How is your week going?  If you are anything like many of the people I have spoken with this week, you are having one of the most productive weeks of the year.  Your focus is like a laser, your to-do list is pared back, and your eyes are on the prize:  to finish up the most critical items before the end of the year.  So, I have to ask you:  why is every week not more like this one? The likely answer is that in other weeks you lack the goal clarity that is helping you focus now.  Our new research, High-Impact Performance Management: Using Goals to Focus the 21st-Century (Not a Bersin member?  Click here for the summary), which we launched yesterday, supports this hypothesis: that many employees lack the clarity they need.  Here are a few findings from the study: Though 76 percent of organizations cascade goals, only 36 percent of organizations have a standard, enterprise-wide approach, which often results in inconsistencies in approach and, potentially, the goals themselves. While more than half (51 percent) of senior leaders convene a series of meetings throughout the year to discuss goals with business leaders, only six percent of team managers /  middle managers receive their goals in the same way, which can result in inconsistent goal messaging.  Though nearly 60 percent of organizations said senior leaders revise their goals during the course of the year, only 36 percent of respondents indicated middle managers make similar revisions to align to new directions being defined by their supervisors.  This can result in the organization’s leaders thinking the company is headed in one direction, but the day-to-day actions of employees taking it in an entirely different one. Our research finds that having that goal clarity - both at the start of the year and on a continuous basis - is a critical factor in predicting business performance.  Specifically, we found that employees with a high level of goal clarity were four times more likely to score in the top quartile of business performance.  Further, organizations that have employees revise or review their goals quarterly or more frequently were three-and-a-half times more likely to score in the top quartile of business performance. This new research summarizes the current state of goal-setting and management, including an overview of common goal-setting practices; a review of the academic debate around goals; our analysis of the challenges of modern goal-setting and management; current trends in goal-setting and revising; and the three key principles and seven related practices that our data indicate are critical to effective goal management (see Figure 1). Figure 1:  Three Principles and Seven Practices for Effective Goal Management Source:  "High-Impact Performance Management: Using Goals to Focus the 21st-Century," Stacia Sherman Garr / Bersin by Deloitte, December 2014. I hope that if you are taking some time off in the coming weeks, that you have an opportunity to unplug and reflect.  When you come back to set your goals - and help your organization set its goals - for 2015, I suggest analyzing your organization’s current goal setting approach and asking yourself: To what extent does your organization’s goal setting process enable you and your employees to have that "end-of-year" clarity on your goals and objectives? To what extent do your organization’s systems, processes, and culture support continued clarity? What can you and your organization do differently to enable greater goal clarity, both in January and throughout the year? If you are able to move the dial on any of these elements, you truly will have given yourself and your employees a gift - the gift of clarity.

My colleague Robin Erickson, Ph.D. and I just completed a webinar called "Get Ready for 2015: Ten Top Actionable Talent Acquisition Trends." In the question and answer period at the end, one of the almost 1,000 registrants asked about the ability to actually apply for a job via a smartphone:  Will it make the recruiter’s job harder or easier? It’s a good question, isn’t it?  Is ease in applying for a job a goal?  If it is really easy, will recruiters just be flooded with junk applications?  Or should the act of applying be laborious enough that only the truly committed apply?  Is it different by industry? By age group? A poll during the webinar showed that over a quarter of participants used mobile in the recruiting process—but we really don’t know how many supported the ability to apply with a mobile phone.  And this moves us to the broader consideration—how do we in human capital management (HCM) plan to use smartphones with not only applicants but also with our existing employees? What is your company’s stance on HCM apps on smartphones?  Do you use them today? Will you add mobile aps in the year ahead?  Please let us hear from you!  Take this short survey (just a few minutes, promise!) on use and intended use of human capital related apps on Smartphones by clicking on the link below. https://bersin.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4Oe9ZKgWotNWEVT&Source=BLG   This publication contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this publication. As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Copyright © 2014 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.  

You know you will need to hire new employees in the new year—but are you ready? Will your competition out-engage you in your marketplace? And what will you do if you cannot find the talent you need when you need it?   This afternoon, my colleague Katherine Jones, Ph.D. and I presented a webinar that outlined ten actionable trends that we think will make a difference in talent acquisition (TA) in 2015. If you missed it, you can check out the live tweets at #PFLiveChat and here is a brief recap: Manage Your Employment Brand: Your employment brand reflects your organization and is your strongest asset for attracting new employees and continuously attracting/retaining the high-performers you don’t want to leave. Is your employment brand simply irresistible? And are your employees brand ambassadors for your organization? Craft a Strategic Social Media Campaign: Recruiters need to "go where the puck will be" and understand where candidates are spending their time (pssst: they’re not just on social networks and job boards!). Our recently published High-Impact Talent Acquisition (HITA) industry study found that mature TA functions are five times more likely to have an effective social media campaign.[1] And leading-edge companies have dedicated social media strategists to curate content. Develop a Candidate Experience Strategy: Just like in dating, recruiters should create a good first impression with candidates. Check out my September 28th blog, It’s All About the Candidate Experience, for some suggestions on how to differentiate your organization’s candidate experience. Reimagine the On-Line Application: Unfortunately technology hasn’t kept up as job seekers today are faced with first-generation hiring management systems. Face it: many applicants are searching for jobs on their mobile devices and they’re not going to fill out a 25-page application on their phone. Want to know what’s happening with mobile? Take a short survey and check back in a couple of months for the results. Reinvent Candidate Communications: Ever applied for a job and wondered if your resume went into a black hole? Or worse, applied for a job and received an auto-reject notification within minutes? In a world where we can personalize our M&M’s (yes, I did it for Christmas!) and even our phones know our names, recruiters should be sending personalized content to candidates. Make sure the messages are authentic and representative of your employment brand. Engage Hiring Managers: According to our HITA research, recruiters developing effective relationships with hiring managers is the most influential drive of TA performance outcomes—and a staggering 97% of mature TA functions report that they have strong relationships with hiring managers.[2] And guess what? Developing relationships doesn’t cost your organization much money—just time and mindfulness! Develop Talent Pipelines: Not to be overlooked, developing candidate pools is the second most influential driver of TA performance outcomes.[3] The task of recruiting has moved from the reactive filling of requisitions to proactively courting high-quality talent. Ultimately, with talent pools done well, recruiters can deliver talent on demand. Up the Ante on Onboarding: Did you know that 22% of staff turnover occur in the first 45 days of employment and that 4% of new employees leave after a disastrous first day?[4] Organizations should customize their onboarding programs for various job roles and generational groups, but should include a consistent experience and messaging. In addition, automation is critical to both efficiency and consistency, and some onboarding can be done online before the first day (aka "preboarding). Make Your Metrics Matter: Understanding the importance of metrics and analytics is a significant challenge for the talent acquisition function. With an array of metrics available, organizations should first decide what they want to measure, then determine if they have the technology in place to support the need. The next big thing? Going beyond historical reporting to predictive analytics. Plan for Global TA: Regardless of organizational maturity level, our research found that 68 percent of TA functions were not globally prepared.[5] TA leaders should consider their unique talent landscape—which includes candidate availability and engagement, as well as technology solution and services providers—as they look to take their functions to a global level.   So what else do you think will be important for Talent Acquisition in 2015? Feel free to add a comment below, connect with me on Twitter @RAEricksonPhD, or by email at rerickson@deloitte.com   [1] High-Impact Talent Acquisition, Key Findings and Maturity Model, Robin Erickson, Ph.D., Kim Lamoureux, Denise Moulton / Bersin by Deloitte, September 2014. [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid. [4] Help New Hires Succeed: Beat the Statistics, SHRM Presentation by The Wynhurst Group, April 2007, www.masteryworks.com.; Egon Zehnder International, 2007, as quoted in http://selectmetrix.com/ blogs/category/onramping/. [5] High-Impact Talent Acquisition, Key Findings and Maturity Model, Robin Erickson, Ph.D., Kim Lamoureux, Denise Moulton / Bersin by Deloitte, September 2014.       This publication contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor.   Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this publication. 

The HCM technology market is hot. Our 2014 research shows that 20 percent of HCM software buyers will replace their current standalone talent applications with an integrated talent management suite over the next 12 to 18 months. What’s driving the purchase of HCM systems? A top reason is the need for better analytics capabilities, cited by 53 percent of our survey respondents. (See Figure 1.) Many organizations are frustrated by their inability to access, integrate, and analyze talent data to make better decisions. And many are willing to dump their existing systems and purchase an integrated talent management suite to get these capabilities. To court these buyers, a host of vendors will be trotting out their analytics solutions at this week’s HR Tech conference in Las Vegas. IBM will be prominent among crowd. The company announced last week that its Kenexa Talent Suite now includes a Watson-powered data discovery application. This new offering allows HR and business professionals to access data, explore trends, and analyze patterns using natural language queries. SuccessFactors will undoubtedly be another voice heard among the din. Its workforce analytics solution provides access to HR data, benchmarks, and analysis capabilities. Oracle, Workday, and many other talent management system providers will also be at the event showcasing their analytics solutions. Aside from purchasing a system, HR organizations need to have the right skills to be able to access, analyze, and draw insights from data.  Does your HR organization have the skills it needs to measure, analyze, and draw insights from data? Find out in our new report on organizing and staffing your talent analytics function.  

Do you have a family member or friend who has been unemployed for six months or longer? Or perhaps underemployed for the last few years? It’s no secret that U.S. workers were hit hard by the Great Recession. One feature that has distinguished this recession from many past ones has been the persistence of long-term unemployment. Indeed, many workers who lost jobs during the recession have yet to find work, and many more have dropped out of the labor force completely. As of October 2014, 3 million Americans have been looking for work for six months or longer.[1] The long-term unemployed are much more likely to drop out of the workforce altogether and are also much less likely to find a job than their short-term unemployed counterparts.[2] What makes long-term unemployment so frustrating is that traditional (and even logical) explanations for unemployment seem to have no bearing on the issue. As we move toward a skill-based economy, it would make sense that under-educated workers are having a more difficult time finding work. But research has found that long-term unemployment does not discriminate. Job-seekers are just as likely to be college educated as not, and even relevant work experience does not seem to help the long-term unemployed.[3] In January 2014, the White House unveiled its plan that calls for employers to develop leading practices for recruiting and hiring the long-term unemployed, seeks to ensure that federal agencies give the long-term unemployed a fair shot, drives innovation around the issue through a Department of Labor grant competition, and enables workers to seek out training resources to increase their job-competitiveness.[4] The White House long-term unemployed initiative has received a positive reception from the business community, with over 300 companies signing the pledge. Many of these companies have already employed some leading practices with regard to recruiting the long-term unemployed, and others are sponsoring initiatives aimed at getting more Americans back to work. In response to the White House call to action, Deloitte Consulting LLP collaborated with The Rockefeller Foundation to develop three handbooks aimed at helping 3 million Americans get back to work: ·        For Employers: A Guide to Recruiting and Hiring the Long-Term Unemployed: A Handbook for Employers—this guide enables employers to leverage industry leading practices aimed at the long-term unemployed and includes a case for change, the long-term unemployed maturity model, recommendations for recruiting, an implementation toolkit, vignettes, and case studies. ·        For Job Seekers: New Guide, New Destinations: Navigating Out of Long-Term Unemployment—this guide for job seekers includes recommendations for retooling a job search, including personal stories and lessons learned from employers and the previously long-term unemployed. Also included are an overview of available resources, a checklist for successfully finding a job and interactive exercises and activities. ·        For Community Leaders: Engage Your Community: A Local Guide to Addressing the Long-Term Unemployment Challenge—this guide for local community leaders includes a four-step plan to help mobilize support in local communities, recommendations to develop a local strategy for addressing long-term unemployment, guidelines on identifying a local long-term unemployment ecosystem, sample action items for each ecosystem partner to mitigate long-term unemployment and talking points on how to advocate for the long-term unemployed. I’ve been happy to support this initiative for four reasons. First, according to leading economists, the United States’ current level of long-term unemployment could cause lasting damage to the U.S. economy as a result of skills deterioration, lower labor force participation, and higher levels of structural unemployment (the unemployment resulting from industrial reorganization, typically due to technological change rather than fluctuations in supply or demand). Second, I believe that the long-term unemployed are an overlooked labor pool. Despite decreasing unemployment, as of August 2014, there were still 4.8 million unfilled jobs in the United States.[5] It makes business sense for organizations to target the long-term unemployed with their recruiting strategies and the employer handbook will help them develop the business case for doing so. Third, like hiring veterans and the disabled, it’s a good thing to help Americans find work who may not have been given a fair shot (good from both the feel good perspective and for your employment brand!). Fourth, and much more personally, I also have family members and friends who are long-term unemployed or underemployed and I’m hopeful the job seeker handbook will help them. What can you do today to help our nation’s long-term unemployed? ·        Download a copy of the handbooks here for yourself ·        Help us get the word out: o   Share the link with your organization’s Talent Acquisition leader and recruiters and ask them to download A Guide to Recruiting and Hiring the Long-Term Unemployed: A Handbook for Employers o   Share the link with your family and friends and encourage them to download the New Guide, New Destinations: Navigating Out of Long-Term Unemployment handbook o   Share the link with your community leaders and encourage them to leverage the Engage Your Community: A Local Guide to Addressing the Long-Term Unemployment Challenge handbook ·        Tweet about the handbooks—please help us make these resources go viral! Here’s a shortened URL: bit.ly/1sIqdn7 ·        Look for the upcoming, complimentary Bersin research report Unemployed but Not Unemployable: Recruiting & Hiring the Long-Term Unemployed on www.bersin.com ·        Join me for the upcoming, complimentary Bersin webinar: Unemployed Long Term, Not Unemployable:  What Companies Can Do To Help on Thursday, November 13th at 2:00 pm ET [1] Source: "Employment Situation Summary," Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 5, 2014, www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm. [2] Source: "More Gloom for the Long-Term Unemployed, from Alan Krueger," Wall Street Journal / Jon Hilsenrath, May 22, 2014, http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/05/22/more-gloom-for-the-long-term-unemployed-from-alan-krueger/?KEYWORDS=long+term+unemployment. [3] Gretchen Gavett, "The American Way of Hiring Is Making Long-Term Unemployment Worse," Harvard Business Review (Online) (13 December 2013) http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/the-american-way-of-hiring-is-making-long-term-unemployment-worse/ [4] For more information, see the White House website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/02/10/more-300-companies-pledge-help-long-term-unemployed-0 [5] Source: "Job Openings and Labor Turnover—August 2014," Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 7, 2014. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/jolts.pdf This publication contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this publication.  

Last week I attended the Talent Analytics Leadership Roundtable hosted by Northwestern University and co-sponsored by Sears Holdings Corporation. The event included over 20 talent analytics thought leaders from companies in high tech, retail, financial services, manufacturing, and service industries - a veritable Dream Team of analytics brainpower. The discussion revolved around how organizations are deriving value from talent analytics, their use of methods, models and technologies, and trends for the future. Here is a recap of a few key themes from the discussion. 1. Predictive retention models: Coming to a desktop near you. With their advanced analytics capabilities, most of the roundtable participants have built their own predictive retention models and are using these to understand and help prevent turnover. But these models will soon be available to the masses. Solution providers big and small have jumped into this space with pre-packaged solutions: Oracle, Workday, SuccessFactors, Visier, Evolv, just to name a few. In the near future, these models will be available to thousands of organizations. The question is: are HR and business leaders ready? If the models are constructed well, they can be extremely beneficial to organizations in uncovering potential problem areas and helping organizations identify targeted initiatives to help mitigate turnover. But HR needs to be able to validate these models over time and within targeted employee segments. One Fortune 100 company I talked with recently, for example, said that its model was very accurate for individual contributor and manager-level roles, but totally fell apart for senior leadership roles. HR needs an advanced analytics capability to be able to assess the accuracy of these models. In addition, some organizations worry about disclosing the predicting turnover scores for individuals, as managers may not use this information appropriately. If a manager can only send one of two high potentials to a development event, for example, perhaps she will send the individual with a lower predicted turnover score, figuring that to send the one with high predicted attrition would be a waste of money (and eventually the attrition becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy). For these reasons, HR leaders will need to decide who has access to these models and how they are used. Both HRBPs and managers will need training on how to use the information in the models, and new talent initiatives may need to be created given the different factors related to risk. The use of predictive retention models is an exciting step forward for analytics, but HR needs to get ahead of the game to make sure they serve their purpose.   2. Continuous performance feedback replaces the dreaded annual performance appraisal. We’ve been saying for more than three years that the annual performance appraisal is dead (or should be.) For many of the participants at the roundtable, this goal has become a reality. These organizations have moved past the static, once a year performance process in favor of more continuous feedback. This approach includes regular feedback check-ins with the manager (typically two to four times per year) plus ongoing feedback from peers (sometimes called "crowdsourced" performance feedback). While these organizations are enabling broader, more immediate feedback from a variety of sources, they still emphasize the importance of managers and employees having conversations about performance. In other words, peer feedback does not completely replace managers, but rather supplements and supports manager-to-employee conversations. At Sears Holdings Corporation, for example, employees have a digital cloud-based application they can access anytime on their computer or smart phones to request and give feedback to anyone else on the platform. The tool provides a view into how they are achieving results and how they are demonstrating capabilities and living the culture. The feedback goes directly to the employee and the manager has full visibility to all feedback an employee receives, helping both quickly identify what worked well and where they can improve. The new platform was specifically designed to structure feedback in the most effective way possible and create a growth mindset, facilitating continuous improvement. Launched three months ago, the new feedback tool is catching on, with over 10,000 feedback submissions in the first months of deployment. This is the future of performance feedback. Companies that are still stuck in the once-a-year review cycles would be wise to rethink now how they conduct their performance process.   3. An overhaul in employee engagement measurement. In a similar vein, the annual employee engagement survey process is due for an overhaul, and many leading organizations have moved past the static process in favor of continual measurement. Similar to the performance review issue, why wait for a once-a-year reading on the engagement levels of your employees? If you have a problem, most of your high performers will have left by the time you analyze the survey results. Instead, organizations with advanced analytics capabilities are continually monitoring employee engagement by analyzing employee postings on internal discussion sites and communities. IBM, for example, has an initiative underway to use sentiment analysis of internal postings to monitor engagement on a regular basis. By augmenting their traditional survey approach with ongoing monitoring of engagement, the company can get a better handle of issues as they arise and take prompt action. These are exciting trends but a big change for many companies. HR needs to be at the forefront, advocating for these ideas and paving the way for these changes. That will require a savvy analytics capability, a great deal of change management to gain buy-in, and development initiatives to upskill HR and business staff to appropriately glean insights from data.   4. Prepare to address privacy and ethical issues around analytics. Analytics offers so much promise, but it also brings up a number of ethical questions and privacy concerns. From the example cited earlier (what if managers start discriminating against employees with high predicted attrition scores?) to organizations wanting to scrape employee comments off external sites , ethical questions - as well as legal ones - abound. These are even more prevalent in Europe, where the legal standards on data are higher. Even something as seemingly simple as analyzing diversity data can be fraught with legal concerns. Analytics leaders need to be thinking about these issues now and establishing partnerships with their legal teams to address these concerns. Even if an initiative is "legal" it can raise concerns among employees that will cause a backlash. Just because data can be collected and analyzed, that doesn’t mean it should be. Analytics leaders will need to tread a fine line and decide what is appropriate for their organizations. The more transparent they can be about the purposes of the research and how it will be used, the more acceptance and support may be gained among employees - and the press. (For more insights on this issue, check out this article.)

We just released new research which shows an astounding gap between what business executives say and what they do, and one of the biggest issues highlighted is a lack of focus on leadership development. Here is the data: A majority of America's business leaders (66 percent of CXOs and 63 percent of CXOs in waiting, among the 300 surveyed) say they are very confident that their organizations will outperform the competition over the next 12 months. But when asked about their confidence in their ability to address specific obstacles to growth, nearly half had some doubts (43 percent of CXOs and 44 percent of CXOs in waiting). Note: A "CXO in Waiting" is an executive in succession to take on a CXO role. What is keeping these leaders up at night? It appears to be three things. First, problems CXO's worry about (talent and skills gaps, cyber risk, competition from emerging markets) are not getting funded adequately. The data shows, for example, that 72% of the executives who worry about Cyber Risk are not prioritizing investments in funding and incident response; 67% of the executives worried about emerging markets are not adequately investing in talent and business in these markets, and 35% of the execs worried about skills shortages are not prioritizing investments in HR and people development. While the research does not explain why this gap exists, it appears that CXOs simply struggle to get their teams to develop actionable solutions to these issues. Second, and perhaps more importantly, CXOs are not confident in their leadership pipeline. Our Global Human Capital Trends research shows that leadership remains the top talent issue among businesses around the world, with only 14% of companies stating they feel they feel their leadership pipeline is "ready." Fig 1: Findings from Deloitte Business Confidence Survey Third, organizations are not adequately investing in the development of leaders. In this study the data from CXOs was striking: only 48% of top executives believe their direct reports have the skills to become part of the C-Suite in their organization, and 50% of the individuals who are CXOs in waiting have "little or no access to leadership training" to help them grow into these positions. Even worse, only 49% of the the up and coming emerging executives told us that "the organization creates opportunities for me to succeed" and only 49% of CXOs state they are committed to developing leadership skills at all levels of their organization. So one could argue that the problem is executives themselves: they are not asking for or spending time on the development of their own top teams. We have been studying leadership development practices in companies for almost ten years now, and our 2014 Leadership Development Factbook shows that spending in this area increased 14% last year and large companies spend between $7,400 and $10,600 on top executive development each year. So companies are spending the money and they are making an effort, but unfortunately the solutions are inconsistent and not delivering the impact we need. This research shows, for example, that only 26% of companies even have successors identified for their top positions - so the problem is not only one of development, but more significantly one of "selecting the right candidates." Selecting the right senior leaders is difficult. Internal experience, motivation, cognitive skills, personality, relationship skills, and entrepreneurial skills all play a role. Too many companies promote people who are "in the pipeline" or "highly successful in their prior role" and then find that it takes several years for these high-potentials to realign themselves as senior leaders. (Our data shows that only 36% of executives even have a successor identified.) Our High-Impact Leadership development research, based on the study of more than 700 companies over the last five years, shows that successful leaders have skills in four broad areas: people leadership and execution, intellectual capacity and drive, adaptability to different cultures and situations, and ability to influence and align people toward a goal. These are broad skills which must be assessed slowly and once identified, leaders who move into CXO roles need support. Coaching of these "new executives" is critical. One senior HR executive told me that "the worst thing we do is promote a highly successful VP into a SVP role and then not give him or her the right level of support in their new position, often letting them fail and go to the competition." Executives have to realize that it often takes years for new leaders to become seasoned, high performing executives. Finally, our research shows that despite the best intentions of Human Resources leaders and Leadership Development teams, without direct senior executive involvement, leadership development programs fall flat. Companies that have leaders who are directly engaged in selecting leaders, teaching, and coaching their team are more than three times more likely to have robust leadership pipelines and highly engaged leaders.   Fig 2: Financial Impact of Strong Leadership The bottom line: executive confidence is directly related to confidence in leadership, which in turn is related to executive focus on leadership development. When we asked investors to tell us how they value companies, they gave companies with "strong leadership teams" a 35% premium in valuation. Time and again stories show that companies that look at leadership as part of their competitive advantage build capability that drives innovation, performance, and engagement at the same time they're shipping new products and capturing market share.

HR already is grappling with the challenges of out of date, incomplete or potentially inaccurate about corporate employees. Analytics teams are addressing issues of data cleansing and the creation of data dictionaries to solve the linguistic and data model incompatibilities across the organization. (Note the great variation in what constitutes an "employee," or how "attrition" is defined across a company).   However, in the current flood of attention paid to analytics in human capital management, we as practitioners need to keep one more point in mind: thatbusiness-relevant (not just HR relevant) analytics will stem from the combination of HR data with production and financial data. This creates an immediate challenge for the HR professional.   The challenge for HR becomes to better understand the intersections between the workforce in total, and the mission and vision of the organization — current and future. Furthermore, HR will need a firm grasp of the comparative costs of workers of all types: not only competitive salary data and benefits;, employer costs of labor; and workforce overhead, for example,  but also the costs related to an increasingly contingent workforce.   The analytics required will need to assist the HR team in the hiring and development of a disparate, global workforce such that the team has the data necessary to deploy just-in-time talent where and when it is required. New data types abound within HR: video and telephone-derived candidate interviews and the job applications themselves are just one example. Capturing text communication between recruiters and candidates or employees and customers is another. We can anticipate that these and other data types will proliferate across the other areas of the business as well. This leads to the bigger challenge of synthesizing, extracting meaning, and storing unstructured data; data gathered from all parts of the organization. How will HRIT and IT professionals derive standard data models from these more recent types of data? How will it integrate with the structured data in the employee profile and system of record today?  The focus on business-relevance leads to cross-disciplinary analysis; the added requirement for managing new data types is an added challenge for both HR and HRIT. Begin building your analytical skill sets now! And download Karen O’Leonard’s High-Impact Talent Analytics: Building a World-Class HR Measurement and Analytics Function for more details!   This publication contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this publication.   As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.   Copyright © 2014 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.

Workday Rising, the annual Workday conference for its customers and prospects was held in early November in San Francisco. Attendees heard from Workday executives on upcoming products, from current customers on their deployments and ensuing outcomes, and from vendors and systems integrators on the fit of their solutions with their Workday customers’ technology and implementation requirements. In addition were the well-received customer collaboration meet-ups, which were customer-driven discussions about relevant topics of customer common interest. With close to 5000 in total attendance, this year’s conference is the largest Workday Rising to date. Workday now reports close to 700 customers on its human capital management platform, 100 of which also use the financial management platform. The spring 2014 announced recruiting product has twelve companies live in production on it. All customers are on an identical version of the product, with their own configurations running on top of it. New releases are bi-annually, with, the company announced, updates that used to take 24 hours now taking as few as six. Key areas of the presentations at the conference included the ever-of-interest analytics, the new user experience, and technology updates on applications and the platform in general. Analytics: "Analytics is the new frontier ," according to Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield, co-founders and, respectively, the CEO and Chairman of Workday. Analytics played center stage in their joint keynote, as the two leaders of the company kicked off Workday Rising with a discussion of current and future product features from the company. They see three progressive phases in analytics of increasing sophistication and benefit to end users: the first, more common today, is data that describes the organization as it stands; the second is predictive: a theme common to many software providers in the HR community today; and the third, demonstrated in this keynote, adds the ability to recommend actions based on those predictions. Simply put, Aneel stated that the versions of analytics support moved from "that happened," to "what could happen," and finally to answer the question "what should you do about it?" Workday Insight Applications, the new suite of applications, uses advanced data science and machine learning algorithms to enable both financial and workforce-related decision-making. Each Workday Insight Application will address a specific business scenario by providing insights, surfacing predictions, and recommending actions that a decision-maker can take, all of which can be accomplished on mobile devices. To accomplish this, Workday also introduced SYMAN, an intelligent information engine that weaves a predictive engine, a recommendation engine, matching algorithms, and search relevancy throughout the Workday foundation of HR, talent, and financials.It creates industry trees, which are taxonomies organizing hundreds of job positions and job categories for more than 20 industries representative of Workday’s customer base. Here mapping of like titles and positions are classified and normalized into common definitions.As adaptive technology, the solution "learns" over time, in theory, making it more reliable in its predictions and recommendations. With its unique perspective among standalone HR and talent providers with support for a complete financial suite, Workday also provides analytics on financials. Predictive analytics — almost a buzzword in today’s software vernacular — was demonstrated at Workday Rising with this example: ascertaining the fit and likelihood of success for an existing employee in various "next jobs." In this example, an employee has a very high risk of leaving the firm (95%) and is a fairly high performer. The system evaluates the likelihood of Jack’s success in three different moves that his manager could suggest as a career advancement. The employee retention model in general contains a total of 62 factors, including evaluation of such areas as the market demand for skills, the employee’s tenure in the organization, and the length of time between promotions. To this end, Workday had acquired Identified in February 2014, using both its data scientists and technology for improved sourcing technologies, predictive analytics, and machine learning.[1] The new product sets will be available to Workday customers in 2015. User Experience Like all providers of software solutions for HCM today, Workday is focused on improving the experience that end users - employees in addition to HR staff—have with their applications. The new interfaces were designed to make the experience of technology at work mimic the ease of the consumer experience. This is the second "new look" that Workday has created over this year; this incorporates the flat design as seen in Apple’s iOS 8. With a "develop for mobile first" philosophy, Workday is close to completing a migration from Flash to HTML5 support throughout the product. Users can elect to access the new interface now if they are users of iPhone or iPads; Android users will see these in March with the release of Workday 24. Application Updates Higher education, often an ill-served industry, is the target of Workday’s student applications, developed for mobile devices. Higher ed is a key vertical for Workday; the ensuring product set was designed with input from institutions including University of Texas at Austin, Yale University, Stevens Institute of Technology,Broward College ,and Tallahassee Community College, among others. The first offering in the higher education suite is student recruiting which uses analytics to match prospective students to profiles of historically successful predecessors who actually complete their degree. Recruiter management, campaign and event management, success tracking, and the use of smartphones to keep track of likely applicants is part of the current release, with more features beyond student recruiting scheduled for the future. Other additions to applications include those to the recruiting module to support questionnaires, activity streams, and social job postings. New organization charting displays are now included in the core HR module. Unlimited custom dashboards are supported for user who want to design their own - and often many different dashboards. Enh ancements to mass operations were another area of attention in current and upcoming releases. First translations of Workday’s mobile apps on mobile devices are now available, as is embedded video for use in onboarding. Supply and demand analysis for future workforce planning is also provided. While announced earlier this fall, Workday highlighted its new Composite Reporting functionality at Rising, which enables customers to combine various data sources such as actuals, budgets, statistics, and headcount into live multi-dimensional reports that users can format, drill down into, and act on all within Workday, rather than having to export to tools such as Excel. Financial Management Betsy Bland, the VP responsible for financial management products highlighted a new application that will predict employee expense deviation and predict areas of overspending - including which workers are most likely to deviate. Upcoming functionality in Workday Financials will include financial scorecards and KPIs, as well as additional enhancements to reporting, dashboards, and analytics, according to Bland. Inventory management is also forthcoming—this will allow businesses to purchase materials, and track and manage their storage and use. For global customers, the future will include more prepackaged localizations of taxation and the like. Technical Updates Workday’s 700 customers are currently generating one billion transactions per month on the platform (which, by the way, is 45 million as an average each working day.) While they can never touch the code for the product, they can - and do - configure many processes and reports suitable to their specific organization. According to Stan Swete, Workday’s Chief Technology Officer, customers have created 448,000 custom reports, and 137,000 custom business process definition in the system. Integration is always a critical issue for customers, as companies typically have many disparate solutions across their enterprises, especially if they are large or global[2] Workday’s early acquisition of the Irish company Cape Clear resulted in the Workday Integration Cloud, comprised of an integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) that allows all application integrations to run in the Workday Cloud without a customer having to use on-premise middleware. Mr. Swete states that "Workday is committed to raising the bar on integration." Here we review what the company provides today. One option is documented APIs with which customers can create their own integrations, another is tools such as the Enterprise Integration Builder and Workday Studio, and packaged integrations. Customers can define and create their own custom APIs through Reporting Services, referred to as "Reports-as-a- Service"  to extract data out of  Workday.  They can also create integrations against the Workday API using other own middleware technologies, such as Microsoft.NET, TIBCO, or Oracle Fusion Middleware. The Workday Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB) tool is a simple graphical and guided interface to define inbound and outbound integrations without requiring any programming.  At a more complex level, Workday Studio is another development tool enabling customers and partners to build sophisticated integrations to and from Workday that are deployed and run on integration servers in Workday’s data center. Workday also provides "packaged" connectors that are tested, certified, and supported by Workday itself. These include connectors to, solely as examples, Cornerstone OnDemand for learning, HireRight for background checking, and in this release, large legacy payroll vendor integrations, such as to the SAP payroll, whether provided by ADP, NGA, or SAP itself. Workday supports an in-memory architecture, which means its data is main memory resident rather than stores on disks, which allows faster retrieval of data. It uses a database named Riak, an open source solution from Basho Technologies, the creator and developer of Riak, an open source distributed database (sometimes categorized as a NOSQL database) and Riak CS, a cloud-based object storage system that sits on top of Riak. Riak is architected for low-latency, availability, fault-tolerance, operational simplicity, and scalability. Conclusion Today, as a nine-year-old company, Workday provides enterprise cloud applications for human capital management, payroll, financial management and analytics. It has grown rapidly to the 700 customers using its software suites today. Workday Rising is the major event for those customers, who gather to hear about new products, the future roadmap, and as importantly, to talk to other customers like themselves. The growing number of technology and implementation partners is demonstrated by the increased presence of software provider and systems integrators in the exhibit halls. This publication contains general information only and Deloitte is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this publication. As used in this document, "Deloitte" means Deloitte Consulting LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Copyright © 2014 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.   [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/27/workday-acquires-identified-a-potential-disruptive-move-in-recruiting/   [2] See Deploying HCM Technologies: Making Change Work. Katherine Jones, Ph.D., Bersin by Deloitte. June 2014.  

UCLA’s annual HR Roundtable Retreat featured an interesting discussion of future workforce trends. Led by Marina Gorbis of the Institute of the Future, part of the discussion focused on the growth of "microworkers," individuals who freelance a variety of projects or jobs for different employers. Although freelancers are nothing new to the workplace, numerous online platforms such as oDesk, Elance, and Freelancer.com are making it easier for these individuals to find work, so that the freelance movement appears to be growing. According to Forbes, an estimated one in three Americans (roughly 42 million workers) are freelancers. That number is expected to grow to 50 percent of the workforce by 2020. Many individuals turn to freelancing due to challenges in finding full-time employment in a tough job market. But for a growing number of workers, freelancing is a lifestyle choice. These individuals prefer the benefits of freelancing - being their own boss, flexible work schedules, and the comfort of working from home - over the structure of a full-time office job. From the organization’s perspective, freelancers provide a ready source of talent to supplement the existing workforce. Go to any of the popular freelancing sites and you can find a great many individuals with wide-ranging skills. Some of the top freelancing roles include: Writing Editing PowerPoint creation Graphics Data analysis The last item on this list, data analysis or analytics, is a prime area for freelancers. The lack of analytical skills is one of the key challenges in HR organizations today, yet most of these organizations have yet to create a clear roadmap for developing these capabilities. These organizations can turn to freelancers, who have the skills to help organizations analyze, interpret, and visualize their data. Kaggle, for example, provides a competition platform for top analytics talent. Organizations post their data, and statisticians and data scientists from all over the world compete to create the best solutions. If you are nervous about turning over your organization’s sensitive data, you can require individuals to sign confidentiality agreements through a Masters Competition. Many organizations have used Kaggle to find the expertise they need, including my own organization, Deloitte. HR leaders need to help their organizations understand how to best incorporate this talent into their workforces. If your organization has yet to utilize freelancers on a wide scale, this may initially require a bit of legwork. You may need to involve your procurement department to specify how to hire freelancers. You will likely also need to involve your compliance and legal groups to make sure you don’t run afoul of employment laws such as the Fair Labor Standards Act. You may need to modify your contracts, confidentiality and intellectual property agreements, insurance requirements, work schedules (for different time zones), and payment terms to accommodate freelancers. Furthermore, your HR systems and tools may need to be modified to track this new category of workers. For managers, hiring freelancers will require a shift in how to onboard and incorporate this new talent into work streams. The organizational culture will need to build an acceptance of freelancers as part of the workplace ecosystem. These are areas where HR can help. Many organizations are already leveraging the talents of the freelance community. According to Gorbis, one of her large tech clients staffs many of its projects with a ratio of 10 freelancers or microworkers for every one employee. Even on a less grand scale, freelancing promises to change the dynamics of the workplace. HR leaders should look at how they can help to build this larger talent ecosystem.