse team? And I'm really, why was it important to you?
Rajesh Anandan:
You know, I I'll spare the retroactively crafted founder story. Cause those things you just can't believe, startup origin stories, that sound like a neat straight line. My co-founder and, Art Shectman you know, we were at school together undergrads at MIT in the early nineties. And you know, when you're in an engineering school, you over-index on other humans who are different. And I think for a lot of us, for the first time we found a space and an environment and a community where it was all fine, we could be whoever we were. And there wasn't need a need to hide parts of who we were for fear of being bullied and things like that. And we didn't have these labels then I don't think I'd heard of autism until much later, but in retrospect, we of course have close friends who are neurodivergent and who we've seen, how they've struggled, trying to navigate a world that was not designed with them in mind and unfairly had to figure out how to function in a society and workplaces.
Rajesh Anandan:
And so fast forward a few decades, I'm dating myself here, but I'd done some research with another friend who runs a due diligence firm and research and consulting firm, Stax's. Looking at a thesis I had around communities of humans who were being overlooked or underestimated because of ableist views and looking for evidence of an over-indexing of attributes that could be strengths in the workplace. And so I was describing some of the findings from this research with Art, my co-founder, and he's been a serial entrepreneur and he was building a software development shop at the time. And he said, you know, some of the profiles sort of traits or attributes you are describing are exactly what I would look for in a quality engineer. And I could never find good quality engineers. And gosh, if you can find me a few folks who have these strengths I've got work that needs to be done.
Rajesh Anandan:
And so that's how we got started. As an experiment, we, you know, went to a couple non-profit advocacy groups for adults on the spectrum, and they were kind enough to humorous and help us craft a job description. We posted that job on grass. It's an advocacy network for autistic adults, and we had 150 applications within three days.
Stacia Garr:
Wow.
Rajesh Anandan:
A third of the applicants had graduate degrees, no one had any sort of work experience that related to the job we needed people to do. So we stumbled through the screening process and identified three of the applicants, trained them up pretty quickly and saw within a few months that they were able to do the job at a very high standard. And that was all the evidence we needed. And we launched Ultranauts then at the time called Ultra Testing as its own firm.
Stacia Garr:
Very interesting. So it sounds like you started with certainly with research, understanding, you know, kind of a little bit about this landscape and then with, as you said, an experiment at the beginning but now, you know, fast forward, how many years ago was that?
Rajesh Anandan:
Eight years ago. Okay.
Stacia Garr:
So now fast forward eight years ago, and I'm sure that, you know, over the course of this time, you've gotten a lot of questions about what it's like to lead a diverse team. We talked about this in our prep session, you know, and what misconceptions people people may have. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, from that start with those three quality engineers to today, what you've seen?
Rajesh Anandan:
So I would say, well, so many things and we'll touch on some of the sort of learnings we've had as a team. During the conversation I would say the most important thing is that if you take any group of humans you will not be able to describe that group accurately with any single statement. And so while our intentions were good and certainly there's evidence of an over-indexing of certain traits, like logical reasoning ability, or visual pattern recognition ability among autistic adults relative to the general population, these are generalizations, you know, it doesn't actually describe any specific individual. And so I think the biggest learning is that the sort of generalizations and these tropes, even if they're well-intentioned are not particularly helpful and keep you from getting to the ground truth that you need to understand in order to develop and design the kind of systems that actually work for everyone. And so you know, I'll, I'll simply say while ableist tropes are bad, clearly. So to our super power tropes or tropes about heightened abilities, and as one of my autistic colleagues shared, you know, in her words, she said, listen, all my life I've had to be exceptional just to be accepted. Like, can I just be accepted?
Stacia Garr:
Hmm. Yeah. Great point. Well, let's, I think that leads nicely into this question that I had for you, which is what is your team actually look like? So let's go to that slide.
The Ultranauts team
Rajesh Anandan:
So today Ultranauts is a team that spread out across 29 States. We've actually been a fully virtual organization from day one. So we've had the luxury of eight years of experimenting and trying different tools and practices to keep our team engaged and connected. And so when COVID started to unfold operationally, nothing changed. We were all already working from home and, you know, maybe my colleague who heads up growth and I traveled didn't travel anymore to events. I mean, that was pretty much the only thing, but we, we, our DNAs as a fully virtual organization so we're fully distributed and incredibly diverse. And so three quarters of our team across the company are autistic, and that's not just our analysts and engineers, it's our quality managers or colleagues and leadership team or head of outreach.
Rajesh Anandan:
And so that's been very intentional because we fundamentally believe that if you can bring together different brain types, different information, processing models, different problem solving styles, different thinking styles, different learning styles, and forge collaborative teams, you could do better. And there's a fair bit of evidence that backs up that assertion that cognitively diverse teams do perform better in terms of solving more complex problems, surfacing more unique insights and driving continuous improvement. And in our case all through the lens of improving software and data quality in highly complex and fast moving domains. And, you know, the one thing I would say is we have adopted this approach because of our fundamental belief that our differences as individuals do actually make us better together. And not because we are trying to create jobs for artistic talent, like that is not while that is a part of what happens because of the nature of what we're doing.
Rajesh Anandan:
The mission is to demonstrate that diversity neuro diversity and which leads to cognitive diversity is in fact an advantage. And so we go out and of course invest differentially in reaching pools of talent who've been left out and marginalized. And so sourcing looks very different for us. And we can talk a bit more about that later, but from the time you apply, everybody's treated the same. You get to work at Ultranauts because we believe you are the best brain for the right job. And not because of anything else. And because of that, you know, we've been able to create an environment where diversity really is embraced and it flourishes.
Diversity
Rajesh Anandan:
And if you could go to the next slide, not only are we cognitively diverse, but arguably we might be the most diverse engineering firm in the world across any dimension, you know, so if we look at gender 40% of our team are cisgender female. 5% are non binary, 5% are trans and other 12% have other gender identities. And so, you know, in a way cis-gender males are certainly not the majority or a plurality.
Stacia Garr:
And can you for, for our audience who may not know what cisgender means, can you explain that?
Rajesh Anandan:
Sure. that would be individuals who identify with the sex of their birth, born a male identify as male. And then in terms of race and ethnicity 28% of our team are people of color. Now, this is an area where we are not reflective of the population the American population. And so we've got work to do but we also think of diversity in terms of socioeconomic status. Three quarters of our team were unemployed or underemployed, nothing to do with their fierce capabilities as professionals and humans and everything to do with the construct of how you know, people get hired and the sort of highly subjective and ineffective tools that are commonly used, which leave out incredibly capable humans from having a fair shot at contributing. And so we've been on this journey to try to change that.
Rajesh Anandan:
And over 40% of our team used to live in poverty. And so we think about diversity across many dimensions. We don't think that point solutions to improve or increase diversity on any one dimension can work. There's certainly no shortage of failed attempts to say, Oh, let's set up a program focused on X group. Because the reason you might need a program for X group is because there are underlying sort of inequities in how the organization functions. Maybe it's in how you recruit, how you develop talent or how you manage, you know, how you build relationships how information is shared all of this stuff. And if you don't get to the root of what's creating unfairness and an uneven playing field, then all these point solutions just don't work. And on the other hand, if you can really take an honest look at what is, what are those underlying causes that are resulting in a workforce that is not diverse on whatever dimension it is and you start to tackle, attack those surgically. Then what you end up with is a diverse work force. As we have, like, we didn't set out to be gender diverse or racially diverse or socioeconomically diverse. We, this is an outcome of the process we've gone through.
Stacia Garr:
And I think one thing to, to call out for folks is that, you know, just to to pick on one of these you've mentioned here that 10% black, the technology industry is historically really it's incredibly difficult or to get that number very high. It seems for I think, many of the reasons that you've mentioned, but just for folks, for point of comparison, I was recently actually looking at at Facebook's numbers here and, you know, they, they at least have been saying, they've been putting a big focus on this. And, and even with that big focus, I think their numbers are like 3%. So even though this is not necessarily where we would want it, it's still, I think, remarkably better than what we tend to see in the tech industry.
Rajesh Anandan:
Yeah. And so part of the challenge is to continuously challenge ourselves. Like good compared to what you know. So when we look at the broader sort of technology industry or kind of engineering fields and we're all quality engineers, it's a low bar and it's meaningless, you know, so it's I think, you know, the only sort of valid comparison is what is it in the general population? Cause everything else, it starts to sound like an excuse, right? Oh, there isn't a pipeline of talent or, well, you know, maybe this particular discipline is doesn't have as many graduates or what have you, by the way, we also looked at our team in terms of academic background. And actually I think almost 30% quarter to 30% of our team. If we look at team members who are performing extremely well don't have a college degree. So, you know, we're seeing bigger efforts around this like Google certificates where we're trying to disrupt that barrier of, if you're not part of the third of the population that have a college degree, then suddenly you're left out of a whole wide range of fields, which makes no sense.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, no completely agree. We actually, we just published a podcast. We did with a gentleman called Matthew Daniel who's with Guild education. And we spent quite a bit of time talking about that exact topic about how this, this issue of college degrees leaves out so much of the workforce. So just kind of moving us on, you know, these numbers are great, but I think a lot of people would want to know, okay, well, what results have you seen so far with your business? So can you talk a little bit about that?
Rajesh Anandan:
Yeah. we've grown at over 50% a year in terms of, you know, growing the business while maintaining a hundred NPS among clients and our clients include a range of leaders in the industries that we work in from, you know AIG, Berkshire, Hathaway, Bloomberg Bank of New York, Mellon, Cigna, Comcast Warner media. We also work with startups. We work with pure technology companies and SAS companies. Slack's been a long time client. And then so commercially, we're professional services firm. So we're growing at a really healthy clip. And we saw the sort of impact of that as COVID started to unfold and companies started to shut down entire business units and shut off contractors and vendors and all this stuff. And we took a hit as well. Looking back a year, Q2 last year, I think for us, as for many organizations was not fun at all.
Performance
Rajesh Anandan:
And we lost a couple bigger accounts, took a real hit to our top line, but we recovered in a quarter and because the services we provide in terms of data quality engineering and software called engineering, are that much better than what's out there. We ended the year having grown our top line by 70%. In the middle of what was arguably incredibly challenging year. And, and we do that because we do this work better. If you could go to the next slide, you know, the nature of what we do is preventative. If we're doing our job, bad stuff, shouldn't happen. You know, your software should launch and release without any critical failures, your machine learning models and predictions, your analytics engine should be accurate and trusted, so bad things don't happen. But there've been a couple of examples where we've been brought in to replace a larger consulting firm, and we had to redo an entire piece of work, or there was a really well defined, measured baseline we were starting from.
Stacia Garr:
So it was possible to compare what we did. And the results we were able to deliver. In one case, a Prudential business unit brought us in to replace an IBM team, doing some fairly technical kind of compliance testing on their software. And we were able to not only use the same sort of automation tools, but actually do the same work so much more effectively that we increased the sort of rate of detection of defects by 56%. I mean, you have to ask, like, what were they doing before? Not only that we were able to actually do it in sprint versus delaying delivery of that platform. And no surprise, we replaced IBM at that business unit and, you know, completed 14, 15 projects. I think in another case we were brought in to replace or in place of CapGemini by an AIG business unit.
Rajesh Anandan:
And CapGemini is a great firm. They were sort of working across that company and this particular CTO didn't want a sort of cookie cutter industry solution. They were building a highly complex underwriting insurance underwriting platform and needed a partner that could have just capable, quality engineers, who not only had the technical skills to build sort of a scalable test automation framework, which sounds like a bunch of garbage, but actually be able to understand the business and what that meant was our quality engineers read through the 500 pages of underwriting logic, and actually understood it and cared enough to also understand the pricing regulations at the state and federal state level that varied by product and synthesize all of that into what to test to answer. The simple question of is this policy quote being delivered, correct, because the stakes are high. And so we've been able to show over and over again that yes, actually we do this better.
Rajesh Anandan:
And because of that, we've been growing as a business. And that's because of not in spite of the diversity of our team.
Inclusion
Rajesh Anandan:
The one other thing I would say, if you go to the next slide is that we think of success, not just in terms of the value we provide to our clients. Obviously we're a business. That's what success is. We would create value in a differentiated way that that helps our clients extract, you know, grow the business, mitigate risk and so on. But we also do think about success in terms of our ability to create an environment where everyone has a fair shot at success and can thrive. And does that in a, in the context of a team where they feel connected and engaged and they feel like they belong. And so we measure loneliness. We created a simple metric that we call our net loneliness score.
Rajesh Anandan:
Think of it like NPS for customer health as a forward-looking indicator of the health of your business. The loneliness score is similar in that it's a forward looking indicator of the health of our team, therefore the health of our business. We have a bot that pulls our team at 5:00 PM local time every day. Every day is a single poll. We cycled through about a dozen of them as a team we've kind of arrived at what those calls are. And each one ties back to a dimension of inclusion or wellbeing that we as a group have decided that it's important for us. And so loneliness is one of them. And we now have data for several years that we are consistently not a lonely group, a whole lot less lonely than the American workforce. You know, I think a few years ago, the surgeon general at the time was sounding the alarm about loneliness being an epidemic in America. And it's only gotten worse and 40% of American workers reported feeling lonely at work before COVID and we are now even more isolated. And before COVID I think 15% of Ultranauts reported feeling lonely at work and during COVID in spite of being surrounded by fear in panic we had the systems in place that actually brought our team even closer. And so, you know, the last quarters loneliness polls were averaging closer to 10% and that's, you know, people responding to that poll saying, I feel lonely at work.
Stacia Garr:
Right. And I think that's remarkable, you know, particularly as you mentioned, you're a remote team from the start. And so you know, that you know, that ability to even improve upon what you, what was happening during the, during COVID I think is really remarkable. One thing I don't think you mentioned at the beginning is how many folks are on your team? How many people work for Ultranaut?
Rajesh Anandan:
So we're still a small firm, you know, we're just south of a hundred people.
Universal workplace
Stacia Garr:
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Just to get folks on the line have a of the scale. Okay. So we've talked about, you've got really strong diversity, you've got really strong business results and other results such as this, so help us understand how do you do this? What does this, what does this look like? What's the workplace design look like?
Universal workplace: Flexible workplace norms
Rajesh Anandan:
So we think of what we're doing or trying to do as creating a universal workplace, which simply is shorthand for applying universal design principles to reimagine and redesign the system that is work top to bottom. And so for us this universal workplace has sort of four dimensions to it. One is building flexibility in as the norm, not as a thing you need to ask for an exception. Certainly having the flexibility to work from an, in an environment that you've been able to design based on your own needs, hugely important for our team. Maybe, you know, it's not for everyone. And you're seeing some of the research come out where it's working from home is super productive for some, but not all for our team in general. You know, many of our teammates may not have even applied if this was not an option, but we think of flexibility across a lot of other dimensions as well.
Rajesh Anandan:
We've moved away from the notion of a FTE, a full-time equivalent as sort of the way to think about units of work and a work week, because it turns out there's really no evidence that suggests that a 40 hour, 50 hour work week is optimally productive for all humans or even most humans or even many humans. And yet this is the construct we're stuck in. And in our case we have incredibly capable team members who would be hyper-productive for some fraction of that time. But if they were forced to work this quote full time week, simply to have a salary or simply to be able to progress in their career, you know, it, it would be unproductive. It might be overwhelming. It would be bad for their health and, and just bad for the team. And so we have created what we call a DTE, a desired time equivalent.
Rajesh Anandan:
So in almost all of our salaried roles you have, and I would say over 85% of our team are in salaried roles. So that's important to you. You can't have any of this stuff without income stability. And that's been a journey for us as a small business, right? And a lead startup we've we've had to work our way to this point where now we feel like we've dealt with some of those core issues around income stability. I would say, you know if you can't, if you don't have that, and you don't have psychological safety as just building blocks, you have nothing. And so, you know, you've got to address those things first because otherwise you don't have a conditions for people to be able to use their bandwidth and their brain cycles to focus on value and work, and instead have all these other fears that, that are playing in the background.
Universal workplace: Transparent decision making
Rajesh Anandan:
So flexibility's important. A second dimension is just transparency. You know, when you bring together people who are this different, who have very different views and experience, and maybe in some cases bad experiences at other workplaces, unfair experiences, it's really important to have as much transparency as you can, in terms of, particularly in terms of decision making, like, you know, one of the polls that we cycle through with this bot is I forget the exact phrasing, but it's like, I understand how decisions are made at this company, particularly those that affect my job. And so you respond on a Likert scale, you know, and that's sort of our proxy for do people feel like they know what's going on and why things happen. And so we've done a lot to create that transparency so that people do feel like they understand why decisions are made and what's being made.
Rajesh Anandan:
We publish our sort of performance dashboard that the leadership team works with and works off of to run the business. There's 40 odd KPIs and it's published. So the whole company sees the same metrics that the leadership team is responding to. Whenever that the leadership team meets, we meet once a week as a group, we publish notes on actions, decisions. So there's transparency. Obviously we don't publish everything. Like if there's some HR stuff happening, but for the most part, it turns out, you know, there's nothing special about what does the leadership team talk about? Cause every organization I've been in, you know this is kind of a pet topic of what, what do they talk about? And at Ultranauts you don't have to worry, or you don't have to wonder about this. It's a waste of brain cycles to wonder, because here it is.
Stacia Garr:
Can I, can I jump in on that? One thing I really like about that is we did some research actually over the course of the pandemic and are continuing to do it, that we called the responsive organization. And two of the components of a responsive organization was distributed authority. And then also growth and transparency. And what I like here is, is that pulling of those really with the obviously the transparency of these metrics and kind of how the business is doing, but then also the, the logic behind these are the decisions we made and sharing that because kind of understanding how decisions are made, helps others make their own decisions and make better decisions aligned with the same principles that the senior leadership team does. So there's something I really like about that.
Rajesh Anandan:
Yeah. And I don't want to, you know overstate the notes. You're absolutely right. Like having providing context for why decisions are made. It's just so important because that's the only way you can have individual actors in a system making good decisions. Otherwise, you know, you need a very hierarchical bureaucracy which is ineffective. And we can certainly do better on that front. You know I would say trying to build those organizational habits where providing the context is just part of what we do, you know, even on the leadership team, like we have a diverse leadership team and we've tried to adopt a habit where the night before the weekly meeting, if you have an agenda, item or topic, you've got to submit it. You know, we use Trello and we're engineers, so this stuff is all this, send it here and it'll populate somewhere and isn't it great.
Universal workplace: Focus on team wellbeing
Rajesh Anandan:
But the format we try to use is first give people a heads up, right? So put the thing on the agenda before the meeting and then provide the context, you know, do you want a discussion? Do you want a decision? Like, what is the purpose of this? And then what is the context, you know, that I need to know in order to have an informed conversation about the decision or about to meet and then you know, wellbeing obviously it's important particularly because we're distributed. It's impossible to know when someone is not doing well. You can't see that someone's not doing well. You might not run into them in the hallway. You won't see them stressed out at their desks. And so it's really important to not only sort of measure wellbeing. Like we have our bot that's getting a pulse check of the team every day.
Rajesh Anandan:
But also de-stigmatize mental health as much as possible, make it okay to take time off. You know, everybody in the company has to go through a part of onboarding is just going through a workshop around managing stress and anxiety. We have access to as a standard for, you know, kind of part of the resources everyone has access to. We have access to a mental health services provider where you can have therapy sessions or counseling sessions. We have a team forum every couple of weeks. That's hosted by a life coach that that we work with. And that's a safe forum for people to just share concerns that they have with a group of peers in a moderated way. A life coach has office hours that you can sign up for one-on-one and all of this stuff around wellbeing, we try to make it provide lots of possible ways you can get help and we try to make it really easy to ask for help, and we try to make it okay that you need help.
Rajesh Anandan:
And kind of diffuse a lot of the stigma around mental health by talking openly about it at a all-staff meeting a couple of months ago, we had a member of the leadership team, very openly share about some of the mental health challenges that they're struggling with to just create the sense among the team that this is, you know, this is okay, and it's okay to share. It's okay to ask for help, but that takes time and creating that sort of the safety, you know, the psychological safety only happens through actions and what the team sees as sort of observes around them and and sees their peers doing, the managers, and leadership team. And that creates the safety and the feeling of safety that allows people to then actually feel safe, to ask for help or call out a mistake.
Universal workplace: Inclusion business practices
Rajesh Anandan:
And then the fourth dimension, I think the most important one here is that for us inclusion is not just a feeling. We've tried to define it for ourselves and then design inclusion into our core business practices. And this is a very different approach from most organizations where there is a defaulting to creating quote workplace accommodations for kind of team members have different needs. And to us that that's a that's not a solution. You know, that's a symptom of the problem and only a bandaid and is not a bad place to start to figure out how you need to change your practices so that that person doesn't need a special accommodation. And so we'll talk a bit more about that, but everything from how we do recruiting, not just for, you know, one group of job applicants just for everyone, or how we provide and think about learning and development, not just for one group, but for everyone and how we run our projects and our teams which we just published a paper on what we call inclusive, agile, which is just a better way to implement agile and scrum better for everyone, not just one group,
Stacia Garr:
Right? Yeah. Well, let's go there because I love the folks I'm sure want to know, you know, how do you approach let's, let's start with recruiting. So what does the talent acquisition and hiring process look like?
Objective recruiting
Rajesh Anandan:
Sure. So if you could go to the next slide there's been a fair bit of research looking at the efficacy of different recruiting techniques in predicting on the job performance. And it turns out doesn't matter, which study, you look at the most common tools that are used, like a resume review, which essentially is looking at previous work experience or a subjective kind of unstructured interview, which is right with bias are just really ineffective. You know, it turns out pattern matching the past is really hard to do, and it doesn't predict the future. And also it then actually calcifies the status quo when you leave people, you know, if someone hadn't had a shot before, they're never going to get a shot. But also we, you know, dramatically overestimate our ability as humans to spot talent. And so the reality is that whether you look at years of work experience or other things that are looking at the past, like reference checks, these have no correlation with, on the job performance.
Rajesh Anandan:
Unstructured interviews are almost useless not as useless as years of work experience. And then when you start getting to structured interviews, you know, asking the same set of questions of every candidate, and then before you start interviews, you have a scoring rubric that defines what a good answer is. So that you're just trying to constrain the natural human bias that will kick in, it's everyone, and there's no way around it. You can't train it out of people but you could try to put some guard rails to minimize it. So structured interviews can be helpful, but most helpful are observing and actually evaluating someone's work and someone's abilities. And so you could call that a job test. And so at Ultranauts, we use job tests for all applicants for all roles, because it's just a better way to more objectively understand if someone's going to be able to do the job. We of course do use interviews, but they're all structured.
Rajesh Anandan:
And they come in toward the middle of the process, not at the beginning where you have no data. And they're focused on really trying to dive deeper into someone's interests and motivations to understand whether that aligns with the core work to be done and the nature of that work. Because we want people who are going to be excited and driven and motivated to do the job they're being hired for. And again, this is not just for, you know, autistic applicants that have to do job tests. You'd never do that with like set of a program where all your female applicants have to do this very different process, right? You just wouldn't do that. You shouldn't do that for any group because if the process can be better, it would be better for everyone. And so the one thing I would say on this is when it comes to job tests it's not only for technical roles.
Rajesh Anandan:
Of course, most people we hire we're hiring for a quality analyst or quality engineer role, but we use job tests for everyone. So we may be the only company in the world that hired a head of growth and sales, where the, you know, applicants had to take job test, because let me tell you if you're, you know, decent in any kind of sales role, surely you can have a convincing conversation, but that says nothing about your ability to, you know, strategically dissect a market opportunity or creatively and quickly get to a senior decision maker. But these are the things you could test. It's easy enough to construct, you know, a test or a simulation that allows you to observe and see how someone's able to do that, which is going to be a whole lot more accurate than asking them questions and getting really convincing answers.
Stacia Garr:
So we had a question come in through chat about potential recruiters reservations around structured interviews. So a sense that they don't have the choice to ask the questions they want to. So is that something you all have encountered? And if so, how have you addressed it?
Rajesh Anandan:
So part of this is you do need to be able to kind of go deep into someone's strengths and interests because really, you know, the whole process is less about finding reasons not to hire someone it's just really to understand what they bring to the table. What are they going to add? What are the strengths that they haven't and do those lineup with the job to be done? I would say, you know, first, even just starting with the job description, like we try to unpack the role into the actual requirements of the job and, you know, work backwards from there. Like what, what are the skills you need or the competencies you need. And then to the extent that has very specific requirements around experience, we fleshed that out. But when you do that, you're able to and then for each of those requirements, how will we validate that requirement?
Rajesh Anandan:
So some of those map back to things where we're trying to validate in an interview, some of those map two things, we're going to validate through a work simulation or a job test. And so the focus of the interview then is to try to drill down on those attributes. We're trying to validate in that interview. And so, yeah, we start with sets of questions, and then the recruiters do have the flexibility to go add questions, but, but they've got to cover a minimum set of common questions because otherwise there isn't, you know, it's much harder to compare across interviewers certainly, or, or even with the same interviewer across across applicants.
Stacia Garr:
Right. Okay. Makes sense. I'm just conscious of time. So I want to make sure we move on because you mentioned learning and career development in, in your approach to that as well. So can we talk a bit about how do you think about that a bit differently than maybe a traditional organization does?
Rajesh Anandan:
Sure. you know, as a professional services firm creating an environment that allows for and supports continuous learning and creates the conditions for accelerated learning are mission critical. Doesn't matter, you know, what skills you come in with 18 months later, those are out of date. So having a kind of engine that's continuously building our capabilities on our team is absolutely missing critical. So everybody who comes into the firm in, you know, in our core delivery team, which is 90% of our employees. So we haven't done this for everyone, but it's covers our core services delivery team all the analysts, all the engineers, all the managers has what we call a learning path that they are currently on and they know what learning path they're going to be doing next and a learning path to simply sort of a micro kind of module that tightly coupled theory and practice and is designed for neuro diversity.
Design for neurodiversity
Rajesh Anandan:
And if you go to the next slide we've sort of been on this journey to redefine how corporate training happens because most corporate training doesn't work. We know that doesn't actually impart skills and then it's particularly unhelpful for learners who are neuro diverse. And thanks to my colleague, Nicole Radziwill, who in addition to running large scale engineering teams and being a data scientist is professor data sciences is near divergent and she's been sort of authoring an architecting, our approach to learning. We call it designed for neuro diversity. It has a few very specific principles, and we apply that to how we create curriculum and learning experiences. And so that's table stakes, but most organizations just put up, you know, a one hour video when you're supposed to learn something. You know, you've got to create learning experiences that are self-paced that are actually designed for engagement.
Rajesh Anandan:
You've got to have hands-on practical exercises coupled with the content in micro modules versus like study this thing for, hours and hours and hours, and then you have one exercise at the end. Like that's not how learning happens. And those activities need to actually tie back to your day job. So it's relevant. So you can actually ingest internalize it. And then some very specific things around how we design for accessibility and kind of different learners. But everybody, you know, on our delivery teams has a learning path that they're on. They know what they're going to do next. And this is framed around what we call a launch pad. It's acute, you know, we're Ultranaut, so everybody's a launchpad, but it's your personalized learning path. And we're at startup, right? We don't have a lot of resources and yet we've made this important enough because it's mission critical that we create this environment around continuous learning. And so everybody who comes in you know, as part of their onboarding has a launch pad that ties to like, where do you want to go? Like, what is the aspiration? What is the role you're trying to work towards and then work backwards from there to where you today, what is the learning path you need to take now? And what's the one you need to take next?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, that's great. Question that came in was round just, you know, there's obviously a lot of technical skills that people need to develop and use. But what about the non-technical skills? So are you, is there kind of a specific thought and effort that you put around your learning and development efforts to enable people to focus on you know, potentially things like active listening or communicating more effectively or something like that that you think is, you know, important so that all of the audiences, all of the diversity in your team can be affect, you know, feel included.
Rajesh Anandan:
So to us, that's not a question of training, it's more a question of systems because, you know, it's like you can have all the workshops you want people go back to their desk and behave exactly the same that they did before. And so, as we think about aligning on the way in which we work and communicate and treat each other we think in systems and tools, right? So very organically from one of our projects emerged a different way of implementing agile and scrum because it turns out while agile was designed to be inclusive. In fact, it is not. And so because on our teams, right, we're running agile scrum teams where we'll be brought in by fortune 500 firms to build test automation, frameworks, or do data quality audits across the enterprise. It's complex technical work, it's moving fast, we've got a wide range of communication preferences.
Rajesh Anandan:
You know, we've got a significant portion of the team with selective mutism and don't speak. We have a significant portion of the team who have auditory processing challenges. We have a significant portion of the team who have severe anxiety or workplace PTSD. And so we're running teams that have all of that stuff going on. And so it's important that the way in which we run and manage teams and manage work and communicate allows everyone to be able to contribute and participate. So very basic things like, you know whenever we have a interaction like a standup meeting or a town hall meeting you can always participate in chat. You can send in your questions or suggestions beforehand. So you don't have to think on the spot, things are transcribed. So if you're having trouble hearing and following along, you don't have to text your brain for that. You can just consume the information in a way that works for you. That's the simple stuff, and it's surprising that this isn't universal, right?
Feedback- My Biodex
Rajesh Anandan:
The more interesting stuff is around things like feedback, you know? So it turns out that the way, most managers are taught actually doesn't really work for most people. So like, you're always taught when you're giving critical feedback, give it in the moment in a live conversation, sandwiched by positive affirming comments. Well, it turns out for our team and I would guess for most people, most teams that's not optimal, you know, it really depends. But then how do you have an effective way to give feedback? If it depends? It depends. It's not an announcement. So we've built in the ability to very quickly look up someone's feedback preferences. So that it's a one single command in Slack to pull up someone's feedback references. If you're about to have a conversation where you're going to share some feedback as a peer or a manager and we've made, you know, we productize that into what we call the Biodex, which came out of a simple kind of thought from a team member a few years ago, who said something like, you know, like it never really figured out how to work with some of the members of my team. I wish humans came with a user manual. And so we said, yes, wouldn't that be nice? And so that's evolved into what we now call the Biodex. It's got 20 odd fields, and these are all things you should know about me about how to work productively together, including my preferences around receiving critical feedback.
Stacia Garr:
I think we have a screenshot of that. Don't we in the deck?
Rajesh Anandan:
Yes. I think if you click maybe to the next.
Rajesh Anandan:
The slide after that.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah.
Rajesh Anandan:
Yeah. So you know, that's the simple bot screen that you can look up if you want to look up someone's feedback preferences. And I would say, you know because of the way in which we work and having these systems and tools and process it also allows us to really surface the strengths people bring. It doesn't constrain us, you know, all of the systems and process and tools simply take away a lot of the stuff that might otherwise be really taxing or alienating, which then frees up a lot more brain cycles in bandwidth for the real work to add value to clients and to innovate in our own practice. And so there's an example of that, certainly the Biodex which is now a bot, and we released it to a group of alpha users because anytime we described this, every team says, Oh my gosh, I want the Biodex.
Rajesh Anandan:
I'm like, yes, yes, we'll get around to it. You know, we're not a software developer, we're not a product firm, but we can cobble together a product. And, another kind of example of just taking what we're doing for ourselves and you know, making that useful to others. And in this case, as an actual service, is a service we launched last year that we call talent bias detection, which essentially is taking all of our capabilities and techniques around auditing data and understanding data called, usually a chief data officer or chief digital officer might bring us in to do an enterprise data quality audit or to build kind of automated quality checks into their information supply chain so you can trust what you're getting on the other side and all of this, the same sort of skills and techniques applied to interrogating the data exhaust being generated throughout the employee life cycle turns out can be incredibly helpful to surface patterns of bias and actually bring a data driven point of view to the conversation around, great you want to improve equity in the workplace? Where do you start? Where do you actually make those investments?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah. And we've talked a lot about that type of work in the DEIB tech research that we've done in and how you that can both help us understand what's happened in the past, but potentially be able to flag when that bias is happening in the moment for folks.
Rajesh Anandan:
Absolutely. And so, you know, simple use case of that is performance reviews. So we're, you know, a couple of engagements we're doing are around essentially building bias detection and running just you know, normally you might run some simple word association and well, we've got 20 different sort of techniques to do that, to really go deep in a much more precise way. And once we do that audit because we're engineers, we're building those quality checks so that they can run automatically every time there's a review cycle and go from sort of surfacing patterns of bias into being able to raise a red flag or an individual performance review that has sort of a high likelihood of bias. So it's much more actionable and kind of real time.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Great. Well, I know we are just about at time, so I'm going to move as just here to the end and want to encourage folks to get in touch either with, with me or with Rajesh. I guess just a final thing you mentioned with this bias, bias identification that you're now doing some work helping other companies, do you want to spend just a moment kind of wrapping us up and telling us about what you're doing there before we let folks go?
Rajesh Anandan:
Sure. You know as you might imagine, it's very sensitive work. And so there's not a lot I can share other than to say, the core problem that we're helping companies with is that, you know, most companies have made very serious commitments to tackling inequity in the workplace across different dimensions, including race. There are a lot of sort of hypotheses around how to do that. And no shortage of advice you can get. But very little evidence in terms of, you know, what actions can have the greatest impact. And so we've narrowed in on a few different aspects of the employee life cycle, like performance reviews, or kind of these employee practices, talent practices, performance review is being one kind of leadership, potential identification being another succession. So, and we're able to go in understand sort of the processes that contribute to that outcome of like a performance review or promotion decision, and then apply a whole range of different techniques, including analyze the actual text looking for over a dozen different types of bias in helping companies build essentially a lexicon of biased words.
Rajesh Anandan:
And, and the reason this is hard to do with sort of an automatic ML tool is it's so company specific, right? And so there's a bit of work to be done in the context of the company taking the time to actually understand the specific processes and nuances in order to start kind of building that talent bias audit of a performance review process. And then from there, honestly, it's fairly straightforward to automate that audit or those bias checks, so that every time you have a review process or every time you've got a, you know, leadership potential discussion, that's got an output of documentation that you can run the same sort of analysis and just spot the red flags. It's never going to answer the question in a yes or no way, but it certainly helps you figure out where to focus.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, definitely. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us and with folks who are listening today and who will listen on recording as well. We really appreciate it and good luck to you and your journey of continuing this work and in sharing it with others. Thank you so much.
Rajesh Anandan:
Stacia thanks so much for having me.
Stacia Garr:
Thank you. Bye-Bye.
Q&A Call-People Analytics Tech: Employee Engagement/Experience
Posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2021 at 9:49 PM
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Stacia Garr:
All right. Priyanka, can you help a little bit with if anybody else comes in, because I'm going to go ahead and get us started. Okay. Perfect. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining today. Priyanka and I are excited to share some it's really, this is a work in progress that we are, that we are doing. Literally, we were working on the paper last night and shifting some things around, shifting some more things around this morning. So you're getting to be a part of the process today but what we wanted to do in general with the people analytics tech study that we did last year was to then do kind of deeper dive some through the three biggest areas of focus. And so focus, meaning by size in terms of the number of vendors were in a given space.
Speaker 1:
So that is the employee engagement experience category. It is ONA and then the last one is what we call multi-source analysis platform. So folks like Visier as well as others. So this is the first of our deep dive studies that we're working on. And what we're trying to do is just give a little bit more understanding of what we are seeing within each of these markets. So today is employee engagement and experience. For those of you who don't know us, I think everybody does, but we're RedThread Research a human capital research membership focused on a range of things most relevant for today, people analytics and HR technology. And you can learn more about [email protected]. Okay. So Priyanka, I think you were going to lead us off with some of the things that we see specific to employee engagement experience from the study.
The importance of employee experience
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah. And just to show, so I'm just going to set up the stage a little bit but not spend too much time because I know we already know a lot of this stuff. So just to begin, we know that employee engagement experience became extremely critical in 2020. And this is just one of the many data points that we have from that year that shows that employee experience became so important as part of HR strategy and it increase from almost 50% to 70%, from 2018 to 2020, and moving forward, HR leaders see it becoming even more important. So we know this became really important. It's going to continue being extremely important. So before we actually get down to talking about the technology, we just want you to spend a little bit of time understanding what these two concepts are, employee engagement and experience, and talking a little bit about the differences between them, how we see them and what is the relationship between them.
Differences between the two terms
Priyanka Mehrotra:
So if you just go onto the next slide, Stacia. Thank you. So just to give an overview of how we see these two terms, so employee experience can be seen as what employees perceive through their journey or their own way, perceptions of their interactions with organization. And so in that sense, it has a broad scope employee engagement by comparison is what employees do or behave. And in that sense, we see it having a much narrower scope than employee experience. We can also see employee experience as the cause that impacts or effects employee engagement and as a way results in employee engagement, among many other things, of course.
Relationship between the two
Priyanka Mehrotra:
But just so that we understand employee experience is something that feeds into employee engagement, and this is what we're seeing in the next slide, which is how that relationship moves between the two. So all the organization interactions that employees go through the life cycle journey feeds into what, what is what we see as employee experience, what we understand as employee experience for these employees and that ultimately results in how engaged they are with their workplace. So having set up these two terms and just expand that a little bit, I just want to open it up to anybody for any thoughts or feedback about these two topics.
Priyanka Mehrotra:
What do others think?
Speaker 1:
I think it's useful to have them broken out because I think a lot of people are still mixing experience and engagement. I see Speaker 2's hand up.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say the same. It's, it's great to put them side by side. I think I'd be interested to know your thoughts on what the, kind of, what the alongside employee engagement, what are the other kind of key outcomes of input experience that we can use to understand employee experience? Does that make sense? Or do you see engagement as the kind of number one result of good employee experience?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, so I think, you know, and this is part of partly due to you know, a lot the employee experience vendors have come from, and we're going to talk about that in just a second, but you know, the, the other outcomes that we see folks talk about so much as customer experience, you know, the relationship between EX and CX. And so and then, you know, CX driving revenue and other important metrics that we care about.
Stacia Garr:
There was an interesting piece and actually Speaker 1 probably is a little bit closer to it than I am, but the interesting piece that Medallia recently put out talking about how that relationship between EX and CX is not quite as linear as people might think about. There's a bit more nuance when it comes to how those two are connected, but, but to directly answer the question, Speaker 2, I think that CX is the other one that we see people focused on a lot. What are others see or think Speaker 3 I think I see your hand up. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
Hey yeah, I was just going to say, so my title is director of employee experience and I am all HR. And the reason that we titled it as such is because we felt that the holistic all encompassing umbrella is the experience and that every touch point, whether that be an HR policy or recruitment retention, onboarding dealing with alumni from the organization, that that is all kind of part of that experience. And so I definitely look at this and say, yup, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 1:
Well, listening to Speaker 3 talk, I'm also struck by the difference between there's there's things that are measuring people's perceptions of the experience. And then there are things that are actually creating the workflow that provides the experience, and that kind of gets wrapped into the same space. Because if you look at something like a service, now it's positioning itself as the experience platform architects experiences, it doesn't tell you if they're good or bad, it architects experiences, whereas something like a Medallia is going to listen to you like, or that experience sucked. Like they're going to capture that for you. So it gets really easy for me. It gets really easy to get lost in experience as is it a workflow, Is it a measurement of perception? So I think focusing on measurement of perception is helpful.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And one thing I think we wrote about, and we didn't actually include this graphic in this deck, but we wrote about with the Microsoft Viva announcement was exactly your point Speaker 1 that there has historically there's been a technology that has come under the experience banner that has been designed to capture experience. And then you know, a lot of the engagement folks have kind of blended over into the experience because they're not just measuring your engagement, but they're also capturing the, you know, onboarding experience or that it, how do you feel it, you know, 30, 60, 90 days experience, et cetera. And so they're kind of bleeding over, but, but a lot of the language with the exception really of service now can kind of create a new category if you will, was around capturing experience, not influencing experience.
Stacia Garr:
What I think in, and we wrote about with Microsoft Viva as being, I think pretty, pretty transformational is that you're now going to both be able to understand the broader experience because you're able to look into all these different Microsoft products that we're all using, like right now, literally with PowerPoint and then potentially be able to to change that experience and measure it. And so I think, you know, we at RedThread try to stay away from the, like, this is such a big deal kind of language because most of the time it's not. But I do think that has the potential to, because it opens the aperture of what experience actually is even beyond what service now is doing. Quite a bit. I think that that has the potential, but I think you're well to start to come back to where we started, I think it's appropriate to acknowledge that there is experience measurement and then there's actual experience. And they're not the same thing.
Stacia Garr:
Any other thoughts on that?
Stacia Garr:
I know we have a number of folks who are not on camera. Feel free to go ahead and still kind of raise your hand and we can get you in. Also we promote everybody to panelists, so you can be on camera if you want, because obviously it's a, a dialogue that we have here. Okay. Priyanka I'll let you move on.
Areas of focus for people analytics vendors
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Moving to the next slide. So now we're going to talk a little bit about the technology and what we have seen in specific to terms of people analytics technology. So those of you familiar with our work know that we do this annual people analytics study every year and as Stacia mentioned in both years we have see that employee experience has been the biggest category of vendors and just looking at the numbers on the vendors that focus on these two areas as their primary talent areas of focus. We can see how this has shifted over the past one year as well. So in 2019, for example, we had 43% vendors say that can employee experience was that binary area focus. And that jumped to 60%, sorry, 50, 58%. In 2020 and similarly employee engagement also went up from 60 to 67%. So again, we saw organizations shift their focus in these areas and we saw vendors match those areas as well, and they really stepped up to meet the needs of the customers.
Engagement/Experience customers are mostly happy
Priyanka Mehrotra:
And the following slide will show that customers in general have been mostly happy with the vendors. So we had a customer feedback poll that we ran along with our vendor survey. And this average NPS score that you see here is the score that is only for the category of employee engagement and experienced vendors. And coincidentally, it was also the category that received the most number of customer responses. So we had about 16 employee engagement experience vendors, and 12 of them received over five customer responses, which was great compared to other categories and also the highest and best score. So an average score of 61, which is pretty great and just put it in a little bit of context. Enterprise software in general tends to have an average score of 40. So this is pretty high compared to that. So that is our findings from are people analytics study.
Stacia Garr:
Correct me if I'm wrong, this is slightly lower than the average overall for all of them.
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yes. Yes. The overall people analytics study, we had an average score of 67, so slightly lower, but still, almost there.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah.
Stacia Garr:
And then I think it's, it's probably, we're saying back on, on the last slide. Oops, sorry. Here some of this, some of them we've been in these numbers was due to more vendors being in the study. But I think also a lot of people, I think Speaker 1, you, you mentioned this have just glommed on to the employee experience language. And so some of his jump may have been what was happening in 2020 and everyone said, I'm an employee experience vendor now. So I think that's important to acknowledge, but, but it kind of comes back to the point where Priyanka started, which is this concept has just taken off so much. You know, and Speaker 3 I think you mentioned this idea of in play experience being kind of the culmination of all the different things that we've done in the past. And so, you know, I expect it will continue to get energy, but it's important that part of the reason we put the definitions right in here to actually understand what we're talking about versus some of the other, other processes. But I just wanted to highlight, I think that some of this growth has just focused to being enthusiastic about the term, shall we say?
Backgrounds of employee engagement vendors
Stacia Garr:
Okay. So one of the things we did here for the first time is we wanted to actually talk a little bit more specifically about the vendors that are in the space and where they came from because that influences their bent in terms of the offers that the offerings that they give. And so Priyanka did this really cool thing. She's letting me present it, but she's the brains on this. One of looking at what kinds of backgrounds these different vendors, and she broke it into three groups at the top and the orange in the Venn diagram is employee engagement native. So like they started out as an employee engagement vendor, like that has been their bread and butter. On the lower left, we've got those who have some of a professional services background. And you can see here, we've got a Willis Towers, Watson, and then a vendor called Qlearsite kind of it's it's in between the two.
Stacia Garr:
We'll talk about that in a moment. And then on the lower, right, we have these vendors who are driving employee engagement by other talent areas. And so I think that I'll just kind of give, give a little bit more detail on each of these and then we can discuss any of the individual vendors that you all like. But so what we see here with the employee engagement natives that I think is interesting is so we've got Peakon, we've got Perceptyx and Glint, those are the, just those in the orange what's interesting here though, is two of those three, right. Have been acquired. Right. So now Peakon is with Workday and Glints, obviously part of LinkedIn and you know, Perceptyx, they have PE backing.
Stacia Garr:
So, you know,
Stacia Garr:
That puts you on a path. I'm not saying that they're, I don't have any insight on what they're doing, but that puts you on a path I'm seeing Speaker 1 nodding his head firstly.
Speaker 1:
It's just a matter of time.
Stacia Garr:
I did not say that.
Stacia Garr:
We've got Culture Amp who is, you know, one of our over on the lower, right. And we talk about them kind of being part of this driving engagement just on that same subject. So there, you know, I don't even know what series they are on, but they're a unicorn. They've got, you know, tons of investment in them. So something will happen one way or the other there. The blue area, since I've kind of gone to the lower, right. Is we say driving engagement by other areas. So you might say Culture Amp, like they've, you know, they're pretty, pretty engagement. But the reason we put them there as they did the acquisition of Sugata I guess about two years ago now which was a performance management vendor and a big part of their focus is now pushing quite a bit more into the manager and coaching side.
Stacia Garr:
So they, we just actually learned that they're doing a partnership with a vendor that's pretty popular here in the Bay area called Life Learning Labs, I think is what it's called. And they're creating kind of little micro learning bursts that are getting put into their solution to support the performance and engagement work. So that's why we've kind of said that we've see them as being a little bit more on the moving into this blue blue section and then the others who are in that blue section Betterworks. They bought a vendor that you all may be familiar with called Hyphen which was kind of in the continuous pulse survey space. That was, I think again also about two years ago Reflektive bought a vendor, they've been in engagement as well as performance, but they also bought a vendor called Shape Analytics.
Stacia Garr:
And then they themselves recently got acquired by LTG. And so that's going to pull them kind of more broadly into the talent space. Well, so while they're still still kind of swimming here or there, that's them. And then Fortay their their initial approaches talent acquisition but they kind of take this broader, broader look at talent acquisition and engagement as being related. And so they are packaging that together. But so again, you know, we're kind of putting this together because we think that having the, the background and where these vendors are and what they're doing can help consumers understand, okay, this is, this is their natural bet just to round out. And then I'll, I'll pause for comments over on the left, on the professional services side. So Willis Towers, Watson they've got a pretty robust engagement solution that we got briefed on this year that we hadn't seen before.
Stacia Garr:
And they've got a lot of clients using it. It's as you would expect reasonably tightly coupled with professional services offerings. But it can be bought standalone is my recollection. Yeah. Okay. And then Qlearsite, we have them kind of on the bubble because they were started by a bunch of former IBMers. And so the look and feel of their reports and a lot of their thinking kind of comes from that professional services background, but they are definitely a SAS company. So that's why we've got them on the bubble. So anyway, a few questions for you. One is this useful, this is the first time we've tried to think about this this way. So is it useful? Two, if it's at least a little bit useful, which you'll probably say, cause you all are very kind, how could we make this better?
Stacia Garr:
And three, are there any other questions you have? Yeah. Speaker 4?
Speaker 4:
Yes, of course. It's very useful. The reason being is exactly what you said at the very beginning with the top bubble who's sponsoring them where they came from, who they're, like you just said for the last one who their originator employees founders are speaks to probably what to expect from them. They're probably not going to be so different and varied. I don't recognize any of these names. So I need to know the generation that came before because I'm familiar with those ones. It's super interesting how fast things are moving.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah. Great points. Thank you. How about others?
Speaker 1:
I love the breakdown. I'm curious on how they're actually like, it feels like they're all going to go towards that bottom right bubble in terms of their development paths. Like my perception is the classic survey vendor is basically limited in scope now because things like Culture Amp and the others have taken the survey and they generated a, you know, no, do this or no, try this, or no, think this, on top of the survey. So I feel like the whole lot, you know, in the professional services background, there was a person saying, Hey, your survey says X, you should do Y. When you get to the Culture Amp site, it's like your survey says X here's three AI driven suggestions of what you could do. Like let me less than professional services. So I think it is really, really interesting because it understands the background. I feel like everyone's going to be driving to that bottom right corner.
Stacia Garr:
Hmm. Yeah. That's an interesting point Speaker 1. And what that also brought to mind for me is the point that I made about acquisition, right? Like Peakon and Glint via acquisition effectively had the capability to drive through other talent areas because of that. And Perceptyx is building a performance and recognition solutions. So, yeah, so that's really good points. Speaker 3 I thought I saw your hand up. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
I don't know if it's the previous life of accounting. The CPA in me that looked at this and thought, and now what I kind of want an Excel spreadsheet or a grid that says you know, here's what it was, here's what it is. Here's what it does. Here's what it might merge with. And I think it went from, I looked at this, I spent two minutes looking at it. I thought that's interesting, but to take that from, that's interesting too, now this is useful and I can action something from it. It would need a bit more for me. So it really depends on what your purpose is. If it's a, you know, an information piece. Yeah. I look at it and I, I thought it was informative, but I wouldn't do anything with this information.
Stacia Garr:
That's helpful. Yeah. Yeah. I think on the report we have quite a bit more kind of detailed as you would expect in a report, but I think what that makes me think of is Priyanka. Maybe there's a you know, given this as if you were looking at this vendor asking these types of questions or something like that, that would push people with okay. Do not toss this point. That's interesting. But what do I then go do with this? Yeah. Super helpful.
Speaker 3:
So what, now what?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Priyanka and I were talking about this, and she's like, but we haven't finished writing this. I'm like, this is the perfect time to get feedback. Let's throw it out there. So thank you. I know we've had some folks join since we started. You will see that I've promoted you to panelist. The reason for that is so that if you want to show your video and participate actively in the conversation by a video, you can, if you want to not be on video, but still participate, please do. And we do have chat. So please go ahead and put anything you want in there. Wait, I think there are people in chat. Sorry. I totally missed that. Okay. So let's see here.
Speaker 5:
Hi. yeah, maybe just a questions to you to help understand what are some of those criteria is that some firms on this, this I'm asking you because from the professional services background they might be a few more firms who might know me offer such services like the likes of Concentric and probably many more. Right. so yeah, maybe what are some of those criteria that might help to give some context? I don't know.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. So the criteria is they have to be in our study. And so to be in our study, that means that vendors have to go through a pretty exhaustive vendor survey and they then do a 75 to 90 minute briefing with Priyanka and me. And then ideally they also will send a survey to their customers so we can get a sense of their customer satisfaction. So the, I guess we know that this isn't necessarily totally exhaustive, even though we have 60 plus vendors in the overall study. But if you know, folks who we should consider putting in or who would want to participate, please share, share who they are. We'd like to make it better. Thanks.
Backgrounds of employee experience vendors
Stacia Garr:
Any other comments or thoughts on this one? We have a couple more for you all. Okay. All right. Let's, we'll keep going. So we did the same thing with our friends in the employee experience space. And so the way that we separated this was focused on engagement and Ex or focused on CX. I think as you guys, as you all would expect given kind of the nature of our work, we didn't have any who are only focused on CX cause then why would they be in a people analytics, tech study? But so right now but there's a ton of folks who are focused on both CX and EX, and those are the folks who were in the middle. So yeah. Confirmit, Ennova, Macorva, Medallia, Press Ganey via the SMB acquisition last year, Qualtrics Questback and SMG. And so that means that they are all pretty actively working most likely with the operation side of the house on collecting customer experience data, and then also working with HR, collecting employee experience data. Moving over to the other, oops, yeah Speaker 1.
Stacia Garr:
Looking at this particular set. This is one other, the structure that strikes me, there's a whole set that do passive detection and there's a whole set of do active detection. I think actually delineating on that is quite interesting from a market perspective. So something like well, Yva's has got both, Microsoft is mostly passive, things like Questback and Confirmit are pure survey based. And that is that's going to be a dividing line and how this plays out over time.
Priyanka Mehrotra:
If you can tell me how to show that.
Stacia Garr:
We've got these folks here, so we'll get to, I completely agree, because we are, so we have been discussing this at nauseum of how to divide these folks up. Cause you're right, right. So exactly, as you said, you know, Medallia and some of these others, you know, Yva, Worklytics, clearly they are the, the challenge. And so let me, let me maybe step back. We, I find it interesting and I want to know if you will find it interesting that the, all these CX folks jumping into EX or kind of making a lot more noise about EX, a lot of them have been here for awhile. But like for instance you know, one of the things that we learned last year was just how active Confirmit is in our space. And part of the reason that we were, I use it, they were a CX vendor.
Stacia Garr:
Part of the reason that it wasn't as obvious they were EX vendor is they white label, a ton of stuff, but they're actually the underlying platform in a lot of other platforms, it turns out. And that was something new that we learned. You know the combination like with Press Ganey, who only focuses on healthcare, on patient scores, which are CX and and what nurses and doctors and others think is totally fascinating. All of that really influences how they approach this market. Right? So that was part of the reason that we thought to look at that, you know, to call out those who do CX and EX. On the engagement and EX side, you know, these are folks who have very firmly made the transition, not just because there's some who we put Glint on the other side. Cause like, you know, if you look at, for instance, Glints marketing, 85% of what they talked about is just pure employee engagement. The folks who are here are very much, so some engagement, some experience like really evenly divided. And so we thought that, you know, kind of that combination of engagement of EX, whereas the other folks are clearly eat, just EX plus CX. We thought that was interesting, but maybe it's not that interesting. I don't know. Well, what do you, what do you all think?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think I don't, I don't disagree with this breakdown is that the, the question in terms of, you know, the Press Ganey is, and the Medallia's of the world are looking to link experience to an end state outcome. Like there's no point in measuring experiences for experience sake. There was never an point in measuring engagement for engagement's sake. It was always, how is this driving something we care about? But I don't, I think that the bubbles help, cause it's like, this is a vendor who's going to have some sense of how experience relates up to customers, et cetera, customer experience. And they can measure those two things together. They've got that kind of understanding and expertise, whereas the others are detecting things about employees from the floor of their work. So I don't even know, I don't know if it's a useful distinction.
Speaker 1:
I just it's. It is. It's very distinctive and how the information is captured is not the purpose is, as I think is really clear, but the how of that capture is where there needs call that or not. I don't know. It's something that strikes me as a really big change in how we are listening to employees, whether we're listening to them and giving them a chance to, you know, actively express what they want because we're filling in a survey or we're literally just scraping their communications paths and time and response frequency and detecting stuff from that. Like they're very distinct processes. So yeah. I don't know how you build that into the model, but as I've been watching this space evolve, that whole passive thing is quite distinctive.
Stacia Garr:
Yup. Great. Anyone else have thoughts?
Speaker 1:
Yeah. I wonder if maybe there's a, for the sake of this year, there's almost an asterix that we put on some on the ones who are passive, you know, or passive primarily or something like that. And then in next year, maybe it'll, it'll be a little bit clearer. I think as a researcher, there's always this period where you see things changing, but there's not quite change to fully articulate it, like as a thing. And I think that we're there. Like we know it's a thing, but like it's not clear where the chips fall yet, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
Stacia Garr:
Okay. That's, that's all super helpful. So, but to, to Speaker 1's point, you know, Yva and Worklytics over here, and Microsoft Viva, which is obviously a combination of a whole bunch of different products, those are all looking at passive data sources over here on the left. And on the right Medallia is, Qualtrics has some, I don't think Questback has any, I don't think, did Ennova how any passive data do you remember Priyanka?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Not much.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Confirmit, not no Macorva I don't think so. Yeah. So that's kind of the distinction on this chart.
Backgrounds of "no" survey vendors
Stacia Garr:
Okay. So then moving to our last one. So these are, these are folks that are, have kind of traditionally swim in, in what feels like slightly different lanes, but are now much more clearly saying we're in the engagement space via non survey methods.
Stacia Garr:
So the home for, for some of, for the ones on the left that's organization view, they do, it's pretty sophisticated, actually extremely sophisticated text analysis to understand, you know, themes, perceptions, et cetera on the far right, we've got Swoop Analytics, which under the hood does ONA. If you look on the top of it, it actually, doesn't, it's not as obvious as for some of the others, like let's say a Polinode, which is very clearly pure ONA but they do ONA to understand engagement and then R Squared is really, they do a combination of these two to understand engagement as well as some other outcomes. So you know, again, kind of back to the point of earlier, is there another chart that's just, you know, scraping of communication data, that's the non survey approach on here potentially on that might be another way that we could think about this. But the idea is trying to open the aperture of folks a little bit to say, you know, look, engagement by and large has meant survey historically. And it's moving forward is not going it's already not totally only meaning survey, but in some instances it's meaning no survey and it's these other approaches as well.
Stacia Garr:
Any thoughts or questions on this one, Or how does that make you all feel like that's a pretty big shift, right? From asking people the questions that we know they do engagement to looking at just their data. Speaker 3?
Speaker 3:
It almost feels like performance management five years ago. Right. I was like, this is the traditional approach. We do this thing. And it goes in this document and we share feedback and surveys are the same thing. It's this formal approach. And we gather feedback and we share the results and we do something about it. So I think it's, it's great to see it moving in this direction. I guess I'm new to these particular vendors. Can do you, can you tell a little bit more, but what they're actually analyzing? Like what data is it that they're getting access to and then producing an output from
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Priyanka, do you want to take a first swing or do you want me to?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, so it's primarily for Organization View it's employee text data and that can be in any form that is already collected by the company. So it may be survey texted, or from a survey that a company, might have run and pulling from there. It might be some other form of feedback that the company might be might've collected. So they don't actually collect the data. All they do is they take the employed text data provided by a company and run their sophisticated text analysis on it. R Squared does mainly thought communication, text analysis or communications data created by employees whether it's a communications tool or emails, jobs, things like that. That's what they analyze. They also do ONA and similar to Swoop both of them do organizational network analysis by looking at collaboration data. So who is collaborating with who looking at that data, that the networks that they're creating being themselves. And Swoop in particular has integrations with Yammer and Facebook workplace. So they collect a lot of employee data from those communications platforms and tools, particularly.
Speaker 3:
Thank you.
Stacia Garr:
And in particular, R Squared claims to have a pretty high level of accuracy when it comes to turnover predicting turnover I don't remember if they made any claims on engagement. I don't recall that they did, but but they are certainly selling this in, in the engagement space. Yeah it's very, this is kind of very on the edge of things. And so, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of data ethics and privacy implications and all the rest of that go along with this. Yeah Speaker 4?
Speaker 4:
You just said it. So the technologies are catching up to be able to do this. And then can you just summarize, like how many years have these companies been in business doing this one, a thing, you know, which came first, was it the business plan or the technology so that you can, and then what you just said and there's ethics and other considerations for the future?
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So R Squared I think is about three years old. They came out of a different industry. They were, Oh, I think security, I think like internet security is my recollection, but don't 100% hold me to that. But definitely a background in folks who had a different, who had expertise that could be applied to this space in, in a different way. It's kind of the point. And so on that one, which, which came first, I think they saw a problem and they said, Hey, we've developed texts somewhat similar that could address this problem, but they didn't come there. They're part of a group of vendors or vendor leaders who don't have the HR backgrounds who don't, you know, I think there's, there's a lot of within our industry, a lot of almost unwritten rules of, you know, what's okay and what's not.
Stacia Garr:
And so they're, they're part of a group of folks who are coming in and without knowledge of those rules, which is good and bad, like I'm in many instances, I'm all for breaking the rules. Like let's try things, let's experiment, let's do the rest of that. But I think that some of the, the concerns that our industry has tended to abide by you know, they're getting communicated, but I will say there's others who are in that group. And I'm not saying this particularly about R Square, but in general, I see these vendors get educated, which is like one of the coolest things that we get to do. We get to see them come in and be like, could I do this thing? And then they talk to people like us and then a whole bunch of customers who were like, yeah, maybe not quite that way.
Speaker 1:
And then about 18 months later, they're like data ethics and security are really important. Like, yes, yes they are. So I think, you know, even though this is kind of a long way of getting to what I think your question is like, you know, are they aware of these things? Are they taking these things into account? The industry and customers are educating them. So like none of these vendors can run any farther than a significant group of customers we'll let them run when it comes to things that are on the cutting edge and what I have typically seen as vendors just kind of get pulled back when customers are just like, well, we're not going to do that. Like I get that, you could do that, but we're just not going to do so, Speaker 1?
Speaker 1:
I'm just curious on how on how ONA gets into the experience category. But I think, I wonder if that is your question, cause you highlighted it on the edge and listening to you and thinking about it. I can see that it is and I think that it isn't. So I'm quite curious on to, you know what led you to including it, but as an edge category, because I think that would be instructive
Stacia Garr:
Priyanka?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah. So I think more than experience, I would say they're leaning towards engagement right now, the way that they're doing it is looking at collaboration data to see how engaged an employee is by looking at their interaction levels, their communication levels, things like that. So for example, one of the use cases that Swoop highlighted for us was that they use data from Yammer, for a customer to see what was the level of interaction and communication during a webcast event for a company that had just shifted to remote working and that they use sort of like a standard to say that okay employees are really engaged because they're messaging and they're really on Yammer and our Yammer is going to berserk because of the amount of communications that it's listening. So that's how they're looking at engagement in this nontraditional sense.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.
Stacia Garr:
I think this is at least for me, it's some of these vendors those who say they're doing engagement, like it makes me uncomfortable. Cause like I have a very clear in my mind definition, like as a social scientist of what engagement means and that it is, but I also recognize that that's very like 2005, right? Determine engagement has just been trod over by everyone, I mean anything. And so as we think about this market I think that we just have to recognize that the way folks are thinking about engagement is different and what's most important is for the customer to understand what that means, because that may be, that may be great for them. You know? So some of the things that the ONA vendors in particular are good at is when, you know, one company acquires another figuring out where, how are people interacting and connected to each other. And, and what's important to keep in place what's important to strengthen et cetera. And that's a form of engagement, you know, how people are connected to each other. So I think we just have to kind of, as I tell my daughter have a little flex brain here, even though it might make us a little bit uncomfortable.
Are we seeing shifts in how to maintain employee engagement/experience with more hybrid work model?
Stacia Garr:
Okay. So we have roughly 10 minutes left and we did get some questions. So we'll go ahead and pop those up. I will say many of these questions, we don't necessarily have the answers to, so this is very much so a discussion, but since they were submitted, we wanted to make sure that we brought them up. Okay. Are we seeing shifts in how to maintain employee engagement experience with more, with more hybrid work model? So I would say that we're certainly seen shifts in measurement of employee engagement and experience. And we saw a lot of folks try a whole bunch of different things over the course of the last year. So whether that's, you know, the collaboration discussion or kind of more open collaboration and open communication about what's happening in the organization you know, I think we saw kind of the burst of happy hours and connectivity, and then it feels like that's kind of died off a bit.
Stacia Garr:
So I think this is still an open question that people are trying to figure out. And then I think also they're trying to figure out what is it going to look like when you have a subset of employees who are in the office during a certain period of time versus others? So I think right now we're seeing a lot of experimentation, a lot of ideation, but obviously most people are not back in the office yet, or they're not really back in that hybrid environment yet. So I don't think we've seen any, anything definitive. That's kind of my, my sense. How about others? Or maybe let me change the question. Have any of you all seen anything cool that you're like, Oh yeah, that could really work. Or that's something that I think is I haven't seen before. I know there's a lot of you on the phone, so feel free to come off, mute. Speaker 5. You came off.
Speaker 6:
So I don't know if it's something I would consider like super innovative as much as it's something that I hope sticks, but it's this notion of bringing the employee experience to the employee wherever they are. And I think before, if you want it to be a part of the culture of a company, particularly a large organization or one, that's a small kind of tight knit startup, you have to be with those people. And it's not to say, you have to be like, there is a hard requirement. It's more you miss out on so much of the institutional knowledge and comradery and kind of connection building that is really helpful. But I think the pandemic caused a lot of companies and people to think about how do we meet that, how do we take all that investment we've made in snacks and table and pool tables and stuff, and bring that to the home because we can't give everyone a pool table. And so I like the trend of meeting people, kind of what that experience at home and little things, you know, I've seen little stuff like just sending people, Postmates gift cards or Uber eats gift cards to grab lunch because we used to have catered lunch on Fridays or something. You know, it's sending them gift baskets saying, just thinking of you, you know, I saw one and it's something I got actually at two years ago, but it's something that is completely applicable now, which is, it was a succulent that said life would SUC without you. Adorable. Like it was the card made my day more than the actual succulent. But I think that that organizations are making people feel valued in many ways. But one of the things that I think is really working is just those unexpected delighters. And I hope that's something that continues because I think that's something that makes work feel much more personal. Despite not being able to have that intimacy or that closeness of physicality.
Stacia Garr:
I love that. Yeah, Speaker 3.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, it definitely has seen some creativity in our teams. We just released a big project. And so the VP of the, our technology group ordered hats with the name of the project on them for the entire team to surprise the person who had spearheaded it. And so now every time there's a meeting for that project. And so getting creative in, in the box of your zoom meeting or your teams meeting and what people can actually see and participate in. So I've seen a lot of that. I think the extension of that is supporting the whole person versus the employee. And what we've seen is what I've been calling for the last year, uninvited authenticity into people's homes has allowed us to open that conversation to now. I no longer just support you getting your work done, but I support you managing your entire life so that you can get your work done. And so I, I definitely think that there's been a switch there on the focus and I'd love to see that continue for sure.
Stacia Garr:
Great. Yeah. I love that.
Stacia Garr:
Anyone else.
How can people preserve serendipity and watercooler talk remotely?
Stacia Garr:
Great. Thank you. Well, I think that one ties in actually pretty well to this, this next one, around this concept of how do we preserve serendipity and watercooler chats remotely? So I've seen a few technologies that are trying to do this. So things where, for instance, you can kind of effectively walk into the coffee shop if you will, or walk into the office. And it's kind of a virtual environment that kind of looks like it and you just, you know, like sit yourself down to work, right. And you're there. And then people can see who else is in the space. And, and if you wanted to like, just bump into someone, you just move your little avatar up to them. And then in that instance, both your cameras go on and you're talking. And so by going to basically into this space, you acknowledged that I'm open to these serendipitous interactions, but you're still getting work done while, you know, in between these different interactions. So that's one thing that I've seen folks do that it seems like it has some potential at least. I'm wondering, have you all seen anything else?
Speaker 2:
I think we've certainly seen that exact use case Stacia being used really, really well at events as well. So the kind of breakout rooms at events where you can go up to different vendors and speak to them in that kind of similarly serendipitous setting that's yeah. Seems like a really exciting use case to be able to deploy that within the organization
Speaker 8:
As well. So yeah. Very cool.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:
The other software I've seen is donut.com, D O N U T a and instead of moving your avatar is, and it being on you to initiate it actually initiates for you. So it randomly starts setting you up for 10 minute meetings. And I think that to me is much more of a watercooler experience. Cause you don't know who you're going to run into. But it does allow for that continuous watercooler chat, which is kind of cool.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. That's a great suggestion.
Speaker 2:
I think you can set up a similar thing on, on Slack as well to do that right. That you can kind of set that up across the organization or whoever's in the Slack different Slack channels and it'll automatically bumped them together, which is really cool as well. Yeah.
Stacia Garr:
Cool. Yeah. Is that just a bot in Slack?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, exactly.
Given there are so many useful & varied solutions, how are companies creating a seamless experience?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Cool. All right. Then let's go ahead. Given there are so many useful and varied solutions, how are companies creating a seamless employee experience? Well, that is multi-billion dollar question. So I mean, I guess kind of stepping back, kidding that I think that we spend a lot of time talking about the importance of it, of a tech ecosystem and, and having a clear perspective on what the employee experience needs to be and then your tech ecosystem matching that need, or that experience you're trying to create. I think that you know, that's obviously the 30,000 foot level. Then there's as we get further down, you know, how are you making sure that these different technologies are integrating together? I think that is, there are a number of ways to approach it.
Stacia Garr:
I think every vendor has some way that they claim kind of makes it so that it's seamless and easy. And so for some of them, it absolutely is. I think that one of the things we've, you know, Vizier is doing some work on this and I think it's meaningful, there are some vendors who have been really working to kind of create their ecosystems where they do clearly work together well. And they've put an effort, extra effort. And so potentially thinking about if you love one system and seeing who's kind of already in their partner ecosystem, who might fill your techniques as a way to begin your pyritization efforts. I think that can help with creating this seamless employee experience. But I think that, you know, this is obviously a very complex challenge that folks are facing and unfortunately given that complexity, it kind of depends on the individual situation. Anybody have anything to add to that?
Speaker 7:
Well, one thing that is happening and probably will continue to be a trend, is this stuff showing up in the work tech. So being, having the experience show up in Slack, Teams, and Viva so that it, even though behind the scenes platforms, there can be many, many of them, but you know, they're creating apps so that they, you know, show up in the flow of work. Yeah.
Stacia Garr:
Great. Speaker 2?
Difficulties between people analytics & employee experience?
Speaker 2:
It's kind of similar to Speaker 1's previous categorization comment. But I wondered if you'd seen or sensed any difficulties in terms of the customer within the organization between people analytics and employee experience when the two teams or departments are distinct. So how did EX vendors manage when those two teams aren't necessarily working very well together and who are they selling to primarily and what are the kind of challenges there?
Stacia Garr:
I think that the first first thing is, is what kind of EX vendor is it right? Is it, is it a service now or is it a, you know, a Medallia cause they obviously their primary customers are going be different folks. And then, you know, in terms of kind of what does that look like together? Our advice is always to run it through people analytics just because you're looking to, they've got a pulse on so much other data that you wouldn't necessarily want that to be just stuck in one part of the organization. So even if, you know, to use your example, Speaker 2, the engagement and the people analytics folks are maybe not playing as nicely together as they should. Ultimately people analytics I think is kind of the source of truth or will be over time. And so if I'm a vendor, that's where I would be trying to drive the focus. You know, obviously you work with whatever customers you're working with, but I'm trying to kind of keep that focus over on the people analytics team would be my thought.
Speaker 1:
Just a quick kind of pile on to the conversation. One thing I think if you're an EX vendor and your EX people are not connected to your PA people you're likely to orchestrate things that don't count. Like one of the things we're seeing, especially with the Medallia relationship is the data tells you the, where it makes sense to listen. If you just think about experiences, experience, like you can listen everywhere. I see a lot sort of back to this question is like, how are companies creating the experiences? Like half of them are wondering around like wondering where to start. I don't think we've got the answer of how yet. I think we're still questing on a how to start. And I'm one of the things we're seeing specifically with the PA team is like, okay, well, which populations do we have, no do we have kind of materials signals that there is a, there's a reason to go, listen, we're not just listening for listening sake. So is it onboarding, is it promotions? Is it new managers? Is it all these different places like that? The situational data starts to tell you where it's important to listen. I cannot see you being successful without that really good understanding of the dynamics in your business. So otherwise you're going to put listening and for listening sake and yeah, you know, people get what you get, you get the Alice in Wonderland outcome. Like where are we going? I don't know. It doesn't matter.
Stacia Garr:
Okay.
Speaker 1:
So yeah, it's a great question because it's often not the people on the EX team that should be making the experience process. So they have to be integral to the how and why and where, there's personal view and what we're seeing, what we're seeing from the conversations we were in.
Stacia Garr:
Cool. Thank you.
Speaker 2:
Awesome. Thank you.
Conclusion
Stacia Garr:
All right. So we are just at a time there was one question, but I don't, we're not going to cover that one. So I just want to plug our next Q&A is going to be on the purpose, purpose driven organizations work that we did. So for those, you know, we did an entire year of study, first research and this podcast series, which we just wrapped up on organizational purpose. And so we're going to do Q&A session on that. So if that's of interest, that's April 15th there's two other events I wanted to flag for you all. If you have interest in attending one, maybe not as relevant for this audience, but potentially is on learning content. So how do you think about learning content?
Stacia Garr:
What content different audiences need, when they need it, why they need it, how to deliver it, et cetera. So if you have learning folks or yourself for learning folk, that cares about that. We're going to do a roundtable on that on April 13th. And then the other one, which probably is more relevant to this audience is a roundtable on DEIB. So diversity equity, inclusion, belonging, and skills. So we just kicked off a study where we're going to be looking at what are the skills that an organization needs to be more diverse, equitable, and focused on inclusion and belonging. And how do we think about those groups of skills? How do we think about how we drive that change across organizations? So that'll be around table that we are doing on April 22nd.
Stacia Garr:
So if you all have interested in that one we'd love to have you participate. And then I will give a plug for one more piece of research we have going, which is on DEIB and Analytics. So we are looking for research interviews for that. We will have a roundtable because we've got a lot going on right now. We're kind of pacing that one a little bit slower. So they'll probably be in May. But looking at the intersection between diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and analytics, and how we make it stronger, better look at the data we need, et cetera. So lots of stuff going on around here. So thank you all so much for coming today and always appreciate the really active participation from everyone in the conversation and hope that we see you on another one very soon. Take care.
The Skills Obsession: The Price of Skills Debt
Posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021 at 3:00 AM
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Guests
Matthew Daniel, Principal Consultant of Guild Education
DETAILS
“When software releases went from Microsoft releasing once every other year to releasing 16 times a week, you know, like all that started to happen; our ability to keep up with the world around us really started to decline.” Whatever else he is (and he is many good things), Guild Education’s Matthew Daniel is genuinely passionate about skills. Scrub that: he’s agonized about them—and he’s even more agonized about the trouble we’re storing up for ourselves as a society around them. As we find out in our hour together, he fears we’re wasting a lot of time and missing a lot of opportunity chasing the wrong metrics about them, ignoring vast swathes of the ones our workforces (especially our frontline teams) have. But his agony does lead to positivity, and we think you’ll agree with him when he says the original purpose that got so many of us into L&D will help us win through.
Follow Matthew Daniel on LinkedIn here
Find out more about Matthew and his work at Guild here
Check out some of his many independent thought leadership pieces for CLO magazine here
Webinar
Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills.
Partner
We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.
Season Sponsor
We are very grateful to Workday for its exclusive sponsorship of this season of the Workplace Stories by RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.
TRANSCRIPT
Five Key Quotes:
When computing moved to the cloud, the frequency of upgrades to software and new innovation that could happen started moving at such a pace. I just finished Michelle Weise's book Long Life Learning, and there's actually a graph in there that talks about where humans were kind of in front of the technology, and then there was a point where technology moved in front of humans. I think it's been pronounced at different times, we’ve definitely had that, but I think when things moved into the cloud, automation became something happening more quickly. When software releases went from Microsoft releasing once every other year to releasing 16 times a week, you know, like all that started to happen; our ability to keep up with the world around us really started to decline.
I think there are a lot of days that we in talent development can't see the forest for the trees. We get really caught up in semantics, in instructional design methodology, in which learning system we're going to have, and whether we're doing workflow learning
I work in learning and talent development in companies. And she says, Oh, so you're one of the people that helps people that already have skills get more skills.
If a CEO comes to a CLO and says, do we have the skills for the future? The way they will know that is not because they have a skills cloud, it’s because their intimacy with the business leaders and business strategy lets them articulate where the business is going.
What skills should we have? How do we solve this?—from deep down in the deepest of my gut, I am saying, do not forget why you decided to do this. Stay focused on the impact that we have. Do good work. Solve the problems, but ultimately do not lose sight of our frontline, of our non-exempt employees of the talent and potential we have in our organizations, and let's go change the world. Let's make it better. Let's do the work, figure it out, and leave the world better when it's all said and done then than where it is today.
Dani Johnson:
Today, we talk to Matthew Daniel of Guild Education.
Matthew Daniel:
We are creating skill debt. I personally think that when I look in the mirror and I look at 88 million Americans—and maybe you don't love that number, you want to cut in half, whatever the number is you want to take—we have a skill shortage. And that skill shortage is the result—brace yourself—it’s a result of Learning and Talent Development not doing their job. And I celebrate that number, because it's so much opportunity; never have we mattered more!
Dani Johnson:
Matthew Daniel is the principal consultant on the employer solutions team at Guild Education. His focus is on supporting Fortune 500 companies to put together plans to up-skill and re-skill their talent for the future of work, especially in light of COVID.
Guild is at the forefront of the future of the work movement. They partner with Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit universities to offer educational benefits to their employees with a focus on frontline workers. Some of their partners include America's largest companies like Walmart, Disney, Discover, Taco Bell and Chipotle.
I have the opportunity to talk to Matthew about once a month about skills re-skilling, skilling 2.0, and everything that's going on with respect to it, and I found that he has a really interesting perspective when it comes to skills and its impact on frontline workers and diversity and inclusion. One of the things that captivates me about how Matthew speaks about skills is his ability to think about things differently. Matthew steps out of the traditional way that we talk about skills and introduces this concept of ‘perishable’ skills versus ‘durable’ skills that I find really intriguing.
Dani Johnson:
Matthew, welcome; we’re very happy to have you today on our podcast about Skills. This season, we're talking about all things skills, and you and I have had several conversations about the ins and outs of what's going on in that world, so thank you very much for joining us.
Matthew Daniel:
Yeah, it means I’ve been given the opportunity to get on the phone and rant and rave about skills. We're going to do it, so thanks for the opportunity to chat.
Dani Johnson:
But you're one of the most passionate people I've ever talked to you about this, so we're, we're very excited to have you here just to start out. I'm wondering if you can give us a brief overview of you and your work at Guild, kind of what you do.
Matthew Daniel:
So me as a human; I’ll just say 15 years in learning and talent development, and I guess longer than that now, but incredibly passionate about helping people develop the skills that they need to go be successful, to be better, to do better, and the impact that that has on families and generations long after this moment.
And so that makes me really passionate. That's brought me to Guild, and Guild has this mission really to unlock opportunity for America's workforce, specifically through education; we use a double-bottom-line business model that does well by doing good. So if I say that a little bit differently Guild is a B Corp, and that allows us to a) really work with both on the education side, the learning side, and with corporations to put together education benefits in a way that a gets to business strategy and b) really elevates the employee experience.
We’re hyper-focused on the frontline early career employees, and so we built out this dynamic learning marketplace with universities and learning partners that focus on serving adult working learners. These aren't colleges and universities that are focused on 18 to 22 year olds; these are really programs that are focused on people who have jobs, who have kids, who have a regular job, life, and help them develop new skills.
I actually work directly with the employer partners. So we have employers that come to us like Chipotle, Walmart, Disney, folks like that, who are trying to transform their workforce to engage their workforce. And so I get to work with a team of economists and learning folks and I get to work with consultants who are looking at business strategy and really thinking about talent a couple of years down the line, and how do we actually build out programs and policies that help move people in an organization into these programs, and then really develop the skills that are needed for a couple of years down the line to help the business actually execute on strategy.
Dani Johnson:
It sounds fascinating and it sounds super necessary right now, given the state of the world. I want to ask you a question about your own skills; tell us a little bit about the skills that you need for your work today, and how you got them.
Matthew Daniel:
Number one, obviously is talent strategy, and that is a thing that I got from doing. I was in-house at Capital One, I’ve been around learning and talent development for a while, and I've gotten to see it at a number of large organizations. Usually at moments of transformation, I started with GP Strategies and we did a lot of outsourcing in the learning space; they still do, but it gave me a chance to be at places like Microsoft or Cigna or Bristol-Myers Squibb at the moment that they were changing the way they were approaching learning. And so I got to see a lot of how you build an L&D function in a way that actually supports the business. And then I went in-house at Capital One and had the great fortune of being there in the middle of our digital transformation, and so that skill of how do I think about the talent I have and up-skill those folks and how am I bringing in the right talent, and then what is the up-skilling even the right talent needs whenever they land that came through reps.
Another skill: writing and research is a part of my job, and I wanted to give a plug to Ms. Linda Williams in Whitehall High School for Junior Level Advanced Grammar; I have never had a better writing course in my life than I had my junior year of high school. So like that skill that I take and use every day, everywhere, was something that started there. And of course it just got better. On the research side, I have historiography, I have a BA in history and historiography, if you don't know it it's like the way that history is written. It was one of my favorites; I didn't even know what it was. It was one of my favorite courses in the world of fake news. Like the first time that I read three chapters on Reconstruction by different authors who like saw that through different frames, I just realized how much bias we bring to them, which has really been a skill, you know, over the years that has served me well, as I'm trying to look at business strategy and think about like, how do we approach this and how is my own bias weighing into the solutions I'm bringing to the table anyway. And that's about enough about that.
Stacia Garr:
You and I are like soul twins on this; I’m a historian as well, and my favorite courses were on propaganda. And then also similarly I took a single course, whatever, 12 weeks on Abraham Lincoln, I read like 10 different books on Abraham Lincoln and how they all portrayed him differently and how the authors were influenced by where they were in the time in history,and all this other stuff.
Chris Pirie:
We have a whole ‘poets versus quants’ kind of thing through the whole season emerging here. Hope the best one wins!
Dani Johnson:
We talked a lot yesterday about soft skills and how some of our non-traditional backgrounds have really helped us in the work that we do now, especially the research and the writing and those types of things. It was interesting that we think our kids think when they get out of college, that's what they're going to be doing the rest of their lives. That's hardly ever true; I think about, I mean, I graduated with a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and I am worlds away from that.
Matthew Daniel:
All I wanted from college was to get out for three and a half years, because my big goal was just to get the credential; like, I didn't want to go to college, I really just knew that the credential played into my opportunities in the future. And I came from a family where literally no-one had ever graduated from college before, and I was a first-generation college grad, and I just knew it was important to open doors. Other than that, like all I wanted, History was the thing that I could stay engaged with and like to take 20 hours a semester and finish. And so that's what I did.
Dani Johnson:
That's awesome. But I want to switch over a little bit to just kind of skills in general. So why do you think skills are hot or important right now?
Matthew Daniel:
Skills were always a bit of a challenge. I mean, if we go back decades, but ultimately when computing moved to the cloud, the frequency of upgrades to software and new innovation that could happen started moving at such a pace. I just finished Michelle Weise's book Long Life Learning, and there's actually a graph in there that talks about where humans were kind of in front of the technology, and then there was a point where technology moved in front of humans. I think it's been pronounced at different times, we’ve definitely had that, but I think when things moved into the cloud, automation became something happening more quickly. When software releases went from Microsoft releasing once every other year to releasing 16 times a week, you know, like all that started to happen; our ability to keep up with the world around us really started to decline.
So I think why skills are hot in one form is like innovation, cloud technology, automation; I think on another broader issue of like, why is it hot in companies? Ultimately, buying our way out of talent shortages through talent acquisition is not a sustainable approach. It's pushing wages higher, it's in HR, talent acquisition is large, is highly operationally focused and is a large volume of activity in the organization. And it is just not sustainable to continue. I mean, there was a time in companies where all promotions hired from internal talent, like over 70% of what you had was coming from internal, that change really pushed outside, we needed skills and we were infusing it from outside the organization, but ultimately it's not a great business strategy to always think you can hire all the skills you need in the future.
And so this is from a talent development lens. It's really pushed us in my opinion, into a conversation about skills continuously, because we're not just needing to hire it, it’s not sustainable to hire it the way we are now we've got to develop those skills, and so it's become a kind of an economic conversation about supply versus demand. And it just has pushed that conversation to the top.
Dani Johnson:
That's really interesting. I don't ever, I don't think I ever sort of glommed onto the fact that the term talent shortage comes from, you know, acquiring talent from the outside. If you were continuously developing your people, you'd never have a talent shortage.
Matthew Daniel:
Right.
Dani Johnson:
Talk to me a little bit about soft skills in relation to what you just said, because I agree with you that, you know, the cloud has definitely accelerated everything. We had a great conversation with Lisa Kay Solomon and she talked a lot about soft skills and design and some of those types of things. I'm interested to understand how those soft skills fit into the conversation.
Matthew Daniel:
Yeah, this is so interesting.
Dani Johnson:
And I know you don't call them ‘soft’ skills.
Matthew Daniel
I don’t. You know, here's the thing—I think I'm going to go on a tirade for just a second, you guys figure out how you use this—I think there are a lot of days that we in talent development can't see the forest for the trees. We get really caught up in semantics, in instructional design methodology, in which learning system we're going to have, and whether we're doing workflow learning. And does it all matter, like, I don't know if this is appropriate for a podcast, but some of that is just ultimately bullshit, like, go ahead and put the bleep over by word there. But ultimately we are spending a lot of time and energy around it, should it be called soft and hard and all those things end up being more marketing focused than they are substantive in the field that we're in.
Ultimately, here's the challenge that I think we're up against: we have 88 million Americans who don't have the skills they need to lead us into the future of work. And that's a problem. And so taking a step back. I think we, through both working in Entangled and working at Guild, we had a project that we were doing for a university that was trying to figure out how do we handle lifelong learning: how do we handle the complexity of what is people coming in and out of the university throughout a very long life, and where their real challenges that they're up against? And about that time, you've also got this Bersin by Deloitte data point, it’s made it all over the place and it was based on other research, but it was the durability of skill or the half-life of skills is roughly five years; in the more technical, it’s closer to two and a half. And so the response from the L&D community has been, especially in this cloud-based technology, it's all changing is to start to index heavily on, then we have to build an entire organization, systems, tools, models, so that we are constantly pumping out shorter content more frequently. Like that was the response to that data point. And a lot of it has to do with marketing. Right? Like everybody launched latched on to that con that concept. And they were like, great; make it short, make it fast, get just the skill you need and go. And what we said is, okay, wait,let's just take that some school skills are more durable and some are less durable. And let's think about the implications of that in itself, which is to say if the entire L&D function spins up a ton of energy around just pumping out perishable skills, are we creating the talent that needs to lead us to the future, or are we just going to have to constantly keep finding talent as a result? We're going to have to go shop for whatever company has talent that's two years ahead of me? Great, Capital One went through the digital transformation five years ago I'm going through it now, so I'll just go hire all their talent because they've already done this thing, they have those skills rather than looking at my people and going, like, do we have the durable skills that we need in our shop to get through this transition, to get through this change, have I built a workforce?
And let me just talk about when I say durable versus perishable, what we kind of separated into three buckets and the way that we talk about it and think about it. There are highly durable skills, and these are dispositions of ways of thinking and acting at this really broad scale. Then there's semi-durable skills, which we kind of classify as frameworks or methodologies. They stick around longer than just what technology you're using today, but they may not last as long as this disposition about for you, the way that you go do critical research, right? You have a way of thinking of the world, of taking really complex ideas as an analyst and breaking it down and solving the problem you use methodology or semi-durable approaches, which changed every couple of years, they're more stable. And then on the last bracket, we talk about perishable skills. So that's generally probably more related to technology; I mean, let's be honest, Microsoft Word is about as reliable a skill as you could have gotten, right? Like technology versus soft or, you know, those things don't really matter, the question is how durable is the skill, in my opinion. And so when we start thinking of that, if we think of agile, you know, durable agile skills or taking really complex products and bringing it down in the minimum viable products, that's the dispositional skill of being able to do that. You do that through scrum and kanban, those are your semi-durable methodologies. And then ultimately you're using, you know, whatever the platform is, Asana or a JIRA or whatever that thing is. And knowing how to use that tool to live out the method, to then live out the concept of delivering—those are kind of in higher order. So here's the thing, Asana you're going to replace that in three years, we all live in America, we know like you're going to replace that whole technology over and over again. The method is a little more stable, but the disposition is the thing that is most stable or durable.
So here's where that landed us. If some skills are more perishable and some skills are more durable, what are the implications of that? And the more that I thought about this, and of course, Guild brings this lens to the table where we're constantly thinking about the frontline, If I think about the way that I distribute the development of skills in my organization and if I'm really honest, when I look in the mirror, I give the most durable, dispositional skills to executives, to leaders, Ivy League grads, because like number one that costs me the most to hire and number two, like I'm going to make the investment because they're going to be my leaders. And then we look at the frontline and we kind of look at them and go, well, you know, heck, you're making $17 an hour, you’re going to go somewhere else or we're going to replace you. So let's just teach you how to click the button in the system that we have today to make sure that you can do the task that we have.
And to a certain degree, I think workflow learning in the concept of embedded learning, reinforces that concept more than anything. I mean, if workflow learning is about doing while learning, which is a little bit different to me where you're thinking about how do I actually practice the skill? That's one thing. But if workflow is embedded from the sense of learn how to click the button or learn how to say the thing, when you get the phone call or just super-tactically, what process do I use today to process this thing in my large company, then all I am giving you, over and over, is a perishable skill. You guys have worked in the technology world, we call when you make bad decisions about coding a system to give a user what they want, we call it technical debt. We're like, Oh, you want that button on that page? Well, the architecture of our system doesn't really work that way, but we'll give you that button, and we just know every release we have to maintain that. It's a problem, It's trouble, but we’ll go do that thing.
We are creating skill debt. I personally think that when I look in the mirror and I look at 88 million Americans, and maybe you don't love that number, you want to cut in half, whatever the number is you want to take, we have a skill shortage. And that skill shortage is the result—brace yourself—it’s a result of learning and talent development not doing their job. And I celebrate that number because it's so much opportunity—never have we mattered more!
But honestly, when I look at that, as somebody who's been in this field for 15-plus years, it breaks me to think that we have created an industry that ultimately sells products so well and has a growing budget and it's doing great things, and yet the impact that we're having is diminishing in terms of impact, especially the frontline employees who right now in a K-shaped recovery of an economy are taking the greatest hits.
Something is fundamentally broken about the way that we're thinking about this. And I don't know that I have the solution to it, but what I do think is that if we walked into to developing our talent and a) didn't say, oh, you’re frontline employees so we don't need to invest less, but b) if we also said, how do I make sure that while I'm teaching you to click the button, because you know, by God, you've got to do that thing and keep it going, how do I make sure that I'm giving you frameworks or similar durable skills and dispositions, or ways of thinking about problems and solving problems and approaching the world that set you up to last in this company longer and set us up as a company to be better able to navigate the next challenge without me just teaching you how to click the button.
Dani Johnson:
That was very eloquent and I want to point out that you wrote an article on this in CLO magazine, and we'll put the link on the page so that the people can get to that. And I think the emphasis that you put on frontline workers leads me to my next question is, you know, how do skills and access to data about skills affect diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging?
Matthew Daniel:
Ultimately, if this way of thinking about skills and the investment that we make in frontline skills, being more focused on throwaway skills, how to use the processes and tools that they have, the reflection moment that I have in that is that we—learning and development—could be reinforcing systemic inequities more than we care to admit.
Quick story. I'm starting at Entangled; it’s a lot of people who don't come from workforce learning. There's this young lady, she’s probably 24, 25 years old, she’s fresh out of grad school, she’s got an MBA. She's smart. We meet for one-on-one. I said, Hey, I'm Matthew, I work in learning and talent development in companies. And she says, Oh, so you're one of the people that helps people that already have skills get more skills. And I was like, I'm one of the people who takes everybody who graduates from college and gets them ready for the workforce. You know what kind of like in my head, I went on this whole, but that question—her name is Frances, that question that Frances asked me—that kept me up at night for the next couple of months, because I started asking myself if I reframe that question, was she fully informed in that question? Absolutely not, I mean, look, there’s Capital One as an example, there were 400 of us supporting 3000 roles where there are 30,000 defined skills, we’re trying to figure out how to keep the business running—it’s a hard job, right?
And this whole thing of skills is super hard, but ultimately I think we, forgive me for using the phrase, we kind of whitewash this issue, through like making courses and opportunities. Like, we go to our business resource group and we create some special employee resource group, whatever you call them, that we create kind of programs for diverse talent, a cohort of 20 per year to get into some kind of access, or we make our courses more diverse in terms of the representation in the course. And we're like, Oh, we pat ourselves on the back that we're doing work towards equity. And I think a really hard look that I've had to do in the mirror this year in reflection over the past 12 months is that I have stood up systems, created policies, established processes, all in the name of fiscal responsibility about, you know, how much do we have to spend on external content and what's our budget for these courses and how many people can we pay to have license to the system. And we have, over and over, eliminated the people at the end of the spectrum, frontline talent, from access to our content, to our systems. And ultimately not only have we created our own skill shortage by only focusing on the task in front of us; we've also robbed the opportunities from the talent.
We say all the time, talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not. And ultimately we in L&D may be robbing our organizations of some of the greatest potential in talent, because they sit in the frontline and they're non-exempt employees and so they just don't get access to content or the systems or the programs or the mentoring or the class. I think of Capital One, here's, you know, you're going to be an executive you come in and one of these rotational programs and we give you how the business makes money in presentation skills and storytelling skills, and we give you all those things, and then we wonder why the folks at that end of the spectrum performed better than folks in the frontline. We are clearly segmenting, I guess, is the kind word, but we are, we are dividing our talent. And that frontline talent is where most of our poverty employees that come from poverty live, where our employees that come from rural backgrounds, from black backgrounds and, and, and other people of color, we, we take those people and we do it in our heads by separating exempt versus non-exempt. But essentially what we're doing is we're locking down access to more skills to the people who would benefit the most from it. And I think that requires a hard reflection on if we're making the right decisions and what part we play.
Dani Johnson:
We completely agree—this has been a soapbox of ours for, I don't know, eight or nine months now. We're exempting the frontline, and we're also exempting those that aren't considered quote, unquote leadership or high potential. And so we basically rate people early on in their careers and that's who they are the rest of their careers, there’s not an opportunity to get out, which is kind of horrifying given the fact that we've made so many leaps and bounds to scale learning. It doesn't cost us as much as it used to, but we're still making that distinction between the haves and the have-nots when it comes to developing skills and giving knowledge.
Stacia Garr:
The potentially intriguing thing about skills, though, is that we may be able to use it to circumvent some of these decisions that we've made. So if you think back, you know, you mentioned Matthew, you’re, you know, first-generation college graduate, you know, there are plenty of other really smart people out there who may not have graduated college who have only a High School degree. My brother actually is one of them; he owns his own business, there was no big corporation that was going to take him because he doesn't have a college degree, but he’s an incredibly effective human being.
And so I'm wondering if, is there an opportunity for us to think about skills as a way to maybe bypass some of the traditional gates that we've put in place? You know, Dani and I have talked about how, you know, the requirement for a college degree for a lot of jobs is a little bit of a ridiculous thing. And so can we turn to skills instead as a way to think about, you know, whether it's the credentialing or it's the certification that someone can do the job, as a way to get around some of those gates that we've put in place that disproportionately impact some of these diverse communities.
Matthew Daniel:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And companies are doing that. I mean, there are companies who are getting a lot of notoriety for this. I think IBM has like 15% of their workforce that they are making, we call that skill-based hiring, right? That's the industry term for it. So you have companies like IBM, or Google has come out and said, they'll make hires that way, Apple’s done the same way. I even have a friend at Humana. They have, I think, eliminated ‘college graduates’ from something like 50% of their job postings, which is really significant. So does skill-based hiring help make up that ground? I hope and would wholly agree, but that has to be one of a part of an ecosystem.
So let's go back to what we talked about a moment ago. What, like, what's the big thing that we're trying to solve and it's an entire ecosystem. The people who help determine what skills you get are your state government in K-12, it's your universities, both private and public, in college, it's workforce development boards, state agencies then county structures. You have those of us in the workplace that are trying to develop school skills. And quite frankly, all of us are speaking different languages. We're using different skills, we're using different approaches. We're using a different technology—in fact, there aren't a whole lot of places we even interact with each other. You know, one of the reasons I loved Macy's learning conference is because all the K-12 and higher ed people that showed up, like I really thought it was weird for a really long time. What are they doing here with all of us learning people, but ed tech and corporate learning technology are getting closer and closer every single year. And so I think you're right on, and I want to see the whole world move to this, I actually have a piece coming out, hopefully in the spring about this concept of both skill-based hiring. But I think the other side of that is going to be when we do skill-based hiring, we need to acknowledge that there are going to be gaps. One of the things that I want to see in this world of skill-based hiring is this greater integration of talent acquisition and talent development. As a matter of fact, I just got a new mentor at the beginning of the year, and my new mentor is in talent acquisition because I just feel like I don't know enough about what happens on that side of the fence. And then in many organizations, excuse me, talent acquisition, talent development are a bit disassociated except for, with hypos, right, because hypos, we got to hire them, but we know they don't have all the things we need. So we're going to put them in these development programs, these really rich development programs.
And I think in this skill-based hiring world, if we walk into that and believe that we're going to hire all the skills that we need by eliminating the college degree, I don't think that's realistic, I think we're deluding ourselves. So there has to be a way that talent development and talent acquisition work together. And so I think of like gateway jobs skills that let's take a CSR, customer support rep, right? Most companies are loaded with CSRs, lots of talent there and there's a lot of need in computer user support specialists, it’s like a 11% growth over the next five years, as far as jobs go and so there's a lot of skill-matching.
To your point, where if we did better at looking at that from a skill standpoint, instead of just looking at a degree, we could actually say, well, you know, I could take you here and with one one month bootcamp, I could not hire a bunch of college grads and I could take people out of my call centers where I had a whole lot of talent, and move them over and easy to replace talent easier, certainly then computer user support. So if I start looking at what some of those pathways are in the organization and I intentionally build the infrastructure between talent acquisition and talent development to make sure I'm skilling people for that, then that can be a really successful approach in my mind. But it has to, it's an ecosystem, right? We're back to this; it’s a really big problem, and it needs really good partners within the organization and outside the organization who are looking at it and helping you solve it. But ultimately you put college degree as an on the job description and you've eliminated 76% I believe is the number of black candidates, and something like 80% of Latinx candidates. So like, yes, we will never get to equitable opportunities as long as we're making a degree a toll-gate.
Chris Pirie:
Could you talk briefly about the relationship between skills and experience? It seems to me as a hiring manager, one of the things that I would pivot more strongly on is somebody's experience rather than a sort of a list of skills that frankly are hard to describe and define?
Matthew Daniel:
So I've been a hiring manager; that’s one of the things that's always interesting in this conversation to me are people who talk a lot about skills, but have not really had to hire many people. I had a team of about 15 at Capital One and that 15 folks, each one of those job postings brought in more than a hundred people who applied for that job. And so I do think we have a technology gap here that just isn't scaled, the applicant tracking system just doesn't do a good job of helping us get through this issue, and it's just easier to put a college degree is like the thing that helps us. But Chris, the question is super-valid from the standpoint of how I don't just want to see a list of skills, right? I'm going to list skills that are no more valuable to me than the name of a college degree—maybe even less so. I do want to see the experience or the story. And then on the other side, we're still telling you, but I need a one page resume that you submit here. Like, we are putting this pressure on candidates that is just unreasonable. And we're putting pressure on hiring managers that's unreasonable. If you're getting 80 resumes, I mean, a good recruiter is filtering through that and giving you the 12, but also I didn't always trust my recruiters, I went through a lot of resumes myself and was like, did you see this project they worked on, this is exactly what I need. That's what I need. What's not in your job description. Well, you told me I needed to keep the job description consistent so that we didn't have any risk on compensation analysis. Right? Like this whole system is somehow broken.
But ultimately, yeah, you're right: the experience tells me a lot more than a list of skills. I want to know how you use those skills. And the example there is agile; when somebody says I've worked with agile, my question is what I mean, what does that mean? Like, does that mean you understand kanban or scrum again, the, the kind of middle skills. Do you understand how to use JIRA? Like you so good? You can put stories into, that’s one part of agile, or do you get it at a fundamental level or the dispositional level where you're thinking about how do I take really complex things and break it up? Which I also think is where some of the skill libraries that we have available to us fail us. When you get one word like agile to describe something that is massively complex, it does not tell me what I need to know.
Chris Pirie:
I'll give you an example of that. We looked at a skill library from, in my previous role from a very, very large provider who claimed to have hundreds of thousands of skills documented in their library, and we were rolling out cloud computing and we needed people who were skilled in managing containers. And it turns out that if you went to this skills library and looked at managing containers, it was always about moving big metal boxes around. So, you know, I think that the essence of this for me is we don't have the language to describe what we're talking about; it’s not precise enough that we can bring technology to bear on this problem of mixing the job that needs to be done with the people who have the capability to do it in a very friendly manner working on them.
Matthew Daniel:
That's right. You have like MZ partnering with Western Governors partnering with Salesforce and Google to work on the open skills network. So they're working on what is a definition of a rich skill descriptor, and putting context around it—MZ’s working on skills, not even just in language, but clustering, they're using machine learning to figure out what the clusters give context to a skill. So there is good work happening here, but it's not baked into the systems that we have today, it’s not baked into the processes and it's going to get better. Like I am a hopeful person; we are going to figure this out, the world is going to get better, but my God is it painful between now and then to see how broken it is and know that we want it to be more.
Chris Pirie:
I love the optimism, and I share your frustration about the capabilities of L&D teams; I mean, my life's work now is trying to fix that, or at least draw attention to it. And many people in the future might not have—in fact, many people today—might not have an L&D department, right? I'm a gig worker. I have stitched together five or six different jobs—we’re already 10 years from Daniel Pink's book Free Agent Nation, right? So what do you think about people who exist outside of corporations? It seems to me this fixing this is very important for them.
Matthew Daniel:
I'm just going to own that. I have spent almost the entirety of my career focusing on the Fortune 500. I actually, because I was thinking about this exact question this morning, I was looking up, my three-year-old is like, what are you doing, Daddy, can I have more cereal? And I am on my phone going and how many employees are represented by the Fortune 500, right? Like I am thinking about this exact question and how many people, it leaves out of the equation and quite frankly, small business, which makes up 50% of our economy, they don't have the means to do what we're talking about here. I mean, you're talking about gig workers, and gig workers have the obligation on their own to develop, and I was actually looking at some data on this, not too long ago in the IT space gig workers actually keep their skills up better than people who are in-house, so I think gig workers are less of a problem than small business employees, who need to have access to skill development, but are unlikely to get that coming from their own business.
Which is why I go back to the ecosystem; this is where I think having learning partners and some kind of a guide to help them get there that's not just selling me something, like I need a third party to help me make this journey in my own talent development that's not biased to just their own content, which unfortunately is what I get a lot of times.
Chris Pirie:
I have one more quick question, and this is on my soapbox, to use Dani’s phrase, is about the granularity with which we manage all this stuff a little bit related to the last question. You said something like 30,000 defined skills at one of your customers or one of the places where you've worked; in my experience, it all gets unmanageable very, very quickly. So what would your advice be to a learning leader today who is getting questions from their CEO about, do we have the skills for the future? And is being pulled by the industry into this big mapping exercise that's going to consume trillions of person hours. What would your advice be on how to think about the skills that my organization needs?
Matthew Daniel:
Are you sure Dani didn’t set you up to ask this question? Okay. So Dani and I have talked about this a bit, because I do think it's too unwieldy. I think that there are companies and organizations who have the means and capacity to go take on the entire skills cloud and figure out exactly what skills are needed and what the frameworks are. I think many organizations, especially in the scrappy L&D world, need… if a CEO comes to a CLO and says, do we have the skills for the future? The way they will know that is not because they have a skills cloud, it’s because their intimacy with the business leaders and business strategy lets them articulate where the business is going.
On that one, I want to nail it on the head that no matter how good the technology gets, it is not going to predict what skills are needed in the future, at least not anytime in the near future. You need to get that through your awareness of what's happening in the business and your ability to see what's coming down the pike—acquisitions, decisions about different products, all those kinds of things that's where that insight about whether or not you have the skills for the future should be.
The other thing that I'll say about this, and this is where Dani and I have spoken: I know the whole world is moving towards skills. I had a piece in Training magazine, not too long ago where I said like, don't figure out all the skills in your company—there are 30,000. Here's what I want you to do; I want you to go find the 10 jobs that are in greatest demand in your organization, and map the skills for just those 10 jobs. And then I want you to go find the 10 places where you are most likely to automate or lay people off, and I want you to go find their skills. And then I went from each of those, it's unlikely that one is going to match to the other, right? If ‘data scientist’ is your greatest demand, it's unlikely that CSRs are going to get you there in a short term, in, you know, six months of learning. What is more likely, though, is CSRs gets you to computer user support specialist, and computer user support specialists gets you to engineering. And then we have these kind of two-step processes: instead of solving for 30,000 skills, solve for the top 10 in-demand jobs and the top 10 in-decline jobs. And those are going to take you through; you'll end up mapping a solid 30 to 40 roles in your organization, but you'll actually have something you can go do three months from now. If you try and map the entire skill framework for your company three years from now, you will call me and say, well, we were getting really close and then we changed out our HCM, or we were getting really close and we decided to go with a new concept provider, or we've decided to old LSP, or it's always going to be disrupted by what's in the ecosystem, go solve the problem, get that done, earn the credibility, get better at it. And then you'll know whether that skills cloud actually is valid whenever it shows up at your door.
Stacia Garr:
I just want to comment, because I think that for kind of on the people analytics side, we've been doing a lot of this type of work with workforce planning, strategic workforce planning, but I want to kind of call out the thing that I think is maybe different than what you said, Matthew, which is this idea of kind of the two-step or even potentially three-step process where you truly are thinking about, you know, given those top 10 and those declining 10, how does that basically create or impact a talent pipeline between the two and kind of thinking about that connection?
And so I just want to call that out, because I don't think I've ever heard anybody articulate it in that way but I think that that could potentially be really powerful, particularly if you're focused in the way that you mentioned. And I think come to some of the themes we've talked about both within this podcast and also in our research, I think it's a much more humanistic approach than, you know, so many of the others, which are like, okay, well, you know, these 10 types jobs are going to go away and sorry guys.
Matthew Daniel:
I have a piece I'm working on for CLO next month, and what I have said is that, like the theme of the piece, the secret to talent mobility is humanity, not machinery. And I think it's wraparound support and people who can advocate for you, you are more likely to get more talent mobility through that than you are through your HCMS recommendation, that is the next skill that you need for now. There will be a time where it won't be that way, but ultimately right now, like use humanity to get you there and that's going to serve you well for the next couple of years.
Dani Johnson:
Couple of themes I've heard from you, Matthew and one is this, and it’s a really important problem to solve. We have to solve it. The second thing I heard from you was it can't be solved entirely with tech right now—it can’t, we have to leverage our humanness and all that comes along with that, including our ability to think reasonably and deeply about this, rather than just relying on technology. And then the third thing that I think I've heard is stories, strangely, like from the very beginning through the end of this conversation, I've been hearing stories. You can't look at a resume and decide if that person is worthy of a job; you’ve got to get into the stories, you can't just look at the data and decide, do you have the skills you need? You've got to get into the stories.
Every time I talk to you, I think to myself, man, this is a big mess and that the other thing that I think is, but I'm really hopeful that we'll get there. And that's one of the reasons that I've always really liked our conversations is because even though we're talking about really hard things and we're not there yet, you leave me hopeful for the future of solving this problem. So thank you so much for being with us today; it was fantastic, and we'll make sure that the articles that you've written about this topic are available on our website so that people can continue to study.
Matthew Daniel:
Can I leave with this? I want to leave with this. I said the reason I do this is because I want to make people better, and here's what I believe: I believe that if you are in the field of learning and talent development, or overall human resources, you didn't get into the field generally because you thought to yourself, Oh my God, I love HCMs, or you thought I can't wait to write the next policy to cover one of the big problems and exposures we have in our company. And you didn't think, man, I love laying people off, right? All those things that are a part of our job, as LMS is and SCORM and content integration, those are just the things. If you were in a room with me, it would be like guttural, like standing on a chair, yelling, is to remind this field of why we got in this: we got in this because we saw that people can be better, and do better, and that if we pay attention to people and we make investments in them it yields business results, but it also has generational impacts.
So as people out there are thinking about skills—what skills do we need? What skills should we have? How do we solve this?—from deep down in the deepest of my gut, I am saying, do not forget why you decided to do this. Stay focused on the impact that we have. Do good work. Solve the problems, but ultimately do not lose sight of our frontline, of our non-exempt employees of the talent and potential we have in our organizations, and let's go change the world. Let's make it better. Let's do the work, figure it out, and leave the world better when it's all said and done then than where it is today.
Dani Johnson:
That was beautiful. Matthew, thank you so much for your time and your passion. It's been a great conversation.
Matthew Daniel:
Thanks guys.
Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.
Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.
Q&A Call: Choosing Learning Tech
Posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2021 at 10:46 AM
Q&A Call Video
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Stacia Garr:
Great. So thank you everyone for coming today. We are going to get started with this call on choosing learning tech. So for those of you, I don't know, I'm Stacia Garr I'm co-founder and principal analyst with RedThread, and we are human capital research advisory analyst firm. I'm joined today by Heather Gilmartin Adams. Wanna say, hi, Heather.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Good morning.
Stacia Garr:
And we are, Heather is actually going to do the majority of the talking today. Just to quick housekeeping before we dive in these calls are pretty informal. The whole point is to have the informal discussion around a given topic and really to answer questions either that you all have, or that folks have submitted to us in advance. This is based on some of our most recent research on choosing learning tech and Heather's actually in the middle of writing a report on it.
Stacia Garr:
So your active participation in questions is certainly appreciated. As I mentioned a moment ago, we do record these calls and so they will be posted to our website for RedThread research members to be able to access after the call. So just know that whenever you're you're sharing any information again, to the informal component of this, we do like to just give it an opportunity to share into networks. So please be, feel free to say your name and where you're from. And if you want to be connected with folks after the call, you know, we can certainly take care of that. Okay. So with that Heather, can you move to the next slide.
Stacia Garr:
Thank you. So for those of you who may only know a little bit about us, we're RedThread Research, we are human capital research membership focused on five areas, learning and career performance in play experience, people, analytics and diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging. And then, and that's looking at both the practices and the technologies within those spaces. We, as I mentioned, just recently moved to a research membership that folks can purchase directly on our site or for teams or enterprise, you can purchase through contract. But we also do advisory as well as events. So that's enough about us and who we are and what we do. Let's move on to the next slide, Heather.
How can orgs best choose learning tech to help meet business goals?
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
So as Stacia mentioned, we've been looking at learning tech for a long, long time for years. We haven't though specifically focused on this question of choosing learning tech and we realized in 2020, we did an update of our learning vendor landscape survey. And we realized there is so much more out there even in 2020 than there was in 2018. And this kind of prompts a question, how do buyers make sense of all of it. And how do you think about choosing learning tech strategically and holistically in ways that work for your organization? And so that's kind of why we decided to kick off this research. We've done a number of interviews we've done a lit review thus far, but we're kind of in the middle of it.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And so I'm excited to have this conversation with you all today because it'll inform our thinking on the topic as well. So just to give you a little bit of background, the research question that we've come up with is how can we best use learning tech to help meet business goals and sort of some sub-questions that we're looking into are around, what questions are most important to consider, who should be involved, and how can org think about what they already have versus what they might want to acquire somehow? So that's sort of broadly what we're, what we're looking at. What was really interesting was that as we started to have conversations and dive into the literature on it, this question became obvious that this question, the answer is changing. So when I had a couple of initial calls with some practitioners and thought leaders in this space, I asked them, what does choosing learning tech mean? And they basically just laughed, because it means different things to different people. And so if you guys are willing, as Stacia mentioned, we like to keep these informal and conversational. I'd love to hear from you either in the chat or feel free to unmute and talk for you, what does choosing learning tech mean?
What does choosing learning tech mean?
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
I have ideas about this that I'll share but I wanted to give you guys an opportunity to weigh in.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Participant from call text said tech that supports and facilitates learning and organization. Oh, I love the breath of that definition.
Stacia Garr:
And just kind of following on from, participant from call text's point. And that may seem terribly obvious, but, you know, I think that the point, and I don't want to steal your thunder Heather, but I think the point is, is that in the past, what it tended to mean was choosing LMS. Because that was the definition of what learning tech was.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of reflected in the literature, right? There's a lot of this is going on. I'll show you guys the next slide. So this was a word cloud of the lit review that we did. And it might be a little bit hard to see the only two specific tech names that show up in the lit review. So that showed up in the literature enough to warrant making it onto the word cloud where LXP and LMS. And I think that's just a testament to the fact that for a long, long time choosing learning tech meant choosing the LMS or and you know, maybe if you were really forward-thinking choosing an LXP. Participant from call text said in our case tech that enables colleagues to enhance the learning activity enhances the experience of learning attracts learning engagement. Yeah, exactly. So there are all these other things, and participant from call text says seconds those points and would add a vehicle to retain and attract top talent. That's really interesting.
Stacia Garr:
It seems like that would be obvious, right. That's part of what we're trying to do here, but for so many years, that just hasn't been a focus that hasn't even been an outcome. So for those of you who, I don't know I tend to do most of our research on people, analytics and measurement and the like, and the disconnect between the learning world and pretty much the rest of the talent world is just remarkable. Whereas, you know, in, in so many other things we're doing with talent, you're absolutely right, I mean, you know, it's, how do we attract and retain top talent? How do we make sure that we're, you know, engaging these people, et cetera, et cetera, and with learning, it is, well, how many hours did they complete a learning and did they get to the end of the course? And it just, it's almost like they exist in two different worlds, which has been an interesting learning for me.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. I think the learning world has a bit of catching up to do, data-wise.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. But it, you know, it's starting, so that's exactly. Yeah.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
It really is. It really is. Oh, participant from call text said tech that enables learning and learning needs could be anything doesn't have to be specific learning tech. Yes. I love that point. So one of the things that we've seen a lot in the last year is leveraging platforms that somebody else that somebody not a learning and development pays for in the organization. Right. So learning is latching onto integrations with Slack and teams and even email sometimes and project management software. So yeah. Leveraging any tech that people are using wherever they are, we're meeting them where they are with learning and not creating specific, you know, learning tech to do that. Yeah. Love that point.
Initial finding
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
So you guys are kind of you've already touched on this. But yeah, so one of the initial findings from this research thus far is that L and D needs to be thinking about much more than LMS and LXP's.
And this is actually a model that Dani Johnson, one of our co-founders came up with a while ago. Now it's been maybe a year or two. But it's only now that we're seeing sort of broader thinking in line with this model, ie: that, that L and D needs to take responsibility for not just providing, learning in an LMS, but for helping employees plan their careers and discover content and learning opportunities and consume development opportunities, wherever they are, and experiment with new skills and knowledge and connect with others in the organization and even outside the organization to further their developments and L and D needs to take responsibility for helping employees perform better on the job. Those are sort of the six behaviors that L and D employee behaviors that L and D needs to be thinking about how to enable.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And, then there are two other behaviors that are kind of admin around managing and creating, learning opportunities and analyzing those learning opportunities so that we can improve. And so the circles on the model are behaviors that L and D either needs to do themselves or support employees, the boxes underneath are all different types of functionalities offered by different technologies. And as you can see, LMS and LXP are just one box each, and there are, I think, 30 boxes on this slide. And and so basically what that means is that there's just so much more out there. And you know, learning has been historically focused on a very small percentage of the functionalities and the technology that we really should be thinking about. And it was interesting when I was talking to Christopher Lind, who is a great, if you guys aren't following him on LinkedIn, you should he's an amazing thought leader in the learning tech space. And what he said is I get it. Like I get it, that people are focused on, had been focused on LMSs and LXP's historically, because there are a lot of them out there. And there is a lot to consider even within that tiny slice of the learning tech world. But we've got to broaden our horizons, basically what he said. Stacia do you have to add on that? Or are there any questions on this model or on this, this general idea, this initial finding.
Stacia Garr:
I'll maybe add, while, folks are thinking about if they have any questions. I think, you know, kind of building on the point I made just a moment ago, a few things that I think are exciting here is, is under analyzed. You know, we are seeing a rise in non-traditional learning players come into the analytics space here. So, you know, we saw a partnership announced between PeopleFluent and Visier a few weeks ago. And I think we're going to see more of that type of work coming through. So at the moment in our people analytics tech study, the only two analytics players we see are Watershed and M level.
Stacia Garr:
And so you know, it's, it's, it's fun to see some other folks starting to take this more seriously. The other thing that I think is interesting is, you know, we've got perform and performance tracking here, but you and I have had some really interesting conversations recently that have kind of bridge that performance tracking with coaching, and understanding you know, kind of how we can have those two concepts really feed each other, and then how that can potentially connect to performance management. So, you know, one of our hypothesis and things we've been talking about for really, since Dani and I started the firm, was that the areas of learning performance management engagement are all coming together ever more closely. And I think we're seeing that show up certainly in terms of the specific learning tech, but then also in how it's connecting to other areas too.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah.
Stacia Garr:
I'm just going to broaden the partnerships that need to happen from L and D to the rest of the organization. And quite frankly, what the broader tech stack needs to look like.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. Yeah.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Cause that's one thing that we don't touch on a whole lot yet is the linkages to the other tech, right. So learning tech doesn't exist and absolutely should not exist in a bubble. And so if we're thinking about learning tech, you're thinking not only about how do those pieces interact with each other, but how do they interact with the rest of the tech in the word? Yeah.
How can L&D identify the most important learning tech needs/gaps?
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Participant from call text (Speaker 1) said, love this model. I've been using it for a year or so to get a handle on learning tech inventory and determining gaps. I'm curious, one of the questions I'm skipping ahead, but one of the questions that we had was how do you think strategically about identifying what tech you need in an organization? And so you said determined gaps. So if you're willing to unmute and share with us either now, or when we get to that question, we'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 1:
So I'm new to role, has only been like a year and change, but I stumbled across the the article that you guys have published, I guess, back in September or whatever last year. I started, I latched on to that model and have really, we've been going through understanding what our inventory is and the tech and the learning space, but also across the company to show those gaps and then trying to work with our L and D side of things. So I sit in an HR operations group separate from our learning groups. So we have a new CLO. So I've been working understand where the new vision and strategy is going to go from there, so that this way we can kind of help them understand how we can take the technology side of things and learning, help that map and help enable their strategy moving forward. And then that's going to help us start to identify where those gaps might be and help prioritize those. So we can start to look for additional technologies that might be able to help them in there, in that space. I'm not sure if that helped answer your question.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah, that's great. I love it.
Stacia Garr:
And I think that's interesting. You just, you mentioned that you, you report into basically HR operations, not into learning. And so just a question for you kind of back to what Heather and I were riffing on a few moments ago, which is, are you also looking at how all this tech connects into your broader HR tech ecosystem?
Speaker 1:
Yeah. I have a link right into our IT folks. So I'm making sure that's kind of what I was getting at before in terms of that's one of the things I love out of the article is don't compete with IT, like work with them because I have a very small group and trying to maintain and oversee all these learning systems versus having IT, do it for their systems. Yeah, I'm kinda tied to the hip with my IT rep to make sure that, you know, we're leveraging whatever they're doing, you know, we're looking at, I think the new Microsoft Veeva was just announced, but that's something to be from a tech IT perspective, not necessarily L and D. So I'm trying to see if we can kind of jump on their coattails with that and leverage the systems that they're bringing in as opposed to bringing in like learning specific systems.
Speaker 1:
Cause you know, it's better not to compete with them because we've seen that with we have Microsoft Yammer and we were bringing in like a social learning platform and Yammer came out first and it took off better than our social learning platform. So it's, you know, again, like we're competing. So that's why no one's going to this one. So, you know, trying to minimize that competition moving forward as well, because IT is going to be ahead of us for the most part, a good number of technology. So that's kind of where I'm focused.
Stacia Garr:
And I think the point to that is, is that the technology that IT is buying is most likely going to be work tech that they're already going to be in. And so this idea of trying to siphon them off from something else to do something just for L and D and it'd be outside of their day to day.
Speaker 1:
Exactly. I want to try and get us more towards like, how do you do stuff in the flow of work, as opposed to let me stop my work, go find something and some other system, and then come back and work. Right.
Stacia Garr :
Exactly.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. That's fantastic. We'd love to hear how it goes. Kind of, it sounds like you're in the, at the beginning slash middle.
Speaker 1:
The early stages. Yeah. But yeah, no, definitely let you guys know.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah.
Additional initial findings
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And that actually kind of links to some of the other initial findings that we have, which is linking texts as Speaker 1 is doing, which is fantastic. When you take decisions to business strategy is recognized as a good idea in the literature, at least we're not seeing that they're seeing there's this gap in the literature because there are a lot of articles on you need to link your learning tech to strategy. And there are a lot of articles on here's how to choose a good LMS or here's how to choose great VR software or here's how to choose a great micro learning platform. But there's, there's this like gap in terms of how to operationalize a strategy holistically before you get to the tactics of, you know, specific platforms that you're going to choose. So that's actually kind of why we're writing this, this particular paper in the first place is, is to kind of fill that gap. And then, and then to Speaker 1's point as well, you need to know what you already have before you start thinking about what else to acquire. Otherwise you're just chasing after the latest, shiny thing and not giving thought to sort of how it fits in or how it's going to meet an actual need.
Do you ever experiment with tech prior to choosing or just leverage RFP responses to make a decision?
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
The next one was, do you ever experiment with tech prior to choosing or just leverage RFP responses to make a decision? So I think my opinion on this is as much testing as you can possibly do before you buy the better. So if you can only get demos, then make sure you have a really good couple of use cases that you want the vendor to walk you through in the demo. If you can get a test account and play around with it yourself, even better just leveraging. So one of the, one of the big issues that both vendors and some of the tech thought learning tech thought leaders see with RFPs is that they've become a little bit of a check, the box exercise and, and some vendors will, if the RFP is not super, super detailed and clear, then sometimes vendors will say, yes, we can do this.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And they can do maybe a version of this, but it's not the version that you need that will meet your needs. And that comes up particularly with integrations, you know? So, so a lot of times an RFP, the line item will be do you do integrations? And the vendor will say yes, and then you'll come to implementation time. And the integrations that you actually need, it turns out, Oh, that vendor, that's not what we meant by integrations. And so the more that you can play around with things before you purchase the better, Stacia.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I would add that. Well, a few things, one is, so often the integrations are just, or via API or a flat file CSV upload, and that's in many instances that works fine, but for if it's a specific need it very well may not. But, I think the bigger point here is that it goes back to why, why would we talk about the need for strategy to drive tech decisions versus the other way around is, you know, if you go in and you say, you know, this tech can do all these things, like let's figure out how to use them all. So we get the most value out of our investment. You often end up with a whole bunch of features and functionalities that you just may not need. And even like worse for my position as an analyst, it drives the wrong behaviors in the vendors because the vendors are just looking to check the boxes on the RFP so that they can get in the conversation.
Stacia Garr:
But if, instead you go to a vendor and say, we're trying to achieve this thing how might you help us achieve it? Or here's what we think we need, help us see what we may not, you know, it's much more of that dialogue and it's, you know, RFPs are fine for an initial rough cut. But it's, I think you need to be a lot more specific about it and you're not going to get that only from an RFP. And quite frankly, you're not going to get it only just from experimenting as well. You know, it's that beginning, that relationship with the vendor, having that conversation about what it is that you need. And then also understanding from the customers who may have had similar needs, have they been able to meet them? So that's the other thing that wasn't on this question, but I think is important for folks to do is, you know, go and talk to other customers who are, will surface references and who have ideally been in a situation similar to yours and understand did this vendor actually meet your needs or do they work with you to meet those needs? And what did that process look like?
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah.
How to get peer feedback about vendor relationships and capabilities?
Speaker 2:
Thank you. I want to ask you, I am also not so long in this line of work. So I was interested to ask you, so how would you recommend that I go about and ask other people about their experiences, because sometimes it's, for me, it seems a bit intrusive to like to ping people on LinkedIn and say, I can see that, I saw you somewhere using the same technology. Do you have any experiences? I'm sorry if this is like a very obvious question, but I'm also interested to hear, so what, would be your advice on this?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, so I would start with the vendor. Usually the vendor will have a series of preference customers who have already said that they're happy to talk to potential new customers, and be specific with the vendor about what you want to talk about so that they can find the right person. Yeah. I am looking for someone else who has implemented at this scale with, you know, these types of capabilities and on this timeline as an example. So that's one way. A second way can be if you don't want to kind of go directly through the vendor is a lot of vendors have their own conferences and events. Even now, you know, there's just tons of virtual events and you can either find folks I mean, obviously whenever we go back to in-person, you can just kind of, a lot of times there'll be sessions that are dedicated to a particular topic, and it's easy to kind of bump into people, but even now you can look at who's speaking at those events, because usually if they're speaking there, have you already know that they've waved the flag and said, I'm willing to talk about this vendor.
Stacia Garr:
Sometimes also they have these pretty, pretty sophisticated like networking spaces within the technology right now. And you can go in and just pose a question like to the room, which is actually an advantage of it being virtual versus in person. And get people's perspective. A third way can also be, you know, you mentioned not wanting to cold bump into people in LinkedIn, but a lot of these organizations, a lot of these vendors will have their own LinkedIn groups and where it's kind of acceptable to go in and say, Hey, I'm thinking about implementing, you know, Degree. What's been your experience? And then the fourth way is if you do find someone it might be beneficial just to find keynote, good old fashioned networking, find that mutual connection who might be able to make the introduction for you. I mentioned that one last, because I feel like that's the most obvious of all of them. But I think all of those are ways that you can, you can get to folks who have used the tech.
Speaker 2:
Thank you very much. Yes, some very neat ideas. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Let's see participant from call text said, that's a really important point, Stacia. I work in a sales function for a vendor, and certainly from my point of view, if a potential new client approached me with an issue they have, or goal they're looking to achieve, rather than a generic sales inquiry, the demo or platform we provide is going to be way more effective for all parties. And it's really interesting. So we were working with a large tech company on just helping them, helping them figure out their like rating matrix their rubric for an LXP that they were looking at. And we help them. They did a great job thinking through some of the use cases that that they wanted in their demos. And they got really specific, like, okay, we have a person just become a new manager and they need to do this, this and this.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And how would you, how would you help them do that? And we have an admin who needs to do this, this and this in the backend of the system and how would you help them do this? And so they came up with a couple of demos and they sent them to the vendor ahead of time. And it was really enlightening for them to see the differences in the approaches with the vendors. You know, one of the vendors came back and the vendor seemed to understand exactly the use case, walked them through exactly how the person would do that. Like really gave them a good sense of what it would be like for that person to have that experience. And then the other vendor kind of came back with here's why we're great, you know, and it was an incredibly enlightening experience for the buyer.
What is more frequent: do teams adapt to the technology they have in shaping their agenda, or do they buy technology?
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Right. All right. So the next question is what's more frequent. Do teams more adapt to the technology they have in shaping their agenda or do they buy technology? So this is interesting. It goes back to the question about, should using strategy to drive tech decisions. Right? So I think just to hammer on the point that any technology decision or any technology purchase that's made, not in service of a specific business goal is probably not going to serve you well in the long run. But I think another interesting angle to this question is what we were talking about earlier. Do we leverage existing systems to meet our business goals or do we buy technology to meet those goals? And I think with that Yammer example was great, right? That was a case where we need, it was really a better idea to leverage what you already had. And so I think, I think there's for me, there's a two part answer to this question, is the strategy driving your tech decisions? And are you very aware that you actually need to buy something? Or can you leverage once, you know, your business decision or be your business goal, then you can say, okay, do we have the tech to, to meet that goal? Or do we actually need to buy?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And I think an area where I see an opportunity to potentially adapt existing technology is when you're moving into a new space and you're just trying to create an MVP and to understand what might work. So, you know, you might be looking to experiment within just one, one part of an organization and say, okay, we're going to just, you know, it's going to potentially be ugly, but we're going to use this, this existing tech that we have and make some adjustments and just see could it potentially provide the value that we're looking for and, and do that in a low investment type of way. And then moving on, you know, after you get a little bit of a sense of how might play out, you know, in reality, in terms of if it fits the needs, if users would use this type of approach, etc. Then you can kind of step back and say, okay, well, we got the ideas, right, but like, is this actually the right tech or not?
Stacia Garr:
So I think that can be a good opportunity to leverage existing tech. The other area that we're actually really strongly pushing thinking about adapting current technology is with diversity equity and inclusion, and belonging. So we have seen a dramatic increase in the percentage of DEIB or I'm sorry, vendors offering DEIB solutions. And a lot of people don't know that their vendors are doing this. And so we saw, I think it's an 87% increase over two years ago of percentage of vendors who are offering DEIB as a feature. And so I think push going ahead and looking at what your vendor has to offer, whether you're looking at DEIB or you're looking at learning and seeing, you know, does the latest instance of this actually have what I need or have they, you know, if it's a true SAS software, you're going to get the updates no matter what. So have they made an update I don't know about, and it's already there. And I could leverage it to do the thing that I'm trying to do. So I think those are good examples of when to look to your current tech to see if it fits the need before you go and look outside the organization.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. That's a great point actually. And I've seen it, not just in DEIB, but in sort of learning more broadly, adding for example, talent mobility type features have become really popular skills
Stacia Garr:
Or lightweight performance, I think we've seen.
How should L&D be thinking about tech integrations?
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff that maybe your vendor has rolled out and it wasn't the original reason you bought the platform. And so you're not really thinking about it that way. Yeah, I love that. All right. The next question is how should L and D be thinking about tech integration? So we kind of already touched on this or talked about it a lot. So for me, there are two really important elements to think about. When you're thinking about integrations, one is the user experience and one is how you're using the data that your different systems are producing. So one of the things that we're seeing is a movement away in sort of learning tech purchasing broadly. We're moving away from trying to find one platform that does it all and toward a recognition that there are lots and lots of vendors out there.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
And some of them are really great at this. And some of them are really great at this. And some of them were really great at this. And so how do we create an ecosystem that pieces all of those best in class technologies together. And that's where integrations become really, really important. Right. And so when you're thinking about that, the things that you want to ask vendors about are, can you fit into my existing ecosystem, such that my users can't really tell, and probably don't even know that they're going on to a different system from whatever central access point I've decided they should go to for learning. And similarly, can the data that your platform is producing or collecting, can you put this data in whatever I've decided is my central repository where I want to store and access and compare all of the data that I have.
Most frequent integrations
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
So, for me, those are the two big, big elements to think about when you're thinking about tech integrations. I'd be very curious though what you all think and what questions you kind of follow up questions you have. Can you give any examples of most frequent integrations? So a lot of times, especially in enterprises there will be, you know, a central HRS system and a central LMS system. And so those probably are already integrated. And what I'm thinking about is if you're going to add on another piece of tech, let's say you decide that you need a micro learning platform for whatever reason. And so what your micro learning platform would be need to do is integrate with that LMS and potentially even with the HRS. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 2:
Sorry. It might be quicker like this. So yeah, basically, one of my let's say parts of my job was to work on integration between HRS and LMS that we are having. And I'm also interested to see maybe to ask you as well, too because there is now we see a big emphasis on the webinar delivering platforms when it comes to Adobe Connect I don't know, Zoom as well. But then also some teams and I was interested to see, so maybe to see what other intuitions there could be, because yeah, this is I'm fairly new. So this is something that my organization needs, but it could be something else as well. So that's what I wanted to, yeah, mostly HRS. Yes. It's a central system. But then it comes like Teams would have to have a special integration with, for example, our LMS to, for example, enable good let's say webinar, attendance I think that Zoom has some good APIs when it comes to that. I'm not sure for Teams. But yeah, so that's the background of my question.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. So I would, I would kind of go back to the have your strategy, drive your choices theme that we've been going with. So I hesitate to say like, oh, all organizations are doing these integrations, or, oh, you need to think about this integration because maybe that's not right for your organization. I would it seems to me like you want to figure out what technologies you need and then figure out how to integrate them all all together. And I'd be thinking about it.
Stacia Garr:
But I do think, I mean, so as Heather mentioned, you're going to integrate your HRS, you know, whatever your human capital management system is most likely to, if nothing else, so that you can have the system of record data that you need about folks. And then I think the other area is, you know, when you, when your thinking about most, likely any of your performance activities, you're going to want an integration back to your learning resources to, you know, for instance, people are, have identified that they need to be better at presentations just to pick something you know, there people can then get directed to the resources that help them understand how do I deliver a better presentation. We're also seeing kind of a rise in the connection between learning need, like this learning needs identified through things like performance and experiences.
Stacia Garr:
And so those experiences could be coaching. They could be mentorship, they could be internal talent marketplaces that kind of thing, but we're, we're starting to see folks think about how do we bring those connections to bed together. So that folks don't just have a learning need that's been identified, but actually have a way to get there. That's not just content. So I think those are some other areas to potentially think about your integrations. But I would go back to Heather's point, you know, the ultimate question is what is the learning experience or the learning culture that you're trying to create, and then what would be the technology that can enable that?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Thank you. I mean it maybe goes back of course, to the previous question, because yeah, only now that was the question that I think I submitted. So it really is about, for example are you aware at any point what is really that you're trying to accomplish on a, let's say through to three years period, or I don't know how long, I don't know. So for many of the contracts with the vendors, how long do they last really? But I would say that it's more long term when, especially when it comes to a bigger organization. So that's why I asked the question and when it comes to integration, it's what you said earlier as well. So people I think when there's promise a lot of things in general, but when it comes to specifics and really accomplishing some things, then I don't see that a lot of stuff is possible. It requires some custom development, which is like, need funds for that. And it's not something that you budgeted for. So I think that's why I asked for most frequent funds. So I can maybe see what could be possible expenditure. I mean, it's even better if you can announce something that you'll need something. So that's why I asked, thank you. Maybe linking too many stuff now.
Stacia Garr:
I think that's good. But one thing just to add on there is make sure that you ask your vendor, the vendors that you're considering at the beginning, what type of support they give for implementation and for basically making these integrations and other potentially more customized aspects of the implementation work. So in our people analytics, tech study, for example, we found 40% of vendors offer that support as part of their subscription and do not have a year one additional cost for that, 60% do not. But, you know, you may find that that offering of support is the thing that tips you one way or the other, and also can be indicative of the vendors perspective on one, you know, the extent to which they're kind of software first versus software to generate leads for consulting, two the extent to which they think you'll need support long-term so a lot of them say, look, we get that.
Stacia Garr:
You're gonna need some help getting set up, but we don't expect you to need long-term support because the technology is mostly self-sustaining once you get implemented. And so we're not gonna, we're not gonna charge for the upfront because we want you to be successful and we don't think you're going to need it longer term. So we're not going to charge for that either that can give you a sense of one budget, but then also what you need, what you should expect from them longer term in their overall philosophy. So I would check into that at the beginning, start of the process.
Speaker 2:
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Heather Gilmartin Adams (40:58):
One sort of tangential thought to that. It sounded also in your question, like because you said you're new to the space you were feeling like I need to know, just kind of what's out there and what my options are so that I can maybe think about how to build them in, in the future, or maybe budget for them. And actually that's a really good point that's come up in a couple of our interviews is learning leaders need to have at least a decent enough sense of what's on offer in market. So that when they're in a meeting and they hear a business challenge, they know kind of whether there's a technology that can assist with that or not. And so I just kind of building up that awareness is in fact a great thing that you're trying to do. And if you're interested, we have a tool on our website that you can play around with that kind of shows you what the vendors in the space are doing. All right. So that was actually the last question.
Stacia Garr:
Before we go to this, are there other questions that folks have that we didn't cover live today? And I just put a link to the tool in the in the chat
Stacia Garr:
Okay. So it sounds like there's nobody who's going to speak now, so we'll forever hold our peace Heather.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Right. So, yeah. Do you want to speak to this Stacia?
Conclusion
Stacia Garr:
Two weeks from today. Our next Q and A call is going to be on employee engagement and experience tech. So I know at least one person here mentioned Microsoft Veeva. I wrote a pretty long blog on Microsoft Veeva when that announcement came out. So that will be one of many things that we talk about. In general, we're going to be talking about what this market looks like based on our people, analytics, technology research, and aware where people sit, what they do. What we see as some of the differences in the different vendors and how one might want to approach the space. So it'll be like this, it'll be free flowing discussion. But Priyanka Mehrotra who's on our team and is actually leading this research. She and I will be on together and we will share our thoughts and take your questions. It's going to be fun. So cool. Well, I think with that, want to just say thank you to everyone for your participation and whether it be a chat or voice or, or however you chose to participate. And for anybody who's listening after to the recording, please go ahead and feel free to reach out to us with any questions or anybody who's here today. If you have more questions, let us know. And we look forward to seeing you on another Q and A call soon.
Heather Gilmartin Adams:
Yeah. Thank you everyone. It's a great conversation today.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Thank you. Take care.
The Skills Obsession: Designing the Skills Future
Posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 at 12:14 AM
Listen
Guests
Lisa Kay Solomon, Futures and Design at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford d.school
DETAILS
“What I introduce to are the kinds of skills that allow them to navigate ambiguity.” If that seems like urgently-needed capability you or your team to have you’re in luck, as you’re about to find out a whole lot more about why you’d need such a thing… and why you won’t find it, alas, in today’s conventional curriculum (including corporate L&D).
In the first full episode of our new RedThread podcast—our deep dive into what we’re calling capitalism’s focus on ‘The Skills Obsession’—we meet passionate educator, innovator and bestselling author Lisa Kay Solomon. Designer in Residence at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (‘the d.school’) at Stanford University, Lisa presents in her dialog with Stacia, Dani and Chris something of a masterclass in what thinking about the future actually needs to consist of—and how that feeds into her conviction that, “learning is the currency of possibility.”
Find out more about Lisa and her work here and her chosen workplace platform for her interventions, the d.school, here
Webinar
Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills.
Partner
We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.
Season Sponsor
We are very grateful to Workday for its exclusive sponsorship of this season of the Workplace Stories by RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.
TRANSCRIPT
The five key podcast soundbites:
What I introduce to are the kinds of skills that allow them to navigate ambiguity, and to use their imagination in order to expand their perspective around what might be—and then to bring those futures to life.
I think about skills as learnable abilities, but what does that mean? It means you can develop an ability, do something, by practicing it over time. Much of my work is really about creating conditions to allow for deliberate practice of these new skills; how do we learn how to ask questions through a discovery lens? How do we learn how to become more resilient? How do we learn how to navigate ambiguity? I believe these are teachable and learnable skills—and that makes me so happy.
One of the things that's interesting to me as I get more serious and more focused on teaching futures literacy and futures thinking and strategic foresight as a strategic skillset, is that it's not really taught anywhere. And it's certainly not taught in a foundational K-12 context. The closest thing you can get is History and Humanities.
To me, learning is the currency of possibility; I not only makes me more creative as an educator, as an author, as an idea person, about trying to make sense of where we're going, but I think it gives me the opportunity to be more resilient—when you learn, you're more resilient.
There is so much emphasis on getting to answers quickly: on performing. What do we need for the future? We need people comfortable with being curious. We need people comfortable being courageous and being able to say, I don't know this, but I know it's a problem, so how else can I learn more about it?
Welcome to Workplace Stories hosted by RedThread Research, where we look for the Red Thread connecting humans, ideas, stories, and data—defining the near future of people and work practices.
Stacia Garr:
My name is Stacia Garr, and I'm the co-founder and principal analyst at Red Thread Research, along with Dani Johnson, who is also co-founder and principal analyst at Red Thread and Chris Pirie of the Learning Futures Group. We're excited to welcome you to our first podcast season: this episode is part of Season One, called The Skills Obsession in which we investigate the current preoccupation with all things skills. We talk to thinkers, writers, leaders, and practitioners about the current state of thinking on why and how we are managing skills at the people and organizational level.
Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the Red Thread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday. It's one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial HR and planning system for a changing world.
Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.
Lisa Kay Solomon:
I help students learn skills they don't yet know that they need.
Dani Johnson:
That was Lisa Kay Solomon of the Stanford University d.school. Lisa is a best-selling author, educator, speaker, and dynamic force for good in the world; she’s dedicated her career to making design more accessible and learnable. Lisa is currently a designer in residence at the Stanford d.school, where she focuses on bridging the disciplines of Futures and Design Thinking, creating experiences like The Future's Happening to help students learn and practice the skills they don't even know. They need.
Lisa Kay Solomon:
I think about skills as learnable abilities, and so much of my work is really about creating conditions to allow for deliberate practice of these new skills. So how do we learn how to ask questions through a discovery lens? How do we learn how to become more resilient? How do we learn how to navigate ambiguity? I believe these are teachable and learnable skills—and that makes me so happy.
Dani Johnson:
Lisa is a long time friend. We've had the opportunity to sit in a couple of her sessions at the d.school, and we were really intrigued with how they made us think differently and how she's talking about the skills that people will need in the future.
Lisa Kay Solomon:
We can see the past, but we can't influence it. We can't see the future, but we can influence it. And so to me, that's a call for getting more serious about the scales and the discipline of learning how to imagine a multiplicity of futures, or at the very least challenge our status quo.
Dani Johnson:
Let's listen into our conversation with Lisa Kay Solomon.
Stacia Garr:
Welcome, Lisa, thanks so much for joining us on this podcast: we’re going to be talking all about skills in this season, and we are just delighted to have you helping us think through skills and the future of work. And what does that all mean as we bring it together? So can we maybe start with a little bit about you and your work? I know you mentioned that you are helping people design and think about the future: can you tell us a little bit more? What does that mean: what is your work?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Well, Stacia, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be talking about skills, and as they relate to the future of work—I think about this all day, every day.
And the challenge in part with my work is that at the d.school, where I teach classes about the future and design, I help students learn skills that they don't yet know that they need, because what I introduce them to are the kinds of skills that allow them to navigate ambiguity, and to use their imagination in order to expand their perspective around what might be—and then to bring those futures to life.
And if you think about where most of these students have done their foundational learning… you won't see any of those skills in there! So it's very much applying some of the foundational skills around learning how to read and literacies across all different disciplines, in new ways. So my work is really to not only bring these students on board, to help them see that they are capable of learning these new skills, but to give them the space, to master them over time.
Stacia Garr:
Amazing. Well, let's step back because you used the word skills. I use the word skills as we started this, but what does that even mean? It's a really broad concept, and so what does that word mean to you?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Again, I want to say thank you for doing a whole series on skills, because skills are, it's one of those words that we throw around, and we may be talking about different things, I don't think there's any necessarily one definition; the way I think about it, I think about skills as learnable abilities—again, more, more meta words—but what, what does that mean?
That means that you can develop the ability, do something by practicing it over time. And so much of my work is really about creating conditions to allow for deliberate practice of these new skills. So how do we learn how to ask questions through a discovery lens? How do we learn how to become more resilient? How do we learn how to navigate ambiguity? I believe these are teachable and learnable skills—and that makes me so happy.
Stacia Garr:
One thing we've been wrestling with is since we've been doing the research is this concept of skills versus competencies. And are those things that you just mentioned, are they, are they competencies or are they skills? Are we kind of just calling what we used to call competencies skills now? Or does it even matter?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't tend to get hung up too much on the semantics, as long as they don't confuse us. So that's why I like to break it down to the smallest bit.
So for about nine years, I taught at a really revolutionary program in San Francisco. That was an MBA in design strategy, housed at the California College of Arts. So imagine, right—this is probably like mind-blowing to some of your listeners right now—like what is an MBA program doing in a 110-year old Arts and Crafts school in San Francisco? Crazy, right?
And what I used to say about that program—and we could talk a lot about it, because it was my first introduction to actually transitioning my career from being an advisor to an educator where I had to think very seriously around what am I organizing this learning experience against—what are the skills that I hope that our students come out of this program with?
And it allowed me to articulate that, for starters, I wanted employers and organizations to know that when they hired a DMBA-er, as we used to say, they were getting a certain kind of talent that they wouldn't necessarily find in a more traditional program, because we utilized some of the critique-based, project-based learning typically done in arts or architecture applied towards analytics and systems thinking and business processes that the employers were getting, or the people hiring them were getting someone that was more adaptable, more flexible, more resilient, more comfortable with iteration and rapid learning.
Is that a skill? Is that a competency? Does it matter? I don't know. It only matters because we've developed systems that are trying to measure these things. And so it was really interesting to try to help the students understand that what they were learning may not be yet on the hiring docket of what these organizations were looking for on paper, but they were developing the skills that these organizations needed for the future.
Stacia Garr:
Interesting. Yeah, that reminds me, Dani and I have very different backgrounds. She is an Engineer and I am actually a Historian by education. And one of the things I've talked about as being the most valuable that I learned from that education is pattern recognition. And what we do as researchers in HR is pattern recognition, seeing things, and ideally seeing them before other people do so that we can help elevate the understanding of what's happening out there.
But I think it speaks exactly to what you're saying: as a historian, no one was saying I was going to apply that skillset to doing this type of work, but it gives you that foundation to really do amazing things in really any context.
Lisa Kay Solomon:
I love that you share that partnership. I feel like you just model the debate. My husband and I argue every night about what our children should be learning. He's in the venture capital business, he loves STEM, he loves coding, and I do too, and I do think technology is and will continue to be a huge part of our future. And we talk at the d.school about the importance of coding literacy and even understanding that tech really is the design material of the future. And Stacia, to your point, like where do you learn how to imagine the future by understanding the past by understanding patterns? I love the Mark Twain quote that I heard was recently debunked, but until I hear the original person said this quote, I'm going to keep saying it, which is that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
You know, one of the things that's interesting to me as I get more serious and more focused on teaching futures literacy and futures thinking and strategic foresight as a strategic skillset, is that it's not really taught anywhere. And it's certainly not taught in a foundational K-12 context. The closest thing you can get is History and Humanities, which is ironic, right? That the closest thing to helping you understand the future is actually to study the past.
And I'll bring in another one of my favorite quotes from Stewart Brand, who was the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and he actually created was one of the founders of Global Business Network as scenario planning from where I first did my futures work almost 20 years ago. And he says, we can see the past, but we can't influence it; we can't see the future, but we can influence it.
And so to me, that's a call for getting more serious about the skills and the discipline of learning, how to imagine a multiplicity of futures or the very least challenge our status quo of this official future that we're all walking around with.
Stacia Garr:
Right, right, and I love that idea of multiplicity of futures—so this concept that we may think that there is one future, but there clearly isn't and, and having a sense of thinking through what could those different futures look like and what are, back to our topic, what are the skills that we might need to make those futures come to life in a way that is satisfying for each of us.
You’ve talked a lot about your transition, you mentioned going from an advisor to an educator, and obviously the skillset that you have as a Futurist is not one that you necessarily learned in a specific place. So can you talk a little bit about the skills you need to do your work today, and how you even acquired them?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
How much time do we have? I don’t know—I’m still figuring it out! I mean, one of the things I love about my work is I learn something every day. To me, learning is the currency of possibility; I not only makes me more creative as an educator, as an author, as an idea person, about trying to make sense of where we're going, but I think it gives me the opportunity to be more resilient—when you learn, you're more resilient. And that's what I love about design, and why I'm so passionate about teaching the skills of design: who doesn't want to feel like they have agency over their future, even when the world around us is getting more complex and filled with more ambiguity and uncertainty?
So I take these skills very seriously as an educator, as a designer of new possibilities, as a parent, as a member of my community: I'm always asking ‘what if,’ right? That's probably the biggest, quite the biggest skill that I bring to the table is this sense of maybe applied optimism or applied possibility, which is this combination of like observing the world around me first, having the humility to not go in there with a solution looking for a problem, but to really pause and pay attention, what's really going on here, and to try to understand it at different levels, like what's the presenting source of pain or challenge—what’s maybe driving that, so now you're sort of look at it through a systems lens to try to understand, like what might be the root causes, then the ability to say, well, all right, what parts can I influence, and what parts are out of my control? And then the ability to say, well, ‘what if’—what if we tried this and the ability to put that out there, not knowing if it's a right idea or not.So over time, being confident that or comfortable maybe offering up a possibility without full information or guarantee that it's going to be the right one.
And I want to juxtapose that with where so much of our foundational schooling is, and certainly a lot of what I see in the Stanford students, which is there is so much systemic reward for being right. There is so much emphasis on getting to answers quickly: on performing. What do we need for the future? We need people comfortable with being curious. We need people comfortable being courageous and being able to say, I don't know this, but I know it's a problem, so how else can I learn more about it? Who else can I bring here?
And I think that's the other big skill that I have Stacia which is, I am very excited to build and learn from others, build relationships and learn from others, and I fully credit my mom for that, and that is because she was a chief learning officer for 25 years. And before that got her training in psychology counselling—so she's a PhD who loved to unpack the dynamic of the human experience.
She actually wrote a class at Penn when I was too young to even appreciate what a rock star she was, called the psychology of personal growth. How cool is that—that this woman was so ahead of her time. I mean, now, she'd be like a Brené Brown or an Oprah!
And her intuition was like, she saw these Penn students—we grew up in Philadelphia, and she worked and taught at Penn—and she saw these students like so raring to achieve, and she wanted to give them an opportunity to pause, to learn about themselves. And so that was my context growing up—seeing someone who was herself, always learning and asking questions. And she used to say when she went in as a chief learning officer, that her job was to be the learning partner of the leaders that she worked with. I just thought, That's so cool.
Chris Pirie:
I'm going to chime in here with a question, if I can, based on what I've heard so far? One of the things I'm hearing from you is quite a lot of references to what I would call ‘mindsets’ or ‘approaches’? It might be useful to talk a little bit about design, about your sort of stock in trade, around design. What do you think are the skills and the mindsets that are important for design, and what's happening in the design world? Because I'm sure it's not standing still; I'm sure there are changes and forces at work on the world of design. So talk about design through the lens of, of skills, if you could?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Well, design is another big topic that we could cover. And I think part of what I try to do in my contribution to the field is to break it down so that everyone could see themselves in the definition of design. So there's lots of different ways to describe design—design as an output, design as a process, design is a set of practices, which is where I tend to fall. Because again, those practices are teachable and learnable.
And I'll give you two definitions that I love just to make sure that everyone, because this is a learning podcast around skills, they may be like, I'm not a designer. Well, newsflash—I think if you're in the learning business, you're in the design business. And here's why: my favorite definition of design comes from my dear friend and colleague Nathan Shedroff, who started that MBA design program that I mentioned earlier, and he's been in design for 30 years.
And what he says is as a designer, it is my responsibility to make choices that trigger the right responses. To make choices that trigger the right responses. Okay, so that's interesting, so that seems to suggest that first of all, you are in the service business, right? Because your job is to make a choice that sets somebody else up for success.
And if this is still abstract, just think about like, I often say to people, what's, what's something well-designed in your mind that, that you love. And I get to answers more than any first time. First people say, I love my iPhone. Okay, well, a number of people made choices to help you love your iPhone. Right? What does your iPhone do for you? Well, it's a mini-computer in your hand and it's seamless and it's beautiful, okay: so they made choices to trigger those responses. And so it suggests that you need to know enough about the people you are designing for them—what success looks like for them or the kind of goals you're trying to trigger for them?
So in the spirit of a learning context, your job as a learning professional is to create choices, to help the person you're designing for, you’re making choices for, be successful. So you need to understand what success means for them? What does it mean in the context of the role? What does it mean in the context of the organization? What does it mean in the context of the industry? So you have to have a lot of different information before you make any decisions about what it is that you were going to bring for them forward to them.
So that's design, and then I'll try to even get it down a bit more concrete. When I think about, and this comes from the work of Don Norman originally, he was a cognitive scientist/psychologist who wrote the book The Design of Everyday Things, which is a foundational book in the world of design. And he basically said design's role is to do two things: one is to deliver functional utility. So, again, in the context of learning, am I helping you learn something you didn't know that helps you do your job as a functional utility. And I would say, and this is what makes great design, the emotional engagement piece, right? So you're not just learning it because it's like hideous and you're trying to memorize it; you are becoming more of yourself when you're learning it. There's an element of joy. There's an element of vibrancy. There's an element of humanity, because humans have that emotion. And we now know from research, that emotion is actually triggered to learning and that's equally important in the decisions you're making, right? Which is why, for example, and I'm just going to take this meander down to this most basic level in the spirit of design, like you could design a very dry worksheet to try to get someone to learn something new—or you could create an immersive experience, where they're using their full body. Which one is going to have the lasting impact that you want in terms of them advancing their abilities in some way? We know it's the ladder. Well, that takes a totally different skillset to do so.
Stacia Garr:
I love this. One thing I don't think we told you before we roped you into talking to us today is the other group that is going to be listening to this podcast is people analytics leaders, because people analytics is very much so a part of understanding skills, quantifying skills and helping us think through what ones we need in the organization in the future.
And some of the research we've been doing around people analytics technology really gets at this point around making your words, making choices, that enable success. And we've been talking a lot about how, before you, as a people analytics leader, design a study, or you design a dashboard, you need to understand the people who will be using that dashboard will be using that data. What decisions are they trying to make? And what does the success mean as a result of those decisions? But I think the point that you just made kind of made a light bulb go off in my head around the emotional component. So when Dani and I write a study, we use a story brand perspective, which is understanding what the high level problem is, what the specific problem is, and then what the emotional personal problem is. And so for anybody who, in this example, is using a people analytics dashboard, or is looking at the skills problem from a quantifiable perspective, they're going to have an emotional angle to this too. And as we think about how we present data or how we present decisions, we need to be thinking about that emotional connection, so are we going to be able to help that person solve the problem that may be stymieing their career right now? Or the one that they say we've just got to be able to get our heads around what new things we need to do, because that is an emotional problem, too, and we can bring data to bear on that, but understanding that that's a problem that we need to solve. In addition to the presenting problem, I think you called it simply, what skills do we need an organization?
So I love this idea of applying the utility and the emotional component to some of these kinds of more data-driven questions that we see with skills as well.
Lisa Kay Solomon:
I mean, it's such an interesting point, Stacia, and I think it is Blue Sky territory around. Re-Imagining what these metrics are for some of these more qualitative and hard to measure skills. Like I said, we're at the dawn of a new era and in many ways, the last 10 months of navigating three crises at the same time between the pandemic and the economic crisis that we're facing and the real reckoning on institutional racism and demand for changes in how organizations support diversity—the old metrics don't fly, none of them! (Well, not none of them, but very few of them.)
So we have to be comfortable in really saying, let's design backwards. At the end of the day, not only do we want to be able to show results for our organization that shows whatever it is, profitability, growth, resilience, strength, we also want to be able to say, what does it mean for someone to feel like they are thriving at this organization—to feel like they are contributing their best talents and passion and power, even, to this opportunity? Because of course we know that’s what's going to enable them to stay and recruit others and put their best foot forward.
I'm not up to date on the latest numbers around engagement, around trust, around support, but I don't think they're good. So something tells me, and so we're doing a lot of work measuring the wrong stuff. Now, I don't mean to say that so glibly, because then of course the answer was, well, what’s the right stuff we should measure. And I don't think we know yet how to measure some of this stuff. How do we measure imagination? How do we even measure curiosity? How many times somebody put a question in a team search form, how do we measure the strength of your relationships, the diversity of your race? We're beginning to, but I don't think we should fall in love with these early metrics; we’re not there yet.
I remember a couple years ago I had a conversation with the head of school, my daughters go to a really fabulous school, all girls school and the head of school pick these character themes every year to do deep dives into. And one year as resilience, understanding I live in Silicon Valley and the pressure to perform at Silicon Valley is out of proportion with, I think the developmental needs of young people, not unique to this school and sort of endemic to certainly this area and many others. And so I thought it was a very noble and brave thing to be able to say, look, we're going to focus this year on resilience. And I remember being at a parent coffee and it just raised my hand. I was like, if this goes, well, how do we know? How do we know that our girls are more resilient? (This happens to be an all girls school.) How do we know? And I have to believe that in this answer, and this is very draconian, it has to be something better than they don't mention being depressed. That's not the metric!
And so I think that's the creative challenge ahead of us is to really say like, what is it, what is it we're shooting for now? The exciting part is that I think different fields are getting at this, but we need to come together some ways—we have some studies on happiness, some studies on thriving, some studies on becoming on growth mindset. And we need a sort of mind-meld of some of these to really understand what that looks like in the context of a work in the context of community contribution.
So I'm hopeful, I'm excited—but I think we have a long way to go.
Chris Pirie:
Some really interesting ideas that I just took away from the conversation so far is one is you, you mentioned that skills are teachable, eEven these mindset type skills of resilience and fortitude and curiosity, they're teachable as well. So that's kind of an interesting parameter.
The other connection that I'm making is with the work we've been doing around purpose, which turns out to be a lot about human motivation and the psychology of engagement. And I think we're in that territory again here, in terms of thinking through what a skill is; if I can write code it's useless unless I'm motivated to do that to solve a problem. And, and so there's something very, very interesting about that.
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Yeah. I just want to pick up on a couple of things there, Chris, thank you for calling that out. It is. I keep coming back to my purpose, which is to help make these intangible skills, teachable and learnable.
I believe that, every day, and I feel so privileged to do this work and I love the idea that our all leaders leaders of all ages—and I'm doing increasingly more work with K-12, because my experience working with executives frankly, is that we have to spend a whole lot of time unlearning to then relearn—and so my systems thinking brain was like, why don't we just get it earlier in the pipeline to teach them that?
So it's like, why don't we try that? So I'm doing a lot of work, actually, with schools in K-12 around creating futures, programming and literacy, and what does that mean? And we're just in the early stages of articulating that, but one of the foundational ones that is true for both design and futures is this notion of navigating ambiguity. I totally agree with you, Chris, that it's a mindset, but it is also a skillset. Let me give you a couple examples of that. One of the ways that we tolerate ambiguity is just to identify that there are a number of ways that something might unfold—that there's not a single right answer. And so we actually spend time identifying a spectrum of possibilities, right? And so we even did this when I did some early scenario planning around COVID, back in March, where we said okay, well, what's one critical uncertainty that we don't know about how it's going to unfold. Well, is the pandemic going to be short and relatively quick, or is it going to be long, longer and more durable in some ways… How do you know, let's unpack that?
Well, what would lead it to be short and quick? Oh, well, we have therapeutics that work, we have abundant testing, we have PPE, we have supportive healthcare. We have vaccines. Okay… what would lead to it being longer? Oh, well we do have shortages. So now, all of a sudden, we're doing another design principle, which is going from the abstract to concrete in order to help break down the ambiguity of ‘how long would this pandemic last’ into more understandable terms.
Now, again, we're not predicting, but we're managing our ambiguity by naming ends and by breaking it down and allowing us to get into a more active research mode than we would have with that big question of, I don't know when the pandemic is going to end.
So that's one strategy, and therefore like coupling it with a couple of practices on how to navigate that question. That’s just one of them. So next week, I'm starting winter quarter teaching my favorite class, called Inventing the Future with Tina Seelig, who is a brilliant creativity entrepreneur guru at Stanford, a real thought leader and author, and Drew Endy, who runs Bioengineering—such a fun class. The whole purpose of the class is to get students more comfortable unpacking the ambiguity around us. And the original inspiration for the class when we started developing it three years ago was to help primarily engineering and CS students not jump to the question of, can we build it, but to really pause and say, should we build it? How do we know? Well, what if we could give you skills and practices that at least help you better understand the potential implications of it? So that's just one sort of specific example. And over the course of the 10 weeks in the quarter, we introduced various creativity and futures practices in order to develop, help them develop the skills to think about what it means to invent the future.
Stacia Garr:
Very cool. My husband was one of those Stanford students who actually took Tina Seelig’s class, and I can't say how much just her approach and her thinking at the d.school just changed his approach. He was a master's student, and it just I think fundamentally shifts once you've gone through that experience of design and over the course of 10 weeks, incredibly shifts the way you look at the world. So I just want to put an exclamation point on the work that you're doing and folks at the d.school are doing, because I think it makes a huge difference; I've seen it!
Lisa Kay Solonon:
That's great to hear it; it’s transformational. What's so fun is when you see the light switch flip; you just don't know exactly when it's going to happen, but it is that embodied cognition about like, wait, what—I don't have to accept these assumptions at face value. I have the ability to identify all the assumptions, ask myself what would be the opposite, then go into a research mode to see if the opposite might be true?
I mean, it's transformational, it’s epic, but Tina's brilliant and the class is designed to make it accessible to say the ability to imagine something new—the ability to ‘be innovative’ or a creative problem solver. That's not for a select few, that's for all of us, If we allocate intentional practice to these skills, we cannot get better at things we don't practice; I don't know about you, but I was not born learning how to make a beautiful PowerPoint. I just wasn’t, right; I had to practice.
And so then you have to put yourself in a position where to say, how could I practice with people that are masters at their craft—how can I learn from them, how can I apprentice from them, how can I use technology to facilitate that? So, yes, it starts with a mindset, as Chris said earlier, which is foundationally a growth mindset that I can learn something, I want to learn something, I'm capable of learning something. And then it's the grit, it's the perseverance, it's over time, and being willing to take feedback and say, how could I do better?
Chris Pirie:
But there's something else going on at the d.school in the context of Stanford that I think is interesting too. Because if I'm at Stanford, studying Neuroscience or Biology, there is an accepted curricular and path of study to do that, right; there is a set of skills that I need to acquire, whether it’s how to properly use a pipette or understand the knowledge base around chemical interactions, whatever.
What you do in that context, though, what the d.school does in that context is sort of collide people together from different disciplines. And so I think you're saying that there's something going on other than following this sort of established set of skills and knowledge acquisition. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Absolutely—and I agree with you, Chris, we are a very, very lucky place. I mean, the d.school, first of all, is a little bit of misnomer in that it's not really a school from a standpoint of having a curriculum; it’s a institute of experimentation and creativity, really, which allows us and encourages us to take Stanford students from all disciplines, whether they're master's students or undergrad, CS, Humanities, PhDs, to come and learn together in an experiential class that exposes them to these practices of creative problem solving against a real-world problem, ideally.
And so you're exactly right, Chris—we want students that come in with their body of knowledge, their depth that they are learning, and to then go adjacent to go abroad—I mean, sometimes we talk about T-shaped people where they’re kind of applying their different skills.
Again Stacia, this has really helped my dinner conversations with my husband; the book Range that came out which talks about the importance of being able to pull from different disciplines. This of course, makes me think of Steven Johnson's work on where good ideas come from, where he talks about the adjacent possible. And so there's something about the d.school that creates an environment of psychological safety. I mean, we know that if you sign up for a class at the d.school, part of our job as educators is to make it safe, to take risks. And in fact, on day one of our class on Inventing the Future, we say to the students, if you come to this class, you get a guaranteed A, this is not your class. We can't tell you what an A looks like; we can tell you that you have to show up every day,ready to learn, ready to take risks, ready to go into new places.
So again, Chris, your point, that's not in the textbook; that’s not like, okay, now I'm at the 201 level. And Chris, you and I have talked about this before; this is why I love, for example, the practices of improvisational theater, because it forces you to get comfortable taking the next step without all the information. And a lot of times at the d.school, some of the opening activities we'll do are steeped in improvisational theater practices; we call them Stokes or warmups, but they're really to kind of get you present, get you loose. It's been very interesting to learn how to translate them in a remote setting, but we're doing it, and we are pushing our craft on that.
But Chris, going back to your point about the sort of pedagogical difference to say, you are not here to acquire knowledge that has a checklist; you are here to identify areas of practice that you want to explore for yourself. And the d.school, even in the last few years, has really has really migrated its focus from teaching the design thinking process, which was really popularized by David Kelly at the d.school, which is a user set human-centered approach to solving problems, first, you got to understand and empathize and you have to define what the problem and new idea. I think that that process was useful as an on-ramp, but I was always as a human capacity person, and I was always interested in what did it unleash? What were the practices that it unleashed—what did that process afford you, the experience of getting exposure to.
And over the last five years or so, we've been migrating from teaching the process or a process to really teaching abilities. And we have identified these eight design abilities that include navigating ambiguity, communicating deliberately building and crafting intentionally experimenting rapidly, moving between abstract and concrete. And I encourage anyone to go to the d.school to really read through them because I don't want to overwhelm you with, with all of them, but to me, this is the sort of the layer that you can add on to any of those discreet disciplines that will really expand your ability to solve important problems.
Chris Pirie:
Great. It's great because you've introduced another synonym that we can use for skills—this notion of ‘abilities.’
Dani, I know you have some, some questions, sorry.
Dani Johnson:
I have so many questions! As an engineer, I’ve always looked for the right answer, because that's how I was brought up. But I'm curious, Lisa, about your take on when we started needing to go back to our human self and look at design? It seems like the majority of progress that has been made since the beginning of humankind has been made because we were doing what you're now having to teach students to do? So when did that switch? When did we start needing to introduce this back into our human selves?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Gosh, it's so interesting, Dani, I agree with you… I feel like this is a terrible metaphor, but I sometimes think about the movie Soylent Green, ’It's about people—go back to the people!’ It was terrible, because they were eating people, but it is why I think I'm so passionate about design, because I think design is fundamentally human it’s a human scale, requires real nuance; it requires all the skills that I know you've spent a lot of time researching around what makes learning human, and I don't have a great definitive answer to you. But my hunch tells me is that it started probably a hundred years ago when we moved to a more industrial model of education, of kind of moving towards valuing efficiency, over exploration—the move towards multiple choice tests and personality tests and intelligence tests, and those kinds of things, and then we created a whole systems around it that are really, really hard to dismantle.
I mentioned earlier, I'm a parent of teenagers. I mean, I cheered for joy when all the standardized tests for college entry were canceled, initially, because I felt like, wow, this frees up 100 hours of studying for a stupid test. Forgive me if any of your listeners are working at the College Board, but it's like, we know, we know that these are not indicators of future success, and yet we rely so much on these numbers, right, that were gamified because we've created a whole industry around it. I actually posted either like a blog post or something about it early in April, and I was like, what can these young people do with these hours back? Imagine, maybe they give back to their community, maybe they take some creative risks; maybe they become social entrepreneurs or find civic agency and engagement?
And sure enough, the industry found a way to keep crawling back and make it even more terrible for these young people to go through. And I just think that is soul-crushing, and not a long-term resilient activity for them to be doing. So Dani, I agree with you. I mean, there was just, again, why it's so exciting to see some of these movements in K-12 project-based learning Reggio Emilia, even… I remember like this like 10 years ago and Google was really, maybe 15 years ago, and there was this like 60 minutes special with Sergei and Larry and they're like, what's your secret, and they're like, well, we were both in Montessori school, and everyone was, yay, Montessori!
I think that in part the education system values something different. And then, in the last 15 years, and I'm a little biased being in Silicon Valley, but we started to have a very techno-centric view—that technology was going to create abundance. And we're just at the beginning of really unpacking, like, what are the dangers of that perspective? How do we really challenge it? Who's making the technology, what are the biases that go into it?
Chris, you had asked a question that I'm realizing I never came back to around what’s the future of design? I think the future of design is design justice—designing for equity and really using those same design skills that we use to create great products to actually say, how do we use that to dismantle some of these systems and to rethink?
At the d.school, we're doing a huge push around using design abilities to make emerging tech more accessible through analog modalities like AI cards so we can teach fundamental algorithms to six year olds so that they don't just have technology happened to them, but they have the wherewithal to say, Hey, is this a classification algorithm? Is this a clustering algorithm? How would I know, where do they get the data? How can I challenge that? And to really think of those as literacies that we need to take seriously.
Chris Pirie:
Ethics as well. Ethics for engineers.
Dani Johnson:
I think it's interesting that you're going back to K through 12; I think it's obviously the right move. I mean, we've been talking to CLOs and CHROs for years and years; I think they face different pressures as well, like we talked about the system being in place for a hundred years and the metrics that they're measured against and the system built around meeting those metrics, and having to teach skills in a certain way so that things are most efficient; it seems like such a big problem.
Are you optimistic that we'll ever unpack some of these systems, and make it a better place?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
I think it's going to be a battle; I have to remain optimistic, or else I've got to resign tomorrow. I mean, I am advocating more and more of my time to doing this and we have to work with you really future-forward educators and administrators willing to do it because, again, it's a little bit of a chicken and egg question going back to station's point earlier about like, how are we measuring these things? We don't yet have the measurements, so you need some role to be able to say, no, what? We know that we are building, courageous, resilient young leaders. We know that we are, and so it is going to be important that we allocate time towards that, and that may not be measurable yet. So it takes some courageous schools and some creative educators to say, look, this candidate or the profile of our students are not going to look like the students that you're used to getting: we think they're better.
And so like, we're going to need some big player in the system—to be able to take a public stand on that. And I do think that we have a slight opening here; never let a good crisis go to waste. So I think that UC systems, for example, stopped taking SATs altogether this year. So the question will be like, is this a blip? Or are they like, we can't wait once the vaccines let's get those testing machines up and running again, or are they going to use this time to say, how else can we better understand which students do well and why, what are their qualitative characteristics? And then to create a system around it where they're connecting, like what happens next with these students, right, because of these qualities and then downward to say, Hey, look, High Schools: this is the stuff we're looking for.
For years, we've just been in this default mode of, well, let's just take what's available, SAT scores, GPA, but because this is such a strange year, as so many of the status quo systems were disrupted. We have an opportunity to reimagine, but we have to put a stake in the ground. One of the things that we're doing around our K-12 futures initiative is, we're trying to, ahead of time, articulate as if they were the World Economic Forum Skills of the Future—like we’re trying to make some of those connections from the beginning to say, look, this isn't happening as a one-off, this isn't a like little niche program like Reggio Emilia and preschools and child-centric—no, this is actually serving you, big corporation! So I think there's an opportunity to connect some dots.
Stacia Garr:
I think one thing that sort of came to mind as you were talking about that is our view of what data is. We think of it in terms of numbers; in the last couple of years, and especially within the last 10 months, we've seen reputation becomes so much more important. And I use the term reputation in how do you quantify a person without quantifying the person? So things like portfolios have become much more important word of mouth, and rating how well you like to work with somebody has become much more important.
The rating systems I think have started to change. Usually when we talk to organizations, it's all about those quantifiable skills, doing things in a certain way, the most efficient way, but we're starting to see some of those things creep in. And so it gives me hope that we can figure that out as well. I think tech will play a part in helping to digest some of that and help us make better decisions.
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Well, that’s why the work you're doing is so important, right? Because you're putting the research behind it. And I love the work, for example, you've been doing or exploring the role of tech to really promote diversity within organizations. It's not the lip service, not just like changing the diversity statement, but really challenging in productive ways.
I believe that people are not changing because they don't want to, they just don't know how—I really approach this from a much more empathetic standpoint and to say like, well, we're going to have to learn together, and we may not do it right away. I mean, that's the other thing we have to suspend our desire to solve it and fix it, right? These are problems. And so like a big part of my work is finding those bright spots and really unpacking them to say like, how is this not an anomaly, how can we learn from this? Like what, what else is there?
But it’s also humbling work. And Dani, just to give you like another example over the summer, we did a lot of scenario planning with schools, K-12 schools, getting back in the Fall. And at the time, if you remember, way back in the summer, we were kind of optimistic that we could go back in Fall; I mean, yes, there was the looming threat of a second/third wave, but it looked like things were subsiding. And so it's like, do we go back in person? Do we go hybrid? And so they were looking at different possibilities, and we asked them to take a design lens and say what do you know to be true among everything? Even though we can't predict the future, from a human perspective, from the stakeholder group that you are serving at your core, which is students, what do we know to be universally true?
What we knew to be universally true is that these students need more social-emotional support than ever before; whatever their conditions were, they’ve been isolated, they’ve been cut off from human connection; non-negotiable, and now that we know the teachers need that too.
Okay, great, so we have that fundamental truth going in. Okay, what are we going to do for the schedule? In my mind, it was like a no-brainer—take 20% off the content and fill it with community connection, whatever, it was so obvious to me, 20%, 40% whatever, it’s so clear what the need is. And yet schools could barely budge. It was, well, if we just shift this five minutes, we could get another lab in there, we can… and I'm like, step away from the standards. Who is stopping you?
And this gets back to a fundamental lesson. My very, very first job out of college was working on a political campaign, where I was trying to raise money in order to get Harris Wofford re-elected, who was the Senator from Pennsylvania, started the Peace Corps, early Civil Rights Act. It was a very expensive race at the time; I was 21 years old, and they're like, you have to raise $7 million. Okay! So now that's like the equivalent of $50 million something, and I was like, no problem, 21 years old, government major, I’m a newbie but they'll teach me how to do it. They'll teach me how to raise $7 million, right? And what I learned like week one, there was no ‘they’—I had to figure it out. And of course it was clear, like don't break this rule, there were laws even then, so don't do this, but everything else you can do. So it was a really early lesson in navigating, like how to get towards angles, but how to learn, how to be scrappy and figuring it out. And I think there's a lot of that going on—that just people, like I said, going back to the same mantra, you leaders cannot be expected to be masters at things they've never had a chance to practice. And definitely that's where school leaders are; and definitely, I think that's where a lot of organization leaders are.
Dani Johnson:
Let me ask you one final question. I feel like I've been hugging the conversation a little bit, but kind of tying it back and taking that last statement and tying it back to skills: if you had one piece of advice to give leaders that are struggling through this skills question, what would that advice be?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
I would say design backwards. Design backwards to say, when you think about your teammates, your colleagues, people working at your organization, and you think about what would allow them to do their jobs to their best ability and to identify them—it's not the same job, lots of different nuances, what does that look like? And what is the best way that they may be able to learn those skills in order to not just do their jobs, but to feel that sense of purpose, to feel like they are connected to something bigger than themselves, because we know that that will keep them motivated and keep them excited and engaged, which is important, and to allow them at least for a little bit, I know it's uncomfortable for a lot of people cause they there's a lot of investment, a lot of sunk costs and systems that everyone knows that don't work, but we use them anyway.
Park that aside, and do some dream-storming. If you could say, what would it look like for this to really be a learning organisation and for people to design backwards, to say that they are able to learn what they need to while doing their work, what would allow that to happen? And then to do the analysis to say, well, where are we right now? Where do we need to be? What should we stop investing in? Even though we might've spent a few million dollars, our context has shifted, we know new things now that we didn't know. And if the investment we made is not going to get us to where we need to be, let's make the hard decision and say, let's not keep investing.
Stacia Garr:
I know we are close to the end, but I want to come back to something you said, Lisa. In the context of K through 12 education and how we can make this stick, you said we need to have a few courageous partners. You referenced the UC system specifically regarding SAT scores; I think that applies to the corporate world as well—that we need a few courageous organizations, right?
And so one of the questions I've been thinking about as you've been talking is how do we do that? How do we scale this? Like the d.school, as wonderful as it is, doesn't exist outside of our little bubble here. How do we find those courageous corporations? And how do we scale some of the magic of what you're doing around design to think about the skills and really the workforce of the future that we're trying to design?
So that's kind of my question about advice. How do we scale this?
Lisa Kay Solomon:
It's a great question. So excited for your next guest to answer it.
Yes, we are lucky at the d.school. We're small, and in fact I really want to get props to a couple of my colleagues that run something at the d.school called the Uuniversity Innovation Fellows Program. And they started this many years ago, I don't exactly know, over five years ago to, in some ways address this exact problem, how do we help scale design practices and social impact on college campuses that don't have the luxury of having their own d.school?
And so they created this amazing fellowship program where students apply from universities all around the world with faculty sponsorship. The idea is that they spend time at the d.school—they used to do it in person, but they're now finding ways to design it remotely—and they come and they get some exposure to the work that we do and the practices and the ways of thinking and the mindsets, and then they go back to their university campuses and they apply it towards a social innovation challenge there, or a leadership challenge or a student challenge, so steeped in real-world humans that are trying to create new value in their local places of their campuses.
And the impact has been just extraordinary, and I think that they have researched it and they've written a book about it. So I love that model, because we're scaling communities of practice, both in a kind of thoughtful, high-touch way, though I don't think they were ever an algorithmic substitute for observation and empathy, and thank God, right? Because there's always a need for these kinds of human skills; you need to have a high touch and the d.school is not the only one doing it. I think that, again, we can, we can look to a lot of different industries that know how to do that well, particularly in the care-taking space and even in the, in the teaching space. And then we can sort of allow for networks to share and spread that with their local communities in that way.
So I think that is certainly a way to continue to grow. Now, listen, it's not the exponential scale that we're used to doing when we ship software, but humans are not software, right? And I think this is one of the biggest tensions that I think all human capacity supporters, learners, people analytics need to contend with—that the learning that we're talking about, the learning of mindsets and the learning of these very human practices can be ignited in a short timeframe, you can get exposed to it. You can have the life, but they develop over a long timeframe, right?
So I always say like learning sits within many tensions right now. Learning is fast, right: we can Google something, we get the answer bubble, but learning this kind of learning is slow; we don't become resilient in an hour. We become resilient because we intentionally practice resilient in different forms. And, and so I think we just need to honor some of the constraints of that if we really want to build these skills for a lifetime, we have to honor that scaling bit. They take a little bit longer, but doesn't mean it's not possible.
Stacia Garr:
Wonderful. Lisa, thank you. This has been as engaging as we hoped even more so. And I think your thoughts on how we take these somewhat seemingly nebulous concepts and make them concrete has been incredibly valuable. So, thank you!
Lisa Kay Solomon:
Thank you. So fun. I mean, yeah, lots of learning ahead.
Chris Pirie:
So much food for thought. Thank you—thanks, Lisa.
Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the red thread research podcast today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday. It's one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial HR and planning system for a changing world. Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information, and access exclusive content, at www.workday.com/skills.
Q&A Call: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging Technology
Posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2021 at 4:04 PM
Q&A Call Video
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Stacia Garr:
All right. So we're going to go ahead and get started. We did have a smaller acceptance for today. So maybe just be us, but that's great. So really for the sake of the recording, cause I know most of you here I'm Stacia Garr, I'm co-founder of RedThread Research were a human capital research advisory membership, and we focus on a range of things, including most relevant for today, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and HR technology. So what we're going to do today is to just give a few of the findings from the research, and then I'm going to let Priyanka do quite a bit of that. And then we're going to answer either the questions that you have here, or we also have a few questions that were submitted in advance. For folks who are maybe new to this conversation, this is a conversation. It is very informal. And the idea is really just to give a chance to to get your questions answered or to have a good discussion about this topic of DEIB technology. Okay. Priyanka, do you want to move on?
Defining DEIB
Priyanka:
Well, okay then I'll move ahead with just setting the stage up. So what I want you to do very quickly was just share a few definitions of how we define our concepts, these concepts of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. And I'll just give everybody about 20 seconds to read them because they're slightly longer for me to read them on for everybody. So if you want to just stick a second and then we'll move ahead with this.
DEIB became a bigger priority in 2020
Priyanka Mehrotra:
And moving on. So just setting the stage of why you're talking about DEIB this year, of course we know DEIB became a very crucial topic in 2020 for various reasons. COVID-19, BLM movement, social justice movements, natural disasters, everything just kind of made the DEIB so crucial in 2020, and we have this data here from Glassdoor, which showed us that there's been such an immense rise in DEIB job openings in summer 2020 and 250%. That's crazy. And we can see the lines moving right after social justice movement gained momentum in the summer of 2020. And as we can see, like in December 2020, it's just completely shot up higher than it had ever been before. So when you think about the role of DEIB tech, there are a few things why we think it's so crucial and what is it that it can actually do.
The role and types of DEIB Tech
Priyanka Mehrotra:
So a few things that we wanted to highlight, what is it that it can do for us? And it can uncover bias in policies, practices, and programs. It can help us identify gaps between goals and actions. It can make recommendations on what are the steps that leaders and organizations should do next, and it can analyze data and information for greater insights. So keeping these things in mind and looking at the technology that vendors are offering in this market, there were a few things that we noticed about the types of tech that we typically tend to see in the market. We decided we divided them into three types that we majorly see. We have the DEIB focused vendors where their primary business is focusing on DEIB. That's how they go to market. Then we see the DEIB feature venders their primary business might not be DEIB.
DEIB Tech market in 2021
Priyanka Mehrotra:
They might be going to market with something else, but they do have features and additional capabilities that directly address DEIB. And then we have the DEIB friendly vendors who maybe going through market for totally different reasons, such as the recruiting software, but they, for example, they might have artificial intelligence that can be used for DEIB purposes as well. So looking at the DEIB market in 2020, 2021, what are the major trends that we saw during our study, one we saw an overall growth in the market. We saw a major increase in HR tech vendors in general offering DEIB features that part of the solution. So the DEIB feature vendors that I just mentioned before. We saw a major increase in the number of vendors who are offering these capabilities as opposed to DEIB friendly or DEIB focused vendors.
Priyanka Mehrotra:
We saw greater focus on inclusion and the impact of AI on mitigating bias. So we've traditionally focused on diversity for so long, but inclusion really came into being in 2020 and 2021. Last, we saw evolution of emphasis from gender to race and ethnicity. So during hashtag me too movement, that was a lot of focus on gender. In 2020 we saw that shift towards race and ethnicity really come into its own. And people analytics for DEIB has arrived that's what we saw in a big way in our findings. And so I'm just going to touch on all these points at a very high level.
Stacia Garr:
Sorry. Do we want to ask if anybody has a high level question on any of those five before we dive in?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yes. Thank you Staica.
Speaker 1:
Not for me. Very straightforward.
A more steady evolution
Speaker 2:
Question Priyanka. So you say there was a shift from gender to ethnicity and race. You refer to the, me too, as a, as a, let's say a movement or a trend. We have the Black Lives Matter. Is, is this like really sensitive to societal evolutions? Is that what you see and might change again? I mean next year, if another topic comes on the political agenda or is it a more steady evolution?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think I would say it's been a more steady evolution. We definitely continue seeing gender as a very important part of what DEIB tech vendors are providing as part of their offerings. But we also started seeing some Venders include race and ethnicity as part of, for example, the service that they're providing for that customer. So race becomes a part of it and intersectionality became quite important and became quite common. We started to see more and more vendors offering that in the way that the customers can slice the data and see how they can create groups. So for example, I know Visier offers a cohort analysis in which you can create any type of groups, right. And you can create groups that have different attributes and you can compare them. So, so we started seeing more and more vendors really bringing those capabilities into their solutions. Stacia, did you want to add anything?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, so I think I mean gender has been a common focus largely because it's something that is you can focus on globally. There aren't as many differences in terms of what you can study or look at as race. I would say though that this, the movements of this summer, and I wouldn't call them political movements. I mean, I think they're very much social movements, at least in the United States. They were response to what was happening. That doesn't mean that there wasn't already, in there certainly is a deep problem that was existing. But I think, but it was a reaction. I will say though, and I've been kind of contemplating this and I don't have any data to prove it, but I, wonder if there was a greater willingness to focus on race, which has been a very difficult topic, certainly in the United States, a greater willingness to focus on it because it was immediately following the pandemic where we had kind of in, in some ways, softened ourselves up to say, we don't have all the answers and our executives, our leaders were saying we don't have all the answers.
Stacia Garr:
And they'd kind of gotten into a habit of, of saying that for three months. And then we have these massive protests in, in this movement. And so I think that there was just a greater willingness than we've ever seen for people to say, Hey, you know, maybe what we thought was happening, wasn't happening, maybe what we thought, you know, that we were more inclusive and yet it seems like maybe we weren't. And so I think there was that greater openness, but I think, you know, your, your question Speaker 2 kind of says, okay, well you, if we focus on race and ethnicity here in 2020 and 2021 and maybe 2022, is there going to be something else in 2023? I mean, I think potentially, but I think that that opening of the aperture to focus on more diverse groups and folks who haven't had that spotlight, if you will, on their experience is probably a good thing. I think we're going to see in general, more of that opening of the aperture.
Regulation
Speaker 1:
And actually on that topic. Can I ask a quick question in terms of the role that you see regulation playing in this, obviously in the UK with gender pay gap reporting, obviously, you know, drives a requirement and adoption and awareness in the market. We're starting to see, you know, the emergence of regulation taking place in some markets, but specifically in the US do you guys have a particular view on the likelihood of the emergence and proliferation of regulation?
Stacia Garr:
I would say don't have a particular point of view. I may think that we're, we have seen regulation in general it has, we have seen movement. So I think that, you know, that there's one aspect of it that can certainly be positive. Obviously though, you know, regulation can be a very heavy instrument to use for some of this. So I don't know that I have a particularly strong perspective. But I do think that the, the opposite in the regulation or, or, you know, fear of legal repercussions has had a chilling effect for decades on this space. And so I think that there's a way to think about that, that kind of cuts that way, too, in terms of, you know, how could we actually be encouraging these behaviors in a way that isn't, what's the carrot in this, as opposed to just the stick. But all that said, I think that a lot of this is just, is being driven by employees and, and by customer demand, you know, you look at Edelman Trust Barometer, and what they say in terms of what they expect of leaders to do. And, you know, they say, I think it's 67% of America, or maybe I think actually it's 72% of Americans expect their CEOs to take action on societal issues, particularly related to diversity. So I think that that represents just a bigger shift in, in the society.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. And actually you touched upon something which is going to be a follow-up question, which is really about the complexities of the US legal system, about a liability, once you identify a problem, and that is a hurdle or an obstacle to organizations wanting to better understand where they may have bias, let's describe it as that and the risk that, that creates legally around exposure and liability. I didn't know if you guys have a view on that, is that, that as a, stifling factor and adoption.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, we do. And I'm going to let Speaker 3 go though, because I know he also a strong perspective here
Speaker 3:
I have a perspective, which is sort of changing the piece, which is around what you're suggesting Speaker 1, which is the SEC disclosure regulation change. The SEC disclosure regulation change means that a investor could sue a company if there is any material loss due to some kind of harassment social injustice element coming out. So, you know, we find out that X, Y, Z company has been underrepresenting or underpaying or in any way, shape or form disadvantages, a group their share price goes down. If an investor holds that and that, that hasn't been disclosed, that hasn't been kind of presented, then they can potentially say, you should have known this was a material problem. You didn't, you didn't disclose it. I'm going to sue you for nondisclosure. It hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 1:
It's almost like double stick. Then there's a stick waiting for you. If you identify a problem, there's a stick waiting for your, you died.
Speaker 3:
Yes. Yeah. And people are working at which side of that. They want to be on. It's a good thing.
Speaker 1:
The biggest stick. Okay. Thank you, Speaker 3. I appreciate it.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And then I think the other component of this is folks are weighing the reputational risk with the legal risk. So kind of beyond the risks that Speaker 4 was talking about, but, you know, there's so many organizations who have just been on the wrong side of it because consumers are now taking action. You know, we're, we're seeing broader social action against organizations who are not responding to this. So I, you know, I've been, I feel like I've been saying this for a few years, but I feel like there's almost a grace period right now in the eyes of the consumer where it's like, okay, you know, tech's probably not going to have a great balance of men and women. Right. Okay. Like, let's acknowledge that, but let's do something about it. And I mean, my guess is that if in five years, if we haven't done something about it, consumers will hold companies to much greater account. Whereas right now it's kind of an acknowledged reality that I think that maybe the consumer will be, or customer will be a little bit less likely to hold people account for it, if there's action.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Thank you.
Stacia Garr:
All right. Priyanka you want to keep going?
A growing market
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah. Okay. So real quick, we can touch upon all these key findings that we have here? So a growing market, we saw the overall market size grow to over 300 million since 2019, the total number of vendors went up 296 from 106 that we had identified in 2019. Similarly, the compound growth rate grew by almost 60% since 2019. So a significant growth definitely more solutions with DEIB features.
Priyanka Mehrotra:
So like I mentioned, we saw more and more technology, HR tech vendors who had not traditionally been in the space or had been going to market with a different value proposition, adding DEIB features or capabilities to them. So we saw an increase of 10% of DEIB features, right? As DEIB friendly venders, we saw a decrease of almost 9% and similarly DEIB focused vendors, we saw barely a growth of 1%. So definitely there's, there's a shift in mindset of a lot of vendors who traditionally have not had not been thinking about DEIB in a very specific manner, but adding now DEIB specific feature capabilities and going to customers to allow them to meet these needs and challenges.
Priyanka Mehrotra:
So another key finding of course, was the growth the shift in focus towards inclusion. So in 2019, we know intrusion was still a priority for leaders, but very few were actually measuring it. And now as a researcher, I, when I looked back at the Sylvia, I wish that we had asked people how they were actually measuring inclusion, because I'm really curious to find that out, but it's still great to know that it used, the inclusion is the top measure of success. When we asked vendors how customers measure their success from, from using the solution they said that the increase in inclusion is the top measure. And this has gone from being fourth in rank in 2019. So that's, that's a significant shift that you're seeing.
People Analytics for DEIB has arrived
Priyanka Mehrotra:
The next key finding was of course, my favorite one, which is people analytics for DEIB has arrived. You know, we've been talking about analytics for DEIB for such a long time, and it was great to see an increase of almost 20% which as a, as a primary challenge in vendor, among vendors, who we're looking to solve DEIB related challenges to analytics for their customers. Again, I think this is a very significant finding. We saw a number of analytics, people, analytics vendors who have added DEIB features and capabilities. It goes back to our point of seeing a rise in the DEIB feature venders. So really coming into this field of providing analytics and using that for, for DEIB challenges. So with that, we've covered the key findings and we'll move on to the questions. Stacia, Ready?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, let's do it.
What should users consider before buying new DEIB Tech?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
All right. So the first question we received was what should users consider before buying new DEIB tech?
Stacia Garr:
I think it's like any other tech, right? So, what is your overall goal that you're trying to achieve? What's your overall strategy, that you're working towards and, where does the technology potentially fit within it and how does it reinforce and enable other practices? So, you know, I think that is, that is always question number one. Question number two is around, I think the level of expertise of the vendor instead of supporting this type of work. So there are some vendors who've been focused on DEIB for a long time and can help guide folks through some of the legal intricacies. Like we just discussed in some other aspects. There's some who are relatively new to this and, and, you know, innovation is always welcome. But, but that may be what you're getting more than kind of the expertise.
Stacia Garr:
And so we think there needs to be a match between what the organization needs and the support it needs and what the vendor is able to provide. And then I think, you know, third is always kind of where what's the match between the vendor themselves and in the organization. He knows some organizations are smaller and, and thus, you know, maybe more nimble, other organizations are larger and perhaps it better able to scale. So again, what are your organization's needs? And what's the ability to absorb that type of culture and, really status of the vendor. So those would be my top three.
Benefits & risk of DEIB Tech
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah. And I would add to it. So a few things that we had highlighted in our report is as with any technology, you really have to understand what are some of the benefits of using it, but also some at the same time, what are the risks that come with it? And of course DEIB technology being, being in the space that it plays, and it's really, really important that users before they adopt it, understand some of the benefits of doing that. So just at a very high level, just going through some of the benefits that we see of using DEIB technologies, of course, providing equal opportunities for everybody raising awareness and real time, enabling individual actions, as well as on a broader level, providing insights in critical decision-making moments, creating more consistent processes, measuring and monitoring impacts of efforts to analytics, of course, and signaling importance as well as building trust and confidence.
Priyanka:
So those are things, of course they're not exhaustive, but some of the really important benefits that somebody can reap out of DEIB technology provided it's done correctly and applied in a thoughtful manner. And of course, these come with their own sets of risks, such as legal and reputational risks, like Stacia talked about being seen bias and data. And now of course, people who create those technologies, the biases can creep in from that as well. They maybe don't end up being excused themselves. It may also lead to big brother fears, unintended consequences may in fact, end up damaging employee trust and creating a disconnect between people and processes. And again, similar to benefits, of course, that are additional risks, then I'm sure we haven't listed here, but just some key things to keep in mind before looking at purchasing such tech.
Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think Stacia already covered this, like really being thoughtful about where you are in your journey. What is your level of understanding of the DEIB issues? What are the specific goals that you're wanting to solve for and how much support will you need from the vendors similar to what Stacia said, whether it's big enough to support your organization needs, do you have international headquarters? Will they be able to provide you support at all hours of the day? So all those things, I just think that to keep in mind when going to the market, and of course, another thing that we really want to highlight is auditing in-house techs or a lot of companies, or a lot of vendors may already have DEIB tech features and capabilities like we mentioned, and your customers may be using them for something totally different. So for example, Workday and SAP, need to be that we piloted all have recently introduced really crucial DEIB features that people, the customers who are already leveraging these technologies for some other purpose, might be able to use for DEIB as well.
Speaker 1:
Well, ask a related question. And it's more about, you know, corporate adoption and who's championing adoption of those technologies within the organizations. So, you know, if you think about the range of DEIB technologies, whether it's a pay equity solution or whether it's a solution that deals with using AI to remove unconscious bias from, you know, the, the talent acquisition process, you know, it can obviously serve specific functions within HR broadly, right? So, you know, you could be serving a solution that takes out bias in the recruitment process to someone in the talent team, you know, pay equity could go to a reward specialist then obviously separately, you've got DNI specialists now come into organizations where we look, when we look at where organizations have truly champion and adopted these technologies, what's that pattern look like? Is it very fragmented based upon, you know, kind of specific functional focus or is it, HR departments taking a more broad view of how these technologies knit together to solve a problem? Does anyone have a view on that?
Stacia Garr:
I'll jump in and then I'd love to hear other folks' perspective as well, but in general, right now, it's still pretty highly fragmented. I would say generally speaking, the exception to that is when you have a CEO who, or, you know, C suite executive, who's very strongly driving this. And then in that instance, you may have, you know a DEIB council or some sort of centralized group, you know, basically often a kind of a tiger team that's been tasked with figuring out how do we solve this problem and what are the, all the different ways that we could approach it. So when that happens and that's when we'll just tend to see a centralized approach, but otherwise right now it does often tend to be, to be centralized. Priyanka and I actually next week are kicking off a report on DEIB and analytics.
Stacia Garr:
And, and one of our key questions there is kind of what does that partnership look like and who should be driving? What part of that focus, because, you know, there certainly is an onus on whoever's leading DEIB, but a lot of times they're just not in the, in the depth, in the weeds enough to kind of know where this tech sits, what it could do and how it could tie back. So I think that there really is a good question around ownership that that needs to be solved, but to your, to your direct questions cut. I think that it, it depends, but is mostly fragmented.
Speaker 1:
Do you know, what's really interesting about that. Of course, it's really about where the money is in the organization. So I asked the question because, you know, we ask ours have you know, an excellent DNI specialist. That's really helping drive awareness and a change in our practices across the organization. But, you know, she doesn't have much budget, right. Yet we've got large talent teams that do hold large budgets because they're out there working with recruiters. And, you know, so it's also about finding where the dollars are to support these initiatives within organizations. And I think that is also fragmented as well, right?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, it is. Now I think the thing that's interesting is I think that there can be almost a immediate reaction to say, well, we should have kind of some centralized group that's driving this because that would create greater order, et cetera. But, you know, diversity is one of those things where, you know, if not everyone in the organization is participating where everyone is a part of the solution, you know, then, then it's not going to work. So that centralized model that we use in so many other things, I think doesn't necessarily work. So I think that part of the question is, is how do we heighten the overall awareness? So that the talent leaders who do own that budget are saying, Hey, wait, we have a role here. What could we be doing? And taking a lead, what do others think?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Well, what I see here in the Benelux is that if it's centralized and it's because there's a clear nonfinancial risks for the company. So if the CEO or there's executive takes ownership or wants to be a sponsor, then it's because there's a real threat because there's value in it. And it's like Priyanka said, you know, in five years customers will hold companies accountable for that. And I see in some industries, companies moving faster, banks, I serve a lot of banks. They for instance, are very much aware of their nonfinancial risks and their reputation also due to the financial crisis, etc. So they're sort of heading that movement now quite unexpectedly, I would say. But it really depends on, I think the value they can see from it or the risks they see from not doing it.
Speaker 2:
And then whenever it becomes relevant, then all of a sudden it does get on the agenda of everyone. If I talk with, with companies about, you know, HR and a big serving, all of a sudden in every company, we get the DNI responsible on the table. All of a sudden this is a person with teeth, whereas before it was a person with posters, let's say, now it's become a person on your team. It's like the data protection officer, the DNI person. Yeah. It gets more and more powered.
Stacia Garr:
Think I might borrow that from posters to teeth.
Speaker 4:
I love that.
Stacia Garr:
Speaker 4, you're going to add something.
Speaker 4:
I love Speaker 1's questions. I think it's quite, it's quite fascinating and sharing something that we were seeing we're in the analytics space. So there's some element of centralized understanding of opportunities, scale challenge. So we have a lot of people, people like leaders working with the DEI leaders that kind of go, well, where are we? What do we need to do? What are the opportunities? And then one of the big things they're looking at is like, what can the CEO say as a forward looking statement, as somewhere we're going to try and hit. So you need analytics, horsepower, you need DEI sponsorship, you need the executive, but to your point, Speaker 1, that the DEI lead doesn't have the money to go and buy a technology that will help tell an acquisition.
Speaker 4:
They kind of need brought into the conversation to say, you know, our funnel is actually our biggest problem, or our attention is our biggest problem. Like the, the analytics is kind of at the hub of that, which problem piece of the problem space to be solved first, but DNI doesn't have the budget without analytics. People are often, you know, fixing different pieces of the bus with different technologies because they're trying to help.
Speaker 1:
And you know what, that's a really interesting point. Now, I, you know, this, this is almost like a, you know, you know, when you get told in school, there's no dumb question, but you know, that there really is. I worry that this is one of those. And I just, whenever I think about this topic, I think about cause and effect, and I think, you know, from what I've encountered, there's lots of solutions that are looking at analyzing the effect, but it's really about how do you then tackle the cause. And actually when you start,
Speaker 1:
And obviously that's a very complex answer because there's, it's multi-dimensional, but, and so of course you, there isn't one solution that helps you to drive that change. It's about culture is about process, about lots of different things. So, you know, the reality is you will probably string together a number of solutions that will help you tackle cores. But again, how do you knit those together? How do you measure the extent of that response as being effective or not effective? And so I just, you know, to me that that's an open area or an open question of how do we tie cause and effect together and how do we help organizations understand that better?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I don't think that's a silly question at all. I think, you know that's kinda the question at the, at the heart of all of this, you know when, before anyone implements one of these solutions, you know, one of the things that I talked to them about is, you know, what's success look like? You know, what's the needle you're trying to move. So is it, is it different behaviors? Is it actually representation? I actually tried to discourage the latter because it just takes so long to measure. You know, ultimately of course, that's, that's what most are focused on and hoping for, but but being, you know, clear what, what those measures are, and then you know, to the extent that you can being scientific about it. So, you know, adjusting the job descriptions. Let's say somebody wants to use tech steel or something like that.
Stacia Garr:
You know, do we see any meaningful impact on, on just, you know, the, the number of applicants? Okay, well, let's do it. That's kind of one thing that we, we can measure you know, then interviews, lights, you know, making sure that we have diverse candidates on there as well as diverse interviewers now. Okay. Measuring those behaviors, does that result in any, you know, higher percentage of, of hires, of diverse backgrounds, ect. So I think, you know, being purposeful about the way that you're approaching it, and then being very clear on, on the behavior or the kind of intermediary outcome that you are trying to drive long before you get to representation. I think that can be, can be helpful in understanding that cause and effect much better. But I think, you know, like so many of the things that we do in the analytics space, it's basically a series of ongoing experiments that we're running and trying to see which things are, are impacting what, and then continuing to stick with those things. Once we find some areas of success. But they're great questions, Speaker 1.
Stacia Garr:
Anybody else have questions? I know we've got some other folks on the line who haven't spoken up, want to make sure we give you an opportunity or you can put things in chat too, if you are in a non-talking mood or you know, for whatever reason. All right Priyanka. Why don't we move on? What other questions did we get?
How can analytics be leveraged as part of DEIB Tech?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, so I was going to say it almost sounded like a perfect segue to our next question, which is about leveraging analytics as part of DEIB teck and how that can be done.
Stacia Garr:
Oh, well, I feel like I've kind of gave an answer just now. So I'd love to hear, I mean, we've got a couple of folks from analytics vendors on here. So maybe I'd love to hear a little bit of your guys's you know, quick view of how you've seen folks leveraging analytics and most effectively. So Speaker 3, do you want to maybe lead off?
Speaker 3:
I am on mute. My, my little microphone button was not paying attention to me. The thing that we've seen kind of consistently is that that analytics has driven the strategy. Just to share a story of a large food manufacturer you work with. They'd had a diversity program underway on the hiring side of things for a really long time, but their representation wasn't moving. And it was when they engage with the analytics team. They're like, well, that's because we're hiring people and they're leaving as fast. And then they dug underneath the data to find out as a, why are people leaving so fast? I mean, I've had like an, a subsequent question around the tech. I see a lot of focus going into, Oh, diversity is a problem. We just gotta hire differently. It will be fine, which I think is a natural instinctive reaction.
Speaker 3:
I also don't think it works. So I always think of an organization as an ecosystem. One thing that's true about ecosystem, there are new levers, there are shapes and influences. So the analytics helps by understanding if I move this, what else moves? It's not, I'll move this and only this, cause it's not an engine, it's an ecosystem. If I move this, what else moves do I end up with more exits? Do I end up with mobility? And so, you know, I think the analytics helps by really understanding where are the two or three places to Speaker 1's point? Like where do you put the technology and the dollars to actually move the needle? And that's, that's what we're seeing. And again, we've got a number of customer stories that are, they're doing some good stuff on that. That's, that's our perspective.
Stacia Garr:
Thanks Speaker 3. Anyone else have any other any other thoughts they want to share?
Speaker 4:
Hi, this is Speaker 4. Just a quick question, I guess, to the group. I recently read a report that I thought was really interesting. I've had a lot of conversations with clients about diversity equity inclusion, and oftentimes it's focused on hiring, Oh, we just need to hire more people. And that's probably the hardest way to move the needle. And recently saw a report that talks about internal labor market analysis. So to your point, Ian, looking at the impact that you will have from all three things, so hiring promotion and then, you know, retaining folks as well. Just curious if that's been a part of the conversation. So first doing the analysis of are you hemorrhaging people, are you promoting people and what's the effect there, and then also the impact of hiring so that companies are looking at it across the board, as they seek to have a more diversified workforce, how they're actually going to accomplish that. I feel like technology allows, you know, more companies to kind of pinpoint on each one of those things. And trust me, I understand that within my work, that information lives in four to five different systems. And that's usually the problem that none of these systems talk to each other. But just curious to hear from you all, if, if you've seen that come up now more than often than before?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I'll take a first whack and then let others jump in. So I think so as Priyanka had mentioned a little bit ago, the top success measure that we're hearing folks hold vendors accountable to now is inclusion. Whereas two years ago it was the hiring to the diversity of the talent pipeline. And I think that that's a, a reflection, two things. So one is to your point, that recognition and Speaker 3's point as well, that you can't only hire your way out of this problem. You have to actually be able to retain people. And, and that means that you need to be focusing on inclusion. The second thing is I think that with everything that happened in 2020, one, we saw a lot of organizations obviously pull back on hiring. And so it wouldn't have made sense for hiring to be in the pipeline to be the metric that folks were focusing on.
Stacia Garr:
And then too, with the social justice movements, I think the awareness that inclusion was not working for everyone in the way that maybe people thought it was a heightened people's awareness that they needed to be focusing on inclusion. So I think that we're seeing that shift. The question is though, and Priyanka also mentioned this, is how do you measure inclusion? You know, you mentioned internal talent markets, is…you know, people's or access to some of those opportunities and their ability to move within an organization, a measure of inclusion, potentially. You know, there is people's perception of their inclusion as measured by and engaged, you know, maybe on an engagement store or dedicated inclusion and belonging study. Yes. You know, so, I think that right now there's this grand exploration of all the different ways we might measure inclusion and think about holding ourselves accountable for it. And there's certainly no one definition of what it is, but there is a heightened awareness over two years ago, for sure that we need to be focused there. How about others?
Speaker 4:
It's a really interesting perspective because I do, I definitely agree, but working with clients, I'm hearing them talk about inclusion from the perspective of what's happening within our organization and less so as they're thinking about talent acquisition. And so trying to understand how we move the needle to get clients, to think about this from a technology standpoint, from an analytics, because I feel like that's the most positive impact that we can have. To say it's not necessarily for them, it still isn't necessarily about inclusion. It's how does the diversity landscape within the organization, how does our diverse workforce mean that we're actually hitting a marker? So for example, let's say that Dell has a 2030 initiative where they want to hire 40%. They want their workforce to be 40% women in senior leadership. That's still the kind of data points that you're seeing out in the sphere.
Speaker 4:
And so while they're having conversations about inclusion from a workforce perspective, there is still this idea of how do we diversify our workforce. And I feel like, yes, it's hiring, but it's also promotion. And it's also, what's the experience that's happening within your organization. So people aren't leaving because what I'm also hearing from a lot of clients is that their diverse workforce is leaving in droves. And as they are going through the talent acquisition process, they're having more diverse candidates decide to not move forward with the process. So in one case, a client said it's now 50% of their diverse candidates that are declining an offer at that stage.
Speaker 4:
I feel like the analytics is a part of it because I feel like there is a piece of not understanding what's happening in your organization. That then feeds the top of the funnel. Because if you understand how things aren't working for your people, then the way that you're talking to new audiences and how you're adjusting the culture of your organization, not just from a diversity perspective, but the entire culture then begins to shift and I'll get off my soap box.
Stacia Garr:
It's great. It's great. Yeah. I mean, I think that for the most progressive organizations from a DEI perspective I think they've figured this out. So in my head I'm thinking of like a General Mills, right? Like General Mills is kind of an, it isn't a non traditionally diverse location. But they've been focused on diversity for years and years and years. And it is part of their conversation when they're having people go through the interview process and then when they're onboarding new candidates, it's just kind of in, in the water, if you will. And so, you know, the folks like, General Mills understand this connection. I think that you're talking about, you know, we actually have to have an inclusive environment and we have to go talk about it to our candidates.
Stacia Garr:
And that has to be part of why they may want to join. I think, you know they are definitely in kind of the top level of maturity when it comes to this. And so I think that we're starting to see an awareness as I said, of, of the importance of inclusion broadly, I think that we're probably talking about the top 20%, 25% who are making that connection between, okay, we actually now have a much more inclusive culture. We at least can talk about inclusion in our culture in a meaningful way and tie that back to talent acquisition. So that would be my observation is, you know, we're still talking about probably 75% of companies who are not doing it, what do others think or have seen.
Speaker 4:
I have a couple of stories from clients are doing exactly what Speaker 4 is talking about. Again, it was driven by the same notion that Dell is putting out a number that, you know, they're making a public statement to Speaker 1's point around what's different now is that people are having to be transparent about their progress and then sort of validated on that progress. So, you know, the driver was, if we're going to put out a number, how do we know we're going to get there? So they looked at the internal path. They recognized that their representation overall was good, but it was not at managing, you know, supervisor managerial director levels. And so the very first decision they took was actually to change the opportunity for progress inside the business, before they look to do anything external, they recognize that if people coming in we're not seeing team lead supervisors that represented them, that was not likely to be a successful strategy. So they've actually chosen to change. And this is, this was three different organizations I talked to, they, they all focused on that internal mobility aspect first because they saw what was going on in their data. So I actually think there's, you know, potentially a very, very interesting study on like, how do you move the needle?
Stacia Garr:
That'll be after DEIB and analytics. Does anybody else have any questions on this one?
Speaker 5:
I do have a question around, have you done any work on sort of mapping the maturity of organizations, so on the client side, in terms of where they are on that journey and does it influence the type of vendors they're choosing, whether it's those that have got kind of completely focused on DEIB or those that have just got their established elsewhere in their organization, but have features and functionality?
Stacia Garr:
Hmm, that's a great question. We have not, when I was at Berson, I ran a big study on DNI maturity when we did a big maturity model. And did all of the things that you're supposed to do in terms of, you know, testing the impact on financial results in the like. What was kind of interesting at that time though, was that actually was the beginning of my interest in DNI tech, because when I asked people what tech they were using, they're like do you mean e-learning, it's like, no, that's not what I'm talking about. But so at that point, we certainly didn't see it. And I haven't run another maturity study to look at this, but I would say that, and this is just completely off the cuff. So excuse me, be the messiness of the thoughts, but I think that when we first see organizations looking into this, it's often a point solution.
Stacia Garr:
So, for instance, Textio is a, is a good example because it's a very clear use case. It's clear who the owner is. It's a, you know, a recruiter, a talent acquisition organization. Okay. We're going to fix our job descriptions. Okay, this is something we can pretty easily get our head around it's well scoped, etc. I would say that organizations who are newer to this space are more likely to buy something like that because it's very clear and the business case is clear. I think that the more sophisticated organizations, they're probably using that, and they're also, you know, looking at the more sophisticated beginning their, their analytics journey. So they may be looking at some of the more sophisticated analytics tools, like, like a Visier. But you know, they may not be doing some of the more sophisticated analytics.
Stacia Garr:
I think that then assuming that they've been able to use that technology to identify where their real challenges are, then we'll start to see kind of a more nuanced and sophisticated buyer of some of the other technologies. So they might be looking at you know, some things like organizational network analysis. So how are, you know, different populations connected within the organization, and how does that reflect inclusion? So you can kind of see how they would build in terms of their understanding and their willingness to go into some of the more nuanced aspects of the tech and what it can do. That's again, just kind of off the cuff of my thinking on what we would see. But I'm certainly curious to hear what others would think.
Priyanka Mehrotra:
I think maybe I can just add something to that point, is that one of the questions that we did ask in our survey of the vendors was, what is your customer organization size. And what we typically have tended to see, I don't have the numbers here, but I can share it with you later, is that more majority of our vendors reported customers who were smaller, had small number of employees. So under a thousand, I wanna say, so it doesn't necessarily reflect the majority, but of course, I think what it does show is maybe that smaller organizations are more open and willing to try these technologies for DEIB purposes than maybe more established and enterprise size organizations. So that might be something helpful.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. But I think what's interesting about that. Priyanka is, is we saw an increase in what was it, the organizations that were five to 10,000 over a couple of years ago. And so I think that we're seeing an increase, in certainly size and I think that it reflects the maturity of the solutions and probably a maturity of some of these organizations as well.
Speaker 1:
Would you mind if I ask a related question? Obviously sitting here in the UK I have a little bit of a sort of restricted view generally from effort by country, you know, what are the markets that really adopting this? I get a sense. So US are significant adopters, as well as the UK. Are there other hotspots around the globe where certain markets are really gravitating towards deploying these types of technologies?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah. So I definitely say Canada Australia, New Zealand as well I would say Northern Europe. So Speaker 2 was here from, from Benelux. We're seeing, focus there. I'm just trying to think here.
Speaker 1:
That's a fairly typical pattern actually, isn't it. When we think about technology adoption, Scandinavian countries, Benelux countries, UK, US, and Australia is fairly typical. Okay, thank you.
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I will say though, when we did a DEIB strategy report in one thing I was surprised in that research was the extent to which some Asian countries have been focused here. So you know, that is an area where I think that there is potential to their concerns are different. But there was more traction there than I would've guessed. Just kind of thinking about it without having done the research.
Stacia Garr:
I see, we've got just a couple of couple minutes left. Any other questions on this one? And Priyanka, do we have another question?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, actually we did receive an interesting one. This is the final one.
Stacia Garr:
Okay.
Stand alone solution vs add-on to an existing HR Tech platform?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
So is it better to integrate a standalone solution with others, such as learning, ATS, etc. or find an add-on to an existing HR tech platform?
Stacia Garr:
We had the answer to this one. We could just call it a day and be all good.
Priyanka Mehrotra:
My instinct as a researcher is to say it depends.
Stacia Garr:
Yup. I agree. So do you want to give your thoughts Priyanka and then I can add on?
Priyanka Mehrotra:
Yeah, I think like touching on what I had said earlier, you know, you already may have DEIB technology in solutions that you're using for something else. So it very well depends on what your use cases, what are the challenges that you're specifically looking to solve for? And what technologies already exist in your ecosystem. So if you're a Workday user, you already have that in your organization, it probably makes sense to go ahead and use their DEIB features and capabilities similarly with ADP. So I think versus like, if you have something very specific, it was just like, we've been talking more Texio for a bit. If that's something that you need to add to your recruiting efforts, then you need to look at a point solution that meets those very, very specific niche needs that your organization might have. What do you think Stacia?
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think it just depends on where you are. And the other thing is you also may try something and find that it doesn't work. You know, you may try the, the Workday solution and find that that's not meeting your needs, and then you go and you find something else. So I think it just kinda depends on what those needs are and what you have available and the extent to which it meets,
Speaker 2:
If I may, I don't know how the situation is west, but here it looks, we don't even document more than gender. So I have these organizations now asking whether we can map, you know, all the different dimensions, necessity, sexual orientation, religion, etc., outside of an HCM, also due to GDPR issues. Because in the existing solutions, the best you get is a binary gender indication, even just binary. So there is nothing about the gender spectrum or whatever. So there is clearly a need, but I see organizations really being puzzled with finding solutions on how to satisfy the needs, because they were assuming that they had the data, but actually they don't
Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I think what we tend to see here in the US is, is folks asking for voluntarily, and if it's voluntarily given, then then being able to include it. But to be honest, I think that this is an area I need to understand more for, for GDPR, because I don't actually, I mean, to me, my gut, when I hear about mapping outside of the HRS, it's like, Ooh, I'm not sure, but I think that that is completely rooted in gut. Does anybody else know kind of about the legal implications of that?
Speaker 4:
Wherever you're, if you're holding it, you're holding it. It's like, if you're the owner, you're the owner a hundred GDPR, that's more a case of what's your standing relative to the data. So if, if you can't, you'd have to, yeah. You can't really hand off that to a third party and say like, Oh, we're no longer the owner that third party is acting as an owner for you. You would, you would have to, like, I don't really see loopholes in terms of a business not being designated the owner of that data, if it's about their people. What I have seen some people do is try and do aggregation. So it's not a record on the employee. It's a, it's a extrapolation from the data. So we get a percentage, female, a percentage of race, but I'm not putting female against this specific employee. So I'm not, it's not on the person, therefore you're not got that same level of liability for it. But it's awkward. It's just awkward. And then typically your right Speaker 2, typically in Europe they don't track race and ethnicity for many, many strong reasons, which is different in the US. In the US you have to categorize somebody into five different standardized buckets of, of race for EOC reporting. So there's actually really different reporting frameworks in both places.
Stacia Garr:
Cool. Well, I see we are at time. So I want to just say thank you all for a robust discussion. Really appreciate everybody's participation and thoughts, and obviously, you know, this is area, that we're continuing to research and to work on. And so, you know, if you have other areas of interest or things that you think, Hey, this is something that, that is really I'm hearing a lot from my clients or my customers, or whereas just top of mind for us as an organization we definitely would love to hear about it. So you can drop me an emali at [email protected] or Priyanka, just Priyanka at the same place, or if you can't remember either of those [email protected]. And and we would love to hear from you. So with that gonna say, thank you so much. And until the next time that we all come together, we hope that you do well and stay safe.