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Workers are tired of being the cog in a machine and boiled down to a list of responsibilities in a job description. They want more—a chance to sharpen their skills, follow a made-for-them career path, and feel like they are contributing to something bigger.
Are you ready for this new era? The time is now for human-centered work, but organizations may be struggling to keep up with the swift changes occurring in the workforce.
Join Eightfold and Deloitte as they discuss how organizations can make this shift by measuring human performance instead of productivity, how company culture plays into this, and why leader support is critical to making it all possible.
The conversation centered around the importance of becoming a human-centered organization in today’s rapidly changing landscape. Leaders must prioritize human sustainability, rethink ownership models, and incorporate workers and other stakeholders into the decision-making process. Organizations must adapt to the changing world of work by leveraging talent intelligence, measuring human performance using advanced data analytics and AI, and fostering a culture of trust and collaboration. The speakers emphasized the dual challenges of trust and imagination in the workplace and the need to democratize AI for better leadership and management. They highlighted the importance of providing safe spaces for workers to play and experiment.
Jason Cerrato 00:09
So wonderful to be back with you again today, and it’s so exciting to hear about all the programming coming from HCI and the resources available to leaders, and the fact that live events are coming back, and I think a big part of that is opportunities to come together and listen to learn, listen and learn from each other, especially with everything that’s on the plates of leaders trying to address all the challenges at hand as we think about the trends and the work that people are dealing with and building the future of work. And what better kind of segue to think about what we’re going to talk about today as part of this ongoing series that Eightfold and Deloitte have come together to build in partnership with HCI, and I’m super excited to be joined by son and David, for you know this, this discussion about how to become a human-centered organization that thrives as a deep dive in this 2024 human capital trends research from Deloitte, just as a way of quick introductions. Again. My name is Jason Cerrato, VP of market strategy for Eightfold, have a little bit of a hybrid role, and have had a little bit of a hybrid background. At Eightfold, I’m involved in product strategy, thought leadership, transformation, product marketing, but a large part of that is working with leaders, addressing a lot of the themes and topics we’ll be talking about today. Without further ado, I want to introduce the rest of the esteemed panel here today and hand it over to David. David…
David Mallon 01:53
Thank you Jason, and thank you all the audience for joining us today. A quick, also sort of further introduction for myself. I lead a team within our human capital practice in the US, which we call research imminence and marked activation. And one of the many hats I get to wear as part of that team is being part of the core author team for the annual global human capital trends study, which is going to be kind of a core of what we talk about today. But with that, let me get us moving forward. There we go. So I know this has been part of a series, and perhaps some of you in the audience have been have come to one of the past sessions, but if you haven’t, well, let me just do a quick kind of introduction to the research and give you a sort of flavor for some of the things we’re going to talk about year over year when we do what we call the global human capital trends, at its core, it’s a really simple set of questions. It’s just going out to the world of business and asking leaders, not just in HR, but leaders in general, when it comes to the people side of business, when it comes to the human element in organizations, where are those currents? I suspect all of you had a chance to, you know, stand in a river or stand in the ocean and you feel that pressure that’s pushing you somewhere else, right? That’s what we’re trying to get at, is what are those currents year over year that are pushing us in different places, with regards to our people, our work, our workforces and so forth, right? And if we can name those currents, we can begin to tell stories about them. We can make better decisions about them. We can begin to thrive in them, take advantage of them, versus just being pushed around, right? That’s what this process is every year now, last year, if you, if you’ve looked at the study, year over year, last year, you’d see, we started talking about this notion of a boundary list world. And what we meant by that is that, you know, year over year, and we do the research again, there’s some common elements to it. We will do some sensing activities. We’ll get a sense of maybe what some hypothetical trends might be. We’ll do research, big, big surveys to leaders around the world, maybe other research efforts with particular audiences. This year, we did a separate survey with executives and with frontline workers. But you get the idea it’s a big research project. We collect lots of data, and we use that to figure out, okay, what? What are the new set of currents this year? Sometimes we find that we ‘re the same currently being talked about for a while. We just we, we just realized that it’s changed in some way, and we need to talk about that sometimes we find new things right this past year, something else happened. Began to realize that actually some of the basic vocabularies that we’re using to describe the world of work themselves were questionable, the lines between things, the boundaries between what is a job and who’s what exactly is an employee and and even some of the proxies we use to understand those things, like job descriptions and and CVs and resumes. And engagement, for example, as a measure of the relationship between a working organization, we found that these boundaries were fading, and this year, we decided to go further and poke on some of those proxies that we think are also challenged. And you see some of those examples here on the screen, and you’re going to see when we talk about the trends they all speak to, okay? Well, in a world in which the boundaries between you know, what we understand is work and workforce and workplace are shifting. That gives us opportunities. Let’s dig in further to actually understand how organizations are trying to address those opportunities. I keep, I’ve already kind of given you a little bit of the background of the research. This year, there was a big survey, 14,000 plus respondents in 95 countries. We’ve been doing this now for about 1213 years. We think it’s the largest, longest look at these kinds of currents in the world of human capital, and it’s a very global story. We find very similar data in pretty much every part of the world, and also every industry sector and size of organization as well. It’s mostly the same, regardless of how you cut it. There might be subtle differences in sort of degree of difficulty or sort of availability resources, but, but it’s a generally a common element now, in, like I said, in this notion this year, of doubling down and looking further at this notion of a boundaries world, we’re finding is the speed at which the boundaries world is evolving is accelerating. And what, what we’ve kind of come to recognize is that the more boundary less work becomes, the more important is for organizations to focus on that human element, to try to focus on unlocking human performance. Human Performance being a kind of combination of both the business outcomes and the human outcomes. We want to see more of that in a second. While, our research shows that many organizations haven’t yet made this sort of shift in mindset or shift in some of their decisions and such. We also figured out that most organizations actually are aware this needs to happen. They know it. They just aren’t necessarily doing it. Yet. We’ll also come back to that a little bit a little along the way. And so you’re going to see throughout today’s conversation a lot of focus on especially where leaders can help close that gap with that. Let’s talk a little bit more about human performance.
Sona Manzo 07:27
Thanks, David. I love this equation, the new math of human performance. You know, this mutually reinforcing cycle of human and business outcomes is what we have now termed human performance, because it’s really humans, more than physical assets, that are truly driving organizations forward today. And if you think about the traditional mindsets that we’ve held on to, they often suggest that organizations can either prioritize human outcomes or business outcomes, but usually not both at the same time. This same mindset has often put a premium on business outcomes and underestimated the importance of our human outcomes. So this new equation is really intended to show that they can thrive together by multiplying the business outcomes and vice versa, to drive this human performance equation so as organizations look to shape and adapt to this ever evolving future, work, prioritizing human performance is really key to building organizations that can thrive both today and tomorrow. So this potential impact is here and it’s real. Our analysis shows the multiplier effects for both the business and human outcomes, and this is something we’re weaving into our discussions with organizations who are looking to go through the transformation and really capitalize on talent intelligence to weave this into the equation so we can make sure that we’re we’re doing these synergistically. So back to you, David, I think sorry
David Mallon 08:52
on talent intelligence. Jason, take it away.
Jason Cerrato 08:55
Yeah, I think actually, this is a great transition to why we’ve come to partner with you on this series, and why there’s such a strong connection between the work we’re doing at Eightfold and the research and the trends report. So I think this slide is a build if you want to just click a little bit here, David, as we think about the tools that people have been using and the systems that leaders have been working with, and what talent intelligence and the capabilities of things like AI, and you know, you had talked about standing in the river and feeling the current and understanding where this is going, but then being able to visualize that and see it. I think talent intelligence allows us to shift from this world that historically has been built around jobs and the organization to one that is increasingly focused on talent and the work that’s being done, especially in times like this, where that work is changing so rapidly. So there’s one more click, David, but really what it is is it’s getting closer to skills, and it’s not just skills. It’s. Skills map to people in context based on the work they’re doing, because that work is changing very rapidly based on a variety of factors: where they’re doing it, how teams are constructed or potentially deconstructed, and the tools they’re using. So all of this is talking about just the all of these boundaries that are changing and the deconstructing of the typical ways we have organized around work, and part of that is how we’re understanding talent in the context of work through some of the technology like we have at Eightfold on the left hand side. This is a visualization of how some of this technology works, and it incorporates a broad data set, making better sense of your organizational data, incorporating what’s happening in your industry with market data and public data, but also a real time understanding of what’s happening across the talent life cycle, with user interactions across a variety of talent decisions in organizations. And what happens is, through the power of deep learning, AI, you get on the right hand side, intelligence for individual users, but also intelligence for the organization and for leaders. And what happens is this becomes a dynamic Win Win relationship, where you’re able to better track a moving target with moving data, and especially in a dynamic environment that’s moving in real time and you’re trying to plan for a fast approaching future. This helps with things like sustainable talent strategies, where it’s not just one strategy, it may be a variety of strategies. So this is how, you know, the concepts and application of talent intelligence are weaving in very succinctly with what’s happening with these trends and themes and currents. And what’s also happening is, you know, in the last few years, a lot of leaders have been talking about expanding the view of talent, and we’ve been talking a lot about total talent strategies and blended workforces, but this technology and capability even takes that a step further and thinks about this as an agile talent ecosystem, and as we no longer have four walls, it thinks beyond The walls to incorporate more of those ESG initiatives into society, as well as strategic talent opportunities into partners and the supply chain, so it moves beyond employees and applicants and contractors even into society. And that’s not to say that we haven’t been doing this in years past, but now we have systems and the ability to collect and process that data which allows us to visualize and nurture more comprehensive strategies for sustainability and agility. So this starts to mirror and echo some of those themes that David was mentioning in the introduction of the session today.
David Mallon 12:57
Thanks, Jason. So, at this point, these are the currents for this year’s human capital trends. Sonia’s introduced this concept of human performance, and that new equation, Jason’s kind of gave an overview of what’s possible when we try to dig into understanding what these trends mean for our workforces and then make decisions related to them. I’m going to go through each individually, and particularly from the point of view of leaders, leaders at all levels. How are you helping to make those decisions? How are you helping to use this sort of intelligence to close gaps from knowing to doing, which will again, we’ll go a little bit deeper on in here just a second, because we’re going to go through each of them in detail. I won’t do them all here, but I will say you see that there were eight this year. We’re going to cover the first seven. Leadership is going to be the thread that ties them, ties them all together, right? We’re going to talk about leadership in the context of each so as I said, the kind of running undercurrent then is, what does it mean to lead in this boundary, less world? What does it mean as a leader? What are your opportunities? What are your risks? What are you just doing differently? But before we get there, I’ve teased a couple times this notion of knowing versus doing.
Sona Manzo 14:22
Yeah, such a great point. You know, for each of the trends that we’ve studied, we’ve measured this knowing versus doing gap, and really what that is, is the difference between how many respondents say this issue is important to their success compared to those who say they’re actually leading in this space. So year over year, leaders and leadership are near the top of the list for the barriers and the challenges. How can we really embrace these new ways of working and drive organizations forward in this family boundary list world? How can we be leaders, given that both high tech and human driven aspects need to come together, and you can see here on the slide that the gap is actually quite substantial. One of the things that we do. His trust and its relationship with transparency was actually ranked as the most important across all the trends studied this year, and it also had the largest knowing versus doing gap. And when we probed into the reasons for organizations inability to make progress to date, there really was actually a small proportion of respondents, about 33% that says that cited insufficient understanding, but really constraints such as capacity for change, limited resources, lack of leadership alignment were consistently shared as a justification for this organizational inertia, if you will. So this is really further proof that organizations are being held back by these old mindsets, holding on to these old proxies and operating constructs. So thinking about how to fuel human performance and leading in this boundary list, the world will likely not only come from clearing these mental obstacles a long way, but operational ones as well. And each of these years trends include a set of practical guidelines to help organizations bridge this gap between knowing and doing.
Jason Cerrato 16:02
So, yeah, so when I gave a heads up that we’re going to include some polls in the session today, and we wanted to learn a little bit about who’s in the audience. So we do have a poll here, and with the help of our technical wizards behind the scenes, we do want to give you a chance to interact with us and answer the poll here. So we shared with you some of the research around the knowing versus doing gap in your organization. What is the main reason driving the knowing versus doing gap in your organization? If you’re feeling some of this. So can we take a few minutes here, with the help of our team, to allow for the poll, and while people are taking a few moments to fill that out as we look to see how the responses come in. Sana and David, any guesses on what we’ll see based off of maybe some of the things you’re seeing with clients?
Sona Manzo 16:50
Ah, well, I would say, you know, unfortunately, this resistance to change from employees and or leaderships continues to be a challenge. And while we’ve seen that in traditional, you know, other studies as well. It seems to be larger at this time, and so, you know, from our perspective, making sure that we get in at the front end of these initial organizations through leadership alignment and making sure it’s infused with an understanding of employee sentiment is so critical.
David Mallon 17:22
Yeah, and I’ll just pick up on that. I see the resource results starting to build here. Resources and priorities, which seem to be kind of being the lead at the moment, are, in a way, a proxy for leadership, right? So if the organization, if its leaders, are struggling to have a clear sense of the road in front of them, for example, do they have the right kind of data, the right kind of tools that can give them a picture of what what’s happening? If they’re struggling to make decisions? Then inevitably, you don’t have the ability to marshal the resources you need. You don’t have you’re not you’re not saying that this is a priority that we’re going to solve for and we’re going to resource it appropriately.
Sona Manzo 18:11
And that really ties back to lack of time or competing priorities, right? They’re all tied to leadership around what’s most important to priorities?
Jason Cerrato 18:22
Yeah, we appreciate the participation. Just as a heads up for anyone who’s joining us during their lunch break or potentially doing some multitasking, we will have two more polls over the course of the session today, so keep your phone handy or however else you filled out the poll, but we appreciate the interactivity, and it’s wonderful to get the responses. So off to the next topic there. David, sure,
David Mallon 18:49
so Okay, so if we’re going to lead in a boundaryless world, what are leaders doing differently to close that knowing and doing gap? Well, the first thing I want to say is, you know, we’ve, I think we’ve touched on this a couple times already, is this new focus on human performance. It’s not a trade off. How do I balance business and human outcomes? It’s not that one comes at the expense of the other. They are multiplicative, right? And leaders play a fairly pivotal role in navigating that, taking advantage of that fact, and they’ve got a unique position in organizations to help, to help the organization embrace this concept of human sustainability. The bound is an opportunity for leaders if they can take advantage of the moment, if they can take advantage of that there are these boundaries holding them back, right? It’s normal. They might feel some amount of anxiety, because maybe they were used to assuming that a job was a job. But this is a moment in which you can, you can do new things in new ways. Nice, right? But it will require some shifts. It will require leaders to think differently. For we talked about this in last year and this year study, and that is to sort of think like a researcher, think like a scientist, activate their curiosity, look at their decisions as experiments that they’re going to test and collect data and go again, and it’s not going to be so much about having the best right answer first. It’s going to be about how quickly you can learn from new information. So check in that regard, challenging orthodoxies, operating with a degree of humility and empathy and learning as fast as you can,
Sona Manzo 20:43
and it just ended up thinking differently. Leaders are going to need to lead and manage differently as well. So really learning how to navigate this new world together with workers and CO creating new roles, no new boundaries and new relationships, and this really means we need to rethink the ownership models and the value must shift. Organizations need to be abandoning formal illusions of complete control and recognize the role they play in a living, evolving ecosystem. Just as Jason was discussing this ecosystem continues to expand and workers, whether those are, you know, employees or other parts of the ecosystem there, are increasingly assuming greater influence and accountability for organizational society outcomes demanding that, in fact, in many cases. And so we want to help them in incorporating them into that, and in fact, helping them lead, hand in hand with the organization.
Jason Cerrato 21:34
And I also just think leaders will need to evaluate success differently. I’ll put in a quick shameless plug at Eightfold. We have a podcast called The New Talent Code, and one of the themes we talked about is leading, managing and measuring success differently. And part of that is, if you change the inputs, in many cases, you change the discussion, which can change the decision, which can change the whole framework. So if you think about, what are you actually measuring for that can drive the type of prioritization and outcome that you’re trying to achieve? So for example, think about that equation of human outcomes and business outcomes. If you’re thinking about this, let’s use the topic of internal mobility or development. For example, we were working with an organization where, when they’re looking at managers, typically they’ll look at a group and measure things like attrition rate or retention rate. Well, that sets up a certain framework that is measuring for a certain thing for the sake of the organization. Well, how about mobility rate or development rate? That also adds an additional framework and in the shape of the individual, but also for a different outlook, for a different discussion. So how do you measure success and can also change the discussion and also drive different outcomes? I
Sona Manzo 22:53
I think that’s such a great point. Jason, you know, there’s an organization that we’ve been jointly working with. When you think about this concept of human and business outcomes coming together and understanding that opening up more transparency and democratizing movement within an organization can really change not only, you know, overall retention rates, which is a great business outcome because we were, you know, capturing and retaining resources, but it really changes the human element. And there’s just a great, kind of heartwarming anecdote of an individual who came up to a leader, really just tears of joy on her face and saying, you know, understanding now this new solution that allows me to see my skills and the opportunities that I can pursue, that I have some agency actually, to start taking courses, getting mentorship, learning about projects, has really changed my perspective and is going to allow me to have now what I consider, you know, life changing opportunities for my family, and so I just think you know that human element is so important and is so closely related to our outcomes,
David Mallon 24:01
and it’s a good entry, entry to the first of our seven trends which we want to go through now from this angle of sort of what leaders are potentially doing differently to close the gap. And that is human standard, human sustainability. It really is sort of the anchor trend this year. It comes directly out of this conversation around human performance, around both, you know, trying to achieve both business and human outcomes. And it’s this. It’s the first and anchor trend because it is core to how we will do just that. We define it as the degree to which its organization creates value for people as human beings. So lead them with greater health and well being, stronger skills, employability, opportunities for advancement, progress towards equity, belonging just a heightened connection to purpose. Fundamentally, it’s about the organization sort of replacing an extractive or transactional thinking with regards to its people and focusing on. Sort of greater value for each person, connect to the organization and trust as kind of a glue, as Jason mentioned, leaders are gonna have to measure success differently, and that’s a big part of what we’re finding with this particular trend. When we think about how organizations traditionally do measure themselves, and not just the business outcomes, but the human outcomes, one of the common ways, and it’s one that’s Freud says quite a bit of of confusion, and to some degree, some some back and forth in the marketplace, and that is ESG, most of the people side of things are typically grouped under that s component. And that can be limiting, because social metrics, in comparison to environmental ones, are difficult to quantify. They often lack clear definitions, which is not surprising. It’s why you’d see the 19% of leaders say that only 19% so I should say, say they have a reliable way of understanding. Are they creating that social value? And only 20, 29% of organizations feel like that. They are. You know, clearly moving forward here. So it, it’s, it’s, it’s part of the challenge. We do see a disconnect in how workers and executives view progress towards these kinds of questions, towards moving from knowing to doing. When it comes to human sustainability, 89% of executives tend to believe that they are advancing human sustainability in some con, some capacity, but only 41% of workers agree, so it speaks to why we need more stories like the one Sona just told now, executives, especially the C suite and the board, are in a very unique position to help their organizations embrace human sustainability, while research does indicate that most leaders are confident in their ability to do the hard work to scale the human element and build people skills in the organization and progress towards their broader sustainability goals. They do tend to overestimate their progress, and they do tend to be relying on those sort of outdated proxies of traditional notion of a job, for example. So there’s going to be shifts that need to be made, and they’re not going to come without challenges. Leaders should consider leaning into a more integrated or cross functional way to approach leadership in the organization, evolving their own mindsets in ways that may not be entirely comfortable, and it likely will require different kinds of measures, even of leadership itself, different accountabilities for leaders. With that, Jason, let me tell us a bit about this example at Coke. So yeah,
Jason Cerrato 27:29
so this is Coca Cola Euro Pacific partners, so they’re a bottling company in Europe. So this is not, not coke in Atlanta, but Coca Cola Euro Pacific partners, but they applied talent intelligence as part of addressing internal skill gaps for their employees as to help with employee engagement and career development. You know, thinking about human sustainability and planning for the future, and as a result, you know, thinking about the themes of the research. You know, increasing transparency, increasing understanding, developing a new way of work, dealing with the future. This created career opportunities for employees, but also, you know, better understanding for leaders of the talent they already had in house and how to make that talent aligned with where the business needed to go for future opportunities. So this process has now had a significant benefit, not just for the employees, but on things like succession and workforce planning for the future. But as a result, there’s also been other things like this that have immediate impact on understanding skill gaps, but also career development, so that you’re helping to retain and develop those individuals, but also with the visualization of this data. Through the use of this technology, they also were able to formulate a strategy, and part of this is this can sometimes feel overwhelming. The way they approached this was, they came up with a strategy to figure out what were the key skills they wanted to focus on that really drive the business. And the way they articulated this was, what were the 100 key organizational skills that make the boat go faster, and how can we build around those for the organization and then select three to five critical skills for each role to kick start personalized development for people in those roles, and then build, you know, a development plan around that starting point. As a result, they were able to do personalized skill development for future career paths within the organization, and this drove engagement, development, mobility and the number of employees with up to date talent profiles increased to 80% engagement scores increased, but it also helped with the formation of four learning academies, one of which built around how they lead. Another one was built. Around how they sell. Another one built around how they serve in their supply chain, and then another one built around kind of their position in society, built around a lot of the ESG initiatives. So thinking about human sustainability, planning for the future, being better corporate citizens, I thought this was a great kind of use case of how the visualization of this data, the ability to track a moving target of the wishes and needs of your talent with the strategies of your business, feeds into some of the themes and currents, as you referred to them in the research.
David Mallon 30:37
What do I like about that story? I’m sorry. Sona, go ahead. Was
Sona Manzo 30:40
just going to say, I think, you know, giving this transparency and capability to employees, it’s really interesting that it becomes like a destination that people are excited to go to, to have this exposure and be able to, you know, pursue these sorts of opportunities. So David,
David Mallon 30:58
no, I appreciate that. I was going to say something similar. What I like about the story is, it is focused on both what the organization obviously wants and needs, but also what the individuals in those different kinds of talent groups, for example, are looking to do. And that it segues quite nicely into the second of these trends, which is, if that’s what we’re gonna be focused on, is enabling human performance. And you know, for example, thinking about those academies they’re building, thinking about the initiatives trying to accomplish as a broader organization, but also what needs to come from, from each individual, you start asking different questions about what is out the outputs we’re looking for, what is productivity. And the second trend speaks to maybe, in a world focused on human performance, the traditional notion of productivity as kind of an economist might define it as simply inputs and outputs. You know, how much output do I get? How much input efficiency for? All you know, at its core, is that enough to describe the full value that humans bring in the organization in an era in which the work itself is essentially much more human centered. Are there other sources of data? Can we use tools like AI, for example, that help us better understand that full value? We have lots of new data and lots of new technology that make it possible for us to measure not necessarily just what we can, but what we should. And that can include the sort of kinds of talent intelligence that Jason’s talking about. It can also include taking advantage of the data, the kind of exhaust that comes from Workplace tools and technologies, the collaboration tools we use every day. It can also in kinds of work that is more you know, away from the desk as it were, can include things like sensors and connected devices, wearables, badge scanners, biometrics, etc. There’s lots of interesting experiments to use. I was poking earlier on, thinking like a researcher. There’s lots of experiments going on here, but they all center around the work itself, and as the work is changing, it’s not surprising that our measurements of that work should adapt as well, so that we are more meaningfully evaluating the human element in that work. We’re more meaningfully looking at how we’re balancing outcomes for humans and organizations. Again, coming back to the notion of human sustainability, workers and leaders on this one, do share a common perspective on the positive impact, potentially, of how new data is used. But there’s a and as we’ll get to in a second, there’s an important part in the two working together in terms of what data and why. Now, as you can, as you as a leader or those in the audience, sort of consider thinking about making this shift towards new ways to measure work, using workforce data to get at a greater notion of human performance. There are some things leaders can do to manage differently. One is to look at the metric, performance metrics that matter most to your organization. This is a great place to to lean into the differences in industries and sectors. But in that regard, experiment, try to find the balance and collaborate with workers directly. They usually have great perspectives on ways to actually capture the magic that happens on the ground, as it were. Think about metrics that and that leaders and managers use themselves to evaluate the success of their teams and departments. Try to get out of the habit of falling back to tracking activity. You know, think about call centers measuring calls per hour, take a human performance lens and think about how technologies like AI can help you capture data that would be more helpful versus the easy data that’s right in front of you that give you a sense, for example, in a call center, of really getting at Are you driving customer satisfaction? Are you driving growth and revenue? Are you? You are creating more sticky customers. Those are the metrics you’re after. Anyway, the cost per hour was always just a means to an end. And empower your managers to focus on human performance as a specific outcome, to not just track and drive to activity. Most workers say that managers have a very significant impact on their own human sustainability issues. And in fact, one global study respondent said managers have a great impact on their mental sorry, as great an impact on their mental health as their spouses do. And so in that context, managers are in a very unique position to influence this question, and simply just adding new responsibilities to their existing roles is likely just to cause, you know, burnout. So this is really about leaders empowering managers to prioritize what’s on their plates so that they can focus on questions of human sustainability. Sona, tell us about Hitachi,
Sona Manzo 36:01
Singapore. David, have really gone into the mind of a researcher. So Hitachi really set out to improve their organizational productivity and efficiency by trying to measure worker happiness. And so workers who chose to participate in this initiative, or this experiment, if you will, could receive AI based suggestions for increasing feelings of happiness throughout their work day. And ultimately, Hitachi was able to see and then show improvements in both human outcomes, so things like psychological capital and business outcomes, some of the things that David was mentoring right profit, sales per hour, retail sales. So collectively, again, we’re back to that equation where we see synergistically, really looking at human outcomes, can can improve across the board, synergistically. Really fascinating example.
David Mallon 36:48
That brings us to our second poll.
Jason Cerrato 36:51
So again, with the help of the technical wizardry, we will bring up the code for the audience to participate. But the next poll question is, what additional support or resources would help your organization better assess and enhance productivity, and we have six choices for you to ponder and provide your responses. And as the phones come up and people punch in their responses, we’ll wait to see how the results tabulate. But saner or David, what do you expect to see here based on what you’re hearing in your travels?
Sona Manzo 37:32
You know, I think three and four are really good. You know, work together in concert, right? So for many organizations, we have kind of historical repositories of data, but an inability to really leverage that in meaningful ways. So when we start to introduce new concepts like that, you know, talent intelligence and being able to do things like talent rediscovery or looking at adjacent skills those you know, tools and technologies bring really meaningful insight they have to be intertwined with, you know, understanding those advanced data analytic capabilities and, indeed, you know, really rethinking some of the measurement techniques or the management techniques and leadership that we’ve been talking about. So I’ve just found it fascinating to see kind of the transition from, you know, from, if we think about individuals who are working in areas like talent acquisition or talent management, really giving them the tools and the analytics to have better insights and then transform their role from more administratively processing data and really having to spend a lot of time calling through a lot of information, when We can give them different kind of tools and insights. It transforms their ability to be a more strategic advisor, and ultimately increases, you know, their human outcomes, their satisfaction and ability to lead in a new way in those business outcomes.
David Mallon 38:58
Yeah, I’ll just add, is the connection back to the first poll around alignment of, you know, of priorities it plays here too. So how are we better connecting the priorities that the company wants with the things that workers do every day?
Jason Cerrato 39:21
So, leadership, leadership, buy in and support. So that’s in lead, clear alignment on productivity, metrics and company goals enhance data analytics and capability. So part of this is a little bit about what you can measure, but I think a lot of this is what gets measured gets done,
David Mallon 39:40
right? Yeah, it makes sense. Okay. Thank
Jason Cerrato 39:43
you everybody. I think we have one more coming up. So, stay tuned to keep your phones Close. Next slide. David, so
David Mallon 39:50
that gets to our third trend, and it continues on this, this focus on data in a way we all know, try. Trust is widely acknowledged as a key driver of the relationship between, well, all human relationships, particularly the relationships between workers and organizations, workers and each other, and so therefore it’s a key driver of human performance. But there are trends today that are putting trust at risk, certainly the rise of misinformation. You know, just being in a very turbulent market, lots of changes, constant changes, you know, mergers, downsizing. You know, obviously the pandemic returned to the office, etc. There’s lots of reasons why workers and organizations find it difficult to trust each other. They find it difficult to trust the markets around them, et cetera. So the question becomes, in that context, how can organizations elevate trust, trust inside the organization and between all of its component parts? 86% of leaders in our survey say one of the ways to get there is that the more transparent the organization is, the greater the workforce trust will be. Well, that’s what we found when we did this research. Maybe not, it’s not quite so simple. Transparency isn’t necessarily what it used to be, and it and that assumption may no longer hold true when we’ve talked about transparency in the past organizations, it’s tended to be a sort of one way street that it was about, what is the organization going to share with the workers? They’re going to tell them all of the goals and objectives. They’re going to tell them all the backstory. But today, transparency is actually coming in all different directions, and the challenge is it’s often happening, whether we want it to or not. Workers. There’s a lot of data about workers that gets shared with the organization, whether the worker necessarily has a say in it. There’s a lot of worker data that workers are sharing with the rest of the world about the organization that the organization may not necessarily have a say in. And technology is certainly making this more complicated, because technology is capturing a lot of that data, collecting a lot of that data, and it’s also making it easier to share in every possible direction. The challenge here is that transparency is important in relationships, but it’s but it’s it’s a positive when it’s intentional, when there’s a conversation, when both sides sort of decide what they’re sharing, why they’re sharing it, and how it’s helping to demonstrate what is kind of core to trust, which is that both sides believe the other side is kind of working in their best interest. So in that regard, transparency becomes a net positive. But if you’re not having those conversations, if they both sides aren’t necessarily clear about what’s being shared and why, or it’s or that that transparency has been imposed on them in some way suddenly, because suddenly, suddenly transparency becomes absolutely a net negative. So getting that balance is fundamentally the challenge. Most organizations are fairly early on this journey. As far as our data is showing, only 13% say that they feel like they’re kind of leading here. So an increasing focus on trust and transparency, especially the relationship between workers and organizations. It shouldn’t surprise you, it was the top response from executives in our survey as to kind of one of their biggest challenges, right? And only 16% of workers responded that they actually have a high level of trust in their employer. So you see both sides kind of get the stakes here. This is going to require us to use our kind of framing from earlier, managing differently. It’s going to require that leaders are unequivocal, sorry, unequivocal about creating trust and psychological safety in the organization. So you carry a heavy responsibility as leaders to not just build trust with your workforces, but also to create that safe environment within the organization that’s necessary to have that trust flourish and to elevate human performance. So put transparency in conversation with privacy, and talk about them together. Bring workers together in conversation with leaders to talk about, what are we what are we sharing, and why are we sharing it, and to whom and how, and ultimately, how is this potentially going to be used for the good of all, versus potentially, you know, to harm any one particular group. There is a quick example here that we’re sharing. And this is just a kind of working use case. This was a British multinational that was already collecting the kind of data that many organizations collect in a, you know, regular fashion, which is CCTV system data from, you know, inside or inside factories, the organization figured out they could use this data to identify and predict unsafe events. They sat down with the workforce and said, we’re going to do this. You know, we’d like to do this. We’re going to collect this data anyway. We’d like to analyze it and use it for this purpose, but it’s ultimately so that we can. Make the workplace safer, the workforce essentially said, that’s great. Let’s do it. Let’s see how it works out. And the good news is, it resulted in an 80% reduction in safety and since the first three months and worker trust went up along with it, which is the important part. Okay, that gets to our next trend, which is a bit of a sort of shift from the first three. If we think about all the technological direct disruption around us, we think about the potentials that can come from new technologies, particularly AI and generative AI. We’re noticing, though this disruption is potentially outpacing the capacity of many organizations and workers to get the best out of it, where it’s outpacing our ability to actually figure out how best to use it. To use a word, it’s outpacing our imagination. It’s outpacing our ability to to think about and imagine kind of our future, AI enabled selves, as it were, to prevent this deficit, what we’re kind of uncovering in this particular trend is organizations need to figure out how to scale curiosity, how to scale imagination, how to scale those human capabilities that separate that are distinctly human and separate us from technologies like curiosity and empathy and creativity and divergent thinking and emotional intelligence. We’ve got to scale these things, because as new technologies become better at replicating the sort of more functional side of work, what is left in the work for the human to do is to leverage those it’s really lean into those technologies. And as work itself is changing, we are continually presented with this question of, how could it be better? And that’s where our imagination is going to be so important, not just as leaders, but actually of everybody in the organization, to take full advantage of those opportunities, to to imagine our future selves, to to not just try to do old things in new ways with this technology, but really to change work itself for the betterment of the organization and the worker alike. A large majority of executives say they’re going to use Gen AI, for example, and they’re already put things in place. But you know, and workers are also saying they’re excited by the opportunities, especially to the degree to which AI can begin to do some of the more sort of drudgery parts of their jobs. But again, there’s this question here that we’re going to miss this window, this particular threshold in front of us, if we’re not, you know, if we don’t have more imagination. Now getting there, this is going to require that leaders think differently. You’re going to have to figure out how to operationalize those human capabilities data from our skills based organization research showed that 68% of leaders are confident that they have reasonably trustworthy, very verified and valid information about their workers hard skills, but only 48% are confident that they have a decent sense of their human capabilities or soft skills, and most organizations are not up skilling on the soft skills in a sort of systemic way, and that’s part of the challenge. Leaders also need to highlight for workers and teams and managers on the ground that these human capabilities are important. They’re not on the sidelines. They’re not something you can assume leaders have responsibility to communicate the importance of curiosity and empathy, and one way to do this is just to model it in practice, ask questions and sincerely Listen, that sort of shows what it can look like and paints a picture of success. And building on a theme that we picked up from last year, think about working those create moments in the day to day, ad hoc and built into work where imagination gets exercised. So a kind of classic example would be like the hackathon. So to tell us a bit about IKEA,
Sona Manzo 48:53
Yeah, I love this example because it’s really one where they’ve moved beyond really focusing on process and procedure that we would typically see in a call center, and really thinking about how to engage from a creativity and human connection perspective. So the way IKEA approached this was really focus on upskilling and transforming this role of the Call Center team members to change their focus, and they were able to free up time by introducing an AI bot to handle a lot of the routine customer questions, and then investing in this comprehensive strategy to upskill their team members. And so ultimately, the call center workers were able to strengthen their design skills and become advisors in terms of the way they could interact with their customers. So it translated, you know, upskilling provided new opportunities and engagement for these team members, and it translated to better business outcomes as well. And
David Mallon 49:50
That gets us to our last poll. I believe,
Jason Cerrato 49:54
David, I think for the sake of time, we’re going to skip the poll and stay with the content I’d like to. Value the content based on the time we have left. So we’ll skip the poll and jump right into digital playgrounds.
David Mallon 50:06
Okay, we’ll do and as Jason said, Our sixth of the seven trends we’re going to talk about is, sorry, the fifth of the seven is digital playgrounds. I’m going to do this one quickly because I think it sort of is a parallel one to the last one, imagination, imagination deficit. If we are going to figure out where we can use that imagination, where we can bring our workers into the process of thinking about what our future selves could be, we’re going to use all these new technologies and take advantage of the moment. We need safe places to play. And the good news is that organizations often already have a lot of the digital tools where this could be done, that they curate them in the right ways, if they bring together, for example, digital twins that they might use in their manufacturing and supply chain parts organization, but start to use them now for essentially workforce related questions, thinking about the the evolution of the workforce at large, but also individual jobs that might happen in a particular place. That’s one way. If we think about how we use tools like AR and VR and sensors and and Internet of Things and so on, if we curate all these things together, we can create, not necessarily, we’re not saying there’s going to be an actual playground, but, but you can use these to to to ask questions, to experiment, to try things out, and to engage the future in a way which might feel a little bit less risky. What we’re finding is that this is one of those ones where, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of experimentation out there, but it’s, it’s early days, if you want to, if to get there, is going to require that organizations do think differently. Bring some of these technologies that are being used elsewhere in the organization into workforce contexts, democratize access to them, connect the play to work. We’re not this isn’t necessarily plays, necessarily always about doing things that are purposeless, but it is about exploring, uh, new questions, not necessarily always solving problems. You’ll see an example here, and you can go deeper on this example in the report. This is an airport in Vancouver, in Canada. They’ve created a complete digital version of their airport, which they don’t just use, you know, to sort of visualize the spaces. They actually use it to make decisions and to plan. They use it to look at traffic patterns. They use it for training exercises for their workforces. They use it to even down to to make choices about where they put art in the airport. But they built it expressly knowing that their workers would come up with new uses for it that they hadn’t even thought of. And it’s been a big part of their ability to again, to sort of grow and and imagine sort of the future of that airport. The six of our trends are micro cultures, when it comes to how cultures typically play out. Play out in organizations, most organs, most managers, most leaders. And you think about even when you might have applied for a job, and you think about how we tend to think about culture in the context of bringing new people in. We tend to think that culture is a monolithic thing, that the company just has a culture. Well, we’ve dug into this with this trend. We found that most organizations are actually a lattice of local cultures, Team cultures, department cultures, different parts of the world, etc. Their organizations are actually made up of a number of micro cultures. And the degree to which companies are beginning to realize this and take advantage of it, it’s a huge source of value. It’s a huge source of agility. It’s a huge source of innovation. But it does require that leaders think and manage differently, that they are allowing for those different cultures to exist and to thrive, and they’re finding ways to say it. We can have values that we all aspire, that we all believe in across the whole enterprise, but we can have different norms in different parts organization to sort of fit local contexts and local needs, and as leaders acknowledge this, 50 you know, the challenge here is most leaders tend to necessarily want things to always be in the same way. As leaders begin to acknowledge this, 50% of our executives this time kind of began to admit that, you know what, when there’s a moderate degree of variation, things seem to have things seem to be better. There’s benefits to it, right? So see how this plays out in terms of who we hire for. See how this plays out in terms of the kinds of measures and metrics we use. Think about how we evaluate leaders, but leaders, I’ll talk to you specifically. This is ultimately going to be about also you not balking at the notion that there might be, might not be, one size fits all answers to sort of key questions across the organization. Again, sort of separating values, things that we want, that we want to hold to be true in terms of what. We value what we value, versus norms, which are so those day to day behaviors and activities and rituals which are just sort of part and parcel how work gets done in terms of this particular switch, the key here is just to lean into it, figure out how you can harness it. Figure out where you can define and where these micro cultures are, start with the work itself. They usually come directly from the work itself. Try to find that balance between consistency while still preserving opportunities for local relevancy. And then obviously, figure out ways for these cultures to talk to each other. So you’re going to need managers and leaders that act as sort of the modular interfaces between different cultures, the last of our trends. I’ll wrap up quickly, because it kind of touched me, it’s it, it’s from a leader’s perspective. It’s more about how you’re working with the HR function. But to meet the demands of this new boundary list world. What we’re noticing is we need people’s expertise. We’ve heard you talk about human performance, human sustainability, and the human element throughout today. We’re going to need human expertise diffused throughout the organization, not just within a specialist function. We’re going to need it to be a boundary other than HR, you know, kind of in air quotes, to be a boundary, less discipline that involves both specialists who have HR roles, but also a mindset on the part of leaders and managers across the organization. HR is going to have to be a part of this to sort of create the roots, the connections to make that true, but leaders are also going to think and manage it differently, to grow their own people, related disciplines, their own expertise in those disciplines, and partnering with those specialists in HR, that’s going to look like, to some degree, redefining the role of managers, and we’re seeing this happen in real time across a lot of companies right now. What is a manager, especially, what is that middle manager? What does it mean to manage, and how are a big part of their role, playing connector and being people leader and helping workers to grow and making decisions about the people’s side of work itself, which means new metrics and analytics that we need to put in the hands of managers. We also democratize people, practices and data related to the said things, and use AI tools and so forth to get there. With that, apologies for we’ve run through the last two quickly, the last two or three there very quickly, but hopefully, we hope we’ve given you a sense of these currents kind of what’s happening. Good news is, if you want to know more about them, you can go find the trends research itself. But more specifically, today, thinking about managers and leaders, what’s different for you in terms of closing that knowing to doing gap that I’ll say thank you,
57:57
and thank you so much for this resourceful presentation. We don’t have time for a Q&A session, but just as soon as it is shared in our Q&A section, if you do have questions, post them in the Q&A box, and of course, we’ll pass them along to the presenters to answer them offline. Just a reminder to HCI members, today’s webcast has been approved for HRCI and SHRM credit, as well as for HCI recertification. Your credits for attending this webcast will soon show up in your My HCI profile, under the transcript tab while you’re there, don’t forget to check out hci.org for even more insights, as well as information on our certification, virtual conferences, premium membership and more, I’d like to say one more thank you to our presenters today and to the good people at Eightfold. And I’d like to also thank our well cast viewer. Thanks for spending an hour with us. We’ll see you next time!