As Oracle puts it, “The current economy is service driven. To win, your organization must focus on two things: taking care of customers and taking care of employees.”
Sounds rather obvious, but what does a software company have to do with helping employees take care of their work-life balance? Well, it seems like quite a bit.
Jeanne C. Meister’s and Karrie Willyerd’s Harvard Business Review article “Mentoring Millennials” from May 2010 said, “The makeup of the global workforce is undergoing a seismic shift: In four years Millennials – the people born between 1977 and 1997 – will account for nearly half the employees in the world. Millennials view work as a key part of life, not a separate activity that needs to be ‘balanced’ by it.”
Clearly Oracle has listened to this advice and has decided that adding functionality to address this group is a critical piece in helping companies become more competitive. They believe this makes their offering much more compelling in the sea of cloud based solutions.
Oracle has been working on a new category of innovative applications that are designed to drive employee engagement and satisfaction. That’s a good thing because a happy, engaged employee will be great for your customer service and have a positive impact on your internal employee engagement and your recruiting efforts.
Oracle’s tools help employees successfully achieve their business performance goals in ways that align with both their personal and career aspirations. Sounds interesting? Once you get a better look at these you will agree that Oracle is onto something.
I sat down with Mark Bennett, Product Strategy Director at Oracle, for a more detailed look into the concept, current product offerings and a peek into the future. Read on to see what this is all about..
Q: Mark, will you start by providing me with an overview of what Oracle’s Work Life solutions are? What do they do?
A: Work Life solutions is a name for a category of Applications and Features that Oracle is releasing over time. It is a combination of individual applications that may be licensed while others are already features included within Oracle HCM Cloud. It really consists of three areas at the moment:
My Reputation: This is an application, also known as Oracle Workforce Reputation Management, which has been available since Q4 2013.
My Wellness: This is an application that we have previewed in Oracle HCM Cloud Release 9 and will be generally available in the next release.
My Competitions: This is not a separate application; instead it is a feature of Oracle HCM Cloud previewed in Release 9 and will be generally available in the next release.
Those three are what will comprise Oracle’s Work Life Solutions initially.
Q: What was Oracle’s motivation for developing these capabilities?
A: We wanted to do two things. From an industry perspective, we wanted to demonstrate our continued dedication to and our investment in innovation—the measured investments that allow us to bring new tools to the market to help customers solve important problems. In this case, tools for employees that allow them to proactively take control of how they are viewed (i.e. reputation), how they function (i.e. wellness), how they work on self-improvement, etc.
From a societal perspective, we saw, like many have, that work-life issues are a big part of many people’s experience and we think it’s important to provide these tools to help address these issues. Personal Life and Work are becoming so integrated, given the technological advances in communication and self-measurement, that we need to provide new tools for employees to manage the intersection of work and life more effectively, making them happier employees and individuals simultaneously.
Q: Do you see this as a product differentiator compared to the other Cloud HCM Providers?
A: We do.
Q: Why?
A: We see the bringing together of these tools and connecting them to the enterprise as a product differentiator. Some of these tools might be available elsewhere, but Oracle is providing a more complete and integrated set of tools, which we feel is important when you are trying to see how the multiple facets of your work and life interact. Oracle is trying to align the interest of employees with the interests of organizations in a way that is driven from the employee and provides the clearest value to the employer.
Q: Can we do a deeper dive?
A:
My Reputation: Not only are we performing more sophisticated, multi-factor analysis of an individual’s social profile, graph, activities, and content, we can go beyond to include other enterprise activities as well. More importantly, we are relating the insight from this analysis that is relevant to the enterprise in ways that are actionable by the individual. Finally, all of this is done such that it respects the individual’s opt-in and privacy needs in a secure fashion.
My Wellness: We are taking a broad array of wellness measures that includes an extensible architecture for connecting to the wide selection of wearables. But rather than simply being a platform for aggregating the wellness data, we are relating it to the enterprise in ways that provide actionable insight to the employee. From this insight, they can take action to improve both their engagement as well as productivity. We also enable the HR and benefits organizations to manage wellness programs, including tracking aggregate metrics such as total participation, which can be used to help reduce healthcare costs through rebates from carriers or from reduced claims.
My Competitions: We are making contests easy for customers to create. These opt-in contests are relevant to the customers’ business objectives in a way that engages the workforce through fun, friendly competitions that can be based on either system measurements or by participants voting. Beyond that, we are integrating these competitions into the other Work Life applications to further help employees orchestrate their actions across work-life.
Q: What kind of feedback have you been getting from customers about this new initiative?
A: Customers are both surprised and pleased. They did not expect that a large vendor like Oracle would invest in Work Life, but they are pleased as they see this as a way that they can engage, retain, and attract top talent in ways that provide an advantage in the talent marketplace. The customers that we've spoken to have immediately engaged and started to tell us what they’d like us to add next, a byproduct of the fact that much of this is being done organically – albeit manually– within organizations anyway.
Q: What is Oracle’s Ultimate Vision for Work Life Solutions?
A: Oracle wants to extend Work Life Solutions further to where both companies and their employees would both find the insight they want as well as the platform to align what they want from their relationship. At its core, the vision of Work Life Solutions is about strengthening the relationship between employer and employee by addressing these important work-life issues employees are facing, which impact their engagement, energy, creativity, and productivity.
Q: Is this something that Oracle sees as a tool for their customers to gain an edge over their competitors?
A: We do indeed. Oracle believes that these tools help customers gain an edge by driving employee engagement, energy, creativity, and productivity in new, effective ways that affect employees in authentic, intrinsically motivating ways. All of these factors being improved result in huge gains for customers. In addition, as word of mouth travels about our customers providing these tools to their employees, it will act to help them attract the top talent they are looking for.
Q: You found that you were onto something, what was it?
A: When we began developing My Reputation, it was standalone and addressed the increasing importance of social media to both employers and employees. Our team then saw what was happening with wearables and the quantified-self trends, and we developed My Wellness to address that need. It was then that we saw that these two applications, in addition to My Competitions, were addressing a new, broader need of companies and their employees. We identified this need as being centered on work-life and so we’ve started with these three applications and features. However, we know there is more to do, so we are continuing to listen to customers and employees on this important topic.
Q: What trends or themes are you hearing from customers?
A: What we are hearing from customers is what they are hearing from their employees.
Recognition/Kudos: We already have Kudos today in Oracle HCM Cloud and we are hearing that customers and their employees would like to see that expanded in scope. Customers are hearing from employees that being recognized by not only management but also their peers for their contributions as well as their achievements helps them feel highly engaged and creates stronger bonds across the organization.
Wellness: Customers are excited about Wellness and have indicated that more kinds of “trackers” such as nutrition and brain training would be welcomed. In addition, we’re hearing from customers that they would like to see capabilities like lifestyle education and additional, aggregate enterprise wellness measures added.
Competitions: Customers have indicated that additional kinds of competitions based on corporate social responsibility would be helpful, such as carbon footprint reduction initiatives or food drives.
Final Thoughts:
Oracle’s goals for this project were to demonstrate their continued dedication to and their investment in innovation, bring new tools to the market to help customers solve important problems, and provide solutions to help employees manage the intersection of work and life to make them happier employees and individuals simultaneously. Clearly they have made an excellent step in that direction with these brand new tools. The interesting thing is that this isn’t viewed as the end game for Oracle, but instead is being viewed as a starting point for a completely new category of tools which are sure to be expanded over time.
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