This article is co-authored by Matt Gee, CEO of BrightHive.
In the aftermath of mass layoffs at Google and its parent company Alphabet earlier this year, former employees immediately took to forums to question whether an algorithm had decided who would go. The company was adamant that wasn’t the case.
But the questions have lingered. In fact, they loom large over any major effort companies make to capture and use data on employees’ skills. That data can be incredibly helpful in zeroing in on gaps that need to be filled across the workforce, targeting upskilling and reskilling opportunities, and informing who to hire and promote. All things that can benefit employees.
It can also be used, however, to decide who to let go — and who’s to say it won’t be?
In fact, in one survey of HR leaders at 300 companies, 98% of them said that in the event of a recession this year they would rely on algorithms and software to reduce labor costs. They were almost unanimous, despite the fact that half of them worried that their tech might make biased recommendations.
That’s not a recipe for employee trust.
And a lack of trust will undermine any effort to gather useful skills data. Sure, you can track which employees log the most hours (a pretty useless measure of productivity, much less skill) and mine their job descriptions and performance reviews for data. But you’re not going to get them to tell you about expertise they’ve developed outside the job, or get them to take any voluntary skills assessments. They won’t tell you what education and training programs interest them, or what other jobs in the company they might want to have.
Beyond the basics, employees will still be a black box. And they’ll be more likely to intentionally mislead. Just look at what has already happened as companies have deployed technology to track what employees are doing. It’s backfired, with studies showing that employees who know they are being monitored are twice as likely to fake work.
Attempts to track and make sense of skills data could be just as counterproductive if not done right. And to do it right, companies must start with this bedrock principle: You use skills data first and foremost to create value and benefit for the employee, and then you look for ways to capture that benefit as the employer.
And that’s got to be the same bedrock principle of any service or tech provider a company uses, because third-party providers are uniquely positioned both to build ideals into concrete solutions and to serve as an outside voice of accountability. In a corner of HR that is awash in vendors, it’s all too easy to find ones who won’t question and push their employer clients to be employee-centric.
When vendors and employers put workers first, trust can grow. This starts with recognizing and building around worker autonomy. Americans value employers’ advice on career and education pathways, but that is not the same thing as wanting your company to tell you exactly what to do next.
And many corporate education and training programs, as they are designed today, effectively do that. If someone is an IT specialist I, they are expected to move into an IT specialist II role if they want to advance, and the education and training that is made available to them reflects that. That is an assembly-line approach to skills development, and the fastest way to lose someone’s trust is to treat them like a widget.
Companies that engender trust and loyalty, on the other hand, take a skills garden approach. They don’t dictate what employees learn, so much that they are consuming a steady diet of new knowledge and skills.
Like in any good garden, of course, those options are still curated based on demand and quality—and smart employers show people how different types of education and experience build into desirable career pathways, a cookbook of sorts, but they aren’t in the role of the parent telling workers which vegetables to eat. Giving employees that autonomy is essential to building trust around skills development and data.
That’s good for learning and development, and for productivity. Compared with workers at low-trust companies, those at high-trust companies report 50% higher productivity and 76% more engagement, according to research highlighted in the Harvard Business Review.
There are a lot of different approaches companies could take to addressing the trust issue, but they all start by recognizing that employees’ interests have to come first.
Skills data, and the attendant opportunities for education, should be used to help the employee grow over time. Companies will almost certainly benefit but that has to be a secondary concern.
Otherwise employees will see skills mapping as just another system that takes up time and energy but doesn’t help them do their jobs. And your skills data will be as useless as your data on time on task.
