What is Cloud Attitude?

What indeed?

Cloud attitude is a term one of my very talented Italian colleagues, Nicola Pace, coined to describe how leaders should be looking to better serve their people. He told me it’s being open-minded about how to achieve results when technology permits process efficiency improvements.

Here’s a very basic example. At SAP we use Microsoft Teams for our conferencing, but just last week one of our stakeholders set up a meeting with me on Google Meet. I raised my eyebrows slightly, but clicked the link and joined in. And guess what?

The experience was the same

Friendly faces. Mute buttons. Screen sharing. In fairness, after 30 seconds I would’ve been hard-pressed to remember what platform I was on. After the meeting, its purpose successfully achieved, the video conferencing platform mattered not one iota. Had I requested we exclusively use Microsoft Teams, it would have wasted everyone’s time, including my own. With a cloud attitude, the experience takes more precedence than the process.

Regular readers of my content know that I bang on about leaders existing to serve their people and not the other way around. Traditional leadership has been outdated for some time now, but the hardest part has been convincing the traditional leaders of exactly that! It’s why I like to talk about “new” leadership and explain that a new leader includes any person who has realised it is they themselves who need to change to better help their employees.

Do you remember when the concept of employee experience was new and arguable? 

Not anymore

Study after study. P&L after P&L. All indicate that an investment in employee experience and culture leads to outperformance compared to a strategic focus on customer experience. While the irony of customer experience being an old fashioned strategy is not lost on me, what is concerning is that “old” leadership perpetuates in a world that will punish it ever more severely, as time passes.

Culture change used to be effected via a bottom-up method. Well, they used to try it that way, anyway. New leaders understand that they are the ones who need to adapt to their people. Their people have already changed and know what to do. They don’t need to be told anything, they just need their leader’s help to smooth the path to getting it done.

The history of HXM

Just as we did 50 years ago with ERP, SAP created the HXM category in September 2019 when we spent $8 billion to buy Qualtrics. We could see the technology now existed to take HR from the HCM transactional cost model to a HXM asset management model in order to vastly improve employee engagement and productivity.

Plenty of commentators saw it as a big risk and poured cold water onto its prospects. Of course, our risk calculations were correct and not even three years later, I feel a little satisfaction knowing that our competitors have all jumped aboard the accelerating HXM bandwagon. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and we now have a situation where primary HXM application features are becoming relatively homogenous across suppliers. When that happens to technology in any industry, it’s an indication a process is both efficient and effective.

It’s thus a surprise to me when SAP SuccessFactors moves from sales to implementation that a client’s leadership team requests feature customisation and justifies it with, “Because we’re different.”

You’re not really...

Leaders destroy value when they obstruct proven processes for the sake of self-perceived uniqueness. 

Remember I said above that new leaders smooth their people’s paths to performance. New technology like HXM has provided leaders with an opportunity to reinvent their HR processes and directly link employee experience with company results. However, if leaders (of the old fashioned variety) simply take new technology and apply old processes to it, they waste the money spent on the tech, but more importantly, they waste the incredible employee experience opportunity presented by it.

Atteggiamento cloud

That’s “cloud attitude” in Italian. A tribute to Nicola and its roots. But I digress. 

By comparison, leaders (of the new variety) brimming with cloud attitude will embrace technology’s opportunities to improve processes, thus improving the employee experience and helping their companies to join that burgeoning list of outperformers. Molto bene.