Episode 130: How Microsoft Created A Thriving Workforce By Going Beyond Employee Engagement (An Interview with Dawn Klinghoffer)
In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David is joined by Microsoft’s Head of People Analytics, Dawn Klinghoffer.
With over 25 years of experience in HR, Dawn is passionate about using data and analytics to drive insights that help organisations make better decisions about their people. She’s also a big advocate for employee thriving.
In this episode, Dawn shares her thoughts on why employee thriving is so important, and how organisations can create cultures that support it. The conversation will also cover:
What employee thriving means and why it sets a higher bar than employee engagement,
What the positive and negative drivers of employee thriving are at Microsoft
How to set up people analytics to deliver value to companies and employees,
A sneak peek into upcoming research in areas like when in-person matters
The future direction of people analytics
If you’re interested in learning more about employee thriving, or you’re just curious to learn what Microsoft is up to in the world of people analytics, listen to the full episode below, enjoy!
Links to the resources mentioned in the podcast:
https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thriving-not-engagement
Support from this podcast comes from Hibob. You can learn more by visiting:
https://hibobl.ink/DHL
David Green: In today's episode, my guest is Dawn Klinghoffer, Global Head of People Analytics at Microsoft. I've had the privilege of knowing Dawn for quite some time now, and with 20-plus years in the HR and people analytics industry, Dawn is a true thought leader in the people analytics space.
Today, we're going to be discussing recent work Dawn and the People Analytics Team at Microsoft undertook, which led them to shift from measuring employee engagement to instead measuring employee thriving.
Dawn Klinghoffer: We wanted a higher bar than just engagement. In measuring engagement, often was the case that while things looked pretty decent, when we get under the covers a little bit and really understand what's going on, there were key areas that we needed to focus on. So we thought, "Is there a higher bar that we could aspire to?" and we did an external literature review, we did internal focus groups to really hear from our employees, in terms of what made them bring their best to work every single day.
David Green: Dawn will walk us through what employee thriving means, why it sets a higher bar than employee engagement, and what the positive and negative drivers of employee thriving are at Microsoft. Our conversation will also cover how to set up people analytics to deliver value to companies and their employees, and the likely future direction of people analytics. Dawn will also share a sneak peek into her upcoming research in areas like when in-person matters and employee burnout. So without further ado, let's get started.
Dawn Klinghoffer: I've been doing this work probably a lot longer than many people have. We didn't call it people analytics 20 years ago, we didn't really know what we should call it; and the only thing we knew was that we had access to a data warehouse with lots of people data, and we wanted to make sense of it. We took the approach like, "Hey, there have got to be rich insights in all of the data that we capture about our employees, and we will pave the way to understand what it is that we should be looking at and how to add business value to the company, and how to really change the way HR works, to being a little bit more science-based and using data to make decisions"; so I like to say bringing the art and the science together of HR.
David Green: And how have you seen people analytics evolve over the years, and maybe how has your team grown over the last three years as well, and how is it structured now?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah, so actually surprisingly, the amount of headcount hasn't grown that much over the three years, but I would say the value that we have brought to the organisation has continued to grow, and we have had to do that in really smart ways, in really figuring out what the right work is that we should do, with the highest impact. I'm pretty fortunate that we had a decent-sized team, even three years ago. So again, while we did grow, it wasn't significant, not compared to the amount that I'm seeing other people analytics teams grow, because they weren't as well-resourced I think previously.
But it really comes down to constantly listening to what it is that the business is driving, and it certainly made it easier for all of us during the last few years to understand what was top of mind for companies; and what was top of mind were their employees. So, a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're pretty fortuitous in making sure that our listening systems were really already pretty mature, even before this happened, so it wasn't a big scramble for us when we needed to understand even more clearly how our employees were doing. We had the right infrastructure in place to be able to do that and be able to share that information with our leaders and managers, and even back to our employees.
David Green: And I think, as you shared with us in your case study, An Excellence in People Analytics, that listening ecosystem, from memory I think you pulse 2,500 Microsoft employees every day, obviously not the same 2,500 employees every day; it's representative of the workforce. You set that up obviously during the pandemic, I think it was 1,500 employees the day before the pandemic, 2,500 afterwards. I guess that's really helped you throughout the last three years it is now nearly, since February 2020, to really understand how employees were feeling, but also then how you should shape your approach to what was remote, and I guess now hybrid work?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah, and what I would say is, we're not done. So, even though we have this infrastructure, we're pretty fortunate that we work at Microsoft, and Microsoft has really started to play a huge role in the employee experience space. So, with Glint and the work that we're doing, we just announced Viva Pulse that is going to be coming, it's funny that the meeting that I just had just prior to us getting on the call together was about how we are going to continue to shape our listening system, so not just any one particular survey, but how do they all work together seamlessly and simplicity at the core, not to over-survey anyone, but to really get the biggest value for what we're doing.
We have some ideas on how we're going to evolve the listening system going forward, and that really energises me, because again it really plays into the fact that technology is evolving, what our leaders and managers need is evolving, and that hopefully we can get ahead of it and be there paving the way for other companies to also think about, "Hey, that's a good approach and maybe that's something that we should take into consideration as well".
But while I say that, every company is different. Pretty much anytime I've had the opportunity to share this, every company is unique, and so you really have to do what is right for your company. While ideally, pulse has worked really well for us, the random sampling of 2,500 employees, that's not just because of the pandemic, it's because we've grown so much over the years. When we started doing this, 1,500 was a pretty good sample size for the size of the company, but we've grown so much we needed to up the sample size to get a good representation. But every company will have their own needs, and they also have a unique business outcome, and so you have to think about, "What's right for the company that I'm trying to support and provide value to?"
David Green: It's interesting, because we're going to spend some time talking about the work that you've been doing around employee thriving now, and what I personally love about people analytics is it allows us to better understand the drivers of employee experience, employee behaviour and employee performance, and then identity areas for improvement within organisations, because that's the whole thing it's about; it's not just about the insights, is it? It's about the actions and the outcomes that arise from that.
As you said, it takes the guesswork out of HR and allows businesses to focus on what really matters for their employees and company success, which brings us to the recent article that you and Elizabeth published in Harvard Business Review on employee thriving. Just for those that haven't seen it yet, and we will put a link in the show notes, the article explains that Microsoft has opted to start measuring employee thriving rather than employee engagement. I'd love to hear what prompted this shift, and why employee thriving?
Dawn Klinghoffer: We had been measuring employee engagement for many, many years, gosh, longer than I have been working in people analytics, I believe, and engagement is a good aspiration. It has served us well, it serves many companies well, but during the pandemic we started to realise that we wanted a higher bar than just engagement. In measuring engagement, often was the case that while things looked pretty decent, when we get under the covers a little bit and really understand what's going on, there were key areas that we needed to focus on.
So we thought, "Is there a higher bar that we could aspire to?" and we did an external literature review, we did internal focus groups to really hear from our employees, in terms of what made them bring their best to work every single day. And that's where we came to the conclusion that thriving was that higher bar that we were after. There was a good article that Adam Grant wrote during the pandemic about languishing. We see that thriving as kind of the opposite of languishing. And then, I will just share this personal story that I have shared a couple of times before, but I think it's worth noting how I myself really got behind thriving.
I have two daughters, my oldest daughter is in college, my younger daughter is still in high school. My oldest daughter was supposed to start her freshman year of college the Fall of 2020. Her university was one of the few universities that decided they were not going to have kids on campus that first semester, that they were going to be all remote. And this was my daughter's dream university. This was her first choice, she applied early decision, she got in, she was just over the moon excited about heading off to the East Coast.
We found out a couple of weeks before we were supposed to leave to drop her off that they weren't going to have them on campus, so she stayed home with us for a semester, and I saw her excitement level go down and down. She wasn't depressed; you heard a lot about kids being depressed. She wasn't depressed, but she wasn't thriving. And then, when she was able to go to campus in January, we couldn't even bring her there, because again we still weren't vaccinated, but we dropped her off at the airport and kind of said, "Good luck".
After the first couple of days, where she just needed to get used to being on her own, we saw her living her best life like no tomorrow. She was thriving. I mean, everything about that university just got her more excited every single day. So that's for me when I really got my head around this concept of thriving. I saw it with my family and I saw it with her, and it definitely made me happy. Can you imagine if you have an entire workforce of people that are thriving, where they're literally bringing their best selves every day?
We know that you can't thrive every single day, so really what it's about is figuring out, what are those obstacles that get in the way of thriving; and what's the environment where people can thrive? And so, we're starting to do all of that analysis now. We had our first employee signals thriving results last spring and we just did our second one, it just closed actually a couple of weeks ago. And from the spring, what do people that are thriving talk about? They talk about a collaborative environment and teamwork; they talk about inclusive culture with autonomy and the flexibility to work when and how is best for them; and then they talk about wellbeing support.
If we look at the opposite, what are people that are not thriving talking about? It's about silos and it's about bureaucracy and this lack of collaboration. So, that's where you can say, "How can we remove those obstacles so that we can thrive more?" and that's what's really important for our managers and leaders and our employees, because this isn't just about managers and leaders, this is about employee experience, this is about employees working with one another and being energised and empowered to do meaningful work every day.
David Green: Over the last two years, you'll know this, because you kindly completed it -- we had 184 companies complete it this year, I think it was over 114 last year; and we asked the question, "Where are the three areas where people analytics is adding the most value in your organisation?" and both years, diversity, equity and inclusion came out number one. So, I'd love to hear, what is the role of the people analytics function in driving the initiatives that ultimately lead to success in diversity, equity and inclusion?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah, it's a great question, and I partner very, very closely with Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, who's our Chief Diversity Officer, and we partner on all things diversity and inclusion. I've bought the report that we just launched this year, not only to be able to share the goodness that it was our biggest year in terms of representation, but we shared more data than we've ever shared before. We really took this notion of transparency to the next level to be able to share more information on our demographics, to be able to share what our exits are, to be able to share employee signals results by our different demographics.
I loved being able to share so much of the work that we do to really help our organisation be as inclusive as we can be. And diversity and inclusion is not just a data exercise, by any stretch of the imagination, but we use data first to measure, then to learn, then to take different actions, then to measure again and to learn again, and that is the flywheel that we use. So, it definitely made me really appreciate the work that we've been doing.
David Green: And of course, we talked about the importance of the listening ecosystem in the context of employee thriving, but it's just as important in the context of diversity, equity and inclusion; it's an important component in the overall effort to, as you say, measure. I mean, clearly you can't measure it without analytics, but also then to put in place areas where you can improve and then to measure and learn again; it's so key, isn't it?
Dawn Klinghoffer: So key, and we're so not done. It's not like we said, "Okay, we're done now, and now we're moving on". No, this is just one more step in the journey that we have and we learn from what we're doing constantly. And so, yes, that is the critical aspect of it. And there's a whole bunch of work that goes on below what we share in the external release, to really provide insights to our leaders in terms of, "Hey, this is working well, keep doing this" or, "This is not working so well. We might want to take a different approach".
David Green: I know we've talked before, there's a few others, there's not many, there's people like Patrick Coolen at ABN AMRO, Keith McNulty at McKinsey, and a couple of others that share regularly what they're doing. I mean, obviously it helps the people analytics field, and I know that's a big passion for you to help the field as well as help Microsoft; it helps HR professionals understand it more. But I'd love to understand, how does it help you as well within Microsoft, for example, in terms of when you're sharing some of the work that you're doing? I guess it makes you hit a higher bar before you share it, as well, but I'd love to hear how it helps you within Microsoft.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Well obviously, the stuff that I'm sharing, we usually share externally after we've seen some type of impact that we can have internally. So, I think the goodness is that we tend not to share things that have not had impact. But the work that we did on work/life balance, for example, and really understanding, because work/life balance is something that was important before the pandemic, it was really important during the pandemic, and it continues to be important now; and so really identifying different levers that can create more sense of balance, like having focus time, like prioritisation, managers helping you with prioritisation, we love sharing when we've seen benefit.
After we instituted some different programmes and we saw our work/life balance improve, it was like, "Oh, wow, this is definitely something that we want to share externally. I wrote about this in the HBR article, but work/life balance and thriving are different; they're not the same. Not everyone that's thriving has perfect work/life balance and vice versa. And that was a really interesting analysis that we did, because it really solidified in our minds how different they can be. That's about being energised about the work that you're doing, about meaningful work and empowerment.
I mean, if you think about you're working on a big project and you have a deadline, but you know that if you meet this deadline, the impact that this is going to have on the company, on the world is going to be huge, you can forget about your work/life balance for a short period of time, and you can say, "You know what, I'm going to put in those extra hours, because this work is so meaningful and I'm empowered to do it the way I need to do it. It brings me great amounts of energy".
But it's hard to persist like that. It's not like you can do that all the time. So, you can have these short times when you do that, and that can actually boost your thriving. But can you do that day in and day out for years on end? Maybe there are a few people that can do that, but not everyone.
David Green: What advice would you give to chief people officers and people analytics leaders that might be listening, on how they can direct people analytics to solve the most important challenges for their organisation; but also that they benefit employees as well, because I know that's something that you particularly reinforce at Microsoft?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Definitely, and that is something that we hold in very, very high regard, that everything that we should be doing, we should really look critically to ensure that we are doing things that benefit the employee, and realising that there are some things that we do that really benefit the organisation, but we ensure that we do them so they're also benefitting the employee. I mean, if you think about it, even feedback is a gift. So, when you are being told that, "Hey, you might want to change your approach on this", we see that as benefitting the employee and not just the person that you're providing the feedback to, but the person in their sphere of influence as well.
You asked what advice would I give people? I mean, that's where it's really important to truly listen and understand what it is that is most important for your leaders, and most important for not just HR leaders, but business leaders, and be able to insert yourself at the right times. And even just taking conversations where people are hypothesising, but they are making statements, and being able to take those hypotheses and prove it with data can actually help either reinforce, or it can myth-bust and say, "I know that this is what you think is going on in the organisation, but it's actually not". And so, we want to make different decisions knowing that that's not actually what's going on in the organisation.
David Green: I read this quote that Satya Nadella's reported to have said last week, and he was referring to the productivity paranoia that the Work Trend Index brought out. And the quote is, "When you were talking about this employer/employee difference on hybrid work, I think the best way to bridge the paradox is not to have more dogma, but more data; instead of this being some kind of argument, let the data really help us move forward", and I think that's probably a good lesson for all leaders out there, I think, isn't it?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Absolutely, yes. We definitely want to be data-led and not dogma-led. So, I appreciate that comment from our CEO definitely, and he lives that. I mean, he asks that right questions, he wants to understand the data, and that's just one of the many reasons why I love working for Microsoft and I've stayed here for almost 25 years.
David Green: Yeah, and I think it's important, because the whole conversation around hybrid, you said it's not done, it's constantly evolving; look at the data and then relook at the data, and when you've made decisions, look at the data again and then learn from it. It's not like a once-and-done, this, is it? So, it's really important that people take that into account.
Dawn Klinghoffer: I love that you brought that up. I actually was in a meeting this morning where we were talking about some work that we're doing, When In-person Matters. And this is work that we're doing for Microsoft, so really understanding when is it critical for people to be in-person. And I said, this is why Viva is so important to the world, because this isn't going to be one-and-done, we're not going to just figure out when in-person matters and be like, "Okay, we have all the answers, we're done". It's going to be something that we have to continuously monitor. And we need to make that easier for our customers as well, because they are going to need to do the same type of thing.
So, while I'll be excited to share when the right time for me to share is, share the work that we've been doing on When In-person Matters and when it matters for folks at Microsoft, but I'm also excited to hear from other corporations in terms of what have they found for when in-person matters for them? It's going to be unique depending on the type of work that is being done at companies and the culture that's being driven. And so, I think we're still in the beginning stages of really understanding hybrid work and what that means.
The one thing that I do know is that people value being able to work when and where is best for them, but they also value connection and team connection. So, it is a paradox and we need to figure out and guide people with data the best we can.
David Green: Is there anything else that you can share that you're looking at as a people analytics team moving into 2023?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Looking at burnout is another area of research for us. Kathleen wrote this great LinkedIn article about the human energy crisis, and part of the human energy crisis is really understanding how your workforce is doing and how their wellbeing is holistic. And so, yes, that is another component. Thinking about our employee listening systems and thinking about the next evolution of our employee listening systems is also another area that we are very much focused on.
In addition to that, just really helping all of my partners across HR understand where we can provide insights to help them prioritise the work that they're doing. So, there's also this big push, in terms of crew development. One of the things that we did was a drivers' analysis on thriving, and career is the top driver of thriving. So, helping our partners understand different areas that we can lean into, in terms of ensuring that our employees are getting the career opportunities that they are looking for so that they can thrive.
David Green: Yeah, and of course I've just asked one question the wrong way round, so we're going to come back to the in-person experience thing now, so apologies to listeners on this. But I think it follows up nicely into work that you're going to be looking at. How would you even go about analysing whether in-person matters; and what would be some of the data sources that you would look at?
Dawn Klinghoffer: First of all, it's really important to understand where your employees are located. That's kind of the first step, I would say, in When In-person Matters, because companies are not the same today as they were three-plus years ago. I think that it used to be -- and Microsoft has always been a distributed organisation, but not all organisations were distributed. And now it's important to understand, "How distributed is your organisation?" and, "Are people all collocated; and are teams collocated?" So, that's the first, I think, baseline understanding that is important to have.
Then you need to start looking at different collaboration patterns and how people are working. You can do that through different technologies, but understanding are people meeting in person; are they meeting, largely for us, on Teams; how are they collaborating, different hours of the day that people are collaborating? But again, everything should tie back to the sentiment, understanding are there different patterns that we see that lend themselves to employees thriving more than others, or are employees having more positive sentiment in terms of team connection, inclusion, other aspects? So, that's really what we're focused on, is to understand these different collaboration patterns and then match that up to sentiment.
David Green: Yeah, and as you said, it's work that's continually ongoing and continually evolving and will evolve over the next months and years, I guess.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Yes, definitely. And again, all aggregated information; we are not looking for individuals, we're not looking to implicate anyone or to hold anyone up on a pedestal and say, "This person is doing it exactly the way --" This is all aggregated data that we're looking at for trends and patterns, to be able to provide the best insights to our partners.
David Green: And a lot of those aggregate insights that you find, sometimes they're a bit "Aha!" moments for managers, or anyone in the organisation. I always remember the rather famous one about people sending emails out of hours and the extra work that causes their teams. And obviously, managers generally don't want to cause extra work or stress for their teams, so it actually can change behaviours.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Absolutely, yes. And now it's almost second nature a little bit. But what I would say with that is, while that was a huge "Aha!" moment, what did we end up doing? Well, we partnered with some of our folks in the top management and learning and development areas and we said, "Every team is unique", and they created what we call Team Agreements. They're conversations that you have with your teams and you sit down and you really go through all aspects of how you work together. You can do this with your direct team, you can do this with your leadership team.
I've attended multiple team agreement conversations that's not necessarily a one-and-done conversation, and you go through and you talk about, "When do you like to receive email? And if it's on the weekend and I need to get hold of you, would you rather I text you and tell you that I need to talk to you, or are you going to be checking your email, because you don't need to check your email?" but just trying to understand how everyone works, and then come to that agreement so that everyone again can bring their best selves to work every day.
So, those team agreements I think have been extremely helpful in understanding, taking the insights that we learned, but then taking that dialogue and that conversation and then getting that agreement that this is how we are going to work as a team.
David Green: I think that might lend itself quite nicely to the next question. This is a question that we're asking everyone on this series. We create a little video clip and it will go on the myHRfuture YouTube channel. What tips can you share, maybe from the data, or maybe about how you do it with your own team; what tips can you share with listeners about how to foster collaboration in a hybrid team?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Okay, well the tip first of all is to have the conversation on how people want to collaborate, so that is the first tip. We do that by having these team agreement conversations. But the other thing is to again continually listen and learn, because even that team agreement that you had could become obsolete in three months, depending on new team members joining the team, depending on different aspects of your life that you are going through. So, just understanding that this is an ongoing dialogue and that the more you can be transparent with one another, share your voice, listen and learn and obviously measure to understand whether or not you're making the right type of progress, that's what I would say.
David Green: We're approaching the end of 2022, Dawn, so I'd love to hear about some of your predictions, without putting you on the spot too much, for what you think 2023 holds for the HR and people analytics world.
Dawn Klinghoffer: I think we're going to have to think really creatively about how we work in the future and just even thinking about office spaces. I think the spaces will need to evolve over time, and we need to think about more the outcomes that we're trying to drive, and then how do we create the right type of environment to drive those outcomes. I'm so excited about the future because I feel like we have so many of those insights, or are getting so many of those insights, that I feel like this worksite of the future is going to be just amazing; I can't wait to get there.
It's not going to be walking into a building and sitting in your little office or cubicle and staying there all day, it's going to be much more dynamic, and I'm excited about this evolution. And people analytics are going to be at the centre of this because really understanding how it is that people bring their best selves to their work every day, no matter where or when or how it's done.
David Green: Anything else that you're particularly excited about potentially for next year?
Dawn Klinghoffer: Well, I do think that we saw, over the last few years, that employee listening has become front and centre, in terms of what a people analytics team focuses on. And I'm also excited about the next evolution of that as well and being able to really work on the right questions that give us the biggest impact, and then how do we get to the point where we have more flexibility and we have more autonomy, in terms of getting at that information to help all teams thrive.
David Green: Well, I think, Dawn, that's a good place to leave our conversation. It's a long episode, it's a good episode, I think there's lots that people will be able to unpack from that. Thank you so much for sharing your time and knowledge with listeners of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Can you let listeners know how they can get in touch or follow you on social media, and find out more about your work? We will put links to some of the resources that you've mentioned in the show notes as well.
Dawn Klinghoffer: So, follow me on LinkedIn. That is the best way to stay up to date on the research and analytics that we are sharing, and also just other titbits of information that I like to share on LinkedIn. So, definitely LinkedIn is the place to follow me.
David Green: Dawn, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for being a guest on the show.
Dawn Klinghoffer: Thank you for having me, David, I really appreciate it.