Erik Ebert is an SAP SuccessFactors Solutions Director for GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.

For several years Workforce Analytics has been in the SAP SuccessFactors family but has not been fully adopted as an integrated and working solution. This has changed. Now the time is here—your company can improve decision-making, find answers to key questions about workforce challenges, and receive guidance to help solve them with workplace analytics.

Driving impactful decisions with solid business evidence.

Workforce Analytics on HANA (WFA on HANA) provides actionable insights on workforce data to drive your business strategy today and help you plan for the future. Our workplace analytics solution increases the effectiveness of HR with a comprehensive library of standard metrics, industry benchmarks, and HR best practices that help measure the things that matter. GP Strategies helps you to quickly and easily implement a powerful Workforce Analytics solution for any HR metrics area, starting with Employee Central (core workforce and mobility). For example, you can analyse and understand termination rates (voluntary and involuntary) and analyse your organisation to determine the areas in which you are losing more talent than others.

WFA on HANA is designed for business execution and fully integrated with SuccessFactors. It is easy to use and provides the insights and tools you need to take action. With more than 30 years of expertise in HR metrics built into the tools, technology, processes, and services, SuccessFactors sets the standard for workforce metrics and benchmarks, and it provides the tools that make everyone successful. Selected metrics available with WFA on HANA Core Workforce and Metrics Pack include:

• Average Headcount
• End of Period Headcount
• Start of Period Headcount
• Organisational Tenure
• Age & Generation Distribution
• New Hires
• Rehires
• Promotions
• Demotions
• Job Changes
• Involuntary Terminations
• Voluntary Terminations
• Gender Distribution
• Male to Female Staffing Rate
• Male to Female Staffing Rate – Managerial
• Average Annual Salary per Employee

Each metric pack includes a defined set of source data fields that are extracted from EC to generate Base Input Measures and Dimension Hierarchies. These two components form the basic building blocks. Filtering Base Input Measures by Dimension Hierarchies generates a rich set of Derived Input Measures. Derived Input Measures are combined in formulas to generate Result Measures (in percentages, ratios, etc.) that are commonly used in analysis and reporting, as well as in benchmark comparisons.

Getting started.

GP Strategies consultants offer proven excellence in HR analytics, planning, and metrics, and are available to share best practices and accelerate your business execution. Let the certified and experienced HCM consultants at GP Strategies deliver a successful implementation for you. Contact us to learn more about this offering and how you can get started with SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics on HANA.

About the Authors

Erik Ebert

For the past 25 years, Erik Ebert has supported organizations across diverse industries and geographies to implement digital transformation strategies, improving business performance within human capital management (HCM). Erik has a track record of building lasting relationships through a consultative approach, resulting in happy clients, successful projects, and effective teams. Erik works as a Business Development Director with HCT at GP Strategies in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Welcome back!  In my final installment of this three part series, I will cover the options available for Exporting data from Employee Central (EC) for the purposes of data validation.

The time to complete data validation can often be misjudged as it is a high time and resource consuming process.  While business teams will be involved in validating the data, using an automated approach can add efficiencies to this process including the ability to test 100% of the migrated data immediately after the first test migration.  Data validation determines the integrity of the migrated data through a process of comparing the migrated records in the destination system to the source system and is a checkpoint to ensure the data migrated is complete and usable.

Once the process of migrating data into Employee Central is complete, data validation testing can begin.  But how will you get the data out of Employee Central?  There are many reporting options available within SuccessFactors Employee Central that will not be covered in this blog.  Instead, I will list the various methods that have worked for me in the past:

Located in the Admin Center:

o   Export Users – use this to export the User Data File (UDF) and confirm all employees in scope to be migrated exist in EC with the correct status, either active or inactive.

o   Import and Export data – select ‘export data’ as the action and export the data from any generic or custom object.  The output will provide a direct dump of live data from the database of the object selected.  The output will be in CSV format.  There is no customizing these reports.

Located in the Report Center:

o   Ad hoc Reports – use this to build your own reports to export live data from any standard object, like job information, personal information etc.  The reports are quick and easy to build with options to merge data from more than one data set and/or from different domains if desired.  The output can be saved in multiple formats such CSV, Excel and more.

o   Advanced Reporting – existing in the Online Report Designer (ORD), this reporting tool is available for all EC customers and needs to be activated in your stance before use.  It is an ODS (Operational Data Store) database which allows you to build queries and reports with any EC object – standard, generic, foundation and custom MDF objects.  It may take longer to set up the reports initially as ORD requires skill training and sometimes performance can be unpredictable and poor.

Located in the Integration Center:

o   My Integrations – make use of SAP’s built-in templates available from the Integration Catalog or create or own and then deploy and monitor these simple file-based integrations to your third party system via the Integration Center.  These outbound files can be manually executed or scheduled using a variety of different trigger, source and destination types using different formats.  Ideal if you want to send outbound files to a secure server location via SFTP or web services like REST or SOAP.

Using the SF API or ODATA APIs to extract data using an external system:

o   Some of the ETL tools mentioned in part 2 of this blog series used to import data into Employee Central can also be used to export data out of Employee Central, like SAP Data Services.  An automated reconciliation framework can be built in parallel with your migration framework to provide high-level migration results in a timely manner.

o   The ODATA API can be used to extract data directly into Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, making exporting data even easier.  More information on how to do this can be found here.

Data validation is important and cannot be overlooked. The tools and resources available to you will aid in determining the best ways to extract data from Employee Central for your project. Feel free to reach out to me at x-jspaull@gpstrategies.com with any questions.

To read the first two installments of this series, please click here.

Click here to subscribe to our blog!

About the Authors

GP Strategies Corporation

GP Strategies is a global performance improvement solutions provider of sales and technical training, e-Learning solutions, management consulting and engineering services. GP Strategies' solutions improve the effectiveness of organizations by delivering innovative and superior training, consulting and business improvement services, customized to meet the specific needs of its clients. Clients include Fortune 500 companies, manufacturing, process and energy industries, and other commercial and government customers.

Many customers today question if a move to the cloud from in-house payroll would be a worthy investment. SAP offers a few options in this arena, whether you already run SAP On Premise payroll, you outsource currently, or you recently implemented SuccessFactors Employee Central, we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each to help you better decide.

With SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP offers a few approaches in delivering the payroll framework:

1. Continue using SAP On Premise Payroll (Your staff members execute all payroll functions and backend processes.)

2. Use the functionality of SAP EC payroll (Some infrastructure and costs can be eliminated.)

3. Continue to integrate with hosted payroll solutions (for example, Ceridian, ADP, etc.)

There are pros and cons to each; let’s review some of these key considerations.

So why integrate EC with your existing SAP On-Premise Payroll?

The On-Premise SAP Payroll solution is a proven payroll solution (supporting more than 60+ country versions). This solution makes a lot of sense if you’re already live on it and when stability and flexibly are key. SuccessFactors decided to reutilize the SAP Payroll Engine to offer a complete cloud solution; a total rebuild would have cost an extreme amount of time and effort when they already had a proven solution. Below are some specific points to consider:

1. You operate and process SAP Payroll in a non-supported EC Payroll country (SAP lists 41)

• Where do you sit in terms of your roadmap?
• Where do you see yourself going in the global market, acquisitions, line of business, etc.?

2. If your payroll is highly customized to meet key business requirements, the standard EC Payroll out-of-the-box solution won’t be ideal.

3. Your payroll is heavily integrated with SAP Time Management and evaluation, includes complex rules within the collective agreements, or you have external time systems integrated as part of your SAP Time on premise solution. Those processes will need to be reevaluated when considering EC Payroll for ease of integration.

Other Considerations:

EC Payroll is a hosted system provided by SAP to Cloud customers who possibly have never had HR or Payroll in house or a larger customer base with an ECC background; the incentive is to integrate HR and Payroll On-Premise with EC and leverage SAP’s latest offerings in moving the cloud.

The following chart summarizes core differences:

 Integration

Replication of master data from the cloud (EC) to On Premise is supported with different middleware components.

Payroll data is migrated to the EC Payroll system or the On Premise environment by different offerings such as Dell BOOMI or SAP Cloud Platform Integration (SCPI), formerly HANA Cloud Integration (HCI). Then, the system that you choose replicates the master data via iflows.

The middleware components will query master data over a spanned period for master data relevant changes. The frequency of this poll is configurable to your schedule requirement.

Replication Considerations

Adding direct updates to master data records in the SAP ECC environment risks reversal entries during the replication process. For example, an addition of a recurring payment directly will pay the employee accordingly until the next replication. An entry from EC will remove the entry and in turn reverse payroll entries deducting the employee. It is imperative one system of record is maintained for master data.

In addition, key fields may be treated differently in SuccessFactors Employee Central versus ECC. For example, in the case of a recurring payment or deduction, the payment model field is typically maintained to assign the payment schedule. In EC, other fields are utilized for the start date and frequency. These fields replicate to other field values in ECC that in most cases are hidden.

During the cycle of payroll testing, replication should be turned on so the full end-to-end scripts/scenarios are tested in conjunction with the payroll calculation. In many cases, data is loaded directly during testing cycles. This is helpful in case the test environment has no connectivity or technical limitations prevent replication. Consecutive payroll cycles should be performed with the appropriate iflows and integration activated.

Payroll Control Record

If payroll is in process, that is, the payroll area is locked from master data updates, the replication monitor will track and log the employees in error. These can be replicated down when releasing the control record during the regular payroll cycle.

All errored employees can be selected for replication during this cycle. Anyone running the standard SAP On-Premise Payroll has experienced that updates cannot be performed in the past or in the current period while payroll is in process. With EC, this concept goes away because EC updates are allowed continuously. This is a great advantage for data maintenance, such as with employee life-cycle changes or salary changes, if your payroll cycle is a few days.

Transaction SLG1 – Application Log for Troubleshooting and Error Monitoring

Errors may include employees locked, field values not updated successfully, possible configuration entries missing, etc.

Improved User Experience

With the Payroll Control Center/“Payroll cockpit” SAPUI5, screens were introduced with HR Renewal 2.0 and the same user interface is used for EC Payroll.

The user interface (UI) allows the payroll processor to distribute payroll errors, logs, monitoring, and audit reports to key users. This topic could surely take a further deep dive, but to summarize, the typical payroll processes can be executed and tailored for each organization (much like how one would configure a payroll process model). Traditional SAP GUI transactions, such as releasing the control record, have been replaced and automated as part of the “repeat” cycle of payroll.

Note, in many cases the original ECC reports are called and have not been reformatted. For example, with the payroll log or payroll journal, the main advantage is the distribution of the payroll processes, auditing, and staff monitoring.

This is a lengthy subject and I did not cover everything. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at skarmakar@gpstrategies.com.

For further information, you can review the SAP guides and Product pages below:

EC Integration Business Suite Page

EC Payroll Product Page

About the Authors

soumenkarmakar

Working as an IT consultant gives me an opportunity to not only learn and stay current with the technical aspects, but allows me to work with people, understand how best to stream line and improve on their usability and efficiencies. What better reward… As an SAP HCM consultant specializing in North American payroll, I work with end users, client managers, project managers, technical architects and developers; it’s so imperative to understand and be relatable to different priorities, agendas and personalities. Based in Toronto, Canada I started over 19 years ago working in SAP Payroll, in more of a technical role that expanded to a lead role mentoring other consultants and client team members. I broadened my knowledge in working in the US for over 10 years specializing in US payroll solutions, integration and the legislative areas of US payroll. Large global projects have also given me the great opportunity to work in South America and across Europe. In doing so, I’ve learned how cultural system requirements vary by degree and, in general, how users react and use their toolsets differently. Soumen Karmakar holds a B.A. majoring in Business and Computer studies, courses at University of Toronto and Waterloo in addition numerous SAP HCM related courses.

By Kaihan Krippendorff , Founder, Outthinker

The myth

I love entrepreneurs. They offer us a vision of possibility. They seem to break rules, chart their own paths, challenge dogmas, take risks I would shy away from—and succeed, sometimes spectacularly.

The entrepreneurial narrative is innately, inevitably moving. It speaks the human machine. It unifies public sentiment behind the ideas of a better world, fresh thinking, freedom, self-realization … all while also promising wealth.

The idea of entrepreneurship inspires us into action. Steve Jobs once said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

I am not alone in my admiration of entrepreneurs. People most often referenced on lists of the most admired business people are invariably business founders like Richard Branson (Virgin), Steve Jobs (Apple), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Rupert Murdoch (News Corp), Oprah Winfrey (Harpo), Larry Page (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Steve Schwarzman (Blackstone), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg LP), and Elon Musk (Tesla, Space-X, and PayPal).

What jumps out from these lists—other than the under-representation of women—is the mental picture they trigger. When we think of greatness in business, we think of the entrepreneurs who quit school or a career to risk it all and start their own thing. They follow a remarkably similar narrative: they pulled together a small amount of money (far less than you would think starting a business requires); they were impassioned to solve a problem; they faced daunting hurdles but overcame them. They fought through a jungle of disbelief, self-doubt, and sometimes betrayal—and ultimately came out smiling on the other end. Victorious!

That core story may sound familiar to you from another discipline. It sounds a lot like the “hero’s journey,” described by mythology researcher Joseph Campbell. That journey is the heart of just about any good movie or play. No wonder we find it easy to wrap it around the narrative of successful entrepreneurs.

There’s just one problem with this particular storytelling. It isn’t true.

The well-loved entrepreneurial story, as entrepreneurial guru Michael Gerber points out in his enormously influential book and concept, The E-Myth, is far more myth than reality. The true entrepreneurial journey is far harder to generalize than we would like, and its many permutations often lead to failure. We just don’t discuss those as often. 

I sought to look objectively at the role entrepreneurs and employees have played in our society, seeking to test the broadly held idea that entrepreneurs are the true innovators that have shaped modern society. What I found is that employees have had a profound, and under-appreciated, impact. Arguably more profound than that of entrepreneurs.

The truth

Without employee innovators, we may not have had the internet or a personal computer or mobile phone with which to navigate it. We might live in a world without digital photographs, ATMs, or GPSs. You may prefer to not have email today, but that internal innovation too might not exist but for the passion, commitment, and struggle of employee innovators.

Yet we don’t hear much about these employee innovators. You can find over 50,000 books about entrepreneurship on Amazon.com but only 200 about intrapreneurship. We prefer celebrating entrepreneurs. I believe that is not because they matter more, but rather because we prefer telling the lone hero, David takes on Goliath story the entrepreneur represents.

I began to wonder: by focusing our attention on the lone hero, what are we missing? More to the point, does the entrepreneurial hero story really hold up against the facts? I decided to investigate.

I started with the list of the 30 innovations that most transformed our world in the last 30 years, selected by an eight-person panel of experts organized by Wharton Business School who considered about 1,200 innovations in their analysis.

My team and I then dug into the histories of these innovations. In particular, we tracked the three stages that are common to every innovation journey:

1. Conception: who conceives of the idea?
2. Development: who developed the idea into something that works?
3. Commercialization: who brought the idea to market?

According to the hero narrative we like to retell, the entrepreneur conceives of the idea, develops the idea either on their own (Michael Dell in his dorm room building computers) or with a small team (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage), and then launches a company (Dell, Apple) to commercialize the idea. The stories of our favorite hero-entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson would all support this. But let’s look at the facts.

Our findings are illustrated in the graph below:

Who conceives of transformational ideas? Answer: Employees

Contrary to commonly accepted truth, only 8 of the 30 most transformative innovations were first conceived of by entrepreneurs; 22 were conceived by employees. Without the inventiveness of intrapreneurs, we might not have the internet, personal computer, mobile phone, DNA sequencing, magnetic resonance imaging, or fiber optics.

Who develops of transformational ideas? Answer: Corporate and Public-Sector Employees

Interestingly, employees within academia and governmental institutions play a major role in the development of transformative innovations, particularly in the cases in which the innovation has significant social value, as is the case for stents, AIDS treatment, or large-scale wind turbines.

Who commercialized the idea? Answer: Competitors

The popular face of innovation is that of Facebook … or Tesla, Google, Uber, or Microsoft, companies that established themselves as disruptors and took down incumbents.

But as it turns out, such disruptor stories are the rare exception. Only 2 of the 30 most transformative innovations were scaled by the original creators! And one of those two, Microfinance, was a model that Nobel Peace Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus scaled in order to give to the world. He has not inspired organizations all around the world to copy his innovation.

More than 50% of the time (16 out of 30) the innovator loses control of the innovation. Competitors take over. Then, through a battle of players seeking to commercialize the innovation, the innovation scales.

Olivetti, for example, invented the first PC, but very quickly its competitors caught on, with HP, Commodore, Micral, IBM, and Wang taking over. Facebook was not the first social-networking site. Barclay’s Bank, arguably the first to introduce the ATM, could not prevent competitors from picking up on its innovation. And no single organization could prevent competitors from catching on to breakthrough innovations like bar codes, fiber optics, or digital cameras.

The path

So, if we want to map out the true path of the innovations that have most impacted society, the story would have to go like this:

An employee (not an entrepreneur) conceives of an idea. Then a combination of employees from the public and private sectors work on building the idea. Once a solution is found that works, the competition takes over and scales the idea.

Employees, not entrepreneurs, are the true drivers of innovation and growth.  And their role is about to increase for those corporations able to dislodge the seven barriers employees most often cite as blocking their attempts to innovate.

About the Authors

GP Strategies Corporation

GP Strategies is a global performance improvement solutions provider of sales and technical training, e-Learning solutions, management consulting and engineering services. GP Strategies' solutions improve the effectiveness of organizations by delivering innovative and superior training, consulting and business improvement services, customized to meet the specific needs of its clients. Clients include Fortune 500 companies, manufacturing, process and energy industries, and other commercial and government customers.

Hint: It’s the same five things every other worker wants.

No one would argue that competitive compensation, good health insurance, opportunities for development, a sense of purpose, and a work-life balance are instrumental in keeping great employees and bringing in the best. While learning organizations may not be able to control all of those factors, we certainly have influence over many. Let’s look at five.

Workers want opportunities for development. Learning organizations are notoriously poor at providing their own audiences role-based training. How do you develop an instructional designer? Keep having them write and hope it improves over time? What is the pipeline for growth for a client engagement manager/program manager? More projects?

Putting “senior” in front of one’s title isn’t meaningful enough. Consider ways to help your employees grow in capability by shadowing and learning from experts. Consider external growth opportunities such as conferences and classes. Consider creating multi-disciplinary teams that are responsible for coming up with a learning solution—so it becomes both a developmental opportunity and something that meets a business need.

Workers want purpose, clarity, and measurable goals. Learning organizations can connect learning interventions to those goals and demonstrate results with strong analytics tied to the how participation in those interventions are linked to outcomes. There is an “aha” moment when learning professionals actually see that their intervention had a positive impact on the business. Teach your professionals to identify an evaluation strategy at the onset of a project and encourage follow-through. When things are moving fast, the first thing that tends to go is evaluation!

Workers desire a work-life balance. Learning organizations can tee up content in a way that works for the modern learner to help create that balance. Consider incorporating a full or partial work-from-home policy. Consider job sharing. Also, advocate for your learning team. They are working hard to please the business, and partners will continue to get content quicker and at better quality. Arm your learning professionals with language and options on how to push back or reframe the conversation.

Workers want autonomy and flexibility. Learning organizations can personalize experiences by offering multiple ways to achieve the same outcomes. What does personalization mean for learning professionals? It could be finding ways for them to contribute outside of a “traditional” path to leadership. It could be moving that individual from the learning team to the business. How better to create an advocate of learning and training than to have someone who was on the “inside” now be one of your clients?

Workers want opportunities to be innovative or creative. Learning organizations can encourage, develop, and deploy experiential, apprentice-type, or hackathon programs that are based on Design Thinking principles. Allow your team to put themselves in the learners’ shoes and ideate ways to solve the business problem at hand. Maybe the budget is tight, but sometimes, an innovative solution isn’t always expensive. Bottom line—don’t skimp on design. You’ll get a better end product.

Learning organizations can capitalize on the tenets of a great employee experience and positively affect employee engagement and retention. Focusing on what all employees, including learning professionals, desire can help you increase engagement and impact business outcomes.

About the Authors

Britney Cole

Britney is a learning leader with experience in organization development, human performance, and corporate learning and has worked remotely, managing virtual teams for more than a decade. Britney lives in Minnesota with her husband and three small children (ages 5, 7 and 8) where she keeps warm with plenty of blankets and cozy hats. She likes to talk, so you might see her at learning conferences as a speaker. Britney has provided consulting for clients in the financial services, pharmaceutical, steel, chemical, media, technology, retail, manufacturing, and aerospace industries. She forms lasting partnerships with her clients helping them with learning design and architecture, content development, leadership and professional development, performance consulting, technology implementation, and change management. Most recently, she is helping pioneer new experiential learning methods and defining learning 3.0 taxonomy.

As learning professionals, we’re hearing about the realities more every day: virtual, augmented, and mixed. But what do we really need to know to make informed decisions on their use? Augmented reality (AR) is a content delivery method that not only makes sense, but also has a shorter learning curve.

During a recent webinar, I discussed the basics of AR: what it is and how it works, how it fits into the strategy with some practical use cases, and how you can get started building your skills using one of a few low-cost tools.

If you missed the webinar, a recording is now available for you to watch online. By the end, you will see how to incorporate AR as a powerful tool in your toolbox and have action items to get started. If you are looking for the abbreviated version, I wanted to offer a quick look at some of the key takeaways:

• AR is an excellent learning technology add for serving up contextual microLearning nuggets for in-the-moment, just-what-I-need performance support. Get in, get what I need, and get on with it.
• AR is not ideal for audiences who have access to their PC where they do their work. Consider other delivery methods.
• There are some low-cost tools that are as simple to learn as our rapid course development software tools (Zappar and Layar). A simple AR page interaction is developed in much the same way as a course page, though lower-cost, off-the-shelf AR development tools are not quite as sophisticated.
• Consider where you will gather, create, or curate your content from. Does much of it already exist? If yes, great! If no, you need to consider traditional artifact development timelines in addition to the build of your AR experience.
• Pilot, pilot, pilot. Start small and plan an AR experience for a select audience. Get their reaction to the content you serve up, the form factor they used, and how you communicated where and how to access the AR experience. Get smarter for round two before you go big.

After the presentation, several great questions came up from the audience and I wanted to share them with you. Below are those questions and my best answers. This is an ongoing conversation, and I encourage you to keep the questions coming in via the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Q: How much does an AR solution cost?

A: Like other tools in the toolbox, cost varies significantly by what you plan to do. Most off-the-shelf providers have either a subscription model, for which a seat license is paid to create AR experiences, or a per-AR-page flat fee that licenses the use of the page for a given time. Other off-the-shelf providers have tools that perform more sophisticated actions, and those typically have a multiple order-of-magnitude-higher seat license arrangement. At the top of the spectrum, there are consulting firms that build AR experiences; they use proprietary tools and specialized programming skills.

Q: Can you describe what a WYSIWYG is?

A: Great question and a good reminder to back off jargon in our sessions. 🙂 WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get. These tools allow me to drag and drop icons, links, and artifacts directly over top of my AR marker or trigger image. What I see is what I will get when I publish and test. I am actually seeing what the work will look like—think Storyline or Articulate Presenter. No direct coding required.

Q: Can you tell us more detail about storyboarding the experience?

A: For AR experiences, when we develop the learning journey for our people, whether it’s an ILT curriculum or a web-based experience, we’ll want to storyboard the AR from both content and serve-up perspectives; these can be interwoven, but let’s review each one separately for the purpose of our discussion.

• Content storyboarding: What content will I include and why, what’s its purpose, and what should trigger its availability?
• Serve-up storyboarding: What iconography, labels, or other visual cues will I add onto your stage to launch certain artifacts? What will they look like, and where will they appear on the stage? Where will they launch when the learner interacts with them? Full stage or part? Will it link them to another resource, or will the AR tool host your content (think InfoSec requirements here), and will the learner be prompted for credentials? This can interrupt your learner experience, so it needs to be well thought through.

Q: What is the best novice learner app to start with? AR Creator?

A: I started with Layar and it took a few hours to sort it out, and about 3 hours to create the augmented business card that I shared in the webinar. I have also built in ZapWorks, which is not unlike learning Captivate and then Storyline. When I began, I knew the features; I just had to sort out how they worked in one tool versus the other.

Lastly, if you will be at the eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions conference in Orlando in March, come join my BYOL session (315) and I will walk you through your first simple AR project! Fun stuff!

About the Authors

Ann Rollins

Looking for the Connections I LOVE MY JOB! The process of untying difficult knots for my clients, and getting better with each repetition thrills me. I take the skills and knowledge learned with each rep on to the next challenge, becoming a quicker study, agile problem navigator, and solver. However, I wasn’t always this way. How exactly did I get here? My evolution from instructional design order-taker to bigger system thinker (about many things, not just instructional design) began on October 3, 2000. My charmed life was shattered in a moment while my family was on what should have been the vacation of a lifetime. On day 3, my father died of sudden cardiac death a mile offshore, while scuba diving with my mother in Barbados. He was only 55. He. Was. Healthy. Any sudden death is traumatic, but an emergency at sea in a third world country adds a dimension of horror that thankfully most will never experience. There is plenty more to the story, bad and good, but that is for another time. I slept-walked through the months that followed, trying to make any sense of how and why it happened. When the fog finally lifted, I spent so much time rethinking the last months, looking for the connections, and I struggled because I couldn’t make sense of it all. I felt like I was in my own darker Groundhog Day film: wake, grieve, rinse, repeat. In that experience, my problem solving acumen evolved. I learned that looking across a situation and revisiting an experience over time, while it may not change what is, allows me to search for, plan and change what is next. You see, humans typically try to problem solve by focusing primarily on changing what is. Sometimes, you simply can’t change what is. Death taught me that lesson about non-negotiables. And her lesson helps me solve problems much more effectively today. When we experience a singular event, our brains are hard-wired to make sense of it, to fix it. As new information comes in, and we are presented with new problems or challenges; our brains quickly make the associations, and then connections to create the jump needed to assess and respond in better, more effective ways with each pass. This is closely related to how I approach the business problems that our clients bring to us. Their challenges are real; they have problems that they cannot solve. These problems are costing them money and mindshare; they hurt. When they bring these problems to us, our job is to look at the problem, and revisit similar challenges that we have seen in the past. When we revisit situations that have some commonality (because they all do, frankly), we evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and what tools should be at the forefront of our options for solutions for them. I’d like to think of my own experience with all of my clients as a network that gets bigger and bigger with time. Client industries, size, and tenure with GP Strategies all vary, but we shouldn’t use those imaginary “partitions” that separate one from the next to keep us from thinking across the wide span of solutions that we’ve provided to our clients. However, in order for my network to grow as fast as I want it to, I need to keep my head up, and constantly survey what is happening with my peers and counterparts on other projects. Like my network of clients and projects, I also have a network of peers that I have forged and nurtured during my five years at GP Strategies, and a network of folks outside who have traveled my career journey with me. I regularly reach out to get new thoughts on my ideas, brainstorm with people in different capacities, collaborate in different ways, and allow those experiences to pull me out of my comfortable ID space and into others. I want to know what they see, because with each additional “rep” we can make our work better, and solve client problems faster and in more innovative, creative ways. I hope you enjoy the resources below, and look forward to connecting with you! Become part of my network on Twitter: @AnnibabyCan

The term employee engagement has become ubiquitous in today’s organizations. Leaders may talk about engagement, but with so many different models, concepts, and definitions, it can be hard to understand what engagement actually looks like.

GP Strategies’ model of employee engagement is simple and pragmatic. We define engagement as a mutually beneficial relationship between the organization and its employees, characterized by contribution and satisfaction. Organizations are looking for maximum contribution from all employees in order to achieve success. Employees are looking for personal success, which is defined differently for each individual. Some may want meaningful work; still others may be looking for recognition or work-life balance. Regardless of how each person defines it, all employees are looking to derive a maximum level of satisfaction from the work they do. Engagement happens when organizational and individual paths to success meet and employees are able to experience maximum satisfaction from their jobs while contributing at a maximum level to the team and organization’s goals. You can see this in an organization when more employees are having “great days at work.”

GP Strategies’ research shows that employees in organizations with the highest reported levels of engagement outperform those with the lowest levels when it comes to two things: clarity on immediate work priorities and thinking of their work as more than a job.

While the concept may be easy to understand, how do we move engagement from a concept to a daily priority? For many organizations, the journey will start with measurement—implementing a survey to better understand the state of engagement. However, knowing what engagement is and how it looks for your employees is not enough to transform workplace culture. Many organizations measure engagement but fall short of reaping the benefits. Bersin & Associates research shows that while 71% of organizations conduct some type of employee engagement survey, fewer than half felt it was leading to positive business outcomes.

Surveys and measurement tools are simply not enough. What’s needed is a framework for holding the organization accountable and taking action on survey results.  We look at this framework as a model of shared accountability. Shared accountability means that while engagement is the primary responsibility of the individual, managers and senior leaders play a vital role in creating and maintaining an engaging work environment.

Creating this environment might at first feel like another thing on a leader’s to-do list, but you are probably doing many of these things today. Doing them more consciously and with intention can only enhance the work environment and contribute to driving a culture of engagement. Build. Give. Create. Link. Commit. Recognize that clear-and-simple actions can make a meaningful difference. Here’s what it looks like.

• Build solid and personalized relationships with your team. Having a close professional relationship with your employees allows you to better understand what success looks like for them and what they need in order to do their best work. Have frequent 1:1 conversations in order to get to know each team member better and share information about yourself, especially your work style.
• Give regular feedback. Don’t wait until performance review time to give feedback! Nothing can drive performance quite like a timely conversation on how employees are progressing on specific projects. This can be the time to give well-deserved recognition or realign priorities and goals when employees seem to be getting off track. If you have negative feedback to give, make sure to provide employees with specific guidance on what they need to do to improve.
• Create a high-performing work environment. Make sure the team and the organization’s priorities are clear for all—you won’t be able to get much done if everyone is going in a million directions. Moreover, look for processes that may be getting in the way of doing the work, and advocate for resources that will help your team accomplish their work more effectively.
• Link the work to a larger purpose. Employees need to understand what their priorities are, but it can’t all be about output. A myopic focus on performance won’t inspire employees and unleash the discretionary effort you need to accomplish your goals. Describe in vivid detail your vision and understanding of the organization’s future, and share stories of the impact the organization has on customers and the larger community.
• Commit to action. The most powerful thing any leader can do to drive engagement is quite simply to commit and take action. Have a team meeting to discuss the team’s engagement, and agree upon actions that everyone can take to improve the working environment. And don’t forget that engagement happens at the individual level, so make sure you talk to employees 1:1 (even if you only have 5 minutes) to better understand what drives their satisfaction and contribution.

Remember, the survey isn’t an evaluation of leadership; it’s a great starting point to encourage the type of dialogue with your employees that will inspire connection and change. Surveys don’t change things—people do.

About the Authors

GP Strategies Corporation

GP Strategies is a global performance improvement solutions provider of sales and technical training, e-Learning solutions, management consulting and engineering services. GP Strategies' solutions improve the effectiveness of organizations by delivering innovative and superior training, consulting and business improvement services, customized to meet the specific needs of its clients. Clients include Fortune 500 companies, manufacturing, process and energy industries, and other commercial and government customers.

How do you refer to our youngest generation? Next Gen, Gen Z, iGen, Centennials, and Gen We are all monikers that have been proposed. As they emerge as a presence in the workplace, learning leaders must consider their preferences as well as their potential when designing effective workplace learning, collaboration, and communication experiences. In a recent blog, I described this generation as one that depends heavily on their personal devices for connecting to others. Next Generation employees prefer point-of-need access to information versus a more structured curriculum. They seek out visual, graphical stimuli versus lengthy text.

With that in mind, we need to create experiences and use instructional techniques that sit at the intersection of Next Gen preferences and organizational goals for a more productive digital workplace.

Audience Response

Most high schools, colleges, and universities use mobile apps that encourage interactivity and allow them to monitor individual learner and group pulses, preferences, questions, and trends. This real-time data allows instructors to shift their lesson plan focus mid-stream, if necessary, to address questions and learner confusion. Transferring use of this technology to corporate learning world is a no-brainer. It addresses another workplace need: the ability for learning teams to move from manual to automated methods for collecting, analyzing, and reporting assessment data. Keywords: audience response app, interactive poll, mobile assessment

People We Can Look Up To

According to social recognition firm Globoforce, “Top reasons people stay at their company are meaningful work and their team.” (source) Speakers at professional conferences and forums have historically been those with name recognition; however, there is a growing demand for speakers who are social activists, community organizers, and experts on cutting-edge issues and topics. The Next Gen admires those who are taking bold stands based on shared core values.

Human rights lawyers, journalists, and fresh, new faces running for public office are just a few examples of roles who we are following in droves on social media. Bringing their thought leadership to a corporate setting is a way to humanize our workplace and energize individuals to become more productive. Keywords: social activist, shared values

Create Useful Artwork

Infographics are not an innovative concept, but having learners create them as a practical activity during a workshop is a technique you should experiment with. In a digital workplace, presenting data in a compelling way is a behavior we all must embrace, regardless of generation. There is more data than ever to synthesize, and creating tables will no longer illustrate the trends nor help promote your ideas. Designing and presenting an infographic may be either a team or an individual exercise, and since it is multimodal, it will serve to engage both sides of the brain. Parameters for learners to discuss include:

• Layout of text, including color, shape, and whitespace consideration
• Design themes
• Incorporation of interactive elements (surveys, links, hashtags)

Below are two examples of infographics:

• Restore Employee Trust and Pride
• Range of Gamification

Have teams post and present their work products and request peer and facilitator input on how well the infographic conveys ideas, collects data, and enables real-time decision-making. This activity supports a common organizational goal for more effective presentation of data. Keywords: infographic, data presentation, multimodal learning tools

What workplace preferences, learning-related or otherwise, do your Next Gen employees get excited about? Share your ideas in the Comments below. Thank you!

About the Authors

Ellen Kumar

Ms. Kumar is a Solution Architect with GP Strategies, and has served in roles ranging from Account Executive, to Operations Director, to Project Manager/Training Consultant. Prior to GP Strategies, she worked for University of Dayton Research Institute and GE Aircraft Engines (now GE Aerospace). She holds an M.S. in Materials Science & Engineering from University of Dayton.

In my consulting career I find that more and more executives are relying on data versus intuition to make business decisions. This aligns well with my belief that at the end of the day, the sole purpose of data is to inform a decision.

So before collecting any data, I first determine:

• What problems am I trying to solve?
• What are the core decisions that needs to be made?

If you agree with me, you will embrace the notion that data is not the star of the show, rather it is a supporting actor. The star is solving the core problems. But to do that, decisions will need to be made. And to make good decisions, you will need data.

So before you start to collect data, make sure you have clearly identified the problem you need to solve and the associated decisions necessary to take action to resolve the problem. I find it extremely helpful to begin by documenting your answers to the two basic questions listed above. It will force you to ensure you are working on the right problem. It will also require you to actually think through the problem by considering various points of view.

As you work through this process, consider one of these three distinct types of purposeful binary decisions:

1. START – To commit to something new (a venture, a product, a technology, or an approach)

2. STOP – To discontinue something (a venture, a product, a technology, or an approach) or to continue if your decision is not to stop

3. PIVOT – To change directions by deliberately deciding to shift your strategy

Interestingly, the more complex your organizational responsibilities, the more you need this simple approach of thinking through the decisions before launching into data collection.

In conclusion, this data and decision making process will:

• Ensure you are addressing the key problem.
• Help you communicate effectively and efficiently with your staff and customers.
• Focus and prioritize your data collection and analytic requirements.
• Help you and your staff ask the right questions that focus your precious resources.
• Ensure that your data analytic strategy supports the key business issues and goals.
• Provide a written baseline that all stakeholders can refer back to at any time in the process.

About the Authors

Rocky Ellens

Rocky Ellens is a GP Strategies Sales Enablement Practice leader, helping drive client business-to-business sales team performance. Rocky has over 15 years of experience providing innovative thought leadership and performance consulting across Fortune 100 clients in Manufacturing, Retail, Finance, Food and Beverage, and IT market segments. He holds an MS in Human Resources and Organizational Development. He is a retired Army Colonel experienced at providing a foundation of leadership training and teaming designed to pull work groups together in pursuit of a common objective or goal. Follow Rocky on LinkedIn

Design is design no matter what you’re doing. When it comes to designing learning experiences, applying Design Thinking principles is a no-brainer. Design Thinking is all about getting in the end user’s shoes—the learner! So, why aren’t more learning professionals applying this method? Lack of time, lack of understanding, and lack of identifying the actual problem to solve all come to mind. However, it’s 2018! There is no excuse!

During a recent webinar, I walked attendees through several Design Thinking principles to help jump-start their year by putting the learner at the center of interventions. If you missed the webinar, see the recording available here: Design Thinking to Design Learner Experiences. By the end, you will see how designing learning experiences and Design Thinking go together like peas and carrots. If you are looking for the abbreviated version, I wanted to offer a quick look at some of the key takeaways:

• While Design Thinking is a buzzword, most learning professionals are already incorporating elements of it in their day-to-day processes and design sessions. The approach isn’t necessarily new, but it’s focused on three main things: knowing your learner, knowing your problem, and taking action. Then, see if that action created positive business results. Remember, what matters is that any learning experience, training program, or development initiative is based on outcomes so that we can move the needle. Moving the needle can be operational, such as better business results, or even internal, such as improving morale, engagement, or retention.
• The food/recipe analogy – When cooked or baked just right and with the perfect blend of ingredients, you can have a fantastic meal that you want to make again and again. When it comes to crafting training and learning experiences with a Design Thinking mindset, our role is to create a recipe that people LOVE to experience. They love it enough to come back for more! And, they possibility contribute—just as someone who takes a recipe and tweaks it to their liking. They add additional salt, spices, or sugar. On the flip side, we want learners to add and enhance the learning experience so it continues to evolve, improve, and make a difference.
• When you determine what group you want to get together to go through a Design Thinking exercise, invite diverse perspectives to the table—different backgrounds, disciplines, and demographics. This helps avoid unconscious bias. So, don’t just have decision makers in the room. Have a junior person. A high performer. An average performer from another division. A senior leader. Use Design Thinking sessions as a development experience for your workforce!
• While the “steps” in Design Thinking can vary from team to team, organization to organization, the mindset is the same—understand the people and problem, and take action.
  • Empathize
  • Define
  • Ideate
  • Prototype
  • Test/Implement

Solving a problem with a Design Thinking approach takes the pressure off. This is not about getting it right before you can move forward. This is about taking action in order to learn. You’re constantly tweaking and sense-checking along the way, gaining insights you may otherwise wait too long to discover if you were to wait until things were “perfect.”

After the presentation, several great questions came up from the audience and I wanted to share them with you. Below are those questions and my best answers. This is an ongoing conversation, and I encourage you to keep the questions coming in via the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Q: What if you were going through a Design Thinking process for multiple roles/learners?

A: Create separate learner personas rather than trying to generalize your audience. And, personas aren’t always roles or functions (although that could be a factor). This might not necessarily be different levels in your organization (associate, manager, etc.), but it could be how each learner “shows up” at work. For instance, a segment of employees may be specialists in a particular area but are not necessarily motivated to understand how other areas of the business can improve their customer’s expertise. Whereas another segment of individuals with a similar role or level have more general expertise and need to hone technical skills. Components of a learning experience might be the same for each persona, but it’s important that each group is differentiated and personalized.

Q: How long does a design thinking process take? Are you in Beta forever?

A: It depends. Just like creating a one-hour classroom training might take a week, building a one-week immersive, simulated experience will take much longer. And, many will debate on how much research is needed during the Empathize phase. Do you need a complete role excellence profile, which could take months? Or a week of observations? Or, do you craft a simple persona with built-in assumptions during a one-day workshop? Feasibly, if you take one problem and have identified a target learner population, you could do a Design Thinking workshop with 8–12 people in two days and cover Empathize, Define, and Ideate. Many of our teammates look to create functional prototypes that can be tested in 2–4 weeks (or even less). When you force an early prototype and accept something as simple as a script or story, then you reduce investment bias, trying to force the solution as opposed to failing fast.

Beta forever happens, but it’s not a fate you have to accept. What is good enough for the audience? I argue that content has such a short shelf life that even a “final product” requires tweaking and updating. We recently prototyped a coaching app with a diagram. We asked users to close their eyes and pretend the visual was appealing and everything functioned. We simply asked them targeted questions: Would you use this feature? Would you pay for it? Would you use it more for productivity or more for gathering information? Then, it helped us tweak to get to the next level: a series of screenshots. We asked the same previous questions but added more. So, prototyping can emulate phases of a “waterfall” design (Alpha, Beta, and Gold stages), but the way in which you test/review is different. If you keep a purpose when prototyping, you’ll make progress.

Q: How do you reconcile the time demands of the iterative process with budget restrictions or client-based time restrictions?

A: Ironically, I find getting client feedback is easier. We have stopped long in-person or virtual reviews (where most people tune out and multitask), but show a segment of an experience and ask key questions via a survey or Google Form. By chunking it down, we can get feedback more passively, which many of our clients prefer since there are such great demands on their time.

As for budget, we have approached it differently, depending on client. For some, we only scope the design session, and then based on the ideas, we plan to prototype or build out; we then scope those separately. For others, we plan for a retainer for a period of time that involves dedicated time from a mix of roles that we anticipate we might need, such as visual/UX developers, graphic recorders, consultants, and writers.

Q: Ideas for when the response to “Let us research, investigate, etc.” is NO.

A: I get it. Clients may not have time or money to spend on analysis. Try to go about it a different way. Often, I find the resistance is around what people assume is “analysis”: weeks of interviews with high-cost resources, expensive travel, and lots of time out of the workflow. Position it differently. Interview at dinner. Observe during a meeting. Send out a survey and follow up with a short Q&A. Ask to just do a ride-along for one day. Ask the learner to put themselves on camera for the day and send it to you. Go find job descriptions. Read Glassdoor reviews. Google. Tinker around your internal network and ask questions. Be scrappy.

Q: Follow up on the resistance question above: Could you use a SWOT analysis when the answer is “no” as a way to convince the client?

A: You could—but don’t make too many assumptions. Perhaps use the SWOT as a way to draft learner personas, and then ask learners if that resonates.

Q: What if the learners are not hungry? Is there a secret recipe?

A: Ditch your prototype and try another idea. The secret recipe is don’t hold on to something that isn’t working.

Q: Do you have a concise definition of Design Thinking or a resource you can point to that provides more detailed information?

A: I really thought about this one, and even did some research and cobbled a good pitch: Design Thinking is an action-oriented approach AND mindset that rallies around a problem and those experiencing the problem. It’s focused on knowing your learner, defining the problem, and testing solutions until the problem is solved.

Q: Can you provide an example of what a prototype or product would be for testing (such as a document, a short eLearning lesson, a lesson plan, or all three)?

A: My favorite “first” prototype is via a written story. We name someone and walk them through a narrative of the experience the learner takes from start to finish. Through that, we identify all the components of the learning experience, whether it’s meeting a mentor, watching a series of videos, taking part in an online MOOC, or completing a work project as a capstone. I make it fun with icons.

Q: How does Design Thinking change Performance Consulting? What considerations should be made?

A: Performance Consulting is a capability, whereas Design Thinking is a way to solve problems with a human-centered mindset. Great performance consultants analyze the work, worker, and workplace with the lens of outcomes that produce results. I would push performance consultants as they empathize with their audience: Help define the problem to solve and then urge them to act on it rather than just reporting out.

Q: How long is “good research” for Design Thinking? We have market research that spans the last 5 years—yet there is an internal urge by a lot of new people not to rely on it—but to spend the time/$ to do the research again.

A: I’m assuming you mean research on your learners/end users. I think the point of Design Thinking is to get to know your learners and care about their lives. Market research can help give context, even if it’s slightly dated, but it won’t tell you the stories or the context. Don’t just use research and data analytics—be sure to observe and engage!

Q: If you consider the ripple effect, would you “cater” to the learner’s leader, the leader’s leader, or the organization?

A: Cater to the learner. The ripple effect exercise (which I LOVE) helps you identify, if you solve the problem for the learner, what the impact would have on others. If you find that impact creates a problem for someone else in some way, then reframe the exercise with that individual in the center. As for the organization, ideally, the impact would be some positive business result gain. But, a positive business gain in one area “could” have a detrimental impact on another. For instance, if your learners are call center agents and you are solving for improving the customer experience, then the length of the phone call with a customer may increase because the agent will be building rapport and creating a value proposition with the customer. However, longer phone calls can lead to longer hold times for other customers, which could lead to increasing staff, which could lead to increasing costs. But, would those costs be offset by the additional sales or increase in customer loyalty? Map it out!

About the Authors

Britney Cole

Britney is a learning leader with experience in organization development, human performance, and corporate learning and has worked remotely, managing virtual teams for more than a decade. Britney lives in Minnesota with her husband and three small children (ages 5, 7 and 8) where she keeps warm with plenty of blankets and cozy hats. She likes to talk, so you might see her at learning conferences as a speaker. Britney has provided consulting for clients in the financial services, pharmaceutical, steel, chemical, media, technology, retail, manufacturing, and aerospace industries. She forms lasting partnerships with her clients helping them with learning design and architecture, content development, leadership and professional development, performance consulting, technology implementation, and change management. Most recently, she is helping pioneer new experiential learning methods and defining learning 3.0 taxonomy.