Events

Q&A Call Video

Transcript

Introduction/What Are You Seeing?

Dani Johnson (00:00):

Okay. So I think we're recording. Let's just check that really fast. Yeah. Okay, great. Great. So we got that whole conversation right there on tape, I think it'll be riveting for those listening later. But welcome to our last Q and A call of the year where we're going to be talking about 2021 trends. Some of the things that we've seen this year, and some of the things that we have a really good feeling are going to drip over into next year. And I'm here with Stacia Garr we're co-founders and principal analyst of RedThread Research. And I have a dog barking under my desk. So if you hear it, that's what that is just a brief introduction to RedThread. If you're not familiar with us, we are a human capital research membership firm, and we focus on things like learning and career and performance and people analytics, diversity and inclusion has been big for us this year. And all of the technology associated with any of those things. We also cover pretty in depth. Especially this time of year, we get a lot of, we get a lot of pieces out on learning technology.

Stacia Garr (01:07):

Yep. And just to put a finer point on that. So we just launched the formal membership here in December for folks who don't know there's still quite a lot of content available for, for those who are maybe not quite yet ready to become a member. But the idea is, is to kind of formalize the membership and also allow us to do research that's not sponsored. So it's gonna allow us to expand the breadth and the type of research that we do here in 2021.

Dani Johnson (01:39):

Awesome. So today we're going to talk about 2021 trends. We're going to want to start with a question for those of you who are out there. We obviously don't know everything and we say that regularly. We would love to understand what you're saying, what you think trends will be in the upcoming year. So you can either use the chat we're big on chat for introverts, but also if you have, if you just, we've given everybody permission to talk. So let's just have a conversation about some of the trends that we're seeing out there.

Speaker 1 (02:19):

This is Speaker 1. My favorite topics are the digital learning, of course. So if everything's online, if everyone's working from home, if everyone is now needing to be sort of working remotely and independently you know, that affects the tools and technologies that affects performance and goals. What skills and strengths do you need now compared to before? So much of that just goes under, you know, the large heading of digital. And then also like you mentioned, the I liked how you included the phrase belonging in your diversity and inclusion, and so kind of that engagement piece. So, you know, how do people connect in 2021 when you're digital?

Stacia Garr (03:17):

Great. Yeah, and we we actually had a big debate about that internally because we were, you know, the move seems to be to DEI diversity, equity and inclusion. And, you know, I think that belonging piece is really important and we're like, well, it's, you know, four letter for four words, is that too much for an acronym? And we just said, you know what, we're just gonna, it's, it's everything. So we're, we're doing all four.

Dani Johnson (03:43):

I think you hit on a couple of really good ones, Jackie, and some of the things that we're seeing, so learning obviously is expanding quite a bit. And then, and then obviously the diversity and inclusion we've seen sort of ramp this year as well. What are others seeing?

Speaker 2 (04:06):

Hi, this is Speaker 2. Can you hear me? So I knew you know, at my organization, a lot of our current work is really focused on on skills and just, you know, kind of individualizing learning experiences for people so that they are able to improve specific skills that they want in relation to their job or future roles. So that that's something that, you know, I foresee us being focused on next year is personalization. And then how do we help people acquire new skills, right. That they're gonna need and kind of keep up with the evolving change of, of, of their roles within the organization.

Dani Johnson (05:08):

Yeah, I think you're right. So I think we've seen that discussion go on for a while now. And I think we're at the point where it's actually gonna do some good, this whole idea of skills. One more, one more comment before we move on in chat says continuing performance management, and what skills of the future look like, how they'll evolve and how do we prepare people for them. So kind of along with what's he saying skills. Anything else before we move on?

The 10 Big Trends

Trend 1: DEIB Critical To All People Practices

Dani Johnson (05:44):

All right. So Stacia and I recently put together our research roadmap for the coming year, and we're seeing basically 10 big trends and they've kind of fall in buckets. So we want to talk through these trends very quickly before we get to the questions, we had a lot of really good questions that were submitted this time. So the first one that we're seeing is DEIB be critical to all people practices. And I'm going to actually let Stacia talk about that one first.

Stacia Garr (06:09):

Yeah. So I think for those of you, who've seen research that I've done in the past on DEIB our recent strategy report that just came out a couple of weeks ago, the integration of DEIB into everything else that we do is something that we've been talking about for a long time, but it feels like now we're seeing that catch up everywhere else. Which is really exciting whether that's from a, you know, just a general practices and awareness perspective, but also from the tech we're going to be publishing our DEIB tech report the second week of January. And so we're going to talk a lot about some of the changes that have happened there, but I think the most remarkable one and this is a little preview for you all, is that we've actually seen the market size increase by three times since when we did the study in 2019, we published in January, 2019, so two years ago.

Stacia Garr (07:07):

And we think that that just incredible market growth reflects the fact that people are looking to integrate across all the different practices and interested in how tech can be used to, to accelerate that. I know we've got a question a little bit more deeply on, on the tech side of this. So I won't jump to that too much right now, but we just are seeing this show up much more broadly has felt like for a number of years, we were kind of saying this was important and now we're seeing people reflect it back to us, which is really exciting.

Dani Johnson (07:36):

Yeah. And I've been surprised at how much it's creeped into some of the other discussions like skills and, and mobility, for example, it's, it's becoming an imperative to pay attention to an all these other areas.

Trend 2: Managers as connectors

Dani Johnson (07:47):

Same thing we're seeing is a managers as connectors.

Stacia Garr (07:51):

Yeah. So this one is in my space as well. So for those of you who follow our stuff, you may have seen that we did a big study on managers that came out in mid October and what we did there was, it was so cool. Like we do a lot of research and I think all of it's cool, but like this piece was really cool because we had done a snapshot of organizational and manager behaviors actually this time last year, literally actually I remember we closed the survey on December 17th, so literally a year ago. And then, so it was right before the pandemic started. And then we were able to do a comparison of what was happening with managers and their behaviors during the pandemic. So we've rerun the survey in September and October of this year. And one of the shifts that we saw, well, we actually saw two big shifts in that study.

Stacia Garr (08:39):

One was that the amount of autonomy that individual employees felt they had went up as you would expect with what happened with the pandemic. But then second, they said that managers were much more open to new ideas, which was, which was really good. And what you would hope for. The challenge we saw was that pretty much every other support, whether it be through the manager or through the organization, every other support that employees received went down. And so as you think about moving into our, you know, whatever this, this new reality is going to look like, we know that a big portion of it is going to be a higher percentage of workers who are remote. And because of that their managers are going to be even more important than in the past. And in many ways the managers are going to be the connector to the organization in a way that wasn't necessarily as true in an office setting. And so we think that as we look to the future, the question is, is how, what, you know, better understanding that shift for managers and how managers can help connect employees more broadly into the organization is going to be a big theme for this year.

Dani Johnson (09:40):

The other part of that is a lot of times managers, we haven't talked to one organization where, to who is like, Oh yeah, our managers just kill it. They're awesome. A lot of managers don't have the skills that they need in order to do some of the things that Stacy was talking about. And so we've seen a big uptick in the conversations around performance management and learning and mobility and all of these things where managers are, or managers are a part of those discussions as well, where we haven't necessarily seen that in the past. So instead of sort of a standalone thing, we're actually seeing managers integrated more into these different things as well.

Trend 3: Mobility is a focus

Dani Johnson (10:14):

Third one is mobility. Mobility is definitely a focus. I think part of this is because of some of the things that have happened this year with respect to large swaths of organizations being furloughed hand their skills not being needed right at this very minute, we're seeing this a lot, especially with frontline workers. And so mobility has really become a focus we're in the middle of a research project, actually, we're done with the research part and we're in the writing portion of mobility right now. And one of the really interesting things is the switch in the past mobility has mostly been used for retention and for engagement purposes. And now we're seeing organizations also include things like need making sure that we've got the skills in the right place, making sure that we have the right skills. And so moving people around to develop those skills, et cetera. The other thing that we're seeing where it comes to mobility is a lot of our vendor friends have come to us and said, Hey, we've got this new mobility project or product. They would really like you to see and give us feedback on. So it's not just the learning leaders and the business, the people leaders that are seeing this it's also is the vendors that are recognizing that this is a thing and will probably continue to be a thing into the future.

Dani Johnson (11:28):

Any, any comments on that Stacia? Any thoughts?

Stacia Garr (11:31):

Well, I think, you know, it, it ties into some of the other things that you're going to mention here, but, but you know, the focus on skills and kind of, you know, skills, not in isolation, but skills is kind of part of an enablement of other things that are really important

Dani Johnson (11:44):

For sure. And if you've seen a theme so far with just these three it's that some of those walls between some of the silos we've seen within the people practices are really breaking. And we're having to have wider discussions across the organization about how we deal with people on how we help people rather than staying within our talent acquisition and our learning and our performance silos.

Trend 4: Definition of "learning" expands

Dani Johnson (12:05):

The next one is the definition of learning expands. And we've been talking about this one for a while now, but in the past six to seven months, we've seen this really sort of accelerate. We're no longer just talking about courses and we're no longer just talking about the LMS. We're actually defining, learning very broadly. What does it take in order to help people plan? How do we helping people discover what they need? How do we help people experiment? What's our, what's our take on failure in the organization and how can we get people to learn from them? All of these things sort of wrap around this idea of learning, which we're sort of moving toward employee development, because we think that's a more inclusive term. How are we, how are we developing people in our organization to get not just them where they want to go, but where to get the organization where it needs to go. And we think we'll continue to see that through this year and probably beyond that.

Trend 5: Not just skills, skills as an enabler

Dani Johnson (12:58):

And then the final one, a couple of you have mentioned already is skills. We've actually been following the skills conversation for years. Like we started, we started listening about four years ago and I've had regular conversations with companies like Deloitte and Microsoft to kind of understand how they're viewing it and what they're doing and what they see as important. One of the things that we find really interesting about the last six months is we're not just talking about skills, we're talking about skills as an enabler. And so until the, the, the COVID crisis gathering skills and figuring out a skills data was more of a a conversation that we were having with ourselves rather than figuring out what to do with that information to help actually enable things in the organization. And so some of the things that we've seen over the last little while is we can barely have a conversation about mobility without also talking about skills.

Dani Johnson (13:52):

We can't, we seem to be running into diversity, inclusion, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging all the time when we're talking about skills. So all of these things where we're talking about, you know, giving people opportunities to develop these skills and moving people in the organization to develop these skills, have that diversity and inclusion component associated with them. And the same thing with data, why are we collecting this data? Where's this data going, what's it going to do, et cetera. And so we think the conversation is shifting from skills and re-skilling, and the whole sort of philosophical discussion that we've been having for four years on skills. We think it's finally firming up a little bit and we're using skills as an enabler. We're going to do the skill thing, but why are we going to do these, the skill thing we're going to do it for very specific reasons within the organization? Any thoughts, there Stacia?

Stacia Garr (14:39):

Yeah. And I think that, that this also ties in really well to this you know, the, the heating up of the market around, you know, specifics skills and specific needs that organizations have moving forward. And so we're starting, I feel like we're starting to see a lot more specificity and it ties into actually our next trend here, but a lot more specificity around what are the skills that we need, not just like, Oh, the, the, you know, like top 10 general skills we need in 2021. But like, as an organization, as we're actually doing our planning, what are the, what are the skills into what extent do we need them in order to do X, Y or Z thing? So it just feels like it's kind of gone from being up here in the sky and a little bit ephemeral to a lot more concrete around what we're trying to do.

Dani Johnson (15:25):

Yeah. I think you're right. And I think it's also changed the way that organizations are thinking about their people. So up until about six months ago, we were talking mostly about, okay, how do we get the skills? And a lot of times the question was we buy them. But, but since, since there's a shortage of pretty much everything right now we're seeing organizations say, okay, well, how do we develop these skills, and what people need to develop these skills and all of those kinds of conversations have come in that, that weren't there before that I think makes the skills discussion much more interesting and much more concrete and much more actionable.

Trend 6: Data as a crucial element of success

Dani Johnson (15:55):

Data as a crucial element of success.

Stacia Garr (16:01):

Yeah. And so, and so this ties in really well, you know, it's fun cause Dani and I kind of, we have our swim lanes to a certain extent, but they often intersection and the skills conversation is actually one of the biggest examples of how they've been intersecting. So so Dani has been doing a lot of work on kind of skills from a learning perspective and what's happening there. And then I've been doing a lot of work in understanding skills from a data perspective. And, and what's fascinating, isn't in so many organizations, those too late to parallel paths remain parallel and they're, they are not intersecting. And so a big thing that we're going to talk about this year is, is how should they be intersecting? Cause there clearly is talking about the same skills, the same people, the same need in the organization, but it's just tends to happen in two different parts of the organization.

Stacia Garr (16:48):

And so skills is a great example of that with, with data. But I think there's a lot of others. For, again, for those of you who follow what we do, we just publish the people analytics tech study last week. And in that we talked a lot about kind of just a range of, of capabilities that that technologies are now offering folks. And I think the underlying message though from 2020 was that tech, or I'm sorry, that people analytics and then the tech that enables it is more important than ever, you know, as we saw workers go into to leave the office and work from home, there was this incredible sense from leaders that we don't necessarily know what's happening. We don't know what's happening necessarily from an engagement perspective or what's working or what people need. And so we saw the role of people, analytics just really shine this year.

Stacia Garr (17:37):

And I expect that shine not to come off, if you will. You know, I think that now that people have kind of seen the value of it, they're not going to be willing to relinquish it. And so we see that particularly for employee engagement and experience, but we're also seeing that more broadly as we start to see different platforms that can bring in a whole lot of different information and to give us a much more nuanced understanding of what's happening for people, what helps them achieve success and also what are some of the warning signs that we should be looking for? So I just think that we're going to continue to see 2021 as a year to bring in data and to start to really do this analysis with the idea that it will really begin to impact business outcomes in a very large and meaningful way in 2022.

Dani Johnson (18:20):

Yeah. I think one of the outcomes of that too will be that all of the people practices are going to have to start thinking differently about how they do their job, because if you think about it up until fairly recently we've all used our gut to determine whether we hire somebody or, you know, where we move people or all of those things have been largely, you know, how someone's performing has been largely based on gut, but with some of the things that we've seen this year with, with data and technology, we have a much more unbiased view that helps us make decisions better, but also that we can push down to individuals to help them make, make decisions better, which I'm pretty excited about.

Stacia Garr (18:55):

Yeah. And it, and it connects back to the point around DEIB being integrated with everything. You know, that's one of the biggest opportunities is this connection between DEIB and data and people analytics using it to make less biased decisions, help us understand where bias may exist in organizations and to flag that in critical moments of decision-making. We're gonna dig into that topic in Q1. Because I think I've, to be honest, I've been just trying to get there is Dani now for the last three or four months, and we just had other things on the agenda that had to get finished up. But for me, I think that's a huge topic for 2021

Trend 7: Humanizing of human resources

Dani Johnson (19:32):

Humanizing of human resources. I think this is a really interesting one to talk about right after we talked about data. Sometimes we think of data as sort of non-human and cold and exacting. But what we're seeing is that some of this data is being used to actually humanize human resources a little bit more. I think we're also seeing it, this idea of humanization, when we think about kind of how we've addressed this crisis versus how we addressed the last crisis, it's pretty different. So in 2008, a bunch of people got laid off. We didn't, we were more concerned about the world in the economy and the business. And we were about those people this time around, it seems a little bit different. And I don't know if it's because of, because COVID is a really personal thing, or maybe I'm hoping we've evolved as the human race just a little bit, but we are starting to understand that, that the human part of human resources is a really, really important thing. So we've talked about that with the DEIB, we've talked about it with managers and making sure that they connect people, talked about it with that data and how it helps us become more human by making better decisions and less biased decisions. But we think in general, sort of the humanizing of human resources and the experience associated with working we'll continue along that path.

Dani Johnson (20:45):

Any thoughts there Stacia?

Stacia Garr (20:49):

No.

Dani Johnson (20:49):

Apologies for putting you on the spot there.

Trend 8: Purposeful, holistic employee experience

Dani Johnson (20:53):

Purposeful holistic employee experience.

Stacia Garr (20:58):

Yeah. So again, this year we spent a lot of time talking about purpose and the role of purpose and organizations and, and the and how we've seen that kind of tying back to what Dani just said, seeing that really show up in the midst of this pandemic. And, and we expect that to continue in the purpose research, we talked about, you know, it's this just a fad, this whole focus on purpose. And we think not for a whole bunch of reasons that I could go into, but I think that, that, that this focus on connecting having a clear organizational purpose and enabling employees to connect their own purpose to it is going to continue tied into that is this idea again, of this holistic employee experience. And I think there are actually two ways to read holistic. One is you know, is actually Jackie mentioned at the beginning, there has been this big shift to digital.

Stacia Garr (21:49):

And before the pandemic, I felt like we were talking about kind of the digital workplace and then the, you know, in-person workplace and with the pandemic, we've really seen those to integrate and have to think about kind of this more holistic perspective of what does an employee experience mean. Now, when you, when you layer in purpose into that, I think you're not just talking about kind of the nuts and bolts of an employee experience, but really about how does all of that come together and enable an individual to achieve their purpose and enable the organization to achieve the purpose. Their purpose is we think as we look to 2021, we're going to start to see, we are already seeing all of those things kind of meld together in a way that I think is much more holistic and much more, again, human than what we've seen in the past. So not just a digital experience, not just an in-person experience, but really all purposeful holistic employee experience.

Stacia Garr (22:41):

Dani, did you have anything you want to add there?

Dani Johnson (22:42):

Yeah, I think again, that, that data is helping us provide that really personal experience to individuals. And so it's, we're not doing, we're not putting in people in personas anymore. We're not talking about job roles anymore. We're talking about providing that employee experience. That's really personal to the individual and we're able to do that because of some of the advances we've seen in data and technology,

Trend 9: Building networks, changing work

Dani Johnson (23:02):

Building networks and changing work. And I'm going to let, Stacia start on this one too.

Stacia Garr (23:06):

Yeah. So one of the outcomes of the pandemic and people working remotely is that and we know this from a number of the organizational network analysis vendors is that we are seeing people strengthened their immediate network and their immediate relationships with the people that they work with on the day-to-day, but their weaker connections are dying away. And that is problematic for a couple of reasons on the individual level. We know that diverse people tend to have led to be in lower power networks and so, and have weaker connections to higher power networks. So if we think about kind of all the benefits of diversity and all the need to accelerate the, the rise of diverse individuals in the organization that weakening of those networks is a challenge. And then secondly, for the organization, we know that if we have less diversity, we have less of all sorts of other benefits including critically innovation.

Stacia Garr (24:02):

And so, as we think about kind of longterm moving in this new world of, of how we're going to work together you know, there will be a larger percentage of the workforce who are remote. So we've got a real nut to crack we think around how do we make sure that people are still building networks, still making connections? You know, we talked about managers as connectors and that's great, but we all know that that cannot be the only, or the strong, you know, just the it needs to be one of many strong connections. And so we think there's a conversation here around how do we make sure that people are being connected in ways that are meaningful, that allowed them to grow, that allowed them to get access to the opportunities they need with an overall benefit to the whole organization.

Dani Johnson (24:42):

And I think the other part of that, that trend that we're seeing is the changing of work we're seeing work, adjust to accommodate remote better than it ever has before. And the whole world is talking about this right now. So we're not going to address it too much right now, but it will probably, it will most likely, it'll definitely creep into some of the things that we write about because it literally having a remote workforce. And some of the things that have happened this year literally changed the way that we work.

Trend 10: Acceleration…of everything

Dani Johnson (25:07):

And our final one is the acceleration of pretty much everything. So just an example of this, we had a conversation with an organization that was trying to implement an LXP, a learning experience platform at the beginning of the year. And they had this year and a half long plan, and they were going to roll it out to different parts of the organization at different times, et cetera, et cetera.

Dani Johnson (25:28):

And then COVID hit and they were, they had everybody online within three weeks. So one of the things that we think will take a lot of time don't necessarily take the time we think they will. And we're seeing this in pretty much everything. So diversity and inclusion has stepped up, but this year learning has stepped up this year. And the importance of managers has stepped up pretty much everything on this slide has, has been accelerated at least a little bit by COVID in some of that, the DEIB challenges with that we've seen this year, and we don't necessarily think that's going to slow down now that we know that we can get stupid work out of the way and do things faster. And we think it's probably going to continue. Any thoughts there Stacia?

Stacia Garr (26:11):

No, I agree. I think I'd love to hear what other people think though, now that we've kind of laid out our 10 for 2021,

Dani Johnson (26:19):

Any thoughts on this and please feel free to use the the chat as well.

Speaker 1 (26:29):

This is Speaker 1 again, I love the example that you just gave where under previous project planning, that's a year, year and a half, but under crisis it's three weeks. Like that's amazing. It'd be interesting to follow up with them in a year to see, you know, and how's it going now? You know, did it, did it all fall into place just like you expected?

Dani Johnson (26:50):

Yeah, no, I think you're right, Jackie. And we definitely will. I'd love to, I'd love to understand kind of what happens with that organization. I think sometimes we're afraid to introduce change into an organization because we're afraid of the pushback when everybody's sort of rallied around one, cause things tend to go smoother. And so it'll be interesting to see how much change we can continue to push without sort of that, that unifying challenge and bolt says, I love the holistic employee experience, huge topic for us.

Speaker 1 (27:20):

Yeah.

Dani Johnson (27:22):

Any other thoughts here before we move on to your questions or anything we missed or anything we missed?

Stacia Garr (27:27):

We have plenty of contenders who almost made this list.

Dani Johnson (27:39):

Okay. Please continue to comment and share Stacia and I are big on making sure that everyone understands that we don't know everything and how we learn and how we develop and how we make this. The most useful thing possible is to integrate other people's ideas and thoughts and questions. So the questions that we got we got a good chunk of questions we chose about eight of them.

Are there any "usual" trends that override disruption?

Dani Johnson (28:00):

The first one is, are there any usual trends that override disruption? Which we thought it was a really interesting question and we actually put it at the front because we wanted to talk a little bit about it. Just kind of going back to the trends that we've talked about. Some of the things that have been ramping for years now is diversity and inclusion. The DEIB has been ramping for years, the learning trend, it used to be not that that important within organizations and now has become very important, not just to individuals, but also to senior leaders. Data has been ramping for a really long time as well. So we think some of these definitely overrides sort of the crisis that we're in, which means they probably have a longer, their trajectory is still going up. Stacia anything to other,

Stacia Garr (28:46):

Yeah. I think employee experience and purpose. I think that that's another one, you know, again, back to our purpose research you know, we talked about how the business round table made their change to the statement on the purpose of a corporation in August, 2019. So that was clearly before this. And you know, the business round table doesn't do anything until it let's just say they're not the fastest moving most on the cutting edge of, of stating these types of changes. So I think they were really kind of an indication of a long lead up to this focus on broader purpose in stakeholder capitalism. So we think that one and then that integration with employee experience again, was something that we were seeing before this. So I'd just underscore that one too, right?

Stacia Garr (29:32):

Any thoughts from, from you all, are there trends that you've seen sort of accelerated by COVID, but maybe were in place before?

Speaker 3 (29:48):

This is Speaker 3. I have seen a lot more interest in how do we communicate, not just what programs are in place for DEIB, but how do we effectively communicate and connect all of our staff to these initiatives? So before it was a lot of people would just be doing it or not a lot, but some people would be working on it. But now we see more people, I should say more executives than at the board level of the companies that I'm working with are connecting and wanting to make sure that their entire company knows their role in DEIB.

Dani Johnson (30:25):

Yeah. I really like that example. I think that's sort of a perfect example of what we're talking about here. DEIB, we've been, we've all been given it sort of we've, we've been talking about it for years, but now it goes clear up to the board level of Stacia was telling me before this call that we've never seen a higher need for, what did you call them Stacia? The Chief Inclusion Officers?

Stacia Garr (30:46):

Chief Diversity Officers.

Dani Johnson (30:49):

Officers at the top of the organization who are actually giving some real time and effort and consequently budget to, to some of these things that we've been trying to solve for years with volunteer panels and things like that.

Stacia Garr (31:01):

Yeah. Yeah. Just to kind of, to jump on that, you know, we've we published this DEIB strategy report, and one of the things we talked about there was the executives are more open to the DEIB topic more broadly, and I have this is totally a thought experiment, but I'm going to share it with you guys. Cause I think it's kind of interesting. I wonder if part of the reason for the greater openness and the greater desire to move the needle here is that we, by when the social justice movement started this summer at that point we were depending on where you were roughly around three months into the COVID crisis. And I think that through COVID a lot of executives got a whole lot more comfortable with being able to say we don't necessarily know all the answers, this is hard.

Stacia Garr (31:52):

We're doing our best. We're, you know, a much more compassionate, empathetic, open, and potentially vulnerable leadership approach than what we would have seen, you know, six months prior. And so I wonder if some of this greater openness and some of this greater desire to actually maybe properly fix some of the DEIB challenges we have was a result of leaders already kind of having just gone through this, you know, very challenging initial experience with, with COVID and having already adopted kind of a more empathetic posture. So we'll, we'll see if that's kind of a long-term change and if that continues to play out. But I do have a strong hunch that that may have contributed to this greater level of openness.

Speaker 2 (32:38):

Hi, this is Speaker 2, Stacia. Just to kind of jump off of what you were saying. I've noticed in the organization that I am in very heavy involvement, like up to the CEO receiving, you know, emails and messages, even like you know, senior VP leader of leaders, of business units, holding all day conferences and just kind of having their face and their thoughts and out there. Which I think is really interesting because that, that's sort of the first time I'm seeing this embrace by senior leaders all the way up to the CEO being very vocal about this topic.

Stacia Garr (33:25):

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, that that's something we heard from a lot of folks when we did the interviews for that study. And I think it reflects this broader shift that we've seen actually in the in the Edelman trust barometer, where they talk about they, they Edelman focus on within the U S but, you know, by and large us consumers expect companies to do something about social justice and about diversity equity, inclusion, belonging in their organizations. And I think that is actually then translating to action. There was a really cool data point and I need to see if there's an updated one where it said that in Q1. So just before the kind of the pandemic really got going the just 4% of S&P 500 companies talked about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging on their earnings calls with investors. And in Q2, that number shot up to 40%. And so I think, you know, there is this heightened awareness that DEIB can have such big impacts on the organizations. And so there is a that greater executive embrace as you mentioned, Speaker 2.

Speaker 2 (34:36):

Yeah. And I think even just showing vulnerability in terms of like, you know, we don't have the answers, we want to work on finding solutions. And you know, we, it's important to keep talking about it and keep the dialogue open. So I think just, you know, whereas before it, might've kind of been not addressed or kind of swept under the rug, like we don't need to address this. I find that leaders are now getting at the forefront of it and addressing things that you know, incidents of social injustice that might happen and say, you know, this is unfortunate. We don't have the answers, but, you know, feel free to reach out if you want to talk about it. So,

Stacia Garr (35:23):

Yeah, definitely. And Marlene, I see your comment. I'll see if I can find the study and send it out to you all. It was RBC. Did the, did the research.

Dani Johnson (35:36):

just to wrap this one, someone says that he and his organization, they're seeing more interest in visual collaboration and digital workspaces as people move as people, as more people work from home. And I think that's, I think that's awesome, first of all. And secondly, I think it's needed we've seen more acceptance of some of the things that we use as well. We use a tool called Miro and we've been able to take that into a couple of organizations and introduce them to something like that that allows you to still do some of those sort of hands-on group activities that need to be done in order to get the work done and in a digital way. So we're thinking, that's fantastic.

How are organizations putting their 2020 DEIB commitments into action?

Dani Johnson (36:11):

The next couple of questions have to do with DEIB. So we'll continue that conversation. How are organizations putting their 2020, their DEIB commitments into action in 2021? And do you have examples?

Stacia Garr (36:25):

Yeah. So, and, and I'd love other folks comments and thoughts here, but I'll kind of kick us off here. You know, one of the things we saw was immediately after the murder of George Floyd that a lot of organizations made kind of very public commitments with regard to what they were going to do with DEIB. So, you know, for instance, we saw like you know, Adidas saying that they were going to fill 30% of their open positions at Adidas and Reebok with lacquer or Latino or Latina candidates. IBM said they were not going to offer or research facial recognition technology because of potential human rights abuses. We saw Facebook and a whole bunch of other organizations talk about the number of black and Latinx employees that were going to bring into the organization.

Stacia Garr (37:20):

They said they were going to double them. And then there were a whole bunch of organizations that pledged to make large contributions to you know, black lives matter, NAACP ACLU, et cetera, et cetera. So, so we saw a lot of immediate action right after, and then I feel like some of the changes that came down or that I feel like then what has happened is organizations have begun to go away. Do some of the hard work mentioned, you know even in, in, I think there was an article in the wall street journal in July that said the chief diversity officer was the hottest job right now in the market. And, and the number of DEIB professionals I've personally seen, just move has been pretty astounding and used to, and it feels like there's a DEIB role at pretty much every company that wasn't there three months ago.

Stacia Garr (38:07):

So I think right now organizations are starting to do the work of putting more people, more investment into their organizations. But what that's going to translate to on the other side is I think still an open question, you know, there's and then I think there's also a question of how they're going to talk about it because there are a lot of changes that organizations will make, particularly as their results and their, their mix of talent and their focus on accelerating particular types of talent that may not get into the news. It may not be, I'm almost certain, it's not going to be the thing that they put into their CSR ESG reporting. And so I think that there's going to be kind of a dance that organizations have to do as they try to demonstrate that they're walking, you know, that they're walking the talk but do it in a way that one, their legal teams feel comfortable with. Cause that's been a big, you know, throttle on DEIB efforts as well as the publication of what's happening with them. So what their, their legal teams are comfortable with and then also what they feel like kind of furthers their, their talent brand. So I think that there are things that are happening, particularly with regard to talent acquisition, and then also talent mobility. But I think it's going to take a little bit of time for us to see them.

Stacia Garr (39:22):

Do I see your comment if the compensation for DEIB roles will improve? I think, I think it will. And I think it already has begun because the talent market is so tight right now for DEIB roles. So I think that's a good call out.

Dani Johnson (39:34):

I think someone actually surfaced a couple of good questions too. So there's the one, she says, one thing that comes to mind as we talk about one so much focus on moving digital and to DEIB is the need to keep in mind the portion of the workforce that can not work digitally. How are they being supported and included in opportunities, et cetera. So really good question. One of the things that I think we're seeing is some of the technology is allowing us to address some of the challenges with the DEIB, even though those are frontline workers and cannot work digitally. And so even that, well, the aspect of digital that affects them as different, but we're still using some of those digital tools to make sure that we're taking care of them. The other thing that we're seeing just no past, and I think this pretty predates COVID two is more of a focus on frontline workers. So a lot of learning tech and tech in general has been focused on exempt workers, people that work in an office. We've seen that shift a little bit as new tools come out and new awareness comes out of, you know, as organizations realize the value of those workers and understand the need for them to grow and develop as well.

Dani Johnson (40:44):

Any other thoughts or questions on this question? All right.

What are the top 3 DEIB goals that are contributing to DEIB tech buying?

Dani Johnson (40:52):

Let's move on to the second DEIB question, which is what are the top three DEIB goals that are contributing to DEIB tech buying?

Stacia Garr (41:01):

Yeah, so And the pet study, we talk a bit about this. So, so the kind of the top three areas that we saw as a, as an area of focus were employee engagement and experience DEIB analysis and monitoring. And that was a big shift, like a few when we did the study last year that was much lower. So that was number two that showed up number two. And then the third one was performance management when we, when we looked at kind of the, the analytics side. And so when we're thinking about kind of the DEIB intersection here, a lot of it is understanding, you know, amongst those three kind of really critical areas, what's happening with people. What are, what do we need to understand about our different populations and and how their experiences are then influencing their the kind of what's going to happen with the talent pipeline overall.

Stacia Garr (42:00):

So we know that representation numbers are backwards looking. And so now I feel like we're starting to see people trying to use the tech to get a little bit farther back into what's happening and to be able to address things a lot faster, but so, so engagement and experience. Certainly like I said, performance management, because that contributes to our ability to advance people in our understanding of how people are performing and their perceptions of what's happening differently. And then the, I should say from the PAT study the learning and development being the third, third one and the understanding of how those learning experiences are different for different populations.

Dani Johnson (42:40):

Great. Any other thoughts on this question? Okay, let's move to the next one.

How are organizations defining mobility?

Dani Johnson (42:48):

How organizations defining mobility. So one of our, the trends that we mentioned earlier, and one of the things that we've seen craziness around is this idea of mobility, moving people in the organization to different parts of the organization. For some reasons, a couple of the biggest reasons that we see the first and I think probably the oldest is we moved people around organizations to, to retain them, to, to give them experience for sure, but to retain them and engage them as part of that larger employee engagement thing that's happening right now. The other thing that we're seeing since COVID is the, the need to move people around the organization to put the right skills in the right places at the right time. So as large parts of organizations have, have become unnecessary, especially given sort of the situation that we're in, we're seeing organizations really ramp up the skilling three skilling and the development to take tangential skills and turn them into the skills that they need in the organization right now.

Dani Johnson (43:49):

So a large communications organization, for example, had to sort of either furlough all of their retail, or it had to retrain them to, to handle some of the online stuff that was coming in at a greater pace, because some of those retail stores were out of commission. And so that's just one example of the way that we've seen organizations sort of think about mobility differently. Another thing that we're seeing is mobility used to mean moving from one job to another job from one role to another role. And that is also sort of being redefined. It's much more of a, I don't want to, I'm not sure how we're going to say this yet in the research, but it's much more of a, sort of a psychological move. So mobility doesn't necessarily mean picking up and moving somewhere, even though a lot of organizations are still thinking about it, that way mobility actually means working out of wherever you are and getting new experiences and new opportunities while maybe still having your home base, where it was before.

Dani Johnson (44:42):

And we're seeing that manifest itself in things like talent open talent, marketplaces. Some people call them gig economies within the organizations. So they're trying out gigs for two or three weeks. We're seeing it in terms of rotations. So you still belong to a central place. But you have the opportunity to experience some new things. In the military, they call them details and they can be up to a year long. And so this idea of mobility is changing to be much more sort of cerebral than it is physical, which I think is really, really interesting. The research that we have coming out in a little bit, sort of talks about how different organizations handle that differently. We have the latter model, which is moving people up, are really defined the latter on, you know, what your put your next step is. We have the lattice model, which has been talked about for 15 years, which is moving people around to give them more breadth.

Dani Johnson (45:28):

We have the agency model, which is what a lot of consulting firms use, which is organizing the people around the work instead of organizing the work around a predefined organization of people. And then we're also seeing quite a bit of organizations start to talk about external workers. So retiree pools and gig workers and contractors and consultants, and those type of people paying attention to them as part of your talent pool and helping the organization understand what skills they have so that they can also be mobilized within different parts of the organization. So we did this study five years ago. We did it again this time I've learned a lot and things have changed quite a bit about about mobility, but those are the biggest things. People are thinking about it more cerebrally than they have in the past. And we're probably including more, more talent pools and, and, and paying attention to skills that skills data to help people get where they need to go. So I'm gonna stop right there for a second. Any questions about mobility?

Stacia Garr (46:29):

You know, I'll just add, as you were talking. I wonder if like, with some of the changes that we've seen with the workforce, like we know we've seen a large percentage of women go out of the workforce, it's like three to one and we've seen other changes around you know, younger workers. And, and I just wonder if all of that will get connected here into mobility, you know, thinking about those different talent pools differently. And, and also, I mean, it seems funny, but we've kind of stopped talking about the whole, you know, baby boomers leaving the workforce, but it's, it's still happening in very great numbers. And so I wonder if this will all kind of end up coming together, particularly as, you know, as we get a vaccine and as potentially the market starts to take off again.

Dani Johnson (47:20):

Yeah, no, I think that's an interesting thought. And as, as walls in organizations continue to become more transparent and permeable as well. When you retire, you don't necessarily retire. You are put into, you know, you're a lot of people still consult with the organizations that they retire from. And so what does that mean for, for the skills that we thought we were going to lose, but maybe we're not losing and the way that people want to move. The other thing that we're seeing that's really interesting is success has to be redefined in this new, in this new sort of way. Not everybody is going to be CEO. We had one organization actually say that not everybody is going to be CEO. And so how do we help people have the best experience and get the best types of experiences that they want and learn what they want to learn while they're here and be okay if they step out of the organization for a while, knowing that we want to keep that relationship good so that they can come back later. So it's, it seems to be that we're rethinking it and we're not necessarily thinking of ownership anymore, but rather relationship, which I think is a pretty healthy way to think about it.

Dani Johnson (48:20):

All right. Any other thoughts here before we move to the next question?

What are the most important questions that HR leaders are trying to answer with data?

Dani Johnson (48:26):

What are the most important questions that HR leaders are trying to answer with data?

Stacia Garr (48:32):

Yeah, I think I kinda touched on this one earlier. But you know, from our, from our PAT study, like I said, it was in playing engagement experience, D&I performance management and learning and development. And so I think what all of that really points to is trying to understand the employee experience much better and to be able to understand, you know, what's going to happen in terms of our talent retention in terms of, you know, what we're gonna need from a skills perspective what we're gonna need from a new talent perspective versus maybe some of these other talent pools. So we're seeing, seeing kind of a focus there, but most immediately the focus has been how are people doing during COVID. And I think that's gonna continue. One thing that didn't actually show up in the PAT study though, that I also am hearing about anecdotally is that focus on wellbeing and burnout. It wasn't in the study. But I think that in something that we're going to hear more about, particularly quite frankly, as we get into February, you know, and for many, many people, the vaccine is still three, four months off. And it just starts to feel hard you know, a long winter, et cetera. So That's what I think.

How important will attention to the remote work be?

Dani Johnson (49:50):

How important will attention to the remote worker be? Pretty important for the next year. I, and I think it will continue to be important. I think I'm hoping there. One of the things that comes out of COVID is enough time understanding how it feels to work remotely, that we have a lot more sympathy, empathy, and impetus to change the way that we work with with our remote counterparts. This one is always really interesting to me cause I've worked remotely for 15 years. Our entire organization is completely remote. We have people working for us that we've never met face-to-face. And so it's, it's an interesting mindset shift to, to take into account remote workers. But I I'm hoping that this has given us enough empathy to sort of think about it differently, moving on. And I think with that, some of the technology that is surfacing per someone's comment to help us do this better is getting better. It's getting better and it's allowing us to do completely different things. We're not just putting the live experience online now. We're actually doing completely different things that may even be very, say a little bit better than, than in-person in some cases. What do you think Stacia?

Stacia Garr (51:06):

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I think we're going to the big challenge. I think one of the big challenges of 2021 is going to be, how do we balance when, which, when people are going back to the office, which people go back to the office, which ones maybe don't and with what frequency, and then, you know, when we've all been remote to any more level playing field in some ways. And so as we manage those in office and remote relationships, how do we make sure that we remain inclusive for those who are remote?

Dani Johnson (51:38):

Any thoughts on this one? All right.

Dani Johnson (51:46):

The next one is when things settle down, will purpose still be a thing.

When things settle down will purpose still be a thing?

Stacia Garr (51:49):

So I think you were going to jump in, I saw you come off mute.

Speaker 1 (51:53):

Oh, I was just gonna say one of the phrases I've heard different people saying to you is others have been remote, just like you gave in your example, it's not new to everyone. So I would hope in 2021, those that are well-experienced with working remotely and keeping engaged and keeping on track can, you know, have the bandwidth to reach out to the ones that are struggling. So maybe like like you said, a level playing field because it's not a new thing. It's just new to everybody all at the same time this year for obvious reasons.

Dani Johnson (52:30):

I think that's a really good point. So back to the purpose question, when things settle down, will purpose still be a thing?

Stacia Garr (52:40):

Yes. As I, as I said before, the purpose was, it was a train that had been coming. And I think it's going to still be here when, when this is all said and done. Now you go back to why organizations, you know, clarify their purpose, you know often a part of it is providing clarity in terms of why we're doing what we do in the face of a lot of other changes. So, you know, some of those changes are technology. So as we have more AI and we have more machine learning, a lot of people have been asking before COVID, you know, what is it that makes us human? What's our unique human contribution. And part of that is aligned to purpose is, is understanding what it is that we uniquely do. You know, the gig economy the ability to work from anywhere enhanced by our increased remote capabilities makes us ask questions about, you know, well, why would I join this organization?

Stacia Garr (53:37):

What do I get, what am I contributing by joining this organization? And having a clear sense of purpose helps answer that question. So I think that there's all sorts of reasons that purpose will continue to be a thing. I think the bigger question though, is we'll the organizations who have clarified or reinforce their purpose through COVID remain as committed to it. Well, we still see the level of commitment that we've seen and, you know, it's easy for, for healthcare organizations, you know, we've, we have this purpose podcast that we're that we're putting out right now. And we've had, for instance, Medtronic and Johnson and Johnson on there, and it's easy for easier for them to clearly articulate their purpose, but will other organizations continue to do so. And I think that for some of them who really are clear on this and believe in, it absolutely will. You know, another interviewee was Rachel Fichter at S&P Global, and, you know, that's a financial services firm, and yet they have a very clear sense of purpose. So I think it'll be interesting to see if there's some drop-off but I think that the fundamental reason for a focus on purpose will not shift.

Dani Johnson (54:50):

I think just because of time, we're going to leave it there. We've gone a little bit over what we usually schedule for a Q and A, we really appreciate everybody who has participated, and we really appreciate those that sent these questions in, because that makes our life much easier. When do we have questions in the Q and A session. This we'll be providing a transcript and a recording to, to those who are members on the site. And if any of you have any follow-up questions or would like to discuss any of these further, or have ideas that weren't shared today, please, please, please reach out your questions and your comments make us smarter. Thank you so much.

Stacia Garr (55:23):

Thank You. Happy holidays!

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Guest

Rachel Fichter, Global Head of Talent and Leadership, S&P Global

Details

Wall Street might not be the most obvious place to find a company with Purpose. But then we found our podcast guest, saying things like, “If purpose is an articulation of the reason for existence, we end up articulating something we were already living,” then—maybe we’re in the right place after all.

Meet Dr. Rachel Fichter, once a professional cellist and educator who now spends her days helping colleagues accelerate progress in the world by providing intelligence essential for companies, governments, and individuals to “make decisions with conviction”… in other words—live out the company Purpose statement.

The company in question she’s doing all this at is the world’s leading provider of credit ratings S&P Global, where she’s the 22,000-strong company’s Global Head of Talent and Leadership. What’s interesting is that her company is also helping its customers better orient to a Purpose perspective, by creating environmental social and governance information products that help investors better evaluate companies around important metrics like climate change to social justice, as well as help clients understand where it stands with respect to those increasingly critical KPIs.

On this podcast episode, Rachel tells us all about her journey to such a position, and why Purpose could matter for a global financial data and analytics company like S&P. So, a definite important contribution today to us gathering the inputs to try and answer our question of, ‘Is Purpose Working?’ Like me, if you’re interested in how questions around how talent management, leadership development, executive coaching, organizational development, culture, and workplace Learning factor into the Purpose discussion, then you’re going to want to hear Rachel’s thoughts.

This podcast interview covers topics like:

• How S&P has adopted a consciously ‘agile’ approach to delivery these past couple of years
• What reimagining the performance experience looks like
• The importance of the 2019 Business Round Table Purpose statement to S&P’s new focus on Purpose
• Why there are still Purpose challenges and trade-offs
• Why everything she does is like interpreting a musical composition

Resources

• Rachel Fitcher LinkedIn profile
• RedThread’s on-going Purpose work

Webinar

This season will culminate in a live online gated experience (a webcast) where we'll review and debate what we've learned. Seats are limited. Secure your place today, over at www.novoed.com/purpose.

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

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Guest

Jeff Orlando, Chief Learning Officer of Medtronic

Details

As we dig deeper into answering our question ‘Is Purpose Working?’ we find that while Purpose is a very new concept for many, having a conscious organizational Purpose has been BAU for some corporations for decades. This week we meet one, which had it written down in 1960, and which specifically states that the company’s” first and foremost priority” is to contribute to human welfare. The company in question is $30bn, Ireland and Minnesota-headquartered Medtronic, the world's largest medical technology company and creator of the world’s first battery-operated pacemaker. And we also learn how, 60 years after being defined, it’s a Purpose statement that continues to serve as an ethical framework and inspirational goal for all 90,000-plus employees around the world. Explaining all this for us is the company’s Vice President, Global Learning and Leadership, Jeff Orlando. Based in Philadelphia, Jeff explains just how new he is in post—he joined the very week the company had to move into Lockdown, in March—but also how quickly he’s become part of the Medtronic family.

In this fourth conversation in our season Dani Johnson and Stacia Garr from RedThread, and Chris Pirie from LITNW, talk about what makes Medtronic’s conscious sense of Purpose even more interesting than its heritage and on-going affirmation (something we get into big time in the conversation) is that it’s marked by ritual. In 1974, the company introduced a special in-house “mission and medallion ceremony” that’s now held many times a year at facilities all over the world; an employee gets to receive the medallion as a reminder of the honor and responsibility they have in fulfilling our mission. Acting as a deliberately symbolic way of bringing new employees together behind the company’s defined common purpose, could rituals like this be something other CEOs pursuing Purpose be looking at doing too? Should your Purpose statement really act like the Constitution for you over time? It’s a fascinating question—and one bound to come up at the special ‘Is Purpose Working?’ webinar early in 2021, our live, online gated experience where we will debate all the Learnings from Season 7 that have come through. With inputs including today’s great discussion with Jeff.

This podcast interview covers topics like:

• A shared podcast participant history (Deloitte)
• How he sees L&D’s contribution is creating organisational capability to win in the market
• How companies with a defined Purpose seem to have so much passion about it
• The idea all employees are really only ever ‘stewards’ of the Mission (the Medtronic Purpose)
• How L&D has an important place in creating the space and time for the ceremonies that can anchor your Purpose work
• How HR accepts the Mission is its Mission, too—but it still needs to help the company meet immediate targets

Resources

• Jeff Orlando LinkedIn profile
• RedThread’s on-going Purpose work

Webinar

This season will culminate in a live online gated experience (a webcast) where we'll review and debate what we've learned. Seats are limited. Secure your place today, over at www.novoed.com/purpose.

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

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Guest

Aaron Hurst – Author of the book, The Purpose Economy

Details

Purpose has become more and more a key concept for modern organizations: type ‘Purpose in American business’ into Google, and you’ll get 1,740,000,000 responses, for example. But how real is it? Is it the same as CSR or giving corporate money to a good cause? And, crucially, what’s its connection, if any, to L&D? On this special new Season on the podcast, we’re attempting to answer, if we can, these questions under the rubric: Is Purpose Working?

In this second conversation in our season Dani Johnson and Stacia Garr from RedThread, and Chris Pirie from LITNW, interviews Aaron Hurst: someone who literally wrote the book on  the science of purpose and fulfillment at work. Aaron is a consultant, VC, social entrepreneur and Seattle-based Purpose influencer. In 2014, his book The Purpose Economy Aaron brought widespread attention to the concept of Purpose and its importance for our lives today.

This podcast interview covers topics like:

• How he ended up in Seattle after ‘something of a nomadic career’
• Why the purpose age represents a new economic era and major progress in humanizing work
• Why the non-profit world he started working in frustrated him—and what he did about it
• Why he wrote The Purpose Economy and how he’s convinced we’re in a whole new economic era fueled by ‘meaning’
• What last year’s Business Roundtable commitment to Purpose did for a lot of CEOs
• The role of L&D in Purpose

And stick around for the end – where Chris, Stacia, and Dani have a 3-way debate on what Aaron told us.

Resources

• Aaron Hurst LinkedIn profile
• Imperative website
• Aaron Hurst's book: The Purpose Economy
• Aaron's foundation, Taproot
• RedThread’s on-going Purpose work

Webinar

This season will culminate in a live online gated experience (a webcast) where we'll review and debate what we've learned. Seats are limited. Secure your place today, over at www.novoed.com/purpose.

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

2020 has been a year of volatility as most of us have moved to remote work. In this Q&A call, we talk about how the shift to remote work has impacted managers and how they can better enable employees. We talk about how managers can be more responsive during and after COVID-19, a part of our Responsive Organization research. In the past, managers have focused on efficiency, but now organizations are focusing on different metrics and communicating with employees differently. Here are a few of the questions we discussed:

• What aspects of managers historical roles have shifted due to COVID-19 and working remotely?
• How should managers adjust their approach to better enable their employees in this new reality?
• What performance metrics should managers focus on when assessing work from home performance?

There were many great insights during this Q&A. Thank you to everyone who attended and participated live. We hope you join us live for the next Q&A call.

Video Contents & Questions Asked

You can jump to the following locations in the video using the timestamps on the video and in the chapters menu (next to the full screen icon).

• 0:00 Introduction & housekeeping
• 1:23 Overview of responsivity research
• 4:39 Managers role in responsivity
• 8:41 The impact of 2020’s volatility on managers
• 16:21 Changing role of managers during remote work
• 20:33 Accountability & management
• 25:29 Focus shift to different performance metrics
• 28:32 Successful leadership during remote work
• 35:10 Focus on performance not presence in remote teams
• 42:12 Comparing employees vs measuring improvement
• 45:08 Changes to management approaches during COVID-19
• 53:21 Wrap up

Q&A Call Transcript

Introduction & housekeeping (00:00)

This Q&A session is on how managers should enable employees during remote work and volatility, which seems very timely. And it’s based on actually, let’s start with some, some housekeeping stuff. We always promote everybody to a panelist because we want the discussion. So we answer the questions that have been sent in, but we actually really want the discussion. So if you disagree, or if you have something to say or experiences, please feel free to share, but also make it a safe place. So no attacking. This is not CNN or the comments section of any website. Let’s keep it respectful. We’ve never had a problem with that, but we say it anyway.

Raise your hand to speak. Just to give us a chance to keep order, especially because we’re recording this. Unmute yourself and then feel free to discuss the topics in the chat. The chat often offers us quite a bit of color that we don’t actually get on the the recording. And if it’s of interest to you, we can send you the chat. The other thing that we want to make clear is you are being recorded. So anything you say will be posted live. If you don’t want to say anything to the entire world feel free to chat separately, or to set up a conversation with a separately. Cause we’d love the information. We’d love to talk to you about it. We just want to make sure everybody knows kind of where we are and what we’re doing. Any questions on that before we jump in?

Overview of responsivity research (01:23)

Okay. So late last year and early this year, and then into the summer and now into the fall, we’ve been working on this idea of responsivity. And we determined responsibility as “the ability of organizations to recognize trends in the operating environment and effectively turn possible disruptions from those trends into distinct organizational advantages.” So it’s basically all of the disruption that happens. What are you doing with it? Are you just reacting to it and putting stopgaps in place or actually looking at it and making something out of it? And organizations do this to varying degrees. Some of them do it really well. And some of them don’t.

We published some research in June of this year, which introduced a model. And this was based on lots and lots of interviews. It was based on four round tables and also some quantitative research. What we found was that organizations that were responsive, those that were able to respond to the environments that they’re in, basically looked through the world in four lenses.

The first one is respect for employees. And this one seems to be foundational. If organizations don’t have respect for employees and their skills and abilities, they don’t seem to be able to react much to their environment at all.

The second one is distributed authority, and this has two parts. The first one is how much do organizations push the decision making to the edges of the organization. But it also has to do with how clear they are about the authority that individuals have. So it’s so distributed authority obviously is going to be different in different areas, in different functions, in different industries, but how clear they are on the authority that individuals have seemed to be a pretty big determinant of how responsive they are.

Third one is not surprising to me cause I work in this field, but transparency and growth was huge. Organizations that focus on making sure that their employees are continually growing, tend to do better than those than those that don’t. And those that are transparent about what they’re doing and where they’re going, rather than just treating employees like cogs machine that do one thing all the time also tend to do better.

And then all of these things we thought were really interesting, but what was the most interesting of this study is that there’s a separate set of behaviors that kind of goes along with trust. Trust was by far the most impactful thing that organizations could do to be responsive. And that has a lot to do with community building and purpose-driven sort of mindset and how they handle failure and how they allow people to bring their real selves to work and all that good stuff.

So when organizations, and especially the people in the organizations that help develop the people processes when they develop those people processes, they should be considering each of these four things as they develop those people processes. They should be looking through these lenses and determining if they’re taking care of these four things in order to be responsive.

We actually think responsivity will become the new efficiency. We’ve been focusing on efficiency for about a hundred years, as organizations, we think the ability of organizations to respond to the environments that they find themselves in and take advantage of those disruptions is going to be how businesses get ahead in the future.

Managers role in responsivity (04:39)

So that was the main study. And this model can be found in the report that we put out on that. Since then Stacia has been doing a little bit of work on managers. We found managers to be an incredibly important part of responsivity and organizations. And so I’m going to turn it over to her to describe this side.

Yeah. So kind of to give a little context of you know, what Dani showed on the last slide, we found that there are basically three major factors that can influence organizations’ ability to effectively address what’s in those four lenses. And those three factors were data and technology (So people analytics), managers, and then culture. So we’re kind of working our way through these.

We wrote a report about people analytics which we call “the now of work lessons from an octopus.” And really the idea there being that people analytics and the data and insights that you have, are a big part of what kind of feeds the responsive organization. But so that was the article. Now we’re moving on to this next area of focus, which is around managers and what managers need to be doing.

So if you guys get our newsletter, you probably have seen this engaging in a lot of work on this. So we are, we have a survey live right now on this topic. We’re doing interviews right now on this topic, this Q & A session, and a roundtable really to try and understand this manager topic.

The reason that we're doing another survey is that we had the data from the responsive organizations study with immediately pre-COVID and so we wanted to really be able to focus our understanding on what’s happening during COVID in the social justice movements that you’ve been seeing.

So that brings us to this slide, which is we went out and we said, okay, we know what our data has shown in terms of what responsive managers are doing, but what are other saying right now? And so we went in and looked in and have been working on summarizing what we see and what you see here, I think is a, is a decent summary of what others are saying.

So the first thing is, is that managers have a, in this moment right now, a greater need for, for personal awareness. So an understanding of kind of how they are doing before they’re able, you know, it’s the whole “Fix your oxygen mask before you try to help someone else.” It’s kind of the same thing. You know, managers need to have an awareness of how they’re doing that. They’re doing okay. And before they’re able to kind of turn and support the people on their team.

The second one, and this really aligns to the research that I just mentioned about people analytics, is this idea that they’re gathering information, they’re getting information more broadly, and they’re using that to make better decisions. And that, you know, it completely aligns with what we see with this responsive org model around remote work around distributed authority. Because basically what we have with remote working is a need for distributed authority. We don’t have that kind of same hierarchy that we were seeing before. So that’s bottoms up information.

And then the other thing, and we actually heard this in the round tables that we did in the spring as well, is this, this high focus on authenticity, vulnerability and honesty. And that need certainly to come from managers, but really managers at all levels. What we’ve started to see in the interviews is the importance of just incredibly transparent and timely communications from leaders and then throughout the entire organization about what’s happening. And, you know, the, the statement that “We don’t know yet, but we’re looking at it” is an acceptable statement. Whereas before that may have hurt some organization seem taboo. What we’re seeing so far is that organizations that have done that are farther ahead than those who have just kind of kept their mouth shut and continued whistling in the dark, if you will.

The impact of 2020’s volatility on managers (08:41)

So so these are kinda the 3 things that we seen At least in the external research and that we felt have been validated by what we’ve seen in our own research. So I’d like to pause there and we’ve got a whole bunch of questions. But I want to pause there and just see if anyone has anything else that they want to add in terms of how they’ve seen the volatility of the last 6 months impacting managers.

I think from my Stacia side, it’s MJ, we’ve seen a lot around the trust because we historically had not been an organization where we, I mean, we’re very relationship based. So we, we weren’t remote workers at all. And then all of a sudden we were dabbling in remote working, which is not a bad thing, but a bit of a culture shift for us. Then all of a sudden we’re slammed into this. And we’ve had a lot of conversations about how we support our managers, how we give them the tools to, you know, just let people do their jobs, you know. And if people went dark, how do you go and explore where that person is? You know, what is going on with them without going and being appropriate and doing that without, you know, making assumptions and that kind of stuff.

So all these three things along with the prior slide that Dani presented around trust are things that are manifesting for us. But I do like what you said last, which is we don’t know yet, but we are researching it. I absolutely think, I mean, as a former consultant, especially that that’s a really good answer. But part of the challenge is people don’t have the language and this is, this is a challenge with management anywhere in any organization. If you don’t have the words, you either stumble through it or you make promises, you can’t keep. And so I actually like us getting to the point where we have a different vocabulary.

Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think that the thing that I really like, what you just said MJ, is this idea of even just the phrase it’s giving the phrases to people like these, these are the sorts of things. Like not, not that you have to read this and be an autonomous, but like, these are some of the things.

I often I’ll tell Dani this, like with my kids, this is really funny, but you know, I read these various parenting books, and I used to think that that was completely ridiculous because in the moment I’m clearly gonna know what to say. Obviously that was before I had kids. That’s what I thought. And then now with having kids, I find that, you know, some of the actual literal phrases that come out of the book, that’s like, I see you doing this. Maybe we should consider that. Like having just those words, somebody put them in my head, even though obviously I changed them in the moment when I’m under stress, I need that help.

And I think we’re not that different at work. If it’s a different vocabulary, it’s a different situation that we’ve had just having those words handed to us. And then at least it’s a tool that you can kind of tweak in the moment. I think that’s so, so important.

I think Stacia and MJ, both alluded to this idea of tools, which I think is really important. For lots of years everybody that we talked to said, you know, “our managers suck.” And okay, maybe that may be true, but you can’t fix managers by sending them through training only. I think those tools are tools are increasingly important and I’ve seen more focus been being given to those tools in the last three or four months than I’ve seen it in the last 10 years probably. Yeah. Any other thoughts?

Yeah, Dani, I echo that not all of these problems can be solved with training and it’s really hard to solve it overnight. If you weren’t already on that path and you don’t even have the words word for it, the longterm solution. And I think the willingness and capacity are huge factors. And what happens if the person was not willing or has no capacity? So there’s lots of other factors that take a long time just by definition.

I think that’s true. I think that’s totally fair. And I think I’ve also seen, and Stacia I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too, I’ve seen more of a focus on, are these people, the right people for the management position? Like, can they actually lead people and manage people or do we have the wrong ones in place? Have we been promoting on some weird criteria instead of the ones we need to?

What’s interesting and what I’m seeing, as I’m talking to other people as well, is that there’s like this manufactured authenticity, is the word I might be using, where the managers are now like manufacturing this interest in you and you know how you’re doing. And it almost seems like it’s scripted. Right. Whereas you know, and that’s, that’s emerging a lot through COVID, which it should, people should be interested anyways if your a leader. But that was always a good quality of a leader is like, you know, I care about you, the person I’m leading in addition to, you know, what we’re trying to accomplish here as the business. But it’s one of the downsides I think of what’s happening right now is it’s just, people are manufacturing this care, which again, points to the fact that maybe you shouldn’t be in charge of people in the first place.

It’s true. And I think to your point, Brad, at what I’m seeing is there are some intrinsically good managers, right? And there are some genuine people out there who have always, for years been doing this, they had good role models and they had the language. But I think there’s also a point now with COVID, because it is more of a personal type intrusion or disruption, people are like, okay, when do do I hand them off to a therapist? Or when do I actually have this person get help that I’m not qualified for too? Right? Because I think we all need to know when we’re not an expert in an area, right. There are some things that I am happy to discuss with my talent with my peers. But then there’s some stuff that I’m very well versed in knowing that I’m not trained to handle that. So I think this is a new dynamic too, because for those managers that are really good, they also, I think have to form a bit of a line or a barrier or an understanding to the point about personal awareness of where their capabilities top off.

I think that’s a nice highlighting of the division of responsibilities, if you will, between what managers should and can be doing and what the organization should and can be providing. So, you know, to your point, if, if a manager gets to a point where it’s like, you know, this might be a bit out of my depth knowing where they can turn. Cause I could see there being a hesitancy to have the conversation because it, you know, they forecast it, maybe getting out of their depth. They don’t know where to what the next resources to hand someone off to.

So, you know, knowing, okay, well, if we get to this point, we’ve got a resource that’s now being offered around kind of COVID stress with connections to therapists or, you know, whatever, whatever the particular benefit or resource is. But again, that goes back to, to the concept of communication of information and or organization being able to say, know, this is what we have on offer for this particular moment and the difficulties that are inherent and here’s how you might want to use it. I think that’s kind of the distinguishing factor there.

Anyone else have anything they want to share on this one?

Changing role of managers during remote work (16:21)

Okay. I think we’re going to move on to some of the questions that were submitted for this Q&A session. Let’s start with this one right here. How are organizations communicating the changing role of the manager in the world of remote work? I’m going to kick that to Stacia right off the bat.

Yeah. I’ll start with this and then I want to, I’d love to hear what you all are seeing. So on the basis this on some of the interviews that we’ve been doing. And what we’re hearing is really a range. So we talked to someone yesterday who basically said, “yeah, we’re not talking about this. Like they’re still just managers managing.” We’re like, “Oh, okay. That’s interesting.” And they’re like, you know, “they should probably be talking to their people a bit more and we’re encouraging that. But like, you know, nothing is kind of fundamentally different.”

So that was one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum was an organization that we actually will be featuring in the research. And that is one that kicked off a concept of managerial commitments. And to be fair, that was already in flow before COVID happened, but they’ve kind of tweaked and refined what was happening as a result of COVID. And so they had Chelsea will probably be like, she got this wrong. I think it’s six managerial commitments that every manager is expected to do for their employees. And then the idea is that employees can then hold their managers accountable for them as well. So things that they’re asking you know, whether it’s frequent one-on-ones with the focus on growth and how people are doing kind of in the moment. There’s a of a range of things that are in those managerial commitments, but they’ve been very clear. I’m like, this is what you’re supposed to do. And this is how this looks up at different within COVID and working remotely, et cetera.

So I’ve kind of seen the range of things. And those communications I think, are coming out in a couple of ways. One being certainly direct communications around like, Hey, this is what we expect, et cetera. This organization I’m talking about with the managerial commitment actually then developed a self assessment for the managers to go through and see how they thought they were doing with regard to the commitments. And then they enabled a basically a feedback mechanism. So they could say, “Hey, you know, like I just assessed myself and I kind of have a perspective on how I think I’m doing. What do you all think of how I’m doing so that I can adjust those right now during this time? So I think what I’m seeing is quite varied in terms of that focus.

What are others seeing?

Hi, this is Sandra I’m calling from Quadient. One of the things that we have started to do, we introduced what’s called “smart work.” And it’s around new ways of working and we’ve got three pillars. One is about wellbeing employee wellbeing. And continue to focus on wellbeing as well as the other pillar is empathy. So wellbeing and empathy really came through for us, you know, with the pandemic and employees appreciated the way that the leaders handled and managed and supported. And so we’re looking at well-being, empathy, and we called the way we work.

So we’re introducing working from anywhere. And with all of these, we are providing managers as well as employees with toolkits. And part of the toolkit is coming up with team commitments and holding each other, including the manager, accountable for the team commitments. So I think we are requiring not necessarily more of managers, but a different way of working and how things have just changed and what our expectations of a manager are in this very changing world.

Accountability & management (20:33)

Sandra, you brought up a really interesting point and that is accountability. So when we did our performance management research last fall, every company that we talked to didn’t really have a lot of accountability for their managers to actually develop their people or take care of their people. I think we’re seeing that shift a little bit as well. Accountability is becoming more of a thing. Wondering from all of you, if you’re seeing that as well, if your organizations are more sort of inclined to, to make your managers accountable, whereas before maybe they were just assuming that they were doing their jobs?

Hey gang, this is Ryan. I can speak a little bit of how the transition went for us. And I think we’re fortunate that we have a lot of employee listening tools and you know, we’re able to put in a bit of a continuous listening strategy. But I think how, when you talk about accountability, how it really went for us, it actually went in phases.

So the first phase of accountability was really around communication, and like communication from leader leaders, managers. I think that was like early in the sense when people were a little bit in the dark, not sure what was going on. Are we going remote? Are we, how long are we doing this for? So a lot of what we focused on was just getting that communication out.

The second phase that we started driving accountability on was really then around prioritization, right? So it was around like, how are we making decisions? How are we allocating resources? And that became the next big question. I would say around the summer of like, how are we getting this information out to people? How are people people being brought in to the decisions that are being made around prioritization?

And then I would say the third area that we really, again, been running pulse survey has been getting data back from our employees. The third area that we’ve been most focused on has been burnout, right? We’ve been 6 months in. Schedules have changed. Fluctuated people have been living in this new reality for some time. So the accountability that we’re now bringing back out to the managers and communicating out to them is a more focused accountability around checking in with your people and understanding their wellbeing.

So I think that’s what’s been helpful for us is not to say, you know, let’s, we need to do all of the things all of the time, but dependent on what people are feeling kind of the most strain with and having some of the data to be able to drive us. I think that’s how we’ve seen some of the focus area shift over the last six months.

Nice. So when you say that you’re creating that accountability, is that through the poll surveys kind of getting data feedback back from folks on, on what’s working or not who’s doing it or not?

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s always obviously having our platform makes things quite a bit easier. So I, I recognize that. But in terms of accountability, I think there’s within platform or, you know, within the tools that you have, but then there’s also a lot that we can be doing outside of that, right? And I think that’s again where our people and experienced team has really, really plugged in in terms of creating those forums and those abilities to support managers in that.

So again, when we’re talking about language, that was super important, we have Slack channels built out specifically for mentors, specifically for leaders. So, you know, when things were happening around the social justice movement and how to talk about it, it was just posting language and the manager and leaders channels of like, here’s a Slack that you could send to check in. Here’s a prompt that you could use to open up again. I think there’s stuff that was happening within the platform and how we drive accountability through that. And then I think there’s lots of other ways, again that are asynchronous or almost like communal source, I think is what we’ve went to. It’s like, let’s put the resources out there, whether it’s confluence or in Slack channels and you’re not getting singled out to go and use it, but you can come in and draw from that well when you need.

So that’s another thing that’s been really helpful for us. So it’s been kind of creating those spaces for people to go and grab that language or those frameworks or those templates or whatever it may be that we’re really trying to have a push on. And I do think another key thing that’s been helpful for us as again, like a single focus. So like with managers, we have so many things that we need to carry. So again, being able to focus on a particular thing to work on has also been something that’s worked really well for us. It’s like, let’s just focus on this for this quarter because we’re sensing that this is what our employees are really asking for and what they need.

I absolutely love that, accountability in phases. Our managers are so overwhelmed right now with all the information coming in, everything that we’re asking them to do. You know, we’re shutting down locations or bringing people back in to the office, making decisions about hybrid, remote, onsite. And I think there’s just so overwhelmed with all this information coming at them. And I love this idea of accountability in phases because it makes it, I think, more manageable and more digestible for managers. So thank you. I love that. Any other thoughts? Sorry, go ahead Stacia.

Focus shift to different performance metrics (25:29)

I was just gonna say there was a comment in the in the chat that I wanted to kind of bring up, which is the question. It gets an accountability around the kind of metrics and some of the metrics that may be shifting. So if, if in the past we were focused on efficiency, like what Dani was talking about and maybe some productivity metrics, are we shifting down to metrics such as engagement or resiliency or some other human focused metric? What are your thoughts on that? Particularly in this context of accountability,

I can give you my thoughts, Stacia. I think it’s really scary for organizations who have never done it before to start putting metrics around these types of things. As you heard in the interviews we did for performance management last fall, they’re not doing it. And one of the reasons they’re not doing it is because of that accountability issue. I don’t think a lot of people know how, or what kinds of metrics to put into place to make sure a manager is a good manager. And I think that’s scary for a lot of people.

Yeah. I mean, I’ll maybe share anecdotally what I’m hearing on that kind of the people analytics side of the world. Because a lot of them, you know, kind of what Ryan was talking about are being tasked with, you know, these, these pulses and these updates and the like, and it seems like there’s a real grasping at straws if you will, for, from senior leaders to say, “How, how are we going to be sure that people are doing things like?” There’s a lot of these tools that can look at the email traffic, or when people log on or log off. And like, are those the right metrics? And God bless, most of the people analytics people are like, “No, stay away from this. This is a terrible idea.” Which is, you know, makes, makes me happy.

But I think there is a legitimate question around what are we gonna hold people accountable for? You know, kind of a concurrent area of interest for me right now is what are we going to do with PM this fall? I mean, I know it’s not an annual review of blah, blah, blah, yet a huge percentage of organizations have an annual review. So what are we going to hold up? What are we gonna, what are we going to ask people to measure on? Or are we not? And I don’t, I don’t know the answer there. I know that there’s certainly a lot of consternation around it, which is why, I especially wanted to bring up this question that was submitted.

But you know, my guess has said, it’s going to be much more around on people’s reflections on other people’s impact to them. You know, on the perceptions of how much they helped their ability to flex to the times their ability to kind of think through the problem. Which are much more complex metrics and more subjective. But let’s face it, every metric we’ve had for white collar workers is somewhat subjective. So that’s my gut on where it’s gonna go, but I just don’t know.

Successful leadership during remote work (28:32)

What to make sure we get to some of these other really good questions. I’m going to move us on to the next one. What are the indicators for the types of role person leader that is successful when working remotely? And Stacia actually put a great big, huge X through this one.

And the reason I put a great big X on this one is I don’t think it’s a type of person, right? It’s not a type of leader. Instead if we go onto the next slide, Dani. It’s really about the behaviors, right? So what are the behaviors that can enable that more effective remote working both from a manager, but then also what are the behaviors that our employees need to adopt?

So I have some thoughts here based on kind of some of the reading that I’ve done, but I’d love to turn it open to you all first and get your thoughts on kind of what manager behaviors have you seen that are enabling more effective, remote working.

I think perhaps empathy because everybody’s situation is a little bit different and I’ve seen really great managers kind of flex if you will to situations. So I think empathy is one. Doing more of the checkin before you do the checkup. How you doing? And really, you know, again, that empathy understanding that, you know, some may be parenting, you know, children remotely. So I really think empathy is really key for the managers right now. And resilience, right? They’re often the ones that, you know, they’re the first line of the employees and what’s going on all the emotion there. So I think really empathy and resilience, cause it’s not all going to be pretty.

Yeah, I think from my side, it’s a little bit flexibility and understanding, which ties on to what Sandra was saying about the empathy piece. But I think it’s, it’s this idea that, especially in remote, we don’t all work the same. And so, you know, I have people on my team who are working parents. And you know, when everything’s closed and you’ve got your toddlers at home, they get up and they work from five to seven, they get the kids going from seven to nine, they hand off to their spouse, they get back on. So it’s just being flexible. And I think a little bit adaptable.

And it’s also understanding that we have a shared experience in that we’re all in this together, we’re all home together, but our experiences are not identical. So it’s kind of refraining from judgment to. Just because I don’t have little ones and my guys can go upstairs and basically, it does still challenge their 14 year old executive functioning skills, but they can still, for the most part, get things going. I don’t have that same panic when the kids are running through the camera or I’ve got a toddler on my lap who wants to play with my keyboard and be like mom or dad.

So I think it definitely is stretching managerial capabilities because we all have to get something done, but how we do it and how we go about it isn’t the same. So even though I’m a more senior, more experienced manager, I’m finding myself gut checking myself in my own bias, just to say, “look, if this were you in your twenties, what the heck would you have done? What would you have done in your thirties?” And you know, now that I’m more senior, you know, I still have to kind of bring myself a little bit back and say, “alright, Mary Jo, take a break, see what’s going on. We’ll all get there.” And then just try not to be so judgy.

I think it’s interesting that we stepped out of this sort of sameness. So if you, if you think about zoom calls or conference calls before everybody had the same background. We were talking about background a little bit yesterday. But today everybody’s got a different background and we can actually see in their lives a little bit more than we could before. And I think that speaks to your point, MJ, everybody has to do this differently. And the way that we manage people seems to have become much more flexible and much more empathetic, and I’m going to use the word human because it has to be. I think we’ve stepped out. I think this has been a major step in moving away from sort of the robotic way we’ve treated employees in the past to a much more human and empathetic way that I’m hoping that we continue to treat them in the future.

I want me to ask a question though, cause we’ve been asking this from the interviews. Which is, this is great, like we should be more empathetic. We should be less judgy. We should be all these things, but what’s the organization’s role in enabling managers to do that? Because there’s a lot of onus that we’re putting on managers and saying, “Hey, go do these things that you didn’t do before.” So what do we, as organizations, do to help them do that?

Yeah, I can share a little bit on our end. It was adjusting our performance process, right? So the question that, the very questions that we asked and how we asked how to be looking at accomplishments in light of the last six months or in that last period really made their way into the language by which when we did our performance process the questions had quite dynamically changed. In terms of not moving from what was their accomplishment or, you know, what was the rating or, you know, those types of questions, but very much around you know, “looking in the light of all the change over the last six months, how would you rate how, or how would you go about giving guidance on the, you know, what, what this person did?”

So again, I think it’s just like, again, adding that additional layer of context, knowing that the last three to four months that we went through and we were doing this review are just like unlike any other business period that we’d went through. And so giving that baked into managers to again, give them that framing while they were going through the process of looking back and evaluating and thinking about how performance had looked over the last period was one of the ways that our organization kind of systemically tried to put that mindset across the organization.

I love that. Yeah. And I think that’s the ultimate question. What is the system and what are the incentives within the system to encourage people to do this?

Focus on performance not presence in remote teams (35:10)

And I think that’s actually a really good lead into the next question as well. Which is how best can managers focus on performance, not presence with remote teams. This is something we heard quite a bit in the round tables we did with respect to the responsivity research. A lot of people said ditch the nine to five, it’s not going to work. It’s really not going to work. So how are you doing it within your organizations? And Stacia what have you seen in the interviews that you’ve done with respect to this?

Yeah, I’ll start there and then let others in. You know, the biggest thing is a focus on outcomes and clearly defined outcomes. So moving away from the, we actually talked about this in the report, we did the double double shift on performance management women in COVID. There is a perception or we have a bias that when we see other people working, even if we’re not working with them, but we’re in the same office building with them and we see them over there doing their work, we have a bias about the amount of work they’re doing, the quality of the work they’re doing, et cetera. When someone is physically removed from our vision, our bias is that they, you know, may not be working. Your brain starts to populate with all these questions.

So if you then translate that into exactly what MJ was talking about, where you have some people who are working from five to seven AM and nobody else is online to see them online. And then, you know, they’re breaking off for a period to help their kids. And then it’s intermittent. The biases that we have about that physical proximity then can carry over to what is actually happening in terms of a digital presence.

And so one of the biggest things we’ve seen people focus on instead is very explicit outcomes. And that way you can say, if, you know, no matter when this person is working, if they achieve these things, then, you know, we can say that they’re kind of meeting their goals, meeting their expectations. So that’s one of the big focuses. And of course, you know, we should have been doing this all along when we were talking about our goals and objectives. But the remote working environment is just forcing that much more in a much greater way.

I think Stacia, it’s MJ again, I think what we found a little bit is that when there were performance issues in the physical, in presence environment, those have been kind of exacerbated in remote. And so now they really have to be addressed. It’s not like you can just kind of gloss over somebody or let somebody kind of occupy space and move around to another team member to pick up the slack. It’s becoming more pronounced that this person hasn’t engaged, or this person hasn’t connected with the team or this person hasn’t done their part of a deliverable.

And so it’s almost like, while we have to be compassionate and empathy and empathetic on one side of the house, on the other side of the house, we really have to address some performance problems that maybe would have been hidden or not as pronounced before this circumstance.

How about others? What are you seeing?

I think we see managers struggling. We’ve been talking, you know, since the beginning of COVID, when people were starting to remote. The managers struggling with managing by performance and not presence. Because they were was so used to doing the walk by and, you know, peek over the shoulder, you know, to see what was going on and they don’t have that.

And I think what it really highlighted for a lot of managers and leaders is this whole concept of really having strong outcomes. What are the goals? What are we looking to achieve? And then managing to that. And so I think managers have struggled, but I also think managers have stepped up because they’ve had to make that shift to really focusing in on performance measures, opposed to presence.

I like that idea a lot Sandra. When we when we started the responsivity research or after COVID happened, we saw two things happen. The first one was just a huge uptake in spying software. And there have been a couple of horrifying articles written on it. Where people are taking screenshots every 10 minutes and checking in on the video and making sure that you’re sitting in front of your computer, doing exactly what you want, you’re supposed to be doing. And I think we saw that because of exactly what you’re talking about, a fear that people aren’t doing, what we need them to do. And that kind of goes back to this mindset set that we’ve had forever on efficiency and, you know, on task and all of these types of things.

But when I read those articles, it made me think about the amount of time I spend away from my computer thinking about my work. And how are we accommodating that? You know what I mean? So it’s only fair that if you’re going to take a screenshot of me in front of my computer, then once I leave and start thinking about it, that I also get credit for that work. And how do you do that? And the short answer is you can’t. You can’t know that I was thinking about responsivity was on a walk with my dog. And so how do we actually change that mindset in individuals and managers? And I’m really curious because this is a huge deal right now. How are your managers sort of making that leap from efficiency, you know, on task to as long as the work is done, we’re good.

My sense is that also comes to goal setting and agile goal setting, right? I think there’s a lot of when we’ve done goal setting. Goal setting is hard, right? It’s always like, how do we set the right OKR? How do we find the right measurement? Those things always come up and then you set up and you put them in a glass case. And I think that was something that like, we had to break the glass case pretty immediately. Where, you know, quotas or, you know, the goals that we’d set at the beginning of Q2 just weren’t going to be relevant. So I think it moved into like, how are we bringing goal setting into that weekly, biweekly conversation and adjusting as we’re going.

And then that way it allows us, I think, to say like, okay, well, performance is moving in the direction that we want it to. And we’re kind of capturing that, communicating that more effectively. Rather than like, we put this number or this task at the beginning when we set something. And I think that’s going to continue to be the case because, you know, whether it’s agile or responsiveness, I think organizations are realizing that planning three months out is very much a dice game right now, right? Like it’s, so I think that’s a bit of how is it that goal setting just doesn’t happen at the beginning of the quarter or at the beginning of the year and then we just march to that and measure on that performance, but it is something that’s actively happening in much shorter feedback loops or increments. So that’s another area, I think if the manager and a direct report are talking more about goal setting and remaining aligned on that, I think that’s another way that there’s a lot of benefit that can come from that.

Comparing employees vs measuring improvement (42:12)

I have one more question. I think that was really insightful. I have one more question and I don’t know if I’m going to get any takers on it, but one of the things that we started hearing during the performance management stuff was, we’re not comparing people to each other anymore, we’re comparing people to themselves. Is that playing out at all in, in the performance discussions that you’re having now, because it’s harder now to compare people to each other. And so it’s much more about, I mean, the idea would be that it would be much more about improvement of the individual than it would be about meeting some arbitrary goal for everybody.

Yeah. I didn’t think I’d get any takers. Well, I’ll jump in, because usually no takers means that it’s going to go to Stacia. So I had a conversation with someone yesterday about this. And I think the crux of it is coming down to the extent to which the organization has connected performance scores to compensation. Because ultimately if we step back, the reason we were comparing people to each other ultimately, is to decide, you know, do we give Dani a 10% increase or bonus and Stacia only a 5% or vice versa or whatever.

And so what I have been hearing is that in the organizations that have reduced the tightness of the connection between the two that they are much more open to that idea of comparing people to kind of their growth and the extent to which they’ve, they’ve met their growth and yes, their goals, but, but you know, much more about them as individuals versus the comparison to others.

And those who really still have this tight connection to compensation, they characterize it as, you know super focused on fairness, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m not saying it’s wrong, that’s just how they see it. I think there is a reluctance to move away from that, because if they do that, the whole rest of the system starts to come crashing down. I think you have to take, you have to have someone in an organization like what Cisco did, which is, they just said, “Stop, we’re going to completely stop this and then redesign the entire system.” And that takes a lot of guts to do.

So that’s been, my observation Is just that when there’s the looser connection, yes, focus on growth. When there’s that super tight connection it still seems to be the focus on comparing against each other.

I think for, I completely agree, but I think the when there’s a super tight connection, there are also much better metrics to determine whether or not somebody is hitting that line. You know what I mean? So I think what we’ve tried to do is take Taylorism and apply it to thinking work instead of doing work. And it’s caused all kinds of trouble because it’s really hard to get those metrics for desk workers versus somebody that works on a line. It’s crazy. I don’t know that we have all figured out how to do that yet.

Changes to management approaches during COVID-19 (45:08)

I want to get to the last question that we’ll discuss today, which is: What conscious decisions or changes are managers taking to their management approaches during COVID-19?

And I think we’ve touched on this a little bit. This question was actually written initially more in kind of the first person. So like, what are people, even people here, doing in terms of changing your approaches to managing others during COVID-19? We broadened it, but initially the question was like trying to generate some ideas on what individuals here are doing or are seeing.

I thought I was empathetic. I am. But I just realized how more empathetic that I have become. And also I think trust. I don’t know, I came in late, so I don’t know if we talked about trust. As I think as we, you know, work in this remote environment and we talk about performance versus presence. I think that a lot of managers are learning that they have to build that trust muscle that they may not have had before.

I like that Sandra. And I think it’s actually even broader than just the manager. I think it’s the organization has to figure out how to build trust and how to put the systems in place so that managers can actually do that building of trust. It’s a sort of systemic thing and an individual thing. Other thoughts on this question?

I’m going to jump in with a super tactical one. And that is some of the tools, and this may not be managers themselves, but the organization broadly. I have heard in our interviews so far, a lot of people talking about the greatness that is moving to Microsoft teams or Slack. And not that there’s anything not great about that, for sure there is. But what I have been struck by is some of them who’ve actually focused on, “well, we just do a lot more email.” And those organizations have been also those organizations who have said, “we haven’t really talked much about the changing role of the manager.”

And so I think there’s a discussion around the tools that we use and Slack is a good one. I think, you know, the project management tools. So there’s less back and forth or less scattered back and forth around particular projects. But kind of thinking about how do you actually enable people to work remotely on certain things together, even when they’re physically apart.

You know, we, we had RedThread, we’ve been well again Dani and I have worked remote for like 10 years. So we have we have a ridiculous range of tools for the size of our team. But they’re all designed around kind of this collaboration idea when we’re physically apart. And so that’s something I’ve heard in some of the more forward thinking organizations.

Stacia, this is Dan. So I definitely agree with you guys on the on the tactical side of things. My team has essentially moved more to email communication that we then link back more so to project management documents that have, you know, what I would have considered 6 months ago, you know, too much detail. But as you know, it’s just more task line items with the expectation of dates and times. And then the communication and comments sections are just, you know, much more robust than they ever have been before.

So instead of being in the office having those conversations live, it’s all done over email. Because what we’re trying to do is limit the number of meetings in a length so that, you know, essentially there’s no need for anything over a 30 minute meeting. Because if you haven’t done or haven’t kind of sent forward your comments or your feedback on certain items, then we need to postpone the meeting until you have. And you know, we try to keep the meetings much more succinct now, just simply because we know that these things, meaning online, gets old, it gets tough. And, you know, sometimes we just, we need to be being more succinct with that.

That said we do also take time once every other week to kind of just catch up on completely, whatever else is out there. So if it’s stuff that I’ve researched or something you saw, or if you want to comment on kids’ sports teams or something like that, that’s all that’s all on there. And so the biggest shift that I’ve seen is us managing the work much more closely in these project management tools and then having people much more prepared for the meetings. No one walks into meetings with so give me the update. Like you walk in, everyone knows the update. There’s been a paragraph written about it. You’re expected to read it and then go from there.

Yeah. I love that. I love that. I think we’ve also seen we have a policy that we don’t jump on the phone unless there’s a video. And that is probably because of the 10 years that we’ve worked remotely. We understand how important that that connection is. But we’ve seen an uptake in video used outside of the organizations as well. Just wondering if you guys have seen that. I think it’s a really small decision, but I think it makes a difference when you’re talking face to face with somebody, especially when you’re trying to communicate.

So sorry, I just, I have a good one on this cause my wife and I have talked about this a lot. Cause her team has pretty much moved from all video in the very beginning to sporadic video. And they’ve gotten used to the fact that they can still be on the video and whoever wants to be on there. But they’ve kind of gotten past this policy of majority of the people now are either working out in the middle of the day or, you know, they’re not as business professional during the day. And so they they’re cognizant that, Hey, if I’m not on video, it’s usually because I’ve been doing something else. There’s no need for you to look at me and my, you know, quickly post-workout face or something or, you know, just didn’t have the time to kind of do the whole shower thing in the morning. But I’ve seen it kind of go back and forth. The, the tool, the video usage is up, but the, you know, there’s not a push to, you must be on video, ready to go kind of thing. So that’s just the slight nuance that I’ve seen.

We skip the, you must be ready to go part. It’s basically only when we’re recording that I look like this. You don’t know what the bottom half of me looks like.

You know, I think initially everything was zoom zoom, or we use teams and we found a document. I can’t remember it’s Deloitte or McKinsey. And what it does is help you to focus on how you’re going to communicate. So for meetings, maybe it’s video conferencing. For just a quick question it might be chat within teams. And then for other things, it might be email. So as a team, you sit down and you come up with how you gonna going to communicate. And I think that has helped people as well.

Yeah, I think that’s a great point around communication norms. So Chelsea who’s on our team and who’s actually helping with this research. She just joined and one of the first things I said was, okay, here’s how we communicate about different things and on what urgency scale and like, this is what we do. Cause you’re right. That’s one of the hardest things is knowing. And you know, if it’s a team where like unimportant things should not go on chat, you know, then like, and you’re chatting about stuff that, that person’s like, “why are you interrupting my day?” You know, that creates that dissonance. So I think that’s a wonderful point.

Wrap up (53:21)

I think we’re at time. So we’re gonna go and end the call, but we want to thank you all for your insights and for the questions that were submitted. They have helped this conversation to be pretty rich. And we’re pretty excited about some of the things that we’ve learned here. We will be posting this video as well as the transcript online within a week. So look for that and we’ll send you a link to that as well. And please join us for our next one, which will be on mobility and how you move people around the organization.

And then I want to give a plug. We did a more robust roundtable on this topic that was sponsored by CultureAmp. But that was 80 minutes. We started with an overview as we did today on responsivity, but then we broke up into 4 subgroups and had really rich conversations within those groups. Then we came back together, shared what we learned, did this really cool voting exercise on what people thought was most interesting, and then came out of it with a set of actions that people can go in and do an implement. So if you want to dig in further, please click here for those notes and mindmap.

Thank you so much, everybody. We’ll talk to you next time. Okay. Thanks. Bye.

In this call, we discuss the importance of distributive authority – allowing employees to act in making decisions at all levels of an organization. We talk about good examples (which can be hard to find) and touch on principle-vs-rules-based approaches to decision-making. We discuss empowering employees to act, even when it’s not tied to financials. And of course, we share insights on what is happening during the massive changes we’ve seen this year due to COVID-19.

There were many great insights during this Q&A. Thank you to everyone who attended and participated live. We hope you join us for the next Q&A call.

Video Contents & Questions Asked

You can jump to the following locations in the video using the timestamps on the video and in the chapters menu (next to the full screen icon).

0:00 Introduction
1:28 Overview of responsive organizations research
7:45 How are companies changing culture that is dictated by job levels and titles that become the barrier to empowering employees?
21:02 With COVID-19, have organizations slowed down enough that there is the time to be thoughtful about this and overt to the employees?
25:51 How can my organization find the right balance between allowing broad decision-making and ensuring safety, good decisions, etc?
29:08 Does diversity really affect employees ability to act and react to their environment?
33:54 How do we empower employees to create development plans, document them and act on them if they are not linked to any financials?
41:44 How are companies empowering employees during COVID-19?
44:21 Clients are much more interested in burning topics, getting help with BLM reputation, money management, etc. but broader diversity topics do not get much traction at the moment. Do you relate to this?
46:58 Wrap Up

Q&A Call Transcript

Introduction (00:00)

So our session today is on empowering employees to act. This is a pretty broad subject. Some of the questions that we got will narrow it down a little bit. We want to base some of what we share with you on some of the recent research we did for a responsive organization. So that’s kind of where we’re going. As always, you know, as we go through, please feel free to comment and talk. We want this to be an open space. Obviously we are recording and we will be publishing this. So if you don’t want your face or your ideas out in the public, message us privately, and we’ll keep it to ourselves. But we, we love the feedback and we love the interaction.

So for housekeeping, just, just five, really quick things. First of all, make it a safe place, no swearing, no stomping up and down. None of that kind of stuff. We want this to be a safe place to share ideas. The second one obviously is to share your ideas. Third one, in a group this small probably isn’t as valid, but, you know, raise your hand to speak. We keep a really close eye on what the panelists are doing. So go ahead and raise your hand, unmute yourself, and then feel free to discuss topics in the chat as well, if you’re more comfortable using chat than you are speaking out loud. Any questions on any of that?

Overview of responsive organizations research (1:28)

Okay, great. So when we think about getting employees to act or empowering employees to act it takes us back to some research that we completed in may this year, the responsible organization. And one of the sort of lenses that organizations should look through in order to make sure that their organization can respond to external and internal pressures is distributing authority. So making sure that everybody in your organization has the right amount of authority to move the organization forward. And when we sort of deep-dived the distributed authority portion, or three big buckets that came out.

The first one is how decision-making rights are distributed in your organization: who has the ability to make decisions and how you make sure they have that decision-making ability. The second and third ones were a little bit of a surprise to us, but equally interesting. Diverse and engaged teams. It turns out that when you have a diverse and engaged team, your authority is distributed a little bit more broadly. And collaboration is the other one. When you enable your organization to collaborate, distributed authority is a little bit more prevalent.

So I can talk about this one. So, as part of the responsible organization research. In addition to the four lenses, we basically saw that there were kind of three, three levers or three areas where you can help drive responsive organizations. One of them was the organizational culture itself. Another one was managers, and then the third one was data and analytics. And so we recently, some of you may have seen an article you recently published called “the now of work and lessons from an octopus.” And the idea was how do we take what’s happening with data and analytics and use that to help us understand how to make a more responsible organization.

And so when we think about what that specifically was with regard to distributed authority and the connection of people analytics, we saw, there were three particular items. The first being ensuring broad access to analytics products. So when we think about the role of analytics within responsible organization, a big part of it is giving insights and distributing those insights so that people do have the information they need to make decisions. And from a people analytics perspective that starts with designing for the distribution of information, and then obviously all the relevant security controls and everything else that has to go along with that. But if you start from a bias of, we’re going to share information versus we’re going to keep it from closely held, that makes fundamental differences in terms of your decisions about the types of information you collect, how you analyze it, how you distribute it, what you expect people to do with it, etc.

The second component of this, as it related to people, analytics was about sharing valuable insights. And so the point being, you know, Priyanka and I have at this point looked at, I think, just this year, this last six weeks, 30 different technologies, and we’ve got another 20 to go. And when we look at what’s being delivered to managers, oftentimes it’s interesting information, but it’s not valuable information. And so the distinction being that we want to make sure that what we’re providing, isn’t just something that’s kinda like, Oh, Hey, well, that’s nice. And then I go off and do the rest of my work, but instead I can make decisions that are important and that drive value in the organization based on the information we receive. So that’s the second component from a people analytics perspective.

And then the third component is analyzing and enabling collaboration. So, you know, I know Brian and Max and others who’ve been on here before, you know, we’ve talked to some extent about organizational network analysis and understanding, you know, how does information flow through organizations. And that gets it, Dani’s point a few moments ago about distributing authority. So if we’re understanding how information is being shared, if we understand how people work together and collaborate, that enables us to maybe design organizations more effectively for distributing authority. So these were kind of the three areas we saw within people analytics that can help with distributing authority more broadly.

Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. You’re saying that I mean we’ve heard information has power forever and ever and ever. But it really is when you need a distributed authority, unless people have the right information in order to make decisions that distributed authority doesn’t do anything. And that goes much, much further than just the manager level. In most organizations, we’re seeing information sort of float down the organization till it’s the manager level and then that’s where it resides. We rely on those managers to get that information all the way down to the individuals. But what we’re finding is those organizations that are using technologies and putting systems and processes into place to actually share that information further down. We’re actually getting much more responsivity in their organization cause they’re empowered to do something about it.

So we’ve gone over just two quick models. Are there any, well, it’s the same different aspects of the same model? Are there any comments or questions about these before we jump into the questions?

I’ll just add an addendum. So we, this research getting mentioned, the core research was published in May. It was based on a giant lit. review. We then did a survey of about 300, both HR leaders, as well as managers and employees. And then did a whole, like probably the most sophisticated statistical analysis we’ve done of any research. And that’s kind of how we got to the four lenses and then the sub components of it. So it’s not just some pretty circles on a page, even though that’s what we’re showing. There is a very substantial amount of work that went behind this that’s published in that research for May.

We also ended up doing four round tables with about 30 leaders in each to sort of round out what it meant. It was a really interesting topic, but a very deep and complicated topic. And the stories from those leaders really provided a lot of color and a lot of help to those looking for information on how to do this better.

And those, and we did really nice summaries and mindmaps and everything of those conversations that are available on the website. So if there’s more that you want to see beyond the conversation today, particularly with regard to the other three lenses, that information is available.

Changing the culture of job levels & titles (7:45)

Okay. So let’s jump into the first question. How are companies changing culture that is dictated by job levels and titles that become the barrier to empowering employees?

Stacia and I were talking about this question at the beginning, it took us two or three times the question to sort of understand what it was actually asking, but this is the, this is the big challenge right now. We have really traditional ways of thinking about working organizations and the way that those traditional structures don’t necessarily lend themselves to empowering employees. So what are we seeing that companies are doing to change the culture, to make empowering employees possible?

So I can jump in with, with a start. One of the biggest things that we saw in the research that we just kind of touched on a moment ago is this this topic of decision-making rights. It’s kind of getting that clarified and, and understanding both what is the state today, the explicit state and the implicit state. So there may be a situation where people say, this is what you’re allowed to do. And then there’s what you’re really allowed to do. And then documenting what the changes are or how you need it to be moving forward.

So one of the most interesting things we saw coming out of the round table was a suggestion of publishing a decision-making log, which we had actually never heard of. Maybe you guys have, but the idea that being that we in particularly senior leaders make decisions in the organization, they document what the decision was, the thinking behind the decision-making process. And then they share that broadly, basically one, certainly to communicate, you know, this decision or why. But also more importantly, as part of kind of a learning effort to help the organization learn how they should be making decisions, what are the type of criteria that really matter, and then to be able to model that same type of decision-making.

So, you know, that clarity, I think is one component, the second component being basic, you know, these are the types of decisions that people have authority to make in different roles or titles, etc. And then the third component was that we heard, particularly with regard to COVID was this focus on when it’s appropriate to look to expertise versus title. So, you know, particularly, you know, when you’re close to a customer or you’re close to a particular problem being very clear on, you know, when you, when that person has a higher level of expertise, this is when they should be making a decision versus, you know, other situations. So just being very clear on some of those decision-making rights was one of the biggest things we saw both in the research as well as around too.

Yeah. And interestingly, those organizations that do this best aren’t necessarily the ones that offer the most freedom for decision-making rights, which we found really interesting. It’s more a matter of communicating what decision rights they have. So for example, you know, how do you determine who gets what days off? Do I actually need to ask? Or can I just tell you that I’m going to take Friday off? Or can I provide an extra discount for a long time customer? Is that something that I need approval for? Is that something that I’m empowered to do? So making sure that those communications are really clear and that everybody understands what decision-making authority that they have.

And then the other big problem that organizations run into is consistency. Because a lot of times decision-making rights are really dependent on the immediate supervisor and that can’t be in an organization where you’re trying to get everybody to move in the same direction and be really responsive. So making sure that you have systems and processes into place to make sure that that consistency is there was the other big piece. Any questions or comments on this? What are you all seeing?

I agree with what you’re saying in terms of being clear about what your decision rights are and making sure that it’s consistent. And then I think over time, the blurring of the boundaries and the character of the people and the situation that they’re at. So it’s worth it to come back frequently to review it, whether it’s with your direct manager or organizationally. I’ve seen it where I got to blurry over time. And then it’s like, what Stacia said, what you say and then what really happens, becomes very different.

Yeah. I think a really good example of this is actually Ritz Carlton. And this is the example that’s used all the time, but everybody in that organization knows that they have up to $2,000 to solve a customer’s problems or guests problem, right? So everybody knows what the boundary is. I can sell this guess problem up to $2,000. It’s been communicated broadly and they’ve been consistent in the way that they handle that. So that it’s always going to be consistent. It’s always going to be that. You’re right in a lot of organizations that does get a lot, a lot blurrier and, and not every organization and not every situation is as cut and dried as is Ritz Carlton. But that should be the goal communicate what you can do and then make it consistent across everything. I like that Jacquie, any other thoughts, comments on this one?

I tend to read about it more than I actually see it. And I wonder, you know, it’s great to cite them actually, because one needs to pull out the shining examples where you find them. Certainly not many of the companies I work with would do it, not for lack of pressing them to become more transparent. But I wonder whether there’s a direction in your research, did it emerge at all that larger companies are less likely to do it then smaller companies perhaps? Because I mean, anecdotally small companies I know are doing it, but they’re not the ones I work with. So presumably that’s why they don’t need me because they do it. Maybe that’s the lesson, but I’d be interested in the demographics and stuff that you looked at because is this a handful of large companies and mainly mid, SMBs, midsize companies, or who is doing this good stuff?

I think if it gets even a little bit more complicated between large and small, because you also have situations where there’s a business unit within a large organization that is doing it well. And then there’s sort of a pocket within that organization. That’s doing it. I mean, there are the sort of usual suspects, you know Ritz Carlton, Nordstrom, Gore, those that you hear about all the time that have set this as part of the way that they do things. I think it also becomes an issue of sort of mission and vision and also the way that they handle failure. So when you put something like this in place you have to expect a certain amount of failure. And the communication that you have about that failure is going to determine whether or not it continues to happen or whether it shuts things down completely. And so I think it’s a really complicated thing. And I think you’re right Max. We hear about the really good cases, but we don’t see it broadly. But what we do know from the research is that those organizations that are doing it tend to be much more responsive to the market.

I think the other thing, I mean, we’ve focused a bit here on kind of decision-making rights because that’s where I started us. But, but the other places we think about changing culture that I feel like we’re seeing a lot of is using a lot of the feedback mechanisms, no employee poll surveys or, or the like that we’ve seen particularly explode since COVID. The thing I find fascinating is there, it seems like there used to be an assumption that because people were sitting in the same building and actually knew what was going on in their heads and what they thought as soon as they go to work from home, it’s like, “Oh wait, maybe we don’t know, we need to ask them questions.” And it’s like, well, you probably didn’t know before, but whatever. So, but, but we’ve kind of seen that.

And I think where we’ve started, if we’re talking about this question here about how do we make that shift? One part of it is asking, obviously. The second part is sharing what you’re learning in terms of what people think, feel, things should be done to do the work better. But then the third part is enabling action and enabling that broadly. Do you think the area that we tend to see the biggest trip up is this idea that we just got, you know, whether it’s engagement survey, experience survey, or whatever it is, we just got our results and we, HR going to go and take charge and we’re going to drive the change. And it’s like, you know, HR as a percentage of the organization is so small. And if you’re trying to change company culture, you have to be doing exactly what we’re talking about, empowering employees to act. So what is the enabling action plan that you’re putting in place, but allows people to understand the data and the insights and then to go and do something and to have some structure of the decision-making. You know, these are the types of things that you can do or where you need to get some feedback or check in from our senior leaders. But, you know, giving some reign people to do something that that will drive positive change and gives them a sense of doing something to make my workplace a better place.

I mean, I have one shining example that that really gets me thinking, “Please don’t do that.” And that’s ONA, organizational network and analysis. There’s this whole thing about active analysis where you using surveys and passive analysis where you are putting millstones around their neck, or looking at their emails and phone calls who’s talking to who, etc. And it really bugs me when I see companies saying we are only going to do passive. I said, can’t you pretend to do some active, just so that employees get the impression that you’re interested in what they’re saying. I mean, you can tear them up afterwards, but just try and do that. And I think that I’m seeing that as a sort of a growing trend, more and more passive coming in less and less active. And I kind of wonder, again, I think there’s this dichotomy, you know, when Dani was explaining it very well earlier. Dani, to your point, I wonder if this isn’t sort of Pareto principle or worse, you know, like 80/20, you know, 10/90, 5/95 or something. Because I’m, I’m seeing less. Again, it’s large organizations doing that. But I mean, your, your point that organizations that do do it, do really well when they do it, I think is the, is the key message. And I just, I wish more people would hear that particularly on the ONA front, for example.

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. So I think I’m seeing something slightly different on the ONA front in that you guys, I think there’s more general interest broadly in passive, but there’s still really great reticence, particularly in the bigger organizations that we were talking about to do it. Because of, you know, fear of what happens if it ends up on the front page of the journal. And so I think that I am seeing a bit more interest on active and doing some combination with passive, but relatively like, and maybe it’s just who I’m talking about and I’m looking at others are too. But the kind of acknowledgement of the importance of trust, particularly when it comes to, you know, spying or some of the other things.

I think the thing that bothers me though, we’re talking about what bothers us about ONA is all that information being held within HR. Not that everybody needs to see, you know, the big, pretty graphs and all the rest of that. But, you know, I think I know of only two vendors who are giving an individualized report back out to people that says, here are the people who you said are kind of your trusted network. You yourself tend to be a boundary spanner, and maybe you want to build in these directions or anything that would help people actually do something with the data we’re collecting on them and help them with their career and to be more effective would be great. What bothers me is when it’s all just kept behind and it’s like, okay, well, we’re going to use this decision for succession or for you know, post M&A decisions, et cetera, et cetera. That’s that I think is you know, you’re not distributing authority. You’re not enabling people when you collect the data and then hold everything to yourself. Off my soap box. A hundred percent,

Are companies being thoughtful enough during COVID-19? (21:02)

If I could add another angle, it’s sort of a question with an observation to start in terms of companies changing their culture. I’ve had experience in my past with large companies going fast one way or another. And to me, that’s where the lines get blurry, especially you bring another acquisition and their culture is different. And so in my past, it was always moving too quickly to really have those robust conversations and be thoughtful about what the differences in the cultures were, which ones you want to promote actively or passively one way or another. But now this is my question: with COVID-19 have organizations slowed down enough that there is the time to be thoughtful about this and overt to the employees? Or are we just moving quickly because of crisis and we’re not able to be thoughtful about it? To me, it seems like you have to think both short-term and long-term so that you can focus your resources and be consistent over time and throughout the organization and give that feedback and readjust and all that kind of thing. And I’m curious about what the impact of this year is on those resources and availability.

Well, let me take a stab of that. I don’t know, Stacia and I are going to agree on this, so I want to speak first. (Get your point in before I can) I see what you’re seeing Jacquie, but I’m also seeing sort of a more optimistic view of it. So I think first of all, I don’t think organizations are slowing down. I think they’ve had to speed up tremendously. I use the example of somebody that was trying to put an LSP into place. And they said, yeah, we’re going to roll this out over the next year and a half. And it turns out COVID happened and then everybody was up and going in three weeks. So, we’re seeing things move much more quickly. Stacia and I have had this conversation a lot, change doesn’t take as long as we think it’s going to take. People are much more adaptive than we give them credit for.

So that’s happening. At the same time, because things are happening faster, I think organizations are getting better at adapting and accepting good enough versus accepting perfect. So if you think about a waterfall design versus an agile design. Going through the steps and making sure that everything is exactly right, I think is becoming more and more a thing of the past because things are moving too quickly to do it that way. So now I’m going to throw it to Stacia and see what she has to say.

So, I agree with most of that. I think that we were in this massive period when COVID first happened, crazy acceleration, like Dani said, like, Oh, we got to get this stuff in, we gotta make decisions faster. And I feel like we kind of really ramped up. And then I think we hit the realization that this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. And then I feel like we, in some ways kind of backed off. It was interesting. I was actually talking to a vendor yesterday. He was showing me big data set that the analysis that they had done on hours worked and actually you can see it in the hours work. So you actually see the ramp up to a significant increase in hours in the like six to eight weeks post-COVID, so March to end of April kind of roughly time period, mid May. And then it backed down lot closer to where were .and now actually it seems like it’s kind of going back up and I think maybe that’s because we’re starting to look towards the end of the year, final quarter activities, etc.

But that’s kind of a long way of saying that, you know, I think because Jacquie we’re in this it’s-a-marathon-not-a-sprint period, I think people are now starting to say, okay, well, if we’re going to have this more flexible work from home arrangement, when it, you know, whenever we go back into the office, we’re going to have to rethink what the culture looks and feels like and what the employee experience looks and feels like. Because we’re going to have to design something that people really want to be here and want to do the work. So I think we may be in that moment now, and I’m just starting to hear about some of those conversations. So I don’t have enough kind of data to really say absolutely that’s where we are, but that’s not my gut given all the conversations I’ve had.

One of the one of the really interesting comments we got in our round tables is fairly, forward-thinking guy running an HR department said, “We’re using this as an opportunity to change things that don’t work. We’re weeding out things that don’t work.” And so I do agree with Stacia, like we are slowing down enough to sort of say, okay, now how do we institutionalize this rather than react to everything that’s going on right now? They think we’re doing it much more agilely and we’re allowing ourselves to not be perfect as we do it and adjust as we go rather than the way that we’ve done it for the last hundred years. Any thoughts on that?

I like the opportunity to do it better and fix the things that are broken. And I’m super curious, and I’ll ask you again in three to six months, you know, they had this moment, but did it last? And then how fast did we go back to just how it was or what kind of changes will remain and be institutionalized? It’s a super curious time. Yeah. I mean, please do ask us in six months cause I would like to know as well. I think that’ll be an interesting discussion.

Broad decision-making vs good, safe decisions (25:51)

All right. I’m just looking at time. I think we’re going to move on to the next question. We have many, many questions and we’re still on number one. So let me move to the next one. How can my organization find the right balance between allowing broad decision-making and ensuring safety, good decisions, etc? So this is one of things we heard quite a bit during the round tables and something that we’ve continued to hear is, you know, if I allow this amount of freedom or if we, if we put things in place where things don’t have to be perfect, how do we ensure that good decisions are going to be made and safety and those types of things aren’t going to suffer? You want to take a stab at that first Stacia?

Well, I think that we, we touched on it a little bit on the past question and that’s why we grouped these two together. But I think a lot of this comes down to you know, being clear on the expectations. You know, it’s, it’s a principles approach, not a rules based approach in terms of the decisions we’re making. With the exception being safety. That’s a rules based approach. And Dani and I have actually talked about this in the context of, and even learning systems that we offer. You know, using certain types of learning systems for compliance related content and things that we need to have clearly denoted as having mastery of. Versus other types of learning systems that we use where you’re trying to encourage exploration and learning and it’s okay to fail and all the rest of that. And so I think that that kind of dual track approach is important to think about, I think we have a tendency to rely on doing things one way, but they don’t think that’s the case. So safety, yes, you know, compliance focused. And then, you know, other things being more of a principles based approach and being clear in your communications on that.

I also think this is really changing the conversation we’re having in general and organizations. Like we’ve been so sort of, you know, how’s this person performing on a scale from one to five and if you screw up, you know, what does that mean for your career? We’ve been thinking in those terms for so long, because we’ve been focused on efficiency for so long, but I think this is really interesting. We’re now saying, listen, the world is moving too fast for the people at the top to make all the decisions we have to broadly distribute decision-making authority. So how do we do that? And how do we look at failure as data instead of looking at it as a failure of one individual? How do we take the information from all of those smaller failures and do something with them?

I think in one of these calls, I mentioned the CEO who challenged his direct reports to have intelligent failures. Which I think is really interesting. He didn’t, he didn’t measure them on successes. He measured them on how many intelligent failures, which means they thought through the decision, made the decision and then it still failed. How organizations are starting to think about failure and think about it as data rather than as a career blunder is a really interesting thing for me. And I think it kind of goes back to, Jacquie, the question you were asking. Is this going to hold or are we going to back down and start focusing on efficiency and making sure everybody’s in the right place again? Again, any thoughts from anybody else on this?

Does diversity really affect the ability to act? (29:08)

Let’s move onto the next question. I’m going to toss this one to Stacia because she is our resident expert in diversity and inclusion. One of the things that came out of our responsive organization, stuff that we did not necessarily expect was diversity and the role that it plays. So the question we got was does diversity really affect employees ability to act and react to their environment?

Yes. I mean, we all know, or maybe we don’t all know cause we got this question. There’s, there’s tons of studies that show the impact of diversity and diversity of thought and perspectives on our ability to see around corners, to look at things in different ways, and to be able to react more more thoughtfully and in a more agile fashion. You know, one, the things that ran through the responsive organization research was the importance of taking outside information and bringing it in and using that to kind of change our perspectives. And so when you build in, you have diverse people and diverse perspectives in your organization, you’re enhancing your ability to do that just from the get go, and then continuing to encourage those people to seek out those diverse experiences and diverse information I think is really important.

The other aspect of this, and Dani touched on this a few moments ago, is the idea that because the way information flows through an organization, the way that power networks work and organizations a lot of decisions and information gets held in specific networks within and therefore we’re not having nearly as much participation in providing new ideas, making decisions as we, as we might think we are. You know, just because we have diverse people in the group doesn’t mean that they’re getting the information and making decisions.

And so if you’re able to create a more inclusive environment where those people can bring their perspectives, you’re going to get that broader decision-making and authority. So, you know, if the answer is a resounding yes. I will say though, it’s not easy. And I think that’s the thing about all this distributed authority work is it’s not the most direct line that you can see from here to there. It might, you know, kind of go around and around like this, but the thing is, is when you get here, the result is better, but it takes a a willingness to kind of engage in the less linear path to get there. I think that’s the crux of everything we wrote about in this research is, you know, the greatest efficiency is not necessarily the best way forward. And so we needed to kind of get out of that mindset and be more open, you know, open the aperture to possibilities and ideas that may not be what we, to those in the leadership in the high power positions, think is exactly the right way to get there. Any thoughts on this or examples that you’ve seen?

One of the things that we heard in the roundtables was the idea of introverts versus extroverts and how most workplaces are built for the extrovert. And so we actually had a pretty deep discussion, a 15 or 20 minute discussion, on how you, how you engage those introverts in an organization or in a system that doesn’t necessarily recognize them. A book by Susan Cain “Quiet” is fantastic, especially if you’re like me and are an introvert. But some of the other things that we heard were, you know, send really detailed agendas and make it really how they’re going to be expected to participate in those. Be aware of those that aren’t actively participating in, ask them their opinion, or text them in the background and see if they have questions. Or establish that there aren’t any really bad ideas, there are just ideas and we’re all here to learn from each other. And those things sort of go back to, you know, it’s effort. It’s effort, and it’s not a direct path, but the ideas and the path that you have moving forward is probably going to be much better.

I’ll just add reinforcement, that I agree diversity is very important. Diversity of thought, experience, backgrounds. But I would call out what you just said about the effort that it takes to make it safe for people to put their thoughts forward. Space to fail and also the time that it takes to do all that. And the power networks, I think, is very important to call out the power networks. Trump and many of the others. Because if you’re asking for their opinions or experiences, but they’re only saying what they think the power network wants to hear, you’ll never get that diversity. So there’s other things that are at play. This is definitely not something that stands alone. Any other thoughts on this particular question?

Empowering employees when it’s not linked to financials (33:54)

Okay, let’s move on to the next one. How do we empower employees to create development plans, document them and act on them if they are not linked to any financials? I thought this was a really interesting question. In organizations that are responsive or even organizations that are healthy and that are working well employees understand that those development plans are very useful to themselves. So it’s not just for the organization. It’s not just check the box activity, but they are designed and supported by managers and upper leaders to make sure that that employee is developing in the direction that they wanted to go. And so in organizations where this is not happening, where you’re really struggling to get those development plans in place, it’s usually due to lack of communication about their importance and the benefits associated with him, lack of support from the managers, the direct managers and lack of enablement of those individuals to make sure that those things happen. So in a lot of organizations, if the manager doesn’t value them, then they’re just not going to get done.

(34:57): Whereas in organizations where this is working well, the manager is as involved as the individual, but the individual also knows that they can call on the manager at any time to have that discussion about what’s next in my career and help them move forward. Stacia, did you want to add anything before I open it up?

No. I mean,I just kind of laughing at the beginning because when we first got this question, I was thinking to myself, “Well, what are their incentives, right?” If people know what their purpose is, what their work is, what they’re trying to get out of this experience, I think that this question goes away to some extent. But if you’re unclear on helping people understand what the benefit is: What’s in it for me? And instead if you’re using development plans as a mass grave for just how can we get you to do this work that more effectively for us? And there’s no “what’s in it for me” for the employee then yeah, you’re going to have a problem. Which I feel like is stating the obvious, but it never fails to amaze me how often that seems to get forgotten the ultimate employee what’s in it for me.

Completely agree. One of the other lenses that we’re not necessarily hitting on today is transparency and growth, which kind of weaves right into here. How is your organization providing opportunities for individuals to develop? So if you’re giving them their employee development plan versus opening up and saying, here are all your options, how can I help you develop the way you need to? It’s a completely different mindset and it’s a culture shift, but one we’re seeing more and more. Any thoughts from anybody else?

I think it’s tough developing people in a very VUCA world. So you put plans into place, but nobody really believes that you’re going to be there to enact that plan. Then you have to start saying, “Are we doing this for you as an individual so that you can transcend this company and you can take what we give you to our competitor, etc? So I think we need a new approach for development planning, where we take into account the reality that somebody is probably going to leave in two years. One interesting phenomena and I don’t know if it speaks to this side, I have the privilege and it is a privilege of coaching some great leaders. I’m not a great leader. I’m a much better coach than I am. I’m a better coach of leaders than I am a leader. And I stay with my people from job to job. So when they change companies, I stick with them. And so in a sense that is a continuous development plan. So when we work on the development plan, we don’t make an assumption that they’re going to be staying in the company where I originally started working with them. I wonder if more companies would have the courage to start doing that with their employees, particularly with Gen Zs, by the way.

Yeah. I think it’s an interesting point, Max, and I think it goes into the whole coaching and mentoring aspect that we’re also seeing come up in the development space. Just like with skills. I did a quick sort of view of this space and there are over a hundred technologies that focus on coaching. One of the biggest is BetterUp. And that’s exactly what better up does. It basically says, Hey, coaching is for everybody. And we’re going to bring in these coaches from outside, not necessarily in the organization. And so I’m working with somebody to develop myself, not necessarily develop myself for the role that you need me in right now. So I think more and more organizations are starting to think about that.

I also talked to a really tiny company called Lighthouse started by this woman who’s like 30 years old and she’s kind of on fire right now. What she’s done is she’s basically gone to all the big business schools and recruited people to be coaches for those people that you’re talking about. So Gen z and early millennials basically said, “Hey, you’re moving from your first role to your second role. You need some coaching. Let’s have someone talk to you that just barely got through with that, to help you think through what the next step should be, or what options you have in this place that you are.”

So I think more organizations are starting to adopt that mindset, but it’s hard to get people to stop thinking about what’s in it for me as an organization. What are the immediate things that I can see from developing this person right now to a much broader sort of how do we develop a development culture here? And how do we make it a safe place for everybody to develop and remain friends with them, even if they decide to move on to another organization?

Yes. I was just going to say one thing, literally every client that we work with has rolled out some version of growth mindset in the last couple of months. And as part of that, what we’re starting to see is baking the development into their rewards and recognition. So traditionally, most companies reward some combination of performance and contribution. And adding growth and development to that equation, I think is something that’s sort of a logical next step. If they’re really serious about their growth mindset that you need to recognize and reward the development people are taking on and what they’re accomplishing in that regard. Because it doesn’t necessarily show up right away in their performance or business results. It’s an investment in their future. And that collective future of the organization.

I love that idea Brian. I don’t know that I’ve seen it quite as much as you have yet, but I love the idea of rewarding people for having that growth mindset or being motivated to continue to learn and grow and develop. We’ve talked about how HRN learning and development can’t understand everything that an employee needs. It has to be sort of a do it yourself job. And so rewarding that is really cool. The other thing that I really like about it is as far as performance goes, you’re completely in charge of how you develop. It doesn’t rely on how your function is doing or what your manager did. It’s purer in a sense than some of those other things that we usually measure people on. I love that idea. Other thoughts before we move on here?

So just to add, that’s a great point from Brian, is that at IBM now a growth mindset is a requirement to keep your job literally. So, in other words, you are at risk if you are not developing yourself skills-wise, knowledge-wise, etc. over any given period. So that’s quite quite tough building it in, but very much speaks to the point that Brian was making.

Companies empowering employees during COVID-19 (41:44)

Yeah, very interesting. All right. I think we’re over time already. Let’s do one more question and then we’ll wrap this up. And I think I want to do this one. How are companies empowering employees during COVID-19? I would love before Stacia and I answer this, because we’ve done a little bit of research on it, I’d love to understand from from the rest of you, what are you seeing? How our employees sort of approaching COVID-19 as an opportunity for change?

Well, this is Brian again. I mean, the number one thing is empowering employees to decide if and when they come back to the office under what conditions and what sort of precautions or measures need to be in place. I see that a lot because employees are all over the board. There’s some people that have no intention of returning to the office anytime soon. And some people that really miss being around other people. There’s people who have no interest in wearing masks ever under any circumstances. There’s other people that insist that, if they’re in the office, they want everybody to wear mask. And putting all that decision-making authority in the hands of employees. I think at least four different big clients that we have all taken that exact same approach.

I like that a lot. What are other people saying? Also that seems really important. I don’t know, feeling safe in your work environment seems to be a pretty big deal. So the fact that they’re empowered to actually make those decisions for themselves is awesome. What are other people seeing?

I know, sort of along with that, one of the things that we’re seeing is more organizations are being flexible with work hours. Particularly as students go back to school or not. I know we’re being very flexible with that, right Stacia? It’s a different world than it was in March of last year. And so figuring out how to make it work for your employees so that they can make it work for their families is becoming a bigger thing. Both the hard rock and those organizations that are not allowing flexibility and a benefit in those organizations where they are. Other thoughts on this one?

All right. We have lots of stories in the responsive organization research that kind of address this. So if you’re interested in some more examples, go ahead and go there.

Crisis management vs optimization (44:21)

Dani, there was one comment in the chat that I had just want to squeeze in here before we wrap. So, someone said to the point is it going to hold? And I think this got back at some of the development conversations we were having. This person said, when I speak to strategy consultants selling to C-suite, they tell me that topics which actually get traction with clients right now are burning topics, real crisis management, badly broken things. Optimization topics, the kind we are discussing here are a difficult sell, say the diversity topic we’ve just discussed. Clients are much more interested in getting help with BLM reputation, money management, but broader diversity topics do not get much traction at the moment. Do you relate to this?

So I’ll maybe jump in and then you can open it. I think yes, but I don’t know that that’s any different now than ever. You know, the burning platform is always the thing that is going to get the C-suites attention. I’ll go back to the diversity topic, which I think is potentially different. Particularly with regard to diversity, and also, I may have mentioned we’re doing some research on purpose, there is a greater sensitivity to the purpose-washing or diversity-washing that organizations may be engaging in, particularly right now with regard to Black Lives Matter, then there was in the past.

And so there is a huge amount of cynicism to people just posting on their Twitter account, we believe black lives matter and leaving it at that, if they don’t then turn their focus also inwardly and talk about what they’re doing within their own organizations with regards to diversity and inclusion. Now is that driven because CEOs understand that like BLM management means that it also means you need to focus internally? Maybe that might be it. But I do think that because of the increasing power of employee’s voices as stakeholders that we are seeing that greater focus on a number of things. So so I don’t know that that now is any fundamentally different in burning platforms being what gets attention. But I think the extent of how far the platform is burning into the organization, may be shifting.

Wrap up (46:58)

Any thoughts on that? It’s a big topic. We should have addressed this at the beginning of the end. Lots of say on this one. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think we’re going to leave it there. Always, if you have thoughts or comments that you didn’t necessarily want to share on this call, please feel free to give us a shout out. Contact us on LinkedIn. We’ve provided our email pretty much everywhere. We’d love to hear from you and your, your thoughts. It makes our research better. And I want to mention our next one is September 17th. And I had mentioned at the beginning that you kind of did the slice of responsive organizations for people analytics. We’re going to be doing the slice of responsible organizations from managers. And we’re kicking off that research. We’ve actually got a survey that’s going to publish this week on the topic, and then we’re going to do this next Q&A call also on that topic on September 17th. So if you all want to come along to that, that would be great.

And then the other thing we want to mention is, as I said last time, we have our membership kicking off. It will launch sometime in October. We’re just doing a lot of work on the website. We want to get it perfect, cause it’s brand new. So you all will see that at some point, but I’m not putting my money on it. Maybe by the one after that we’ll have the membership up and going.

Alright, thank you everybody for joining.

In this week’s call we discussed the important role of people analytics in organizations. We grouped questions into three areas around people analytics: business alignment, tech, and COVID-19. We  reviewed the five pillars of business-aligned people analytics and discussed recent trends in organizations. We touched on data ethics, which is an increasingly important topic.

There were many great insights shared on this Q&A. Thank you to everyone who attended and participated live. We hope you join us for the next Q&A call. https://player.vimeo.com/video/447568466

Video Contents & Questions Asked

You can jump to the following locations in the video using the timestamps on the video and in the chapters menu (next to the full screen icon).

• 0:00 Introduction
• 03:58 Overview of Questions
• 05:27 Business Aligned People Analytics Summary
• 07:02 Five Pillars Research
• 23:22 Trends in People Analytics
• 30:32 What are Data Ethics?
• 41:10 Legacy Corporate Systems versus Small Vendors
• 45:21 How can People Analytics Measure Skills
• 51:05 Applying People Analytics During COVID-19
• 54:56 APIs and Non-Traditional Data Sources

Q&A Call Transcript

Introduction (0:00)

There we go. Alright. So for those of you who I haven’t met on Stacia Garr, Co-founder of RedThread Research. So, since you’re here, you probably know who we are, but we are human capital research and advisory firm. And today we are going to be covering this topic of people analytics. So I’m joined today by Priyanka Mehrotra. Priyanka, do you want to introduce yourself. Hi everybody. I’m Priyanka Mehrotra. I am a research leader at RedThread Research. So for those of you who haven’t joined these calls before this is actually our third one, and this is something that we started really as kind of a trial over the course of the summer in advance of the launch of our new membership in the fall.

And the purpose of these calls is to really kind of have an informal conversation about some of the questions that we get about the research. And some of the things that we’ve heard from you that you’re interested in talking about, but then also to kind of, you know, use the research as that foundation of the conversation, and to build it out, and bring you all in, to get your perspectives in on some of the questions that are top of mind for all of you.

I mentioned the research membership, so we are actually going to be launching that in September. And so these calls will be a part of that research membership. And there will be one more that’s free before the membership actually takes place. And, and basically what we’re doing with the membership is just putting in place a relatively small paywall so that we are able to continue to fund the research.

To date we’ve been using a sponsorship. And so we’ll probably still be doing some licensing of the content, but we want to kind of move to a broader base of support. Because number one, you know, one of our biggest priorities in launching RedThread was that we do unbiased, high-quality research. And so the membership will allow us to do that. So that’s kind of where we’re going. But if you have any feedback on these calls or anything we can do to make that type of membership more valuable, please go ahead and let us know. So, with that one to go ahead and first start with some housekeeping.

So Priyanka, can we go to the next slide? And for those of you who have been here before, like I see Max, he’s been here before, a few things. One is we’ve been trying to make sure this is a safe space. So this, you know, there isn’t any, any judgment here. We’re really just trying to kind of come together and share ideas and to learn from one another. We ask and as part of that, making it a safe space that you, you can certainly share some of the ideas that you’ve heard from here. But as, since you don’t kind of generally specifically attribute them when you’re doing that sharing we do, however, I should say put the recording of this on the website, as well as the transcript, but we don’t identify in the transcript who, who said what? So want to make it a safe space.

Second, share your ideas. As I mentioned, a few moments ago, that’s really what makes these calls work is people sharing your ideas. And as part of that, as I mentioned for those of you who first joined, we ask you to turn on your video, if you were able. I understand that as, as we were saying, some of you are not able to, but it just makes it a little bit more personable and makes it easier for folks to connect. Along with that we ask that you say your name and your organization before the first time you speak, just so people have a sense of kind of the perspective that you’re coming from.

You can certainly raise your hand to speak there’s that capability within zoom, but also you can, you know, I’ve, I’ve got a decent view of, of you all, so you can also just wave or just unmute yourself and start to talk when there’s a good break. And then also I want to encourage you to participate in the chat. I have the chat up. And so if you’re not able to jump in for whatever reason, you know, screaming children or dogs or cats in the background I’ll make sure that I’m following the chat and we can incorporate that as well.

Overview of Questions (3:58)

All right. I think that’s all that I had. Priyanka. Did you have anything? No, I think they’re good to get started now Okay, perfect. Alright. So next slide. So we had just received a number of questions. We’ve grouped them into these four buckets. So, the first being around business alignment, second round tech, the third round COVID-19, and then finally around ethics. So, I should maybe start by just sharing the, kind of the perspective that Priyanka and I bring to this has been our focus on people analytics across the last two years of RedThread.

So our focus on research has been in people, analytics technology. We’re in the middle of the second version of that study right now. So getting vendor demos and briefings, literally every day, many of them multiple times a day, I think we’ve got two later today. And then also we’ve been doing a series of interviews about the role of people analytics in business alignment and responsiveness, and really kind of the org of the future.

So, which we’ve been said, the org of the future is now the org of now. So, we published a study an article just yesterday on that particular topic. And so we’ll cover a little bit of that today. But again, this isn’t a webinar, this is a Q & A, so we’ll share what we have and then we’re looking for you all to kind of jump in. All right. So then Priyanka, why don’t we dive into the first Q&A that we got?

What does Business Aligned People Analytics look like? (05:27)

First Question: What does business aligned people analytics look like, and just to add a little bit more detail into that, how do you think successful organizations are doing this? Yeah, so this one, I think really aligns pretty well. Priyanka, if you want to go, I think it’s on the next slide to this study that we released back in June. And this was a study called the five pillars of business aligned people analytics. And we did not put, we did not put this question in guys like this really came in from somebody it’s not like a ringer, you’re thankful for it. And so so what we, what we learned in that study was a few things.

One is that a lot of organizations, and even though I think it’s close to 80% of large organizations have the people analytics team, we know that most of them say that it’s not as effective as it should be. And so when, and in what they’re doing right now is kind of on the left side of this bridge, which is this ad hoc data reporting. We then talked to, quite frankly, some of the smartest people analytics practitioners that we know, and tried to understand what it was that they had done.

And what was interesting, and I guess someone expected is that none of them started off really with this kind of great executive mandate and, you know, this sense that they were truly business aligned. They all kind of started on the left hand side of the, of the bridge. And some of the things that they did to get to the right, are the five pillars that we have here. So I’ll give just like a 20 second overview of what those are and then maybe pause and kind of get your alls’ reactions and thoughts.

Five Pillars Research (7:02)

So the first one we say is be a business partner, and that one seems terribly obvious, but what we actually meant here was don’t just be trying to align to the business, actually be a business owner. So meaning coming to the table with thoughts that are at the same level as the part of the business that you’re serving, having new ideas, really understanding the P & L of the business and what makes a business tick.

And so, if you have that understanding saying, okay, you know, I know that in this part of the business, you know, product is what, you know, these particular set of product managers are, what drive the business to its success. So here’s what I’ve done to understand what’s happening with these product managers.

Just as an example, or, you know, in a different part of the business, it might be marketing that really is driving the success, but really understanding what, what are the levers of the business, why they’re important and then focusing analyses and insights on those levers without always having to be kind of told, Hey, well, would you go and do this analysis for those parts of the business? So that’s what we meant by one, two was think like a sales rep.

And this was maybe I think my favorite finding from the research, which was not that you should, it’s not just a matter of going in and saying, “Hey, we can, we can do these things for the business,” but one of our interviewees talked about mapping out the business mapping out who is in the business, the impact that they could make on the business broadly and the things that mattered to them, and then focusing on those people first. So really like a sales rep going in and opening up a new business that was critical to kind of getting people analytics, traction to being able to drive business results.

The third one is delivering products, not projects. And so I think we’ve been hearing this one increasingly in the people analytics space for awhile, which is this idea that when we take on new projects or new work, excuse, they need to be scalable. So it’s not a single product project, but actually a product that will be continually used over time and can be incorporated into business processes.

The fourth being provide context-specific decision support. So that means, you know, just getting that greater level of granularity in terms of what the business needs and not trying, not providing kind of general, “Oh, across the business broadly, this is what we need.” But instead having a bit more of a laser-like focus on different parts of the business and understanding when things change, what the differences should be for the business should do. And then fifth being democratized, personalized insights. And you’ll actually see this thing show up again in another piece of research. So one that we launched yesterday, which is this idea that you need to be taking advantage of the scale of the business. And, and the fact that you have people throughout the business, who can make really important decisions if they have the right data and making that information available to them to make those better decisions. So that certainly is managers, but it’s also employees increasingly.

So I know those longer than 20 seconds, but that has the overview of what we learned from this particular study. Does anybody have any comments or thoughts on what maybe resonated with you or things you’ve seen come alive in your own work or practice? Yeah, I think for me, maybe I can speak. I might’ve missed introductions so briefly I’m, I’m head of people analytics at ICRC. And I think for me out of these, the biggest challenge is number three because I guess where we are is a pretty standard maturity level where yeah, our customers are not yet fully on top of their, of their data.

One of the questions they want to ask an answer to the point that they come to us with a very mature request. So very often as we answer the questions that they came with, we find the question on the way. And yeah, we, we, we cannot start by delivering a product. It has to be a project first where we, where we find we better understand what they need. And at some point after a couple of months after a couple of iterations, it becomes something that could look like a product. Yes. And, and for you, what does that kind of process look like? Cause I think that’s pretty common of what people experience, right. If somebody wants a specific answer and then you kind of have to figure out how do you do that scale-ably across the organization. So what does that journey from the individual question to potentially more of that productized version look like for you?

Well, first of all, I have to say I’ve been two and a half months in my role. So I was in the international committee of the red cross previously, I was in Nestle. So it’s a it’s, I don’t have a process yet. And I think it depends a lot on who you’re speaking with because some parts of the HR organization are more mature and they might already have done things on their side and they come with something that’s already pretty, pretty mature and pretty advanced. And then you can answer more, more effectively and more quickly come to a product. But I think there’s a couple of things that that we learn. I think when we, on people analytics to try to clarify as early as possible, when you start a conversation with someone about a question that they want to answer such as: what data do you have? What data are we going to base this on? And how solid is this data source? Who’s going to be my main point of contact with you as we, as we go along and explore this this issue to make sure that the data we use is correct and that the answers we give are business relevant? And eventually what is the end product looking like? Is that just a one-off question that you’re asking now? Or is that something that you’re going to need to answer on a regular basis? So I would say in general, the more you can flesh out these questions at the beginning of a project, the more you can start off the right way and save a lot of time later. Yeah. And then in the article we just published yesterday, we talked a bit about ABN Amro and how they do this.

Priyanka. Did you want to share a little bit of their story about how they do the the contracting process and how that can help with delivering products, not projects? I was actually thinking about a different example in my mind, but what actually came to me when you were talking about asking questions in the beginning of the project, my instant thought went to Kraft Heinz because this was a recent example that we heard. And that was specific to context to COVIC specifically. And though they spoke about it specific to COVID. I think it applies more naturally through all project cycles and initiatives that people analytics are taking, which is in the beginning, before you start undertake any data collection, data analysis project. You talk to the leadership to understand why exactly are they looking to collect that data, what are the insights that they’re hoping to get out of it, and what is going to happen with those insights. How actual those insights going to be, what is the value that employees actually get going to get out of it? So having that clarity in the beginning, not only puts a lot of shows thoughtfulness going into any initiative, but it also helps clarify the process through the way as well. I think that that’s a very important point that you brought out. Great. How about others? What else, what else kind of jumps out at you from this? Or is it a particular challenge?

Max Blumberg consultant. Most of the clients we’ve worked with them. This is from having people analytics for four more years than I care to remember long before it was called people analytics. I thought I was doing my first project. I, I thought it was a PhD research question that I was answering. And I’m really pleased that I haven’t lost that perspective because that is how I still look at, you know, I’m just solving it. But I find that just to go back to a Priyanka’s idea there about speaking to the executives, the Kraft Heinz example, is that we really increasingly insist on going back to corporate strategy when we’re doing it. And we get a lot of strange looks and a lot of pushback, and we even lose clients at that point. But we know from experience that unless the people analytics strategy, is aligned with the corporate strategy, you’re going to do some bad things. And people say, well, you know, what, what relevance, you know, maybe the HR strategy needs to align with the corporate strategy. But people analytics. And there are some really obvious points of alignment. One of them is what are the core competencies and the non core competencies of the organization. So if you spend your whole time fixing engagement and attrition with art looking to see, is that a priority? You know, is it more important than innovation? You know, yes, it’s costing us $30 million a year. Yeah. Lack of innovation is costing you a a hundred million dollars a year, you know, which is even more.

But people, analytics folk are often afraid to look at that. We go for the familiar engagement retention, maybe a bit of productivity if you’re brave, stress, etc. So my view is that I agree exactly with what you say. I would be more explicit and say, go to the corporate strategy. What are the core competencies? And here’s a great example, by the way, I had one very large, well known brand name. And the head of people, analytics took it to heart and went to the ex-co and said, you know, I’d like a list of, of our core competencies and non core competencies. And they didn’t the company hadn’t actually articulated a list of those. And this guy, he was a guy, took it on as a project was promoted through the organization for it saying, you know, wow. And, you know, the ex-co was saying, we’ve never said that, and here are them. And then from Bose, he ensured that every people analytics recruitment. So if a core competency, if you’re in a development house like Microsoft, you know, presumably developers that are developing Windows 10 or your operating system, or a core competency for you. Therefore your recruitment processes, that address programmers are really critical. Whereas those that address your transactional financials are not core. So you can’t just have one recruitment process for everybody, if you want to get into the core, non-Core. So there’s a great idea for understanding what is at Microsoft: programmers right now. We have a whole suite of people analytics project. So that would be my input go even higher.

Yeah. I have kind of two add-ons to that. One is I think that you speak really well, Max of the the difficulty I think that people analytics has. Because it kind of rests in this uneasy place where often it reports into HR. But you know, when I take off my people analytics hat, and I put back on my HR and all the research I’ve done over the years on HR business partners, and HR operations, and you know, everything else. I mean, we spend all the time talking about how, you know, HR itself isn’t aligned to the business, or has challenges aligning to the business and the terribly hackneyed phrase of having a seat at the table and all the rest of that. So if you think of people analytics to your point, trying to align to HR strategy, which we already spend all this time saying it’s not often aligned to what the business is doing.

It’s highly likely that people analytics is going to get itself into trouble because of that. Now we, the uncomfortable place to your point, I was just, if you go around and essentially around them and you go to the business, people analytics has to deal with the politics. Obviously, if the relationship with HR while trying to pursue kind of what is potentially what is most valuable for the business. So it’s a tough place to be, I think, is the thing to acknowledge. But you know, when these conversations that we had, and this is actually, I think it’s going to be the final article that we’re going to do all these interviews, we’re going to talk about the people analytics operating models and what those reporting relationships maybe should look like or how you should think about them differently. Because I think that’s critical to people analytics success is understanding how to manage those relationships.

There are two companies and I can mention one because you’ve mentioned it already, ABN AMRO, and another one that are kind of saying we are, if business partners aren’t, this is about going around HR and going wherever you need to go. People analytics functions, firstly are pulling themselves slightly away from HR, number one, which is no bad thing. And secondly, they’re saying if business partners, aren’t going to give us the information we won’t, because they’re not sufficiently analytical and elicit quantum, but that is not a requirement you need to be analytical is a requirement. Then we’re going to create our own, and I’m seeing a new job title in at least three companies now called a people analytics partner. And that’s interesting. So the people analytics partner does what the business partners should have done.

And people are saying, well, maybe business partners are on the wrong part of the business, maybe they need to be in the people analytics part of it. So that just speaks to your question. That’s how they get around the HR restriction. Yeah. Yeah. And I’d say one thing really quick. Yeah, no, you probably want to move on to. We’re fine. We’re good. Okay.

And I’m Kristy Muir year for those of you who don’t know me with Instructure, I head up strategy and operations. But I like this, this dialogue between Max and Stacia. And as I said, as I think about data strategies, I was just reading the four worlds of work in 2030, this global workforce of the future report. And it was really interesting because I think that as we see more people, analytics, strategies grow and develop, I think we’re going to see, I think we’re going to see different strategies. It’s not going to just be, you know, one size fits all. And I think that, you know, you have companies that have an innovative corporate strategy and it’ll align with that. You have companies who have like a people matter most strategy, and it will align with that. You have people where, you know, maybe they’re you know, like a code of boxy or they’re doing good in the world. There’s, there’s just so many different strategies. And that really, that report got me thinking a lot in line with this, as well as just to what the future of those HR analytics look like, people analytics look like and how all of the strategies are not like it’s not going to be a one size fits all. And I think it’s going to determine a lot of, even the future of HR tech landscape of the future of that.

Yeah, I completely agree. So one of our interviewees for this particular article actually said that the era of one size fits all is dead. Data moves us beyond best practices to practices that we know based on scientific evidence work in our organization, in a particular context. And so I think that is speaking exactly to what you’re saying, Kristy. There may be, you know, even to use Max’s example, you know, within Microsoft, there may be one part where you have a focus on, on innovation. You know, and then you’ve got another group that’s just like trying to keep windows operating for all of us.

And the skill sets and the way that you manage telling those different parts of the businesses is different. And so, you know, I think the data provides us now the ability to do that much more effectively than it ever did in the past. But if we’re stuck in the old model of quite frankly, models that are just kind of, you know, summaries and really straw men to get us started, or straw women. You know, that is a, I think we are then under-serving the potential that data has to help us make better decisions. What was the, what was that article? I was looking it up. I hadn’t read it. I was just on your website. It’s the five pillars here. I’ll pop it in the chat. I’ve got it. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely.

Trends in People Analytics (23:22)

And I think in the interest of time, we should probably move on to the next question. So, the second question we have here is what the major shifts and trends are we seeing? So we, I mentioned these interviews that we’ve been doing, and basically we started the beginning of the year. Everybody’s muted, maybe. Sorry. Okay. So we started at the beginning of the year and with this study, where we were like, okay, we had just finished the responsive organization research, which I I’ll talk about here in a moment, but we knew that people analytics was an important component of the responsive organization. And then when we talked about the responsible organization, is all about how organization now, mind you all, this was January. Okay.

What the research was all about, how organizations can respond to volatility and change, because, you know, we’ve been talking about volatility and uncertainty and you know, all this complexity for years. And so we did this study and so we was people, individuals. So we started these interviews. What’s the future of work? What’s people analytics role in this? And then COVID hit. And we said, you know, the future of work is not the future of work, it’s really now. What we thought was all this need for being able to adjust to volatility and changes now. And so that is what this piece of research really looked at. And so, you know, what we thought was something we were going to be talking about happening in five years. So I started happening at this moment. So what, what we found here, if you want to go to the next slide, Priyanka is this, this model of responsivity. And so when we talk about responsivity and gonna go ahead and pull up the definition, make sure I tell you guys, right. What we said.

So, responsivity is: the ability of organizations to recognize trends in their operating environment and effectively turn possible disruptions from those trends into a distinct organizational advantage. And so we said, okay, well, what does that look like? What do organizations that do this well do. And so we found four lenses, which are there on the bottom: respect, distributed authority, transparency, and growth, and then trust. And for this particular piece of research, we said, how does this especially apply to people, analytics leaders? What should those teams be doing in order to meet these changes and trends that we’re seeing happening with COVID? But also, I mean, we’ve had black lives matter, you know, we’re only in August, I’m sure we’re going to see something else major.

Cause it seems like that’s what 2020 is all about. So it’s really, you know, how can people analytics help us respond to that change as you can see here, you know, each of the specific things and some of them aligned to what we just talked about with regard to sharing information, that’s, that’s distributed authority. But also a lot about transparency and growth. How do we provide information to people broadly and then give them a supportive environment so that they know that they should grow and have the ability to make decisions. And then on kind of both sides, we have respect, which is making sure that employees feel heard, which we’ve heard a lot about during COVID. And then trust making sure that people feel like they’re part of the community. And so in this research we talked about how does people analytics do this. I just, again, to be so Priyanka, doesn’t keep yelling at me. I’ll stop there. Is there anything here you guys want to talk about in terms of what we’re seeing with regard to how organizations are responding to this moment? Or have you seen any examples of this happening in organizations?

I am seeing the pallet devolving to a very small number of people in most organizations. So, organizations are discovering that they can get the same amount of work done with one third of the workforce where people are being, especially from group or corporate perspective. And I guess that makes for much better responsivity when you’ve got a smaller team, that’s my observation.

Max, do you think that is happening because of you know, just to be blunt where many organizations are reducing head count and therefore you know, it’s just a consequence of having fewer people around? It’s an accident. It’s a shocking, but accidental discovery. I don’t think anybody was expecting if they just said we can’t afford to keep this many people on. So do you know the usual systems people put on know one, one half of salary or whatever it is for a period. And then we’ll let you know, at the end of four months, what’s happened to footfall, etc. And the core team were told, get on and do as best you can.

Folks will understand if performance isn’t what it was. Performance didn’t decline at all. As far as the group processes where it was a real shocker, it was a shocker to me. Apparently it wasn’t a shocker to all the companies, but to some people at the companies saw it. But so yeah, it, wasn’t, it’s a great example of a kind of an A/B experiment unintended. You know, cause you couldn’t have done that at any other time, but it’s amazing. So small teams create great responsiveness at the best of time. So maybe the lesson in here is something about smaller, more proactive teams, something like that, or for people analytics. Yeah. One of the companies we interviewed and we can’t say who they are. But they basically have a people analytics leader embedded with most of the business. It’s an incredibly organic organization in that they they kind of have a centralized people analytics team, but it’s, it’s not that big. But really instead what they do is they basically have all these people analytics leaders out there in the business. Because the idea is that people analytics so core to how you run the business, but you can’t have someone who’s kind of only tangentially related. But, but the second part of that is they believe that these small teams need to make the decisions.

And so that’s why you have to have the people analytics leader there. So kind of the it’s not one of the things we talked about this with this research was how we’re moving potentially away from an incredible focus on just efficiency for everything and instead more towards responsiveness. So things that we may have in the past thought were inefficient, like having a number of small teams, where there could be redundancies in our new world, they can make us more responsive. And ultimately that may make us more efficient. But it’s a very different, you know, distributed way of thinking about things versus the hierarchical way, which for the last, you know, 40 years we’ve said, that’s the most efficient way to run a business. So it’s very much a mindset shift.

What are Data Ethics? (30:32)

I have a question.

Yeah, Kristy. One thing that I actually think a lot about you have under respect, keep the people in people data and under trust, ensure data ethics. I think so much. And I think even going back to your previous slide, there’s no one size fits all and how the corporate strategy works. There are absolutely corporate strategies where it wouldn’t keep the people in people data. And it wouldn’t, I mean, what are data ethics? That, to me is a big question that I’ve been thinking about.

Yeah, well, we got that question actually. So, so I don’t think we actually have a slide on our thoughts on it, so I’ll just kind of talk and then Priyanka jump in here. But you know, we’ve been, some of our research has been sponsored by the folks over at 222 which is a consulting firm that focuses on people analytics. And one of the things they’ve done that we think is cool. And we don’t like, I’ll talk about Max’s stuff if I think it’s cool. I’ll talk about anybody who’s cool.

So I just mentioned the sponsorship in the interest of transparency. But they worked with their folks to come up with a data ethics charter. And so basically this is a charter that organizations abide by that, that is being on GDPR compliance and gets that, you know, what are the types of things that we should do or shouldn’t do when it comes to people data? So for instance you know providing clear insights to employees on what’s done with their data when it’s collected is one component.

A second component of it is having a data, what do they call it like a, basically a data board to review all the decisions about how data is used and to make sure that it kind of meets their standards. So, you know, for instance, if what they were doing ended up on the front page of the wall street journal, which is, we all know happened last year for some companies, would they be okay with it? Would their employees be OK with it? You know, kind of that sort of conversation because it’s not, it’s not financial data, it’s data about individual people and and you know, whatever, no matter what your strategy is, there should be something, some things that are kind of okay, in terms of what you are analyzing and what you’re not.

The goals may not be things are the end results and decisions may not be things that make everybody happy. And for some people may not be, you know, they may not consider it ethical, but the way the data is handled and the way we think about the data is kind of the, the key thing. That’s kind of on the practitioner side, on the vendor side, we spent a lot of time talking to vendors about their role and their responsibilities when it comes to data, ethics and privacy.

So the reason we’re talking to them is, one overall, this is obviously to your point, Kristy, a new space for a lot of people. They haven’t thought about the ethics of, of all this, but the vendors are dealing with people who are probably new to this space all the time. And so the vendors coming in with a perspective on what’s ethical and appropriate and is at least a starting point to help kind of form the basis of how our industry is thinking.

And so we’ve been pushing on them because vendors, automatic response tends to be what we do with customer wants us to do. And I get that, but the customer often doesn’t know what they should do. And they’re looking to some guidance, particularly around people analytics, cause people are very much looking into partnership relationships with people analytics vendors. So they’re looking to the vendor for some guidance. So we’ve been pushing the vendor to provide some guidance and obviously the, the, the range of what they provide varies.

But what I’ve noticed is that vendors who come from outside of our industry. So let’s say they were in marketing, or there’s an incredible amount of people who come from security, which I’ve observed which is kind of interesting. But the people who come from outside of our industry are very into the individual data. Like we’re gonna, we’re going to give the managers all the information on who’s going to turn over in the next three months, based on our trip model. Like I, as an analyst and like, that’s, you know, put that in the hands of a manager who doesn’t know what to do with that and we all of a sudden have a whole bunch of problems, right? The vendors who have been in our industry are much more like, well, we need to think through what are the implications? What is this like for that person who’s manager suddenly got this information and maybe isn’t handling it very well.

So what, how should we be thinking about that? So seeing seen a significant difference between new vendor or vendors from outside the industry coming into our space, and those who’ve been here historically. There’s lots of things that are good about vendors coming from outside our space. So I’m not trying to throw them under the bus, but I have noticed that difference between the two. And I think it’s something for folks to kind of be aware of when they’re doing this partnerships, cause their ethics and privacy base, I think is a little bit different than people who have been historically in the HR space. So that’s kinda my initial response Kristy to come at that question.

Yeah. I really appreciate that. Thank you.

Yeah. What are, what are others seeing? To those who are working with vendors? I think I can start with that probably because we’ve been doing so many random briefings. And I’ve been particularly excited about this because last year when we published our study on people, analytics, they specifically call out a few things that we think windows can really improve upon, which is a good, a better user experience, more advanced, natural language processing capabilities, better data integration, and more individually passive data. And I think we’re starting to see that this year increasingly with vendors that we have accused of done briefings with.

So we’re starting to see a lot of improvement in user experience, how the dashboards are being built, what the visualizations look like. They’re definitely much prettier this year, for sure. We’ve seen some great advanced natural language processing capabilities and vendors that we were not expecting to see this year. So that was a good surprise. We’ve also seen vendors starting to open up their platforms. Using a lot of API is connecting to nontraditional data sources.

So I think that’s definitely been a that’s that’s upgrade direction. I think the risk seeing some of the trends moving in. I love your idea about educating the manager’s station. So I think ethics, you know, who, whose ethics are we going to use? I remember having this out at a conference somewhere the CEO’s ethics? The committee that you spoke about? Who’s so, you know, I think it’s gotta be a collective thing, but it’s so real what you’re talking about. Because one company at the moment would love to do its organizational networking analysis. And I absolutely dead keen as most of you I’m sure are on, on passive data. You know, and there are huge issues about doing passive data analysis. Cause people don’t know that they’re being tracked and that it’s being used. I’d advise against it, but that’s “Max ethics.” You know, I’m an old guy from another generation. I’m not used to being tracked other than my own, my own watch tracking me. Gen Y and gen Z at the conference didn’t seem to have that much of a problem because black, the lobster they’ve grown up in the water and the heat’s been turned up slowly. And it’s all I know is a life of being tracked. But, you know, I would say at the very least just use that as an ethical example, I would say at the very least, if you’re going to use passive data, do an active survey as well, even if you’re not going to use the results.

Just so that employees feel like they’re part of it. And I think that’s a huge part of ethics. Is that the involvement and, you know, Jonas, you you’re a Nestle person. I remember when Jordan came in and took over the the Fitbit work that was a huge issue and had long discussions about is it right? And Jordan said, you know, max, I would never do anything bad with the data. And I said, you know, Jordan, as I know and love you, I don’t think you would, but what about the person who’s going to take over from from you? And so there are a whole bunch of, as, as you say, there are whole, you need to have a manifesto that’s going to last longer than one manager and bring more managers into it. It’s very tricky. Yeah. And I think that’s the, for me kind of from where I sit in the space, that’s, that’s the thing that worries me the most. A lot of us go to these same people, analytics conferences, and we know each other, it is a community. That’s one of the things I love about this space is it is a community.

But as you know, I see all these kind of new folks coming in and I sound like totally, nimbyism here with our community and I don’t mean to be, but I think we do need to, for those who have been here and we think have good intentions to codify, what are the things we think are right? And maybe they will change, you know, to your point, maybe gen Z is just like, who cares. Right. But that should be a conversation that shouldn’t be an assumption, I think, is that the point that, that we’re trying to make with all of this, because we don’t know what’s going to happen in this. And we all know how powerful data is or data are, I guess, the proper way. So we think that that’s part of what we’re driving to cause right? The ethics aren’t going to be the same everywhere and, and they shouldn’t be, there’s going to be different standards, but being clear on what we think as an organization is okay, and what we think is not, and what we’re going to go to employees for. I think, you know, if it kind of goes to the lens on the far right and around trust. And if you guys haven’t read it, there’s a really great book out there called. Who can you trust? I can’t remember the author.

I remember I remember seeing her a few years ago, but she is, it’s just dynamite. And the thing that’s struck with that kinda stuck with me the most, and it’s actually reinforced by Edelman’s trust barometer is that organizations right now have the strongest amount of trust from people compared to any other entity, more than the government, more than religious institutions. Actually maybe not more than small government, but, but all other government. And this is worldwide study. And so we have an incredible position of importance and if we start to lose that trust we can lose it with, with bad data practices. So I think it’s a really important role that we all have in organizations. So. All right. I’ve been on a soap box for awhile.

How do Legacy Systems Compare with Small Vendors (41:10)

How do you think the legacy corporate systems, like SAP, compare to some of the new, small, but mighty competitors? Oh, SAP, our friends. So, so let’s move on to the next slide for those of you who haven’t seen this. This is our from last year study, people analytics tech study are how we looked at kind of the whole people analytics landscape. So just to orient you really quickly and on the X axis on the left hand side, we have what we called frequent analysis.

And on the right hand side, we had continuous analysis. So tools that are looking at data every day, giving insights every day versus on the left hand side tends to be more like monthly, quarterly, that kind of thing. On the Y axis on the bottom, we have data creators. So they’re creating data by things like surveys on the top data aggregators are pulling in data from other places. I think this year that’ll be did it integrators cause we think that’s more accurate. But anyway and then in the middle of the Y access centers, those vendors who do both. So with that kind of background, you can see number one, there’s tons and tons of the small, but mighty vendors. And then number two, the big vendors tend to kind of be we’ve got SAP on here.

Workday was not on last year study for a number of reasons, but we’re actually talking to them today, so they will be on this year’s study. And then our friends at Oracle just don’t seem to want to play. So but I think that the thing is that the, the bigger vendors are kind of good at being able to bring in certain data from a lot of different sources, and most many of them their own because they’re such big ecosystems. T

hey’re not necessarily so great all the time at pulling in data from other sources. Maybe we’ll get proven wrong about that today when we talked to Workday, but but they, they tend to be really good at that. Because they often, if company has all of their systems with like an SAP success factors you know, they obviously can kind of bring things in a bit more seamlessly than some of the others. But, you know, as is typical with larger organizations, their level of innovation tends to be slower.

Their ability to kind of turn out new ideas tends to be slower. And, you know, they’re I guess I would say that our partnership tends to be not quite as strong as some of the other smaller players, because they’re just so big and there’s so many moving pieces. They obviously offer plenty of really great things. But I think that those remained the bigger, bigger differences. And so then it comes back to you as a practitioner and organization.

What is it that you need? Do you need kind of some of these more innovative approaches do you need by contrast to move that, you know, like SAP is our system and so that’s just kind of who we need to, to work with because that’s kind of what we do here as a company. So it really comes back to the type of partnership I think that folks need and from the vendor and the type of capabilities that they need. Which I know is a little bit of a punting of the question, but I think that it’s hard given, you know, we’ve got 37 vendors on this graphic. It’s hard to speak with more specificity than, than that. Given kind of the question. Is there any specific questions on vendors from what we learned last year or what we’re learning right now? I have a lot of questions, but maybe take up too much time.

What was that Max? Oh, okay. Well, we’ll just leave it there because I do want to, I am sensitive to time and I see that you all put the book, who can you trust in the, in the chat. That’s awesome. Thank you. Alright, let’s go ahead and move on.

How can People Analytics be Used to Measure Skills? (45:21)

How can people analytics be used to measure effectiveness of upskilling and reskilling for increased business performance? So I almost said to Priyanka, let’s not, let’s talk to this question cause it can take up the entire hour. So I think there are a few things. We know that there are a few different models that organizations are using for building their skills taxonomies. So one is kind of a top down model. You know, this is what we think are all the skills that are out there.

The other is more of a bottom up model. So kind of looking at all the skills that are out there and starting to group them into different, different families in the like. I think that, so those are kind of the two models. The benefit of the latter is that it’s more organic. It can be more relevant and up to date. It also requires much bigger kind of competing power, quite frankly, to kind of continue to be getting that information. On the other side, it is probably a bit more stable. It’s probably a little bit better “organized,” but it also tends to be more static and slower to, to keep up with the times.

There are lots of vendors out there who can help you do this. We’re actually working on a big list of it right now. I think we’ve got 15 on it right at this moment. But but you know, some of them that others have mentioned certainly IBM and Degreed and MC and all the labor market analysis vendors, they, they’re all kind of doing this clerical. We spoke with them yesterday. The challenge that we see for all of these is that they either rely on somebody identifying the skills themselves saying that I have these skills or some somewhat imperfect assessments of their skills.

And so right now I think that the assessment mechanism is one of the nuts we have yet to crack. And so when we talk about that, the measure of the effectiveness of these efforts, I think that’s one of the things we’re going to have to get better at before we do this really well. In the moment with what we have right now, I think we’re kind of mediocre at this. And, and that’s part of, we’re actually starting a study on this to try to figure out how we might do this better. But if you assume that you, that your efforts are adequate in terms of the measurement, think then it becomes, okay. Well, how do you make sure that you’re matching this against specific interventions that have been happening in the organizations or specific initiatives and making sure that your measurement at the change in skills is happening at the right point in time? We haven’t seen folks doing this very well yet. So that’s kind of where we’re, I’ll leave that again in the interest of time.

Has anybody else seen folks doing this? No. No. And I think if anything like the skills, taxonomy and the intervention and exactly how that lines up with the assessment, I think for me, that’s the crux that I struggle with with skills is that I don’t know if there’s actually going to be a good answer. This one vendor you didn’t mention is eight-fold. So, I mean, they have, I think it’s 2.8 million different skills identified. And the approaches that you mentioned the top down and bottom up, I think where that should land, where it’s going to land is in skills ontologies as opposed to taxonomies.

So that the relationships, not only between the skills themselves, but between how those skills are categorized it all exists in the same model. And then you can build use cases off that whether those are learning use cases or career mobility or hiring or diversity and inclusion. I mean, that, seems to me where all this is headed. Yeah. That’s a great point, Brad, thank you for, for making it. And I especially do love what eight-fold is doing.

So the thing that they do that I think is very cool is they play with skills inference. So if you have you know, if you’re good at one type of programming language, you’re likely also good at these other skills. And so you, as an individual, don’t have to identify that, which is really I think helpful because that’s something that, you know, people are notoriously not great at thinking about as kind of some of these adjacent skills.

The other thing that eight-fold does that I think is great is they apply that across obviously all people, but when you’re searching for people, they don’t limit to the verified skills they limit, they include the likely skills. Which if you look at that from a diversity perspective, diverse people tend not to list nearly as many skills as of majority population folks. And so when you include the likely skills, you get a much bigger talent pipeline than you would, if you just looked at what somebody actually puts on their resume or their LinkedIn. So I think that it’s it’s has a lot of power, a lot of potential. Yeah. Thank you very much, Brian, for mentioning that.

Sure. Speaking again. Ian Bailey did some wonderful work at Cisco. I think with LinkedIn and they had a wonderful visual dashboard of skills and competencies which I don’t think ever was productized or made available as far as I know. But it’s an internal tool, so it might be worth asking Ian to show them to you.

How has People Analytics be Applied during COVID-19? (51:05)

Yeah. Priyanka. Thank you. Okay. Let’s I know we’ve got just five minutes, so Priyanka let’s go ahead. Alright. So here we come to some COVID-19 reasons. What are some of the interesting ways people analytics has been applied during COVID-19? So if you all have a chance to look at those two articles that we’ve put into chat we have within each of them people analytics during crisis or people analytics during COVID-19. So we’ve got lots and lots of examples of kind of everything that we’ve been talking about today.

But I think that just to maybe tie back to what we were just talking about, the, the skills example, and one of the most powerful examples you think of this working well during COVID was came to us from Thomas Rasmussen, who was at National Australia Bank until just very recently. And basically what they were able to do because of the strength of their skills profile, skills data. They were able to look across all of their employees and figure out which ones had the skills to work more directly with customers. Because as you can imagine with being a bank, so obviously not just a health crisis, but an economic crisis for many, and they were getting many more calls from their customers asking for help. And so they basically were able to redeploy,

I think it’s 700 people within a week from kind of non-customer facing roles, but had customer experience over in the customer-facing role so that they could support their customers during COVID-19. So, you know, we’ve seen a lot of, a lot of studies about using more engagement and pull surveys and all the rest of that. But I think that one was a really powerful example of using skills and just having that strength of skills to actually meet business needs during COVID. So I’ll maybe leave it there because that’s a lot of examples.

Okay. Tiffany, you put in an example here had the same. Do you want to talk about that? Are you able to talk about that Tiffany from chat? Can you hear me? Yes. yeah. We’re a relatively small financial advice firm in Europe and Canada, and because we are organic and sort of grown, we try to keep tabs on who has any sort of licenses or who can serve clients. So when we had to shut down all of our suburban and rural branches and clients couldn’t get-face to-face access with their branch team, we immediately pivoted so that the thousands of home office employees who had the certifications became frontline, investment helpers, answering phone calls and driving service.

So that trades didn’t have to stop just because we couldn’t get that face to face interaction. So that was, that was really a, a huge help for the client base almost immediately when everything’s sort of shut down at a regional level. That’s awesome. Cool. Thank you for sharing them. No, I I’m glad that the question came up and, and the original response actually made me think, “Oh, you know what, we did that too. Wow.”

I wouldn’t have thought of that as a people analytics function, but that’s exactly what it was. Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing to see all the ways that people analytics has been applied in the last four or five months call. Does anybody else have anything on this that you’ve seen? Okay. Well, well we’ll move on then. Priyanka, was that our last one because I think we covered ethics already. Oh yeah, we did. Actually. That was the last question. So in case anybody else has anything to add in the last two minutes, more than welcome to.

APIs and Non-Traditional Data Sources (54:56)

Quick question, when you were talking about the APIs and non-traditional, what was the word you said? I forget. What, what, what do you mean by non-traditional APIs? I meant APIs from non traditional data sources for vendors who don’t, who have not been typically looking at certain data sources in the past for us to starting to look at. So for example, one of the vendors that we spoke to yesterday is being focused on labor market insights data mostly now they are starting to think about other data sources, such as bringing in voice channels, data from voice channels and analyzing that. Bringing in financial services data.

And we’re seeing a lot of engagement and experience vendors also start to think really deeply about how can they pull in performance data and learning data to bring a holistic employee experience platform to the users. So, in the sense that they’re increasing the number of places where they’re pulling in and analyzing data for to bring a more holistic picture for the user. That makes sense. Thank you. Yeah.

All right. Well, I think we’re right at time today. So thank you all so much for a wonderful conversation and the engagement. If you have any other follow-on questions, just go ahead and send them along. And if you have any feedback on how this went we’d love to hear that too. So we’ll say goodbye for now and have a great rest of your day and a good weekend. Thank you very much. Thank you. Take care.

This week’s call was all about Gender and Performance. We started out the call with an introduction to our Leveling the Field and The Double-Double Shift research. Through this research, we found that the experiences in the workplace around performance are very different for women. These differences represent clear, systemic, significant disadvantages for women, resulting in a consistently unequal experience. We also researched how COVID-19 has changed the landscape even further for women, when many employees are working from home. From this call, you'll become more aware of the problem and learn strategies to address it in your organization.

Q&A call transcript

Introduction (0:00)

All right. We’re now being recorded. I’m Dani Johnson, one of the cofounders of RedThread Research. We started these Q&A calls because we realized that so many people have questions and they don’t get the opportunity to ask them or don’t have a relationship with us personally. And so we want to give them an opportunity to ask these questions and deep dive the research just a little bit more. So I’ll be sort of emceeing. You’ll hear a little bit from me and then Stacia, do you want to introduce yourself?

Yeah. So I’m Stacia Garr, cofounder of RedThread Research. And for the purposes of today, I’m the primary author on this study on gender and performance management. We’ve actually got two studies. I'll talk about why we have those and then we’ll have a wide-ranging discussion, based on what you all want to know about them – and anything else that we want to talk about relevant to the topic of gender, performance management, and COVID right now.

Overview: Leveling the field & double-double shift research (1:00)

So Stacia, why don’t you start with an overview of that research. I know we put together an infographic on it, and maybe we can just pop that up and show it really quickly. So as I mentioned, just a moment ago, what we have done is actually 2 pieces of research. So the 1st one is what’s called Leveling the Field, which you all can see the infographic for. And this was a piece of research that began out of a study that Dani and I did last year with Emily Sanders, where we were looking at some of the critical practices of performance management. We got through that study. I actually said to Emily, “You know what? I wonder if there’s a gender component to this research. Like if there’s something interesting happening with gender.” And Emily said, “Yeah, you know, usually it shows there aren’t that big of differences. When we look at, you know, scores and blah, blah, blah.” But we’ve actually at the same time, just finished a study on women and networks and technology. And I said, you know what, let’s go – just see what we can find.

And so what we found is actually what you see here at the bottom, which is that in our data set, women are 17% less likely to say their manager can effectively have difficult conversations, 16% less likely to say they have formal performance conversations, 14% less likely to say their organization has a culture of trust, and 8% less likely to say their environment facilitates information-sharing. There were actually a few other things, but these were kind of the highlights of what we found. And so I kind of think of that as the beginning of going up, like, you know, Alice through the looking glass where we went and we said, huh, well, we heard, we know, you know, in conversations that women tend to get less feedback and some of these other things, but what’s happening here more broadly.

And so we then went out and we did this incredibly large lit review, and found all of these studies about what was not working for women with performance management. And so we then said, okay, well, let’s put that in the context of the model that we just developed, which is what we did here. And so that model is really around 3 concepts of culture, capability of managers, and clarity. So this idea that those are the three factors that really drive high performance. And so we then said, okay, within each of those out levers, what should we be thinking about when it comes to women and gender? This is all great and good. We did this over the course of the winter. We were just about ready to hit publish on this study and then COVID blew up. And we said, well, this is probably not the time to talk about this. So let’s take a step back and let’s think about it a bit more.

And then we developed really the follow-on study, which is one we call, The Double-Double Shift, which is really kind of taking what we learned there with regard to culture capability of managers and clarity, and saying – right now we work from home in the pandemic – what does this mean? What should we be thinking about? So that’s kind of the big frame for how we got to where we are and these two studies in particular.

Thanks, Stacia. And just so you all know, you can access both of these infographics on our website and they should be accessible to anybody (Leveling the Field and Double-Double Shift), whether you’re a member or not, even though memberships are free right now. So feel free to access them and study them, and pull them up right now and ask questions about them, all that good stuff. Okay. So we’re going to start with a question that was asked online, and then again, please feel free to share your questions in the chat. We’ll answer those we prioritize first.

Why is gender & performance management important? (4:44)

So Stacia, why is this topic of gender and performance management so important, especially right now with COVID?

You can see here, I’m going to leave this up on this Double-Double Shift infographic, because I think that this does a really good job of highlighting why right now with COVID. So we know, and everybody is now starting to write about this. It’s kind of funny when we first started doing this work, not many folks were talking about it. Now we’ve got Melinda Gates today in foreign affairs writing about, you know, the impact of the pandemic on women and differentially. But, we know you know, for a lot of the women who are working at our organization, they’re taking on a much greater percentage of the housework, the childcare work. And a lot of that childcare work is actually coming during business hours. And so that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re doing a worse job at their jobs. We know that it just means that they tend to be doing it in chunks of time. And so those chunks of time – so not necessarily being accessible during every single moment of the traditional workday. We know overall, everyone is working longer hours, if you look at some of these work-from-home reports. But the fact that they may not be available every single moment of the day could lead to some unconscious biases that we know exist, even when we’re all in the workplace in a normal time. So, there’s a tendency for some of the things that we’ve found in the core report to be amped up.

So one of the most interesting findings that was in the study was if someone is a mother, whether that has an impact on their work. And not just the fact that somebody knows that they're a mother actually ends up with a bias kind of creeping in, and they tend to get recommended for difficult positions or difficult learning opportunities less often that can lead to, you know, promotion. And also you can kind of see a statistical impact on their performance scores. So you think about that then in a work-from-home environment where everyone can see, you know, like me, I’ve got my kids beautiful tower behind me. I think it can turn into a real challenging situation.

How has COVID-19 exacerbated the situation? (6:59)

So how much do you think it’s exacerbated? That’s what I wanted – exacerbated with COVID versus what was happening normally anyway. It’s hard to say I would, because I think that, you know, and we’re already hearing this and I’d love to hear what other people think, but we’re already hearing a lot of organizations saying, okay, well, we’re not sure what we’re going to do with performance. Like if we’re an organization that had scores in the past, you know, are we going to take the equivalent of what many schools did, which is just say, "Hey, everyone gets a pass."? This is a difficult time, whatever. So, so it’s, it’s unclear because I think we haven’t gotten to that point where a lot of organizations are going to give scores. But I think though, and, or I should say promotion opportunities because many organizations, you know, don’t have scores, but they still have to make decisions on how to promote people and the biases can come in there. So, I think it’s a little bit early to tell. But I do in terms of the actual impact on advancement, but in terms of how people are being treated.

I think, you know, we both know that there’s kind of two approaches. There’s the, "Hey, you’re an adult. We expect you to get your work done and we know you’re going to do it on your own." And I think that probably in those environments, women are probably doing, you know, comparatively fine. But in the environment where it’s been a lockdown, tell me everything you’re doing every minute of the day kind of approach. I think it’s probably turning out to be extremely difficult. I think it’s really interesting that you mentioned learning opportunities. I think sometimes we don’t necessarily include those when we think about biases. I do learning for RedThread and we are starting to sort of dig into that idea more and more. There are lots of opportunities that women are sort of passed over because they’re mothers or have responsibilities outside of work or perceived responsibilities outside of work that would make it more difficult for them to participate.

Can I add to that Dani? One of the things we wrote about in the first report though, is sometimes I think that the women are not necessarily pursuing those opportunities either for a range of reasons. So one might be just, you know, they don’t have access to the networks to learn about them. So it’s not that they’re actively being passed over where they just don’t know that opportunity exists, and so they’re not putting their hand up. The second is, particularly, you know if they have other responsibilities, whether those be childcare or eldercare or whatever it is, they may say, "Hey, you know what. I’m in a situation where my manager understands me, they’re flexible. Like we’re kind of good. Like why would I go and, you know, upend this Apple cart." And so that’s not to say that there wouldn’t be another manager who would be those same things, but they’ve kind of gotten themselves into a decent situation. And so there isn’t a real reason to advance because that would kind of upset everything else in their world. So those were some of the things we saw in the literature for us in terms of being other reasons people may not be pursuing these opportunities.

What are companies doing to reduce bias? (10:02)

That makes sense. And probably a little bit more now, just because everybody is so slammed with everything that’s going on. You mentioned biases and I wanted to go to a question that somebody asks about what companies are doing. You mentioned that a lot of companies are considering maybe not giving performance reviews this year. But the question is what are companies doing in performance calibrations to reduce bias?

Yeah. So, it’s an interesting question because there’s actually a whole bunch of things you should be doing before you even get to any sort of calibration session. Right. So one of the things I’m trying to remember yeah, so we actually had it right here. So only about 60% of organizations are being very clear about what the promotion criteria is. And we see similar things in terms of being very clear about what employees goals are. So, you know, if you think about at the end of whatever your period is, if you haven’t been very clear on what people are expected to achieve at the end, it’s very easy for biases to get in the way – because, you know, you didn’t know what you expected anyway, and you know, it all kind of falls apart when there’s no structure, I think is the point. So, there’s that aspect.

The other, you know, some of the other aspects, can we get into this here? I think on feedback is, you know, we need to make sure that there’s a range of sources of feedback so that, you know, the biases that the way that somebody has presented in a calibration session isn’t just based on a single person, but it’s based on a well-rounded perception. Similarly, frequency of feedback, we all know about all the biases that can come in because of feedback. And so making sure that you’re doing it more frequently can at least overcome some of those. So making sure all that happens before you actually get into the calibration session is super important. And then when you’re actually in the session, you know, having a thorough conversation about, okay, well, what are we basing this on? What’s the actual evidence of these things? You know, what’s an alternative interpretation of what may or may not have happened. And then, you know, kind of zooming out because you can’t do this on an individual level, but zooming out what are our patterns? Are we consistently rating a certain type of person at high potential high performance, whereas you’re consistently not reading other types of people? There’s some technology from actually SuccessFactors that'll allow you to do that – where you can take your 9-box and you can see by gender or by you know underrepresented minority status, whatever it is by age – you can see where people tend to fall on the 9-box. And then you can also, it’ll also pop up for your historicals. So this person for 3 years has been rated high performance, but medium potential, yet they’ve never been advanced. Is that okay? Maybe? I mean, maybe there’s good reasons for that, but maybe there’s not, so there can also be kind of a technological intervention.

But I think the strong practices and approach throughout the year, and then in the meetings themselves is your first line of defense. And the technology is kind of a flag for what may be happening that you may not be seeing. I like that. I like the idea of technology and data. You and I have talked a lot about how data is helping us make more informed decisions across the board, but especially when it comes to biases in diversity and inclusion, etc. We also had a conversation earlier this week where we wanted to sort of dive into this idea of high performance and leadership tracks, and all of these things that we tend to assign to employees when they’re fairly young and it just sort of follows them, which also biases them. I’m also fairly short of that. The way that those things are assigned probably will get biased and not necessarily based on data. So we plan on digging into that a little bit more. I think it’s a really interesting question.

What additional challenges do women of color face? (13:42)

We’re in a really interesting place in the world and in our country specifically right now, because we’re dealing with COVID, but we’re also becoming more aware of this idea of Black Lives  Matter (#BLM). One of the questions that we got was what challenges do women of color, especially leaders and managers, face and what do they need or want in order to solve those problems? Yeah, it’s a great question.

I think for someone to say, you know, it’s just because of homophily, it’s a little bit easier for me to answer the questions on gender than it is necessarily to extrapolate to color. And I am a little bit hesitant to do so because this research did not actually focus on people of color. So all that said, what we generally see in research is that what's happening for women because it tends to kind of be I would say the most advantaged of the underrepresented groups, what is happening for them just tends to be worse, particularly for women of color. Women of color tend to just, if you look at the statistics, they just end up being so much farther down it’s really, really heartbreaking. So, you know, what would I recommend just kind of giving all those caveats first, you know, is what we’ve done here in general, which is with this research, we just say that, look, if we do everything that’s in here, it’s going to raise everybody’s vote, right? If this has just meant much of it is just sound performance management practice. And that will enable us to make sure that we have better conversations throughout. So, it starts there – make it better for everyone particularly around fairness and feedback, and focusing on the development opportunities. So everything that we have here on this, in this culture bucket. So that’s where I would start.

I think then it is you know, moving on to capability of managers we have here, we talk about barriers in the report. We actually talk about visible, semivisible, and invisible barriers. And some of the invisible barriers and some of the visible and invisible barriers are the ones that are, I think, most likely to affect people of color. So things like it’s unclear to the extent which my manager support actively supports diversity, my manager doesn’t have the language to stand up for me when something happens that gets at diversity – so those are some of the things that are kind of in those semivisible or invisible barriers. And so we think that giving managers the language and the practice around how do you, if something is said, you know, something like a microaggression where someone makes some offhand comment, you know, not really appropriate, certainly not, you know appropriate if we’re trying to be kind and you know, the best version of ourselves for everyone.

What’s the language that managers should use? What’s the language that employees should use? How should they know that the manager knows that they’re saying the right things. So I think this is an opportunity for some of the virtual reality training that we’re seeing are some of these things that actually puts you in the moment, because I think that the problem’s not something you can read on a piece of paper. I’d never let that happen. I’d say, blah, blah, blah. But when you're in a moment where someone has said it, and it’s someone where there’s relationships you know, you need to have the right words and at least putting yourself in some sort of alternate reality that could give you a chance to practice. That may be a step in the right direction. But I think that issue of these semivisible and invisible barriers is where there’s likely the biggest opportunity for people of color. Again, saying that was not the focus of this research. That’s just me. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think there are parallels that can be drawn there. It has to do with decency and being human and all those good things. I’m interested.

What practices promote a good D&I culture? (17:44)

There’s a question here about culture and training. So we know that diversity and inclusion training has not been super successful in the past. We also know that some organizations are much better at developing a good culture around diversity and inclusion than others. What are some of the things that you’ve seen that promote this good culture and address kind of how do I know how to talk to about this with my coworkers or my manager, etc.? Yeah. So I think in the organizations that I’ve seen build a good culture, it has started in the recruitment process. It starts before anybody is actually ever a member of your company. This is who we are, this is what we do. This is what we stand for. And this is integrated into every aspect of how we engage with a candidate, how we assess the candidate, how we treat people, and then it continues on through the whole employee experience.

So you know, when you come into onboarding, how do you talk about it? You know years ago, I did a study where we talked about General Mills and I think General Mills is in many ways, just a remarkable story because they’re in a, shall we say, not very diverse area of the country, and yet they have some of the highest diversity of any organization that you can see. And part of the reason for that is they’ve built a culture that when you come into, for instance, onboarding, they say diversity is every single person in this room’s responsibility. And inclusion is everyone at belonging and equity. It is what we do and who we are. And that gets that expectation then filtered through everything in their leadership training. They’re learning, you know, as you talked about performance management, succession, everything. And so I think that is how you get there. It’s, you know, it’s the system that reinforces and yes, performance management, what we’re talking about today as part of it. But it's just one piece in that bigger, bigger picture – but it has to be deeply entrenched from the beginning.

Do existing approaches to feedback inhibit / help? (19:52)

Thank you. Let’s go into our next question. Do existing approaches to feedback enable achieving gender parity in the workplace? Yeah, so yes, it can, It can certainly inhibit, it can also certainly help. You know, you can see here on this one, we talk about analyzing performance feedback language by differences by gender. So, for instance, there’s a couple of technologies out there right now that will let you basically ship in all of your performance reviews and then analyze them for tone, for the type of language that’s used, etc. That technology and associated research has tended to find that the feedback that women are given tends to be more relational in nature and based on, you know, specific behaviors. So things like you did a really good job fostering that relationship with the customer. You’re very kind and open and warm, right? By contrast, the same, you know with a man, that feedback tends to be more you had to have a strong relationship, but that resulted in us being able to increase the revenue or the sales from this customer by 10%, this year – very tied to business outcomes very much so. The commentary on what happened, but then the business result and also the feedback tends to be in general about the things that actually drive business results versus some of the softer stuff. So this has been replicated in numerous studies.

So, you know, I’ve seen it from technology providers who have kind of shown me their data, but then I’ve also seen it a bunch of academic studies. So if you think about how should we be giving feedback, no one making sure that it is certainly behavioral, but then tied specifically to a business outcome. The second part of this is that the feedback to women tends to be a softer, so less critical feedback around the things that you need to do better and more of a kind of, yeah, just, well, you know, you did this thing well, good job keep doing that. And the research shows that when feedback is vague and nonspecific like that one, that it’s harder for women to improve, but two, it impacts their performance scores. Interestingly, if feedback is similarly vague and nonspecific for men, it does not have an impact on their performance. And when we look at some of the research behind why this might be the case. And some of that gets into this idea that women are, there’s a fear that women will be more emotional about the response. And so people can, and this is men and women. This isn’t just like, yeah, this is women as well. We’ll tend to not give that more critical feedback. And so I think, you know, how do we address that?

Create a feedback culture – creating an expectation. This is what we do. This is how we do it. We have unclear practices and language that we use, and this is the expectation. So that whoever’s coming into that feedback conversation isn’t letting in some bias around how this person’s going to respond, impact the quality of the feedback that they give to them. Because, you know, if people don’t get good-quality feedback, how are they going to improve? Right. So it becomes this reinforcing cycle. So that is the biggest. Second thing that we’ve found around feedback. I remember when we were doing it, one of our roundtables for responsible organization, one of the best pieces of advice I heard for that whole thing was learn how to give drive-by feedback. So instead of sitting down and having a formal meeting and making it a big deal to get feedback, learn how to just do a drive by, "Hey, you’re doing this wrong. Hey, can you fix this." Much more acceptable and create that feedback culture, and makes everybody aware that the feedback is what we’re trying to do here. Rob said that he watched a presentation about a women and feedback. The key message of the presentation is that men get feedback and coaching on business acumen and other very specific business related topics. Like you were saying, women more often get feedback on style. I’ve gotten it myself. And that pretty much aligns with pretty much everything that we’ve found in the research as well. It is what it is, but we can fix it. That’s exactly right. Rob – it’s in the longer report, a number of sources of research that supports that.

Do women giving feedback to women focus on style? (24:15)

Stacia, I’m curious. Do women giving feedback to women do the same thing? So it doesn’t matter who the giver is. The bias when the receiver is a woman is to focus on style. Yes. Hmm. That’s fascinating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s interesting. We mentioned at the beginning, we also wrote this network report. We also find, you know, instances where you might think that when in their network are women, a woman manager with a woman direct report tends to support more – that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, sometimes it can be the opposite case. So, it’s interesting. The what’s your intuition might be for how these relationships would order is actually not how it tends to work.

What is the best way to address D&I analytics? (25:02)

I wanted to read this question and a statement from Jennifer Beck, who’s attending. I find a lot of organizations are pointing to a single D&I number or group initiatives to a single program. One result is that outreach is sort of singularly focused. Hence real diversity is masked, i.e., an organization may have more women in positions of power, which is great, but women of color and other minority groups are still underrepresented. What is the best way you have seen organizations address this or at least in their D&I analytics?

Yeah. So Jennifer great question. I think that this is an area of real development. So we’ve been, as I think you, you may know, we do a lot of work on the people analytics side as well. And so we’ve been just kind of hammering this topic of D&I and people analytics, and we’re starting to see some movement historically though. I think the reason that we’ve seen this is that the EEOC requirements do not allow for things like intersectionality, right? Like there’s such a joke, those metrics. And so, we think that kind of this more sophisticated understanding is something that they've lacked. So that’s the historical perspective. Add onto that, a lot like the number of organizations I’ve talked to historically. I started doing research in this space in 2013, who just wouldn’t touch D&I metrics. They said, look, if we do it, we can get in legal trouble. If we know about it, like we’re just gonna get into it. Then we can have that deniability that is starting to change. And part of the way that it’s changing is one, certainly employees are demanding it, but two, quite frankly, the technology providers are making it a lot simpler to do it.

And so it’s gone from this mammoth undertaking as an organization to something that well, you know, actually literally, what was it last month? Workday just launched a D&I analytics thing and we were on a call with them. I was on a call with them earlier this week. And I said, I think this may be one of the biggest things that drives change here, because if you have to make an additional investment to do this thing, which could be perceived as risky, I’m probably not going to do it. But if it’s right there in your Workday module and you can get these analytics and you can do exactly what you’re saying, because you can filter, you know, to the nth degree because now these analytics packages enable you to do that. You’re going to start to get these answers. So, you know, what do they do? I think, you know, some of it, and I’m not promoting Workday because there’s others, obviously who do that, I’m just mentioning it. Cause they’re  so widely used in the industry. But I think that getting access to the metrics saying that, you know, particularly right now with Black Lives Matter, if you think this is important, let’s go and look, we can do it. And then, you know, D&I partnering with people analytics, because right now that partnership is not nearly as strong as you might think, partnering with them to say, okay, what can we actually see? And not just representation numbers, cause representation numbers are, you know, such a lagging indicator. But, you know, are women of color having conversations? What map your diversity demographics over your engagement data? What did women of color say about their trust in the organization about, you know, the quality of the feedback they’re getting and really started to dig into that. But yeah, I think, you know, I have real concerns about singular color diversity, you know, indices. They certainly have some value, but they’ve masked a lot.

But I think the real real story is where we can now get with these sophisticated analytics, which is at these individualized levels. So I’m not sure if that fully answers the question, but that’s kind of what I’m seeing. I think part of the challenge is collecting the data, right? I mean, I work for some organizations that are international that are not allowed to collect some of that data. And so it’s sort of like, what’s the point of measuring inclusion if you’re not allowed to measure inclusion of or cut the data by different demographics like that? Well, I think that’s why gender has been such a hot topic because that is something everyone can collect where, you know, that the ethnicity question is one that is uniquely American. Thank you.

Which formula do you use to represent a D&I index? (29:31)

Yeah. Kind of going along with that, we have a submitted question, which index or formula do you use to represent a diversity and inclusion index? When that question came in, I kind of, as I’m laughing, I laughed, then I laughed now. I mean, there’s so many of them, you know, it’s hard to, I don’t really have a perspective on which one’s better, you know, or because I think that there’s strengths in all of them. And there’s also weaknesses, like we were just saying with Jennifer. But I think, you know, what’s important is to make sure that you are getting a robust set of questions that look at not just diversity, but also inclusion, belonging, and equity that you make sure that you’re asking that regularly and that you’re following up on it. Pretty much, not every, but many of the engagement experience providers today have an index. You can certainly add your own questions onto them. But I think it really just, you know, starts with that foundation, build on it and then go with what seems to work for your organization.

Yeah. I think that last point, they should go with what seems to work for your organization is a really important one. Everybody’s got different challenges. We’re all trying to settle diversity and inclusion, but it’s different for every single organization. And it isn’t really what you can cheat off your neighbor. In this case, you need to figure out kind of what works for you and your organization.

What was surprising about the research? (30:49)

I’ve got a question here asking what you thought was the most surprising thing about the women and performance research. So there were a number of surprising things that overall, Dani, as I told you, when we were doing the research, it was most, it was largely depressing. I’d have to step away from it for a few days and then come back to it. To the extent to which it was depressing by that has been most surprising. But I think kind of the one nugget that I took away that I hadn’t really fully considered, and this is in the main report in the Leveling the Field report was a study on rating scales. And I’m sure Rob will get a lot of this one.

Then there was a study that was done. It was in a university setting where they took professors and they looked at what their scores had been on a 10-point rating scale. And so it was this same group of professors who had delivered things, who had delivered this, you know, similar content. It was the same class, but they all kind of get in their own slightly different way. When he was on a 10-point rating scale, women were much less likely to get the top score than men, like hardly any women got it. The university decided to switch their rating scale for students for these professors down to a 6-point rating scale. And when they did that the likelihood of women and men getting the top rating now with 6 was equal. The teaching didn’t change. The content didn’t change, nothing changed. The only thing that changed was the rating scale. And so they started to then dive into why that might be the case.

And in many cultures, our own included, there is a perception that a 10 is perfection and perfection is something that is heretical in our culture, very difficult for women to achieve. And so when you shifted it from this 10-point scale to the 6-point scale, and it wasn’t this idea, you know, you think about it even like with what gymnastics or skating, you know, like the 10, the perfect it’s amazing, but there was no longer that perception. And so it was much easier to give people, give women that 6-point scale. And so that to me, and certainly there’s an argument, you know, Oh, well, you’ve reduced some of the gradation, blah, blah, blah. But I don’t think it really holds water.

I think that this point around the perception of what the top rating means is important. So you then translate that to our organizations. You might say, well, that seems maybe not so, so connected because most of us have a 5-point rating scale, blah, blah, blah. I would ask, what does a 5 mean in your organization? Does a 5 mean perfection? And if a 5 means perfection, you’ve probably got the same problem.

How do I help women be heard better? (33:50)

Interesting. Kind of along the lines of well, perfect. Well, the next question has to do with women being heard. So there’s a perception in organizations that women aren’t listened to or heard as much as men. And the question is how do I help women in my organization be heard better? I think, you know, there’s certainly a few things. One is an education and an awareness that this is happening – and we’re seeing some of that happen with some of the implicit bias training. I have lukewarm feelings about implicit bias training, but raising awareness is I think generally a good thing. And that probably comes there.

I think second is to build in practices and accepted phrasing about what happens when somebody gets overrun, you know, somebody might notice that it happens, but they don’t know what, how to handle it. So, you know, teaching, even in leadership, I’m most likely, quite frankly, in leadership programs or in manager programs, you know, you’ve observed something happen. Here’s what you say, like literally, "Oh, that looks like a point that Dani just made. Dani, could you maybe build on that even if somebody else has kind of jumped on and restated what was said?"

I think another thing is to be aware of and this isn’t just for women, but to be aware of different communication styles. Some people are just not that thrilled about jumping into the middle of the fray. And that’s exacerbated in our zoom world, right? Like we’re kind of in this weird world where the person talking now has this green box around their face and everybody gives attention. And so it can feel uncomfortable to jump in and have that dialogue. And if there’s a preset pattern of a certain type of person who is the one in the green box, that’s only gonna get exacerbated. So, building in kind of an expectation. We saw this, Dani, on our roundtable – we saw it was really interesting. We thought that once we got to a certain group side, there was a tendency for the women to kind of shrink back and for the men to dominate the conversation. In these roundtables, we have what I think it was around 12 to 15 people on a zoom call where that happened. And you know, the way that we kind of address that the next time is we actually just said, okay, we’re going to do lightning round robin, answer the question in two sentences. And then we move on to the next person. So again, that’s just a practice and accepted practice that this is what we’re going to do, and that makes sure everybody’s heard. So those are just a couple ideas that I’ve seen. I’m sure there are lots of others out there and if others can add that. That’d be great. Rob, I see you just asked about the name of that study. I’ll pull it out of the report and send it to you, or you can get it out of the report, but what we can not do that in follow up. We’ll stick it on the same page as the recording as well for everybody else.

I also wrote a study just about women being heard for Brigham Young University earlier this spring about this – was fascinating to me, partly because it’s my alma mater, but it was really interesting. They were trying to figure out why women weren’t speaking up. And they found that when they made the majority of the group women – so the groups were generally five people – when it was four women and one man, women tended to speak out much more. The other thing that they did is they changed the way that they made decisions. So, in most organizations, it’s majority rules or the person who has the most authority makes that decision in these groups. They forced them to make them by unanimity which I thought was really interesting. And as soon as, you know, unanimity changed, even if there was a mixed group, though, the ability and the likelihood that women would speak up changed – it was really interesting. I felt similarly, so you and I went to very different undergrads, but I went to a woman’s college. And when I went to grad school, I was just shocked. I looked around and I was like, why are you not talking? Why is that quiet? And obviously that trend has continued in the line of work I went into. But it was, and I think for me, it was because I was in undergrad, surrounded by women and we all had to talk. No one was going to talk if the women didn’t talk. So I think I’ve kind of built in a habit of leadership in the habit of just, yeah, just doing that. And so that’s been an interesting observation, quite frankly, since I graduated college.

What is the one finding to take away & implement? (38:34)

I know we are. Okay. So Rob says similar experience for him working near the gap, 73% women. Interesting. okay. A couple more questions. I know we’re nearing the end of this meeting and we have about four minutes left. So anybody who’s on the phone that wants to ask a question, please get it in. One of the questions that came in was I’ve read your study. I’m really interested in the one takeaway you would like us to what’s the word I’m looking for? Paraphrasing your roots, the one thing that they think that they should take away and implement into the organization. Yeah, here, I’m just gonna pull up the key findings so that we can look at the same thing.

I think the number one finding is that while performance. Okay, I’m going to give you three. I know you wanted one, but this is different experience for women. Like I don’t think that it’s, there’s just a ton of research out there. You know, if you start where I did, which was a little bit skeptical after doing this work, I am completely convinced that it is a different experience than something we need to address is. It’s especially a different experience here with COVID-19, that’s number one. Two, though, is if we do some of these changes that we recommend – increasing the quality of feedback, giving more training on how to give feedback, helping people understand how to articulate, you know, objections when incorrect language is being used, or people that are being treated unfairly. We do all those things. Everyone benefits, women benefit, men benefit, people of color benefit, everyone benefits. So while the initial effort might be to advance more women or people of color, everyone’s going to do better. I think the third thing would just be, and this is adjacent to this, but look into your learning opportunities. I think that’s a big source of some of this. Ultimate unfairness is, you know, performance is obviously connected to learning opportunities and for a whole host of reasons, women aren’t getting an equal shot at those. And so there’s a big opportunity there, and that is I think, a relatively no one’s going to say you shouldn’t do that. You know, we know that the more gender diverse, the more diverse period. Teams tend to perform better. If there’s financial data, there’s a financial imperative to do this. If we know that impacts financial data. So go there.

How much will tech help with this problem? (40:55)

Final question. How much will tech help us relieve this problem in the future? I think the value of tech here is twofold. One is that it can help us identify patterns that we didn’t know existed. So when people say don’t do that, and then you can have an objective way of looking at data and saying, yes, actually we, all of us do this. And you do your manager as an individual. Here’s your own track record. And that’s not somebody else with a bias perspective saying that that’s based on data. I think that is a significant benefit of tech. Number one. Number two is because so many things happen within critical decisions get made in technology systems. I think that the ability to highlight what’s happening at the moment of decision-making is really important. So it’s that heightened awareness, but then the awareness in the right moment, the combination of those two, I think has real power. But, ultimately, we’re people. This is an incredibly complex people problem, and tech's not going to save us – it’s going to help us, but it’s not going to save us. And that’s true in pretty much anything having to do with people. It can inform us to help us make better decisions, but it’s not a silver bullet – ever.

Alright, I think we’re gonna leave it there. Thank you for everybody that joined us live and thank you for those who submitted questions online. It made this a really fun conversation. We will send the link to this recording to everybody that was on live, as well as anybody who submitted a question. And then we’ll be posting this live on our website, hopefully in the next week, so that you can go right to the question you have an answer for. That’s it. Thank you so much.

At the 2020 PAFOW Conference in San Francisco, we presented the latest insights from our research on the people analytics tech landscape, including:

• An overview of the marketplace
• A review of RedThread Research’s vendor solution matrix & interactive tool
• Determining what makes a differentiator in this market
• Risks and recommendations – for both customers and vendors

 

People Analytics Tech Landscape: The Market & Vendors from Stacia Sherman Garr

Did you know that employee experience can affect the experience of your customers? The following slides highlight initial findings from our Employee Experience / Customer Experience study.

Red threadresearch excx_medallia experience_final from Dani Johnson