[00:00:00] LIGIA: Okay. Hello everyone. And welcome once again to another episode of The New Talent Code with me Ligia Zamora and my other co-host Jason Cerrato. Hey Jason. Well,

[00:00:14] JASON C: um, it’s great to be joined by another Jason. I hope you have your energy up.

[00:00:20] LIGIA: that’s going to be super interesting because every time I hand it over to Jason, I guess we’re going to have to figure out which Jason. Funny, funny thing. It’s going to be, it’s going to be an amazing episode. I’m not even sure how much time I’m going to have to spend just introducing Jason Averbrook’s, accomplishments.

[00:00:28] For those of you who obviously already follow Jason, he’s a senior partner and global leader of HR transformation. At Mercer, I’ve known Jason for a very long time. His, career spans two decades in HR and technology sectors, and is part of Mercer’s Global Generative AI Strategy and Services group.

[00:00:49] So he’s spearheading a lot of discussions around innovation solutions in the HR tech space. So, let’s just get started. We have a lot to talk about, and I think this can be a very fruitful and engaging conversation.

Jason Averbrook, welcome.

[00:00:56] JASON A: Thank you, Ligia. Thank you, Jason. It’s so great to be here. And, uh, when you talk about decades, like, can you just keep it at two? Because I think if you just keep it at, even if it’s three or four or five, just let’s stick to two forever. Is that cool?

[00:01:11] LIGIA: Jason, I met you when I was five. You were, of course, much older.

[00:01:15] JASON A: Perfect. Exactly. Good. Good.

[00:01:17] JASON C: that’s like in my, in my mind when people say 20 years ago, they’re saying 1980, right?

[00:01:22] JASON A: Yes, exactly. Right. It’s just, I’m time, time, time. Great to be here, guys.

[00:01:28] LIGIA: Awesome. Thank you. Well, listen, we always, we’re fascinated at at Eightfold by nonlinear careers. We talk a lot about adjacent skills and what we would have, what we’d have done had we not ended up where we did. Um, tell us a little bit about, you know, how, how you came into this career, and, more importantly, what did you think you were going to be when you grew up back when you were five-year-old Jason Aberbrook?

[00:01:47] JASON A: Wow. It’s a great question. So, Ligia, I always, I mean, a lot of times when I do keynote speaking, I always ask people the question, Did your parents raise you to be in HR?

[00:01:54] LIGIA: Yeah.

[00:01:54] JASON A: And it’s always a fascinating answer that you get. Uh, interestingly, my parents, my dad was an insurance salesman. He worked for the same company for 47 years.

[00:02:06] And interestingly, my dad’s father, my grandfather, worked for that same company for 48 years.

[00:02:13] LIGIA: Oh my God.

[00:02:14] JASON A: So they had a total of 95 years with that company. I’ll never forget being young. I don’t think it was five years old, but being young saying, Wow, I wonder if I’m going to do this. Um, so I don’t think I ever was going to, but I thought about it a lot.

[00:02:31] My mom was a teacher. Uh, and I, at an early age, became a technology geek. So I kind of combined technology. Business, uh, education, and a really desire to care for people into what I want to go do, which was weirdly work in a hotel. So when I was 15, I was working in an Embassy Suites hotel and I was 18. I was actually asked when I graduated from high school to move to Southern Florida to open a hotel.

[00:03:11] JASON C: Wow.

[00:03:11] JASON A: And when I got to the hotel for the first time, there was nothing there except dirt.

[00:03:15] LIGIA: Oh, wow.

[00:03:15] JASON A: So I got a chance to design the hotel, build the hotel, and in return, they were going to, or they gave me a scholarship to go to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas to be in hotel restaurant management.

[00:03:27] LIGIA: That’s amazing. I didn’t know that.

[00:03:27] JASON A: So that, like, weirdly, that’s how I started my, my business life.

[00:03:32] LIGIA: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

[00:03:32] JASON A: Do you want to ask the next question?

[00:03:32] LIGIA: HR? But when did you pivot to HR?

[00:03:32] JASON A: So,

[00:03:32] LIGIA: aspect of that,

[00:03:32] JASON A: yeah, so yeah, I got, I had one of those OSMs, do you know what an OSM is?

[00:03:36] LIGIA: No.

[00:03:36] JASON A: Oh shit moment, where,

[00:03:36] LIGIA: swear on this podcast. Go ahead.

[00:03:36] JASON A: oh shoot,

[00:03:36] LIGIA: Oh, shoot.

[00:03:36] JASON A: oh shoot moment, where I actually got mugged,

[00:03:40] LIGIA: What?

[00:03:41] JASON A: I got mugged.

[00:03:41] LIGIA: yo this is going to be an interesting episode.

[00:03:41] JASON A: Yeah, I, in my hotel, uh, leaving my hotel, I got mugged, jumped from behind, beaten up, my chest slid open

[00:03:47] LIGIA: What? I’m

[00:03:48] JASON A: of, uh, yeah, exactly.

[00:03:50] And I was like, oh my God,

[00:03:51] LIGIA: you

[00:03:51] JASON A: I’m done with this business. Left Southern Florida, came back to Minneapolis, and ended up taking a job while I was getting my undergraduate degree, uh, at a company called Controlled Data, which then became Ceridian Corporation. And that’s how I ended up in the HR payroll space.

[00:04:11] So if you think about that, like, the only reason I’m here today is because I decided to go to a Wendy’s outside of my hotel, to get a salad and got jumped from behind.

[00:04:22] JASON C: That’s quite a story.

[00:04:23] LIGIA: win. You win for probably most interesting story for that first introductory question.

[00:04:28] JASON A: Yeah, sorry. I didn’t mean to go deep into it, but that’s how I, like, weirdly, that’s how I got into this space. Um. Was, and you know, and on the Ceridian story basically, I said, what could I do while I’m doing my degree? And they said, we have a role to implement payroll. I’m like, I know nothing about payroll, except I knew it was a pain when I was managing these hotel employees.

[00:04:48] And I said, this might be an interesting thing to try. So we was on a DOS based platform, talking to a mainframe, and I started implementing payroll for companies here in Minneapolis while I was getting my undergraduate degree.

[00:05:02] LIGIA: Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm.

[00:05:02] JASON C: Wow, so Ceridian, PeopleSoft, LeapGen, Mercer, you’ve been in this space for quite some time. You’ve seen things, you just talked about working in mainframes with DOS. We are at the front seat of a turbulent market with a ton of transformation happening right in front of us. Everyone that we’re talking to is asking us, you know, how do you make sense of this?

[00:05:27] Where do we start? How do we step our foot on this journey? And, you know, Jason, I’ve been following you for some time, read, read a lot of your content, watched a lot of your webinars, attended other sessions you’ve presented. I think one of the reasons why I was so excited to, to chat with you is it’s not exactly where you start. It’s even before that. Right. So one of the reasons why we’re here with The New Talent Code is we like to talk about ways that you need to think different and manage different and operate different. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve heard you phrase this a certain way. Do you want to help start the conversation with just around that, around when people say, where do I start? What is that first step?

[00:05:55] JASON A: Yeah, thanks Jason. I mean, I always, I mean, one of the, and maybe it’s just the way my brain works, I always look back to understand where we’re going. You know, and you kind of have to do that to really understand and have the perspective of how we got to where we are. So if you think about the world of HR, HR started basically as something that was designed to manage people that worked on machines.

[00:06:19] So if you think about that, you know, what these people did, and I know, sorry to date myself here, but the manufacturing economy, you know, which is where HR started, was to make sure that people were safe. To make sure that union laws were followed. You know, to make sure that people had pensions to protect their long-term careers.

[00:06:40] You know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and I would say that if you think about that, most people that were in the space back then, their job wasn’t to understand skills of people.

[00:06:47] JASON C: Correct.

[00:06:47] JASON A: was to make sure that they had, that they had people that could run the machines. The machines had the skills, not the people.

[00:06:47] You know, the people were kind of just doing rote work. So, if you think about that and fast-forward to today, the role of HR has changed drastically as we’ve switched from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy to probably an intelligence economy.

[00:07:05] LIGIA: Yep.

[00:07:05] JASON A: That the way that you must think, in my personal opinion, to understand HR is to say the way HR was designed originally as a personnel department.

[00:07:17] If we’re still doing things the way we did things then,

[00:07:21] LIGIA: Mm-Hmm.

[00:07:21] JASON A: And we’re applying that to this new code of work, we’re probably doing stuff that doesn’t apply any longer. So if you think about that, you know, the way I used to do a performance review, it probably doesn’t make sense anymore. You know, the way I used to do the allocation of comp, it probably doesn’t work that way anymore.

[00:07:34] The way I used to do talent management, quote unquote, probably doesn’t work that way anymore. Yet many people in HR still operate that way. We’ve gone from generation to generation to generation to generation of technology, DOS to Windows to client server to web, still doing the same thing.

[00:07:49] LIGIA: Mm-Hmm.

[00:07:49] JASON A: Okay, and then we wonder, and who do we blame?

[00:07:53] We blame the technology.

[00:07:55] JASON C: Right.

[00:07:56] JASON A: So what I’d like to do is I’d like to take a step back and say, we have to design the way HR should work. for the way that the world works today. The reason that people have jobs today and what those jobs are, and if I do that, then I can be an effective HR organization. But so often people don’t, haven’t adjusted HR to meet the change in the world, and therefore people say HR is just this transactional thing that gets payroll done, that counts people instead of making people count.

[00:08:31] And instead of thinking about people’s careers, their skills, and their future.

[00:08:36] JASON C: Yeah. I love the way you phrase that. And, you know, when you think about this concept of talent management, you first start seeing it surface around the assembly line. Right? And you just brought us from the assembly line to knowledge workers. And I loved how you said, now moving into intelligence workers.

[00:08:51] And I think, um, when people are having this discussion today, there’s still a lot of discussion and talk around, this is, we’re, we’re doing this primarily for knowledge workers. Everything’s for knowledge workers. And we need to even advance that, that concept even further. I’m not sure if your ears ring occasionally from time to time, but often when I’m speaking, I quote you directly and talk about the phrase that I grabbed on with this HR needing to learn to unlearn, right?

[00:09:17] And you can’t just optimize for what you’re doing today. You have to build with a whole new future in mind for this new way of work for this new organization and this transformation we’re going through. Can you tell us a little bit more about, about that concept? Maybe with some of the. clients or engagements you’ve been working on, or maybe some, some stories from the road.

[00:09:36] JASON A: Yeah, I mean, Jason and Ligia, one of the things that’s so challenging, yet so fun, about the opportunity that, in what I do, is transformation means change. Okay, trans means change. And in order to truly change, like I said, A, you have to understand where you’re, where you came from. But B, you can’t just do the same thing going forward.

[00:10:01] Which means you have to unlearn the way you have thought. And that’s really hard. That’s not just really hard in this little tiny microcosm of HR. That’s really hard in life. So, you know, as a parent of two boys who are 19 and 16, how did I, how might I learn how to raise my kids? Based on how I was raised.

[00:10:27] Is that the way I wanted to raise my kids? In some cases, yes, my parents did a good job raising me. In other cases, I chose a different path. But in order to choose that different path, I had to unlearn some of those things. And when we think about the fact, excuse me, that the world changes so fast and the world is changing around us, if we don’t change how we do things, All of a sudden we become outdated, or old, or, you know, not relevant is probably the best way to say it. Not relevant. And in many organizations where we’re working with organizations today, they will say that the HR function is not relevant.

[00:11:08] LIGIA: Mm-Hmm.

[00:11:08] JASON A: nothing worse than not being on that island of relevancy. Does that make sense? Like, there’s nothing worse.

[00:11:14] LIGIA: It, it does, but I, I gotta, I gotta challenge you here because.

[00:11:14] JASON A: Oh, I love a challenge, and I love the, and I love the butt.

[00:11:14] LIGIA: word. I was going to use another swear word, but I’m going to call BS because, okay. So it’s a lofty goal. I love it. Yes. We have to stay relevant. We have to understand what’s happening in the workplace, but guess what?

[00:11:19] I’m a busy recruiter. I’m a busy manager. So, do we, I guess, tap into or people or how do we help HR staff? Stay, stay in tune with the changing workforce, and, you know, take the time to unlearn, like how, what are the mechanisms, to drive that internally? Because I mean, yes, we all want to stay relevant.

[00:11:35] We all want to stay up with the times and then drive that transformation within the organization. And I think part of it is a fear of, oh my God, how much more work does this mean? But more importantly, it’s getting out of your day to day, right? And understanding what that change entails. So I know it’s a loaded question.

[00:11:51] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:51] JASON A: isn’t bss. The concept is ve very valid. I mean, and I mean nothing against the way you asked the queue way you said that, but I was answering Jason’s response as to what, what are, what are I seeing in organizations?

[00:11:56] I’m seeing organizations not take the time to unlearn and I’m seeing organizations not stay relevant. Now your question, what does it take to stay relevant is, and I’m gonna use an A word. And it’s clean. It’s alignment.

[00:12:11] LIGIA: Yeah.

[00:12:11] JASON A: I have to say, what are my overall business objectives?

[00:12:17] LIGIA: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:17] JASON A: I was with a, I had lunch yesterday in another state with a CHRO of a retailer that has business objectives of going back to the basics.

[00:12:25] LIGIA: Yeah.

[00:12:25] JASON A: being attacked by this new world of e commerce. What does HR need to do to support that strategy? And then what do I need to do as a talent acquisition leader to support that strategy?

[00:12:39] Based on the fact that my audience is a group of Gen Z or Gen AI that think this way and work this way. How do I stay relevant? By knowing what’s going on in the business strategy. By having a people strategy that’s aligned to that business strategy and knowing my audience. If I don’t do those things, I’m not relevant.
[00:13:06] Does that make sense? I’m missing the mark. I’m tone deaf. I’m doing stuff that isn’t tying back to outcomes. And I’m doing stuff that doesn’t resonate with the audience that I’m trying to hit. And unfortunately, Ligia, and I know it’s hard, That you are changing the tires on a, changing the wheels on a bus while the bus is moving.
[00:13:27] Because you don’t get time to stop and do, oh, let’s listen to Averbrook pontificate on unlearning and oh, isn’t that cool and things like that. Like I’m not tone deaf to the fact that people work their butts off 60, 70 hours a week just to keep the lights on.

[00:13:45] LIGIA: yeah, yeah.

[00:13:46] JASON A: at the same time I’m saying that we have to infuse a little bit. of unlearning and a little bit of evolving into that. Otherwise, we don’t get the change we’re looking for.

[00:13:58] LIGIA: Mmhmm.

[00:13:58] JASON C: I, when I, when I listen to you describe that, I pick out three key areas. One is the need to expand your view, right? You talked about understanding what’s happening in your industry, understanding what’s happening with disruption, being able to potentially disrupt yourself. I think I also heard you say around this needs to be increasingly continuous, right?

[00:14:18] Well, from an HR perspective, we’re used to annual processes and things being done in cycles. And in the, in the modern world, this is now being done continuously. And then the last one is not just doing something for HR sake, but being aligned with the business and not just where the business is today, but where the business needs to go. [00:14:36] So I pull all that together to, to pick out another one of your phrases that I, that I love. Is that it’s not just change or change management. It’s building a culture and a feeling and an approach around this that becomes, to use your word, changefulness. Do I have that right?

[00:14:53] JASON A: Yeah, so Jason, the way that, one of the things that’s so hard is, you know, we use this term change management. And, you know, and I’ve been using it my whole life. So I’m guilty of, I mean, most of the, by the way, just really quickly, just on the personal side, most of the stuff I say, I’ve made these mistakes.

[00:15:13] JASON C: Mm

[00:15:13] LIGIA: Mhm.

[00:15:13] JASON A: who built product at PeopleSoft, as Ligia mentioned, as someone who built product at Ceridian, as someone who helped implement these products, what I’m talking to you about is not stuff that I’ve done perfect. I’m definitely not perfect. It’s learnings that I’ve had throughout. So I’ve watched, I mean, I, there was a moment in my life where I was the CEO of a company called the Marcus Buckingham Company.

[00:15:31] And our goal was to change the way we did performance reviews. Lofty goal, but to change it. So what we did is we created some really cool software. We started to push the software out to people, and we said, Hey, as part of it, you need change management.

[00:15:47] LIGIA: Yeah.

[00:15:47] JASON A: And the change management, we started like three or four weeks before they went live with the software.

[00:15:54] And all of a sudden, we said, Guys, here’s how you’re going to do this going forward.

[00:15:58] LIGIA: hmm.

[00:15:59] JASON A: And what happened was at that moment is that the people didn’t have an open mind. So I could push out all the great change management stuff. I wanted quick reference guides, PDFs, top tens David Letterman’s top tens, you know, whatever we want and cool videos.

[00:16:17] Yeah. Yeah. Digital adoption tools, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But if my mind isn’t open to doing it that way, or I don’t see value for me. I could have all the change management tools that I could possibly come up with and I don’t, I won’t do it. I won’t adopt. And then you know what happens is people say, the technology is the problem.

[00:16:39] The technology is the problem. It’s not the technology that’s the problem. It’s the fact that I tried to put a solution into the hands of people that didn’t understand or didn’t see the value in what I was trying to do and weren’t bought into it. So, Jason, when I think of changefulness, I think of changefulness as opening the mind.

[00:16:57] Helping people see the vision, understand the value, understand the why, because it’s changing their job. Most people don’t want HR to change their job because they already have enough stuff going on in their day to day life. And if, once their mind’s open, then I can apply change management concepts to get them to figure out how to use the tools.

[00:17:20] Now, hopefully if I do the change full the right way and the design the right way, I’ve already designed for change and I don’t need to do change management. Like none of us go to training on how to use LinkedIn. I didn’t go to training on how to use the podcast platform because it was designed for me easy, right?

[00:17:31] It wasn’t designed for someone who’s an audio engineer. Does that make sense? So if I design for change built in and I design with that mindset in place, then guess what? The change management can be minimal because I’m ready. I’m ready to go and I love this concept.

[00:17:43] JASON C: Now, having, having grown up in the HR function and having, uh, worked in this space, you come from a, uh, an environment where everything needs to be eyes dotted, T’s crossed, documented. Where’s the manual? Show me the standard work. All of all of those type of procedural things that HR has owned and built and managed over time.

[00:18:03] You talked about how in your experience you had engaged a team right before go live day. I did the same thing. We did a roadshow around the world, engaging people. Um, you know, maybe a few months earlier for a lot of folks that are listening, that are starting on this journey, right. And thinking about where to start.
[00:18:19] If you’re creating this concept of changefulness and sharing the vision, How early do you start bringing people into the tent? How early do you start engaging them in the vision even before you start talking about the tools and the process?

[00:18:33] JASON A: So let me get real with an example. I’m going to become a skills-based organization.

[00:18:38] LIGIA: Mm hmm.

[00:18:38] JASON A: I’m going to become a skills-powered organization, where maybe for once, finally, when I say people are our most important asset, I might actually know something about my asset.

[00:18:51] JASON C: Correct.

[00:18:51] JASON A: Oh my god, seriously?

[00:18:51] Like, hey, in the past, people are our most important asset, but I know more about the value of my laptop than I do about my people. Yet I have a CEO saying people are my most important asset. So now, I’m saying we’re going to become a skills-based organization. Which, by the way, has a ton of value, a ton of merit.

[00:19:09] But if I just say it, and I’ve been saying people are our most important asset for 20, 30 years, what do people say? Uh, here’s just the next cool thing HR thinks they’re going to do. Now we’re going to become a skills-based organization. And guess what? Everyone’s going to automatically fill out their skills profile.

[00:19:28] LIGIA: hmm. Mm

[00:19:30] JASON A: but guess what? Then all of a sudden, in reality, we don’t provide any value back to the employee.

[00:19:35] LIGIA: hmm. Mm

[00:19:36] JASON A: we start to say, guys, there’s something wrong with our strategy. Uh, people are filling out their LinkedIn profile, but they’re not filling out their internal talent profile. Why? Because they don’t see the value.

[00:19:48] They weren’t bought into it. So Jason, it’s changefulness starts when you develop a strategy. So if your strategy is to become a skills-based organization, you start the changefulness there and say, I better make sure that every manager in this organization is bought into this. Or do the work to get them bought into it.

[00:20:09] I better make sure that everyone in HR, not in a silo COE, but an East West model, believes in the power of skills. Because guess what? Once I do that, then my, then I’m going downhill. Then it’s easy. But if all of a sudden I don’t start there, I’m three weeks, four weeks, four months before go live, you know, which by the way, people should never call it go live.

[00:20:36] They should call it go begin. But you know, because that’s when I begin to see the value, not celebrating the live and then we’re done. But you know, three or four weeks before go live and all of a sudden like, Oh, better start thinking about how to get people. Think different, you know, that’s, that doesn’t, I mean, it just doesn’t work.

[00:20:52] And I’m just going to say, back to Lahir, what I said to you earlier, like, I, I made this mistake. I, when I was at PeopleSoft, I rolled out something called E Apps. Okay, E Apps were something that you used to be able to dial in via a modem, download a Java app, if your modem stayed connected long enough. to download the Java app so you could change your address.

[00:21:20] LIGIA: Wow.

[00:21:21] JASON A: It took about five minutes to download the Java app every time you dialed it. And then we asked ourselves why no one used it.

[00:21:30] LIGIA: Mm hmm.

[00:21:31] JASON A: Why no one uses it because it didn’t, it didn’t, it wasn’t designed for them, you know, designed for their life. So learning from that, you’re like guys. We didn’t set them up, they, and the person didn’t see any value.

[00:21:44] Cause guess what, they changed their address, they clicked on OK, and it said saved.

[00:21:49] LIGIA: Mm

[00:21:49] JASON A: And then, they never knew anything from there.

[00:21:52] LIGIA: So Jason, to be clear though, when you talk about this, this starts at the, not at Go Live, it starts at the strategy. Actually, doesn’t it really start at the business case formulation? Because it’s the same objections that you’re going to get if you’re trying to get funding for this.

[00:22:05] JASON A: You know, like,

[00:22:05] LIGIA: It’s like how many things can we roll out and then how much adoption are we going to get and is it really going to drive outcomes and results?

[00:22:12] JASON A: So Ligia, it’s a beautiful statement.

[00:22:15] LIGIA: Thank you. Am I, am I forgiven for the earlier one?

[00:22:15] JASON A: Oh, you can call BS on me anytime, because it makes me think. But no, it’s a beautiful statement, because one of the things we oftentimes forget about in the strategy piece is, is something that we use a ton in the work we do called measures of success.

[00:22:23] LIGIA: hmm. Mm

[00:22:25] JASON A: success?

[00:22:26] LIGIA: Mm

[00:22:27] JASON A: all of the, all of these initiatives have to have measures of success.

[00:22:33] And so often we see the measure of success as go live.

[00:22:37] LIGIA: hmm.

[00:22:38] JASON A: Or we see the measure of success as adoption. And if you tell a CEO that I just spent a million dollars on something and we have 72 percent adoption. Actually, if you spend a million dollars and you tell the CEO you have 99 percent adoption. You know, a, hopefully a CEO says, what is that?

[00:22:59] Like, so? You know, what does that mean? Like, what’s, like, how did it move the needle? How did it help me achieve my business strategy? So if we think about that, it goes back to what are we, what’s the outcome?

[00:23:11] LIGIA: Yeah.

[00:23:12] JASON A: to achieve. And that that outcome. So you’re right. That outcome should be in the business case, which then should flow into the vision, which should have been created as part of the business case about what I was trying to do.

[00:23:26] So, I mean, yeah, it should go all the way back as far as humanly possible. But, you know, if I didn’t set those measures of success correctly, and I’m about to go live and my measure of success is adoption, You know, and then I have, I tell the CEO, I’ve got 99 percent adoption and they say, cool. Yeah.

[00:23:49] LIGIA: And I could see, I, I understand. It goes back to what you said. It’s not about the technology because you’re right. The problem is you get stuck on the sticker price of the technology that you’re bringing in and so then it’s like, oh, but it went live and it’s like, that’s actually not what we’re driving here.
[00:24:01] Yeah. The CEO might even go, go live with what?

[00:24:04] JASON A: Yeah. Like, yeah. I mean, one of the things that’s so frustrating for me is that because of vendors like you guys, we have the best technology in the industry we’ve ever had the best. And if you ask most organizations, which I, that’s all this, I spent my life doing this. With enterprises, they would say they’re not any better off from an HR technology standpoint, from an HR technology footprint, than they were when they were running DOS-based systems.

[00:24:35] LIGIA: Wow, that hurts, yeah.

[00:24:37] JASON A: And that’s really frustrating. And the amazing thing is, it has nothing to do with the technology vendor.

[00:24:43] LIGIA: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:43] JASON A: It has everything to do with the fact that we’re still just doing what’s called a technology transition. Going from one technology to another, doing the same thing. Instead of truly transforming how we work and getting different outcomes.

[00:25:01] JASON C: And even those measures of success, so those measures of success, you can’t just take how you’ve always measured or evaluated something and push it into the future. You have to redesign and rethink what the success look like in this new way of work with this new technology. That’s one of my big soapboxes currently is a lot of people will say, well, here’s what our current measures are and here’s how we currently track what we do.

[00:25:22] And how do we expect that to improve going forward? And I’m saying, well, if you do it entirely different. With different data and different outcomes, you’re going to also need different measures of success.

[00:25:31] JASON A: You know, and Jason, I mean, by the way, once again, there’s. When I, when I speak, sometimes I feel like I’m preachy, and I don’t mean to be preachy.

[00:25:31] LIGIA: No, not at all.

[00:25:31] JASON A: I’m just trying to, to, no, no, no, I’m just trying to go back to, like, history. Like, there was a point in time, and part of, part of being knowledgeable, I guess, is just, is having some grayish hair, where you’re kind of like, like, there was a time where, like, Y2K, okay?

[00:25:36] LIGIA: Oh

[00:25:36] JASON A: There was a measure of success at Y2K, was let’s make sure that the technology infrastructure doesn’t fall apart.

[00:25:43] LIGIA: Yeah.

[00:25:44] JASON A: You know, like what, like, what was the business case

[00:25:47] LIGIA: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:25:48] JASON A: to go to a Y2K compliance solution, which by the way, there was no such thing as a Y2K compliance group. But let’s just say it was Y2K compliant.

[00:25:59] Um, like that was a technology measure of success, right? And there are times where a technology measure of success makes sense. You know, if I’m an organization that, my learning organization’s working great. But I have 19 learning management systems I’m paying for. So I’d love to just consolidate to save money.

[00:26:20] That’s, that’s fine. But let’s make sure our measures of success meet the outcomes we have so that when we’re done, we don’t just say, okay, it was a go live, but I became a skills based organization, which means I sold eight times as much as I did the year before. Or I have five times the level of customer satisfaction, or I have four times the.

[00:26:45] amount of time that a job stays unfilled, which means, which results in X amount of whatever, expense reduction, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So how do we get our measure of success to not be HR looking at itself in the mirror, but looking through a window at the impact of the business?