14 2 104 Seeds 68 Peers Runtime: 115 minAudio: 2.1 StereoLanguage: EnglishSubtitles: ItalianResolution: 680×480Frame Rate: 25 fpsVideo Bitrate: 5227 Kb/secAudio Bitrate: 320 kbps Year: 2015 Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Seth MacFarlane, Amanda Seyfried Genre: Comedy Director: Seth MacFarlane Ted and Tammy Lin Groom couple want a baby, but to be eligible to be a parent, you will have to prove hes Ted person in court.Ted 2 2015 [English] Full Movie Download Torrent

How come the vast majority of the 100 highest ranking websites in eLearning still have websites that don’t work well on mobile? Despite usage patterns trending out the roof for mobile web access, less than 4 in 10 of the biggest players in the L&D industry have mobile marketing strategies that use responsive websites (websites that render properly in any device). Here at the NOW creation hub we’re all about the responsive. Click to any tech blog these days and you’ll be bombarded by stats, infographics and studies all telling you how quickly the mobile internet landscape has grown, and what it means for B2B digital marketing. Let’s distil this down to the key points that matter most right now: Internet access via mobiles more than doubled between 2010 and 2013, from 24% to 53%. (ONS, 2013) The rise in tablet ownership is about 3 times faster than that of smartphones (KPCB Internet Trends 2013) In 2013 the percentage of tablet-owning UK households more than doubled from the previous year, to 24%.  (The Communications Market 2013, OfCom) So accessing the web from mobile devices is a massive growth trend. In fact, back in 2011 those clever clogs at Morgan Stanley predicted that this year mobile internet access will surpass fixed internet access (from the desktop) globally. When Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker and her team made this prediction back in 2011 they could not have known how close to the mark they would be. In China mobile internet access had outstripped desktop access by mid-2012, so from where we stand today, the global dominance of mobile web seems an inevitable outcome. Why bother with browsers on the go? So what are these folks doing with their devices on the streets, on the train and on the go? Well as it turns out, when you make it super easy for surfers to convert and conduct commerce on the go, thats just what they tend to do.  Take a look at the analytics overview below. Just three weeks after going live with the responsive upgrade we did for them, landing page conversions are up nearly 330% on tablet devices and over 122% on smart phones. If you’re actually selling products and services online, as is the case here, then notice how real transactions are up 500% on tablets and 112% on smart phones. So what’s the hold up? "Where do we start?", "Sounds a bit complicated", "Don’t we need to redesign our website from the bottom up?" and "Why would we go responsive now when we’ve not even got our desktop site converting efficiently?". These are the "good excuses" most marketers today make when they try to justify the decision to leave the responsive option on the table for another day, meanwhile, there’s a bold group of marketers running riot with the new business opportunities nurtured via mobile every day. Digital marketers don’t do magic, but they can talk like magicians at times. Truth is, most digital marketing companies make responsive design sound just a wee bit harder than it actually is. After all, why would any digital design agency want to add responsive functionality without a fuss when the current blend expectation coupled with a fear of the unknown means it’s easy to package up a Pandora’s box of marketing apps that go way beyond the brief? Over the past few months, we’ve redesigned dozens on websites to make them engage prospects more and convert leads better. So far, the web architecture required to make content responsive on any device have never taken more than five days to deliver. Calibrating the perfect mix of SEO’d content powerful enough to convert prospects into customers regardless of the platform they choose to use requires long terms analytical study and an agile approach to campaign planning. But the clear and present challenge of adding new opportunities for prospects to engage via mobile channels is, in itself, no more more than a business week away. Want to make your website work effectively on tablets and mobiles: Talk to us now about adding responsive design to your existing site in five days or less.

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here Is your B2B marketing more successful that the X Factor? We’re told by X Factor’s publicity machine that a whopping nine million people watch the show every week, but what obsessive B2B marketers want to know is: How many of these viewers actually call up? What’s the conversion rate? Is it better than we can achieve in the B2B marketing world and, if it is, what can we copy? B2B marketers bang on about conversion rates all the time.  We want to make steady incremental gains that constantly squeeze more out of the marketing budget by encouraging increasing numbers to adopt a call to action. Analytics and marketing automation have made calculating conversion rates in B2B marketing pretty easy these days, but in the cold light of day, these calculations don’t always look that impressive to the B2B newbie. If landing page conversion rates are hovering at about 2-4% of all web visits, lots of petty experienced B2B marketers think that’s OK. During the first weeks of a new direct mail campaign, open rates well below the industry average (about 16%)can be pretty common too. We’re not saying these numbers are acceptable (like others in the industry, we reckon that B2B marketing must strive for better). But every now and then, when we sit down and try to realistically set expectations with clients at start-up we get the face. They look in disbelief when we tell them that a web site conversion rate of 2-4% are above the industry average and they panic at the thought of triggering outbound email campaigns that only 1 in 10 will open. Wouldn’t it be good, we thought, if we run the B2B analytics rule over something like the X factor, assess the conversion rates achieved by the world’s most successful entertainment show and compare them with those achieved in B2B marketing. As inquisitive B2B marketers, we want to be able to do this: Over at X factor production company SYCOtv, they’re not so keen. Surprise Surprise, no one at SYCOtv wants to tell us this information, so we need to rely on maverick online disrupters like Sofabet. Sofabet does a pretty good job of sneaking a peek under the hood to uncover the "real story" about X Factor voting. hub and spoke marketing is frequently illustrated using stock images like this one After the 2010 season (season 7) Sofabet tells us that 15 million people voted across the entire series. Season 7 comprised 30 episodes: 10 of theses were live shows (This is where the voting happens). These live shows were supplemented by "boot camp" episodes, "judges houses" episodes and "results" episodes (which encourage social activity but not voting).  In B2B marketing terms we think of this as hub and spoke content marketing: the live show is the hub (where voting / conversions happen) the other shows are spokes (where social activity creates buzz). In terms of audience, season 7 was X Factor’s high watermark averaging 13.2 million viewers per episode.  Crunching the numbers on all of this all of this - X Factor has a conversion rate of 3.78 percent (ie: 3.78% of those who watched also voted). Since it’s high watermark in 2010, ratings for X Factor have fallen. The 2014 season drew in about 40% less viewers than the 2010 season, yet we’re told (by the shows presenter Dermot O’Leary) that over 40 million votes were cast over the course of the 2014 season, and over 10 million of these were cast in the final show alone. This is an amazing achievement given that the show’s finale was watched by only 9.1 million people. X Factor’s viewing figures have fallen by nearly 40% since 2010 but the number of people voting for contestants has increased by over 260%. B2B marketers might put this down to great targeting: The show is watched by less people but a much higher proportion of these people are actively participating in the show. But they’re much more likely to put it down to creative use of the numbers. The most authoritative figures we can call on to help us assess what B2B marketers would call X Factor’s conversion rate probably come from YouGov. For reasons that we expect only YouGov can explain, this market research firm routinely conducts research around the X factor. Most of YouGov’s output focuses on predicting winners rather than determining any watchers to voters comparison but when pushed, the stats business has said (during the 2012 semi-final) that about 11% of the X Factor viewers they poll actually say they will vote.  11% sounds much more realistic. It’s comparable with the kind of numbers we’re familiar with in B2B marketing. So what can B2B marketers really learn from the X Factor? Well if we take Dermot O’Leary as our mentor, we’d probably say that the next time we’re asked to present campaign analytics to a client we should probably just flash a few big numbers on the screen without worrying about anyone in the board room asking really difficult questions. If we base our arguments on the YouGov data, then we’d say the X Factor may actually learn something from B2B marketers. See the full story Is your B2B marketing more successful that the X Factor?

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here Cartes Secure Connexions marketing support pack: coming soon Starting to panic about all the marketing stuff you’ve still got to do for the Cartes Secure Connexions Expo? Relax: We’ve got it covered. Our special trade show marketing pack for Cartes exhibitors officially launches next week, but your opportunity to see what’s on offer starts today. The products and services below are the best sellers that Security & ID companies going to trade shows most frequently ask us for. Take five minutes now to see what’s on offer. We can only support a small number of companies at each show so all offers are limited.  If you like anything you see just register your early bird interest and we’ll contact you before these services go public next week. Pre or Post-show email marketing with lead nurturing and marketing automation Turn a bucket full of existing contacts and new prospects into a hotlist of scored leads using our awesome content and marketing automation combo. How does it work? 1. If you don’t already use a Marketing Automation system like Marketo, Hubspot or Act-on, we’ll set you up on ours (Don’t sweat the tech. We know these systems inside out and we’ll handle all the boring stuff). 2. Use the checkboxes below to choose how many campaign outputs you’d like to run on and around the duration of Cartes Secure Connections. 3. Hack out your campaign theme with us over skype, hangouts or even that little black thing you walk around with. 4. Let us manage the rest while you just focus on just being great on the day. Or, if you want to take the opportunity to just try out our automation platform, why not take the opportunity of trialling it in the build up to the show. Costs: from £2,499 Limited availability The L&D Fast50 Power the social debate during Cartes Expo with our real-time news generation packages How does it work? 1.We work with you before the show to create the perfect debating question or questions for your business at the event. 2. Our research team gets to work on the days of the show, asking your questions to prospect entering and exiting the venue. 3. As soon as at least 50 visitors have responded, our writers turn the fresh data into breaking news - directly relevant to those at the show - tag it for social, optimise it for search, then publish it on the Fast50 website. Learn more Costs from £750 Limited availability The responsive microsite The products and services your company is promoting at this year’s show, on a responsive microsite designed for expo visitors on the move How does it work? Exhibitors at the Cartes Secure Connections use our pre and post show microsites to: Pre-publicise show activity and drive key targets to their stand Schedule meetings and prioritise demo sessions Develop social seminar topics that engage and get shared Connect with budget holders and influencers who may not attend Costs from £1299 Limited availability The Cartes Secure Connexions content marketing #hackbundle A B2B marketing #hack designed to create three awesome news hooks for the big products and services you want to promote before, during and after the Cartes Secure Connexions How does it work? A live #hack session featuring your best marketing people and our creative content specialists. Over the course of one morning or afternoon, we hack out three awesome news hooks to get show visitors talking about you this June. Costs from £750 Limited availability Amplify your message eShot design: Impress new and known prospects with an HTML email template that drives readers to a new or existing landing page created exclusively to promote the activities you’re planning for this year’s show (here’s one we we did earlier). Costs from £499 The big show news story: Choose this option if you don’t already have a news story ready for the show. One of our award-winning writers will call you to help you assess your company’s best story options. They’ll take a brief, then write up your show release to your full approval before Cartes Secure Connexions gets under way. Costs from £750 Boost your story: Use Now’s mainstream and social media influencer lists to kick-start your story Costs from £499 See the full story Cartes Secure Connexions marketing support pack: coming soon

Content from the nowcomms.com: the B2B marketing company for tech busineses in education, sports, security & ID. See the full story here Out-now: The Learning Technologies marketing support pack From the B2B marketing agency that brings you the Learning Tech show exit poll; say hello to our new learning technologies marketing support pack for trade show exhibitors. Why we did it If you’re the business that’s been questioning hundreds of trade show visitors as they exit the L&D industry’s landmark event for the past five years, you start to notice a few things. You see that the companies with the biggest stories can easily achieve more mindshare than the companies with the biggest stands; that the best face-to-face conversations are always influenced by the social buzz that builds throughout the show; and that the most welcome giveaways are not USB sticks with pitifully low storage capacity, but cheap practical resources that L&D professionals can actually take away and use in the workplace later. None of this is rocket science: everyone who has ever exhibited at any major trade show knows that thinking different pays dividends, it’s just that thinking different becomes harder when everyone is working towards the same deadline. That’s why this year we’ve come up with a snappy pick ‘n’ mix marketing pack. It’s stuffed with the simple but effective B2B marketing services you need to leverage the mainstream media and social marketing channels visitors depend on before, during and after the show. What’s in the pack? Check out the full pack here: it’s stiff with stuff we know works ‘cos we’ve tried and tested it all before. New for 2015: Special edition exit poll personalised for your company Want to really learn something from your experience at Learning Technologies this year? Our retrospective LT show #hackday delivers all the no nonsense know-how how you need. Every time we publish the LT show exit poll, things go just a little bit crazy.  Companies that didn’t get a mention call us up to work out why. Companies that did get in touch to ask what else they might do to achieve even better impact at the next big industry show they go to. Truth is, unless we know up front, the deep insights revealed by the personalised (and private) exit poll report we can create for individual companies, just get lost in all the hubbub as we race to publish the big picture results. Want a special edition exit poll report personalised for your company? Jump to the pick ‘n’mix marketing pack and order your LT retrospective #hackday before the show begins and we’ll do the hard bit. The big show news story Don’t tell us - you’ve got your big story buttoned down already right? There’s this nippy new LMS/learning  portal/mobile app/authoring tool/resource bank or whatever that’s so hot your big news story is just going to write itself come January. Sounds fantastic. On the other hand, if you do ever need a team of award winning writers who know more about creating cool content for companies selling into the L&D space than anyone else in the B2B marketing business, we’re at your service. Use the pick ‘n’ mix marketing pack to develop one big news story that rises above the competition, or use our content marketing #hackbundle to create three awesome news hooks for products or services you want to promote. The pre and post show microsite? We built this one for exhibitors who understand that winning at Learning Technologies isn’t just about getting ready for the big day; it’s about good preparation and really convincing follow-up. Located at someplace like yourcompany.com/lt and made fully responsive so you don’t disappoint visitors on mobile during the show, these custom microsites act as tailored teasers. Use them to engage and connect with prospects before the show and keep your brand, products and services top of mind later on when the serious job of review gets underway back at the office. The LTfast50 The real time news engine that powers debate across the L&D industry’s most popular social platforms during the exhibition. The LTfast50 gets the big questions you want to debate on the social agenda by turning views into news in less that 50 minutes. How do you get it? All that sexy stuff plus a bunch of basics like news amplification, html design, eShot emails and yada yada, yada. It’s here now, but it’s going fast. [social_share style="bar" align="horizontal" heading_align="inline" facebook="1″ twitter="1″ google_plus="1″ linkedin="1″ pinterest="1″ /] See the full story Out-now: The Learning Technologies marketing support pack

There is one language our brain is instantly capable of speaking, from birth. It is tolerated in primary school, seriously neglected in secondary, and by the time we leave college, it’s almost forgotten. Yes, I’m talking about pictures and images. Current L&D practice doesn’t leave much room for them, even though pictures are a crucial thinking, design, and communication tool. Here are some tips to improve your visual language skills. Acquiring skills for free A language we all speak when we are kids Talking about bilingual families, I often hear comments about "how lucky" their children are. How so? Well, they are growing up with an extra language "for free". No effort, no evening classes, no study work. A language for free. How lucky. And yet we are all born with innate capacity to speak a very powerful, international language. We communicate with pictures before we can read. We learn a vast amount of information and skills as illiterate children through the use of pictures. How lucky. School does a pretty good job at suppressing all our drawing and picture instincts, but our brain doesn’t give up: it still processes visuals quickly and with minimum effort. Death by clipart No. Please. Not. Him. Again. And this is why you can detect a boring learning solution at first glance. There it is, the tired sticky figure trying to tell us something important, and clearly not succeeding. In fact, its very presence makes the content that comes with it much less attractive, tired, repetitive. Death by clipart again. If you think you don’t have the time, skills or resources to come up with your own images, I’d blame your schools and colleges, not you. They convinced you that text is king and you lack those visual skills. Time to reclaim your free gift in 3 steps. 1. Rediscover Rediscover the basics of drawing and how it supports the thinking process. Drawing is crucially important during the brainstorming, design and prototyping phases of any learning solution. They give you an advantage by adding speed to all these processes. Books such as The Sketchnote Handbook (Rohde, M.), The Doodle Revolution (Brown, S.) or The Back of the Napkin (Roam, D.) will let you recover your dormant skills. Read at least one, and then practice. 2. Sentences Think sentences, not words. In this text-based world, we tend to think in text units. Letters combine to form words, and words to form sentences. But it strikes me to see how many people think about images as words rather than sentences. When they search for clipart or a picture, they type just one word in the search box. But pictures can tell a whole story, with present, past and future. They are much more than an adjective or a noun. So when you think about visuals, assign them the value of a sentence, not that of a word. Doodle, sketch, draw and take pictures with sentences in mind. 3. Shoot Your (phone) camera can help create original material using everyday items Your camera is your friend. There are simple messages that can be easily captured using some common items found around the office and at home. Time-related concepts? Grab a watch, put it on a newspaper, take a few shots from different angles and chances are you’ll find one shot that is unique, original and relevant to the work at hand. Even if you only spend a few minutes per week taking pictures, over time you will build your own personal library. Bye-bye clipart. The post 3 steps to better visual language skills appeared first on A Learning Blog.

Tranquilo, Neo: no TIENES que elegir una pastilla (Fotograma: The Matrix, Warner Bros.) ¿Qué es mejor, una imagen o mil palabras? Cuando esta conversación pasa de un contexto informal a uno profesional, y especialmente al de la formación, me pregunto hasta cuándo vamos a estar estancados en esta falsa dicotomía que tanto perjudica al sector. En inglés, las expresiones "sucker’s choice" (la falsa premisa de que es necesario forzar una elección entre dos opciones) y "chicken or the egg" (la falsa premisa de que una cosa debe preceder a la otra) sintetizan perfectamente mi opinión sobre este tema. Contexto Siempre que pregunto a un profesional de formación qué es lo más innovador que ha hecho, obtengo una respuesta distinta. En algunos casos es la implementación de un nuevo LMS, una integración, o la introducción de una plataforma social de aprendizaje. Otras respuestas describen procesos de análisis, diseño de intervenciones o captura de indicadores que evidencian cambios en la organización. ¿Innovador? Todo depende del contexto. (Foto: http://www.beamicrohero.com/) Todas las respuestas son indiscutiblemente innovadoras, aunque muchas podrían ser, a ojos de otras organizaciones, obsoletas o simplemente estar muy lejos de constituir una innovación. El motivo, por supuesto, es el contexto: el valor de las cosas depende del enclave donde aparecen. Ejemplos y contraejemplos Por eso me parece fútil el uso de ejemplos para tratar de demostrar un extremo u otro de una falsa dicotomía. J Carlos Arroyo apunta en su blog que la imagen de Aylan Kurdi no dice nada sin la ayuda de palabras. ¿No dice nada? ¿Dice bastante? ¿O dice suficiente? (Foto: Wikimedia Commons) Visualicemos (no tengo la imagen, lástima) un bosque en terreno escarpado, con árboles perennes de follaje denso, aunque deja entrever el horizonte, también accidentado. Delante hay un lobo, enseñando los colmillos, con las orejas bajas, patas flexionadas, con la actitud -difícil de describir con palabras, pero inequívoca para casi todo ser vivo- que precede a un ataque. A la derecha hay una zanja natural, por donde quizá discurre el agua, aunque no se ve por la cantidad de maleza muerta. A la izquierda, un pino estrobo corta el paso con sus enormes ramas extendiéndose horizontalmente a ambos lados. En fin, es muy difícil describir la escena, y sin embargo, en caso de tenerla delante de mis ojos, concluiría en una fracción de segundo que mi única vía de escape es trepar las ramas del pino que tengo a la izquierda. Si fuera un mono, analfabeto, sin uso de la palabra, habría llegado también a la misma conclusión en el mismo periodo de tiempo. Sin palabras. Pero si el mono o yo hubiéramos tenido que leer el párrafo anterior, probablemente ya tendríamos los colmillos del lobo clavados en la carne. Por cada ejemplo que ensalza la palabra, se puede aportar un contraejemplo que hace lo propio con la imagen. No terminaríamos nunca. Lo que más me preocupa de este post es que insinúa que somos incapaces de interpretar una imagen sin la ayuda de palabras, y peor aún, que "una imagen sin palabras no tiene ningún valor". Supongo que en Pinterest (70 millones de usuarios) e Instagram (300 millones de usuarios) no estarán de acuerdo. Si vivieran, también me gustaría saber la opinión de Da Vinci y Sorolla. Evidencia En el ámbito de formación de empresa, los empleados consumen información gráfica con avidez. Buscan, ven, analizan, comprenden y recuerdan imágenes con facilidad. Es, como digo en otro post, un lenguaje innato y gratuito. Es una observación que se repite en cada taller, con cada sesión, con cientos de empleados. Evidencia pura y dura. El uso de imágenes elegidas o diseñadas expresamente para estimular el recuerdo es claramente efectiva: la gente llega incluso a referirse a un concepto por la imagen que he usado, no por su nombre. Lo mismo ocurre en técnicas de solución de problemas: la visualización desbloquea, acelera y mejora el proceso. Por supuesto también uso imágenes para evocar un concepto concreto, una idea vaga, para iniciar una discusión, un debate, creatividad. Las imágenes funcionan, y muy bien. Con y sin palabras. No tenemos ese lujo En un contexto tan competitivo, variado y difícil como el de la formación, donde necesitamos mejorar el rendimiento de la organización empleando para ello el menor tiempo posible del empleado, considerar la imagen como medio de comunicación inferior o incompleto es un lujo del que yo, personalmente, creo que no dispongo. Mi Introducción a la psicología de Atkinson y Hilgard. De lectura recomendada, pero sin perderse en sus palabras. No tengo el lujo de perderme en laberintos filosóficos que desgranan si una imagen es real o imaginaria, o la posible ambigüedad interpretativa de la imagen (como si el texto no fuera susceptible de ambigüedades) y mucho menos prescindir de las imágenes basándose en estas cábalas. No; cuando hay que analizar, diseñar, implementar soluciones, obtener y presentar resultados (todo ello real, no imaginario), no queda tiempo para estos lujos. Todos somos bilingües. Hablamos con palabras, y hablamos con imágenes. Colegio y universidad desarrollan la palabra y dejan atrofiar el lenguaje visual. Dado este claro desequilibro del que partimos (el contexto) toda proposición que defienda el uso de la palabra frente a la imagen me parece contraproducente; afirmar que la imagen es inútil sin palabras, irresponsable. Madurez En nuestro ámbito de la formación, considero un síntoma de madurez el bilingüismo palabra/imagen que sabe encontrar el mensaje más efectivo para cada contexto. Y por supuesto, el destierro de esta falsa dicotomía: ¿Una imagen o mil palabras? No, por favor. Basta. The post ¿Una imagen? ¿Mil palabras? ¡Basta! appeared first on A Learning Blog.

Metrics, although necessary, can easily infuence behavior in undesired ways. They can’t be taken lightly, and I would never recommend limiting the number of tracked metrics to just a handful. But I found these 4 learning metrics managers like, because they are likely to trigger productive discussions about your learning solution’s deployment and impact. Butts in seats You still have to count them (photo: Beatrice Murch) While we all have heard a thousand times that metrics have to move beyond attendance, many good conversations start with attendance statistics. Learning effectiveness is useless if it didn’t reach enough or the right people. Avoid bringing just a number per location: good attendance tables -including demographic components such as geography, group, role and seniority- lead to good conversations about the potential of a learning solution to drive change, its operational challenges, budget and milestone reviews. Smile sheets Moving on to Kirkpatrick’s level 1. So easy to dismiss but so important in order to understand the quality of the experience as a crucial enabler of learning. I would, however, avoid the actual smileys and go for the business-oriented type of survey that managers are used to see elsewhere in the business. Specifically, using a 5-point Likert scale, I ask two questions: Were you satisfied with the learning solution? Would you recommend this learning solution to others? To calculate the results, count the top answers, take away the bottom three, divide by the total number of answers and multiply by 100. The result ranges from -100 to 100; you want at least a positive number. What’s considered a "very good" result will depend on your specific business, but will probably be around 30. For recommend, the result is called NPS, and for satisfaction, NSAT. Although I have seen these metrics exhibit consistent bias by culture and context (for example, the same learning solution is rated lower in Denmark than in Ireland, or by a group that has been recently reorganized) they are a great starting point for conversations with management because they demonstrate the ability of your solution (and by extension, your team) to engage employees. Management feedback Always capture and tabulate positive management feedback Although qualitative and potentially subjective, management pays close attention to what their peers are saying about a learning solution. And when you hear a general manager telling you that he has heard great things about the new program, you have an ally that may help in geographies or divisions where the solution has not been deployed yet, or in organizations that remain skeptical. Whether it’s an email, a hallway conversation with permission to quote, or a brief mention during a staff meeting, these little feedback nuggets do carry enough weight to be brought to the table.  Follow-up activity LMS progress and attendance are great. But they don’t tell us anything about impact outside the learning environment. However, with a bit of effort it is possible to obtain great additional data points that indicate impact. After delivery, your LMS is no longer a good radar. Keep track of your solution’s impact by adding other data points For example, it is very likely that you are setting up job aids, portals, social media channels and other systems and resources that support the learning solution after it has been delivered. Because these tend to sit outside the LMS, they don’t get tracked. But it doesn’t take much effort to "plant" counters on job aids, so you know who and how often employees are using them. Or measure social chatter within the channels you created. Or measure traffic to a supporting portal. With a little help from your friends in IT, you can add simple telemetry that gathers evidence of new behavior in corporate systems. A few data points is all you need to show management how the learning solution is driving the desired impact. That’s all? Certainly not. Although you may notice that the above four points map loosely to Kirkpatrick’s levels, there are many other metrics I would use, including longitudinal studies. For example, after a career advancement program, I would track participants for two years to see if their promotion/transfer rate differs from a control group. My experience with these, however, is that they are not as interesting to management, because these metrics span more than one or two performance review periods or business cycles. Yes, metrics can easily influence behavior. The post 4 learning metrics managers like appeared first on A Learning Blog.

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.

We are a research organization, and one of the most important thing we do is share information, data, and perspectives. Over the coming weeks there will be a lot of new insights coming, and I want to highlight some important things you can do to help. First, we are in the final stages of producing the Bersin Talent, HR and Learning Predictions for 2015, which will be out soon. I have personally spent countless hours on this research, and it brings together our combined perspectives on the ten biggest imperatives we believe HR and talent professionals should consider in the coming year. I won't give away any secrets, but stay tuned it's coming soon. The second big project I want to highlight is one you can participate in right now: Deloitte's Third Annual Global Human Capital Trends study. This is a massive global project I lead with two other partners, and it represents one of the biggest (if not the biggest) global studies of talent and HR issues around the world. Like last year, we expect to have data from more than 90 different countries and we have already found some dramatic shifts in the issues and capability gaps in HR around the world. Right now we are in the final stages of closing the survey, and we would like your help. Please take the survey here - it will help give you (and your peers) great insights into the global issues we face in 2015, and I greatly look forward to sharing results with you. I am excited to start sharing our perspectives for 2015 in the coming weeks!

Most HR organizations have been slow to adopt analytics - too slow, in fact, in the minds of many impatient business leaders.  Our research conducted last year showed that just 14% of HR organizations in the U.S are using advanced or predictive analytics to make talent decisions. These companies have created strong analytics teams with a diversity of skill sets and have established data governance processes for data quality and integration.   Despite the prognostications that 2014 would be "the year of predictive talent analytics," things haven’t changed all that much. I keep hearing the same questions from HR leaders over and over again: "How do I get started with analytics?" "How do we clean and integrate our data?" "How do we upskill our staff to be more data savvy?" If HR continues to drag its feet, it risks losing control over its data, and its chance to gain some real power within the organization. Witness the articles in support of CFOs owning analytics within corporate America. CFOs understand the value of data and are already using analytics to help them understand and predict margins, pricing models, and potential new revenue streams. For decades Finance has been using analytics to better understand where the business is strong and where it needs improvement. CFOs could be a natural fit to lead analytics across the organization - taking over responsibility for HR analytics, marketing analytics, and operational analytics. Most CFOs are in a position of power within their organizations. They already control much of that data on company financials and operations.  They have credibility and are seen (in many companies) as the source of truth.  They understand data and know how to use it. In many organizations, HR falls short on all of the above. Which is why HR risks losing control of its talent data to CFOs, who may be looking to further expand their leadership roles and spheres of influence throughout the company - and who are tired of waiting for HR leaders to "get it" when it comes to analytics.  I’ve already talked with several companies over the past two months that have centralized their analytics across functions. In a some cases, the CFO is running the analytics organization. In others, it  falls under the COO or CIO.  This should be a wake-up call for HR leaders. The battleground over corporate data is threatening to heat up, and HR can’t throw up the white flag and  lose its stake in the one area that promises to bring it credibility with executives and power over talent and business decisions. If your HR organization is still new to analytics, here is one thing you can do: Find a business leader who is willing to partner on an analytics project to solve a problem (e.g. reducing turnover, improving engagement, reducing accidents/theft/leakage, etc.) Put together a skunks works team, borrowing talent from another department if necessary or partnering with a university or external supplier, and look to get a small ‘win.’  After that, evangelize the results and find another internal stakeholder or two to partner with on another, slightly larger, project. After you have a few small wins and have built some credibility with business leaders, you can ask for some additional resources and start building an analytics team. Many HR people say, "I can’t get the funding for analytics,"  and it's no wonder...since they haven’t proven the value and their credibility yet.  So start small - look for a  supportive business leader with a pain point  - and grow from there. Any don’t wait too long, or before you know it, your CFO may be managing your talent data.  

Competencies are the language of talent management.  They provide guidance to managers and direct reports alike on the behaviors that are expected.  They also are a way to assess those behaviors, whether for the purpose of hiring, development, or performance appraisal.  Yet, for all that can potentially be right about competencies, so much can also potentially be wrong.  In many organizations we talk to, competencies are too numerous, ill-defined, or too complex.  The result is the competencies are infrequently used and ultimately cast aside.  Therefore, we have to ask ourselves, "Are competencies dead?" We are currently in the midst of a new research initiative on this question (and we’d like your help on it - see details below).  Our initial research reveals, no, competencies are not dead - in many organizations they are alive and well, working as intended.  In the organizations that are not using them effectively, though, the competencies seem to be collapsing under their own weight, dying a very slow death.  These organizations have "zombie competencies" - or "zompetencies," if you like.    So, how do leaders keep their organizations from creating zompetencies?  Here are a few suggestions: Design for criticality:  Focus on what is essential to success - not every competency necessary for doing a job.   Design for impact:  Focus on competencies that align to the organization’s business strategy and greatest areas of need.  If your organization is making a major transformation from one focused on execution to one focused on innovation, competencies should be a part of the bedrock of the change effort. Design for simplicity:  Constantly ask yourself if the competencies are necessary or can be expressed more simply.  Further, in an effort to reduce competencies, do not combine two competencies into one.  "Visionary leadership and tactical execution" is not one competency. Design for acceptance:  Avoid the trap of developing competencies in a vacuum.  Competencies need to be broadly socialized and amended as they are developed, to ensure both broad understanding and agreement on their content.  Ultimately, managers and direct reports need to understand the competencies, what they mean, and how to use them - and integrate them into how they talk about talent on a regular basis.  How does your organization keep competencies alive and well?  Or how has it gotten rid of zompetencies in the past?  We are currently looking for examples of effective approaches to competency models and how they support talent management.  Please email me at sgarr@deloitte.com if you have any examples from your or other organizations you can share. Special thanks to Joe Folkman and Candace Atamanik for their contribution to some of the concepts in this blog.

Impressive this year is the software creator’s mantra "develop for mobile first." Our survey of providers indicated that solutions are created and in the market for every area of talent:  learning, rewards, performance management and appraisal approval, succession and hiring management and many more.  Even core HR. Even content authoring tools. There is employee self-service and managerial self-service, and for hourly workers, the ability to clock in and clock out—all on their mobile phones. And the applications available for mobile use in HR vary in both number and sophistication. Oracle offers a company directory, Organization Navigator, predictive analytics, goal management, talent profile, and a personalizable dashboard on mobile devices. SumTotal offers a Smartphone app for every one of the 18 content areas we surveyed.  Close to 70 percent of the providers surveyed have mobile learning management capabilities today. Nine of 48 support the ability to supervise people and take notes on the experience for sharing later. Mobile apps are pretty much everywhere. But are companies actually using them for human capital management?  We decided that would be an interesting question to pursue! What is your company’s stance on HCM apps on Smartphones?  Do you use them today? Will you add mobile apps in the year ahead?  Or do you have no need nor plans to deploy mobile HR apps in the future? Whatever your stance, 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.     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.  

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. 

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.)