Here’s a scary thought — more than 90% of the world’s total electronic data has been created in the last two years alone. And by the end of this year it’s estimated 1.7MB of data will be created for every person, every second. So what is the value of this data and what exactly should we be doing with it?

This is the question many businesses are asking themselves as we enter the fourth industrial revolution, a time of intense digital transformation where the use of data is completely changing the way we do business.

Across the organisation there will no doubt be hidden, passionate data champions, and what better time to discover them and amplify their skills. Call on these team members to help the organisation on its journey.

Before organisations start considering how to leverage the data available to them though, there’s a critical question that needs to be asked — do we have the necessary skillset to derive meaningful insights from data and convert this knowledge into action? In most cases, the answer is no.

Forrester says that 74% of businesses want to be data-driven, but only 29% are successful at putting analytics into action. While McKinsey found that 70% of digital transformation programs don’t reach their goals, which means that of the $1.3 trillion that was spent on digital transformations in 2019, $900 billion was wasted on efforts that did not yield intended results.

Even more alarming, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2020, 50% of organisations will lack sufficient AI and data literacy skills to achieve business value. It’s not a technological challenge that we’re grappling with though, it’s a human one, a lack of data literacy.

The answer isn’t simply hiring more data analysts though, in fact, the number of data professionals in the world is already insufficient to meet demand.

What does it mean to be data literate?

Just as literacy is our ability to read, write and comprehend language, data literacy is our ability to read, write and understand data. More than that, it’s the ability to derive meaningful and useful information from data and to apply this to create better products, services and experiences.

Data literacy is not just the domain of a few teams across the organisation – all workers from the shopfloor to the C-suite will bring greater value to the business by better understanding how data is entwined in their everyday tasks and being empowered to realise its full potential. We need to upskill the entire workforce to be data literate, and HR has a critical role to play in developing this competency across the organisation.

While this may seem a daunting task, the good news is that data literacy is a learned skill, and with the right tools and support, anyone can become data literate.

Here are seven steps that HR professionals can take to improve the data literacy of their workforce and prepare for the future of work:

1. Make data literacy an issue

HR professionals have an incredibly important role to play in the design and implementation of any organisational data literacy program, starting with building awareness and excitement around the possibilities that a truly data-driven organisation brings.  For data literacy to be taken seriously, HR must first convey how important it is to all employees, including those in traditionally non-data roles.  Data literacy is a concern for every person across the organisation, not just a select few. And like any culture change, it needs to start from the top, so getting executives’ buy-in and support will be crucial:

Even more alarming, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2020, 50% of organisations will lack sufficient AI and data literacy skills to achieve business value. It’s not a technological challenge that we’re grappling with though, it’s a human one, a lack of data literacy.

2. Locate your data champions

Across the organisation there will no doubt be hidden, passionate data champions, and what better time to discover them and amplify their skills. Call on these team members to help the organisation on its journey by tasking them to support others in using data in their day-to-day activities. Celebrating your data champions’ skills and drawing from their knowledge will go a long way in laying the foundations for a data-driven culture.

3. Take stock

It’s difficult to design a data literacy initiative if you don’t know where you’re starting from, therefore it’s vital to measure your organisation’s existing levels of data literacy before you roll out any new programs. There are a number of assessments and measurement tools available to help measure the current level of data literacy across a diverse range of employees or the organisation as a whole.

4. Set a goal

What does ‘good’ look like when it comes to data literacy for your organisation? Start setting goals by mapping out what data literacy looks like at different levels and in different roles within the organisation. Doing this will help you to prioritise your efforts and direct resources to the right places. Unsurprisingly, some roles require higher levels of data literacy than others, for example the needs of a retail assistant will differ greatly from someone working in digital marketing. The retail assistant’s data role will most likely lay in creating and sharing data — through collecting customer details, encouraging database subscriptions, etc., whereas the marketer’s data role will involve accessing and analysing data to create targeted campaigns and communications.

5. Get learning

Once you know where you’re starting from, and where you’re going, it’s a matter of focusing on the gap in between. Your organisation’s data literacy program will require a unique mix of resources and tools to support it on its path. Fortunately, there’s an ever-growing domain of tools, templates and training modules available to learn from and implement.

Before organisations start considering how to leverage the data available to them though, there’s a critical question that needs to be asked — do we have the necessary skillset to derive meaningful insights from data and convert this knowledge into action? In most cases, the answer is no.

6. Encourage a culture of curiosity

Encouraging curiosity is an important element of building data literacy. If the teams aren’t open to exploring data or being inquisitive, they’re unlikely to uncover insights that will help the business to innovate. A study by Harvard Business School found that 92% of employees credited curious people with bringing new ideas into teams and organisations and viewed curiosity as a catalyst for job satisfaction, motivation, innovation and high performance.

7. Continually reassess

Ensure you schedule regular reviews to assess progress to date, measure incremental improvements, identify gaps and make changes to your data literacy program. Successful data literacy programs will not be a one-hit-wonder or ‘set and forget’ activity, these programs will adapt to the evolving needs of the organisation and technological advancements.

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Leadership development is critical to business performance and attracts significant investment. Unfortunately, most of this is poorly spent on programs that look good, but don’t work – primarily because they don’t follow the principles that have been proven to have the greatest impact.

What are these principles? Look at almost any award-winning leadership program, including our work with NSW Health that recently won gold for innovative program design at the international Brandon Hall Excellence Awards, and you’ll find themes of greater focus (fewer topic areas), action (experience not passive education), stretch (novel, uncomfortable challenges) and high-quality rapid feedback.

Here are the five steps any organisation can take to design and deliver a leadership development intervention that will produce the outcomes you seek.

There is no limit to the number of desirable focus areas for a leadership development intervention. But including them all isn’t helpful, as it dilutes the amount of concentration on each one.

1. Get serious

I’ve met too many organisations where they say they want a transformational impact, but they aren’t prepared for what it will take. So, before you start, make sure that your commitment matches your ambitions. If it doesn’t, you will start making major compromises from the outset, and you will end up with a half-baked intervention with limited impact.

These compromises may include:

• Can we have something that doesn’t take much participant time?
• Can we have something that is really innovative but doesn’t involve taking any risks?
• Can we have something cheap?
• Can we have something where participants don’t have to be fully engaged (so that they can be answering emails and returning calls at the same time)?
• Can we have something where we don’t have to change anything else about the organisation so that it can align with, and reinforce, what the program is trying to achieve?

These questions will diminish the success of your organisation’s leadership. So, if your stakeholders are already asking such questions and you’re intending to accede to them, stop reading now. If you’re happy to commit to excellence, read on.

2. Get clear

The most important design question you can ask is “What do we most want from this intervention?”. One example of this was for a 100,000+ employee organisation which had 21 CEO-equivalent positions, reporting through to a Group CEO. Their goal was to have a pool of leaders who would be job-ready in 3-5 years to step into one of those 21 roles. Once this was understood as the most important outcome, everything else followed. In a different case, a company’s goal was to ensure that the top 200 leaders would be equipped to work together to take the organisation through the most demanding and complex inflection point in its history.

Once these high-level ambitions are known and agreed by all key stakeholders, it’s possible to get more granular in terms of the required mindset, capability and behaviour shifts, as well as the program design implications.

The answers for your intervention could be anything from ‘driving top-line growth as we expand geographically’ to ‘making our company the most innovative in our industry’ to ‘ensuring our digital transformation is a complete success’. The key is that the question is asked and answered, and then communicated so effectively that everyone understands.

Too many leadership development interventions suffer from insufficient discomfort. When asked ‘how often in this process did you feel stretched out of your comfort zone’, the average response should be around 80%.

3. Get focused

Many programs, even after getting clear about the required outputs, suffer from a major problem: design overload.

There is no limit to the number of desirable focus areas for a leadership development intervention. But including them all isn’t helpful, as it dilutes the amount of concentration on each one. One of our most staggering findings in evaluating leadership programs is that more than 90% suffer from targeting too many capability areas. The result is that all of these programs then fail to achieve the capability shifts they were aiming for and miss the results that they could and should have delivered.

The key negative impacts are:

• Reduced time per focus area. This is as simple as it sounds. If the program affords 120 hours of participant time, then in crude terms, you can either spend 15 hours each on 8 capabilities or 40 hours each on 3 capabilities.
• Ambiguity and cognitive load. Arguably even more significant than the time difference, is the difference in clarity and focus for the participant.

That doesn’t mean dumbing down a program or avoiding leadership dimensions which are multi-faceted. It’s simply about giving the most important elements dedicated attention, not marginal attention.

4. Get active and uncomfortable

Getting active and uncomfortable is critical for participant experience. The implicit goal of any development activity is to move people’s ‘mental representation’ of the capability to a more accurate, complete or sophisticated level than where they were at.

If your goal is for people to evolve their mindsets, capabilities or behaviours, it won’t happen through listening to someone talk, or through a chat with colleagues. It will only happen if you take action – and that action must involve applying the mindset or capability that is in focus. If you are focused on, say, collaboration, then participants must do something that requires them to collaborate – and with a higher level of mastery than they usually demonstrate.

If that activity is to have a sustained effect, it must provide either intensity and/or novelty. Too many leadership development interventions suffer from insufficient discomfort. When asked ‘how often in this process did you feel stretched out of your comfort zone’, the average response should be around 80%. However, in most programs we have evaluated, the typical result is 30% or lower. Most programs focus on elements that are most visible and easiest to deliver (such as typical executive education programs) yet the lack of immersion and stretch means the chance of such programs delivering the desired results is almost zero.

For a successful intervention, you must take people to a place of discomfort (while ensuring that they feel safe to go there). That discomfort can come in very different forms (a time-pressured collaboration, a presentation to a demanding audience, a deeply emotional conversation or a completely out-of-the-box immersive experience), but the test is that participants find it ‘just about manageable’. Broadly, that means that people feel that they are likely to succeed if they give the task full effort but are likely to fail if they do not.

Of course, these ‘heat experiences’ are not enough in themselves. They must be combined with processes that cause people to take on new perspectives and challenge their old assumptions, as well as sense-making to integrate their new learning into their overall way of leading. But without the hands-on heat experiences, none of the other activities will make a difference.

5. Get results

All of these steps only count if you are clear on getting results. Quite appropriately, most major leadership development awards today place a high weighting on the quality of evaluation.

Grouped information from leadership interventions must focus on impact, not reactions. Once again, too many programs are focused on what’s visible and easy to collect (e.g. ‘how did you find the venue?’). Indeed, in our evaluation of programs, we find the lowest scoring element overall is most often the program impact measurement. They literally have no idea whether the program worked – all they know is whether participants enjoyed it.

More than anything, evaluation it is about understanding what data you need to collect and collecting this data throughout so that participants can receive rapid, dynamic feedback on their development journey – showing them where they are making progress and where they are not.

This is how we develop. We start at a certain point, we strive to improve, we see what has or hasn’t changed, presented in a way that helps us understand why and how we can continually improve our development. It’s how we learned to walk and talk, and how some of us learned to become great musicians, scientists, public speakers or CEOs.

Leadership development is critical to business performance and attracts significant investment. Unfortunately, most of this is poorly spent on programs that look good, but don’t work

Shifting your mindset from what’s easy to what works requires real commitment, but the difference in value creation is binary – executed well, you can have the strongest leadership cadre in your sector, delivering an incomparable level of competitive advantage.

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There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the notion of online learning (or eLearning). Yet it’s astounding that after two decades, many organisations are still making fundamental mistakes — at a massive cost.

Begin with a thorough understanding of why training matters to the organisation and the individual, how the knowledge will be implemented, and what the learning outcomes are

Consider the typical approach to online training: take an existing face-to-face training program (read a hundred-plus-slide PowerPoint deck with over twenty bullet points on each), drop it into a learning management system (LMS) and whack on a ‘next’ button.

This is chalked up as a win, due to:

1. Saving a resource from having to deliver training in person, and;
2. Allowing employees to learn at a time that suits them.

In reality, however, this click-click-click-next approach rarely produces an engaging experience, and learning suffers dramatically as a result.

There’s no shortage of evidence showing the substantial performance and bottom-line benefits of effective online learning, but the keyword here is effective.

Improving online training isn’t a matter of changing LMS or jumping on the latest technology trend (we’re looking at you, virtual reality). As obvious as it sounds, if our objective is to educate people, we need to make people central to the process.

Instead of online training, a helpful frame is to think of it as an online learning experience.

Just as we would for an offline program, online learning requires a framework for engagement. This involves journey mapping the experience, cognitive framing to put people in the right mindset, setting context and the right content to deliver the desired learning outcomes.

The effectiveness of online training hangs on establishing context and carefully considering content. Without a skilled facilitator or trainer to ensure comprehension, these are the areas where online learning typically falls down.

For learning to be considered effective, a transfer of knowledge needs to take place that enables people to put what they’ve learned into practice. And if there isn’t a behaviour that needs to be changed or a skill that needs to be learned and applied, then the question should be asked — why does this training need to exist?

While there are numerous learning frameworks, the following 7 considerations ensure a great online learning experience:

1. Know the purpose (the why, how and what). Begin with a thorough understanding of why training matters to the organisation and the individual, how the knowledge will be implemented, and what the learning outcomes are — the skills that should be learned and/or the behaviours that need to change. This is the basis for establishing what content needs to be communicated.
2. Know the context for the organisation (and keep it short). Offline training allows more time to be spent on the who’s, why’s and how’s. Online learning requires a different approach. Long videos and lengthy text don’t make sense — these aren’t the way we naturally consume content via online channels. The context component should be summarised in a short introductory video, 1.5–2 minutes at most.
3. Know the context for the audience (and bring it to life). Case studies, stories and scenarios are the most effective way to bring learning to life. When people see themselves in a situation — when it’s relatable — they’re much more likely to care. And when they care, they’re far more likely to want to learn about it. It also provides people with an opportunity to think about the desired skill or behaviour in the context of their work. Wherever possible, use real examples to ensure greater relevance.
4. Know the audience (the who). An in-depth understanding of who the online learning experience is for is essential to communicating for maximum engagement. Applying empathy, using activities like personas, helps uncover detailed information about the audience, including who they are, what they like/dislike, their drivers and communication preferences. It helps determine what content is relevant, as well as appropriate language and tone of voice.
5. Know people’s attention spans (hint: they’re short). A growing number of organisations are embracing microlearning, as it suits busy schedules, short attention spans, and can be delivered anytime, anywhere, via mobile devices. Microlearning focuses on delivering a single, bite sized chunk of knowledge. Modules typically focus on only one learning outcome.
6. Know the timing. Increasingly, learning is happening in the flow of work. Just because it’s delivered online, doesn’t mean it needs to be consumed while sitting in a room alone. It should allow people to learn, then implement that knowledge immediately. By continually improving their capability and applying it to their day-to-day activities, we build a positive feedback loop.
7. Know how to inspire learning (and not because we told them to). Curiosity is an incredibly powerful driver of active learning. By incorporating curiosity into framing and content, through questions and teasing small amounts of information while temporarily withholding the rest, we put people in the right mindset to learn.

By taking an experiential approach to online learning, and beginning with these seven considerations, we can dramatically improve the outcomes.

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A new year and a new decade. A new direction in the Australian workplace?  With legal and social changes, this year promises to be a significant one for HR professionals in Australia. The workplace continues to be an area of focus for lawmakers and regulators and remains a forum for broader social issues to manifest. Herbert Smith Freehills partner Anna Creegan on what to expect in 2020 in the Australian workplace.

1. Religion

With the Prime Minister and a star Wallabies back publicly sharing their commitment to religious belief, in 2019 conditions were ripe for a reassessment of religion in Australian public life. 2020 begins with the draft Religious Discrimination Bill 2019 released by the Prime Minister and Attorney General and expected to be introduced into Federal Parliament this year.

The Bill would see the introduction of laws addressing discrimination on the basis of religion in employment and areas of public life. Notable exceptions to discrimination on the basis of religion in employment would include employment for domestic duties, religious hospitals, aged care facilities, accommodation providers, and where the individual cannot perform the inherent requirements of the role. The Bill would create a new office of the Freedom of Religion Commissioner, within the Australian Human Rights Commission.

If the Bill is passed, all Australian employers will need to understand how it affects their management of religious issues in and outside the workplace.

2. Climate

2020 begins with climate dominating the national discourse. But could this become a workplace issue? It seems it already has.

First, there are direct impacts. Employers are presented with new challenges in the form of air quality issues and temporary absences from work by volunteer firefighters and others affected by climate issues.

Then there are less tangible changes. Our firm’s 2019 report, Future of Work, returned data from a survey of 375 executives at large corporations across the US, UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia. It tells of an anticipated rise in workplace activism which is increasingly focused on social and environmental issues, particularly climate change. Larger companies and in particular mining companies predict a rise in activism triggered by environmental issues, the report notes.

As 2019 ended, institutional investors reduced investment in fossil fuel stocks. BlackRock described sustainability as its ‘new standard for investing’. It seems reasonable to expect employee activism to follow, and there are indications that this is already happening. Our report records that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter employees were active in coordinating 2019 climate protests. And in late 2019, CFMMEU National President Tony Maher joined those identifying a ‘lack of progress’ in Australia on climate and energy, contemplating (in a submission to the Select Committee into Jobs for the Future in Regional Areas) falling incomes and prospects for people in coal regions without major government programs.

Expect climate to be an emerging issue in Australian workplaces this year.

3. Safety

This year will see industrial manslaughter offences take effect in Victoria in July, and possibly in Western Australia.

These new laws would follow the industrial manslaughter offences already in force in Queensland and the ACT.  Further Industrial manslaughter offences are proposed in all other jurisdictions except New South Wales and Tasmania.

The message is clear, as articulated by the Chief Executive of WorkSafe Victoria, Colin Radford. In a February 2020 release, Mr. Radford said “employers are on notice to take their health and safety obligations seriously or risk jail if your negligence causes a worker’s death. If you show a reckless indifference to human life, you will face the full force of these new laws.”

Mental health has received similar attention. New safety laws that are expected to take effect in WA this year define ‘health’ as ‘physical and psychological health’. This gives a clear duty to ensure the psychological health of workers engaged in the business, at least while they are at work. This followed the Western Australian Government’s release of the Code of Practice: Mentally healthy workplaces for fly-in fly-out workers in the resources and construction sectors, which recommended a range of measures to assess and control risks associated with FIFO work.

These changes expand traditional concepts of workplace safety and create significant consequences for employers and their senior personnel if safety laws are breached.

4. Money, time and job security

Perhaps the biggest issue for Australian employers in 2020 will be ongoing scrutiny of their practices in engaging and paying staff and keeping records of hours worked.

There are a number of issues at play here:

• Fair Work Ombudsman investigations – targeting non-compliance with awards, enterprise agreements, the Fair Work Act, and sham contracting.
• the ATO’s Single Touch Payroll system – giving employees easy access to information on income, employer superannuation contributions and tax withholdings.
• updated modern awards – creating new limits on the use of annualised wages for staff in clerical, horticultural, pharmacy, banking, finance and insurance, mining, local government, and other areas, from 1 March 2020. These changes will:
• give employees an entitlement to pay in addition to an annualised wage where they work above a set number of hours in a roster cycle or pay period.
• require employers to give employees information about how the annualised wage has been calculated.
• require employers to conduct 12 monthly reconciliations of the annualised wage against the employee’s award entitlements (from the start of the annualised wage arrangement); and
• require employers to keep a record of start and finish times, and any unpaid breaks, for employees subject to an annualised wage.

Whether an employer can simply opt-out of the annualised wages requirements of awards by using a common law annualised salary is the subject of much discussion. Employers should consider this carefully.

• the Modern Slavery Act – introduced in 2018, which requires Australian entities (or entities carrying on business in Australia) with at least $100 million global consolidated revenue to (from 2020) submit an annual statement on the risks of modern slavery in their operations and supply chains.
• the rise of class actions – providing a forum for employees (in some cases with the support of unions) to pursue underpayment and other claims on a collective basis. For example, in the CFMMEU backed class action by Renyard against WorkPac, 600 union members are claiming $12m in entitlements, on the basis that they were wrongly classified as casuals.

It is clear from these issues that human resources professionals can expect a busy year. These changes and challenges will be best met by human resources teams focussing on compliance with laws, monitoring further changes to laws, and achieving direct engagement with the workforce as far as possible.

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For many people, the turn of a new year comes with a new year’s resolution. But despite our best intentions, most of us have already abandoned our resolve as the first month of the year comes to an end. Only 25% of resolution setters stick it out for a full month, and fewer than 8% take their resolution through to the end of the year.

Despite these glum statistics, the year of 2020 is a golden opportunity for serial resolution setters as it signals the beginning of a new decade and the promise of a clean slate. Bill Gates once said that while people overestimate what they can do in a year, they underestimate what they can do in a decade. What better time to turn over a new leaf and set bigger and better goals for the future?

To avoid finishing before you’ve even begun, here are some tips to help you start the decade strong, achieve your goals and come out the end of it better than ever.

Go slow. Set smaller milestones and make small incremental changes in the direction of your big goal. This helps make the goal more achievable, rather than too drastic and unachievable.

Find your purpose
A lot of people know what they want, but not why they want it. However, you will find it’s much easier to stick to something when it is something that matters to you.

Having a purpose makes it easier to bounce back in challenging times by providing stability, confidence, and determination. To kick off the new decade, take the time to re-evaluate or land on your purpose. This will help you to decide on which goals and activities are important to you and set you up for long-term success.

The Japanese concept of Ikigai could help you land on your purpose for the next decade. Ask yourself the following four questions:

• What do you love?
• What are you good at?
• What does the world need?
• What can you be paid for?

Ikigai believes that your purpose can be condensed into six words (no more, no less). My purpose is, “living, laughing, contributing, with assertive humility”.

It is a combination of these things that can help you understand your priorities and contributes to a more fulfilling life as a whole.

Go slow
We look at our final goal as if it’s the first step, leading us to feel overwhelmed and quickly give up on trying to achieve it. The key to progress involves building new, small habits to help you achieve your goals.

Go slow. Set smaller milestones and make small incremental changes in the direction of your big goal. This helps make the goal more achievable, rather than too drastic and unachievable.

For instance, if you want to lose a certain amount of weight by the end of the decade, don’t start with an unsustainable crash diet or an extreme exercise routine – it won’t last. Start by adding one positive habit to your life at a time. Start by walking your dog twice a week for a month. Once it’s part of your routine, start cutting out soft-drink during the week. Eventually, these tiny positive changes will feel like part of your lifestyle rather than a chore.

For those with a professional goal in mind, start by breaking down the steps into smaller milestones like a promotion or a pay rise. Work out exactly what you need to do to get to the next level – perhaps it’s to exceed sales targets. If it is, commit to reaching out to five next sales leads a week.

A lot of people know what they want, but not why they want it. However, you will find it’s much easier to stick to something when it is something that matters to you.

Build your resilience
For some people, a minor setback can send them off the rails, while others can bounce back with a spring in their step and even more determination to succeed. What’s the difference? Resilience.

It’s a common misperception that resilience is either a born-with skill or only developed in the wake of major adversity and trauma in a person’s life. In fact, resilience is a skill that can be learned and acts as a psychological buffer against obstacles; enabling you to maintain balance, protect your wellbeing and sustain high cognitive performance.

A few ways to build resilience to help you achieve your goals include:

• Tackle life with a glass half full approach: A positive mindset acts as a launchpad for victory, and it’s important to recognise that every challenge comes an opportunity for growth. This attitude will keep you moving forward.
• Maintain positive lifestyle practices: Exercise regularly, enjoy a healthy and well-balanced diet and get 7-8 hours of sleep a night. These basic lifestyle factors are really important contributors to emotional wellbeing and longevity.
• Be social: Having a strong support network is imperative for building resilience and improving overall life satisfaction. More than that, positive reinforcement from your peers can improve self-respect and confidence.

For some people, a minor setback can send them off the rails, while others can bounce back with a spring in their step and even more determination to succeed. What’s the difference? Resilience.

There is no better time to reflect on what the last ten years have delivered and set some goals for what the next ten will bring. But remember that your life won’t change overnight. Take the time to understand your purpose, invest in building your resilience and go slow. Doing this will allow you to keep your head up, navigate setbacks and put you on the path to being the best version of yourself this decade.

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Almost every HR department is focused on the employee experience these days. LinkedIn’s 2020 Global Talent Trends research cites experience design as one of the fastest growing areas in HR, with 2.4 times more job titles related to “employee experience” than existed five years ago.

Employees are now in charge and they are your customers. You work for them; they don’t work for you.

Employee experiences are complex. Experiences encompass the physical work environment, the pay and rewards system, a company’s management and leadership, and of course, the job, opportunities to grow, and culture. So, when companies jump into this area, those involved often begin by scratching their heads and wondering just where to start and stop an experience initiative.

What I’ve found works best is to focus. Look at the variety of survey and exit data on hand and find the areas with the most pain. It may be related to new hires and difficulty in onboarding; it may be senior salespeople who feel their pay has fallen behind, or it may be simply a lack of clarity around roles and a need to an improved approach to job design.

What most do realize is that bureaucracy, driven by a twelve-year economic growth cycle, is part of the problem. There are too many meetings, programs, strategies, and tools. We need to simplify, clarify, and rationalize all the factors involved.

To address the huge interest in employee experience, a new wave of HR tech tools has emerged. Vendors ranging from ServiceNow to Qualtrics to Medallia, as well as Workday, SuccessFactors, and LinkedIn, have all started to jump into this space. In fact, almost every tool for employee feedback, wellbeing, recognition, and rewards now feels like an EX tool, making it harder than ever to make sense the available options.

• Think about the employee experience problem as one of diagnostics (listening), action planning (focus), design (solving), and instrumentation (monitoring).  In other words, you really must:
• Listen to determine what the actual problems are (surveys and feedback data),
• Develop action plans to give managers specific guidance on what to do (action plans and dashboards), Design new experiences (redesign how work gets done, often without changing back-end systems),
• Continually monitor results.

Employee experiences are complex. Experiences encompass the physical work environment, the pay and rewards system, a company’s management and leadership, and of course, the job, opportunities to grow, and culture.

Just as your marketing department is always looking at customer experience, market perception, and customer satisfaction with your product – you need to take the same customer first view in HR.  Employees are now in charge and they are your customers. You work for them; they don’t work for you.

The new world of EX is here to stay – let’s learn to focus well and we can really make work better.

Five tips for designing an improved employee experience

1. Use feedback and surveys to listen and understand where employee experience, turnover, and other employee-related issues are problematic.
2. Develop action plans that go directly to line leaders so they can resolve problems locally.
3. Co-design new solutions with your business counterparts and build them in an iterative and agile way.
4. Monitor how the EX changes over time, so you can see what works and what doesn’t; be ready to revise.
5. Remember that you work for your employees and not the other way around.

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HR departments are occasionally accused of sponsoring flavor-of-the-month agendas. Some of these accusations may be justified. However, there is one current flavor-of-the-month agenda that HR should champion with great focus and zeal. That agenda is business agility. In the midst of today’s complex, turbulent, and uncertain business environment, organisational agility is a key to short term and sustainable success. Periods of stability may be needed but they will be increasingly short-lived,

However, it may occur that in some cases HR departments have a greater focus on stability and steady consistency. This tendency is reflected in the occasional magazine article that characterises HR as the corporate police, the writer and enforcer of rules, the internal champion and the protector of employees from the consequences of competitive reality. Let me suggest three reasons why such reputational attributions might occur. I will conclude with what might be done to reverse some of these trends that will enable HR to be a central play in building and sustaining business agility.

Why reputational attributions might occur
First, several years ago a leading HR association ran a survey of its members asking “What are the highest values that HR should have?” Number one was harmony, that is, peaceful consistency. In the midst of competitive turbulence, peaceful harmony may be part of the problem and not part of the solution. In the midst of dynamic change, if some people are not feeling anxious or threatened, they are hiding from the necessity of personal and business agility.

“HR departments are occasionally accused of sponsoring flavor-of-the-month agendas”

Second, many HR practice areas are implemented over large populations of the organisation. It takes considerable time and effort to design and implement systemic HR practice areas such as performance measurement, rewards, basic training, and employee work rules. Once that work is done the sunk costs of quickly redoing them are financially and psychologically formidable. Thus the tendency is toward status quo stability.

Third, many HR departments are internally focused. They conceptualise employees as their target customers; their line of sight in language and logic is to the inside rather than to the outside. As we have discussed in earlier articles in Inside HR, the research from the University of Michigan is reasonably clear. HR professionals tend to know more about internal issues (e.g. HR practices, supply chain management, accounting, etc.) than external issues (customers, competitors, global financial trends, etc). And, yet, HR professionals with a primary line of sight to the outside significantly outperform HR professionals with a line of sight to the inside. It is tough to create an agile organisation without being intimately familiar with the drivers that mandate business agility.

Proactively sponsor agility
First, HR departments need to readjust their own culture. The mindset within HR will need to shift from stability, harmony and internal line of site to dynamic, tolerance for dissonance and external line of sight. This shift will need to be reflected in HR’s staffing criteria and development expectations.

Second, HR professionals will need knowledge not only about internal employee requirements but also about external competitive trends and customer requirements. However, if HR is to truly play a proactive role in creating business agility, it must fully understand the underlying social, political and economic trends that drive competitive dynamics and customer demands. By so doing, HR may then focus on creating organisation capabilities that create turbulence for its competitors instead of responding to turbulence that is created by its competitors.

“It is a great time for HR to embed in itself, the agility that it seeks to embed in the rest of its organisations”

Third, historically, HR has focused on communicating internal information through the workforce. In the future HR will help create agile organisations by infusing employees at all levels with external information. HR will become the expert purveyors of market reality throughout the company. It will be a major task for HR to embed competitive reality in the hearts and minds of all employees. It will ensure that employees continuously update their knowledge and skills to reflect the reality of market turbulence. This important HR agenda will be the foundation of business agility.

This is a great time to be an HR professional. It is a great time for HR to embed in itself, the agility that it seeks to embed in the rest of its organisations.

Action steps

• Recognise the culture change that HR might need to undertake from stable harmony to edgy agility.
• Deeply understand the political, social, and economic lead indicators in the competitive environment that drive the mandate for business agility.
• Avoid being trapped by the sunk costs of the status quo; rather, be prepared to continuously undo what has already done and be prepared to create new practices that drive emerging sources of competitive advantage.
• Rebalance the distribution of institutional information from internally based information to external information about customers, competitors and the economic reality.

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The post What are the top 3 ways HR professionals can drive business agility? appeared first on Inside HR.

Over the course of 2019, I hosted, keynoted and ran sessions at employee experience summits around the world. Attendees comprised a broad cross-section of organisations, industries and regions, at various stages of implementing EX — from those who were curious about how to take the first step in bringing EX into their organisation, to leaders of established employee experience functions grappling with how to link their EX strategy to bottom-line business outcomes.

Yet despite significant differences in where organisations were focusing their EX efforts — especially between regions — there was one common conversation: People are still struggling to define what ‘employee experience’ actually means.

At every summit, I asked ‘what is employee experience?’. And while it seems like a simple question, the answers ranged from uncertainty to incredibly long-winded.

This isn’t surprising — EX is still in its infancy. And like any significant shift, be it technology or social, there tends to be an awkward period where we struggle to concisely articulate what this new ‘thing’ actually is. It takes time to collect the relevant data to support it.

“The employee experience is how an employee experiences, recalls and retells the story of their day, week, year and career”

For example, people have been practicing mindfulness and meditation for millennia with positive results, but it’s only recently that neuroscientists definitely proved the impact mindfulness has on our physiology. Similarly, most leaders know intuitively that the employee experience is the right approach, but most are still struggling to prove and articulate why.

This is where a shared definition is crucial, as it gives us a starting point for:

1. Talking about the subject with credibility and influence; and
2. Determining what we should be measuring.

We’ve spent years exploring the science of experiences then applying it to real-world applications. This has slowly distilled into the following definition:

The employee experience is how an employee experiences, recalls and retells the story of their day, week, year and career.

Within this definition, there are a number of elements to consider when incorporating EX into a strategic plan.

Experience: The process or fact of personally observing, encountering, or undergoing something. By nature, humans are experiential, living life as a continuous stream of moments and feelings. Work is no different.

“Life is a narrative stream we’re constantly remembering, retelling and revising, based on our experiences”

Remembers: We tend to remember things that defy our expectations, especially extreme deviations. When it comes to experiences, our recollection is an average of the peak and end moments. These two instances disproportionately shape our overall memory, however they don’t need to be monumental. They can easily be the everyday moments, interactions, connections and conversations.

Retells: Helping people talk about their experiences by providing the right language and artifacts gives them an opportunity to relive their experiences. This also plays a powerful role in defining the employer brand.

Story: Humans are driven and connected by narratives — whether it’s the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions, beliefs and identity, or other’s stories that influence our emotions and behaviours. Life is a narrative stream we’re constantly remembering, retelling and revising, based on our experiences.

Day, week, year or career: A reminder that experiences can be massive, spanning years and careers, but they are also in the day-to-day. We need to consider both when designing the employee experience.

Numerous factors influence how EX is integrated into an organisation — the purpose, the strategy, the culture — ultimately, though, it’s about finding what matters to the people that make up your workforce. This is why there isn’t a single handbook or step-by-step approach to EX, rather a framework that helps leaders build great employee experiences.

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Over the course of the past six months, I’m increasingly hearing more conversations centred around talent reviews, with debates about their value as well as how to run an effective talent review process.

My experiences conducting hundreds of talent reviews and building the process for both local and global companies have taught me that there are a few critical factors to create a successful talent review.

A clear, company-specific definition of potential
There are lots of conversations around “competency frameworks” rather than capability ones and many organisations get caught up in the complexity of defining what is potential for them.

Instead of using one of the many global generic potential models that exist (I must admit I’m not a fan of the 9-box process for a number of reasons), I’d suggest you create your own company-specific definition of potential that includes the following elements:

• A track record of sustained high performance/experiences across fundamentally different challenges. Past performance in one job tells us little about future performance in a different job, although many still use this as a judgment lever. I’ve seen many high potentials fail with this approach.
• However, sustained high performance/experiences across different, highly challenging scenarios indicates high cognitive capability and provides insights about resilience, ambition and other critical factors that predict potential.
• Think about how your definition of potential also fits with the four or five capabilities your business strategy requires.

Keep it simple
You should be able to conduct a talent review with two documents:

1. An individual summary of each person including their roles, past experiences, strengths etc, and
2. A succession plan that takes in current and future roles for the next five years.

Remember to look at what future roles may exist in next five years as this will determine the skill/capability requirements your company will need moving forward. Don’t clog your talent reviews with unnecessary data as this will just confuse the conversation.

Talent ownership by leaders
During a talent review, it is critical that leaders are able to articulate their high potentials’  strengths, weaknesses, behaviours and next development steps. Make sure your leaders are engaged in this process and that they have done their homework in preparation for the talent review.

Quality conversation outcomes
HR leaders should facilitate talent review conversations to ensure consistency across the organisation. This may sound basic but before the talent review the HR leader should meet with every business leader who will be presenting their high potential talent in the meeting to review their assessments and screen for any controversial choices. In the talent review the HR leader needs to focus on the following:

• Keep the conversations fact-based: The only facts discussed are those most relevant to accurately place and invest in an individual. Anything else including irrelevant stories, challenges based on levels etcetera must be carefully shut down, with priority focus given to the facts.
• An independent view from HR: Whenever possible, HR business unit leaders should have an independent view about the talent being discussed and actively participate in the discussion. HR should always be the neutral player in the organisation, interested only in the best overall outcome.

Development outcomes for high potentials
In your talent review session, you will have thoroughly discussed each high potential’s strengths, weaknesses and development needs. You will have calibrated that the group agrees with those findings, as this is critical if the high potential is to have support for their development opportunities/roles. You should have the right people in the room to make smart, aligned decisions about that high potential’s next development steps.

Therefore, a key output of a high-quality talent review is to identify the primary development action for each high potential. When you make this decision in the meeting, you have the benefit of not only having holistic input from your peers, but also their alignment and support of that decision.

HR responsibilities for organisation’s talent reviews
Finally, talent reviews mean nothing without follow-up on the decisions made. I have often seen companies hold fact-based, disciplined talent reviews – and then fail to take the actions they committed to follow through on. Follow-up is easier than it sounds and includes:

• HR records every decision made: If it’s decided that the company should move an employee to Singapore next year, for example, this action should be recorded along with the person responsible for that action and date due.
• HR follows up monthly: Once a month, the HR leader who facilitated the process or owns the outcome should check with the leader for each action item to see if that action has occurred. They should offer to help move the process forward the leader isn’t moving quickly enough.
• Integrate reporting into regular group meetings: Most business units have a regular meeting cycle and talent review follow-up should be integrated into that. The status of talent review actions should be tracked and reported just like any key financial or operational metric.
• Consolidated high potential summary by CHRO: This step is vital so the CHRO can have regular conversations with the CEO and executive team members around the bench-strength of the organisation and what areas need to be invested in. This may also include understanding what capability gaps exist in a company’s succession plan and whether these may need to be addressed by external recruitment.

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While we may not be on track for a recession in 2020, economists have predicted the lowest global growth since 2012. If you find yourself in a position of leadership during lean times, when there may not be a rising tide in your favour, what are your options for staying afloat?

1. First, challenge yourself to ask “how might we maintain growth with the resources we have?”
For example, this might mean making smart investments in R&D or marketing. A renowned example of this is Samsung, whose heavy investment in these areas during the last recession led to their successful reinvention as an innovative brand. This catalysed the release of the first Galaxy smartphone and provided strong competition to the Apple iPhone of the time.

Of course, if such investments are not possible or unlikely to be productive, you will need to make some difficult decisions, which could include retrenchment and other cost-saving activities. If this is the case, consider the following.

2. Understand how to increase your impact or sense of purpose
While this may seem counterintuitive in lean times, research shows that truly purpose-led organisations outperform profit-led organisations in financial terms, by up to 10 times. Communicate and demonstrate a compelling ‘why’ to your people, and unite your team with this purpose to supercharge drivers of performance such as engagement, innovation and employee wellbeing, and maximise your organisational impact.

3. Balance the wellbeing of the business and your people
You are likely to have invested time and resources in ensuring that your financial wellbeing is gauged and closely monitored, that efficiencies are being made where possible, and expenditure is under review. Invest in a similar process for your people by conducting regular, brief health checks of the organisational climate and morale. Pulse surveys are low in cost, but high in value. Aside from providing valuable data on how people are collectively tracking, when you act on this information, it also demonstrates that you care about your most important asset – your people.

Also ensure that your leadership and management teams are equipped with the necessary emotional intelligence to effectively support people in their teams, and understand available referral channels if anything needs to be escalated. Support formal or informal events that enable individuals to foster important social connections, and model positive habits for good physical health within and outside of the office (for example, try limiting your own after-hours emails, which have the potential to interfere with sleep for yourself and the recipients).

4. Think long-term when it comes to your workforce
While redundancies may be an instinctive consideration during an economic downturn, a more strategic approach to leadership involves evaluating the cost savings of layoffs versus the costs of re-training and re-hiring new staff when the economy picks up again. More importantly, redundancies have the potential to severely affect morale and productivity at a time where you want to minimise this as much as possible.

Consider alternative solutions, such as offering shorter work weeks or days. In the case of Honeywell International during the 2008 US recession, it was decided that furloughs (employees taking unpaid leave) were more favourable than retrenchment. Maintaining the workforce was just one of the reasons why Honeywell was able to regain high productivity and effectiveness once the economy improved. 

5. Look after those who are exiting, as well as those who stay
If the unfortunate outcome of retrenchment really is your only option, how can you do this in the fairest way? If it is too costly to outsource, consider leveraging the experience within your own organisation and encourage senior employees to coach or mentor individuals during their exit period, or at the very least, task direct managers of affected individuals with this responsibility.

Understand the impact that redundancies are likely to have on those left behind (including possible feelings of uncertainty or resentment), and ensure that your communication during this time is as authentic, transparent and frequent as possible.

Whether you are operating through a lean economy, a disrupted market or a sudden environmental crisis, there are certain external factors that can create significant hurdles for you as a leader. However, with authenticity in your approach, a strong sense of direction, a long-term view, and optimism that “this too shall pass”, you can still set your people, organisation, yourself and your leadership up for success.

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