Episode 243: How Microsoft Uses People Data to Shape Flexible Working That Helps Teams Thrive (with Dawn Klinghoffer)
Last week, Microsoft announced an update to its flexible work guidelines. As Amy Coleman, Chief People Officer at Microsoft, explained: “We’ve looked at how our teams work best, and the data is clear: when people work together in person more often, they thrive – they are more energized, empowered, and they deliver stronger results.” As such, we’re delighted to have Dawn Klinghoffer, Global Head of People Analytics at Microsoft, as our guest on this week’s episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. As she explains in this conversation, Dawn and her team conducted the analysis that informed this decision, revealing a causal link between office presence and employee thriving.
In this conversation, Dawn and David discuss:
What the data shows about the ideal balance between office presence and flexibility
Why "moments that matter" are key to in-person collaboration and connection
How Microsoft's people analytics team is evolving its composition and strategy in the age of AI
The impact of deep vs. broad AI adoption on employee thriving
How AI is transforming employee listening, from sentiment analysis to real-time feedback loops
The creation of Microsoft’s new Analytics Innovation team—and what it signals about the future of HR
This episode is packed with data-backed insights, practical examples, and a forward-looking perspective on how HR can lead through complexity and change.
This episode is sponsored by HiBob.
HiBob is the all-in-one HCM platform built for HR leaders who need connected data, flexible workflows, and a user experience people actually want to use.
Learn more by visiting hibob.com/davidgreen2025.
[0:00:11] David Green: For many organisations, the past few years have been a whirlwind of policy shifts, pilot programmes, and pressure to decide what the future of work should look like. But what if the real question isn't where people work, but whether they're thriving? That's the lens Dawn Klinghoffer and her team at Microsoft have taken. As head of people analytics at Microsoft, Dawn has spent the last five years helping Microsoft navigate hybrid work through a clear-eyed commitment to employee experience, and to use data, not dogma, to inform decisions. And today she returns to the podcast to share what they've learned. So, today in this very special and exclusive conversation, Dawn shares the latest insights from Microsoft's journey, how they're measuring employee thriving, what the data is saying about time spent in the office, and how transparency and trust are shaping their approach. So, if you're leading people's strategy right now, or advising leaders under pressure to make decisions quickly, this conversation is definitely for you. Enjoy.
Thank you for letting us know about how things are developing at Microsoft. Since our last podcast conversation, what has been happening with you? And maybe for those listeners that have not heard from you before, can you also provide an introduction to you and the work you're doing at Microsoft?
[0:01:42] Dawn Klinghoffer: So, hi, David. Thanks for having me on the podcast again. It's always nice to be here and to talk with you. My name is Dawn Klinghoffer. As you said, I lead people analytics at Microsoft. And wow, there has been a ton going on at Microsoft since we last spoke. I would say that just within my team, there's been a lot of change; within the HR organisation, there's been a lot of change; so, I'm excited to get into it and then to talk more about it with you. But I would say the biggest change that's happened is that we have a new CHRO. So, Kathleen Hogan moved on to a different role at Microsoft. She's now the Head of Transformation and Strategy, sitting on the senior leadership team, still working directly for Satya. And a woman named Amy Coleman, who's a longtime Microsoft employee, she is now our CHRO. And Amy and I have known each other, gosh, for over 20 years, we've worked together. And so, it was great to see someone that I've worked with for so long, who has had clear aspirations to be CHRO, get that position.
It's the first time at Microsoft where an HR professional has been the Chief People Officer. So, it's a really big deal. It's a really big deal for the function, especially for the folks who are HR professionals, to see this type of succession plan work. Our past CHROs have been from the business. Kathleen was in a sales role before she took on a CHRO. And then Lisa Brummel, prior to that, she was in an engineering marketing type role before she became the CHRO. So, yeah, it's been a big deal and a lot to celebrate.
[0:03:44] David Green: And I guess also the fact that Amy's come from within, not just a testament to her, but it's also a testament to Kathleen and maybe also how HR has become not just at Microsoft, but generally, a much more strategic partner to the business than maybe it was ten years ago when Kathleen first assumed the role as CHRO?
[0:04:06] Dawn Klinghoffer: Yes, so when Kathleen assumed the role, remember that was right when Satya had taken over as CEO. And every CEO works a little bit differently. And so, yes, but I agree with you. I think that it is a true testament. So, well last year, I remember people making a big deal about the fact that at Microsoft, we were combining HR strategy with people analytics. Actually, there was a new leader at Microsoft that was hired, Katy George. She was the former CHRO of McKinsey. She actually went to work with Kathleen in the new transformation and strategy office. So, now I work directly for the CHRO. People analytics has always been its own centre of excellence, no matter where we have rolled up to. It continues to be its own centre of excellence. But now, I work directly for Amy and I am a regular participant in the HR leadership team meetings, as opposed to more of a guest participant, which I have to say, I was there more than not, but now I am there every week.
[0:05:23] David Green: And our previous episode was very much on the work that you and the team have been doing around employee thriving at Microsoft. For those that haven't listened to that episode, please do. But if you haven't, for those that haven't, what does thriving actually mean at Microsoft? Why is it such an important North Star? And maybe, how has some of the research that you've been doing around thriving evolved since the last time we spoke on this topic?
[0:05:47] Dawn Klinghoffer: So, I love talking about thriving. And so, I'll do a little micro-session of what thriving is and why we moved to thriving. This happened during the pandemic, when we realised that the bar that we were looking at for engagement needed to be higher, okay, because we would look at our census surveys and see that largely, our employees were engaged, although we would hear a lot in the comments that showed that maybe there was something missing there. And so, we did a lot of research focus groups and we came up with this North Star called thriving, which is to be energised and empowered to do meaningful work. And that is our North Star that we focus on with our biannual census survey. And it has served us very well over the last several years as a North Star. We've been able to do a lot of, I would say, really innovative research with thriving as the outcome variable.
[0:06:48] David Green: And what I love about the work that you're doing at Microsoft, and thanks, you've obviously shared it with us on the podcast a number of times, and obviously with the group of companies that we work with at Insight222 as well, is how you've approached your decisions about in-person work and hybrid models and return to office and all those topics. I know you've taken a particularly rigorous and long-term view on this at Microsoft and used data to inform the journey all the way, not just one off, but continuously. I think Satya refers to it as, "Data, not dogma", when it comes to this topic. Can you talk to us about this methodology and what data sources you use and have used, and what questions that you're asking, and why it's so important to be so careful to get this right?
[0:07:37] Dawn Klinghoffer: Okay, so let's go back to before the pandemic, because this is not something that we started measuring during the pandemic. We've been studying different work patterns and the impact on engagement, or now thriving, for years. So, if we think about the research we did prior to the pandemic, we were very interested in this notion of people working in the office, or at headquarters, and people working remotely. And the reason why is we are a global company, we are located all over the globe. And oftentimes, you're not necessarily located in the same location as your manager. And so, we were trying to understand when people were not co-located or when people worked remotely, what was the impact of that on engagement? And surprisingly, we found that people that worked remotely, this is prior to the pandemic, they were often more engaged than folks that were located and co-located and went to offices. And we had a very strong hypothesis for that.
So, prior to the pandemic, we mostly hired people either close to our corporate headquarters office or to another Microsoft office. And when we hired people that did want to work remotely, they had a strong desire, usually on the personal side where they couldn't leave their family, they had elderly parents, their community, whatnot. And so, it was almost like an exception for folks to work remotely. And they were so thrilled that they were able to meet their career goals, work at Microsoft, have really impactful and energising work. So, then we go into the pandemic and we level the playing field completely. Everyone's from home and everyone said, "This is the greatest work-from-home experiment ever". And well, yes, it was a great experiment to say, "Can we all work from home?" The answer is yes. I mean, companies did it extremely well. Knowledge worker companies did extremely well during that time, okay. And our technology, by the way, Microsoft technology enabled us to work remotely.
It probably started about two years ago, we started to see some of our competitors have return-to-the-office plans and requiring people and mandates to come back to the office, sometimes three days a week, sometimes four days a week, sometimes five days a week. We've continued to study this. And Satya has always said, "We want to use data, not dogma, to make the decisions on how we work". We didn't see any differences between folks that were still working remotely and folks that were coming back to the office. But about two years ago, that started to change. And we started to see that folks that were coming into the office were thriving a little bit more than folks that were working remotely. Now, it was about this time that we did a lot of research on the moments that matter for people to come together in person, because again, we were finding that there were moments that matter that really helped people work better, and that in-person connection couldn't be replaced, okay? There were some aspects of onboarding that were really important to do in person, coming together to build social capital, getting to know folks that you're working with, starting a new project, okay? Those are some examples where it was really important for people to come together in person. But this was something that we wanted to watch. We wanted to continue to study this and not make any knee-jerk reactions.
We do this biannual census survey. Again, we're using de-identified badge data, people coming into a Microsoft office versus working remotely, using thriving as the outcome variable. And every time we would look at this, it was every six months, we would see that there was more and more of a correlation between people coming into the office, they were thriving more than the folks that were working remotely. The last analysis we did, not only was it a correlative relationship, we also ran our causal models this time. And it has a causal relationship, people coming to the office. And I'm just going to talk just a minute about my own personal experience.
So, I'm an introvert. I get my best work done when I'm by myself, thinking deeply. I thrived during the pandemic working from home. I was like, "Oh my God, I'm never going back to the office. This is amazing". But I live our data because I truly do live with data over dogma, absolutely. And so, when I started to see this happen and I started to come into the office more, and I think that even subliminally, I didn't even realise that I was thriving more by coming into the office versus working remotely, and I know that it's surprising to people, but I'm really pleased that we have data now that shows this type of causal impact.
[0:13:04] David Green: This episode is sponsored by HiBob. Still managing comp, performance and onboarding across disconnected tools? It's costing you time and holding your team back. HiBob is the all-in-one HCM platform built for HR leaders who need connected data, flexible workflows, and a user experience people actually want to use. When Ecosia switched to Bob, they cut their contract and onboarding time from 8 days to just 15 minutes and saw a 706% return on investment. Get the full story at hibob.com/davidgreen2025, or come and see us at HR Tech in Las Vegas, booth 2822. HiBob, HCM for people-proud companies.
As you referred to, many of your competitors have already mandated a full return to office and various numbers of days at various times. And the headlines are now saying that Microsoft is working on their own return to office. What can you share about that?
[0:14:29] Dawn Klinghoffer: So, first of all, one of the things that I did forget when I talked about the results is while we see that people that come into the office are thriving, the actual data is people that come to the office three-plus days a week are thriving more than people that don't, flexibility has always been core to Microsoft's fabric. We were never a five-day-a-week company. If we look at the data before the pandemic, people had the flexibility to go to the doctors when they needed to, to go to school, help their child's classrooms one morning a week. I mean, there was always flexibility and that's part of Microsoft fabric. And we continue to see that sentiment loud and clear in our surveys, that people want to continue to have flexibility. So, the best of both worlds is to come into the office three days a week and you still have two days a week of flexibility. Anything that we decide using the data, and also understanding that the SLT has been talking about this for a while, even in absence of data, but if we do decide to have some type of flexible work policy change, I feel good knowing that we have data to support that. And whatever we do, we will continue to support flexibility as well, because that truly is what's critical.
We want the best of both worlds, we want people to thrive, so we want people to have those in-person connections, but we also want people to feel like they have the flexibility to work in the way that's best for them.
[0:16:30] David Green: It seems, I mean obviously, we've spoken about this a number of times over the last few years, you're always thinking at Microsoft about the outcomes that you're trying to get. So, one of the outcomes obviously is thriving employees, because you've shown that when employees are thriving, that has a direct impact on performance and loads of other metrics that you look at. And also, the flexibility helps lead to those outcomes as well, doesn't it? So, it's very much thinking about the outcomes that you're trying to achieve from both a business and a people perspective within the organisation, isn't it?
[0:16:59] Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah. And you bring up another really important point, is the business. And every business is a little different at Microsoft. And so, they might have their own outcomes that they're looking to drive. And even during the pandemic, there were certain roles, you know, our data centre roles, they didn't work from home, they couldn't work from home, they had to work on site. And so, different businesses have different needs. And we also need to understand that and continue to measure, because maybe they don't get as much flexibility, but how can we have other aspects of their employee experience that helps them thrive.
[0:17:47] David Green: And it seems that if we take a look at some of the wider thing, there is a lot of debate around return to office, obviously, and the number of days people should be in the office. And as you said, it's not a binary conversation. One size doesn't fit all here within companies, let alone across companies and industries as well. There's some really strong opinions around this. How do you, from a people analytics perspective, how do you keep evolving your measurement strategy so that you try and take the emotion out of it and actually think about what's good for business, what's good for employees?
[0:18:25] Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah. And I thought about this a lot, because from a research perspective, this wasn't a random study. These people were self-selecting in to going to the office, okay? For me, I wasn't really self-selecting, but I was. No one was making me come to the office. I was looking at the data and thinking, "I think I'm missing something if I'm not coming to the office". And so, for companies that have instituted some type of return to office, say it's five days a week, you still have to measure, even though that one variable isn't going to be the variable that you're focused on anymore. There are going to be many other variables that you're focused on. And so, what ends up happening is where you work maybe isn't a driver anymore, because everyone's working in the same place, but there are many other drivers that can actually enhance where you work, okay?
So, I think that's how you constantly evolve the measurement plan. At the end of the day, we want employees to thrive, Microsoft to succeed. And Satya will say, because we've shown this with data, if employees thrive, companies thrive. There's also a causal relationship between thriving and the impact that people have. So, for us, that's a really good outcome variable. And we have to continue to look at all the different aspects and ways that that people thrive.
[0:20:04] David Green: Yeah, and it's going to be interesting, isn't it? I mean, we're going to talk obviously about AI throughout the remainder of our conversation, and it will be interesting how AI and some of the tools that we use to do work, how work changes, how that has an impact on this. I mean, you'll continue to study this phenomenon around thriving and where people are working to thrive to do that, I guess, and clearly we don't know, although perhaps at Microsoft you know better than many, how AI can potentially impact this along the way. I don't know any thoughts that you might want to share with listeners around that.
[0:20:44] Dawn Klinghoffer: We are in a very unique time with AI and I'm so thrilled to be at one of the companies that's at the forefront of this. And I do think that AI is going to continue to augment the work that we're doing. I'm excited to get into this conversation with you, because one of the big areas of focus for us also, in addition to understanding flexible work, one of the bigger aspects of research that we've done over the past couple years is the impact that AI has on folks and their ability to thrive, and how you should be using AI to thrive the most. Because rolling out AI at your company, there's many different ways to do it. And so, we've really tried to study what is the best way? What is the way that we get the biggest benefit from AI? And that truly is understanding one aspect is thriving. What are the conditions of AI usage that lends itself to thriving?
[0:22:05] David Green: I want to take a short break from this episode to introduce the Insight222 People Analytics Programme, designed for senior leaders to connect, grow, and lead in the evolving world of people analytics. The programme brings together top HR professionals with extensive experience from global companies, offering a unique platform to expand your influence, gain invaluable industry insight and tackle real-world business challenges. As a member, you'll gain access to over 40 in-person and virtual events a year, advisory sessions with seasoned practitioners, as well as insights, ideas and learning to stay up-to-date with best practices and new thinking. Every connection made brings new possibilities to elevate your impact and drive meaningful change. To learn more, head over to insight222.com/program and join our group of global leaders.
What are you finding around thriving and use of AI, and what guidance would you offer to those listening, based on obviously what you found at Microsoft?
[0:23:25] Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah, I think one of the most insightful areas that we found is the difference between broad usage and deep usage. So, oftentimes we hear people that are rolling out AI to your corporation, they say, "Use AI as much as you can. Use AI in all the products that you have available to you and get the benefit from it". And what we saw was when you do that, you actually increase the administrative burden and you don't necessarily get the biggest impact from a thriving perspective. What gives a bigger impact is when you have deep usage, when you say, "You know what, this month, we really want you to focus on the Copilot and teams, okay? Become an expert in the Copilot and teams". People start to really see the benefits and it helps the administrative burden. And so, that's just a simple, I would say a simple insight. But to be able to shift how you're rolling out AI and give people the right guidance to have the best benefits, I think is huge.
By the way, I do think that the Copilot and Teams is truly life-changing. In fact, yesterday, I was in a meeting and you know, normally you have the chat on the right-hand side and the AI assistant was part of the chat and said, "Don't worry, I'm here to help you. I'm going to tell you when time is almost done, I'm going to follow up with you during the meeting and tell you what decisions have been made". I mean, normally we've been seeing that at the end of the meeting, but to even get little updates during the meeting was awesome. And what I loved is people were loving the Insight agent, and that gives Microsoft insight as to how people are feeling about the Copilot. So, it was all good. I felt like it made me feel good that we're going in the right direction. But we have lots of different Copilots. And believe me, if I would feel overwhelmed if every tool I opened, I was like, "God, I have to use Copilot, I have to figure out one thing". But to get really deep in in one particular product, I can understand really helps you to adopt and see the benefits of it.
[0:26:01] David Green: Yeah, that's interesting, because for years we've been saying to people around people analytics, "Don't try and boil the ocean, focus on priority". It's similar with that, isn't it? Focus on something that's maybe important, that's close to your work, that's going to help you be more productive, for example. Focus on getting deep on that and getting confident with that before trying to do everything, because AI can just seem so big that if you just think like that, you probably get overwhelmed by it. Whereas if you just do one or two things and you build that confidence along the way and share with your colleagues, I guess as well, then you're going to make progress both individually, but as a team as well and as a company.
[0:26:38] Dawn Klinghoffer: And then I have another story that is specific to people analytics. So, again, we have so much work to do on our team. And I could probably employ four times the number of people that I have with the amount of analyses that are constantly going on. And we had a little bit of a fire drill that was going on in the last few days and we were putting together a deck, and one of my analysts said, "I'm going to take the insights from the Copilot and Power BI, and that's what we're going to use for the executive summary". And I kind of held my breath like, "Okay, let's see". And actually, they were quite good. We had to massage them a little bit, okay? But especially the analyst, it gave them such a head start on where to start with, because he didn't have the time to spend a couple hours and digging into exactly what the hotspots were. And so, to be able to get that head start, even if you do need human intervention on it, understanding the context, the external environment, super-impactful.
[0:27:55] David Green: On the employee listening side, Dawn, I'd love to hear, obviously you've been pioneering employee listening at Microsoft for at least the 10, 12 years that we've known each other, and obviously seeing that evolve as well. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how you see employee listening and how we do employee listening evolving in the age of AI.
[0:28:15] Dawn Klinghoffer: Yes, before we talk about that, I have to give a huge shout-out to my product friends that own the Viva Glint product. I mean, we have such a close, tight-knit relationship with them, which is incredible. I mean, we work hand-in-hand with these folks and they truly see us as practitioners, strategic partners to them, which is amazing. And by the way, they are so open to external companies that are customers to them testing out new things as well. So, just a huge shout-out to them and how we've come so far from the early days of trying to work with our product teams to where we are now.
So, we've been working with them on kind of what the future of employee listening is, in particular in the age of AI. I mean, already the Viva Glint has an amazing Copilot functionality that gives you sentiment at scale. We've been doing sentiment at scale for many years at Microsoft, even before we were on the Glint platform, but having that in the portal so that managers and leaders with really large teams that get hundreds, if not thousands of comments on the biannual census survey, they can distil all of those comments into strategic themes and actions for them to take. So, that's a really great way to leverage AI. But what we're thinking about more is how do we change the way we interact with surveys in the future, in particular, employee listening? Ambient listening was one of those ways of changing the way we listen to employees by using calendar and email metadata, again in a de-identified way, but understanding work patterns and huge value for employee listening.
But in the future, if we think about some of the feedback that we get on our surveys, okay, one is that managers and leaders will often say, "So, I get all these comments but they're not telling me exactly what they want us to do. And sometimes, I don't even understand what they're telling me." Usually, you get that when you have smaller teams and people are reading through individually each comment. They'll be like, "What question were they really addressing here? I'm just not sure." So, how can AI help with that? Well, if you have a listening agent that's more of a personal listening agent that it asks you a question, you answer it, and it writes right back saying, "I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Do you mean…" and try to get it to be more actionable, so actually help you shape the feedback so that it's clearer for the folks that are going to get the insight. That helps the employees because at the end of the day, employees want to provide feedback to see change happen that has an outcome. And if our managers and leaders don't understand the feedback that employees are providing, it's really hard to take action on it. So, that's one of the ways that we want this kind of modern employee listening to act.
We have a daily signal survey right now. It has served us extremely well over the years. We survey 2,500 employees every business day, we have a small number of questions that we ask. But how could we use this listening agent to replace daily signals, and think about different times in the flow of work that it's important for us to get feedback on the employee? Another area that has a huge amount of value at Microsoft is what we call our research surveys. And our research surveys have largely been questions that we are interested in knowing the answer to, but we don't actually give the results to managers and leaders, because we use it, we use the results. Like, we ask people about, like, the daily signal survey; we ask people about, you know, all sorts of stuff. So, we're going to get more intentional about how we use our research surveys and how can we use our research surveys for HR and leave the surveys that we have currently, daily signals, employee signals, every question in that survey is something that either a manager, a team, or a leader can action on. Okay, so no longer do you have questions in those surveys that the manager or leader looks at and says, "I can't impact this".
[0:33:03] David Green: How is AI changing people analytics at Microsoft, both in the work that you do, but also maybe how you actually structure the team as well?
[0:33:15] Dawn Klinghoffer: Well, so last year, I made an intentional shift in how I structure the team to really carve out a new organisation I call Analytics Innovation. And that analytics innovation team is really focused on the future vision of what this modern people analytics experience is. So, while I still have an analytics and advisory team, I still have an advanced analytics and data science team and an analytics at scale team, this new analytics innovation team is really focused on just that, focused on how do we use our technology and provide really a product for people to interact with, to get rich insights, to help with people and organisational insights. I'm pleased to say that we've released our version one of that, it's in what we'd call private preview, so we haven't rolled it out to all of our managers yet. We've rolled it out to a subset of managers who are piloting the experience. And we have a lot of great insight and how that works with some of our other agents that we've launched at Microsoft, like the Analyst agent.
So, it's lots more to come, but I'm really energised and enthusiastic about what I'm seeing so far, because I think that people analytics is going to change profoundly. And by the way, we're going to be able to get a lot of what we do in the hands of managers and leaders like never before. They're going to be able to interact and get better insights that we just couldn't provide previously, because we didn't have that type of scale and didn't have the thousands of people on my team to assign to every leader of the company. So, what I'm really hoping in the shorter term is that we're able to provide much more scale and do a lot of the more complex work that we sometimes have to put on the side, because we have so much kind of operational analytics, if you would, that we need to contend with. But I do think there'll come a point in time that's not so far in the future where the roles on people analytics teams will be drastically different. And as we talked about before, a lot of this AI, it does require some human intervention. It is not autopilot.
So, there'll be new skills that people analytics teams will need to build while AI helps drastically change how we do our analytics, preparing data. I mean, as long as I can remember, the majority of our time before we analyse something is preparing the data. It's about 80 % of the time is preparing the data, and 20 % is analysing. If we could cut that down with AI preparing the data, wow, that's just going to speed up the flywheel in terms of what we're able to accomplish.
[0:36:47] David Green: So, we get quite a lot of CHROs listening to the podcast and certainly a lot of people analytics leaders as well. If they're listening to this right now and they're under pressure to mandate something fast, maybe coming back to our return-to-office conversation earlier, without enough data, what's your advice to them?
[0:37:06] Dawn Klinghoffer: There are going to be times when business leaders need to roll out a change and you don't have all of the data, and that's just part of running a business. And that doesn't mean that it should stop you from continuing to do analysis and continuing to get the right data sources so that you can impact decisions moving forward. Because even if someone needs to make a decision in absence of data, so what is your role? Provide follow-up insights to make sure that that decision is as successful as possible. So, there's always ways to iterate after the fact, even without changing the actual outcome, but changing how things are done. And so, that is the advice, is don't hold up your hands and pretend you're a victim of the decision, okay? Lean in and help make that decision be as successful as possible.
[0:38:10] David Green: Very good. And now, Dawn, this is the question that we're asking everyone in this series. Hopefully it's quite a nice one for you as well. Again, asking you to look into your crystal ball a little bit here, and don't worry, we won't hold you to it, what's the single biggest shift that you see in the future of work by 2030; and how do you see HR leading it?
[0:38:32] Dawn Klinghoffer: I mean, obviously, I think you know the answer that I'm going to say, but I do think that that it is about AI, and HR is going to have a profound impact. I'm leading through this because how are we going to reskill people and redeploy resources in ways to take advantage of the humans that we have in new ways? And that is the role of HR. And so I think, gosh, if you've always dreamed of being in the field of HR, now is the time to do it, because I think that there's going to be a lot of really amazing work to be done and figuring out how to do this at scale in the right way, being extremely agile, knowing that things are changing so quickly. I mean, things will probably be different in six months, let alone five years. And you and I have had this conversation. When you ask about five years, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, we can't even predict sometimes the next six months". But yes, I am bullish on the future and truly bullish on the amount of impact that HR can have.
[0:39:53] David Green: Yeah. And obviously, it's a huge opportunity for HR leaders out there to really, as you said, lean in to do this and have that impact on the organisation. And obviously, data is absolutely key to helping enable that, isn't it?
[0:40:09] Dawn Klinghoffer: Absolutely, yes. It has always been key and it will continue to be key. Whether or not you have all the answers today, I would say again, chip away at it one at a time. I think on your previous podcast, I've talked about our wish list of data elements that we could have. And while every month we chip away, we get one more of those attributes we're looking for, one more of those data attributes gets added that we want to be able to bring into our analyses. So, it's constant, and that's going to continue to evolve, especially in this age of AI.
[0:40:56] David Green: Well, Dawn, this is a perfect place to leave our conversation today. As always, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you and learn about the brilliant work, the pioneering work that you're doing at Microsoft. Thanks for being a guest on the show. Before we part, can you let listeners know how they can follow you and all the great work that you're doing at Microsoft? I think you're not just obviously on LinkedIn, you've got Microsoft pages that people can go to as well, some of the research that you're doing and publishing at Microsoft.
[0:41:27] Dawn Klinghoffer: Yeah, so definitely look for me on LinkedIn, because I will link the work that we publish on my profile and I continue to try to share as much as we possibly can. So, yeah, follow me on LinkedIn and follow my other team members on the people analytics team because there are many folks on my team that are involved in sharing insights.
[0:41:53] David Green: Yeah, definitely. And two names that I can give to listeners, Kanwal Safdar and Becky Thielen. Becky's been a guest on this show as well. So, that's two people. Amy Coleman, obviously your boss and CHRO at Microsoft, and Karen Kocher, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with at UNLEASH a few months ago as well. And many others in Microsoft. We thank you for sharing the work that you're doing as well, because it acts as an inspiration to others in the field. Dawn, thank you very much again for being on the show.
[0:42:25] Dawn Klinghoffer: Thank you. Thank you for having me, David.
[0:42:28] David Green: Whether you're shaping hybrid policies, measuring employee experience, or simply trying to understand what thriving looks like in your organisation, I hope today's episode has given you something to reflect on and perhaps to take forward in your own work. So, thank you, Dawn, for such an insightful conversation. And thank you, our listeners, as always, for tuning in each week and listening to the show. If today's episode sparked ideas, questions, or even a shift in perspective, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and share the episode with a colleague or friend. It really helps us reach more forward-thinking leaders like you. To stay connected with us at Insight222, follow us on LinkedIn, visit our website at insight222.com, and don't forget to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter at myHRfuture.com to support your journey in people analytics and HR transformation.
That's all for now. Thank you for tuning in and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Until then, take care and stay well.