The Latest Oracle Cloud HCM Innovations With Yvette Cameron

Looking to revolutionize your employee experience? Well look no further, because this captivating conversation between William Tincup and the esteemed guest, Yvette Cameron from Oracle. She unveils Oracle's groundbreaking solutions designed to enhance employee engagement and streamline workforce management.

One such innovation is Oracle Celebrate—an offering that fosters peer-to-peer connections, celebrates achievements, and promotes a culture of recognition. In a world where remote work and disconnection are prevalent, this solution bridges the gap and brings people together, reinvigorating teams with a renewed sense of purpose and unity.

By embracing peer-to-peer recognition, empowering managers, and leveraging the power of data, organizations can create a work environment that nurtures talent, fosters growth, and boosts engagement. 

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Transcript

William Tincup: 0:32

This is William Tincup and you're listening to Recruiting Daily Podcast. Today we have Yvette on from Oracle and our topic today is the latest Oracle Cloud HCM innovations. Normally, uh, Yvette and I get together at HR Tech and we do a briefing and we decided this year to do something Different to not do a briefing. Wow. How novel is that? So, uh, we wanted to give it a couple of weeks and then talk about all the things that they've innovated, uh, in the recent year and, uh, without any further ado, Yvette, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and what you do at Oracle?

Yvette Cameron: 1:06

You betcha, William. It's great to be here. So, um, I'm Yvette Cameron. I am the Senior Vice President for Oracle Cloud HCM Product Strategy, and I've been with the organization just over three years, been in the business for 30 plus years. So there you go. At one point, do

William Tincup: 1:21

you stop saying the number? There's a, there's a time in which you just say, a lot, a long time, just been, been doing this a long time.

Yvette Cameron: 1:29

I used to actually, um, there was a period there recently, um, William, where I did drop the number, but now I've embraced it. It's part of my support of the multi generational workforce. And I think we need to be proud of the experience we bring. I love that. That's my story and I'm

William Tincup: 1:46

sticking to it. I like it. I like it. See, I thought it was just about ageism for me. And I deleted all the 20, everything before 2020, uh, 20. Uh, 2000, year 2000, I deleted everything. It was like, I didn't, I'd never worked. And then I was going to do that in 2005 and just delete it. Just always have a rolling 20, 20 years of history. Uh, I

Yvette Cameron: 2:07

know, you know, it's funny. I actually did start working when I was 16, um, even before that. But unfortunately that wasn't even in my HR career. So I have dropped a few things. So

William Tincup: 2:16

we're just going to leave it there. That's fair. That's fair. The job at Pizza Hut, Captain D's, we're going to leave those off the list for a while. All right. Where do we want to, where do we want to start with these innovations?

Yvette Cameron: 2:25

You know, I think we should start with probably the top, um, the top, one of the top issues for organizations today, which is employee experience. And we have been innovating incredibly rapidly over recent years. And, uh, most recently added to our Oracle Me employee experience platform, a new offering called Oracle Celebrate. So let's start with that. So

William Tincup: 2:49

I want to say celebrate is somewhere in the recognition space. So, am I close?

Yvette Cameron: 2:57

You know, we did a pretty good job naming that, didn't we, to kind of telegraph the solution. Well,

William Tincup: 3:02

that's good, though. That's good. That actually helps employees, because if they have to, like, think about it and go, uh, what do we call the thing, then we've kind of failed them.

Yvette Cameron: 3:12

Exactly, exactly. You know, we came out last year with an addition to Oracle Me called, um, Oracle Touchpoints, which really connects employees and managers to, um, to have these frequent touchpoints and poll surveys, etc. And now this is kind of the other side of the coin. This is Peer to peer connections together, helping recognize, um, individuals, colleagues, et cetera, across the organization in the moment, celebrate successes, milestones, um, progress, uh, you know, uh, competitions, what have you, um, so we're very excited to bring this forward. I will say that, um, Uh, I've had a lot of conversations about celebrations and, and this concept of, um, really focusing on the culture of organizations through recognition and, and not just peer to peer, but it could be manager to employee, it can be manager to an individual anywhere in the company. And some people say, okay, so what's new, right? What's new about this? But I have to say, um, when you bring the concept of recognition and, um, real time feedback and celebration into an organization on top of a tool set that is already unified across skills identification and compensation and Pay at payments and performance and feedback, et cetera, it's a, it's a complete game changer for organizations as opposed to putting some third party technology on top and say, Hey, here's your celebration app, go to it when it really is part of the culture and the integrated technology of the organization, it is truly a game changer for companies. So we're very excited about this new offering. Well, it

William Tincup: 4:57

should inform, if done well, like you said, if it's part of the suite, it should inform performance, it should inform compensation, it should inform other things instead of being bespoke and off by itself. Uh, so that makes sense to me. I think it would make sense to a lot of Oracle customers, like, okay, this is something that's EX is important. We get it. But it can't just be by itself. It's got to actually be integrated into a fuller strategy or robust data strategy. So it informs other pieces. I want to get your take on how folks, uh, your customers and prospects alike are thinking about celebrations in this remote, flexible, hybrid kind of this, the way that work gets done today. How do they. Think of celebrations either similarly than we did pre COVID or differently.

Yvette Cameron: 5:51

It's, it's a great question. I think what I'm hearing and seeing is that this idea of, um, of connecting people in the moment and celebrating successes and achievements and goals, et cetera, is more important than ever. We have such a disperse, um, uh, Organization, you know, structure across so many companies now with the remote work, etc. And building that connection, building that bridge between individuals and building that connection to, um, to goals or achievements and, and, uh, really bringing those, those formerly maybe unseen and unsung heroes forward is so incredibly important today. Burnouts at an all time high, um, feeling disconnected, um, is at an all time high. I recently read a survey, I think it was from Gallup, who said that, you know, um, uh, employees who are really thriving, um, at work, you know, was actually at an all time high last year. You know what that all time high number was? Something like 22%, 22%! And that's an all time high! So there is, there is clearly a need for connecting people in meaningful ways. And what I love about the way that we've designed celebrations is that, of course, you can create programs with or without points, right? There's a recognition and a reward component to this as well. If you want to, you know, deliver monetary or gifts or various things, or you can do it just with the recognition. But the way we've designed it is that organizations can. Set up these programs that really provide feedback and value around company culture, but you can also set it up for teams within your own team if you want to promote projects, right? Like an engineering team who's trying to deliver a project or a feature in the next six months and have milestones and set the recognition and the rewards around that milestone. So large company initiatives, business line initiatives, team level initiatives. All able to be supported through this. And, and again, when you've got these, these organizations that have, you know, 70 percent or more that, that aren't coming into the office, what a great way to connect people. It's, it's more important than ever.

William Tincup: 8:09

What are you seeing from your clients in terms of personalization? And what I mean by that is like, okay, in that moment, you might want to be recognized or celebrated in a different way than I would. How do we, how do we gather that data? Uh, as a team, and then understand how people like to be celebrated.

Yvette Cameron: 8:28

No, that's a, that's a, that's a really good insight, um, and, and question. I think that, um, first off, there's, there's several capabilities that we've brought forward to enable that recognition and to help people, um, um, make that in a, in a way that's maybe, um, uh, easier for them if that's not a natural skill. So we have embedded, for example, generative AI. into the feedback portion so that as you're giving feedback, um, uh, you know, we, we are able to support that and, and bring, use Gen AI and the context, context awareness that, you know, we're recognizing a particular. Milestone or achievement, et cetera and make that an easier process for the giver. For the recipient, um, you know, I, I think that over time as we look at how people, you know, what's the, what's the distribution of feedback, how people are perhaps, if you're using the rewards component, how their Um, uh, redeeming those rewards. Are they, you know, taking a monetary payment? Are they, you know, going, opting for experiences, et cetera? I think that's going to be a, um, an indicator, but I think even more is just asking people, right? Is this, is this recognition meaningful for you? Is there, you know, what are your preferences? And so one of the key components that we have within Oracle HCM is this ability to Constantly be surveying, whether it's a pulse survey on a daily or a weekly basis, ad hoc, periodic, the big annual survey. I think asking people, you know, for that, for that, um, that, uh, insight, you know, is this, does this make sense for you? Is this meaningful to you? I don't know another, a better way to, to, um, to get that insight other than to ask directly. Um, so we'll, we'll see, you know, we'll see how, um, as organizations take this up, um, what kind of new trends we're able to find from individuals receiving these benefits.

William Tincup: 10:27

Well, and what's beautiful about that is different industries, different managers, different customers can use it differently in terms of feedback. So the fact that it's enabled, they can, if they're curious and they want to find out they, they've got a way to do that. Again, getting back to the data's all still in one place, which is nice. What do we, uh, what do you, what do you think, like next year, 2024, what do you think that, uh, you'd like to see in EX next year?

Yvette Cameron: 10:55

That's a great question. You know, um, so we have. Our big, our big here at Oracle, um, investments, uh, over the last two years, as, as we've clearly demonstrated, is focused on the employee experience. And last year, as we introduced touch points and a new way to really put more responsibility on managers to be better leaders, um, for their employees. You know, that's, that was really important as I look out to 2024, I think more emphasis on empowering managers. And I don't mean the senior executives. I mean, middle managers, right? The ones with the direct teams, we've done so much as an industry. We've done so much here at Oracle on the individual employees experience and guiding you through journeys and growing your career and. Connecting with your manager. And, and that was a great start for manager enablement, but there's so much more we can be doing. And, and, you know, I think, um, our investments in analytics and the experiences that we delivered in our grow capabilities, which is, you know, helping managers guide their employees to better experiences, um, continued investment in that, that manager focus. Because again, You know, it is a different world, um, uh, in the, in the workforce today than it was three, four years ago. Expectations of individual employees are so much higher and the expectations they have of their managers, um, is incredibly high. The flexibility, insight, empathy, compassion that need to be able to trust and be trusted. And we need to make sure as an, as an industry, that we are empowering those managers with the tools and the capabilities and the training and the insights that they can be the best leaders possible. Because still, even though it's a different work environment than it was four years ago, still people leave managers, not companies. And we need to do all we can to, to re enable and rearm them with the best tools.

William Tincup: 13:00

Well, I think every dollar that you invest there with managers, you're investing in retention. So, uh, the more tools, resources, training, et cetera, managers are, are often they're promoted and then they're there and then we kind of, we don't give them the tools and resources. So I love those bets, uh, and your innovations, all, anything, anything that you can do for managers. Because I also see it show up in recruiting when candidates are asking questions of their hiring managers. They're asking questions about them. They're asking questions about, okay, how do you handle difficult situations? How do you answer, how do you handle celebrations? You know, things like that. And if a manager is frozen or they can't answer it, the candidate just moves on. They don't, they don't, they're not trying, they're not in the, they're not in the fix you business. They're just going to move on to the next company, which, you know, I don't hate that. I think that's actually the right thing to do for a candidate. So I love that. I love that investment. What other innovations have you seen this year?

Yvette Cameron: 14:01

Yeah. So we have also recently announced our new workforce scheduling and labor optimization solution, which quite honestly, William, although it's, um, you know, it's really geared towards the, the, the deep requirements of scheduling your workforce. Based on the demand of your business. So healthcare organizations trying to ensure they've got the right talent, the right skills to deliver the right patient outcomes or in retail, you know, really tailoring that scheduling to the rise and fall and changing nature of volume of customers and weather impacts, et cetera, or manufacturing. While the, this solution, um, is, is really geared towards that, um, that delivery of those optimized labor schedules, it's really another, um, investment in employee experience. Because ultimately, right, especially again in this environment, um, to combat, uh, burnout and work life balance and all these, these areas that are critical importance for the individual, I want to feel I've got a sense of control over When I'm working that my preferences are being taken into consideration, that when I am scheduled for something that isn't optimal, I've got an easy way to see that schedule, do shift swapping, make sure that when I'm making those shift swaps that it's appropriate again for the skills and and that the overtime is being managed behind the scenes so I'm not asking ridiculous things that are going to be, you know, denied, etc. So we're super excited about our new demand based workforce scheduling and labor optimization because it delivers on the, um, cost, uh, and labor, um, goals that organizations have and, and focusing on the outcomes, again, patient, retail, et cetera, while at the same time, really, really driving better experiences and outcomes for their workforce. So it's a great, um, one two punch, right, for, for organizations.

William Tincup: 16:00

Well, what I, you know, what's interesting and what I love about, it's also you, as you said, it, it helps with ex, it helps with retention. It also helps with what you've done with manager, uh, enablement. So instead of them having to come to a manager, which is exactly what used to happen with schedules, is that their email, their, their, uh, their voicemail box would fill up with, Hey, I wanna work Tuesday, not Wednesday, or this, that and the other. It's like, you know, here's the coverage map. Y'all can just, y'all switch shifts if you don't like where you're at, you know, talk to somebody else and switch. The manager is then enabling them, which, which again, we've, you've given them tools for the managers to do that. So their experience, I mean, it's really kind of the manager experience as well as the employee experience. Uh, I love that. And I love the analytics. Go

Yvette Cameron: 16:49

ahead. Sorry. I was going to say, you know, the, the manager experience in this is huge. The stress on managers today to try to optimize those schedules without the assistance of AI or without the assistance of empowered employees can be really, really quite stressful to your point. So yeah, it's, it's great from all sides. You were mentioning analytics. Yeah.

William Tincup: 17:10

Yeah. I was thinking about the analytics you're going to sit on top of and helping them navigate their week to week to week to week. You know, again, they can start seeing some seasonality. They can start seeing different things, uh, in their own business. So it is helps leadership. It helps managers. It helps employees. Like I can see the analytics becoming extremely powerful sitting on all that data.

Yvette Cameron: 17:34

So, um, it's, it's really interesting. What we've heard from our customers is, um, that too many of today's solutions when they're managing, um, you know, workforce scheduling and the optimization component, um, is that it's the analytics that oftentimes come out of those solutions are very centered on the people. And of course, right, the labor costs, et cetera, is part of it. But The budgeting, the labor cost, the, um, the insights, um, that span not just finance and HCM, but span those demand system and the outcomes and, and all of the components, right? This is, this is where I'm super excited to bring these workforce, um, management solutions to market that, um, are also natively developed as part of a broader suite, because then suddenly, All of that, the budgeting, the encumbrance of finance, the, um, the people, the outcomes, um, component is all visible in a single dashboard. Um, so those analytics are, are, um, incredibly important, and we are working very closely, um, with our healthcare organizations when we publish this press release on workforce. Um, we Did so with a large focus on the health care impact for our health care customers, um, working very closely with many to, to really help them, um, um, you know, leverage these capabilities and they're working closely with us to, to help drive the capabilities as well. But you'll see also in that press release that, you know, we're focusing very much also on other industries. This is intended to be a scheduling and optimization solution for all demand driven industries. And, um, driven by AI and, you know, um, capped with the analytics that give you the insight you need across a business. Um, you know, it's, uh, it's again, it's a, it's a powerful solution across so many fronts.

William Tincup: 19:23

So when you do innovations, we just talked about, uh, ex and, and, uh, some of the things that you've done in scheduling and op workforce optimization. The good news is you. You do stuff like that, especially sitting on top of the platform itself, you already build them natively. And so it's already integrated. You don't have to worry about any of that stuff as a customer. You'd be

Yvette Cameron: 19:44

surprised, you'd be surprised how many, you know, how many organizations take that for granted. And then they bring these solutions in and they're like, um, I don't understand.

William Tincup: 19:53

Why doesn't he talk to the other

Yvette Cameron: 19:55

thing? Exactly, exactly. It's something that so many take for granted and we deliver it because it's not easy, right? It doesn't require knowledge and deep knowledge in all of these areas to truly bring it together in a way that makes sense. Well, you just said

William Tincup: 20:09

something super simple that Probably people wouldn't pick up on it's like budgeting and, uh, not in, not in the HR sense of budgeting, but, but in the financial sense of budgeting, because y'all have a whole host of financial tools as well. And so if they're an Oracle shop, uh, an Oracle customer, this, this data over here feeds things that, uh, other people. The finance and accounting would be able to look at and then see, okay, what are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? How can we make this better? Again, if, if it's a, if it's a tool or an application that sits on, on, on, uh, on a platform, but doesn't talk and doesn't inform, they don't get that. That's, that's just, that's just lost. Um, do you have another innovation you want to go through?

Yvette Cameron: 20:53

So, you know, um, we've been talking about product innovations and of course, you know, we, we, you know, deliver great, great products, but I also want to talk about, um, a service offering. So, we have, uh, recently launched a service offering called Oracle HCM Now, and this is, um, a solution aimed to the mid enterprise organizations, um, from say 2, 000 to 15, 000 employees, a way to help ensure that they are able to. Um, deploy Oracle Cloud HCM in a way that is appropriate for the maturity of their business, um, in a, in a budget understood, um, you know, cost, time, and scope, um, and, and, uh, essentially get to, get to impact, um, faster than ever before. So with Oracle, Um, HCM now, um, we have partnered with, um, several of our, um, uh, of our partner organizations to work with these mid enterprise customers, bringing forward the scope solution. Um, and like I said, at an understood price and timeframe. So that literally within six months or so, right? They can be live with their cloud HCM and some core capabilities and then phase additional components, um, over time as they need for their unique business requirements. So, um, you know, it's, uh, this idea of, you know, fast cloud HCM from Oracle from, for mid enterprise. Yeah. Is it a fit? Absolutely. It's a fit.

William Tincup: 22:27

I love, I love it because again, they've got to show value. Oh, large organizations have to show value too, but they're accustomed to something that might take more time. Uh, but I, I love the, the idea of like, okay, you know what we don't, even though you've purchased everything, okay, you have the full suite done. Let's get you live with something first. And so get you, get you fully trained and get you really operating, get you using that and kind of get that compelling in your organization and then start layering in the next things that you need to. So I love, first of all, I love the adoption strategy and I love working with SIs and basically saying they don't need to, they don't need to eat the entire elephant at once. That's let's not do that.

Yvette Cameron: 23:10

Exactly. You know, and we kind of equate it to, um, a model house versus a custom home, right? You can. Cool. So, so we're working with our, um, with these, these, uh, these partners, um, who over time may, you know, continue to expand or, or focus in particular industries, but, um, you know, they're delivering the model home, but what do you do in a model home? You, you do have choices within that, right? Make sure it's appropriate for your business. And after we've got that, that foundation, then let's Build the second story and the third story. And, you know, again, bring on the pieces and the focus where it matters most for you. Um, so very excited, again, accelerated time to, to, to value, which is critical, especially, um, for these, these smaller organization, minimizing those implementation costs, minimizing the time, as I've said, accelerating that time to value, um, but then making sure that, that they are getting ultimately the, the capabilities that they need because each business

William Tincup: 24:07

is different. Oh, yeah. And I think the one of the, your partners that start to focus on industries, they're just going to get smart. I mean, if they're, if they're doing retailers in that space, they're just going to get really smart about, okay, what can they consume in, in this, you know, in four months, in six months, it's eight months, nine months, et cetera. They're just going to build out models that just make sense. Well, and they're based on

Yvette Cameron: 24:31

these industries. They are already, you know, I mean, cool. Oracle does deliver, Oracle does deliver best practices with its solution, right? We've got, um, you know, uh, uh, uh, localizations, we've got, um, uh, we've got, uh, process flows and journeys and all kinds of best practices to help kickstart and get organizations up and running out of the, out of the gate. But our partners are doing that as well. Um, so we've been delivering, developing and delivering journeys for example, just one, one example of best practices, whether it's by, um, a process flow or an industries and now working with these, um, organizations who are really going to focus on this mid enterprise, those, those best practices, those pre configurations, those things that are going to just really kickstart and get companies up and running quickly, appropriate for their. Location, their industry, et cetera, are just going to continue to expand. So super exciting. And it's not the kind of, not the kind of message that you've maybe typically heard from Oracle. No,

William Tincup: 25:31

no, no. Again, I've said this to you, uh, offline and online, y'all do quietly. You go about innovating in such a great way, but you, you know, it's like. Your Oracle customers know, and I know your prospects know it too, but like the larger, the other folks that aren't in those two camps, they don't know that y'all are innovating all the time. And so, uh, I could talk to you forever, but I know you have like other things to do today. So, um, thank you so much for coming on the show and explaining everything. I love

Yvette Cameron: 26:04

it. I love, I always love your questions and talking with you. Um, it's awesome. Thank you.

William Tincup: 26:08

Vice versa. Thanks for the audience listening until next time.