Today, both employees and consumers hold organizations to higher standards. Just as consumers want to spend their money with companies they trust and believe in, employees want to earn theirs from an organization that aligns with their values. In fact, almost of people report that they wouldn’t work for a company that doesn’t have a strong purpose.

Business success is no longer measured by profit alone – instead, it’s defined by the impact an organization has on every part of its ecosystem. People sustainability – the intersection of employee engagement and corporate responsibility – is critical to building a future-ready workforce and requires an organization to consider the policies and experiences of people across their entire value chain. A comprehensive people sustainability strategy can help increase overall environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics, drive business outcomes, and build a better, brighter future. 

Good for People, Good for Business

People create new business models, lead critical initiatives, and effect change. With a people-first approach, organizations are more resilient, more capable, more innovative, and more motivated to deliver on sustainability goals.

As the “people” experts, HR plays an important role in driving people sustainability. And with the right technology in place, it can start to take a more unified approach to people-centered initiatives. This looks like: tapping into new and diverse talent pools, empowering employees to learn and grow throughout the employee lifecycle, and creating a fair and equal workplace culture where everyone feels a sense of belonging. This not only benefits employees – it benefits business.

Forward-thinking organizations like are already moving the needle on people sustainability. MOD’s mission goes far beyond serving delicious pizza – it believes that companies can and should be a force for good in their communities. “Our purpose is to create a place that includes everyone,” Dayna Eberhardt, chief people officer of MOD, tells 51ˇçÁ÷Chief Marketing & Solutions Officer Julia White in a recent interview for .

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The key ingredient to MOD’s success is its people. MOD is not only committed to investing in its current employees through continuous learning, development, and career advancement, but it also strives to provide opportunities to those who typically face barriers to employment. This includes, for example, individuals who have formerly been incarcerated or have intellectual or developmental disabilities. Today, 99% of company-owned MOD stores have hired people with employment barriers. These hiring practices have led to a more engaged, empowered, and equitable workforce. “Our MOD Squad with barriers have a higher sense of belonging, a faster rate of promotion, and a higher retention rate,” Eberhardt says.

Opening the door to opportunity is just the first step to workplace equity, which is why MOD makes the employee experience a top priority. When outdated HR processes were slowing down its recruiting and onboarding, MOD chose to help redefine the value of HR data and processes, empowering the company to put its 10,000 – and growing – employees who make up the MOD Squad at the heart of its business.

And this is a difference MOD’s customers can taste. “When we take care of our people, our people take care of our customers, and the business takes care of itself,” Eberhardt says.

As we move into an uncertain future, companies like MOD that are actively prioritizing people, making positive impacts on the communities they serve, and taking real steps towards zero inequality will be best positioned to meet the business needs of today and tomorrow. And by putting people at the center of business – in purpose, culture, and technology – these organizations can create a more sustainable workforce and world.

Aaron Green is chief marketing and solutions officer for 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors.

Let’s turn the spotlight to discover how this crisis can create new opportunities for companies and individuals. Here, Gitte Winther Bruhn, global head of Social Responsibility Solutions at SAP, Alexandra van der Ploeg, global head of Corporate Social Responsibility at SAP, and Robert Richardson, HR tech strategy advisor, discuss the importance of . This transition will help us protect our planet, our environment, and the “safe space for humanity” – our society, our friends, and our families – for the next generations to come.

Q: ​​​​​​​When we hear about the consequences of climate change, the social implications still don’t seem to surface in conversations as much – and certainly not as an opportunity. Can you offer some insight into what’s below the surface and why there is an important opportunity we should push above the horizon?

​​​​​​​Winther Bruhn: When discussing climate change, we mainly address carbon emissions, not the impact on humans. We have an opportunity to address human inequality alongside climate actions through an inclusive green economy. Human talent will be crucial for the transition, as a greener economy requires new, green skills – both for emerging jobs and for existing jobs that are evolving. The green and critical transition will be impossible without a suitably trained workforce. forecast that by 2030 the global human talent shortage will be more than 85 million people, or roughly the same as the entire population of Germany. And 85% of these jobs have not even been invented yet. Demand for talent is outpacing supply and will impact society and businesses. This is a challenge, but it provides us with an unprecedented possibility of job creation.

For example, making a carbon neutrality commitment requires significant changes to business operations. Companies must measure emissions, create action plans, execute change, measure performance, report results, and iterate. We need to reimagine training and reskilling for the global workforce. To understand how green skills are applied in jobs, pinpoint where gaps arise and what actions we can take to bridge them. An inclusive green transition could in the next decade but requires significant investments in reskilling.

Green skills are the building blocks of the green transition to unlock the human capital that will power it – in a just way that leaves no one behind. For example, the transition to a green economy remains the best hope for . It would create new jobs and bring more investment to Africa in the long term for the continent’s sustainable development. This is crucial for Africa with approximately 70% of the population below the age of 30 and new entrants joining the workforce every year. UNEP estimates that expanding solar and wind capacity in Senegal will create up to 30,000 additional jobs by 2035.

​​​​​​​We see three key players in this transition: government, employers, and individuals. What are the biggest challenges and tasks for employers in this transition?

​âśÄ‹âśÄ‹âśÄ‹âśÄ‹âśÄ‹âśÄ‹RžąłŚłó˛š°ůťĺ˛ő´Ç˛Ô: It’s great to see the thousands of companies making carbon neutrality commitments. Most companies don’t yet have the requisite knowledge and skills to achieve their commitments though. , such as specialized data analysis focused on emissions and energy use, specialized hardware expertise focused on installing energy-monitoring modules, communicating and marketing with an understanding of how sustainability messaging is perceived in specific markets, and so on.

Three important focus areas for companies are:

• Good job design: Jobs should be designed with the right requirements in mind. Some roles will require deep sustainability specialization, but most will simply require some sustainable competencies to ensure the whole company is rowing in the same direction. Data scientists don’t necessarily need a sustainability degree. Product sourcing specialists don’t need five years of experience in a social responsibility department to purchase less carbon-intensive products and services. Good job design can reflect these requirements to encourage upskilling, attract talent, and allow for the assessment of candidate fit.
• Attracting talent: Attracting talent goes beyond publishing jobs. Candidates regularly review a company’s sustainability commitments when considering where to work. CHROs and talent acquisition leaders who ensure their recruiting brand brings sustainability messaging front and center will disproportionately win over these candidates. People want more than a check; they want to make a difference. But candidates are skeptical of greenwashing. So, prove it by engaging in good job design and touting sustainable commitments and achievements.
• Developing talent: Just as companies can conduct a job design audit of skills required to achieve sustainability goals, they can also audit their people skills. Knowing the skills you require – job design – and the skills you have – people skills – elucidates the gap an organization needs to fill to accomplish its objectives. Candidly, this can be daunting without sophisticated software and machine learning capabilities required to streamline the process. But it’s worth it. Knowing your skills gap is key to delivering effective, personalized upskilling and reskilling programs. Individualized learning, goals management, and performance management drive employee engagement, retention, and achievement of sustainability objectives.

Currently, green job growth is outpacing the labor market’s ability to keep up. Organizations focused on thoughtful job design, recruiting marketing, and personalized, data-driven talent development will have the best chance of achieving their sustainability goals.

​​​Now that we have talked about the employers’ opportunities and duties in their own company and operations, what is the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in this?

van der Ploeg: In most companies, corporate social responsibility teams are responsible for overseeing and implementing a company’s social and environmental initiatives and, therefore, play an important role in supporting the green transition and addressing the skills gap and shortage challenge. The CSR strategy should acknowledge the interconnections of societal, environmental, and business challenges alike. So, CSR teams can set the stage for their own company and partner with others to reach joint sustainability goals. 51ˇçÁ÷has already successfully done this by integrating social responsibility into its sustainability framework.

A company will not only be impacted by the talent shortage in its operations but also in its partner network. It’s relevant for all stakeholders in the economy and it’s evident that the talent crunch is driven by a shortage of skills, not people. Plenty of people are willing to learn. That’s why, in their own interest, corporations should bring all of their assets to support the provision of quality education. CSR teams and their networks have the expertise to run such strategic programs. Last year, for example, , focusing on employability. This year, 51ˇçÁ÷and Generation Unlimited will pilot a program to support ‘learning to earning’ pathways for underserved young people in the digital and green economy. They’ll learn the hard and soft skills needed to become employable.

The consequences of climate change and other global developments such as the COVID-19 pandemic, often affect the world’s poorest. Any detrimental impact on economic or ecological systems will damage the social systems and disproportionately affect generally marginalized communities. That’s why our pilot focuses on marginalized youth in Nigeria, the Philippines, Kenya, and South Africa – with the goal of reaching more than 500,000 young people in the first year. They will get foundational knowledge and 51ˇçÁ÷skills to open a pathway to a successful career in the 51ˇçÁ÷ecosystem, along with on-the-job experience, coaching, and mentorship to help them launch their careers. This truly will be a win for the program, as 51ˇçÁ÷will see skilled young people in the ecosystem helping our partners and customers in their digital transformations and on their path to achieving their sustainability goals while providing the young talents better possibilities to have a career, earn a living wage, and live a decent life.

​​​​​​​What responsibilities and opportunities do you see for governments in this transformation?

​​​​​​​Winther Bruhn: The transition is a unique opportunity to mature functional labor markets with sophisticated, educational, and inclusive social protection systems and a future-proof workforce. Today, many commitments to international agreements are made without reference to the implications on labor markets and skills and training needs. to link employment to action to address climate change and provide a significant driver for green job creation. To succeed, good coordination of policies and actions across government ministries and the private sector, including employers and workers, is needed to prevent and reduce skills mismatches.

I want to briefly mention one last key player, ourselves. Our actions do matter, as they collectively can lead to political change. We all need to embrace the change and the opportunities that come with the transition to a greener economy. We need to make choices on home heating systems, how cars should run, and reflect on our diet to avoid high-emission foods. We need to be proactive, take ownership of our own skill set, and embrace career flexibility. We need to internalize a mindset of lifelong learning.

To conclude, it is essential for all stakeholders, including governments, businesses, and workers, to collaborate on a new social contract and ensure we move forward together – toward a future that works for everyone.

Simone Maienfisch is part of New Business & Industry Strategy at SAP.

Yet we know that the principle is not enough. Talking about it is not enough. Good intentions are not enough. Doing the actual work to define and measure equity across the organization — and to correct if and where necessary: that is what’s required.

At SAP, we are constantly looking at ways to do that work, and we have spent a lot of time focusing specifically on fair pay. 51ˇçÁ÷Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Supriya Jha has written about our multi-year journey tackling this issue, as well as how we’re ensuring the results of our efforts are transparent. That visibility is critical to empowering all of our employees worldwide.

As part of that journey and our commitment to visibility, our organization recently took steps to measure our progress on fair pay. Here is what we found.

An Inside Look Into Pay at SAP

As Supriya outlined, our organization undertook a global statistical analysis in mid-2022 — an analysis that will now be conducted annually — to examine pay against comparable roles.Ěý The analysis found that our employees are paid fairly for equal work in more than 99% of cases.

But our team wanted to go deeper. So, we commissioned an additional U.S.-focused study, which refined the lens to focus on groups where we knew industry-wide systemic barriers to equal pay were more likely to exist. We were thrilled to find similar results.

This research aimed to determine whether there were any statistically significant inequalities among employees performing comparable work, specifically with respect to both gender and race. It found that nearly 99% of 51ˇçÁ÷employees in the U.S. are paid fairly. We adjusted the compensation of employees who found themselves in that narrow minority.

Fair pay is part of SAP’s moral and structural integrity for the long term. We do not just want employees to feel appreciated, we want them to feel empowered, and part of career growth conversations means having open dialogue about salary and compensation. Employees expect — and deserve — to have confidence in the measures in place that will reward strong performance while also paying equitably.

Simply put, we must consistently and regularly review our pay practices to ensure there is equity across the entire system.

An Outside-In Analysis of DE&I Efforts

And yet, we also know that the full picture is much bigger than just pay equity. Organizations must address the systemic and cultural factors that create, or potentially limit, access to career opportunity — those key moments in the hiring, career development, and promotion process that influence how it is someone finds themselves with a certain opportunity in the first place. Take this study for example: a statistical analysis on fair pay across similar roles starts with the assumption that to begin with everyone is already in the best job for their skills and potential.

As we outlined last week, this broader focus is where some of the more complex and difficult change must occur, given its connection to social relationships, networking, mentoring, potential bias, and other nuances that can be deeply ingrained in existing work structures and cultural norms. Some of the areas we are continuing to investigate within 51ˇçÁ÷North America include:

• Succession planning, which literally foretells the future of the entire organization. It starts with elevating potentially “lesser known” folks, with intention. Are we painting a picture of what we want our leadership — and, by extension, our team — to look like?
• Talent funnel, where proactive measures build out diverse pipelines, so “less traditional” talent sources are no longer seen as risky choices, but instead understood for their inherent value. A tip for hiring managers: the level of diversity in your network is key to building high-performing teams in your future!
• Working parents and caretakers, who must be well-supported and cared for at work and at home. Ensuring policies and benefits are designed to support those dedicated to care taking and family-friendly needs.
• Access to opportunity, because too often it is not just what you know, but who you know, that connects you to an opportunity. Mentorship is important, but sponsorship is fundamental.

As we continue to synchronize this holistic view at SAP, we are intentional about fully realizing the power of the diverse communities we want to foster. Though this journey continues, we are proud to humbly continue getting better at making diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) at SAP.

Lloyd Adams is president of 51ˇçÁ÷North America.
Megan Smith is head of HR for 51ˇçÁ÷North America.

It is important to us because our business is built on trust with our colleagues. That trust leads to high performance and gives us a competitive edge for both talent retention and attraction.

In January 2022, we published a fair pay statement, explaining our philosophy and principles around fair pay. It outlined our efforts to create a culture of equity and inclusion, and a promise to ensure our compensation practices are transparent. Our fair pay motto is “aggregate, don’t segregate.”

In April, we reported that 99.8% of our employees around the world had transparency on their pay range. We also launched a new annual global statistical analysis and made pay equity adjustments.

Even with such positive results, however, it’s still not a time for chest thumping. Among professionals who have a career focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I), we know how easy it is to regress. And we have no interest in going backwards. We must continue to raise the bar and push ourselves.

Our current compensation results are not a coincidence and did not happen overnight. We have prioritized fair pay through implementing a global job architecture and global grades framework. We have pushed pay range transparency for employees. We’ve targeted salary adjustments to pay range minimums for those employees whose compensation was below the range. And since last year, we committed to annually reviewing internal pay leveraging statistics to ensure employees are paid appropriately.

At SAP, “fair pay” is more than reducing the gender and ethnicity pay gap. For us, it means focusing on the processes, programs, and guidelines across the organization. We are pushing ourselves to examine the tools leaders use to ensure talent is treated fairly, and that employees with an exceptional work performance are rewarded accordingly.

Fair pay also is about rewarding individuals based on their unique contribution and impact in their teams and the overall company.

We are so committed to promoting pay equity that we’re sharing our insights with others.

Business Beyond Bias features in our 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions work to help eliminate the inherent biases around age, race, ethnicity, differently abled, and LGBTQ+ communities in HR processes. Our software helps companies uncover unconscious bias in calibration and compensation decisions. It shows where an employee’s pay stands relative to the rest of their job family or group within the company. In addition, it allows you to pull in external market pay information into the compensation worksheet to provide additional data points for ensuring fair and equitable pay decisions.

We’re moving toward a day when equitable pay for all people will no longer be an issue but a basic right for every individual. Until then, we’ll keep working on it.

Supriya Jha is chief diversity and inclusion officer at SAP.
Chetna Singh is senior vice president and global head of Total Rewards at SAP.

For too long many companies have taken advantage of their people, simply because they could or because they were too slow to recognize the importance of culture and leadership. The power dynamic has shifted from government to employer to employee to a whole new power base and hierarchy: employee to employer to government. Add to this severe talent pool shortages brought about by demographics, geopolitical change, digitalization, and a new generational attitude to formal sector employment – in short, a shift to the experience economy around late 2016.

Companies most impacted by the Great Resignation are those with attitudes like “If you don’t like it here, you can get a job somewhere else,” those that don’t treat their people like human beings but rather as disposable capital line items. Frontline workers suffered the most in the past, but since 2014 the power balance tipped more and more to these employees and away from leaders and the organization’s human capital management (HCM) function. What we’re experiencing now is the first of a potential series of great corrections – and the risk of not addressing it poses a serious sustainability and growth risk for companies.

The workforce across all ranks now has much more power and influence. After the pandemic, many employees are now saying “I don’t want to be treated this way and I would rather have no job than this job!’” Prior to the pandemic, fear of the unknown was enough to keep somebody in an “OK” job. But, people were furloughed, some lost their jobs, and many who didn’t lose their jobs were still distressed and fearful. Suddenly, the unknown became a lot less scary, and when employers now offer them “OK” and “unknown,” they are choosing “unknown.” It is no surprise that so many people are leaving their jobs.

The Great Resignation is a sustainability warning to companies that have not focused on culture and leadership for a while. It is a great opportunity to double down to give people a workplace with a culture and climate in which they want to work and want to do the kind of work they feel is meaningful to themselves and their company.

The workplace is an environment of the leadership and employer’s own making. Employee experience affects all levels, not just junior employees but also more senior leaders whose high number of resignations is being coined the Grey Resignation. The Grey Resignation will hurt business as much as the Great Resignation.

When most leaders speak of challenges in finding the right talent, there’s a greater than average chance that they’re really talking about digital skills. This is understandable: we largely operate in and are moving further towards a digital world. In this digital world, organizations need the ability to create experiences that keep customers returning and employees engaged. This also means an increasing reliance on the organization’s ability to rapidly and successfully deploy new applications and services, based on leading technology.

However, there is more than one elephant in the room. One is that the skills needed are often the preserve of young people. The assumption is that the valuable digital skills are based on the technology with which those newer to the workforce grew up. These capabilities are highly prized and, if they can’t be obtained through hiring, can be developed through training programs for young people.

Yet while there is certainly appetite for employers to provide up- and reskilling support to those newer to the workforce, it is a benefit that is highly valued across all demographics. According to aĚý, more than half (57%) of all workers say they are “extremely” or “very” interested in participating in upskilling programs, with Ěý53% of those aged 55 and above view upskilling as “very” or “extremely” important.

And yet it is the latter that are rapidly exiting in the workforce. This Grey Resignation represents a huge loss of talent, experience, and networks that cannot be easily replaced. For the most part, businesses are in danger of overlooking this before it is too late. The issue is exacerbated by culture debates and oversteer policies in an accelerated attempt to rectify diversity and inclusion targets since historically the older worker will predominately identify as male.

Why can’t older talent be easily replaced? Because so much of their capability is founded in deep-rooted experience and knowledge that is not easily collated and shared by formal means or automation. Some industries have been struggling with this brain-drain for several years, even those at the forefront of innovation such as the technology sector, where even losing the few people that understand how legacy systems work can raise a major barrier to technological progress.

Losing inherent knowledge and experience is always a concern whenever a person leaves. When a whole demographic heads for the door, it has the potential to be catastrophic, both for the employer in question and the wider ecosystem.Ěý Relationships between customers and suppliers can start to break down as all the informal working practices – the bonds built up over time – disappear in an instant. These are intangible and hard to identify, let alone track, but they are a key part of commercial success and so they must be protected.

It’s important to understand the drivers behind the Grey Resignation. Some are like those mentioned above: a pandemic-prompted realization that the old ways of working do not fit with modern life, that the unknown is actually not as scary as once thought, or simply a deeper understanding of what they individually want to get out of work and life.

Like every other demographic, older workers have been exposed to new approaches to work since 2020. For some, it will have been a blip; others may well have found that remote or hybrid working suits them better.

This could be particularly true for employees that have had to balance demanding careers with caring for both elderly parents and helping with young grandchildren. The door to a more balanced way of life has been opened and people do not want to move backwards.

Some have felt forced out by changes in management and a need to cut costs during lockdowns. Voluntary redundancies and early retirements were common options during this time of urgent fiscal prudence, with many older workers feeling pressured to leave the workforce while their younger colleagues were put on furlough.

These insights are broad, and specific analysis is required in every company where there will be patterns and variations between sectors and, especially within different business functions, demographics or geographies of the companies themselves. As such, employers will need to proactively gather information to build a clear picture of what the specific drivers and motivations are that make it hard for them to retain experienced talent.

Some businesses might already have a good understanding of what’s driving out their experienced employees, but for many the mass exits may be unexpected. ĚýClearly if these companies wish to grow, this sustainability issue needs to be addressed:

• Analyze and prioritize what’s happening on the ground and why particular groups of employees may have resigned. Predict which remaining employees are at risk of leaving (flight risk analysis).
• Identify demographically similar groups of employees.
• Determine priority and build tailored flight risk mitigation approaches for each demographically similar group of high flight risk workers, based on their motivational drivers to leave the business.
• Base remediation plans on each individual employee’s motivation to possibly leave the business.

How Can 51ˇçÁ÷Help?

There are several 51ˇçÁ÷products that can help and their value is, not least of all, that they can integrate natively with one-another:

can help transform people data consolidated from multiple sources as a trusted demographics data source and identify demographically similar groups of employees.

Experience insights gathered from employee feedback to measure sentiment, satisfaction, and engagement (the greatest predictor of flight risk) can be conducted with Employee Experience Management Solutions from 51ˇçÁ÷and Qualtrics. ^Ěý

Predictive capabilities in can leverage employee survey results to create a flight risk prediction, like “who might leave the business and why?”

Armed with demographically similar groups of employees and a tool that predicts who might leave and why, organizations can then design a series of specific talent management remediation strategies to stave of potential further resignations.

Implementing each of the integrated human experience management (HXM) approaches identified to prevent resignations is the sweet spot and strength of . This is also the same world-leading integrated talent management toolset that is best placed to transform the culture and climate in the organization to help ensure future bulk resignations are far less likely.

Learn more at .

Kim Fischer is people analytics architect at 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷customers and partners, to prioritize digital inclusion as foundational to the achievement of their sustainable development goals. 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷Can Help

In 2020, 51ˇçÁ÷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. 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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.

51ˇçÁ÷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. 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics using the standard 51ˇçÁ÷Analytics Cloud connector.

While trying to understand employee sentiment on workplace and flexibility preferences, a survey was created using Employee Experience Management Solutions from 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷Business Technology Platform, specifically 51ˇçÁ÷Data Warehouse Cloud, and anonymization views were defined to protect actual home addresses from being shown. Real-time 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷solutions, including 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions on 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷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 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors.

With the the fourth quarter rally ahead and the holidays nearing, workplace stress levels are climbing as employees return from fall business conferences, strive to meet year-end deadlines, balance family commitments, cope with economic uncertainty and endure an unending health crisis. For global knowledge workers, distributed teams across time zones can mean long hours of emails and video conferences, further compounding stress.

Research and people stories are gaining attention, like Rachel Feintzeig’s , which suggests more rest may be the key to better health and improved productivity in the future of work.

SAP’s Take

Dr. Natalie Lotzmann, chief medical officer and global head of Health, Safety and Well-Being at SAP, believes that creating a healthy, caring culture in which people can thrive and live a fulfilling life in spite of a highly competitive environment ensures that our people run at their best. She counsels employees and people managers and promotes the value of healthy habits like preserving restorative rest.

What rest and recovery look like can vary from individual to individual. According to Lotzmann, recovery can be active, like playing sports, or passive, like sitting in the park. What is more important, she said, is that the person has a regular rhythm that involves periods of task-related concentration, offset by experiences that require a shift in focus to something that has a calming effect, like a walk outdoors, time with a pet or a yoga session.

“Everything that is in a healthy living balance has an underlying rhythm,” Lotzmann said. “It’s not important exactly what it is that you do. The most important thing is that there is a healthy rhythm.”

Micro-breaks are very short breaks that employees can take throughout the work day. As an example of a micro-break, Lotzmann said, “The easiest thing is just to stop, take a deep breath, and look out the window at something in nature. Consciously watch the trees bending in the wind or the birds flying by. Continue breathing and let your mind float. Reflect on what really matters to you in life. Be grateful for what you have. For most people, this is the perfect way to get distance, calm down and reset your brain.”

Research suggests that taking micro-breaks of 10 minutes can improve engagement and motivation. The longer the break, the greater the increase in performance. may include stretching, nutritional intake like coffee — in moderation! — and a snack, or a social activity not centered on work-related topics. Less beneficial are cognitive activities like reading the news, surfing the web, online shopping or banking, which can leave people more depleted, especially under demanding workloads.

Benefits of Rest for Productivity

At SAP, the health management team champions rest as the key to supporting healthy distance. “Rest enables you to have healthy distance, to keep things into perspective and to reflect and recharge. You need healthy distance to make the best decisions possible,” Lotzmann said. “The more you are drawn into a stressful situation without that healthy distance to reflect, the higher the possibility that you will act toward a win-lose or even lose-lose outcome. In a state of healthy distance, you are in a position to realize what really matters, what it takes to resolve the situation toward a win-win outcome or how to turn the challenge into an opportunity.”

An unspectacular example of where healthy distance is useful — and that is likely to be familiar to knowledge workers — is the email chain conversation with many people on copy that takes a sharply negative turn. Lotzmann said that without healthy distance, an automated reflexive reaction of cause and effect leading to escalation is more likely to happen. However, after a moment of restorative rest to gain healthy distance,Ěý people are more likely to respond thoughtfully and achieve better outcomes for all. The distance allows us to realize the big picture, to step into the shoes of a participant or to think about the right person to talk to before taking reflected action.

A healthy and balanced mindset allows targeted action toward the best possible outcome for all.

Micro-Breaks, Supported by Technology

To support and business agility, an organization has a responsibility to empower employees and enable them to take care of themselves. Workplace culture plays an important role in encouraging people to create balance in their lives. However, people will not take time for rest if they believe they will be punished, consciously or unconsciously.

A new crop of workplace technologies is helping employees, many of whom work remotely, to integrate micro-breaks into their day in a way that encourages building healthy habits. 51ˇçÁ÷recently launched a global pilot project to introduce micro-breaks supported by technology that integrates into its online collaboration platform. For those preferring mindfulness, guided meditations by SAP’s own mindfulness trainers are available both as regular sessions as well as via a well-known app on demand.

“My advice is to try it out and decide if it is helpful for you,” suggested Lotzmann, who understands that technology-based prompts may not appeal to some employees. She also has another food for thought, “As we are human beings — and social beings — the most powerful reminders for breaks are other people.” She said that if you can include family, friends or colleagues into your taking-a-break-habits like going for a walk together, participating in a virtual yoga class together or simply reminding each other to take a break and have a chat — most people can build healthy habits more easily in togetherness.

“For many people, this is a great key to do it right,” she added. “The more we talk about taking meaningful breaks and share how we take them, the more likely it is that it really becomes a personal healthy habit in an overall healthy corporate culture.”

Contact:
Ilaina Jonas, Senior Director of Global Public Relations, SAP
+1 (646) 923-2834, ilaina.jonas@sap.com

Operating in a socially responsible way strengthens an organization’s brand reputation. Job seekers and consumers today want to support organizations that stand for something important and that are making positive impacts on society at large. Investors are putting more emphasis on sustainable development goals with a significant increase of focus on social impact. Human rights and environmental regulations are increasing rapidly. All of this demands a more sustainable approach from CEOs and business leaders.

People, Planet, and Prosperity

When you hear the word sustainability, the first thing you may think of is recycling or environmental sustainability, but sustainability is about so much more than eliminating single-use water bottles and reducing fossil fuel consumption. A holistic approach to sustainability incorporates social, environmental, and economic sustainability – or people, planet, and prosperity.

Organizations are increasingly recognizing the need to be as focused on social, or people, sustainability as they have been on economic and environmental sustainability – all three together support and drive business sustainability. People make up society, impact the environment, and power the economy. People are at the heart of any strategy to make progress on sustainability goals. In today’s workplace, HR has both the opportunity and responsibility to ensure that people are at the center of work by creating an environment in which the workforce, and the organization, can thrive.

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Defining People Sustainability

People sustainability focuses on treating people – those within an organization’s workforce, across their supply chains, and in the communities in which they operate – ethically and fairly.

Just as environmental and economic sustainability require careful preservation and use of natural and financial resources, people sustainability requires treating people and human potential as precious resources that must be supported and valued to drive resilience, agility, and achievement of sustainability goals.

Companies that prioritize people sustainability, by creating social impact and building a more diverse and inclusive culture, are able to boost employee engagement and productivity. They’re also better positioned to attract and retain talent. Penny Stoker, global talent leader at EY, unpacks how .

Unpacking the Six People Sustainability Pillars

The 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors HR Research team has identified six distinct areas, or pillars, that comprise people sustainability. Although the areas are distinct, it is also clear that there is overlap between these pillars. At the center of them all, of course, is culture – as it drives so much behavior both within and outside an organization. Let’s unpack these areas a bit in the context of HR and people processes.

Health and Safety
At a minimum, you need to ensure the workforce is safe from physical health and safety hazards and has access to basic necessities. Does your onboarding process provide new hires with appropriate safety training and equipment from day one? Do you have visibility into your total workforce, including their locations? Knowing who and where your workforce is at all times allows you to react quickly in times of crisis and provide support where needed.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Here the focus is on treating each individual, regardless of social identity group or belief system, fairly and equitably and ensuring they feel a sense of true belonging. Are you able to attract and engage job seekers from diverse backgrounds? Do you have a standardized selection and interview process? Do you provide pay transparency? Are you measuring and tracking diversity, equity, and inclusion goals?

Well-Being and Balance
Beyond basic health and safety, this area focuses on ensuring employees’ holistic well-being – psychological, social, financial, and career – is prioritized and supported with the necessary tools and resources. Do you offer a comprehensive benefits package with compelling options? Do your employees feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work? Have you fostered a culture of continuous dialogue between managers and their reports?

Trust and Transparency
The focus here is on employees having a voice, understanding how key decisions impacting them are made, and trusting their organization to act in ethical ways. Do you regularly listen to your employees and act on the feedback they provide? Have you established policies and processes for the ethical use of intelligent technologies and data privacy and protection? Do you publicly publish diversity metrics?

Empowerment and Growth
Here employees are provided the clarity, support, and tools needed to grow their skills and are empowered to influence their career trajectory. Are you offering inclusive learning options to meet the needs and learning preferences of a diverse workforce? Do you ensure managers provide equitable and actionable feedback to their teams? Are you providing equitable access to development opportunities?

Organizational Purpose and CSR
In this final pillar, the organization is actively working towards giving back and making a positive impact on the world; employees are encouraged to participate and feel energized by the organization’s mission and values. Do you ensure individual goals are aligned to company objectives to increase sense of purpose and meaning in work? Are you providing your workforce the space to pursue their passions?

What Can Organizations Do to Drive People Sustainability?

In most organizations today, different parts of the business lead these efforts with minimal awareness of or collaboration with each other’s strategies. However, we have to start somewhere. The most logical first step is to understand where you are today. Do you have a unified strategy – at least across some of these pillars? Start the conversations and begin to break down organizational silos.

Prioritize people, and planet and prosperity will follow. This is what it means to be a resilient, results-driven, and people-first organization. One that’s not only equipped to meet the business needs of today, but one that adapts to the business needs of tomorrow.

To learn more, watch a replay of the SuccessConnect keynote, .

Kim Lessley is global director of Solution Marketing at 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors.

It is defined by the impact an organization has on every part of its ecosystem: workers, supply chains, communities, and the environment. Yet less than one percent of organizations today are fully aligned to all 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

We know that getting this right — or wrong — has real implications. As organizations increasingly shift their strategies toward a triple-bottom-line approach focused on profits, planet, and people, it’s this last pillar that is intrinsically part of the other two despite being historically overlooked. People make the decisions that impact our environment. People design and execute the strategies that drive results and profits. And people are ultimately responsible for how we shape the future of our planet.

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Introducing People Sustainability

At SuccessConnect, we introduced a new term to guide organizations on their journey to create a future-ready workforce and a more equitable world: .

People sustainability is the intersection of employee engagement, empowerment, and corporate responsibility. It is defined as treating people — within an organization’s workforce, across their supply chains, and in the communities in which they operate — ethically and fairly. Just as environmental and economic sustainability require careful preservation and use of natural and financial resources, people sustainability requires treating people and human potential as precious resources that must be supported and valued to drive resilience and agility — and the future we all wish to see.

At SAP, we define people sustainability through six core pillars. While there may be even more considerations when you think about the broader social sustainability umbrella, we determined that these are the most important pillars organizations can focus on right now to help people thrive:

• Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DE&I)
• Well-Being & Balance
• Trust & Transparency
• Health & Safety
• Empowerment & Growth
• Organizational Purpose

A Focus on People Sustainability Can Improve Overall ESG Metrics

New * and commissioned by 51ˇçÁ÷demonstrates that by focusing on the needs of the people in their workforce, supply chain, and communities, organizations can drive positive results for their organization and the environment.

In other words, invest in your people and the results will follow.

Despite criticism of the current state of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, the growing social and economic pressures from investors, employees, and shareholders for organizations to show how they are addressing inequity and climate change while maintaining growth indicates that ESG is here to stay. In fact, a McKinsey report found that expect that ESG programs will contribute more to shareholder value in five years than they do today.

A holistic people sustainability strategy can help organizations improve their ESG metrics across all three pillars of people, profit, and planet. Our research found that more than 86% of respondents believe that investment in people sustainability, as outlined above, can drive positive economic and environmental sustainability outcomes.

Furthermore, people sustainability pioneers, or those with the most mature people sustainability strategies, are 30% more likely than followers, those with the least mature people sustainability approaches, to include people metrics in their ESG reporting. This suggests that the pioneers see the value in demonstrating their commitment to inclusion, engagement, and well-being as an integral driver of their overall ESG success.

The results speak for themselves: our research found that employees of people sustainability pioneers reported higher employee job satisfaction and productivity, are less likely to leave their jobs, and are more enabled to achieve their career goals.

Developing a Holistic People Sustainability Strategy

We’ve established why people sustainability is important, but how can leaders successfully incorporate it into their organization? It requires substantial behavioral change combined with employee engagement and the right technology. According to our research, more than three quarters of respondents at all levels — executives, managers, directors, and frontline employees — believe that behavior change is necessary at all levels of the organization.

Part of this change is approaching people sustainability holistically. The six pillars we’ve identified already exist; however, they exist in silos, operated by different teams and measured with separate goals. Our research demonstrated a notable difference between pioneers and followers in how they approach this challenge: 80% of pioneers believe that addressing people sustainability with a single, unified strategy is more valuable compared to only 61% of followers.

One manufacturing employee surveyed as part of our qualitative interviews put it best: “It’s not even a question anymore. You can’t do social sustainability in isolation. You can be the best company in the world, but if your supply chain is not on board, then it doesn’t mean anything.”

While this won’t happen overnight, a unified approach will produce the rewards organizations need to build the resilient, results-driven, and people-first culture needed to meet business demands. A unified approach to people sustainability will have a positive impact on critical business KPIs, according to the research, including financial performance (71% of respondents agree), employee job satisfaction (78%), employee engagement (76%), and brand reputation (75%).

People Sustainability Helps to Change Work for Good

A sustainable workforce drives a sustainable business. At SuccessConnect, we introduced new capabilities within the 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors Human Experience Management Suite that can transform how organizations can manage their talent. Collectively, these innovations use data and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand every individual’s whole self — their skills, interests, aspirations and much more, even as they change over time — and then use that to match them with opportunities over the course of their career.

When we think of the challenges organizations face today — the skills gap, hiring challenges, and a rapid pace of change — the ability for people to move and grow within an organization is how we will successfully build diverse teams, drive growth and learning, foster belonging, and increase organizational agility.

This is why a unified people sustainability strategy is paramount to the future of work. You cannot make progress on DE&I without trust and transparency. Empowerment and growth are limited without clarity on organizational purpose. Bringing it all together is what creates a resilient, results-driven, and people-first organization — one that’s not only equipped to meet the business needs of today, but one that can learn, grow, and adapt to meet the business needs of tomorrow.

Read the “” IDC Document # US49724322 and join the on October 27, 2022.

Aaron Green is chief marketing and solutions officer for 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors.

*From May through August of 2022, IDC conducted qualitative and quantitative studies of employees and business leaders across multiple countries and industries; two focus groups in the U.S., 16 in-depth interviews with executives across three regions, and a survey of more than 3,500 employees and business leaders in 11 countries across NA, EMEA, APAC, and Latin America.

51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors’ vision for the future of work brings together cloud technology, data, and analytics to put people at the center of business. “It’s something we put into our product: the capability for organizations to change work for good,” Green says.

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In the post-pandemic workplace, 51ˇçÁ÷has identified people sustainability as a business imperative that is the foundation for all other organizational sustainability goals. Green steps into his new role at 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors at a time when traditional HR tenets are coming under scrutiny and employees are voicing their requirements for flexibility, equitable pay, and purpose.

As organizations cope with market dynamics and a changing workforce, Green sees the opportunity for 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors’ comprehensive global HR platform to drive value for customers by strengthening the connection between HR and business operations, creating both a sustainable workforce and profitable organization.

Closing the Skills Gap to Meet Business Challenges

The skills gap crisis continues to intensify in the post-pandemic world, driven by the unrelenting pace of innovation and the new technologies in the workplace. For stable business operations amid the global turmoil, it is essential that organizations have a sustainable, healthy, and skilled workforce that can readily adapt to change. Helping organizations build new skills and uncover hidden skills in their existing workforce are among the strengths of 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors.

“Organizations are talking about how they skill and reskill people to build that resiliency and redundancy into the workforce, so that they are able to meet the challenges of the future,” Green says. “That’s really where 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors plays a huge role in helping organizations understand what skills they have, what skills they need, and how to close that skill and experience gap.”

Building High-Performing Teams with the Whole Self Model

The right skills alone will not create a sustainable, empowered workforce, as the lessons of post-pandemic work has shown. Employees are demanding to be valued as individuals with consideration for their holistic lived experiences, passions, and characteristics that make up who they are. Without this deep, powerful connection of the employee’s authentic self to the workplace culture, some may say, it’s just a job.

The whole self model is guiding how 51ˇçÁ÷advances the 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors HXM Suite. By creating a way for organizations to identify people’s individual traits, like team strengths and work styles, as well as their passions and motivations, they can improve DE&I, create better work experiences and build high-performing teams. Green says that the benefit to business is “being able to not just capture that data but being able to, at an organizational level, use that data to understand how to construct the best-running teams.”

“What are the psychological, the purposeful attributes, of people that make up a high-performing team? To be able to identify those people inside your current workforce and bring that forward – that’s the [power of the] whole self model,” he says.

Understanding How Cultural Diversity Impacts Global Business

Green’s most recent role at 51ˇçÁ÷was senior vice president and head of 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors, Asia Pacific and Japan. He has spent the last 10 years working and living across the Asia Pacific region, with six of those years at 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors. At the mention of Asia Pacific and Japan, Green beams a smile. “I would say it’s probably one of the proudest moments of my career,” he says, referring to his time spent at 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors in the region. One of the things he found unique about Asia is its cultural diversity. He learned “with that cultural diversity comes different challenges in how you really run an organization and get the best out of your people and also make them feel included.”

Building a diverse and inclusive team was one of Green’s greatest achievements. “I’m really proud that as a leadership team in Asia Pacific and Japan over 46% of the workforce are female,” he says, noting that the global average for female talent in tech organizations is 26%. “That’s not just a reflection of the inclusivity of Asia Pacific, but it’s also the way we as a leadership team make sure our workforce reflects the communities that we operate in and serve.”

Green intends to carry this valuable intercultural experience into how he manages and prioritizes to best serve the 9,000+ global customers of 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors. As he says, “In order to serve those organizations, we have to have localization, that deep understanding of how to operate and how business needs to operate in that global but also very local context.”

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At SuccessConnect today, we announced an incredible milestone: more than 5,000 customers are now using !

This milestone is a celebration of our vast and diverse customer community of people and culture leaders. They are leading their own people transformation strategies while pushing the industry and our product teams to continuously improve how organizations can deliver the best possible experience for their people. And in many cases, the unsung heroes responsible for helping people and organizations navigate change.

The community of 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors Employee Central customers is made up of organizations of all sizes, industries, and regions – including , , , , and to name a few.

Unmatched Scalability to Help Customers Manage Global Workforces

We know that organizations face ever-changing global and local regulations with increased complexity. 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors Employee Central provides the foundation for organizations to truly transform how they manage, develop, and nurture their workforce. It is a hub where all things people and talent : employee data, compliance capabilities, employee self-service tools, organizational insights, and more. And it has unmatched scalability and reach, with availability in 45 languages and localization frameworks in more than 100 countries and territories.

When implemented 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions, including 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors Employee Central, it was able to build a single integrated HR suite that delivers global talent insights, implementing 130 standard global processes and reducing HR operating costs in the U.S. by over 20% after the first year.

“51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors is a truly strong best-of-breed HR solution,” said Marc Farrugia, senior vice president of Culture and Innovation at , a leading owner and operator of manufactured housing communities and RV resorts in the U.S. and Canada. “We realized soon after deployment that the value is easily extensible, and over time have seen how well it supports far-reaching business accomplishments year after year.”

The Foundation for More Sustainable Workforces

The flexible, global, core HR functionality provided by 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors Employee Central is the foundation for organizations to build a more sustainable workforce. With centralized employee data, leaders can connect and extend their people strategy throughout the rest of the organization with solutions like and . Today, we also announced several new advancements to the to help organizations transform how they can use data to help ensure that their employees and teams are skilled and aligned to organizational needs.

, a growing pizza chain across the U.S., chose 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors and 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA Cloud to move to a people-centric and cloud-based approach for HR and the broader business.

“For MOD Pizza, providing exceptional employee experiences is key to driving workforce engagement and business success,” said Tara Gambill, senior director of Enterprise Systems for MOD Pizza LLC. “People data is the lifeblood of the system. With intelligent technologies from SAP, we can create integration end to end, and leverage that data to get people connected and productive faster.”

Moving to the Cloud to Elevate People and Culture

Recognizing the flexibility and agility provided by cloud technology, there is steady momentum around organizations migrating from on-premise 51ˇçÁ÷ERP Human Capital Management (51ˇçÁ÷ERP HCM) solutions to 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors Employee Central. As of today, tha new self-service tool is generally available for 51ˇçÁ÷ERP HCM customers to help prepare this transition. The tool provides insights on customers’ current on-premise landscape — including implementation functionalities, customizations, number of interfaces, and existing data footprints — so they can create an informed migration strategy.

Organizations like Microsoft and have experienced firsthand the , including faster time to innovation, a holistic, up-to-date view of the workforce, built-in mobile functionality, and the flexibility to run a more agile, sustainable business.

51ˇçÁ÷Readiness Check for 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors is the latest effort to help our on-premise customers move to the cloud. With the program, we have increased investment into 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors Employee Central with a focus on the need of 51ˇçÁ÷ERP HCM customers. We continue to work on enhanced data and process integration between on premise and cloud to meet the needs of customers, and we are accelerating investments in and solutions. And with RISE with 51ˇçÁ÷for Human Experience Management, we deliver transformation as a service to provide the solutions, services, and flexibility to streamline the journey to the cloud.

“51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors has made concerted efforts to provide increased transparency and accountability in the implementation process,” said Bonnie Tinder, founder at , an independent review site that helps enterprise software organizations make informed decisions about their implementation partner based on verified customer reviews. “To realize the value of any software investment, you need a successful implementation and a quality implementation partner. 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors partner-led projects reviewed on RavenIntel.com have shown solid performance in overall satisfaction, on-time and on-budget delivery as well as project team quality.”

With more than 5,000 customers using 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors Employee Central, we are grateful for the continued feedback, co-innovation, and collaboration across this growing community!

Hear about how organizations are leveraging 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors Employee Central to transform their people and culture strategies at .

Maryann Abbajay is chief revenue officer for 51ˇçÁ÷SuccessFactors.

How 51ˇçÁ÷Has Built an Industry-Leading Time Management Suite One Day at a Time