Reimagining the Post-2020 Employee Experience

Dion Hinchcliffe

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Title: About Dion Hinchcliffe Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, bestselling author, enterprise architect, industry analyst, and noted keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in digital strategy, the future of work, and enterprise IT. He works with the leadership teams of large enterprises as well as software vendors to raise the bar for the art-of-the-possible in their digital capabilities. He is currently Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Dion is also currently an executive fellow at the Tuck School of Business Center for Digital Strategies. He is a globally recognized industry expert on the topics of digital transformation, digital workplace, enterprise collaboration, API…...

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We currently find ourselves living in rather suddenly altered times. The way we work has dramatically transformed, and all of us have now lived through some form major personal and professional disruption. Even what we must collectively prioritize in our work has shifted dramatically in many cases as well.

Organizations are also discovering themselves spending much of their energy managing the consequences of a global pandemic as well as emerging worldwide societal issues, all while coping with a very uncertain and impossible to ignore global economic outlook. As this takes place, our key institutions -- needed at their most in this moment -- seem to having trouble finding their footing in this era of high complexity, pervasive interconnectedness, and a combined sense of profound inequality/disparity.  

As organizations today, if we're not threatened outright with survival then it's at least wholesale transformation by industry. We are still fully appreciating the dramatic recent dislocations and momentous shifts in our underlying assumptions about nearly everything we do to manage and operate our businesses. It's certainly very challenging to grapple with all of this, much less maintain a clear sense of trajectory and purpose.

However, within this sea change of events there is in fact a key dimension of our organizations that has perhaps been the most profoundly disturbed. It's also the most important element to reach whatever new operational model(s) we must move to. Unfortunately, this dimension is also one that has historically received comparatively little long-term strategic investment and has usually been mired in low prioritization, technical debt, and benign neglect.

Yes, I am referring to what is now referred to as the employee experience. For the uninitiated, this view considers both the broad and specific needs of the worker, then establishes a readily navigable physical and digital journey through which workers can engage and collaborate together with each other, key stakeholders, and the wider organization to meet shared goals and objectives. It's how the worker experiences how the business runs.

The Employee Experience Is "In Play" Like No Time In History

The employee experience, now that we understand it more fully, is the literal realization of the worker/organization compact. In short, it represents how we can transform combined human collaboration and technology assets into outcomes that matter to us all. How easy the experience is to use, how it sustains us as human beings, how effective it is to the business, how much it costs, the way it helps us uphold our highest beliefs, goals, and aspirations, and so much more are not only made possible by the nature of the employee experience, but are the essential dimensions of it.

But, as I've often ruefully noted over the years, when I put together a top ten list of yearly business priorities for almost any sized organization, the employee experience invariably falls right outside of it. Regardless of why this is -- and there are many reasons with 46% of employers saying they still have no stated strategy for it  -- it's safe to say that those days, for the moment at least, are currently over. Overnight transformation of the employee experience has now happened, to create one that is now mostly virtual, more self-sufficient, self-service, and highly dynamic. What's more, it's likely to stay mostly that way says poll after poll. The largest shift ever in how we work arrived in just a few weeks, but the aftermath and ramifications will be felt for a half-decade or more.

As a result of all this, as we shall see, is that the employee experience after 2020 will be very different than the employee experience prior to 2020. The following is my best current analysis of what it will look like.

Insight #1: Employee experience is now a top priority of organizations for the first time in recent memory. But the full scope of the needed changes will require -- and mostly receive -- serious commitment to achieve.

Taking a look at the figure below, we can see a primary list of the major inflections that reached an active transition point this year, mostly due to the pandemic. Many were years in coming, but languished and did not achieve significant breakthrough until 2020.

As I found in many of my exploratory industry conversations which I conducted to help inform the views presented here, there's almost too much to take in, a hallmark of the sheer scope of the today's challenges. The dependencies, as we like to say in the technology world, are extensive, as many of these threads are connected together when it comes to the new shifts that will impact any new and/or updated employee experience. 

Managing fast, forced change is perhaps a dominant theme of these major inflections, which has long been happening steadily in the realm of technology progress. But with events like COVID-19 and the recent large-scale civil protests on racial disparities, we see deep and profound change is not only looked to as important to address in a sustained fashion, it is seen as mandatory now.

The second theme is a shift in the employment contract, with workers not as tied to individual employers and their goals, but more involved in the bigger picture of their lives and the purpose their work brings to themselves and the world at large. That latter point is of outsized importance to Gen-Z, with 93% reporting it affects their choice of where to work. Thus there has been a growing push against the short-term thinking that the financial markets have over-emphasized for years. Now workers are now thinking about their careers, their greater social responsibilities, their desire to see positive change in the world, and seeking to have these aspects realized more effectively in their employee experience.

Other inflections are more a result of the fraught situation of the world today. These include a) an increasing emphasis on the wellbeing of workers, b) developing new models for work that are more resilient and less easy to disrupt when large changes happen, and c) delivering on work methods more suited to our future state, which is more distributed, more remote, and more virtual than it ever has been in the past. These include key digital work skills like network leadership.

Another overarching theme, which I've been forming as a critical underlying hypothesis, is a growing urgency to move away from industrial age economies of scale when it comes to managing employee experience, where one-sized-fits-all was sought. With today's technologies, we can now provide locally adapted experiences with a granularity approaching a 1:1 level of personalization, but nearly as inexpensively as a cookie cutter model. When mass customization is a cheap as same-for-everyone scale, you can meet individual needs far better with the same level of investment/effort. This does require what I call complexity management of a higher order, however. In fact, that very subject has now become a top IT issue, according to a just-completed CIO survey by Cisco. I'll explore how our ability to deal with this issue well is unlocking vast new possibilities in employee experience soon.

Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are the keys to delivering this breakthrough and each have profound ramifications for employee experience. In particular, this means everyone's employee experience will eventually be both unique and optimized just and only for them. Understanding and realizing the power of this will take the next decade to fully unfold in the industry.

This leads into the last major type of inflection I'm seeing: A growing frustration with the poorly situated and outdated state of the tools that workers are given, both from managers, HR professionals, and the workers themselves (IT staff are the most pleased with what they've delivered for employee experience so far, but have some good reason not to be in my and others' estimation.) Today's employee experience is largely carried out ad hoc and on-the-fly by the worker themselves out of a vast grab bag of technologies, prior work products, data sets, and institutional knowledge. This employee experience landscape, which I dub a largely accidental one, isn't generally very elegant or effective.

A new generation of workers is also entering the workplace en masse, as I noted in my Future of Work predictions for 2020. Gen-Z isn't accepting what they find the data shows. They want the now-expected high quality digital onboarding, virtual reality training, virtual assistants, wellness tools, and real-time feedback/recognition. While before there was no organizational willingness to make the investments, now we're having to and we might as well get it right.

Insight #2: The most direct and efficient construct to address these urgent inflections in the worker journey is in the employee experience.

However, today the employee experience is spread across many physical, digital, and cultural touchpoints. While the big shift in 2020 has been to the digital, which arguably forms the majority share of the experience at this point for many of us, the usability trend in digital has actually been in the opposite direction for years. at least in the large: A growing blizzard of applications, channels, data streams, notifications, and other digital elements has created profound fragmentation that's only increasing. While all of these digital resources have value, our IT organizations and the industry as a whole has been ineffective at finding a solution to create better organization, design, structure, navigation, training, and adoption paths for all these technologies in the worker journey.

What's more, largely as a result of service gaps, users aren't waiting for IT to meet their technology needs and are sourcing technology solutions on their own. Shadow IT has now become an important part of the digital employee experience as well.

Nevertheless, a way to create what I refer to as a "center of gravity" or hub for employee experience is necessary to make it manageable. By this, I do not mean that employee experience should be centralized. It cannot be. It can be guided and influenced on high, and key personnel can create official experiences for their functions, but digital employee experience is now so vast that no centralized process could ever manage it. No, the future of employee experience is more distributed, with strong but tolerant coordination in the center. 

This leaves us with the key question of where in the technology landscape the employee experience "lives." In this, there appears to be a need for a) a more consistent digital workspace that can help workers manage growing interaction complexity, b) an ability to quickly connect their data and apps better together to solve problems, and c) finding and accessing experiences that guide them in business processes that cross a growing number of tools (sales teams, marketing, customer service, project managers, all key roles, have seen an veritable explosion in the number of tools they must use to do their job in recent years.) This must be made simpler, and the employee experience should have best practice laden digital journeys that workers can readily locate and fire up to do their job.

What we apparently need then, for lack of a better term, is some form of employee experience platform. Platform is a popular term bandied about with reverence in technology circles -- and usually for good reason -- as a uniquely powerful way to organize and marshal concentrated resources around a problem space. Employee experience is front-and-center that problem space for businesses in spades today.

The problem space in employee experience is evident to most of us at the moment: Workers are far too siloed and isolated in their new remote digital outposts. They are working without in-person support and enablement that we've invested in for decades. The remote work digital employee experience we have now was never designed to be the primary employee experience and it suffers badly in many cases. The ever-growing digital employee experience we do have is far too hard to learn and use effectively. Finally, we don't have the digital literacy and leadership skills necessary to fully exploit the massive investment in technology that we have -- and must continue to make -- in order for all of this to work well. This list is not exhaustive. There are numerous other issues, but addressing these systematically first would go a long way.

Insight #3: Transforming employee experience will require a platform solution of the highest order, even if no single platform will likely ever deliver it.

In spending a great deal of time in the last few years analyzing and redesigning modern digital workplaces and employee experiences, several trends have become evident to me: Most apps and data need to integrate in some way to service business needs. And the more apps and data there are, the more true that is, which is why virtually every tech solution has gone out of its way to add app integrations. But they tend to be shallow, general purpose, and in my experience, used to a very limited degree except for one or two critical integrations. For those not tracking this trend, this means that urgently sought after integration needs still isn't being met by the market, by current supply, by a large margin.

Instead, workers become the glue in the systems, the manual laborer knitting it all together. They must make their digital tools and data work together by hand in their employee experience. This is a very poor way of meeting worker needs with technology. While it's still better than using no technology at all, there is enormous headroom for improvement. Yet until recently, it was too hard to build and maintain employee experiences that connected together a critical mass of key business systems and their data together to say, design a personalized end-to-end new hire onboarding process, or create a marketing campaign, run a project, build a team, or solve a supply chain issue, etc. This difficulty is no longer necessary and must be steadily addressed by more modern approaches to producing a more directed and organized employee experience.

Fortunately, we are now witnessing an explosion of solution categories that can indeed enable enterprises to more quickly craft and produce world-class employee experiences that better connect people, apps, and data into interactive, guideded, and highly collaborative scenarios. Many underlying technical trends, from microservices and low-code/no-code, to experience management systems, digital adoption tools, and others have come together to create an incredible palette for developing a next-generation employee experience. What's more, assuming the right IT foundation is in place -- and big if, because most large organizations have reams of technical debt -- employee experience can be treated as a literal entity that can be organized, structured, produced, orchestrated, measured, and governed. Just not centrally, for it's clear the employee experience will be created by everyone, albeit certain central functions a bit more offically, such as HR, IT, comms, legal, operations, supply chain, customer care, and so on.

Whether an organization finds a unifying platform that can bring order to employee experience at the right level of abstraction and usability, or brings the pieces together by cobbling together their own, we can now identify a clear gap in our employee experience portfolio, namely a platform that connects the rest of the organization together and allows digital and even physical resources to be marshalled into experiences in a rapid, malleable, and highly cost effective way. That the elements depicted above and below are necessary in a more efficient and higher production rate form, I am highly confident. In fact, this is actually an internal version of my experience integration stack view, another urgent industry-wide situation in that prior to recently, personalized digital experiences were far too hard to create at scale out of the raw technology and data that we had. Due to the trends I just enumerated, this is being ever-more solved for customers. Now we are having to -- and finally able to -- solve it for employees too.

The upshot: Focusing on delivering great employee experience via better integration, design, production, and management is about to become a major top-level -- as well as locally distributed -- activity in most organizations in the next few years.

Insight #4: Employee experience is all-compassing, but to deliver on it successfully it must consistently result in simpler, easier worker journeys than before.

Its scope must be vast, but the result must be to streamline, remove friction, and accelerate work in a more sustainable fashion that meets shared longer term goals. Divide and conquer must be the approach.

In analyzing the trends going into 2020, and seeing how a step change in employee experience was required in remote work, and how most organizations were only able to do the bare minimum, and it's clear that we have so much more work to do. And returning to work is now the next discussion. What kind of employee experience should our workers return to? This will require some of the most sophisticated and far-reaching thinking most of us have ever done in our careers.

To aid in this, I've spent the last few weeks assembling a vast visual of most of the key moving parts of this more holistic model of employee experience, so we can see the full fabric upon it must be wrought. Some have commented how complex this view is, and I concur. A major point in assembling such a view is to discourage IT, HR, or any single function from imposing a single type of view on it or owning employee experience altogether. It's far too broad, deep,and nuanced for that ever to be possible. Certainly experience production (meaning the creation of experience-led scenarios supported by existing apps, data, and team/communities) for certain official functions would belong to the groups responsible for them, though even these might be extended by local groups who want or need say, a special onboarding or project management process for a valid reason.

Ultimately, achieving the necessary variety, customization, personalization, diversity, and local variability in employee experience requires the explicit encouragement of decentralized activity across the organization in the support and management of employee experience. In other words, we're all in employee experience now. This means an inclusive approach is in my view the only possible approach to meeting the scale and distributed nature of the challenge.

How Will You Meet the New Employee Experience Imperative?

There is so much to examine, explore, and explain in this rapidly emerging model of the employee experience stack. To help facilitate this industry conversation, I'll be breaking these views down into sections and going through them in more detail soon. In meantime, a big thanks to my employee experience industry advisory board for giving me early (and almost exclusively positive) feedback on this model.

I also welcome your own comments and observations online and via e-mail in order to make this approach to employee experience as useful, accessible, and actionable as possible.

Credit for advisory board contributions to the detailed stack view of employee experience above goes to: James Dellow, Rachel Happe, Jane McConnell, Andrew Nebus, Mariano Suarez-Battan, Neil Morgan, and Chee Chin Liew.

Additional Reading

It's Time to Think About the Post-2020 Employee Experience

How Work Will Evolve in a Digital Post-Pandemic Society

Revisiting How to Cultivate Connected Organizations in an Age of Coronavirus

My 2020 Predictions for the Future of Work

Working in a coronavirus world: Strategies and tools for staying productive | ZDNet

A Checklist for a Modern Core Digital Workplace and/or Intranet

Creating the Modern Digital Workplace and Employee Experience

The Challenging State of Employee Experience and Digital Workplace Today

It’s Time to Think Differently About Business Apps—And the Future of Customer-Facing Work

It was just before the dawn of the 21st century and I was a young, fresh-faced analyst covering technology services. My focus was on application implementation services, the denim-and-shovels analog in the ERP goldrush. It was a busy time. Companies were desperate to plow ahead with ERP projects, both because they wanted to be viewed as investment-worthy by stock markets and to avoid a nasty little problem called Y2K.

Back then the focus was on “having” or “doing” ERP. If your business didn’t or wasn’t, you were behind the times. For all the high-minded talk about business process reengineering, the reality was much more prosaic. More often than not, businesses found themselves with major delays and project cost overruns, usually resulting in big cuts to user training or adoption programs.

The system was the thing. It encompassed everything: data structures and storage, processing and workflow, and user interfaces. The people just had to figure out how to work with it. Actually using it required employees to conform to the way the system was designed. Interfaces typically reflected what was most straightforward from a technology perspective, not what best supported the work a given employee or department was trying to do. The system ruled, and if it didn’t work the way you wanted it to, you could add your complaints to an ever-expanding list of projects the IT department was already working on to change it. Picture the scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Ark of the Covenant gets put into a vast government storage warehouse. That kind of list.

Fast forward to 2020. A lot has changed. Business applications are much less monolithic and much more flexible. Some are even easy to use. But for the most part, our concepts of enterprise software still center on what the software does, not what we’re trying to achieve with it.

It’s time to think differently about business applications. Rather than concentrating on functional areas, we need a mental model that helps us to understand the capabilities required to achieve our objectives. Things like engaging our customers effectively, creating ongoing conversations, and shaping great experiences, for example—the building blocks that underpin successful businesses.

A different way of thinking about enterprise software will help us to make better decisions about what we need to invest in, the role(s) each element fills, and how it all works together (read: integrates) to support the way we want to operate.

To do that, stop thinking about enterprise applications in terms of the functions they support. Instead, think of three core elements of business technology that constantly interact: data flows, processes and workflows, and user interfaces (see Figure).

Is this a gross oversimplification? Absolutely. But it’s a very useful abstraction when it comes to mapping out who needs what where, and the most effective way of presenting it.

Let’s break down what each element includes:

Interfaces

Think of interfaces as the digital workspaces an individual employee uses to do their job. This is what they log into when they start work for the day. It’s the place where they find the information and resources they need. The appropriate interface—what’s incorporated within it and how information or functions are presented—depends in large part on the individual role. That will look very different for a customer service agent, a salesperson, or a business analyst in corporate strategy, for example, though there may be common elements across all three. Personal preference also plays a significant role. How I prefer to see data may be completely different from my closest colleague.

Really good interfaces incorporate a variety of data sources and functional capabilities. They are most effective when they’re designed to anticipate and support the way people actually do their work. Familiar is good; intuitive and effective are better. And if you can manage all three—magic.

Processes and Workflows

In any business, there is a crowded landscape of business processes and workflows. Some are formally encoded in applications, others are informal or even manual. As more processes become digital, there’s a greater degree of integration and automation. Application configuration and integration address much of this. The growing use of low-code/no-code workflow management tools extends automation even further.

For any type of work, the crucial question is which process areas are relevant or important. Who is responsible for overseeing or assuring which processes? How does that process and communication flow work when a process extends beyond one team or department? What processing happens where?

Data Flows

Simply cataloguing all of the different sources and repositories of data—even just customer data—is a never-ending task. And as important as it is to know which data are where, it’s even more crucial to understand where given data elements—or analysis and insights derived from those data—need to go in order to support different kinds of work. Data is the lifeblood of any organization. While every part of the business needs access to it, each needs different elements in particular forms and cadences. The customer data that’s most essential to the billing department differs greatly from what’s most important to marketing. But they all need to have a consistent view of the same data.

Framing the types of data, where they originate, the forms in which they are most useful, and for whom they are most relevant offers greater clarity in determining priorities.

Doing Things Differently, Doing Different Things

Every part of the business is doing a certain kind of work—whether it’s finance, operations, HR, or the vast array of customer-facing interactions. Marketing, sales, and customer service are only the most obvious. Each department or team has its own set of tools, some of which are company-wide, others that are unique to them, and some that are in between. Different groups have distinct priorities, types of work, and ways of working.

The key point here is that different types of work require distinct data inputs, specific process flows or portions of broader processes, and tailored environments in which to present information in order to support decisions and actions.

This becomes even more crucial as we adapt our businesses to rapidly changing demands and circumstances. To be successful, we need to find different, better ways of working—and sometimes change what we’re doing in the first place.

With this in mind, and by abstracting enterprise software across these three elements, it’s far easier to understand where there are gaps and what the options are to fill them. Because the biggest challenge to today is not a lack of technology tools. It’s determining the most appropriate combination, in terms of both capabilities and return on investment, to support the work your business does—and the way you want to do it.

Business Reboot 2020: Data-to-Decisions Priorities For Getting Back to Business

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

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Survive or thrive? The underlying conditions of the business matter more than business conditions. Get on with analysis and planning.

As we approach the summer of 2020, much of North America -- and the world -- is getting back to business. It’s clearly not business as usual, with continued social distancing and uneven, half-steps back to business. With recovery in mind, here are some of the latest points of advice from my Constellation Research “Post Pandemic Playbook” for data-to-decisions initiatives.

Underlying Conditions for Business

Just as certain underlying medical conditions make people more susceptible to COVID-19, certain underlying business conditions can make or break a company in a challenging economic climate. Being an analyst, I’ve come up with a two-by-two matrix (below) to explain. On the vertical axis are resources and debt, while the horizontal axis weighs the impact – lasting or not -- of the pandemic and lockdown.

Resources exist in many forms. Large companies, for example, are in a better position, generally, to absorb economic blows, than are small companies, but there’s much more to it than that. Other resources include access to capital, financial health, brand equity, large and sticky customer bases, business agility, and seasoned, innovative leadership. All these resources can be counted in an organization’s favor, and many small companies have more of them than troubled large companies.

High debt is always a millstone around a company’s neck, and if you compound that with a deep economic impact, as we’ve seen in travel and retail, the outcome is not good. Hertz, JC Penney, Niemen Marcus and J. Crew have been the headline bankruptcies in recent weeks, and what they all had in common was high debt levels and, in most cases, questionable management practices and strategies.

At the opposite extreme there are examples of companies that have seen less-damaging economic impact. Grocery stores and drug stores never closed during the crisis, so many food supply and consumer product goods (CPG) companies are doing reasonably well. In fact, some companies, like Kimberly Clark and PepsiCo, saw big sales increases in sales in the first quarter, due in part to consumers stockpiling (and hoarding) goods before the lockdown.

Kimberly Clark reported a 14% increase in paper product sales in Q1 while PepsiCo saw strong SuperBowl snack and beverage sales followed by consumer stockpiling that sent the company’s first-quarter sales up 7%. PayPal saw a 17% increase in new accounts and a 20% increase in payment transactions in the first quarter, as organizations and consumers sought alternative payment options amid the lockdown.

The point is that it’s hard to anticipate outcomes by industry. Instead, look at underlying health, agility and leadership by company. We’re likely to see strong, agile companies consolidating their positions and perhaps acquiring vulnerable rivals that lack resources or that are saddled with debt.

Move to Fine-Grained, Low-Latency Analysis

Even firms that discovered a silver lining in an otherwise dark cloud, like Kimberly Clark, have pulled their financial guidance for 2020 because uncertainty remains. This is one reason I’ve been advocating the adoption of more precise analyses driven by more granular, low-latency data. Timely, fine-grained insight will help organizations better understand big differences in business resumption within countries, states, cities, counties and even suburbs and exurbs. Aggregations at the level of global regions and regions within countries are less useful than they once were. Similarly, predictive models built on old data may need to be retrained or entirely rebuilt for today’s very different customer behaviors.

Demand-driven forecasting is nothing new, but it can make a significant difference when dealing with the rapidly shifting market conditions we’ve seen over the last couple of months. Heading into the lockdown in February, global systems integration and consulting firm Infosys helped a major CPG company to harness near-real time point-of-sale (POS) data, as well as weather, trade promotions and competitive data, to improve the accuracy and timeliness of demand forecasts. Previously the company relied on shipment data, which would have totally missed demand spikes experienced heading into the lockdown in mid-March.

A CPG Pulse report on comparative "essential product" sales and out of stock (OOS) conditions in Georgia and New York in Q1 2020. Source: Infosys

POS-driven analyses of sales in New York State, for example, spotted panic buying setting in on March 12. Sales of the company’s products in the state increased 51% compared to the prior month. As a result, out-of-stock (OOS) conditions spiked by 28%. However, the early warning provided by timely analysis helped the CPG company stabilize the supply problems by March 17. Overall, the use of granular, store-by-store daily POS data has improved forecast accuracy by 70% to 85%. These forecasts are used to accelerate the delivery dates of firm orders, within the guidelines of service level agreements, to prevent stock-outs. The typical improvement across all states for the company has been a 2% increase in overall sales.  

Adopt Continuous Planning  

I’ve been writing about the need for frequent, iterative financial planning and analysis for years, but the need has been all the more acute in today’s climate. The leading firms I have encountered have stepped up from monthly to weekly or even daily planning to respond to changes in supply chains, sales, financial results, and human resources requirements. Cloud-based planning platforms make it far easier to support continuous and collaborative planning among finance and business leaders. But what if your organization is locked into antiquated, spreadsheet-based methods? Is it realistic to deploy a new platform in the middle of such a tumultuous period?

During last week’s Planful Virtual Tour, customer SmartyPants Vitamins presented on a focused, 20-day planning deployment that stayed on track amid the lockdown in March. SmartyPants has been an innovator and challenger in the vitamin category. It launched in 2011 with a single product: affordable children’s multi-vitamin gummies without artificial ingredients. The company subsequently branched out into gummy vitamins for adults and even pets, and in 2016 it surpassed $25 million in sales.

Early in the first quarter of 2020, the company decided on a phased deployment of the Planful, cloud-based planning platform rather than a big-bang deployment addressing the entire balance sheet. “We decided to focus on sales and trade spending, as opposed to the total balance sheet, because sales drives the rest of the organization and how we allocate spending,” explained Cheryl Chow, the company’s Senior Finance Manager. “Sales was already on a monthly cadence, and we needed something dynamic that could pull in actual results data and then reforecast the rest of the year quickly and at a very detailed level.”

Cheryl Chow, Senior Finance Manager at SmartyPants Vitamins, said the company's focused planning deployment went off as planned in March despite work-from-home challenges.

Little did the Marina Del Rey, CA-based company know that its March 2020 project would soon have to cope with that state’s pandemic lockdown. The switch to working from home definitely “added a level of complexity” to the project, said Chow, but the team managed to stick to its 20-business-day deployment schedule with some parallel execution of the four deployment steps: Step 1. Understand revenue drivers and templates and test modeling hierarchies; Step 2. Simultaneously import existing data into Planful, including historical actuals and the existing budget; Step 3. Build out and test reports and reconciling data disparities; Step 4. Roll out new planning and reporting capabilities to the sales team with thorough training.

The crisis confirmed that the decision to start with sales and trade-spend forecasting was the right approach. "Because we were doing this during a period of craziness with Coronavirus, our demand-planning team really needed weekly forecasts,” Chow explains. “They use details available in the sales and trade-spend forecasts to do demand planning because these are the drivers of the business, so it was clear it's what we needed to focus on in the first phase."

SmartyPants wrapped up forecasting sales and trade-spend for the full year and it has developed preliminary sales and trade-spend forecasts for 2021. The company has also moved into the second phase of its Planful deployment, addressing operating expenses.

“Just two months in we’re now wrapping up operating expense templates and starting forecasting for the rest of 2020 and preliminary 2021,” explained Chow. “That's a huge win because I don't want to have to manage dozens of spreadsheets from departments maintaining separate budgets and planning.”

In a planned third phase, set for the second half of 2020, SmartyPants will extend the platform to address cost of goods sold and the overall balance sheet.

In response to the many companies now desperate to get to faster and more agile planning, Planful has come up with fixed-cost, 30-day deployment offerings for specific financial planning and analysis use cases that are currently in high demand. These include cash-flow forecasting, workforce planning, monthly close and consolidation, and multi-dimensional ad hoc analysis. I’d expect other vendors to follow Planful’s approach of offering focused, fixed-cost, fixed-time deployments during this recovery period.

I’ve been around long enough to have seen tough economic conditions before, from the real estate collapse of 1987 to the dot-com bust of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2007. The agile and adaptive companies respond, rebound and lead the way back to better times.

Dear CMOs: Should You Sit This One Out?

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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Today could very well have started with an early morning crisis call that was dominated by the question, “HOW do we respond to THIS?” That call might have happened Friday afternoon…perhaps over the weekend. Some of you might be having this call right now.

In times of crisis it falls to the marketers, communications leaders and customer advocates to start to communicate, especially when that crisis feels as hurtful and impossible as the current tidal wave of emotion sweeping the United States. We have just spent the past several months working to assure (then reassure) our customers that we are “in this together” as the coronavirus spread across the globe stealing lives and wreaking havoc on economies. Now, we have a painful race conversation topped by outbreaks of violence and senseless brutality. It is starting to feel like we just can’t get a win these days.

It is understandable that we want to have a position – a statement of where our brands stand on the issues that impact our customers and our people. But in times like this, we need to stop and really think through the hard questions before saying a word.

Please let’s be clear here: I am NOT advocating for silence. In fact, I whole heartedly support any brand willing and able to take a stand in support of equality, humanity and lifting a community up. What I am offering is a bit of candor.

Making a statement and taking a stand today must be met with continuous action tomorrow and into the next days, weeks and years. Fall down on that promise…break the trust built by your statement and you will lose your customer.

Be bold. Take a stand. Just don’t walk into this lightly.

When embarking on a crisis or support statement…regardless if it is this week or the next crisis around the corner…I suggest asking yourself these honest questions:

1. Is Your Brand an AUTHENTIC part of THIS Conversation? Now is NOT the time to test this. Your gut has already answered this question before you got to this line. Most marketers know…instantly…if they are part of the conversation or part of the distraction. If you are part of the distraction…sit this one out.
    
2. What Stand Feels Right for Your Brand, Your People and Your Customers? This isn’t just about one community…one audience…it is about ALL of your audiences. This is as much about your customers as it is about the people who come to work to build your brand, your products, your promises every day. Have you taken the time to really listen and understand what is important about today's conversation in their words and in their lives? What IS at the heart of the issue for them? Is it the violence? Is it equality? Is it shouting at the top of their lungs, but never being heard? What stand and what statement will best respect and reflect what you have heard? If you don’t know…sit this one out.
    
3. Can You and WILL YOU Follow Thru? Any communication you send out today will be remembered tomorrow. Case in point: The NFL released what, on paper, feels like an earnest and heartfelt statement against police brutality and disproportionate violence against the African American community. The response was swift, with words like hypocrisy and false being added to the league’s sentiment. Amazon released a similar statement denouncing the “inequitable and brutal treatment of Black people.” Hours later, responses emerged pointing to stories of protests from minority workers about working conditions. While I am confident that the words issued by the NFL and Amazon were earnest and intended to be a unifying rallying cry, they were used as opportunities to bring up history and highlight inauthentic voices and moments. Right or wrong, the NFL’s stand against players “taking a knee” in protest discounted them from being seen as an authentic participant in today’s conversation. Will your brand be able to push past any noise of the past to be part of a future conversation? Will your brand WANT to be part of any future conversations? If you don’t know…sit this one out.
    
4. How Long Will You or Can You Demonstrate Your Commitment? Unlike showing support for a single cause or a single event, the current social conversation is a lengthy one. This isn’t writing a check to a charity of choice. This conversation will not go away this week, at the end of the protests or even after the next election. They will continue and be reignited with the inevitability of the “next time it happens.” And because this is a matter of when and not if the conversation reignites, will your brand be there again, reaffirming your commitment to the cause and taking an even bigger step to show support? If you don’t know…please, sit this one out.
    
5. Why Do You Want to Respond? THIS is the most important question to answer...and answer honestly. Do you want to respond because everyone else has? Did your competition beat you to a statement…so it is now or never? Do you think it will keep you relevant in the conversation? Did someone tell you your GenZ customers expect you to respond? This is NOT the conversation to test out your tone of empathy. Unless your brand has an authentic voice in this conversation…unless there is both empathy and honesty interlaced with every word...this is NOT the time to experiment with social consciousness. Virtue signaling does not mean your virtue or your signal is not earnest and pure. But today’s debate and today’s customer has gotten enough chatter and has very little bandwidth for more noise. They crave authentic voices. Trust me…if you are still not sure…sit this one out.

Here is what some people might not tell you. It is 100% OK to say no…to admit you don’t really WANT to have a voice in the current events of the day. But you need to be honest about that now…not a day after a statement goes out. If you don’t want to respond…don’t. The reality of communicating in a crisis is that best intentions don’t cut it. Now, more than ever, nothing less than an authentic communication that is in line with your brand vision, direction and purpose will do. And yes...if you are in doubt...ask us. Advise is our stock in trade. And we are here to help. Just be prepared for me to tell you...it might be best to sit this one out.