Ligia Zamora 00:00
Welcome to The New Talent Code, a podcast from Eightfold that provides practical, actionable advice for HR. We’ll interview today’s thought leaders and those already using best practices in HR to share their advice and get your workforce ready for anything. I’m your co-host, Ligia Zamora.

Jason Cerrato 00:22
And I’m Jason Cerrato, each episode will feature change makers in the talent space to talk about how they’re using cutting edge technologies like AI to transform processes and rethink old constructs to solve today’s most pressing issues in HR, while also designing the workforce of the future.

Ligia Zamora 00:37
It’s what we call The New Talent Code. In this episode, we’re joined by Mark Condon, managing partner and founder of QuantumWork Advisory. In our conversation, we’ll explore how HR can evolve into a strategic powerhouse by leveraging skills, data, AI and workforce insights. Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Mark Condon 01:12
Oh, pleased to be here. It’s pretty excited. So looking forward to this.

Jason Cerrato 01:16
We enjoy talking with people who are trying something new, whether that’s following a new career path or helping others grow, to help our listeners get to know you. Mark, what is the last new step you’ve taken in your career, whether it was advancement or a new learning experience, and how did that benefit you?

Mark Condon 01:33
Think the last one was probably, I was probably a little older, so I was probably, you had to think about it a bit. But during COVID, I was asked to set up consulting business, and I didn’t really know what that meant, and didn’t get a lot of scope. So it was kind of cool in that I just was told to make it up and really just I did a couple of courses at IDEO is in September 2020, and at the same time, build us business strategy, talk to a lot of people about what the gap was. And what we found was people, you know, I’m not disrespecting the Big Four or anything like that. I think they do a great job. But what they wanted was specialist, people that they knew would be there in the sales process and beyond, and that they really focused on the technologies, had intimate knowledge of the various applications, and didn’t have to be sort of taught. And I think it can coexist with the Big Four that can certainly run project management offices and so forth, and they certainly have areas of that. But we just thought there was a particular gap of almost a mega boutique that we have a global footprint. And the other part of it is I didn’t want us to be another HR consulting company. I wanted us to be almost, I’m not, probably not doing it well today, but more like we’re a funky marketing agency slash workforce consultants. So it was, it was more just having a bit of an edge in that respect, and that sort of built a certain culture around what we do. So we attracted certain people who were like, maybe not big company people, but certainly wanted to be understood. They wanted their voices heard, and it’s really driven us a long way. So that was some of the things. I mean, it was really around zero.

Ligia Zamora 03:31
So I’m assuming business has definitely picked up, particularly during this evolving age of AI, I know just recently, a couple weeks back, you were at our US cultivate customer summit talking about workforce agility in the age of AI. Can you give us an overview of some of those major talking points? How do you define workforce agility? How does AI come into the picture?

Mark Condon 03:54
Yeah, I’d say agility as from different perspectives, and I think I think it’s important use the word agility first, and then things like skills and tasks second. And AI is certainly accelerated that. So I think a little while ago was, well, how do we become more agile, more flexible? How does the organization withstand change? So resilience, I suppose, is part of that. How do I move from people from low demand to high demand quickly? How do I re skill them and shift them? And there was some cases during covid and CEOs saying, Well, I was able to move people from where we just weren’t doing business to where we were quickly and easily, using things like talent marketplaces and so forth. So I think that really put it on the radar, fragility for employees, it’s being able to flex and change their career and re skill and sort of democratizing that process more. So I think there’s got to be something in it for everyone, for the company, it’s profit, productivity, moving people. Around flexibility, fluidity of the organization, and for the employees, it’s sort of a reverse, but the same in that they’re able to move and shape their career the way they want to do that. They need information, lots of information, and they also need platforms that give them that data about where to push my career. What training do I need? What skills gaps do I have? How do I anticipate the future?

Jason Cerrato 05:25
So I think it’s like you mentioned covid as a forcing function when a lot of organizations started doing this a few years ago. Right now, what is that forcing function that’s creating that sense of urgency for the companies you’re working with?

Mark Condon 05:39
I still think that covid thing changed things dramatically. I think that’s still there, and behind us is what would happen. How do companies survive if something catastrophic like that happens? I think that’s still in the background, in the planning, and it’s sort of like a shadow over companies. But certainly AI is overtaken everything. And I think now that we’re talking about AI agents, it gives it something much more tangible for people to rally around. Whereas AI was sort of too vague a term, and people were arguing about definitions of it, and now people are going, No, I’ve got this agent that does these things for me. I’ll show you how it works, you know. So it’s gone from the conceptual world to the practical world really, really quickly. And I think people need to be really, really focused on getting on top of that, that wave, and following that to the beach.

Jason Cerrato 06:35
So as these agents have kind of brought more visibility to what AI can do, and they’ve also taken some of the transactions and administration off the plate. Can you talk about how your organization has been working with these HR teams around the work that remains and becoming more strategic, especially around using skills, data and AI to drive some of these insights, and really moving beyond improving HR for HR sake and delivering to the business?

Mark Condon 07:09
it’s really good point. I think if HR just looks at it as HR world of HR cost and administration, then I think we’re missing a 15 because they control, or they have a major influence over the shape of the workforce and what the workforce does. So they actually have an impact on every employee in the company, not those just within the HR department. So I think there’s a lens that needs to be looked at. I sort of look at it as old HR, new HR. So old HR may have there might have been some innovation, but some of them struggled to get the budgets and attention that they should considering, you know, people are so important, but now this is a different game. We’re now having the biggest change in workforce strategies in 100 years, and every job will be changed to some degree in an organization some I call it the 5b model. So there’s a build, which roles should be we build? Which is re skill? Which ones should we buy and bring in specialist resources where we’ve got strategic gaps? Which ones should we borrow? Which is statement of work and contractors, which has to be really part of that strategy as well. And then what’s your bot, your AI, which is your AI agents, and then bundle, which I put a category there, because some roles we want to keep, but we’re not sure we want to keep them in the country, and we might want them done in Budapest or South America or Bangalore, and those roles may eventually become AI as well. So that’s the way I see it. So how do we get into those five buckets? What’s the cost saving? How do we measure that? And you measured to mention something, Brooke, how do we stop them being sort of tactical with what’s left? I see it as a more holistic picture of what is the work? What are the friction points in the work? What are the cost saving potential? How much can we extract from each of those bots? You may end up with 50 bots to extract all that productivity and value out, and that might take three or four years, but you know, where’s the road map for that over time?

Ligia Zamora 09:27
But the challenge here, Mark, is that HR itself as a function is evolving, and HR is also being challenged then to adopt some of these agents and some of this AI technology. So how should companies balance both right? Because, as you become the hybrid workforce, or the agentic workforce, that term has been thrown around a lot. The role of HR, the function of HR, is going to evolve as well. So at what point is HR sort of part of this mix? How would you what is your recommendation to the audience out there, in what order they tackle this and how? Do they think about the HR function itself?

Mark Condon 10:02
Well, you think about it, HR is in control of HR, so that’s the best place to start and lead the organization. And show them the methodologies you know correct, to recruit coalitions, to identify opportunities for cost savings, to involve the organization in those cost savings. Yes, there’s going to be some job losses and some changes, but to recruit in those people that are leaders in the organization, to identify those opportunities, I think, is just a great opportunity. And then I think we’d have to look at the case study of moderna, which is, you know, what does HR become? And in that case study, the Wall Street Journal article said, That’s right. Basically merged the technology and HR functions, and it was basically a competition, almost between those leaders and the HR group versus one. I don’t think that will happen all the time, but I think organizations would love that their HR leader would get that job, or that they didn’t have to go external for that role. So technology is a really powerful beast, and has been for a while, especially around compliance and risk and so forth. Become so big, such a big deal, that HR has sort of slipped back a bit, that people are the most important thing. Technology is the enabler of people, and in some ways that moderna case study just says, I have resources, one of which is a bot. So, you know, the bot is my workforce, and it should be under HR, so that’s if you look at it that way, you go, of course, otherwise, how we’ve got all this work and then other stuff being done external, which doesn’t make any sense.

Jason Cerrato 11:38
And I think part of this is we’re coming up with new roles and titles, one of which is probably going to be a chief of work. So we’ve been talking a lot around work design or different methodologies to get at how we’re designing the future, and whether it’s done by an agent, or it’s automated, or it’s done by a person. We’re looking at some role of some kind, where they’re actually designing the work, and it’s probably some hybrid between HR and IT.

Mark Condon 12:10
I think you’re spot on. I think one of the biggest skills we’ll have, and this is where I think we will help play a role, to help companies through it. But work design, it’s more than workforce design, because that sort of invokes that the units are whole, but the actual work design itself, disintermediating the work, breaking it down to the task level, and then matching it up with the skills, and then you instantly have a data, a real need for data to be organized, because we know we have barcodes about every product in the company that tells you the weight, the size, what it does, everything about it down to the finest detail. But humans, we know barely anything about our workforce. We don’t know what other skills they have, what training they’re doing, and the only way that it’s done now is if we voluntarily uploaded into an environment. But we need to ensure a lot more than that, because we’re just missing out on 50% of what our workforce looks like. And then we can mix and match a bit better, and the employees can say, Oh, my career actually should go that way or that way and pivot. And at the moment, that’s not very clear in most cases.

Ligia Zamora 13:25
You mentioned, it’s funny as you’re going down this path, and you talk about, how well do we know the workforce, how well do we know the work that they do? Is there such a thing you think as a maturity model, how far in the engagements that you’ve had and the clients that you’ve worked with, How far along are organizations in understanding the work that people do and their workforce at the level that they need to in order to adopt agents, and what would be your advice to them at this point?

Mark Condon 13:52
Yeah, look, I think companies can adopt agents even if they don’t have good luck. I think you can experiment in the early days. I don’t think you need to, you know completely, but if you can answer, what skills do I have in real time in an organization, you’re probably middle pack, right? So that’s sort of it. Can you predict future skills gaps and do scenario planning that which you’re probably a four out of five. Can you build optimal team compositions of the 5v model that I just talked about and split the work across those then you’re probably level five. In reality, most people don’t even know what skills they have, so there probably are two you know, they have some automated processes. They have some integration. They might use a data lake to extract data from the talent. What platforms not really well connected to a broader data world. They have disparate. Systems. It goes on and on. So this whole range of point solutions is, you know, the CIO would probably has a heart attack every time HR knocks on their door, because there’s just too many systems, you know. So I think there’ll be a talent platform across most of the HR source of truth platform and then a lot of bots.

Jason Cerrato 15:23
Mark, I recently participated in a virtual panel with some of your colleagues, and they had shared some research and some thoughts around skills based strategies, and they were talking around the ones that are successful and have momentum are largely the ones that are self-contained within HR, and the ones that end up getting stuck or end up with some fatigue are the ones that involve other functions and expand outside of HR. And I’m assuming that’s because they are often not involving the broader stakeholders, or not getting the cultural buy in for the organizations that you’re working with, who’s on the team? Are there broader functions involved? What are the roles and the stakeholders that you’re working with?

Mark Condon 16:15
I think even within HR, I’ve seen case studies where talent acquisition and on the same page as talent management, you know. So I think they need to build a coalition. They need to they need to build a business case internally, and they need to be able to communicate the language. So be strategic about this. Not everyone knows what a skills-based organization is, or really cares. But if you said, look, the work’s going to change, we need the workforce to execute it, talk about that 5b sort of principle, and then say we’re going to need to understand the tasks and the skills. And then it’s like, of course, that makes sense, you know? But I think if people are just putting bumper stickers everywhere of skills-based organizations or skills based hiring. No one spends the time to actually tell stories about what that is. And I think storytelling is really important. And I think, I think, going back to the start of your question, I think it’s the same with other departments. You know, if the CHRO is not on completely on the page. How can you get the CIO on, you know? So I think make sure that the nest is completely looked after, and then look at others. But I think there’s just storytelling as well. This is pretty common sense, you know. Like every job is going to change, does? Does everyone agree with that? Yes. How much is it going to change? We don’t know. How much should it change. We don’t know. How do we make decisions data? Do we have any No. So it’s sort of, you know, pretty logical sequence of events.

Ligia Zamora 17:55
So you mentioned the CIO what concerns are typically come up from CFOs and coos with this regard.

Mark Condon 18:03
The biggest one is the ROI uncertainty. Because while it’s really proven out, well, I think largely proven out, we do need to have this conversation with a lot of data and case studies. You know, companies like Salesforce are doing this right now, like we this is an imaginary world. You know, there’s a lot of companies who are using, you know, agents, partner, if you with your companies like yourself. The other one would be implementation risk, you know, like, how much risk is involved? Are we really going to be able to do this? Do we have the resources and people to do it? And the other one is resource allocation. Where do we put our debts? And so there becomes sort of inertia. I compare a little bit to sort of global warming. People just people know there’s a problem, but some people even can’t even get to the point of recycling their garbage. I think it’s just like work on a plan. The other one is, I think in particular, is scared of asking for money, right? And if you say, I’ll run some ROI numbers past you, which we did some research on about 50 studies. And if you say, look, if I put technology change management, get a consulting company in and build a proper Transformation Project. What’s the ROI on that cost? If I spend a couple of million dollars or $3 million and we’re talking large companies, our belief is it’s about five to 10 times just from a HR administration process and cost savings on turnover, you know, direct HR related costs, cost of turnover, cost of onboarding, cost of recruitment, having a more aligned workforce, then there’s a second category. Well, if I’m hiring the right people more often, and I’m matching skills and work, what’s the productivity improvement, and how much does that more engaged workforce produce? And it’s about 30% Yeah. And then if you look at what’s the cost saving that I could achieve by getting rid of work and having a bot do it, even if there is a cost of the bot, what’s the cost saving? You add all that up, it’s about 50 to 60 times ROI. So the numbers are absolutely huge for a company, and they can’t ignore it for long. So then I think it’s just working out a plan to extract those cost savings and ROI over, over a couple three to four years and but they have to start getting there. The start of this is always proving out the business case, and some of that you need the data to do that. You know, sometimes there’s a get the data.

Jason Cerrato 20:38
QuantumWorks recently released a report called building the business case for workforce agility. And there was a concept in there that’s referred to as this transparency deficit in workforce data is the challenge with what you just explained, part of what you’re referring to there.

Mark Condon 20:54
Absolutely, yeah, and I think this is where HR has to be pretty strong to say, marketing has driven a case for 80 years to get data that’s sometimes a bit rubbery to prove their worth in and their department’s worth. You know, the Chief Marketing Officer spends a lot of their time proving that data out. I just think it’s almost irresponsible that we have the data we just don’t know, or we don’t have the ability to integrate the data, so we can’t tell a story. It’s all in different groups. So I think it’s almost like this is HR moments ago. It’s not enough for me to keep the lights on. My brief can’t be that the company does no harm to itself. I think it’s got to be beyond that as to I’m here to rewire and regenerate the company, to make it resilient, to make it agile. I will give you the 30, 25% cost savings, or 15% but I need to change the work itself to add value for both parties. So my point of view is, don’t create 15% of cost savings, create 30% of value and then distribute that value to the employees and to the organization and to the shareholders. But don’t just give 15% to shareholders because you just have a workforce that doesn’t want to be there. So that’s you have to think bigger.

Ligia Zamora 22:19
What objections have you gotten on the flip side from the actual employees, right the other side of the equation? And what have you seen work in terms of positioning these changes? A lot has been written about job displacement, you know, bots are coming for your job, et cetera, or artificial intelligence written more broadly, what have you seen work? What are your recommendations?

Mark Condon 22:41
I think part of it is to really look, if you’re in an industry that’s lucky enough to I mean, the areas that are going to be very disrupted, from what we can see from the studies, healthcare is going to be hugely disrupted. But because there’s an aging workforce, everyone’s going to have a job. So aging population, everyone will have a job. Manufacturing is probably the number one in retail. Retail and manufacturing are probably the two that will be most disrupted, but most other are either the same or growing. You know, financial services, banking technology companies have seen some certain productivity that they will then want to use headcount in different ways. So maybe there’s less coders in the world, but there’s going to be other roles around experience, design, creating new products. You know, there’s a recent thing of, I think Sam Altman’s company has brought in a product developing expert that used to make the Apple phone. So you’re actually going to have tangible devices that use AI. So there’s a whole new world of products that we haven’t even explored. So I think coming back to your thing is, look, you have to make the people feel safe, and you have to make them part of the process. And I think you have to have open conversation. You can’t just ignore it and say, what’s that large gray animal in the room, doing, you know, that’s an elephant. Let’s talk about it, you know?

Ligia Zamora 24:05
Potentially include them in the design up front for the buy in.

Mark Condon 24:09
Exactly. I just see who knows what’s going to happen. Let’s get in and be part of it, at least. And I think the other one is make ourselves very AI literate and data literate, because we’re really redesigning experiences, really designing workforce, redesigning roles, which is kind of fun, and we’ve got an opportunity to get rid of bad work.

Ligia Zamora 24:32
Work that most people probably don’t want to do if they were asked to, the more the administrative, boring stuff.

Mark Condon 24:36
Yeah, I think they’d probably do it because they have to and but if you said you don’t have to do that anymore, that we want you to do something else, they’d probably go, that’s cool. I hated that. But until they have the other alternative, then they’d probably going to be Bitcoin, which obviously data processing and anything like that. That’s probably gone.

Jason Cerrato 24:55
How much do you talk with your organizations around AI governance and AI readiness?

Mark Condon 25:01
That’s interesting. So a little plug, we part through talent tech lens that we acquired, which is the leading research talent technical research company, which you guys probably aware of, and David Francis and Brian and the team, we’ve partnered with a company called fair now, which is around AI government. So we build an offering for that. I think it’s going to be hand in hand, because the objection is going to be governance, like, what are we doing to govern it? Where our risk exposed are we? And there is no AI governance department in most companies. So who’s going to do that? Work is still up for grabs. Legal, probably think I’ve got enough to do. HR, probably should lean in on that a fair bit, because I think that should lead most things. And either partner, probably a combination of partner using tools to assess the technology around various governance and legislation and then having somebody that’s chief governance officer internally probably like something around that, but I think it’s probably a hot topic most companies that I talk to, it generally comes up in conversation.

Ligia Zamora 26:13
And at this point, given the conversations that you’ve had, Mark, all the organizations that you’ve advised, tell us a little bit more. I mean, are we getting lost or, I sense a lot of companies are getting stuck either in the technology or getting stuck in the analysis, or maybe potentially getting overwhelmed in terms of ontologies, or in terms of breaking down work, breaking down tasks. What is your advice? Typically, how do they get past this? What’s a good methodology? How do they lean in?

Mark Condon 26:44
I think that taking a too narrow view, they may have started off with a skills strategy, and then they get stuck with an ontology issue, and it’s like, that’s never going to be perfect. I think you’ve got to say, Look, we need an agent strategy. We need a work strategy, and that just becomes one swim line of many, and none of them are going to be perfect to start with. So I think the problem is, if you take it too narrow, the first hurdle they face is ontologies. It’s like, well, that’s not going to be solved anytime soon. So, you know, let’s get on with some other things. Like, I think one of the you know, I would suggest putting an enterprise strategy of priority with HR or department with HR, identify some black belts, so called black belts, train them up on how to build a business case. Train them up on how to identify agents. So you have 15% of your time allocated to this. So you could use a marketplace technology to do that and then build some governance, have them, you know, pitch their case for the agents, and then select the top handful, and then invest in those, and then the ROI from those will sustain the next round and the next round and the next round. So you don’t have to ask for money apart from the first time around. And that could be fairly minimal. I do think some infrastructure of investment will be required to get the initial data around skills and I know this isn’t an advertisement for eight for but I see that as being critical. If you can’t break the tasks down, and you can’t match the task to the work through skills, then you probably are missing, missing part of that equation. Another thing I would highly recommend is journey mapping the friction points, as I said, Before building an overall functional blueprint of the organization. To say, Well, this is the these are the 40 friction points that causes the most cost. Then So which ones are the most suitable for that 5b model? So which ones are the most able to be automated? And you’ll find about 30% maybe up to 40% if you include agenetic AI, could potentially be agents. But obviously that means other things are going to need to be created.

Ligia Zamora 29:00
It’s interesting because my next question, and I think it’s rhetorical, because you’ve already answered, it was going to be, you know, in a world where agents are being created for just about every function, everything’s being automated, would you function? Would you work on cost elimination or revenue creation?

Mark Condon 29:17
I think it’s those three buckets we talked about, the different levels of threshold for the CFO, so one is direct cost savings within the department itself for HR, which, you know, we talked about that before, those productivity enhancements are going to be harder to measure, but they need to be measured and straight work cost transfer to a bot from a human is going to be pretty easy to measure. I think it’s a bit like software. When you guys know software, but there needs to be some work up front, and there’s exponential benefit after the software is released. So the once the agent is doing its work, so there’s cost as investment, but once the agent is. Doing its work. It doesn’t have to be fed. It doesn’t need to be paid. Yes, there’s some maintenance, but it doesn’t take weekends off. It doesn’t care about Memorial Day. So companies are in that zone of investing for the future, and I think they’re just a little bit stuck at the moment. But I asked, I am seeing tons of people, companies like Salesforce, that was at cultivate, who are actually just doing it. They’re doing it and they’re working it out, and they’re fiddling around and they’re working out what works and what doesn’t. And I think that’s where design thinking comes into it. Because you can say, well, we’re just going to keep going on an affinity loop until we perfect it, but we’re going to measure it, measure it, measure it all the way through, and we’re going to use data to prove that the program works. I think it’s I’d rather put money on this than the horses any day. So I don’t understand what companies are doing.

Jason Cerrato 30:53
As we close out the conversation, you talked about the power of storytelling and, you know, talking about outcomes, you know, you’ve seen a lot of organizations that have taken on this journey. Can you share either an outcome or an approach that either surprised you or was very interesting, that you may want to share with the audience, just as a nice takeaway, you can protect the organization and not share the name, but just a nice story to maybe leave our audience with?

Mark Condon 31:26
Yeah, I do think storytelling is really important, and I think analogies are really important, and people, I think humans, by nature, communicate probably best through stories, and that’s probably part of our 100,000 history, or whatever comes in history that most things weren’t written down. I don’t know if it’s particularly funny or anything, but when leaders can stand up and say, you know, we could be better, and we’ve got examples of that, and shows humility and storytelling and makes people feel very comfortable, then I think that makes everyone just sort of relax a bit and calm. And I think humor is a really good way of doing that. I’m not going to buy any jokes today, but humor and storytelling as sort of antidote to what can be quite a scary digital world is, I think, really important to make this sort of feel human. And I think the other one slightly different to your question, that is to motivate people to say, look, this is this audience is probably mainly HR and Workforce Strategy and talented talent people. So this is our moment here of lean in, become AI literate, be bold, push forward. Work with technology companies, work with, hopefully, consulting companies like ourselves, but demand investment, but also build the business case. So I think it’s Think big. I just don’t think people are thinking big enough. Everyone says this is the biggest thing that’s happened in Workforce Strategy in the last 100 years, but some people are still not behaving that way. So they’re still they’re not quiet. And I think it comes down to leadership. The leadership need to sit down and say, Look, this is coming in as like a freight train. What’s our plan? The boards will approve it. That’s the thing. I think boards will approve funding to say, “Look, you want $5 million to save 50 knock yourself out.”

Ligia Zamora 33:23
Love it at the end of the day, like Nike said, “Just do it.”

Mark Condon 33:27
Just do it. I think just do it and have some fun. It could be fun. I reckon will be fun.

Ligia Zamora 33:32
I think so. I think it will be life changing and resume building. Yes, love it. Thanks so much. Mark. Thanks, Jason. Thanks for listening to the New Talent Code. This is a podcast produced by Eightfold and edited by resonate recordings. If you’d like to learn more, please visit us at eightfold.ai and find us on all your favorite social media sites, especially LinkedIn, where Jason and I share more advice on strengthening your HR strategies. We’d love to connect and continue the conversation you.