Leveraging Collaborative Technology to Drive Effective Talent Management

Leveraging Collaborative Technology to Drive Effective Talent Management White Paper

White Paper > Leveraging Collaborative Technology to Drive Effective Talent Management We often hear that the only constant in business is change. This continues to be true, and the speed at which business moves today shows no signs of slowing. Of course, the nature of talent management has changed as a result, requiring a much more agile approach to attracting, developing and retaining employees. At the core of this is the challenge of keeping employees engaged ensuring they have the tools, insights and support they need to achieve their goals, stay in sync with their teams and the organization, and grow. Enabling effective collaboration is a critical component in addressing this issue, but not all collaboration technologies will do the job. It requires a personalized, unified solution that is built around each employee s objectives, aspirations and day-to-day work. The Trends Driving the Need for Better Connectivity Because of today s technology, operating on a global scale is the norm, with talent and competitors coming from anywhere in the world. Teams are located remotely, dispersed around the globe in different time zones, making it difficult to meet face-to-face, join in-person training, or exchange timecritical information with peers. At the same time, the work environment itself is constantly changing, especially with the rise of new technologies such as mobile devices to enable connectivity whether in or out of the office, and social networks to exchange information across teams. With the rise in popularity of consumer-focused collaboration and content-sharing tools, such as Facebook and YouTube, there is a growing expectation that similar streamlined approaches to interacting and exchanging knowledge should be available in the workplace. Not All Tools Are Created Equal Enabling seamless collaboration and connectivity across employees dispersed around the globe is critical to empowering teams to keep up with the speed of business. However, while it is relatively simple for employees to connect using a variety of collaboration tools Skype to connect in real time, file sharing repositories to post information, or stand-alone social networking software to encourage interactivity this may actually be counterproductive. According to a study by Deloitte, one of the biggest challenges enterprises face is the overwhelmed employee. Information overload and the always-connected 24/7 work environment are overwhelming workers, undermining productivity and contributing to low employee engagement. However, 65 percent of executives in our survey rated the overwhelmed employee an urgent or important trend, while 44 percent said that they are not ready to deal with it. ¹ The problem is that introducing a variety of collaborative tools that are not tied to employees business processes and objectives means more places for people to go to share information, and ultimately more silos where information and content can get lost. In short, while there are many collaboration tools out there, lack of unification across these tools can be a major barrier to getting work done more efficiently, exacerbating the challenges faced by the overwhelmed employee. How the Right Collaboration Tools Can Address These Issues An effective collaboration solution shouldn t create more silos of information, but should unify the various modes of exchanging knowledge, creating a single place to share information, expertise and training, socially or in real time. At the same time it should speed up business processes, making it fast and easy to connect with others. While there are many collaboration tools out there, lack of unification across these tools can be a major barrier to getting work done more efficiently, exacerbating the challenges faced by the overwhelmed employee. 2

More importantly, the right solution should provide a personally relevant experience for each user: curating and surfacing the most important content, connections and training for each user based on their role, goals, career aspirations, team dynamics and more. Collaboration at the Foundation of Talent Management A common use case with collaborative technology is in training and development of employees, but this is only one area across the broader employee lifecycle where it can be applied. When extending it in a unified fashion across not just learning, but in the hiring, performance management, compensation and succession planning processes, collaborative technology can drive employee engagement and growth exponentially. Let s look at some examples in each area: Recruiting It is commonplace today for candidates and hiring teams to be located in different areas around the globe. Hiring managers may find that the best talent is not found locally and don t want to limit themselves. Or more commonly, even if the hiring manager is only searching for local candidates, there will likely be key stakeholders or teammates located remotely who can add great value to the interview process by meeting with the candidate virtually and providing feedback to the team. In many cases, remote interviews are conducted via phone, but this can hinder the observation of body language and critical personal connection required to feel confident in the decision to hire a candidate (from a hiring manager s perspective), or join an organization (from the candidate s perspective). An effective talent management solution should enable the hiring manager to schedule interviews with the hiring team either locally or virtually, leveraging video conferencing technology without having to go through any separate systems (like a web conferencing solution) for the scheduling, to ensure there are no breaks in the process. Virtual interviews can then be tracked, with the recording automatically posted to a workspace where candidate feedback can effectively be shared and discussed across the hiring team. Learning As described above, the speed of business, as well as the geographically dispersed nature of employees, is changing the requirements for effective learning across the organization. To keep up with the pace of change, organizations must adopt a much more agile approach to onboarding and development. Training is no longer effective as a one-way push, since new developments could make it obsolete within hours of delivery. In addition, requiring instructors or learners to be together in the same room for instructor-led training may be good for certain types of courses, but often becomes unsustainable due to issues with travel cost, scalability and consistency in delivery. Ultimately, learning must happen faster, and while formal learning is important, a blended approach across several modes of learning can be highly effective. For example, an organization might leverage virtual learning to enable the interactivity of instructor-led training, but in a more cost-effective and consistent fashion that can scale across remote audiences. They can then consider recording those sessions and posting them to a social portal for learners to access, or form a community of practice. Learners can then provide feedback, share insights, or post questions fostering discussion across peers, instructors, or experts. Recordings might also be broken up into short chunks to 3

White Paper > Leveraging Collaborative Technology to Drive Effective Talent Management make the content more actionable and applicable for just-intime access, and posted on a video channel (like a secure, internal version of YouTube) for subscription. Critically, employees may need insights to advance their career or get their job done. With an effective talent management solution, the recordings, documents, courses and expertise they need should be easily surfaced for them either automatically recommended by intelligent algorithms for review, or as part of intelligent search. While just an example, combining the pieces above within a single program can enable a blend of formal, informal and experiential components for a much more efficient and agile approach to training. Performance Management Rather than setting goals once a year and reviewing them sporadically, a better approach enables a continuous discussion and ensures alignment between managers and employees. An effective talent management solution can help with this in several ways. Goal management is at the center of this, enabling an employee to view their manager s goals (assuming the manager makes them visible), and then cascade their goals off of those. For example, if the manager has a goal of increasing revenue by 20%, the employee might create a goal to run 10 marketing campaigns, and set their manager s goal as the parent. In this way, both goals, and the progress toward them, can be viewed simultaneously on the same screen alongside any comments, tasks and progress. This capability can foster a more continuous discussion between the employee and manager, enabling the employee to get feedback on achieving their objectives, versus waiting for a review (often with surprising results, such as hearing about issues that should have been addressed when they occurred, not months later) at the end of the quarter or year. Note that with the geographically dispersed nature of teams, virtual meetings also become key to the success of continuous reviews, and can include real-time coaching to ensure these sessions are a valuable component to employee development. Finally, it is unlikely that a manager can effectively assess performance on their own, but it is often difficult to collect feedback from others. A good talent management solution can capture feedback from peers with impressions and badges. This recognition can easily be leveraged by managers to get a better sense of the impact an employee is making, and reviewed both throughout the year as part of the continuous performance discussion and pulled into a more formal review at the end of the year. 4

Compensation Retaining top employees is increasingly challenging today as the economy improves, and employees are passively or actively looking for the next opportunity oftentimes with compensation being a key driver of the move. As such, organizations are in a rush to more proactively address this issue, looking for talent management systems that can help them identify at-risk employees (e.g., high performers who are undercompensated), and roll out budget plans to proactively retain top talent. An effective talent management system can help streamline this process not just with recommendations on optimizing compensation plans, but with the ability to roll out those plans and address any changes effectively. Virtual meetings can be used to roll out budget plans across department leaders, but more importantly, can be recorded and posted to private workspaces for review, Q&A, and sharing of relevant documents needed as part of the process ensuring there is one place to go for the latest information. In addition, as at-risk employees are proactively surfaced, compensation teams can jump into a virtual meeting with managers to share the relevant data and make decisions more quickly. Succession Planning Traditionally, succession planning was done for only the most critical positions, like C-level employees, with talent pools built through formal nominations and discussions among management. Today, this is changing rapidly, as organizations are becoming flatter, with employees at all levels holding the critical responsibility of leading by influence and driving the business forward, even as individual contributors. Succession planning is no longer limited to just the top roles within the organization, but is happening across all levels, to ensure there is a constant pipeline of leaders ready to step up as someone else moves up or out of the organization. However, a key challenge is to identify those leaders and formal nominations are oftentimes not enough, especially with the vast number of roles that are critical to driving the business. Several methods can be used to address this. Intelligent recommendations based on algorithms can surface employees based on their skills and interests. In addition, self-nominations as part of an employee s career planning can be powerful, especially if the technology enables exploration of different career paths and plots a recommended plan to get there. This enables employees to be surfaced in talent pools for roles they aspire to, with a trackable timeline for their readiness. It also can enable them to find, follow and connect with mentors to prepare for the next job. In combination with these methods, crowdsourcing can be one of the most powerful, enabling fellow employees to nominate those that are performing exceptionally for promotion, and also recommend a successor for them should they be promoted. These peer nominations can enable hidden talent to be discovered, and also trigger any suggested learning, mentors or development needed to move up, should the nomination be accepted. With Saba Cloud, Equity Residential is connected with one knowledge platform. Dana Murphy Director of Organization and Talent Development Technology Equity Residential Foundational Collaboration throughout Intelligent Talent Management The example workflows discussed above require a variety of collaborative capabilities, across instant communication, content sharing and curation, knowledge sharing, real-time conferencing, and peerto-peer recognition. However, these workflows will not be successful if trying to leverage a variety of separate tools to handle each of these processes. Effective collaboration comes from a unification across all of these modes of collaboration, tied directly to the talent processes they support. Below is a summary of some of the most critical capabilities of a collaboration platform specifically those within Saba Cloud, Saba s intelligent talent management solution, and how they can be applied to support the workflows above. 5

White Paper > Leveraging Collaborative Technology to Drive Effective Talent Management Instant and continuous communication Effective communication is key to keeping employees engaged and empowered to accomplish their goals. It must go beyond emails and phone calls, with easy workflows at the fingertips of employees as part of their day-to-day work. It must also be trackable, so that communication is never lost, and can be referred back to for later action. Below are some key capabilities to facilitate effective, instant communication: Activity streams Receive relevant updates and information continuously in your activity feed. Filter content by author, keyword and content type to quickly find what you need. Share thoughts, ideas, links and other content, as well as comment, rate and like feed items. Discussions Start a discussion around an idea, issue or topic of interest from your home page, a group or an individual workspace. Your colleagues, customers or partners can add their thoughts to the thread when it is convenient for them. Blogs Share internal or external news with the blog tool. Give others the ability to share, reply, comment, like, and tag your blog. Chat and presence Get quick answers through text chat. Tum a one-on-one conversation into a group chat or initiate a video conference with just one click. Managers can stay in touch with their teams on critical issues by inviting them all to a virtual meeting with a single click, too. 6

Knowledge exchange, ideation and intelligent curation A one-way push of information is no longer sufficient to keep up with the speed of change and get work done. Discussions must be continuous, enabling a multi-way exchange of insights as things continue to evolve. Ideation must happen more quickly and can t be done in a silo. And critically, the most relevant information must be surfaced in a personalized fashion for those that need it. Below are some key capabilities to enable this: ideas. Share ideas with others as easily as posting a comment in the activity feed. Once posted, ideas can be viewed by all, and voted up or down, enabling the best ideas to rise to the top. Others can comment on the idea, possibly introducing a new spin to make it even more effective. Winning ideas can spur awards and recognition as well, introducing a more competitive spin. The idea engine allows employees to solve problems, drive innovation, prioritize projects, and more. Workspaces Create individual workspaces or a complete intranet, without any coding experience. Create pages that serve as a one-stop shop for the latest insights, links and documents. Workspaces allow for comments and make it easy to get feedback and answer questions efficiently. Intelligent curation and recommendations Personalized, proactive recommendations connecting people with expertise, content and learning are pushed to each user from TIM, The Intelligent Mentor, Saba Cloud s machine learning algorithms. TIM curates the content shared by others and provides personalized recommendations to individual employees on the most helpful content, people and training to accelerate their career development. Groups Give small and large teams one place to upload and work on documents, post related materials, and discuss plans with public, private and hidden groups. Idea engine Leverage the power of the network to share and cultivate ideas through discussions, refine them, and vote on the best 7

White Paper > Leveraging Collaborative Technology to Drive Effective Talent Management Real-time collaboration Enabling effective collaboration, training, coaching and interviewing is mission-critical to attracting, developing and retaining talent, but is increasingly challenging as business becomes ever more remote. Below are some key real-time collaboration capabilities to solve this challenge: Virtual classrooms Virtual classrooms enable training to scale broadly across dispersed audiences in a cost-effective and consistent fashion. Deliver interactive training that keeps learners engaged from anywhere, with polls, quizzes, break-out rooms, emoticons and chat. Peer-to-peer recognition and crowdsourcing Peer-to-peer recognition drives engagement and usage, but is also critical for supporting workflows such as performance management and succession planning as described above. Below are some key peer-to-peer capabilities that support talent management processes: Impressions and badges Give credit and public praise to your colleagues for their accomplishments by posting impressions on a job well done, and award badges, such as Leader, Team Player, or Innovator that get added to their profile. At the same time, additional constructive feedback can be provided privately (e.g., You could be even better if ). Leverage impressions to simplify peer feedback in performance reviews, as well as help identify top talent within succession planning and recruiting workflows to drive internal mobility. Video interviews Schedule, conduct, record and review video interviews as an embedded workflow in the recruiting process to reach candidates more effectively and speed up processes. HD multi-point video Share and view webcam streams in HD to facilitate personal connectivity and respond to the reactions of participants. Recordings Record virtual sessions to turn them into an ongoing knowledge asset, and post to a video channel or workspace for continued discussion. Enable interactivity from components such as quizzes that can be tracked even as the recording is shared. Gamification via pq Score The pq, or People Quotient score, ranks the contributions made by employees and awards points based on not just the content shared, but how many individuals found it useful by viewing it, commenting on it or rating it highly. Leverage pq scoring to encourage healthy competition across employees to not only share content, but share content that is helpful across the organization. 8

Leaderboards Keep everyone engaged by recognizing their efforts publicly with leaderboards. Encourage productivity with personalized home pages where employees can watch the leaderboard and track their activities versus others. pq leaders, as well as top contributors of content and insights show up on the board, and can be followed at the click of a button to ensure their insights are received. Rock Star nominations Allow employees to recognize a colleague as a top performer by nominating them as a Rock Star, showcasing their talents and potential across peers and management. Like impressions, Rock Star nominations are surfaced in performance reviews and succession workflows for promotional considerations, but also ask nominators to suggest a replacement to fill the nominee s shoes in case they get promoted. This makes the nominations even more actionable, ensuring a pool of potential successors is available as Rock Star performers are advanced to the next level. Customer Snapshot: Saba helps Equity Residential connect as one culture Equity Residential is an S&P 500 company focused on the acquisition, development and management of high-quality apartment properties in top U.S. growth markets, owning or investing in over 400 properties across the country. Equity Residential was looking to acquire an integrated talent management system to automate its learning management processes, streamline knowledge exchange, and meet other business and operational requirements across more than 3,600 employees. Leveraging Saba Cloud, they were able to replace four disparate enterprise systems web conferencing, intranet, file sharing/social collaboration and learning management technologies and bring them together with one solution, letting the collective genius of their employees be heard. From the legal team sharing guidance, to the maintenance team sharing Saba Meeting recordings on reglazing bathtubs, Saba Cloud helps employees find the information they need, when they need it, to do their jobs. 9

White Paper > Leveraging Collaborative Technology to Drive Effective Talent Management Measurement and optimization One of the most important components of any process is to measure its effectiveness and improve. While the collaboration capabilities described above ensure connectivity across talent processes, it is critical to understand the dynamics of this connectivity for it to be most impactful. The analytics built around Saba Cloud bring to life the detail around how teams are communicating, whose contributions have the greatest impact, and what content resonates, and with whom. Dynamic Network Analysis (DNA) DNA is a visual representation of a network of people showing their collaboration patterns at work. Leverage it to see how people are connecting and interacting, both overall and within groups. Identify key contributors and influencers including those with the most connections and activity who drive collaboration, organizational efficiency and innovation. 10

Reports and dashboards Leverage a set of over 100 out-of-the-box reports, more than 2,100 exposed dimensions, and 260 metrics to build your own custom reports and dashboards across talent management processes and critically, across the interactivity of individuals within the system. Gain insights into the most popular discussions and issues, and address them as needed (for example, through additional communication or formal training). Fully Unified with Intelligent Talent Management Saba Collaboration is a foundational element of Saba Cloud, Saba s Intelligent Talent Management solution. Saba Cloud has collaboration capabilities built into every talent process and function. This ensures that interactivity is easy, and that all exchanges of insights, content and learning are accessible from one place, tied directly to the employee s day-to-day work, so that it doesn t get lost in another collaboration silo. Saba s collaboration capabilities encourage participation and enable more efficient and engaging teamwork, helping to accelerate innovation and productivity across the workforce. Saba Cloud runs on Saba s certified secure, scalable and highly available global cloud. Learn more about Equity Residential s use of Saba Cloud. References 1. Deloitte University Press, The overwhelmed employee: Simplify the work environment, Tom Hodson, Jeff Schwartz, Ardie van Berkel, and Ian Winstrom Otten, March 7, 2014. http://dupress.com/articles/hc-trends-2014-overwhelmed-employee/ 11

www.saba.com Worldwide Headquarters Saba 2400 Bridge Parkway Redwood Shores CA 94065 United States Tel: +1-650-581-2500 Fax: +1-650-696-1773 EMEA Headquarters Saba Software (UK) Ltd. Circa The Ring Bracknell, Berkshire RG12 1AA United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 1344 382950 Fax: +44 (0) 1344 382951 India Headquarters Mumbai 506, 5th floor, C wing, Trade Star Andheri Kurla Road, JB Nagar Andheri East, Mumbai 400059 Tel: (+91-22) 66977222 Fax: (+91-22) 66978087 India Headquarters Pune Level 5, Muttha Tower Don Bosco Road Yerwada, Pune 411006 Tel: + 91 22-6706-6687 Japan Headquarters Saba Software K.K. 8F, Kayabacho Ekimae Bldg 2-11-8 Kayabacho Nihonbashi Chuo-ku Tokyo 103-0025 Japan Tel: +81-3-5649-1201 Fax: +81-3-5649-1202 http://japan.saba.com Asia-Pacific Headquarters Saba Software Pty. Ltd. Level 6, 61 York Street Sydney NSW 2000 Australia Tel: +61-2-8622-7563 Fax: +61-2-8622-7550 São Paulo, Brazil Saba Edificio Rochaverá Corporate Towers Marble Tower Av. das Nações Unidas 14171 15º andar Morumbi São Paulo Cep 04794-000 Brasil Tel: +55 11 3568-2419 Fax: +55 11 3568-2200 Toronto, Canada Saba Software (Canada) Inc. 100 King St, West 56th Floor Toronto, Ontario M5X 1C9 Tel: +1-416-847-1868 Saba delivers a cloud-based Intelligent Talent Management solution used by leading organizations worldwide to hire, develop, engage, and inspire their people. Intelligent Talent Management uses machine learning to offer proactive, personalized recommendations on candidates, connections, and content to help your employees and organization lead and succeed. 2015 Saba Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Saba, the Saba logo, and the marks relating to Saba products and services referenced herein are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Saba Software, Inc. or its affiliates. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Saba 2400 Bridge Parkway Redwood Shores CA 94065-1166 USA (+1) 877.SABA.101 or (+1) 650.779.2791 www.saba.com wp_05/15