One clear theme emerging from the keynote was a focus on simplification. But as Ettling noted, simplifying isn’t always easy. It requires discipline to identify and keep what’s important and effective while getting rid of the rest, and then using technology to make what’s left even more efficient. But it’s not just about simplifying for business efficiency. It’s about simplifying workflows and integrations so people can execute HCM processes like performance management and workforce planning in line with their day-to-day work, and allow employees to focus on customer priorities. It was noted time and again by many speakers that employees are at the heart of how customers will view your organization. Simplifying their work experience and engaging the workforce is now recognized as a critical element of business success.

Simplification through integration was also a theme, reflected in the announcement of a global reseller agreement with WorkForce Software to provide time and attendance, scheduling and absence solutions under the name SAP Time and Attendance Management. Ettling reinforced the notion that with cloud solutions it’s not about having 50 partners, but having deep integration with fewer, simplifying the implementation and ongoing operation. This kind of deep integration with solution providers that bring extensive domain expertise in key areas will also allow users to take advantage of key point solutions while also experiencing the benefits of a unified solution.

SAP SuccessFactors also hopes to simplify self-service, reinventing it as Intelligent Services. The theory behind Intelligent Services is using technology to proactively manage the many “ripples” of change and communication that result from HR events like a leave of absence, promotion, relocation or other availability or structural changes. Intelligent Services builds out workflows to manage the tactical elements of these changes – what paperwork needs to be completed, what office space is required or becoming available – as well as communications that need to take place – how to reroute processes in which you were and approver. Built with many scenarios already in mind, machine learning will help the solution continue to get more predictive as it experiences the real world situations that occur in organizations.

Simple is never easy, but anyone who’s ever made the effort to organize her closet or basement — let alone HR processes — knows it’s worth it. Simplification focuses us on what’s important, eliminates the time we spend looking for things and wondering what to do, and frees us to be more strategic and service-oriented. Getting to simple will be an ongoing journey for SAP SuccessFactors, its partners and its customers, but one that can be well worth it.

–Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi

The post SuccessConnect 2015: Simple isn’t Easy appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

FantasySalesTeam is a gamification solution for sales contests that allows sales managers to track multiple metrics around results, behaviors, and activity, as well as encourage competition on an individual and team level. This video on their website explains in detail how it works. The really interesting thing though, is it also incorporates nonsales staff into the process, increasing their sense of involvement in generating organizational revenue.

The idea here is far beyond what one product can do for sales driven organizations. The idea is how do we radically rethink how we define performance. It’s about outcomes, as well as behaviors and actions. How do we find immediate ways to recognize, measure and reward performance on all of these levels, and have people invest not only in their own success with that of their team?

These are not easy questions. They require us to really look at not only what performance means to an organization, but truly analyze the behaviors and actions that are correlated to driving those results. They require us to continually look for and measure and provide feedback on these traits. They require us to talk about reward and compensation in a much more transparent way. If we’re invested in each other’s success, we need to be much more open about our wins and our losses, and upfront about the financial impact that has for us as individuals, teams and is an organization.

Salespeople often have a reputation of being tough – they are used to rejection and being told no, to being put on leader boards, to fighting for every sale. But why shouldn’t the rest of us be just as accountable for individual and team success? It’s not about a gladiator fight to the death. It’s about actually understanding what great performance is, being unafraid to look for it, reward it, and coach for it. And to hold each other accountable as a team for achieving it.

We can’t all draft our fantasy project team for every task at work. But this idea of rethinking our accountability to the organization and each other could help us radically rethink performance management and team building. And maybe have a little fun to boot.

Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst, Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group @mollielombardi

The post It’s All about How You Play the Game appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Teams are important to organizations today. Brandon Hall Group’s 2015 Leadership Development study found that the top three priorities for improving leadership capability were

• Developing leaders to be effective coaches
• Improving innovation capability
• Developing leader’s ability to manage high performance teams

Yet today, only 18% of organizations consider teambuilding skills a core leadership strength. So how can your organization make better use of teams? Here are three thoughts.

Pay attention. Don’t just point to the three nearest people or your usual suspects the next time you have a project requiring a team. Organizations that use teams as formal development opportunities were 82% more likely to improve revenue over the previous year, and 32% more likely to improve employee engagement over the previous year. Think about the overall talent pipeline and find opportunities to bring people together that can learn from each other. Great teams don’t just happen, they require planning and thought.

Get the right tools. Particularly if you are a dispersed organization. Take advantage of creating cross functional, cross geography, cross generational teams, but make them successful by enabling them with tools beyond email and the conference call. Social collaboration tools to enable synchronous and asynchronous collaboration that not only help teams execute, but help engage everyone on the team more effectively. Don’t miss out on the opportunity for great contribution by someone who is in a different time zone.

Put the I in team. Accomplishing a goal together is the purpose of a team. We are more powerful together than alone. But to take advantage of teams number for the work they produce, but is opportunities to develop individual skills and capabilities, set goals for individuals as well as the overall team. Everyone on the team works towards the common goal, but each individual can have their own agenda when it comes to learning from other experts and gaining leadership opportunities in a more controlled environment.

 Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi

The post Go Team Go! appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

As mentioned in my previous post from the organization’s analyst event back in March, the UI has continued to improve, becoming easier to navigate, and sporting better layout and functionality with each release. CEO David Ossip’s opening session highlighted the continued integration of functionality from its RelatedMatters acquisition in the form of TeamRelate, which brings relationship insights into performance and recruiting conversations. And despite all the time and attention paid to new functionality throughout the talent lifecycle, Ossip reiterated that “nothing we do in talent will ever be a distraction from compliance.”

What was new and different at this event, though, was the feeling of a blurring of the lines between Ceridian, its partners, and its customers. For example, at one point a Ceridian client came on stage to present a customer service recognition award to a Ceridian support team member. It was a powerful example of shared ownership of client goals, and also a powerful example of strategic recognition. If you say you care about customer success and want to reward behaviors that align with that goal, it doesn’t get much better than your client giving someone on your team that kind of accolade. This level of organizational engagement and alignment, and its link to business performance – for Ceridian itself and its customers – was a central theme of the event.

Ossip and team also seem to be finding the fine balance required between being confident and bold in what they do well, and humble enough to know when it makes more sense to partner. You will find no one more adamant than Ossip himself that Ceridian “will continue to be first in compliance.” But he and the team are under no illusions that they will be the next ERP, or that they will ever catch up to key solution providers with deep talent functionality in certain areas. As Ossip mentioned several times, “if you need extensive performance management capabilities, go with SuccessFactors,” one of several organizations with which Ceridian has a referral partnership. The organization seemed to have a quiet confidence this time around that let them stay focused on clients without the distractions of a turf war – despite its desire to continue to build out and improve talent offerings under the expert hand of the newly arrived Lisa Sterling to run the talent management product division.

Ceridian still has a lot of work ahead, continuing to build out talent management components like compensation and succession, and keeping up with the changing market needs in its core products like timekeeping and payroll. It also has key opportunities, such as its newly announced partnership with WorkAngel, a social reward and recognition platform. One area I will be paying particular attention to is the TeamRelate functionality, which has huge potential, but also requires a big commitment and cultural adjustment by users to truly yield value. I still have some concerns about ensuring that managers truly know when and how this data should be used, as with all assessment or evaluation tools. But as the world of software providers evolves to become solution partners, Ceridian’s blurred organizational lines may enable them to better help clients not only adopt tools, but continue to put them to strategic use.

–Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi

The post Ceridian Blurs the Lines Between Organizational and Customer Success appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

• HR is thinking big, but there’s still a lot of blocking and tackling to be done. We all know HR has been working hard to be not just a business partner but a business leader, and there were over 120 sessions with the words “strategy” or “strategic” in the title. It’s important to everyone that we keep thinking and moving in this direction, but there’s a lot of day-in, day-out HR that needs doing.

  It’s all well and good to focus on transforming the function, but someone still has to address the hygiene and dress code issues, and write up the separation paperwork. Which is why sessions on compliance and legal issues were often packed at the show. The good news is, the nuts and bolts of HR and strategic vision are not mutually exclusive. A focus on compliance and good process is what lays the foundation for a big vision of the future. I’ll be writing more on this “hierarchy of HR needs” in coming weeks.

• There is huge opportunity in the spaces in between. What do I mean by this? For many organizations there are still handoffs between process and systems, which is one kind of “space between” that organizations can focus on to gain efficiency and effectiveness. There are also the spaces between technology enabled processes like performance management or onboarding and the people they impact.

  You may have a great performance process and tools to manage it, but for many organizations, the ongoing coaching and learning required of managers to write better reviews, be better coaches, improve goal setting, is left to chance. There is a huge opportunity for technology to step in and help not just automate HCM processes, but enable them. Some of the most interesting conversations I had this week were with providers looking to fill this gap.

• It’s time for HR to call Don Draper. Better process, optimized technology, innovative programs – these abound today when you talk to HR leaders within organizations. But half the time, they don’t get the attention they deserve.

  Both solution providers and HR leaders are looking to better market what they are already doing for the organization. Particularly with learning, simply making it better known what learning resources are available in an engaging way can have a huge impact in uptake (see this example from Staples). Or benefits – helping employees see the value of their total compensation package and take advantage of things like 401k planning can drive a lot of engagement. You don’t always have to roll out new programs. Better advertising and communication about what you do have goes a long way.

There were a ton of other great ideas and conversations this week, and I hope to share more with you in future blog posts. But these are a few of the big themes I heard. Hit me back in the comments with what you heard at the show, and I’ll see you all back out on the road soon.

Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi

The post Do You Hear What I Hear – #SHRM15 Reflections appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Fortunately, I’ll be in good company. First off, I’ll be tagging along with my colleague Ben Eubanks, who will be appearing on the Smart Stage (the perfect venue for a guy like Ben!) talking about Strategic HR. The Smart Stage programming is chock-full of great topics from diversity to incentives to performance management. And there will be a host of other bloggers and influencers at the event too. You can follow everybody using the #SHRM15 hashtag.

But besides the HR social media glitterati, I’m mostly looking forward to the sort of “pattern recognition” that always happens for me at events like this. These shows are always overwhelming – tons of ideas and people and conversations, and the sheer sensory overload of the lights and sounds of Vegas and the expo. But if you stay open to all of it, I find, as it washes over you, some themes and patterns start to emerge. An idea will start in one conversation, and get fed by something you see in a technology demo, and be reinforced by a panel discussion. A few words will start popping up over and over again in different contexts. Five different people will be discussing the same problem from different angles.

That for me is the magic of these kinds of shows. I always say that I’ll never remember the detail of every meeting or every session, but I always walk away with an indelible sense of what the show was about, and what’s really top of mind in our industry. And to me, that’s invaluable.

So if you’re at the show, I hope you’ll say hi and tell me what the show is telling you – and maybe point the wandering new kid toward the coffee or the cocktails, depending on the hour of the day. And be sure to follow me on social media next week as I share my thoughts on the patterns as they emerge.

–Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi

The post The New Kid at #SHRM15 appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

To many of us, talking about talent is like talking about wine – “I don’t know much about it but I know what I like.” The problem is, we all might like different things. And what we like may have nothing to do with actual quality. So how do we first identify, and then go about developing, engaging and retaining top talent? That’s the topic of a webinar I’m holding on Tuesday, June 23.

Sadly, many organizations aren’t really talking about talent. In Brandon Hall Group’s recent Succession Management Study, the top three methods for identifying high potential talent were current performance ratings, manager nominations and work experience (cited by 53%, 50% and 45% of respondents respectively). But even among organizations using these most common methods, only somewhere between half and two-thirds found them to be effective or very effective at actually predicting future success. This begs the question, why are we using them for this purpose?

The answer comes down to the reason we don’t have most hard conversations: We don’t have the right language to talk about talent in a consistent, meaningful, and constructive way. So our conversations, when we do have them, are colored by opinion or recent experience or the bad commute that morning.

Interestingly, only 31% of organizations cited the use of talent review conversations as tools to ID high-potential talent. But 79% of those who do use talent reviews found them to be effective predictors. In order to have the best conversations we need a language to help us break down what drives performance. That’s why tools like assessments were rated as effective tools for identifying potential by 70% of users. While these tools on their own don’t automate the creation of a talent pipeline, they provide objective insight to foster constructive talent discussion.

So ask yourself:

• Is your organization having effective conversations about talent?
• Do you have a language to define top talent that can help guide your plans for developing, engaging and retaining those individuals?

Because if your organization doesn’t have something to talk about when it comes to great talent, you could wind up just talking to yourself. So join me next week for ideas on how to improve the conversations your organization is having on finding and keeping great talent.

—Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi

The post Let’s Talk About Talent appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

What happens next determines the fate of the relationship – in manager/employee relationships as in dating. People with different perspectives need to work together to bridge differences.  And both parties must be engaged in order for the relationship to prosper.

Manager and Employee Engagement

Brandon Hall Group’s Employee Engagement study found that nearly three-quarters of organizations that increased manager engagement the past year also saw employee engagement increase over the same time. In organizations where manager engagement decreased, only 4% saw an increase in employee engagement. And importantly, those organizations increasing manager engagement were more than twice as likely to report increased organizational revenue.

Which is all well and good, but what do we do to improve manager, and therefore employee, engagement? Like the socks on the floor, ignoring the problem will only make it worse, until someone gives up on the relationship. It’s called the code of silence – managers who are newly promoted are afraid to ask for help because they figure, “I got promoted, they must think I know what I’m doing, so I better not let on.” And organizations tend to cross their fingers and hope that someone makes the transition to being a people manager.

There’s a Better Way

It’s easy to forget that managers are employees too, and like all employees, they crave development, feedback, and visibility into how their actions impact the organization and its performance. We need to offer managers – particularly newly promoted managers – the same service we expect them to provide for their employees. Organizations responding to Brandon Hall Group’s 2015 Leadership Development study identified the top three activities to improve performance and engagement. They can serve as a guideline for how organizations should be developing managers

• Increase alignment between performance goals and business goals
• Focus on coaching for development
• Improve managers’ skills in giving feedback

The research also found that 42% of organizations identified “coaching in the moment” as a leadership skill gap – the most significant leadership skill gap cited. By offering opportunities to learn and grow on an ongoing basis – for managers and employees – the socks on the floor don’t need to lead to a final confrontation. Managers also need tools to help them in this process, because coaching doesn’t always come instinctively.

But only 34% of respondents indicate that they taking advantage of tools that offer coaching tips as part of their performance management technology. Through both increased training and increased access to actionable coaching and feedback insights as part of technology solutions, organizations can move the dial on manager engagement to drive true business performance.

–Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi

The post Like All Employees, Managers Need Feedback, Development appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

One major theme that cut across many of the presentations was the notion of hyper personalization, or mass customization of learning and learning content. All of us know in our heart of hearts that we are special unique creatures that have needs only a unique combination of knowledge and experiences can address. This is what I like to call the “special shiny snowflake syndrome”. But this presents a problem for corporate learning, who is tasked with making sure that everybody in a particular role has the requisite core knowledge and capabilities.

Enter advanced analytics and machine learning, which Skillsoft is making good use of through its partnerships with IBM and its newly acquired capabilities. By using technology to map how people consume learning, algorithms that recognize concepts and can point people to appropriate learning content, and responsive design that seems to anticipate your every move, Skillsoft is very focused on creating personalized learning journeys that are individually controlled and experience, but map back to core business priorities.

This journey of hyper personalization is akin to the journey in marketing, which I have written about before. But continues to strike me that as a consumer culture – internationally as well as in the US – we have come to expect the same experience from our enterprise software that we have from our favorite retailer. The good news is, now organizations have the tools available that can help them create this kind of adaptive experiences. But the important thing will also be to measure their business impact – just as marketing holds itself accountable to do.

Because the end of the day, the most important thing is changing behaviors and aligning them with the drivers of business results. And as guest speaker Mike Walsh reminded us, the most effective way to change behavior is to reduce the complexity of the user experience. As you make it easier and more relevant to learn, more people will. These are important lessons for organizations to remember as they develop learning plans, select learning partners, and curate learning content into the future.

-Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst, Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group @mollielombardi

The post Reports from the Road: Some Perspective on Learning from Skillsoft/SumTotal (#Perspectives15) appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

This is not my first Convergence event, and it has been interesting to see how the Cornerstone leadership team and product have evolved. From a learning start-up to one of the last remaining stand-alone talent management suites, Cornerstone has had quite a journey in the past 16 years. In light of this journey, I wanted to highlight three observations on where the organization stands today.

Filling in the gaps. The past several years have brought many additions to the product suite offered by Cornerstone, building from its original learning and extended enterprise clouds to a set of offerings encompassing the entire employee lifecycle — including recruiting, onboarding, performance management, compensation, and succession. Many of the updates shared this year were reflective of Cornerstone’s mission to fill in the gaps of its offering to be able to match the functionality of best-of-breed solutions in each of these areas. These necessary enhancements help round out the suite solution and offer opportunities for Cornerstone to expand its relationship with current clients.

Leveraging extended enterprise expertise. One of the earliest capabilities delivered by the organization was an extended enterprise learning solution. These solutions are designed to not only facilitate the logistics of training individuals outside the organization – resellers, customers, channel partners – but also handling the e-commerce needs to support external training where needed. This capability will become increasingly important I believe, because an increasing number of organizations are operating in a networked marketplace and depend on each other to achieve their business goals.

A powerful partner network. Cornerstone has built a strong network of partners that believe in its vision of cloud computing and offer complementary solutions and services. These include partners that focus on helping organizations think through the processes and strategy that they are enabling with Cornerstone technology, and ensuring that there is ongoing alignment and process improvement. These partners bring the layer of process and functional expertise that tools alone cannot address, enhancing user success with Cornerstone solutions.

–Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi

The post Report from the Road: Cornerstone Convergence ’15 Wrap-up appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.