Anthony Abbatiello 00:00
Our Workforce Radar Research, which we’re gonna talk about today, It’s the first research of its kind that is actually looking at the workforce of the future and actually predicting where organizations need to go in order to drive the workforce lever to meet business objectives. We started this research about 13 months ago with the hypothesis of if there were a GPS for business leaders that can say, I want to get to x result. How do I actually use the workforce as a lever in order to achieve that result? And we thought that there was this space that was missing in a lot of the research. And if you sat in Josh’s keynote this morning, you heard a lot about the research and the insights that they have around looking at what people are doing. What we tried to do is say, let’s figure out where people are going, and where do you need to go next, versus what’s happening, what people are doing behind so we launched the workforce radar research two weeks ago. This is actually the first discussion we’re having live with humans, not on a little zoom screen. So it’s nice to see people in person. Thanks for joining us today. A little bit about the research, and then I’ll introduce my colleague, Jason, or let him introduce himself. This research, I said, encompasses a 13-month program that we led. It included us meeting with over 100 organizations. We did a survey of about 20,000 individuals, so about 18,000 workers, 1800 HR professionals, and over 2500 business leaders. So CEO, business, business youth leaders, to kind of look across, you know, what’s happening in the workforce, and then, obviously, with the ABC, our own insights and experiences as well, to kind of formulate the basis of of the research. So we’ll talk about it today. We’re really going to dive into the intelligent enterprise, which is one of the five signals we thought it’d be relevant for where we are today with HR tech. But first, Jason, let me give you a chance to introduce yourself. Sure,

Jason Cerrato 01:46
Anthony, appreciate the invite and thank you to PwC. My name is Jason Cerrato. I’m the Vice President of Talent-Centered Transformation for Eightfold and we’re excited to partner with PwC on a lot of these initiatives. I’ve been reading through the research over the last few weeks, and the way you described it definitely resonates having a GPS with some very practical advice for where the world of work is going. And you know, at Eightfold, we have a podcast called The New Talent Code where we talk with business leaders that are going through this transformation, and the way I like to frame it is the requirement to think differently, manage differently, and measure differently, and I think that rings true in the report. So excited to talk about it with you today. Really enjoyed going over the research. I already kind of documented a few things that I’ll be sure to use in my travel, commit to memory, but excited to talk about it with the crowd here. And thank you everyone for joining us.

Anthony Abbatiello 02:46
And you know, as an aside, Eightfold is one of the companies that that we featured, that we talk in the report really about not just how Eightfold is transforming the talent intelligence space, but also themselves, what channel their CEO and what the organization has done in terms of using that technology on themselves, so eating their own booking as well, which is great, but actually, Anthony,

Jason Cerrato 03:07
if I could ask the first question, I’d like to ask the question of you; when we work with organizations that are thinking through this, one of the things that I Think stands out is either the understanding or the lack of understanding of how this is different from all the previous times we’ve talked about transformation from all the previous times we’ve talked about skills now with, you know, the acceleration of technology, specifically generative. AI, one of the things that I’d love to get your perspective on coming out of the research is Why is now different, and the sense of urgency to actually think about this differently and prepare for where the world of work is going. I mentioned yesterday. We’re no longer talking about the future of work. We’re living in it, yeah. But wanted to talk to you about kind of why this moment is different in that sense of urgency.

Anthony Abbatiello 03:59
Yeah, you know. So it’s kind of like when we when we started with this hypothesis last year around the research, you think about what’s happening in the world today, right? So let’s just look at the US, for example, for as an example, first we have, you know, a ever-changing economic environment, right? Today, yesterday, last week, today, rates inflation, you know, the Consumer Index constantly is changing and transforming the way businesses operate in just the day to day environment two we have, the pace of change is moving faster than it ever was. That’s nothing new. The reality is that if you look 10 years ago, the average number of changes that an employee went through per year was about one. It’s actually 1.2 today. It’s, it’s that me today, it’s, it’s over 10, right? So you think about yourself from a perspective where we have more change that’s being introduced on on a regular basis into the organization. And the third is, when we research, we found that 45% of CEOs believe that their organizations are not economically viable in the next 10 years. So if you think about that, 45% of the Fortune, 1000 do not believe that they will be here in 10 years. And that’s, that’s a reality, right? You think about who were, who were the fortune, 510, 15 years ago, right? You saw legacy, you know, asset-based organizations and utilities. Now you’re seeing, you know, the fangs and other, you know, soft asset companies. So when you look at all of that together, sorry, is that enough? It’s not us. Oh, okay. So you guys are okay. It’s not killing as long as it’s not killing your beers. You cannot hear they cannot hear me. Terminals, well, okay, thank you. Is that better? Okay, thank you. They keep me honest. So when you look at that altogether now, the workforce has become the center of those decisions, right? Whether it’s economic, whether it’s geopolitical or if it’s organization capital markets related, the workforce and the worker is now the currency and the asset in which we’re all discussing. And so we found that now, this time as that we’re in is presenting a broader opportunity for organizations to rethink how they’re using their workforce as a strategic lever versus just a cost and skill. Month you move Thank you.

Jason Cerrato 06:27
And at the same time, core teams are getting smaller. Even as businesses grow and scale, the ratio of core teams are getting smaller. Organizations are being asked to increase, not only productivity per employee, but revenue per employee, so there’s more pressure on businesses to perform, to hire the right talent, to maximize the capacity and capability of the talent they have in house. But part of that is that’s always been a challenge. I remember, you know, before Eightfold, I spent some time in the industry as an analyst and also spent some time as an HR executive, both as a practitioner and as a researcher, one of the findings we would always hear from the C suite was how long it took, even how difficult it was, to truly understand their own talent and their own internal capabilities. So now with this, you know fast pace of change, all the environmental pressures you know, the need to have that visibility, that understanding, that focus is even more essential.

Anthony Abbatiello 07:26
Yeah, you know, if you think about it, you know, this bit, yeah, there we go. When you think about it. Now, the nature of work and the expectation continues to increase, the efficiency. We haven’t seen the amount of efficiency that we’re expecting. And now with generative AI, you know, really where we are this year, and why HR tech is so exciting is that generative AI is actually starting to become into more of the practical and pragmatic implementation of all these organizations behind us. Even what we found in our research, you know, 63% of executives believe that generative AI will create more effective and efficient opportunities for work, but less than half of workers actually see that happening today. So there continues to be this dissonance. Leaders are expected to do more and get more efficiency yet, the worker aren’t they’re not seeing that yet. And you know, when we talk to a lot of CHROs in our research, most of them are saying, Yeah, we know it’s gonna it’s, it’s, we need it. We need to do it. We don’t know how we’re gonna pay for it, right? We don’t know what’s the right place to start. I, you know, was with a technology client two weeks ago who said, you know, we want to use copilot. We want to have a pilot of copilot in the organization, but we don’t know how HR is going to pay for these licenses. So we’re still thinking about it in in the old manner, the old ways, versus how do we define the way which the research gets into around helping the CHRO become the hero, to drive this, to find opportunities to free cash flow, to create opportunities to get the efficiencies with generative AI.

Jason Cerrato 08:59
So how does the CHRO become the hero I know in the research, one of the things that the workforce radar report does really well is try to connect this to the balance sheet. Yes, and when the organizations that we’re partnering with at Eightfold that are going on this transformation journey, the ones that are doing this really well are tying these initiatives to a specific business problem, something that the executive leadership team couldn’t ignore and that they couldn’t solve with their existing tools or their existing approach, and then saying, Here’s a new approach for how we’re addressing this challenge. And then from there, looking up to say, Well, what else is a challenge in the organization that we can apply this technology to. So they’re taking a problem oriented approach that’s driving a direct business result, and not just improving HR for HR sake, yes, and going through a project for a new and shiny tool, it really is connecting it to the balance sheet. But in the research that you’ve done and the organizations that you’re working with, you know, there’s a lot of people saying, you know, now is the time HR. I think HR has been asked to do a lot of things for a while. So it’s not just now is the time. It’s been the time. But how is this different? How can they step in and become the hero? Yeah, I

Anthony Abbatiello 10:15
mean, so, mostly when we were doing the research, every CHRO we talked to, we asked them about, have you been asked to reduce the cost of HR, reduce heads, reduce capability? Yes, yes, yes. Everyone is constantly having to do more with less. That’s been happening since the 90s. What we found, you know, what’s what’s different now, is there’s two parts in this. One of the signals that the research calls out is being a talent magnet and a talent factory, right? So we talked to CEOs and churros and said, you know, which one do you think is more important? And the reality is, it’s both, right? So one is figuring out, how do we become a talent magnet and dial up when we need to be attracting talent and bringing talent into the organization, versus a talent factory who’s creating capability and skills within the organization. I mean, how much they invest in both of those. That’s one. The second piece is this idea of the workforce balance sheet. And I am, you know, I’ve been advising CEOs and CHROs for almost 30 years now. I am tired of here, you know, talking to CHROs about getting a seat at the table and having a voice like those days are over, right? If you’re in HR and you’re helping, you know, HR organizations drive efficiency, and you know, be brought to achieve that, talent magnet, talent factory continuum, right now is the time where the CHRO has to be the hero in the boardroom, the way the CFO has been for decades. Right? The opportunity we have today with the workforce balance sheet, which is the fourth signal that we call it in the research, is really understanding, you know, when getting in front of the CEO or the CFO saying, cut your cost. HR, you’re too expensive, right? You know, we have a world class capability of PwC, Saratoga, which I’m sure you all know, we help organizations benchmark, and it’s wonderful on its own, it’s never enough. You have to think about what the eight the workforce balance sheet that HR owns, and actually find the opportunities where you can free cash flow and come to the board and come to the management with the opportunity to say, I can reduce or create a set of OPEX improvement that I could then reinvest into the technology and the capabilities that we need to be a talent magnet, talent factory. Telefactory, and I can do so without increasing my my OPEX within HR. I can be more effective with the capabilities I can I can set myself up for generative AI and bringing that agentic workflow into the organization, not just HR and CHROs. Have to stop looking at reducing their headcount, reducing their cost, and taking a blunt instrument to, you know, riffs and workforce reductions, because we’re in a place right now where we don’t we need the workers we have, and we need the opportunities to solve the problems that were our business problems with the skills we need, right? If you were in Josh’s conversation this morning, right? Solving that problem. It’s not just upskilling for upskilling purposes. It’s actually saying, if we’re looking to reinvent our business model, if we’re looking to drive new products and services, those skills that we’re going to need, let’s not go out to the market every time and kind of rehire let’s learn from the pandemic and find the ways in which we could drive that from within. And this is a shameless plug for you, but this is what you guys do within talent intelligence, and is really has transformed the way we look at AI and how we look at skills and talent within the organization. And I’m sure you see this on a daily basis. Yeah.

Jason Cerrato 13:34
So we did a session yesterday, so for anyone who had a chance to join that session, one of the key themes was around, what exactly does talent intelligence accomplish? And one of the main ways to understand it is whether you’re looking at your organization from 30,000 foot high or 30,000 foot deep, it helps bring your data and your talent into focus. And part of this is looking at them in a more comprehensive, complete way, but also in a more predictive, proactive way to prepare for where the work is going and what the business needs, versus historical tracking of how this has always been done. So part of it is the ability to capture that understanding and that more comprehensive awareness of capabilities that are already within your four walls, whether those walls are real or virtual, to be able to create this type of talent agility that helps enable business agility. But the other thing is that this is more than just optimizing processes. And the way you’ve done this historically, this truly is transformation. So when you’re going down this road, it’s kind of like digital transformation. You know, we just came through a decade of digital transformation, and there were some people that whatever that meant, but that’s because it had multiple definitions. But some people did it in spots. We’re only going to do it over here, we’re only going to apply it over there. And it didn’t fully realize the true value of what it could be until the full enterprise is involved. And I think HR transformation works the same way. So when we talk about breaking down silos, working more collaboratively, cross pollinating strategies, cross pollinating budgets and sharing resources, I think this is more the world of work that we’re moving towards, but then also being both a talent magnet and a talent factory looks very different in today’s world. So one of the things that I’m always very curious about is, yes, generative AI as a tool. And there’s a lot of people that you know may have a very similar job description are very similar. Job Title, their job description is changing in real time based off of how they’re getting their job done. Yeah, so on paper, people, I’ve heard people say, I’ve heard CHRO say, Well, everyone in my organization, you know, their work’s pretty much the same. Their job titles are the same. Why do I need this? And I said, Well, if you don’t have the visibility to the data around how they’re actually getting their job done. How do you know? Yeah, and part of this is the ability to read and react to that data in real time, to actually see how your talent is leading your business, versus looking at it through the kind of historical lens we’ve looked at this. But then the other the other challenge is really transforming how you measure and manage this, because in some cases, the way you do this is turned upside down. Yeah, so, you know, upskilling, reskilling, internal mobility. I’ve talked to a lot of organizations that have very constant measures around attrition and retention, but not necessarily development and mobility and cross pollination and moving people around. So how do you create that talent factory as well? Because also how we’ve done this historically was there were these career ladders where you’ve kind of learned on the job and moved through the chairs to develop the capabilities you need to eventually be a leader. Yeah, a lot of those positions are the positions that are gone, yeah? Or even if they’re not gone, they’re being removed strategically to create agility. Yeah, right. So we were working with an organization that recently was talking about moving from 14 levels down to four. So if you’re flattening the organization to increase agility and movement and move bureaucracy out of the way. Well, developing opportunities to learn on the job and build that talent factory looks very different than how we’ve built those things in the past. Yeah,

Anthony Abbatiello 17:33
and, you know, I think it’s interesting because we talk about it, and we’ve been talking about, like, the personalized career paths, learning journeys, you know, skill development, and it tends to be for HR organizations such a high mountain to climb, right? What are you seeing that are? How is Eightfold or generative? AI, how is that helping, you know, create the strategies to get to that outcome of that personalization. That’s

Jason Cerrato 18:02
the so it’s definitely one of the most frequent questions. Where do we start and how do we tackle this? I think people have moved beyond the why, and they’re definitely interested in the outcomes, but they want to learn, what are all those things that happened between someone taking the leap and someone finding the outcomes? What’s the what, when, where, how. And I think part of this is, again, the ones that have been very successful have focused on very specific problems that didn’t try to boil the ocean and do everything at once to really prove out how these new technologies and this new visibility could tackle that problem and drive some type of outcome for the business, and then look up and say, Okay, how do we iterate and add to the next phase and add to the next phase, and what can we, what can we bring to the table to solve for the business? So, for example, you know, working with, you know, automotive companies and manufacturers that are moving to electrification, right? So it’s not trying to do this for all roles everywhere. It’s doing this for the role specifically aligned to shifting to an electric manufacturer or working with companies coming out of any type of financial issues, aiming the technology at positions around financial management. Let’s address those, those challenges first show how this gives us visibility into the skills that we currently have, maybe the skill gaps of the incumbents, how it compares to the market. Let’s show how we can solve for that problem, and then look at where else in the organization we can start to tackle. You know, others have been, you know, very unique IP that organizations are developing for themselves, and if they’re developing some new methods. So we work with a lot of, you know, pharmaceutical and biotech firms where they’re doing very specific, you know, gene therapies that are very new and cutting edge. The people that are doing that work are leading in the field, but also can basically call their shot and go anywhere in the market, because everyone’s trying to capture that capability. So one of the ways to compete there is you need to be able to develop that from within. So how do you become the talent factory? Well, you start to look at adjacencies and learnability, and how can we move people from other areas into this space, to develop this IP ourselves, because if we want to be the talent magnet, that’s one way to do this. But it’s a very limited talent pool, and it’s very expensive. So I think part of this is using the visibility of the data to have multiple approaches at this, whether it’s recruit, retain, redeploy, redesign, build, buy, borrowation, you prefer. But the whole point of this is, if you don’t have that visibility, how we’ve done this in the past was we need to go outside, we need to create a requisition. We need to hire, and then we’ve over hired. We need to have a reduction in force, exactly. And you know, there’s the phrase, when will we learn if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail, right? So this gives you the granularity to have more strategic capability to address it in a variety of ways. There’s no silver bullet, but a lot of different dials and levers that you can put and from there. That creates agility. And

Anthony Abbatiello 21:18
I think that’s an important part we when we were doing the research in the intelligent enterprise, this point about skill, adjacencies is so important, and I think probably one of the most powerful business impacts for organizations, because we, we came out of the pandemic thinking, okay, you know, we hired all this talent. You know, demand has decreased. We’re normalizing. We got rid of talent. You know, big tech hired up a lot. They reduced their their workers. They probably did things in the okay way, I wouldn’t say all the right way, but learning about the skill adjacencies, I think, is the real opportunity where we unlock the power of this technology. And, you know, it’s, it’s great to sit here at HR tech and talk about all this exciting technology. Let’s also not forget, you know, the plumbing and the infrastructure we talk about this because, you know, I was, but my, my co authors and I, when we were writing the research, everyone was kind of shiny Penny magpie. Let’s talk about Gen AI and all this great stuff that say, like, Yeah, but you know what the plumbing and the infrastructure of the home needs to be right for us to be able to live in it and enjoy our time there? And there is a lot, I mean, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, that are thrown into, you know, HCM cloud infrastructure that’s just not getting the result we need. So in order to take advantage of a lot of this, we need to look at, you know, how do we fix that infrastructure first to enable us to leapfrog using generative AI? And, you know, 30 years ago, when I started my career, was always, you know, don’t let the technology lead the business. The business leads the technology. I don’t think we’re there anymore, right? You know, you walk around this, you know, this hall, but the technology can lead the opportunity to get to the business outcome, but you have to know the business problem you’re solving. And that’s, I think, where you know the bigger opportunity is around, around technology, and where, I think you know organizations right now have to foster that culture. So if you’re a technology professional, right, you have to think about, how do we embed that behavior in leaders to help them drive this continuous learning environment? You know, if you’re an HR professional, it’s like, how do you work with your business to make sure that they understand the impact of this, that they’re creating those right behaviors within the organization as well? And

Jason Cerrato 23:37
I think that’s why this is also more than just optimization, it is transformation, because in order to create that environment of well being and to drive the culture, yes, there’s technology that enables new solutions, but you also need to address everything on the table, policies, benefits, culture, leadership, behavior, management, style, how you measure all of this needs to be kind of reviewed in concert. You know, you can’t build a future with policies that were written in 2002 or 1998 so a lot of the organizations that are trying to drive this are saying, you know, let’s put that policy on hold. Let’s implement this. And then let’s see. What are the challenges, what are the questions? And let’s design a new way of doing this going forward, and not use the traditional ways we’ve always tried to manage this, to manage this going forward. So the mindset kind of shifts more from management to governance. Yeah, right, and this is a different way of approaching this. The other thing is, you know, you mentioned how we come into this conversation with talent intelligence, one of the ways that this changes how you’ve done this is the data becomes increasingly dynamic. So it’s constantly learning, it’s constantly changing. It’s evolving, and this requires a more continuous approach. So a lot of the things that we’ve typically done on tied to an annual calendar or in specific cycles now become continuous, and the technology and things like aI help raise visibility to what you should be paying attention to, but it also increasingly be something that’s increasingly done in real time, versus, you know, every June, every spring, or twice a year. And you know, the data will tell you what to pay attention to and what you’re okay with, kind of leaving status quo. But this becomes a living, breathing, continuous, dynamic thing.

Anthony Abbatiello 25:32
It’s, it’s so true, and I talked to, you know, a lot of CHROs, you know, in my travels, and not just for the research. And you know, you know, we’re doing with clients. What’s funny is that I still am amazed that CHROs are still in this place of saying, like I was talking before, about the co pilot, you know, how do I pay for licenses, right, something so simple, or, How do I get licensed for a new talent intelligence? And they’re not thinking about that holistic view, right? They’re not thinking broadly. And coming back to the to the research and the workforce balance sheet, you know, we found that, you know, there’s an opportunity for for CHROs to kind of pan out, like, zoom out and say, What are actually all the costs that are associated with the workforce? You’d be surprised how many HR leaders don’t actually know the total cost of the workforce, right? When I ask them, they’ll talk about, you know, compensation, payroll, benefits, they’ll talk about the cost of HR. They’ll talk about process and operations of HR, we actually think about everything, right? Most organizations have a belly button, you know, people with a belly button and and that belly button costs money, and there are different every piece of that of that life cycle has a cost associated with it. If we just took it down to what we know in HR today, right compensation benefits, right technology provisioning, there’s an opportunity to drive more efficiency and get to the preferences of the workforce better. What we’ve seen is we can actually when we’re asking the worker what their preferences are, right, after fair pay, right? Everybody wants to be paid. Well, fair well, whatever you want to call it, you know, good compensation, good salary, always important. So put that aside. It’s always going to be number one. After that, opportunities for skill developing, right and then the benefits that they need in order to live their life. That’s different for everybody. And when you start to look at preference analytics and a conjoint analysis of saying, Would you prefer another PTO day versus this Wellness Benefit to do yoga or have a gym and in the building or have food delivered every day, right? People get down to what is core and what is needed for themselves, and what we found is that after the pandemic, 10s of millions of dollars are spent on benefit programs that organizations no longer use, like employees are not even touching right? So in the US, an average of 1000 to $3,000 per employee can be saved by just focusing on the benefits that employees want and what their preferences are. And so you can, you can achieve the preferences of your workforce. You could reduce your overall cost of the workforce and on the balance sheet, and you could use that as a way of funding this ROI of getting into talent intelligence into, you know, agentic workforce workflow, into using generative AI and analytics within the organization to embed that efficiency of data within the worker, within HR. And, you know, sort of minds explode with CHROs when they hear this, because, you know, it’s like, how can I get rid of this Wellness Benefit and mental health benefits. They’re all important, but when you get down to it, skill development, financial education and financial wellness, retirement savings, paid time off, those are the things that employees care about the most, and in different parts of your life, whether you’re starting a family or you have aging family, right, there are other pieces on the fringe, and there was opportunities to create a broader workforce balance sheet to start to look at, you know, those opportunities.

Jason Cerrato 29:06
I was hosting a round table with a bunch of HR leaders, and I wish I could claim this as my own, but there was one of the leaders at the at the table who said, you know, our dry cleaning benefit isn’t as sexy as it once was, right? So all of this is on the table to be evaluated. One of the things that you brought up there was the role of preference. And you know, as part of where the technology has been leading us over the last few years, increasingly, we’re driving more personalized experiences, where people’s nine to five is matching their five to nine. But as we lead towards this future of work, can you kind of talk about how the role of preferences and kind of perception came into the research, one of the things that I noticed in the in the radar report was some of the discrepancies, especially between different audiences or constituencies. But can you talk about the role of kind of personalization and, and, yeah, transparency for people.

Anthony Abbatiello 30:05
Yeah, the, you know, I was with Laszlo Bock a couple weeks ago, and he, you know, we were talking about his book and, and, you know, the cafeteria style benefits, right? You know, that was a whole thing back in the sort of mid 2000s and is he was asking on the research, he’s like, Anthony, is this getting back to campus cafeteria style benefits like, that’s actually not where we are, where we’re really into this place of people want what they prefer, right? And to be able to personalize their career and their lifestyle. Because, you know, like life, Art imitates life. Work imitates life. Now, right to your point, 955, to nine. I wish, I wish mine ended at nine. I’ll take it. You know that mirroring of that is actually what we need to to bring in. And part of the this, the whole the research, one of the second, the second signal is around a purposeful location strategy. It’s a lot in the news today, but if you think about this whole point of the intelligent enterprise, you know where people are working, where, when, and how they are working, and then how they can personalize that for themselves. When you get down to understanding the preferences of your workforce, you can actually achieve a greater level of engagement with workers and and drive that through all of these different signals, what we saw in the data is that no surprise this, I’m sure it won’t be the most engaged workers right now are hybrid workers, right followed by in person, and third is remote. So remote workers are not the least engaged. They’re just not the most engaged. Also the differences between men and women. So there’s a there’s a discrepancy between how women perceive hybrid work, how they’re approaching hybrid work. There’s a difference between men and women in adoption of generative AI. So we saw in the research, you know, men are more likely today to be adopting and experimenting with generative AI than women. The what we found in the research is not a lack of desire or trying. It’s no surprise opportunity and opportunities that are presented equally to within the workforce. I say this all because when you’re looking at these different parameters, again, when you’re a hammer and everything is a nail, right, as you think about technology, the first problem we’re trying to solve is productivity and performance of the workforce, right? What do we ultimately want? We want our workforce to be able to perform and operate the best and most efficient way possible, right? Generative AI can get us there. Machine learning can get us there, right? But we have to there are some fundamental basics that we are still missing as we personalize and adapt to the preferences of the workforce, and a lot of that are simply the things that exist today that CHROs, that many of you can drive when you take a more balanced approach to looking at benefit plans, programs, health and welfare, wellness, retirement, paid time off, as well as the technology that we’re going to use to help support your day to day, whether that’s whether working in a hybrid environment, working remotely in the office. I’m sure you’ve seen the news in the last week of two major organizations who announced a full full week the office. There’s an entire chapter, a signal in here, around the locations, the location strategy mandates don’t work. You disenfranchise the workforce, and you creating, you’re creating dissonance between leaders and workers. And so thinking about the purpose to do that, and by the way, sometimes the purpose is to reduce the workforce you want, you want to. You know, people are using that as a way. It is a strategy. It’s not one I like. It’s not one that I advise clients to do. But the mandates don’t work, and really getting back and understanding those preferences and how to personalize the experience of the workforce will still win at the end of the day, and we can do it by balancing that reduction in OpEx to be able to reinvest into those capital improvements that organization state. And I think

Jason Cerrato 34:08
part of this comes from the capability of some of the new tools like talent intelligence for this connected visibility. Yes, right. So when you talk about the engaged workforce, one of the offerings that we have is this ability for kind of personalized guided career navigation, but it’s not solely visible to the individual. It’s also visible to the organization, so you can have a personalized experience unique to you, for how your profile can map to the organization, for common career paths, adjacent career paths, maybe even company recommended career paths where they’re trying to make people aware we need people over here. So it’s kind of done, you know, in concert with the individual and the organization, but in the same platform, you have the enterprise view, where they’re trying to build strategic workforce plans for aligning with the business. So as you have this kind of continuous, dynamic, connected visibility, you’re trying to reach a point in the future that is a constantly moving target. The ability to have data that is dynamic and learning and moving gives you the ability for those two things to potentially reach the same point with a greater likelihood of accuracy, because it’s continuously learning and evolving in real time. So this kind of creates that win win, where it’s explaining to the individual, kind of how their skills map to the organization, but also how their skills map to where the organization is prioritizing for the future, but then as the organization is putting those plans into place, they have visibility to the people already in their organization for how to use them, redeploy them, and allocate them towards the future plans of the business. And

Anthony Abbatiello 35:54
I will say, if you haven’t seen the Career Navigator that Eightfold built and Josh was talking about earlier, you should check it out. It’s a great way of seeing how this technology works for you personally, hopefully you’re not looking for a new job. But I think the the but the

Jason Cerrato 36:11
thing about it is so appreciate you mentioning that is it becomes a living, breathing thing. Yeah, as people update their profile, as they complete training, as they engage with mentors, the more information they put in their profile, the system is learning, but it’s also learning from how the roles are changing, how those career paths are changing, how those jobs are changing. So this is no longer just replicating the way this was done historically on an Excel spreadsheet or in a PowerPoint. This is now what I refer to as dynamic career pathing. And every time someone completes something or goes into the system, there’s something new to see, and it’s actually connecting training to outcomes and career paths. So people are actually seeing which training available to me actually may have an impact and where I’m trying to go. So what happens is we have organizations that are reporting kind of the what’s in it for them, higher levels of adoption and training completion than they’ve ever seen. 300% increase in training hours, an additional 6.8 course completions per year per employee, 91% repeat visitors to the portal. Because this is no longer a static thing. This, every time I make an effort, the information is matching my effort to show me something new. Yeah, I

Anthony Abbatiello 37:29
want to be mindful of time and just say, first of all, I realized when I started this, I never introduced myself. So you don’t know who’s been talking this whole time, but my name is Anthony Apotello, Partner, PwC, and I lead our human capital consulting business for the firm. I also let our research that we’ve been talking about today, workforce radar. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the research, there are QR codes and cards, or you can go to pwc.com/workforceradar, check it out if you have questions, we’d love to talk to you more about it. Jason, thank you for thank you for joining us today. Thank you all for for being here. We’ll hang out if there, if there are any topics or questions you you want to know more about, we’ll be around and feel free to visit us throughout the week, but enjoy the rest of your time at HR Tech. And thanks for joining us today.

Jason Cerrato 38:14
Thank you.