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Guest:

Robert Carlyle, VP, HR Analytics, Systems and Risk Management at Sun Life

DETAILS

“We really just almost assume that, self-evidently, Skills matter—and then went to try to build a Skills library. It is only then that we start to think… what for?” Talk for any length of time with this week’s ‘Skills Odyssey II’ guest, Sun Life’s Robert Carlyle, and these kind of zingers just keep on coming through, along with solid thinking about why doing anything with Skills that isn’t ‘wholesale’ (think, ‘big’) and at scale is a waste of everyone’s time, why it really doesn’t matter if you want to say ‘competency’ versus ‘Skill,’ and many others. You get all this in this week’s in-depth conversation with a real Skills practitioner striving at enterprise level, as well as, heck, a book report on Homer as Tarantino and what the Odyssey actually can teach us all about careers and acquiring knowledge. Don’t say we never spoil you.

Resources

• In the episode, Robert says he is happy to make connections and drive the conversation through LinkedIn (as his commitments allow, obviously).
• All three previous seasons of Workplace Stories, as well as our series on Purpose, which was a co-production with the ‘Learning is The New Working’ podcast, along with relevant Show Notes and links, is available here.
• Find out more about our Workplace Stories podcast helpmate and facilitator Chris and his work here.

Webinar

As with all our seasons, there will be a culminating final live webinar where we will share our conclusions about the show’s findings. As ever, we will share details of that event soon as it is scheduled in early 2022.

Partner

We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

Season Sponsors

 

 

We are very grateful to our second ‘Skills Odyssey’ sponsors, Visier and Degreed. Visier is a recognized leader in people analytics and workforce planning; with Visier, organizations can answer questions that shape business strategy, provide the impetus for taking action, and drive better business outcomes through workforce optimization. Visier has 11,000 customers in 75 countries, including enterprises like Adobe, BASF, Electronic Arts, McKesson, and more. Degreed is the upscaling platform that connects Learning to opportunities; they integrate everything people use to learn and build their careers, Skills, insights, LMSs, courses, videos, articles, and projects, and match everyone to growth opportunities that fit their unique Skills, roles and goals: learn more about the Degreed platform at degreed.com. We encourage you to show your support for their involvement by checking out both websites—and thanks once again to both organizations.

All three previous seasons of Workplace Stories, as well as our series on Purpose, which was a co-production with the ‘Learning is The New Working’ podcast, along with relevant Show Notes and links, is available here. Find out more about our Workplace Stories podcast helpmate and facilitator Chris and his work here.

Finally, if you like what you hear, please follow Workplace Stories by RedThread Research on your podcast hub of choice—and it wouldn't hurt to give us a 5-star review and share a favorite episode with a friend, as we start to tell more and more of the Workplace Stories that we think matter.

TRANSCRIPT

Five Key Quotes:

I really took away from the Odyssey that there's an element between destiny and the view of the Gods, plus the free will of Odysseus. And in many ways, that's us in our normal lives, in our careers; we have directions we want to go, but decisions that companies make about where growth is, what jobs are available, predisposes what's possible. And we can move around and we have an element of free will, but we are also the macro conditions, whether it's a recession or a change in corporate strategy, really limits or gives us new opportunities we didn't expect. And so in many ways, you can take the Odyssey as a view of what an actual career could look like.

I wonder if our focus on Skills is part of giving us a little bit more free will, and the ability to map our journey a little bit more carefully.

When we talk about Skills, maybe we ask, why are we talking about Skills: we want to make better decisions? We want to know who should I hire? How can I develop? Where are the gaps we have in capabilities across the company that are getting in the way of strategy? Skills for me are just one extra piece of information that we use to make these decisions. To make these decisions in the past, you'd often have a whole pile of information in front of a leader, and they would look at it and they would use their informed management judgment to make decisions. Now, how do we really think about improving that, and getting rid of biases, and making sure all the information's there at scale for every decision we make? Skills are part of it–but it's not the only thing we look at.

The challenge around Skills–or capabilities–is that there's tens and tens of thousands of different ones; they’re often described differently and there's different nuance, and I don't think we can use traditional techniques to use them. The real advance, I think, from a technology perspective, is that as machine learning becomes more cost-effective, we can start to use those types of analytical techniques to look at all of the Skills data that might be incomplete for an employee.

Once we see governments really leading this, and focusing on Skills and where are the gaps across the economy, is when I think we'll start to see some real widespread change in how we talk about them.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Welcome to ‘Workplace Stories,’ a podcast from RedThread Research: I'm Stacia Garr, co-founder and principal analyst at RedThread.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

And I'm Dani Johnson, co-founder and principal analyst at RedThread.

Chris Pirie, Learning Futures Group:

And I'm Chris Pirie, CEO of The Learning Futures Group.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

We're calling this season ‘The Skills Odyssey II,’ and it's a continuation of our investigation into the insights and learnings of talent leaders who are already running hands-on Skills projects.

Chris Pirie, Learning Futures Group:

We are very grateful to our season sponsors Visier and Degreed. Visier is a recognized leader in people analytics and workforce planning: with Visier, organizations can answer questions that shape business strategy, provide the impetus for taking action, and drive better business outcomes through workforce optimization. Visier has 11,000 customers in 75 countries, including enterprises like Adobe, BASF, Electronic Arts, McKesson, and Uber; you can learn more about Visier at Visier.com. Degreed is the upskilling platform that connects learning to opportunities; they integrate everything people use to learn and build their careers, Skills, insights, LMSs, courses, videos, articles, and projects, and match everyone to growth opportunities that fit their unique Skills, roles, and goals. Learn more about the Degreed platform at Degreed.com, and thanks to both of our season sponsors.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I really took away from the Odyssey that there's an element sort of between destiny and the view of the Gods, plus the free will of Odysseus. And in many ways, that's us in our normal lives, in our careers; we have directions we want to go, but decisions that companies make about where growth is, what jobs are available, predisposes what's possible. And we can move around and we have an element of free will, but we are also the macro conditions, whether it's a recession or a change in corporate strategy, really limits or gives us new opportunities we didn't expect. And so in many ways, you can take the Odyssey as a view of what an actual career could look like.

Chris Pirie, Learning Futures Group:

Don't worry, you've not accidentally stumbled into a podcast on classic Greek literature: you are in fact listening to ‘Workplace Stories’ by RedThread Research. But I do think that this episode might become a ‘classic’ from our now four Seasons of conversations on the topic of Skills and the journey many of us are on towards Skills-based talent management—a journey that we've called the Skills Odyssey.

In this episode, RedThread founders Dani Johnson and Stacia Garr unlock some incredibly valuable insights that inform our ongoing research into the innovation and challenges of Skills-based HR practices in a conversation with Rob Carlyle. Rob is the VP of HR analytics, systems and risk management at Sun Life Insurance: Rob started as a business strategist, but his early-in-career epiphany that strategy is actually executed by people, led him to an interesting career shift and a subsequent body of deep dirt under the fingernails work applying strategy, data analytics, and machine learning to critical talent workloads. He's something of a polymath, with lots of evidence and experience-based opinions, and insights to share with us all and a passion to build at scale, or wholesale, as he calls it, approaches to helping people thrive at work. Oh, and as you've heard, he's also actually read Homer's Odyssey and thought carefully about how it might inform his work.

You'll hear about many of Rob's learnings on his own Homeric journey so far that just might inform your own, including how a Skills-based approach might connect the needs of three constituencies: managers, L&D teams, and employees; why technology—and specifically, machine learning—has ushered in a new era and a set of possibilities that go way beyond the stacks of competency binders that we all built in the eighties; how the cost of poor hiring is a critical business issue and reason enough alone to do this work, but saving that cost is just a fraction of the benefits that might accrue; the critical questions to ask before using third-party Skills libraries, and why Rob believes that the work has to be done comprehensively and at scale if we to unlock the real benefits of a Skills-based approach. So tie yourself to the mast—metaphorically at least—and listen closely to this conversation between Dani, Stacia, and Rob Carlyle.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Hi, Rob, and welcome to ‘Workplace Stories.’ Thanks so much for coming on today and sharing your insights with our audience.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

Delighted to be here!

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

So we're going to start off with some quick questions to introduce you and your overall work practice to our audience, and then we'll go deeper in some other areas around Skills that we'd love your perspective on. I think it's important for our audience to know, before we dive in, that you may be the most recently educated on the whole concept of the Odyssey; you mentioned that you've actually read it recently, so our hope is that we'll have all sorts of wonderful symbolism in our discussion today that alludes back to the Skills Odyssey. So with that, can you start off by giving us a quick overview of Sun Life, its mission and purpose?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

So, Sun Life is a multinational insurance, wealth management, and asset management company. Including our joint ventures, we have about 42,000 employees in 27 markets and about 140,000 independent insurance and wealth management advisors.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

And tell us a bit about yourself, your title, your work—and why you actually did read the Odyssey a few years ago!

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

So, my title is the Vice President of HR Analytics Systems and Risk Management, which really brings together sort of the corporate view of how to use data systems in a safe way to provide better experiences for our employees or our managers as they hire, develop, and engage employees. Why I read the Odyssey: well actually, I read it largely because it was a sequel to the Iliad, and I had read the Iliad before that, and I found out that they seemed to have a very different style. I know that sounds funny; I actually thought that the Iliad when I read it was kind of like the Quentin Tarantino of classic poetry. And then I read the Odyssey, and found it was quite different and different pacing, but in many ways relevant here. From my read of it, and this might sound odd coming from a person that's probably more data analytic, I really took away from the Odyssey that there's an element between destiny and the view of the Gods, plus the free will of Odysseus. And in many ways, that's us in our normal lives, in our careers: we have directions we want to go, but decisions that companies make about where growth is, what jobs are available, predisposes what's possible. And we can move around and we have an element of free will, but we are also the macro conditions, whether it's a recession or a changing corporate strategy, really limits or gives us new opportunities we didn't expect. And so in many ways, you can take the Odyssey as a view of what an actual career could look like.

I love that.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

I wonder, too, if our focus on Skills is part of giving us a little bit more free will, and the ability to map our journey a little bit more carefully.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I think that's a great point—that the more capable we are, and if you look at Odysseus, and his descriptions in the Odyssey is he's really sort of the great Greek with all this intellect, the bravery, the cunning, the ability to take on any problem. And I think that that's why he's so successful, despite all of the things the gods throw at him. And in a similar way, that's where the most skilled employees, the people that are devoted to learning and constantly upgrading their capabilities actually tend to have the best careers.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Moving on from the Odyssey for a moment, let’s talk maybe a little bit about your own career Odyssey or journey, because in our prep call you mentioned your previous employer, so can you tell us a little bit about where you were before that, and your experience there, because I think we'll be weaving those together today?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

Yeah, this is really my fourth company, and I'll really quickly touch upon this because it might suggest why my experience set is different than many HR professionals? I started coming out of university—I’ve got a doctorate in strategic planning—and I went into what I thought would be a career of a typical strategy consultant, and quickly came to realize that it was the people that make strategies work. Early on, I thought it's about the strategy, it’s about the finance, it's you've gotta get technology and operations, right—but ultimately, it's about having the right people, about developing people. And that started an Odyssey, and through that process, my career has shifted to more and more thinking about how do we enable people and Skills, and create culture and organizational structures that best support talent development and effective strategy implementation. And that's really, I guess, sort of an outside way of coming into HR.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

You mentioned this is your fourth company doing this work, so what have been kind of the others, and how do you see them connecting to the work that you're doing now?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

Yes, the first company I really worked with was actually a startup: after one year in business, I thought, oh, this seems easy, I’ll do a startup! And that ended up being a tech company that tried to optimize workforces through transitions, thinking that if that is the problem, how do you implement strategy with people? The second problem is how do you do it at scale, and it seemed about getting information and trying to find optimization techniques. From that I moved to Aon Hewitt, and took on really started to expand that to a larger client base, and after seven years in consulting, it seemed that it would be time to move over to a corporate role and actually own rather than give advice and own responsibility in the outcomes. And so really took that capabilities and built it into a sustainable practice really on the analytics side at Royal Bank of Canada. And from there, three years ago, I had an opportunity to move over to Sun Life and think about really extending that beyond just the analytics but embedding it into HR processes and making those decision supports available to a wider audience of leaders and managers, and ultimately employees.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

That all sounds really easy to do. So I know this question's going to be difficult, but what's the most challenging aspect of the work that you do today?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I think it's really trying to bring, create a set of capabilities in technology that meets the needs of employees, managers, and leaders. They all have different decisions: employees are thinking, how do I improve my day-to-day and get better at my work and find more fulfilment in my job, and ultimately grow either as a deeper expert in a subject I love or an occupation or vocation or some type of progression to a more senior level, with more responsibility and ability to drive impact. Managers are looking to find people to get work done as well as grow people and engage people, and leaders are trying to have business or organizational impact. And as I mentioned earlier, how do you do that and really make sure you've got the workforce to do that? Because it's not just about the strategy, but about having the people that can deliver on that.

And all of these need to be synchronized. From a technology perspective, they tend to use the same data and information, but we often look at these processes and capabilities independently of one another, and build silos, which makes it hard to have integrated user experiences. And so when you think about doing HR at scale, it becomes a wholesale process rather than retail, but often the way we think about it is retail. Many HR professionals think about, What's the individual interaction look like? Bt when you look at it at scale, it's quite a bit different. So for me, it's trying to figure out how do we keep those individuals, how do we support the individual employee to have better conversations between employees and their managers, but do it at scale and try to improve the average consistency. Great managers probably do a good job regardless of what the tools look like, but there's still always room for improvement, and maybe newer managers or managers that are weaker than they could otherwise be—how can we use technology to support them so that they're the best they can be?

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

We’re asking every single person that we interview for this season what ‘Skills’ means. So Skills is a really hot topic; everybody seems to have an opinion on it—we’ve spent countless hours in arguments over what's a skill versus capability versus competency. In your world, Rob, what is a Skill?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

This may sound heretical, but I actually don't care about a definition—I think the rigor is irrelevant. And partly because when we talk about Skills, maybe we ask, need to ask why are we talking about Skills? And really, we want to make better decisions. We want to know who should I hire? How can I develop where are the gaps we have in capabilities across the company that are getting in the way of strategy? Those are the kinds of questions we ask, and I really don't care if the gap is about Skills or capabilities, or maybe you need a certification to get licensed, could be about general intelligence of an employee, their adaptability, their personality type—all of these are important and relevant to that decision, and Skills for me are just one extra piece of information that we use to make these decisions. If we weren't using computers to do this, or we thought, how would we make these decisions in the past, you'd often have a whole pile of information in front of a leader, and they would look at it and they would use their informed management judgment to make decisions. So how do we really think about improving that and getting rid of biases and making sure all the information's there at scale for every decision we make. And Skills are part of it, but it's not the only thing we look at.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

So, we wholeheartedly agree. Why do you think there's so much lip service around Skills, then, if it's just one input into how you make better decisions?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

They're easier to measure—I think that's a component of it. But I also think there's an element of a technical orientation that many managers have, where they're looking at can you do the work, and Skills are often a good surrogate that you do have the skill to do this job. But when we look at someone who's going to be successful in a role, it's not just about the skill—it’s, do they have the will, the motivation to do that work, will they have a passion for this kind of work? Can they adapt if the job changes, because the job probably won't look in 6 months, 12 months, 2 years the same as it does today? And so there's a lot of other factors, but Skills are easy to measure; they’re easy to do behavioral interviews against. And so I think that's why we go to Skills a lot, and it sounds objective.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

I think that's a really interesting point because the whole of the L&D community right now is talking about how we've been using degrees as surrogates to whether or not someone can do the job for a really long time. And now what we've done is we've basically granularized that, but we're still using Skills as a surrogate to determine whether or not somebody can do a job.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I think that's a good shift.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

So do I.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

But I think it's actually a little bit more nuanced than that. We really have three audiences: you’ve got the learning and development community that looks at certification and courses and the completion of some type of learning activity; you’ve got managers who think about what work needs to get done, and you've got employees thinking about what job do I want to get? And things like that. And Skills, I think are a great translation mechanism between those, because I need Skills to get work done helps the manager, what Skills are developed through this course helps the L&D community figure out what courses are going to be impactful and useful, and what Skills do I need so I can get my next job or be good at the job I've got now, which helps the employee. So I think Skills become more of a universal translation mechanism for these different groups, rather than necessarily intrinsically useful on their own as a source of information.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

Can I go off script for just one second? I'm really curious about the idea of context. So you mentioned that Skills can act as a translator between these three things; the leaders that we've talked to have also mentioned this idea of context, a skill in one context works but a skill in another context doesn't work. I'm wondering your thoughts on that?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I completely agree, and the approach to that is really thinking about what is relevant. Just like if you think about how IO psychologists have been going for a long time, they've looked at different factors that drive different or personality types that are more successful in different situations; I think we'll end up at the same place with Skills. The difference is if you apply those techniques from psychology, there might be five major traits, seven major traits, depending on how you look at it; there’s maybe 40 or 50 questions on your typical psychological assessment instrument that might be delivered. So it becomes complex, but the drivers for each particular role that you'd want to prioritize in your selection are relatively straightforward. The challenge around Skills, or capabilities, is that there's tens and tens of thousands of different ones; they’re often described differently and there's different nuance, and I don't think we can use traditional techniques to use them. So the real advance, I think from a technology perspective, is that as machine learning becomes more cost-effective, we can start to use those types of analytical techniques to look at all of the Skills data that might be incomplete for an employee, but you can probably infer what their Skills are through job history and other things you know about their background.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

OK. Do you think you can over index on Skills?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

Absolutely. And we often underestimate how much organizational context and knowledge matters to be successful in a role. And again, Skills are easily observable, but organizational knowledge isn’t. It’s one of the reasons I believe most organizations likely hire externally rather than develop Skills, because you can see somebody who has the Skills that you may lack, but as they come into the organization, they really struggle because the complexity and the knowledge it takes to learn to work within a particular organization is critically important, but often not measured or assessed.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

So all of this makes me wonder if we're using Skills to try to solve an old problem, right? So I think back to about a decade, probably more ago, and it seemed like we were almost saying the same thing about ‘competencies’—so competencies are the things that we're going to use to understand how well people do things and develop on them, and the competencies we have in the org and all the rest of that. But maybe our efforts towards this old problem have been rejuvenated by this magic that we're calling machine learning and the ability that, Hey, HR doesn't have to manage these super-complex competency things because now we've got the machines that will basically manage this problem. Does that seem right?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

Yes. And I think the challenge—or maybe, the opportunity—is that competencies, even if we were really good at competencies or at Skills, still require the context or the knowledge of what Skills or competencies are required to get work done and to be successful in a job. What I think the machine learning approach offers is that we can allow each of those constituents, the manager, the employee, and the L&D community to speak in their own language. ML can actually do the linkages. So managers can focus on what they do best, which is try to figure out what work I need to get done to be successful, for my team to be successful, for my company to be successful, and really focus on what work needs to get done. ML, when it's really well applied, can take that work and infer what Skills will be required and what other attributes of an employee's background will be required, or are at least predictive of being more successful. And I think that's where the real difference is that it allows managers to talk about what they know best, rather than a recruiter to work with a manager and say, “What Skills do you think you need?” Frankly, that's not where they're thinking, and they'll likely just look at the last employee and say, “What Skills did that person have?”, which might not have been the right thing, because it could have been some other attribute, like great intelligence, will to get work done, high levels of resilience, that made them successful more so than the Skills.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Well, and back to the context too, it assumes that the context is the same and therefore you need the same skill sets—which seems unlikely, particularly given the incredible volatility we're seeing right now.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

Absolutely.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

So Rob, in a different conversation with us you mentioned how conversations in the past have been a mass-media type approach. We would love for you to re-enact that for us; just share with our audience and how you think Skills changes this approach.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I think there's two differences. In the past, we built our internal processes larger around jobs and job families because it was administratively simple to do it that way, where even a modest-sized organization might have 200 or 300 jobs in 20 job families. And to try to understand what are the pathways, the career growth, the Skills required, was really quite difficult to do, and many organizations didn't do it well or didn't even attempt to do it just simply because that was so much effort. And that approach really is sort of a mass market approach; it’s the same for everybody. You’re sort of, you're in a high-level segment, you're in the accounting work stream, you're in the sales career path, whatever it is, and you really get the same capability regardless of how good you are, where you came from, your previous experience—you get really the same experience, and experience the same treatment. What we now could do is really understand that you, with your Skills, your background, don't necessarily need to be getting to duplicative training. We’ll know that your career path can be different because although you're in the sales path today, you might have come out of operations. So that makes you excellent to be potential general manager material whereas somebody else might need other development before they can go forward. And because we'll know the Skills that you've developed along the way. So I think that really allows a lot more hyper-personalization, and particularly when we start to think that jobs look less and less alike—the average, if a company has 300 jobs, types or job codes, there might be 20,000 employees. Many of those jobs with the same coding don't actually look the same, and their detailed requirements are quite different. And so I think that the ability to do Skills, at scale, with customization, really changes it, so it's a little bit, rather than being a segment of a thousand, you're now a segment of one and that’s really been used in the consumer world for a while. I think we can start to use that in the employee side.

The second thing is we can look at employees holistically. And in the past, we've really digitized paper processes—you’d look at a resume, do people have the Skills because that's cheap, you can go through, do you have, or the job of experience, and then you might do a Skills assessment and then you go into a personality test and finally you do a culture fit during your interview. But every one of those screens has some opportunity for bias or error in them, and they're additive. Every time you go through one of those screens, you've got a chance of introducing bias, often bias towards what was successful in the past. But when we look at all of the data at once with machine learning and we're looking at your Skills in that larger context of Skills compared to the work that needs to get done, plus your personality fit, plus your general intelligence, plus maybe an integrity assessment, we can actually measure you all in one go at who you, or other people applying for a role, are the best fit. And in fact, it goes beyond that, because we can compare you with every job at once, so it doesn't become just a selection tool, but this larger sense of who you are holistically through analytics is, where could you go? So the same analytics and data we use for selecting people can also be used for career pathing. And we're starting to see a number of vendors and solution providers move into that direction, where they have a core Skills and capability data set and they're applying it to all of these use cases at the same time. I think that's really exciting.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

We agree; we’re seeing the vendors as well. I'm interested in your take on how this data on Skills and the whole person as you describe them is going to change the way that we work in the future. So you talked about how we can apply it to the system and the momentum behind the system that we've got right now, but how can that change how we actually work in the future?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I don't think it changes your day-to-day job that much, because we don't talk about Skills while you're trying to work. Where I think it really has an impact is in terms of who we hire; we can better predict who will be successful in a role, and I think that's an impact on both the hiring manager, but also the employee. You never want to get hired to a position you're not going to be successful in—no-one likes that, and I think that's one of the reasons why we typically say first-year attrition rates being three times higher than the average attrition rate for a company is because somebody made a bad decision. And so to the extent that we can reduce that, we reduce the cost of first year attrition, both from the company, but also an employee that's realized, I've made a mistake and now I've gotta undo that. So I think that's a really big thing that creates not just an economic cost, but an emotional and social cost as well, as people who have lost a year.

I think the second place is around coaching and development Skills. And to the extent that we know where there's Skills gaps for what's successful, it allows you to really focus on what capabilities people need to build, what Skills they need to work on and where they're struggling, I think it helps give insights to managers to coach employees through where to focus on to get better. And also to know that if there isn't a Skills gap, maybe it's something else; it could be the context, the environment, the team relations, possibly the instructions from the manager aren't clear enough, but it helps you focus on where there really is a skill issue or not. And then I think the third component is about career planning as you are much better able to see where you are likely to thrive and a pathway to get there. That's unique to you rather than some career ladder or pathway that's the same for everybody in the same job, which isn't really likely to work for most people.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

One of the implications we talked about in our prep call was that if we're able to fundamentally change this, people will talk about their Skills and not about their work more broadly at a cocktail party. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that even means?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I don't think we're going to get that far! But what's important is the sense that identity is tied to your job. It's been one of the bigger issues of some communities where they're having companies closing, whole industries are going away: how do people reinvent and view themselves as something that isn't their job, whether it's in, you're in manufacturing or as we have more and more things into white collar, you may see entry-level roles in accountancy or audit going away as those are needed less because of machine learning. So people usually describe themselves by what they do, and by what they do, they mean, what job do they hold, and so there's a whole element of status and things there. And that's how we've always talked about it but as we start to think about Skills, I meet somebody and they say, oh, what do you do and you say, well, I actively learn and collaborate and drive for results. I mean, no one would ever describe themselves that way.

And it is kind of humorous. But the fact is that that actually tells you, if we think about your Skills and the actual work you do, and the tasks you do, that's far more useful for planning and thinking, but it doesn't really give us a sense of identity. And so I think that's going to be the bigger issue is how do we start to shift that where people take pride in the specific things they do and the specific Skills they build. And that will help, I think, create more willingness, both for employees and managers, to try new work and new jobs, because their sense of identity and value won't be tied to a specific job occupation or industry. I think we're going to need that more and more as jobs change more frequently and new Skills become important. There's a higher, I guess, rate of change, and employees, all workers will, will just need to adapt more quickly.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

It makes me think of about… so both Dani and I have young kids, and it makes me think about how early this starts, the sense of identity: you ask people in preschool and kindergarten, people say, well, what do you want to be when you grow up, right—like what job do you want? Not, how do you want to spend your day, what Skills do you want to have? And I think it's a wholesale shift, and it starts very early.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I think there's actually two gaps here. The first is that if you think about what most people do, assuming they go to post-secondary education, college or university, or even trades schools, only about a third of people end up in a job that's kind of linear. Like med students become doctors, law students become lawyers, people taking pipe fitting become pipe fitters, but it’s maybe a third of the workforce has that kind of progression—and they might not even stay in those occupations; the number of lawyers that move into other occupations or doctors who reinvent themselves, it's actually a surprisingly large number of people end up moving even beyond those. But the other two thirds to 70% of the population, your education isn't what you actually become; there isn't necessarily a clear path. And we've been in this place for a long time, but we kind of pretend that it doesn't exist. So I think that's the first challenge that we'll need to overcome is that we're already not doing that, we just don't really recognize it.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

It's an interesting point; Stacia has some degrees in History and I have one in Engineering and, and you have one in Strategy Consulting and none of us are in that space.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

It's funny. Since my children are a little bit older, but I've often suggested that the best education is a combined History and Mathematics, or History and Engineering. I think actually the two of you probably actually complete that blend, because history, you learn how to think and analyze the messy world of literature and unclear events and from documents often and things like that, whereas engineering or the physical sciences tends to be much more cause and effect and observable and measurable. When you pull those together, you're able to really think about and analyze and effectively the come to conclusions in about the quantitative and qualitative worlds.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Yes, we agree . In all seriousness, we talk about this quite a bit, and I think Chris likes to refer to it as our ‘poets and quants theme’ that continues through the podcast. But no, I think as a historian, I would say the ability to identify patterns from very messy data is probably one of the most powerful things.

Okay, we’ve spent a lot of time in the abstract; I want to get a little bit more concrete with what you all are actually doing. So can you talk to us about why is Sun Life in particular focused on Skills right now?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

It's a bit of a cliche, but we really came to the recognition that Skills are the currency of talent management. Leaders are saying, I need someone with this skill: we’re finding that projects particularly in the technology and data world require a very specific skill, and that's where our gaps are. And when you start to focus on that, it becomes Skills are what matter. We're often talking about it in terms of not the roles—again, it's sort of been a natural evolution, is that where our gaps are? So I think that's probably the simple reason. It's not that complicated.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Yeah, no, that's great. Tell us, how are you actually approaching Skills? What's your philosophy, and what's the approach you're setting for your team?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

So to be truthful, we're in the experimental phase right now. The first thing we've realized is that we can't do this at scale with just our own data: 25,000 permanent employees, and another 15,000 employees with our joint ventures, is not enough data to use machine learning to build Skills profiles and all the information we'd actually need. So that's sort of our first realization is you can't do this alone. So we've experimented, and we've learned that. Fortunately, over the last couple years, that realization has been made by smart people that are running a lot of startups or maturing companies that are pouring money into this to solve it, and so our approach right now is really, we're doing assessments with different vendors, test and learn of what is possible, because even if you get the technology right, there's the internal processes, there's changing management behaviors about how you talk about Skills, getting employees to look at themselves in different ways about where I could be and how to close skill gaps and how to link that to micro learning. So right now, we have a high-level architecture of what we think it's going to look like in two to three years, but there's five or six questions we need to ask an experiment about so that we can actually make decisions about who are our partners going to be, what will our change management approach be, what type of communications will we need to put out to employees to effectively manage our change? So we have a roadmap, and sort of an end state we want to get to, but there are a lot of unknown ones, because we've never done this before, but also because nobody's really done this before.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Yeah, no, definitely. Can you talk to us about what you have done so far? So what kind of experiments have you run to date?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

So with leadership, we've actually done some pretty interesting analysis where we've looked at our successful leaders and their skill profiles, as well as their other assessments they might have done that are classic industrial organizational psychologist type things. And we've actually been able to identify what Skills are the most important thing for leaders. Unsurprisingly, the biggest one was the ability to create and engage their team. And again, it shouldn't be a surprise, but often we think about, are they strategic visionaries or things like that that are more on the decision making, but if you step back and you go, oh, business is a team sport, so if you've got the best team, you'll probably win. So that stands apart from the others as being sort of the biggest predictor of long-term success.

That was a couple years ago we ran that type of analysis, and then we've extended it; we've started to extend it to other roles and looking, you know, where we have good Skills data, which isn't everywhere: what are the Skills that really disproportionately drive success? We've also been looking at how to use machine learning to build our own Skills taxonomy, or ontology. And as I mentioned, that sort of proved that we don't have enough data to do it alone, but it also did help us understand what are the Skills that are most important, because there are ones that come up frequently, and even with our limited data, we're able to understand what we'd call maybe our 300 key Skills across the company that are most in demand and that we need to at least start to focus on. Although we can't do this at scale and maybe to the level we would like, we do know where our gaps are, so that's been helpful as well. And then finally, we've been deploying sort of Skills matching to create gigs and small-scale learning and development opportunities that may be a little less traditional—that’s moving out of pilot into production over the next year. We’re hopeful there, but I think the bigger issue there is less about the technology, but how do you have managers that are comfortable having work done on gigs, releasing employees to do temporary work? I think the larger social and organizational challenges are far bigger than the technical ones there.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

You mentioned that there are about 300 Skills you've identified as more critical than many other thousands that I'm sure you've also identified. Can you talk to us about how you got to that point to understand those 300, and then what you're envisioning doing with those moving forward?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

It was largely a machine learning exercise, where the Skills data we have today coupled with what we were with a partner able to pull in from LinkedIn and other third-party sources able to understand what are the Skills we have, where are they in the areas that are growing, what do those Skills look like, how do they cluster together? And so interestingly, probably 40 of them are people often call them soft Skills, I think I'd rather call them core Skills, I think core Skills probably sounds a little bit better because they're, they're pervasive everywhere. And most of the other Skills actually aligned to some extent with our current job families, but not entirely. So it gave us a sense that some job families make sense because there's a lot of technical knowledge where a large portion of our business is an insurance company, you’ve gotta know underwriting and risk management and actuarial science—those Skills are really critical! Similarly, we were maybe a little less sure about what particular Skills on our tech stack are the ones that are emerging, and how do you trade off or compare knowing a very technical programming language versus the proficiency of, or familiarity with, working with agile methods. It turns out you need both, but just getting a sense of that and where we are today and what Skills we have—that’s sort of where we are right now: trying to understand what Skills we need is another challenge, but that's sort of our next step.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

You mentioned, just a moment ago, a bit about data and that some of this data came from LinkedIn, a third-party partner: can you talk to us a little bit more about what were those sources for data that you used and how did you pull them together?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

So we relied on a third party, because we're not experts at scraping the web. So I'll be clear about that! There's a lot of companies that are doing this today. So I think that the first thing is that what used to be rare is becoming, I wouldn't want to say a commodity, but you've got alternative partners. Some of them work almost as data providers, others have that capability: that’s tied in with a service such as talent management, career pathing, things such as that, so you already, you have as you're trying to navigate this, do you want to work with a data provider or a full-service HR solution provider?

And again, I don't know; I’d like to have an answer to that in the next six months which is best, and I don't know if we'll know. So I, I think there's an element here as well, is that as you think about this from a more technology, architecture perspective, how do you build things that are reversible? Because this space will change so much in the next couple years, you don't want to make commitments that lock you in for 10 years. So you can be comfortable with your core HR system, that if you put it in place you're making a 10-year commitment, pretty much; you’ve gotta be thinking that some of these decisions are going to be, I'm going to try it for a year, but I might need to pull it out, and if you're really feeling like you can make a commitment, I'm going to try it for three years and I might have to pull it out. But you do have to have an exit strategy for all of these, because whoever's leading today might not be leading in two years, something could come along that's just a brand new approach to this. That's, I think the biggest warning recommendation is to think about how we undo what we're going to do, but still keep that capability? We know we're going to want to use Skills for hiring: what if I don't use this vendor? How embedded are we with this provider, this partner, and how could we exit from that? I think that's really important. Otherwise, you may find yourself with a lot less opportunity in the future.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

That’s a really great point, and one that folks haven't really brought up yet. To what extent as you've been thinking about, have you been worried about data interoperability? We've mentioned data and Skills, data being used for talent acquisition, for example, and then obviously also for internal mobility. So to what extent, particularly as you think about the tech, have you been concerned with that?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

That is the question 🙂 In fact, I’d say it is the most important question, because nobody wants to fill out a different Skills profile for every tool they use. The Skills landscape, and the way we're using Skills with machine learning, are into the tens of thousands of Skills, so manual curation and linking between systems isn't possible, and so really you need to find automated ways to link different tools that are using Skills in slightly different ways with possibly slightly different language. And that is the technical question that has to be answered: and that’s probably the biggest reason why when I just referenced the need to be able to undo things, I think it's because of that—that if you have something that's so core to a vendor and that vendor goes away, or they stop developing, or they go in a direction that you're not comfortable with, or they deprioritize the industry you're in, and they're not building up the Skills and the capabilities you need, how do you undo that if you've made their Skills library, the core of all of your talent management programs?

And so that's really the key. And even in something as simple as—I look at two areas, we use Skills, we use Workday and Cornerstone, they both have Skills libraries: even with two systems, they both are in the tens of thousands of Skills, how do we link them? How do I find out that if somebody's identified a Skills gap in the recruitment and they want to learn, how do they know what courses to take? Right now, until there's a level of integration, you're probably going to have to repeat some of your Skills assessments. It's not a terrible experience, but it's not a great experience; it’s certainly not predictive, where I saw you looking at this job, you applied, didn't get it, here’s some courses you should take. Like, we're not giving any proactive advice to people until we can link these systems.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

So how are you thinking about this?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

So I think there's two broad approaches. And the technology is at a detail level beyond me, but I'd like to think that this sort of the two approaches we're looking at is, do we hold sort of a master Skills library or ontology that can link to everything else—so do we build something else that takes it from all of our sources, builds it together and maps back, and we're going to own or at least with a partner, some master Skills library? Or do we try to rationalize the number of vendors we have, so there's only two or three that really focus on Skills? And we just do system to system integrations between those two or three vendors? I don't know what's the right approach. That's what we're actually going through in our strategic review; that’s what we're trying to really understand, and what are the trade-offs from a user experience, a cost base, vendor management and complexity. There's a lot of different trade-offs. I'm not sure where we're going to land yet.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

So can I ask a question, Rob, and this goes back to kind of the philosophy you're using to make the decisions that you're making right now: you’ve identified these 300 core Skills that your organization needs; some of the leaders that we've talked to are only focusing on core Skills. I think they've recognized the problem that you see in front of you as well, and they're saying, okay, we're going to take these 50 Skills. We know that these are the ones that are most important to our success in the future, and they're just going after those while maybe everything else settles down over the next couple of years. You seem to be going after everything. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

So core Skills are great for entry level hiring.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

Okay.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

Your employees don't know much; you’re going to teach it to them on the job no matter who they are, so you really want to have core Skills and basic potential, and that your trained. The real challenge is if you're trying to go into new businesses, or grow quickly, you need mid-level professionals who know what they're doing and can teach other people how to do that work, and core Skills aren't enough. So if I think about our highest impact hiring internal talent development, where we want to promote people, the technical Skills in conjunction with those core Skills are absolutely critical. And so I think people have gone away from those other Skills, because it's hard—but, well, it might be hard, but it's also the most important decisions you can make.

Like a really simple thing is like, do you say, oh, are you a good mobile app developer? Well iOS or Android, it matters. If you don't have to scale in the other tool, that's a problem if I need to get something done! And we can pretend we don't want to talk about those, because it's really hard. I think one of the problems is that if we don't do it centrally and at scale, all that complexity gets pushed out to the manager who has to make that same decision, but they're going to make it unaided. And so the complexity of all these decisions and all those trade-offs, it's going to be in every decision we make. You can help it centrally, and use all the tools and technology that are available to sort of do this at scale with all the insights and really good predictions, or you leave it to the manager to do their best. I think I probably five years ago, would've said, let's balance it out and maybe leave a lot to the manager and maybe help them think through of things structurally and talk about it more from process. I think the data and the technology has advanced so much, particularly in the last two and a half years, we could probably take that complexity on centrally as long as we're not thinking sort of in that mass approach, and thinking about curating skill libraries—a lot of times leaders, when you say we're going to build a Skills library, they're thinking about the 1980s with binders of competencies descriptions. That's not what we mean: we’re thinking about data signals of Skills that give a good prediction of whether somebody can do the work, and that's different. So there's an element of education there, but the complexities in the decision, we can pretend it's not there or not.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

What are some of the critical lessons that you've learned through this work?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:
I think the biggest lesson for me is that we define the need around Skills, largely as we need a Skills library, because it's almost inherently good, because if we know more about Skills, we'll make better decisions. And so that initially let us into the path towards building a Skills library and then ontologies and stuff like that, and we didn't think about enough about why do we want to use Skills data, and what other information do we need to make that same decision? So the real key was, how do we want to make better workforce decisions, how do Skills fit in that decision, and then start to solve the problem.

We really just almost assumed self-evidently that Skills mattered, and then went to try to build the Skills library and then started to think, what for?

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

Yeah… we’re seeing that quite a lot. Tell us, in 18 months, where do you see Sun Life with respect to Skills?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I think in 18 months we'll have an infrastructure in place, and we'll have some successful applications of how Skills are making better talent decisions. But I think just the amount of time it's going to take to really understand this, and for the time it'll take for the external marketplace to shake itself out and know who're going to be the winners and losers and what are the best approaches, that’s really the next 18 months. It's really your three-to-five-year period where you can start to get better Skills, influence talent decisions in place, and then let them play out for a couple years so that you get the benefit of that. Because if we make better hiring decisions from 18 months out to 60 months out, and every one of those hiring decisions is a little bit better, every one of our coaching discussions are a little bit better, every career planning discussion is a little bit better, then we'll start to see those little decisions aggregate into some big impacts.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

One of the things I think is great about that is that it underscores how we need to be measuring that these decisions are better over time, particularly if this is a culture change effort, right? So if we think that the real power, from a data analytics/machine learning perspective, is going to come to us in three to five years, that’s in some ways amazing because that means, we know that culture change takes three to five years. So that gives us a ramp to know, like, if we're working on the culture on one level and we're working on the tech at another level, they should come together ideally at the right time. But I think the takeaway from that is you have to start now with the culture change. You have to start now with the measurement so that you can say, Hey, we make better decisions in the middle of 2024 than we did at the end of 2021. And we’d start to see people actually believing it and therefore willing to do some of those changes that you mentioned that are so hard.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

Yeah, and I think that's critical—that as we put the strategy in place, we need a number of measures, both from a high-level impact perspective, but also how are each of the little components building up and do we know that those decisions are getting better? We’ve got a theory. That's what strategy is: strategy is a plausible theory of success, right? We believe it'll work—there’s some causality that's in your business plan and it's going to be successful. And like any theory, you can test it, and if evidence shows that your theory is not valid, you've got to either change your theory or you change how you're implementing it. And so we need to have measures along the way so that our strategy is actually going to be impactful and is being successful, and where it's not, let’s make early corrective action.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

So if you were to advise other leaders on how to get started doing this work, what would you suggest?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

To be really clear on what you're trying to do . And you know, because everyone will wave their hands around and say we need Skills—but if it's a really targeted solution, if I say I just need Skills because our context is I need to hire people: focus there! If you think you need Skills because you're going to do a lot of redeployment, focus there, and be clear on what you want to do. And once you've got that, you can start to think about the solutions, framing up the problem, and starting to work through it. But don't just go assume ‘we need to know about Skills of our employees,’ because that's focusing on process and capabilities rather than outcomes.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

We talked about where Sun Life might be three to five years from now. But if you were to just kind of pull up your crystal ball and think about broadly, what do we see as the future for Skills, what do you think we're going to be talking about in five years that we're not talking about today?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I'm actually slightly hopeful that it'll actually be in the more broad public debate. Many of the government labor departments, ministries of labor, particularly in Europe and North America, are starting to reframe their data collection—and not just for themselves, but for all stakeholders in the labor market so that they can help educators, they can help employers, but also for government so that they can make better policy.

I don't know how much progress they're going to make, but they're certainly starting to invest in that. Five years might be too short a term on a national basis, but once we see governments really leading this and focusing on Skills themselves and where are the gaps across the economy, that's when I think we'll start to see some real widespread change in how we talk about this. So I'm hopeful that we're going in that direction: I don't know if five years is soon enough for something that's that big a change at a national level, but I think we'll be making progress there, certainly in North America and Europe.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Well, Rob, this has been fantastic, and we want to just wrap with our final question, which is the purpose question. So why do you personally do the work that you do?

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

I'll actually go back to an earlier reference I made versus retail versus wholesale: somewhere along the line I became passionate about how do you develop people and make them make, give them the ability and create the opportunity for them to thrive at work. And you can do it one person at a time, or you can do it wholesale! And where the world is today, I think data and technology solutions allow you to do that at wholesale. You won't be doing it a hundred percent—it’s up to an employee and then a manager often to figure out and create those opportunities, specific ones—but I think you can influence those.

So that's kind of what I like; I think I can help make a wholesale approach to helping people thrive.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Wonderful. Well, Rob, thank you so much for such a rich conversation—we have enjoyed it very much, so thank you for taking the time.

Robert Carlyle, Sun Life:

Well, thanks. It's been a pleasure—it’s a lot of fun.

Chris Pirie, Learning Futures Group:

Thanks for listening to this episode of ‘Workplace Stories.’ Dani and Stacia: how can our listeners get more involved in the podcast?

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

Well, they can subscribe and read us on the podcast platform of their choice.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

They can also share this, or their favorite, episode with a colleague or a friend.

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

You can check out the beautiful handcrafted transcripts at RedThreadresearch.com/podcast, and see what else we have to offer as far as research goes.

Chris Pirie, Learning Futures Group:

Or Stacia, they could…?

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Consider joining the conversation and community by joining our RedThread membership.

Chris Pirie, Learning Futures Group:

A big thanks to our guests—on all our podcast Seasons—for sharing their insights and thoughts. We should thank our sponsors, of course, for making it all possible. And of course, we should thank our beloved listeners. Thank you!

Dani Johnson, RedThread Research:

Thank you.

Stacia Sherman Garr, RedThread Research:

Thank you.

Listen

DETAILS

Are we kidding ourselves when it comes to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB)? There’s been a LOT of talk about it, after all: is it being matched by any real action? Is the action that’s happening even being driven by leadership, or is it somehow something we’re getting ground-level folks to do, kind of for free, along with everything else we need off them in the COVID crisis? Are there any numbers, what do they tell us—and are they any good? What does DEIB success look like… and what can I do to move the needle here? These are good, maybe even critical questions, for society in 2021. But we don’t know the answers—which is why we’re inviting you to come along with us on a journey to find them together. Welcome to Season 2 of “‘Workplace Stories”’ from RedThread Research, which we have entitled, with some optimism, perhaps, ‘Integrating Inclusion,:’ a series of conversations on this core HR and HR tech issue. And like Season 1, along the way we think we’re going to be hearing maybe just one or two stories from people on the DEIB front line that will inspire, inform, and energize you, too, including from amazing guests like PTC’s Hallie Bregman and S&P Global’s Rachel Fichter. Because DEIB really is everyone’s problem—and everyone’s job. 

Resources

• Use these websites to get up to speed on where American business is with DEIB: 
  1. https://www.diversityinc.com/ 
  2. https://www.catalyst.org/ 
• Find out more about our podcast helpmate and facilitator Chris Pirie and his work here 
• Catch up on Season 1 of ‘Workplace Stories’ here 

 

Partner

We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

 

Season Sponsor

We'd like to thank the people at Workday for the exclusive sponsorship of this second Season of “Workplace Stories.” Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday.  It’s one agile system that enables you to grow and engage a more inclusive workforce—it’s your financial, HR, and planning system for a changing world.

Webinar

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar at the end of this Season, where you can meet the team (Dani, Stacia and Chris) and join in a conversation about the future of DEIB in the workplace. You can find out more information, register for the webinar, and access exclusive Season content, including transcripts, at www.redthreadresearch.com/podcast and thanks again to the team at Workday!

We hope you follow “Workplace Stories from RedThread Research” on your podcast hub of choice as we start to tell the Workplace Stories we think matter.

TRANSCRIPT

Five key quotes:

One of the things that we've noticed  since we started RedThread is there are a couple of things that go across everything, and DEIB is one of them: what I do as a learning manager, what I do as a performance manager really affects DEIB and the culture that you create.

It is absolutely a leadership priority. It's also a culture priority. And also, we've learned this word “systemic” this year; it’s gotta be a systems and operational model imperative as well to go fix.

Sophistication has increased. For instance, we're not just looking at pure representation data; we might be looking at representation data from an intersectional lens, so not just black employees, but black women employees. In addition, we're starting and we're seeing this in the DEIB and analytics study. We're starting to see kind of almost a hierarchy of the way that people are approaching these analytics.

For me, it's really a transformational thing, it’s like the digitization of business; it just completely shifts how we're going to have to do work and how we collaborate, and how we lead if we're a leader.

This is going to be the new way of doing work, and if my two girls are going to work in a place in an environment in a world that is inclusive of them and where they really, and truly, in any organization, have the opportunity to lead the same as anybody of a different gender, then the work has to happen now—the change has to happen now for it to be natural.

Stacia Garr:

Welcome to 'Workplace Stories' hosted by RedThread Research, where we look for the ‘red thread’ connecting the humans, ideas, stories, and data defining the near future of people and work practices. 

My name is Stacia Garr, and I'm the co-founder and principal analyst at RedThread Research, along with Dani Johnson, who is also a co-founder and principal analyst at RedThread and Chris Pirie of the Learning Futures Group. We're excited to welcome you to our podcast Season: this episode is part of our second Season called ‘Integrating Inclusion,’ in which we investigate your role in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) journey that we believe is a critical force in shaping the future of work. 

We talk to leaders, thinkers, writers, and practitioners about the current state of the art in DEIB, and we focus specifically on what people analytics, learning, leadership and business leaders can do to move the conversation forward—and why DEIB is everybody's business. 

Chris Pirie:

We'd like to thank the people at Workday for the exclusive sponsorship of this second Season of 'Workplace Stories.' Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and engage a more inclusive workforce—it’s your financial, HR, and planning system for a changing world.

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar at the end of this Season, where you can meet the team (Dani, Stacia and myself) and join in a conversation about the future of DEIB in the workplace. You can find out more information, register for the webinar and access exclusive Season content, including transcripts, at www.redthreadresearch.com/podcast and thanks again to the team at Workday!

Stacia Garr:

To launch this Season, Dani and I talked to our collaborator and podcast partner, Chris Pirie. We share our objectives and our aspirations for the Season, and introduce some of the research and people behind it.

Chris Pirie:

Hey, a lot's gone on in the last 18 months—on the planet and in our worlds and everybody's world. Your business seems to have definitely survived and possibly even thrived through this period of time, but a lot's gone on, even since we started podcasting together about nine months ago: how are you both doing, and what have been the highlights and major activities for each of you?

Stacia Garr:

It has been quite the last 15 months. I think for me, one of the highlights, at least professionally, and I don't say this lightly, has been doing the podcast with you, Chris; it’s been something we have wanted to do since the beginning of RedThread, and so getting a chance to do it with such a wonderful partner has been a highlight for me.

I think some of the other highlights have been the opportunity to help provide some clarity during a time of just incredible difficulty. I mean, difficulty certainly for us too, but just being able to write about how we should be thinking about, for instance, managers and how managers could—we had a report called Managing Better, thinking through how we can design for a work that is more responsive, both to the needs of the employees, as well as to the market. And then quite a bit on this critical topic of DEIB, as well as analytics. I think we've just had an opportunity to write and to advise on some really important things that feel like they matter now; they always matter, but during the pandemic, they've mattered more than ever. So that's been a wonderful thing.

Chris Pirie:

It might be confirmation bias on our side, but boy, the topic of work and how we work, and remote work and how we build back better, the work of the future; I mean, it's just been going crazy! Dani, how's your last 18 months been?

Dani Johnson:

Well, if we're talking about the last year 18 months, a lot has happened professionally, as Stacia mentioned for us and RedThread; RedThread is continuing to grow and we're hitting on some really interesting topics—obviously the pandemic threw us all into a completely different world and we've been able to learn a lot as well as answer some of the questions as Stacia mentioned.

Personally, my view of the world has radically changed; in the last 18 months, I've been married and had a child. And this is, I think, particularly poignant for the conversations that we'll be having, because my perspective on working mothers and the challenges that they face and the way the deck is sometimes stacked against them has completely—I mean, I knew it, but experiencing it is something completely different.

Chris Pirie:

Yeah, well said, absolutely. Maybe we could just refresh a little bit on the objectives and the scope and the aspirations of the podcast. Stacia, you called it “Workplace Stories,” and I know that was a carefully thought through name: how does it fit into the overall business model and the work that you do?

Stacia Garr:

I think as a research firm, it can be easy for us to get kind of caught up in the data and providing stories, but often they're small snippets of stories because there's only so much capacity for people to read them in the context of a broader report. And so the podcast”Workplace Stories” really is a chance for us to lift up some of those wonderful stories and really inspirational moments that we hear from people. Often we hear them in our interviews before we bring them on the podcast, but not always, and so this gives us a chance to do that. The other thing that we didn't mention in terms of a change with RedThread is that we've moved to a membership model, which is a great thing because it gives us much more freedom in terms of the research that we do and really to go after the hottest topics without having to necessarily find somebody to sponsor the work. But that does mean that more of our content is behind a paywall, and so the podcast also gives us a chance to really speak more broadly to folks, and to share some of the great things that we're able to see and do and learn with a much broader audience.

Chris Pirie:

Can you talk a little bit about the rationale for shifting your business model there? I think that was always your plan, right, but it's kind of a big step to ask people to subscribe? How's it going, and what was the rationale for that?

Stacia Garr:

Yeah, the rationale is that when we started RedThread, one of Dani and my core areas of focus and importance was around the independence of the work that we are doing high quality, unbiased research. And that has been the case since the beginning, but at the same time, we also know that there can be perceptions potentially around sponsorship: even though our sponsors were wonderful and always let us do our thing, we thought that moving to a membership model would allow us to just broaden that base of financial support for the work that we do because unfortunately, Dani and I are not independently wealthy, and we do have to pay our mortgages and the mortgages of the people who work for us. So it just broadens that base of support, but it has gone really well; I think that we since the beginning, we've been incredibly fortunate that we have wonderful folks who believe in the work that we do and are hungry for that high-quality insight that they know isn't influenced by us trying to sell a consulting project or sell a piece of technology on top of what we're doing. They just want the facts, honestly, as straightforwardly as possible. And that's what we try to do.

Chris Pirie:

Got it. We had a lot of fun in the first Season, which was called “The Skills Obsession,” and we had some great conversations—I had a lot of fun anyway! Did you get feedback from your community? What was the feedback on that first set of episodes that we did in Season One?

Dani Johnson:

Yeah, so far it's been really, really positive. I'm surprised at how many people have commented and kind of come back to us and said, Hey, I really liked this. The other thing that I love is we talked to some really smart people that are doing some really interesting things. And the podcasts have allowed us to not just tell their stories, which we do in writing, but actually to sort of broadcast the passion that they have for the things that they're doing, which I think has been just really engaging to hear people's stories, especially when they're passionate about it.

Chris Pirie:

We're in the stage of this podcast Season, where we're sort of lining up the guests and we've got our wish list of people that we want to have on and we're reaching out to them. And I think it's a real responsibility when people say yes to help tell that story in the most interesting and engaging way. We were lucky enough to have some amazing people in Season One and who really were extremely honest and shared. One of the takeaways for me was just how hard it is to start to approach work through the skills lens, and people were just honest and shared a lot of great information with us.

Dani Johnson:

Yeah, I think that's another thing that sort of surprises me about the podcast. Generally, when we write, everything has to go through somebody's office of general counsel to make sure that the company is okay with it. But when people are speaking about their own personal experience and what they think, it gives us a little bit of freedom to explore that we don't have when we're writing.

Stacia Garr:

And I think also because we're focused on their story versus necessarily trying to make it a repeatable insight that somebody can copy, it allows us to talk more at a personal and human level about why this was important to you? What did you get out of this as a professional, as a human? And I think that insight and passion really change the conversation.

Chris Pirie:

Maybe we can just talk about the research—the broad spectrum of research that you have on your research agenda: people might not know how you pick your research agenda, so you might want to just refresh us there. And we're obviously going to come back around to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, but what's the general landscape of research looking like at RedThread right now?

Dani Johnson:

Yeah. A lot's going on: talent leaders, and just leaders in general, know that a lot is going on. And so we have lots and lots to pick from. Stacia and I spend—I don’t know how long—we do lots of reading: I do an hour of reading every day to sort of get a sense for what's going on out there, and what people care about and what people are struggling with the most, and that's how we pick our research agenda. So on our website we keep a running list of projects that we're doing, and the expected date that we'll be putting things out with respect to those projects, so that's kind of how we decide what goes into it. Some of the things that are on my list, and then I'll kick it over to Stacia, are coaching— we’re seeing sort of an uptick in the coaching discussion again—and then a lot on learning.So when the pandemic happened, the immediate reaction was everybody sort of clinched and went back to the things that they knew, which was LMS and online learning, but we're seeing that open up quite a bit. And so we want to talk about the new skills that L&D needs in order to accommodate the way that the organizations are learning, as well as what are some of the things that the organizations are doing to learn. We introduced a learning framework a couple of years ago, and that will be expanded this year to include everything, not just technology, to really help leaders understand the full breadth of possibilities that they have to teach people.

Stacia Garr:

Yeah, and on my side, I divide it into f three areas. One is broader focus on talent, so we're going to be doing some work on performance management, and as we think about performance management in the hybrid world, what does that look like? And particularly if we think about how some of the breakdowns amongst who is coming into the office and with what frequency—some of that could have some Diversity impacts. So we're looking at that from that angle. I’m hoping to get an update to our responsive managers dataset, because we did a really nice survey on that last October. It'd be fascinating to get some information as we start to return to work—excuse me, the workplace: we’ve all been working really hard!

So that's the talent side. The second kind of group is people analytics, so we just kicked off a study on the C-suite and people analytics, so what do we need the C-suite to know about what they should know about people from a data perspective. And then we're also doing a study on DEIB and analytics right now. And I know we'll reference that in this time, and then we're doing our people analytics technology study. So we've released a deep dive on employee engagement experience. We're working on one on organizational network analysis, and then another deep dive, with the final people analytics tech study coming out at the end of the year.

And then the final area is DEIB. So we've got the DEIB and analytics study that I mentioned, we did a DEIB tech study, a new one in January, and then we're also doing DEIB and skills right now.

Chris Pirie:

So it all feeds together around the sort of common theme of the future of work. Why did you pick DEIB as the topic for the second Season?

Stacia Garr:

Well, we know that DEIB is finally on the agenda of the CEO and boards like it never has been before. And there's a lot of push on HR to do something about it, which I think is wonderful; I think we've been saying we'd do something about it for years and years. But the challenge is that a lot of leaders don't know where to start within HR. They don't know, if I'm a learning leader, what is my responsibility? How do I do this? If I'm a people analytics leader, what do I do? Same thing for leadership. And so we wanted to raise up some of these great stories that we've heard as inspiration and motivation for people on this is what I could do, this is what so-and-so at this company did and to be able to potentially replicate that. I think right now, it just feels like there's a lot of pressure to do something and people aren't sure what they should do that will drive an impact. And with this Season, we're hoping we can accomplish that.

Chris Pirie:

Well, we've got eight conversations, give or take a one or two; it’s a massively complex topic. It's actually the cultural backdrop, the historical backdrop that we're living through—it’s a large part of the forces at work on this topic. Are we going to drill down on some specific areas? How are we going to break it down? How are we going to approach it?

Dani Johnson:

Yeah, we are. One of the things that we've noticed actually, since we started RedThread, is there are a couple of things that go across everything, and DEIB is one of them: what I do as a learning manager, what I do as a performance manager really affects DEIB and the culture that you create.

So we're going to focus on basically three areas. The first one is analytics, where analytics and DEIB cross. There tends to be a little bit of, I don't know if I would call it fear, but at least reticence, when it comes to deciding which metrics you use for DEIB. And as we have broadened the definition from just Diversity to Diversity and Inclusion to Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Belonging, new metrics have sort of popped in. So analytics is definitely one we want to cover.

We also want to cover learning and development. Learning and development sort of has a pretty broad reach within organizations, and if we can get L&D leaders to think more broadly about their role past just DEIB training, then I think that they can have a real impact. The third one is leadership; so Stacia mentioned some great research we've done with respect to managers. We think leadership in general has a very, very big impact on the DEIB culture in organizations, and so helping them come to terms with what their responsibilities are and enabling them and empowering them in the organization is another important part of it.

Chris Pirie:

We talk as if we were sort of imagining what this Season might look like before. And I think there's an important thing to sort of get clear at the start: this is not just a primer on the topic of DEIB, is it, Stacia?

Stacia Garr:

No, it's not. The underlying assumption is that people generally understand what DEIB is, and that they understand that it's important—and imperative, in fact—for their organization. And so we're not going to be covering the basics. We are really going to be diving into, okay, if this is something we should be focused on, what can this type of role, this type of area of the organization focus on to make this become more of a reality?

Chris Pirie:

Got it. How do we all take action? How do we put this into systems, or put fixes into systems that can at least help and move us in the right direction on making a more diverse and inclusive workplace?

What if people do feel like they need a primer, are there are some particular resources that you would point to?

Stacia Garr:

I think going to a place like Diversity Inc. is a decent place to get started. Certainly if you're interested, particularly from the women in organizations perspective. Looking at Catalyst would be a wonderful place as well. Those would be solid places to start, but there is just a wealth of information out there in general.

Chris Pirie:

Can you just basically lay out for us, what is the research that you've done to date on the topic, and what are you planning to do in the future?

Stacia Garr:

Since we launched RedThread, a primary focus has been D&I technology: that was actually one of the first studies that we came out with when we launched the company and we updated that, like I said, in January, 2021. We are doing a study on DEIB and analytics, and another one on DEIB and skills—so really that one is about what are the skills necessary to create a culture of DEIB? And we're focused on skills broadly that we are likely already teaching our managers and leaders to understand which ones are most relevant. So those are some areas of focus at the moment. I would say though, that given our general bent, we look at pretty much everything we do with a DEIB lens. So there will likely be quite a bit more even potentially by the time that this podcast finishes running.

Chris Pirie:

Got it. Any sort of headline takeaways from the research that you've done so far that maybe is particularly thought-provoking and underlying some of the conversations we want to have?

Stacia Garr:

Well, one is we published the DEIB tech study, as I mentioned, at the beginning of the year. And we had just an incredible increase in the number of vendors who are now primarily what we call DEIB feature vendors, so they have it as an adjunct to something else that they do. My takeaway, or my question that I've been considering, is should there even be a DEIB tech 2023 study for instance, or will this become so mainstream that it really truly is just a feature of other technologies? And if that's the case, then that kind of leads us naturally to what we're talking about with this podcast, which is, okay, like if the tech's there, how do we integrate it? How do we connect it to all of our systems and practices?

So I think that is one thing I've been kind of noodling on—I don't think I've even told Dani that, so, Hey, Dani, maybe we won't do that study, but that's something I've been thinking about. So I think that's a big takeaway. I think one of the other things that I've been fascinated about in the DEIB and skills study, as well as the DEIB and analytics study, has been almost the transition of responsibility of certain aspects of DEIB to these different groups. So historically, learning, for instance, didn't do a lot of the work with DEIB—so like if you went to the unconscious bias training, it was usually the DEIB team or an ERG who put that together. And that had the benefit of one, it got done, but two, you had real subject matter experts doing that work. But it had the drawback of you didn't have the learning team’s expertise; you didn't have people who actually necessarily knew how to put together a course effectively, et cetera. We just have the same thing with people analytics, where we have problems with the data sets, et cetera, et cetera, where it wasn't kind of the central organization doing that work, but it was a separate team.

I am fascinated to see in our interviews that those groups are now kind of not even reclaiming, they are claiming that work. And the DEIB team is now the SMEs providing insights. And that feels like a very dramatic shift from where we were five years ago with this space.

Chris Pirie:

This makes me think about your work earlier, Dani (I associate you with this piece of work) around the learning organization and kind of learning maybe six or seven years ago; suddenly we realized that it's too important to just leave to one small team in HR—that it has to become everybody's business. And maybe that one small team in HR’s job is to help propagate and accelerate, nurture learning culture throughout the organization. This sounds like a very similar kind of shift that's going on. Surely DEIB has to be everybody's business, and the question is, what do I do in my particular role?

Dani Johnson:

I actually think it's interesting that we're talking about this because for years and years, we've had a DEIB head or an ERG group that focused on DEIB. And that was how we got DEIB “done” within an organization. And it's become an important enough topic where the C-suite is now paying attention to it, and not just putting a chief officer in charge of DEIB, but also saying to everybody else, Hey, how are we going to actually boots on the ground, get this done?

Stacia Garr:

You know what I just saw though, to that point, is also some organizations are beginning to pay ERG leaders for their extra time: I saw that LinkedIn is doing that now, and Twitter is doing that now. And there's some debate. It's fascinating. There's some debate where some people are saying, well, is this like a good thing? Because like, people should want to do this work.

My perspective is like, this is work and this benefits the organization, so the organization should pay for it. It shouldn't be on the backs of just volunteers who are doing this. But I think all of that is pointing to the increased importance and willingness to invest in this that organizations are starting to truly show.

Dani Johnson:

I think that point's interesting—that people think there are enough noble people on the ground, and maybe there are, but enough noble people on the ground that will do this as a side-gig, an unpaid side-gig instead of actually investing in it and the organization. It makes me a little bit angry, actually.

Stacia Garr:

Yeah. The thing that drives me the most crazy about that is that the people who are investing in this as a side gig are the people who have the lowest power in the organization.

Dani Johnson:

Yes!

Chris Pirie:

We know that culture has to come from leaders. We know that it can and should also come from the ground up as well. But boy, without a leadership directive, this is heavy, heavy lifting in any, in any organization, surely?

Stacia Garr:

Yeah. And by paying these ERG leaders, the leadership is saying, “This matters, this matters enough for us to put our money where our mouth is.” You know, I was struck by something, if you guys remember Matthew Daniel said in the last Season, which was something to the effect of there's unexpected biases, for instance, in our learning work. So if we're expecting people to take extra classes on their own time, there's an assumption that those people have that time, right? That they don't have to rush off and do childcare, or whatever it is. And if you think about that in this context, the paying of these people for their additional time that they're putting in the ERG is potentially addressing a bias that exists—which is that they should just magically find the time to do this. Actually you're now paying them to do it. So if they do have childcare needs, they've got a little bit extra money to pay for that childcare, whatever it is. But I just feel like we need to pay for this work to get done, because we're asking our, as I said, our lowest-power people to do this work. And that's unfair.

Dani Johnson:

I also think when the lowest-power people do it, there's not a lot of coordination and cooperation across the organization—and so having the CEO address it and making sure that it rolls down through everything, I'm hoping, facilitates a consistent strategy across the org.

Chris Pirie:

So maybe it's definitely leadership. I think we can all agree on that. It is absolutely a leadership priority. It's also a culture priority. And also, we've learned this word “systemic” this year; it’s gotta be a systems and operational model imperative as well to go fix.

Quick question on the audience: who is going to get the most out of this? I mean, I guarantee the people we're going to talk to are going to blow our minds, and so hopefully everyone will enjoy it. But as we designed it, what was the sort of audience that you had in mind?

Dani Johnson:

Leaders—of all sorts. We plan on talking to learning leaders and leader leaders and leader development leaders, and C-suite folks. We think that if we stand behind the idea that DEIB is everyone's job, then everybody should pay attention to this podcast.

Chris Pirie:

Well, I think we touched on this a little bit, but there's a plethora of tech and services startups that are starting to focus in this area, right: how do you see that market shaping up? I think you mentioned earlier that maybe it's some kind of additional features to existing products and services, or there's some new startups coming with a focus on this?

Stacia Garr:

A few things have happened since we last wrote about this. So when we published this study in 2021, we saw that the number of vendors who are in this space had increased by 136%. So it's a really pretty dramatic change in terms of folks who have joined. We have also seen an increase in the market size; we in 2019 said that the market size was about $100 million. Our projection for 2021 was that it's $313 million, with a compound annual growth rate of 59%. So it's really a lot of folks who are investing in this.

The biggest area that we saw change was in people analytics, and that's not necessarily surprising. We saw that in the people analytics study as well, that focusing on DEIB was a huge change. And so the amount of vendors who are providing a solution focused in this area has increased, but I think more importantly, the sophistication has increased. For instance, we're not just looking at pure representation data; we might be looking at representation data from an intersectional lens, so not just black employees, but black women employees. In addition, we're starting, and we're seeing this in the DEIB and analytics study, we're starting to see kind of almost a hierarchy of the way that people are approaching these analytics. So for instance, the representation data is foundational and that's good. But then looking at things like employee engagement, experience data by different demographic groups is kind of the first step in Inclusion. And then the second step in Inclusion is really a more sophisticated study of areas that you might have difficulties: so for instance, you might see that black women are not getting promoted at the same rates, and so for instance, you might use an organizational network analysis to understand are those people connected in the same ways that their other peers are connected or are there groups that are engaging in homophily, meaning that they primarily tend to just work with people who look like them?

So we're seeing people kind of moving beyond really this representation, even representation of Inclusion data, to much more sophisticated problem-solving through analytics. So that's one of the biggest shifts that we've seen since we published the study in 2019.

Chris Pirie:

Do the analytics tools include AI tools that are looking at, for example, sentiment on employee surveys and pulse surveys and things like that? That has to be a bit of a game changer, too, right?

Stacia Garr:

It absolutely is, because you're no longer limited to just the quantitative analysis that you could do just by demographics; you’re also now able to take the natural language processing, identify the themes that are coming in from comments, and then back them up against demographic information. And that is really changing things.

The other thing that natural language processing is enabling us to do is to understand a little bit more on the tales of feedback. So, okay, in general, we're not hearing this, but we heard this from just these types of people and it was consistent amongst those types of people, and so it's just enabling us to have a much finer understanding of the employee experience by different demographic groups.

Chris Pirie:

I'm super-looking forward to this project: we’ve got an amazing set of conversations lined up for people. And I know if our last two Seasons of work together are any indication, we're gonna learn a lot. How do people tune in, how do they subscribe? How can they follow your podcast?

Dani Johnson:

You can find all of the Seasons that we've done so far on our website. We have very active social media campaigns with respect to these, both Chris and RedThread Research. And then you can also find them on Spreaker, Apple, Spotify.

Chris Pirie:

Google podcasts—wherever you get your podcast! You just search for “Workplace Stories” by RedThread research. And it was very exciting, wasn’t it? When the first one popped up on your iPhone—it’s a really exciting moment. And then when people start to listen, it's great. Can people join in with the conversation—you know, podcasting is typically a sort of one-way street, so to speak, but I guess through your community, people can join them with a conversation, right?

Dani Johnson:

Absolutely, as Stacia mentioned, she's got two ongoing studies, and I'm about to start one on learning and DEIB. So please contact us, tell us your own stories and help us understand what you're facing and what you're doing.

Stacia Garr:
And also we post this on social media, every podcast, so if folks want to comment on particular episodes, we try to be as responsive as we can: we really think this is about fostering a dialogue and enabling people to learn. And we learn through conversation.

Chris Pirie:

One last question from me: I know that you are both super-passionate about this topic and you also, you're a relatively small, but perfectly formed organization. What are you doing in your work practice to help foster Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging?

Dani Johnson:

I think this one has sort of hit home to me this month, particularly. I have been aware of it and talked about it a lot, but there are opportunities to step in it all the time; we unconsciously offend people, we unconsciously don't take them into account. And I think what I've learned more than anything is ask: continue to ask and figure out how people want to be addressed and treated. And talk to people that are dealing with these challenges and see what you can learn from them; to continuously be more aware and more sort of cognizant of the way that you're addressing the topic.

Stacia Garr:

And then I would say, we do some things in terms of interviewing, hiring, I mean just basic hygiene stuff. So for instance, when we're hiring folks, behavioral interviews and structured questions are the best way to assess folks and the least likely to allow biases to creep in. So we use both of those approaches when we interview folks.

Also, we spend time asking ourselves, like, what is our bias on this? We particularly know this is top of mind because we just hired some folks, but we were talking about different candidates and I at one point said, well, I'm not sure if this person is a fit, but you guys check me. What's my bias here? What is it? Am I wrong, what is it—because I have a bias and I know it. And so we're trying to address that. I think also when it comes to some of our own work practices, like we've talked for instance, upon a round table, should we be turning on transcripts so people who have different listening limitations or whatever that they can follow along. So we're always having a conversation about what we should do. Like everybody, there's more we could do, and we're working on that. But it is certainly top of mind for us, as we are thinking about our organization and our team.

Chris Pirie:

For me, it's really a transformational thing, it’s like the digitization of business; It just completely shifts how we're going to have to do work and how we collaborate, and how we lead if we're a leader. And it's almost the opposite to everything that I was ever told about how to be a leader: the model of leadership that I was taught for many years, just like you, you're a leader, do all this stuff, was about being directive and confident, and knowing the answers and being smart. All those things that I subsequently learned in the last quarter of my career were not helpful and excluded a lot of people unintentionally, of course, but you exclude people, you don't leave space for people to talk; you hire people that fit the culture rather than challenge the culture and bring new perspectives.

And I did work on the topic a great deal at Microsoft. I was lucky enough to work with some of the teams that were set up to try and particularly at the time get gender and racial Diversity in the workforce. And it's so hard; it was so hard to get done. And people's instincts were to reduce it to a set of metrics that we can then compete against, right? How am I doing was what managers used to say, how am I doing on representation of women in my team? I saw the data being used in completely the wrong way.

And then I also saw this amazing, definitely at Microsoft, this amazing culture shift that went on where we stepped back and said, it's just not about metrics and it's not about being directive: it’s about mindset and openness and curiosity. And that obviously became much of my work over the last few years. And so that's why I'm passionate about this; I think it's a new way to organize work, or it's part of a new way to organize work. You can't do anything on your own—you have to collaborate. And if you're not inclusive and you're not open to diverse opinions, you will not do good work. Period.

Dani Johnson:

I like that.

Stacia Garr:

I think that latter point is a big part of why it matters to me: this is going to be the new way of doing work, and if my two girls are going to work in a place, in an environment, in a world that is inclusive of them and where they really, and truly, in any organization, have the opportunity to lead the same as anybody of a different gender, then the work has to happen now—the change has to happen now for it to be natural.

For me growing up, my mom went to law school at 40, after she had me, I was like 18 months old. She's crazy. She did that! And I think about the difficulties that she had as a woman lawyer with a young child at home, an older woman lawyer at that time. And yet at the same time, she infused in me an expectation that that is what you do: this is what you can do, and this is how the world should work, and that has strongly shaped my worldview. But for her, that wasn't reality; that was a reality that she in many ways constructed for me, and I don't want to have to construct that for my girls. I want that to be the reality. And I think that every mom, or every parent, doesn't matter what the color is of your skin or anything, that’s what you want—you want to look at your kids and be able to say you have an equal chance to succeed. And I think that we have an opportunity to help accelerate that happening in the world.

And so that's my ‘why ‘really on all of our DEIB work is because as a parent looking at these kids, I want each of them to have a fair shake.

Chris Pirie:

Love it. Our work through our community may help—wouldn’t that be nice?

Dani Johnson:

I think it can.

Chris Pirie:

Well, listen, we're going to wrap up this episode; we’re going to provide a set of resources to help people get a primer, we’re going to share the guests that we have lined up in the Show Notes, and we're going to have a lot of fun over the next few months as we record these conversations. So thanks for your partnership, you two: congratulations on surviving and thriving through all of this, and let's go help people figure out what their role is making a more Inclusive and Diverse workplace.

Stacia Garr:

Thanks for listening to the “Workplace Stories” podcast, brought to you by RedThread Research. Share your thoughts or ideas for guests and topics by sending an email to [email protected], and consider sharing your favorite episode with a friend or colleague. As always thanks to our guests, our sponsors, and thank you, our listeners. 

Chris Pirie:

We'd like to thank the people at Workday for the exclusive sponsorship of the second Season of “Workplace Stories.” Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and engage a more inclusive workforce—it’s your financial, HR, and planning system for a changing world. 

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar at the end of this Season, where you can meet the team (Dani, Stacia and myself) and join in a conversation about the future of DEIB in the workplace. You can find out more information, register for the webinar, and access exclusive Season content, including transcripts, at www.redthreadresearch.com/podcast and thanks again to the team at Workday!

Listen

Guest

Karen Kocher, Global General Manager, Talent & Learning Experiences & Workforce of the Future, at Microsoft

DETAILS

What actually happens when your boss tells you one day that he’d like you to teach new digital skills to a few people … say, 25 million or so? You’re going to find out this week, because that really did happen to our great guest, Microsoft Global General Manager, Talent and Learning Experiences and Workforce of the Future Karen Kocher, who is leading the huge-scale Microsoft-LinkedIn global Skills Initiative. But important as that large-scale L&D experiment is, it’s far from all Karen wanted to talk to us about; think of the Skills program as an appetizer for a Learning and Skills banquet that includes life, career, and pay advice, as well as useful notes on credentialing and what transitioning to a ‘learn-it-all’ culture entails at company street level. Quite a woman. Quite a conversation. And quite a Workplace Story.

Resources

• Find out more about the Microsoft Skills Initiative here.
• Jeffrey Pfeffer’s The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action
• Connect with Karen to carry on the debate here.
• Keep up with Season 1 of our podcast here.

Webinar

Workday hosted an exclusive webinar with the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills. 

Partner

We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

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Guests

Rob Lauber, former Chief Learning Officer at McDonald's

DETAILS

Truism 1: McDonald’s employs a lot of people. Truism 2: it doesn’t care that much about those people, so long as they flip the burgers OK, right? That 2nd one is totally wrong, as we find out in our great conversation with the giant company’s former CLO, the very engaging Rob Lauber. In fact, with its pioneering Archways Program, thousands of entry-level staff get amazing on-the-job training, but also money and support for up-skilling—upskilling that the corporation is perfectly ok with them using to move on, often to full-time education or valuable social careers like healthcare. Even more interesting: for every dollar put in the Archways Program, McDonald's directly benefits with by $3 back. Skills and what they mean (including some refreshing skepticism from Rob about what the robots really will take off us) has been Rob’s own ‘obsession’ over a storied career, so tune in for more on running training at mass scale—including some fascinating advise on what CLOs can do now, today, in terms of available company data. It’s enough to make you hungry.

Connect with him on LinkedIn here

Check out the Archway Program here

Now out of the Golden Arches, Rob’s new endeavor, XLO Global, is here

Webinar

Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills. 

Partner

We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

Season Sponsor

Key quotes:

We did a study and essentially it showed a 3:1 return; for every dollar we put in the Archways Program, McDonald's directly benefited with a $3 return. So it was pretty easy to justify the program on the business side.

I do think that skills profile, skills inventory piece is a nut that I think is worth cracking.

Marketing's typically led by insights; they take the data, they drive insights, and then that drives the product. I think the HR/L&D organizations need to get much more disciplined and probably operate more in a parallel to the way of marketing organizations.

The CLO has an important role to play there in terms of almost demanding that the people analytics team is providing the insights that help set the agenda and the strategy for what L&D needs to pursue.

There's a huge amount of rich data there that L&D professionals can really draw upon and go after which on the business side are very meaningful in terms of their impact. It could be as simple as you go look at customer complaints and you can identify all the skill opportunities there around products not created correctly, regardless of industry—customer service experiences, not being what you would want them to be, those kinds of things

Stacia Garr:
Today were talking to Rob Lauber, who is currently CEO and founder at XLO Global, but was recently the CLO at McDonald's, which included being Dean of the Hamburger University, and before that he was the CLO at YUM! Brands.

Rob Lauber:
The people functions, HR functions, whatever you want to call them, in organizations need to operate like marketing organizations. And in marketing that's figured out, because data and insight drives action. And I don't think that most HR organizations in the country think about it that way, or globally even think about it that way. It's probably a few I'm sure, but I do think that there are far too many parallels, and not enough action.

Stacia Garr:
Today, we talked to Rob about how to operate a system at massive scale. We discuss frontline workers, and really what a difference skills programs can make in their careers. We talk about automation and AI, and how we can be thinking about freeing up people's resources to do new types of service.

Rob Lauber:
The biggest challenge is always scale and reach. You have an organization where in the US, for example, you're going to hire a million people into that system every year, right? So 3000 people a day are coming onto your system, 3000 people are coming off your system; that creates a lot of reverberation in the organization around having really good, repeatable, easy to execute systems in place, particularly around how you help people learn, or you can't possibly keep up. And that's got a downstream impact, obviously, on the customer experience.

Stacia Garr:
So next time you go into a McDonald’s, and think about that person who's giving you that Happy Meal to keep those kiddos quiet, think about everything that had to happen for that person to be ready to deliver that with a smile.

Rob Lauber:
So my name's Rob Lauber. I was the former Chief Learning Officer at McDonald’s, YUM! Brands before that, Cingular Wireless even before that. And I'm currently getting my own little business off the ground—I’m the CEO and Founder, I promoted myself, of a little entity called XLO Global, which is really an external Chief Learning Officers’ view into the enterprise.

Stacia Garr:
Can you start by giving us an overview of McDonald's as an employer, its size, mission and purpose?

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, so McDonald's is a 37,000 restaurant franchise organization; so it's 90-plus percent franchised. So we call it a system; it operates more like a network than, say , a large-scale entity that we all might be familiar with. And it's got probably 1.8 to 2 million employees around the world in 120 countries, serving about 70 million customers every day, plus or minus. They do a lot of transactions!

Stacia Garr:
Definitely! And you said that you were the CLO; can you talk a little bit more about your work there and how you would kind of generally describe the whole set of responsibilities?

Rob Lauber:
My overall responsibilities were for the learning and development, largely focused on the restaurant environment up through staff largely focused on the operational side of the business as well—so cutting across those countries and cutting across those large franchisees and the small franchisees that we have, and working through with them, learning and development strategies, and then working in the business to get the right infrastructure, the right content, the right business models, in place to really make sure we've got a really good way for enabling people to learn.

Stacia Garr:
And I know just from having spoken with some other former folks from McDonald’s that the franchise environment can kind of create a little bit of a different relationship with the employees of those franchisees, because they're not actually employees of McDonald's. Did that have an impact on the learning responsibilities for you as CLO in your organization?

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, it adds a couple of different dimensions. One, it makes analytics very hard because you're really across different entities, so you run into whose data is it's kind of conversations not unlike you would in a lot of countries, I guess these days with global privacy concerns and things like that. And also the relationship then was more with the franchise owner, and making sure you're really driving and enabling learning that the franchise owner sees as important to their business, because they can always opt out. One of the themes I talked about with my team a lot was thinking like a consumer model, almost—you have to have a relevant product, you have to understand your audience, know what it is that they're really after and deliver a high quality product, or essentially they're not going to buy it and use it.

Stacia Garr:
Right. So it's almost like building an economic model into the L&D function in some ways.

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, the P& L side of it, right? But they're paying royalties and those types of things into the business to receive those kinds of services as well. So there is an expectation there.

Stacia Garr:
I'm heavily focused on data, so I want to make sure we come back around to that data point a little bit. But maybe if you can set the stage for us in terms of some of the unique problems you were trying to solve when you were a CLO, particularly given the nature of the organization?

Rob Lauber:
I would say the big things we were trying to solve were, I guess, today we would call digital transformation, right? Speaking of obsessions, since that's the topic of this all, that's another one at the moment, so a big part of what I was focused on was digital transformation of the way we enable learning at the restaurants: so how do we move from a paper-based, largely, approach across the United States and across the world to a more digital delivery platform that would enable the business to move faster, would make actual execution easier on the restaurant manager and on the employee?

And then I say the second thing was more honing in on how people really are learning at the restaurant level, which frankly is, is a shoulder-to-shoulder experience, someone showing you how to make French Fries and how do we deal with that? So really being plugged into how people learn and then trying to match your offerings into that flow of how people learn was, I'd say the biggest challenge that we faced.

Stacia Garr:
And maybe this is kind of a double click on that answer, but as you think about everything you were doing, what would you say were kind of the biggest challenges you were facing?

Rob Lauber:
The biggest challenge is always scale and reach. You have an organization where in the US, for example, you're going to hire a million people into that system every year, right? So 3000 people a day are coming onto your system, 3000 people are coming off your system. I'm just thinking about that. If you're in the talent acquisition world gives people heart palpitations, or you have to hand them a Xanax when you start talking about those things. But that creates a lot of reverberations in the organization around having really good, repeatable, easy to execute systems in place, particularly around how you help people learn, or you can't possibly keep up. And that's got a downstream impact, obviously, on the customer experience.

Chris Pirie:
So what were your core learning programs: was it about onboarding and franchise management and leadership? How would you characterize the ‘20’ in your ‘80:20’?

Rob Lauber:
I'd say the biggest focus was around enabling the frontline learner, the crew person. Because that was the biggest audience, obviously that we're dealing with around the world, and the least experienced audience that we were dealing with as well; they didn't know how to do the things that they needed to do. That's also the audience that you count on to really bring any changes as the organization moves to life, whether that's a new product, a new piece of equipment, right? That audience really has to know how to operate those pieces with a lot of proficiency with speed and , and capability. So, I put that in the 80 camp, but we ran the spectrum all the way up to helping franchise owners think about their business as they grew, what challenges and pitfalls they were running into and what pivots they needed to make from a mindset perspective in how they ran their business as well.

Stacia Garr:
Maybe just stepping back to you and your perspective around skills, what skills did you need to do your work and how did you acquire them?

Rob Lauber:
It's interesting. I think there are a couple of skills that were really important, I think, in the role. One is having a bit of business acumen, so understanding the mindset and perspective of the franchise owner, which is really a small business owner. And I was fortunate early in my career, I worked for Dun & Bradstreet, and I spent the first five years out of college putting together the business credit reports for small and medium-size and some large businesses that were pre-IPO. And you quickly got to understand the balance sheet; you quickly got to understand cash flow, supplier challenges, people, challenges, those types of things. I think that really helped me come into that role, because I could understand the small business challenge that many of them are facing in that piece.

So I think that one skill that was really important. I think another one was just really around the operational knowledge of L&D and the flexibility around design choices, infrastructure choices, content choices in the organization were really important as well. And then I think there were the obvious ones around, which probably is more a competency, I guess, but influencing and relationship building—and in a franchise system, figuring out who are the early adopters in the franchise system, who are the ones who may not be early adopters but if you get them on board, they help you drive momentum.

So, momentum. I looked at the success and in the things that we did around a momentum factor—how well was it being taken and where was it self-propelling/self-selling itself out across the system because the franchise community we'll be talking about it.

Chris Pirie:
Our topic here is skills for the season, and it means a lot of things to a lot of people. Rob, but what does skills mean to you in the context of your work as a CLO and McDonalds and before?How would you define skills?

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, I always thought of skills as like specific learned abilities, I guess, would be the word, the change, that you need to perform a job successfully versus competencies, which are more about knowledge and behaviors.

So I almost put them in a mindset tool set, kind of a framework. And we would talk about that a lot at McDonald's as well, as there are some things you would do that were really around building mindset and changing mindset or helping frame people's mindset. And then the other side of it was really around the toolset, which was how do you create, and enable people to build their ability to perform things they need to do to be successful in their role?

Chris Pirie:
One of the things we're learning is that the language and the taxonomic structures around these things are very fluid, and everybody's kind of found a way in their environment to talk about them in a way that's meaningful to their business. I wonder what were the kind of conversations that you had with business leaders at McDonald's around the topic of skills? Did they get it? Were they concerned, were they engaged?

Rob Lauber:
I think it depends on who you were talking to on that front. So I think in the broader context, when we think about the employee value proposition, and we would talk about reasons people would want to work at McDonald's, but we would definitely get into the broader skills conversation around; it's the first rung on a career ladder. And those were the places that people could enter into the workplace in general, beyond just McDonald’s, and gain a set of skills that are highly portable.

When you get down to talking to franchise owners and at a more tactical level in the business at the restaurant level, the conversation mostly was driven around performance, right? It was, ’I need to make sure all my people know ‘how to’ and fill in the blank or even, in a lot of cases, I need to make sure all my people understand why we do whatever it is that we're trying to do there.’ So context became important there as well, so the skills conversations typically showed up kinda in those dimensions most commonly.

Chris Pirie:
What about with the frontline workers themselves? Did you ever have an opportunity to talk to them about their approach to this?

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, I think the most common piece around that conversation or the orientation of that conversation or the direction it would head would be, where does this job lead me? Where can this take me? And the conversation around skills typically would come out of that, right? Like my ability to make French Fries is great if I'm going to go do the same job somewhere else in another business, but that's not really going to advance me, which we all seek and strive for every day; I don't think that's different for any of us.

And so the conversation around the portability, for example, of skills and how teamwork communications, dealing with conflict, working in a time intense environment, understanding how to get to work on time, some basic things too are all skills that we talk to people about how McDonald's sets you up for greater success when you move on to whatever it is you want to pursue.

Chris Pirie:
You are pretty connected in the industry; I know you see the world through a much broader lens than just your work at McDonald's, but why do you think skills are such a hot topic for people right now?

Rob Lauber:
I'm not really sure how it's emerged to be the words that everyone's used. I haven't really thought about it linearly. I keep going back to—and Chris, you'll relate because you and I were around at the same time—but in 2003, I was on an ATD (ASTD at the time) public policy group, and we published a skills gap white paper in 2003. And 17 years later, skills are the word that we're talking about today. So for me, I kinda think it's been front of mind for me for a long time. So I haven't paid a lot of attention to it, and I agree with you, why the surge in the narrative—and to Stacia’s point, the obsession is emerging.

I think part of it is around an evolution towards thinking differently about how we acquire talent in organizations. I think that's one piece, and lots of root causes about why we would think differently about that. I also think it's emerging because it helps bridge the gap between educational institutions and businesses; I think it puts it in simpler terms for people to really understand, ‘Here’s what we're looking for from a skills perspective in the business world,’ when I'm talking to a university president and they're talking about their academic rigor or the programs that they have.

Chris Pirie:
Got it, yeah. We had an interview just the other day where somebody was talking about, you mentioned it too, the technology and our obsession with digital transformation; Josh Bersin talks about an accelerated skills half-life, and there's just so much coming. I think a lot of leaders are anxious about where they're going to get the talent to create value from data and all the things that data is, the new oil, all the things that their software companies are telling you, you better worry about it's like people from the do that. That might be some of it too?

Rob Lauber:
Ironically, the ones telling you that the ones that are pitching products to solve that problem. It's a little suspect that way too.

Chris Pirie:
Good point, absolutely well taken!

Stacia Garr:
I wonder too, though, if some of this is, ‘cause we've heard throughout this podcast that skills are intensely or primarily individual—so we've heard like in several iterations, that competencies are owned by the organization, but skills are owned by the individual.

And I wonder if part of this is part of the push to have individuals own their careers even more? And so if you're talking about skills, that's in a language of something that employees can feel like they own, feel like they can acquire or confined sources from which to acquire those skills. And so I wonder if the broader shift that we've seen around putting onus for the learning of them is also a parallel reason why we're seeing the rise in skills.

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, I think too, I think about it too. Is it a more translatable way to talk to people about how to get from point A to point B versus a competency, a 14-point competency compendium that you have in your organization—one of which ironically is resilience—and nobody really knows what that is other than to put up with this pandemic for another month?

Chris Pirie:
Or documents that tell you which competencies you need!

Rob Lauber:
Exactly. It's funny though, because in the skills obsession we are talking about, on the side there's conversations about agility and resilience, and those are competencies that are not skills. So it is kind of funny to watch the parallel conversation and I think it's, it's somewhat unconscious in terms of, and not, I would say an equally valuable conversation is the way I would put it. But I think that it's really interesting to watch that play out.

But I do think it, it just makes it simpler for people to digest one, and two, I do think that, when you think about skills gaps out there and this need for a billion data scientists on the planet, so we can all just analyze data for the rest of our lives and then spit out amazing insights with no one to do anything about it. But the needs at that level are very skill-driven; there’s a methodical way to build those skills.

Stacia Garr:
I think that's a clear articulation of what I was trying to say, which is that it's understandable and an individual can do something about it. So I love that perspective.

Let's shift over, because you did just now mention analytics and data, so that's kind of go after that a little bit more directly. A big theme in the skills discussion is skill supply and demand, with some skills being too short to supply and others in to greatest supply. How have you been thinking about this problem, and how do you think we should be thinking about that more holistically?

Rob Lauber:
I mean, I've seen and read a lot about the skills shortage typically on the tech side seems to be the loudest piece of it, although interestingly, it seems to have shifted away from things like coding because that actually seems to be commoditized now in the workplace, where six years ago I was on a workforce board and that's all we were talking about was building people with coding skills, helping people get coding skills. So it is interesting to watch the shift there.

So I do think that there's a little bit of that going on. I think the challenge around supply and demand is predicting the future, right? And so there's the technical, the technical piece of it as well is predicting the future. So there's anticipation around data skills, or cybersecurity skills, or those types of pieces, assuming that it's only gonna get more complex, more difficult, we're going to need more people for it, these are areas that are going to grow.

And then there’s the big question: what are the skills areas that are actually on the decline or less needed than before? I haven't seen much written from that angle—the contrarian angle that says, actually these are the skills we don't really need much of anymore. And then I do hear on a parallel side, the hard-soft skills conversation, when you think about those pieces while we're , I'd call the, the tech skills, hard skills for obvious reasons… but you hear every once in a while, the murmuring about ‘My teenage kids have no soft skills, like they don't know how to talk to somebody; if they have to make a phone call to their soccer coach, they don't know how to actually talk to them; they want to just text them.’ Right?

So I do think some of those softer skills also will emerge as a supply demand kind of equation at some point as well.

Stacia Garr:
I feel like we're hearing a fair amount of that in this whole discussion of both automation and AI and this question of what makes us human—what makes us stand out from what the robots can do. And in that discussion, whether you call it soft skills, or one of our guests called them ‘durable' skills, which we thought was interesting because they endure past a specific time, they're kind of throughout your whole career—but I think we may hear about it more in that context as well.

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, I do; I agree that we're approaching or in the middle of a pivot moment. But unfortunately, I can age myself and remember when a desktop computer landed on my desk; Chris probably read about that research, ‘cause he's much younger than me, but when when a desktop computer first landed on my desk and there were 40 clerks across the room that used to do all the data entry and now it was me and my colleagues, so you were self-servicing that end, all those people found other things to do. And I do think we're at kind of one of those moments again, where the same thing when the internet became a reality, a whole set of other skills were displaced, and people evolved and moved towards.

I think this pivot is very much similar to that new jobs are being created because a new industry or a new way of working or a new way of operating a new operating model is emerging again, so I see that as it's not a new problem, right? That's why I go back to my 2003 example: dot com bust, skills, shortage of those kinds of things. And I go to 2020 and I sit there and say, Hmm, skill shortage. Even in the pandemic, I think there's like 17 million posted jobs out there in the United States, so in theory all of those should be a hundred percent filled.

It's very interesting to me to sit there and watch the skill supply conversation go on. And it just feels very elusive. It's hard to sit there and I'd be surprised if anyone could proclaim. They have the formula and the science behind with certainty, these skills are going to generate these many jobs. And these skills are going to lose these many jobs.

I think about AI. And I know at McDonald's we were talking about AI at the drive-thru, the application, I actually wrote an article about this, the age of automation and how it's getting impacted our restaurants. And the conversation was more about, is it going to free up people? Sure. But it enables the restaurants to then do things they couldn't possibly do before—like the whole idea of table service, where you come in and place your order counter, and then go sit down and someone actually brings it to you; in the economic model without automation, that was a very difficult thing to do because you couldn't ask your restaurant and be profitable with a low cost product and still provide some level of table service or curbside service or delivery or those kinds of things. So the automation piece actually creates new opportunities for businesses, which in turn creates new opportunities for people.

Chris Pirie:
That's a really interesting idea, because I think there the skills gap between those two activities is pretty narrow—you can imagine taking someone from behind the deep fat fryer and skilling them up to perhaps be capable, more capable in front of a customer. Many of the examples that we see talked about and anxiety springing up around are where those retail jobs go away. And your only option is to become a software engineer for Amazon. And that feels like a vast chasm to get people through in terms of transforming.

Rob Lauber:
Frank Kevin Oaks reminded me of 1981 news article about how ATMs were the death of the teller—and then you go to like 2011 BLS statistics 20 years later, and there's actually more tellers working in banks than there were in 1981 yet ATMs are the understood way of doing business, right—the understood way of personal banking.

So it is very interesting to see, but the role of the teller to even transform into something completely different; they do different services, they provide a higher level of customer service than they did before. I think that's the kind of opportunity at the retail level, the consumer-facing level that is in front of a lot of businesses.

Stacia Garr:
And I think it ties in nicely, Chris, to what we heard another guest talking about, which is this idea of kind of thinking about the skills pipeline and where people move; so you can see the person who was previously making the fries, moving to this customer service or guest service role, and then somebody who may have been doing something else—it was a little bit more skilled being able to move up to something else because they’ve been freed to do that. So it's kind of this value chain that can get released if you're able to automate some of the lower level skills.

Rob Lauber:
I agree, and I think that in the bigger picture of things, we should be thinking about the labor market, that way more in general, right? So should the minimum wage be $7, $15, or $50 is an irrelevant conversation, because history says it doesn't really do anything to impact poverty over the long term anyway. But what does the economic opportunity of acquiring skills do? So how do you create and how do you think of, and how do you position, I don't know, the retail sector as the entry point for skill building for anyone in the workforce… and what does that get you? And then how do you move to another level? What does that get you? How does advancing your education, whether that's completing High School, completing college, getting an advanced degree, how does that position you further up a chain that creates new opportunities for you to move in a direction along the skills pipeline?

Chris Pirie:
One mechanism that we've used in the past around skills to do some of that actually is skills validation and credentialing. At Microsoft, for example, we knew we needed a million database administrators on the planet in order to make sure our technology could work, and so we built a certification program and we created a value around that job role, and injected those skills into the population. What was your philosophy around credentialing? How did it play into life at McDonald’s?

Rob Lauber:
We were a little looser on that in the context, I think. I think back to MCSC, for example; I think that's a great one—the national association of manufacturers’ ‘stackable credentials’ is another good example. But largely the credentialing idea hasn't taken off very far or gone as far as it probably needs to in the world.

At McDonald's, our approach was really more around knocking down barriers to advance your education through the traditional education systems that we have in place. So we had large populations that dropped out of High School, for whatever reasons; suddenly they became the breadwinner in their family, and they had to drop out of high school, or out of necessity they had to get a job and here they are, and they're there, so we focused very much on being able to open doors for people to access education and advance their education.

And that was really the intent behind the Archways Program, which was a gateway basically program that you can come in, work at McDonald's, advance your education and then pursue whatever avenue that you wanted to. So, interestingly, 40%—I think we surveyed like 40,000 crew people a couple of years ago—40% of them wanted to move into healthcare. So that kind of data is very interesting. And there's certainly no shortage of need for people in the healthcare profession, in all ranges, so we introduced programs to people that let them know what are the professions in healthcare that are available, here’s the educational tracks, if you want to be a CNA, or if you want to go all the way to nursing, or you want to be a med tech or whatever, physical therapist, here's basically what your education path looks like. And you can work for McDonald's for as long as it takes for you to get there, and we'll help make access easier; we’ll certainly make it more affordable to you, and give you that path to be able to pursue it in a way that you probably might not have thought of otherwise or had access to other.

Chris Pirie:
That's really, really interesting, and I want to get to this. Can you describe how that program works a little bit?

Rob Lauber:
Yep. So, yeah, so I’ll walk through the pillars of the program: first, we had an English language program, where people, typically Spanish in the US with Spanish as their first language, would learn English as a second language. That was an 8 or 12-week program you could go into, typically face-to-face locally delivered by a certified ESL person; McDonald’s fully paid for that.

The second piece was a career online high school program where you would get a diploma, not a GED. And you could typically in—depending on when you departed or stopped High School—you typically finish in 12 to 18 months. I think our average was like 14 months, and you could get a high school diploma. We then moved into the traditional college path, and McDonald's would fully pay for the high school piece, and that was about $1,300 in value there. And then in the college piece if you work 15 hours a week, you had been in the job for 90 days, you were eligible for $2,500 a year towards a degree program, and you could go to whatever school you wanted to. So if you wanted to go to your local community college, which by far and away numbers-wise was the most popular choice, you could do that and you could pursue whatever degree you wanted to. We weren't specific about like, it has to be supply chain, or tech, or something like that. And that was $2,500 a year.

And we had some preferred suppliers like Southern New Hampshire or Colorado Tech or some others out there, where they would work the other end of the equation to make that $2,500 stretch the farthest it possibly could. So your work experience would count towards some credits and your training experiences inside McDonald's would count toward some credit. And the affordability piece when you got through Cal grants and frankly grants from those schools with Colorado Tech, for example, you could go for free pretty much not out of pocket to attend school—all you had to do is put in the time and continue to work for McDonald's 15 hours a week.

Chris Pirie:
And was this available to people who were working in the franchise system?

Rob Lauber:
Yep, yeah. Over three years we had about 50,000 people participate in the program and a lot of repeat visitors as well, channeling down that path. And we would celebrate a lot of the success that they would have. So at Colorado Tech, I think two years ago, I went out to Denver and there were 170 people that were graduating out of the McDonald's system at Colorado Tech, and they would walk the stage they'd bring their families. And it was a huge occasion; many of them were the first person in their family to graduate from college, and many of them were pursuing other careers and other things, and it was great and they were grateful. And for McDonald's, the idea was they would stay longer, which they would. We knew that. And ultimately they'll turn into great consumers because there'll be fans of the brand probably for a pretty long time. And given what we were able to help them do, there’s a real win-win on that, on that side. And that's how we thought about it.

Chris Pirie:
Is there a lot of upward career mobility in McDonald's as well?

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, absolutely. But when you look at the realities of the upward mobility piece given a highly franchised one, many of those franchises are family owned businesses. Your upward mobility could be limited; it depends on the franchise, but there are opportunities into the McDonald's corporation. So there were people that I knew that came through from franchisees into McDonald's corporate and entry-level kind of jobs and were making their way up the chain. And several of them said, I want to be a franchisee someday as well; this is setting their pathway to get there.

Stacia Garr
Did you measure the success of the program? Was it the increased retention rate? Was it the number of graduates or percentage of graduates?

Rob Lauber:
We looked at it, selfishly, on the business side. So first, what are we getting for what we're spending? So we looked at things like average tenure, likelihood to be promoted, revenue at the store level where you had two or more participants in the program compared to stores that didn't have participants. Those are three measures for example. And we did a study with Accenture, and essentially it showed a three to one return; for every dollar we in the program, McDonald's directly benefited with a $3 return. So it's pretty easy to justify the program on the business side. And a lot of all the confidence intervals and big data stuff you would want to see and that, people would want to know to believe that it was really true.

We also looked at the qualitative measures, so we talked to our top 10 franchisees with participants in it and said, ‘How is this helping you in the community, because so many of them are community-based; how is this helping your reputation? What kind of doors is it opening? What are you seeing in the quality of candidates?’ All very subjective and qualitative, but we also included 10 profiles of franchisees and the benefits they were seeing. A simple example would be like they were able to talk to their local legislators in a way where before they might not have gotten the time of day, because of the wage conversation or whatever it might be, or perceptions about McDonald's as an employer. So this opened doors for them to build better relationships in the community as well, which of course has an intangible long-term benefit.

Stacia Garr:
And then kind of one other question on this is, how did it work financially? So I know you mentioned kind of the return measures, but did the franchisees have to pay any amount if their people were participating in this program, or was that kind of all part of their royalties they would pay otherwise?

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, at the time it was fully funded, and it has been up to this point fully funded, by McDonald's corporation. There is a discussion about a shift, where it's a shared model underway, and we'll see what the outcome is on that. But up to this point, the first five years, from 2015 through 2020, McDonald's corporation underwrote it—largely because we believe from an employer reputation perspective, and also from a business perspective, we needed to do that to get the program momentum and proof points in place.

Stacia Garr:
Fascinating. I want to turn—I kind of foreshadowed this in your introduction—but I want to turn a little bit more to that conversation about data, and how you all were thinking about that. So what challenges did you have in obtaining or identifying skills data, and then actually using it to understand what was happening with skills in the organization?

Rob Lauber:
The challenges we would face were mainly around getting granular; comparing store to store, for example, was very challenging. Typically, we would be able to compare at, what I would say in the US was what we call a co-op level, which was about 55 of those around the United States. And they were basically clusters of operators, maybe 20 or so franchisees, and all of their data would be up and grouped in an anonymous kind of way, where you wouldn't be able to figure out who's who. So we were able to gather that data that way.

Stacia Garr:
Too much noise around this, and not a lot of conversation about what people are actually doing and how they're actually thinking about it. And so we're trying to elevate these stories of how, exactly that—how people are thinking about it. We'll go here next, but also this intersection between learning and, and people analytics; so the data, and because a lot of times it seems like those are two parallel paths in the organization that are never meeting. And so we're also trying to kind of encourage that because we think that the problem needs to be solved.

We don't know the exact answer, but we think those two groups need to work together to solve it.

Rob Lauber:
Yeah. My two-cent opinion is the people functions, HR functions, whatever you want to call them and organizations need to operate like marketing organizations. And in marketing, that's figured out because data and insight drives action. Right?

I don't think that most HR organizations in the country think about it that way or globally even think about it that way: probably a few, I'm sure. But I do think that there are far too many parallels and not enough action.

Stacia Garr:
So how should learning be working with people analytics and thinking about this data and kind of the relationship between the two organizations to really understand both what skills are in the organization today, and how we should be thinking about developing skills?

Rob Lauber:
I think from my inventory perspective—and my experience comes from a large enterprise perspective—and I think McDonald's aside, I know my peers in larger enterprises are dealing with this, too. There isn't really a way to capture the inventory, right? The conversation around needs is always pretty apparent, but the conversation around what do we have in our organization and what can we draw upon an organization, where are we in our organization, isn’t necessarily as evident as I think many folks in L&D or in that probably the people organizations, HR organizations want it to be.

So I can think about an example; I was talking with a colleague of mine a couple of weeks ago at a large consumer distribution company. And they were talking about a driver who has an engineering degree applied for a job with their engineering organization. And they had no idea this person was out there driving, and had that kind of skill set. And at first, honestly, and I, and I'd say this comment in a lot of organizations, there was something dismissive about, Oh, well, they're a driver, right? So really, why would I consider them, we should go external for this?

But I do think that the other side of it was this aha, like, well, how many other engineers do we have out there that drive, they could be doing this other engineering work for us, which can drive value. I think that's a simple example, but that conversation came up once or twice while I was at McDonald's too. Are there IT professionals sitting out there, or people capable of taking at least entry-level jobs in our organization that are in our restaurant communities? And we're just not even aware of where they are.

So I do think that skills profile skills inventory piece is a nut that I think is worth cracking that I think a lot of us are trying to get to. And I think having that then becomes your data analytics driver, right? Because if what you have and where you're trying to go, L&D steps in and tries to fill the gap right, as does talent acquisition, I would say, right? Am I going to buy my talent or am I going to build my talent?

And I think that's really where the L&D role plays in it. I think the analytics team in L&D teams, the analytics piece of it has to be central to beyond just L&D. I think of it in the holistic person profile of who's working in our organization, what’s the flow look like of the people that are coming into our organization; how do we compare against others that are trying to hire the same people we are?

I would lean on that insights organization and analytics or analytics organization, really, to give me the insights about what we see and what we don't know that's right in front of us. Similar to, and I mentioned this earlier, similar to a marketing organization; marketing's typically led by insights; they take the data, they drive insights, and then that drives the product. I think the HR/L&D organizations need to get much more disciplined and probably operate more in a parallel to the way of marketing organizations.

Stacia Garr:
And what do you think the role is of the CLO in driving that? Because we don't often hear, at least on the people analytics side, as the CLO is being a primary customer, if you will, of the analytics function, but it sounds like there's an actually an opportunity here for the CLO to, to be pushing for that service, if you will, from the analytics group?

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, absolutely, I think that the CLO has an important role to play there in terms of almost demanding—demanding is too strong a word—but I mean, the expectation that people analytics team is going to be providing the insights that help set the agenda and the strategy for what L&D needs to pursue.

So I do think that that's an important piece that needs to be there. And if it's not in place, I would suggest to my colleagues, they should try to figure that one out and make sure that it is in place.

Stacia Garr:
Definitely. Are there any other groups just around this out, any other groups that you think learning should be collaborating with specifically with regard to skills that we haven't talked about?

Rob Lauber:
It's interesting, because one of the things I looked a lot at and tried to work a lot with was, we did work around the customer experience and what customers expected out of their McDonald's transaction, for example. So we went over and we looked at customer insights and consumer insights, and what were customers saying about their experience with the brand, and that identified a set of skills that we knew we needed to focus on in the organization around hospitality.

For example, to the example I gave earlier, where automation freed up people to now go interact and engage directly with customers: well when they do engage with customers, what is it that they expect and how do I make sure that those people have those skills and abilities to be able to do that?

The other side is to look to your marketing organization, because that's some of where the outcomes are or the insights that they find about the experience that your organization is providing, is obviously driven by your people. And that's the flip side of the skill development that you're trying to do.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, a lot of what I'm seeing on the people analytics side is the bringing together of customer experience, data, and employee experience data for that exact reason. And so you can clearly see when there's that gap, connecting that back to the L&D group to try and fill that gap, or alternatively to talent acquisition, if that skill set isn't available, or can't be developed quickly enough.

Rob Lauber:
That’s right.

Chris Pirie:
What I love about that is that that's business data, right—that’s business outcome data, and when your learning strategy is driven by that, then what the problem is you're trying to fix, and guess what, whether you're having an impact or not, because you can look back at that data rather than examine your own products and the own experience and something within the sphere of L&D.

Rob Lauber:
I mean, it could be as simple as you go look at customer complaints and you can identify all the skill opportunities there around products not created correctly, regardless of industry—customer service experiences, not being what you would want them to be those kinds of things. I mean, there's a huge amount of rich data there that L&D professionals can really draw upon to set a priority, and frankly go after and which on the business side are very meaningful in terms of their impact.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, very measurable, which I think is important because if you could reduce the percentage of complaints around a certain thing, there's your direct business impact of your work.

Rob Lauber:
And a whole bunch of people outside your function can tell you how much that's worth.

Stacia Garr:
Yes!

Rob Lauber:
And keep your job simple!

Chris Pirie:
I'm sure there are a lot of startups out there that are starting to apply AI and trawling through that business data to generate the skills that need to be worked on anyway; we’re seeing a lot of cool startups using data around skills to create value for a number of different people. Are there organizations or vendors that you worked with out there that you admire in terms of what they're doing around skills and creating value from understanding skills in a better way?

Rob Lauber:
I'm going to now tick off all the vendors that I work with; thanks for that! But it's actually been an interesting question because I don't know that I really ever thought of them that way, in terms of, particularly with the McDonald's scale and the challenges of having access to data. It typically wasn't framed up in that context with that, so it wouldn't be fair to me to sit there and say, I like this organization over this organization.

I do know some of the suppliers that I worked with there that I still talk to today are on the fringe of being able to skills map any training content that you have, for example in your system using AI and be able to present to a learner, e.g. if you take this course, here's three or four different skills that you're going to be able to take away out of there.

So to your point, I think that not only the startup community, but I also think that even the existing community that's out there, are catching onto this as an opportunity. And I think it's good thinking about it that way, it’s really good. And I think three or four years from now, we'll either be onto something, or we'll all agree it's not really possible to tackle.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. I think that's exactly where we are in this, in this whole conversation. Rob, is there anything else we should've asked you about?

Rob Lauber:
No, not really. Not that I can think of off the top of my head. I mean, this has been a great conversation overall, and there's probably could go on for a couple more hours because there's so many cogs on the wheel that we didn't get to that could in this whole area.

Chris Pirie:
Well, maybe you could just tell us something a little bit about what you're going to do next and what, what your plans are, and then also, how can people connect with you to learn more?

Rob Lauber:
Well, I started this little venture called XLO Global, so xloglobal.com is my plug; it's a really complex website of one page, but specifically by design, because I'm really focused on doing three things.

One is advisory services, so I'm working with some startups and that part is pretty public, you can find out about that on the website as well. I'm also then working with some organizations on some short-term projects, around learning strategies, within a particular problem that they're trying to solve.

And then the third piece of work I'm doing is working with a couple of organizations right now on revamping their business model, their infrastructure and their content or approach to learning as a whole, as they're trying to pivot their business for growth as the pandemic comes out. So they're actually leveraging this moment, where growth is a bit of a challenge to get themselves ready, to be able to really accelerate quickly as an organization when they come out. So I'm doing those three pieces of work right now, and that's mostly my focus.

Chris Pirie:
Sounds like you're going to have a lot of fun.

Rob Lauber:
That's all I'm after at this point. It's really good!

Stacia Garr:
Well, that actually ties nicely into what I think is our final question. We've done a bunch of research on purpose. And so we'd like to end these conversations with questions about your purpose, and really why do you do the work that you do?

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, again, probably a five-hour conversation and some psychoanalysis. But I distill it down into one thing. I get huge amounts of satisfaction out of helping other people be successful. And I can't explain it, but I think maybe I'm not unique to all of us on this call either about that, but for me, it's incredibly satisfying to help and to see someone succeed or gain a new insight or from something I might be able to unlock for them.

I've made that my pursuit. I truly believe that's why I'm here. It's I know that gives me the most energy, and so that's probably the simplest way to explain,

Stacia Garr:
Well, thank you for doing it for us and for our listeners today; I think you've helped us all understand something new and given us insights. So thank you very much.

Chris Pirie:
Yes thanks, Rob, great conversation. And I would also say that you have given a lot back to the industry as well through your work with ATD; you’re a very well networked person, and I'm sure you're coaching a lot of learning leaders who are lucky to have you.

Rob Lauber:
Yeah, I just gotta figure out how I monetize that, but I'm not too worried. You're probably doing a lot better at that than me, but I'm happy. I love doing that stuff just in terms of like, Hey, can you give me your advice? And the psychoanalysis part of this stage just for fun is like, I've had people come to me that I know, but don't really know, and they're like, can I sit down and have a career conversation with you because—and they're not an L&D at all, they're like, one of them was like a CFO—and it was like, I don't really know what I'm doing and I don't, tell me what you think, or here's the situation I'm in, what should I do kind of stuff. And it's always been fascinating for me and I haven't been able to unlock why people do that, but it is. I get a lot of career counseling questions from people as well.

Stacia Garr:
Because you listen carefully, and you ask thoughtful questions.

Rob Lauber:
I think my wanting people to be successful and helping them solve their problem comes through in that and the way I approach everything. So it's give, give, give. And I get back a lot of satisfaction and obviously from a career perspective that hasn't really hurt me because when I go into the organizations that I've been in and I'm like, let's be successful. Right? And how do I make sure we all win?

And I think that's helped me get to where I am.

Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.

Listen

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Guests

Greg Pryor, Senior VP, People & Performance Evangelist at Workday

DETAILS

“I think we have to help organizations get out of the way and let people unleash and unlock their capabilities in ways that does not require the organization to be at the center.” Sounds pretty optimistic? No surprise as whatever else he is, our guest this week, Greg Pryor, is an optimist—and we are too, given the power of the examples and the strength of the conviction he gave us in this hour of debate over the future of HR. Greg, People & Performance Evangelist at Workday, a tech firm that is shaking up the world of enterprise software and which we’re grateful to have as sponsor of this whole Workplace Stories first season, shares many fascinating insights into what he sees as a totally new age for human capital management that the pandemic has tipped us all into. These cover the gamut from bleeding-edge academic research on the future of work to the life lessons kids are teaching their parents out of playing Fortnite, and keep Stacia and fellow interviewer Chris engaged and often delighted. It’s a great conversation: use it to level up your thinking about skills. We certainly did.

Find out more about Greg and his work at Workday here

Connect with him on LinkedIn here

References

Conversations for a Changing World with Telstra and Mastercard

How Skills Unlock the Future – HR Tech Discussion with Dell

Forbes – Career Sprints using Agile Development Methods to Foster Employee Development

Webinar

Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills. 

Partner

We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

Season Sponsor

Key quotes:

Around 2010, we entered into this ‘third age’ of human capital management, which I very much believe will be much more around people and performance enablement. There was a very specific pivot in what was happening around the democratization of work, the availability of prediction machines, and the expectations of workers.

If you would ask anyone 12 months ago, could a vast majority of the entire workforce overnight move to remote work, people would have said: just not possible.

I'm also buoyed and excited by the resilience of people. I think this has been such a tremendous experience—that we underestimate how resilient and how agile people are… I spend time with our customers and I think they're optimistic as well. This has been a crazy challenging time, but what it's told us is, wow, people for the most part are good, thoughtful, committed, wanting to do the right things and resilient. So I'm finding the silver lining.

I think we have to help people have to help our organizations get out of the way and let people unleash and unlock their capabilities in ways that does not require the organization to be at the center. I think all of that happened much, much, much faster than we expected.

This CHRO was sharing with me that during the pandemic, they were playing Fortnite with their daughter. And finally he turned to his daughter and he said, honey, when is this game over? When do I win? And she turned to him and she said, Dad, you don't win, man; you just level up.

Stacia Garr:
Today, we spoke with Greg Pryor, who’s Senior Vice President, People & Performance Evangelist at Workday .

Greg Pryor:
But I do think around 2010 we entered into this ‘third age’ of human capital management, which I very much believe will be much more around people and performance enablement. And that there was a very specific pivot in what was happening around the democratization of work, the availability of prediction machines, and the expectations of workers. And I do believe those three things have really driven us into this ‘third age.’

Stacia Garr:
Greg is one of the smartest people we know when it comes to thinking about the future of work, but then making it practical in terms of what can be done today.

Greg Pryor:
I see five specific imperatives: we think about those imperatives in the context of ideas for a changing world. IDEAS is an acronym that stands for Inclusion and belonging, Digital acceleration, Enabling experiences (with the ‘e’), the Agile organization, and then finally the Skills imperative—all of which I believe have been dramatically, both accelerated and amplified by our extraordinary 2020.

Stacia Garr:
Greg shares with us why skills are hot, how tech is changing them and why we have to unlearn everything we know.

Greg Pryor:
My name is Greg Pryor. people call me a lot of things, actually, but some of the titles that I enjoy most, I guess, officially, I'm an executive director at Workday and also on my LinkedIn profile, I referred to myself as a ‘people and performance evangelist,’ and so maybe a little practical and a little aspirational in there.

Stacia Garr:
Wonderful. Well, Greg, thank you so much for coming on today. Welcome to the RedThread Research podcast; we are extremely excited to have you come and share your perspective, both kind of from a technology angle and also just as a follower of what's happening in the workplace and the future of work. So thank you so much for coming.

Greg Pryor:
Well, thanks for having me—thrilled to be here!

Chris Pirie:
Well, we always start with a rapid set of questions, just to give people a sense of your work practice and what you do on a day-to-day basis, so we'll rattle through those and then we'll go deeper on a couple of topics that I know you think deeply about anyway. So can you start by giving us a quick overview of Workday, its mission and its purpose in the world?

Greg Pryor:
Yeah, great question: thanks for asking. So Workday is a technology company offering finance, planning, human capital management solutions for our amazing customers around the world. We've been in existence for about 17 years, so relatively new on the field here, and we just feel so grateful. We have just, you know, thousands of amazing customers around the world. And I believe we wake up every day helping to create brighter workdays for millions of employees around the world who work within our customer organizations.

Chris Pirie:
Wonderful. And can you tell us about your work? What is your job title and how would you describe the kind of work that you get to do?

Greg Pryor:
So I'd probably say, you know, a long time human capital practitioner. So doing that work in various contexts for gosh, more than 30 years long time practitioner. At Workday, I have had the privilege and pleasure of looking after talent management for many years, helping our own workmates have remarkable Workday experiences; as part of that work, as well as you can imagine, I spend lots of time with our customers, and that's a part of my role that I just thoroughly love. I know Stacia and I share a friendship with our friend Josh Bersin, and Josh refers to me as a ‘pollinating bee’ taking information and ideas, and perhaps a little bit of inspiration across our customer community, and I love that.

And then I also have the great privilege to spend lots of time with various academic leaders and really understanding where the future of work is going. So whether that's folks like our friend, John Goodrow at USC who had just thought of doing some of the best work on the future of work, Amy Edmondson at Harvard, Michael Bush at Great Place To Work, my good friend, Rob Cross at Babson College looking at social network science. So I sort of swirl those three things together, sort of practitioner slash former practitioner spending time with our great customers. And then, and then just geeking out with various thought leaders on where the puck is going, if you will.

Chris Pirie:
It sounds like a pretty cool gig you have there, for sure!

Greg Pryor:
Oh, thank you; I mean, it's all the things I love, I have to say. I'm incredibly grateful. They all sort of come together and swirl together.

Chris Pirie:
And can you tell us broadly, what are the kinds of problems that you and the good people at Workday are trying to solve? And remember the frame here is skills in general, but how do you think about the kind of problems that you're going after?

Greg Pryor:
So I personally believe that we are about 10 years into the ‘third age’ of human capital management—that sort of directionally from the 1930s to the 1970s was the age of ‘Personnel, ‘ there was a particular sort of tone tenor and technology that technology may have been a filing cabinet, but maybe technology, nonetheless, I do think from the seventies until about 2010, we were in the age of HR, and I apologize to whoever I may be offending who affiliates or associates or identifies with the previous age of HR. But I do think around 2010, we entered into this third age of human capital management, which I very much believe will be much more around people and performance enablement and that there was, and happy to geek out a little bit on this, but there, there was a very specific pivot in what was happening around the democratization of work, the availability of prediction machines, and I know we'll talk a little bit about that, and the expectations of workers. And I do believe those three things have really driven us into this Third Age.

And from where I sit today and talk with, again, that group of, whether it's researchers or our amazing customers or folks like yourself to stay current on what's going on, I see five specific imperatives. We think about those imperatives in the context of IDEAS for a changing world. IDEAS is an acronym that stands for inclusion and belonging, digital acceleration, enabling experiences with the E, the agile organization, and then finally the skills imperative.

And so I spend quite a bit of my time working with our customers and we, as an organization, thinking about those five imperatives, all of which I believe have been dramatically, both accelerated and amplified by the extraordinary events of 2020.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah, well, we definitely want to drill down into this sort of seeming acceleration and what are the forces at work? I think before we do that, What's the hardest, what's the most challenging side of the work that you do today?

Greg Pryor:
Wow. That's a great question. You know, it's, and it's sort of funny, I guess you know, they say that, and this is what I share with people as well; I do think that what's been interesting and what's happened recently is, it maybe it used to be the technology that was the harder thing to grapple with and work through. And I actually believe that that has shifted, probably over this last decade, and now it's actually, I think the acceleration of sort of programs and principles and approaches on the way we work and helping people sort of, again, I use this sort of metaphor of skating to that future puck.

And so I definitely would have said that if you asked me that 12 months ago, interesting, you know, again, that the technology has now accelerated quite a bit, and those aren't the same similar sort of challenges you may have seen 10 years ago, we were seeing people embracing and adopting. And then yet, I'm completely fascinated by the events of the pandemic where, you know, if you had said, could the entire global workforce or a vast majority of the global workforce, I'm also so incredibly grateful for our healthcare workers, our frontline workers, all of the people who go to work every day to keep us all safe, to keep the supply chain going and keep them. But if you would ask anyone, I'm sure 12 months ago, could a vast majority of the entire workforce overnight move to remote work. People would have said, just not possible. And so I'm also buoyed and excited by the resilience of people. I think this has been such a tremendous experience—that we underestimate how resilient and how agile people are. And so again, it's sort of this funny cross section of three things coming together for me.

Stacia Garr:
I think it's wonderful that you called that out… kind of a funny story, Chris and Dani and I got together in January of 2020. And when we got together here at a very small church and it was raining. And I remember we were talking about maybe potentially a book idea and Dani and I said to Chris, we said, Chris change isn't that hard—it’s just having the necessary incentive to do so.

And Chris, as the wise, you know, kind of corporate executive, said, Dani and Stacy, you guys are wrong. Change is really hard. There's a whole study!And so we'd like to add this very fierce debate, not knowing what we were all just about to go into, but I think to some extent, you know, obviously this last year was very hard, but to some extent the incentives were such, there was no alternative. You know, the boats were burned, we had to work from home. We had to make this change and we all did it. So we're in the middle between those two perspectives is the reality, but we saw it in a totally different way than we would have expected ever before.

Greg Pryor:
And I, you know, but I think it has, gosh, I mean obviously if having to do again would not have wanted to do this giant social experiment, obviously in so many, so many lives lost as a result of it, which is so, so, so sad. But I do think to your point, it has told us that I think it's two things. One, I do think that digital technology enabled us to do things and in many ways, thank goodness we had the technology that we have today to stay connected, to be somewhat more productive than we were before March 11th, you know, around the world. But I do hope that it shows us that people are much more agile, much more resilient. Change is hard; I'm a recovering change management practitioner, I did spend 10 years at Accenture in the historic change management practice there. And so I do say that I'm a recovering change management consultant, but I think to your point for me, when something has that opportunity, I do think we run toward things I think, you know, and so I think too often we've framed some of the challenges as change, and as soon as we do that, as soon as we frame it as change, it does activate the anxiety in us around, around change. But I do think there's the opportunity to say, what are we going toward? What are the opportunities? How will things like skills democratize opportunities for us? Where are the upsides for the opportunity to use machine learning, to curate the future, to provide opportunities to use.

I know I'm getting ahead of myself on that, but I'm, I'm optimistic. I am, and I spend time with our customers and I think they're optimistic as well. This has been a crazy challenging time, but what it's told us is, wow, people for the most part, are good, thoughtful, committed, wanting to do the right things, resilient, autonomy, you know, have a lot of autonomy. So I'm finding the silver lining.

Chris Pirie:
You're a good man. I like it. There's one little thread I want to pull on from something you said before; I think he was saying how in the past, we were frustrated a little bit by the technology, the technology wasn't there and now there's been a shift. And I just want to see whether I understood what you said. I think what you meant was that policy, and the policy around work practices and the technologies that we use might be the drag. Now am I, I don't want to put words in your mouth…?

Greg Pryor:
Yeah, no, I think I, yeah. So I think to your point, it used to be that it was perhaps harder. And again, I'm looking over sort of, you know, the last 10 years, the technology necessarily wasn't there. It was hard to use that technology, that technology had not quite matured to the space, I think we're in today. But I do think to your point, I think it's actually our organization, the way we think about organizations, it's our own, it's sort of a, self-inflicted wound, a little bit, Chris, and the fact that we say, well, people can't do that. Or they won't, or that's too hard, or can we really trust them? I'm hoping that the last year has told us things that say, people are pretty darn resilient, and if we give them a guiding light of where we need to go, you know what sometimes referred to as you know, whether it's the commander's intent or this or what's the purpose people thrive on that they want to move to. So I actually think it's been a little bit of our, and feel free to challenge me on this, but it's been a little bit of our change management mindset that says, well, this change is going to be super-hard and people won't do it and it's to be hard and I have to overthink it and I have to go slow. The pandemic told us that wow, overnight billions of people… anyway. Yeah.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah, I've got one observation on that. And I've got a lot of friends who thought of themselves as evangelists, particularly in the learning space for digital learning and myself included; we spent 10 years, you know, trying to push the envelope and get people to embrace it and move beyond some traditional paradigms. And then all of a sudden, in seven days, everybody's online, everybody's learning online, because there's no other way. And there was a little bit of sort of like what next for us evangelists. It's like, what's our job now? A lot of people are sort of scrambling to figure out, kind of like what are the building blocks of putting things back together?

Greg Pryor:
Yeah. And I think to your point, I think what was interesting is likely, gosh, definitely, that second age of human capital management and perhaps just the last century or more in organizations is the organization saw itself as the point of primacy; everything had to move through that. Our companies were designed to control, to be controlling, to create predictability and they may appropriately put themselves in the center.

What I think we saw was this great democratization of work: we saw this great democratization of capability. And now what we see is, I think we have to help people have to help our organizations get out of the way and let people unleash and unlock their capabilities in ways that does not require the organization to be at the center. I think all of that happened much, much, much faster than we expected. But now, like to your point, we find ourselves on a new game field to be like, okay, well, that just happened: where next?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, it's really interesting. We did a study last year—we actually started it in 2019—where we were asking about how we could build organizations that could respond to rapid change, et cetera, and mind you, it was in 2019. And we had a really hard time getting people to talk to us about this, because they're like, whatever the economy's going, like everything's going great guns, why are you guys focused on this?

We ran our survey actually December, 2019, right before the pandemic started and got this amazing snapshot of what we ended up calling ‘What responsive organizations do differently.’

Greg Pryor:
Love that report by the way.

Stacia Garr:
Thanks! But it speaks to everything you guys are talking about: the four things we found that mattered are respect, so respect for the individual and for their capabilities, distributed authority, so the center getting out of the way, not that it's not important, but not putting those barriers in place, growth and transparency and then trust. And I think that's what we saw in this last year.

This season is called the skills obsession, but we'd like to ask everyone before we dive in, what does skills actually mean to you? Because it's a very broad concept, we throw this word around. So as you think about that term explicitly, how do you define it?

Greg Pryor:
So I'll take like a half a step back if I can. So at Workday, at least for, you know, the last seven or so years, we have really thought about our talent strategy around enabling five fundamental factors. And that's helping people to understand where they can make a unique contribution, a collective contribution to our collective capability.

The second is around capabilities: this idea of how I look at my skills, my experiences, my competencies, and the energy and energy that I need, and I know you had my good friend Clint on a recent podcast one of my favorite people. And if you haven't listened to that one, stop this podcast and go and listen to the one from Clint because he is one of my favorite people, but we now increasingly know, right, our mental and our physical wellness are the energy we bring to that.

So we think about that as capabilities. The third is this idea of career; how do I think about people's career interests and abilities, and then connections. Stacia, you and I share a good friendship with Rob Cross around this idea of social network science. And then people do want to be compensated and recognized. And so our work has really been around if we, to your point, move the person to the center, and we create these five conditions for success, we believe that is this idea of sort of people and performance enablement.

So one of those five factors is capabilities. And so we really do believe that it is central, not only to people's contribution, but their career interests. And I believe that we're seeing a shift to where what we would call ‘capabilities’ is the new career currency. It's a really significant shift that what I believe we're seeing at least, especially amongst people, maybe a little bit more junior or earlier in their careers, is that they absolutely understand that their capabilities—collecting, developing maturing, progressing—is the way that they will see both success and satisfaction.

I'm not sure that I've defined it the way you asked for it, but what I would say is I do believe this idea of capabilities and skills being a component of that is the new career currency. It’s what's going to give people a democratized opportunity for jobs, and it's going to be actually what we want to collect.

I'm a big fan of Bob Johansen at the Institute for the Future—I love his work and he is just a wonderful person—and in his book New Leadership Literacies he talks about sort of this idea is especially people in younger, in their career, early in their, in their career of a gameful mindset at work. And I think he is onto something so powerful here in specifically, it's interesting. I was with the CHRO over a very US-based retailer, and this CHRO was sharing with me that during the pandemic, they were playing Fortnite with their daughter. And finally he turned to his daughter and he said, honey, when is this game over? When do I win? And she turned to him and she said, Dad, you don't win, man; you just level up.

I don't even understand what you're talking about! And I think this is the paradigm. When we look at the next generation of our workforce, they think about collecting capabilities, collecting skills, and that gives them the optionality to do amazing things in the future. Those are the superpowers that they put in their backpack and that they go and they face the next great challenge with.

And so I actually really believe we're seeing an in front of our eyes this shift from sort of promotion and an organization as this as a sort of central measure of career success, to progress. And I believe underlying progress is the ability to collect, to mature, to grow, to deepen, to strengthen this set of capabilities that gives you optionality to do things in the future.

Stacia Garr:
I love that point; it actually goes to a piece of research we're releasing next week on career mobility. And we talk about mobility is about mindset, not movement. And it thinks that captures what you just said: that’s the title of the report next week, it’s out there.

But this backpack analogy, like you said, with, with the video games, I think that that's actually really powerful Greg, because as people are moving from, you know, types of work, I'm not going to say job to job because I know that we've got a whole discussion about that, but types of work, those skills in their backpacks from the one that they pull out for particular types of work, and they're thinking about what's the type of work I want to go do and need the skills to have, as opposed to, I want this job title, you know—winning the end game, the promotion, whatever it is. I think that's a fundamental shift.

One of the questions we have is why now? Why is it skills, or why is this mindset of about skills being in your backpack? Whatever it is, why is that happening now versus five years ago, 10 years ago?

Greg Pryor:
I think it's the convergence of three things that were already in place, and are absolutely being amplified and elevated. The first is this idea of the democratization of work. And so when we think about it, I had the opportunity to work a number of years ago with John Boudreau and a group called Create, where we really looked at a 10 year forecast on the future of work. And we are seeing absolutely that the democratization of work, moving from roles or jobs as the point of primacy to work. The second thing that we see is the advancement of machine learning; we’re big fans at Workday of the book Prediction Machines, and how does that now help us predict sort of the, if you will, the ‘Uberization’ of work I can predict what's the body of that's most relevant to me that builds on my capabilities and my connections, that's consistent with my career interests?

And so we see that democratization of work is this idea of the prediction machine, along with the expectations of our workers. I'm a fan of the work that Tammy Erickson has been doing at the London Business School on this idea of the psychological narrative of generations at work. I'm a big fan of hers anyway, but she talks about this idea that especially our Millennials entered the workforce during the Great Recession, and I believe what they watched and what they saw was that unlike, maybe in my generation where there were large corporate layoffs, you'd lay off just huge numbers of people, what they saw was based on people's capabilities, based on their optionality in the organization, they kept their job or they didn't, you know, one a week, or two every Friday. And so there's this narrative of particularly our millennial generation seeing those capabilities, those people with the greatest breadth of capability have the greatest optionality to survive the next uncertainty.

And I was sharing this theory before the pandemic—that especially our Millennials group who have grown up in a very volatile, uncertain time, and obviously the pandemic has now just absolutely accelerated that. And so this is where I do think this idea of capabilities are the new currency, so you have the combination of gigs at work and the democratization of work; you have the now real availability of prediction machines to identify who are the best people to do that work based on their current skills, their connections, and their career interests. And then you have this expectation—exactly as you've described—moving sort of from, you know, promotion to progress as the fundamental principle.

So the convergence of these three things dramatically accelerated by the pandemic, I think, put us where we are today.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I mean, I would add a couple of points. One is, so I am technically a Millennial—you guys may not believe that—but Millennials, I felt like I couldn't say that for a long time cause but now I'm comfortable in my Millennial skin, but I think, you know, another part of this is Millennials did see their parents get laid off, many of them particularly, you know, kind of those of us who were on the older side of the Millennial phrase. And so I think there was that.

And then to add to that your capability, yes, those people who had broad capabilities kept their job, but also those people who were innovative and combined capabilities, even if they did get laid off, they were the ones who went out and started new companies. I mean, we know that actually companies that tend to start in recession often are stronger. And so those people were able to combine those capabilities and unique ways and make really big impacts, but they had to have those sets of skills that overlapped in interesting ways.

One comment I had though, you were gracious enough to share with us a framework that kind of talked about some of these things before. And I was interested in what I think is a little bit of a tension between this idea of, you know, there's this democratization of skills availability, both kind of inside and outside of the organization, but at the same time for an organization to take advantage of that, they have to be able to retain those people and retain those skill sets—even though those skill sets in theory are quite a bit more available to anybody.

So as you've thought about that at Workday, how do you think about a greater availability of skills, but keeping those skills within kind of your four walls with your current employees?

Greg Pryor:
It's a great point, and gosh, you know, I think we'll look back 10 years on this and say, this was one of the biggest drivers in the way that we all work. I think right now, they under-appreciate what an impact that this is going to have and viewpoint.

So I think two things, one, I think I do believe the new war for talent, if you will. And I've been, and I was old enough to live through the last war for talent; it very much is going to be this, this notion of the I'm going to recognize people for the capabilities they have, right? And there’s going to be a resurgence of, whether you call them skills, competence, that we use capabilities as this broad context for all of that, but I do believe that will increasingly become the currency by which we sort of look at the valuation, if you will, of human capital: so attracting, retaining, engaging, inspiring the application of those capabilities is sort of a major job—one, if you will, for talent management and for human capital professionals moving forward, perhaps outside of maybe ensuring mental and physical wellness, it may be the number two most important thing over the next five years.

I will also say, I do believe, to your point, we're also going to see that the technology and this democratization will open you to access to these capabilities beyond where you thought about historical employment. And you know, just when you didn't think wave one of that change was going to be big enough, like wave two changes the game. So it's a both/and I think; how do you attract people to your brand who say, Hey, I may not join you as an employee or, or I'll join you for a short gig; I think that the whole world is about to open up.

So yes, you have to do your point, job. Number one becomes even more important and you have to identify what that capability looks like, how that capability has value within your organization—and then, especially as we look at some of the likely movement toward more distributed and decentralized workforce, where do you have access to that workforce now, maybe anywhere in the world. Yeah. It's, it's a big—it’s a big idea.

Chris Pirie:
I'd like to drill down a little bit more on what's going on in the technology space. One thing that just occurred to me, Greg, from your conversation before was I think maybe half a generation ago, most people's access to technology was through their employer. And what we've seen with technology, it's become more ubiquitous, and people can build their own skill; they can build their own platforms, they can launch their own businesses based on access to technology that was only available through this sort of corporate structure in the past. And I think that's driving a lot of the changes, both the self-confidence in our millennials and this focus on skills, too.

What do you think are the technologies—you mentioned machine learning, for example—but what do you think are the technologies that are most impacting the conversation around skills today?

Greg Pryor:
Yeah, I will declare my bias on this. I do think that most people under-appreciate the incredible impact that specifically machine learning will have encouraged. Again, I'd coach people. If you have an interest in there to read the book Prediction Machines, written by three economists at the university of Toronto, interestingly enough, from an economic perspective of what's the change that will happen.

And I'll geek out for a second on one of the examples. I have two college-aged daughters, and they do much of their clothes shopping through a company called Stitch Fix. And if you know Stitch Fix, what you may know about them is you don't go shopping there; first, what they do is you fill out a profile and they use algorithms, augmented by people, to send you the clothes ahead of time and they believe their predictions are good enough that you won't be sending all these clothes back all the time.

Now, in fact, that's true; in my case, I don't know that we've ever sent any of these clothes back. So I don't know what's teaching the algorithm other than maybe they have a very loving father who would do anything for them, and so more and more boxes continue to show up at our doorstep. But this idea of a prediction machine—and Chris, I'll give you a super specific example, and I don't want to kick out too much on Workday technology specifically, but I do want to make it practical—I will never forget the moment I had the opportunity to use, it happens to be Workday's talent marketplace capability. And so the way that works is I type in a gig; I identify, I describe the work that I need done. Machine learning immediately breaks that description down into a series of skills I can augment and add skills to. And then I hit a sort of submit button—and I'll never forget the moment, literally a millisecond later—a list of 150 people at our organization who could do that work appeared in front of me.

And so for me, I was first of all blown away that it happened so instantaneously. And then I would say, I was perhaps both shocked and dismayed that the first 10 people on the list I had never met; I had no idea who they were. And I thought to myself, wow, I have lived in this bubble, a constrained world, where who you knew created opportunity rather than what you knew. And all of a sudden, I mean, it was overwhelming to me.

That's just for me, this democratization of opportunity; I saw a list of names of people who I did not know, and my own bias, my own sort of behavioral economic bias of what you see is all there is, I thought the a hundred people I knew at work, they were all the people who had had a capability and all of a sudden, there's this list of 10 names.

Then interestingly enough, the next 10 names were people I knew. And I was like, wow, I'm also sub-optimizing my work by limiting it to what only my brain could hold. Right? If you're familiar with Dunbar's number, I mean, I'm not smart enough to fully realize that no, the 150 people that one knows, but we've just got limits in our own brain, by how many people we can know. And I am optimistic and hopeful that specifically machine learning will help me democratize opportunity, and help us move from who we know to what we know.

Chris Pirie:
This is technology that's inferring what people's skills are based on looking at data that surrounds them.

Greg Pryor:
Yeah; and so again, that's exactly what it's doing, it is making those inferences. And, and I will also say, and I'm glad you mentioned that because I do believe what's so central and what we see in all of the research—a few years ago, I spent some time at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Labs with other HR people to talk about the implications of machine learning and technology on HR, and what we all walked away with, I believe, was this both/and: the importance of having the machine learning to do that inference, but you absolutely need to add human judgment on top of that.

And there's all sorts of really interesting studies where it's a both/and; let the machines do what they can do to find those 10 people who I hadn't thought of, then let me apply my judgment to just to talk to those people, to engage them, to find out if this is an area of interest. So I very much believe it's a both/and let the machines do with the machines, do well, and then let the humans do what are essential human skills, which is the ability to connect, to engage, to motivate, to understand whether this is a gig that, that someone wants to do and is good for them.

Chris Pirie:
So play this out, let imagination go wild; if we can really master these technologies and we can build these tools, what happens to the job description? What happens to the promotion systems that we have, because they're all based around these taxonomies that people have painstakingly glued together? And what you're telling me is that those things are artificial constructs full of bias and machines are going to do a better job. What kind of talent management future do you envisage if this plays out?

Greg Pryor:
Gosh, those were your words. But I also happen to really agree with them, by the way. I think the last 2-300 years were based on the point of primacy was this idea of the job. Again, a big fan of John Boudreau's work, where he talks about reinventing work and reinventing the job. And I do think we will shift from jobs or roles being the center of the universe to work and people being the center of this. So I'll geek out for a moment if I may on that, so the first thing to your point that I do, and I'm optimistic about, I have a, maybe I'm oversharing here, you're going to have to tell me what one of my daughters is a nursing student. And I envision for her a world in the world of healthcare—and so grateful for all our amazing healthcare workers out there in the world today—but where it can look at patient records and information and health care provider records and information, and say, this team of people is likely going to have the best success with helping this particular patient based on their capabilities, the things they've done, their skills and experience, and based on their connections.

When we look at the world of psychological safety, when we look at the importance of trust in the relationships that we have, again, a nod to the great work that Amy Edmondson has done—originally discovered out of healthcare workers and her study of things in the healthcare space—this idea of curating teams or capabilities of people that maybe the best there.

To your point, then, I do think that allows us to evolve and to elevate the work that we do as human capital professionals or HR professionals to a next generation of work that really becomes about enabling people, enabling their success. I will make a plug for one of the new capabilities that I think is going to be required is this idea of social agility, and that the ability to quickly create new relationships, to build trust, to understand the context as people move in and out of these gigs faster. And so I do think human capital professionals will play a greater role in helping elevate the essential human capabilities while also helping us transition into this future of work.

Stacia Garr:
One of the things I wonder about is what this will do to the HR profession. I think that Chris mentioned some of the specific processes that we have in place, but I can see this in many ways as being a great enabler, which I think is a good thing, right? Chris mentioned kind of job descriptions, or maybe your traditional talent or succession or promotion process. But if we're able to use tech to handle some of the basics and/or some of the recommendations that we need, I wonder if we're actually going to be able to enable our business leaders to do much more of this themselves. Because there is an HR saying, well, here's the rules on your job description? Here's the rules on this, which I think could be a good thing.

Greg Pryor:
I mean, I agree. I think there are always, and so I'm, as you know, a glass half full person, but I also don't want to suggest that they are not unintended, right? I’m a big Star Wars fan, there’s good and evil in each of us, that’s what we learned from the original Luke and Darth Vader, it's how we choose to use it. So I do think we always should be very conscious of the choices we're making of the unintended consequences, where these things can come off the rails, but I'm on the optimistic side; I hope and believe that this technology will do what technology does well, which will then allow us to elevate. And I believe one of the most important things that we will be asked to do as human capital professionals is to go upstream and to help people embrace this new world of work, to figure out what the path is that democratizes, enables, empowers versus perhaps exploit's or biases against: I think that's our work ahead.

And so it's, hopefully it's letting chatbots and other things answer questions for people. It's finding those gigs for people, it's making recommendations through technology so that we can really elevate the essential human work of empathy, creativity, innovation. What do we think about strategy? How do we help enable people using essential human capabilities to find their way in this new world of work. Much the way I think we saw it with the pandemic; the value of empathy just exploded in the past 12 months, which, which I felt I thought personally, was fantastic.

Stacia Garr:
I should clarify. I didn't mean to say that the HR profession was going to go away. That's not at all what I meant.

Greg Pryor:
But I think that's what we have to be aware of; I believe it will change faster than we think it will. One point of view.

Chris Pirie:
I don't want to be the downer in the conversation here because I'm an optimist too, but there are some things that we need to watch carefully. A couple of examples: a lot of people picked up on the story about bias in resume screening. I think Amazon had a disastrous experiment where machine learning was just replicating the past and all the biases, maybe even amplifying, the biases of the past. I mean, it's now a known problem and it's getting a lot of attention. There's a lot of ethics being taught in computer science programs now, but we do have to be careful.

And then there's one thing that you said, Greg, that really interested me, and that is the importance of trust in all this. And I think right now that Edelman Trust research says corporations and places of work actually hold a high degree of trust. People that have a high degree of trust in their place of work, more so than in their communities and neighbors even—it’s quite shocking. So I think trust is going to have to play an important part, especially if we hand over work to the robots and to technology. Have you done any thinking on trust?

Greg Pryor:
Again, I couldn't agree more. I do think that trust at the end of the day is one of these essential human capabilities; it’s one of these essential human skills. And so what I'd love to see to your point is that human capital professionals, HR professionals are able to work on those ideas of a bias, of ensuring that there's good, ethical work being done in that space, rather than answering benefit questions as an example.

I think the challenges we have as we move into the new world of work, we think about the new workplace and the new workforce expectations. Goodness, there is so much important work to be done in the HR space, but I do think so much of it is new. So I think what we're going to see is to allow us to automate and augment what we can and what we should, so that we can elevate our thinking, our capability or a human judgment in exactly into the areas that you just talked about.

I think what we've learned over the past year is that what our people in our organizations, to your point look to human resource professionals to is now two, three, four times greater than maybe what we've historically and the leadership role and responsibility that HR professionals now have is crazy off the charts compared to what it may have been a year ago.

Stacia Garr:
One of the things that you've talked about in the past in addition to the democratization of opportunity is the idea of a development divide. And I think that kind of connects in here to what we're talking about, how access to and funding for, learning could amplify the current opportunity divide that we're seeing. So as you think about what this new world looks like, how do you think we potentially address that?

Greg Pryor:
Again, this is where with all of these changes or evolution, there are consequences. And I think we need to be clear-minded about the consequences and be using again our essential human capabilities. That is one that does make me anxious, and I do think as Chris talked about earlier, that on the one hand, we have this great availability to digital learning to capabilities, but that there are so many people in the world who don't have that access, and does that amplify this sort of development divide along with the digital divide?

One of the things, a trend that I see is that organizations are increasingly thinking about development, whether that's access to more traditional college experiences—that, I think, I wonder if it's going to become a new benefit, if you will, it's going to become part of the new fundamental part of the offering that a company will have, whether it's to its employees, to its broader ecosystem or community of people who may make a contribution or to its customers, I think that's something we need to continue to watch, and we need to make sure that we see that the positive side of that.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, it's an interesting point. We had a wonderful conversation with the former CLO of McDonald's, who was talking about using opportunity and development as part of both their retention strategy, but I think also positively impacting the communities in which they work. Another great conversation was with Matthew Daniel at Guild Education, and he also was talking about, you know, how do we get more access to opportunities for, for people who are usually frontline workers or, or people who are kind of in more traditional blue collar jobs. So, a really important topic.

Greg Pryor:
Really, really important and a couple of great organizations who are doing fantastic and important work in that space. It's got to become one of those priorities. And I would include that in this skill imperative not only how we look at skills, how we identify skills, but how we grow and develop to ensure this, you know, this democratization of opportunity

Stacia Garr:
Kind of moving us forward: we’ve talked quite a bit about how digital transformation of HR and learning and many aspects of business life really got accelerated in 2020. As you look to this year and pull out your crystal ball, if you can, what do you think is going to move to the top of the people agenda now—what are you focused on at the moment?

Greg Pryor:
From everything I read, and gosh, I think this is going to be true for at least the next year is that wellness and the responsibility to help ensure that there is physical and mental wellness, I would say is top of the list for all the folks that I talk about. How we continue to be empathetic, how we continue to understand how we continue to use listening mechanisms to understand where people are, and provide them support. So I do think that idea is going to be in a fundamentally new space. I think traditionally we've thought about that as not part of the fabric of what an organization offers beyond a benefit, and I now think that has come into the corporate tent, if you will, as something that organizations will feel a responsibility, a greater responsibility for them, they maybe have in the past.

I will also say that at the same time, one of the things that I find; our friends at McKinsey had done an interesting body of research, looking at the last recession. And to your earlier point, there were those companies who really used that opportunity to put their foot on their gas rather than put their foot on the brake, and we see now 10 years after the recession, they've done materially better than other organizations. And so I think there's going to be this duality of, I need to address and ensure that I'm addressing what's happening in the world today and this is not an opportunity to sort of put my head in the sand and say the future isn't still happening around me. We are, I think going to see more decentralized workforces, I think we're going to see new constructs in the way we think about who our workers are, and so I do believe that organizations using that opportunity now to really think about those things are going to be really well positioned five or 10 years down the road.

And unfortunately, people without the ability or the capacity to think about that today are going to fall further behind in this digital divide, or what I call the COVID chasm. I do think there is this COVID chasm that has allowed accelerators to accelerate and unfortunately, others to fall further and further behind.

Chris Pirie:
The K-shaped recovery. Are there any organizations out there that you think are doing particularly good work? I know that you get to work with some of your customers, for example, but anything that's really caught your attention recently of good progress?

Greg Pryor:
I think there's just so many… I’m a really big fan of Telstra; when you think about agility and the work that they're doing, Alex, who, who looks after that group, is crazy smart and doing just brilliant things. The folks at Dell are doing some really advanced work in this space, really thoughtful; I'm a big fan of Unilever, I love the work that Lena and Tom and crew are doing there. Now I'm going to be in trouble because there's going to be others who are going to be like, Hey, I think the thinking of Michael Arena at Amazon, I'm a big, I'm a friend of Michael’s, and I think he's doing some of the best thinking in this space right now. Lots of organizations.

And then I have to say on the other side of that, I am such a fan of Dean Carter at Patagonia. I mean, not only is Dean one of the most wonderful people on the planet, but his thinking on this both/and, he's a big user of technology, but he is tripling down on humans, on empathy, and he's got some crazy interesting ideas on this idea of applying the theories and principles of regenerative farming for the workforce that say what if our goal was to help people not to trade money for their life and for their energy, but what if our role was to actually lift them up and enable their capabilities and help them be more well and more capable and enabled to make a greater contribution? Mike Malloy at Quicken is doing such wonderful work. I mean, there's a lot of really exciting pioneers doing, I believe, wonderful work in this space. There's lots that I'm missing. I apologize to all my friends who may be listening and I forgot you.

Stacia Garr:
And I know that some of the folks that you mentioned have some links and opportunities where you've interviewed some of them. So I think we'll put on the podcast page links to those folks that Greg just listed, because we'd love to share the work of others.

Chris Pirie:
Where can people find out more about your work—is there somewhere we can send them?

Greg Pryor:
My wife accuses me of being an over-sharer on LinkedIn, and I view myself less of a sort of originating sharer, but more of a broker of other people's good work. So feel free to follow me on LinkedIn; what I try to do really, there has to be a curator of other people's great work.

Chris Pirie:
Great. Are there resources at Workday that we can send people to?

Greg Pryor:
You can look me up on Workday; I’m also a contributor to Forbes, and if you're part of the Forbes HR council, I contribute there. And then I do often provide blogs and webinars. Again, my wife tells me I overshare, but especially around inclusion digitalization, but doing a lot of work on that and yeah, you can sort of just Google me on some of those things. I have a lot to say as you no doubt discovered.

Stacia Garr:
Well, our final question—and I can't wait to hear the answer on this one—is around purpose: for everyone we talked to, we want to understand why you do the work you do? Was there a particular person that inspired you or a particular purpose mantra that you have, but why do you do your work?

Greg Pryor:
Gosh, thanks for asking. For me, what has always been so clear across my career is I really do believe in the power of people. I personally believe that so much of the structure we've historically had in the world has not allowed us to really unleash and unlock the greatest amount of our human capability, and so that's what's always driven me.

And what I see at least what I see in the research is that it's not that that has not been held back by the individual or limited by the individual, it’s been limited by the structures around us. It's been limited by the way we've thought about constraints in the world of work in the past. And I am so excited; I really do believe that we are 10 years into this Age where we put people and performance enablement at the center where we think about their wellbeing and wellness, and we think about things like now, social agility, how we accelerate relationships, because we know that the density and positivity of our relationships are fundamental to our success more so than 10 years ago in a role-based way of work.

So I'm very excited, I'm very bullish; clearly there are consequences, but I think we're at this once in a generation, if not in a once in a lifetime, opportunity to enable people to do their best work, to feel good, to feel satisfied, to feel a sense of belonging, that we've all, I can't imagine anyone who didn't discover the importance of belonging over the West, feeling like you, you connect with other people. So anyway, that's what drives me.

Chris Pirie:
I love it, Greg, thanks—it was so inspiring to talk to you; you really bring a lot of energy for the ideas that you collect and espouse and the insights that you do that you generate. Thanks so much for joining us and for your time today, and we'll send people to scoop up your oversharing.

Greg Pryor:
And thank you for all your leadership and working and sharing this with other people; it’s so inspiring. So grateful.

Stacia Garr:
Thank you so much for being on!

Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.

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Guests

Satnam Sagoo, Director of Learning and Organizational Development at the British Red Cross

DETAILS

For some reason, we don’t listen enough to what our peers in the non-profit world can tell us about skills. But when a practitioner there says something like, “We see anybody joining us as an empty vessel: a bit like in Men in Black, someone wipes your brain out at Reception, you come through and then we up-skill you. That means we forget you come with a commodity of a vast array of skills; that’s why we hired you, that's why you're supporting us—all of those things that we so much want, but we don’t have a way of actually capturing that and supporting that as a network,” we think a lot of ears will prick up in corporate L&D! If you agree, check out this deep dive into everything from skills frameworks (their seductions and their perils) to credentialing with Satnam Sagoo. Satnam works at British Red Cross, where she’s accountable for developing and delivering the organization’s learning and organization development strategy—creating an L&D offer that meets the need of all 5,000 permanent staff but also what can be at times of crisis 100,000 temporary and external volunteers. Is this the most heart-felt of all our looks at The Skills Obsession? We’ll leave you to judge—it certainly moved (and inspired) all of us.

Find out more about Satnam’s employer British Red Cross

Connect with her on LinkedIn

Webinar

Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills. 

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We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

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Key quotes:

Anybody joining us as an organizer, as an empty vessel: you come to us, a bit like the Men in Black pen, someone wipes your brain out at Reception, you come through and then we upskill you. We forget you come with a commodity of a vast array of skills; that’s why we hired you, that's why you're supporting us—all of those things that we so much want to look for people, and we don't have a way of actually capturing that and we don't have a way of supporting that as a network.

L&D,we're all building frameworks—I’m sure all of you are— ultimately, we need to address how we are treating our people: are we empowering them, or taking that power away? Anybody who's in the people space of that HR family never says ‘no’ to the leaders, because we're so scared that if we say no, they won't come back to us, and this is the first time that top tables are talking to us. So we want to say, yes, we want to give them what they want to give; but we want to also say, actually now is the time to have that conversation. We're scared to push back—myself included.

Within our metrics, the things that we're using is obviously the kind of who's done it and not done it, that sort of stuff, but also the engagement and the repeated engagement. The mechanisms that we're using are also around the connection to wellbeing as well: are there measures that we haven't looked at to support individuals? We're doing wellbeing checking every quarter, which I think many organizations are doing, but we kind of connect it to the L&D portfolio because obviously I lead on that as well.

Teaching people to learn rather than teaching people the thing, and making sure that they're agile enough to adapt to their environments and find out what they need to know in order to deliver what they need to deliver. I think that’s pretty forward-thinking; I think organizations are getting there, but not as fast as they probably should.

It’s kind of emotional, but I'm really inspired by some other things that we do as an organization.

Full Transcript

Satnam Sagoo:
We often, as organizations, forget that people come to us with a massive skillset. And for us it's really about going, how does it work for you as an individual? How do I respect what you already bring? and we're working on a mechanism where we can support that and capture that. So for us, it's really about you come to us as a full suite as a person, so let's utilize that.

Dani Johnson:
That was Satnam Sagoo, the director of learning and organizational development at the British Red Cross. Satnam is accountable for developing and delivering the British Red Cross’s learning and organization development strategy; her role includes creating a learning and organizational development offer that meets the needs of all of their people, which has 4,000 staff and 100,000 volunteers.

Satnam Sagoo:
The difference between a humanitarian organization is that you find your way to our organization through a connection of the heart. Value to an organization like the Red Cross brings is that connection to the heart; to me, fundamentally that is the difference—that there is such a strong connection to your personal values and your heart. That's what a humanitarian organization offers outside of the normal organizations, and we have the same issues.

Dani Johnson:
We met Satnam in 2018 as a part of our engagement with the International Federation of the Red Cross: we were taking a look at their learning strategy, not just for the internal learning that happened at the Red Cross, but also how they educated their volunteers to do the most good. The most amazing thing that I think we learned is that an organization of that size with mostly volunteers had some of the very same challenges that some of the organizations that we talk to.

I think Satnam brings a really interesting perspective from a skill standpoint, but it was also an incredibly inspiring conversation.

Dani Johnson:
Satnam, welcome to Workplace Stories by RedThread Research; we’re thrilled to have you this morning.

Satnam Sagoo:
Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here!

Dani Johnson:
The first section of questions are just rapid fire questions, just to give us a sense for what you do and give our audience a sense for what you do. So the first question is, can you give us a quick overview of the British Red Cross, its mission and purpose?

Satnam Sagoo:
So the British Red Cross is one of the Red Cross and Red Crescent national societies; it’s one of 192 across the globe. We are one of the oldest we've been in formation for 151 years this year. Our overarching statement is that we connect human kindness with human crisis. Our configurement, it really is about 5,000 staff and about 20,000 volunteers who give us up to sort of 35 hours a week, if not more. Then in addition to that, because of the sort of circumstances we live in, we have really grown our light-touch volunteers, which we call ‘community reserve volunteers,’ probably around the 80,000 mark. Our kind of overarching connection with the global movement is very much that we all around the corner and across the globe.

Dani Johnson:
What do you do specifically for the Red Cross—what’s your job title, and how would you describe your work?

Satnam Sagoo:
So I am the director of learning and organization development; I am responsible for the learning and L&D aspect for all of the British Red Cross, that's from everybody who's working with us to our light-touch volunteer. So we do all of the L&D offers. Yeah, so that's kind of us in a nutshell.

Dani Johnson:
Okay! And what problems are you trying to solve?

Satnam Sagoo:
What problems aren't we trying to solve is the question, I think. We do everything from introducing the kind of basic suite for mandated training all the way to that sort of expert level of learning and specifically role-specific learning, everything in between and the developments that we have.

It's been an exceptional time for us globally. So for us at the moment, it's very much about ensuring that we are reaching out to everybody that we can reach to, and that we are supporting them. So programs that we've been involved in have been very much around that voluntary within your national community, to your domestic environment, around supporting food deliveries, vaccination, all of those things—they’ve been passed the new kind of portfolio that we've been supporting people with.

We're doing a lot of work around building that, bringing our motto about connecting human kindness, recognizing that all of us are going through crisis in a different sort of way, so our very much our training framework has been about supporting yourself first and then supporting others. And that's where we've been in the last few months and the space that we've been in the last year, definitely. Parallel to that, we are also supporting every initiative that comes out, because every initiative seems to have a learning angle attached to it—whether that's the kind of very proactive Zoom and virtual learning environment that we're all in down to bite size and down to supporting our CEO, our leadership with how to take that in. And in addition to that, I'm also the wellbeing lead for the organization, which again, brings a lot to that narrative forward.

Dani Johnson:
Right on—so you're not busy at all! Just a quick clarifying question; are you responsible for the 5,000 employees of British Red Cross as well as the 100,000 thousand volunteers there that are learning? Okay, great; what do you find the most challenging aspect of your work is?

Satnam Sagoo:
It varies on a day-to-day basis, and we've got lots of things and constantly the business's appetite to have change and continuous improvement, which often means that you need to be connected at some point. And I would say in the last couple of years, we've got much better off me being in part of that conversation, so I'm actually currently leading a change program in the people space which is looking at culture, it's lifting up skills and capabilities, it looks at retention, so it's good to have been part of that question from the very beginning.

But the other challenge, as people know, is that any development still seems to be seen as ‘training' in some aspects, which won’t be new to any of your listeners. It's not new to anybody else, our culture’s growing to accept that that's not the case. So it's supporting that, and hence very much that conversation of leading my peers and our executive leadership through all of that.

But I would say there has been a challenge within 2020 and the kind of portfolio of work that we want to achieve going forward is one of the things that is probably imperative in many people's lives, but more so within the Red Cross is what we call digital poverty. That's been a substantive part of our organization, and how do we support people who are volunteering with us and who actually don't have access to broadband—all of the areas that come on digital poverty, and in particular, the conversations that we're now having by education, you know, people, children that are able to succeed are because they’ve got those available, but that is also recognized in our work and not just volunteers, our staff.

So if you think of what we do in the refugee space, how do we support people who don't have that? We've got a quote that says, you know, we're asking people to survive on 22 UK pence a day [$0.30], and what does that look like? So that is the humanitarian challenge, and that challenge is also there for our people; our people are also at home, and any humanitarian organizations, we are not renowned for our paycheck. So again, how are we supporting our infrastructure, and we don't want to create layers of those that have technology and those don't. So it's been the one that's been our biggest challenge.

Dani Johnson:
I love that because you're supporting volunteers as well as full-time people. And sometimes we think of communities like yours, NGOs like yours, as completely different from the business world. But I'm actually hearing that challenge from a lot of business leaders as well; like not everybody has the same access to bandwidth, not everybody has the same access to technology. And so how are we solving that problem? So we're really excited to get some of your insights on that.

Let's switch gears just a little bit and talk about skills more broadly. You mentioned skills and knowledge; you know, it's a pretty broad concept, we’re doing some research on it right now—skills are just very broad. What does that word mean to you?

Satnam Sagoo:
I think in the classic sense, if we were to draw back, it's the kind of thing I wrote on my CV is probably still in a, in a version of my CV or my LinkedIn, you know, the skills that I have. And the reason I start with that is because that's probably how the world perceives skills, and when you're in this world of learning and development, it's a complete game changer, and we all know it's a multifaceted layer of how we support.

And that's where having that element of organization development is really keen to me. So I've just submitted a product page that goes to our board on Tuesday on the skills and capabilities that we need
to support our strategy for 2030, but also how do we continue to evolve in this world that is asking so much of us?

So there are portfolios of capabilities in the first instance, and they have great grand was like deductibility, empowering leadership, all of those fantastic titles. But in essence, what's needed is the infrastructure and cultural mindset to support that. And so our work is really about, we recognize that we need to be in the adaptability space and within that, there's a portfolio of skill sets. You know, there's a portfolio of skill sets from agile leadership, growth mindset, design thinking, critical thinking, you know, decision-making—all of that, that suite of things that we as L&D professionals would put under that, but what does that actually mean for everybody? And what does everybody need to know?

And if I was to really take something like adaptability, our biggest thing that we need to do is build that digital literacy in our organization. And that comes from the conversation we just had, which is around how do we support everybody, understand that level? And a great insight that we're doing is, almost to kind of say, this piece of training or learning is supported by—you know, how you're on your phone, it says is only supported by if you've got an app on iOS or Android, we want to do that kind of simple language for people, so that everybody knows. And that also from my kind of higher-up organizational perspective, we get the funding to support that, we can get the funding, that people can go and get what you're not going to have all of this old tech that doesn't support.

So that's the real granular level. And that's what we will call building sound foundations. And then we've segmented it into three phases, so building sound foundations is kind of like, just let us get the face line, right? And then there's maturing the baseline—so where do we need to be? And too often we found that skills are often something that ends up on your appraisal, you’d make tenuous links and connect it through adaptability strain.

But what we want to do is, you know, say, forget about it for year one. We're going to build the infrastructure you need year two, we need to assess you and kind of say, where are we? And it's no bad thing to be a novice or beginner. And where do we need to be as an organization ? Do we need to be at an expert level or are we effectively at that sort of beginner level?

Then that's maturing that baseline, so for us that skills portfolio has been stretched into understanding how do we implement that kind of development at infrastructure level at a cultural mindset level. And that's really when you'll get that buy-in and too often in the past, what we've done is sort of said, you need this course con decision-making. So go and do a course, tick the box. You've done the decision-making… Oh, nothing's changed in the organization. So this is really turning it on its head and kind of going, where are we culturally? Are we ready culturally? What cell culture now, what is it? If this is where we need to be, how do we get to the ‘B’?

Dani Johnson:
I liked that—I like the fact that you're flipping it on its head. It seems like a lot of organizations are able to identify the skills that they need, but they put those skills in a culture that doesn't support it, which causes it to fail.

You talked a little bit about skills and capabilities; we’ve heard a lot of conversations about skills and competencies as well. Is there a difference between those for you, or are they one and the same?

Satnam Sagoo:
I think in classic L&D language, there is a difference. Capabilities, that kind of family skills is more of that kind of, one of the elements of growing that capability. And in fact, we've got so much literature that covers that approach, so capability is very much seen—if you could grow it capability, you would grow it through the 70:10 methodology. If we were to talk about all our CVs and all our portfolios, most of us will put on a personal point, I learnt less through my academic qualification and I've learned more through my on the job experience. And so a capability has grown through that methodology just genuinely around that whole kind of area.

And even each other’s skills are broken down; so for example, if you think of something like decision-making, which we focus on quite a lot in the British Red Cross, is very much about what does that mean? What does that mean to you as a leader? What does that mean to you as an individual? And so for us, anything around equality, diversity and inclusion is part of that decision-making, and so those portfolios, each of those skills, is even broader, but for us it would be the capabilities that is the kind of overarching family that skill belongs to—and that we will endeavor to do it, deliver that through a much more blended approach.

Stacia Garr:
So I went in to connect the dots between what you're talking about, kind of broadly with skills and specifically the mission around human kindness with human crisis. So what role do you see skills playing in the operations and mission of the Red Cross specifically?

Satnam Sagoo:
Ultimately, we're an organization that's supported by donor funding. And what we see is that, as with every organization, we want to be able to deliver more with what we've got. We've been fortunate that during this time that we’ve been supported continuously from our donors and government, but we still want to be able to do that, and ultimately the goal of the organization is that purpose is efficiency in its broadest sense, but the reason behind that is so that we can reach more people. We need to be more aware of how many people we can reach, and as we go into the kind of fallout of what 2020 and 21 has seen to be, we know that our services will continue to be needed more and more. So for us, the whole upskilling and supporting our people is very much around how much more are we able to do with that resource—we want to make the organization efficient, so that doesn't necessarily mean in different ways, but we want to be able to utilize our resource. So really for us, it is being able to be the best we can to support those people in crisis.

Stacia Garr:
And to maybe build on what I think I heard you say, it sounds like there may be a sense that with Red Cross, particularly because you can have so many volunteers who are donating their time, that there may not be kind of a big focus on, for lack of a better term, it's almost skill efficiency, which we certainly do have in the, in the private sector. But it sounds like they're very much so because, you know, just like any other organization you're constrained by resources and you're also constrained by people's sense of impact. And they want to be making an impact with the skills that they're contributing, so it sounds like there's some of the same constraints around skills and aligning to mission that we hear kind of in the traditional corporate sector.

Satnam Sagoo:
Yeah, definitely. And I would say that we're no different from any other large organization of our size. The difference between a humanitarian organization is that you find your way to our organization through your connection of the heart, that value like an organization like the Red Cross brings is that connection to the heart.

And we have so many applications and I could talk about, you know, I was helped by the Red Cross I've met and my team takes pictures of wherever they see a Red Cross sign. So again, I think to me fundamentally, that is the difference—that there is such a strong connection to your personal values and your heart; that’s what a humanitarian organization offers outside of the normal organizations. And we have the same issues.

We also have some areas that, you know, we are supported by volunteers, but one of the things that we do as an organization is often think of them or anybody joining us as an organizer, as an empty vessel: you come to us, a bit like the Men in Black pen, someone wipes your brain out at Reception, you come through and then we upskill you. We forget you come with a commodity of a vast array of skills; that’s why we hired you, that's why you're supporting us—all of those things that we so much want to look for people, and we don't have a way of actually capturing that; we don't have a way of supporting that as a network. We have a phenomenal amount of people that come join us.

So a classic example of late, where we began to turn that around in the head is we've had to make all our buildings, which is not, I'm sure it's the same for many people, COVID-safe, and we have a very small health and safety team. So what we did was we actually wrote to people and said, is there anybody in the organization, within our staff and volunteers who has health and safety background, current kind of accreditation, all of that. And we had all 40 volunteers who had, who had run health and safety teams, and we were directors of health and safety, and they just said, of course I'll do this!

So we often as organizations forget that people come to us with a massive skillset. And for us, it's really about going, how does it work for you as an individual? How do I respect what you already bring? And we're working on a mechanism where we can support that and capture that. So for us, it's really about you coming to us as a full suite person—so let's utilize that.

Chris Pirie:
Can I ask a question here? I'm really fascinated about the difference between if there is a difference between engaging and working with volunteers versus employees—and you do both, so you have a sort of unique view into that. There's something from the corporate world that makes me anxious about the lack of command and control, and I use those words very advisedly! Do you get volunteers who just say at the end of the day, look, I'm sorry, I can't do this, I'm walking away: what’s your observations on the different modes of engagement between a volunteer workforce in a paid workforce?

Satnam Sagoo:
I think in the paid workforce, you always have the carrot and stick kind of approach that you can do. Thankfully, we do very little of the stick, I would say in the BRC which is always a positive; we can reach those people and we can get to them, we'd get information out. And then with volunteers, each individual is different. Some join us because they want a spirit of community and they want to be part of a team, some join us because they have a small amount of time available they want to use up, and then we have these layers of infrastructure people who fall in between.

What we have found, particularly because I'm analyzing my space, is we are looking at what we call collectively the people experience or the people's journey into the organization. And that's where we have the things that apply to everybody; it doesn't matter if you're a volunteer or a member of staff, and then the things that are sort of slightly different, which is the volunteer experience and the staff experience.

And what we have found is that through the organization, in what a volunteer wants from us is one point of contact, which we don't do; sometimes they might get 18 emails from different people in an organization where it says, do this, do that. In the learning experience, point to gate, they get lots of handoffs, and if you are already giving one day of your time a month, what you don't want is a deluge of stuff—what you want is one connection.

And that's what we get the most; we get please, make it simple, relevant to me, and then give me some sort of platform or an opportunity where I can go in and learn better. And our volunteers vote with their feet; If I don't like something, I can just go, I will go—I‘ll write to the CEO and then go, that’s a different conversation in its entirety—but I think it is what we all want; we want that great customer service, and we are growing, and that's one of the must-do skill sets that we want to ensure is that everybody gets a good customer service, internal and external, but recognizing that people have come to you as a volunteer because they've got an allegiance above anything else to this wonderful organization. And some will only want to learn a little bit; they’ll only want to know what's specific for their role; others will want to grow, and want to be part of that team. So it's really individual, but it's very much for us it’s supporting that people experience.

Dani Johnson:
I think it's a really interesting sentiment. I know we've talked about this before, we were all in Switzerland a couple of years ago and we talked about some of the similarities between the Red Cross and working for a volunteer organization and working for the private sector, but kind of what you said, just drove that home.

We also work with organizations who are trying to provide a single point of contact, as you said through a lot of them are doing it through technology, but that's what individuals want and their learning experience is, Hey, tell me what I need to know and make it easier for me to find stuff and let me learn on my own. And I'll rise to the level that's appropriate for me and my role, or I'll rise to the level that's appropriate for me in my career. I think it's really interesting that even though the Red Cross may not use all of the technology that a lot of these organizations do to accomplish the same thing, the need is the same, which is striking to me.

Satnam Sagoo:
And I think it's that there are words that we now use too much, and I think it's that having that empowered individual and often what we do is our infrastructure takes away that power, and then people begin to lose that instinct. So we go from a kind of very much a proactive learner, to a much more culture of can't do/won’t do, because we haven't supported people on that journey. Nobody turns up at your doorstep in an organization as an empty vessel, and nobody turns up to work intent to do a bad job. And in essence, that’s the heart of it, and we need to build as organizations, we need to build on that and to empower people and create a culture of that empowerment and where people can sustain, but often all organizations put in these barriers that disempower people, and we get a culture of helplessness.

Dani Johnson:
That's really interesting, and I’m not sure I've ever put it together exactly like that, but some of the ways that we've done learning in the past have disempowered people; they've come to depend on the organization and expect the organization to spoon feed them, whereas most people learn naturally. And so if we could feed that from the beginning, we wouldn't have some of the problems that we currently have.

Satnam Sagoo:
We've probably all been guilty of developing products like that, as well as just click here, do that three times over. It's also very human nature; we had a team of people who was supporting Reception, and someone would say, where are the bathrooms? And you'd get one of my Reception people would pretty much take you there, walk you to it, and then another would sit back and go you go down there, turn left, and you realize the different type of person they were.

And actually I would use that; that was one of my fundamental examples I used because it's so easy besides that one was empowering. One was seen as the most helpful because they took you there, but you wouldn't find your way again, cause you have to go through multiple layers of doors. So it's that style that we naturally fall to as well. We talk about empowering our people. But too often, we have created a culture of learning helpfulness because we've said, let me make it that easy for you that you don't even have to think.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I like that a lot. I'd love to turn us a little bit back specifically to this skills topic, and maybe kind of raise this up a little bit. I want to kind of begin at one level and then we'll maybe dive down a little bit more deeply; we’re obviously doing this podcast called The Skills Obsession, and I have a question which is your take on why skills as a topic is so hot right now. Why are we talking about this—all of us in the industry, not just us here on the podcast?

Satnam Sagoo:
I think it's because we've hit that wall of helplessness. So we've now got to this notion that actually what they're missing is this still, we haven't addressed the culture, but saying what they're missing is a skill. So of course, L&D that's your game, isn't it, that's what you do. So what you're going to do is you're going to give me a skills framework, you're going to take into that culture and you're going to build this skill for me because in two years time, they'll all come out and it’ll be fantastic. Won’t they?

But nobody’s spoken to L&D, but we're all building frameworks—I’m sure all of you are—and we're going, what? This is how we're going to fit in. Ultimately, we need to address how we are treating our people. Are we empowering them or taking that power away? And these obsession with skills is because five people can't work Zoom, they can't do this, or they can't do that, and now all of a sudden we've had this pandemic, it's requiring us to work in an agile and growth mindset: you’re hearing those words, aren't you, my skills, my looks at the same, you know, decision-making, design thinking or design thinking is another one, critical thinking, strategic thinking,—you know, all of these great titles and why are we doing that? Have I suddenly lost all ability to do any skills? Have we lost the ability to suddenly do online shopping. We've all done it, we’re all adapting, so I think it's really about how do we well skiing because of the recent kind of pandemic, which is only really, if you think about it, it's been a 12 month journey and we're all asking people to change their ecosystem, their behavior, their culture, by upskilling them. Now some will be ahead of the curve and already up-skilled, but actually you're not going to get to the majority, and you're going to have to say, the skilling is there, we will support you, but there is an element of change that we need to bring for everybody. That’s my kind of thinking,

Dani Johnson:
Can I ask you, Satnam, do you think sort of the skills thing is a trend, or is it just relabelling a problem that we’ve always had?

Satnam Sagoo:
So it's the Trojan Horse, you know, that's what it is; it’s been there always, you know, the growth for the people's family, HR learning and development has been massive, but what we didn't grow is the ability to say no. And we've always said yes—anybody who's in the people space of that HR family never says no to the leaders, because we're so scared that if we say no, they won't come back to us, and this is the first time that top tables are talking to us. So we want to say, yes, we want to give them what they want to give.

But we want to also say, actually now is the time to have that conversation. Is it a skill—and we know that skills are changing rapidly, what we were learning two years ago is now not needed. So how are we gonna address them? So, yeah, I think there is a trend and we're scared to push back and myself included. I'm not gonna say I do that, but I think we need to bring that I'm joyful that we have organizational development as part of my role, but we need to bring that bedrock with it.

Stacia Garr:
Where I was going to go is maybe a little bit of a pushback on that. Not that I disagree with anything you've said, but I think there may be something bigger also happening, which is through the example of the Receptionist, right? I think that for many years—decades, really—our thinking has been, particularly as it is with regard to skills, we'll show you what to do. Then you just do it, like the Receptionist who takes you to the bathroom. And fundamentally, we've kind of moved to this economy where we need people to give them some direction and for them to go find the bathroom.

There’s only a small portion of the population that we've focused on, on developing that capability, and so all of this stuff, I think may just be a proxy for enabling a broader portion of the population to find the bathroom on their own. So maybe it isn't just relabelling it—maybe it is kind of more about this enabling of what it is that we're asking people to do. And if we haven't been asking them to do it and to have those structures in place for 20, 30, 50 years, however long, they're going to need some guidance—potentially.

Satnam Sagoo:
I would fundamentally agree with you. And I think I use marketing analogies quite a lot in the work that we do, because I think they know how to target you all. When we all walk into a shop or when we do walk into a shop for the online mechanisms that we used for, we want to be signposted. But the click that we do to buy, to put in our shopping trolley or the patches that we do physically is where we are empowered ourselves to do it, but what we want is that lovely signposting that says all of the books on, I don't know, geography or in this area that's labeled well, you know. A lot of people have talked about that curated learning experience to me, that's, you know, that is the signposting—and what our people experience tells us is firstly, when you overs signpost or tell me that, tell it puts me off because you're not treating me like I've got my own initiative, but then I turn up in a room, there’s no signposting, so you do too much in the beginning and then you leave me stranded.

I didn't know why that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to help all people be that signposting, that curated journey. And the nudge approach is also working with us. And so I can tell you that we had a piece of work, which was just looking at our mandated training and we weren't able to get the compliance high and we couldn't understand why everybody needed it. And then we got to go out to people and said, why isn't this working for you? You know, why aren't you doing it? And I would say that the majority of people, about 70% said, I thought I had done it. So I know I once told me what the suit was. And I think it's almost thought that bit of work that you do use, you read it so many times that you can't see your own gaps. And in a way, we also need to take a sight of what is our role, my role and my team's role.

So again, I think that signposting is really important, which is, you know, the experience we should get from anything that we do in all our lives, really.

Stacia Garr:
One of the themes that we've seen in the skills discussion is kind of her and we've talked about now is around supply and demand—so this idea that we do have some deficiencies in some skill sets and over-abundance and others. How do you think we should be kind of thinking about this holistically?

Satnam Sagoo:
There's something that we did this year, which I'm happy to say more of the data with you, which was that when we went into the UK first Lockdown, there was an appetite to support people with wellbeing, support people with their learning, support leaders, support their managers, you know, you can see the portfolio growing. And what we did as my team was flooding the market—we gave them every option they could possibly want and we allowed choice, but we allowed that choice, we allowed a streaming of trimming it down to what was really needed. And we didn't become precious about our material, because we got someone else to build the initial first round. Often when you're a small team, a learning and development team, you spend months developing something—and when it doesn't work, it's kind of pride and ego in a way that takes over because you don't hours of hard work that you do not want to, what you really want me to remove that slide that I spent 15 hours trying to save so much emotional attachment with all our products.

And in a way, we removed the emotional attachment. We bought in an expert in that area, and he created a portfolio of products that they had, that they could create, and we created a choice. And then those that were the most high-hitting we did in-house, we built those and we built, we kind of continued to evolve them. Each of our sessions is supported by what we call the Living Program. So the living program is very much around evaluation, both immediate off the sheet, got the happy sheets kind of process, and then kind of a couple of weeks and like, have you applied for it? If you haven't, why haven't you applied it? So the Living Program is almost that need not to kind of visit a product in two years time, it's more need to do it here and now, but we took to it, the product development side of it because we needed a menu very quickly so that people could pick and choose, and then when we got that menu a bit more refined that's when we took it in-house.

And so my experience of this is bringing in someone who doesn't have the emotional connection to it, get them to do that early work so if it didn't work, it didn't work. And then you can have a much stronger connection with the relevant products.

Chris Pirie:
That's interesting—it’s sort of easier to experiment if it's somebody else's work, and you can observe dispassionately, measure the data and see what happens. I have a quick question where you said you'd submitted your paper on your skill strategy for 2023, I think you said: how do you think the conversation is going to go with leaders? And have you had any feedback yet? These are questions that we're all struggling with a little bit. Do you think leaders are in a position to engage in really useful dialogue around this topic?

Satnam Sagoo:
What I'm submitting next week is the kind of completion of the change design phase; our overarching change program is called Fit for the Future. And I would say the fact that we're doing this, that we're looking through that microscopic lens, and in particular, the focus that we beat on what is the as is, is that our leaders may not necessarily be comfortable, but they are happy to investigate it. They’ve said, we know there are areas of improvement. So we need to hear this, as is because some areas aren't working some phenomenally good at this.So yes, I would say definitely the British Red Cross, our board and our executive leadership is very keen to have this. They've seen versions up until now So they know where we're coming. We even did a kind of, we applied the Dreyfus capability model to kind of give them a level of maturity as well, recognizing the limitations of that product.

And again, we've been talking about change for a long time, but there is an element of that we really want to get it right this time around. And not really sings true cause I lead a wellbeing, so we've had lots of feedback about how our managers are feeling. And we had 93% of managers tell us that they were having check-ins, that they felt the organization was more honest than it's ever been through it's communications, and that people are sharing more about their life, and that was really useful.

And you know, people were talking about how my child has cut my hair, so excuse what it looks like to the kind of, you know, I've had something really horrendous happen in my life, or I need to take time out. And in a way this world that we've lived in that's allowed us to go into your home, has allowed us maybe to drop that guard—that you know, that kind of, I need to be a certain way. So I would say that through this journey, we've learned a lot of that positive feedback about just being real, tell me as it is, has really helped. And I think our leadership is very much like how do we capitalize on that, because that did really work. So come and tell us where the barriers are and we want to learn and work with you.

Dani Johnson:
One of the conversations that always comes up when we talk about skills and capabilities or competencies or whatever you want to call them, is the data surrounding those, because the data helps us make inferences and it also helps us sort of intersect with some of those other things. And one of the things that we're seeing, interestingly, that skills are intersecting with is diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. So I’d love to understand how you're thinking about skills in the access to the data about skills and how that impacts diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

Satnam Sagoo:
Oh, you didn't use my favorite sentence that comes with that normally, which is return on investment: don’t you just love that one?

I’m an epidemiologist by background, that’s a different life long time ago, but I love data. So it's not something. And often when we think about metrics and what we're measuring, my question is why are we measuring it? And that's what I always say to my team. My team dreads it. I say, don't tell me that you've got great Excel skills because Oh, you can do power BI. Everybody loves a power BI dashboard up to my minimize anymore. You know, you can do a great dashboard, but what are you telling me?

And within our metrics, the things that we're using is obviously the kind of who's done it and not done it, you know, that sort of stuff, but also the engagement and the repeated engagement. The mechanisms that we're using are around also the connection to wellbeing as well. Are their measures that we haven't looked on to support individuals? We’ve now introduced that airport checking, you know, you go in or you have pizza today, so we're doing wellbeing checking every quarter, which I think many organizations are doing, but we kind of connect it to the L&D portfolio because obviously I lead on that as well. So we're trying to connect where that journey is, our happiness connected to the metrics that we're measuring, so that we've layered that happiness metric, but how are you as an individual feeling how you supported and how does that connect with how much learning and development that you are able to do at this very moment?

I'm sure in many parts of the world, we've got people who are now homeschooling managing three of the people in the office, and if I expect them to suddenly go off and do their whole suite of mandated training because they didn't do it. And of course we've had those emails being sent to them, you know, thou shall do this or thy system will be disconnected, but way we've found that we've got a small percentage that we, we need to find out why, and could they have a huddle, which is someone just calling them. We’ve also tried to connect return on investment; one of the things we've also set up an in-house support nine for all Red Cross people to understand how they're being impacted by the pandemic. So again, we ease different layers of metrics. So we want to give you the complete picture of an individual and the complete picture of the organization.

Dani Johnson:
Well kind of along with that, one of the other big conversations we're hearing is this idea of skills credentialing or skills verification—like, you say you have this skill, but do you really have this skill?

Lots of organizations are struggling with that, and I wonder, two questions, first of all, how is the British Red Cross handling that? And the second thing is, does it vary between your employees and your volunteers?

Satnam Sagoo:
So it's good because we're going to introduce a digital passport this year. There's two facets to that; firstly, we kind of had so many old systems that we're bringing together, so record loss and everything else. And also in the wider UK kind of context is we've got lots of volunteers who volunteer for many different organizations, and there are significant transferable skills. What happens is they'll go and volunteer for say Amnesty, and then they'll come to volunteer for us, and we'll make them do the same thing—we’ll make them do like an information governance, we’ll make them do all of that. So we've got an ask within the organization around looking at what that means. So that's all kinds of first approach to it. And our first approach to that is going to be you itself telling us what you've got, all my stock, not LinkedIn's approach of kind of being what you've got: if you've got a certificate, as you put that in. And then our view is the moment. This is our view that as it is, when we need a bit, like I said, the example of the health and safety question, and that's to staff and volunteers, we may have credentials that point when we ask for it, so that's all first kind of interpretation. We haven't drilled down any farther on the kind of key skills and capabilities that we want to support. We will have different markers, but on that kind of passporting, we want to empower individuals, but that in, and when those opportunities come, we then could they to the level they're at and kind of go, you've turned up really keen, and so we all testing that approach with a group, for people that we are going to call the change influences, and that's thought to take forward the change program.

Dani Johnson:
That's really interesting, so right now you're using some sort of self-verification. Talk to me a little bit about this digital passport you mentioned; is it for the British Red Cross or is it BRC, or more broadly?

Satnam Sagoo:
So for now we're going to be testing it in the British Red Cross. We are working as an organization to test it within ourselves, but in the UK, so outside of the kind of Red Cross family; we're going to test it within the voluntary sector so that volunteers across the UK don't feel like they have to duplicate. So there are layers, which is a kind of national level that we're doing with the volunteer board, but all of the UK. And then there's obviously us testing out in the organization.

Dani Johnson:
I think we're getting close to time. So in the British Red Cross, sort of broadly, what are some of the skills that are quite unquote ‘hot’ right now?

Satnam Sagoo:
I think definitely that sort of agile mindset—it’s really having that. And there is a change in capability build which we're looking at and we’re looking at the narrative of that. And then area of that, we've done a commitment to, so the British Red Cross has committed to being at an anti-racist organization, and that has meant that our portfolio of equality, diversity and inclusion has grown and I can send some stuff through you about that, but that's been really inspiring to see challenging all of the above—it’s been really interesting to see that growth.

Adaptability as our kind of whole thing is massive now about how do we kind of bring that in? And then we are still at the ground, we’re still doing that whole kind of digital data literacy. What does it mean? And one that's coming up that we haven't seen for a while, but it's revisiting and I've heard from other colleagues in different organizations is about succession planning—that kind of whole driver around succession and developing professions as well. So those are kind of our hot topics.

Dani Johnson:
I think it's interesting that you mentioned agility, and the kind of the way that you're handling learning within the organization seems to speak to that. So you talked a lot about, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but teaching people to learn rather than teaching people the thing, and making sure that they're agile enough to adapt to their environments and find out what they need to know in order to deliver what they need to deliver. I think that’s pretty forward-thinking; I think organizations are getting there, but not as fast as they probably should.

So just to wrap up, is there anything else we should have asked you about that we didn't?

Satnam Sagoo:
My portfolio has grown so much that I kind of feel like there's areas that we could talk about different elements on this so much. We all still growing; as I said, the EDI portfolio, the wellbeing experience, the fear that if we send out a survey now that we've gone into our third lockdown we won't get the high results we got in the last one one—you know, all of those things that are the kind of worry of a person who leads on any of the learning stuff. So yeah, I mean, I think we've covered a lot.

Dani Johnson:
Yeah, we definitely have. Two more questions; how can people connect with you and your work?

Satnam Sagoo:
Quite simple. They can either go through my LinkedIn profile, which is readily available, or they can even contact me at British Red Cross: that's fine.

Dani Johnson:
Perfect. And then the last question, and this is a question that Chris taught us to ask that we love, and it's one that I think is particularly pertinent to you: why do you do what you do?

Satnam Sagoo:
Because I'm a lifelong learner. and where else would I want to be? And that's really it. I'm a classic 45-year old person that is in that kind of area of life where I've done my two career changes—I’m textbook! But ultimately I'm a lifelong learner, and where would we want to be but leading this journey?

Dani Johnson:
Thank you, Satnam, so much for your time; it's been a fascinating discussion.

Chris Pirie:
Thanks for everything you do, Satnam—thanks for all your work; I can't imagine how busy you've been over the last 14 months!

Satnam Sagoo:
I was up till three am like Monday and Tuesday just finishing this thing off. It’s kind of emotional, but I'm really inspired by some other things that we do as an organization.

Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.

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Guests

Nuno Congalves, Global Head of Strategic Capability Building at Mars

DETAILS

“I think that in the future, what will be really necessary in terms of skills are people that talk different languages of skills… talking different languages of different skill sets will be something really, really important.” Why is it significant that become more expert seems so fused with speaking restricted languages? And what does it mean to have ‘intentionality’ about skills? How do you start to really understand the skills needs of an organization you join in COVID? This week, these and many other thorny but critical issues get exposed via our debate with long-time friend and highly accomplished CLO and talent leader Nuno Gonçalves, who is now starting to do at global confectionary, food and pet care giant Mars what he did at  European life sciences player UCB: implement a cross-company, future-focused skills strategy. It’s an excellent conversation with a truly passionate learning ninja who’s thought deeply about these problems.

Find out more about Nuno’s employer Mars

Connect with him on LinkedIn

Webinar

Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills. 

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We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

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Guests

Madhura Chakrabarti, Global Head, People Analytics at Syngenta

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Dr Madhura Chakrabarti is one of our favorite HR thinkers and doers, so we jumped at the chance to hear of the genuinely pioneering work she’s doing for the 29,000 people who work for her employer Syngenta, a leading Swiss-headquartered science-based agtech company that helps millions of farmers round the world grow safe and nutritious food, while taking care of the planet. Despite COVID, in early December Madhura and her small L&D team launched an innovative cross-company skills framework supported by a new learning platform implementation.

This episode is a great chance to hear about the real practical challenges of creating such a framework and how hard it can be to find the right partner to help, as well as the importance of people analytics in general: you’re really going to hear from the HR data and skills coal face here. Making this experience even better: Madhura’s charm, professionalism and fierce intellect. Truly, some great Workplace Stories this week!

Find out more about Madhura and her work at Syngenta here

Connect with her on LinkedIn

Webinar

Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills. 

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We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

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Stacia Garr:
Today, we're speaking with Madhura Chakrabarti; she’s the global head of People, Insights and Analytics at Syngenta.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think it was a stretch or a learning even for myself, because when we set out, in complete transparency, my mindset was, Oh, I know what they need, so I'll design it, don’t worry about it. So I could have just gone with it and designed, but it's only after that listening exercise, I realized, Oh, actually there are very distinct needs–and just because I'm interested in data, not everyone is equally interested in data and in a similar way. So we really have to cater to the user's needs.

Stacia Garr:
Madeira is one of the smartest people we know she brings in academic perspective—she’s a PhD, she also has an extensive practitioner perspective, and has married those together in her recent work at Syngenta.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
This is Madhura Chakrabarti, I am the global head of People, Insights and Analytics at Syngenta, based out of Basel, Switzerland.

Stacia Garr:
So Madeira, welcome to Workplace Stories, our RedThread Research podcast; thanks so much for your time and for sharing your insights with our audience today. I'm obviously excited to have you on here—we work together, and it's so cool to get a chance to hear what you're doing today.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Glad to be here, and honored to be here; thanks, Stacia.

Stacia Garr:
We're going to start with some quick questions to introduce you and your work practice to our listeners, and then we're going to go deeper on some questions. We really want to hear your perspective on here about your experience.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Sounds good!

Chris Pirie:
Madhura, can you give us a quick overview of Syngenta—its mission, and its purpose?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
So Syngenta is a 29,000-people company, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. We recently became Syngenta Group as a result of becoming a conglomerate of other companies, and the mission, or what the company does, is really an expert in crop science and seeds. And it provides digital solutions to farmers across the world so that they can make better decisions in their day-to-day lives.

Chris Pirie:
And what is the work that you do? What's your job title and how would you describe what a typical day looks like for you, if there is such a thing?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Good question. I lead the global People Insights and Analytics team, and in very simple terms, because it's a fairly rapid section, our mission is really to understand how we can use data and analytics to make better talent decisions and talent related business decisions. It's a fairly new function; we’ve been roughly here for two, two and a half years. We are still trying to build it out.

Chris Pirie:
And what are the sort of forces at work on Syngenta, and you and your role as well? What problems are you trying to solve?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Short answer is many! But at the start of our journey, we actually had identified three main pillars, the first pillar being strengthening the core of People Analytics, and that really entails things like how do we upskill ourselves—we are a seven-person team, and constantly be at par, be abreast of the latest and the greatest, and technically also constantly upskill ourselves.

The second pillar is around how we scale People Analytics and some of those sub-points or sub-bullets underneath that is the HR upscaling work that we'll be discussing today. The other big part in that second pillar is coming up with a Data Lake; a seven people team cannot really serve the entire company, you need to have a scaled mechanism. So these are kind of the two things that we are focusing on in the second pillar.

And the third pillar is really around embedding people, analytics and business and HR topics, so this is where our actual work like analytics in DNI, or doing a sales effectiveness study, or doing an org network analysis study, all of that comes in underneath this pillar. And it's contingent upon what the business needs and sometimes what HR needs

Chris Pirie:
And then since we're talking about skills generally in this season and specifically today, what are your skills—what are the skills that you need and your team needs to do your work and, and how did you acquire them?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think I would broadly break them up into two. One is more around technical skills, and that's more like table stakes; you cannot do it anything else if you don't have them. And that's more around pure analytics, statistics, construct measurement, survey building, I think I'll go back to mainly graduate school, but of course now LinkedIn Learning and other learning platforms to keep reinventing and re-brushing those skills. The other bucket is really around influencing others and stakeholder management that I feel like I've picked up on the way in the journey by working and just being in different roles and making some career moves. That's how I've picked them up.

Stacia Garr:
So one of the things we've noticed in this podcast series, which we're calling The Skills Obsession, is that there are kind of two groups that are obsessed: one is the learning folks who have made up quite a bit of this podcast series, but then there's also our friends, the people analytics folks. And one of the things I was most excited about with your story is you're actually bringing them together: you are a people analytics leader who's been focused very heavily on the learning aspect of this. So can you give folks a sense of the recent initiative that you focused on with launching a new learning experience platform combined with that HR capabilities initiative?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Sure. So this works spanned quite a bit. I would say almost like 18 months from the very start of it to where we are today. And it really happened in two main categories. One was identifying what should HR as a function be upskilling itself on, so that was a project or an initiative by itself. And that started somewhere around the middle of 2019. We took the first six months—we gathered, we did an agile project team that came together across the globe within HR and determined what are those six capabilities? We actually looked at external research in past internal initiatives, we gathered some quick employee voices and came up with a list of, I think, 25, and then shortlisted and came to six at the end. And we shortlisted based on the fact that it needs to be fit for purpose, right? So all of a sudden, if I say 'AI in HR is important,’ there are a lot of other things that we as a company need to do before we go and start working on AI, right?

So it needs to make sense for Syngenta as a company, HR, as a function—so fit for purpose applicable to all roles in HR, because we didn't really want to go down the route of here are five, four for kanban and here are two for HRBP. So we wanted to have a generic set of six that will apply to the entire function.

And then you also talked about relevance in the next three to five years: you don't want something that might be a hot topic 10 years from now, and at the same time, you don't want something that's really hot right now to somewhere that will still be relevant in the next three to five years. So those are kind of the parameters we use to bring it down to six. And the six were data fluency, the part that I led, then employee experience, agile, tech savviness, partnering, and customer centricity. The first phase of the project, which was around six months, was around determining the skills. And then the next one year we actually spent, or almost eight months or nine months, to develop the framework. So if we were to design something around data fluency, what would that mean?

We did quite a bit of product testing around that, so after we developed the framework, got feedback from a variety of sources, we then designed the pathways. And at the same time—this is where it coincided with the larger learning experience platform launch in the company—we said, let us be pioneers and let us come up with design actual pathways in the platform. So we took our vision of that framework and converted those to actual learning pathways on the platform. And we now have six of these learning pathways: we have many more, but for HR, we have these very six dedicated ones, all built in-house.

Stacia Garr:
Great. So I want to start or dig in a little bit deeper on that first phase around kind of determining those skills. So did you all do any assessment of the level of those skills or capabilities in the organization today when you were making that decision around which, you said a list of 25 to a short list of, of six. So kind of what, what was the baselining and did that influence where you ultimately landed?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
The short answer I would say is we didn't do a survey or an assessment per se for employees, because we also had to always balance it out with other surveys that are going on, and do we really want this to have employees answer, way too much service, right? So there's always that reality that you have to juggle, right?

So I didn't do that, but having said that there definitely, I would say data, not so much quantitative data, but data from what worked in the past. So there were many models that were initiated or launched in the past that didn't quite work or there was feedback around why certain things stuck with the company and certain things never really stuck with people.

So we have that. We also had some external review of the HR function, and there was a lot of qualitative and quantitative data around an external party looking at our function and seeing what are our strengths and what are some of the things that we need to work on.

So we have that data and that very in-depth review from that external party. And then it wasn't a skill assessment, but we did some quick listening exercises where we asked people, what does 'HR 2025’ mean to you, and what are some of the skills that you think we need to develop that we don't have today? So we gathered some of those responses and there were also a bunch of quick polls that we did at various forums. We have something called the ‘One HR Week,’ which is where the entire function comes together virtually, and we have a ton of initiatives around HR and people and development for that whole week. So we gathered some quick data from those different sessions as well around skills.

Stacia Garr:
That absolutely makes sense. And then you mentioned you developed this framework: can you explain to us a little bit more in a detailed way, what that framework was?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Sure. So what we did was, when we were in a position when, once we knew these are the six that we have to work on, and then we identified who's going to be leading, we decided we'll do something called a Yam Jam, which is a Yammer jam, for each of these. Actually we did it for four out of the six capabilities, and we gathered people, we did different sessions and we had specific questions, so two minutes each and everybody had to write in, we had almost 200 to 300 people in aggregate across all sessions give us feedback. /span>

So we gathered a lot of data. For example, for data fluency. I asked the question, what does data fluency mean to you? right, and gathered that feedback. There was another question around, if you were to learn data fluency, what skills would you learn, right, and why would you learn them? So things like that, and what really emerged similar things emerged for other capabilities as well, but I'll focus on the data fluency part as there were three distinct needs of users. One was, I want to understand the data enough so that I want to read the dashboards, I can influence decisions. I can talk about it, I can, I can add value to conversations that are happening about talent, but I don't want to dig my hands dirty or, you know, I don't want to go too deep. So they were very clear, like I really want to know data enough.

So that was one bucket. The second bucket was people who wanted to go a bit deep, but they were, we don't want to do PhDs. So it just makes sure that it's not too deep, but we definitely want to understand what are the data sources we can pull? How can we do some quick analysis to answer a question? So it was almost like a deeper level of the first persona. And the third was where people and to be completely transparent, there weren't a whole lot of them and I almost force-fed them a little bit, that these were people who wanted to go, so people like us in order to develop the people analytics team and make it sustainable. You want technical people: these are people who want to aspire to become data scientists or go deep along with having consulting skills. So it's a very niche skill and the smallest group of all, but those were the three user types or user needs that emerged. And then what we decided was we needed different pathways for these different people. So we went ahead and did a lot of external exercises, listening exercises, where we looked at data fluency: I think I spoke to seven different companies, just understanding what they have done. And there were some really good ideas that came up as to what has made them successful in launching these programs.

So we took those, the internal needs, and then we put together the framework around, let's say for the first set of user needs or first persona, if you were to call it, the name of the person, I think we call them the information consumer—all they want to do is to consume information, not to not do too much of analytics. So for them, we came up with a series of not activities, but it's a mix of, it could be LinkedIn modules talking about why is data fluency important mixed with something like an escape room exercise, where it is about understanding how to use data, how to differentiate anecdotal data from actual data: so more around fundamentals of analytical thinking, and how do you bring that thinking to the table?

Those were just two examples, but around six to seven concrete activities or learning activities that you could be doing, which will address your need for that particular bucket of the first user need or the first persona. And we did that for the second persona. And then we did that for the third persona as well.

Stacia Garr:
Out of curiosity, what did you name those other two personas?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
The third one we named the scientist practitioner. And the second one, I think we are still in the process of finalizing it; we don't have that, but the first and the third are finalized. It was a bit of an exercise.

Stacia Garr:
Well, what I love about what you shared there is that it's something that could apply to any competency, right, or capability; so kind of this bigger picture group, understanding the personas within what these people need to learn and then designing the learning pathways around what their particular needs are that's just replicable across, across anything that we would do.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah, and that's really important. I think it was a stretch or a learning even for myself. Because when we set out, in complete transparency, my mindset was, Oh, I know what they need, so I'll design it, don’t worry about it, so I could have just gone with it—but it's only after that listening exercise, I realized, Oh, actually there are very distinct needs; just because I'm interested in data, not everyone is equally interested in data, and in a similar way. We really have to cater to the user's needs.

Stacia Garr:
So it's not just the absence of the skills or the skills that need to develop, but actually the needs that they have—and within those needs also an underlying motivation that they have to acquire those skills.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Absolutely.

Chris Pirie:
I love the design thinking approach of being customer-centric at the beginning; that’s interesting. I also wonder why six, was that a constraint that you gave yourself? Often good design comes from constraint. And I think a lot of our conversations around these skills and skills frameworks for me revolves around the appropriate level of granularity. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose six?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I don't think there's any magic to that number, but we were very clear, especially when we presented it to our HR leadership team, we were very clear that it shouldn't be a laundry list of, you know, here's these 15 things that we think are important—it has to be realistic and it also has to be achievable. If you want to upskill yourself in all of these, then whatever 12 to 18 months, should be a good enough timeframe.

So I think that was our main lens to look at it. I think we did come to seven, but then two of them could have been easily consolidated. So that's some strong feedback we got from our leadership team. So we then ended up consolidating.

And as you can imagine, a lot of these skills are also overlapping, right? So digital technical savviness. I mean, do you really want to keep it different or is that… I mean, even within the six, to be honest, there's so much data fluency needed in being agile or an employee experience, but there's a lot that you can actually combine. So there was a consolidation exercise, for sure.

Stacia Garr:
And you mentioned, you had gotten feedback to identify these three different personas. Once you had done that and had started working on the learning pathways, did you all also get feedback at that point?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yes. So we did a set of, we call it product testing, when just the framework was done, and it was pretty intense because we recorded all six of the capability leads. We recorded 30 20-minute videos introducing ourselves, why this is important and then the entire framework, and then we had a bunch of 20 to 30 product testers across the globe that actually went through all of those videos and then we had sessions where we came together and they gave us feedback, and we did some quick NPS surveys as well. Like would you recommend this framework to others or would you recommend the skill to others? So a lot of good feedback came from there saying, you know, this is good. This is not going to work for me.

One of the things that people said was there's a lot of commonalities among the six capabilities, so if there's a way to guide me to something else while you're talking about a particular skill, that would be really helpful. So if you're talking about agility and hypothesis building is really important, then tie it to the data fluency pathway because that's how you garner interest in each other.

So a lot of feedback happened there—that was one round of product testing, and then when we actually designed the actual pathway on the platform, we did another round of product testing as well. But to be very honest, I think we got a lot of interest in the first phase; by the time we launched it already coincided with a couple of other big initiatives, so the amount of feedback we received on the platform when we road-tested it was less. But at the same time, now we have launched it as of December 3rd, we launched everything officially across the globe. We are just going to look at the feedback now what happens.

Stacia Garr: Right.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
So, fingers crossed!

Stacia Garr:
I understand that you said that it coincided with a couple of other big initiatives, but it also may be that you got a lot of the big issues out of the way early in the design.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Absolutely, but what I would also tell others were on a similar journey is putting it on the platform is, is a learning by itself. Like when I was literally putting it on the platform, the kind of experiences or the kind of notes I had to put in—because it's not a bunch of LinkedIn modules, right? It has certain activities where you need to sign up; it has a community of practice that you can sign up for, so it's a mixed methods thing. So for some of them, let's say you're scrolling down, you've just gone through a few videos, and then all of a sudden it's an activity that you have to sign up for, but the actual activity will happen in the site that you are in. So how do you change that mindset that, well, this is not a module: you just need to sign up on this activity sheet so that your local HRBP can do this, right?

So because there was such a variety of things that we offered within each pathway, the actual platform experience is also important. And to gather feedback is also very crucial.

Stacia Garr:
Interesting. I want to maybe step back a little bit. So you were the global leader of People Analytics. How did you become involved in this? Like who was it led by an in, why were you a part of this?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
The first phase I was asked to lead the entire initiative, just identifying what the skills are going to be. It was very organic, let's have a project team together, let's have somebody lead it, I think I was in general passionate about the topic. So, it happened very organically and it happened really well.

The second phase, we realized that we need experts in each of these six fields or in these six capabilities, so let's have one person lead one capability and let's have one overall project manager lead the entire thing. So that's how we came together across HR. And I would say it's a mix; three of the six capabilities. So employee experience, agile and data fluency, we had people who actually lead it in their day jobs as well, so it only made sense for them to read these capabilities. The other six, I think it was more of people who were passionate about the topic and, of course, who had the capability to lead it. So it was a mix of your role determining who leads it, plus your passion. But of course, we had very strong sponsorship from our CHRO, who thought this is the top.

Stacia Garr:
One of the things we all know can be difficult is creating that alignment across these different areas of HR and these different teams and you even called out that one of the most important things was making sure there was a connection from one of these sets of capabilities to something else. I could see with there being six teams, it being hard to kind of maintain that connection. So what did you do in terms of maintaining that alignment and communication across these different groups so that you could kind of create this cohesive whole offering for folks?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think we hit an extremely strong project manager who kind of brought us together. I know it seems obvious, but I think her tenacity and her skills—kudos to her, every Tuesday, 8 to 9 or 8 to 9.30am was our meeting, and we had people from across the globe, from New Zealand to us, covering the entire globe. Imagine the difficulty of bringing everyone together, but we all pulled it together. So for a year, every Tuesday, 8 to 9.30am, we met as a team to discuss our progress and then we used Microsoft teams as our platform to collaborate: we had a whole channel dedicated to it and all of the conversation that happened, all the decks we prepared, everything that we revised and the durations, all of that happened on that single platform. So I don't think how we could have managed it just through email or just through, you know, meetings. That platform really helped.

Stacia Garr:
Now kind of turning, you said he launched it on December 3rd: what are you thinking in terms of the measurement? So how are you going to know if this has been successful?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
A couple of things. One is, of course we want to look at the platform, data, the metrics that come with it, so how many people have viewed it? How many people have started a more do which module is more popular, which mode is more popular—are people reading documents or are people watching videos more or are they signing up for activities? So we already have a framework that we have prepared for each of our pathways that we want to track the data; hopefully it’ll go up and not down over time.

We also have developed a dashboard, not just for the HR capabilities, but for the entire learning platform, where at an org level you get to see what are the top most skills that people are aspiring for, what are they signing up for? And you kind of get the business unit wide view or, you know, gender or other demographic view of the data. So that's another piece.

And then to be very honest, there's no death of qualitative feedback. So people will write an email and say, Hey, I couldn't sign up or what's this happening? Or have you considered this resource or that resource? So not everything, but we are trying to capture some of those qualitative feedback as well. So between the dashboard, the platform data and the qualitative feedback, that's our first approach, but I'm sure it will evolve and we have to put in some more. But let's see how we progress in the next two to three months.

Stacia Garr:
The dashboard is really interesting, because it basically is your way of enabling leaders to keep a pulse on, are we improving the skills of that? We've said we want to go out and improve. Was that something you envisioned doing from the beginning?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
We did actually. So what happened was, as I said, the HR capabilities was one part, or one stream; the other much bigger stream was launching the learning platform for the entire company, right? So my team was involved in one of the levers that they call the measurement lever. Of course, the question that was posed to us was how do we measure learning? How do we know this is working? So we came up with this framework of, there’s a bunch of metrics that we can track at an individual level. So me, as an individual learner, I want to know, when do I learn the best or how many courses have I taken in the last one week? Or is there a pattern, do I learn during a particular time of day, or things like that.

Then there's a set of metrics that are relevant for the manager, right, to understand how the team is progressing. Then there's an org level need, where as an organization, we need to understand which corporate functions are really leading the way in learning, or is this a business unit, or if you break it down through different demographic lenses.

And then there's a strategic level of, can we connect learning with metrics that Syngenta as a company is poised to deliver. So for high level metrics like anything to do with crop science or building a better life for farmers, are there things that we can correlate with learning? That's a very high goal—I don't think we are there yet. We are very much in the lower ranks of the pyramid right now. So individual, manager and organization-wide metrics. So in that organization wide leg, we had envisioned that dashboard—that this is what it'll cater to, and this is why we need the dashboard to look at them or look at an org view.

Now, one thing I will say is that we had a lot of debate for the manager rank of the pyramid, because there's a school of thought that believes, yes, managers should have access, because ultimately you want to see where your team is, and how your team is progressing. But then there's also another strong school of thought that said, we don't want managers to know—I don't want my manager to know what courses I took yesterday. So, you know, there was a lot of debate that way. We are not currently feeding anything to the manager, but so right now it's at an individual level, but it might be again, a journey.

Stacia Garr:
And I'm sure also there's a level of comfort that needs to happen with folks in getting this type of data and understanding what might go where, and, and the rest of it, because it may come eventually in place, and I just take whatever I want and my manager can do whatever they want with it, but it doesn't matter.

What I love about what you've shared—lots of things—but one thing is, you know, we hear a lot in our space about the democratization of data, about making it widely available, but we don't see a lot of practical examples. And I think what you've shared is a very practical example of how you've thought through how this data could be useful at the individual level. Certainly some thought on, on how it could be useful at the manager level, even though it's not available, but the thinking there. And kind of that pyramid that you mentioned, I think is really a powerful framework for other people to think through, as they're thinking about their data efforts and data dashboards and the like.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Right, right. I think the other thing I will mention is as we went through that process, we also realized that ideally, it all sounds really good that you have you've thought through it all, but then there are realities around what can the platform deliver, right? So it's not magic that I want 17 metrics around in that individual layer and all 17 are available on the platform. And if it's not available on the platform, are you actually going to feed it individually to the individual? No. right; I mean, you can't do that.

So then we had to tweak our approach to say, what could be an MVP? So let's say we have identified 16 or whatever, 15 things that we want to measure at an individual level; maybe only five or seven of them are available in the platform or are kind of a ballpark available in the platform. So let's have seven as an MVP and let's do the rest in as phase two, so longer term. So then we divided each of those layers; what’s an MVP, what's a nice to have, or can come in future. And that was a good reality check, because otherwise we were on this spree of anything we think will happen and we can make all of this work, but that's not quite it, because you always are constrained with what the technology can provide.

Stacia Garr:
And I know that with some of the particular learning platforms the concept of measurement and kind of the measurement that we bring to some other aspects of our people world—and Chris might hate me for saying this, but they seem to be a bit behind. You know, we, I think that there's kind of been the learning spaces long-term, you know, focus on smile sheets and the like, and the rigor of what we've seen in some of the other aspects of people analytics isn't there.

So can you talk to me a little bit about what that conversation looked like for you all with your vendor ? Hey, you know, this is where we want to go, we can use the things you're providing us, but how did you approach that? What was their receptivity to that conversation? And what do you kind of see moving forward?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I'll try to be as agnostic as possible, but I'll talk in generic terms. So some vendors were very, very rigid about what they have provided or what they will provide; it was a pretty difficult conversation to bring them from what their product to say, actually, our needs are a little different and we have identified these needs—only two of them are kind of matching with what you have, but what is your vision around the rest?

And they just kept going back to what they have, right? Those were actually part of our selection criteria as well. A lot of these conversations happened before we finalized the vendor, whereas a couple of others were definitely much more open, and they also gave us concrete examples of how they shifted their roadmap based on their client feedback. So testing that before finalizing the vendor is really important. And measurement was just one lever, right? There were other levels as well. So there was a process, there was integration with other stuff, things like that. So all of us were part of that discussion, and of course we had to keep it short. That's really important.

Chris Pirie:
As the L&D guy in the conversation. I couldn't agree more that we still seem to be on very foundational activity, tracking-type data and metrics in the learning space and though we're all very, very desperate and anxious to get to the business impact side of things, it feels like we're a long way.

Do you have any examples of things that you wanted to do? The vendors that you spoke to found it difficult to respond to or to your data scientist hat on,and tell me what you wish they could have brought to the table for you?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think the biggest one was in that final layer where we had business outcomes, you know, the top of the pyramid—and that's where I said that we are yet to go there, that’s where we were hoping that we'll get much more insight from the vendors or actual examples, but we didn't quite. So for example, one of the things that I know was pretty ambitious of us, but we wanted to say, ultimately, it helps us sell better to farmers because of the courses that we have taken, right? And I'm putting it in very simplistic terms, but if I take five agronomy courses, do I, as an organization sell more?

So any relationship that we could establish between learning and selling more, or influencing farmers' decisions more, we didn't end up getting anything there. And it's a hard problem—I don't want to say they can’t solve it and look, we have done it, we have done it either. But so I do want to recognize it's a very hard problem and it's so many factors involved, ultimately in the selling decision that you can't really pinpoint to learning, but if there was some way to directly establish relationships between the final outcomes that we're interested in as an organization and learning, that would be a deal breaker, I would say.</span

Stacia Garr:
Just to dive into the data side of that a little bit more, were the vendors able to actually bring in some of that data? Because obviously you'd have to bring in for this example of your sales data for different groups and then be able to kind of slice and dice based on what functions people were in, or what region or whatever, and whether they took the courses. So were they unable to bring in that data, or were they unable to share that so that you all could do that analysis yourself, see, during your Data Lake or in some external tools?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I think with regard to those higher level questions about the business outcome relationship, they were just unable to bring in or show us examples. But with others, I think it was more around, yes, we have the data, but right now it's not on the platform, but yes, we think about that. So it was more yes, we can implement it if you want, or we can do it, but right now it’s we are not able to show it on the platform.

But, you know, Stacia, the other thing I'll mention is we also had a learning ‘aha!’ moment here. We thought the more the metrics, the merrier, right. But the vendors actually told us, and some of the external learning we did when we spoke to other companies was, t the end of the day, give the individual just three metrics, and that's what you can drive the maximum impact—don’t bombard them with like 15 metrics that they don't know what to do at every day. If it's changing at some point, I'll be like, okay, I don't care.

So try to consolidate and give them the bare minimum or two to three that you think are important. That way, certain vendors also helped change our thought process. Just because we can think of 15 doesn't mean we have to give 15, right: think about what really matters. And at the end of the day, or rather end of the week, what does an individual want to know about his or her learning path?

Stacia Garr:
I'd like to kind of lift up and think about what you're going to be doing moving forward, kind of taking this experience as an initial example of what could potentially be done. Can you talk about your vision for how people analytics could help with, skills, identification, or verification or talent redeployment in the future?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah, I think again, this could be an hour discussion by itself. A couple of thoughts: one is especially given the experience we had employee listening plays such an important role, understanding your population for which you're building the learning product is critical that we saw our personas and our user needs would not have come up if we had not listened. Right?

So people analytics, and again, to me, people analytics, employee experience, they go hand in hand—it’s not really a different team or different skill set But we can play a really important role in that process of whatever listening we do internally to understand user needs, beat quantitative or qualitative, to gather that data, to mine that data, to help that that's where we come in quite a bit. The second is the sources from which we get information about skills. That's just going to exponentially increase over the years. Internal listening is only one source. You also have, I'm sure the HR employee tracking system, every company has, there’s some amount of information there. Then there is, there are professional networking sites that you can get information on, there are learning platforms that you can get information on. So how do you connect the disparate data sources and come with a consolidated view of what are the skill gaps? What are the skills people are aspiring for? Managing those disparate data sources, analyzing that data. That's where people analytics can play a key role, and of course the end part of it, which is when you have launched a pathway or a learning platform, how do you measure that people are actually learning? So that's the third piece where people analytics is critical, and if organizations don't have people analytics teams in that space, then that would be a red flag. You absolutely need to involve the team there.

Stacia Garr:
You mentioned kind of this exploding or exponentially increasing, I think was the right word, sorts of data around skills. I can see that as potentially an opportunity, but it's also a challenge. So we'd love to hear kind of your thoughts on those different data sources and how folks might want to approach or think about that challenge as they're moving forward.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
The first thing I would say is really, what does the business need? Try to understand the business needs, and where the company is going. So I'm sure digital is top of everyone's mind, and everyone's going through a digital transformation—but what exactly is digital, right? I mean, is it data analytics skills, or is it becoming more technology-savvy? Like for us, farming equipment or farming digitization or technology that supports satellite data.

So trying to understand the business needs is really important—and what's the need, do we really need to up-skill our own population to make it prepared for the next five years? Or, can we do it with interim solutions? There are a lot of vendors these days that look at the current talent pool, the external talent pool, the gig economy talent pool, and a couple of others and they bring together a project team that will suffice for a particular project that you don't have the skills for, right?

We haven't quite implemented that, but we have actually looked into some of those solutions because some of the business needs are very, we need to put a team together next week to start on this project, but we don't really have these skills. So we need to think about what the company needs long-term, but not forget that there are many short-term and medium-term solutions available today, especially given the gig economy structure that we can avail of. That would be my call-out given some of the business problems that have come to my team in the past 1, 1.5 years.

Stacia Garr:
When I ask you, you've mentioned kind of being involved with the broader HR function and specifically with learning as you've done this work. When you think about addressing skills broadly, who else do you think needs to be involved in that conversation?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Meaning, outside of HR?

Stacia Garr:
There could be other groups within HR, I could tell you who I might be thinking of, but I don't want to influence you, but I think both within HR and outside HR.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
So I think beyond learning and analytics, I see HR BPs as a key role, because their insight into what the business is thinking, what are the kinds of daily conversations that happen on the ground: that really helps give us a picture of what are some of the skills that we need to upskill ourselves on, so that we can have a more informed conversation with the businesses.

And also, a lot of companies, their HRBP population tends to be very tactical. So how do we move to being a more strategic input into the business rather than very operational? So, that itself was a good input for us to kind of look at what skills we need to look at in order to change.

Other than that, I think IT in general partnership with them, especially in terms of learning platforms or what do we have, where do we want to go, how can we integrate? That's really important. And I think once we have the solution, or maybe not once we have, but throughout, we need the business leaders at least to sponsor or to support. Some of the best conversations we have had was when we did these learning workshops; as a result of that learning platform launch our very visible business leaders came and addressed us and just talked about learning, and what does learning mean? And we ask them questions like, if you want to have one outcome of learning, what will it be? One of the things that repeatedly came from these business leaders was, I should be able to find what I want to learn easily—that was at the top of their mind.

The other thing, which to me resonated really well with me was people talked about learning can be just going to an orchestra or opera and listening. And to me, that's learning. So, you know, how do you look at learning and the non-work space as well? And people actually consider that very much a learning, but then that has its own measurement problems, because when we were working on the measurement, How do you actually metricize, going to the museum because that's learning?

So that has its own issues. But that was one of our eye-opening moments—when we heard business leaders talk about learning. That also really energized us to think about it in different ways. So that's important to make it successful.

Chris Pirie:
When I look at what's going on in the learning world today, there's two predominant sets of activities. One is very data-driven—the kind of work that you've been doing. How do we codify, how do we automate, how do we track? And then there's another almost, I don't know whether it's on a scale, but at the other end there's how do we build a culture? How do I create a culture where learning in my organization is something that is supported and good and encouraged. As a data person, what do you think about the culture side of things?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah. I mean, that's something we have been really thinking about hard, because this is not an easy problem to solve. And it's almost in every deck that we have created a learning culture, right? I mean, that's there.

I think the launch and the marketing of it is really important—it goes a long way in creating that culture So I would really have almost like a marketing team associated with the launch of the product, and treat it like any other product in the market. And we can see that the stronger the launch, greater the uptake in those areas, so creating that learning culture.

And then also, I think it goes down to the individual leader a lot. So I, as a manager of seven people, how much do I emphasize on development? I could have my own ways of emphasizing—in my team, we have this two-hour session, monthly development sessions. We just talk about one topic that we have either read or something that we need to upskill ourselves, and somebody presents. So I think leaders, it's up to them to create that culture within their team. So that's more of a bottom-up approach and businesses launching it, or business leaders launching it, is more of a top down approach. So between those two, it could be powerful in creating the culture. And constantly measuring it—don’t forget measurement.

Chris Pirie:
At Microsoft, what we used to say is, if it doesn't get measured, it doesn’t get done. That might be the culture link.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Yeah, exactly. And you're talking to a people analytics person, so yes, everything is measurement.

Stacia Garr:
So just starting to wrap up; are there any organizations that you admire in terms of how they're approaching skills today—folks who you've talked to that you think they're doing?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Some interesting work? I think it's the recency effect, Chris, because you mentioned Microsoft, I think some of the work they're doing, and I may be a little biased with my conversations that happened around the HR data fluency skills, so maybe not overall, but I know they have done some really good work and they have a team dedicated to it: there’s some very dedicated efforts around it.

Lloyd's Bank was another organization that we spoke to and they have done some really good work, especially the persona idea, even though their personas are completely different, but that idea actually came from my conversation with them where they had certain personas. And they made it a very fun way of identifying with the persona, and therefore going and learning certain skills because you are that persona.

I was pretty impressed with their work. And I think Unilever in general is always the leader in this, mostly because of all the stuff that I've read, I haven't personally talked to them.

Stacia Garr:
What else should we have asked you about that we didn’t?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
You know, with any initiative when it happens and when it's done, it feels like, Oh, it was wonderful, and this was all planned and everything happened as per plan. But I just want to give people a very realistic picture; there are many times where we just didn't know what we are doing, or if this is even going to launch—or when we had the framework, we had wonderful PowerPoint decks, but we didn't know how reality would look like, but it just so happened that the platform was launching at the same time.

But if that had not launched, I don't know if we would be here today with actual learning pathways, so there are a lot of coincidences. There are a lot of points in time where we didn't know what the next step was and it could have completely fallen flat and not gone anywhere.
So, you know, just keep at it and you just have to make things work as you go; it’s not always very well planned out. A year ago, we didn't know that we will be in this position today where we actually have launched pathways for six of our capabilities.

Stacia Garr:
You've shared a lot of really great information. Some folks might want to follow up and have some other questions: how can people connect with you and your work?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Definitely, you can connect with me on LinkedIn; that would be great.

Stacia Garr:
And then wrapping up, final question: we’ve done quite a bit of work on purpose over the last year, and so we like to ask all of our podcast guests a question about their personal purpose—to really just want to understand why do you do what you do? Why do you do the work you do?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Oh, that's pretty deep. I think there's this inherent need in me personally—that the need for connection with people, that's very strong. But at the same time, I think I also have an affinity for numbers, and so I think part of me is always asking but what's the numbers, what's the evidence, and what's how can you break it down, and how do you know this is true? How do you know this is not true?

So this fascination for facts and fascination for people, I think that's where I found them coming together and people analytics. And that's what I do, and ultimately, if this can make leaders make better decisions about people—if this can help an employee know what to do next in his or her career or what to learn next, you're actually improving somebody's life in the organization.

Stacia Garr:
So you're not just a scientist-practitioner, you're a scientist-humanist, if you will?

Madhura Chakrabarti:
That’s a lovely title.

Chris Pirie:
That should be a job title!

Stacia Garr:
It should be.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
Maybe that's what we call our third persona—we’ll tweak it.

Stacia Garr:
Well, thank you, Madhura, this was just wonderful; we appreciate all the really concrete examples and just sharing the details, and helping people see there's no one pathway to getting here, but it is possible.

Madhura Chakrabarti:
I really enjoyed the conversation as always, Stacia; thank you, Chris. Good to know you.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah, likewise—thanks so much!

Chris Pirie:
We are very grateful to Workday for their exclusive sponsorship of this first season of the RedThread Research podcast. Today, the world is changing faster than ever, and you can meet those changing needs with Workday; it’s one agile system that enables you to grow and re-skill your workforce. Workday is a financial, HR and planning system for a changing world.

Workday will also host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season where you can meet the team Dani, Stacia and myself, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. You can find out more information and access exclusive content at www.workday.com/skills.

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Guests

Matthew Daniel, Principal Consultant of Guild Education

DETAILS

“When software releases went from Microsoft releasing once every other year to releasing 16 times a week, you know, like all that started to happen; our ability to keep up with the world around us really started to decline.” Whatever else he is (and he is many good things), Guild Education’s Matthew Daniel is genuinely passionate about skills. Scrub that: he’s agonized about them—and he’s even more agonized about the trouble we’re storing up for ourselves as a society around them. As we find out in our hour together, he fears we’re wasting a lot of time and missing a lot of opportunity chasing the wrong metrics about them, ignoring vast swathes of the ones our workforces (especially our frontline teams) have. But his agony does lead to positivity, and we think you’ll agree with him when he says the original purpose that got so many of us into L&D will help us win through.

Follow Matthew Daniel on LinkedIn here

Find out more about Matthew and his work at Guild here

Check out some of his many independent thought leadership pieces for CLO magazine here

Webinar

Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills. 

Partner

We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

Season Sponsor

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Guests

Lisa Kay Solomon, Futures and Design at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford d.school

DETAILS

“What I introduce to are the kinds of skills that allow them to navigate ambiguity.” If that seems like urgently-needed capability you or your team to have you’re in luck, as you’re about to find out a whole lot more about why you’d need such a thing… and why you won’t find it, alas, in today’s conventional curriculum (including corporate L&D).

In the first full episode of our new RedThread podcast—our deep dive into what we’re calling capitalism’s focus on ‘The Skills Obsession’—we meet passionate educator, innovator and bestselling author Lisa Kay Solomon. Designer in Residence at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (‘the d.school’) at Stanford University, Lisa presents in her dialog with Stacia, Dani and Chris something of a masterclass in what thinking about the future actually needs to consist of—and how that feeds into her conviction that, “learning is the currency of possibility.”

Find out more about Lisa and her work here and her chosen workplace platform for her interventions, the d.school, here

Webinar

Workday will host an exclusive live webinar towards the end of the season, where you can meet the Workplace Stories team of Dani, Stacia and Chris, and join in a conversation about the future of skills and skills management. Find out more information and access content at www.workday.com/skills. 

Partner

We're also thrilled to be partnering with Chris Pirie, CEO of Learning Futures Group and voice of the Learning Is the New Working podcast. Check them both out.

Season Sponsor