UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll and workforce management solutions, made a strong move this week with the introduction of generative AI-powered conversational experiences for its UKG Pro and UKG Ready HCM suites.

“We’re reshaping how people will access information, analyze insights and complete important processes at work,” said Hugo Sarrazin, chief product and technology officer at UKG.

Generative AI has the potential to transform work, but new Brandon Hall Group research shows that many employers are taking a cautious approach. Only 38% of HR organizations are actively involved in shaping the GenAI strategy for their organizations and only 33% say GenAI has a potentially positive impact.

That gives HR suite providers like UKG an opportunity to show these companies — their customers — the value of GenAI and how it can be implemented responsibly and ethically in the service of people. This can build deeper provider-customer connections.

Here are just a few examples of how GenAI can be leveraged for HR:

• Rather than navigating complex menus and forms, employees can have conversations with a virtual assistant to complete tasks like requesting time off, enrolling in benefits or updating personal information.
• Unlike traditional chatbots, GenAI can understand and interpret context and nuance, and has the potential to provide personalized responses based on a person’s role and situation.
• An AI assistant can ask clarifying questions and guide the user through processes in a more intuitive way. An employee could simply say, “I need to take next Monday off” and the AI could confirm the date, check available vacation time and submit the request seamlessly, without the user needing to locate the right forms or remember policy details.
• For new employee onboarding, an AI assistant could proactively reach out and have friendly dialogues to collect paperwork, introduce company resources and training programs and answer common questions in a personalized way. This takes a task that employees often find tedious and overwhelming and makes it more approachable and helpful.

UKG will showcase its generative AI enhancements at its annual conference, UKG Aspire 2023, Nov. 6-9 in Las Vegas.

This is just the latest move in UKG’s ongoing effort to build a culture around GenAI, which has been used in some form since 2015. For example, UKG has now hosted three hackathons, each involving more than 1,000 employees, experimenting with all types of innovation around AI with a thematic focus on “building great workplace experiences.” UKG then took specific use cases and tried them out on customers.

UKG understands that the natural language processing and conversational capabilities of AI can humanize and personalize HR technology. We look forward to hearing and seeing the details of their plans at UKG Aspire 2023.

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The world of human capital management has changed forever. HR leaders are not separate from business leaders — they are business leaders responsible for optimizing the collective genius of the workforce to collaborate, innovate, evolve and excel in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

HR must become ubiquitous to an organization’s success by working strategically in alignment with the rest of the enterprise to ensure employees have everything they need to drive success for themselves and the business.

HCM is not about L&D, Talent Management, Leadership Development or other traditional functions. Those are simply instruments that must operate with the seamless fluidity of a symphony orchestra to enable organizations to thrive in a highly connected digital world that will only become more intertwined in the coming years.

Excellence in HCM means understanding — and being laser-focused on — organizational business goals.

HR strategists must leverage the tools at their disposal — and develop new tools and approaches — to enable and empower the workforce to deliver results at the speed of business. However, many organizations are three-quarters of a mile behind in a one-mile race.

The siloing that has plagued HCM can severely impede organizational evolution:

• If you focus on L&D in a vacuum, you miss that the entire organization is impacted by how learning and development is approached.
• If you focus on DE&I initiatives in a vacuum, you miss that diversity, equity and inclusion are really the outcomes of embedding the values and principles of DE&I in everything you do.
• If you think only leaders are in charge, you miss that strong leadership is needed from everyone at all levels to successfully leverage each person’s unique capabilities, experiences and mindsets.

Brandon Hall Group’s HCM Outlook 2023: Insights Into Excellence can help you catch up in the race for HCM ubiquity. We provide the insights you need to drive excellence in human capital management.

In this book, you will understand that:

1. Learning must become more ingrained into the organization’s DNA to ensure the business always has the talent it needs to be successful. This includes shifting to more agile processes for developing and delivering learning and embracing emerging technologies that will shape the future of work.
2. Retaining top talent requires going beyond traditional approaches and developing employees with the agility and resilience to acquire new skills while learning how to collaborate with robots and other forms of smart technology that will drive future business growth.
3. Leaders — while becoming more inclusive, collaborative and supportive of employee growth — must warm up to reverse mentoring that can help organizations bridge generational gaps.
4. More people with power and influence must become allies and advocates for members of underrepresented groups if the values of DE&I are ever going to be embedded across enterprises.
5. Employers must embrace hiring automation that extends to bias-free interview questions and 24/7 scheduling that will create a superior candidate experience while delivering a diverse, talented and resilient workforce.

Our intent through this book is to embrace the future and provide insights into what excellence will look like in the years ahead. We envision HCM as the catalyst to drive future business success. But to do so, HR leaders and strategists must shed misguided paradigms and embrace the future with the agility, resilience and creativity that leads to excellence. 

To learn how to download a free copy of HCM Outlook 2023: Insights Into Excellence, click here.

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Organizations are increasingly trying to provide contextualized experiences to their employees, especially when it comes to learning. To drive adoption and engagement, L&D teams want to create more personalized learning experiences, but they are often challenged by scale. It can be difficult to avoid a “one-size-fits-all” feel in a large, complex or extended enterprise. 

This is why Meridian Knowledge Solutions has built its LMS as a multi-tenancy platform. Multi-tenancy is an approach to software that allows there to be several, seemingly different instances of the application that all originate from the original, central platform. 

There are many reasons this approach is so appealing for learning technology. If an organization wants their sales team to have a different look and feel to their learning environment than the support center, in the past they may have purchased two separate systems. This is expensive and presents a lot of duplicative effort for both IT and the L&D team. With multi-tenancy, each group can have the portal they want, driven by the central LMS.

As organizations get larger and more complex, multi-tenancy becomes even more important. Different business units, geographies, and brands almost always need to have unique user experiences for their teams. Managing multiple platforms in a large organization can be chaotic. If the organization’s learning needs extend beyond internal employees to external audiences like partners, resellers, customers, or franchisees, those unique experiences become critical. Each of these audiences has needs that are vastly different from both employee audiences and each other. Meridian also works with several government-related entities leveraging multi-tenancy to create different learning portals for complex agencies at the local, state and federal levels.

In any learning environment, the biggest challenge organizations face is reporting and analytics. In Brandon Hall Group’s research, it is the number one feature companies say they are looking for in new learning technology. It is also seen as the number one challenge with extended enterprise learning. This is because as organizations get more complex and deploy more disparate technology platforms, it becomes nearly impossible to consolidate and analyze all the data. In a multi-tenancy environment, the data is all flowing into one place and is far easier to manage.If your organization is looking to create, deliver and manage multiple learning environments, it is important to consider a provider like Meridian that has experience delivering multi-tenancy at a variety of scales and industries. 

– David Wentworth, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group

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One of the biggest challenges facing Learning and Development teams today is an inability to properly measure learning’s impact on the business. Brandon Hall Group research has found that the number one reason why companies look to either switch learning technology or learning technology providers is to get better data and analytics capabilities. Additionally, data analysis is the number one skill L&D teams say they need to be successful in the future.

Proper measurement is critical. L&D teams that cannot move beyond simple completion rates and smile sheets are doomed to continue operating in the dark. A look at the top three challenges facing learning’s effectiveness (according to Brandon Hall Group’s State of Learning Practices study) reflects this problem:

1. Not enough time
2. Inability to measure learning’s impact on business performance
3. Inability to measure learning’s impact on individual performance

That same study found that the number two L&D priority for achieving business goals is improving learning analytics. It all adds up to a critical situation where organizations recognize how important good analysis is, yet struggle to do it.

Brandon Hall Group Smartchoice® Platinum Preferred Provider ELB Learning has a host of different learning technology products, all of which feature measurement and analytics as key elements of what they do. For a specific example, ELB learning touts the Lectora authoring tool. Some organizations may not think of an authoring tool when they think of analytics, but that is a huge part of the overall problem. Measurement and analytics are seen as an endpoint for the process of learning, something to be considered once everything has been built and delivered. This is why so many companies default to holding up completion rates as proof of success.

Using a tool like Lectora allows L&D teams to build the kind of trackable metrics that demonstrate progress right into the content. This is achieved via the xAPI data format. Instead of only tracking launches, completions and test scores, xAPI allows for the collection of any kind of learning experience, whether it occurs online or offline. Without xAPI, it is next to impossible to track what is occurring within any given learning interaction. This kind of data provides invaluable insight into what is working and what isn’t when it comes to learning. It means programs can be tweaked or changed as needed, rather than starting over from scratch.

Additionally, the “noun, verb, object” xAPI statements mean tracking can take place wherever learning does, not just within an LMS, this means Lectora content is fully trackable regardless of how learners access it. Having multiple data points around how learners interact with content gives deeper insight when analyzed along with other data such as sales, performance management and more. The xAPI standard has been around for a while, but organizations are still just beginning to discover its potential. Lectora makes it simple to publish in xAPI and begin the journey to a more mature learning measurement approach.

– David Wentworth, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group

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Boca Raton, FL — Sep 14, 2022

Brandon Hall Group, the leading independent HCM research and analyst firm, is launching a study on September 20 to understand how and why employers are currently using the performance review, and what the best practices are for the future of the performance review.

This research will look at the performance review process at high-performing organizations and what is driving them to change their processes, and what those changes will look like.

Brandon Hall Group’s research initiative, The Current and Future State of the Performance Review focuses on how:

• Whether organizations primarily use performance reviews as measurements of past performance or indicators of future potential
• What challenges organizations are facing in developing impactful performance reviews
• How organizations are using technology to create better performance review experiences

To participate in this study, click here. Participants will receive summary results of the survey six to eight weeks after the survey launch and will get immediate download access to Brandon Hall Group’s strategy brief, Six Ways to Make Performance Management More Relevant.

This quantitative research will be complemented with qualitative interviews to create an understanding of the methods and techniques high-performing organizations are using to receive maximum value from the performance review process. The data and insights will lead to the development of research reports and tools — such as self-assessment tools, models, and frameworks — to help organizations improve the way they design and deliver performance reviews.

“Organizations are taking a new look at their performance review processes,” said Cliff Stevenson, Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group, “Organizations want to be able to make the best people decisions they can.  The focus of this research is to understand what organizations are doing now, and how they are changing their process moving forward.”

About Brandon Hall Group:

Brandon Hall Group is the only professional development company that offers data, research, insights, and certification to HR, Learning, and Talent executives and organizations. The best minds in Human Capital Management (HCM) choose Brandon Hall Group to help them create future-proof employee development plans for the new era. 

For over 28 years, we have empowered, recognized, and certified excellence in organizations around the world influencing the development of over 10 million employees and executives. Our HCM Excellence Awards was the first to recognize organizations for learning and talent and is the gold standard, known as the “Academy Awards of Human Capital Management.”

Our cloud-based platform delivers evidence-based insights in the areas of Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Diversity and Inclusion, Talent Acquisition, and HR for corporate organizations and HCM solution providers.

To learn more, visit www.brandonhall.com.

The post Brandon Hall Group to Launch Study on the Current and Future State of the Performance Review  appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

While organizations invest a lot of resources into their brand, brand awareness and standards often aren’t as big a priority for the organization at large outside of sales and marketing. The development and dissemination of the right brand are critical to the success of the business, but few groups or teams are specifically focused on doing so — and that’s a problem. The entire organization should be involved in promoting the brand and building trust.  According to research from Accenture, lack of trust costs global brands $2.5 trillion per year — $756 billion is lost by companies in the U.S. alone. 

Brandon Hall Group Smartchoice® Gold Preferred Provider Absorb sees the LMS as a unique opportunity to help establish and sustain clear brand standards, both inside and outside the organization. An LMS that is built for both internal employees, as well as the extended enterprise (customers, resellers, franchisees, etc.), helps drive consistency. 

For employees, the LMS environment itself should exhibit the brand while at the same time providing consistent, standardized training on brand and messaging. Using the LMS as a single source of truth for branding keeps the message from getting disjointed or diluted coming from multiple sources. The training can ensure a clear understanding of the brand across all employees and provide training on how to position the brand in the market. It can also help train employees to be brand ambassadors.

For the extended enterprise, an LMS plays an even more important role in brand consistency and awareness since the audiences are not employees. For partner and reseller audiences, training via the LMS helps grow brand equity and loyalty.  Using the LMS to train partners, resellers and especially customers provides an opportunity to build brand awareness and loyalty via a consistently high-quality, on-brand experience. This kind of training augments the capabilities of the organization’s corporate communication efforts, amplifying the brand. The LMS is also an effective way to quickly disseminate any updates to the branding or messaging to a wide variety of audiences simultaneously.

One area where brand consistency is critical is among franchisees. Absorb works with many organizations operating in this model, and they leverage the LMS to ensure each location is living up to the customers’ expectations of the brand, regardless of who owns it. You can see just how Absorb gets it done with their client A&W Canada in this case study.

Absorb’s clients leverage the platform’s ability to provide customized experiences for each audience to ensure that employees, customers, and partners are all getting the branded experience that is right for them. Absorb LMS equips administrators with the tools to customize lessons to a team’s needs, including documents, videos, live webinars, and more. These delivery formats can help learners digest elements of the organization’s brand, internally for employees and externally for partners, franchises, members, etc. And the Absorb LMS helps administrators understand if those trainings are effective. Advanced tracking tools, customizable dashboards, integrations, and analytics will help you measure your ROI and monitor trainee progress. 

Ultimately, a strong brand is dependent on consistency. Building that brand consistency into the LMS experience ensures that the organization can have tight control over what that brand is and how it is leveraged.

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As employers adjust to the ever-evolving future of work, learning is more critical to business success than ever before. But the return on an organization’s investment in learning can’t be optimized unless learning professionals become more strategic and more closely aligned with business leaders.

We will explore this important topic during a Sept. 20 webinar featuring top leaders from CommLab India, ranked among the world’s leading eLearning development companies.

Learning professionals must shed their reliance on formal learning and become strategists who leverage a wide range of options to arm the emerging workforce with the competencies needed to help the business and grow their careers.

The learning strategist of tomorrow must be proficient in strategy, leadership, interpersonal relationships and technical skills while excelling in organizational competencies ranging from performance consulting to talent structure modeling, neuroscience application and technology leadership, just to name a few. Here is the full set of professional and competencies from Brandon Hall Group’s Certified Learning Strategist program.

In the webinar, RK Prasad, CEO and co-founder of CommLab India, and the company’s chief learning architect, Howard B. Lewis, will provide solutions to the age-old quandary: how does L&D truly become a strategic business partner? You will leave with:

• Competencies that learning professionals must embrace to provide strategic solutions to critical business problems

• Examples of the results that are possible through strategic learning-business partnerships
• Strategic scenarios that attendees can respond to

Learning professionals at all career stages — from entry-level instructional designers to senior leaders — must have a deep understanding of the organizations they serve and develop skills to be true partners with the business. 

Please join us Tuesday, Sept. 20 at 11 am ET. If you aren’t sure you can make it, register anyway and we will provide a recording and the webinar slides to use when it suits you. 

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The Challenge

Getting and keeping employees engaged in learning is an ongoing challenge for most businesses. Training programs that are static and event-based come across as large, boring and intrusive to people’s daily work. Organizations need to do a better job at driving the adoption of learning programs, as well as reinforcing and supporting the concepts and skills the learning is trying to build. There are several key elements characteristics L&D teams can bring into their learning programs to make them more effective. The learning should:

• Be engaging
• Provide opportunities to try and fail
• Provide reinforcement of key concepts
• Give learners a sense of accomplishment or mastery
• Include collaboration with peers
• Offer some kind of reward or recognition

An aspect of learning that can deliver on all of these points but is often overlooked is gamification. It is passed over for seeming frivolous or gimmicky, but when leveraged properly, gamification can really drive results.

The Rethink

Gamification touches on many critical points that make learning successful. Far from being frivolous, game-based learning injects elements of fun, play and competition in pursuit of serious results. Within the context of a learning program, gamification can:

• Encourage strategic thinking
• Provide an opportunity for practice learning
• Enhance learner motivation among disengaged learners
• Promote healthy competition
• Improve self-direction and independent thinking
• Foster collaboration
• Afford a safe environment for learning through experimentation and trial-and-error
• Help develop a spirit of patience and persistence among learners

There are two approaches when it comes to gamification in learning. First, there is the practice of adding gamification elements to existing learning content. This can include awarding points for completing certain steps, publishing a leaderboard for learners to compare progress, or providing badges or achievements for “leveling up.”

The second approach is game-based learning, where the learning occurs as the learner plays an actual game. These could be as simple as a word search or a matching exercise or as complex as an action-based video game.

Both approaches are effective and have their own use cases. In either case, understanding the impact game mechanics can have as a learning tool is important to ensure they are being used properly. Not only can they provide a contrast to more formal, traditional eLearning content, but games are also more closely and clearly tied to specific learning objectives, making them more relevant and contextual. 

The Recommendation

What Brandon Hall Group Says About EI Design’s Solution

EI Design has a comprehensive understanding of game-based learning and gamification and they work with clients to design programs that fit their needs. They can repackage an organization’s existing content with gamification elements to make it more engaging and promote critical thinking. At the same time, however, EI Design knows that games are not the right solution in every case, so they work with clients to find the right fit.

It starts with identifying the right strategy. EI design aligns their gamification approach to the expectations of the client’s learning program. These can include improved motivation, improved engagement, or more rewarding experiences. This is how they know which games or gamification elements will make the most sense. Some examples of this alignment include:

• Driving learner engagement – Use challenges and rewards
• Motivating learner performance – Use leaderboards, badges, and points
• Promote healthy competition – Us group points and leaderboards

An organization cannot implement any gamification strategy without a solid understanding of employee knowledge needs. EI Design always begins its approach with this kind of needs analysis. It is also important to understand the behavior change that is required. This will determine what kind of game or game mechanics are used and how. Instructions for the games must be clear and concise to ensure a positive experience.

EI Design uses proven gamification approaches and techniques to achieve successful gamification, including focusing on longer-term gamification which can include gaming apps, VR integration, microlearning, and personalized gaming challenges. Ultimately, their approach to game-based learning is driving learner adoption, engagement, retention and performance.

• David Wentworth, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group

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Boca Raton, FL — Sept. 9, 2022

Brandon Hall Group, the leading independent HCM research and analyst firm, is launching its annual HCM Outlook study on Sept. 13 to understand the priorities of organizations in the coming year and how hybrid work, economic uncertainty, the “Great Resignation” and other disruptors will impact goals and objectives.

The study focuses on investment (in time and money) in Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Talent Acquisition, Human Resources, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I), Future of Work/Digital Transformation and Metaverses.
The research will also identify trends regarding how:

• The evolution of the hybrid workplace is impacting the approach to human capital management strategies and priorities
• The ongoing talent retention crisis is shaping trends in hiring and developing talent
• Organizations plan to address the impact of inflation and other economic variables and the possibility of a recession in 2023

To participate in this study, go to https://www.research.net/r/F6THZT3. Participants will receive summary results of the research six to eight weeks after the survey launch and will get immediate download access to the Brandon Hall Group research summary eBook, Learning and the Future of Work.

“We believe HR and business leaders are at a critical crossroads,” said Brandon Hall Group CEO Mike Cooke. “They are adapting to an emerging workforce, an evolving hybrid work environment, social, political and economic volatility and more critical technology choices than ever before. It’s not overly dramatic to say that the strategies deployed in 2023 could impact critical business outcomes for the rest of the decade.”

This quantitative research will be complemented with qualitative interviews. The data and insights will fuel the development of research reports and tools — such as self-assessment tools, models and frameworks — to help organizations improve their use of technology to drive talent outcomes.

About Brandon Hall Group:

Brandon Hall Group is the only professional development company that offers data, research, insights and certification to Learning and Talent executives and organizations. The best minds in Human Capital Management (HCM) choose Brandon Hall Group to help them create future-proof employee development plans for the new era. 

For over 28 years, we have empowered, recognized and certified excellence in organizations around the world influencing the development of over 10 million employees and executives. Our HCM Excellence Awards program was the first to recognize organizations for learning and talent and is the gold standard, known as the “Academy Awards of Human Capital Management.”

Our cloud-based platform delivers evidence-based insights in the areas of Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Diversity and Inclusion, Talent Acquisition and HR for corporate organizations and HCM solution providers.

To learn more, visit www.brandonhall.com.

The post Brandon Hall Group to Launch Study of 2023 HR Priorities appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) is a business imperative for most employers, Brandon Hall Group research shows. But many organizations struggle to embed the principles across the enterprise.

Building diverse workplaces and inclusive company cultures requires a combination of executive alignment and people development, starting with individual contributors.

Allyship — when people in an organization actively promote the culture of inclusion – can greatly accelerate creation of a DE&I culture. 

On Sept. 13, NovoEd and Brandon Hall Group offer a webinar that explores how HR and learning organizations can use allyship and collaborative learning technology to align employees around complex goals. The session will demonstrate how to build networks of allyship to develop people into the types of employees who can embody and enact a company’s vision and culture.

An ally is someone who is not a member of an underrepresented group but who takes action to support that group. Allies utilize their credibility to create a workplace where everyone can thrive. For example:

• White male executives can be allies to women of color who want to reach the same position in their careers. 
• Cisgender employees can be allies to colleagues from the LGBTQI+ community. 
• People from privileged backgrounds can be allies to those who lack the same economic stability and opportunities. 

This webinar focuses on inclusive leadership and allyship programs as deployed at Visa, General Mills and Walgreens. These programs are examples of how to develop and deploy complex learning initiatives that change the effectiveness of people and transform cultures by creating internal alignment at scale.

Dr. Kristin Lee, Virtual Learning Manager at NextUp, Amberly Santana, Senior Learning Experience Designer at NovoEd, and Claude Werder, Senior VP and Principal HCM Analyst for Brandon Hall Group, will provide insights and research to unlock the secrets for increasing allyship and cultivating inclusive leaders. Attendees will leave the webinar with:

• Models and approaches to building inclusive leaders and allies
• How to improve the impact of your DE&I initiatives
• Best practices and decision-making strategies for balancing learning science, psychological safety, learner engagement strategies and your organization’s culture

Please join us Tuesday, Sept. 13, at 1 pm ET. If you aren’t sure you can make it, register anyway and we will provide a recording and the webinar slides to use when it suits you.

-Claude Werder, Senior VP and Principal HCM Analyst, Brandon Hall Group

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