HRE Moderator 0:00
And now, I will the stage to Jason Cerrato, Vice President, Talent-centered Transformation, at Eightfold AI.
Jason Cerrato 0:43
Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here and partnering with you again, and it’s wonderful to have this opportunity to partner again with Nate Paynter from Deloitte, as mentioned. My name is Jason Cerrato, the VP of Talent-centered Transformation with Eightfold, been with Eightfold for about three and a half years, and in my current role, I spend the majority of my days working with organizations that are setting out on this journey to transform this their organizations, both as a result of and with the power of AI, so really excited to have this opportunity to join forces with Nate and Deloitte Eightfold. And Deloitte are partners, and we have a Deloitte-Eightfold alliance where we work in partnership together. Last year we had multiple sessions where we addressed a lot of the research coming from Deloitte in this area. And one such session was a session like this, where I was able to join Nate for a conversation that occurred around tech talent specifically, and that was held on October 1, which is not that long ago, but seems like ages ago, and today, we’re here to talk about AI automation and agility and rethinking tech talent for a competitive advantage. So with that introduction, I’ll hand it over to Nate to introduce himself. Thank you for joining me again. Nate, looking forward to the discussion today.
Nate Paynter 2:08
Always, always love the discussions that we have, Jason, and it’s a privilege to be here with you. Thanks for hosting me. Thanks for having me back, looking forward to continue where we continuing where we left off in October. Quick introduction of myself. So Nate Paynter, and I’m a principal in our human capital practice at Deloitte. My focus is I lead our tech talent consulting practice. And what that means is we’re taking the world’s number one human capital consulting practice, and we are pointing it at the issues that our CIOs and CTOs of organizations face in partnership with CHROs and other talent leaders. And so that is really my task, is to help us stay ahead of the market and help companies with some of the biggest challenges that they’re facing right now. And one of the things that I love being able to do is, is address and have these dialogs with with you and others around things like this topic of agility that you we have on the front of this as a header. Wow, you mentioned it. The things that are shifting since, since October, pretty great. And the amount of agility that that we’re all having to flex is pretty fascinating. So looking forward to the discussion today, and meetings like this and discussions like this are powerful because we are designing the future with every step we take.
Jason Cerrato 3:24
Right? We’ve talked about the future of work for some time now, but we are actually living in it. So the chance to get together, share ideas, have discussions, is what’s really powerful, to collaborate with thought leaders and understand cutting edge research and best practices and what organizations are doing on this journey, because we are building this step by step together. So matter of fact, you know, Nate is dialing in from on location working with organizations today in Detroit, dialing in on location from working with organizations and having discussions in Chicago. And now we’re here, broadcasting live to this audience. So we’re really happy to have you here with us for the hour, for the hour. We plan to talk about this agenda around aligning workforce planning with business goals, leveraging AI and automation to close skill gaps and upskilling and re skilling the future of tech talent. We’ll also follow the chat if there’s any questions along the way, and hopefully leave some time at the end for Q and A, we’ve already had a couple questions submitted, one of which was, will this be recorded and shared after the event? And yes, that will occur. And also, I believe there is a Resources tab available through the On24 module, and if not, they’ll also be shared as a follow up email. We will include some of the research that we’ll be referencing, as well as a link to the previous session that Nate and I did in October, in the event that you’re joining us today for the first time. So with that, we will kick it off. And one of the things we like to do is we want to kind of understand where people are in this conversation and get a kind of a read of the room. So we will have a couple polls that we will kick off along the way. So stay close to your mouse, or whatever device you use to be able to respond and interact with us. And as a result of that, we’re going to start the conversation today with our first poll. And our first poll is what is your organization’s biggest challenge in securing tech talent. And as you can see here, we’ve provided four options, and we’ll give you a few minutes to go in and select your answer to this poll. And I love this because then we get to see kind of the results in real time. And it’s always a bit of a horse race. But Nate, as you look at this question, and you think of the options here and the conversations you’re having, what are you expecting to see when we look at the results in a minute?
Nate Paynter 6:08
I don’t want to lead the audience here, but I’ll tell you, one of the biggest topics that is still front of mind is the topic of this overall session, which is really around adapting workforce strategies to emerging tech including AI, I think that’s a super prevalent topic that I’m addressing very actively with a lot of companies, a lot of our clients at Deloitte. But the interesting thing to me, Jason, is also how much that really ties into the skills gaps and if we’re doing it right and how it’s really identifying, then how do we really retain the top talent that we have, knowing that we’re shifting essentially the work and what’s required. So I’ll be curious to see how the audience reacts here.
Jason Cerrato 6:55
Yeah, I didn’t think that I’d be asking you to lead the witness a little bit, because I believe it’s all of the things based off of the conversations that I’ve been having in understanding what leaders have on their plate. So let’s see. We have about half of the audience that has submitted an answer at this point. Let’s take a peek so it looks like we have skills gap and lack of qualified candidates. 15% retaining top talent in a competitive market, almost 30% adapting workforce strategies to emerging technologies, close to 40% so that jumps out to the lead and then building a diverse and agile talent pipeline, ties with skill gaps and qualified candidates. I think this rings true. And again, part of this is adaptability. Part of this is transformation. A big part of this is understanding what’s needed in a time of great uncertainty, and driving what that word means when we talk about agility. One of the things that I’m interested in is always reading the leading thinking coming out of Deloitte. And having done a session in a series with your team last year, we talked a lot about, you know, the 2024 human capital trends. Well, I’m very grateful that we’re having this chance to meet today, kind of on the heels of the rollout of the 2025 Trends Report, one of the things that I picked up during my initial read of the report was this word or phrase, and I’m not sure if you coined it, but I’m going to be using it state agility, which is the combination of stability and agility. How do you create an environment that is stable for the business and stable for the associates and the workers, but also allows for this agile nature of dealing with uncertainty, creating flexibility, being able to shift and react and respond with all of the things that are on a leader’s plate and organ organizations plate and uncertainty in the market. So I picked up on that phrase right away, state agility. Do you want to kind of share where that came from, or your thoughts around that? Nate?
Nate Paynter 9:14
Yeah, I wish I would have coined it, but I am not the one that coined it. Jason, but it is. I think it’s absolutely prevalent in the market right now, and it’s one of those things that we’ve been kind of navigating. I would say internally, how do we get our workforces to become more agile? How do we get them to be able to adapt to the changing business needs that we have and then be able to deliver things faster and with more of a value focus, which is core to a lot of the principles we’ve seen with Agile. And the Agile Manifesto that was was launched years ago. At this point, hard to say that, but it really has been a while now. The fascinating thing now is, especially with all the volatility that’s in the market, is we still need people to be agile. We need them to be more agile than ever, but we also need to make sure that we’re creating some form of stability for people, because everything else is so volatile around and you know, one of the things that I would say volatility is kind of my word of the day. You may hear me use it quite a bit because I think about things like, we’ve got a really volatile, I would say, overall tech talent marketplace. We’ve got people moving in and out of different positions. We also have a, I would say, volatile, current kind of way of working. And then with AI coming to the forefront. We’re getting everyone is trying to figure out exactly how AI is going to disrupt work, and therefore disrupt the workforce. And that is creating volatility for managers and employees alike. And then we’re seeing volatility, of course, with, you know, the work, I would say, the overall talent market today, and I think a lot of that’s being influenced even by, you know, some of the government actions that are happening right now, and uncertainty that’s happening there. So it’s impossible to ignore all of that. And so I think figuring out how you can create the agility that’s productive agility, while creating some stability for people to get work done and drive the results of the business that really, truly need that stability really becomes a key anchor. So I look forward to people reading a little bit more about that, but it’s a very prevalent topic.
Jason Cerrato 11:30
I have. I have two thoughts on that, and I kind of reflect back on my career. I’ve been an HR leader, I’ve been an industry analyst. Now I’m with a vendor helping develop HR tech. So I’ve seen this conversation from kind of three different sides. And when I was an HR leader, I was part of a transformation team doing transformation work myself, you know, back in the late 2000s and during the teens, and that was about the move from on prem to the cloud, and when we were talking about transformation, then I think a lot of the focus, at least in my experience, was around the data. It was around understanding how to break the hold and management of the data, to free it and release it to the line leaders and the business leaders and to employees to create faster response times and empower the business lines and empower your workforce with data. I think now the transformation that we’re going through is not around empowering data, it’s around empowering talent. And how do we free up some of the binds for how we’ve packaged and organized talent to create agility, to free up skills and talent in your workforce, to respond to work, whether it’s unplanned, whether it’s unforeseen, whether you’re responding to the market, whether you’re pivoting to competition in your industry. How do we break away from all of the rigidity in the traditional structures for how we got here to create this agility with talent, the way we were doing a decade ago, with agility around data. So you can tell me if you think I’m wrong on that, but from my lived experience, that’s what I see. And then the other part about this is, you know, as we look at this slide here, aligning workforce planning with business goals. When I think about workforce planning, a lot of that comes down to some of the topics of the day around board design and work design and what, not only what is the talent I need, but how do I create an organizational model that allows me to create that movement. One of the jobs I held was head of talent acquisition and workforce planning, and in that role, I also had a secondary role as an HR business partner to a CIO, and they said to me, Jason, we just got head count approval to add 15 additional heads, but I’d like to have them be new roles and new profiles to help me build the CIO org of the future, and I’m not entirely sure what that looks like. Can you help me develop what that is? Because there are probably elements of who’s on the team today that would be a part of that, but there’s probably a lot of skills and a lot of capabilities that we’re not even thinking of that we need to consider as we think of this org of the future. And when I put those two stories together from my experience and some of the conversations I’ve been having having, I just think how we’ve done this historically is changing drastically. So even when you think about or design, there’s been a lot of discussion around you know, I read that Ethan Molly book last year, co intelligence, and I read it after I saw a report that he wrote from the MIT Sloan press around the impact that large language models and generative AI will have on the org chart. And he was saying, You need to stop thinking of it simply as a tool. And what does it mean when it’s a teammate, and how do you plan for that, and how do you design for that? And there’s a lot of research that’s going on now around we’ve gone from organizations that were shaped like pyramids to organizations that were shaped really thin and tall like trees, to organizations that got flipped upside down, like an upside down pyramid, to now things that are shaped more like diamonds, where you have some lower level positions being automated, right? And then you have this more flat, horizontal organization with a lot of work being done in the middle. And I think that brings us to this conversation around what does that middle look like, and in the middle is where the managers reside, and what is that kind of need and role and changing dynamic of managers driving an organization that’s built very differently. So I know you have some some thoughts around that, so I kind of wanted to get your your take there, because I think the role of managers, and what they’re asking for and what they’re looking for is going to be very different.
Nate Paynter 16:04
Yeah, and I’ve got a couple points that I’ll bring in from our trends report here in just a bit. Jason on managers, because I do think, I mean, there’s a tremendous I would say, you know, I use the term as a consultant, I use the term unlock quite a bit. And I think there really is an unlock for organizations to think about what we’re really asking of managers. We’re actually putting more and more on their plate. And I’ll talk a little bit around what that’s starting to look like, but there’s so much to your point that is rolling up. I’ve been talking about it as rolling up to the responsibility of managers so that workers can get their individual job and tasks done. But if you play that out even in a different way, like I want to go to your workforce planning point and kind of tie a couple points together, at least from my lens, we’re no longer. It was probably even a year ago, two years ago, when we talked about workforce planning, we were primarily focused on, you need to open how you’re thinking about planning, not just to your current employees, but your overall workforce. So we need to think about this ecosystem of workers, but we were still really fundamentally talking about human beings, and we were talking about using external vendors. And right, everything was gig economy. And I’m not saying that’s not important. It remains very, very valid today, but now we’ve introduced a third layer there. And so when we start talking about advanced planning today, we’re talking about, how do we think about either machines or bots, with workers, with external workforce, and how do we think about shifting work and planning the work that needs to be done across all of three of those? And the challenge is, when we haven’t established some level of maturity in our planning organization or agility even agility is probably even a better term, then starting to add these new dimensions, becomes more complex, and it becomes harder and harder to do, because we haven’t really built the core muscle. I’m seeing that very regularly right now. It’s fascinating, because if I go back to your starting point of where you’re going, there we all do and all companies that I work with do workforce planning. It’s just whether we’ve really invested in it, and we’re doing things that are really advancing and trying things, but we are looking at what workforce do I need? It’s Are we being proactive? Are we being reactive? Are we rethinking work? And one of the points that I’m seeing very regularly right now, and you hit on it briefly, is this focus on experiences. So when I go into planning, we’re now not just looking at a planning around, how do I best allocate the resources and the skills, but we’re adding experiences to that skill gap, because in many cases, I may have skills that we can identify, that we can document, but have I applied those skills into an experience or a situation that is similar to what I need to apply them to in my new role, in what I’m required to do tomorrow. And then, if I get it right, what I’m doing tomorrow is shifting in a quarter or two quarters, and I may be doing something different. And so when I think about agility before agility of workforce, it really is, we’re going back to we’re breaking down the role, because the role has been too broad of a topic. It’s got a lot that’s built into it. There’s a lot that’s defined in the role for simplicity and for today’s tomorrow’s world today, which is really happening today, we’ve got to be able to decompose that role into these experiences, into these skills, if we want to best allocate our workforce, and if we really want to get the work done of the future.
Jason Cerrato 19:55
So when you and I agree with you 100% so when you look at this slide and you’re talking about this expanded view of experience that you mentioned, and kind of the expectations of leaders and what’s needed. Part of this is, as we’re redesigning the org, the work is changing at the same time, and it’s not just about the experience or the capability, it’s about the application of that experience in context, right? And that’s where you get at if you have a tool that’s automating some of the transactional work that we may have waited heavily in the past and that’s coming off your plate, the work that’s remaining that’s amplified is the application of it, the judgment of it, the kind of business you know, criticality of it, and what does it mean for critical thinking and or sometimes maybe even questioning the automation that’s presented to you, right? And I think that was a theme that came out of the 2024, of Deloitte research around amplifying the human right. But I think now we’re seeing that at an at an added level.
Nate Paynter 21:02
I think that’s absolutely right, we’re getting more and more finite with how we’re going to look to apply human skills and experiences. And so that view of experiences, the view of if you have 10 years doing a role that has a predisposed view of what that experience you’ve created is that’s different than actually looking at what were the experiences you were creating, and how did you really apply those key capabilities, what functional and technical skills did you bring? What leadership skills did you bring? Right, if I really want to push this to the next level, so I you know the real focus here in our trends report is doubling down on we need to continue to challenge ourselves on how we’re talking about experiences and what you get out of those experiences, not just assume that by playing a role or doing work for a period of time, naturally grants you or gravitates to giving you those experiences.
Jason Cerrato 22:00
In the TA world, we’ve talked about experience versus relevant experience. Now I think we’re talking about kind of application of experience, right?
Jason Cerrato 22:09
So with that, I do want to get back to the audience a little bit and ask another poll question. So if you can go back to your mouse or your device. Where do you see AI making the biggest impact on your workforce strategy? So we’ve talked a little bit about planning, we’ve talked a little bit about the org model, we’ve talked a little bit about experience and requirements. We’ve talked a little bit about how the work is changing. Here you see identifying skill gaps for future needs, enhancing hiring and recruitment decisions, improving internal mobility and upskilling for your existing workforce, automating HR workflows for HR efficiency, or expanding your dataset to monitor industry trends around, how are you competing and what’s happening in Your environment, and how are you broadening your view? So here we have a couple more options. It’ll be interesting to see you know which which horse runs to the front of the pack here, but definitely all things that are top of mind in the discussions that I’ve been having as I’ve been traveling to round tables and conferences and meeting with leaders.
Nate Paynter 23:23
What are your thoughts there? Nate, I hope that we get a mix. I really hope we get a blend from from the group, because I agree. I see all of these topics as front and center, and there are tremendous opportunities. I think we’re moving very quickly from use cases that are, you know, starting to actually build out capability and advanced capability to things that are being tested and really truly are starting to add more significant value, and proving out that value in every one of these key areas.
Jason Cerrato 23:56
All right, I’m gonna advance, and we’ll start to see the results here. So we have identifying skill gaps in forecasting future needs. 27% enhancing hiring and recruiting decisions. 10% improving internal mobility, 18% automating HR workflows. 43% expanding your data set. Got a zero, but I think that may be maybe underlying or a given, but here automating HR workflows for greater efficiency. Do I Do you think that’s kind of an underlying requirement to address the options that were in our first poll? Or why do you think we’re seeing that?
Nate Paynter 24:36
I personally love that we’re seeing this audience, and those of you that are that are on the line today, really looking at those automation and efficiency opportunities. I think Jason that there’s we’re seeing agents and right we’re making this pivot right now, a freely really, from, you know, generative AI to agentic AI. And I think that that likely is driving a lot of that shift in workflow, and we’re starting to see more and more use of agents, easier to acquire in the market, easier to build, and there is a lot of opportunity for us to take some of the transactional work that we’re doing and access and visibility to data and really putting it into the hands of AI to make us better at our jobs. So I would imagine that’s part of the driver that’s happening there.
Jason Cerrato 25:30
I agree, but I also think in the conversations I’m having, I’m more on the HR side. Talent transformation to truly be transformative. Needs to operate like digital transformation. And digital transformation really achieved the greatest value when the whole organization was in and the whole organization was involved, and it wasn’t just a pocket program in one area, or it wasn’t just an effort for it, right? So talent transformation operates very similarly, and as people start to understand what we’re actually doing and designing in different ways. Every part of HR is on the table to be transformed or addressed or looked at, and at the same time, HR teams are often being asked to do more with less. So I think as they’re trying to fully realize what transformation is different from potentially, you know, optimizing processes, they’re two different things, and then trying to accomplish all of it. They’re also looking at, what are the tools I have to help me address the need to make these changes? I think that’s a big part underlying this. Because when we’re having HR discussions, it doesn’t matter what the topic is or what the focus is. It’s almost as if every part of the process comes into the conversation because it’s all connected and systemic.
Nate Paynter 26:52
I mean, it’s a great point. It’s a great point. You know? What I also love about seeing some of these results come through is we really do like we’re seeing more to your point of the complexity of AI, and so, you know, as we’re starting to look at work, that’s shifting, and the focus of how AI really is changing the world. It’s driving really a lot more simplicity in the way we work, but it’s also driving a lot more complexity, just like we were talking about the complexity of experiences and skills, and so the complexity that is required of talent leaders, talent managers to really figure out how to get all of that right in this really volatile world I mentioned I would use that a few times. I think is, is, you know, it’s super dynamic, and it’s requiring a lot, just like it’s requiring a lot of our managers. But to your point, one of the great thing that’s that’s there, is we also have at our fingertips, I think, more tools and technologies and AI solutions that can help us to manage that complexity, if we’re intelligent, and how we’re using them and how we’re applying them. So I’m excited about what that may bring you. Know, complexities, creating a new requirement, and then an AI is required, creating a new requirement, but AI is also providing solutions to solve for that requirement, and and we’re going to continue to see the dynamicism.
Jason Cerrato 28:21
So as we talk about that leveraging AI and automation to close some of these skill gaps, I think that is part of the uncertainty or discomfort that people are going through right now because they’re trying to move fast and methodically at the same time, there’s this. I was reading an article today around balancing the fear of missing out versus the fear of messing up right and really understanding kind of how to apply these new tools, how to address the work while the work is also changing. So I think this goes into a big part of why planning is such a hot topic, why using AI as a tool to analyze the data is increasingly important, but also why that role of the manager continues to change and shift. You know, one of my Learn learned, one of my learnings in my in my experience, was when we were doing this, back in the olden days, still using traditional methods and email and paper and pencil and PowerPoints, and not yet, not yet AI enabled. We would roll out these initiatives or these programs, and then we would often go to the managers to say, Okay, here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we’re offering, here’s what we’d like you to do for your your workforce, here’s what we’d like you to do for your team. And you know, sometimes that step is skipped, and it’s crucially important, but the other part is sometimes we’re asking managers to participate or deliver something that wasn’t done for them, or that they haven’t taken part in yet, or that they’re still getting comfortable with. So I think because all of the paint is still wet, all of the glue is still drying, there’s a big part of kind of this uncertainty, uncomfortableness, as people are trying to go fast and methodically at the same time, which maybe is where that st agility phrase comes from, creating a state, stable environment, while trying to deliver and develop agility.
Nate Paynter 30:29
Yeah, well, and Jason, it brings up another topic, right that’s prevalent that I’m seeing right now, pretty actively in conversation. And I would love to say that there’s like a magic formula out there, but I think it’s going to be one we all have to solve together, which is, how do we create those experiences when a lot of the you know, entry level work roles, you were talking about the diamond shape, and if we have fewer people in those entry level roles, then how are we Creating those experiences to give people that experience set right, and it really is going to be a challenge. I think we’re all going to be faced with now, what I would argue is we’re not really faced with it yet, and the reason we’re not is, I think we’re all still trying to figure out exactly how to move or what’s going to where that efficiency is going to come from in those roles. So I haven’t seen us move so much to where we’re in the diamond shape, yet. I see more discussion around we’re going to there’s a prediction that we’ll get there, and when we get there, that creates some nervousness and some tension as to how we’re going to then navigate that and create that middle layer with confidence, while the lower layer is maybe shrinking. So it’s something that we’ve got to navigate, I think together, because I don’t know that we’ve got a single solution for it, and I think that’s why so many organizations are looking at different ways of approaching their learning and development programs.
Jason Cerrato 31:46
They’re looking at different ways of creating strategic and intentional collaboration. Right? At the same time, we’re giving people tools that make it much easier to find answers on their own and kind of work independently. We’re also removing a lot of those historical steps for how people have learned on the job and gained experience, right? So there’s this need for collaboration, especially between the expert and the novice. And one of the things that I’ve been hearing in some of the research is how AI and generative AI especially can help kind of accelerate the expert, but also potentially be a distraction and a delay to the novice. So you need that collaboration to be able to provide some of those kind of amplified humanistic experiences around critical thinking, judgment, questioning, application, right? So it’s not just taking what you’re given without question. It’s being able to understand what does this mean in context, right? And create an opportunity to learn on the job in a new way, as the organization takes a different shape, and we don’t have those steps or ladders we’ve used to learn in the past.
Nate Paynter 33:07
Yeah, well, and so going to each of those points, I fully agree with what you’re talking about, Jason, and going to those points and even thinking, then, okay, how do we start to move and where are we going to get the value? Value becomes a really key component as to how we’re even going to achieve that. One of the fascinating things that we’re seeing this again, is in our 2025, human capital trends, this was one of the points, right, we really have continued to see that one of the biggest reasons that that companies are struggling to be able to move their organization to a machine worker, AI and human interface is because we haven’t really defined what value we’re expecting out of it. We haven’t defined a base case, a baseline for how we’re even going to measure what’s being done today. And we’re not evaluating what the work is that’s fundamentally shifting. We’re still, to an extent, in many cases, in a little bit of an experimental phase. Everyone is trying things and giving access to technologies and tools, but we’re still not intentional in the ways that we’re really kind of leveraging that and using that, and I still believe that we’ve got to get more intentional about how we’re going to do that. Now, in order to do that, we have to be educated. We’ve got to continue to bring ideas right and we’ve got to understand and be able to evaluate what’s going to work for us. But that right now is still pretty big void, I think, in what we’re seeing in a lot of these cases, we’re seeing the access to technology which is moving at a faster pace than ever before, but we’re still really struggling to say, if I apply this technology, what am I expecting to get out of it, and what is even going to be the greater value that I get when I scale that solution, as opposed to just pilot or test it. And so we really need to be more intentional, I think, is one of the real keys in how we’re going to get that otherwise. You know, some of these points right, which can be both scary and daunting and frightening and also exciting, don’t really come to fruition, or they don’t come to fruition for certain companies and other companies end up with more of a future focused and future balanced structure and way of working and workforce that they’re able to leverage.
Jason Cerrato 35:30
Yeah, I 100% agree, and I think a big part of that is around creating opportunities to learn and experiment. In the 2024 report, the Deloitte research team talked about it as creating digital playgrounds. When I was doing HRD training in my background, we talked about creating learning laboratories, and, you know, this safe environment to experiment without judgment and to fail, but fail with purpose. So you learn, but also fail in an environment where there’s some psychological safety. I think that’s a key part of experimenting with some of this. I think a key part is empowering managers to lead, so that managers are kind of on the front line of experimenting with these tools, so they know what they do and how to kind of use them with their team. But then, as I look at this slide here that you shared, it also comes down to understanding what the technology is capable of, and how that aligns to the business case, right, and how that aligns to the metrics and the measurement of value. And the organizations that I’ve seen that have been successful on adopting these technologies, or have been successful at getting through the various stages of their journey have really been attuned to a business case, and maybe weren’t trying to solve for everything. They were trying to solve for a specific thing, see what they learned as a result of that, and then from those learnings, what can they attack and add next and kind of iterate as they go, versus trying to have a perfectly planned project from the very beginning for what it’s going to look like four or five years from now?
Nate Paynter 37:17
Yeah, yeah. I absolutely agree with that, and I think we’re still going to see, you know what you were starting with, the digital playgrounds, the sandboxes, the places for people to experiment pretty regularly. I think what we’re now seeing is more of a request that we’re starting to move out of the sandbox right? We’re making that next level evolution. And so it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to have those learning opportunities. It means that we need to now take some of the learnings and apply them and start to see results. And so I do think there’s a great evolution that we’re talking about here. The fascinating thing, of course, is while that was 2024 trends, that was still somewhat of a prediction of where we were going to go in 24 right, and where we were going to be going in 25 I think we’re seeing the acceleration of that. So there, there hasn’t been time to say we’ll build these, you know, places to play, digital playgrounds, and then we’re going to, over time, move to value based on the speed of all this optionality and what’s happening out there. It’s very quickly. We’ve talked about about a six month to a single year window of digital playgrounds now moving into we need to get something out of the playground and and that’s fascinating to me. That’s, I mean, we’re talking about paces that we haven’t seen before the and that’s another struggle I think we’re really seeing in in organizations, again, excitement and very daunting tasks to try to get those the benefit out of the investment.
Jason Cerrato 38:59
And I think that speaks to the diagram at the bottom of the slide around how these concepts are changing. And you’re kind of reframing the mindset automation to augmentation, output to outcome, predictability to potential. We often talk about how you need to think, manage and measure differently. And I know when Deloitte joined us last year at our customer event cultivate the Deloitte team, talked on stage about how when you’re applying these things, you can’t necessarily use the same measures and constructs of what you thought success looked like.
Nate Paynter 39:50
You have to understand how the data is used, how the technology is different, and then create potentially, a new set of measurements and a new value framework to try to get at ROI and impact. And Jason, we’re going to see that continuing to evolve. I mean, I talk about the pace of change here, and if I just play out a scenario for you, we did some initial analysis. It was really eight months ago, and we said, for a lot of tech workers, the majority of our tech worker, right tech workforce, that we could find about 40 to 45% efficiency in Gen AI solutions. So essentially, helping those people to be to be able to do, you know, 40 to 45% more with the current population. Great. It’s wonderful when we started to apply and build test cases about that with that same workforce and really kind of prove that out. We actually found is we as humans, were kind of holding back on the metrics. We were seeing 70% improvements in things like coding and things like building out product roadmaps and building out user stories. And so we were accelerating at rates that the initial data actually said we could do. But when we as humans, said, Hey, how much are we willing to sign up for? We were pairing it back to 45% it’s fascinating to me, because what we’re going to see now is, if we really do employ and right, I don’t think anybody is quite there. There are probably some very advanced tech companies that are we start to employ that to the tech workforce, and we say, Okay, now we’re seeing that 70% productivity, the fundamental roles of product managers, the fundamental roles of engineers evolve, and all of a sudden, the next wave that comes after that is, how do you take that evolved role and drive the next layer of machine support for the evolved role? And we’re going to get into this continuum, which, again, I’m excited about what it will look like. We don’t know, because we don’t know what the evolved world is yet, but it’s going to be a really, you know, I guess, academically exciting exercise, a little bit of a daunting exercise to manage. And again, I think it goes to, you know, the group that’s on this call right now. We’ve got a lot ahead of us in how we’re going to navigate all of that.
Jason Cerrato 42:05
So I think that transitions into the next segment here, around upskilling, re Skilling and the future of tech talent. So how do we get from here to there? And I think part of it is understanding a little bit of skills, skill adjacencies, how the work is changing, but also changing the timelines around how we evaluate this work, that this needs to be almost constant and iterative. And, you know, being in the TA space, I remember we talked about how hard it was just to update our job descriptions, right? And now we’re talking about work changing and tools changing and measurements changing and outputs changing almost constantly.
Jason Cerrato 42:50
Yeah. So part of this is, not only does that lead to a different talent profile and a different way of working, it needs it leads to a different way of managing, and in some cases, you may need tools to help you do that, and management turns into governance, right? What insights are you gaining? What are you learning? Are you questioning it? Are you agreeing? And then, how are you putting that into action? Right?
Nate Paynter 43:16
I don’t know how companies are going to be able to keep up Jason, without thinking about the tool sets to kind of evaluate skills, experiences and individuals. And I think that’s a big piece. As we start to move to personalization, we start to move to very individually focused jobs that rely on something that you know, a few people have done now, ultimately, we’ll be able to scale some of that faster, but when we’re starting to launch jobs, we’re going to need new ways to think about the people that we have, what the job requirement is. And it may be a short term job, it may not be this long term job, with job architecture that we are expecting is going to, you know, we build once and it holds for 10 years. Some of these things are going to be things that hold for months, if that, we need to get work done, and we need very specific expertise to do it, and I really think to do that manually, right, without the help of analytics and machines to show us where people are and where data is and how to navigate that is, to an extent, a fool’s errand. I think it’s going to be extremely difficult for companies to keep up with, and I do think it will be, to an extent, a requirement, that it’s required to manage the business. It’s also going to be a requirement that’s going to be required and expected of our workforce.
Jason Cerrato 44:43
So I think that brings us to this theme that, you know, I’ve been alluding to, which is the importance of the manager in this but also how that role is changing. And I love the provocative question here, do we still need managers? And if so, how should they spend their time? I think we still need them, but I think it’s a question of how they spend their time, how it’s applied, and how the work is changing. But you can, you can tell me that question.
Nate Paynter 45:11
I fully agree. I fully agree. I actually in in one of the things I believe that we’re going to need to do this goes to the experiences and skills. I think we need to evaluate how we’re looking at our managers differently. And I really do fundamentally believe that managers are going to be required now, can we take some of the weight and the challenges off of our managers and do things in a different way? I think we’re going to have to re look at that as we’re re looking at work itself. And I want to play that out, play that forward here in just a minute. What actually makes me nervous about some of the data, right again, from our from our 2025, human capital Trends report, is this point of 42% fewer positions being posted. I think that’s really triggering. You know, do we still need managers? But it makes me nervous that we would try to take away any of those roles, because what we’re really also seeing is this increased expectation of what managers are doing. I think we’re putting more and more weight on managers plates, and what I’m seeing is, in many cases, we’re seeing managers that aren’t prepared, because the expectations of what we want them to be prepared for are significantly greater. And in many cases, it is a pretty ill to form, or Ill formed job description. You are there to manage whatever is required of a particular function, including now the internal workforce, the external workforce, a very dynamic, changing set of expectations, new priorities popping up, left and right, that are driving fundamental value that often now is rolling up to a C suite like we talked about on our Last call in October. And that expectation now is putting more and more pressures on managers. They’re not being trained or prepared or given the tools to actually do that. So we’ve got people that are still trying to take a learning of I was doing the work now i managing multiple people doing the work, and we’re asking them to actually accelerate and become leaders beyond people managers, and I think that’s one of the fundamental challenges that we have, is because we’re putting all of those, all of this complexity, down to our managers, and expecting them to have an answer To all of it is one of the biggest challenges and conundrums I think we’re going to face over the next at least a year, is how to how do we manage that better?
Jason Cerrato 47:47
And as I’m looking at the way this slide is designed, and the from to on the bottom, again, stability to agility, control to empowerment, predictability to potential, this seems like the operationalization of a lot of the thinking that came out of last year’s report. As everything starts to get a little clarity and we get a little further along in the journey, but I’ve been working in the HR space for over 25 years, and for the entirety of those 25 years, we’ve always talked about the importance of the first line managers right now, it’s the role is changing, the work is changing, the profile is changing, the skills are changing. So it’s not just addressing that work as we traditionally known it, it’s now addressing that work in a completely new way, using completely new tools, potentially for a completely different purpose, right?
Jason Cerrato 48:43
And potentially managing and govern a workforce. And we’ve been talking about a blended workforce of full time equivalent and gig workers and contractors. Now we’re potentially talking about agents.
Nate Paynter 48:56
Yes, yes, yes, it is. It’s a completely different in dynamic proposition that our managers are facing. And to your point, Jason, when we start to look at all those words that are kind of in the bottom center right, stability to agility, predictability to potential, I mean, that’s really what’s at the core of all of our of our 2025 trends report is building on last year and talking about the tensions that are really out there that are forcing us to take kind of an existing perspective of what we need of our people, and thinking about what’s the future requirement of of those, those individuals, in this case, the managers. If you flip ahead one slide, Jace, I do want to hit a little bit on some of that complexity, right? I do love the notion, right of you know, if we think about the manager role, what are we really asking of them? One of the things that’s fascinating, we’ve tried to roll this up and talk about all of the requirements. I actually think this is still a simplified view. And if we took all of this and we really broke it down into what they have, what you have to think about as a manager to be successful on a day to day basis. Each of these boxes has a number of sub boxes, and we start to break down a lot of how do I even measure my time? It even takes a reasonable manager to not get overwhelmed by it, right? Historically, I think we would have people that you would give them a set of things that they needed to accomplish, and they would say, Okay, I’ve got my suite of work that I need to do, and I can kind of predict out what my day will be. Now you have to have a level of managing ambiguity and just being able to solve for whatever is being thrown at you, and that could be a sit down meeting with the CEO of your company to explain exactly what your product team is developing, if you’re working in the tech world that may be on the list that was never on the list five years ago. So when I really look at this, I think there is a lot we need to be able to provide this group of people with tools. As I mentioned, I do think we’ve got to rethink a little bit of what is the a lot, I say, a little bit a lot of of how we’re setting up these managers to be successful with the expectations on them and then the tools that are provided. And I want to hit on one other point that I’d love to get your thoughts on it, which is, you know, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with leaders, and there’s been this is the pinch point that I’m seeing regularly within significant number of organizations, and they’re saying my managers are not performing. I’m not getting what I need out of them to effectively move my business forward, particularly with tech managers. And the fascinating thing to me that we’ve started to have a dialog around is, well, most of these people are not new to your organization. While hiring may be down a little bit, a lot of the managers have accelerated into their roles at certain points of time, which means we as leaders have promoted them, expecting that they can perform, or we’re managing them and not telling them they’re underperforming. But there’s something that’s a really big disconnect right now that I’m seeing in the world of us, having leaders that are not satisfied with that performance, but they’re also contributing to something that is not allowing them to get the performance out of those managers, and I think a lot of that is the tooling and the expectations.
Jason Cerrato 52:28
Yeah, I think when we ask a lot of managers and we continue to put more on their plate, I always say, how are we making that easier, and what tools are we giving them, what training are we giving them, but also the success profile of what got them through the organization, to get them to be a manager, is also changing for what that work is now, and for what the team and what the work the team is doing underneath them that they’re managing. So even the tools that they know, the tool that they’ve used to be successful, aren’t necessarily the recipe for how the work is getting done underneath them, how the work is going to get done, for what they need to guide or govern. So part of this is it’s not just more faster, right? It’s different, right? So how do we how do we train, think, identify, acknowledge, and then execute in a way where maybe it’s the same people with better tools and better training. Maybe it’s a different profile.
Nate Paynter 53:27
I love that. I absolutely love that. I love that notion of it, getting people to think that instead of just challenging it, it’s are we even asking the right things? Is it different? What is, what is the world look like today and what will it look like tomorrow?
Jason Cerrato 53:43
And I think, I think it’s increasingly important as we look at the demographic shifts and changes where there will be a shortage of workers at the same time, we are automating work, so there’s a mix in the workforce. But we also have heard from the research, there are fewer people raising their hand to want to manage people. So also, not only do we have fewer people to pick from, we have fewer people to pick from that want the role. So now you really need to be clear on what the role is, what it requires, and what success is going to look like.
Nate Paynter 54:16
And what I would also argue is that takes away a lot of the the people that you can mentor as a manager, right? Because there’s less of an interest that I’m creating followership of somebody that could start to carry maybe some of the load that’s on my plate. If we get individuals who say, I don’t want to manage people I just want to do my job, just give me the tools to do my specific role within the job, and now it’s up to the manager to pull all those things together and make sure that they’re the team holds. You’re adding more and more pressure to them, not alleviating it’s it really is going to be dynamic.
Jason Cerrato 54:54
So I think this is why I love to partner with you and kind of get what’s coming from the research from Deloitte, and what your thinking is and the conversations you’re having, and then, you know, the people that I’ve been meeting with, because all of this is changing. You know, right before us and with every day that we wake up and go to work, there’s something new to either learn, address, understand or discover, which is why sessions like this to kind of share some of these findings and kind of give people some provocative things to think about are so important with that we have one last poll for the audience that I want to offer here, as the role of managers evolves, what changes Are your organizations making to support them, providing more leadership development and coaching programs, redefining the manager roles, leveraging AI and automation to offload some of those administrative burdens, enhancing collaboration between HR and IT to better forecast and address skills. Or we haven’t made significant changes yet, but plan to in the future, and hopefully, maybe that’s why you joined us today. If the folks that are still here with us can take a few minutes and provide some of their thinking here, again, I think it’s not a it’s not a one solution, answer, it’s a little bit of an all of the above, but it’d be interesting to get them read from the group.
Nate Paynter 56:19
Yeah, yeah, and I agree with that, Jason, I don’t know how we can it. We can do all the leadership development and coaching programs, and we do need to amplify those, but if we’re not also thinking about the role and setting those expectations and redefining that role, I think we’ll be in trouble.
Jason, I just want to thank you again for for having me on it’s always it’s always wonderful to talk with you and share thoughts and share perspectives. And so thanks again for hosting me today.
Jason Cerrato 56:55
I always appreciate the opportunity to partner with you. I was just scanning the Q&A. So for the sake of time, let’s look at the responses here and have a little close out to our final poll as the role of managers evolve. Here were the answers providing more leadership and development. 29% redefining manager roles. 11% leveraging AI and automation. 25% enhancing collaboration between HR and it almost 5% we haven’t made significant changes yet, but plan to in the future. 29% so we have a tie between some that are already putting in leadership and coaching programs and some that know something needs to be done, but they’re investigating a path forward. So I think both of those are at least promising, and hopefully, through this conversation today, you understand the need to start thinking about this. And like I always say, think, manage and measure differently, but I love this kind of term of st agility, creating a stable environment to drive agility going forward. So if you can take some things away, that may be one to kind of think about as you’re putting together programming for your organization. Any closing thoughts Nate before I hand it back?
Nate Paynter 58:15
No, I will. My one closing thought is just, I actually love how much I agree. I love how much people are investing in the leadership development and coaching programs. I’m not surprised that we’re seeing a number of organizations that are still have yet to address it. And I think there’s a lot of companies right now and a lot of people that are, for lack of a better term, a little bit paralyzed by all of the change that’s happening right now and trying to figure out what to do about it. And it’s very daunting. It’s a daunting task. So hopefully, even just providing some clarity into what’s going on with our conversation today with you Jason, is helpful, helping people to understand that it’s not an issue that they’re facing on their own, and that we’re going to see more companies facing it is helpful. One quick plug, I would encourage everyone, if you haven’t looked at it, Human Capital 2025 Trends Report launched, I think it was last week. So new data, fresh perspectives. And if you’ve enjoyed this conversation, please go and read it so it’s available in the Resources tab.
Jason Cerrato 59:14
And if you don’t find it there, we will send it out in the follow up. Additionally, I would also make a plug. If you enjoyed this conversation. The recording will be made available if you want to re review it or share it with others, and we will also include a recording to the previous session that Nate and I did in October. So if you want part one to this conversation, you can see part one. Thank you everyone for joining us again today.
