Collective Sense of Purpose

Most organizations trace their roots back to a few people coming together around an idea. When these organizations were founded, the only thing they had was people. They did not yet have any profit, probably had very few resources, and may not even have had a well-defined strategy. The organization consisted solely of people with a shared vision to do something and a desire to make it a reality. The employee experience in these companies was defined by a clear focus on a common purpose. Everyone in the organization knew what the company was trying to achieve and why it matters. This strong collective sense of purpose is hard to maintain as companies grow, add multiple divisions, and spread across different regions and locations.

Urgency and Openness to Change

People in small startups have a sense of urgency driven both by opportunity and threat. The opportunity is the chance to be “first to market” and build something successful. The threat is knowing the company has limited time to acquire customers and start building revenue. Grow or die is a reality in most startups. Maintaining status quo is not an option. This urgency fuels an openness to change. The purpose of the company is clear, but there is a high level of flexibility shown toward how the purpose is achieved. All strategies are viewed as temporary methods that will shift over time to address changing conditions. Frequent iterations and modifications are expected and normal. The act of adapting is viewed as a critical factor in driving opportunity. The goal of these companies is not to continue doing things that they have already done. It is to build on accomplishments to achieve new successes. Large companies tend to lose this sense of urgency because the stakes of success and failure are less noticeable. There is little risk of the company going under due to a poor quarter or even a poor year. As a result, people often start to grow comfortable with the way things are, taking an attitude of “why change what isn't broken?”

Everyone Knows Everyone Else

When you have a small group of people urgently working to achieve shared goals, it does not take long for everyone to meet everybody else. Many startup organizations begin with everyone in the company literally sitting in the same shared office. The companies may have leadership structures and defined roles, but these structures do not hinder collaboration between people based on job titles. The employee experience is one of “we're all in this together.” Because everyone knows each other, they know what others are capable of beyond their formal title. This leads to people getting opportunities and exposure to a variety of things outside their normal job description. Consider this story from a startup where I worked. We had a major meeting with a Japanese company and the sales leader discovered the people he was presenting to had limited fluency in English. Fortunately, we knew one of our engineers lived in Japan as a child, so he helped deliver the presentation in Japanese. This is an example of the power of truly knowing your colleagues and organizing work based on what people can contribute instead of assigning work based on formal roles. It is hard to know people at this intimate level when the company's workforce consists of hundreds or thousands of people across different locations.

Influence Is Gained Through Impact

People with high levels of performance are quickly recognized in small entrepreneurial companies and moved into roles of increasing influence and responsibility. Conversely, people who do not make meaningful contributions are quickly identified. I was working in a startup when I first heard the phrase “He's all hat and no cattle” from a colleague who grew up in west Texas. He was describing a leader we hired who had excellent credentials but never seemed to get anything done. Shortly after my friend made this observation, our CEO ask this leader to seek opportunities elsewhere. Reputations are built quickly in small companies. If you are a person who makes a difference people will hear about it. Similarly, if you are not responsive, cooperative, and productive people will quickly know that, too. The way people gain influence in small companies is by having an impact on the company's growth and profitability. People who create successful products, increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, or increase operational efficiency quickly get noticed. They are given roles in which they can have even greater impact, regardless of what their current role may be. Terms such as career ladder or chain of leadership do not mean much in a small company. What matters is the ability to have an impact on things that affect the company's growth and survival.

In large companies it is hard to see the impact one person has on overall company performance. Because employees in large companies have limited ability to show how they affect business outcomes, they often shift toward demonstrating they are relevant to company operations. If you ask people in these companies what they do, the answer is often less about what they achieve and more about what they support. This can make it difficult to figure out the exact function of many roles in large companies.ⁱ This does not mean these roles are not important, but it is much harder to connect the contributions of people in these roles to tangible and specific business outcomes. People tend to gain influence in a large company by moving into formal leadership roles, which can lead to a lot of politics in staffing decisions. This inevitably changes the culture of the organization. People start to focus less on accomplishing things that tangibly affect business outcomes and more on managing the impressions they make on others.

A challenge facing large companies is how to retain the elements of the employee experience that enable the agility of small entrepreneurial organizations. This starts to become difficult after a company's workforce grows beyond a certain size. In my experience, the change starts to happen at about 250 people, when the CEO is unlikely to personally know or even recognize every employee.ⁱⁱ How can a large company build a collective sense of purpose across multiple divisions, maintain a sense of urgency and openness to change over multiple years, enable everyone knowing everyone else across thousands of people, and identify individuals who are having the most impact within a complex organizational structure? There are certain things about how people work in small companies that simply cannot be replicated in large organizations. But large organizations can create many of the employee experiences associated with small companies through fully leveraging the capabilities of work technology.

People Decisions

Decisions about employees make or break the success of organizations. The most significant are decisions about which people to put into different roles (e.g., hiring, promotions, team assignments, etc.). The decision of which employee to place into a particular role impacts on how the role is performed and also communicates to other employees what attributes the company values, rewards, or tolerates. For example, promoting someone who achieves results through belittling others sends a strong message about company values to everyone who has worked with that person.⁷ Decisions about where to invest compensation and development resources, although not as influential as staffing decisions, also have a major impact on employee performance, motivation, and retention.⁸

People decisions can be broadly divided into external staffing decisions and internal talent decisions. External staffing decisions are about how many people to bring into the company, whether to employ them full-time or as contractors, and who specifically to hire. As companies grow, it becomes difficult to figure out where it makes sense to add headcount. If two departments say they need to add 100 people, but the company can only afford to hire 50 new employees, how should these staff be allocated? And when people are added to the organization, how can the company ensure it is hiring the right people? What companies need is technology that can evaluate the business impact of adding (or not adding) headcount and ensure quality of hires across the organization.

Internal talent decisions include assigning employees to roles or teams, making promotions, transfers, and terminations, and investing compensation and development resources. Large organizations face two major challenges in this area. The first is about matching people to opportunities. How can the company ensure the right people are on the right teams? When does it make sense to transfer people internally? How can the company match people in one part of the company to opportunities in another area? The second is about evaluating the contributions and capabilities of people to guide decisions about who to reward, develop, or move into new positions. Which employees are making the greatest contributions? Which have the interest and potential to take on greater levels of responsibility? Are any employees hindering the success of others through inaction or counterproductive behavior? What companies need is technology to help match employees to opportunities within the company, facilitate internal talent movement to maximize the impact people have on the company's performance, and enable leaders to make better talent decisions through accurately assessing the performance, potential, and capabilities of existing employees.

Creating Communities

A company is an organization of people coming together to achieve mutual or complementary goals using shared resources. Effective organizations are composed of effective groups, teams, and communities sharing information and supporting one another tactically and emotionally. The problem facing large companies is how to create, maintain, support, and change these communities over time.⁹ Traditional methods for structuring teams, groups, and departments used spreadsheets and hierarchical reporting structures that provided little information about how people actually work together in a digitalized, virtual world. Just because two people report to the same manager does not mean they actively work together or even work on the same things. What companies need is technology that can help leaders measure how people in the company work together and provide insights into how the formal structure of the organization affects the people relationships that drive company performance.

Another challenge is maintaining the performance levels of communities as they grow. As teams become larger, the relative productivity of each additional member starts to decrease.¹⁰ This is due in part to the complexity associated with coordinating activity across greater numbers of people. It also reflects the communication challenge of keeping members aware of things relative to their role without overwhelming or distracting them with superfluous information. What companies need is technology that enables community members to effectively share information and coordinate activities in an efficient manner across large numbers of people.

Self-Management

The phrase self-management incorporates both self-development and performance improvement. It is about employees' motivation and ability to build their capabilities and achieve results. People in small companies understand that if they don't figure out how to get something done then it probably won't get done it all. And if it doesn't happen then the company may cease to exist. This drives employees to learn what they need to know to accomplish their goals. As companies grow, this sense of urgency tends to decrease as the relationship between an individual's actions and overall company performance becomes unclear. The consequences of not doing something become less immediate. If someone in a small company does not do their job everyone notices. If someone in a large company does not do their job it may only be noticed by those who work directly with them. And even then, no one may really care.

Psychologists use the term social loafing to describe the tendency for people to work less hard in large groups and organizations.¹¹ People are born with two complementary psychological needs: the need to achieve meaningful goals and the need to conserve energy and resources. The first motivates us to get things done, and the second guards us against working too hard and burning ourselves out.ⁱⁱⁱ Taking a break from work also plays an important role in self-reflection, enabling us to think about the future to ensure we are focusing our time effectively on things that truly matter to us.¹² The problem in large groups is people get stuck in a more passive, reactive mode toward work because to some degree they can “hide in a crowd,” This is not necessarily because they are not motivated or committed to the company. It can simply be because they do not feel their individual contributions matter that much. Or that they do not realize what they should be doing differently. What companies need is technology that makes it clear to people in a large group why their individual contributions matter and how they can increase their effectiveness; that keeps people engaged by increasing awareness of the difference they are personally making for the company, its customers, and their colleagues; and that provides them with supportive feedback and constructive resources they can use to improve their level of impact.

Security and Compliance

The bigger a company becomes the greater its security and compliance risk. Larger companies are more likely to be targeted by criminals due to their visibility and depth of resources. The broader scope of operations associated with large companies often makes them subject to greater regulatory compliance than small companies. The more employees a company has the more likely it is that one of them will inadvertently do something that violates legal regulations or endangers the security and safety of themselves and their colleagues.¹³ Security and compliance violations do not just create tangible damage, they also raise concerns among employees about working for an unethical or unsafe company. However, employees dislike being forced to spend time following extensive security and compliance protocols. Security and compliance are important, but they are not what makes a company successful. A challenge facing large companies is how to maintain security and compliance without making the experience of work seem overly rule-bound and bureaucratic. What companies need is technology that automates many of the activities associated with security and compliance and reduces the amount of time employees have to spend thinking about it.

Saving Time

One of the common complaints about working in a big company is how long it takes to get things done. In a small company, it is possible to get every stakeholder together and go from discussion to decision to action in a single conversation. This is not feasible in large companies where the stakeholders may be in different departments, locations, and time zones. Things happen slowly in large companies because actions have to be coordinated across multiple groups. Operations must agree the action makes sense, finance has to ensure adequate funds exist to support it, information technology must ensure it can be supported with existing systems, legal may need to ensure it meets regulations, and so forth. A friend working for a global company once told me, “Every single person in this company could agree that we should do something immediately and it would still take six months.” Large companies also spend a lot of time on routine activities. For example, if a company hires only a few people a year, then time spent scheduling candidate interviews is manageable. This ceases to be true when a company is hiring hundreds of people each month. What companies need is technology that facilitates communication and decision-making across groups, makes it easier for people to find resources and gain permissions required for different actions, and automatically performs routine administrative functions. This technology reduces the time required to get things done and frees up employees' time to focus on more valued-added activities.

Large organizations face a dilemma in a digitalized world marked by an accelerating pace of change. On the positive side, the capabilities of larger companies provide them with more power and resilience than smaller companies. They have a depth of resources to overcome challenges and bounce back from setbacks. However, they lack the agility and efficiency of smaller, more entrepreneurial organizations. This lack of agility can also make it difficult to attract talent who don't want to work for what they see as a big, slow-moving, impersonal, bureaucratic organization. The question is whether big companies can use their depth of resources to create employee experiences that mimic what it is like to work in entrepreneurial startup organizations? Technology cannot solve this dilemma completely, but it can help large companies act and feel more like small, agile ones. And it is this agile ability to change that increasingly makes the difference to company success.¹⁴

Workforce Design and Analytics

These solutions integrate financial, operations, and human resource data to guide decisions related to organizational design, headcount allocation, and compensation structures. The power of these systems lies in their ability to incorporate data from multiple sources and interpret it using sophisticated mathematical and visual analytics tools. The more advanced solutions provide insight into the impact workforce design has on business outcomes and employee work relationships and experiences.

Recruiting Management

These solutions support the logistics associated with hiring new employees. The core focus of these solutions is to make it easy for managers to staff roles by automating administrative tasks tied to opening requisitions, recruiting and interviewing candidates, and enrolling new employees. Most of these solutions incorporate or link to features associated with opportunity matching, talent sourcing, and job transitions and onboarding.

Opportunity Matching

These solutions match job opportunities to people based on their interests and capabilities. These solutions can support external hiring and internal talent transfer, as well as job sharing, part-time, temporary, and contractor job assignments. The solutions may support both formal job transfers and informal team assignments. Many of these solutions use complex machine learning algorithms to evaluate people's fit with different opportunities. This makes it easier for companies to fill positions while also supporting employee career growth.

Talent Sourcing

These solutions help find and attract job candidates. This is done through a combination of methods including solutions that search for candidates based on online information, tools to support targeted placement of job ads and recruiting marketing materials, and tools to create and maintain candidate communities such as alumni networks and career interest groups.

Job Transitions and Onboarding

These solutions support activities associated with moving people into new jobs or positions. This includes tactical activities such as completing forms, enrolling in payroll, and providing work training and equipment. It may also include cultural aspects such as meeting new people, clarifying job roles and expectations, and becoming part of the work community. These solutions can support external hires or internal job transfers.

Compensation, Payroll, and Benefits Management

These solutions support designing and administering compensation, benefits, and rewards programs. This includes supporting payroll operations and benefits administration, legal and regulatory compliance associated with pay plans, and complex commission-based pay structures. They help ensure companies fulfill the financial aspects of employment contracts. Automating the operational complexity of pay and benefits administration processes also enables companies to create more tailored and effective reward systems.

Contractor Management

These solutions support the operational and regulatory needs associated with contract employment relationships. This includes matching contractors to roles, onboarding contractors into positions, handling the administration of contractor pay, and complying with contract work regulations. This technology enables companies to effectively use contractors as a critical part of the organization's workforce.

Work Scheduling

These solutions support shift scheduling common to many operational, manufacturing, and service jobs. This includes designing shift schedules, collaborating with employees to cover different shifts, and tracking hours worked to support pay and other operational activities. These solutions may include tools giving employees control over setting schedules, analytics systems that integrate operational and employee experience data to set staffing levels for different shifts, and methods to ensure compliance with scheduling requirements and regulations.

Certification Management

These solutions ensure employees have the necessary qualifications required to perform jobs. Many of these solutions include links to training and other resources employees can use to become certified or maintain their certification status. These solutions may be linked to scheduling and facilities management solutions to ensure work shifts and locations are staffed with people possessing the necessary qualifications and security access. This may include assessing health requirements such as vaccinations or scanning visual images to ensure employees are wearing appropriate equipment such as safety glasses.

Talent Management Decisions

These solutions help companies make decisions related to compensation, development, promotions, transfers, team membership, and role assignments. These solutions work by providing decision frameworks that integrate data about employee accomplishments, behaviors, interests, and capabilities and present it in a way that supports accurate decision-making.

Facilities and System Access

These solutions manage and track access to online systems and physical work offices and facilities. These solutions are used to maintain security and ensure regulatory compliance. They can also provide data showing how facilities are being used and that provide insight into how the design of offices and work sites influences employee experiences.

Work Experience Platforms

These solutions incorporate technology solutions employees use at work into a single platform or portal, enabling employees to more easily access tools and information needed to perform their jobs. They shape the experience of work through how the solutions are displayed and the user experiences they create. They often include features to create online communities consisting of employees in similar jobs or groups.

Learning Experience Platforms

These solutions are a type of work experience platform focused specifically on employee development. These solutions incorporate a variety of development resources including tools to help employees identify and track development goals, find and access relevant training, build development relationships through mentors and learning communities, and locate assignments and roles that will help build their capabilities. They may also provide tools so employees can form learning communities to share and discuss development and training content with others.

Learning Content Platforms

These solutions enable training instructors and employees to build, edit, organize, and manage training materials including training assessments and certification tests. They may incorporate a variety of training modalities including video, narrative storylines, virtual reality, interactive exercises, gamification, and integrated curriculums.

Team Management

These solutions help employees coordinate and communicate team activities and projects. They enable employees to set up groups and communities, define goals and share and track information across team members. Some of these solutions are informal in nature, focusing on sharing information across team members in a general way. Others are built to support formally defined team processes and project management methodologies such as Agile, Waterfall, Critical Path, or others.¹⁵ Team management solutions often integrate or incorporate technology solutions focused on supporting electronic communication and collaboration spaces.

Electronic Communication

These solutions include e-mail, chat, instant messaging, calendar scheduling, and other tools that support immediate and asynchronous communication between employees. Many of these solutions support use of visual imagery and audio or visual recordings. Electronic communication is not typically thought of as a tool for workforce management, but the electronic communication solutions available to employees and how companies use them significantly shape employee experience.¹⁶

Collaboration Spaces

These solutions create shared virtual spaces where employees can meet to discuss issues, explore ideas, and develop solutions. These solutions can be entirely online such as virtual whiteboards or may blend in-person and online technology such as video conference rooms. The availability, design, and use of collaboration technology can be a major factor affecting group cohesiveness and team effectiveness.¹⁷

Role Clarification/Goal Management

These solutions support communication among employees, managers, and coworkers related to roles, goals, and expectations. They may incorporate goal management methodologies such as goal cascading, OKRs (objectives and key results) and shared team goals.¹⁸ These solutions often include tools for defining and aligning goals, revisiting and revising goals over time, creating shared goals across team members, providing coaching related to both goals and behavioral expectations, and linking employee goals to business operations metrics related to productivity, financial performance, customer satisfaction, or sales.

Self-Management

These solutions provide employees with feedback, information, and insights to help change their behaviors and improve their performance and skills. They may provide employees with nudges¹⁹ to guide and remind employees of things they want to do differently. Many of these solutions collect, analyze, and present data so people are aware of the impact they are having on themselves and others. Examples are solutions that analyze the emotional tone associated with a person's electronic communications, gather survey data showing how a person's behaviors are being interpreted by others, analyze calendar data to provide feedback on how a person is using their time, or track mobile and physiological data to increase awareness of physical activity and health.

Electronic Profiles

These solutions integrate data about employees or candidates to facilitate decisions related to staffing, development, compensation, and performance. They typically include information such as job title, organizational reporting structure, pay levels, job history and tenure, demographics, past experience and education, and formal qualifications. They may also have information related to past performance, future potential, development goals, career interests, and psychological attributes related to work such as personality and ability traits. Collecting and integrating information about candidates and employees enables companies to make better decisions about them, but it can also create anxiety among employees who, for very valid reasons, may be skeptical about how this data will be used and whether it will be done in their best interest.²⁰

Talent Assessments

These solutions are designed to measure employee and candidate attributes, interests, and capabilities. This is typically done through structured questionnaires, tests, simulations, or interviews. Depending on the assessment, this data may be used to guide staffing decisions and/or be used to support employee development.

Experience Measurement

These solutions provide insight into employee and candidate experiences. This is usually done using surveys that ask targeted questions based on an employee's job role, career interests, or after they complete a work activity. Many solutions use embedded analytics to interpret data and provide guidance to managers or other individuals who can act on the results while ensuring data confidentiality and anonymity. Experience measurement solutions may also incorporate data from other sources, such as analyzing patterns of absenteeism to determine if employees are experiencing difficulty managing work and nonwork schedule demands, electronic communication data such as e-mail to provide insight into employee work patterns and attitudes, or data from wearable biometric devices to track employee stress and fatigue. Experience measurement solutions are sometimes referred to as employee listening technology.

Virtual Reality

These solutions create highly realistic, immersive virtual environments to support training, collaboration, or communication. This is one of the faster-growing areas of work technology with some people predicting that it will become so comprehensive and realistic that we increasingly shift much of our work into a massive virtual environment called the metaverse.²¹

Robotic Process Automation

These solutions enable companies to automate repetitive online processes and activities. This technology is becoming increasingly robust in terms of the complexity of processes it can support to the point that almost any process that requires people to do the same steps over and over can potentially be automated.

Interoperable Data Management

These solutions enable companies to collect, store, manage, and analyze extremely large datasets containing data from multiple sources in a single system. A key feature of these solutions is their ability to combine workforce data with business operations data found in financial, supply chain, manufacturing, sales, and customer management systems. This is often referred to as “creating a single source of truth” and facilitates the ability to analyze and use data to guide workforce management decisions and actions. A key feature of these solutions is a concept called interoperability that enables linking and maintaining data collected from sources that use different data frameworks and structures.

Gamification Platforms

These solutions enable companies to apply the gamification concepts such as storylines, rewards, or contests to encourage engagement and completion of processes, training, and other tasks and activities.

Mobile Enabled

This is more of design feature than a solution. It refers to designing technology solutions so they can be accessed through mobile and smartphone devices. This makes solutions much easier to access particularly for employees who do not work at desks. Most technology solutions can be mobile enabled, but not all are.

Single Sign-On

These solutions simplify security access by creating a unified framework that works across multiple technology systems. Using single sign-on makes different work technology solutions easier to use by employees and, if designed correctly, strengthen system security by reducing the number of access points.

Wearables and Biometrics

These solutions enable collecting data from employees about their physical location and health. These solutions often feed data into solutions used for facilities access, self-improvement, and experience measurement.

Relationship Analysis

These solutions provide data about the nature of employee relationships and how people interact. Many of these solutions use survey data collected using a technique called organizational network analysis. Relationship analysis can also be done using data from electronic communication, collaboration space, team management, and facilities access solutions. These solutions are particularly valuable for guiding decisions related to organizational design and workforce productivity. For example, Figure 3.1 shows what an organization looks like based on a traditional leadership organizational chart versus a relationship analysis chart. The figure on the bottom shows how often people interact with each other and identifies Jordan as the person who is central to the organization's operations. This is in contrast to the hierarchical organizational chart on the top that suggest Jordan's role is relatively minor.

Chatbots

These solutions use artificial intelligence functionality to create user interfaces that mimic natural language. Chatbots make it easier to perform certain kinds of administrative tasks such as scheduling interviews or asking questions about benefits. But they are not always responded to favorably depending on whether employees expect a chatbot versus a human and the perceived efficiency of the chatbot for addressing employee needs.²² It is somewhat uncertain how they would be viewed if used to perform more sensitive tasks, such as providing coaching or counseling.²³

Machine Learning

These solutions use complex iterative mathematical algorithms to identify patterns and predict future outcomes. These solutions are often used to guide hiring, staffing, and development recommendations in career matching, scheduling, talent sourcing, talent assessment, and learning experience solutions. Machine learning can be applied to any solution that generates large amounts of data used to predict an outcome of interest. For example, it could be used with experience management solutions to predict employee turnover or employee profile data to predict likely employee career paths. However, caution is needed when using machine learning for sensitive talent decisions such as hiring or compensation because most people prefer to be evaluated by other people, not by machines.²⁴ This does not necessarily mean machine learning should not be used for such decisions, but it can create risks related to perceptions of fairness and equity.

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The list in Table 3.1 covers most of the technology applications that currently exist to support workforce design and management. New applications are constantly being developed but they can usually be associated with one or more of the solutions in this list. An experienced HR person might be surprised there is no mention of common types of HR technology such as human resource information systems (HRIS) or applicant tracking systems (ATS). This is intentional because what these systems do can be thought of as a prepackaged combination of different solutions listed in Table 3.1. An HRIS is a mixture of electronic profiles, compensation, payroll and benefits management, and facilities and system access. An ATS is combination of electronic profiles, recruiting management, talent assessments, and job transitions and onboarding. The advantage of thinking of work technology in this more modular way is it enables companies to mix or match different solutions to address different needs. Over time I suspect companies will use work technology applications the way we use our computers and phones: they will have a core work experience platform that they complement with a mix of specialized solutions that frequently change based on their particular needs.