Greg Pryor, Workday’s Senior Vice President, People & Performance Evangelist, explores the trends and technologies that are transforming human capital management.
The future of work is changing, and so is human capital management. Organizations are reframing their people practices to meet people where they are and provide them with opportunities to thrive.
In this episode, we sit down with Greg Pryor – Workday’s SVP, People & Performance Evangelist – to discuss the next big IDEA in human capital management: inclusion, digitalization, enabling experiences, and adaptive organizations. Greg explores trends and technologies including:
About Greg Pryor
Greg Pryor is Senior Vice President, People & Performance Evangelist at Workday, responsible for applying Workday’s technology to optimize the company’s internal talent management programs, including leadership and manager effectiveness, learning management, career engagement and performance enablement.
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Visit our website at futureofworkseries.ca.
DOUG:
Welcome to the Future of Work Series presented by Algonquin College's Corporate Learning Centre. I'm your host, Doug Wotherspoon, the Chief Learning Officer of an amazing team of creative professionals that are dedicated to helping individuals and organizations thrive. In this series, we're sharing some fantastic insights to help you optimize both yourself and your organization for the future of work.
So let me introduce you to Workday. Founded in 2005, Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, two former PeopleSoft executives, got together at the back of a diner to map out what a new vision for financial services and human capital management might look like. They had just been through a hostile takeover by Oracle and really thought there was a new way of designing a cloud-based system for all. Flash forward to today: Workday now has 3,000 customers, 42 million users, and a market capitalization of $46 billion. Not bad work, over those past 15 years.
GREG:
What we see as actually the future of work is very much around much more agile team structures; much more networking; much more capabilities around looking at jobs or gigs or assignments; and how humans and machines are increasingly working together to do that work. I really believe that capabilities or skills are the new career currency. It used to be jobs, but it really is now increasingly moving to skills.
DOUG:
So we're joined today by Greg Pryor, Senior Vice President, People and Performance Evangelist at Workday. Thanks Greg. Thanks for a great presentation today at our Future of Work Speaker Series.
GREG:
Yeah, my pleasure, I really enjoyed it.
DOUG:
So let's dive a little deeper into the presentation. One of the key concepts you talked about was this idea of this shift that you're seeing, this third wave of human capital management, and this idea of moving from performance management to enabling performance. Do you want to talk a little bit about what Workday thinks?
GREG:
Yeah, absolutely. And I realize that it's just a shift in one word, but at least in my experience, it can be so incredibly powerful. When we look at the way we've managed performance for 150, 200 years — really since Sloan introduced the idea of management theory, and even Taylor, the theory of work before that. We've had a single way of doing that, which is, how do you manage people's performance? And, at least for us, really embracing the idea of design thinking, and thinking about the user at the centre of that — we found that shifting that one word from How do I manage performance? to How do I enable performance? really has unlocked and unleashed not only lots of new ideas, and the strategies we would use to enable people's performance, but we have found ultimately, at the end of the day, that it's really unlocked and unleashed people's capabilities. And so it's a one-word change, but it's been incredibly powerful. In fact, more than 80% of companies are actually taking the step to re-imagine performance management.
DOUG:
And I love — I mean, it's a very humanistic approach to some of these concepts that kind of move us away from that Taylor-ism, hierarchical approach. You Introduced today, this "big IDEA." Can you go into a little bit of detail on what does IDEA stand for?
GREG:
Yeah. So, you know, we are experiencing this once-in-a-generation, if not a once-in-a-lifetime, shift in the way we think about human capital management, and we're really, I believe, about 10 years into that shift. And so, just very quickly, I think from the 1930s to the 1970s was the age of personnel. From the 1970s to about 2010 was the age of HR. And I do think about 10 years ago, we entered into this third age around people and performance enablement. If you believe that as the thesis, what I think about as the next IDEA, it has four components.
The I stands for inclusion — increasingly so, how do we become more humanistic? Ironically, as we see artificial intelligence and machine learning and other technologies, take over the cognitive components of jobs, what's interesting enough is that it's actually requiring us to really focus on our human skills, on social agility, on the way we think about interacting with each other. And so how do we help enable people by, first and foremost, focusing on them feeling a sense of inclusion? So the I is really around helping people feel inclusion and a sense of authenticity and belonging.
The D is really around the digitalization. And increasingly, as we look at machine learning and other types of augmented intelligence playing a bigger role in the cognitive components of work, we're thinking about how do we use bot technology, how do we use machine learning and other types of behavioural nudges in the flow of work? I know you all at the College are doing amazing work around re-imagining work and especially learning in the flow of work. And our consumer experiences are really around getting nudges, around understanding the context. Whether it's Amazon or Google, this idea of predicting the information that's relevant for you, and then curating that in context.
The E is around this idea of enabling experiences. And, as you had mentioned, at Workday, we've moved to this idea of performance enablement instead of performance management. A big part of that shift has been moving from measuring activities to measuring outcomes. And so, as we talked about in the session this morning, at Workday, we actually survey our entire company every Friday. Every Friday is what we call Feedback Friday. Now that can sound overwhelming to your listeners. But we actually curate two of the Great Place to Work Institute's 34 questions every Friday. It takes our Workmates maybe 15 or 30 seconds to complete that. But what it allows us to do is understand at the team level, what does a people leader need to do to create or to enable performance for their team. And so we actually turn that survey every quarter. We share with our people leaders the level of experience that their team is having. And we've done that in partnership with our friends at the Great Place to Work Institute. They're the folks who do Fortune's analytics behind great places to work.
And then finally the A — and I think this is what we'll increasingly see — is this idea of the adaptive or the agile organization. And I believe that increasingly, to compete in a more dynamic, fast-paced world, we need to really be thinking about how adaptive are we, and how quickly are we adapting to changes in the competitive landscape?
DOUG:
So inclusion; digital transformation, the digitization; enabling experience; and this agile, adaptive workforce. So let's kind of go into each one of those. Sure. And this is the interesting part for me, which is this interconnect between all the data that we're now churning out of our systems being able to be used in real time to understand where we sit, fundamentally, from an inclusion and diversity perspective. Can you give us some examples of some of the things you guys have done with the data that you have?
GREG:
Yeah. So the intersection of inclusion and belonging with the digitalization of work. To think about the digitalization piece for a second, we really see, I would say, three fundamental trends there. First is, as you said, the democratization of data. We now have, through systems like Workday or other applications, a growing number of data points to help us understand what people need to be successful. So you've got the democratization of data. The second piece that we see then intersecting there is this idea of what's called prediction machines. We're big fans of the, of the book Prediction Machines.
DOUG:
University of Toronto.
GREG:
University of Toronto; three economists at the University of Toronto have just done some wonderful work in talking about this idea of how you predict what's relevant and important to people. And then based on, again, the good work that you all are doing as well, intersecting that in the flow of work. So you have the availability of data combined with the availability of technology — specifically machine learning — that can predict what's relevant to you, and then automagically curating it to you in the flow of work. So these three things we really believe are coming together in a very powerful way.
One of the things that we do, to your point around inclusion, is as part of our Feedback Friday, six of the questions that we partner with the Great Place to Work Institute on are related to belonging. And so we specifically have a belonging index we can measure across gender, generation, geography, ethnic background, level, all sorts of things. And we're looking to say, are we being a great place to work for all? So whether you're a digital native as a Gen-Z-er, or you're a baby boomer, or you're in Pleasanton, California or Paris, France, we want to make sure that we're creating a great place to work for all. And this democratization of data, combined with what some might call augmented analytics, allow us to then curate content specifically to each people leader based on the experience of their team.
DOUG:
Yeah. The idea that you can help a leader understand how a segment of their team may be feeling that is different than the team itself, in real time, and then suggest to them ways that they can then turn that information into something that they do on a daily basis — I mean, that's a game changer. That's what you're talking about in the shift.
GREG:
Well, and it's our consumer experience, right? I mean, whether it's Amazon from a shopping perspective or even our automobiles these days — Tesla has a great part of their technology where not only does it detect where there may be a gap in the car itself, but it also recommends where's the closest dealership that you can get it fixed. So that idea of curating actions, if you will, in the flow of work, based on where you are or this idea of context sensitivity — I think it's about to be as game-changing in the world of work as it has been in our consumer experiences.
DOUG:
You mentioned today — this kind of consumer versus workplace, I think, is an interesting place to dig a little deeper. This idea that we spend a huge amount of time understanding, mapping the customer journey, the customer experience, and increasingly that's now to be expected from the employee side. I think there's a great opportunity for organizations that spend as much time mapping the employee experience and understanding the employee journey as they do the customer journey. And I know Workday feels the same way.
GREG:
Absolutely. And our, sort of, principle number one — and it's always been Dave and Aneel, our two amazing cofounders have always fundamentally believed that happy employees lead to happy customers. You all at the College are great customers of ours and we're so grateful and appreciative of that. But I think, really, two things. One, not only will you see this mapping of employee experience and understand these macro and micro moments that matter, but then actually thinking about them together is ultimately, I think, the real virtuous cycle. Blake Morgan, who is a writer and futurist on the future of consumer experience, shares a Workday story in some of her work and she's a big advocate of looking at that together. And if your listeners want to listen, Blake does a really nice job of talking about the relationship and the impact of consumer and colleague experience. And we're focused on that virtuous cycle every day.
DOUG:
So we've talked about inclusion, we've talked about the digital side of the component, we're talking a little bit about the employee experience. That kind of leaves us the agility and the adaptability. So what do organizations need to be thinking about to become more adaptive? And I know you talked about skills, and the skills being the new threshold from which we're going to understand work. Talk a little bit about Workday's perspective on agility and adaptability.
GREG:
I think this idea of organizational agility really is driven by three things. One, and foremost, is businesses need to be more adaptive and to be more agile. The second thing is workers actually have the expectation, increasingly in our millennial and Gen Z generation, they expect to be moving away from roles as the point of primacy to really working on work. And the third thing, I do think that's ultimately, at the end of the day, going to enable that is this machine learning or augmented intelligence, that will actually begin to curate the work that is aligned to your career interests, that considers the capabilities or the skills that you have or you want to build, and then equally considers your connections. We now know without a doubt that most of our work is done in teams, that we collaborate with others.
I think the stars are absolutely lined up. Businesses need greater agility. And any organization, whether that's a university or a college or a nonprofit or a government organization, absolutely needs to be more agile. Workers are expecting that and really shifting from jobs to career experiences. And I think we're going to see more and more of that. And then the technology has arrived exactly on time to begin to curate those career experiences that enable agility. And then I absolutely think the new career currency is going to be this idea of capabilities. And when we think about capabilities, it's skills, experience and energy. From a wellbeing perspective as well, what's your personal health, your resilience, your ability to attack and take on this good work in front of you? So I think we've got a positive perfect storm that's creating this virtuous cycle. Businesses and organizations need it, employees expect it, and the technology will enable it.
DOUG:
Yeah, it's a really interesting time to be in this field. And you mentioned earlier this idea of social skills and the importance of social skills. And at the College we've long had — you have the technical skills and then you have the soft skills. And I refuse to call them soft skills anymore.
GREG:
Yeah, yeah. [Laughs].
DOUG:
They're called power skills or social skills. So talk about that and this context of psychological safety. Because I know, again, both Dave and Aneel have talked about psychological safety and the importance of it in their organization.
GREG:
Yeah, yeah. What is maybe a little bit counterintuitive is this idea that as we see machine learning and other types of augmented intelligence, or what's sometimes referred to as artificial intelligence, play a much greater role in work, the likely thing that will happen is that machines are much better at the cognitive aspects of work — those things that machines do well, which is large computing, review of data and context. What humans are still much better at doing is applying judgment. And this idea of social agility becomes even more important. So all of the trends and the research that I read, whether it's the World Economic Forum or some of our great partners, academic partners, it's all about connections, it's all about social agility.
I actually think, to your point, let machines continue to automate the good things that they'll do. But then as human capital professionals, how do we enable people to do what what only humans can do? These essential human skills, which you referred to as the power skills, which are really around social agility — so creativity, empathy, engaging judgment. These are things that, at least in the research I read, are increasingly more important for humans.
DOUG:
So now you have the situation where you're doing your Feedback Fridays and your leaders are receiving detailed analysis of their strengths and areas that they need to improve upon. You're surfacing them up contextual recommendations on how they can go about improving that. And that ultimately leads to a leader being able, in real time, to make adjustments to the way in which they manage. And for somebody that has none of that technological infrastructure in place, where do they start on this kind of crazy journey?
GREG:
It really starts with the power of receiving feedback and we've always believed that. And you look at the literature, you look at the good work that my friend Amy Edmondson has done around psychological safety. We spend a lot of time with Sheila Heen from the Harvard Law School on thinking about what she calls ACE, which is appreciating, coaching and evaluating feedback. I'm a big fan of Sheila's work on really asking people for feedback.
When you look at the neuroscience of this, it's really important, and that's actually why we instituted Feedback Friday. It was the power of a people leader being vulnerable and saying, I'd love your feedback. Now, whether or not they really love it, you know — I think it's maybe an acquired love. But I can't tell you how many of our people leaders come up to me today and say, Gosh, I just didn't know what I didn't know. And now I can be really focused.
I was with our Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Corporate Strategy, Leighanne Levensaler. We were on a walk-and-talk the other day, and I'm a giant fan of Leighanne, and one of the reasons I joined Workday was the chance to work with Leighanne. And she was sharing with me that she had just received some feedback. She is new as our Chief Marketing Officer; she's been our Head of Strategy for many years, and she's building a new relationship with the team, and she got feedback through Feedback Friday that she could be giving some more feedback.
And she was sharing a story where the team reinforced for her... They said, Gosh, we gave you this feedback — you know, that she asked what she could do more of — and then the team said, We really appreciate, Leighanne, you have really turned this on. And, I think, even more so than levelling up on the experience herself, what's so important is the team feels like they're being listened to. The team understands and can see a change in response. And for Leighanne, who again is one of the smartest, most capable leaders I know, she turned that dial up and she let the team know and they immediately responded and said, We really appreciate that you're listening to us. And I actually think that that's 75% of the battle here. Yes, you can level up on these skills, but what your team wants to know is you care and you're focused on them.
DOUG:
And I love the term levelling up. We're just getting better, we're always in this state of constant improvement, search for constant improvement. And a team loves, more than anything, being asked their feedback, but more importantly, for that feedback to be listened to and actually actioned. Because there's nothing more debilitating, more disheartening, than to see it play out the other way. And the idea that you've done Feedback Fridays makes a cadence of it, just a cultural component. So kudos to Workday for doing that.
GREG:
Thank you.
DOUG:
We've kind of gone the full circle behind this big IDEA of inclusion, of digital transformation, this idea of experiences, and then ultimately the agility and adaptability of an organization. It all comes together in the story that you shared with us earlier about Wex. And I just love that story. Do you want to explain who Wex is to our community? Because I think it kind of ties all those pieces together.
GREG:
Yeah. I'm glad you asked about Wex, I appreciate that. So Wex happens to be a dog who also happens to be a bot at Workday. And so Wex grew up out of the opportunity to think about work in different ways — as I mentioned earlier, based on the work of John Boudreau at USC. He's a good friend and his books are really around the future of work and reinventing jobs. We need to understand and appreciate where can machines take cognitive components of work. And so we actually originally invented Wex and his personality was sort of a mad scientist —
DOUG:
A sage.
GREG:
A sage, yes, exactly. And then we sort of took a step back and we applied our own hiring criteria to thinking about Wex, and we have an amazing team at Workday who does this. But we're a big dog personality, and so Wex eventually took the personality of a dog, sort of a combination of a bull mastiff, a lab. And Wex is your scout. Wex happens to be a puppy, because from a machine learning perspective, he has sort of a playfulness about him, and he's learning all the time. And he shares that in the conversations he has with people. What's really neat, at least for us, about that, is it's this fundamental idea of automate what we can so we can elevate essential human skills. So Wex actually answers about 2,000 questions a week from our Workmates.
DOUG:
A week!
GREG:
A week. With about a 94-95% accuracy. And then what we find is, where there are those questions that are more complicated, that really require empathy, that's when our human teams become involved. And so we've really practiced this idea of automate what we can, so we can elevate those essential human skills, those more complex topics, those topics that require empathy or more thoughtful judgment. So we're super lucky to have Wex on the journey with us answering those more straightforward questions. Wex has a fun personality as well. And our Workmates just enjoy engaging. We're going under now what we call WEXsanity, where people are interacting and engaging with Wex. But most importantly, that's allowed us to focus our humans not on answering rote questions, but on really applying great judgment, applying creativity, applying uniquely human empathy to work with our Workmates and create a remarkable experience for them. So it really is increasingly becoming a world of humans and machines working together to achieve a remarkable experience.
DOUG:
Yeah. I love that. Automate to elevate, so that the folks that are working for you actually are doing the most important, the highest-value work and creating personal connections because they now have more time, given that you've taken the mundane away from them. Fantastic.
So that's the end of this section. I had just a couple more questions to dig a little deeper into who you are. If you weren't in the role that you're at, if you weren't in Workday and in the people business, where would you have found yourself, do you think?
GREG:
Oh my gosh, that's a great question. I think I'd be a volunteer firefighter, believe it or not. Something very, very different. When I was much younger, I did a lot of volunteering with emergency services folks. I think, again, it's this people-centric part of my role. So very, very different career. But that's actually... [laughs]
DOUG:
Ah, love it. Great careers are blessed with great mentors along the way. Give me an example of a piece of advice and a mentor that really changed the direction that you're on.
GREG:
Yeah. Oh my gosh. I am so grateful and have been so blessed with just so many people who have made such an impact. I'll give you maybe a somewhat random — and she wouldn't have actually known this, but Gerri Elliott, Gerri is currently the Chief Customer Officer for Cisco. And I was at Juniper Networks when Gerri was there. This was about 10 years ago. We and the team were re-imagining performance management and we were sharing our approach to the various leaders, and Gerri was a Chief Customer Officer and Head of Sales at Juniper Networks at the time. And we laid out this plan, and I'll never forget the moment, because it was so pivotal in my career, where Gerri said, Well, are you going to drop performance ratings as part of this?
And I said, Well, you know, Gerri, there's a lot of risk in that. We had re-imagined almost every other part of what became Talent Matters at Juniper Networks. And she said, Gosh, you know, really what value is there in these performance ratings? Now, this was before we saw a lot of the research that really did say, actually there's very limited value in the ratings. And so Gerri, ahead of her time, she just turned to me and she said, Why don't you just let it go? So what? So we discover we should do something different in three months. And that was such a pivotal moment.
I'm sure Gerri wouldn't even remember this interaction, but I bring that up because you never know where those pivotal points come from. I am personally a big believer in this idea of social network science. And we now know through the research of my good friend Rob Cross and others, that the density and positivity of our relationships are actually more predictive of our success than our individual capabilities. And that's increasingly becoming so as we look at the collaborative intensity of work. And so being open to that random sort of comment. And again, Gerri, I'm sure in a million years wouldn't remember this conversation even. And yet it was so incredibly pivotal in my experience. So that's one. I've again been very lucky and very blessed, but you never know where these are going to come from. And so being open-minded, sharing your ideas, testing new things, and then really being open to, What's the universe telling me here? That was one that ended up to be a pivotal moment in my career, where I really was able to take a step back and fundamentally re-imagine performance management. And I'm forever grateful for Gerri and that passing piece of advice that I'm sure she doesn't even remember.
DOUG:
Ah, well, thank you Gerri! And then lastly, for somebody coming into this business, brand new... if you could talk to your 20-year-old self, any advice that you'd give that younger you?
GREG:
I actually think that we are at this once-in-a-generation, if not a once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity to reimagine human capital management. So rather than my 20-year-old self — if you are entering the human capital space, I would say there is no better time to come into this space. We are about to see such an exciting new day in this, what I think of as the third age of human capital management. And the application of technology, of working with humans and machines together, of really understanding the science behind social network science, behind organizational science — I just think it's a great time. So for me, the advice I would give to my 20-year-old self or someone today is, be open to all of the exciting things and be prepared for those things to actually come to fruition so much faster than we might have expected. So I would say, no better time to get into the human capital management space today.
DOUG:
Go for it.
GREG:
Go for it, absolutely.
DOUG:
Well, listen, Greg, thank you. On behalf of the College and everybody that gets an opportunity to work with the Workday team and the Workday products, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us today.
GREG:
Well thank you, and thanks for being a great customer. And thanks for helping our community and helping people not only build their new careers, but their next careers. We're so appreciative of the great work you all do.
DOUG:
Well, that's it for this episode of the Future of Work Series. Let's keep the conversation going. Follow us on social media and learn about our events at futureofworkseries.ca. I'm Doug Wotherspoon. Thanks for joining us.