It’s difficult to get near-unanimous agreement about anything these days. The importance of employee experience (EX) in driving talent retention and business results is a notable exception.

96% of organizations said EX is important in realizing business objectives and success, according to the Brandon Hall Group study, How HR Can Collaborate on Employee Experience. And 76% of respondents overall said EX is critical.

But there is a catch. HR organizations sometimes look at EX through a different lens than employees, particularly frontline employees and deskless workers who often don’t have the same access to information and digital tools available to them as traditional office workers.

While 56% of organizations surveyed by Brandon Hall Group said they invested in employee training to improve EX and more than 40% cited improved leadership development, wellness, recognition and onboarding programs, only 26% said they improved digital workplace tools to address work efficiency.

That is a sizable gap that deserves attention. Digital workplace technologies are not always top of mind for HR leaders as a driver of employee experience, and only 47% of HR organizations surveyed said there is a strong level of collaboration between HR and IT on digital tools aimed at improving employee experience.

That’s why Brandon Hall Group and Kyndryl, a leading provider of digital workplace services, collaborated on the webinar, Better Together: HR and IT Collaborating to Improve Employee Experience, which is now available for on-demand viewing.

Dennis Perpetua, Kyndryl Vice President and Global Chief Technology Officer for Digital Workplace Services, joined me on that webinar.

“In my experience, the best collaboration generates the best outcomes,” Perpetua told me. “When you are trying to optimize something — like digital tools to help employees — bringing more points of view to the table is critical. When you look at Brandon Hall Group surveys that say 41% of employees don’t feel like they have the optimal tools to do their job, that’s a situation where IT should be at the table collaborating with HR on that.”

It’s important that HR and IT align on the overall goals for employee experience and how technology can support those goals. HR understands employee needs and the human aspects of work. IT understands available technologies and implementation considerations. Collaborating allows each group to lend their expertise.

“You can’t expect IT to understand everything employees go through and you can’t expect HR to be experts on 5G networks, generative AI, Microsoft Copilot and all these different tools that are available. But if you bring the two of us together regularly, that cross-domain collaboration ensures that we can actually optimize the employee experience,” Perpetua said.

It’s not that HR and IT do not work together now. They do. The most common types of collaboration, according to our research is:

• Establishing consistent touchpoints between HR and IT to align on EX goals and strategy.
• Partnering with IT to streamline and modernize HR systems and processes to remove administrative headaches for employees.

What is less common — but would make a big difference in improving outcomes, Perpetua believes — are:

• Cross-functional HR-IT teams working together to manage major EX initiatives from design through change management.
• Working together to pilot changes in technology before full implementation.

Brandon Hall Group’s research also showed that most CHROs — or the executives within HR who are responsible for HR technology — are not often deeply involved in technology decisions impacting employee experience. This means HR is in the position of being largely reactive to technology situations rather than advocating for what workers really need.

The data shows that only 15% of HR executives are deeply involved in EX technology decisions, while 24% of organizations have little or no involvement.

Perpetua said digital tools are critical across the employee lifecycle. “The entire technology experience lays the foundation for how employees generally look at how they are part of corporate culture and how they’re valued, how they’re being enabled to do their jobs,” he said.

Deanna Jones, CHRO of the energy technology company Baker Hughes, concurs. “The employee experience around technology is important and it’s important that everyone who works for us knows it is important to us. Tech needs to be easy, speedy, and useful with a great human interface.”

While HR and IT sometimes appear to be talking different languages — for example, connection and belonging for HR compared to data and security for IT — their missions are actually very similar.

HR, for example, knows that the onboarding experience can make or break the employer-employee relationship. The technology that enables employees to complete their employment paperwork, register for benefits, communicate technology preferences, obtain their employee ID,  and connect with mentors or onboarding buddies, can define the quality of the experience.

It only makes sense that HR and IT work closely together to ensure that the technology is closely matched to the onboarding objectives. “The employee onboarding process is a ripe issue for everybody,” Perpetua said. “There’s not a single customer I have ever spoken to that has said, ‘I’m not interested in that.’”

Another critical area is access to technology applications and resources. At its core, access to technology is an inclusion issue. Perpetua said HR and IT must be aligned on the criteria for access.

“How is access actually structured? Is it by persona? How does access flow into job roles? What level of security is required for different types of employees and technology tools? We have to ensure that we have the right controls around data and that everyone has the right access to tools they need to do their jobs,” he said.

“This is not just procedural. We need to make sure that employees feel as though they have contribution equity into the work products and the outcomes that the company wants. This ranges from the very basic things to having screen readers for how people with certain disabilities are enabled to collaborate and how they can find resources within the company. We need to make sure that the technology access provides equity that is instilled across the organization.”

In the webinar, Perpetua shared customer success stories and I shared data from the EX study, including information on how involved HR is in forging a generative AI strategy and the barriers to maximizing the use of data and analytics to improve employee experience. View it — and get the slides from the webinar as well — here. If you’d like to talk to a Kyndryl Digital Workplace Expert you can schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation today.

The post Better Together: How HR and IT Can Collaborate</ br> to Improve Employee Experience appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

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Topping off a year of high-powered moves that significantly strengthened its position among the top HCM technology brands, UKG announced several partnerships and product enhancements at its annual customer conference, UKG Aspire, Nov. 6-9 in Las Vegas.

UKG, since its formation in 2020 through the merger of Ultimate Software and Kronos, has stood out as a unique tech company that infuses its values of belonging, equity and impact into its technology offerings.

CEO Chris Todd and his team are hyper-focused on delivering HCM and workforce management technologies that empower culture transformation in organizations. As the company’s 2024 fiscal year gets underway, UKG made it clear that the bold innovations of 2023 — which included the launch of UKG One View, a unique multi-country payroll solution — would continue.

UKG announced:

• A collaboration with PayPal that will empower millions of people to directly deposit all or some of their pay each pay period into a PayPal Balance account and use the funds within the popular digital wallet. Not only can employees deposit all or a portion of their paycheck into their PayPal Balance account, but PayPal will, in some circumstances, make anticipated payroll funds available up to two days ahead of time, creating another avenue for people to have faster access to their earned wages.
• A strategic partnership with Eightfold AI, a leader in AI-powered talent intelligence, to help companies transform high-volume hiring by more effectively attracting and engaging high-performing, diverse talent. Eightfold AI’s market-leading Talent Intelligence Platform delivers patented, deep-learning AI to help organizations use a skills-based approach to recruitment. Utilizing the open and extensible framework provided by the UKG FleX platform, Eightfold AI will tightly integrate with the UKG Pro Suite to allow customers to be more intentional and purposeful when hiring, especially at scale.
• UKG Bryte, an AI-powered assistant that uses generative AI (GenAI) to help guide employees, people managers and HR leaders by shining a light on important insights that support great workplace experiences. UKG customers received an exclusive first look at the intuitive experience provided by UKG Bryte at Aspire.
• The launch of the UKG Pro Benefits Hub, which makes it easier for employees to understand the full scope of their benefits options. The hub uses a side-by-side plan comparison tool that helps employees select the best plan possible, whether based on need, budget, or both.
• The expansion of its longstanding strategic collaboration with Microsoft that will utilize the UKG FleX and Microsoft Power Platform to make it easier for mutual customers to create unique employee experiences specific to their business.

Beyond the partnership and product announcements, UKG leaders shared plans and strategies for product and service improvements with industry analysts at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. Here are selected highlights:

Great Place to Work® Everywhere

Todd was not using hyperbole when he called UKG Great Place to Work® (GPTW) a singular asset that no one can reproduce. Since acquiring it in 2021, UKG has expanded its use. With the launch now of the GPTW Hub, UKG offers customers decades’ worth of data on employee engagement and sentiment to help organizations identify leadership and employee experience strengths and areas for improvement through the lens of their workers. At a time when organizations are struggling to retain top talent and hire and keep frontline workers, the data and insights that the hub can provide can be pivotal.

While the hub is a separate product, data and insights from GPTW are integrated across all of UKG’s many solutions, from large enterprise organizations to smaller organizations with 500 or fewer employees.

The focus on frontline workers is particularly important as they comprise close to 80% of the workforce and have traditionally been underserved. While talent attrition in some areas of the workforce has leveled off, companies large and small struggle to find — and keep — frontline and deskless workers. When companies can benchmark their employee experience practices against data with more than 100 million data points, that creates insights that can be transformational.

AI Innovation

UKG doubled its innovation budget in 2023, and it shows. After having seven patents issued between 2007 and 2023, the company filed 24 AI-related patents in 2023 with the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office. Today, the company has more than 2,500 AI models in production.

UKG Bryte, the GenAI guidance system, is built into UKG Pro, the HCM suite for mid-market, enterprise and large enterprise organizations. Its capabilities include high-impact solutions, such as leadership development nudges, frontline worker insights, career opportunities, employee-driven skill development and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) action planning.

Leveraging Bryte and UKG FleX People Fabric, a behavior-focused AI platform, UKG will unveil many new GenAI capabilities in the first half of 2024. UKG executives acknowledge that many companies are still evaluating the pros and cons of GenAI, and a new Brandon Hall Group study shows only 23% of HR professionals in large organizations believe AI will have a positive impact while 33% are uncertain and still evaluating.

But UKG has been focused on AI for years and stressed its commitment to responsible and ethical AI, framed by a three-layer data security and transparency model built on a foundation powered by strategic partner Google’s Large Language Models. It enables UKG to serve customers of any size, in any industry at scale.

Powerful HCM Suites

UKG’s two HCM Suites — UKG Pro and UKG Ready — are the only end-to-end cloud-based platform to serve the entire global market. Both incorporate Great Place to Work in all markets.

UKG Pro

Serving larger and more complex organizations, UKG Pro features strong workforce management vertical solutions for healthcare, manufacturing, retail/hospitality, services and distribution, and the public sector.

In 2023, additions included the launch of the UKG One View global payroll system (see below), a new mobile app, a benefits hub, a strategic workforce planning solution, automated position posting, and SMS messaging and candidate scheduling in the Recruiting hub, and its Pay + WFM bundle for large enterprises, among other enhancements.

Moving forward, the strategic partnership with Eightfold AI talent intelligence improves how organizations can attract and source candidates in UKG Pro Recruiting. Other additions for 2024 include:

• Greater control for employees over how they receive their pay, along with financial wellness tools and education.
• AI-powered skill suggestions to deliver better career possibilities for all workers.
• Personalized pathways to help employees move vertically or horizontally within an organization.
• Actionable recommendations for employees to grow their skills toward the opportunities they want to pursue.
• Enhanced performance reviews through the assistance of UKG Bryte within the Performance and Coaching module.

UKG Ready

UKG is investing heavily in Ready, the suite for smaller organizations in all industries. Previously focused on serving only companies with 200 or fewer employees, Ready now will serve organizations for the under-500-employee market in North America while expanding its footprint abroad.

Improvements in 2023 focused on employee experience and ease of use, simplified benefits and onboarding and, of course, leveraging GPTW. The company added more sales reps, expanded marketing efforts and added more activation and customer success people to better serve the busy SMB market.

A host of enhancements are targeted for 2024, including eight additional languages and Ask Bryte AI, a natural language search engine that will help users get answers and additional resources to do their jobs better.

UKG Labs

Part of UKG’s multi-faceted innovation strategy, UKG Labs is a startup ecosystem and virtual laboratory of early-stage companies from around the world, onboarded in small cohorts.

With the idea of “improving the velocity of market discovery,” as one UKG leader put it, the company works with the start-ups for a minimum of three months to explore niche ideas that could improve HCM offerings. For example, Bountiful is a referral-as-a-service platform for recruiting that automates the often-manual management of existing candidate referral programs. It also enables anyone, anywhere to refer great talent into jobs and get paid for it. Companies use the platform to improve employee participation, hire faster, diversify the talent funnel and maximize the efficiency of the talent team.

Besides supporting the startups, UKG looks everywhere for innovation:

• They listen to customer suggestions and will deliver 60% of top customer ideas to the market in 2024.
• They turn to their employees — U Krewers — to develop ideas in quarterly two-day development sprints.

UKG One View

The multi-country payroll solution, launched earlier in the year after the acquisition of Immedis, a leading global payroll provider, UKG One View firmly establishes UKG as a leading player in global payroll.

UKG’s vision is to transform the global payroll paradigm into a more efficient, technology-enabled multi-country payroll experience. While traditional multi-country payroll systems are complex to manage, lack transparency, have compliance challenges, contain schedule-to-fund gaps and offer a generally poor employee experience, One View provides the payroll flexibility organizations have been searching for and a truly global experience at the same time.

Eventually available to all UKG markets, One View also offers AI-driven payroll reporting and analytics that can shine a light on employee transaction costs and compensation planning, which is incredibly difficult across multiple countries without a single source of truth. The potential impact of UKG One View on employee experience as it evolves and expands is enormous.

Key Takeaways

2023 has been a banner year for UKG and it is in an enviable market position among HCM technology competitors entering 2024, even though the market for growth may be tougher due to economic and geopolitical strife at home and abroad.

With its investment in AI, the acquisition of Immedis and subsequent launch of the UKG One View global payroll platform, UKG’s strategic partnerships (Google Cloud, Eightfold AI, PayPal, Microsoft and others), and infusing the power of Great Place to Work data across all its solutions, CEO Chris Todd and his team have done an exemplary job of forging a unique place for UKG in the crowded and chaotic HCM technology market.

With its UKG Ready, UKG Pro, UKG Pro Pay + WFM, and UKG One View products, UKG serves the entire HCM market, from SMBs to large enterprises, which provides them with an advantage in a potentially tough market against top competitors like Workday, Oracle and SAP that concentrate on the enterprise and large enterprise spaces.

UKG wisely doubled its innovation investment in 2023 and is doing an excellent job addressing all personas of an organization, especially the frontline workers, frontline managers and the emerging non-employee segment of gig workers, temp workers and contractors whom Brandon Hall Group believes will continue to expand as the post-COVID work environment continues to evolve.

UKG has placed its bet on building human-centered HR technology focused on making work better for everyone at a time when there is so much division in the world. They back it up with an employer brand that strongly aligns with its marketing messages. That is a winning combination.

The post UKG Primed for More Innovation,</ br> Market Expansion in 2024 appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Onboarding is an employer’s first chance to confirm for new hires that they made the right choice.

A compelling, personalized onboarding process is a critical first step to ensure employees find themselves welcomed, supported and believing they are in a position to succeed. A poor onboarding process can severely impact employee retention and result in significant downstream costs to recruit and train replacements.

Technology is critical to onboarding — especially in an era of remote and hybrid work and widely dispersed workforces. Unfortunately, Brandon Hall Group research shows that most companies are in the early stages of developing high-impact onboarding. Only 9% said they offer a fully integrated set of onboarding resources and technologies.

While focusing on training and culture is important and a primary focus for HR teams, the quality and sophistication of technology can be the difference between onboarding success and failure in a hyper-connected world.

“A lot of pieces must come together for onboarding to be strong,” said Chris Kirkpatrick, Director of Offering Management in the Digital Workplace global practice at Kyndryl. “There can be 15 different things  — or more — that must come together before an employee begins the first day. Digital workplace technologies can make it all seamless, integrate HR and IT workflows, and measure the whole experience from start to finish through Experience Level Agreements (XLAs). This can cut the business processes for a new employee from days down to hours.”

More than ever in a hybrid environment, onboarding should be engaging because it sets a tone. “It’s important for employees to be clear on their roles, how they contribute to the organization, and how to work across their various teams. We must consider that many employees are working from their home. That changes the reality of work culture. Employees need to know where they fit and how they can contribute. Then they need to be supported,” Kirkpatrick said.

Technology with a Human Touch

Even though many onboarding experiences are now virtual and must be digitized, Kirkpatrick focuses heavily on the human touch — and especially personalization.

“We must understand the context of the employee,” he said. “The big thing is timeliness. The business needs employees functional as soon as possible, and there can be a tendency to overload them with too much information.”

“We should consider, ‘How can we avoid doing that?’ ‘How can we explain to employees what is to come so they understand where they are in the onboarding process and what they will experience the first week, the second week, etc.?’ We want to make sure the onboarding experience is personalized to the role and intuitive, and considers how the employee will balance work with onboarding,” Kirkpatrick said.

After that, HR leaders must ensure new employees feel connected and supported; effective use and deployment of digital tools help, but the foundation is sensitivity to human needs.

“Remote working, with the right tools, can actually drive a more inclusive and diverse culture,” Kirkpatrick said. “But remote work can lead to increased isolation for some types of personalities. Hybrid work gives businesses access to a bigger pool of talent, but you also have to address isolation considerations. But culturally, if done right, it can drive sustainability.”

By that, Kirkpatrick means sustainability as a human issue. He points to ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance), a framework to evaluate companies on how they manage their impact on the world. Kirkpatrick prefers using the acronym SEE, standing for Social, Economic and Environment. “We believe that organizations must focus on the social element first to drive the sustainability and impact on communities and of human life. This approach then naturally feeds into wellness, which also impacts engagement and employee experience in their day-to-day lives.

“Sustainability is huge for Kyndryl because we were spun off as a company (from IBM),” Kirkpatrick continued. “Sustainability was born into our company’s purpose and our mission. What I love about my job is being able to talk to customers every day about elevating sustainability and improving work culture through our solutions and about how that drives employee experience and makes the business sustainable by design.”

Technology, sustainability and employee experience must operate in balance and organizations need to realize the benefits of focusing on these areas. Kyndryl uses XLAs to measure that. Digital tools, including AI-driven solutions and data and analytics, enable automation of processes, reducing manual intervention and adding speed and reliability. XLAs deliver insights to help improve the employee experience — during onboarding and throughout the employee lifecycle.

“Ultimately, You can’t fix what you can’t see,” Kirkpatrick said. “HR leaders must be able to see the current employee experience and pain points. You can use journey mapping, but you need to be able to gather data and analyze it to deepen the understanding of the experience and quantify where the friction is. Some of it is technical design, but then you have to put yourself in the shoes of employees and make human-centric decisions.”

The post Kyndryl Shows Digital Onboarding Can Be Personal, Sustainable appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Most employers — 87% according to the Brandon Hall Group HCM Outlook 2023 study — have adopted a hybrid work model that enables employers to work away from a central office location at least some of the time. Two-thirds of respondents to that same study said this model was effective or very effective.

But in some industries — including financial services — executives continue to believe that employees must work full-time in an office to foster culture and collaboration. Leaders of some large global banks believe that face-to-face interactions with clients and colleagues are critical to drive business even as hybrid work is overwhelmingly popular among financial services employees.

That thinking among financial services leaders could backfire. A survey of 300 managers and staffers at large financial services companies around the world by Kyndryl, the world’s largest provider of IT infrastructure services, shows that:

• 86% of respondents said it is important or extremely important to work remotely at least some of the time.
• 75% said they would at least consider looking for other jobs if they were not able to work remotely some of the time.
• 72% prefer to have the option of working remotely at least three days a week.

Understanding the Gap

At a time when talent retention and employee experience are among the most critical business issues, financial services companies pushing to get people back to the office full-time are swimming against a strong current.

“When you look at the talent in the financial services industry, they are saying they want to be in a hybrid environment,” said Ivan Dopplé, Global Practice Leader of Kyndryl Digital Workplace Services. “They feel strongly about workplace flexibility. They want a meaningful mix of in-office and remote work. So, providing employees with flexibility is important for talent retention. A hybrid work model can also help banks find and attract the very best talent.”

Brandon Hall Group research also shows that on-site work at many companies does not look much different than remote work. This frustrates employees, who don’t understand why they have to commute and lose flexibility when they could do the same work at their home or remote offices. Hybrid work should be more than working in different locations; it should offer different experiences at each location.

“Most financial services employees prefer to work away from the office when doing high-focus, individual-oriented tasks such as status updates, data analysis and training or learning activities,” Dopplé said. “Networking and team-building activities were most often preferred to be done in an office environment.”

Key Research Takeaways

The Kyndryl research also found that hybrid work models:

• Fuel productivity. More than 80% of respondents said hybrid work enables them to get more work done and makes it easier to meet deadlines. Dopplé added that 76% of respondents said having a hybrid work schedule enables them to deliver a higher quality of work.
• Increase collaboration.
  • 64% of respondents agree or strongly agree that hybrid work models enable their teams to be more collaborative.
  • 61% agree or strongly agree they are more likely to seek input on work from teammates when working remotely.
  • 78% agree or strongly agree that having a hybrid work schedule makes them more engaged on days working in the office with their teams.

“Most of the respondents indicated videoconferencing tools, messaging systems such as Slack or Teams and access to an IT help desk are critical. No real surprises there, but without reliable access to these tools and support, hybrid work cannot be successful,” Dopplé said.

• May enhance diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
  • 67% of respondents said virtual meetings are an easier environment than in-person meetings to contribute ideas.
  • 64% said they were more likely to contribute ideas in a virtual meeting.
  • 78% agree or strongly agree with the statement, “I am just as empowered to advance my career when working in a hybrid setting as I was working in the office full time.

“When shaping the research,” Dopplé said, “we were curious to learn perceptions about unintended inequities that may be created or exacerbated by hybrid work models. But participants suggested the contrary.”

• Improve work culture.
  • 85% of respondents agree or strongly agree that working in a hybrid environment makes a positive impact on their company’s work culture.
  • 87% agree or strongly agree that having a flexible work arrangement has a positive impact on their daily employee experience.
  • 91% agree or strongly agree with the statement, “My manager trusts me to get my work done remotely.”

However, Dopplé said, more than half of respondents said that while managers trust employees to get their work done remotely, the managers would prefer that their team members work in the office most or all of the time

Recommended Action Steps for Financial Services Leaders

Prioritize Employee Autonomy and Flexibility Over Control

Many financial services companies lauded their employees’ ability to be productive and innovative while working from remote locations during the pandemic.

Now many institutions want to return to “normal,” failing to understand that the work world has changed forever. Employees had an opportunity to reassess their relationship with work and have decided that the old way no longer works for them.

If employees could be productive away from the office during the pandemic, they can get the same results now. If adjustments to the hybrid work experience are needed, focus on the best ways to improve it rather than trying to force workers back into a system they don’t want and that could drive them from the company.

Clearly Differentiate Between On-Site and Remote Work Experiences

Hybrid work should be more than working in different places. It should be about working in different ways and having a mix of experiences that complement each other. Financial services companies should engage their employees to understand what the optimal hybrid experience looks like and take steps to reach it.

While some financial services workers who work directly with customers probably do need to be on-site all or most of the time, management should work to provide them with some level of flexibility. For employees who don’t usually work with customers, companies should find ways to make coming into an office a valuable experience that employees can embrace and benefit from.

Give Employees the Tools Needed to Succeed in Hybrid Work

The success of hybrid work depends heavily on technology — mobile apps, wearables, instant messaging, video conferencing, assistive technology, real-time data and analytics, and much more. Financial services must select tools that fit their business needs and the needs of employees. One example: There are tools that help employees filter through the various types of messages they get every day. This enables employees to focus on getting meaningful work done while working off-site and having time for team meetings and collaboration while on-site.

However, many companies — after investing heavily in digital workplace technologies during the pandemic — have failed to fine-tune their use and functionality in the new hybrid world. Only 41% of organizations have the right technology for workplace navigation and only half have tools to help employees adopt technologies, according to Brandon Hall Group research, Is Your Employee Experience What You Intended?

That should change. Just having access to these tools is not enough. They must be adapted for specific use cases within banks and financial services offices. Workers also need resources to help them adopt the new technologies into their daily workflows.

Nurture Collaboration

As was demonstrated during the pandemic, high-quality collaboration can occur virtually or in-person. But it doesn’t happen by itself. Organizations must make a habit of soliciting input from colleagues who work in the same office and virtually from colleagues across time zones. Kyndryl’s research suggests that leaders who enable this kind of agility realize improved collaboration, productivity, organizational culture and employee satisfaction. Here are a few ideas:

• Use collaboration technology effectively. Take advantage of tools like video conferencing, screen sharing, whiteboards, etc. Make sure everyone is comfortable using them. Provide tech support if needed.
• Be flexible and accommodating. Accommodate different time zones and schedules. Record meetings and make notes available. Offer flexibility in working hours.
• Encourage overcommunication. Don’t assume remote workers have the same context. Loop them in on relevant messages/announcements and update them on decisions regularly.
• Role-model desired behaviors. Leaders should actively participate in collaboration, demonstrate transparency, communicate frequently and set the tone for openness.
• Gather feedback and improve. Check-in regularly on how collaboration is working. Encourage suggestions for improvement and make adjustments based on feedback.

Promote Cultural Engagement

Even though most financial services employees surveyed expressed a strong preference for hybrid work, physical separation inherent to hybrid work can complicate the kind of engagement that fuels innovation and advances business initiatives.

Financial services organizations that embrace hybrid work should be intentional in cultivating cultural engagement. Kyndryl, for example, found passionate employees willing to be cultural ambassadors. They developed local activities and championed company culture-related events. Other ideas include:

• Create or support employee resource groups (ERGs) focused on specific identities, cultures or interests.
• Have leaders and managers regularly communicate company values, mission, and goals.
• Spotlight employees who exemplify your culture via newsletters or the intranet.
• Create mentoring and buddy systems to onboard new hires to the culture.
• Recognize and reward employees who promote and uphold the culture.
• Share stories and examples that reflect your organization’s values and culture.

The post How Financial Services Companies Can Embrace and Facilitate Hybrid Work appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Frontline workers — who account for approximately 80% of the workforce — use on average about 1% of their organization’s technology budget, according to various estimates.

Let that sink in.

Frontline workers — variously identified as “deskless,” “offline” or “essential” — regularly interact with customers, make sales, provide services and handle day-to-day operations. They are the face of the business and directly impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. But they have fewer tools and less voice than their more integrated and connected corporate peers.

“I was at an airplane manufacturing company recently and they’re still building planes using paper instructions and doing QA (quality assurance) using paper instructions,” said Ron Xavier, Technical Business Development Executive, Microsoft Global Center of Competency for Kyndryl Digital Workplace Services.

As incredible as that sounds, the situation at that airplane manufacturer is not unusual. Manufacturers struggle more than retail and hospitality, for example. But many frontline workers across all industries are stuck using outdated systems and processes that hamper productivity and negatively impact their employee experience.

In the 2023 Employee Experience Study by Brandon Hall Group, only 40% of employers said they have the right technology for their frontline workers to successfully navigate the workplace. Only half said they have tools to help employees adopt all the various technologies that are used in the workplace.

However, more employers are recognizing they must do better. Almost three-quarters (73%) of respondents to our study said it is important to use innovative technologies to support employee productivity and efficiency.

Changing the Status Quo

Frontline workers are often mobile or work out of multiple locations where it can be difficult to access devices and internet connectivity. Their jobs require specialized software and applications to access customer data, check inventory, submit orders, manage projects and more. They deal with customers face-to-face and need technologies that enable quick access to information to resolve issues on the spot.

Kyndryl, the world’s largest provider of IT infrastructure services, and Microsoft have a strategic alliance to deliver state-of-the-art solutions to help customers accelerate hybrid cloud adoption, modernize applications and processes, support mission-critical workloads and enable modern work experiences.

Kyndryl’s Xavier and Noel Pennington, Director of Partner Strategy for Microsoft Cloud for Retail, are evangelists in this space. They are passionate about the need for employers to invest in technology that empowers frontline workers to increase their connection to the business and improve their engagement, productivity and efficiency.

“I am a retail guy,” Pennington said. “Retail wants to spend $6 on technology per user per year. They don’t see the value of technology to drive all their initiatives and goals. Companies are missing the boat on the minimum tech spend they need to move the needle.”

A Microsoft Work Trend Index special report on frontline workers and technology, published last year, found that frontline workers are at an inflection point. No one felt the burden of the disruption from the pandemic more than the two billion frontline workers around the globe. They’ve kept grocery stores stocked, ensured the power grid stayed up and running, provided essential healthcare services, and made and distributed the products the world depends on — all while weathering personal risk and ongoing disruption.

The Microsoft report found that frontline workers will consider a job change for better pay and benefits, work-life balance, and flexibility. Technology plays a big role in enabling all that. Plus, 63% of frontline workers are excited about the job opportunities that technology creates and technology ranks third on the list of factors that workers say could help reduce workplace stress, the Microsoft report shows.

“I think tools like Microsoft Teams and Viva allow companies to onboard employees quickly and integrate workers very quickly,” Pennington said. “If you don’t have tools and technologies that help you do your job – whether you work at McDonald’s or Home Depot, or installing windows or whatever, it’s difficult for workers to feel connected.”

Digital Tools Have High Impact

Technology options abound — mobile apps, wearables, instant messaging, video conferencing, assistive technology, real-time data and analytics, and much more. The key is selecting the right tools for the right environment.

When frontline employees are equipped with user-friendly, mobile-enabled technologies tailored to their specific environment, roles and workflows, there are many benefits:

• Improves productivity and efficiency. Digital tools provide quick access to information and automate manual processes so workers can accomplish more in less time.
• Increases engagement and job satisfaction. Workers feel more empowered and appreciated when given modern tools that make their jobs easier.
• Enhances customer service. Workers can access customer data instantly to resolve issues faster and deliver more personalized service.
• Boosts collaboration. Digital communication and file-sharing tools keep frontline teams connected and working together.
• Provides real-time performance insights. Data and analytics give frontline workers feedback to improve their work.
• Enables omnichannel support. Workers can seamlessly move between assisting customers via phone, email, chat, in-person and more.
• Improves training. Digital learning platforms allow quick onboarding and ongoing skills development.

The Devil’s in the Details

The challenge is giving frontline workers the right tools and connectivity and providing the training and support they need to adopt the technology and use it in the way it is intended.

Kyndryl looks at digital tools through three different lenses:

• This is having the right tools in the right place, such as the cloud-powered Microsoft 365 productivity platform, device management tools such as Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Teams for collaboration, which is especially important in frontline worker environments. And it all needs to run through a strong network, supported by Kyndryl services for 5G-enabled edge networks.

“This allows you to have people walking around a factory, a warehouse or wherever else people need to be, with necessary connectivity to communicate, get the data and information they need and receive and provide real-time answers with coworkers,” Xavier said.                                                                

• Visibility. This means having an all-in-one analytics solution, like Microsoft Fabric, that can handle everything from data movement to data science, real-time analytics and business intelligence.
• Connecting legacy systems with the right type of modern devices, such as portable small mobile computers, is critical so frontline workers can access what they need when and where they need it.

“That’s going to give them the capabilities that they need to interface with a core system so they can do time tracking, request services, access reports or do whatever they need,” Xavier said. “If we want a collaboration platform, like Teams, to be the front-end system for frontline workers, we need to be able to integrate with the organization’s core technologies that they use to run the business, but it needs to be available within your collaboration platform.”

Company-Issued Device vs. BYOD

The debate about whether employers should supply devices or employees should bring their own has been raging for years. There is no easy answer.

“I think it depends on industry,” Xavier said. “Retail, for example, is very different than manufacturing or healthcare. A big furniture retailer has their people on the floor using hand-held computers, but they don’t allow employees to bring their own devices. They want computers they control because they give them more insight into the custom capabilities of the manufacturer and [the ability] to see the health of the device. You can’t monitor as closely if someone brings their own Android device.”

Work complexity is also an issue. “If it is fairly simplistic work and the employees don’t mind using their own devices, that works for everybody. But if the work is more complex where more data can be exposed and the monitoring of the devices and the data must be more granular, then the company is much more likely to purchase specialized devices suited for that environment,” Xavier said.

Solving the User Adoption Problem

No matter how devices are supplied, the key to success is properly training frontline workers to optimally use the software.

Too often, companies favor a lot of information over context and application. It’s important not only to show workers how to use the technology but why they should use it. The adoption strategy also can’t be one-size-fits-all. It should be tailored to the demographics and work environment of the organization.

“The most effective thing I’ve ever seen done with adoption is through a day-in-the-life approach,” Xavier said. “Microsoft provides day-in-the-life presentations on using various tools in your job and the impact these tools can have on how you perform your job functions.”

“Let’s say I am an older person and I am using Teams and I need to ask someone a question and I have to walk down the hallway and go up the stairs to find someone in another room to get the answer. Or I could use the push-to-talk feature on the device and simply reach out to that person to get a quick answer, or if more detail is needed, I can ask someone to come down and show me what is needed.

“This illustrative approach puts everything in perspective so the employee understands the value of using the technology,” Xavier said. “Showing people the actions they would take during a day at their job really resonates with employees for all different generations in the workforce.”

Key Takeaways

Frontline employees are a company’s most valuable asset but often are overlooked when it comes to providing digital workplace tools. By prioritizing technology investments that target the unique needs of frontline workers, companies can significantly improve productivity, employee engagement and customer satisfaction. Future business success depends on creating a positive employee experience where the frontline workforce has the digital tools needed to do their best work each day.

Here are some strategies for HR leaders to keep in mind:

• Involve frontline workers in selection. Include input from workers on which tools would deliver the most value in their day-to-day work.
• Highlight benefits. Communicate how the technology will make specific aspects of their jobs easier to build enthusiasm.
• Conduct contextualized training. Understand how your employees learn and deliver training in ways that are likely to engage them. Depending on the situation, hands-on demos, day-in-the-life scenarios, videos and in-person sessions can all be effective. Avoid long, written documents that lack context.
• Appoint ambassadors. Identify tech-savvy frontline workers who can answer peer questions and promote adoption.
• Offer ongoing support. Have help desk staff available to troubleshoot issues and provide guidance on new features.
• Track adoption metrics. Gather data on technology usage rates and challenges impacting adoption.
• Solicit feedback. Survey frontline workers or hold focus groups to collect input on their technology experience and desired improvements.

Need a Digital Workplace Expert? Schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation today.

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Two-thirds of employers say they will invest significantly to improve talent retention this year, and more than 60% believe reimagining career development is critical to success, Brandon Hall Group research shows.

This generation of employees is accustomed to continuous change and evolution. Seeking new experiences comes naturally. Therefore, employers must provide reasons for workers to stay. One way is to demonstrate that they can build their careers right where they are.

Employee Development and Retention for Lasting Success

But career development has been a difficult lift for most employers; our research shows two-thirds don’t believe their efforts are effective. There are many steps necessary for success. One foundational requirement, now more than ever in the evolving hybrid work environment, is technology. For example, TalentGuard, a Brandon Hall Group Silver Smartchoice® Preferred Provider, offers a career pathing solution and other tools that give employees a window into future opportunities so they can devise a career path that aligns with their skills and life plans.

Technology facilitates the six strategies that our research shows are critical to building a strong career development program:

• Provide Individual Development Plans for all employees. IDPs must align with an employee’s career aspirations, performance development needs and the organization’s (or team’s) business priorities, and development planning must be revised as often as necessary based on changes in employee performance or aspirations, or the needs of the business.
• Hold career discussions with employees several times per year. IDPs cannot be updated regularly without frequent career development discussions. Organizations where manager-employee check-ins are consistently held have a built-in platform to frequently broach career development. Technology facilitates this for remote and hybrid workers

• Offer coaching and/or mentoring regarding career growth. Most employers that believe their career development programs are effective provide career coaching and/or mentoring to employees, our research shows.
• Enable self-service career planning. Most employees want to take ownership of their career development. But employers must provide the tools. Only about one-third of employers said they offer easy-to-navigate apps or portals where employees can do their own career planning.
• Match employees to internal opportunities to develop their capabilities. Employers are only beginning to take advantage of a relatively new HR solution: the opportunity marketplace, which is a digital platform where organizations provide — and workers find — the opportunities most relevant to their mutual benefit and success.
• Use assessments to better understand employees. Talent assessments on behavior traits, preferred workstyles and capabilities can reveal valuable insights that can help organizations work more closely with employees to meet their career goals.

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Brandon Hall Group conducted a pulse survey in March 2023 in an attempt to understand the extent of workforce reductions and their subsequent impact on employees, managers, and the organization as a whole. Roughly two-thirds of respondents are from outside North America, and more than half indicated their organization has already reduced their workforce this year or estimates that a workforce reduction will occur at some point. Notably, responses were consistent across demographic groups regarding the impact of layoffs on employees of the organization, except in a few instances, which will be noted later in this Strategy Brief. 

Some survey results were expected, particularly around decision-making and impact on employee morale. Several influences were unexpected in that they reflect a change or divergence from accepted norms or practices. This Strategy Brief will explore those before recommending how companies navigating the aftermath or planning for a workforce reduction can best position their retained workforce for continued success. 

Workforce Reduction’s Focus 

The impact of layoffs on employees of the organization has effective ways to address and overcome it as a company. Our conducted surveys explore the employees’ morale, motivation, and reaction to the company’s situations. We will additionally address how the downsizing affects those who stay and how to keep them satisfied with their jobs throughout the process.

Expected Impacts of Downsizing in an Organization

When a company faces a workforce reduction, questions that often come to mind are: 

• How did you make the decision on who would be affected? 
• How are those who were not separated handling the change? 
• What else is the organization doing to cut costs? 

The answers to those questions in this survey are largely as you might expect. Regarding the question of how decisions were made, responses show that the primary determinants were performance and tenure. These are the logical places to start as a reduction certainly offers you an opportunity to clean house of low performers and performance is often (though not always) very well-documented. Tenure is another logical starting point as companies will many times look to those most recently hired as well as those closest to typical retirement age. While these are to be expected, we will make the case that adding in potential as a more frequently used filter may be critically important.

In terms of impact to remaining employees’ morale and commitment, most companies indicated a moderate impact of downsizing on an organization. Individuals who remain employed when a reduction takes place often feel demoralized. It is logical that they would question whether their own jobs are also at risk. It is no surprise to learn that companies see a 59% high impact on morale and a 47% high impact on trust and loyalty following a workforce reduction. Increased communication in both frequency and transparency is a critical response. 

Part of addressing the pressure on trust and loyalty from your surviving workforce is looking at what else the company is doing to manage expenses to shore up the organization from further job losses. Once again, survey responses are in line with what you might expect to hear. Measures such as hiring freezes, removing low performers sooner and giving high performers more opportunities top that list. 

Unexpected Results of Workforce Reduction

One of the top unexpected strategies listed by companies to reduce costs was to rescind job offers. We categorize that as a surprising result because we would anticipate that WFM practices would keep hiring in line with core business needs and hiring freezes would be implemented long before the decision to reduce the workforce is executed, allowing processes the time to even out. 

Another unexpected result is that salary reductions are not higher on the list of potential cost-saving actions (less than 10% of responses). This is surprising because reducing payroll expenses is the end goal of a workforce reduction. Leveraging a minimal pay cut of 1-3% across the board can result in substantial savings for an organization. Perhaps this is due to the proximity of responses during the COVID era where salary reductions were heavily deployed by organizations seeking to avoid layoffs and maybe those companies have yet to return to pre-COVID salaries as is. 

Our most unexpected result, however, is that more than one-fourth of organizations that responded indicated that their organization is taking no other cost-saving actions in the wake of a workforce reduction. In this modern era of work and the sustained volatility of the economic climate, it seems irresponsible at best and negligent at worst to fail to deploy a truly holistic and balanced approach to cost reduction strategies. Reducing your workforce should be your last line of defense, not your first.

How we can reduce the impact of layoffs on employees of the organization.

If you are in a position of leadership in an organization that is looking at cost-saving measures and the potential need to reduce your workforce as part of that strategy, consider the following approaches.

Look at Long-Term Potential

As previously stated, performance and tenure are common decision points when determining who may be affected by a reduction in workforce. In neglecting potential as a parameter in decision-making, companies are failing to consider the longer-term implications of their decisions. Concurrent to this latest wave of “right-sizing” is the conversation about the future of work, upskilling and reskilling needs in the workforce, and making sure the company is ready for what’s next. This is arguably a more critical conversation than ever before. 

When evaluating employee populations, teams should ask themselves: 

To be clear, we are not advocating that you overlook obvious performance deficiencies in favor of future potential. We are recommending that you include future potential as a filter to ensure you are not overlooking someone you will need to deliver success in the future. 

In this same vein, if you are forced to separate teammates, consider providing upskilling/ reskilling roadmaps as part of separation packages where it might make sense. Helping individuals plan for a future state can engender loyalty and a willingness to return. Then follow through on bringing back those who meet the expectations at the earliest possible opportunity.

Revisit WFM Practices 

A time of economic stress that results in workforce reductions often offers an ideal opportunity to revisit workflows, policies and procedures, and ensure they are optimized. Particularly if hiring freezes are driving your savings plans, it is worth looking at how forecasting and job approval processes are managed to minimize overextending your workforce needs. Revisit data collection plans, consider exclusionary periods before posting openings and tap into the power of internal stretch assignments to fill roles with a net-zero headcount increase in the shorter term. 

Protect Remaining Staff 

Many respondents indicated that they plan to give high performers more opportunities on a go-forward basis. Be careful that this doesn’t become code for “dump more work on our best people” without looking at corresponding support structures and workflows. Opportunities for growth, broader exposure, or promotion are one thing. Burying good people in even more work without proper transition, support, or fair compensation is a recipe for disaster. With our Enterprise Membership, you can explore the full potential of your organization, because when the market begins to stabilize, and it will, those high performers will be the first to head for the door, and you’ll want to know what to do next.

Workforce Reduction: Key Takeaways

It is easy to fall back on long-standing practices when economic pressures require you to consider headcount reduction to manage costs. We now have more tools, information, and knowledge at our disposal, so companies must be far more intentional and planful in their decision-making. 

This will minimize any negative impact of downsizing on an organization‘s employees as much as possible. Being resourceful when it comes to employees management supposes great importance, on Brandon Hall’s Excellence Club Membership you can access resources in six main areas, focusing your HR on development and change, to shape the current practices and what may come next. We should be thinking beyond the immediate pressure relief to factor in the return to normal in the future.

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UKG, building on its practice of leveraging AI across its human capital management (HCM) and workforce management solutions, recently announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud to use generative AI to create more powerful business insights.

With the move, UKG, a Brandon Hall Group Silver Smartchoice® Preferred Provider, strengthens its position as a market leader by combining Google Cloud’s GenAI and large language models with its own AI models and Great Place To Work® proprietary data to create more conversational interactions with their HCM solutions.

“We believe GenAI can be a tremendously powerful tool that changes how people go about analyzing information and insights at work,” said Hugo Sarrazin, chief product and technology officer at UKG. “Our collaboration with Google Cloud will help employees and leaders make better decisions, have more productive conversations, and anticipate how today’s choices can impact tomorrow’s operations and workplace culture overall.”

GenAI is a hot topic in HR, with 91% of respondents in a recent Brandon Hall Group study indicating the technology has utility at work. While many organizations surveyed were mostly familiar with GPT3 by Open AI, at least 50% of respondents said they are using — or soon would use — some form of GenAI for:

• Enhancing and scaling training activities
• Improving employee engagement and experience
• Accelerating training content development
• Supporting predictive analytics
• Assisting employees in filling out forms
• Writing and updating job descriptions

“The moment you understand what generative AI is, the concept is so inviting that you want to understand it,” said Luis Fernando Gonzalez, Global Development Manager for Director for Cemex, a leader in producing and supplying cement products.

Partnerships like UKG-Google Cloud are important because, while HR and learning leaders and practitioners are optimistic about the future value of generative AI, they are also concerned about the source of information it draws from.

“Is it from a respected scientific journal or news source? Is it from Wikipedia, which can be easily manipulated, or a self-published book by a radical author?” asked one HR leader who is experimenting with generative AI at a property management company. “One concern is that we could hit a point where we over-rely on what we get from these technologies without understanding where the information is coming from, which could lead us in some wrong directions.”

The model deployed by UKG and Google Cloud may ease these concerns. UKG says they are using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, designed specifically for enterprise use, rather than the consumer versions of GenAI, such as GPT3 or Bard. This also allows UKG to create a multi-model approach, where Vertex AI provides the foundation and UKG’s AI models and data are layered on top. Customer-specific models and AI training are then layered on top of that, creating an experience that end-users can be confident about.

“Our expanded partnership with Google Cloud is another chapter in our commitment to providing organizations around the world with the opportunity to move from a good workplace to a truly great workplace for all,” said Chris Todd, CEO at UKG. “We are committed to exploring how all emerging technologies, including GenAI, can enhance the workplace experience for everyone.”

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