In 2024, HR teams faced rapid transformation, from using AI in their daily work to major shifts in human capital trends. Watch as we reflect on how these trends shaped the industry in 2024 and how they’ll likely continue to impact HR teams in 2025.
Leaders from Deloitte and Eightfold will discuss the following:
Sarah Lally 00:00
My name is Sarah Lally with HCI, and I’ll be your moderator for the hour. Please join HCI on social media for updates and to share your insights. I’ll turn this over to our first presenter today, Jason Cerrato, Vice President of Marketing Strategy at Eightfold. Jason, welcome to today’s webcast.
Jason Cerrato 02:23
Thank you, Sarah, it’s wonderful to be here. We love partnering with HCI, and we also love partnering with the this team. Deloitte, hopefully we have some new people in the audience today, but hopefully we have some people that have been here throughout the year as this has been part of a series, we’ve been talking about the 2024 Human Capital Trends report from Deloitte. And it’s amazing to think we are here almost at the end of November, because I’m still referencing the 2023 report. I was just talking about it earlier this week. So what we wanted to do today was kind of have a lively discussion with these esteemed researchers and thought leaders around the discussions we’ve been having over the course of the year, with a line of sight to what’s next for 2025 so what I wanted to do was introduce the panel, and then get the conversation started. So, without further ado, let’s first introduce the panel. So first, I want to hand it over to Sue. Sue. Can you introduce yourself, please?
Sue Cantrell 03:31
Thanks, Jason. It has been such a pleasure to be on so many of these with you this year and exploring our 2024 human capital trends. I lead what we call human capital eminence. It’s really about thought leadership at Deloitte, and I have the pleasure and privilege to do original research, talk to clients about the challenges they’re facing, what are the new trends that we’re seeing, and really be able to produce things like the Human Capital Trends Report. One of my particular passions is pulling it through into tangible practices we can help companies with to advance the state of the field.
Jason Cerrato 04:13
Wonderful. Next, I want to introduce Sona. Sona, do you want to introduce yourself?
Sona Manzo 04:17
Yes. Thanks, Jason. Wonderful to be back here with this team as we wrap up our season this year, if you will. And my role, I lead the Deloitte alliance with Eightfold, and I work with organizations globally to help bring together strategy, experience and process design informed by leading technology and the great AI capabilities of talent intelligence platform, when I met the Eightfold team back in 2019 I could see where this was headed, and the synergies between the trends that we have here and how we might bring those to life for our customers. So, here to help share some stories today of what we’ve seen in the field.
Jason Cerrato 05:00
Next.
David Mallon 05:03
My name is David Malin. I am a managing director in our human capital practice here in the US. I’m a human capital researcher by trade, and I lead a capability in our human capital practice, which you call research eminence and market activation. And it’s about how we use research and sensing to help our practice make better decisions, to to expand our footprint and market and to ultimately make our solutions more evidence based.
Jason Cerrato 05:32
I love that. So, with the 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report, we’ve been talking about themes around human sustainability and rethinking productivity and workplace micro cultures and creating digital playgrounds. These concepts of transparency, but also what it means to have a transparency paradox, the thought of an imagination deficit as we incorporate AI into our workplace. What this means for leading in new ways, and thinking of leadership going into the future, and what’s landing at the feet of HR in this concept of boundary, less HR. So to kind of summarize some of the conversations we’ve had over the course of the year, we looked at the series of conversations we’ve had and some of the questions that have come in, and some of the polls that we had at previous sessions, and I kind of wanted to summarize some of those conversations and pose some questions to the panel. So for the folks that have been here, some of the folks that are new, this will be a nice summary or recap of those sessions. So I want to start with you sue as boundaries dissolve from how we’ve organized work, historically, we’ve talked a lot around the strategies we’ve used to organize work, but What strategies can organizations employ to reimagine work in new ways that are not only human centric, but also adaptable to how work is changing so rapidly in real time. Yeah,
Sue Cantrell 07:12
thanks, Jason. I actually think you hit on a number of the strategies that we cover. But I think overarching The idea is that, you know, when boundaries are dissolving, we need to stop using those old proxies that no longer fit a new world of work that we’re all living in now. So a couple of examples here. We think of workers as employees. That’s kind of the old proxy to capture the singular notion of kind of full time staff, but yet, we’re not really considering the full ecosystem of workers, all of the folks that create value for the organization. And that’s a much more human perspective. And today, with technology, we can find and manage a full ecosystem where workers, I’m talking about folks like gig workers, contract workers, workers and partners, partner organizations and the like. Another thing we talk both in 2023 and 2024 about is this, this notion that this proxy of the job to describe work, right? It typically documents a set of repeatable functional tasks. Functional tasks, but But oftentimes it doesn’t account for the dynamism of work today, where oftentimes work is performed outside of traditional job boundaries. And so this enables people to be seen more as whole humans when we when we think about them as collections of skills, as attributes, rather than just as job holders. And technologies like Eightfold can help organizations better match workers to work like projects and assignments and let them be seen as full individuals. Another couple of strategies that we cover in our trends report is this, this notion of the proxy of a culture, a monolithic one size fits all culture of how organizations should operate. But in reality, what we found is that organizations are made up of abundance of micro cultures. They vary in the way they work and the norms and behaviors. And that’s actually can be a good thing to elevate performance, and this enables culture to fit kind of local needs and be more human centric, around around the human and I’ll just bring up one last one, because there’s a lot to unpack in that question, this notion of like the proxies of what we call employee engagement, which has been around for so long, to evaluate The relationship between organizations and workers, and we question method, maybe, maybe, when we think about that relationship, perhaps we should be thinking about the measurement of trust, or metrics that also benefit the worker, both the both the worker and the business perspective. Because when you think about engagement, it’s really about measuring discretionary effort, how much of that workers are willing to expand for their organization’s benefit, that helps the company, right? And so you had mentioned, Jason, we introduced the concept of human sustainability, which is about organizations creating value for workers, helping them be more employable, for example, or with better well being. And our research found that that actually helps elevate business outcomes. So this notion that we might want to maybe not measure worker activity or productivity so much, but rather measure the human and business outcomes and have technologies help us with that is an important strategy.
Jason Cerrato 10:37
I love that. You know, at Eightfold, we have a podcast, and I’m one of the co-hosts, and we have a theme or a motto of how you need to think, manage and measure differently going into the future. And you know, what gets measured gets done, and in many cases, the way we’re going to operate, some of those traditional proxies are getting flipped upside down, right? So what success looks like could be very different. So depending on what you’re actually trying to achieve, you need to think about, well, let’s drive those behaviors with the with the right measurements. For example, we were just talking the other day around. If you’re trying to drive mobility in an organization, those are different measurements than attrition and retention. Attrition and retention, or did they leave, or did they stay? That’s not mobility. Mobility is mobility is movement cross departmental not did someone go or did they stay in place? Right? So again, again, thinking of things differently for the behavior you’re trying to drive. I love that, and I think that’s a great transition to my next question, which I’m going to aim at, Sana. So Sana, you work directly with organizations putting this in place. You know, what specific steps are you seeing HR teams take to try to integrate this more deeply with the business for strategic impact, when they’re trying to take some of these concepts and some of these kind of plans and bring them to the ground.
Sona Manzo 12:12
Yeah, Jason, I think what you were saying about we need to think, manage and measure differently, with the view of, you know, the end in mind, what is success going to look like. So it’s really critical for organizations to be thinking about stakeholder readiness and alignment at the front end of the process. You know, sometimes we’ll go in and organizations will say, we’ve been working on our vision. We’re all aligned. Everyone is ready to go. Let’s jump in. Let’s let’s accelerate. And what we find is that often, just making sure that we are level setting and getting a little bit more time to engage with the stakeholders, to get everyone’s thinking aligned, and then use that to start thinking about change readiness for the broader organization is really helpful. Again, thinking about it with, I would say, a user experience mindset. So who are the personas, not only just the stakeholders, but who are the personas across the organization? That also requires us to start thinking about this concept of the micro cultures that we’ve been describing, right? So kind of gone are the days we’ve had traditional, monolithic view of culture. So when we’re going through this experience design piece, we want to be thoughtful about who are those individuals we need to engage. What are the micro cultures that we need to enable, and make sure that we’re thinking about that from a design perspective and enablement perspective and a change perspective. And then I would say, you know, again, kind of breaking out of some of the traditional silos we found organizations getting great value, instead of just thinking about something narrow, like candidate relationship management or talent acquisition, thinking more broadly about talent intelligence, and where does that help us go as an organization, particularly as we look to achieving skills based organization strategies and impact so that thoughtful process. You know, often we find we’re able to actually accelerate some of those journeys of acquisition and mobility and even maybe resource management and workforce management. How do we think about that and align it with the business and pairs of the auto organization, again, adding value as quickly as possible on that journey?
Jason Cerrato 14:12
I love that this kind of concept of talent-centered design, designing for the user, understanding the personas right, driving outcomes that deliver value to the business, and you’re seeing it every day by process of elimination. David, you know I’m coming to you, one of the topics that we summarized our series with was we focus a lot on technology and on automation and on AI and what that means to the work that people are doing, but for all of the things that it takes off of the plate, it also emphasizes the role of the human in the work that’s left and the work that’s remaining right. So we’ve talked about that over the course of this series. How can organizations cultivate creativity and curiosity and empathy and all of the power skills across leadership and their teams, or really amplifying the human in the leadership that’s required going forward.
David Mallon 15:12
Yeah, so I it’s it. It’s about my favorite thing. I’m glad you asked me this question. So you call them power skills, different different groups, called different things, soft skills, power skills. What have you we the term that we’ve used historically of Deloitte is enduring human capabilities, and we use that, that name intentionally, because what you’re describing are actually personality traits. They’re things that are inherent to all of us as human beings. They’re essentially this sort of, they’re like a bicep, right? We all have a bicep, but some people are just some in some folks, it’s big and bulky, and, you know, well developed. In some it’s not, right? They’re all there. And so when we talk about cultivating those enduring human capabilities, they are. They’re part of what defines us as human. And they’re and we, we’re not training them. We are trying to find gymnasiums. We’re trying to find places to go practice and hone them. Right? There’s lots of great examples, for example, with empathy, particularly in like customer service context, where you put people into situations where they’re sort of forced to see the perspective of the other person, and by doing that enough times, it’s getting on a bike and actually practicing empathy. My favorite is curiosity. There was some great neuro science research done recently that took pictures of people’s brains and found that that your brain when you when you’re feeling curious looks exactly like your brain when you’re feeling uncertain. So actually, it makes some sense. A lot of the work that’s been done about how we develop that curiosity muscle is, how do we intentionally put people into uncertain moments, sort of get them to think about things, thinking to sort of to maybe go out and explore the world look for signals, but on questions that are not easy to answer, questions that are actually thorny and somewhat, you know, somewhat unfamiliar. And so by doing that, and by doing it in regular ways, just like, you know, just like going to the gym every day, by finding ways to sort of get on the bike every day and practice, that is, that is how you would effectively cultivate someone’s curiosity.
Jason Cerrato 17:27
I love it. But also that leads to a conversation around building environments with psychological safety and learning laboratories where you build environments for strategic failure and the ability to to learn quickly and fail fast. So that’s, I think that’s a big part of how the world of work is going to change going forward, right? Maybe in the in the world that we came from, we operated very different from the fast iterations of how the world of work is going to be done going forward. So like So David, I’m going to stay with you for the next question, and this is about kind of the trends as they’ve evolved through the years. And I referenced how I’m still stuck on last year’s report, and the world is moving too fast for me. The thing that I that I keep sticking on from last year’s report is how last year’s report talked about, kind of the proliferation of skills based strategies, and how organizations were experimenting with skills based strategies. And if you start to experiment in one in one area. It doesn’t stay in one area. It kind of proliferates across the talent cycle. But then also how these things become dynamic and continuous that we’re breaking away from the traditional annual calendar or cyclical HR process to become increasingly dynamic and continuous as an HR function and as a talent practice, and that was a theme that kind of jumped out at me and has stuck with me and continues to be at the tip of my tongue as I’m in conversation. But as you’ve been at this for quite some time, how have the trends changed over the years? If you’ve worked on this research? Sure,
David Mallon 19:19
well. So we’ve been doing this since 2011 now, if you went back and you looked at the reports and kind of first two or three years, they’re not going to look like they are today. They’ve evolved over time, not just in the kinds of things we uncover, but in the just the form, just the research, the sort of structures and so forth. But we do think it is the longest and largest longitudinal look at what I’ve always liked to describe them as, as currents. It’d be very easy to think we do this annually. They’re trends, that they’re predictions. So actually not predictions. We’re not telling the future intentionally it. We’ve all had a chance to stand in the ocean or stand in a river, and you feel that pressure. It’s pushing you someplace that’s now, that’s not in the future. And that’s what we’re trying to do every year is to go out into the world and say, when it comes to the people side of business, what are those pressures that are sort of pushing us to into different places? And if we can give them names and we can tell stories about them, then it makes it easier for us to to be intentional about how we react to them, to sort of thrive in those currents, right? It is global. It’s been global since the beginning. It is always been a not necessarily focused on HR, although we can talk about that. This past year, we surveyed 14,000 people in 95 countries. The story has been similar year over year. We always hit a very large global sample, and the stories remarkably similar, regardless of whether you’re talking about where in the world or industry or sector, what have you. It, very similar issues. Just the, you know, the kind of conditions on the ground or degrees of difficulty might be different. And so that’s that’s very much true today, as it was in in 2011 I personally have been involved since, basically since 2014 and I’ve been an author and researcher supporting the project, and it is one of the greatest hats I get to wear in my role. Sue. Maybe I’ll let you jump in, in terms of sort of talking about maybe the shifts in the trends.
21:17
Yeah, sure, I actually the human capital trends was one of the reasons why I joined Deloitte, and I feel very privileged to now be part of this team. And I actually see I’ve been an avid reader even for years, since the beginning, even before I joined. And I see three major shifts I think, over the years. I think the first and perhaps the most important is this idea that we’re really moving away from thinking that these trends are HR issues. They are really about people issues, and people issues are now at the heart of business and C suite issues. So let me give you a little example and perspective on this. So in the beginning, towards the beginning of the trends, the report oftentimes focused on new trends in workforce practices, like new trends and rewards, new trends in performance management, new trends in talent acquisition. But in recent years, boundaries are coming down between those kind of HR areas and even between the HR function and the rest of the business we wrote about boundaryless HR last year, and tech trends and business trends are converging with workforce trends so today, you’ll look at some of the topics we cover trust human sustainability.
Jason Cerrato 24:38
we wanted to ask, what is your biggest priority as an HR leader in shaping the future of work over the next year. And you have a couple choices there. We’ll give you a couple moments if you can reach back for your mouse and pick an option, and we’ll take a few moments to see the tabulation of the results. I always love watching The results come in.
David Mallon 25:22
I do you think people are answering the survey later are influenced by it
Jason Cerrato 26:02
always reminds me of a horse race.
26:08
Clearly, the leadership has held at number one from the very beginning.
David Mallon 26:16
As Sue said, we’re we’re currently working on next year’s trend, and we actually just recently came out of a fairly lively conversation about leadership and what we’re going to talk about next year.
26:29
Yeah, it’s a perennial, and it’s so important because they really set the tone from the job
Jason Cerrato 26:37
well, the next kind of session, or the segment of time for our hour today is going to talk about the future of work, and I am. the next section of our discussion here today. I and the race is on.
Sarah Lally 37:27
That’s so hard to just select one I
37:40
I think learning and growth is just so critical, and that’s a perennial that I think is going to continue to grow more important over time. And harkens back to what David was saying around human capabilities, and the ability to learn, how to learn, is kind of a meta capability that that is going to become increasingly important, and when our work is so ever evolving and changing. To go back to what I was saying about human sustainability, we all need to have those skills to be continuously employable.
David Mallon 38:33
Go ahead, son, yeah, I
Sona Manzo 38:35
would say it’s really interesting to see this. And you know, thematically, the top two kind of come together when you think about some of the offerings that organizations are focusing on to give agency to their employees. And what I mean by that is, you know, that we’ve moved from a mindset shift so much focus on talent acquisition and bringing new talent into the organization, which was a big focus when we were seeing, you know, the evolution of the the talent intelligence platform and the skills based AI strategies, but over the last 18 months, we’ve seen a real shift in that, with a significant increase in the focus on what I would say, kind of collectively the talent management capabilities, a real focus on opening up the learning and development aspects and giving the individual the ability to really understand where their skills fit, be able to express their preferences and where to go with that, in addition to them, you know, rethinking internal mobility in a way, and I really, like you know, with some of the concepts that Salesforce has introduced. So at Dreamforce, this year, they announced that they were rolling out their career connect. And the concept with with this is really thinking about it as a career mosaic. So how might an individual understand how their skills can continue to be progressed within the organization, and what opportunities would that open up for them, laterally and upwards, and opportunities to contribute to the organization? And so they’ve just launched for their over 70,000 employees to create career passports, which are basically a profile that has insights to skills that are curated for them, and then these personalized career mosaics, so jobs, career path courses and the concept of a career navigator that they are having access to, and that will continue to grow in terms of capabilities moving in things like mentorship and gigs in the future, but the early kind of results are from their pilot that they had incredibly strong engagement with the community that was in the pilot, and over 90% of the internal positions that were filled during that pilot timeframe for that that cohort came through that mechanism, really high engagement and Learning and repeat kind of navigation to this Career Connect piece and with the global launch, I think it was just great to hear, you know, one of the one of the comments was, it was such a fun and easy process. I loved the experience of seeing how my skills come together. This has been so helpful. I already have role suggestions and course suggestions day one out of the gate, this is really cool, so you can see how empowering this is, right? So gone are the days where it was so hard to get insight into what learning opportunities are meaningful for me and what opportunities for career go growth are with this new construct.
David Mallon 41:15
What I what I yeah, what I like about this example is it’s just the top two things on this list are just so ripe for disruption and reimagination. And that example is a good. Is a good. We’ve been on this progression we’ve been talking about, you know, for the ball across all the trends the decade, we’ve been doing them, moving from ladders to lattices to to jungle gyms to, I love the mosaic concept. It really is about as we’ve begun to think about our identities, and I think that’s the really an important use word to use here, as we think about our identities as workers in work, it’s getting past the notion that our identity is a job with a job title in an office, right? And it’s more about, well, what can I do? What value can I bring? How can I expand what I do? How can I expand the value that I bring? And that isn’t necessarily going to be about this notion of sort of forward progression, or it may not even be about that kind of movement. It may just be about I am just more impactful tomorrow than I am today. Yeah.
42:27
And what I love about that, what it takes into account for, is that empowerment and that individualization. Because, to your point, David, not everybody wants to move vertically or in a particular way, and so it gives that empowerment. And, you know, just connecting this to some of our work and trends, you know, we’ve written a lot about the skills based organization in 2023 we read about end of jobs, and the whole idea that you can dynamically match skills to work, skills to learning to create a more personalized experience mobility, rather than, you know, traditional ladders, and then almost being able to also, I think importantly, is to look at adjacent or near skills, not just the the actual skills you have, so that that can open up areas for you to develop, using that adjacent or near skills as a foundation. And then And then, when it comes to talent acquisition, being able to like, use affirmative filters that screen in people based on skills or adjacent skills to open those doors of opportunity and movement,
Jason Cerrato 43:35
I was just gonna say, to kind of reframe or rethink that concept of career ladders and promotability. There’s a lot of organizations that are trying to remove bureaucracy and expedite decision making and become more horizontal or consolidate functions more operationally. And you know, we were talking to an organization that’s going from 14 job levels down to four. Yeah, right. And if you, if you operate in a world that looks like that, it’s not about promotability. It’s about right? Because there’s, there’s not as many levels right now, it’s about employability, and what skills do I have where I can contribute to the team? And it’s about moving horizontally and adding value to the organization in a broad way. So it’s thinking about your career differently, and the value you add to the team and kind of the network that you have. So the world of work is looking looking very differently. David, what are your thoughts on that? Well, so
David Mallon 44:44
picking up a little something I had said before, I do think we, we do as individuals. I think we, we have a role to play here, not just organization. So I’ll go back to one of the things I liked about what Santa’s example pointed to is that, as organizations, what we really owe the individual is to help them with real guidance about the choices in front of them and the implications of those choices. But ultimately, as individuals, we do have, as you said, we have empowerment here. We have the ability to exercise those choices. We have the ability to make not just choices about this isn’t just a traditional learning development question. It’s not just about, okay, well, do I go take a course or watch some, you know, video on YouTube, or do I or what have you? It’s not necessarily about how I do traditional education. It is as much about the choices I make in my day to day work, and how you know, where, where do I deliberately try to put myself into sort of a stretch situation? Or where do I deliberately sign up for some sort of gig assignment in the organization? Or where do I just aspire for more, right? And making those intentional decisions is actually and then, and then, finding moments to reflect about how they go, that is always and and will probably always be far more developmentally impactful for us than, you know, engaging in some sort of course or class. That’s, I guess that’s my first reaction to your question.
Jason Cerrato 46:29
So Sue in the report this year. You know, we’ve talked about this new equation, but earlier in this hour, we talked about the poll, and we the topic of productivity came up and thinking about measuring it in new ways. In the in the research this year, we talked about this concept of human performance. So can we talk about kind of this thought around thinking of human performance in new ways? Yeah,
46:56
sure. So here’s one interesting step that we uncovered in our research this year, we asked people, you know, how effective are you at evaluating the the evaluating the value created by workers, and how to unleash that value? The answer was, 17% said they’re effective at it. So, you know, it’s tough, right? Do we do we equate value with productivity, and when we think about the word productivity, it’s been around since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, right? And it’s literally defined as output per hour, or net output. So it’s output oriented, it’s input oriented, it’s activity centric, things like time on task or revenue per employee inputs and outputs rather than outcomes. So that that focus on that human performance is focused on outcomes. And actually, this year, a little sneak into what we’re writing about. David and I just had a conversation about, you ask anybody how their day is going at work, and inevitably they’ll say, busy, right? We equate busyness with performance, and I think we need to decouple that is, is busyness performance? Not necessarily. So we need to focus on outcomes. And so that new math is really, we really think that we need to have not just business outcomes, but the human outcomes, what we call the human sustainability, that they’re mutually reinforcing. And part of the trick here is that we touched on this before, is that one of the reasons why we haven’t gotten there is because it’s so much easier to measure busyness or activities, and we’re just, I think, beginning to be at the cusp of an era where you know now that nearly everything is digitized, and we have so much data, we have unstructured data, with the ability to collect real time data, can we actually start to make a dent in measuring more effectively the value that workers create through measuring human and business outcomes together. David,
David Mallon 49:10
yeah. I mean, in some ways this is, I think Sue even hinted this earlier. In some ways, this is all it forces us on the ground, our clients ask us these questions. It forces us to think about traditional processes like performance management and so how we’ve looked at that, at, you know, how that’s worked over the years. And I don’t think I’m, you know, it’s not gonna come to great surprise to anybody watching this that you know, we’ve been organizations have been trying to break, disrupt, fix, reinvent, performance management for as long as I’ve been in the world of HR and human capital, and I’m not sure anybody would say that they’ve entirely, you know, cracked that particular nut yet, because we are trying to do so many things at once. Because we are we are trying to understand the value that individuals bring. We’re trying to make decisions about our workforces, about the or about the organization, about, you know, sort of who gets promoted, who gets rewarded. We’re trying to, we’re trying to grow as, you know, as teams and as as a company, right? So we’re trying to do all these different things. And as Sue has just articulated the vocabulary, then the metrics, the information that we use, is sort of moving target, and in the past, has been mostly focused on what was easy to measure because that was easy to also trust. That’s an important element. All this is trust. And as we’re as we’re realizing that just because it was easy to measure doesn’t necessarily mean it actually points at the outcomes we all want to be true. It’s forcing us to go, Okay, what? What would we collect? What information, what intelligence would we collect that would tell us whether or not those outcomes are true, and do we trust the that data? Do we trust how it’s collected? Do we trust how it’s going to be used that and back to a couple of previous chapters written last couple of years around workers and worker data, and workers having some agency over what data is used, and last year and this year about transparency. And you know what, what information is shared to who, for what reason and why? Right? These are all important questions. And ultimately you have to resolve them if we’re going to make this human performance equation a reality. So
Jason Cerrato 51:28
I think, you know, that’s a that’s a great segue into this last section of the time today is part of the benefit of the technology we have and shifting to more continuous processes that are dynamic is the immediacy of information that we have, and that’s part of how I feel we can better prepare to operate in more uncertain times, because you just have More information at your fingertips to be able to react to things dynamically. You know, research has shown we’re not very good at predicting things. We’re actually better at just reacting to them. So the best combination is to have a dynamic approach. But you mentioned this transparency paradox, right? And the trust element. So for this concept of kind of data and analytics and where things are going, what are what are you thinking about for kind of where we’re headed in the future, and especially with, you know, the world of AI and this kind of trust component, what’s, what’s top of mind, or some of the things that are keeping you up at night? Well, I’ll start to say, or maybe maybe even spin it more positively exciting you
David Mallon 52:57
Well, no, I mean worry or excitement? I think the answer to the question would actually be the same, and it’s not necessarily a new one. Even in 2018 we first had a chapter on what we now call people analytics. The core question we’re asking was, how far is too far when it comes to the data about our people in the workforce? On some level there is, there’s reason to believe that, you know, this particular pick, your pick, your cliche, this particular train is left, left station, the source left the barn. There’s lots of data in the world, and there are lots of HR tools, AI tools that are being, you know, expanded upon and developed every day, and and more and more uses for it, and and so it’s not a matter of if there’ll be, you know, ever more uses of data and ever more questions asked of that data, and ever more questions related to work and workforce and workplace, the things that we’re talking about today. It’s not a matter of if. It’s just a matter of kind of what, when and how, far and so, ethics and and and anchoring. Back to today’s conversation, human performance in trying to make things good for both humans and organizations at the same time, that has to be our anger.
54:20
Yeah, yeah. I might just add on a couple things. I mean, Shoshanna Zuboff wrote a book maybe five or six years ago about this age of kind of AI surveillance or right surveillance capitalism, I think was the name of the book. And that’s the area that we don’t want to necessarily go into, right we, which is why we wrote the transparency paradox last year. Because sometimes transparency, meaning if you collect data about workers and make it transparent, sometimes it can really help workforce trust, if it’s done responsibly, some of what David’s alluding to, but sometimes you just need to make it private, you know? And that’s that How far is too far right to be able to elevate trust. Because sometimes we oftentimes think in the back of our heads that the greater transparency, the greater trust. Well, that’s not necessarily true in a world when we can collect data on workers as they work. So a couple principles of responsibility that has been really backed. We’ve done a great deal of research on this in the last couple of years. One is give to get. That’s the heart of, I think, the 2023 trend on negotiating worker data, which is, you know, you need to get the data. You need to give benefits to the workers, right? You need to clearly tell them how their data is collected and used, you need to be able to, obviously, account for an ethical AI framework and monitor for bias and the like. I mean, Jason, you had asked where we think it’s going and a couple interesting questions we’re pondering this year. Is, for example, if your data and expertise is baked into an algorithm or baked into an AI system. You know, do you get rewarded for that over the long call, right? Like, you know, Gen AI sometimes is collecting qualitative data. It’s collecting images, for example, on sites like Shutterstock. And you know, how do we reward workers when their data or their their work is being used in Gen AI? And how do we give credit for them? Right? So this, this topic continues to be a hot topic that evolves over time as technology evolves.
Sona Manzo 56:38
One of the things that I think is, you know, in this give and get piece, and it kind of reflects back on some of the sentiment we’re hearing as organizations deploy talent intelligence for their organizations, is the excitement that employees are sharing when it’s explained properly, right? Like, here’s what we’re going to be providing to you, and here’s how you’ll be able to use it to navigate, have more transparency, build connections, and build your career. And some of those are just, even just the straightforward ability to navigate connections and see people that have like interest or like skills, for example, provide great benefit in terms of kind of the sentiment of the, you know, the worker population, in terms of what the value is for them, of this data that’s being utilized.
Jason Cerrato 57:28
Well, this is why I’ve loved this series, and I’ve really, truly enjoyed the conversations with the three of you, because it’s not just the technology, it’s the strategy, it’s the culture, it’s the leadership, it’s the empathy, it’s the management, and the conversations we’ve had have brought all of those things together. So I hope the audience has enjoyed the series. I’ve enjoyed the research, but I enjoyed how these conversations have brought the research to life. I’ve enjoyed Sona bringing some of the implementations and examples to the real world, and I’m looking forward to the report from 2025. So, we can reconvene these conversations in the in the next year, but not too fast. Let’s enjoy the holiday season. But thank you so much for the series and appreciate the robust.
