HR Tech Preview – Creating Great Employee Experience featuring Oracle

541 – HR Tech Preview – Creating Great Employee Experience featuring Oracle

Host: Steve Boese

Guest: Chris Leone, Executive Vice President of Development at Oracle Cloud HCM

This episode of the HR Happy Hour is sponsored by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement, and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. The current business and hiring environment has redefined what it takes to succeed as an HR professional, requiring HR leaders to adapt and innovate at lightning speed to help their organizations remain competitive. Download the 2022 Paychex Pulse of HR report to discover the tools and tactics your peers are using to deliver on both HR and business objectives – faster and at scale – while still meeting the evolving needs of their employees. Visit payx.me/PHR2022 to download your copy, today.

This week, we met with Chris Leone from Oracle for an HR Technology Conference preview.

– How Oracle works with and supports customers as work evolves

– The importance of teams throughout the entire organization

– Ongoing innovation at Oracle, resulting in a 2022 Top Products Award for Oracle ME

– Communication across different types of organizations

Thank you for joining the show today!  Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we look forward to you joining us at the HR Technology Conference in September! Check out the 2022 agenda online, then register with code SB22F to save $300 on your pass here.

Transcript follows:

Steve 0:24
Hi, this is Steve Boese and welcome to a special series on the HR Happy Hour Podcast Network, where we will talk with three leading HR technology providers about all things HR Tech and the upcoming HR Technology Conference set for September 13 through 16th 2022 in Las Vegas. But first I’d like to thank our show sponsor Paychex. This episode is sponsored by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. The current business and hiring environment has redefined what it takes to succeed as an HR professional, requiring HR leaders to adapt and innovate at lightning speed to help their organizations remain competitive. Download the 2022 Paychex Pulse of HR Report to discover the tools and tactics your peers are using to deliver on both HR and business objectives faster and at scale, while still meeting the evolving needs of their employees. Visit payx.me/phr2022 to download your copy today. And thanks for listening to the HR Happy Hour Podcast Network. And let’s start the show.

Steve 1:32
Welcome to the show. My name is Steve Boese and today we have a great show. We are welcoming back to the show one of our favorite guests from one of our favorite companies, longtime friends of the podcast, our friends at Oracle. Today we’ll be talking with Chris Leone. Chris is the Executive Vice President of Development for Oracle Cloud HCM. He’s responsible for the strategy and product management development and go to market functions that deliver modern HR in the cloud to global users. Chris, welcome back to the show. How are you?

Chris Leone 2:01
Fantastic. It’s, really great to be back. Super fun talking to you. And Trish. Huge shout out to her!

Steve 2:09
Trish, we speak, she’s on vacation well deserved. So not with us today. But I’m probably having as much fun as she’s having. I’d imagine maybe a little bit more. Who knows more, probably more. Well, Chris, it’s great to see you. I mentioned at the top of welcoming you back to the show. I looked it up prior to jumping on with you today. The last time you were on the show with us was September 2020, right. And I looked through some of the show notes. And it was right as you’d imagine and six, seven months into pandemic and lockdown, etc, etc. There was a lot of notes around transitioning to remote work supporting customers who got to make rapid agile pivots to new ways of working. And of course, we even talked about your own teams at Oracle as well and having to manage transitions as well. So maybe as we start the conversation today, can you think back a couple of years it’s been crazy, like what are your some of your observations, both from the working with your customers and supporting them through the last couple of crazy two years? And then maybe even as well, your own teams? Because you manage a big team yourself. And you’re going through many of the same things?

Chris Leone 3:13
Yeah, no, it’s great. It’s been a couple years. So thinking back, you know, what I remember is, we were all still trying to figure out how to operate in this pandemic world where everybody was working from home and full time, right, there was no such thing as going into the office and meeting with customers, I wasn’t meeting with my own team. And I remember every call, I would get on with customers, because we did a lot of things through zoom, or you know, those type of calls. And we’d always ask, so what are you doing? How are you? How are you managing it, and just to kind of share notes and talking points as far as how each company was kind of managing working with their customers, or how they were managing working with their staff. And in some ways, obviously, was a really tough time and really tough time globally. But in some ways that, you know, I do think it brought us closer to our customers. I mean, I think we were all dealing with kind of the same thing and trying to figure out how to still get work done still support our customers help out in any way we can.

Chris Leone 4:24
And I just remember us in an executive meeting with with our executive team, and talking about what could we do to help our customers what do they need? What can we do? It wasn’t about like selling them anything more. It was really like, hey, look, how can we help, right? What do they need? And I know, we did something around Oracle Health and you know, we helped, you know, track vaccines and those things that we did some things at the corporate level. And then on the HCM side, we did set some things around their health and safety module. So it was really more of a hey, what can we do and how can we help. I don’t think everything’s completely behind us, you know, I think it’s like, we mask in the right places where we need to, we don’t mask and most of the places where we don’t need to. I think things are mostly back to normal. I’m in the office today, as you can tell. And, you know, many of my team comes to the office, it’s definitely not a full time, you know, mandated policy here. But you know, we’re doing as much as we can to safely come back to the office and collaborate and, and see each other live. And same with customers. I mean, I’ve been out and met with customers live, which is just great. And so yeah, I think we’re mostly past it. I mean, you know, you never can say that always knock on wood and worry about it.

Steve 5:50
I get that sense as well. And whether it’s going to visit customers, having folks come into the office, at least some of the time, right. And even, you know, we’re gonna talk a little bit about events, right, that are coming up events, at the corporate level kinds of conferences, both internal as well as public kind of external events. Finally, coming back, it seems, although they’ve been around, right, we’ve done some events in the last couple of years, but certainly not at scale, perhaps. And now it does seem that more organizations are jumping back into that space as well. Were there any things Chris, you think about? Maybe your teams or just things you’ve learned from your customers over these last couple years that, that you said yourself, hey, we’re not ever going back to that this new way of working or this new? Like, do you think this was a good takeaway from the last couple of years? And we’re gonna stick with that? Because it will work for us moving forward?

Chris Leone 6:39
Yeah, I think we’ve learned how to work in more of a virtual way, you know, and I think we can, we can work as a team, even engineering, and product management who do benefit from being in the same room, a lot of times, it really is, you know, easy when you’re just sitting next to somebody to talk to them. But, I think we’ve adapted to not having to do that all the time. I think a combination of being able to get together at critical times, and define what the next product release is going to look like, or what the requirements are going to look like, or talk through things. And then, you know, we’re virtually for a period of time. So I think, you know, where, at least from, from my team perspective, I think where we’ve really evolved is to, you know, have a good combination of kind of virtual work, and then together work and then virtual work. And, I think it’s not perfect, but I think we’ve gotten to a better rhythm where we can do it and still keep productivity and motivation. And, you know, what I think about is we have different generations in our workforce, right? We hire interns. And then you know, I have people that, I just literally said, congratulations to someone who just retired from was a PeopleSoft person for, you know, like, 35-36 years. And he was on payroll, which is great. And so I just, sadly said that was not sadly congratulations, but sad to see you go. So, I think different kinds of groups need different things. I mean, some of the younger generation really wants that contact with people and they want to come to the office more and, you know, have team lunches and things. And then, you know, maybe as you’ve been around for a while, then you kind of know what to do day to day, maybe you don’t have to be in the office as frequent. So we have to cater to two different groups in our in our team.

Steve 8:35
Yeah, now that’s great, Chris, I appreciate you sharing some of those observations. One of the things we talked about back in 2020. I know this, and actually came up again, I mentioned events, right? I was recently down in Austin, at the Oracle. I guess it’s HQ now. I’m gonna say this, admittedly, apologies to my Oracle friends, but it’s it’s difficult to not consider the big buildings right off the highway in the San Francisco area. You know, to me, that’s whatever. But the facility in Austin is beautiful, by the way. And I do want to mention something else I saw there, but it was an in person event, right, where analysts and media types were together, got it got the updates and the briefings from from many members of your team. I think you were in virtually on that one, but was great, though. It was it was great. And I do get that sense. It was great to have everybody together in one place. It was really kind of kind of a charge in the room for sure.

Chris Leone 9:32
I missed it. And I did it virtually. So I did the kickoff. This was one where, for me personally, I was feeling sick. And what changed in that and I didn’t end up getting COVID But I was like, you know, do I go, do I not go you know, infecting a group of analysts would probably not be a great thing. So I took the like, let’s be cautious, but it was a great event. And not only that, no, you want to maybe mention the F1 but what was cool. At the end of this, and I wasn’t there to see the whole thing but apparently, in the lobby you so you guys all went in and we did the whole day and the feedback was great love seeing you, you know, seeing you and all the endless community. But at the end, I guess they wheeled in a, you know, mock of the Formula One car, everything was yours. I missed that.

Steve 10:23
Yeah, it was really interesting, because it’s a beautiful facility. It’s a brand new building, it looks, you know, gorgeous campus building. And we walked in in the morning, and we were escorted right to the area to the big conference room where the meeting was going to be, which is totally normal. Just a normal kind of walk through a big, you know, expansive, nice lobby, not particularly noteworthy. It was just nice, it was new. And then we had our day we had our sessions and event you know, in presentations, q&a, et cetera. A full day of content and learning about some of the innovations at Oracle HCM, which we’re going to talk about here in a second some of them and then when it was time for the day to end, I guess. And we were kind of okay, let’s we’ll leave and we’ll leave the same way we came in and all of a sudden, like, wait a minute, Formula One race car, or in this case, a replica, but still, it was full size in the lobby there. And like, I thought to myself, How did I miss that walking in this thing is beautiful. It struck me how big the car was, I could not get over how large in length and even in with that car was, it was right in the lobby there. And of course, is for folks who don’t know Oracle’s either the main sponsor, or one of the primary sponsors of the Red Bull Racing Team Formula One, which I gotta admit, I’m totally into. I never watched formula one before the pandemic. And like many others, I’m totally into it. I in fact, a friend of mine recently bought me a Red Bull Racing team shirt. But you know, it’s got the various Red Bull Oracle’s on there a couple of other various sponsors, I don’t know all the sponsors, there’s a lot of them. But the it’s very, very cool. So yeah, that was that was really, really neat experience in there. The nice folks down at the Austin facility allowed anyone who wanted to, you know, get up next to the car, take photos, etc, etc, was really cool.

Chris Leone 12:05
Very cool. Very, very cool.

Steve 12:06
Because one of the things certainly we talked about that event we talked about back in September was ongoing innovation, how to sort of keep teams innovating how to how to kind of keep productivity and efficiency high. And in times of difficulty, crisis, et cetera, et cetera, which you guys have done a great job at, I want to talk a little bit about first want to congratulate you and the team. Because today as this podcast posts, we are announcing over at Human Resource Executive, and the HR Tech Conference, our Top HR Products for 2022 list released today, of which Oracle, ME, Chris, which I want to give you the chance to talk about a little bit, was one of our top products winners this year. So before we dive into the specifics of Oracle ME, maybe we could step back a little bit to sort of the the thinking processes about, hey, what do we need to do to build technology to support organizations today, particularly support employee experience, I’d love your thoughts on kind of the genesis of that, which then results in product.

Chris Leone 13:03
Totally, we’ve been thinking about this for a while, I mean, it three years ago, four years ago, we started talking about, look, we have a large number of customers now that are running our core HR system running our payroll system, you know, we’re in the multiple 1000s+, I mean, we’ve been doing well, and customers have this solid platform in place. And we were talking about how we create a better experience and immersive experience for them. And what are some of the things that we could do, we could deliver to make it easier for our customers to communicate better to build better relationships, lasting relationships, to understand how the workforce is feeling, how motivated they are. And this was literally pre pandemic and, and that, you know, the pandemic unfortunately, hit and then we just kind of accelerated the investment in kind of this experience platform really to, to help companies really kind of manage through this. And, you know, creating a experience layer on top of a transactional system was something that we felt we had to invest in. So we had this white boarded. And we do this a lot. I mean, we have a lot of innovations that what all call are in the research phase, and kind of on the shelf. And so, you know, we had a number of these different innovations that we have been talking about for a while we do POCs or engineering teams do these POCs and some of them never see the light of day, you know, some of them are like, you know, that’s cool, but I don’t think anybody will ever use that in the next 10 years. And then some of these are like, hey, you know, this is the perfect time to kind of pull that off the shelf and bring it to market.

Chris Leone 14:50
And so when Yvette Cameron came on board, she was really a big driver of kind of the employee experience and she really helped us on, you know, honestly kind of formulate what the strategy should be and how they how these things should work together and create this, this this experience layer. So that’s kind of how it started. And it wasn’t like, you know, all of a sudden, we just kind of said, Hey, we have all these, like different capabilities, let’s just put them together and make a product, we really thought about how this would all work together, and how we can create this, you know, kind of layer that can sit on top of our system, as well as we recognize that, you know, as much as we’d love everybody to use 100%, Oracle HR product for everything they ever do. That’s the that’s the only share. But that likely will never happen. And so we realized that we had to work in a ecosystem where, they might use large part of our products, but you know, we need to work with other custom systems, they may have other third party products that they might bring in. And this is layer, this employee experience layer that that that we’ve built, would allow them to create kind of a really nice experience, holistic experience across, whether it’s all Oracle products, whether it’s Oracle, HR ERP, plus other things, this experience layer that just could rise above.

Steve 16:13
Yeah, and thank you, Chris, for sharing some of the background behind Oracle ME. And I think, you know, as you dig into what sort of elements of Oracle ME, right, they have that kind of cross functional capabilities, whether it’s the journeys capability, or the digital system capability, etcetera, right? I mean, maybe let’s talk about that just a little bit like, one of the big, I’ve been logged in, I think you’re considering you’re where you’re at, too, I think you’d agree with me, I’ve been a proponent of for any size organization, really small, medium large, to try to consolidate on as few application providers as possible, it just makes sense to me, it always has made sense to me, for we don’t need to have, you know, we do 30 minutes on why that’s better philosophical. Yeah. I do think it’s better, right. But one of the ways that that the capabilities are enhanced, or you the customers benefit from consolidating from one application provider, or as few application providers as possible, or these kind of cross application capabilities, say like an Oracle journies, or even digital assistant, right, that works with multiple components of the system. And maybe love for you to comment a little bit about that the elements of Oracle ME that really do benefit from kind of that, that full suite approach maybe that that customers hopefully are adopting?

Chris Leone 17:32
Yeah, I mean, so when we thought about it, we felt that we had to be able to bring in different components of other systems, different processes, from other systems, as well as our system. And that system includes, you know, HR supply chain, ERP, many of our customers went full suite, some don’t, many do. And so some of the things that we thought about, certainly, the digital assistant is is one of those kind of voice activated voice integrated system. And it’s not, you know, where I kind of differentiate it from other kind of digital systems, it’s really designed for the enterprise, meaning we deliver a ton of conversations that you get out of the box. But it’s completely extensible to pick up conversations from any system you have. And so it’s really a platform component, as part of our suite. So what’s nice is customers, many of them, take what we deliver out the box, and then extend it for their own FAQs into other systems, they can plug in via, you know, service integrations. And so it’s great, whether they’re using our helpdesk, or maybe they have their own helpdesk, they can still leverage it to, you know, log a ticket, get feedback on that ticket, all those types of things. So the digital system really allows for one level of extensibility. The other area that we invested quite a lot in and it was part of journey. So journeys is is a way to orchestrate step by step guided processes, we deliver a lot of them out of the box, we tried to make it so you could not only just you know handle onboarding and off boarding, which were the traditional processes, but but really start to orchestrate more value added processes, like grow your career or you know, maybe compliance related processes or whatever were you got married. And here are the things you need to do beyond just the transaction.

Chris Leone 19:27
So there’s a ton of these that we built in, but we made it so not only can you incorporate our products, you can also incorporate components from other products through and we have technical ways that you can bring in different UI patterns into the task itself. And we’ll get into the technical ways you do that, but we built that in. But we also have a process orchestration component. So something that we have as part of our technology, something that we that we ship and customers can turn on that allows you to create these have extended workflows, these extended integrations into third party systems. So some of the things that we talked about, maybe you have a facilities application, and you need to get badged when you go into a new building, and you want to handle that through a workflow process, and you want to have the facilities manager, you know, sign off on, you know, the badging process, we now can extend to other systems through our process orchestration component of journey. So it fits into journeys, it’s a task and journeys are multiple tasks, you can create, you know, UI components, UI widgets, and we can plug in to third party services up to other systems. So those types of extensions really allow us to be part of a broader ecosystem.

Steve 20:43
I appreciate you like diving into some of the details, you said you wouldn’t get too technical, which I appreciate it a little bit as well. But it’s important, though, I think, because again, that is a strength and a benefit, right, of using these technologies is that extensibility and that, yeah, it’s technical, but we’re not talking about and correct me if I’m wrong, Chris, we’re not talking about some custom languages, or programming methodologies that no one knows. Right? Like that are so obscure, right? That you wouldn’t be able to find in the marketplace, or you wouldn’t be able to kind of learn yourself, right? Your IT team I’m talking about.

Chris Leone 21:19
Exactly. In fact, so process orchestration, it really is a graphical way that you can lay out, you know, multiple steps in the process. And more of the how you want that workflow to be orchestrated, what roles you want to incorporate in them very, very easy to do. But when you get into integrating to a REST service in another system, that’s probably where IT has to get involved. But the digital assistant is one where, you know, the team that has done a great job where you can create these conversations. And you can do that, from a business perspective, really, the business user can come in and create a whole conversation, or a whole FAQ and how they want you to respond and the system to respond without having it at all in the middle of that and deploy it as, as part of the digital assistant. Very, very easy. And at some point, you know, it’d be great, we probably shouldn’t show it at the analyst event, super easy to do. So we’ve tried to really support this kind of low code environment, right, where where the more of kind of the business functional person can can do most or all of the work and then kick it over to it maybe for the last mile of the last 100 yards. And so that’s really how we’ve orchestrated a lot of the extensions that we’ve tried to deliver on.

Steve 22:33
Yeah, it’s really, really powerful capability. But at the same time, it’s very accessible and the user experience, you know, the end user experience of these tools, that’s fantastic, whether it’s journeys, or the digital assistant, or even a couple other things we didn’t even really touched on yet that are part of the Oracle ME kind of platform. And I think I will admit, just in full disclosure, I mentioned Oracle ME is one of the Top HR Products of the year for 2022. I am a member of the team that does select the award winners. And I was looking through my notes on my official demo, I’d seen Oracle ME a couple of times, obviously saw it at the analyst event earlier in the year. But in my official demo that we had from the team, I made a note that I thought the communicate capability, the HCM communicate capability was one of the real differentiators from other products I’ve seen in the market. Right, I do a lot of demos. Right, I see a lot of stuff. Maybe, Chris, just real quick comment a little bit on that product, specifically because I thought it was particularly noteworthy. And I made a note of it. So I guess that’s the definition of note where they wrote a note for you to comment about that specific capability.

Chris Leone 23:43
So Oracle HCM communicate is awesome for a number of reasons. The key problem that we’re trying to solve, and it was how do we allow the HR business partner to be able to communicate more effectively, more consistently, but most importantly, target the right audience that they want to communicate to what I always felt, and I won’t criticize any products. Most of these are, you know, social platforms. But when I get communications or I get job offers on some of these social platforms, they’re never relevant to me, it’s always like, you know, here’s a senior technical role for you or you’re like a junior. So what we wanted to be able to do with HCM communicate was provide a really high fidelity way for HR business partners to create really compelling looking communications, whether they’re through email, which many communicate through email, or they’re through SMS, because in many retail environments, they don’t have emails, right.

Steve 24:52
Their frontline workers, deskless workers, etc.

Chris Leone 24:55
Exactly. So, we want to be able to communicate in through multiple channels, but we want to target the right community. And what we what we have in our HR system is different slices of workforce data. So we know so much about who you are and where you are, what building you’re in what level in the organization, are you a manager, are you an individual contributor, what country you’re in, we know so many things about you what benefit plan you’re in, I mean, so what we have enabled is is really robust communication capability, where I can create these really nice looking visual kind of forms that can go through email or through SMS, I can target down to like, here, the two offices or the two retail establishments in Northern California in Pleasanton. And I want to send it to managers there because we have a special campaign that we’re launching or a new benefit program. But I can connect it to the rest of the Oracle ME platform. So now think about it, I’m sending a communication, I can ask you. And it’s not just a single communication, these are campaigns meaning, if I want more information on like a marketing campaign, if you like a marketing campaign, exactly, sure, I can, I can request more information about one part of it, and I can follow up so you can track all the metrics of it, but I’ve really targeted that campaign, and then we can connect it to other parts of Oracle ME. So now, if it’s a journey for someone in a new benefit program, or a new, you know, launch of some clothing line that I want them to go look at, I can send them that communication, send them a you know, a journey that walks them through, like how to sell it, here’s a video of how to sell it, here’s what’s going to be on the department store. So now I can start to create broader level communication campaigns, track them, and connect it to other parts of Oracle me and make it a really compelling campaign that HR can can really drive.

Steve 26:50
Thank you for diving into that. Chris, I don’t wanna say it’s my favorite thing I saw of the Oracle ME platform that day. But it was one thing I knew that stood out. And, and we honestly, for folks who are listening to this, like, here’s what you’re gonna want to do is a couple of things, you’re gonna want to either come to HR tech and see a demo of Oracle ME. And then the other HCM products, Oracle, be there, of course, be doing some demos, you bet you you mentioned earlier that camera in front of the show, we’ll be doing a session all around employee experience that we’re excited about as well. So that’s an opportunity for we’ve talked, I mean, we’ve scraped 1/10, of not even probably of the surface of, of what some of the capabilities and opportunities that a platform like Oracle ME presents to folks. So I do encourage folks to, to learn more about it there. Or Chris, and I want you to maybe talk about this a little bit as well. We did, we did the show, we talked about sort of pandemic and transition and things are kind of normal again, one signal in the tech community that things are getting back to normal is the return of Cloud World. Oracle Cloud World coming up in October. I’d love for you maybe to share a couple thoughts about Cloud World coming up, coming back to an in person event in Las Vegas this year. And maybe I know you’ll be doing a solution keynote there, because for folks who haven’t seen Chris present, it is a treat. And I’m not saying this to butter him up. Chris is the best presenter in HR technology. I’ve been on record as saying that I know I said that two years ago, but maybe give us a little bit on Cloud World.

Chris Leone 28:19
That’s funny. Well, thank you for that. So Cloud World, first and foremost, I’ll say a couple things. It’s gonna be great to get back and see all our analyst friends, all our customer friends that we just haven’t seen, I you know, we always have a customer dinner in HR. And we thank our customers, I mean, they’re friends of ours, we want them to be successful. I’m looking forward mostly to the customer event that I can’t remember, it’s Tuesday or Wednesday, but it’s like a, you know, dinner, and we have drinks. And that’s probably gonna be my highlight just to hang out and really just kind of get to reestablish connections, one to one not just over the phone and over zoom. So that’s one. So I’m looking forward to that. My keynote, the reason I love doing the keynote, and it’s funny, I’m not great at talking about industry news, or you know, kind of the future of work. I mean, I understand where things are going. I understand all of those things, but I just love how our products and solutions can really help our customers solve their problems better and I always when I always want to do a presentation, I’m always looking for that intersection, right I’m always looking for Look, I know what the top problems are in different industries and and what HR is struggling with or what the business is struggling with. And I know how our products can help solve those and what I always tell my team is where I like to kind of walk the line is kind of balance like How we can solve those problems with the product and the innovations that we’re delivering.

Chris Leone 30:04
And because I believe them, and I believe in what we’re doing, and obviously I love our product, it just comes through why, you know, why the product, you know, shows well, and why I love presenting it. So we have a lot of new things. I mean, what’s cool about my team is they’re always delivering new things. And, and sometimes, and I don’t know, every feature we deliver, I mean, I have a huge product management team, I have a huge team. But I’m telling you, when they when they come in, they show me Hey, these are the cool things in the release. I just get excited I get excited about I’m like, Really, we finished that finally, I mean, thank God, so. So what my session will be certainly we’re going to talk about the employee experience, and we’ll continue to invest in it. And I think we’re going to go there as I really want to show because we came out with Oracle ME and I think we took a broader approach than some of the competitors or some of the others in the industry, we went beyond just kind of survey capabilities. And yeah, we can we can ask you about upholstery, we have that in there. And, we have a whole touchpoints area. But we said, hey, look, we need to make this a bigger platform kind of play. And, and so I think we’ll brought up but what I want to show is we were really thoughtful in how we tried to make the solution work across all of Oracle ME, it wasn’t just a bunch of modules that we said, hey, we got all these modules, let’s go stick them out there and call them something, we really, really defined a set of processes where they all work together. And really taking this whole employee experience and putting it into what we call into the flow of work. You’ll see it sticks throughout our products. So now you’ll see journeys, you know, in front of transactions after transactions, extending to third party systems, extending to teams and those types of things. So we’ll talk about how this all works together. And you can create these compelling experiences that go beyond just a transaction. So you’ll see some of that.

Steve 31:57
That’s good. That’s exciting, Chris. And I know like in the notes, we mentioned Oracle ME many times on the show, it’s one of the Top Products of the year 2022. You know, I wrote the blurb that accompanies the announcement. And Oracle ME in the announcement, and I don’t remember exactly what’s in there. But it’s something along the lines of it’s really, really encouraging to see an actual technology solution that’s architected around creating great employee experiences that goes beyond just kind of measuring. Right, because there’s lots of as you mentioned, there’s lots of survey tools around they’ve been around for a while, we can ask people how they feel right about anything really, right. But to actually deliver experiences that actually elevate what they’re doing in the workplace, how they feel about work, helping them navigate through the the ups and downs, and the changes in a career, etc, etc. That’s really the breakthrough to me.

Chris Leone 32:49
I totally agree. And in fact, when I talked to my team, when we started talking about this, because we have some survey capability, we invested a lot. So if you see what touchpoints does, and how we’ve created this whole pulse survey capability throughout, and even broader surveys, we’ve done a really good job and put a lot of effort into that. But but when we first started talking about I said, we do a survey here at Oracle, and you know, the thing that my team always wants is like, what do we do after the survey, not just like, hey, we’re going to have a team meeting, and I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do and maybe we’ll follow up on it. What are the kinds of day to day things that you’re going to see that are different. And so when we architected and thought about some of the solutions around touchpoints, and around what we’re doing, it’s like, how can we really enable kind of manager employee, not just how you’re feeling? But what next steps? Can you take day to day? How can you have check ins that are relevant to the survey that you just completed? You know, how can you make that feed into a ongoing performance process or performance evaluation that, you know, happens over time? So we incorporate all of these kinds of components, and then realizing it was funny.

Chris Leone 33:52
So we have a whole celebrations area, and I was like not, I was like celebration Do people really want so I remember in PeopleSoft, we had celebrations, and we used to call it the, you know, the birthday app, because you’d get like, Hey, happy birthday. And, and but you know, you can we created this really cool thing as part of touchpoints where you can celebrate anything, right? So it can be your birthday, it can be your anniversary, and those are nudges that we automatically can recommend that you send, but you could be selling some bring anything could be just like you had a great week, you go on a vacation, hey, you’ve deserved this time off. You know, I want to make sure you have a great time. Here’s a celebratory, you know, email I’m gonna send you or communication we send you so they really thought about my team did a really good job of thinking about like, how can we really not just take, you know, survey information and like, have a meeting and talk about it, but how we can really put it into action. And so people can really feel like things are changing, things are different. Yeah.

Chris Leone 33:52
That’s a whole nother thing, if you will of Oracle, we didn’t really get a chance to talk about with the employee manager relationship kind of building and strengthening capabilities that are that are in there as well. So look, I just encourage folks to go to oracle.com you can learn plenty there. Come to HR Tech, of course, I’d love to see you there and Oracle Cloud World as well. I plan on being at Cloud World with you, I can’t wait. It’s gonna be great. It’s gonna be a great fall. So we’re super excited to be back out doing events. Super excited to congratulate you, Chris and the team. Please give my regards to the entire team and do that tonight. And then get on get on the Zoom and tell them I said congratulations. Congratulations on the win for Oracle ME. And thanks so much, Chris. Let’s let’s do this again, maybe you know, maybe less than two years from now, maybe one year from now. We’ll check in with you again next fall and talk about what’s going on at Oracle HCM?

Chris Leone 35:41
I would love to! It’s always great speaking to you, Steve, you make this so easy. So thank you very much. And I look forward to seeing you at Cloud.

Steve 35:48
Well. All right. That’s Chris Leone. And he’s the Executive Vice President of Development from Oracle Cloud HCM. Thanks so much for joining us. And we’ll put links to all the relevant things we talked about in the show notes. I highly encourage folks who want to learn how how technology can actually impact and elevate the employee experience to go check out what Oracle is up to, because it’s really impressive stuff. So okay, for Chris, thank you so much. My name is Steve Boese. Thanks so much for listening. All the show archives, HRHappyHour.net. We will see you next time and bye for now.

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