This week’s podcast guest is Ernest Ng, Vice President of Global Employee Success Strategy and People Analytics at Salesforce. In this episode, Ernest shares his team’s approach to managing the workforce, mirroring the approach the company takes to ensure customer success and satisfaction.

Throughout our conversation, Ernest and I discuss:

• The role of people analytics in ensuring employee success

• The importance of developing a data driven culture across HR

• Salesforce’s approach to hybrid work, known as the success from anywhere strategy, and the role of the people analytics team in enabling the approach, by helping the business to understand the conditions that help employees be productive and healthy

• The critical elements for success in people analytics, including getting the right stakeholders involved in the execution phase and the investment phase

• The team’s work on skills inference and how this has been used across internal mobility programs, career development, mentoring programs, as well as talent acquisition and onboarding

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Huler, you can learn more by visiting huler.io.

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Ernest Ng, Head of Global Employee Success Strategy and People Analytics at Salesforce, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show Ernest, it is great to have you on. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your role at Salesforce?  


Ernest Ng: Sure. It is great to see you, David. It is great to be able to be on this podcast, so thank you again for having me. So, I am Ernest. I lead people strategy and analytics at Salesforce. We have a team of, close to 40, data consultants, IO researchers, survey specialists, data scientists, NLP experts, data engineers, and business architects, really just focused on driving employee success with data. 


What that means really is, we want to take a data and research informed approach to, what I like to always say our people strategy is, which is basically cultivating the conditions that allow an employee to thrive. So, this is what my team works on and because we are growing at such a fast pace, as a company, people analytics is really key to helping us scale efficiently and effectively.   


David Green: Ernest, we have known each other for quite a few years now. I think we possibly first saw each other either at a PAFOW conference in San Francisco, or maybe when you were over here at a meeting that Unilever was hosting back in 2015 or 2016, I think. And you have been in the people analytics field for a long time now, for over a decade, we could have a whole podcast on it, but in terms of how you have seen the field evolve over the last decade, what are some of the main things that you have seen?  


Ernest Ng: Yeah, I think in the beginning, people analytics was really reporting and survey work. That, I think, is still the bread and butter of many people analytics functions. But I think, with the proliferation of technology platforms, APIs, AI tools, all of these different technologies, it has really been able to transform our fields. We have more data to use, but at the same time, that means we have to be more careful about how we use it.

So, in addition to being more steeped in data science techniques and data engineering, than when I first entered the field. I think for me, I am thinking a lot more these days about privacy and ethics. Especially now that many of us are actually in our homes and the office is actually our home. And so, as the company reaches further into your personal life and people analytics has now the responsibility to be very careful about the things that we do with people's data. Especially because now, most people are at home.  


David Green: Yeah, it is such an important thing. And certainly, some of the research that we have been doing at Insight222, over the last few months, is actually really showing that this whole topic around governance and ethics is still really, really high profile within people analytics teams, as it should be. I think, we are effectively custodians of our people's data and what we do with it is so important. 

The other thing that is quite interesting from your introduction Ernest, is this way that you combine employee success and people analytics at Salesforce. What is the thinking behind that? 


Ernest Ng: I mean at Salesforce; our HR organisation is called employee success. And basically, what we are doing is we are looking at our employees as customers. In the same way that we would approach our customers, we have a customer success organisation who is dedicated to really ensuring that people who are using Salesforce, are successful using it and getting the value out of it as much as possible and constantly driving that renewal opportunity with them. That is the same way that we approach our employees. And so, in the same way as the sales organisation and our company has customer success, we also have employee success because we are using those same techniques, we are using those same frameworks, in order to drive our employee success. 


So that is why it is called employee success, but then also, that is why people analytics is so important because you need that data, you need a data informed strategy in order to really drive that success. It is not just managing the resources, it is really trying to drive success, drive value, from basically all the time that you spend working. 


David Green: Yeah, I love the link there because you need great data to really affect customer success, likewise you need great data to affect employee success. It ties in nicely to what you were saying about the importance of ethics and privacy as well. The fact it is employee success, sounds like it is as much about the employee as it is about the organisation, which is really good. 


So, to kind of get us moving into the wider conversation Ernest, you have mentioned that a lot of us are working from home at the moment. I know Salesforce has talked about what it is going to be doing, from a hybrid work perspective. When we spoke last, we talked a little bit about the success from anywhere, strategy. I think our listeners will be really interested to hear a little bit more about that and then perhaps afterwards, we will get into the role that people analytics will play.  


Ernest Ng: Yeah, for sure. So well, success from anywhere, is how we are envisioning our cultural transformation. So, we are applying a beginner's mind to the way that we work every day, utilising technologies like Salesforce and Slack, to really bring people together in different, relevant, uniquely Salesforce ways, so that we can drive success for our stakeholders.

So, what does that actually mean? It means that we are intentional about all of our actions, so we are constantly questioning ourselves around, do you need to go into the office? Do you need to have meetings? Can it be done virtually or asynchronously? So that is really the thought process around our Slack first culture.

And then when you do need to come together physically, what is that for? And the way that we really think about it is, when you come together physically and you can't do something asynchronously or virtually, it really is around cultural immersion, inspiration, connection, and building trust. So really, we have to connect with an intention, that is one of the core elements of what we are trying to do. This means that our office and physical spaces are just as important as our digital spaces, but we can't take for granted what happens within them. 


So that is our success from anywhere strategy, it is this link, this balance, between a Slack first culture and then connecting with intention. And so, thinking about how we utilise both our physical and digital spaces, in order to do all of those things. That is really how we are approaching and thinking about hybrid work. 


David Green: That is great, and I think that is really going to open up a beautiful conversation now around the role of people analytics in your success from anywhere strategy. What are some of the main responsibilities? At what point were you brought into support? And maybe as well, how do you see that evolving as we go through what I guess, like it is in pretty much every organisation at the moment, is like an experiment around hybrid working and bringing people together? 


Ernest Ng: Yeah. Being at Salesforce for 10 years, I think to answer your first question of when people analytics was brought in, we were brought in at the very beginning. Because the data is super important to inform our strategy.

And so, they brought us in really in the beginning, to try and understand what are the conditions that are going to help employees be productive as they start to be home more often? Especially when we got into lockdown and everything like that, they really turned to us in terms of helping them understand, okay, what are the things that we need?

Before the pandemic, we already knew that remote workers experienced greater levels of work stress and burnout than office employees. So, when you basically turn everybody into a remote employee, who hasn't actually had all of the training and experience of setting boundaries and things like that, you are going to start to drive a lot of burnouts. That is what we were helping to monitor in the beginning through our various pulse surveys, anonymised and randomly sampled calendar data, to understand meeting behaviour and increased workloads. And actually, what we found in the beginning, was we found that basically everybody was working an extra day. People were taking their commute times and instead of commuting, they were having meetings during those times.

And so, these insights really allowed us to help focus our employees on setting boundaries, invigorating our company prioritisation process. 

That was one thing, but we were also then able to help to bring data around, people felt like they were missing something, there was something missing, and that was all about connection. So, while people were meeting together, there was just something missing about how they were meeting. We were able to bring a lot of the academic literature about trust-based relationships versus transactional based relationships, and how there are differences there to really start to inform our strategy and think about, okay, just because you are meeting doesn't mean you are building a relationship with that person. You have to think about it intentionally.

So that is how we got to those two main pillars about Slack first culture and then connect with intention. And that was all driven by the work that our team was doing.  


David Green: And I guess this is an ongoing, as I referred to earlier as an experiment that might be the wrong word, but I suppose it is an experiment in many respects, in many organisations, because you were having to adapt to what was happening with the pandemic at different times. And obviously the Delta variant, I know in the US is having an impact, and we don't know but we may have other variants that will come in and then we will start to see how, because I think we have seen that throughout the pandemic we are very adaptable as human beings, we will start to see how people are using the office space, as you talked about earlier. And with that intentionality that you are building into, success from anywhere. 

People are probably going to use the office differently from how they have used it in the past and I guess people analytics can really help inform A) how people are using it and B) what that means around workplace design, moving forward.  


Ernest Ng: Yeah. So, my team also owns real estate analytics as well, and global safety and security analytics. I think in this hybrid work environment world, all of those things are super important to inform what that employee experience really is. And so we were, I think, a little ahead of the curve in terms of combining all of those things together in people analytics, because now we have both our office and real estate data sets, our badging data, people coming in, we have our safety and security data as well. That combined with your regular people data, you actually get a very holistic picture about an employee's experience as they interact with the workspace.  


David Green: And it makes sense, doesn't it, combining people and places together. It sounds like you had the foresight to do that prior to the pandemic, I think we are seeing more and more companies looking to do that now. So again, another exciting area for people analytics to have an impact.

I know from talking to you before and I know that it is the case with the success from anywhere strategy as well, the program has sponsorship right up to the top of the organisation at Salesforce. Let's talk about people analytics more broadly. I know it is an area we have spoken about in the past, how important is it to get the right stakeholders engaged in people analytics work?  


Ernest Ng: I mean, it is super important, but I think there is two ways, at least I think about it in two different ways. I think about it between finding the right balance between execution and investments, and the execution side has a different stakeholder than the investment side. 

And so, what I mean by people analytics work in the execution phase is, it is really about, okay, what are those current business needs? Whether it is recruitment strategy due to increased competition for hires, or retention strategy due to what we are all experiencing right now with the great resignation. Those are projects and the team needs to work on that now, to resolve the issues that we are facing now. So, it is critical to get the right stakeholders involved because they might just have the data and the perspective that could make a more rigorous and impactful analysis. The execution side, it is really important when you are solving for now, to bring all of the right stakeholders together, so that you are not actually painting a very narrow picture.

But then on the investment side, these might not be immediate use cases, but I feel like people analytics and the role of people analytics is really to help your organisation see around the corner.  And so, it is your responsibility as well to invest in developing the knowledge and know how, to capitalise on opportunities when they arise in the future. So you are going to have to actually do some thinking and investment in terms of, I am going to dedicate X amount of hours or X amount of my analyst time to do some of this research, that might not have an immediate payoff right now, but you have to make some future of work bets so you are not caught flat footed, when the working landscape changes. Things are going to constantly change with COVID and all the different variants, how our businesses are changing, and all the different geo-political changes. This is where your boss and your CHRO needs to be your key stakeholder and understand what are these investments that you are making in your time and why you are sacrificing some of the other stakeholder’s immediate needs, in order to actually invest some time here to prepare for the future. 


David Green: Yeah, I like that helping the organisation see around the corner, because as you said, the future is always uncertain, it is possibly more uncertain at the moment than it had been perhaps two years ago, but yeah. And as you said, it is solving real business problems that are happening now for the organisation, using people analytics, and maybe diverting 80% of resources towards those and then the 20% focused on what could happen.

I guess that is why combining employee success strategy and people analytics make sense, because obviously part of employee strategy is looking at things that maybe aren't happening now but may happen in one to three years’ time. Maybe even a bit longer into the future as well and striking that balance.

As a people analytics leader, having that supportive boss or CHRO or chief people officer is so important to actually be able to have that conversation. Ok, I am dedicating X percent of my resources to stuff that is not happening now, but it may well happen in the future. What sort of advice would you give to one of your peers around what are some of the points they can make, to actually have that conversation, with their chief people officer to try and help them understand why that is so important?


Ernest Ng: Yeah. I think now is a really great time to have those conversations about the investments that you want to make. Because I think, with the great resignation, every chief people officer is dealing with the immediate need to really understand what is going on in their organisation, what is going on with their people, and then how to really mitigate some of those issues. And then trying to understand what are the issues that we, as an organisation can solve? What are the things that we are not doing right? And what are the things that are just going on in the overall business environment, where we can't control?

And so, now is the time because there is a huge opportunity for people analytics to help provide some of that clarity. As you start to provide some of that clarity, you are better able to influence and better able to really think about the investments, and think about the value of people analytics, and make that known to the CHRO. Be that sort of flashlight for them. And I think, this is now the time. 
 

David Green: It is interesting because, I think, as a people analytics leader and as a long tenured one such as yourself, that the stakeholders you are dealing with across the business, are actually quite myriad. Whether it is employees or employee representative groups, through to people as part of the C-suite, chief people officers, colleagues that work in other analytics teams across the business as well, if you are tackling a business problem, bringing all those data sources together and working together around that. Also finance, IT, there are so many different stakeholders that you work with for different points and different projects as well.

What are some of the other elements, besides stakeholder engagement or stakeholder management, that you think are critical for a successful people analytics function?  

Ernest Ng: I think it is super critical, especially around these investment type projects, whether it is data infrastructure, repeatable analysis or frameworks, dashboards, and any sort of conceptual work or theoretical work, those things are critical to think about because it is important for you to scale. 


And so, it is always important to think about how you are innovating and that is, I think, super important for the success of a people analytics function. Besides just engaging your stakeholders, you have to be thinking ahead. You have to be thinking about how you get scale, because a lot of people analytics functions are fairly small in comparison to the rest of your HR organisation, and so you are always going to have to be thinking about scale or else you are just going to get into this constant execution firefight. And if you are not thinking about scaling, it is going to be really difficult for you to actually get good stakeholder engagement because the stakeholder might not actually want to engage with you.  

David Green: I guess it depends on different organisations, but is part of achieving that scale helping your colleagues in the wider HR function, to develop their capabilities around using data in their conversations with each other, but with the business in terms of increasing that data-driven culture? I think that is a phrase I hear a lot. Is that something that you and your team are focused on at Salesforce?   

Ernest Ng: Yes, definitely. I think the way that we look at it is, there is a nuance between data-driven and the way that we like to think about it in terms of being data informed, in terms of the way that we approach problems, is sometimes you don't have the data to drive the right decision. Sometimes our systems aren't in place, sometimes the data collection mechanisms aren't there, but we need to have a data informed perspective.

And that is where working with all of our stakeholders, to really try and get them to understand, what data do they need? What data is going to help them to be informed about the effectiveness or the efficiency of the things that they are doing? That whole process is a long process because it is disrupting the traditional ways that HR has done. But it is super important to do.

So that skill up, while a lot of people analytics professionals might not like enjoy doing it, it is a necessary part of ensuring that people analytics is embedded in the transformation of HR. So, you are going to have to do that, if you want to really transform the way that the HR function operates and the role of people analytics being critical to that transformation.  


David Green: And I guess back to your point, if you want that execution, you need that kind of data driven mindset, data informed, I like that nuance actually. Because when you are implementing a lot of the insights from analytics work, there is change management involved as well, so it is unlikely that people analytics teams are going to be able to do that on their own, they need the support of their colleagues in HR and other parts of the business to actually execute effectively and make these things happen. And then measure the outcomes around it as well. 


You have talked a bit about scaling, and I know a great area around scaling is around productising people analytics. You have done a lot of work around productising people analytics and in fact, I think you may have been the first people analytics practitioner who even talked about productisation, at least to me, quite a few years ago now.

Can you talk us through the importance of productisation and the impact of getting this right? 


Ernest Ng: Sure. I mean, productisation and the way that I think about it, is critical to how you scale. And this is why I have personally invested heavily on my team, into data engineering, data science, and research. Without these products, like data sets and data pipelines, algorithms and NLP topic models, IO and OB theories and logical frameworks. Again, it becomes an endless firefight on number crunching on Excel, Google Sheets, or whatever your preferred spreadsheet is. Building decks that need to be refreshed every now and then when an executive remembers, oh, I liked that. Can you refresh that for me, so I can see if it is still applicable? 


And that, I think, wipes consultants and analysts and people analytics out. Like that sort of groundhog day experience, it is really de-motivating. So, especially at Salesforce, when we are adding all these new employees and all of these new leaders, creating the right product infrastructure is critical to getting all of the new people leaders plugged in and ready to go at scale. 


And so, that is why we constantly think about it from a product perspective because of our growth, because we are bringing in all of these new people, all of these new leaders, we can't keep producing random cuts of things for these new leaders all the time, because then it is just churning out these PowerPoint presentations, or these Google Slide presentations and that is not enjoyable for most people. That doesn't necessarily help move the business forward, it just keeps maintaining things.

So that is why we think about productising things that we do. Ensuring that if we are doing an analysis, we are making it into a product of some sort, meaning it is scalable, it is repeatable, it is something that our data infrastructure supports, so that when a new leader comes in, it is just a push of a button in order to get you your cut versus having to do some special thing all the time.  


David Green: And I guess what it forces you to do, as a people analytics team, is to think almost in the mindset of if you are on the customer side, thinking about the user experience as well. So, making it easy for that new manager coming in, to be able to use that to support them in their work. 


Ernest Ng: That is exactly the case. You have to think about your stakeholder. You have to think about what they are considering and especially because you are dealing with humans, and humans are complicated in general. 


You have to make it easy for them to understand your analysis because sometimes your analysis is going to be fairly complicated, so as you think about the productisation, as you think about that product mindset, you have to really think about ok, what am I actually trying to impact? And how am I solving for that? How is this going to help solve for that? That constant refinement is super important in order for you to be effective and also efficient in your work.  


David Green: It would be good for us to talk about a bit of an example here. I would love to hear about the work that you have done within Salesforce, and the people analytics team, on skills inference and how the principles for effective people analytics that you have just described, helped ensure the success of that project?


Ernest Ng: Yeah. The way I think about it is, skills is one of those investment areas that we have been working on for the past 2+ years. And to be honest, I think it hasn't paid out completely yet. So, the bet hasn't paid out completely yet, but our work in skills and understanding skills, has really influenced how we think about internal mobility, career pathing, interviewing, and also all of these new AI, HR, or HRAI vendors and what they are doing. 


So more about our projects. The project was our attempt to understand the skill sets that make up jobs and whether or not we could understand similar skill sets. And as such, we started with job descriptions, resumes, open-sourced role descriptions, like O*NET, if you are familiar with those databases, to really start to understand co-occurrence of skills. These co-occurrence of skills, form patterns of distinct skill clusters for every job, that then we can map every job into two-dimensional vector space really to see how jobs were similar to each other.

This then became the foundation for our internal job recommendation algorithm, but it could also then be used for career development recommendations, mentor matching. And so, this basic research that allowed us to really understand co-occurrence of skills and skills in general, allowed us to get smarter about how do we think about skills as the foundation for how jobs are to be done.

Also, I know there are many vendors out there that say that they can do the same thing and actually we have partnered with some of them around doing this work, but in my mind, without the investment that we made into that, we wouldn't actually be very good critical evaluators of all of these tools as well.

And so that is where I think the investment piece has paid off is it allowed us to be smarter about approaching this specific area of work.


David Green: And what is interesting about what you just talked about there, and I have said this before on previous episodes of the podcast, it is almost like having this skills data provides a bit of a link between what have been quite siloed HR practices, such as internal mobility, such as learning and career development, such as identifying mentors, and then I guess workforce planning can bounce off all of that. Which is so important.

And as you said, it is one of those investment areas that may not pay off straight away, but that could pay off quite significantly in the future as the organisation continues to grow.  


Ernest Ng: Yeah. I think skills is fundamental to the future of HR. Understanding skills is definitely important and so the smarter you can get around understanding how skills influences all of those different HR processes, the better you are able to then think about, how are you going to scale it? How are you going to make it repeatable? And without that basic skills protocols and understanding, it is going to be hard to design anything that is repeatable and scalable. 


David Green: So, we talked a little bit about enabling the rest of HR. I think we have agreed, and you have made very powerful commentary around how, as people analytics teams, we have to get involved in this and we need to support our colleagues in HR to learn what they need to know, so we can enable them and then to help scale the work that they will be doing and ultimately benefit the organisation and the workforce.  

Now, what are some of the things that you have done at Salesforce, to help enable HR colleagues with people analytics?  


Ernest Ng: I mean, it is the hard work of spending time and investments with our colleagues and helping them really think about their area of business critically. In terms of really sitting down with them and helping them think through their metrics. Think through, what is their success criteria? How do they know that they are going to be successful? Then operationalising those into measurable variables.

And so that process is important. That process is super valuable to building that trusted relationship with your stakeholder, so that they are not resistant to any evaluation that you are going to do on their program. Part of that is because they want to constantly be better. So, I think that is where the enablement piece really comes in is it's not just enabling them on the products that you create in the dashboards and the analysis but enabling them to think about their business in a data informed way as opposed to just, this is what I have done in the past.

We talked about increased complexity and increased variability by geographies and all these things, that HR is going to have to face in the future and is facing right now, and so gone are the days where you can just roll out a program that has been benchmarked, or that companies have done in the past. You have to really be able to think about your work critically and be able to get that data to refine the work, as things in the environment change.

And so, the enablement piece is really around helping your stakeholders think through that process, and then you create that product to help them monitor and help them really drive those success criteria.

So, Salesforce has a futurist who helps us think about all the various scenarios that could happen. He has been telling us that we should be expecting more uncertainty, moving forward. And so, we should be prepared, and I think as HR, we should be prepared with more data to guide us through these uncharted waters. If organisations want to be more resilient in this uncertainty, I think people analytics is going to have to take a more critical role in guiding HR around this.   


David Green: And I guess we have seen that in the last 18 months. Listening to you and a seeing speakers at some of the virtual conferences that have been happening over the last 18 months, and talking to some of your peers in other organisations as well, it is clear that people analytics has been absolutely invaluable to those organisations that have invested in it, invested well in it, and supporting them understand firstly, how employees are feeling about suddenly having to work exclusively remotely from home, helping the organisations themselves adapt to that and what it means. Supporting managers having to manage remote teams, which they may not necessarily have had to do before and then the whole piece, as you talked about, around as we start to go back, hopefully, to the workplace at some point, what does that look like? How do we do that to ensure that the organisation and our employees are going to be successful? And then, how do we manage that on an ongoing basis? 
It is just clear that people analytics is front and centre of all those conversations as well. So hopefully any executive that had any doubt about the role of people analytics has had those questions answered over the last 18 months or so.

Finally, the question that we are asking everyone on this particular series of the podcast. How can HR help the business identify the critical skills for the future?

You have talked a little bit about this already actually, so I am guessing this will fall into your investment. 
 

Ernest Ng: Yeah. I think it is thinking about those hard skills and what new skills are going to be vital. But while HR does need to be more data-driven, we can't forget that our role in HR is to work with humans, and we can't forget that we are human resources. The function is human resources and there is just something special about humans, that businesses can't forget about.

So, I think to answer your question as how HR can help businesses identify the critical skills for the future, I think it is HR’s role to really identify those humans skills. Success from anywhere roles, the ability to cultivate human connection, to build trust with each other, to drive productivity, to manage wellbeing, is going to be the most critical, in my opinion.  

So partially this is because I was schooled in the Peter Drucker philosophy of management, and one of the things that he said is “Integrity is the very essence of management” And that is something I think that HR is best positioned to help the business do, is to remember that it is management's responsibility to be there for their employees, with integrity.  
 

David Green: So, the thing there for all of us in HR is, don't forget the H in HR, the human element of that.

Well Ernest, as I always do, I have really enjoyed discussing people analytics with you and the great work that you're doing at Salesforce. Thanks for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast.

Can you let listeners know how can they stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, if you do social media or find out more about your work?  
 

Ernest Ng: Yeah. Obviously, there is the Salesforce blog, we talk about a lot of the various, success from anywhere, type of work that we are doing there. I am not super active on Twitter, but you can follow me on Twitter @ng_ernest. And you can reach out via LinkedIn as well, I am pretty searchable, pretty unique name on LinkedIn. Happy to connect.  


David Green: Well Ernest, thanks very much again, for being on the show. It has been really fascinating to learn more about the success from anywhere approach and the role of people analytics and as I said, it is always a pleasure so thank you very much.