The Future of Employee Experience: Leveraging Technology To Drive Engagement
BY Mary Jones January 10, 2025Organizations that lack a technology strategy risk falling behind in addressing employee engagement—one of the most pressing challenges businesses face today. Research from leading firms like Gartner, Gallup, and Forrester reveals alarming trends: 60% of employees report burnout, 80% experience loneliness, and 70% feel disengaged. These factors contribute to a 50% increase in quiet quitting.“We need to drive engagement. We need tools that allow us to recognize each other and foster leadership transparency,” said Jaime McMahon, chief digital officer at LineZero. McMahon spoke during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s December virtual conference.McMahon pointed out four priorities for HR professionals moving into 2025 including:Transforming HR through technology and strategic integrationCreating a future ready workforceFostering a culture of innovation and adaptabilityEnhancing employee experience and engagementHR professionals are prioritizing talent retention, according to a survey by Fuel50. Organizations are increasingly recognizing employees as vital assets to their business rather than replaceable workers. However, the challenge lies in effectively retaining talent. According to Fuel50, only 20% of organizations have systems in place to track employees’ skills and abilities.Creating the framework for data and AI gives organizations the ability to track the ROI of engagement initiatives, detect trends, and make changes as needed faster. “How do we make sure and get access to this type of information so that we can make our workforce effective? At the end of the day, it begins and ends with the data” said McMahon.Driving Change With Data and AIJaime McMahon the chief digital officer at LineZero led the conversation (company photo)Taking advantage of new technologies like AI is smart for business. AI is rearranging old operational habits. The capabilities offer ways for a customized employee onboarding experience, as well as automating routine HR duties. It’s not just about AI, though, says McMahon.Integrating a digital workplace becomes a centerpiece for efficient communication, feedback, and document management. Employees stay informed on important company business, making them feel included, which in turn creates more engagement. Plus, it enables proactive decisions with real-time analytics.Organizations should avoid focusing solely on building a digital workplace and instead aim to create a comprehensive digital hub. This hub integrates five key components: communications, which facilitate seamless information sharing; engagement, which fosters connection and collaboration; a digital workplace, which provides the tools and infrastructure employees need to work efficiently; analytics and insights, which drive data-informed decision-making; and AI assistance, which enhances productivity and support through intelligent automation.“When I think about what’s going to make an impact today, these all make a dramatic impact,” he said. Companies who are not implementing these digital concepts will likely fall behind their competitors. Looking into the new year, companies who seek to stay ahead must invest in digital hubs, embrace AI, and make employee experience the focal point of their business strategy.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, LineZero, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Mary Jones is a freelance writer out of Ohio. Her work is featured in several publications including The Dallas Express, NDash, and The Daily Advocate.(Photo by Parradee Kietsirikul/iStock)
Compensation-Planning: Best Practices and Trends
BY Mary Jones December 17, 2024When you think about compensation planning for your organization, what comes to mind? If it’s not approached strategically, it can harm your business. HR managers often face the challenge of balancing company budgets with the need to offer competitive pay scales. Research from Visier, a platform that helps businesses and employees by combining people and business data to provide insights, found that a failure to identify and quickly address wage compression issues in teams can lead to faster resignations.Business News Daily defines compensation planning as encompassing all the compensatory elements of a company’s strategy, including employee wages, partner discounts, and raise schedules. These compensation decisions impact more than just finances; they shape an employee’s attitude toward the company, influence their work effort, and determine how long they stay with the organization.“When pay is adjusted quickly the length of tenure is significantly longer,” said Sean Luitjens, general manager, total rewards at Visier. Luitjens spoke during a From Day One webinar about “Compensation-Planning: Best Practices and Trends,” moderated by journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza.Visier research revealed that new employees who received a raise within their first month stayed with their company for an average of 31.5 months. In contrast, employees who received a raise within six months quit 1.8 times sooner than those with annual raises, and those who had no raise at all quit 2.3 times sooner. That’s why more compensation planning cycles are crucial for your overall company success.Sean Luitjens, general manager, total rewards at Visier, led the webinarUtilizing data analytics to identify key issues for your company enables informed decisions around pay. This process shouldn’t be rushed just to check a box. The advantage of having a tech and data strategy is clear: “When you start to break it down between the details, eligibility, budget, bonus LTI, and then try to take all that and create a pay philosophy, it’s exceedingly complex,” said Luitjens.Organizations can leverage data analysis by tapping into various sources, such as performance reviews and sales targets. Building more data points and reference benchmarks allows for continuous improvement. The key is aligning this data with your business goals to inform pay decisions. Factors such as an employee’s role, performance, and tenure in the position should also be considered.Managers must also gain the knowledge of compensation planning. If they cannot understand it, how can they execute and communicate it to their team? When you give them an anchor point, explain why you are giving them that number, says Luitjens. “Put yourself in a B2C marketing position and put on your UX hat, and start to work yourself back on how they would work through the process, rather than sending an Excel spreadsheet,” he said.Luitjens ended with a summary of three compensation planning best practices, again emphasizing the importance of the manager experience in the process:Define your destination and the road there.Place manager experience at the center of delivering pay philosophy. Create a cynical and ever improving data strategy.“When it comes to compensation planning specifically, really place the manager’s experience at the center of delivering the pay philosophy.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Visier, for sponsoring this webinar.Mary Jones is a freelance writer out of Ohio. Her work is featured in several publications including The Dallas Express, NDash, and The Daily Advocate.
HR Planning & Budgeting 2025: How To Maximize Your Employee Experience Investment
BY Mary Jones November 20, 2024The end of the year approaches fast, and for businesses and organizations, this indicates the time to complete annual budget plans for the coming year. Decisive strategies delivering the highest ROI are driving an industry shift, placing employee experience (EX) at the forefront of organizational priorities.“We are in a new wave of focusing on our employees, which is different from the way organizations used to operate,” said Rob Catalano, chief marketing and strategy officer for WorkTango. “We need to be intentional that employee experience is important. When we create our plans and strategies we are thinking about them as well.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz Esparza, journalist and contributing editor at From Day One spoke about the importance of employee experience when approaching the budget planning with Catalano during a From Day One webinar titled, HR Planning & Budgeting 2025: How To Maximize Your Employee Experience InvestmentBoosting employee relationship management yields the benefits of higher morale, and in turn increases retention and employee engagement. A Gartner survey supports this, with these five priorities for HR leaders in 2024: Leader and Manager Development Organizational Culture HR Technology Change Management Career Management and Internal MobilityThe survey's top three priorities highlight how HR leaders are embracing change and the need for strategic agility. Happy employees drive stronger company profits. According to Harvard Business Review's study, How Employee Experience Impacts Your Bottom Line, organizations that prioritize employee experience in their budgets see revenue and profits rise by at least 50%.Organizations that fail to integrate employee experience into their current and future strategies risk falling behind, says Catalano. HR leaders must leverage technology, AI, and other digital tools to achieve the same success through robust employee experience initiatives.Rob Catalano of WorkTango led the webinar (company photo)“Technology needs to be that critical part of your strategic planning and your budget carved out for these types of things if you want to impact that employee experience,” said Catalano.Annual employee surveys don’t yield the fastest employee experience results anymore. Many employee issues aren’t identified and resolved until several months later. “No one’s going to act or do something different if you’re only getting your engagement index of how people feel once a year,” Catalano said.How To Approach Budgeting and ROIInvesting in employee experience doesn’t require a large portion of a company budget. Two thirds of companies that invested less than $10,000 saw a ROI up to 5 times. What is more important is identifying and measuring what Catalano calls the three pillars, People ROI, HR ROI, and Company ROI.Every company will determine these metrics differently as they should–ROI is not one size fits all. One company can receive a high ROI with the same plan another company used, who only saw a minimal ROI.“If we think about employee experience and all those pillars, there isn’t a silver bullet when companies are thinking of a multi threaded experience strategy. You can’t do it all, but be thoughtful. What are the right things that are employee focused versus company focused?”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, WorkTango, for sponsoring this webinar. Mary Jones is a freelance writer out of Ohio. Her work is featured in several publications including The Dallas Express, NDash, and The Daily Advocate.
AI-Powered, Human-Centered Team Transformation at Scale
BY Mary Jones November 01, 2024Work norms have shifted rapidly over the past four years. With hybrid work becoming the norm, organizations now face the challenge of engaging all team members while staying aligned with company goals.At From Day One’s Boston conference, AceUp’s founder and CEO, Will Foussier and chief technology officer, Rohit Begani, spoke in a thought leadership spotlight about “AI-Powered, Human-Centered Team Transformation At Scale.” Amid shifts in work locations, schedules, and efficiencies, some organizations lag in adopting AI—yet it can streamline operations and support flexible teams.Foussier cited a “connection crisis” affecting hybrid and dispersed teams. Nearly 80% of employees work on a hybrid model, emphasizing the need to develop strategies for better team engagement and collaboration, says Foussier. Among those 80%, only 23% expressed feeling connected to the company. To address this, AceUp focuses on team coaching, leveraging AI to drive business impact and connect teams to specific OKRs and KPIs.Begani, left, and Foussier, right, spoke during the thought leadership spotlightCompanies who utilize team coaching benefit from upskilling and reskilling opportunities and can easily implement virtual team members into the happenings of the company. It is designed to tailor the coaching to the needs and goals of the business. “The beauty of team coaching is that you can actually bring people together to address a business challenge,” said Foussier. AceUp created a way to effectively utilize AI to enhance current coaching sessions for businesses rather than replace them altogether. They achieve this by focusing on AI-driven team-building methods that reshape how leaders and employees work together. “We have seen that it helps them clearly define a goal which is aligned with their business goal, and help them track the outcomes of team coaching,” Begani said.Using AceUp’s AI bot Ally, coaching sessions can now help companies detect and analyze where improvement is needed. Ally joins the call as a normal coaching participant, captures video, audio, and analyzes that data to discover breakthrough moments. “With all of this data, we are able to provide hyper-personalized coaching–and this coaching is for moments that matter,” Begani said. “These individuals are already going through coaching with a human coach, but because we have an understanding of their gaps, there's an ability for a model to support them on specific needs.” Once the data from the team coaching sessions are collected, it is managed in a dashboard that breaks down the information and reports any discrepancies. Then, the company can assess and redirect to decide how to change them. The future of leadership lies in teams. This idea inspired a team-coaching model that uses AI to collect session data, enabling personalized experiences, tailored goal setting, knowledge retention, and deeper insights into company dynamics. AceUp’s approach shifts from “me” to “we,” from leadership to team-ship, and from manager-as-coach to team-as-coach.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, AceUp, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Mary Jones is a freelance writer out of Ohio. Her work is featured in several publications including The Dallas Express, NDash, and The Daily Advocate.
What Makes Skills-Based Hiring the Most Effective Approach
BY Mary Jones September 18, 2024Many positions remain vacant in the workforce, even though there are qualified workers available, which is why many companies are removing degree requirements and relying heavily on skills-based hiring. During a From Day One webinar, Dan Miller, solutions architect for SHL discussed how skills-based hiring is transforming the workforce. In a conversation moderated by journalist Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, Miller shared why it's a better approach for companies to acquire new talent.While the resume remains an important tool, the days of gaining job candidate’s qualifications solely from a resume are gone. A skills-based hiring approach provides organizations and workers numerous benefits. Hiring managers can look at applicants’ LinkedIn profiles and other accompanying information to learn more about the worker and make an inference. “[Skills-based hiring] involves inferring someone’s skills based on their previous experiences and what’s been posted,” Miller said. In other words, rather than looking at just the resume, managers can look at the bigger picture before they come to a conclusion. According to Miller, the first step to prioritizing skills is removing educational requirements from job postings, which sets the stage for further changes to the hiring process. To further implement skills-based hiring, organizations should define key skills and competencies for each role, use assessments and testing to determine skill level, utilize AI-powered hiring tools, and train hiring managers on what to look for.Companies struggling to keep workers long-term benefit from a 20% higher retention rate over two years when utilizing skills-based hiring, says Miller. Workers gain access to higher paying jobs, and receive an average pay increase of 25% without a college degree. “Given the high costs associated with attrition, skills-based hiring confers business impact even beyond expanding the size of the eligible talent pool or demonstrating a commitment to social progress,” according to the Harvard Business School. “Skills-based hiring strategies are designed for the roles that fall in between those where degreed and non-degreed workers have long labored together and where the degree is a matter of employer preference and not of necessity.” Dan Miller of SHL spoke during the From Day One webinar (company photo)These benefits demonstrate the positive impact of skills-based hiring on both employees and organizations. Organizations implementing skills-based hiring methods are doing so for three reasons: agility, agency, and equity, says Miller. Agility involves having employees who can fluidly transition to different areas and positions, enabling companies to effectively utilize internal candidates. Agency empowers individuals to shape their own career paths by recognizing and developing measurable skills for future roles. Equity ensures that all qualified candidates are considered for open positions, helping to prevent discrimination in the hiring process.“There’s overarching reasons that skills are becoming important. Part of it is that roles are rapidly evolving,” said Miller. “It is a shift from work-focused to person-focused,” he said. As companies shift toward skills-based hiring, it's essential to understand the skills necessary for success in each role. Miller said SHL's Global Skills Assessment, which collected data from over 10,000 individuals, identified various skills indicative of success at work. Some companies will need personalized skills to fit their roles and positions. These skills include taking action, striving to achieve, establishing credibility, taking ownership, among others. When skills-based hiring is done right, both companies and applicants experience the benefits. Companies secure capable workers for essential positions, potentially for years to come, while applicants and employees have the opportunity to earn higher wages and develop skills that advance their careers both within the company and beyond.Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, SHL, for sponsoring this webinar. Mary Jones is a freelance writer out of Ohio. Her work is featured in several publications including The Dallas Express, NDash, and The Daily Advocate.
To Engage Your Workers, Train Them Like All-Around Athletes
BY Mary Jones August 22, 2024Workers have growing concerns about job security, especially with new AI and technology being implemented in the workforce. Many companies aren’t addressing these concerns properly or at all with their workers. But educating and maintaining transparency with AI use is key to employee retention and success. Leaders at Comcast agree. During a fireside chat at From Day One’s August virtual conference, Sonya Echols, VP, HR, for technical operations, network, engineering, and construction at Comcast spoke with journalist Jenny Sucov about engaging, educating and training employees. Comcast uses a mixture of traditional and non-traditional methods to learn about employee needs. In addition to yearly and quarterly surveys, they strive to know their employees well. The company focuses on “making sure we have a culture around communication, open doors, (and) making sure people feel comfortable coming to us,” Echols said. “Organizations, especially the larger the organization, have to have multiple touch points to understand where their employee population is, around their mindset, and what they are dealing with,” she said. Employee Growth Opportunities and Retention Developing knowledgeable employees into future leaders is an important way that Comcast sustains and supports its workforce. Every employee has the opportunity to learn the skills they will need to thrive within their organization and beyond, says Echols. They offer a large content library filled with on demand courses accessible at all times. Comcast invests a lot in who they bring into the company. They want their employees to feel empowered as they move along their career path.Journalist Jenny Sucov, left, interviewed Sonya Echols of Comcast (photo by From Day One)What may seem revolutionary is everyday life at Comcast. Utilizing daily meetings to relay knowledge is an overlooked necessity that Comcast differentiates in. Transferring knowledge prevents an issue of no one knowing how to handle business due to an exit of one employee. It also builds on skills that can later transfer into multiple departments. “We’re focused on building the skill sets they have, [so] they can be successful in other areas,” said Echols.Employees can try out roles they are interested in through job swaps and less-formal mentorship programs. Echols credits the success of mentorship to the commitment of everyone. Comcast leaders feel it is their duty to develop the next set of leaders for the company.Address AI Integration With Employees When asked about AI, Echols says it is important to use technology to our advantage, both personally and professionally. Soon it will be a vital skill in the professional setting that employees need to be prepared for, says Echols. “Technology is here to stay and things are going to continue to change,” she said. Through their focus on surveys and communication, Comcast is familiar with their employees' needs. Organizations should have a more thorough plan for engaging their workers if they want workers to stay with their companies long-term, says Echols. “If you are not having conversations about technology and what it means for your organizations, you have to start now.”Mary Jones is a freelance writer out of Ohio. Her work is featured in several publications including The Dallas Express, NDash, and The Daily Advocate.
Belonging for Everyone: Reimagine the Future of DEI
BY Mary Jones June 13, 2024Without taking diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) training seriously, workplace inclusion will not improve. Cultural bias could corrupt the company, making it unsafe and undesirable for minorities in certain roles within a company. Companies deciding that DEIB is unimportant could see higher turnover rates than their competitors who utilize this training to support and accept their employees without judgment. At From Day One’s Dallas conference, Renu Sachdeva, head of client solutions at Talking Talent, North America, spoke to the importance of DEIB training in the workplace, especially in the midst of pushback. For Sachdeva, pushing work around DEIB forward is a driving point each and every day. She shared the story of Botham Jean, who was murdered by an off-duty police officer in 2018. Botham, who went by Bo, was a colleague of Sachdeva. Bo’s murder drew attention to racial biases, being that he was an unarmed Black man, killed in his own home. “Bo is a huge part of why this work continues to be so important to me today,” said Sachdeva. Despite the recent positive steps forward in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, there are still many hurdles to jump over to reach the end goal, says Sachdeva. Many business leaders are already seeing budget cuts and reluctance to these initiatives. But this training is vital to understand the significance of inclusion for the long-term success of companies. Additionally, more workers consider it table stakes when considering a place to work.Renu Sachdeva, head of client solutions at Talking Talent, North America, led the thought leadership spotlight “94% of people in a survey said that it is very or somewhat important to them to feel a sense of belonging in the workplace. And yet 75% have said that they felt excluded in some way,” said Sachdeva. With a percentage so high, why would a company not want DEIB training within their organization? Satisfied employees means more productivity and higher retention rates. Talking Talent’s approach to DEIB is rooted in two beliefs. First, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is for everyone. Second, you have to fix the culture. Saying DEIB is for everyone means that no particular ethnic group or cultural background is excluded from the conversation. It should be at the forefront of the employee lifecycle, and practice in recruiting efforts, onboarding, and performance reviews. Rather than offering training as a one-time solution, it should be an integral aspect of the overall employee experience. Inclusive leadership and allyship training for current and future leaders ensures that each leader has the necessary skills to invite diversity and inclusion into the company. Sachdeva says that employees who get promoted may have exceptional technical skills, which is why they get promoted in the first place. Yet, they have not gained the managerial skills to foster inclusion and guide people underneath them as a strong leader. Each organization has its unique risks if effective inclusion is not a priority. Pushing the work around DEIB forward is a necessity, and can propel engagement and success, says Sachdeva.Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Talking Talent, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Mary Jones is a freelance writer out of Ohio. Her work is featured in several publications including The Dallas Express, NDash, and The Daily Advocate.