SHRM  0:00

Hello, thank you for joining us for this presentation, “The employee-centric talent strategy: Prioritizing employee growth in the new world of work”. This program is part of the SHRM webcast series. You can learn about upcoming and on demand events from our E newsletters, and the webcasts homepage at SHRM.org/webcast. Shrimp thanks Eightfold AI for sponsoring this program and our series of free webcasts for the HR community. Now about today’s program, the world of work continues to change rapidly, and organizations are facing new challenges in developing future proof workforce strategies. Our presenters today with Eightfold AI and SAP SuccessFactors will discuss the importance of upskilling and rescaling employees in the context of recent talent trends and changing expectations. To lead our program, we’re pleased to welcome Carly Ackerman with Eightfold AI and Greg selkie with SAP SuccessFactors. Here’s background on our speakers. Carly Ackerman is a director of customer experience for VIP in partnership accounts at Eightfold AI. Working closely with pioneering leaders. She has contributed to broad organizational and workforce transformations designed to meet the evolving demands of a disruptive global economy. Miss Ackerman is a frequent speaker and thought leader on talent trends, workforce transformation upskilling and the employee experience. Greg selkie, is vice president and h x in Value Advisor at SAP SuccessFactors. He supports the SAP SuccessFactors North American HR Cloud team working directly with senior leadership at both current and prospective customers with the desire to bring competitive advantage solutions to life through innovative strategic thinking. Mr. Selkie is a trusted adviser who helps organizations implement sustainable long term HR cloud platforms with high impact. He’s a human resource professional with over 25 years of talent management and HR leadership experience. Mr. Selkie has helped drive global HR transformation and, in an environment, professional services organizations and in the life sciences industry with Roche, Aon Hewitt and Baker McKenzie. I’m now pleased to turn over the webcast microphone to Carly Ackerman and Greg selkie.

Greg Selke 2  2:23

Perfect, thank you, Connor, I appreciate the introduction. very flattering introduction. So, thank you for that. I just want to thank first of all, all of you for joining us. We know you’re very busy. So, thank you for making time in your schedules to join us. I hope you’ll find the next 55 minutes or so insightful and learn some things that you can take with you in the future. I’d also very much like to thank SHRM. We’ve been a longtime partner with SHRM and love it. So, thank you for letting us join you. And very much a big thank you to Eightfold for letting us partner with them today. I’m thrilled to be here. And again, I’ll turn it over to Carly to get us rolling. And we’ll go from there. So glad to be here. Thank you all.

Carly Ackerman  3:11

Yes. Likewise, very excited to be here today with all of you. And thank you so much for joining us. During today’s session, we’re going to cover the HR megatrends for 2023. And we’re going to deep dive into employee experience emerging technologies, and how these relate to both dei and B strategy as well as leadership development. We’ll also make sure we leave you with a few actionable next steps. It’s a pet peeve of mine when a webinar ends without any sort of action items. So, want to make sure you have some clear next steps. And we’ll dive right into a poll to get everybody warmed up. All right. So, starting here, we want to know how important is the employee experience to your organization might seem like a simple question, but we have a couple of options here. And we just want to gauge the audience before we jump into the rest of the content for today. And we’re while we’re waiting for folks to answer the first poll, Greg, I’d really love to hear your biggest aha from the trends research that we’re about to dive into.

Greg Selke  4:15

Yeah, so a couple of things. We’ve been doing the meta trends research, which I’ll explain a little bit more about the methodology here in a couple of minutes. We’ve been doing this for several years now. And every year things change, especially as you all know, the last three to four years with the pandemic and everything that’s been going on. There was lots of movement in what our recipient are that participants in the research prioritized and talked about. My biggest aha is this year. There’s some consistency. You know, the past couple of years. It’s the same top eight trends Basically, some moved up some move down, which we’ll talk about. But I think, for me the biggest aha specifically is we talked a couple of years ago about the new normal, and oh my gosh, what’s the new normal going to be? And how’s this going to play out over the next few years? I think we’re getting closer to the new normal. Or maybe we’re there. I don’t know, that’s up to each of us in our companies to decide. But I think consistency and sort of a leveling out of where we are, is sort of my big aha, which is not really exciting. But I guess it’s sort of reassuring that maybe things are settling down a little bit.

Carly Ackerman  5:39

Or maybe the new normal is, is constantly changing and dynamic. So interesting to see how it’s how it’s evolving. Yeah. All right let’s take a look at some of the results that we’ve got. All right, any reactions described,

Unknown Speaker  5:57

we check it out very

Greg Selke  6:04

well, I’m thrilled that a 60s, actually almost what 80%, say it’s a priority, thrilled that the C suite, one out of five considers that a C suite priority, that’s encouraging, because any anything that we’re going to talk about without it, as you all know, without it being aligned to the business strategy, and having impact on the business, and with buying and sponsorship from the top, however you define the top that’s critical to make anything successful and work. So, I think these are very encouraging. Yeah, it’s

Carly Ackerman  6:38

exciting to see that it’s not just an important priority for HR, where I think something like this is classically and historically lived.

Greg Selke  6:47

I’m also encouraged that everyone, at least those who responded, We didn’t put a category in here that I don’t understand what the employee experience is. So, I’m thrilled that enough people were able to actually say, I know what this says, or at least enough about it, to vote. So that’s encouraging as well. Yeah.

Carly Ackerman  7:05

All right, I think I’m going to hand it to you to start diving into some of the mega trends.

Greg Selke  7:09

Okay. So, every year, as I mentioned, SuccessFactors, does very extensive research on what’s happening in the HR field. And we always prioritize and sort of socialize, if you will, our top eight. So, there are eight of them, we’re going to only cover for today, the four are listed here. But there are four others, I just want to give you a couple of headlines around. But the bottom line for all eight of these is, it’s all about the employee experience, which is why we did the poll question. This has gone from you know, people call it different things they always have, I’ve been in HR 20 years. And it’s always been important that people call it different things. Now, probably maybe more than ever, it is important, it is the foundation of how HR and businesses are organizing, what they do with their all of their people, efforts and strategies. It’s not just a trend or a buzzword anymore. And as we go through and explain what’s behind some of these trends and our findings, I think you’ll see that it’s part of all of these, it’s no longer a standalone thing that rests with, you know, whoever does your engagement survey or that kind of thing. It’s embedded in everything we do across the HR landscape. Employee brand is more important than ever. So, it’s very important that organizations get it right, in order to attract talent and keep talent. I’m sure most of you have probably heard the term moments that matter. Also big, big part of the employee experience, which is very important. And again, it will be embedded through our topics here. People, you know, there’s, there’s a million reasons I’ve heard, I’m sure you’ve heard the expressions of white people, leave organizations, you know, they join organizations, but they leave their boss or a million other cliches like that. Everyone has individual things that are important to them. It’s how you treat them when you know when they have to take care of an older parent or when they have kids issues or their own issues, or whatever it is that matters to people how an organization helps them through that matters big time. And we saw that as much as we possibly could to much actually, the past three or four years out of the pandemic and where we are now. Maybe more than ever, people are looking for meaning and purpose out of their work experience. It’s very important that organizations figure out how to do that which includes upskilling, rescaling helping people grow, creating the right environment to do so. All that good stuff. which we’ll talk about quiet quitting is in the news still receiving attention in our research. And we’ll come back and talk about that a little bit. But I’ll leave it for there for now, the four trends we’re not going to cover, and I’ll cover this very quickly, just a headline or so, when we do our research. Our research department does both focus groups, with organizations and surveys, and they typically do it with business leaders, HR department, people, and employees when they’re given the access, so they can compare and contrast some of these themes. This year, we did a little different. Instead of doing our own research, we did some of our own research, but not as extensive. We went out and looked at about 300 Other sources, what every firm on Earth is saying is important in a meta trend. And again, our research team has a bunch of PhD data scientists, they analyzed all that to come up with these topics. So, this is not just our data, it’s an aggregation of everything that you read every day. But with an Eightfold and SuccessFactors perspective on each of these, the former not going to cover one is around competing for skilled talent. The whole recruiting thing, as we all know, is very, very important and very, very difficult. Right now, there’s a shift towards skill-based hiring, it still is pretty much an employee market, in terms of supply and demand. The other one, the second one we’re not going to cover is making flexible work arrangements work effectively. You know, we’ve all been to probably by now 2030 webinars on the hybrid work model, we’re not going to cover it now. But it’s still very important to figure out how to make that work for groups like deskless workers, which we’ll talk more about in a few minutes. Another one we’re not going to talk about, but the headlines are just curating the employee experience helping your workforce, not burnout, and not leave and not get disengaged. And all the things I just mentioned around providing meaning and purpose and, you know, to staying close to what they want with pulse surveys and engagement surveys. The last one, the fourth, fourth one here, actually the eighth one, that the fourth we’re not going to cover is the realizing holistic well-being. People are just burned out; many people are just tired or burned out the past few years has been very taxing on people. Couple of things, I do want to share it again, you probably have read this and feel it. HR people are right in the center of this. There’s lots of research out there that HR folks are more tired and more burned out than any other type of employee in an organization, because we’ve had a rough couple of years. So, if you’re feeling that way, hopefully you’re getting help from your organization to move forward. The other thing in this space, financial well-being is going to be taken more seriously this year, I just read an article in the paper 50% of the paper online, actually 50% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. I’ll leave it at that. So financial well-being financial situations are certainly part of well-being. Those are the four we’re not going to talk about very quickly. We’ll get into the four we are going to go into more detail on the first being the mobilizing the workforce for the future. This is all about career planning, long term skill planning, mobility of your workforce, internally experiential learning and coaching. The second one, which will be fascinating, can’t wait to hear what Carly says about some of the stuff around technology, a lot about AI. And just broadening the scope beyond recruiting and onboarding, which is been the recent past. Diversity, dei B is still a top priority. But it’s shifted from more of a siloed approach to a lifecycle approach, which we’ll explain more on. There has been a new finding this year in our research, there are starting to be some resistance and backlash. backlash to di MB strategies. We’ll talk more about that. And generational differences as well as deskless workers. I just wrote a paper with a colleague of mine at SuccessFactors couple of months ago, happy to send it to anyone who’s interested in on ageism, was actually called Baby Boomers The Forgotten demographic. And we did some research and there were some very interesting insights. One of two of them. One was that of the research that we were able to collect only 8% of organizations actually include ageism in their diversity strategy, which we thought was sort of shocking, actually. And 20, only 21% offer flex benefits to that group, which again, I thought was sort of shocking. We did a focus group last week with eight of our biggest and best customers on why and got some great explanations for why which I’ll come back to it in a few minutes. And then the last thing is people leaders, certainly, you know, the past three or four years has changed things for people, leaders, they’re right in the middle of everything, you sort of have to feel sorry for them sometimes, because everything hits them employees go up to complain to them and talk to them, they have their own job and their own customers, top leadership is coming down on them to do this and do that. And it’s a tough role and trying to keep them ready to continue to advance and grow and develop their backups, you know, other people to take their place. It’s tough. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that in a couple of minutes as well. Okay, currently anything to add.

Carly Ackerman  16:25

Now equally as excited to get into the details of each of these.

Greg Selke  16:32

All right, you’ll see at the top, so there’s our first immobilizing, the workforce in the future, you’ll see at the top two equals two. And this is not a math course, that’s basically explaining that last year, we did our research out of the eight priorities, this was the number two priority from the organizations we were involved. It still is number two, recruiting is still number one, by the way. But a few thoughts on this. When we talk about mobilizing the workforce for the future, organizations are developing, in addition to the, you know, the broad, strategic, foundational, typical career things is much more individualized now, companies are shifting that way so that their employees have more career options, more visibility to career options, more ideas and suggestions. more tailored to the moments that matter and the things that are important to them, and a lot more fluidity and how work is assigned, whether its project based, or assignment based, joining dynamic teams, which we’ll talk about as well, it’s just not your standard, you know, you do the job postings up on the website, and you wait to see if you get it. And then from a succession perspective, you know, everyone’s always three years out ready for their next job, you still have to have all of that. But there’s much more that’s necessary now, to keep the workforce plugged in and doing what organizations need them to do. And it’s very much a shift away from short term filling roles and with certain skills and trying to develop your workforce for longer term strategic business needs. Everything has changed the past couple of years, the global economics have created uncertainty for organizations. For most companies, it’s easier almost now to manage their and move their internal workforce than to go external and find people they either don’t have most organizations don’t have unlimited budgets or hiring freezes going on. So, there’s not as much freedom to just go to the market and hire people, which is forcing more focus on what we do with the people we have. There’s also a little bit of peace of mind of knowing, you know, people, you know, your workforce, where you should better than your external workforce. And sometimes it’s better to go safer with the people that you know, than the people that you don’t know. So, a lot of focus on an internal mobility. A new term that I had not heard until recently was quiet hiring, which is filling skill gaps without adding new full-time employees. It’s the internal filling from within kind of thing. But I think that’s going to continue to pick up steam. One final comment on this and I’ll turn it to Carly. I think from a learning perspective and upskilling perspective. You know, we all adjusted the past couple of years with lots of remote hybrid learning opportunities. And at first, I’m sure many of us thought this is just never going to work. But for many of us, we’re zoomed out, we’re teamed out whatever you want to do, but it worked people did. To find a way to learn virtually harder for some demographic groups, obviously, you know, deskless workers, not everyone sits in an office, if you’re on a utility pole or on an oil rig, it’s a little harder to learn and do all of this. But they found ways to make things happened, which was fantastic. And I think as we move forward, experiential learning and coaching, are going to be back and very important, along with nothing, we’re going to drop everything we’ve been doing that we’re going to; we’ve learned some things the past couple years as we move forward. So, Carlene, turn it to you.

Carly Ackerman  20:42

Excellent. Well, I wanted to double click a little bit on this idea of personalization. So today, organizations are expecting employees to answer a whole host of questions about their careers almost completely on their own questions like where am I today? On my career journey? That might seem like an easy question, but I think we can all empathize that that is sometimes not as transparent as we’d like it to be. Where do I want to go? Where can I go, I think is a more interesting question that we’re starting to be able to tackle, and how do I get there? How do I get where I where I’d like to go or where I think I might be able to go? So, we know there’s a better way to answer these questions. And there are a variety of tools that can help employees start to chart their own career paths that are in a way that’s really tailored to their aspirations. So, we’re now able to leverage AI powered solutions to support workers as they address all of these classic career questions, we can help an employee define where they are today. And that’s not just in terms of what they’re able to cram onto a resume. But we’re also able to help them enrich that resume by looking at their experiences and helping them understand what they’ve done, the skills that they’ve been able to collect, and the plans that they’ve made to date. So, where what are those aspirations that they have? And what are how are some of the experiences that they’ve collected over the years helping them facilitate that path forward, we can also provide individuals with options, maybe somebody is really myopically focused on the straight and narrow, hierarchical path, and that’s fine. Maybe they want to explore some alternatives without feeling like they need to take a step down or a step back. So, creating transparency in terms of what’s available to somebody based upon those aspirations. And also giving some alternative ideas to consider if the straight and narrow is not necessarily the path that they’d like to pursue. And once individuals are able to define a North Star, or even if they’re kind of considering a variety of potential North Stars, we can help employees understand the skill and experience gaps that they’re going to have to close. And better yet, we can help them determine what they need to do to actually close those gaps. What types of projects do they maybe want to tap into? What courses should they take to your point on rescaling and upskilling? Is there any sort of experiential learning that they can do maybe in the field or with a mentor overseeing the work that they’re doing? So, there’s just a whole host of ways to leverage technology to start connecting the dots for people and create really meaningful experiences within an organization not forcing people to feel that they need to find these opportunities by searching somewhere outside of the organization? So, I think, Greg, you made a great point earlier, that and employment brand is really more important than ever. And these are the types of things that really contribute to that type of employment brand that’s going to instill loyalty within the existing workforce. Anything you want to add there?

Greg Selke  23:57

No, I’m good. While sad. Awesome. I’ll turn about a couple of Yep. Couple of closing comments on this topic, we’ll move to the next one. One thing that we heard in the research was the need for a more comprehensive skills taxonomy. And what that means is it includes when you think about skills and competencies and competencies still are and will always be around probably, but it’s expanding to include other things like personal attributes. So, a big focus on the whole self and different working styles. Many of you have probably done Myers Briggs, and a million other assessments that are out there, as well as career aspirations, and how that plays out in terms of skill development, and just a rethinking of how organizations organize all of that into us. Well based framework is becoming more and more important. As we know, people leave for a million different reasons, in order to keep people and you know, lower turnover, learning and development can’t do at all, you just can’t send we all know that you can’t send people to a course and expect the world to change. It’s got to be broader than that. And the holistic picture where people feel, yeah, they care about me. And there, they’re looking out for my career along with me. One of my favorite things, we have a customer, that when they hire people, one of their value props in recruiting is, you know, when you join us, and this is after they got the offer, obviously, when you join us, we hope you stay a long time. But if you don’t, we can almost promise you got to leave a little wiggle room, that you will leave with a better portfolio than when you walk through our door, you are going to learn so much and meet new people and grow. And we hope you’re here for a long time. But even if you stay 234 years and leave, you’re going to be better off by joining us because we have a super strong learning culture, and we’re going to make that work for you. And that just speaks volumes to people walking through the door that they get it to care about me. And it’s all about the culture that an organization has, you can just do the stuff in a vacuum. Couple one final comment around who owns employee development and reskilling, upskilling, etc. My experience in HR is there was a trend a few years ago that while employees have to own their, you know, their own development, the organization provided the frameworks, the tools, the courses, the learning all of that, but really, at the end of the day, HR would try to push it out and say, well, please have to figure out what they want and go for it. I think that’s shifting and not I don’t mean that as crass as it sounds, you all get it, though. I think that’s shifted, given what’s happened. And given that right now, it is more still on employee job market. Organizations have to help own this or otherwise, we’re all going to have a tough time finding people and selling why they should come to you versus other organizations, and certainly a tough time keeping them. So, I think it’s important for us to all to figure out what does that What’s that look like? A couple of closing questions to think about for your business. Everything we just talked about. Where are you? Where are your data sources, you know, to manage all the things we just talked about? You know, you have to know who your workforce is, what their skills are, where the gaps are, in terms of what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization? And what data do you need? And how do you use that data to manage everything we just discussed. And then coming back to the employee development thing, the last point here, thinking about what is the organization’s role in employee development versus leaving it up to the employee? Think that’s all we have. Carly, any final thoughts on this topic before we transition?

Unknown Speaker  28:28

Think you’re on mute.

Carly Ackerman  28:31

I am on mute. The one that I wanted to just quickly reinforces the comprehensive skills taxonomy item here. We had mentioned that one of the trends that were not covered is related to skills and the shift towards skills-based transformation. I think that part of the reason we didn’t include that as one of the deep dives is because it’s so central and such a red thread through all the other trends as well that we’re speaking to today.

Greg Selke  29:04

Yep. Cool. All right, Topic number two, adopting emerging technologies with purpose. Last year, in our research, this was the third priority. And it’s still very, very, very important. You can see some of the couple of bullets here explaining what this is. We’re going to focus on a couple of different things, you know, artificial intelligence machine learning, it is continuing to get traction with HR, as is global legislation related to this. I think right now rightly so. HR and businesses are sort of critical and cautious about how they’re using or planning to use this. One of the things we learned, and I love this, I heard a presentation from the SuccessFactors research team couple of weeks ago. One of the things that’s very important Besides the obvious, you know, mitigating bias and some of the very legal things, a new focus is explain ability. And I love the term and basically, it’s, you know, if you’re, if you’re going to do this in your organization, you better be able to explain to everyone, your general counsel group, certainly your employees, your customers, anyone else? What are you doing? Why are you doing? What are you doing with what you’re learning from it, and be able to explain all that in a transparent, honest way? One of the things we also learned in our research is from an employee perspective, employees are, you know, again, there are variations I hate always say thrown out generalizations because we all know, it’s not that simple. But in general, most employees and groups, demographics in a workforce are okay with AI in the organization for basic tasks, you know, asking HR questions and getting answers, putting in requests for a training course, or having training courses suggested to them, some of the task oriented transactional things, less of a problem, the problems start rising when we start doing evaluative kinds of things. So, you’re going to let AI evaluate my performance or assess my skills or my competence. All of a sudden, people are a little more apprehensive there. And again, not that that’s not a good usage of AI, it certainly is a great use case and will be more in the future. But again, it comes back to the explain ability, being able to explain to people that no AI is not going to determine your performance review rating, but it could influence the performance process and suggest some pretty cool things for you, as you think about your future career, etc. And this is not just in, you know, we I think we all started using this a little bit in the recruiting area, and onboarding and talent acquisition. And it’s now expanding pretty quickly across talent management and other areas of HR Karlene comments.

Carly Ackerman  32:26

think what’s most interesting is, I think about a year ago, we may have had a similar conversation and the extent to which organizations were prepared to adopt AI NML was very different. So just seeing organizations on this very steep exponential curve of not only interest in but readiness to adopt these types of technologies, it’s been a really interesting journey to watch, especially as somebody who works in the in the AI and machine learning space. So, I think we’re ready for our next poll. All right, so we’re going to ask folks to respond how? Or has your organization adopted AI to support HR transformation. And really, it can run the gamut in terms of how you may have adopted it. So, we’ll give folks a couple minutes to respond.

Greg Selke  33:23

Good and, Carly, while people are doing that, can you share a couple of examples or an example, or two of organizations that you’ve seen that are leveraging the technology we’re talking about? To retain top talent.

Carly Ackerman  33:38

Yeah, I certainly have a lot of stories, the one that comes to mind immediately is an organization that has started to implement the building blocks of what I would consider a world class and employee experience. So instead of this organization, it happens to be a top 10 financial services company. And like many organizations, like many of you, who are on the line now I’m sure have been experiencing they were struggling to find technical talent. It’s oftentimes it’s hard for big banks to find tech talent because the work is not considered as cool and interesting as if you’re working in the tech industry directly. So instead of just completely overhauling, its recruiting efforts. The along the vein of what we’ve been sharing thus far, this organization decided to structure its talent transformation completely around enabling internal mobility. So, they saw this as their opportunity to reduce attrition and really demonstrate their commitment to growing their existing employees’ careers. So, leaders at this organization introduced AI to match employees with the right internal opportunities, and they were able to give them the tools they needed to understand their options and what they needed to actually do, or you know, things they needed to accomplish to you successfully make those internal moves. What’s most interesting is that these leaders were also able to kind of share the love, so to speak, and give their business leaders access to data that would actually help them better understand their current employees. I know you mentioned this before, you know, we expect leaders to understand their workforce, when you start to chip away at it, I think it’s a very difficult exam question to, to answer, as we know, what are the skills of my workforce. So, they were able to provide this type of insight to their business leaders so they can start to more proactively plan against their workforce needs. So, I’m excited to see more of these types of stories where organizations are starting to shift that paradigm from looking outside to looking inside to fill gaps and retain top talent. So, with that, let’s take a look at the results. A little bit more consolidated here, in terms of the responses, so most folks saying that we haven’t started exploring just yet. Ai. Interesting to see that, that I think that we’ve I’ve asked this question a couple of times on webinars, the number of folks who understand the value prop, but haven’t made investments yet continues to tick up, which to me is exciting to know that it’s no longer a question mark of whether or not this is something that we that we would consider investing in. It’s, it’s, you know, we’re proactively trying to understand the value prop, and we’re proactively trying to understand how it might help improve outcomes for us as a business. And your actions from you, Greg,

Greg Selke  36:43

this is about what I would have expected at this point seems very, very typical and normal from what I see from our customers. So yeah, excellent. All right. So, a couple of very quick closing comments on this topic, before we move to the next one. Some takeaways, hopefully, are, please, as you think about this topic, probably think about adopting stricter standards of what’s required in this space just to stay safe and get good adoption with your employees, please figure out how to be transparent and the whole explain ability concept of why how what are you going to do with the information? Please do remember tasks versus, you know, evaluative things. One is a little trickier than the other, obviously. And bring it back to the employee experience. Think about I mean, we’re all people to how do you feel about AI? And I hate to use this word, but being used on you with you, whatever. But think about it, you know, how would you feel if you were in your employees, yours, and you are because you’re an employee of your organization as well. There’s lots of change continue to happen in this space, chat. GPT, lots of different things are coming on the market. So, the use cases for how to integrate all of the things we talked about, it’s very important to figure out what are you going to do with this and why. And then finally, our research has shown that there can be burnout with us, you know, think about some of the times that you’ve been exposed to this technology. shorter periods of time are probably better, versus long drawn-out processes that use any of the things we’ve just talked about. And then finally, a couple of things to think about, how are you taking into account what your employees are thinking about this topic, their attitudes, their preferences, their comfort level? And then how are you going to assess the benefits and the risks of anything you do in the space? So, stay tuned, this is an exciting topic and will not go away, nor shut it. So. Okay. Moving to I know, we only have 20 minutes left, and we got to have some quad time. So, I will cover currently quickly. A few high-level thoughts on the IB. It’s interesting, this dropped on our survey prioritization this this year from fourth last year to six. When we looked at the comments from the focus groups and the survey comments, it’s not that it’s less important. It’s viewed differently this year. Were in the past it was, you know, the diversity COE or that silo within HR, and now it’s really being spread across all people related processes and practices in in businesses, sort of a lifecycle approach around pipelines and certainly recruiting and retention and different workforce segments to new areas that popped up this year. To identity attributes. It says we call them. The first is the whole deskless. Worker, there’s been a lot of focus on, you know, diversity strategies for people who work in offices. But what about if you’re, you know, in a retail store, or some of the examples I mentioned earlier? What does What do DIB mean to those employees? Is it different? And I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to understand what this means, and how it’s important to other kinds of people in your workforce. Another renewed focus is on generational differences. As I mentioned earlier, baby boomers are a big part of the workforce. People are thinking about retiring. Most organizations have at least four if not five generations in their workforce. Think about that. That’s a little bizarre. How do you motivate an 18-year-old versus a 68-year-old, some things are similar, some things are not similar at all? And that’s a big, big, big challenge. One of our takeaways from the research is that there is no more this year than last year, resistance and backlash to diversity efforts. In organizations, and the main reasons, based on again, the comments from folks. The people who are a little resentful, either are insecure about what’s happening, they don’t think it’s necessary that enough has already been done in the diversity space, or they feel like they’re not getting their fair share. And our recommendation is leading organizations instead of running from this will address that head on, I’m very proud to say. And again, this is one example. So don’t want to go down a rabbit hole, but SAP last year, and I was part of it did a series of focus groups with Caucasian white males in their 50s and 60s at a manager level, and really got into this with on why it’s, again, not that these folks were against diversity, but it was more educational related. We just wanted to have real dialogue on what they were thinking about the strategies of SAP, which has won numerous awards for diversity, and wanted to be real with people that typically have more of a resistance. And it was wildly successful. And again, we said I think two or 300, white 5060-year-old managers who are men out back into the workforce with a totally different perspective that helped champion all of our other diversity efforts. So, Carly, turn it back to you.

Carly Ackerman  43:00

Awesome. Well, we are moving right along to our next poll. So very simple one, does your organization have a DI B strategy?

Greg Selke  43:21

Wait, while people are doing that could What do you see coming in terms of technology that’s helping in the D IB space?

Carly Ackerman  43:30

Yeah, I think there’s, as I mentioned before, there’s been such a huge focus on skills. And that’s in large part because focusing on skills unlocks the potential of skills-based talent processes that remove barriers for opportunity based on things like title degree tenure, those historical pedigree types of backgrounds that we look for in people. So, when you actually kind of strip that all away and look at the skills, you’re able to look at skill adjacencies. And where individuals might have some learnability in in a new space, maybe a space that’s not expressed explicitly on their resume, for example. And this allows organizations to expand the potential pool of talent that they consider, and it also expands the potential career paths for the individuals who are kind of engaging with a with a skills-based talent strategy. So going back to the technology’s component of our conversation, we’re seeing that technologies are impacting both the supply and the demand side of the equation. So, expanding the amount of or the supply of talent so to speak, that employee employers are tapping into as they start to look more at the changing nature of the business demands and the nature of the workforce needs based upon the changing nature of business. So, with that, let us move to the responses. All right, little more even split here

Greg Selke  45:13

it’s interesting to me and this is an interesting topic. I’m not surprised, again by the results depends on what kind of organization you’re in if your public versus private if you’re this versus that, if you’re big versus small, what industry you’re in, there are lots of different factors on how strategic and formalized a DAP strategy can be, should be all that good stuff. So not surprised on this. And again, that’s an interesting topic. And that it, it’s got to work for each of your organizations, it’s going to look different from firm to firm. And that’s okay, as long as it’s all legal and all that good stuff. Absolutely. So, Carly, back to you.

Carly Ackerman  45:59

Yeah, of course. Well, I don’t want to kind of sound crass about this, but D IMB is profitable. So, an organization’s commitment to diversity can really paved the way forward for higher profits, competitive advantages, improved innovation, we’ve seen some data around that, and just in general, sustained long term growth. So, you can see here we’re sharing some data coming from a recent Eightfold analysis using proprietary data. And in that analysis, APR found that four of the top five revenue generating US companies maintain higher levels of racial diversity from 2019 to 2022, when we compare them to their industry benchmarks, and we’ve also seen similar outcomes from McKinsey studies, McKinsey found that organizations in the top 25% for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians. And they also found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15% more likely to have financial returns above their respective median industry medians. So, the bottom line here is that the more dei and be principles that are incorporated into an organization’s culture, the better the financial returns are going to be through performance, as I mentioned, innovation, and then just in general employee engagement when folks feel like they are included and belong within an organization. And just a little bit more data before we wrap up this particular topic. We know that keeping an eye on di and B and investing in those efforts consistently is a long-term payoff, right? This is something that’s not going to happen overnight. But when you really invest in it consistently, you’ll see results over time. We’re sharing here just a few more key data points from another study from Eightfold. In this study, we used diversity and employee retention data from 31, fortune 500 companies. And in that we found two key facts. Increasing the share of black or Hispanic employees by 10% can increase employee retention at a rate of 4.4%. And similarly, increasing the percentage of women in the workforce by 10% can increase the retention rate by 1.4%. So real tangible outcomes when it comes to having a focus on both racial ethnic and gender diversity. We’ve seen this reinforced by some other studies, for example, great places to work, they were able to show that when employees believe that everyone at the workplace is treated fairly, there are 5.4 times more likely to want to work for that that organization for a longer time. So going back to that theme of loyalty, and when you focus on meaningful dei be programs, employers are creating that kind of environment that makes an employee feel as though they belong and that their work really matters. So again, that that theme of loyalty and retaining top talent, we’re seeing some real tangible results with dei be. And then I think we’re going to have you closed this this theme out.

Greg Selke  49:14

Yes. And just one quick comment on this, you know, lots of great research here and we just did a focus group again with a lot of our customers on this separate from the official research on just on everything we just talked about. And one word came out from them as the overarching theme for this and it was intentionality they said, you know, we’re doing a lot of good stuff. We’re all over the place, just sort of like the poll results. Yeah, we got a strategy. We’re doing some things great, not so great and other areas, we need to do more. It just needs to be intentional, because if it’s not intentionally designed into, again, the life cycle approach across all areas of HR AR, it probably won’t stick as well as it could or should. So, keep that word in mind as you approach some of your D, ay, and B priorities this year, where you can be intentional and push up versus Let’s just hope that happens. It’s probably a good approach. So, all right, we only have a couple of minutes, we are going to cover our last topic, which is people, leaders and people managers. I’m not, we’re not going to go too deep on this, because this is sort of sort of obvious. We all know that, you know, mid managers, people, leaders, they get beat up a lot by again, as I mentioned earlier, by their employees, by their customers, by top level leaders in the firm, and the past three or four years was brutal. For this group. This actually went from an eighth priority last year, up to a seventh priority this year, organizations are just struggling with finding people who are ready to manage, if you will, in the quote, new normal, it’s hard, it’s hard. And you know, hiring from the outside is even harder to find people who do what you need them to do. And also, even the discussion, as you know, as we said, at the beginning of this conversation about looking internally, it’s hard to assess who would be a good manager as an individual contributor to promote to a manager, one of the standard classic mistakes is organizations who take their top sales rep, and then put them in a management position. Totally different skills, just because you’re great at sales doesn’t mean you have what it takes to be a good leader. So very important to really think about what is the again, the taxonomy of what is needed from a skills perspective. But also, the people centric competencies or skills around, you know, how emotionally intelligent are these folks to be able to deliver? You know, rough news, you’ve been let go or let laid off or thanks for your great year, but there’s very minimal compensation raises this year, no bonuses, how do they handle that? So, I think moving forward, a lot more focus on how to assess talent for these management roles. And how to help them not burnout and be successful, is going to continue to be a big focus as we move forward. Carlene?

Carly Ackerman  52:36

Just keep moving, so we can get to some questions.

Greg Selke  52:40

Yeah, just a couple of things to think about, as you as we close it out here. You know, think about how are you currently assessing managerial readiness and individual contributors for these roles? And, you know, what’s the, how’s the changing role of leadership, evolving, giving the changing notion of your business, you know, what’s happening in your business that’s shifting what you need from your people, leaders in any leader for that matter. Trust one final comment. Trust is really important. Again, I wrote a paper last year in the middle of the pandemic about trust. And I’ll leave you with a final thought. 20 seconds promised Carly’s back to you. If you have a pen handy draw of a four-quadrant matrix. I love matrices, on the x axis across the bottom put low trust and high trust on the y axis going up and down. But I have to work I need to work. And the paper was fascinating to write because if you think about what goes in each of those four boxes, what about someone who has to work that really doesn’t trust their company? What do you do to keep those people and keep them productive? If they have to work and there’s high trust? What do you do? It’s probably different and obviously better. People who don’t have to work. They’re working because they want to do their near retirement or supplemental income because their spouse partner works. What do you do for those people to keep them? So, trust is a very important factor, and it plays out differently with different employee groups. And I’ll turn it back to you, Carly.

Carly Ackerman  54:20

All right. Last poll of the day, which of the HR megatrends will be most important to your organization’s success and 2023? You don’t have to limit it to I guess you do have to limit it to the that we covered today. Maybe choose I’m not sure if you think it’s one of the other four that we didn’t cover. But Greg, I’d love to hear for you from your perspective. Maybe based on the four we covered today, which one you think might be most important for you?

Greg Selke  54:55

I’m going to be a cop out and pick all I know I can. I’m not pushing the buttons I’m going to cheat and do this. No, no, I’m going to pick all four of that we just talked about for different reasons. I mean, you can’t do anything without people. I mean, most companies can, unless you’re an odd industry, you got to have people, which is all about a. So, you got to find ways to make that a top priority and get people and keep people give them the world we live in, you have to have state of the art technology to stay up with things, otherwise, your competitors are going to beat you to it, and your customers are going to expect it. So, you have to do that. You have to do diversity. And again, this is not just a nice to have, it’s a half to have given the complexities of businesses in the society that we live in. Everyone has to feel included and valued and respected. And that’s a challenge. And then obviously, leaders lead us so if you don’t have the right leaders, going to be hard to do the other three and any of the other four that we didn’t talk about top, my vote is all of them to cop out.

Carly Ackerman  56:01

I will I agree with you, obviously, that all four certainly going to be incredibly important, I think, as a as a people leader as a as a manager, which is one of the demographics that we covered. Preparing people leaders for today. And tomorrow, I think is so critical leadership at all levels, right is super important. And I think the importance of middle managers is understated. We certainly need those folks to stick around and to not burn out on the various issues and whatnot that they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis. That’s not necessarily their single singular focus. The other obvious one for me is adopting emerging technologies.

Unknown Speaker  56:44

Of course, of course, me too.

Carly Ackerman  56:47

Well, let’s look all right. Looks like a lot of people agree with me, I’d love to see that. And then following the people Leaders Initiative would be mobilizing the workforce for the future. So, it seems like we have some like-minded folks on the call today. Yep. I’ve been trying to answer a couple of questions through the chat as we’ve, as we’ve been moving through. So, if we didn’t get to your question today, we’ll share our LinkedIn information at the end of this session. So, you can feel free to reach out to us. There was one more slide that I just quickly wanted to voice over if we have a moment. Before we move to like the actual closing. This slide can’t get into the details of it now. But I’d mentioned at the beginning of the call wanted to make sure folks had some actionable next steps. So, you’ll be able to download the PDF of this of this session. And you’ll be able to revisit these next steps for getting started. But I apologize. We can go for it and with the closing ceremonies.

Greg Selke  57:54

That’s it from my perspective. Thank you, Connor, back to you. Thank you very much. I hope you found value in this. And if you have questions, as Charlie said, I think you have our LinkedIn profiles and our contact information please feel free to reach out if you want to talk more about anything we covered. So, thank you hope that was helpful.

SHRM  58:12

Thank you. This webcast is sponsored by Eightfold AI. A full AI delivers the talent intelligence platform, the most effective way for companies to retain top performers upskill and rescale the workforce recruit top talent efficiently and reach diversity goals. A full day’s deep learning artificial intelligence platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into a competitive advantage. For more information visit www.Eightfold.ai. Before we sign off, we want to thank Carly Ackerman with a full AI and Greg selkie with SAP SuccessFactors for the information they provided today. And we also want to thank everyone tuning in for being with us, and for choosing SHRM for HR webcast. That concludes this program.