Jeff Smith, Chief Product Officer, 15Five chats about the future of HRtech and how AI powered platforms will redefine the scope of HR in years to come:
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Hi Jeff, tell us about your time in HR tech and more about your role at 15Five.
I’m currently the Chief Product Officer at 15Five where I lead product management, product design and R&D operations. Organizations are asking their HR teams to deliver more and more strategic impact, while employees have entirely new expectations of work. I’m passionate about helping HR teams answer the call to deliver both. I get to live that out in this role.
As a former L&D leader, I led performance management at an organization that scaled rapidly, doubling headcount on the way to IPO. I know how difficult it can be to truly connect HR programs to business impact without the right systems in place, and to build productive partnerships with people managers, which is the only way HR programs can scale.
I have a diverse background in product, innovation, design, UX, and CX. I love uncovering and translating qualitative and quantitative research into insights, strategy, education, product features, inventions, sales enablement, people programs and business impact. I’m also incredibly interested in the role of the people manager, which is why I wrote the book, “The Meaningful Manager: How to Manage What Matters,” a step-by-step how-to guide to people management that’s simple, impactful and fulfilling.
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How does your new AI-Powered Predictive Impact Model enable HR teams?
Our Predictive Impact Model harnesses machine learning and 15Five’s vast dataset spanning six years, 30 million responses and thousands of organizations to help HR teams maximize employee engagement with the confidence of precise, predictive insights and recommendations. That happens in several ways:
- Diagnosing Problem Areas: The model analyzes vast amounts of employee feedback data to identify specific areas where engagement is lagging, and forecasts the potential impact of improving these areas to average levels. This helps HR teams separate the signal from the noise, and focus their efforts on just a few hyper-specific opportunities to improve engagement among specific employee cohorts.
- Strategic Planning: The model suggests targeted interventions, such as improving work-life balance, addressing leadership concerns, or enhancing professional development opportunities. This ensures that HR teams allocate resources effectively, and the 15Five platform helps them build coordinated campaigns and track progress.
- Enabling Managers to Act : HR teams can’t be in every 1:1 or write every performance review. Enabling managers to act is the critical last mile. The 15Five platform brings these predictive recommendations to life with a full range of dynamic manager enablement capabilities, spanning on-demand learning, live coaching, guided 1:1s, an AI-powered assistant for managers, and more.
What are some of the common reasons for disengagement that are seen today across organizations?
There are usually a wide variety of things that cause disengagement across an organization. Reasons for disengagement often vary by specific departments and teams, so this is difficult to generalize. That’s why uncovering specificity is so important. It reveals the actions that matter most to a particular organization and a particular team.
I will say many of the top causes for disengagement we see boil down to poor management, and that includes strained relations between mid-level managers and employees (it’s not only limited to senior executives). Ineffective leadership, micromanagement or lack of managerial support can significantly impact employee morale and engagement.
The bigger picture is that the total global economic cost of disengaged employees exceeds $8.8 trillion annually, according to Gallup. While organizations collectively spend billions to address the problem, they often struggle to identify the most actionable causes of disengagement and strategically deploy the limited resources they have to improve it. We’re providing a solution to this problem with our Predictive Impact Model, which takes the guesswork out of disengagement and provides a clear path for how to improve it.
What would you say are the fundamentals of a very engaged and very disengaged employee?
This is again tough to generalize because there’s no one-size-fits-all to engagement or lack thereof. The key is knowing how to diagnose causes of disengagement across your organization and how to improve them with precise action. Trying to pursue it blindly, and use intuition or noisy data to guess where and why pockets of disengagement exist just doesn’t work anymore. It never really did.
What in the modern scope of HR needs to improve in your view?
Removing the guesswork. At 15Five, we liken HR’s need to shift away from guesswork or “squishy ideas” to how the marketing industry made the same transformation a couple of decades ago with the dawn of digitalization. John Wanamaker, now considered a forefather of marketing and a department store pioneer, famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
That quote is over a century old, but too often, this quote speaks to the moment HR is in today. Guesswork doesn’t fly anymore, and it doesn’t need to.
The nature of the Internet and the platforms it enabled made it possible for marketing to go from placing ads mostly blindly, to understanding with detailed metrics how those ads performed. In this way, marketing evolved from guessing and hoping to measuring and proving. Marketing leaders now have a robust set of tools at their fingertips that directly connect their efforts and investments to business impact.
HR too, now has the platforms and tools available to remove the guesswork and to show the measurable, quantitative impact of our work. Using data also gets HR out of the all-too-common cycle of putting out fire after fire, too overwhelmed to actually strategize and act in ways that deliver business impact. Using data is helping HR finally break that cycle.
Take us through your thoughts on the state of HRtech and what near future trends will command the market?
There are three main trends I see that will continue to take hold in the next year (and beyond):
- Greater leveraging of data to make better informed decisions around employee performance, engagement and retention, as well as workforce planning and talent acquisition – specifically, using data to take targeted actions instead of one-size-fits-all “HR homework.”
- More use of predictive analytics and AI to predict – and get ahead of – things like employee disengagement, which leads to turnover if not properly addressed.
- Greater emphasis on talent development to position organizations to promote internally as roles open up, empower team members to take on more complex tasks and enable leadership to only dip into the hiring budget when truly necessary. Upskilling and reskilling–especially for leaders and managers–through continuous learning opportunities will become increasingly important to keep employees’ skills up-to-date as the industry continues to quickly evolve.
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Jeff Smith, PhD, is Chief Product Officer, 15Five
15Five combines generative AI, custom analytics and human-centered principles within a complete platform including 360° performance reviews, engagement surveys, goal tracking, manager coaching and training, and ongoing feedback tools like guided 1-on-1s and check-ins.