HRE Moderator 00:01
Welcome to today’s webinar, aligning the path forward, how talent intelligence brings HR and business strategy together. I’ll pass the stage to Jason Cerrato, Vice President, Talent Center Transformation at Eightfold AI.
Jason Cerrato 00:59
Thank you, Paige. It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you for everyone joining us. It’s always great to partner with HR Executive, and for this hour, we’re excited to partner with 360 Insights, who partnered with Eightfold AI on our annual talent survey this year. We’re excited to share some of the findings from that research, and I’m joined today by Dylan Teggert, a Principal Analyst from 360 Insights. Thank you for joining me, Dylan.
Dylan Teggert 01:31
Pleasure to be here.
Jason Cerrato 01:34
I am looking forward to walking through the results of what we found from this year’s study and having you share some of those insights. And really, the focus is around aligning the path forward, especially in today’s fast-paced world, as organizations are facing lots of dynamic conditions and tons of uncertainty. So this is a little bit of a look back, but also getting some insights for how we’re starting to address this looking forward, but again, really interested in diving into the research and understanding what we discovered. And it’s been a great partnership with 360 Insights. So let’s jump into the conversation. So with that, happy to have you kind of introduce the study and who was involved and kind of set the stage for us. Dylan, take it away.
Dylan Teggert 02:24
Sure. So 360 Insights partnered up with Eightfold to run this talent and HR leadership survey a couple of months ago. I’m kind of curious as to what’s driving, you know, changes we’re seeing in the HR industry, as well as just how HR and employment are tying into the broader environment that we’re kind of moving through right now. You know, at 360 Insights, I look at workforce management very broadly. You know, kind of how to achieve optimal workforce optimism. You know, workforce optimization empowers leadership through better decisions and enhances the quality of work and life for employees. So, this partnership with Eightfold was kind of the perfect way to go about it. So we ran two different surveys. We had one with 500 HR leaders at the VP level and above and companies with 5000 employees or more across six countries. We had Australia, Canada, UK, Singapore, Germany and the US. And then we also had another survey running simultaneously for 1200 employees, full or part-time in the same six countries, and we asked them, you know, a slew of questions related to, you know, their employment, how they how their HR leaderships are run, what their relationship is with executive leadership. And we got some really interesting results. Yeah, one of the main ones you see here, one of the biggest takeaways we had was kind of the overall interaction HR was having with their leadership, especially in relations to business strategy and kind of general collaboration. A lot of the respondents felt like their overall company talent strategy didn’t fully align with its overall business objectives, but kind of starting right here with this 53% you see, it was mainly with development and execution of the company’s overall business strategy, just not really being on The same page with what HR wants to do and with what the executive level wants to do. There was just this disc, you know, the kind of two trains passing or two ships passing in the night of, you know, both having their own individual goals, but not really sitting down and making sure they were on the same page.
Jason Cerrato 05:01
So Dylan, do you think part of that is looking at the responses? There’s an element here of being involved versus when you’re involved. So you see here 35% consulted and 11% informed, which kind of speaks to exactly when in the process you’re involved, are you seeing that weigh in in terms of sentiment or that any differently from how you may have looked at this in the past, especially with the pace of change and the way business is moving?
Dylan Teggert 05:38
I think it is changing. I think because more and more, and this is something I think people maybe feel broadly in in certain Western economies generally, is more and more. Is it share? Everything is shareholder-driven. So and for a certain amount of time, as people become a bit more market focused. Less and less focus has been put on the actual people on the ground doing the work like the foot soldiers of your business, the people actually dealing with customers, making sales, the tiny little blocks that add up to building your grand structure of as a business. And in that, HR has been kind of sidelined a little bit, not all the time, but HR is just as strategic as any other department in an organization. You’re either going to hire the right people from the start of your or you’re not. And you’re either going to value your roster or your of people, of players you have at your company, or you’re not. And if you’re not, you’re going to be having constantly little holes in your ship. There’s going to be you’re going to be constantly taking on water and constantly fighting to correct decisions that were just not made from the outset. And that part of that comes from sitting down with your HR organization being like, This is who we need. This is who we want. This is what we want to do with these people. And if you’re not getting fully involved from the outset, well then you’re already kind of starting off in a rocky ground. So minimal involvement, or no involvement, is obviously, you know, a very small percentage here. There’s always some level of involvement. But are they being taken seriously? Is a different question.
Jason Cerrato 07:26
So let’s dive in a little further here.
Dylan Teggert 07:32
This is kind of the frequency of, you know, frequency of collaborating with the C-suite strategic initiatives. And this is more of the long term. What is it like? What I was saying previously, kind of, what is your business plan? What are your goals for the future? And how are we going to build a roster of people from the outset that are going to be a part of that? You know, three, year five, year, 10-year plan as a business, you can’t really take on people that you expect to replace every year or every 18 months or 24 months, when you have these long-term strategies, you’re going to have a constant brain drain that’s going to just put extra stress on the business that doesn’t necessarily need to be there. Do you want to be focusing on hiring, or do you want to be focusing on hiring the right people that are going to take you on that journey to where you want to be as a business? And that’s where collaborating on these strategic initiatives is very important for HR, and very important from a leadership perspective, getting all on the same page, understanding what the business objectives are, and taking them all as a whole, and figuring out where the organization fits into that.
Jason Cerrato 08:52
Yeah, and I think one of the key words I picked up on there was strategies. So when you’re thinking about three, 510, years out, these things are not necessarily one plan or one strategy. It could be a variety of plans or variety of strategies because of the dynamic nature of the market you’re competing in the dynamic nature of where the business may be headed, or options of where the business can spend its time or spend its resources. And I think that’s the difference of being involved versus being consulted or informed, right? So I think this this regularly versus occasionally versus rarely, is something around being transactional and reactive versus more proactive, predictive and driving, right?
Dylan Teggert 09:40
That’s exactly, yeah. You know, touching base here and there is not a bad thing. But when you’re trying to all make all steer this big shift that is your business in the right direction, you kind of need all hands on deck. I apologize for all the nautical analogies. I don’t know. It’s raining and they go. So I guess that’s about the top of the mind. No problem.
Jason Cerrato 10:02
I’ve been a lot of these sessions recently, and people are using the navigation theme quite frequently, because we are not to put another pun on it in uncharted waters. Here.
Dylan Teggert 10:14
There you go. Yeah. So lastly, and this was the last, you know, in that kind of the trifecta of fully involved from the outset, regularly collaborating with HR and the C suite. And then lastly, this part here, which is, you know, HR leaders believing whether or not their company’s talent strategy aligns with the rest of the business. And this kind of goes back to the fundamentals we were talking about a moment ago. Is that if you want to have the right roster of people to get done, what you want to get done, you want to do that from the get get go. You want to set a plan, figure out who you have and what you need to get it done and then execute. You don’t want to be doing that as you go. You don’t want to be building, building, you know, the car as you drive it, in finding out how to do it. You want to make sure you have the right team of people on board to get it done. And then execute your strategy from there. And it’s not to say, you know, 44% of people is, you know, almost half. Pretty good, pretty good start. But when you kind of take it all together, which you will see, I think, in the next slide, is that only a very small amount of people are actually doing all three of these. Effectively, only about 18% so uh, yeah. And so for the purpose of the study, we consider this 18% to be, you know, best in class. Kind of the ones that are, you know, they’re talking to each other, they’re collaborating regularly, and really, they’re just on the same page for what the goals are, what the strategy is going to be, and one in five doing that is not really, not really the kind of numbers you want to see, mainly because this is not existing in a vacuum. This is existing in the larger economy and the larger employment economy. And does help, and does begin to answer some of the bigger questions we have about engagement, about productivity, loss and other aspects. And when you’re just and we’re not, and when organizations aren’t on the same page, you’re going to continually having these leaks, and it’s going to be energy leaks, about where your company wants to go, how your company is going to do it, and how it kind of trickles down to the people who are actually doing the work for you, and how they feel about it while they do it, and all this kind of getting lost, you know, in broken telephone, you know, a poor a strategy that leaves out HR, or you know your your talent, or people professionals then being translated down to those people who then have to pick the people to do those jobs. If at every step you’re losing some knowledge or some communication, you’re going to have results of people that are unhappy at work or not going to do the work properly, and over time, it’s going to degrade your ability to make effective plans and strategies.
Jason Cerrato 13:33
So looking at this slide, you know, we you walked us through those different questions on the survey, and from the leaders, you know, 53% were fully involved, and 52% say they were regularly collaborating, and 44% said they believe that their strategy was aligned. But you’re saying here, looking at those response respondents, there were only 18% that answered in that bucket across all three measures.
Dylan Teggert 14:00
Exactly, yeah. So though that 18% answered positively to all the previous things we looked at, which we called, you know, being fully aligned, or best in class for the purposes of this study.
ason Cerrato 14:15
And I think the based off of how this survey was constructed and those responses were built. I think the element here is timing right, being able to be engaged and act on the front foot versus being on the back foot. And kind of being reactive, or, you know, consulted or informed, again, talks about kind of the nature of, kind of best in class versus transactional. And as well as not only having a strategy or strategies, but having strategies that are aligned with where the business is driving and where it needs to go, and having the right people involved right so there’s timing of this seems such a crucial element as the world of work is not only getting. Faster, but I think you also called out potentially asynchronous and remote and virtual. So we’re also potentially playing telephone and sharing information in new ways and collaborating in new ways that may be working against this.
Dylan Teggert 15:16
Absolutely, I think that reactive part is really important, because if there’s a strategic misalignment and HR is kind of just sidelined as being an administrative apparatus, you’re going to have a lack of support with new initiatives that could actually help you bring on talent to get those bigger strategies done and to achieve those three, five year, 10-year plans that we talked about. And if there’s a devaluing of a department, then there’s a weakness in your business. You know, either, if it’s if it’s not, if a part of your business is not that important, then maybe you should review, reevaluate its purpose or functionality in your business, or you should harness it and figure out how to make the most of it. And that’s the case kind of with the HR we were seeing in some of these in this study, was that a lot of people felt that they were just not being used as the strategic arm. They have the skill set to bring on the right people that are going to help make good decisions. And all those micro decisions are going to add up to a business that is effective, yeah. And that’s, and that’s what leads us, kind of directly into this here, the most important factors of achieving business, you know, objectives, and the top one is retaining top performers. So how are you going to go about doing that? Well, you need to have an HR department and HR professionals that are going to be enabled to do those things, capture the right people to the capture, just to capture the attention of the right people is going to be one of the hardest things, or to go out and seek them, but also communicating the skills you want you’re desiring out of a potential workforce, or the skill you’re desiring out of your existing workforce. But the interesting thing here, which I think taught you know, it creates this kind of complete cycle of why these problems persist, is that, yeah, the top ones, we know, retaining top performers, understanding skills, capabilities, aggressive workforce and building a diverse workforce are kind of universals. I think people have always kind of wanted those. But when you look at the bottom here, that’s where you kind of see how these problems become cyclical. So the bottom three priorities, you know, in the confines of the survey are advancing employees into leadership positions, improving succession planning and then extending best practices to line management and leadership roles. Can’t really achieve the top three without effectively doing the bottom three, and that’s where kind of that closed circuit of how this keeps happening. So you’re just not really focusing on the right things to get the your main priorities. It’s fine that those are your main priorities, but executing on how to effectively succession plan, people and how to effectively advance employee you know, employees into leadership positions is a absolutely necessary way to build a resilient organization, but you because you can keep bringing in the best people all the time, but if you’re losing the leaders who really know the business from the in inside out, you’re just never going to have that foundation that’s going to be really helping you move forward, to help you weather the hard times, to help you weather the challenges that might come in the future, the you know, the known knowns and the unknown unknowns, as the you know they’ve used in the Political Science World.
Jason Cerrato 18:56
And as I’m looking at how this chart was built, you also have how the answers were in terms of priority, ranked first, ranked, second, ranked, third. I still see here a lot of the responses that were ranked first still have to do with hiring as kind of the first priority. So we’re still in a in a talent acquisition, recruitment led kind of focus.
Dylan Teggert 19:25
It seems we are, and I think, but I do think that’s kind of a problem that’s been created by shooting themselves in the foot. And I think that tie. And as we and as we go through the results of the survey, and kind of get into more of the employee perspective, we’re going to realize that that’s that talent, that drive for talent, drive for recruitment, is partly based on the fact that people just don’t want to stick around. And then, yeah. As we see here. You know, skills was a big part of it. Understanding skills and getting into that strategic mindset about skills and higher and skill-based hiring was consistently something that people wanted to get better at. I think when you have high rates of turnover, higher rates of turnover. You know, where people are kind of looking for jobs, as you’ll see later on. You know, 82% of people have been looking for a job in the last 12 to 18 months. I believe that may be because they don’t like where they work, but that’s also maybe because they were hired for the wrong reason, and they’re not being used effectively at work, and that’s where kind of understanding skills becomes more important. You understand, you know, maybe I was hired to do job a, but also I have the skill to be able to do job B and C as well. But understanding that individuals are not just a single set of skills. They’re, you know, multiple skills overlapping. That’s a key way to kind of pick and choose the talent you have on your team. And if you want to really capitalize on the talent you have as well as gain new talent, you need to have a better understanding of the skills makeup of your talent network, and that means people existing at the company and people you’re trying to bring in as well. Yeah, so looking at the priorities a lot of these companies had, again, you know, retaining recruiting better candidates of the town pool was number one, lowering turnover rates and identifying high performers to promote internally. These are things that make sense, of course, and any business is going to want to do these, I think probably at any point in history, there’s businesses want to do this. They want to, you know, recruit better people, lower lower the attrition rate, and identify high performance. Those, I don’t think were terribly surprising, and shouldn’t be terribly surprising, but the key factor of this, and it’s more to remember when we get into the employee data, is that these are the main things they’re looking to do, these top three is to keep people around, to bring in the right people. But that messaging is being lost on people. It’s part of that broken telephone. As you get into the employee data, that HR is setting itself up to achieve these goals, but it kind of flopping on execution, not all the time, but in a way that’s causing a significant amount of people to look elsewhere.
Jason Cerrato 22:58
Are there any other surprises here? Maybe from what’s at the bottom of the list. I know I’m looking at speeding up the process or analyzing data towards the bottom, and I would expect those to be a little higher, at least in the ranking.
Dylan Teggert 23:14
Absolutely. And you know, for a significant number of people, they are still fairly high relative, you know, relative to the top ones, they’re not as high as they could be, but speeding up the recruitment and hiring process was something that made a lot of sense in terms of obviously achieving the goals of lowering turnover rate and identifying top performers and recruiting better candidates, because You want to get the right people in sooner, to get the work done sooner. But I guess one thing I kind of found interesting with the data here was the analyzing data to inform workforce decisions was ranked pretty low, and to and to speed up the recruiting and hiring process, you need to analyze the data better and to do any of the top three, or any, really anything above anything on this list, need to have better data to inform you about workplace decisions. And while the bottom one gaining a better understanding of skills makeup for the Talent Network with ranked last, again, it kind of ties back into that data piece. You need to have the right data to understand what you’re looking at. Bad data feeds bad decisions, but good data can help direct those bad decisions. And if you just aren’t prioritizing it, and you aren’t looking at the things, what actually may help you you aren’t maybe, you know, comparing your strategies to the market, or having a software that can compare you to other market decisions, sure, and seeing what people are doing right, then you’re going to be just on a bit of a meandering path. You could just not be the most effective path going forward.
Jason Cerrato 24:58
So Dylan, this is a great start. To the conversation, but I want to take a moment to learn a little bit about who’s in the audience. With the help of our producers, we did add a couple polls to the to the content today, and we’re going to initiate a poll right now to try to poll the audience and get some live research during this session. So here is our poll question, where do you think understanding the skills makeup of your workforce can drive the most impact in your organization? And there’s a couple choices here, and we will let the audience take take a moment to grab their mouse and navigate the slide here to respond, but I always like watching the results come in. It’s kind of like a horse race. You see maybe some of the early responses, and then who takes the lead, but Dylan, from this type of question and what you’ve seen and who you’ve been talking to, what type of results do you expect to see here?
Dylan Teggert 26:03
I think it’ll be, you know, definitely in the direction of understanding skill is going to help drive impact in your organization. Kind of, going back to what I said earlier, is that not just for people coming in, but for people you already have, you need to understand less so who’s on your team, but what they can each print to the table kind of been that, you know, the money ball analogy, if you’ve ever seen that movie, you can have people that maybe on the surface, don’t seem like the ideal candidate. They don’t fit, you know, that vision of what you have the ideal person, but maybe they have some skills tied in with other people on your team that are going to bring the kind of change you need in your organization. It kind of affects everything if you’re able to manage your team effectively by understanding that, you know, Jim brings this to the table. But when Jim works with Nancy, they are. They, they, they, you know, coalesce into this person or this entity that can really tackle these certain types of problems. But if you just assume Jim and Nancy are these flat individuals that have a base set of tools that you hired them for, and not other you know, B and C and D, ranking of skills you may not understand that you’re able to kind of enable them to do things that they maybe didn’t think possible within your team.
Jason Cerrato 27:36
Well, we’re going to go ahead and see the results. So thank you for everyone that has submitted a response so far. We’ll just give a few more seconds for anyone else who still needs to submit and stay close. We’ll have another poll coming up shortly, but let’s take a moment to look at the results. So where do you think understanding the skills makeup of your workforce can drive the most impact in your organization? And we have a tie Photo Finish, 27% both for boosting performance, aligning skills with business goals and staying agile, adapting to change with organizational agility. Let’s look at the other results. We also have another tie for second or third, in this case, closing the gaps and planning smarter. Any reaction to that? Dylan, I don’t think I’ve seen a two way tie for first and a two way tie for third before. This is pretty cool.
Dylan Teggert 28:29
That’s pretty wild, especially 18.9% very, very precise. But I think it makes a ton of sense. You know, skill is going to help close, close gaps and address skills gaps, because kind of, like, like I said, you’re mixing the ingredients that you have on your, in your in your roster, and sometimes those come together to make interesting solutions to challenging problems. And, oh, I sorry. I think we jumped away there for a second. There we go, and oh, it looks like the results are changing, though, so and then staying agile again, it kind of goes back to setting that foundation from the get go, having a foundation based out of skills that can address multitude of problems. People are not just good at one thing, they’re good at other things, and they can adapt to different changes and based on those skill sets. So kind of going back to the gym and Nancy, you know, situation that I mentioned, you know, while they’re tight, they’re while they’re Priority A skills, or maybe what you hired them for B, you know, their B, C and D skills, when mixed together in the right time, can help you stay agile. You know, you people are hired to be adaptable, and understanding skills allows you to be adaptable. And it’s not always just for the first thing you can think of when you think of that person. It’s a it’s a more of a mixed salad of that.
Jason Cerrato 30:05
I love it. So on to the next section. 71% agree they struggle with staffing challenges internally and externally. So this is another data point coming from the HR leaders. Dylan?
Dylan Teggert 30:20
Yeah, this was, again, kind of goes back to their that broken cycle that we saw. They’re struggling with challenges internally, internally, mainly because they haven’t hired the they haven’t necessarily hired, I don’t want to say they haven’t hired the right person from the start, but they maybe haven’t necessarily hired the right person from the start. And when you want to have internal growth, you want to have people that want a future, and a future that includes stability and promise and ambition within your company, even if it’s in a small way. They want to feel like they have a place to work today, tomorrow and in the future in their job, because growth is something everyone enjoys to achieve in these roles. So when you’re looking, when you are struggling with challenges internally, it may be involved stepping back and kind of looking and looking at who’s on your roster, what skills they have, kind of going back, kind of going back to that skill of intelligence, aspect of it, to it, or talent intelligent aspects of it, understanding the multitude of factors that make up the talented people on your team and externally, understanding what your business needs. Because, if you’re part of the reason people are struggling with staffing challenges is because of, yes, the greater economic setting people are people demands are changing as to what they want out of work, but also maybe you’re not asking the right questions in your hiring practices, maybe you’re putting out the wrong messages in your external hiring search. And if you’re able to cast perhaps a broader net by understanding that there’s a variety of skills that could help solve this problem or fill this role, then maybe you’re going to open yourself up to different possibilities in the hiring process. But how did that comes down to kind of knowing what skills you need now and in the future?
Jason Cerrato 32:16
How did that play out in the data? Let’s take a look. I uh, this one was shocking for me a little bit.
Dylan Teggert 32:28
Yeah, this one was, you know, pretty surprising for us as well. It just goes to show you kind of that there’s this, you know. It goes to show you the continued disconnect here between what HR leaders feel that they’re doing and then how it’s being received by employees. Because obviously, as we’ve seen, well, as we’ve seen earlier, there’s a disconnect between the first line of communication. There’s a friction there between executives and HR. So there’s a friction there, you know, that’s mashing up the message that the business wants to HR to find the right people. So HR feels like, Okay, we’re on a good track here. We got, we got the tools we need. But they they’re already starting off on the wrong foot, because there’s been a disconnect between the leadership and then when they go to communicate that to people on the outside, in the outside world, it’s confusing. The messages are lost. Maybe you’re asking for skills that are overvalued, or you’re undervaluing skills that you need, and you’re not compensating people properly, and that leads to the 82% of people serve or employee service saying they’re actively looking for new job, because maybe that happened to them, and maybe this is now the result. But there are the data on the reason people are looking for new roles is pretty extensive. We had a lot of responses from people. Then we can get into that, if you like.
Jason Cerrato 33:59
So I would have to assume, from a hierarchy perspective, obviously compensation weighs in on this. But once compensation is accounted for, for the number to be 82% you’re acting on other things as well. So I have to assume dealing with a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity around maybe how they fit into the organization today, but also, if I don’t understand how I fit into the organization today, and I also don’t necessarily know where we’re headed in the future, it’s really hard for me to see myself here in the future. If I’m having trouble seeing myself here today, is that when you’ve been coming out of that.
Dylan Teggert 34:38
Definitely, and I think that ties into the kind of the another big piece of data that we saw was that employee satisfaction was at 61% and which means that HR and corporate initiatives have to catch up to employee needs, mainly because it just leads to lower performance, and then that leads into the 82% of employees looking for a new job, people are not performing as well because. Are less engaged. You know, happier. You know, from a couple studies from Oxford and journal of labor economics, happier workers are about 10 to 13% more productive. And this will tie back into this. But if you assume, if you assume that that means, if you’re in a company of 1000 people, if everyone’s not working at let’s say roughly 100% every day, or whatever 100% meets your business. It’s almost the equivalent of about 50 people not showing up to work every single day every year for your business. And how that kind of translates into this 82% of employee surveys when you apply that across the entire business, you have people showing up to work every day that are just not as happy as they could be. There’s maybe a negative managerial influence. You know, managers account for a big part of employee team engagement and kind of overall employee happiness. And then externally and internally, there’s high levels of daily stress, you know, people dealing with loneliness, negative emotions about work and the economy, and then when you look at the responses we got from people, yeah, pay and benefits and culture are the main reasons to to look for another job, but also to land, you Know, to select a job as your top choice. And so there’s clearly some people are saying what they want. They want better pay, want better benefits, and they want a kind of restoration of that social contract. I guess you could say, you know, Fair Work, for fair wages, for fair results for everyone. But it seemed that there’s, I don’t want to say there, I would, I would say almost a sense of denial from leadership as to what’s actually causing this. People say people don’t want to work, or that there’s other, you know, changes in people that are making them not be productive, but it’s actually this is a two way street. You have to give people what they want, but also you have to meet people where they are. They have to meet in the middle somewhere. And right now, I think people are just not feeling like they’re being valued at work, because maybe they weren’t hired for the right reason, and they don’t like the company culture or and they don’t like the messages they’re receiving from the higher powers at work. And so now you have four out of five people looking for a different job.
Jason Cerrato 37:25
And one of the ways that you started digging into this in the research was, how are people receiving that information? How are they learning about the organization? How are they being communicated to about those potential opportunities or futures? And I think that was another aha moment for me, which is, I think the next section here, can you walk us through this?
Dylan Teggert 37:48
So this talent matrix here kind of looks at the things people have higher importance in, have high, you know, importance versus satisfaction in the simplest sense it, you know, it’s so in the top right, you’re going to see things of high importance, high satisfaction, things that are important to workers make them feel good. Bottom left, it’s the opposite, not so important. Doesn’t make you feel that great. And it is a little confusing some of this data. So main reasons from the survey that people weren’t happy at work, just to keep it top of mind, poor compensation and benefits, too many demands for the you know, from the employers, for too little pay, poor management and toxic work environments, excessive workload for work-life balance, lack of career growth and opportunity, and poor communication and support from leadership that kind of leads to overall job insecurity and stability issues. So the things that rank low in this matrix, oddly enough, despite all that our mentor programs and career pathing. So while this may seem a little contradictory to the above, because clearly, people want to have a better stability in their job, and maybe a future in their job, and those things would play into it. It’s clear that the basics are just not being done. So maybe there’s a lack of trust that mentorship programs, career pathing are actually going to make any difference when the basics, such as culture and pay are not being done properly, and maybe people just have a bad taste in their mouth. So what I found interesting was that effective performance reviews was one of the top things in this so people still want to have that. They’re open to that dialog. They want to have that dialog about what they’re doing right, where they could go and where they can build. But the issue is that maybe the other thing that you’re seeing more on the left side here are just weighing them down a little bit. So then you that’s and that’s why things such as mentor programs and career pathing are not being done effectively. Not being done in a way that they believe. So it’s kind of holding back that lack of that lack of trust between the two groups, is kind of holding back the performance reviews aspect that shows that people are actually open to positive change in their career. They’re open to hearing about how they’re doing, hearing about where they fit in, and having an open dialog with their with their leadership and management, what like, and that ties into something I found interesting in the data, was that younger demographics, it was more important for them to have a job they cared about and had meeting than money. And that’s where it ties back into the performance reviews, and clearly, you know, defining what work means to them in their life, but ultimately, pay is an important factor, but it but it is more than that.
Jason Cerrato 40:52
Then, the things that are on the top left here are opportunities for promotion, transparency around career development, and opportunities to pivot into new areas. These are things that are obviously changing as organizations change, as careers change, as the way people work changes. You know, job paths, career ladders, all of these are changing in real time, but also this requires culture change too, especially with the need for transparency and understanding. Do I know what opportunities are available to me? Do I feel like I’m being considered? Am I aware of how I map to what they are, and how much do I know you know where to find them or where to go to see these different opportunities? So I think this also speaks to maybe some of the ways or where some of the people that you surveyed were also investing their time. A lot of them were investing their time in hiring new people, and potentially neglecting some of these areas around moving people or finding challenges with moving people because of how things had been done or internal processes, did that also come through in the data, part of that misalignment, part of that hole, and hole in the bucket.
Dylan Teggert 42:08
Absolutely. And I think you kind of hit it right there with just, there’s a misalignment that starts at the top, spreads out throughout the entire organization. So if you’re just hiring people. If you just have this kind of culture of replacement, people aren’t going to believe that you have there’s any opportunities for promotions. They’re just going to keep thinking that well, they’re just going to hire someone else. I’m not going to I’m not competitive within my own company, to even have a viable chance for promotion and messaging like that, is where the strategic aspect of HR comes in. Is that if you do value your people, and you do want to interpret modally, and you do want to have top talent, then you don’t want to let that top talent go. They already work for you. And yeah, while they can go and look on their own time, you they are.
They’re already in the building. Let’s say, you know, maybe not these days, but they’re already, they’re already under the same roof. Yeah, yeah, you could just pick them they have. There is some loyalty that’s there because, again, stability is a big part of it, and feeling valued somewhere is always important to people.
Jason Cerrato 43:18
I’ve heard that phrase three times in the last week, business leaders saying the talent we need is already within our four walls, whether they be real or virtual. But how do we better identify them? How do we better engage them? How do we better inform them of where they can go, and how do we understand them in new ways so we understand what they’re capable of as the world of work changes right in front of us, right? It’s this timing, this alignment, all of this understanding, using some of that data in new ways, which is causing this change, this uncertainty, and maybe it’s also why that navigation metaphor is being used so frequently as well.
Dylan Teggert 44:01
Definitely. And I think it’s also business leaders need to be honest with themselves, if they and they need to be self critical about how they look to employees. Because I think right now, there’s a great distrust between, you know, line worker, let’s say, and the bosses, people don’t trust them, they don’t think they’re best interested in mind, and that needs to be restored. And that in this perfect segue right here, because the rapid pace of change and involving employee needs is exactly that I think employers can’t be telling employees what they what they should want. The employees curate that part of the discussion, and part of that is keeping your ear to the ground about the pace of change and what people want. And that comes. Down to just listening to them. It’s as simple as that, and being open and minded enough as a business leader to be essentially open to admit you’re wrong and come and again, that comes back to good data in good data out, if you’re honest with the information you’re taking in and get and getting it from reliable sources that are going to tell you the truth, then you’re going to be making decisions about your business and about your people that resonate with them and and that kind of comes into AI tools, because AI is not without its biases, of course, but it is rational in a way that we are maybe not as human beings and that, and that’s going to be vital for people to kind of see what they look like to people, and then, you know, you have the glass doors, you have the other review sites about how people view your company, what their experience was like. But what if you didn’t have to go, what if you didn’t have to wait till the process was already done to have that information? If you could, you know, ask the people, you know, talk to the people that are on board right now and in a way that makes them feel comfortable, you know, explaining how they feel, explaining where they feel like the company’s going. And part of that ties into the use of AI, because AI can take that anecdotal information, but also compare it to productivity, metrics, outcomes, other aspects you know, again, going time back into the skills and talent databases that you may have, but you need to build those databases to begin with, and that requires a vast amount of information.
Jason Cerrato 47:01
I also think that AI as a tool. I also think AI as a tool helps with expediting the process of doing some of this right, the ability to do this continuously and learn dynamically and break out of some of the cyclical, annual cycles and calendars we’ve had in the HR function, so keeping up with the pace of change and trying to create that alignment and get on the front foot and be more proactive. AI as a tool for a variety of use cases, as seen here, is one of the ways to do that with on time, kind of real demand, on time, on demand, real time data, right?
Dylan Teggert 47:41
Absolutely, and it’s going to give you it hopefully, in a way that’s as bloodless as possible, in a way that’s not as emotionally driven, in a way that’s more factually driven. And I think that’s why people see have so much optimism about it, and that’s why you see the higher numbers here of 96% of companies currently use or plan to use AI tools and technology. People see the value in good data. People see the value in how it can affect the rest of their business. So in a recruitment and hiring, well, I think you always want a human touch in it. I think it is going to maybe help you have that Moneyball effect where you kind of see the thing that maybe the human we know feel and your perception of someone is maybe going to obscure, so maybe just the way you don’t you know, maybe the way someone talks annoys you, but listen, they have a set of skills that is going to be game changing to your company and and that’s something that AI can kind of Pick out because they have a different set of things that they’re looking at in people. They have a different set of values. And while, yes, we set the values for AI and how it interacts with people, it’s able to bring something to the table that the human mind maybe would overlook or just wouldn’t see at all, and it can analyze so much data so much faster. So it can look at all these candidates a lot faster. It could look at bringing on new employees faster, because it just has the process completely streamlined down to a process because it’s run it 1000 times in the last 10 minutes. You know, yeah, and it’s processing speed.
Jason Cerrato 49:23
So thank you for walking us through that. Dylan, I think there’s some incredible insights here. And if even just looking at the plans to adopt or currently considering data here, if we looked at this chart a year or so ago, I think those percentages would look very different, as promised for the people in the audience, we do have another poll, so let’s see that poll here and see if we can get some responses here of how the people in the audience may be integrating AI into their HR operations today. So we just shared what our respondents said in some of the. Cases that they’re already using or considering. Let’s see if we can get some feedback from the audience here. So hopefully people can see this poll question. This poll question is now live. How integrated is AI in your HR operations today? And let’s see if we get some responses here. So we have a couple coming in. The options are fully embedded, selective use, basic adoption. Exploring possibilities are not yet explored. And I was even referring yesterday, I was having a conversation to those surveys and pieces of research where they ask HR leaders, is your organization using AI today? And they’ll say no, and then they ask the same question of the employees, and the employees say Yes, right? So, this misalignment, this disconnect, this, are you aware of how work is getting done? So I’m interested to see what our respondents say here. What are your thoughts Dylan?
Dylan Teggert 50:53
I think people are going to be selective about how they use it. I think the basic adoption of AI is kind of ground level. Now. People are interested in it. They see the potential, and I think they understand that if they don’t use it, they’re going to start falling behind. And I agree with you that it does bring a level of insights that we just have didn’t have before. It just let you know it has the mind. It is a force multiplier for yourself. It can bring in a lot more data. Help you process it, help it kind of you digest it in a way that you’d otherwise would have had to spend a whole day on previously. And that’s kind of where you see the main positives in the survey data is that people are excited about the efficiency, about the automation, about the improvement of just general functionality, especially when it comes to, again, housing data and being user friendly in the way it gives it to you and output, where previously, people were just afraid about job replacement, skeptical about the future, now that people have interacted with AI more, more of the costs are more of the concerns are about high cost, security limitations with complex tasks, because people are entrusting people with highly entrusting AI with highly complex tasks, and the mix and the results are still mixed, as we were through the, you know, the growing pains of it and adaptability, people are always going to be a little scared of new technology, but I think the more we integrate it, the more we see the positives in tiny ways, even if it’s just like in the kind of the ability to digest five news articles and tell you all about it instead of you reading all five things like that are kind of the small steps towards a bigger use of it.
Jason Cerrato 52:45
Let’s see our poll results here. So again, we have a tie for second, but first is exploring tie for second, basic adoption and selective use, less than 5% fully embedded, not surprising, but a pretty interesting number to think about for a second. There 18% not yet explored. And I bet that is looking at it from the organization, but maybe if we looked at it from how work gets done, that data may look different, but very much along the lines of the themes that we were seeing here. And I always love doing these polls. It gives us some real time data, and we look back and look at that information compared to some of the research that we were sharing. So Dylan, thank you for walking us through that. What I want to do now is I just want to walk through a little bit about our involvement with this research, with 360 insights and how talent intelligence comes into play, and really just share that. How talent intelligence comes into play is it helps organizations do a lot of the underlying things that I think they’re trying to achieve, but also are weighing in at why this has been difficult in the past. Right? What talent intelligence affords is the ability to make better sense of your organizational data. It allows for the incorporation of market data and external data in context relevant to your industry, to benchmark peers to what’s happening from a broader data set, as well as what’s happening with your users, employees, talent, talent network to create a variety of outcomes. So it feeds the ability for an AI engine like the one we have at eight fold, to drive outcomes that support individual use cases as well as organizational use cases. And whether you’re an applicant, a candidate, an employee, a manager. You know, it can help with a variety of things around matching to jobs, seeing career paths, looking how your skills may align to new roles or may be adjacent with some learning to new career paths, or help the organization with. Like planning, how you do campaigns, how you do workforce planning, how you do things like succession, maybe how you handle acquisitions, or a reorg, or a redeployment of people from one area to another. And what happens is this helps with the speed of doing this work, the analyzing of data, in supporting this work, and then creating this kind of win, win for all the various stakeholders throughout this process, which I think was maybe an underlying thread through some of these results. But the other thing is, by doing this in a system of intelligence, this also begins to learn as it goes, and establishes context of where are these decisions and insights and recommendations occurring, and how is this organization making decisions, and how is that different from other organizations? Or how does that compare to the market? And the more it learns, the more it gathers, the more specific it begins to understand that context of that organization. And can even start to make the distinction between different disciplines, different functions, different departments, different locations, and that’s how it builds intelligence over time. So I think this is one of the ways where the time element of the discussion we’ve talked about today, the visibility element of strategic planning with workforce needs, as well as the transparency, feed into maybe some of the path ahead for addressing the misalignment and creating better alignment. I also think it potentially allows for the ability to have strategies, and not just a strategy, because you may need multiple plans in an uncertain future that’s happening dynamically and changing right before our very eyes. So one of the things I wanted to show was this is what that looks like, kind of from an employee experience perspective, where there’s this user experience that’s supported underlying with this data layer powered by talent intelligence, and I think that’s where some of the research and some of the findings and some of the work we’re trying to achieve with HR leaders start to align with the path forward. Right? You can have this user layer that leverages things like skills, but creates some personalized guidance in the organization around potential future roles, around ways to develop and ways to learn, training, projects, mentors, things you can find along the way. But also, this isn’t static and stagnant. This is dynamic. It learns as it goes, as the organization changes, or as roles evolve, or as someone adds skills, this continues to move and shape and change in real time. So this creates some transparency. It creates some understanding, but this also creates visibility for the leaders that are trying to put together plans to align with the business and be more proactive and more predictive and not have to always be on the back foot. And as part of this, wanted to share just one little story of a customer case study that we’ve done here at eight fold with an organization called Amdocs, where they started applying talent intelligence for a variety of use cases, originally with talent acquisition, later with talent management, and then started using some of that into some of their strategic planning. And as they’ve created the visibility to do this and the speed and continuous nature that AI enables, they’re finding better alignment between the wants and needs and career paths and goals of their employees and the agility to keep up with the pace of change that’s being asked and desired by their business leaders. And they’ve created a program where that they’ve actually coined the name harmony, and I love that name, because it creates the ability where there’s a greater likelihood for these two things to potentially have alignment in the future, as you’re moving towards the future and trying to navigate these waters in some of their immediate returns, you know, almost half of their positions are now filled internally, right? So this ability to use this technology and use the data to become more proactive and more predictive and to increase that speed, helps with some of the underlying on underlining timing initiatives, but also help with potentially creating that connection and between the needs and wants of The talent in the organization, connecting the talent management efforts with the talent acquisition efforts. So maybe not every response is to create a requisition. Maybe you know your internal talent within in a more dynamic, robust way, and you start to incorporate them in your in your searches, but then also the ability to plan. For a variety of dynamic futures. So wanted to share that as a nice kind of bow on the conversation, because I think, you know, the findings from the research are very telling. It’s been great to partner with 360 on this. Still, we’re also seeing how tools like talent intelligence are starting to help some some organizations that are on this journey in dealing with the rapid pace of change, trying to create better alignment, and trying to connect some of the wants and needs of their workforce with the demands and challenges of their business. So I share that as a quick little case study or vignette, and there’s more information on that on the Eightfold AI website if you’d like to learn more. But with that, I think we’ve landed right on time, and I love to hand the session back over to Paige and the HR Executive team. Thank you, Dylan, for joining me today, and for those that attended, hope you enjoyed the session.
HRE Moderator 1:00:54
Thanks for having me. Thanks for attending today’s webinar. You may disconnect and have a great rest of your day.
