Going forward, workforce plans must be dynamic and adjustable based on a continuous monitoring of supply and demand. Such flexibility used to be extremely difficult to accommodate – back when the top determinants of supply were worker location and role. Location-bound talent meant that when an employee worked in California, your skills were in California. If you needed specialized IT skills in New York, you had to fly your employee across the country and often they also needed a role change.

But as the pandemic shifted working models to work from home or hybrid models, knowledge workers not only became untethered from the office, but part of a free-range workforce that can work anytime and anywhere. They became location unbound – and prefer it, as evidenced by the large volume of people moving out of the city to the country, to Florida, or even debating a move to the British Isles, anywhere with a good broadband connection.

At the same time, we’re seeing a new trend: unbound workers who are performing multiple – and increasingly diverse – roles as part of their current position. For example, they may work three days a week on one project or in one part of the business, and on the other two days support other initiatives with teams that are across the country or even overseas. These versatile workers are in demand for dynamic teams because their diversity of experience and unique skill sets aren’t necessarily needed in their full-time role, but they are in high demand across the business on an ad-hoc or project basis. This trend could be beneficial to both the organization and employee, as variety can prevent monotony – which hurts the employee experience and leads to attrition – and even increase job satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Mostly this leads to significant increases in productivity and organization agility.

Given these trends, we’re seeing the future of work as a flexible, global, incredibly agile gig economy that encompasses internal and external workers. This means hiring managers don’t always need to create a new position and budget for every skill set they need; rather, the business makes it easy for them to meet their “demand” by finding, accessing, and onboarding the right people – wherever they are – with the right skills to meet their needs. Imagine having a talent management system that can cross-charge the salaries or hourly rates of workers to multiple tasks, departments, and operational units across the globe. People can also sign up for flexible, part-time opportunities, get exposure to new areas of the business, develop new skills, and add value along the way.

There is, of course, a balance to be considered between the permanent and flexible elements of any employee’s position. Too much flexibility and fluidity could diminish job security and expose employees to the negatives of a potential precarious work environment – a healthy balance is therefore vital.

Looking ahead, this kind of role and location flexibility will increasingly become necessary to access the skill sets needed to meet business and sustainable economic growth. Many Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries have had insufficient for births between 2020 and 2022 to meet the demand for skills in 16- to 20-year-old employees entering the workplace between 2036 and 2040. However, Africa will potentially have enough 20-year-olds to fuel OECD country development and economic growth. Tapping into people with desired skill sets from these areas of the world in an ethical and a sustainable way by not relocating people is the best possible way forward. It preserves and bolsters communities and cultures rather than depriving them of their skill base and human resources.

As discussed in a previous article, flexibility is also important when trying to diversify your workforce by attracting, hiring, and retaining workers of diverse genders, age, and ethnic groups. This is critical today. Surveys conducted during the pandemic, such as the , indicate that Black males, for instance, had a much better employee experience when working remotely because they report experiencing less unconscious bias and a great deal more equality. Forcing these workers to come to an office every day can make them more of a flight risk – and put your employee engagement and access to their valuable skills at risk.

So how can your HR department support this level of flexibility and optimize workforce planning in such an environment?

Start to think of ways to address skills gaps and empower employees to work how and where they want. Enable employees to work in cross-functional teams based on organizational tasks or projects. They can be across hierarchies or lines of business and help to create an agile working environment while fueling skill development. It’s also important to take an employee-centric approach to development and growth by providing access to internal opportunities through fellowships, gigs, temporary assignments, mentor programs, and experiential learning. Employees will have the flexibility to create a work experience that is uniquely their own, but it will also create an adaptable workforce that is future ready.

The future of workforce planning is here – and it’s full of potential for innovations. To learn more, visit www.sap.com/people-analytics.

Tammie Eldridge is part of Solution Marketing at 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors.

And it’s not just retail and service businesses that are losing employees and the valuable skills those employees bring. Companies across all industries and sizes are struggling to retain and hire knowledgeable workers with the right skill sets to run and grow their organizations. This is a business sustainability issue and blocker to business and digital transformation.

The pressure to retain and hire quality talent with strong digital skills in particular has intensified with the COVID-19 pandemic, as the business digitalization need was accelerated by five to 10 years. Suddenly, harnessing the Internet of Things (IoT) and investing in robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning are urgent priorities, not long-range plans. This acceleration has created employee skills gaps where organizations that might have been one or two years behind in digital skills transformation have suddenly found themselves to be a decade or more behind. This puts them at high risk of being unable to tap into the new digital economy, which is an opportunity cost few can afford.

The growing digital skills gap has also highlighted current and projected future inequalities because the gap has widened at different rates in different geographical locations and industry sectors. The looming digital divide is potentially so serious that the World Economic Forum has launched the , mobilizing a global movement, including a large number of 51·çÁ÷customers and partners, to prioritize digital inclusion as foundational to the achievement of their sustainable development goals. 51·çÁ÷has also prioritized its own digital literacy program.

To remain competitive and sustainable in the digital economy, businesses must have enough people with the right skills at the right time to help them accelerate their digital transformation. Every business and digital transformation is also a people transformation, but the key point is that the people transformation needs to happen first.

Embrace the “Unbound” Workforce as the New Normal

Today, it seems every employee might be a flight risk, especially those with the skills that are foundational to digital transformation and economic growth. One way to address the immediate skills gap is to stem the flood of people leaving your business for greener pastures – which, for many, are more flexible and less biased work environments. Retention has always been the best form of recruitment. During the peak of COVID-19, knowledge workers were freed from the office and became, at least in their minds, fluid, liberated, and free-range employees. Many don’t want to go back to full-time office work – especially women and people of color. As noted in a previous article, pulse studies have found that women, working parents, and employees of color are the most adamant about continuing to work remotely.

And it’s for good reasons. Most employees – especially women – found that they were able to sustain high levels of productivity working remotely while gaining more time for relationships, stress-reducing activities, responsibilities such as caring for children and aging parents, and more. They could work from anywhere, at any time that worked best each day, and do their jobs well. Most employees report that they are aren’t willing to give this up because an employer says so.

The benefits of working remotely have been even more significant for people of color. For example, Black men reported a massive improvement in their employee experience because, while working remotely, they felt they have not been subject to the same level of unconscious bias. In other words, they feel that they’ve enjoyed more equality working from home – which is critical to fostering a sense of belonging and increasing the likelihood of their retention.

This is why to and meeting the needs of remote and hybrid workers is massively important from both a sustainability and a diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective. It’s critical to develop flexible work environments that balance company and employee needs and create an employee experience they love. Because the fact is, every flight risk threatens your most valued digital skills, as the people with those skills are most likely to leave.

Empower Employees to Expand Their Capabilities to Advance Individual Growth

Another way to address skills gaps is to empower employees to work in cross-functional teams based on organizational tasks or projects. This notion of coming together with others to get work done and then disbanding when the work is finished is widely referred to as dynamic teams. They can be across hierarchies or lines of business and help to create an agile working environment while fueling skill development. By leveraging internal talent, managers and human resources do not have to create new positions, find budget, recruit, or support a team creation process with other time-consuming tasks. Instead, your business organizations can simply bring together employees to form optimal teams that can focus on short term tasks and priorities.

In addition to forming dynamic teams to bridge skills gaps, organizations can also take an employee-centric approach to development and growth by providing access to internal opportunities through fellowships, gigs, temporary assignments, mentor programs, and experiential learning. This allows an organization to build the skills needed for the future while empowering individuals to create a career completely their own. Connecting employees to meaningful work and new opportunities will drive the adaptability needed for better business outcomes.

Proactively Upskill and Reskill

Finally, invest in learning and development. Why? Because every digital transformation is also a people transformation where employers must upskill and reskill their employees to meet today’s changed needs and tomorrow’s capabilities demand. Not only must organizations provide the tools to help their workforce discover learning to upskill and reskill them, but they must create an environment supportive of continuous learning. For example, complementing formal training with informal, collaborative, and engaging communities of practice can offer easy access to experts and knowledge sharing to build up skills quickly. A dynamic environment of learning, feedback, and coaching empowers people to take charge of their development with confidence. Here, learning recommendations turn every employee into a proactive learner by giving guidance and nudging them to take action.

Undeniably, closing the skills gap and striving towards sustainable growth requires organizations to create a create a future-fit, resilient workforce that directly addresses its needs as well as those of each of its employees. This can be truly transformational.

To learn more, visit .

Tammie Eldridge is part of Solution Marketing at 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors.

According to a pulse survey conducted by the , 76% of employees want flexibility in where they work and 93% flexibility in when they work. The desire for flexible work is strongest among women, working parents, and employees of color who have shown gains in feelings of belonging working remotely. Specifically, 81% of Black respondents say they want flexibility in where they work, compared to 75% of White respondents.

This data is in direct contrast to what most executives report that they want in post-pandemic workforce policies. Of those currently working fully remotely, nearly half of all executives surveyed (44%) want to work from the office every day, compared to 17% of employees. And 75% of these executives say they want to work from the office three to five days a week versus only 34% of employees.

So, what are companies to do? How can they make informed decisions about what’s best for leaders, for the business, and for their employees?

Applying a Sustainability Lens to Work Location Decision

One way of looking at the issues of return to office or hybrid work is from a business sustainability perspective. For example, if forcing people back to the office will make critical employees more likely to leave their jobs, you have a real flight risk issue impacting the sustainability of your business. Your business must have enough people with the right skills at the right time to propel it forward.

Another perspective to consider is how today’s business environment has been transformed by climate change, nature loss, and more. The planet needs change, and people demand change. What if, when making decisions about who comes into the office and when, executives considered the carbon footprint generated by employee travel and commutes, weighed against the energy usage working from home, along with the sustainability causes that their employees support?

This would require implementing next-generation holistic steering and reporting that maps operational and experiential data to show progress on goals such as reducing the carbon footprint of the business. Imagine executives having climate and natural capital accounting at their fingertips, including individual and collective employee carbon footprint tracking.

This is the kind of holistic steering and reporting that groups such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) want companies to integrate into their strategic decision-making. Integrating economic, environmental, and social performance data into decisions – referred to as Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics – can help executives serve their own goals, respect their employees’ preferences for when and where they work, and contribute to reaching sustainability goals that make the world a cleaner, greener place.

How 51·çÁ÷Can Help

In 2020, 51·çÁ÷committed to enable companies to report on the WEF’s Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics. As promised, we have delivered to help enable holistic enterprise-wide sustainability performance management. 51·çÁ÷also made it easier to become a sustainable business and reduce carbon footprints with , which can enable businesses to move toward lower carbon emissions and more sustainable operations. SAP’s data-driven approach lets businesses embed sustainability comprehensively and gain actionable insights across the entire value chain to enable companies to transition to low-carbon business processes.

Faced with an ambitious sustainability agenda and carbon-lowering targets, one 51·çÁ÷customer wanted to go further and consider the employee wishes for home/office work, and the carbon emissions generated from their commute to work against the energy efficiency of their home offices. The company had committed to lowering its enterprise carbon emissions and wanted a mechanism to support managers’ operational workforce planning processes.

51·çÁ÷built a proof of concept (PoC) application in just one day once the employee survey was collected. The PoC decision support application was realized as follows:

Employee address data was acquired from records using the standard delivered API. 51·çÁ÷Data Quality Management and microservices for location data were used for both data cleansing – a big bonus since the customer was able to cleanse inaccurate addresses in 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Employee Central – and data enrichment to geocode the home and work addresses with the latitude, longitude, and altitude information. The world of geo-location services was opened.

Demographic measures and dimensions were acquired from 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics using the standard 51·çÁ÷Analytics Cloud connector.

While trying to understand employee sentiment on workplace and flexibility preferences, a survey was created using Employee Experience Management Solutions from 51·çÁ÷and Qualtrics. The survey allowed for employees, whose jobs enabled them to work from home, to answer questions relating to their preferences for the number of days a week they wanted to work from home and their commute (means and time of travel). The insights gathered allowed us to understand that the travel time to work – not distance – is a major factor in determining retention risk amongst various demographic groups and so the information was valuable input for the flight risk tool they had in 51·çÁ÷Analytics Cloud enterprise reporting.

was then able to use external Web services and geo-location services to calculate the travel distance and travel time to work by various means of transport. One of the services was then able to determine the carbon emissions for the means of travel that the employee had specified. The commute travel time by job grade is a leading predictor of flight risk and is easily added to the flight risk prediction dataset.

The systems also gathered information of all the corporate and possible work locations. This opened the possibility for work location optimization, but it was not part of the scope of the PoC.

The data was then blended using 51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform, specifically 51·çÁ÷Data Warehouse Cloud, and anonymization views were defined to protect actual home addresses from being shown. Real-time 51·çÁ÷HANA data anonymization allowed the application to use actual addresses to accurately calculate the travel metrics while safely anonymizing sensitive data for dashboard visualization and drill-down.

A dashboard was built and refined to analyze and interrogate the employee commute measures and identify specific employee carbon emissions each working day. Geospatial representation and visualization were built and demonstrated with interactive zoom and data filters. A what-if scenario was demonstrated with graphs and metrics calculated in real time to show the specific carbon emission impact of changing the percentage of time spent working remotely.

As shown in the below process, this PoC was achieved using various 51·çÁ÷solutions, including 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions on 51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform.

In Summary

Executives can make better decisions about the impact of employees going back to the office and how often, considering the social and actual carbon emissions from commutes in their people planning. Using 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions for employee information to geocode the distance of employees from the office and utilizing to layer experience insights to determine preferences, they can analyze carbon emissions for different types of commutes and make data-driven decisions to fuel their sustainability initiatives.

As shown in the below figure, executives can even look at this data by employee gender, race, and age. This helps them better assess, for instance, how many employees have strong preferences and who would become a flight risk should the business choose to mandate regular employee in-office attendance.

Finally, the figure below shows the simple what-if scenario to demonstrate how quickly and effectively analytics interfaces can be built, in this case, incorporating a slider bar and immediate impact of the change for the pre-filtered employees.

This kind of sustainability data and analysis empowers executives to find the “sweet spot” in decisions that balance their preferences against employee preferences and align them to important goals such as reducing their carbon footprint.

Suddenly, what’s best for all becomes quite clear.

Learn more at .

Tammie Eldridge is part of Solution Marketing at 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors.

In other cases, people can’t make decisions because they have too much data – or at least not the right data or analytics to generate relevant, actionable insight. This “more is better” way of thinking about data and analytics leads to an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to making decisions. Not sure what to do? Throw more data at the problem and see what sticks.

But as with most projects, throwing more resources – both people and data – at a problem can lead to “analysis paralysis.” In such cases, either you can’t see clearly through the chaos to make a decision, or you end up applying a bunch of arbitrary, unrelated data to a new kind of problem and coming up with muddled view upon which to make a decision or recommendation. The problem is, it’s not necessarily the “best” one. This, of course, defeats the whole purpose of analyzing data and generating insights in the first place. They are supposed to make us smarter – help us see things we couldn’t on our own – so we can make the best possible decision to drive the best possible outcome and do so faster and with less effort.

The best decisions are made when you look at the right data at the right time and analyze it with the right tools.

This is true for business decision-makers – and for everyone else, too. For example, before I start a drive, I always check Waze first. I know my preferred and likely best route. But Waze captures real-time data from people actually on the road, deriving traffic patterns, identifying accidents, and more. So, it can provide a data-driven recommendation that ultimately helps me get to my destination faster, safer, and easier.

Put simply, by using Waze, I become more intelligent and therefore able to realize my objective. Similarly, when your organization uses the right data and analytics tools to support decisioning, your enterprise becomes more intelligent – and thus better able to achieve its goals such as executing strategy, driving revenue, managing costs, or mitigating human capital and business risks.

The question is, how do you avoid the pitfalls of kitchen-sink analytics and analysis paralysis?

51·çÁ÷understands this common challenge and has created resources like “,” which is geared for human resource professionals and talent managers. These questions are designed to help decision-makers think critically about the talent management issues they face and what data and insights will have the greatest impact on their organization.

Rather than looking at the “kitchen sink,” it is recommended that you select the top 10 to 15 questions that most impact your organization’s ability to execute your strategy, drive revenue, manage costs, or mitigate human capital and business risks. Selecting a subset is also important for the next steps – setting targets and assigning staff resources to implement interventions and monitor progress, both of which are more feasible with a smaller number of metrics. The document also provides guidance on selecting key performance indicators (KPIs) that can demonstrate progress toward addressing your specific questions.

For example, if your business strategy is to increase market share, focus on questions relating to talent drivers that impact the execution of that strategy and the metrics that HR should monitor to demonstrate progress toward strategic goals, such as:

• Average manager tenure
• Employee retention index
• Managerial quality index
• Staffing rate – expatriates
• Training hours per full-time employee

Here are five recommendations for how to select and manage a set of KPIs.

Focus on a small core set of KPIs.

When in doubt, leave it out. Select only as many KPIs as you can actively manage. Resist the temptation to include everything you can measure as a KPI. Use three key criteria: a clear link to strategy, a willingness to set targets against the measure, and a willingness to commit resources to managing progress.

Get management buy-in and continuous support.

The saying “what isn’t measured, isn’t managed, and what isn’t managed, isn’t done” applies here – active support from executives helps ensure that progress is tracked. Several organizations involve their CEO or head of business unit in KPI selection workshops, which helps with the challenge of gaining executive support. Firms also routinely report performance against KPIs to their boards or executive committees.

Help ensure data quality.

Nothing makes managing KPIs more difficult than suspect data, so you should spot-check the data needed to populate your KPIs. Conduct a structured data verification process to help ensure definition consistency and data validity.

Communicate performance actively and often.

Keep KPIs top of mind. Reports, social media, e-mails, conference calls, and manager question-and-answer sessions all help reinforce the importance of the business objective being measured by a KPI. You should set targets and use benchmarks wisely.

Revisit KPIs periodically.

As your organization’s strategy changes, so should your KPIs. Your organization should actively pressure test your KPIs at least once a year.

Armed with the right data-driven metrics and insights, your organization can better execute your strategy, drive revenue, manage costs, and mitigate human capital and business risks.

Want to learn more about the power of data-driven decisioning for human capital management – and how you can start taking advantage of 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics quickly?

• Be sure to download the document.
• Watch and learn how you can for downstream usage, from a library of over 2,000 metrics with built-in intelligence, and .
• And if you just want a little bit of fun, check out our .

For more information, visit .

Tammie Eldridge is part of Solution Marketing for 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors.

For many, Martin Luther King Jr.’s name is synonymous with his dream of a United States void of segregation and racism. And while his dream has been recognized globally, there is still much work to do to realize it.

I recently sat down with to discuss how people analytics can support organizations’ diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) strategy. Dias is the managing director of as well as the chair and founder of the . He specializes in supporting businesses to make better HR decisions using people analytics and enabling data-driven HR culture.

Q: How does people analytics help HR to solve diversity problems?

A: What areas of your business have the lowest levels of diversity and inclusion, and how bad is the imbalance? Over the years, which HR decisions have caused and added to that inequality? Do different types of employees get promoted differently? Rewarded differently? Hired and retained faster or slower? If you do not change anything, how much worse will the inequality get? If you want to reduce inequality within five years, what HR strategies are most likely to achieve that goal?

With or without data, organizations are making decisions to try to become fairer and more equal. The purpose of people analytics is to enable organizations to make better people decisions; in this case, about achieving diversity goals and solving inequality. By using HR data to answer questions, people analytics helps organizations to make better decisions increasing the likelihood of achieving diversity outcomes across the entire employee experience.

What types of diversity questions are 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors customers answering using their data?

In the 2020 Benchmarking study by the HR Analytics ThinkTank, , which is no surprise given DE&I is a priority for most organizations.

These people analytics functions are empowering their HR leaders to solve diversity problems by supplementing HR expertise with answers gleaned directly from data. From day one, people analytics teams can answer descriptive questions, providing facts about what happened in the past and over time. For example, within a particular job family or location, a specific minority group was three times more likely to be promoted than another. Other functions may go one step further, answering questions that diagnose a problem and use data to answer why an outcome has occurred in the past. For example, they might be able to answer why minority groups are more like to resign in particular locations.

The more advanced functions, which research shows take two to three years to build, will create even more value. Some will be asked to spend more time answering critical questions, predicting how the gender equity gap will increase if nothing changes. The most advanced will provide answers to questions by prescribing what should be done; for example, what strategies are most likely to achieve 25% ethnic minority representation at board level within six years.

How are 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors customers using Workforce Analytics and Report Stories to tackle diversity problems?

The 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors People Analytics solutions has the functionality to support organizations to tackle their diversity issues.

In order to support strategic decision-making, they use 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics to transform HR data into metrics and dashboards, showing end users the answers to questions about what has happened in the past, displaying insights and trends over time. For example, where is minority representation worsening? In particular grades, job families or geographies is there a difference in the way in which different workers are promoted or hired? Using 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics, HR leaders can create better strategies and track progress over time.

Using report stories, 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors software can provide anyone in the entire business with a snapshot view of their business area. Stories will allow end users to check an answer at any given moment; for example, whether their recruitment pipeline contains a diverse selection of candidates or if all the resignations in the last month have been women.

What steps can 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors customers take to prepare for diversity analytics?

The first thing that organizations should do is confirm the objectives that leaders are trying to achieve and identify the questions they need answered to make better choices. In our 2020 study, 94% of 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors People Analytics leaders said their function was directly sponsored by an HR executive but only 32% were positive that they knew what their leader’s goals were. HR leaders need to clearly articulate what their diversity goals are and establish what questions they would like answered by the people analytics team.

The second thing they should do is audit the foundations for data-driven HR success and prepare for the journey. According to the same study, only 42% of 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors customers had a plan for what data to capture, only 16% were sure they knew how the people analytics team should be structured, and only six percent were confident that decision-makers understood how to use their insights in decision-making. A lot of diversity questions can be answered on day one using standard 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors data, but a plan will be required to provide more complex answers over time.

The final tip is to provide answers with evidence to help ensure that decision-makers are empowered to actually use the insight. If given the option, most HR and business professionals will welcome evidence that helps them achieve their goals, but they will only use the evidence if it is easy to access and formatted in a way that makes it easy to use in the context of their job. The organizations most successful with data-driven HR make sure that decision-makers are enabled with the right skills, and their dashboards create the best experience for users to find the answers they are looking for.

To hear more on this topic, for the upcoming webinar (or listen to the recording), “” on January 26, or visit .

Effective data visualizations can also help drive meaningful change — in our own lives, at work, and in the world around us.

Consider one of the earliest examples of an infographic: that proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, how poor hygiene was killing more soldiers than combat. Talk about persuasive! It didn’t take long for the British government to effect changes in sanitation for the troops, saving countless lives.

Contrast this with the failure of Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, who in 1846 tried to use overwhelming statistical tables to convince the medical community in Vienna, Austria, that deaths among women in childbirth plummeted when doctors washed their hands before treating them. Because of how he had presented it, even medical experts could not understand the practical application of Semmelweis’ statistical data.

Why Pictures Are Worth a Thousand Words

New studies show that the in terms of what reaches the brain and how quickly. It takes only a few hundred milliseconds for raw visual stimuli to reach the brain and be processed and filtered for what is important. In contrast, reading lots of text takes time and uses different parts of the brain.

However, not all data visualizations are good or effective at conveying the big “So what?” of large volumes of data. You need to apply what is referred to as , which describes how humans perceive visualizations in relation to other objects and environments and see structure, logic, and patterns. Gestalt theory suggests that human brains are built to make sense of complex images — even if that means organizing parts of images and filling in gaps where needed — to create a new, organized system of understanding. This helps to explain how different people looking at the same complex image can “see” and “understand” different things from it.

Brain Science Can Help Create Compelling, Easy-to-Understand Data Visualizations

Whether you are a data scientist that needs to create better human resources (HR) reports or an HR leader seeking to use data-driven insights to persuade or inform more effectively, applying Gestalt principles of design will help you create visualizations that are more compelling and easily understood.

A simple Internet search will take you to content about laws such as:

• The law of proximity: People perceive visual elements in terms of their spatial proximity. The more closely positioned elements in a data visualization are to one another, the more the brain will perceive groupings and layer meaning upon them.
• The law of similarity: The human brain wants to group together things that look similar, even when they technically are not. To tell a clear story with your data visualizations, use this to your advantage by making elements that you want readers to group together similar in color, shape, or size.
• The law of closure: When the human brain sees complex arrangements of visual elements, it will create recognizable patterns and even fill in blanks to create a complete image that makes sense. So beware of incomplete data plots that readers’ brains can potentially fill in incorrectly.

The point is, the readers of reports all have brains hard wired to make sense of complex images such as data visualizations. By applying Gestalt principles to how you create data visualizations, you can make it faster and easier for readers’ brains to interpret your data visualizations quickly and correctly – and thus understand and remember your big “So what?”

When you combine Gestalt design principles with findings from the latest research on design variables, such as using color versus black and white visuals, you can really hone your data visualizations to get readers’ brains firing on all cylinders. For example, studies show that:

• Colored visuals vastly increase people’s desire to read content.
• Combining content with images drives a spike in view rates.
• Posts with images more than double engagement rates.

Next-Gen Reporting Tools Make It Easier to Tell Rich Stories

Next-generation reporting tools such as the , which works across the 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors solution suite, and the solution, which supports cross-topic analytics, enable these types of data visualizations.

For example, stories in 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors People Analytics allows users to leverage their people data to make better business decisions across all HR disciplines; for example, by visualizing demographic data with recruiting and compensation data. Similarly, 51·çÁ÷Analytics Cloud allows users to cross-reference HR data with other enterprise data, such as finance data, to create revelatory report visualizations that tell stories with real business value.

Imagine, for example, crossing external workforce spend data with finance data to better understand total spend, when spend occurred, and by which departments. The visualizations generated from crossing such data can enable more effective workforce planning and more accurate budgeting.

Visit to learn more.

Data and analytics presented visually make it easier for decision-makers to grasp difficult concepts or identify new patterns and are easier for humans to perceive and digest. Where possible, consider using data visualizations over text in reports and always consider how it will look on a computer, tablet, PDF, or a mobile screen.

I recently had the opportunity to speak to Mike Hoekstra, People Analytics lead at GP Strategies, to discuss how to use and create stories to share data that may have traditionally been “just a report.”

Q: I hear a lot about visualizations and storytelling when it comes to data. What does that mean?

A: The brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text and 90% of data transmitted to the brain is visual (“Communicating Through Data Visualization,” Gartner 2019). Simply put, you will not be able to effectively influence others with data dumps alone. Effective data visualizations are imperative!

That said, the amount of data that HR teams are amassing in their 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions is enormous. There are many potentially impactful insights that can be pulled out of this treasure trove of data, but you need the right tools to create effective visuals and craft stories around these outputs to have an impact on your audience.

How are stories in 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors People Analytics different from the existing 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions? And how can it help customers create visualizations?

Like the existing reporting tools, stories are included with your 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors module licenses. Queries are built upon your 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors transactional data and data access is protected by role-based permissions.

The stories in 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors People Analytics include the capability to create bold, impactful charts and dashboards with data from across the 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors portfolio. They use modern visualization tools from 51·çÁ÷Analytics Cloud and provide end users with the ability to easily interact with the charts and dashboards created.

In addition, 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Onboarding (formerly 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Onboarding 2.0) reporting is exclusively available in stories. And beginning in June 2021, learning data will become available.

In this pandemic era, the strategic spotlight has been shone on many HR programs, including employee experience, wellness, and skill development.Ěý However, HR is not always perceived as a strategic leader. How can a 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors People Analytics help change this?ĚýĚý

Indeed, HR is often challenged by an administrative or operational perception, and still today the impact of their value-add programs is not always appreciated.Ěý In a recent pulse survey, 95% of CHROs felt that they played a lead role in their organization’s response (“The 2020 Lesson for HR: Think Big and Play the Long Game,” KPMG, August 2020).

However, the C-suite is still skeptical of HR’s strategic abilities: About 60% of CEOs and executive vice presidents still consider HR to be an “administrator” rather than a value driver (“The Future of HR in the New Reality,” KPMG, October 2020).

The ability for HR to showcase its strategic side hinges on being able to timely and accurately report on people data to demonstrate its impact.

Who can HR impact with stories in 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors People Analytics?

I’d argue that every single employee in an organization should be using data to make decisions. With stories in 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors People Analytics, you can share reports and dashboards with any employee in your organization and they will see only the data that is permissioned to them. You can get interactive visualizations and stories into the hands of nearly anyone in your organization, including line managers, division heads, and senior leaders inside and outside of HR. The potential scope of influence for HR is nearly limitless!

How are stories in 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors People Analytics different from 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics? Do stories replace 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics?

No, stories do not replace 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics. Both solutions provide the ability to create dynamic visualizations with your HR data. But while story queries are against live 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors transactional data, 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics extracts your data and transforms it into time-trending metrics and dimensions for more strategic analysis, including benchmarking, and can include non-HR data as well.

Since stories will eventually replace the existing reporting tools, some customers are concerned about needing to recreate dozens or even hundreds of reports. How do you suggest they approach this transition?Ěý

First, the sunset of the existing tools is likely years away, so you don’t have to immediately recreate your reports in stories. That said, now is a good time to begin to learn about story features in 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors People Analytics. Upon seeing the dynamic capabilities of stories, customers often quickly think of a dashboard or analysis that would be a good fit and then use stories to develop and share it. Going forward, existing reports can be recreated in stories over time.

Tammie Eldridge works in Solution Marketing at 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors.

The problem is that every organization is unique in ways that are often not appreciated. Each business has its own culture, strengths and weaknesses, geographic context and impacts, internal and community dynamics, and more that influence what works – and what doesn’t – from an HR perspective. Equally important, organizations continuously evolve, so strategies and actions that worked yesterday may not work in the future.

The big “so what” is this: When HR professionals make their decisions based solely on their training and experience – even when tempered by the recommendations of others – it can lead to unintended outcomes. Experiences and assumptions must be tested within the current context in each unique business using people analytics.

I like to think of this testing process as “myth busting,” which was popularized by the beloved show that goes by a similar name. In the HR world, this means using models of actual employee and organization data to test assumptions and gut instincts. The results are often surprising – and lead to different decisions and better outcomes for employees and the business.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it’s not. The 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics solution is so incredibly intuitive that just about anyone in HR can use it – no analytics training or expertise required. Plus, it comes with more than 2,000 prebuilt HR metrics. To help focus on the metrics that matter most, the “” brief includes a series of questions designed to help you and your organization understand HR metrics and help you make decisions that will support your executive strategy, drive revenues, manage costs, and mitigate human capital and business risks.

To understand the power of people analytics and why myth busting is more important than ever, consider the findings uncovered by an 51·çÁ÷customer using 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics. We showed them how to test widely embraced assumptions and preconceived notions within the HR department against actual business data. Here are just a few examples.

Assumption: The Best Source of New Hires Is Your Current Employees Through Employee Referrals

When we looked at the data for this company, this was not necessarily the case. The best referrals came from top performers only; people referred from average performers did not typically become top performers and turned over at twice the typical rate.

Assumption: Commute Time Is a Key Driver of Turnover

This assumption did prove to be true. The data showed that for this business, turnover correlates to both commute time, travel cost, and geographic location, but not directly to distance. Using 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics, the business was able to filter for various variables and identify real drivers of turnover as it relates to commuting.

Assumption: Employee Equity Awards of Any Size Increase Retention

At this company, this proved to be true. Giving employees equity in the business through stock, for example, was highly correlated to employee retention.

Assumption: Industry Experience Is a Key Factor in Successful Salespeople

At this company, this long-held assumption did not prove to be true. In some positions studied, salespeople with little or no industry sales experience outperformed seasoned salespeople. This freed HR and hiring managers to focus on a new set of candidates for sales positions and increase the likelihood of having high performers.

Assumption: Previous Work Experience Can Be an Indication of a Candidate’s Future Performance and Expected Tenure

This is a logical and common assumption that did not prove to be true at this business. 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics revealed that, for this company, previous work experience is not an indicator of future performance or even tenure.

Assumption: The Longer a Person Is with the Company, the Better Their Performance Will Be

Again, this is a logical and common assumption, as employees tend to know their job better over time. But 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics revealed that for this business, this is not true. The analytics showed that Millennials reach peak performance at one year in a position; after that, boredom sets in and they are ready to change jobs and learn something new. For older workers such as Baby Boomers, they reach peak performance at three years in a role. HR was able to use these data-driven insights to help create an evolving job program for Millennials and Baby Boomers that timed job changes around their respective peak performance timeframes.

It’s important to note that these analytics results are unique to this business. Another firm in the same industry or other geographic location may uncover very different findings, which would in turn result in very different decisions by HR professionals. Every business needs to understand their own people-related data using people analytics.

Did any of these findings surprise you and challenge your assumptions and experience? What kinds of assumptions and preconceived notions – many based on logic and past experience – might you be bringing to your decision-making process? I encourage you to become an HR myth buster by adopting 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics. To learn more, visit us online at .

Tammie Eldridge is in Solution Marketing at 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors.

The funny thing is, in most cases, HR staff already has all the data they need, lots of it. They just don’t know how to turn it into insights when they need them most – in the course of their day-to-day work. In recent years, organizations have made vast improvements in collecting and managing their data, including HR and people data. But most of it is stored in silos, making it almost impossible to provide the holistic view of how the organization is doing and what actions to take in the future to realize business goals.

And without these insights, they are back to making countless decisions based on gut instinct, intuition, and habit. This can lead to less-than-optimal outcomes not just for the business, but for employees as well. For example, an HR professional may assume the best recruits come from employee referrals, which may not be true, or falsely assume that industry experience is a key factor in hiring successful salespeople.

There’s a sign I have that captures the gist of this problem very well. It reads, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, what the heck happened?” When people make decisions based on the insights they’ve gleaned off the surface of things and the habits they’ve developed over the years, they are making decisions based on their intuition, not the hard evidence data can provide. Their insights and habits form the edges of the mirror, constraining their view and limiting their insight to only what they can see in front of them: themselves, their knowledge, and their gut instinct. When their decisions don’t yield what they expected, they say, “What the heck happened?” Even the outcomes can be hard for them to explain.

HR analytics vastly expand what HR professionals can see and understand. In fact, with the right solutions, they can even get 360-degree views of their workforce, departments, teams, individual employees and contractors, and more. When built-for-purpose HR algorithms crunch all this data, the constraints of the mirror’s edges are gone. HR staff and executives can see and understand things that their natural mind and eyes would never be able to discern. They can make data-driven, unbiased decisions by looking at metrics, running scenarios, and predicting expected outcomes. And this empowers them to be more effective, unbiased, and strategic decision-makers who are not only more effective HR professionals, but better strategic advisors to the business. For example, they can:

• Identify the promotion rate of minority employees at different levels.
• Monitor employee engagement to see if it increased or decreased in the last 12 months, six months, or three months.

The challenge, however, is making it easy for HR professionals to access and consume HR analytics – without having to bother IT for custom reports, data models, and other costly resource- and time-intensive requests. They need analytics at their fingertips, all the time.

At SAP, we work to solve this with the 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics solution. 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics connects your people, data, and ideas from multiple sources to help enable fast and confident decision-making. It allows users to discover, visualize, plan, and predict, all in one place. And it works to democratize analytics so that anyone – even nontechnical HR professionals – can access and use it with ease, every day.

51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics helps you gain the insights you need to lead your workforce, accelerate change, and drive results with:

• Standardized HR metrics: Take advantage of an extensive catalog of more than 2,000 pre-delivered HR and talent metrics. Each metric is described in terms HR professionals understand so they can interpret outputs with ease and make faster decisions.
• Data trending: Track trends through time and across different periods, such as annual, quarterly, monthly, and seasonal time models.
• Actionable analytics: Answer key questions about your workforce and spot risks and opportunities rapidly with visual, interactive HR analytics.
• Integrated data foundation: Integrate data from multiple systems to create a solid data foundation and rely on 51·çÁ÷software to help manage data quality.

I invite you to explore the “” whitepaper, which includes a series of questions designed to help you and your organization understand HR metrics and help you make decisions that will support your executive strategy, drive revenues, manage costs, and mitigate human capital and business risks. This document provides helpful tips to avoid one of the biggest risks in deploying a workforce metrics capability: “information overload.”

Find more information on this topic on the .

It was not a huge surprise to learn that analytics was at the top of the list given the number of decisions human resources needs to make on a daily basis.

I had a chance to chat with to discuss people analytics. Dias is the managing director of and the chair and founder of the . He specializes in supporting businesses to make better HR decisions using people analytics and enabling a data-driven HR culture.

Q: Analytics and data mean different things to different people. Cutting through the hype, what is people analytics and data-driven HR?

A: If you strip away the hype and the buzzwords, the practice of people analytics and data-driven HR is really about enabling organizations to make better HR decisions. Whether we are talking about dashboards created in 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics, reports created in Stories in People Analytics, data science done in python or anything else, if we [people analytics professionals] are doing our job, we will increase the likelihood that HR decision-makers make the right choices.

Recently there seems to be more urgency and importance about using people analytics. Why do you think that is?

I think there are a few reasons for why these topics have become more important in recent years. Firstly, and obviously, there is the general awareness of data and how most HR functions want to be seen to “do” analytics.

Secondly, and more practically, HR decision-making has been in the spotlight recently. Arguably, many issues organizations have related to – things like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter – are the result of historically poor decision-making and businesses will need to make better HR decisions to fix them. At the same time, organizations that could make better HR choices during the COVID-19 pandemic were more likely to succeed in 2020. Even now, business and HR leaders are making decisions that will directly impact how effective their workforce can be in the “new normal.” What HR leader would not want to make better, more informed, and fact-based decisions and increase their chances of success?

What types of decisions can organizations use analytics to answer?

Any time a decision is made about the workforce, there is the potential to use data and analytics to make a better choice. When you look across the entire employee experience, organizations make thousands of HR decisions – from high level, once-a-year decisions about strategy to detailed, daily decisions about recruitment. When we meet with CHROs and their teams, we can usually identify hundreds of decisions from these leadership teams alone. The real trick is to prioritize decisions and HR questions and then decide on the most appropriate analytics to answer them.

Is there a difference between reporting and analytics? How should businesses choose which one to do?

Reporting and analytics are very closely related, as they are both about providing someone with evidence so that the decision-maker can make a better choice. If you were building a vision or strategy for data-driven HR, personally I would include them both.

The difference between them is usually the nature of the decision being made and the nature of the metrics being provided. Reporting is usually about providing transaction data to a decision-maker so that person can make a choice about their team or division. Normally the context is quite straight forward, as are the metrics, like simple headcounts, ratios, and percentage breakdowns that 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors customers can access from Stories in People Analytics.

The analytics component of your data-driven HR strategy will probably be more strategic in nature. It will involve looking at historic data and trends in order to make decisions about HR strategies and policies for the future. Emerging analytics teams might focus on dashboards and reports in 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics for example, but in many modern functions they will aspire to aid more important HR decisions using more complex evidence based in data science and statistical modelling.

Do you have any tips for 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors customers that want to adopt a data-driven approach to HR decision-making?

I would encourage any organization to build an adoption and change management plan dedicated to data-driven HR. Many businesses think that simply implementing an analytics or reporting tool will be enough, but it usually is not. An organization will need to enable people decision-makers with the right skills and behaviors to embrace a data-driven approach.

Don’t worry though – most HR decisions and questions that people analytics will help with are already being made. You just need to find them. And once you successfully created the foundations of data-driven HR and people are making better choices, it is like cumulative interest in a savings account – as your teams make more and better decisions, you will see a higher return on your analytics investment.

If you would like to hear more insight on this topic, be sure to , “Debunking the 5 Common Myths about Workforce Analytics” on April 13, at 11:30 a.m. ET or visit our .

In this environment of rapid change, it is imperative that organizations become more adaptable and agile in order to maintain a market advantage. Although most companies view organizational agility as a key initiative, few feel as though they are ready to face that challenge in their current state.

This is because the way organizations are traditionally organized worksĚýagainstĚýthis very goal. Steep hierarchies and departmental silos encourage employees to not speak up or go against the grain, causing organizations to carry on “business as usual” without appropriate knowledge regarding failures or shortcomings.

It is for this reason that some organizations are choosing to completely reimagine the way that work gets done. There is a occurring that is de-emphasizing “jobs” while emphasizing the work that needs to get done and the skills that are needed to complete the work in the most optimal way.

One essential component of this work revolution is gaining the ability to “team” in a dynamic way. A Dynamic team may not exist on an organizational chart or have a formally assigned leader, but there is a common purpose, a common goal, and work that needs to get done.

I recently sat down with to discuss these “Dynamic teams.” Sendra is an HR research analyst on the 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors HR Research Team, leading the Enabling Dynamic Teams research program. The purpose of this applied research program is to better understand and enable Dynamic teams to be effective and successful.

Q: There seems to be some confusion around terminology. What exactly is a Dynamic team? How does a Dynamic team differ from Agile teams?

A: Great question. We have defined Dynamic teams as a broad, umbrella term, which generally describes teams that do not exist on an organizational chart, but rather are naturally formed by a group of people coming together to get work done.

A good example I like to use is the numerous “COVID-19 response teams,” which were built rapidly order to address the COVID-19 crisis. These teams tend to be self-managing, cross-functional, and are tasked with doing types of work that do not have one “right answer.” Of course, Dynamic teams are “agile,” meaning they are efficient and adaptable, but they are not “Agile,” which causes confusion.

Agile teams are teams that specifically follow the Agile methodology. Agile teams are typically more rigid in their structure, are characterized as having defined roles and processes, and almost always have formally assigned leaders. In speaking to customers, we see many business leaders saw the benefits of Agile teams and sought to implement them into other departments, such as recruiting, marketing, sales, and HR.

However, the Agile methodology was created to suit a very specific context and did not always translate perfectly. The result of this is that many departments kept the parts of Agile they liked while ditching the parts they deemed unnecessary. For this reason, many of the Dynamic teams we see utilize some Agile terminology (such as, calling the teams “squads”), but aren’t truly Agile teams.

If Dynamic teams are necessary for driving adaptability and innovation, what is stopping companies from leveraging Dynamic teams?

Unfortunately, despite the benefits of Dynamic teams, there are many barriers that exist both from an employee and HR perspective that prevent organizations from leveraging these sorts of teams effectively. All of our HR systems and technologies have been created with individuals and traditional teams in mind. From the HR perspective, we hear a lot of concerns about visibility. If the team doesn’t exist on the organizational chart or in any HR system, how can we track performance, distribute rewards, or provide feedback?

From the employee’s perspective, the biggest challenges are much more tangible in nature. When teams need to come together quickly to get work done, there often isn’t time to get to know one another, to understand everyone’s backgrounds and expertise, or to agree upon tasks, roles, and processes. Additionally, people participating in Dynamic teams are typically balancing the demands of the team with the demands of their “traditional job role.” When their performance on the team isn’t linked to their KPIs, it can be easy for the team’s demands to become less of a priority.

The result is that Dynamic team experiences can feel chaotic, disjointed, and unorganized. In order to begin to leverage these teams successfully, we need to start building technologies and processes to support them appropriately.

You mentioned how technology may help improve the experience for Dynamic teams. What sort of technology could help to enable these teams?

From the HR perspective, technologies such as opportunity and talent marketplaces can help to connect some of the dots in terms of sourcing and tracking these teams. However, from the employee perspective, we really need to go back to basics. Dynamic teams can really leverage technologies like 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR, which can provide them with a space to come together to find experts, Ěýcollaborate and share knowledge, come to an agreement about goals, roles, and processes, and get work done.

Due to the intuitiveness of 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR, Dynamic teams can define what content should remain within the team and what can be shared publicly and communicated accordingly. This kind of technology can also help to provide managers with insight into the work that their direct reports are doing on Dynamic teams so they can better leverage that information when providing rewards and recognition.

To learn more about our research on Dynamic teams or any other of our research programs, please check out our .

Also plan to hear Sendra and Stephanie Craig from 51·çÁ÷Solution Marketing talk more about this topic during aĚý.

On the other hand, deskless workers complete most of their work tasks away from a desk and company headquarters and often lack consistent access to information, communication technology, and their company’s internal systems. Some examples include retail store workers, manufacturing workers, and salespeople. Since deskless workers are typically not located at the corporate headquarters of a company, they are “out of sight and out of mind.” Unfortunately, this often translates to less priority and resources as well as a less positive employee experience than desk-based workers.

I recently sat down with to discuss the deskless worker. Hesley is an HR research analyst on the 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors HR Research team, leading the Supporting the Deskless Workforce research program. The purpose of this applied research program is to better understand and improve the employee experience of the deskless workforce.

Q: When we think of the word “deskless,” it seems that there would be many different types of deskless workers with different employee experiences. Is there value in differentiating between the types of deskless workers?

A: Yes, deskless workers vary considerably. Unfortunately, the business, press, and other organizations often treat them as one workforce segment, but the value of differentiating between them can be helpful to better understand their work context and improve their employee experience. Because of this, the HR Research team developed a taxonomy of deskless workers. This taxonomy has three dimensions that create the various profiles of deskless workers.

The first dimension is duration, which can be either short term or long term. Short term is defined as working in a burst of one day or less before returning home, while long-term deskless workers work away from their homes for more than a day at a time.

The second dimension is location, which can be onsite or offsite. Onsite deskless workers work at primarily one place of business, while offsite deskless workers may travel to various locations to complete their jobs.

The third and last dimension is customer interaction, which can be high or low. High customer interaction deskless workers interact with the ultimate consumer of their company’s goods or services, while low customer interaction deskless workers work in roles that are more “back of house” and not customer facing. For example, a retail store employee would fit into the high customer interaction, short-term, onsite profile of the taxonomy, while a manufacturing deskless worker would fit into the low customer interaction, short-term, onsite profile.

Tell me more about the Supporting the Deskless Workforce research program. What are some themes that have emerged so far?

This research program has two parts: the qualitative interviews to gather HR’s perspective on managing and engaging their deskless workforce and a global survey, which is currently in data collection, to gather the deskless worker perspective. Themes that emerged from the interviews with HR are a lack of strategy related to deskless workers, persistent challenges in communicating with deskless workers, and issues related to providing deskless workers access to HR technology.

It sounds like many HR professionals mention how difficult it is to consistently communicate with their deskless workers. How is HR responding to this challenge? What can be done in the future?

Yes, that’s correct. When talking with HR, the second-most cited challenge to supporting the deskless workforce was communication and information dissemination. Several HR professionals mentioned that, because of reasons such as cost, security, and IT infrastructure, their deskless workers do not receive a company-issued e-mail address, making communication that much more difficult. Therefore, many of these companies have resorted to using supervisors as the only channel to communicate with their deskless workers.

This lack of an adequate communication channel then contributes to the third-most cited challenge: connectivity to the company culture. Since HR is unable to consistently communicate with deskless workers, this leads to an inability to keep these workers connected to the company culture as a whole.

I do believe this is where technology can play an important role in facilitating communication with and engagement of the deskless workforce. HR technologies that do not require a corporate e-mail address, such as 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR, can help companies address these communication and information dissemination challenges. As a result, this can keep deskless workers connected and engaged with the company’s overall organizational culture.

Does HR believe technology is an answer to this challenge? If so, what does the ideal deskless worker technology look like?

Deskless workers make up as much as 80% of the world’s workforce, yet only of software investment is targeted towards solutions for these workers. In our interviews with HR, as much as 59% of HR said yes, they believe technology is the answer to communicating and engaging more effectively with their deskless workforce.

HR claimed that the ideal deskless worker technology would:

• Be simple, personalized, and engaging to use in the flow of work
• Provide a secure, unified experience with everything employees need to do their job in one place – including, but not limited to, HR applications
• Intelligently surface employee-relevant recommendations, insights, and actions
• Provide cross-departmental guided experiences that simplify complex processes
• Enable top-down and two-way employee communications, keeping them abreast of strategic programs and processes as well as collaborating and learning from one another

51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR works to address these features. The site provides an intuitive digital workplace experience with easy access to relevant business applications and processes, information, and communication in a unified entry point for work – with the employee at the center no matter what device they want to use to access it. It empowers teams and departments to effectively communicate and engage with employees without requiring IT infrastructure or support and extends across the entire organization to streamline processes with customizable, guided experiences that make disparate systems interoperable to present a simple and easy experience for the employee.Ěý Employees can also create communities where they can share knowledge and experiences with rich multimedia and micro-learning capabilities, helping to enrich critical programs such as onboarding and training.

And what’s better, 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR does not require a corporate e-mail address. Once an employee logs in they have access to the information they need based on their role – and interests. It is clear HR faces significant hurdles when trying to best support the deskless workforce, but it is clear technology is an integral part of the solution moving forward.

To learn more, Dr. Autumn Krauss, principal scientist of the 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors HR Research team, on January 27, 2021, at 11:00 a.m. for the LinkedIn Live event, where Dr. Krauss will share more insights and best practices from the Supporting the Deskless Workforce research program.

For more information on 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR visit . Also, find more resources related to this research program, as well as other active and past research programs, on the 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors HR Research team’s community .

This current crisis is not only changing how we work, but also creating new demand for tools to organize our work.

I recently sat down with , managing partner of the People Advisory Business at AKT Global, to discuss this topic. Bernstein is a thought leader on this topic and has worked with many multinational organizations, re-engineering their HR and people processes and systems, reshaping their HR functions, and supporting customers with their change management requirements.

Q: How can HR organizations leverage a “new normal” employee experience?

A: In comparison to numbers pre-pandemic, we see that nearly half of employees work remotely at least some of the time during this pandemic and will continue to work remotely post-pandemic period.

This means that HR has some imperative actions to take, from identifying critical skills and competencies to adapting current and future leadership, among so much more. Crux to this is employee experience – creating new employee journeys for the remote world, providing flexible work options, and rethinking experiences for a remote or mixed workforce.

But this isn’t a new situation for HR.

COVID-19 is new for everyone, so how is HR different?

I’m not saying that the impact of the pandemic isn’t new for HR, but the need to deliver a more employee-centric experience has new urgency. We have seen leading organizations embracing this and have been encouraging our customers to adopt. In the digital age, making things easy, fun, cool, and simple is essential in the workplace, especially since it is made up of a large and growing portion of millennials and the younger iGeneration.

Just go to Amazon, Netflix, Apple, or any other online retailer and see how easy it is – easy to find what you are looking for and easy to complete a transaction. These digital giants have gone as far as pushing content based on your personal profile and buying patterns, giving you suggestions for related goods, waiving shipping costs, and providing options for preferred delivery. Their online experiences and customer service centers are also typically hassle-free. And even now during the pandemic, we hear that these leaders are thriving, with Amazon’s third-quarter earnings soaring with a 37% increase in profits.

Their customer service representatives are measured on customer satisfaction, rather than the speed of call completion and the size of the sale. This is known as the “low effort customer experience.”

Simply put, the low effort experience means creating and delivering an easy customer service that is catered to the needs of the customer, rather than focusing on the most cost-efficient way to deal with him or her.

These low effort experiences your employees have gotten used to outside the workplace redefine their expectations. Your people expect simple, intuitive, easy, and online interactions with HR.

So, what defines “effective” in HR service delivery today is not the same as before. And the digital age propels HR organizations to seek out relevant low effort customer experiences and rewrite what “good” now looks like for both employees and managers.

How do organizations achieve this low effort employee experience?

HR needs to transform in order to deliver on this vision by empowering all employees to manage their HR and work at any time and from any device. At AKT, we believe making the employee experience simple, instant, and intelligent is imperative. Organizations should design HR processes from an employee’s perspective – just like their regular work – rather than submitting to the fragmented process ownership between corporate functions and internal and external service providers. And we instill both low effort thinking and digital mentality, coupled with measurement tools, into the HR organization.

This becomes the case pre-, during, and post-pandemic. By taking a holistic view of the employee experience, supported by cross-organizational partnerships and enabled tools to deliver on those many moments that matter, organizations can improve the employee experience and drive employee performance while paving the way for a more digital workplace.

To learn more, join Bernstein and Andy Shean, chief expert of Learning and Engagement at 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors, on November 17 at 1:00 pm ET for the “” presentation, where they will share their insights on how to truly create and implement an integrated, employee-centric, consumer-grade experience using 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR.

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Digital innovation has led far too many employees to the unintended consequence of digital burnout.

With earnest intentions, companies offer employees applications that are supposed to improve productivity and communication, especially in light of a large remote workforce. Instead, these applications can slow down employees as they hunt for information and face unnecessary processes.

Most workers log into 10 or more applications at the workplace, according to one report* sponsored by IDC research and SAP. And employees are even more reliant on digital work tools when working from home. On top of home responsibilities and the isolation many remote workers feel, while working from home, according to Monster.com.

At the same time, people want the freedom to choose the applications that they prefer. Each employee has their own view on how they can be their best on the job.

Whether people feel overwhelmed or overworked, the workforce needs an unparalleled employee experience. To help, what can human resources (HR) leaders do to improve and simplify their digital workplace experience?

One materials science company shared that its HR employees could easily build their benefits enrollment page for each geographic region, eliminating the need for a third party and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. This also enabled greater communication and engagement with the entire workforce, including those who might only have access to a phone and also do not have an email address.

To simplify the employee digital workplace experience, HR leaders should assess how employees are getting their work done and how it is affecting their employee experience.

Expect and Demand a Consumer-Grade Experience

In their free time, employees can share photos and communicate with their loved ones quickly and easily. They should have that same kind of ease of use when it comes to collaborating with colleagues, viewing a pay stub, or booking a training course.

HR leaders should invest in tools that allow employees to hyper-personalize their digital workplaces in meaningful ways. That means enhancing their personal productivity with comprehensive, personalized access to everything they need to do their job.

Capabilities on Any Device

Employees should be able to manage HR-related tasks and specific work applications from any device so they can work productively from anywhere. The recently launched 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR is one tool that helps them do just this.

On one company’s shop floor, for example, line workers who only had access to mobile devices were previously limited in collaborating with other employees and their managers. With 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR, employees have access to the information they need to perform their jobs. For example, in addition to the private recipes needed to manufacture their products, they can also access certification training and new skills needed to perform their job.

HR has the ability to promote various programs and company information to further engage employees and align everyone to the organization’s brand and strategy.

Easy Access to Relevant Apps and Information

HR leaders should look for simple access to relevant business apps and more in a unified entry point for work, with the employee experience as the top concern.ĚýEmployees need an intelligent workplace that streamlines work to create a unified experience across software landscapes and third-party apps.

For business continuity and emergency preparedness situations, organizations should be able to rely on a single platform as a unifier of information. This should be true for multiple applications, collaboration, and updating policies. With a single source of truth, companies can move faster during an emergency.

The materials science company mentioned earlier is relying on 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR for communication regarding changing COVID-19 information. The company can use it for additional capabilities to execute its employee programs in a simplified digital workplace experience.

In addition to the applications available within, 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR supports continuous learning, employee onboarding, cross-boarding, and off-boarding with the same simplified interface it uses elsewhere. It can provide access to community and affinity groups that provide a safe place for employees to ask questions and pursue interests – from building community to volunteering.

The ultimate benefit of all this is a better employee experience and, with it, a better customer experience and company performance. By improving the digital workplace experience, HR leaders can:

• Enable people to work smarter and faster from anywhere
• Engage employees with top-down and two-way communications
• Foster a culture of continuous learning
• Optimize employee onboarding, cross-boarding, and off-boarding
• Support remote workforces flexibly and securely
• Proactively monitor and improve the employee experience

HR leaders have multiple tools at their disposal to understand and foster the employee experience. While 51·çÁ÷Work Zone for HR creates the digital workplace experience to improve productivity, software from 51·çÁ÷and Qualtrics measures the employee experience. HR leaders can gain insights and measure employee engagement across the entire HR life cycle.

They now have the opportunity to provide a simplified digital workplace experience when their people need it the most.

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*IDC document #US46188420BROI, IDC Research sponsored by SAP, “The intelligent digital workplace, leading the way to the future of work, April 2020”

After reading several articles about how organizations are struggling to prove the impact of corporate well-being programs – or justify why they even have them – I was glad to have had the opportunity to sit down with someone who conducted research on the very topic.

is an industrial and organizational psychologist dedicated to bridging the gap between academia and industry. Her research, consulting, and teaching roles focus on workplace health and well-being, diversity and inclusion, and employee assessments and development, and she is currently consulting at the and teaching at . Here, she shares her insights on the research she has done to help prove why well-being programs are a critical part of an organization’s strategy.

Q: What got you interested in researching how well-being programs impact recruitment?

A: The talent wars are on. Skills gaps and low unemployment rates require organizations to develop and market an attractive employer brand in order to stay competitive. It is increasingly critical that organizations develop and market themselves as a place where people really want to work. This was made truly salient to me when I worked as part of the 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors research team from 2015 to 2018. I had the opportunity to speak with dozens of [51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors] Recruiting customers, and I listened to them describe the challenges of building a quality candidate slate to meet their goals.

I also had the opportunity to interview benefits and wellness directors and heard them explain time and again that their workplace well-being programs aided recruitment. I appreciated the expertise and experiences of those making these claims, but as a scientist in the field I had to ask, “Is anyone measuring this?” They were not. I wanted to know, “Are these claims evidence-based?” “Is there research to support these claims?” So, I looked.

Where and how did you start?

Workplace well-being is an area of increasing importance in recent years, with a growing number of companies offering benefits to support employee work-life balance and wellness. For example, in 2019 68 percent of companies offered telecommuting options and . An abundant stream of research points to numerous individual and organizational outcomes related to these benefits, including links to burnout, organizational commitment, turnover, and health. It is clear that work-life and wellness programs are beneficial, but the research has largely neglected to consider how these benefits can influence what happens before an individual is hired.

Concurrent with my work at 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors, I was preparing to complete the last requirement for my PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, a dissertation research project. Motivated by my conversations and experiences with customers, I designed my research to test the assumptions that well-being benefits positively influenced recruitment efforts, and to investigate why. I valued the expertise of the directors I had interviewed, and I wanted to provide them and others the empirical evidence for making their case.

Using a rigorous experimental design, * my research supported practitioner assumptions that companies offering work-life or wellness benefits are seen as more attractive. Potential applicants were also more likely to take action to pursue employment. But why? Results revealed that well-being benefits had a significant impact on perceptions of employer brand.

What did you find?

Similar to product marketing, marketing of an employer brand should consider three things: function, symbolism, and experience. First, what are the functional considerations of employment, such as location, pay, benefits? Second, what is the symbolic value, or, in other words, how does this employment connect to a person’s self-identity?Ěý Imagine an employee of Apple versus Goldman Sachs. You likely conjure up images of two different types of people. Last, what does a potential job seeker imagine it will be like to work for your company?

Results from my study indicated companies offering work-life or wellness benefits were perceived as having higher functional value in terms of benefits. But they were seen as being more exciting and sophisticated, and it was expected that employees would be treated better.

The takeaway: Don’t underestimate the power of your benefits programs for developing a competitive advantage in your candidate slate! Well-being programs signal to prospective employees what it will be like to work for your organization. Build these programs and get the message out there.

To learn more, read the brochure: .

Follow Dr. Pytlovany on Twitter at .

Tammie Eldridge is director of Solution Marketing for 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors.

*More than 400 participants were presented with one of three recruiting advertisements: 1) a job ad listing traditional job benefits, e.g., health insurance, 401k; 2) a job add listing work-life benefits, e.g., flexible work hours, remote work options; or 3) a job ad listing wellness benefits, e.g., stress management resources, gym membership.