Microsoft’s Dawn Klinghoffer on How Leaders Can Tell if Employees Are Thriving

ELISE HU: That is Dawn Klinghoffer, head of people analytics at Microsoft. She is leveraging data to help leaders understand and improve the employee experience and not just trying to track productivity or measure engagement. She's trying to dig deeper into the data and discover if employees are genuinely energized and thriving. We'll talk a little bit about the definitions of energy and thriving in my conversation with Dawn. 

ELISE HU: Hi Dawn.

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Hello.

ELISE HU: Why don't we start by having you introduce yourself and what you do? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Yeah, my name's Dawn Klinghoffer, and I lead our people analytics function at Microsoft. 

ELISE HU: What are people analytics? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: It's a very good question because it hasn't been around for all that long. Think of it as analytics on a company's most important asset, their people. And so we do analytics to understand if they're thriving, to understand what's going on in their day-to-day lived experiences, meaning moments that matter, so when people get new roles at the company, when they're hired, when they're leaving. We do all sorts of analytics that really help our employees kind of have the best work life that they can have. 

ELISE HU: So I can remember working for large companies, and typically you'll get an exit interview, for example, and H.R. will conduct this exit interview and hopefully take what they've learned from the exit interviews to help inform other decisions. Is that a stage of people analytics or a common way to use it? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Absolutely. In fact, attrition is probably one of the ways that many people, analytics functions and companies get started. It's one of the more basic people analytics practices because every company people can leave. 

ELISE HU: So what are other points in an employee's journey that you measure? What else do y'all try and capture? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Definitely one of the biggest areas of research for us over the past five years has been onboarding. We've hired lots of people into Microsoft, and so we want our employees to have an exceptional onboarding experience and understand the different nuances that can make an onboarding experience more favorable or less favorable and then provide that guidance to our managers. 

ELISE HU: And what's the ultimate goal of doing all these people analytics? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: The ultimate goal is to ensure that your employees are thriving. And if I think about what we do to enable that, my function really supports H.R., but we're bigger than that. We also support all of our managers. We support our leaders, and we support our employees. 

ELISE HU: How do you define thriving? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Thriving is to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work. That's how we defined it at Microsoft. I mean, work can be hard, and you want to be energized every day and wake up in the morning and say, ‘Wow, I'm really excited to tackle this challenge,’ not, ‘Oh, my gosh, I can't believe I have to do this again.’ So to be energized is like bringing that energy to everything that you do. And if you have a leader that's generating energy, it can be contagious. It can also create a team that is energized and so that's something that we really want to propagate because lots of challenges are going to come at them every single day. And when you have that energy, you can continue to tackle those challenges. 

ELISE HU: You're a leader yourself. What are some of the telltale signs you look for that people around you are thriving? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Gosh, I mean, some signs, I think that when they have a smile on their face, when they are asking really good questions, and when they are really excited about getting you know, kind of getting the task done at hand. Not just the task, but like looking forward to that future where they can see that impact. 

ELISE HU: What are signs that tell you someone's internal battery is running low? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Well, first of all, you can see it on their face. And, you know, you can tell that they're just like, ‘Well, we did this already’, you know, ‘No, we tried that. No.’ You know, it's more around disagreeing as opposed to agreeing with things that might even be really risky to do, okay. So back to kind of thriving, I think that people that are thriving, they have a bigger appetite to take risks. And when you're not thriving, you have lesser battery to take those risks. 

ELISE HU: I want to dig in a little bit on energy, because you get to measure it, or you have the task of trying to measure it. How do you do so? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: There's many ways to measure energy. The way we're measuring it in the survey is obviously perception-based. So we ask employees the question, you know, in terms of feeling energized. But it can be more complicated than that. And that's part of the beauty of people analytics, is that, you know, you really have to think creatively and think about all the different data elements that you can join together to understand what creates energy. So, you know, we did some work around thriving next to work-life balance. Like, does thriving mean that people have work-life balance? And the answer is not necessarily. And the way that we were able to do that work is we joined together our survey data as the outcome variable with behavioral data. And so we do this in aggregate, and we're looking for broad trends. We're not looking at individuals. But what we did was we connected it to how people collaborate, how they spend their time sending emails, and meeting with one another. And so what you can see is that work-life balance does not completely overlap with thriving. Let me give you just an example of this. You can be an employee that is working on a really critical project, and you're working all the time because this project has a deadline. But, you know, if you meet that deadline, the impact that you can have is exceptional. And so you're energized. You're putting everything that you have into this, and you're thriving during this time. But that's not necessarily sustainable. You can't do that for years and years on end. You do need that balance to say there are times when you're going to put everything into something and then there's a time that you need to recover. Okay. And so that's kind of the complexity of thriving with work-life balance. And we were able to see this through the different collaboration patterns. 

ELISE HU: So we know that we take in data, or H.R. folks will take in data, but then after gathering the data, especially on seemingly abstract concepts like thriving or feeling energized, what do you do with it? How does it get crunched? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: What happens is usually it starts with a business challenge. So what's the business challenge? What problem are you trying to solve? And I have consultants on the team that work with our H.R. leaders and business leaders to really unpack the business challenge and understand how we can help with data. And then the analysts work together with data scientists, and we bring in the appropriate data elements into—whether we're using Azure or we're using just one of our simple tools that we've built through Power BI—we’ll bring those data elements together and we'll start analyzing, we'll start understanding is there a relationship? We'll use statistical models and, depending on ‘Is there a relationship or not?’, sometimes what we find is, is actually the hypothesis that someone had doesn't play out. We call that ‘myth busting,’ because some people have really strong hypotheses that they say, ‘We know that the data will show X,’ and we'll say, ‘Actually, it didn't.’ Or many times will say, ‘Yes, that's true. That hypothesis did play out.’ And then we work with H.R. and the business to take action on either a program change or, you know, however the decision can execute. That's called ‘operationalizing’ the work that we do. 

ELISE HU: So after you have data, you have to kind of look to the future, right. Are we hope that this data helps guide the future? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Oh, absolutely, yes. 

ELISE HU: So you can’t project out into the future based on the general thriving metrics? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: We don't have a predictive model right now on thriving. We have a predictive attrition model. There are other aspects of the work that we do that we can and do predict out. This is only our—we're going into our second administration of measuring thriving, so we still need more data to really start to understand how we would predict that. 

ELISE HU: So in the broader workforce, the trends of burnout, for example, to address that, Microsoft has coined the term ‘human energy crisis’ to kind of describe that strain on invaluable people that keep our companies running. When y’all use this term ‘human energy crisis’? What does it mean? How does naming this function? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Yes. I mean, we can't empower others without thinking about our employees and thinking about the energy that they bring every day. And because of many aspects of the world over the past few years, we feel like employees have just not had all the support that they need, and so we've kind of coined that phrase to say, ‘Let's pay attention to this. Let's put this front and center and ensure that we're doing something different to help our employees through this energy crisis.’ 

ELISE HU: So in the face of a larger energy crisis or even kind of a spiritual one globally—because, you know, we live during a time of climate change and pandemic and, you know, economic strain and all of that—what is the company's role? What do you feel like a corporation can do, because this is so much more of a global issue? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: You know, there's definitely things that corporations can do. Corporations can put employees front and center. They can focus on manager and leader capabilities. Okay. You know, I talked about supporting career growth, you can be intentional, really understanding what makes your employees tick. And that's not something that you can just do in a survey, but that's around manager and employee relationships and having that relationship to understand, ‘What does your employee need?’ Because one employee might need something very different than another employee. And that really can help that human energy crisis—understanding what is it that I can do to help my employee really tackle that human energy crisis. 

ELISE HU: Yeah. What do you tell managers in general? What are tactical things that managers can do to help employees thrive? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Well, you sit down and you have career conversations with your employees. At Microsoft, we have intentional career conversations during our connect process, which is twice a year. But you don't just have to do that twice a year. You can sometimes see it and hear it when you're having a one-on-one with your employee that they might need a change. And even initiating that conversation to say, ‘Hey, is there something I can do to help you get to that next move that you're looking for and provide you with a little bit more energy?’ One of the other analyses that we've done—and we've been looking at this over years and years—is when people do change roles, there's a boost in engagement. But having those one-on-one conversations is so, so critical. Understanding what your employees need from a flexible work perspective, that's something else that can really help your employees thrive. Being intentional about that and really sitting down, we have a conversation called ‘Creating Team Agreements,’ and it's a conversation that you have with your manager and team about how you work best. And so you sit down and you talk about all aspects of work. You talk about communication, and when do you like to to communicate? Do you like to only get email during working hours? Are you good getting email after working hours, knowing that you don't have to respond to that email if it comes in after working hours? So having these types of intentional conversations and creating team agreements about what works best for your team can really help employees. 

ELISE HU: Have you felt like you have had to make changes in your own life in order to replenish your own career energy? And if so, can you talk us through that so that we get a good sense of how that might play out? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Yeah, I definitely have had to raise my hand and say ‘I need a change.’ So when I started at Microsoft, you know, I was early in my career. I was working long hours, I was energized. I mean, I just couldn't imagine a more creative and innovative company. But when I had my first child, I knew that I couldn't work the hours that I was working before, and I wanted to spend more time at home with my child than I was spending working. And so I asked my manager at the time if I could work part-time, but the job that I was in was really a full-time job. It's really hard to make your job that is a full time job into a part time job. So, I was very, very fortunate that one of my colleagues had moved from finance over to H.R. to lead our compensation and benefits organization, and he called me up. This was just so serendipitous. He called me and said, ‘Hey, I'm starting a people analytics function. We need more people with analytics capability. Would you be part of this team that I'm starting?’ And I said, ‘Would you let me work part-time?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ So I was like, great. Okay. 

ELISE HU: That waseasy. 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Yup. I'm like, I'm there. So, I mean, that was the part of my career, I really didn't care about the type of work I was doing, I just needed more flexibility in my life. And so I moved over to H.R., never thought in a million years that that's what I would do. And lo and behold, I felt like I found my calling. And even in a part-time role, I felt like I was having so much impact. And pretty soon after that, a couple of years after I moved, I started leading the team, still on a part-time basis, and then at some point I went to my manager and I said, ‘Hey, if I left, would you replace me with someone full-time or part-time?’ And that was about the time when I realized that I was getting ready to work full-time again. And she said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you know, if you left, we'd have to replace your position full-time.’ And I said, ‘Well, then you know what? I will come back full-time.’ And she said, ‘You do what you need to do to transition back to full time.’ 

ELISE HU: Very cool. 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: And that's what I did. And so, you know, I felt like Microsoft gave me an incredible gift, an incredible gift where I did not have to step out of the workforce at all when my kids were young. And I could continue to have an impact at home and at work. And that was the greatest gift of all, doing something that I was truly passionate about and that I still do today. 

ELISE HU: Yeah, it sounds like your boss there, your leader, really saw you, empathized with your situation, and then made an adjustment that was bespoke for you. But of course, for the employee, admitting that you're struggling or that the workload is beyond your current capacity is still stigmatized, right? Or it's seen as a sign of weakness, especially right now in this confusing time where we're working out hybrid work in an economy that's kind of topsy-turvy. So what are some ways that leaders can identify if their people are going through some struggles and then cater to that, or find ways to adjust or flex to that? 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: I think the first aspect of that is having the right connection and relationship with your manager. That's part of the onboarding experience, I mean, that's one of the key insights that we came out with when we did a lot of our onboarding analysis. You need to meet with your new employees week one. You can't be on vacation when your new employees start. You can't say, ‘Oh my God, I'm too busy. Just do your training and I'll see you soon.’ That's really important for building that trusting relationship with them. And then having these ongoing conversations that are not just one-on-one, check-the-box exercises, but really, ‘How are you doing? What can I do to support your well-being, to support you in thriving?’ Those are the types of conversations that we're really looking to have managers and employees have on a regular basis, not just when things get tough. That way, when things do get tough, you feel more empowered to raise your hand and say, ‘I need help.’ 

ELISE HU: Gosh, I'd love to have some managers say that to me throughout my career. It kind of you're you're saying this out loud kind of makes it glaringly obvious all the times that's missing, right? It's all the time. Yeah. The leader didn't say, ‘How are you doing and how could I support you?’ 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Yes. And you know, even though I've gone through this firsthand, I still have to remind myself when I sit down and have my one-on-ones with my directs, make sure to focus on them, ask them how they're doing, what's going on in their life that they want to share. Because they don't always want to share, that's the other thing, and so then giving them the space and time to just feel comfortable sharing. 

ELISE HU: Okay. Dawn Klinghoffer, thank you so much. 

DAWN KLINGHOFFER: Thank you. It was really nice to speak with you. 

ELISE HU: Thanks again to Dawn Klinghoffer, head of people analytics at Microsoft. And that's it for this episode of the WorkLab podcast from Microsoft. Please subscribe and check back for the next episode of WorkLab . I will be speaking with Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill about the new skills that help people work better now. And please rate us, review, and follow us wherever you listen. It helps us out. If you've got a question, we'd love to hear from you. You can drop us an email at workLab@microsoft.com, and please check out the WorkLab digital publication, too. You can find the latest work trend index report there as well as a transcript of this episode. All of that is at microsoft.com/worklab. WorkLab is produced by Microsoft, Godfrey Dadich Partners, and Reasonable Volume. I am your co-host, Elise Hu. My co-host is Tanya Moseley. Our correspondents are Mary Melton and Desmond Dickerson. Sharon Kallander and Matthew Duncan produce this podcast. Jessica Voelker is the WorkLab editor. Thank you for listening.