Managing Talent in 2022: Keys for Success in the New Year

Sponsored by: Oracle

This week, we spoke with Juergen Lindner, Senior Vice President of Marketing for SaaS, about how the Great Resignation has impacted every business across nearly every country.

– What organizations are currently doing successfully to attract and retain talent

– Importance of workplace flexibility

– Ways that HR technologies can utilize AI to replace repetitive, mundane tasks

– How teams at Oracle are thinking about improvements and advancements

– The holistic relationship between talent operations, supply chain, and outcomes

Thank you Juergen, for joining the show today!  Remember to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript follows:

Steve 0:23
Welcome to the HR Happy Hour Show. Trish, we have a great show today, we are going to continue sort of an ongoing conversation we’ve had on the show lately about the great resignation, right, which everybody knows and everybody is probably struggling with, but we’re gonna take it a slightly different direction and talk a little bit more broadly about the challenges and the issues a little more holistically about how it affects more than just HR and HR people. Right. So we’re going to get a little more expansive on that conversation. We have a great guest from our friends at Oracle, who’s waiting to join us but first, Trish, I was unprepared for the show today, not for the content of the show, but for the question of the day. So I asked you Trish, please come up with a question of the day and asked me so I hope you were able to do that.

Trish 1:07
I do have a question of the day. I went back to the old bag of tricks, the Would You Rather? Would you rather for you? Okay, and then we can ask our guest here in a little bit. So the question of the day is, would you rather visit every state in your country, or visit every country in the world?

Steve 1:26
I think that’s a pretty easy one. I would pick every country in the world.

Trish 1:30
Okay, yeah, I’m gonna do the calculations here. It looks like you’re in the majority. 78% of people who have answered this question said they would rather visit every country in the world.

Steve 1:41
Yeah, I don’t want to go on about this too long and offend anybody. But I’ve been to many of the US states. A lot of them aren’t that exciting. Really quick. I’ll be totally honest with you. I recently drove through a lot of Arkansas. That was kind of awful the entire way. So yes, I think countries for sure for me. So that’s a great question, though. I like it.

Trish 2:03
Is it not a good question? So would you rather like in a pinch? That’s where you go, some of them are a little crazy, but that one was pretty good.

Steve 2:10
Which would you pick? What would you rather do?

Trish 2:12
I would also go with the countries I think, not for the same reasons as you. I love and I hope I get to visit every state eventually. But yeah, I think that I learn just a million times more when I’m seeing other countries.

Steve 2:26
We probably have a big listener base in Arkansas. So I apologize, Arkansas. You’re very lovely people. I promise to look around a little more next time. Alright, Trish, we will ask our guest that. I suspect we all know his answer, but I may be wrong. We are very excited today to welcome our special guest for first time on the HR Happy Hour Show, Juergen Linder, from Oracle. He’s the Senior Vice President of Marketing for SaS, focusing on enterprise resource planning, my favorite, Enterprise Performance Management, supply chain management and manufacturing and human capital management. So really everything. As a more than 20 year veteran of the enterprise software industry, Juergen is continuously driven to help companies succeed in their transformation journeys and take full advantage of new emerging technologies. Juergen, welcome to the HR Happy Hour sShow. How are you today?

Juergen Linder 3:14
Thank you so much for me Steve and Trish, appreciate it.

Steve 3:16
Great. You want to weigh in on the question of the day?

Juergen Linder 3:19
But love to. But I’m also sort of predictable, I guess, if I’m going to also weigh in on the every country in the world type of thing. I didn’t even manage to get checklist for all of the German states, actually. And since I migrated here, 20 years ago, I don’t even claim to have visited every US state, but I’ll try to make a dent into it as much as I can.

Steve 3:40
I was about to ask you. You mentioned for the show. You’re originally from Germany. And I wasn’t sure how many states that were in Germany. So it’s is it 14? Is that right?

Juergen Linder 3:49
Yeah. So 14 states for now.

Steve 3:52
Yeah, I’ve got to get over there myself. Well, we could talk like German soccer later at the end of the shelf we want on my other podcast Bundesliga today, because I’m a very big German soccer fan. So you’re great to have you with us. If you don’t mind. Maybe just because you’re new to the show. I had to give us a little of your background, 60-90 seconds on sort of what you’ve been doing, what you did before and what you’re doing now. And we’ll get into the conversation around the great resignation and how organizations can think about a little bit more holistically.

Juergen Linder 4:18
Happy to, so my German educational upbringing was in Germany. So classical MBA type of background, finished started out in banking, actually, over the course of my studies fell in love with enterprise software implemented software customer sites, and just became very vocal and intrigued as to what it can do from the change management of enterprises. Then started at SAP stayed there for about 16 years typical classical product management type of roles, helping develop feature sets, working with customers, and the ecosystem. Anything from financials to procurement, to supply chain to industry offerings. had a short stint a couple of years, five years in the infrastructure piece as well, to make sure that we have the connectivity properly figured out the API layers, the analytics, and then spend about seven years in sales operations out of all places was never a career path I was looking for, but it just found me. And then about five years ago, now joined Oracle and responsible, as you said, for the applications portfolio, and really trying to make sure that we help customers holistically in the transformation journey and don’t isolate certain business problems in front of customers.

Steve 5:36
Thanks so much for that background. One of the things we’ve been talking about on the show, as I mentioned, is this kind of great resignation, great rethinking, great realignment, there’s lots of terms. I hate saying it, but war for talent is still kind of a term. In fact, as we’re recording this in the US anyway, church, I don’t know if you caught this this morning, the job openings and labor turnover summary report was issued this morning, Trish 11 million open jobs remaining in the United States as of right now. And I suspect in places like the UK, probably Germany and other places, lots of open open jobs as well, and people rethinking things. And so one of the things we wanted to talk about a little bit today is how can HR leaders kind of think a little bit more broadly and holistically across not just in their purview of Oh, my Gosh, I gotta fill that job today. But sort of the impact on this, this really challenging talent marketplace, and how they can sort of work better with the other leaders in their organization to kind of, I don’t know, try to navigate these kinds of really tricky times, I guess I’ll start to your again, is there there’s some things that either you’re working with customers, or some of the customers that have been managing fairly successfully, throughout these last couple of years, what they’re doing a little more broadly as they think about talent, and how to get the talent that they need and retain that talent.

Juergen Linder 6:56
Now, I think it’s a great point. I mean, the great resignation typically is packed as an HR topic. But it’s it’s honestly so much wider. It impacts your supply chain ability, your ability to serve customer the experiences customers have with you. Your ability that you touched on, Steve, to attract future talent as well, if you’re not device decisively invested in certain technologies that helps to get ahead of those type of changes. Now, what we are observing for sure is that this is not an industry specific problem. It’s really very systemic at this point in time. And we feel based on conversations for sure you had on the show that this is really something where people had a lot of time to reflect as to what our values I really want to be known for. And a lot of folks have reconsidered their career path, as I mean, 85-88% of the employees that we surveyed through a study recently just indicated that their definition of what success means to them personally, has fundamentally shifted. And you ask the rightful question, I mean, as an employer, as an HR individual, or as a corporation at large. What do you need to do now in realization of that? A, you need to be extremely supportive? Right? I mean, I think the exit threshold has never been lower, to be honest, right? Because everyone is working remotely. And honestly, I mean, I could have shipped shipped off my laptop today, get a new laptop tomorrow, and I’m on boarded in the new environment, right? The physical type of things that potentially hindered career mobility in the past are gone. And this is a blessing and a curse, right?

Juergen Linder 8:45
Also for us as Oracle, I mean, we have been in the past, potentially always looking, okay, where are their pool of talents that we want to have geographically? The great, or the pandemic in general has had us rethink a lot about how do we acquire talent on a global scale. And we’re much, much more flexible in allowing individuals to cater to their individual life circumstances. And we’ve seen very interesting stories unfold, very sad stories unfold. And I do think every employer at this point in time, needs to be tremendously sensitive about providing this flexibility for their employees to be an employer of choice, the mean that last word very critically, because I do think it’s not just trying to say, we need to react to the great resignation. You need to get quickly ahead of that, and differentiate yourself by being an employer who is keenly interested in making the employee, the center of everything, right. So I do think the power has shifted, that it’s really an employee driven culture right now. And you need to make sure that you can be very accommodating to their needs to their career aspirations. There work-life aspirations, the flexibility that we think the status where we’re seeing a lot of differentiation between companies. And that’s going to be a decisive factor for corporate Darwinism at large, to be honest, because if you don’t do those things right now, I think you might find yourself on the receiving end fairly quickly, that your talent pool has eroded. And companies don’t see you as the destination of choice where they want to go. So it’s a very holistic concept you need to look at right now.

Trish 10:29
Yeah, I agree with you. And I want to know, if you’re seeing any, maybe early winners, not that you have to name a specific company, but just you know, obviously, Oracle has such a wide variety and different sizes of your clients, and, you know, some of these things, you know, flexibility and just more greater sensitivity and greater care and concern for employees, you know, employees have been craving this for years. So now that it’s coming about in this way, are you starting to see any customers of yours that are really, I guess, coming out the other side of it, we hear a lot about maybe companies that are still struggling with what to do, how to change course, how to be more accepting is, as you mentioned, maybe have, you know, maybe you were concentrating people in one location, and I’ve had to rethink that. Are you having any feedback yet? It’s early days, but any from your customers saying these sorts of things?

Juergen Linder 11:26
Now, it certainly is early days, but we’ve seen our trips to your point patterns that are emerging. And we think employers who have not gotten the memo, pardon my French here, that workplace flexibility, geographical flexibility is a must, I think are at the receiving end already. We found fantastic opportunities to tap into talent pools completely outside of our typical hiring patterns as well. And now, I’m seeing a lot of corporations making sure that they are very sensitive in return to office mandates, right. I think companies who go too strict on that will be at the receiving end. And we don’t think that is something that’s going to end anytime soon. I mean, in fact, when we did surveys with our own employee base as to how many folks want to come back to the offices, it was quite shocking. Not a whole lot. And that has massive ramifications. Steve, to your point earlier, how all of those things are interconnected. I mean, if the CFO, for example, that should have your alarm bells go up, because offers real estate planning all of a sudden looks very different asset planning looks very different. If you’re in Supply Chain means very different type of impacts as well, we have the thing everyone right now is a supply chain expert, because because we all experienced empty shelves,

Steve 12:54
I’d say we’ve talked more about the supply chain as a general society in the last 18 months more than in the last 25 years combined. You know, just because of our experiences as consumers, and even some of the B2B stuff too, but just as a consumer, right, walking into a store and not finding XYZ product. Now all of a sudden, I’m reading about the supply chain. I never even heard of it before. It’s so remarkable.

Juergen Linder 13:17
It is absolutely remarkable. But I do think it goes to your earlier statement, Trish, that this is all very intertwined. I think companies that do realize that this is not an isolated problem for an HR individual or HR leadership, but they really do understand that they need to partner up with the business can partner up with the business in very distinct ways, is actually quite a catalyst for making the role very strategic. Right, because you need to think through as to what are all of the ramifications if we’re not getting ahead of this right now. The downstream implications of not shipping products to customers. The customer disgruntlement on the customer experience side the financial implications of Office real estate, for example, in other pieces are just tremendous. And what we have seen is that also part of the study a lot of employees are seeking out employers consciously based on their IT investment strategy. Sounds a little weird, potentially, but I mean, what we found is that if you want to employee you have invested a lot of your career in hopefully something that is beyond bean counting and finance or repetitive mundanity tasks, right.

Juergen Linder 14:28
So wherever we can help as a technology provider to take out mundanity repetitive processes, and help with technologies such as AI to provide a more rewarding workspace in varied experience, both from the user experience but also for example, by new skills that have to be developed by them in the pandemic brought out a very different way how you have to think about your career. Managing in a remote setup is very different than having the possibility to interact with someone physically For you job functions coming out of nowhere, I wish when I graduated, I would have known the Chief Digital Officer or data scientists would pay a professional, I would love to know that ahead of time, but we’re seeing very different career patterns and skill acquisition needs. And I do think companies that are more decisively invested in newer technologies to really help them without are the ones that we’re seeing coming out of the pandemic as early winners, they really have a higher chance of attracting the talent, sticking to talent, and what proactively can counter potentially certain trends, because they see them earlier. But they need to be cognizant, they need to provide a learning environment that constantly challenges the employee, because as I said earlier, the exit threshold is super low, if you’re not sensitive to those needs.

Trish 15:54
Yeah, I I love all of that, because I think you’re really you’re hitting on on something that I think is so core to what HR professionals have been longing for, for years. And it’s while it’s a horrible catalyst, you know, having a pandemic being sort of what creates these opportunities, maybe for lack of a better word. But you know, we’ve heard HR leaders for many years talk about wanting to be more strategic, they want to really be looking at how they can break down the silos between finance and HR, and it, you know, supply chain and all of these aspects of the business, and we want to be true business partners and business leaders. Now’s your chance, right? But I love that you weave in that it’s the technology too, that is finally caught up to the point where you know, you can have a suite that enables all of those various former silos, to actually have visibility and work better together. My question for you sort of along those lines, then is, you know, as someone who’s been in, you know, just software and enterprise software for your entire career. Are you seeing any difference now, maybe in the way that the teams within Oracle are working and thinking about how to bring about improvements and advancements, even in the short term of the next year or two? Is there any change yet in that? Or are you all just kind of at this point, staying the course? Because I know, you were, you know, obviously leaders in that already. But how has that changed? Just the the way you all think about that interaction and interplay between the different former silos?

Juergen Linder 17:38
That’s a great question Trish, and maybe a blessing in hindsight, is that we very early on decided when we had our grant moment of awakening, with Cloud being just a new emerging topic for the IT market that we decisively parted by basically saying, we’re not just gonna lift and shift our resources into the cloud, and hope we get away with it, but fundamentally redesigned everything from the ground up. And I do think that unfolds now rather, February really, for us in terms of really being a complete business platform. By having every line of business application in the cloud already. And really designed to, that you can pick any starting point, but it is never screeching that in in the vendor relationship, you can today start with human capital management or with enterprise planning, but you have the comfort of knowing that as you extend your partnership, with Oracle, for example, it seamlessly comes together. It’s all built on the same data model. And we have very early on decided to go into the newest technologies quickly. And that to your point, which pays out very favorably now, because every 90 days, we can be super responsive to customer needs and market shifts, for example. We extended software for free, right. And in the early days of the pandemic, when we saw that remote work and other type of challenges became a real serious issues for our customers. We couldn’t have done that in your on premises would have been impossible, but it would have had.

Juergen Linder 19:10
And so I do think the software as a service model for us really allowed us to be much, much better business partner for our companies, not just the technology partner, but we couldn’t be really say, okay, look, I mean, you need to scale up or you need to furlough employees very quickly, you need to have all those type of models, you have need to have better insight. So we provided analytics functions very quickly into the market. So the platform in which you’re sitting right now really allows us to be super responsive. And 80% of our innovation is really customer driven. We’re listening very intently. And that allows us to do also ABX testing all those type of things we can see which function our customers using, which ones are not being used. So just a great opportunity to team up with customers like never before. but we’re doing it across the entirety of the business. So if hiring impacts the CFO as well, right, having finance on HR on the same platform is a huge benefit. The same user experience the same data consistency, the same analytical layer, there’s never like, okay, his truth, her truth. He Said-She Said type of thing, right? You have the same data integrity. And I do think that plays out very favorably right now, so that we can also apply all those new technologies on top of the same data platform.

Steve 20:33
Yeah, thanks for that. Folks who’ve listened to the show for a long time or follow the things I’ve said or written know that I’m a pretty big believer and proponent of consolidating as much as your enterprise, infrastructure and applications. On one solution, I just a little biased that way, maybe, because I came up in that world, right, doing a lot of ERP implementations, and really seeing the value of having, say, our procurement system on the same platform as our accounts payable system as on our HR system, quite frankly, right? And our general ledger, you know, you want to extend it out that far, right? I can’t tell you, we can talk someday, if you are good about like sitting around a room and defining the new chart of accounts, like I, I have had a lot of that in my background, I like to do it again, someday someone Someone let me like, redo their chart of accounts, I’m up for it. I’ll do it for free, too. I’ll do for fun. It’s nice, great. But you might be able to share, especially in light of the just the disruption that so many organizations have had to face with supply chains, right? global supply chains, global talent challenges, etc? etc? are there is there one or two things that come to mind either things you’ve seen with existing customers, or just capabilities that Oracle has developed across the suite of applications that really support that kind of both understanding the current set of business conditions, understanding the problem, the challenge, and then sort of driving to the solution, whether it’s, Hey, go to source a product here, bring ramp up manufacturing activity in this facility, because we have the right kind of talent there, etc? What would be just one or two things you could you could you could share with us that really kind of hammer that holistic relationship between talent operations supply chain, and then then outcomes.

Juergen Linder 22:21
So early on in the pandemic, and it goes back to our earlier conversation around everyone’s supply chain expert now. Supply chains have been optimized for razor thin margins, and just in time type of delivery across multiple global type of setups. Very early on in the pandemic, we saw that repatriation of supply chain, right became quite a topic because you needed to have more control, you could not rely if a certain country shut down and went into full lockdown, how would that be damaging to your customer experience, because all of a sudden, you cannot launch a ship. So for that you needed planning and insight. So I think most of the conversations over the course of the last year quite Frank was really around having the insight and the modeling capabilities to really say, Okay, I cannot look at that as a supply chain problem. I need to have the resources, but then also need to have the staff because if I can no longer rely on my offshoring staff, and I need to hire new staff, staff here in the US, for example, massive ramifications from a cost perspective from a lead time perspective, from a skills perspective.

Steve 23:35
Yeah, that’s a great point, I apologize for interrupting but the supply chain, it’s easy to think of the supply chain in this weird, like, it’s just a bunch of boats and some cranes and some trucks. Well, those boats don’t drive themselves, those cranes don’t operate themselves and know, despite, you know, we’ve been promised self driving trucks for 15 years. They’re no self driving trucks out there moving this stuff. It’s all powered by people. Right? I’m sorry to interrupt.

Juergen Linder 23:59
No, you’re absolutely right. I do think technology still holds the big promise here, that a lot of it can be theirs, read less reliance on human in general, and reward them and liberate them for more rewarding tasks. But in the current time, what we’re seeing is to your point precisely, Steve, is that any decision you make? Has you read massive ramifications on how you need to think about the talent that either operates fleets, ships, cargo type of things. Manufacturers factoring skill and very different skills obviously if if you’re in a lockdown type of situation, right? I mean, how do you onboard effectively during lockdown, especially if you need to have manufacturing sites spun off very quickly. Those are very hard core type of business problems in terms of getting the manufacturing facilities properly done, getting the supply chain streams properly orchestrated. and then finding the talent to operate it. So we had multiple of those partnerships with customers. But it helped once again, to be on this technology platform where a, you can, you can quickly move and buy one piece of the offering, you don’t need to buy it off as a large ERP implementation basically just say today have an issue with transportation logistics. So we saw that with, for example, DHL with FedEx type of things they needed to get from point A to point B quickly, and model that, but you then so we were able to provide that much, much more quickly, with consideration for the talent, and very quickly work with the challenge to have supply chain solutions in place that typically would have taken years to get through. And we did it in weeks or month. But it was a business necessity.

Juergen Linder 25:52
And we learned, I mean, I think as everything goes, pandemics are very humbling for everyone. But I do think we’re very fond of the technology foundation, that we could be this partnership that customers really tend to value. And oftentimes we did it also for for the sake of basically saying you’re in a financial bind right now. So let’s talk about costs later, here’s the software get going, you told me to go out of business here. Right, so maybe different partnerships. And I enjoyed the intense intimacy that we develop with partner with customers over the time. And hope that stays the common theme. Because I do think sometimes a capitalistic, capitalistic event like that just fosters and brings out the right partnerships into better focus. So that was a thing for us very important.

Trish 26:43
You know, Juergen,, you and Steve have both talked a lot about skills, right, throughout all of of this conversation. One of the things that I’ve really valued this this last couple months is that at Oracle, you all have put out the AI work studies, which really dive into this idea that yes, thing, you know, things are changing very rapidly. And you’re finding that your respondents are saying they’re changing so fast, they’re very concerned about this pace of change. But I like the spin, you’re kind of talking about skills, because you’re I even wrote it down, you said, you’re, these things can liberate you. Right. So you might not be doing the same job you did before, you might not even want to do that same job. But could you maybe talk a little bit about that study, and about how Oracle is using artificial intelligence, to bring skills or new skills to the forefront for employees, that might keep them in their current companies, right, keep them from resigning. That also helps them think about it in a way that is very liberating and very positive, right? Because sometimes we think of skills is like, Oh, we don’t have the right skills. So it’s more of a negative. So maybe talk a little bit about what you all have done around artificial intelligence and skill development.

Juergen Linder 28:00
Yeah, great question, Trish, and skills are at the forefront of a lot of those conversations, because as you said, it holds the big promise of liberation, for something more rewarding. I’ll give you one example out of finance, and then I go back to more traditional type of thing, but 89% of the finance functions is deemed highly automatable. That’s pretty shocking, likely, right for any final big number, because it means oh my god, my job might be at stake.

Steve 28:30
Yeah, very process driven, very rules driven, right?

Juergen Linder 28:33
The type of task, how you close the books, how you reconcile certain type of data points, very predictable, very repetitive. So we apply AI machine learning for Process Automation across the suite every day. That said, it helped us tremendously also to be a smarter partner for Talent Development at large. What I mean with that is, when we talk about AI and skills, first of all, we find that 29%, Trish to your point, feel that their skills are becoming less valuable, or they feel it could be automated. So there’s more sensitivity, for sure in the workforce, that certain type of tasks could be automated going forward. But this is not going to be an overnight type of thing. It’s typically a gradual shift that we’re seeing. And 83% actually have indicated during the study that they want to make changes of their career, advancing. And 85% of the however, have also said their employer doesn’t support them properly and that is an alert sign. Because technology is there that can help you what we do is for example, we use AI at scale to scour the entire job market try to see how what type of new job profiles are emerging. What are the skills associated with those new jobs so that we can guide our challenge properly in innovative timely fashion towards those new type of job categories that are emerging. We make that very transparent in our offering as well, that they can say, okay, maybe where am I in hyphen deficient to progression? Right?

Juergen Linder 30:16
What type of skills would I need to acquire to be even considered for the next open job and that type of thing. So we try to match very quickly, our own talent, to open job functions, but also make it very transparent which type of new skills potentially they need to acquire. And by it’s almost like, not a video game, necessarily, but and if you unlocked a new skill, you’ve just set yourself up for a very different set of jobs, potentially, that you didn’t even know about. But you need to make that very transparent. Because if you don’t do it, they’ll assume there’s no progression capability for them. Right. So I do think as an employer, you have much, much more responsibility right now, to make sure that individuals understand how a their skill set can be evolved, how you’re helping them with training, what type of new requirements for the business they can participate in. And for that, to your point, you need to liberate them from their day jobs. And if you can automate some of the repetitive type of things from the function I hope everyone is pretty happy, because take myself classical finance, upbringing, MBA upbringing, but I didn’t want to join a corporation become a bean counter, and do everything every quarter again. I mean, look at what Oracle does.

Juergen Linder 31:35
Tomorrow, we are announcing our earnings to the street in nine days. Unheard of right? We also tried to see what can we automate relentlessly. And it has repercussions on the ability of our finance team members to work with the business, not looking into the rearview mirror. And this is what I mean about becoming more strategic. So we really hope that by applying AI widely, a we can become more insightful, we can be more prescriptive, potentially as to what type of skills will be having a high contribution to your success and binding you into the company and allow you for more mobility, because oftentimes they don’t want to leave the corporation as such, they just want to have based on their grand awakening a progression paths that maybe in the past, you were not able to paint for them. That’s where we feel that machine learning prediction and pattern analysis has great, great, great promise. So dynamic skills is one of those things that you know, Trish, like did it we announced massive differentiator, and we feel it can have a lot of good binding experiences for the employee population at large.

Steve 32:48
Yeah, I just wrote recently. Sorry, I wrote recently in human resource executive about meaning at work, and people are like finding meaning at work has really climbed the list of what makes an employer attractive to a person to either join or to stay at. Llike some of the things that are always going to be number one and number two are still number one and number two, right compensation and wages and benefits, there’s still more than two, but this this meaning, this idea of meaning is really climbed a lot. So it’s one of the things that I wrote about, and then I’m researching the topic was learning new skills, and enhancing my career opportunities as a driver of meaning in the workplace. And that comes in really, really high. Like that’s very valuable to not just short term objectives, right, that we’ve been talking about right closing supply chain challenges are closing staffing challenges that a given function or at a given location, but also that longer term, right, that longer term, ability to create a better relationship with with with an employee and have the deci they’re being valued. They’re being cared about and, and there have the opportunity to grow and technology certainly as a key driver and supporting that is one of the messages we’ve heard really all year and 2021.

Juergen Linder 34:01
That’s absolutely correct. I do think purpose is the key word I use here, right? I mean, if you have a purpose, if you feel you’re being invested into continuously, this is a thing what binds you into an employer relationship. As you said, there’s other types of things that always will come up. Desire for mobility, life changes, career aspirations financially, for example, okay, I’m in a situation I want to buy a house of course, you want more money conscious, potentially then another person, right? But I do think if I take myself as an employer, I’m certainly anything but an opportunistic job hopper, but it had to do mostly because I felt constantly invested in constantly challenged and had the privilege to have fantastic managers along the way as well. We were keenly interested invested into progression but now if you have technology to your aid, where you can get a get a little bit more unbiased advice, potentially write and read We have technology work on your behalf on paint career path has helped you with the evolution of your skills of constantly. It’s a huge plus, I do think it will be a catalyst for a lot of employee growth going forward.

Steve 35:12
Yeah, I think that’s great stuff. We could go on and on with this for a while, I think what we should do maybe is make sure we put links to some of the studies that we’ve talked about the work study, the dynamic skills product that Juergen mentioned, as well, I’d even throw out the Oracle opportunity marketplace which came out a couple years ago, but which is a great solution to provide employees with those short term projects and gigs inside the organization to nominate themselves right, acquire a new skill or or maybe develop a skill they already have. But maybe they don’t get enough opportunity to use in their normal role. Right. It was an excellent product, one of our top products of the year, the year came out, I think we’ll link to all that I want to tell one quick story, that mechanic finance story, I’ll tell it I don’t care. It’s my show mentality. I was I was on an internal accounting team, right? So we were doing management accounting cost accounting, so not anything illegal, not st reporting. And under that we didn’t get to touch that stuff. It was internal, right? The company has x revenue this this month, and x cos x profit and whatnot. That was all the legal stuff that that was divided up into, like 30,000 pieces right inside the organization to the different divisions. And I was in a meeting once as we were doing our monthly book close was with the CFO of our division. And I was just like a guy worked at the team. But I knew the most about the computer program. So I was in the meeting, too. And the guy who is the president of our division says to our CFO, so what is the revenue for quarter three? What is the what is the final revenue? And our CFO just looked at him and said, Well, what would you like it to be about that? So what there was some creativity that could not have been automated away. That’s the reason I tell that story. That exchange, I bet that there was always some weird unrealized revenue accrual, we could book we needed to for some indeterminant problem overseas. But I’ll leave that for another day. Trish. Juergen, notwithstanding my story, great show. Great, great to see you hope all as well. Thank you for sharing your insight and your expertise around just kind of the holistic kind of approach to these organizational challenges and some of the ways that you and your teams are supporting folks and getting through them. It’s great to see you.

Juergen Linder 37:21
Thanks very much. Thank you for having me, Trish and Steve, I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.

Steve 37:25
Great, great stuff. All right, just we’ll put links to all the relevant information and research in product stuff in the show notes. Thanks for coming up for the question of the day for me because I blew it at the beginning of the show problem it stuff and thanks everybody for listening to the HR happy hour show. Remember to get all the show archives at HR happy are gone that and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts for our guest, Juergen Lindner, from Oracle, for Trish McFarlane. My name is Steve Boese. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll see you next time.

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