Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:12 Today I want to talk about the flow of work because almost everything that I've been running into in the HR domain has turned into the flow of work. And this is a paradigm that's not new, but maybe I've been responsible for popularizing it. That has really defined the way we work through the pandemic because we all work, including frontline workers in a constantly connected environment of phones, video devices, computers, laptops, whatever it may be. And things come at us constantly. Alerts, notifications, text messages, phone calls, video calls. So we need HR and learning and other recruiting solutions in the flow of work. Now, the whole idea of in the flow of work is that when you are doing a task or a project or an activity, that is your job, there are times when it is useful to look something up, to find somebody to be notified about something, to get what's called a nudge, to get a suggestion, to get a hint, to get some developmental improvements.
Speaker 1 00:01:18 And we really haven't had a paradigm for that other than the telephone notification, which is virtually out of control. In fact, apple put it together a whole notification center to shut off the notifications that come from the 200 apps that are located on your phone. So we need in the flow of work technology that's manageable and intelligent, not just promotional and advertising oriented. And to some degree, maybe the paradigm for the flow of work is a nudge. Nudge is a positive developmental interaction that comes at you when you probably need it and you can choose to ignore it, but it's there to help you. And that's really where this is going. Now, the flow of work is impacting everybody. I've talked a lot about it with many of you about learning in the flow of work because learning is a flow of work activity. When you're in the middle of building a spreadsheet and you need some complex formula and you forgot how to do it, you go out to Google and you try to look it up and figure out how to write it, or you're typing a document and you misspell a word, the spell check kind of fixes it for you or it suggests you how to fix it.
Speaker 1 00:02:24 So learning in the flow of work is huge. And it turns out, if you look at the data we've been collecting in the learning industry, 30 to 40% of companies are doing learning in the flow of work with a lot of different technologies, embedded apps embedded into browsers, browser plugins, learning applications that fit into Slack or teams developmental nudges that come out of the learning system themselves, LSPs that recommend content. All of those things are multiple years in development and available in most companies. The second area, though that's a little more interesting is HR transactions in the flow of work. Now, when Microsoft first introduced Microsoft Viva, I'm not sure they really realized what an impact they were gonna have on the market, but they quickly created an environment where every company that uses Microsoft Technology and Microsoft Teams, and that's roughly 70% of the global 2000 or more is looking for HR technology that fits into teams and teams is a flow of work application.
Speaker 1 00:03:22 So this week, Workday introduced a whole battery of offerings called Workday Everywhere, which is essentially cards, hints, notifications, transactions and journeys from Workday in Microsoft, Viva connections, which is embedded within teams. So you can be sitting in Microsoft Teams chatting away with your friends, and the Workday system could say Your open enrollment is overdue, click here to complete. And that's a paradigm changing interface because Workday, of course, as a big company, is trying to build all sorts of important developmental journeys in the Workday platform, but maybe they don't need to do that so much because those interfaces will take place in teams in Slack, in Salesforce, or in whatever tool you end up spending your time in, in whatever tool Workday decides to build an app for. And Workday claims that they're going to build this kind of interface into Zoom, into Slack, into Salesforce, into WebEx and into Google Workplace and into workplace by Facebook to be renamed whatever their new company name is.
Speaker 1 00:04:27 Here's another example of flow of work activity that I think is interesting in the performance management market. We all do performance appraisals. We all have some form of end of period appraisal process. Nobody really enjoys it. It's kind of a lot of paperwork. We have to fill out forms, we have to complete goals, we have to update goals, and then there's check-ins and all sorts of things that happen from day to day and week to week and month to month. Those are applications. Most of those systems are standalone systems. Lattice 15, five success factors, many others. And you go into that system, you do the performance management stuff and maybe you come back out of it and do the rest of your work separately or hopefully you try to do it all together. Well, a large consumer package goods company decided they were using Workday for performance management.
Speaker 1 00:05:14 It's not a bad system, but it's not very flow of work oriented. They wanted something different. They wanted something more agile. They wanted to be able to do OKRs in one part of the company. They wanted to have check-ins, they wanted to have AI enabled development. And they went out and they found a system that has a very tight and elegant integration with Google Workplace. And this particular company uses the Google Suite, not the Microsoft Suite all over the world, and they evaluated a whole variety of vendors and ended up selecting this vendor. The vendor they selected is a company called BetterWorks because of its integration with Google Workplace. And I talked to the team that did the evaluation and I asked them, why did you decide to do this? Was it because of the functionality? Was it because of the OKRs? Was it because of the ai?
Speaker 1 00:06:01 Was it because of the reporting? And they said no wasn't really any of that. It was because it was so easy to use in the Google G Suite or workplace suite that we knew employees were going to use it and take advantage of it. And all the features of collaboration and goal alignment and kudos and suggestions and so forth that were built in there immediately became available to our employees. In other words, if you're evaluating technology for its core features or its in-depth process capability, that may not be as important as how easy it is to use in the flow of work. Because once something is in the flow of work, it sort of takes on a new dimension. And that leads me to the third topic for this podcast is where this all goes. Now I have the luxury of talking to many, many vendors and looking at all sorts of demos, and if there's anything I've learned about technology over the last few years, everything's getting very intelligent.
Speaker 1 00:06:59 All of these systems collect data. They have the history data of your usage as a user or an employee. They have the history data of the organization, they have the history data of people in your role, and that data is being mined and used for various A applications. Well, what better application for AI than an interaction in the flow of work that recommends or suggests that you do something based on your location, the time of day, how busy you are, your schedule, perhaps the meeting you just finished and sending that data to this backend application so the application knows something about you? I see no reason why that won't happen. A good example is what Microsoft Viva is doing with Viva Connections. If you use Viva Connections and you use Viva Insights and we use Viva Insights here, it's embedded in our Microsoft license, the system does a very good job of recommending things like focus time.
Speaker 1 00:07:55 It knows that I'm in back-to-back meetings 60 hours a week, thank God, and it tells me, Nope, you're taking focus time next week and you're gonna take eight hours off in different chunks of time to try to do something else. That data could be used by any application that chooses to integrate with Microsoft to suggest or recommend other activities. I don't think those systems necessarily would access my Outlook database and look at my calendar on their own, but if they do it through the flow of work application, they certainly can. So I can anticipate a whole industry of nudge oriented applications from traditional or more transactional HR vendors that will manifest themselves in the flow of work. The fourth example I want to give is a great little company that used to be called Growbot that was acquired by Culture Amp. And I wrote a story about this.
Speaker 1 00:08:47 What the CEO Justin did is he built an application for software engineers that was designed to watch the communications you were having in Slack. And if you said something like, great job in your text, it would say, would you like to give this person a thumbs up? Very simple little application. And what it did is it created a sense of social recognition points, badges and other nifty ideas around the conversations you were having in Slack. Now, Justin was probably three or four years ahead of his time. When he first showed it to me was quite a few years ago. I looked at it and I said, that's kind of cute, but I'm not sure how useful it will be. But sure enough, it started to grow and started to take off. And he found that software teams that used it were much happier, much more productive, and they were learning more things about each other because the system was nudging them to provide more positive and developmental feedback to peers than they would on a normal day basis because it was so easy to use.
Speaker 1 00:09:48 It wasn't asking people to do more work, it was really doing something for them. Well, robot grew. Justin changed the name of the company to disco, and sure enough, they were acquired by a company called Culture Amp. And Culture Amp is a bunch of smart guys. This is a company that pioneered ubiquitous surveys and culture and we're the first company to do employee surveys, but they really popularized the idea of culture surveys and they acquired Zada, which does AI enabled development and feedback based on email traffic. And now they're using robot to add developmental and other forms of growth oriented and recognition oriented nudges into their platform, which will extend into Microsoft teams and Slack and other in the flow of work applications. I think this could potentially give Culture Amp a whole new market to go after to sell tools that interface in this way.
Speaker 1 00:10:43 For those of you that use technology as much as I do, and I think most of you do, you know that this paradigm of interacting instantaneously with applications is a common part of your life. It's the way you use your phone, it's the way you use Twitter. It's the way you used Instagram. It's the way you use, God forbid you use Facebook. And so for those of us that cover HR tech, if these HR tech solutions, many of which are very sophisticated under the scenes, can reach you in the flow of work in a positive and developmental way without interrupting you and slowing you down, they're going to be infinitely more useful. So there you go. That's a paradigm changing part of the HR tech market, and I encourage you to think about it and look for it in some of those solutions that you go out and buy over the coming year. Thank you.
