1,000 CHROs on The Four New Functions of HR

Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we're excited to dive into some of our newest research that was developed right inside of our very own EXIM Institute. So welcome all, and to, before we start and we get into all the insights we would like to do, quick intros and a little bit of housekeeping. So I'm Dr. Ben Grande. I lead our employee experience advisory practice in the Americas and also have a side gig as our Chief Workplace psychologist, which means I get to play in a lot of our research, like a kit in a candy store. And today I'm joined by the brilliant and amazing, uh, Dr. Cecilia Herbert. Hi everybody. It's so great to be joining you today and thanks, Ben. It's always great to be working with you, of course. And, um, yes, today we are going to be going through this research that we've been conducted, we've conducted with the XM Institute. So just a quick, um, update on the EXIM Institute, what we do, who we are. Um, we are a small group of, uh, a think tank at at Qualtrics, within Qualtrics. And our purpose and mission is to build a thriving community of EXIM professionals who are empowered and inspired to radically improve human experiences. It's people like you every day. We are here to help, support and enable you in your understanding of the world of xm, your capabilities, and of course, to make sure that you've got the access to the tools that you need to advance your career in this world as well. So we do this in a bunch of different ways. We do this through thought leadership research, things like this. We publish a lot of blogs, uh, a lot of papers and even work tools and things like that that you can use every day. We also have a beautiful community. It's about 7,000 XM pros who come together regularly to share and learn. This is really an evolving area and an evolving discipline, and we're learning a lot from each other, not just in ex but also in CX and across different disciplines. So they come together regularly in a private LinkedIn group to learn and share from each other. And of course, training and certifications. This is a big piece of our enablement and, um, I encourage you to check it out. It ranges all the way from online modules right the way through to a 12 week course that we're actually running soon, face-to-face, um, to build XM skills and capabilities across the globe. So have a look@eximinstitute.com and you'll be able to see this and a whole lot more research that we're producing. So, um, I just wanna say thanks for everyone joining us and, um, let's jump on in. Yeah, okay. And a quick plug for EXIM Institute. So before my current role, I was actually, uh, in the institute, and when I moved out, Cecilia moved in. So we like to move A little bit. We do, we do our all one team of doctors of org psychs around this organization. We are, we always talk about this super scientist team that we have across in all different parts of the business. But yeah, we are just moving around doing each other's roles. That's Right. It's a lot of fun. And I guess before we dive into all the research and insights, a couple of housekeeping items. So if you do have any questions as Cecilia and I go through the presentation, feel free to drop 'em into that q and A window. We will have some time at the end to answer a few of those. You'll also notice if you, if you like or you need close captioning, you'll see that little cc icon. Feel free to use that if you'd like. And also, if you do happen to experience any technical issues during the course of the webinar, most of the time you can just refresh the screen and that'll solve it. If it doesn't, there's a little question mark icon, and you can feel free to click on that. So, but with, with all the housekeeping, I will hand it over to Sicilian and we'll dive right into the research. All right, let's jump on in. So, um, I'm just going to make sure that you can see everything there. So what we did, um, at exim Institute was we actually went out and we wanted to understand the experiences of HR professionals across the globe. We found, we went out there and we spoke to, um, over, over 900 CHROs and senior HR leaders across nine different countries. So in this webinar, we're going to be talking about the global results, but we're going to be also focusing in on the Americas. So we've got the us, Brazil, and Mexico in this sample. Everyone that filled in this research and told us about their experiences were, as I said, either CHROs or senior HR professionals in organizations that have over a thousand employees, so large to enterprise organizations. Okay, so let's jump on in and we will see what we found when we actually went and spoke directly to these people to find out what's going on for them in their roles, what's their focus areas, and what are their priorities. So this is what we found that emerged as the key themes, and we're going to go through these one by one today. So just to give you a quick overview, we found that the C H R O has definitely emerged as the senior executive of the time, the, the newest business growth executive. And also that there is a big focus on upskilling to meet the moment for where our organizations are right now, and that the future of EX isn't just about surveying more and more. It's actually about truly listening to our employees in every different segment of our organizations. And that a lack of strategy, a, a a lack of organizational wide strategy around ex is actually sometimes getting in the way of us actualizing our ex ambitions. So we'll unpack each one of these one by one with you. Let's get into it. Okay. So this is the first trend that I want to get started. And this really does tap into the view that in the last few years, the role and strategic value of HR leaders and their teams have really accelerated well, I like to think that they've become just a little bit more obvious and a little bit more salient, uh, to other executives and to, uh, employees across the, uh, across the organization. And we know that this is happening because across the globe, three quarters of senior HR leaders told us that their organization's function, the HR function is now more involved in the company's strategic initiatives now than they were before the pandemic hit. And this number globally was driven by the Americas. This was an absolutely huge number in the us, Brazil, and Mexico. In fact, in America, this was 82% of these respondents agreed. And in Brazil and Mexico, it was 86%. So this is clearly an emerging area that's, that's evolving for the HR leaders roles today. But I just wanna level set here. Let we know I've been one, I've, I've done this work myself and been internal in an organization. CHROs in their entire people function have always been the driving force behind organizational performance. You know, when you really think about it, our organizations are essentially a group of people working together to achieve a common goal. So when the C H R O and the leadership are uniting together to really build culture and systems and processes that enable our teams and individuals to work as effectively as they can, we are more than the sum of our parts. And it's through this that we achieve organizational performance. But if you're in hr, chances are you are, or if you're on this call, you know this too well, that when times are good and when times are going well, you know, things are predictable, change is constant and maybe within our control a little bit more than it is today. You know, HR really does become that operational function and function, and sometimes it can be seen as a, a bureaucratic necessity to keep our organizations going. But when things get less predictable and we hit uncharted waters, that's when suddenly we turn to our hrs, we turn to our leaders to say, Hey, we need support on knowing what our next best decision is. This strategic leadership, uh, capabilities that exist already that have been sitting there the whole time within our HR functions suddenly becomes more salient. And it's this value and the urgency for strong HR leadership that really rushes to the front of people's priorities, uh, when things get a little bit uncertain and things become less predictable. And so I think we've definitely seen that over the last few years, and this has had a huge multiplying effect on the roles that we've had in hr. So when we looked a little bit deeper into this, we did find a few interesting other data points, and particularly across the Americas, when we asked these leaders about these questions, they told us that they felt that it was important for their organization to improve their ability to adapt to unexpected events in the future. And that it was also important for them to be able to improve their employee experience capabilities and, and that they saw themselves that these HR teams were going to be at the front of enabling these organizations and helping them move towards this greater agility by improving experience management capabilities. These sentiments were very, very strong in the us as you can see there, 93, 90 4% up in those really high areas. So I guess this is this question of, you know, when we are looking at this strategic role of hr, you know, this is coming to the forefront of the way that we move our organizations towards greater agility. I really think that that is underlying a lot of this work. What do you think, Ben? Agreed. This was such a highlight for me to see the awareness of HR leaders that this is happening and that these things are important. It also made me think, and you made a very compelling point about HR has always been the stewards of the business, and that the business really is just people working together. But that word, the business or even the organization, we've used it in our presentation already. We have a tendency sometimes not just us in hr, but when we talk about the business, we're often talking about the operational or financial outcomes of the organization. And we talk about the business or the company as if it's some impersonal entity, but that's not really true, right? That's not really the case. What really is, is exactly what you said. So it's a group of people working together using shared resources to accomplish an outcome that none of us could do individually. That's what the business is. It reminds me, you know, in the institute we have this running joke about Princess Bride quotes. We, everybody on the institute loves Princess Bride, and if you don't, you join, you will soon. And it reminds me of that, that quote, like that word, the business, it doesn't mean what you think it means, right? It's just a group of people. And that's what we are, we are the stewards of that. So the scores here are really exciting to me that there's that awareness, that self-awareness that we are the stewards of the business. These things are important at driving those outcomes of the business, which are the financial outcomes and revenue and margin and ebitda, et cetera. But the rub is how, how do we execute on these things? And so we're actually gonna dive in a little bit, uh, today on how, how do we do this? Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's definitely a seat at the table. And the question is, now how do we do it? And what do we do with this, this newly acquired visibility of the work that we do and how strategically important it is. And look, one of the things that we are definitely seeing is, oh, and I'm skipping forward a few too many slides, there we go, is when you've got that seat at the table and people are looking to you to drive the strategic value forward, there's going to be increased pressure to be able to demonstrate the value of improving employee experience. Your other executives are going to be there looking to you to say, well, if we're going to be investing and really putting time, energy, effort, and money towards these things, what is that return on investment for our operational outcomes and those other financial metrics that we have in the organization? And we've definitely seen that this is going to be happening because our senior executives, as told by our HR executives, are shifting their focus towards employee experience more and more over the last few years. In fact, we saw that 72% of, uh, people agreeing that this is happening, that senior executives outside of HR are looking towards employee experience as a way to build that competitive advantage or to build that sustainable organization over time. And in the US this was even higher, 76%. So this is definitely something that's coming to the forefront of the way we think about our work into the future. So if over half, then half of the leaders in the US are saying that they are needing to link their work. So HR management to business objectives, and this is where gaining consensus around the topics of employee experience being connected to which overall business challenges, uh, business results. It's a real challenge. And it's something that we've been trying and we, we work on for years. And we know that it's hard to do because it's about being precise in our advice as to where we should be focusing our efforts. And really, depending on who you ask, depending on which business leader that manages which part of the business, you are going to get a different answer as to where we should be focusing our energy hybrid working. It's all been about technology. You know, in some people it's been about role specific training. We should be really zooming in there. Or maybe it's psych safety or maybe it's benefits. All of these things we know are important, and investing in all of these things will drive positive outcomes. But when we have finite time and we have finite resources, we need to zoom in on the highest impact areas and really nail those bits. So this is why the evidence-based HR advisory is becoming so much more important. And it's a real skill that we are needing to collaborate with leaders across the business in order to achieve. And we know that there isn't one size fits all different employees within our own companies, let alone our company versus another company or another country or another region. Each one of these are going to require different and unique employee experiences to enable them to be as effective as possible. So how do we do this? This is complicated stuff. Yeah. And it's hard work, Ben. Um, we hear this all the time. What are you thinking in this space? It, it is hard. And I think that's the first thing to acknowledge is that it is not easy to demonstrate an investment into employees and what that downstream impact in the language that that other leaders across the business speak. You know? And to use a very simple example, right? If we know that we need to increase the degree of collaboration and how our teams and functions work together, and we know that's something we wanna invest in, so we put money and effort and resources into, it's difficult then to follow the train of activity and how that manifests itself to get to the, the revenue r o I are to a margin number. That's hard because the models are very complicated. And sometimes if you skip over and you just look at, ah, intervention and let's cross over this big chasm of activity that happens in between and get to those outcomes, we end up seeing nothing. And then that deflates us a little bit. But when we don't see anything and that relationship between these two very distally, you know, they're very far away from each other in the chain of events that must occur, that doesn't mean that there's no impact. That just means that we're having trouble detecting it. And there's a lot of mediating and moderating factors inside of that black box. So one of the things we have been seeing companies, we're gonna talk a little bit about this in a minute, is looking at more proximal outcomes to show the benefit and the value. 'cause the reality is, we are in a bit of a, a contracting when it comes to budgets and money available. We all know it's, we're in a contracted, you know, at ebbs and flows, it expands and contracts. We're in a contracting environment right now. So everything we're doing in terms of investments and employee experience, we have to show the value. So one of the ways, again, looking at customer outcomes as an option, yeah. How does the investments we're making in customer facing employees or even second degree people who are building products, how is their, the investments we're placing impacting customer attitudes and behaviors mm-hmm. That's much closer aligned. That's easier to demonstrate. And sometimes those calculations already done for us between, what's that, what's a bump in n p s or CSAT or customer effort score, what does that equate to in repurchase behaviors and a revenue? So it helps us to give a shortcut and maybe something that's more realistic in the short term. Yeah. And we're seeing, um, we're we're seeing this in the data. We're seeing HR professionals are telling us that they're making these connections and that they expect to do so more into the future. Now, one of the things that we're thinking about when it comes to the metrics that show impact, these are the immediate impact. We know that customer experiences are directly related to revenue spend, uh, cost to serve, et cetera, et cetera. So connecting employee experiences to our customer's experiences, 'cause guess what, it's our employees that are creating those customer experiences has been a space where people are getting a lot of traction. In fact, we saw that 81% of the people that we asked said that this is going to be more important to the future. So it's almost unanimous. We even saw it even slightly higher in the US at 92%. There is a general agreement that connecting ex to CX is going to be something that is going to be extremely valuable or valuable into the future. So I think Ben, you know, we're seeing it, right? We are, we're seeing this in from the North America view in our customer interactions. There's a lot of energy around this. In fact, the advisory work that our team does, a significant portion of that over the last year has been focused on this tying employee experience and customer experience together. And precisely because we're in the environment right now where people are asking for it, and it's a more realistic and proximal, uh, outcome to look at the investments that we're making. The other thing i i, I would point out here is it's not proving out that employee drives customer. Almost every single one of our customers that we work with know that inherently, it goes back to the word you used earlier, Cecilia, which is precision. It's about understanding where is that investment being made to get the best bank for our buck. That's a different question. We can know that that relationship exists, but what specifically do we invest in with limited resources and limited money? The other really exciting thing I'll say about this is that a lot of the demand and the pull is coming from the customer side. So I know sometimes as HR professionals, we get a little bit protective of our data as we should, right? We don't wanna give all the employee data to everybody that's dangerous. But the demand and knowing that the demand's coming from other leaders across the organization, like in customer experience or even in operations, that's exciting. And that means we don't have to necessarily go knocking on everybody's door saying, Hey, you should care about this. That's telling us right now, we're seeing at least in the Americas, people coming and saying, we need this. We need to know where to place these betts. And to give, make this a little bit more real. We wanted to share a very quick case study, make this real for everybody. Um, Southwest Airlines and those of you who have flown Southwest, I'm a big fan of Southwest as a consumer. Uh, I've worked with them for many years now, and we, we, we must acknowledge, like during the holidays, they had a difficult time, but we did a study with them right before that, which actually was really critical in helping them rebound from some of that. And I think if you look at what they're doing today, very successfully rebounding. But essentially, as you would imagine, as in the airline, Southwest has a massive workforce of frontline employees, right? They're not sitting in front of a computer every day. They're working on, they're in the flight crew, they're in the ground crew, they're in the customer care group. And the work we did with them was focused on the customer care group. And those of you who've worked with customer care, supported customer care, extremely difficult job. It's a hard job. Extremely difficult, right? You're dealing with issues and and frustrated customers a lot. It's a difficult job. And what we wanted to understand in partnering with them is back to that point, precisely what do they need to focus on that will have the biggest bang for their buck in that customer care group? Now, if you know Southwest, Southwest has long believed that you go take, you take care of your employees first. Herb Kelleher wrote, wrote about this years ago. So this is deeply ingrained that understanding. So this wasn't an exercise in proving out that that's true. They know that that's true. What they wanted to know is specifically what interventions would make the most difference, what they focus on this customer care team. And what was interesting is it wasn't stuff that's like super obvious, a couple of things. They found one employees and these, uh, in these customer care groups saying that they're able to recover from their stressful jobs they had, they can take time off, they can separate their work and their family life, for example. That was a predictor of some of these customer outcomes, like c e s, customer effort score. If you're not familiar, csat, customer satisfaction. And N P s it also, we looked at, um, one of the other factors was their ability to take on new challenges. Not being boxed into that job, but meeting that need for growth and expanding their capabilities was another predictor. And then thirdly, and I thought this is the coolest one, the ability to openly talk about mental health with managers, Right? That's not something, you know, I don't know about you c Celia, but I wouldn't predict or hypothesize going into a study like that where we're looking at many drivers that talking about mental health would be a predictor of cx, but it was. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so that gives us, it tells us a couple of clues, but again, the, the point here is that it's not about, you know, showing the r o i for these distal outcomes that are really hard to model. Not impossible, but hard looking, more proximal outcomes where we can show the value of what we, what we're doing in hr. Mm-hmm. And that's so critically important to be able to tell that narrative to any senior executive. When I think about the time when you're really stressed and you are not feeling well at work and you know, you shouldn't send that email and you know, you need to step away, being able to say that to your manager and saying, I'm not gonna show up and be my best for our customers right now is so important because that is going to create great customer experiences. And knowing that that's just not just about being a great manager or a good employer, that's actually critical to our business success is going to give you so much leverage as an HR leader to be able to invest in these types of programs and explain the return on that investment about mental health, you know, in the workplace and starting those narratives. These aren't cheap programs and they're not easy to run. So being able to connect that out to business outcomes absolutely. Critically important and so, so powerful. Yeah. Love that. Okay, so let's jump out into the second trend, because I know that we're keen to get through all of these. So the second trend that we found is about upskilling to meet the moment being hrs top focus area right now. In fact, we found it even more so in the us it was very consistent across the globe. We found that there were two main priorities that senior HR leaders and CHROs told us that they had across all over 900 people that we surveyed. So this was that employee training and development and talent attraction were the two top focus areas right now. And then when we looked across this region, we saw that it was consistent here as well, that we could see that in the US they are the top two, followed by compensation. And in Brazil training and development came out as number two. But of course, like we've been just talking about that linking HR management to business outcomes came up. And then in Mexico, again, training and development came up, linking HR management to business practices. But there was also d n I in there as well. So this is slightly nuanced across the regions. Um, but we could definitely see that consistency of those that that being a big area of focus, um, in this region. And I think, you know, one thing to call out here is the timing of these surveys is really critical because mm-hmm. It might not surprise anybody here on this webinar, but the what's going on in the external environment absolutely can and will influence what's top of mind to employees and the HR leaders. Give a real example there. You're seeing compensation show up as like the third area in the US at least. And by the way, Cecilia, these findings very much jive with the day-to-day conversations we're having with HR teams among our customer base, which is different based than the survey, by the way. 'cause this is not just Qualtrics customers represented in the survey. So that's very much jiving. When we looked at, we did a study in 2020 during the heart of the pandemic, and we were interested in understanding what are the factors that, uh, attract somebody to one job versus another. And in that period of time, it was the social aspects of work that emerged as the most important. And that makes sense given what was going on in 2020. Fast forward to 2022, and our colleague Matt Evans did a brilliant conjoint study that looked basically at the same thing. And he found that at least in the US and the UK and Australia, during the peak of inflation, it was compensation that was the most important. So that's a kind of a, a lesson there. Fast forward to today, if we were to run the survey today, would we see d and I come up with mm-hmm. The, the latest ruling from scotus right around knocking down affirmative action in universities? So the lesson I think a couple, couple fold is, one, it's really obviously critical that we are keeping our finger on the pulse of how these external changes are adjusting employees' expectations and what we need to invest in and what they're expecting from us. And two, that these things can and will change based on what's going on in the environment. And we should expect the safe bet would be to expect that that's only gonna happen more frequently with technology influencing. That's right. And look, and I do think that this is a, a beautiful example of how responsive and adaptive our HR leaders are across the globe, that when something is important that we, we jet pack that up the list in our priorities. And what I really love seeing here particularly is that that development is still top of mind for everybody, but even in when times are, are tough and things like that, that we've still maintained that as a top priority. And for us, you know, HR geeks, we know that there is a direct connection between people feeling that they could grow and develop with this organization and their engagement. And we know that engagement is key to productivity. It is key to keeping organizations sustainably growing. So making sure that we are shifting that lens from training and development being something of an investment rather than being a cost to the business. It's really reassuring to see, um, that this has maintained its spot as being something that's a top priority. But when we looked at this data, and we did look across a number of variables, we asked people about a series o of priorities and what they would be doing. And one thing that we saw was manager enablement not being as higher priority as this general employee training and development. Now we know that a general strategy for employee training and development, it's unlikely to be hugely effective at, you know, targeting particular cohorts and groups. In fact, we always say at, you know, exit institute that you need to design your employee experiences and target your employee experience design for particular cohorts or particular groups of individuals in order to be able to get the maximum benefit from that. So when we are looking at who we train, who we enable, who we support, it was a little bit surprising to see that manager enablement was as low as this. And the main reason is is that we know there's been a huge amount of studies. In fact, McKinsey just did one just recently. It was only released a a couple of weeks ago talking about how your managers and supporting your managers, particularly in times of change, uh, the predictor of your organizational performance and that this is amplified in your times of disruption. And that historically organizations have underinvested in manager enablement and that this is one of the biggest indicators of, you know, organizational health, financial performance and, and many other things. So in the US we also saw from that last slide that training and development was a top priority, but when we looked at this in the US, we actually saw that there was an even bigger drop, uh, slightly drop, what slightly larger gap, uh, between employee training and development and manager enablement. So our recommendation here is that if you want to be effective in where you are pushing your training and development, you know, efforts and, and what you're doing, it's to be specific about your, your employee cohorts and their needs and make sure that we are focusing on critical groups. And your managers are one of, it's a very big but very critical group, and this is the most impactful way to enable the success of your organization moving forward. And of course we're talking about using evidence-based methods to really refine this strategy and really get laser focused on these priority areas. And then of course, going back and, and reflecting on the impact of these efforts. What do you think, Ben, what do you see in this data? I have to admit, this was a concerning one for me when I saw this, that there was that large of a gap. And a couple, couple things. One, we sometimes you will use that to, and I'm guilty of this too, I don't want to act like I'm on my soapbox here, but we, we talk about employee experience and we have that frontline employee persona in mind. I do this all the time and we forget that everyone is included in that. And that's especially true of managers. They're part of the, not only a lever to drive frontline experience, but their employees too, even the C-suite. And we've seen in recent studies like managers and senior leaders and even C-suite or report very high levels of burnout, even more so than frontline workers. So that's just a testament to how important that is to what you were talking about in the McKinsey study. We're seeing the same thing in our own research that when you ask employees, frontline employees, for example, that don't manage people, what's really critical to you, they always call out the relationship with their leaders, right? It's the facade of the organization for many of them. We see it over and over again regardless of the environment. We see that coming up as a key driver. We also know that when we're looking in, in the last year, we've been seeing a lot of evidence in our customer data where the frontline employees are calling out, Hey, we really appreciate the relationship with our managers, right? Those ratings are tend to be pretty high. There's some variance from company to company, but generally speaking, we've seen those ratings of frontline people, of their direct managers really high. But then when we zoom in on that persona of the manager and managers of manager one level up, those middle managers, they are telling us they feel dramatically under equipped. And those scores are going down from the past years, they're feeling the squeeze. And as I mentioned earlier, they're also reporting very high levels of burnout more so than frontline. Mm-hmm. So the question I would raise to, to myself as a consultant to you, to all of us here, is how do we reasonably expect to scale if we don't work through leaders? I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do. And specifically what do we need to upskill them with? What they keep calling out is soft skills. Soft skills. Mm-hmm. Soft skills, soft skills. We'll talk more about that later. Mm-hmm. That's right. And so the other thing that we found that was a really interesting finding was, um, this next thing where we talked about priorities, which was around talent traction hiring. We saw that across the globe that that was a, a top priority, yet onboarding not nearly as high a priority. And it's interesting because in the US we actually saw this, uh, even bigger gap. We saw that onboarding. So, so talent attraction hiring was actually a priority for 75%. So that, that was a priority in the us but onboarding 48, so a big gap. And this is a potential blind spot for a lot of organizations. And so I'm, I'm keen to hear your perspective on this Ben as well, around how do we think about this gap between getting people in and then onboarding them. And it's sort of, it's a weird, it's a weird scenario we're in because while we, you know, in some industries like tech, it's, it, it, the job market's very different, but it's also very tight despite what's been happening. It's, it's a rather tight job market for a lot of industries, which is some on the surface surprising when you dig into some explanations, but on the surface, that's not what we would expect or what I would expect at least. But it is. But if you just take, so getting butts and seats is important, right? To be blunt, it's important. Yeah. But you are right. And I think if we take like two steps back, even though talent attraction and selection and onboarding or maybe experiences that people go through and sequence, if you take a few steps back from that, you can make a really compelling argument that that really is a macro experience that represents the first impression. And I'm, I'm gonna steal some research from Lisa Gundry and Denise Rousseau that they conducted in the mid nineties, but they were doing a study, I believe this was Lisa Gundry's dissertation, if I'm not mistaken. But she was doing some work, some critical incident work about how long does it take for people to get really, um, accustomed to the culture of the organization. And one of the serendipitous findings that really had some staying power was that after about two months, it was really hard to change someone's mindset about what it's like to work here as if that's the window of the first impression. And so that, again, used taking that finding and combining it with this point, if we are creating experiences and we're ramping up the investments in talent attraction and hiring, and we're not threading that needle between what happens there and what happens in the first two months in onboarding, we're missing a trick. And we are running the risk of baiting and switching. We're running the risk of a disjointed experience. We're shooting ourselves in the foot by not creating a consistent experience and leaving somebody with a bad taste in their mouth that could eventually really sour the relationship that the person has with the company. And we're doing our candidates and our new employees a disservice by not threading that needle. So to me, that's the big takeaway from that disconnect, especially in the US, is so large. It's a concerning disconnect to me. There's a strong argument that these things really need to hang together. Mm. And it's like, it's interesting 'cause the whole definition of a top priority is that not everything could be a top priority. So we are not saying that everything should be a top priority. Fair point. I think the point here is that, that there, there could be a blind spot, you know, there could be this huge indexing on bringing people in and then a big gap, you know, a bit of a blind spot between how we're thinking about onboarding those people. And it's just getting people to start thinking around that journey for employees in, in their organization to think through how evenly are we distributing our efforts across these critical points to make sure that we are maximizing the value of all that time and effort and energy of get people in to actually get them up and ready and, and adding value in their roles and performing in their roles as efficiently as possible to make sure that we're, again, going back to the value, showing that return on that investment that we're making in those people. And that they're getting the best from us as well. That they're getting a return on their investment from us too. Yeah. Alright. But then we're talking about the organizations. We were talking a lot about organizations and what they're doing. Let's talk about you, let's talk about hr. Ben, what do you think about this one? Yeah, and I think, you know, we do talk a lot about that. Um, we are gonna recap at the end some specific mm-hmm. Suggestions. But one of the things that both Cecilia and I feel really strongly about is caring for the caregiver, right? So we can't be good caregivers of the business, the group, the collective of people if we're not first caring for ourselves. If interestingly, and this again may not surprise you at all, but when we run hr, when we, well when we run organizational surveys and we look by department, HR is usually not the highest on these things. And you know, you would sort of expect them to be if you looked at it from that way. But they, they're not, they usually report relative, they usually show up in the middle or even low in terms of how they're caring for themselves. And we do have some ideas. One is this notion of opening, opening your peripheral vision. We'll come back to that a little bit later and flesh it out. But you know, taking off your blinders for HR and really looking out of what are some of those tangential fields that are doing something very similar. Customer experience is a great one. And where I think Cecilia and I have gotten a lot of benefit from sitting in the XM Institute is because we're sitting right next to people who are experts and consumer and customer experience. There's a treasure trove of learnings there. Market research for example. So quick, quick illusion to what's gonna come later. But I mean that's what it makes me think is like how do we open our periphery and really bring some of those new skill sets in? Yeah. And when we ask people about experience management, you know, we heard loud and clear that experience management and being able to use employee insights to be able to adapt through uncertainty is a critical skillset that HR is going to need to build in order to be able to lead organizations through these next phases. And we saw that here, you know, that experience management is going to be an important capability for HR and it's going to be critical to their success into the future. And in fact, 97% of the respondents from the US agreed with these things and said that this was important to them. So the good news is that we do have resources such as the EXIM Institute that are there to support and enable this development specifically in the discipline of experience management. I don't know about you, but when I went to university and did all of my degrees, I never once did a course in experience management because it wasn't a discipline then. It is an emerging and innovative field, which I encourage HR people to start thinking about their own skills and their own investment in their capabilities to be able to bring this to the front so that we can create experience centric organizations and transformations in our culture. Okay. Third one. And I know that we're gonna have to make sure that we get through everything pretty quickly 'cause we love to chat, Ben and I. But this is really about the future of experience at ex management being about listening, not just in surveying. And let's jump in to what we are seeing here is that we're seeing ex listening in action. So Ben, I'm gonna let you take the wheel on this one. Yeah. On this statistic. This is a frustrating one because when, when we work with our customers and we talk with our HR leaders or the CHROs, they are vehemently that we are listening, we're taking feedback, we're acting on it. And from my view, from the outside looking into various companies, I agree, I think the vast majority of the organizations that I have worked with do legitimately take action on the back of different various listening efforts, whether that's the annual survey or pulse survey, whatever. But they really do listen and they really are acting. And so that becomes really frustrating for them when they see results. Like you see at the bottom. And I'll give you some specific stats. When we do our trend study every year, we have never really seen the rating from frontline employees that their feedback's acted upon. Go above about 35%. Yeah. So about one third or less of frontline employees say that they see the connection between their feedback and the action. Incredibly frustrating for senior HR leaders is probably very frustrating for many of you. I really do not believe that this is a lack of action problem. I personally think that it's a lack of communication. Yeah. And we're not communicating and threading the needle between your feedback action, feedback action. So a specific tactic I'll share that we have had some success with is using what we would call a three by three approach to communicating action plans. Communicate three different times using three different media or channels, the webcast that shares the results out at a high level, here's what we're doing. That might be one the follow-up email from the department lead might be two. You could a variety of different things could be three. One that I would definitely recommend in the next pre communication of the next pulse or the next survey. Remind people, last time you gave your feedback here, here's what happened. Remind people, make it very really stinking explicit. And that can help to, to close that gap. So it's not a lack of action, I think it's a lack of communication. Yeah. And it seems that we're, we're at many organizations and it's not just us and, and often it's not just HR because we rely on that whole organizational effort to have those experience centric habits in their daily work. And we can see that this change management perspective is really starting to think through this cascading effect through the organization of the way that we are connecting these things to our frontline employees. So we saw training and development super high. We saw manager enablement a little bit lower as a focus area, but change management was the lowest rated priority for HR leaders in this across the globe. It was at 25% on average, saying that this was a priority for them. And in fact in the US it was even lower 18%. So when we start thinking about how we're engaging in the skills, the capabilities, the priorities, the habits, the practices of hr, it seems that change management really hasn't historically fit within our wheelhouse as HR professionals. And really starting to think through, okay, well we're leading this now and change management is going to need to become part of the way that we work and the way that we're thinking about cascading these changes and cascading these communications throughout the organization, typically through our managers and our leaders. That's definitely happening. But the thing is, is that if they're saying that this isn't a priority for them, then Ben, who, who is implementing these changes if it's not HR Really quickly. 'cause I know we're short on time. Yep. Um, you know, and I'm, I'm not sure exactly what frame frame of reference I think the participants had here when they were answering this. It's hard to say, but I would look at it a little bit differently. Broaden your definition of change management. I completely agree with what you said, Cecilia. To me, manager enablement goes hand in hand when we're talking about change. We're talking, talking about changing people's mindsets, attitudes and behaviors. And there's no function in the organization that understands influence in people better than hr. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And it's not the change that isn't happening. So even though it wasn't rated as a high priority, we can see clearly that there is a lot of change and transformation happening in organizations. In fact, over half of the, uh, people surveyed told us that they're now running employee feedback programs at least every quarter. And an overwhelming majority told us that they think that this frequency of employee listening is going to increase over the next couple of years. And we're seeing this play out. Um, um, you know, it's not, I think the frequency is telling, um, I, what I see in that is technology is just getting a lot better and we're able to do this more frequently versus, you know, 10, 20 years ago is much more difficult to do this frequently. But the analogy I really like to use here is I don't, I really don't like the framing of surveys, frankly. I, I think that underplays the value of it. I like to use the analogy of dialogue. And we, if we anchor on that definition of an organization being just a group of people using shared resources to accomplish their goals, it becomes very obvious that there has to be dialogue happening. In order for us to coordinate our efforts, we have to talk, in other words. And there has to be conversations happening at all levels. Teams have their conversations with their managers and their immediate team and their cross-functional team members. But there has to be dialogue between senior leadership and decision making and functional leadership in frontline as well. And so that's where this comes in. So again, it's not just about the frequency, but as we'll look, there's also, what technology is also allowing us to do is open the aperture a little bit and look at different types of, of conversations. And the way I might, if we kind of anchor on that dialogue analogy, if Cecilia and I, you know, we're, we're friends, we're, we've been colleagues and friends for a long time and we have a great relationship, I would say. But if you were to look at all the conversations and dialogue we have, sometimes I drive the conversation, sometimes Cecilia drives the conversation. It's two way it, it's not just me dictating when we're gonna talk and what we talk about, but in traditional organizational surveys, that's very much the case. Leadership determines, here's when we're gonna talk and here's what we're gonna talk about. They define the timing of the survey. Mm-hmm. They define that the items. And that's okay. That's okay sometimes because there needs to be leader driven dialogue sometimes. But there has to be balance. There has to be balance where employees, frontline employees or managers can say, here's what I wanna talk about and when I want to talk about it, or at a time that's convenient for me or powerful for me. And that's where, uh, lifecycle surveying comes in that many companies do today. That's where open ends. But a lot of this can get scary because with this unstructured scraping technologies that make it very possible, it's a little scary. And we do not recommend diving headfirst to do all this at once. Do it gradually. Mm-hmm. Start with open ends. Let people, uh, give a, give a always on where people could say, Hey, if I wanna say something really positive or negative, I have a place to go and I can raise that. There really needs to be balance or else that relationship is eventually gonna devolve. Yeah. And look, not only are we seeing the frequency, we're seeing all of this sort of thing change. We're seeing technology driving two-way dialogue. We're also seeing dramatic change in terms of what we're measuring. You know, this is really reassuring. Uh, you know, we were talking about it earlier, Ben, around how a while ago, a couple of years ago, it was all about engagement. And engagement is still being measured, but we're seeing even people bringing in key metrics such as wellbeing and inclusion as the core things that we are looking at in our organizations. And that is definitely changing as well. So one of the things that I've wanted to touch on, Ben, and, and you've spoken so beautifully about this, is how we look to organizations and to other people out there around what they're doing and what best practice looks like. But you've got a slightly different perspective on this and, and I want you to just quickly share that with everybody here Super quickly. Um, I'm a big fan of learning from other organizations. What I'm not a big fan of is copycatting. So we often distinguish between best practices and best principles. Quite simply, best practice would be this company's doing X, this company executed this change, or this company's doing, bringing people in three days a week, uh, for their hybrid policy. Those are great to learn from and those are especially tempting to learn from when we're in an environment where there's a lot of unknowns or uncertainty. Like right now with AI and proliferation of ai, there's a lot of question marks and it's a little scariness when we have data support that by the way, people are scared about it, especially frontline leader, um, frontline employees. When that happens, we're tempted to go and look at what everybody else is doing, keep doing that. But the challenge that I would, I would give all of us, including myself, look beyond just the practice. Why did that practice work in that company? What culturally, what about their history? What about the context? What was the principle hunt for the principle? So that's what I would say and I would close it out by saying copying other organizations' best practices is not a best practice. Yeah, absolutely. And we're definitely doing this at Qualtrics. This is something that we've been working on with our customers is not necessarily telling people exactly what to do, but definitely giving them the principles and the guidance to help them think about what is right for them. So I want to just, um, make sure that we are coming into our last, um, we're coming to our last piece right now, which is, uh, the, this one which is about organizational strategy. So I want to give a quick time check and make sure that everybody's getting their q and A questions in, 'cause we're just rounding out the back of the last trend here, which is around organizational strategy being the thing that is often getting in the way about ex ambitions. So we found overwhelmingly that people told us that a lack of clear strategy was the number one sided obstacle to organizations being able to successfully execute on their ex management practices. And this has also got to do with, um, critical skills and misaligned objectives as well. So when we look at this type of thing in this region as well, it, it came out loud and clear. The US, Brazil and Mexico all said that it's this lack of strategy that is really getting in the way. So one of the big questions that we've got, and one of the big recommendations that we're thinking about is think about who it is that is driving the strategy. We went into this study, I'll admit that I had a complete blind spot, which has my hypothesis has been absolutely annihilated, which we assumed that it was the C H R O that were the ones that were designing and delivering this strategy. And I actually spoke to a C H R O yesterday about this and I said, what is going on? And he was beautifully eloquent and said, employee experience is everybody's job. That every single person in this organization has skin in a game and has a role to play in delivering great employee experiences. So it's our job to bring all these people together and come together on a strategy, but ultimately we are shepherding them towards it. But this shouldn't be the thing that gets in the way of us doing it. And that we need to step up. We need to be that group of people who, our teams being the ones who maybe aren't telling people what the strategy is, but definitely being at the tip of that spear of building that organizational vision and strategy and taking that to the business to try and get them aligned around it so that they can actually get excited and deliver on that vision. And that is going to be the new world of not waiting for somebody else, um, to come along and give us permission to do this, but something that as HR professionals that we are thinking about how we are gonna lead out on this because it's clearly the first domino to fall, um, on a lot of this work. Okay. So that is the four trends, and I'm going to get everybody to start putting in their questions in the q and a and we'll get to those. And these are the four things. And when Ben and I sat down, and we've spent a lot of time in this data, we really came up with these four things that we feel that are the recommendations for HR leaders across the globe to start thinking about. The first is that first one around being a strategic leader, leader align ex KPIs to business outcomes and integrate these into existing business rhythms. Pulling people away from their jobs to focus on this isn't going to work. It is going to need to be something that informs their everyday work and helps managers and leaders do an even better job than they're doing today. Second, is investing in skills and capabilities required to create experience driven transformations. This isn't just us about looking at our employees, this is also looking at ourselves and our teams and making sure that HR and that whole people function is there ready with the skills required. This is digital skills, this is experience management skills. And as Ben was talking about these human and soft skills of empathy and listening that we need to start building. Third is anchoring on best principles, not necessarily best practices to help us realize the future of employee listening in our organizations that are meaningful to us. And we are using influence and inspiration from others, but we are co-creating it with our employees, our managers, and our leaders based on the principles that are important to us. And fourth, take the wheel. Take the wheel on developing your ex vision and strategy so that you can take it out there and maybe have it critiqued, but at least make those steps to have something that inspires and empowers all employees to understand the role that they're playing in creating employee experiences with their peers and with their teams every day.

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