HR professionals understand the importance of adapting to changing business environments, but to be successful, they need strong partnerships with the C-suite. What is the C-suite looking for? Let’s recalibrate the conversation and hear directly from the leaders themselves.
Watch this Talent Table conversation, where our panel of C-Suite leaders will start the conversation and discuss:
You will come away with practical knowledge that gives you a better understanding of what leaders are looking for and helps you be better prepared to have productive conversations with your leadership teams as you work together to implement new tech.
Rebecca Warren 00:00
We’re talking about unlocking what today’s executive needs from HR. So, the question for our panelists today, for our guests, is, on a coach or an economy flight less than four hours, so a commuter flight, do you recline your airplane seat to polarizing questions, so we may not get to the rest of the topic, depending on how this goes. So I’m going to go ahead and start with you, Chris, will you introduce yourself and give us your answer, and then we’ll move on over to Bill Jordan.
Chris Norbury 01:26
Good to see you. Chris Norbury, Chief Executive of E.ons business in the UK. E.on is a large international energy company with a large European energy company business in the UK, serves one in five homes, in homes and businesses in the UK, we’re also a major investor in UK energy infrastructure. And as to your question, you’ve certainly hit upon something that is a particular point. Despite being six foot two, somebody who takes lots of short-haul flight, absolutely not. It’s a matter of deeply held principle, and I’ll leave it there.
Rebecca Warren 02:46
Bill, let’s flip it on over to you and see how you answer our question of the day.
Bill Pelster 02:58
Yeah, you know. So, thanks for having me. Bill Pelster, co-founder with Josh Bersin in the Josh Bersin Company. We do research and analytics work in the HR space, trying to figure out what’s happening with people and the people component of business strategy. And before that, I came out of 20-plus years as a professional consultant, primarily with Deloitte. I was the chief learning officer, and then the CHRO with some internal tours, and wrapped up my time at Deloitte as an elected board member. And as far as you know, flying, I’ve got almost 7 million air miles. Those were actual miles. Those are not the bonus miles to give you, but actually, like sitting paid for any of those outside of your world. And Chris, I 100% agree with you. It’s like there’s a lot of things that your title, you could actually do, but in a polite society, we just choose not to do them. And when somebody decides to recline, I feel like it’s tearing at the fabric of society, and I just want to, like, pop it on the back, and if I have to get up and use the restroom, I want to make sure that I, you know, bump it a few times to let them know. Yeah, that is impolite, and they shouldn’t be doing that. So there you go.
Rebecca Warren 03:59
All right, so my husband is six-five. I’m five-five on a good day if I stand up straight. So, for me, I hadn’t really had a point of view before I got married. But as a six five, married to someone who’s six five, him, just fitting into the seat is a challenge, right? And so we’ve, we’ve gotten into the habit of figuring out how to upgrade or exit row, but if, if the tree, if the seat comes back, it, it literally gets stuck on his knees, like the seat can’t come back if it hits him. So my point of view is the same, no, even though it doesn’t bother me as much, but I am team no as well. So feel free to throw that into the chat or the Q and A, tell us what you think about that. That might be one of the best, you know, polarizing questions that we have. But all right, thank you for that. Let’s get started. So our topic of what today’s executives need from HR. So the first thing I want to ask, because things are changing so fast, right? We need to make sure that we have strong partnerships inside our organizations. We can’t just expect that the C suite is going to do their thing and everybody else is going to fall in line without a lot of communication and partnerships. So we know that there needs to be that strong connection. So what I’d love to hear from both of you first is, what are the top three things the C suite is going to expect from HR in the next three to five years? I know I’m asking you all to make stuff up because we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but what would you say are the top three things that the C suite is going to expect your need from HR in the in the next three to five years. So Chris, why don’t we go ahead and start with you, and then we’ll flip on over to Bill. Yeah, no,
05:48
sure. Thank you. I don’t have a crystal ball. The one thing I know is, the one thing I know is that what I think we will need in five years time will not be what we actually need in five years time, changing into more space, but not nonetheless, I think there is, there are some things that remain constant. And you know, one is that the you know, certainly for us, the business that we’re in is a intrinsically human enterprise. The we supplied energy to people in their homes, we supply energy to businesses. We provide those people and those businesses with means of reducing their energy consumption, decarbonizing their energy consumption, and at its core, you’re supplying or enabling people to access a base what is today a basic human need. Do I live in a warm home? Can I afford to live in a warm home? And that that’s a particularly challenging topic in the UK at the moment, this we, we are an intrinsically human enterprise in the particularly when I think about the customers that we serve. And that means that, you know, in order to be successful, then that that humanity needs to be reflected in the way in which we behave as an organization that can only come from under, you know, from a deep understanding in the board of our business as to how those people who work for us feel, what it is that engages them, and what it is that we need people to do, how we remove blockers, how we help the people that work for us serve our customers to the best of their ability. So you know, and for me, and you know, I, I’m told, told, it’s rare, I’m not sure, but I’m, I am a former chief people officer who became CEO, then, you know, a, you know, really helping us as a as a board, understand the human dimension of our enterprise in a numerate way, in a data, data literate way, but also in an empathetic way, is hugely important. And then the second thing would be, you know, in order to do that, then the depth of understanding of both the market and of the commercial drivers of our business are super important, so to make sure that that that insight is not detached from the reality of the market that we’re in, and it’s not detached from the reality of the commercial drivers that we have that actually compliments and provides an accelerant to those got it.
Rebecca Warren 08:37
I love that, right? I mean, we’ve talked a lot about the AI and tech taking over. HR, but I think we’re going to see that forever, that the human component needs to stay in the business. Bill, what do you think?
08:54
Yeah, no. I mean, it’s a great question. And, you know, we kind of have the luxury on the person side of you know, we do our own organic research on these topics, and we study everybody else’s research, and we try to triangulate what’s going on here. And Chris, I think your initial comment is so prophetic, right? What we think we’re going to need in five years is actually probably not going to be what we actually needed, but we don’t know what that is. So if we accept that as kind of the backdrop there, I think the biggest challenge out there, and I’ve not seen this in my 25 years of really, you know, either consulting to HR, sitting in HR roles inside the organization. You know, for the first time in history, we’ve got two large change wheels spinning simultaneously. On one hand, we’ve got the nature of work being fundamentally re imagined with the, you know, let’s use AI and all the tools out there that’s impacting organizations. So even if the business was steady, the nature of work and how we do the work is changing right in front of us, and we’re living through this kind of tectonic shift. Then on top of that, every survey that we see out there and in discussions with CEOs pretty much believe that their business is fundamentally transforming over the next five years, and they need to focus on what they’re going to be doing next, while not losing sight of what’s paying the bills today. So you’ve got these two huge change wheels moving simultaneously in that context. And this is Bill’s opinion, and anybody can push back, but in the broadest kind of perspective, ice HR normally sees itself as the guardians of the organization. We need to make sure everything is perfect. We need to make sure we understand all the questions. Let’s make sure everything is ticked and tied before we go ahead and do any kind of change. And in a world where there’s ambiguity, and in a world where there is rapid change, yes, it’s important to be a guardian, but also a little bit more of a pioneer in spirit. And how do we reimagine what could be the future? How do we actually be an enabler to the business, as opposed to kind of a drag sheet to the business? You know, let the business kind of reinvent because they’re closest to the customers, and then HR has got to deal with a little bit more ambiguity and a little bit more risk. And when people push back on me and say, well, listen, you know, we can’t do that, because we’re expected to be near perfect. I would just always remind everybody what happened the first couple of weeks of COVID. We transformed so rapidly when HR was given permission not to be 100% perfect, and you could be like 5% imperfect. We moved so fast as organizations, it was amazing to see the amount of transformation. So so so we can do that. But I think, you know, it’s one, you know, the executive team allowing HR to be a little less than perfect, and HR embracing a little bit more ambiguity and being more pioneers than Guardians of the organization as we try to transform because the mark is going to demand it.
Rebecca Warren 11:37
I love that idea of going from the guardians to the drivers. How does that change? And that expectation is more on agility than it is on perfection. None of us are perfect, right? So it is maybe a little bit unrealistic to expect that everything that comes out of that that team, that organization, to be perfect as well. So Grace and agility sound like the two things that maybe we need to move forward overall. I like that, so let’s talk about that a little bit so. And that is, I think when I like what you said, Bill, about the shift, right? You’ve got work transformation and business transformation, and those two things happening simultaneously, maybe not at the same speed or with the same understanding. So trans having HR transform into the pioneers, the innovators, the ones that are driving the business. Let’s talk about that a little bit. So less about personnel or about event planning and more about that, that seat that is innovating and driving talk to me about what that looks like now, Chris in your organization, and what you expect that to look like as we go forward.
13:01
I mean this step back a little bit, then I there’s a confession, which is, I find the conversation, and I’ve got a long career in HR behind me, and I find sometimes find the conversation about the role of HR and the seat at the table as something of a an idiosyncrasy. I don’t see my CFO colleagues spending too much time agonizing about what their role is within an organization to the same extent, and whether they have a seat at the table. And in my experience, there’s, there’s a lot of fantastic people work in HR functions, talent functions, people functions, who, through the breadth of visibility that they have of the business and the intelligence and capability that they bring, you know, bring a perspective on the organization. Bring a perspective on what the future of the organization may be, what the future of the market may be. Very few other people can do. You know, if I’ve got a chief operating officer or Chief Commercial Officer, officer who’s responsible for a segment of the business, they have a narrow, deep slice. They don’t have a breath, necessarily, and you know, so certainly what, what I’m looking for is that the HR, for wanting a better word, you know, brings that breadth, that commerciality to bear, to challenge us about where it is that we’re headed, to challenge us about do we fully understand the context of the world around us and what that means for the market that we’re in, and do we still, do we fully understand the rate of change that’s going on and how we need to change in order to be able to be successful in that future. And that’s that, that’s a conversation that somebody in a in an HR and a talent role is uniquely placed. You know, there’s all the other stuff that comes with it. In terms of talent we need. What skills do we need? How’s the world technology changing? There’s lots of people who will propagate that discussion and propagate that challenge and cause us to think about that, but that breadth, that somebody in those roles has that perspective that they bring and the challenge they can therefore bring about future can be different.
Rebecca Warren 15:41
Okay, so and, and Bill, I’d love to have you weigh in on this as well. I’ll just throw this out there. So, well, I’ll, Bill, I’ll let you check first, and then I’ll throw up my thought,
15:52
So we wrote a paper last year called “The post-industrial” and we tried to put in context the role of the HR leader and the people organization, the way business should be thinking about people. Our hypothesis was very simple, and we studied this for almost three, probably four years, trying to figure out what was going on here. And what we said is, you know, there is a shift that is going on in the marketplace between the industrial model that we grew up on and we all understanding, we all went to business school, and we’ve lived it for so very long, and we’ve shifted into this post industrial world where, you know, it is, it’s about, you know, access to talent. It’s about technology disrupting the way we do things at a very quick pace, on and on and on. And the one of the key hypothesis that we put forward was that in a post-industrial world, that the barrier to growth for organizations is really access to the right talent in a way that we’ve never seen it before. If you go back to the industrial world, there were more people than jobs, and you had the Jack Welch model of fire, the bottom 10% and just go get new widgets that were people and drop them into the organization. And just keep doing that every single year. And in a post industrial world, there are actually more jobs available than people to fill the jobs. And that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. That work is being reinvented with technology, and we just have to think about it differently. In that world where there are more jobs or work available than skilled people to do the jobs. That means the HR organization has a strategic role at the table. They have, they are in, they are in that seat to advise the business of you know, where you get the talent. You know you’re not going to find that perfect unicorn anymore when, by the way, we’re inventing new jobs at a rate that we’ve never invented them before. So you can’t just put out a help wanted ad for a carbon capture specialist, you know, to go do something in the energy industry, because there’s not a lot of them out there. And so you have to think about, you know, what, how HR has got to think differently. And the playbook that we used for so long in that industrial world doesn’t quite work the same in the post industrial and So, Chris, I think to your point, HR actually has the knowledge and brilliance they have the seat at the table, and I don’t like that whole seat at the table with you add value. You will always have a seat at the table, right? And this is the moment for HR to really shine, because the business needs this, this reinvention of talent, whether it’s upskilling of your existing talent into new roles. You know, re skilling people into completely different jobs that they’ve never done before. But guess what? They’re really qualified to do that, but we own the RE skilling retaining people in a way that we’ve never retained them before, and reorganizing the way we do work so we can do it with the right amount of people with the skills and the work that needs to get done this is all HR stuff, and we just need to own it, embrace it, and sit with the business and challenge them and help them rethink the way to approach these problems. So I am more enthusiastic about the role of HR adding critical business value than I have been in the 25 to 30 years of my life working in this space.
Rebecca Warren 18:58
Oh, I love that and that. I’m glad I had you speak first before my thought, because you answered some of what my question was, and also then sparked that, that next level of the question is, and this is no, this is no dig on the folks that we have in HR, right now, right? I’ve spent my career prior to coming to Eightfold in TA and HR. But as we move from the into that post industrial age, do we have the right people in HR, and do we invest enough in our folks in HR? Right when we look at some of the research that’s come out of we invest a lot in other parts of the business, and HR sometimes doesn’t tend to get those dollars or that that attention. Do we need to upskill and re skill? As you said, a little bit. Bob. Bob Bill, do we need to up skill and reskill our HR folks in order to make sure that they’re able to take the organization forward?
20:01
Is that to me? Rebecca, sure, Yep, yeah. Let me give without giving anyway, any kind of like, I don’t think I’ve been retired from my previous organization for for many, many years ago, and early on in, like, the early 2000 like 2008 nine time frame, I stepped into the chief learning officer role for one of the big professional services firms out there, and we did a forensic analysis of the amount of spend and where the spend was going on, developing our professionals and so forth, and and the the part that really amazed me was for our accountants and consultants. At that time, we were spending a neighborhood of 12 to $1,500 per person. When I looked at the amount of spend we were doing on developing HR, it was $78 per person per year, and and that’s not a dig against the organization. It’s more that they are so busy taking care of everybody else that they sometimes overlook their need for development and actually pull them out of their job and let them basically develop and upskill and reskill themselves. So my call to action would be, and I think if you did that analysis, and I’ve done that for many different organizations, and the ratios kind of hold, right, we under invest on the people that are actually supposed to be driving all the strategic change for the organization. And so as we think about this, to answer your question very simply, yes, I think they are hungry for it. I think they typically feel neglected. I know all of them feel overwhelmed and exhausted, and so we have to create space so they can actually learn these new skills. They can understand why this technology is being disruptive, and they can understand how to bring those solutions to the business. So ultimately, they can partner with the business even better. So, you know, my answer is an unequivocal yes, but it’s not a dig that they don’t want to do it. It’s more a burden on leadership to make sure they have the time and space and we invest in them proportionally, understanding the impact they can have across the entire business. Yeah.
22:00
Just a personal perspective, it resonates. I mean, there is a history, I think, of people in HR functions being cobbled as children, for want of a better word, in terms of an under investment in their development. But if I think about, you know, certainly come back to my previous point in terms of my own, you know, what my own expectation would be. Then, if I’m expecting somebody to be able to look ahead at the way that the market is changing, to the way that to what we have to therefore, what we have to do as a business will change, to be able to think about in that context what talent and what skills and capabilities we need in order to do that in a rapidly changing market. If that’s what I want them to do, then what I’m from, what I’m asking, is an awful lot, and therefore, we absolutely have to, we absolutely have to invest in the capability of those people. And I completely agree with Bill. There’s no, you know, I’ve never experienced a lack of desire or lack of willingness. Sometimes there is, on the part of businesses, a lack of action when it comes to the investment and the people you’re actually expecting an awful lot of.
Rebecca Warren 23:15
Right. Well, so let’s talk about the skills journey. Everyone’s talking about the skills journey, right? What does that transformation look like, those wheels of change that are continuing to turn? So how are you both seeing and Chris will come to you first. How are you seeing the shift from jobs filling jobs, to focusing on skills, affecting and benefiting your organization from both a functional perspective, you know, kind of across the the organization, and in a in a more innovative way. What are you seeing there in terms of skills and that shift,
24:00
if I take it, if I take it, yeah, if I take a couple of example, take one example. So we we work with a number of cities in the UK, and, you know, we work with those cities to fundamentally to decarbonize the energy infrastructure of those cities, but those cities don’t want us to do that for the purposes of decarbonisation. They see that. They see the investment in energy infrastructure as a means to regenerate that city, and they see the investment in the energy energy transition as a means to regenerate their city and to create social value in order to deliver on that, then that requires us to change our output and to see those projects, not as infrastructure projects, but projects that require us to bring the capability of the whole organization to bear in that city to deliver The outcome that the city is actually looking for, which is regeneration in social value. And you know, doing that means that, you know, you are oscillating between, you know, capital Capital, and Projects with a high degree of capital intensity, projects where you may be building infrastructure that lasts, that has a 40 year lifespan, through to very immediate activity where you are going into a customer, into somebody’s home, and the installation in the home, or you’re offering bespoke tariffs to businesses and that city and that that different way of looking at that work, that fluidity between different types of work means that it’s all about getting the right skills on the pitch at the right time, and that will iterate constantly as you go forward. And then, of course, in today’s world, you’re doing all of that when you’re trying to do all of that based around digital backbone to which that energy infrastructure connects, and that’s that, in itself, is constantly iterating. So it’s, it’s a it’s absolutely a skills challenge. It’s a challenge about agility, about making sure that you’ve got the right skills on the pitch at the right time. But it’s an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for people in the organization. You know, it gives the opportunity to do things and to contribute to things that perhaps in a way that perhaps 510 years ago just simply wouldn’t have existed. It gives an opportunity for people to learn and to add value in a way which previously, 510, years ago, wouldn’t have existed. And pace of that learning, the pace of change in terms of what we do and what people do, is enormous. So it resonates, and it’s a huge opportunity for our people.
Rebecca Warren 26:58
Yeah, what I hear you saying is that when we start focusing on skills and looking at the objectives of the business, it tends to knock down those silos, get people into new spaces, thinking differently and all working together, as opposed to saying, Here’s my job, I’m going to do my nine to five and go home. How do we think more broadly when we democratize skills and give people the opportunity to lean in and other places?
27:22
We would previously have looked at that was that bit of works infrastructure, that bit of works in the B2B segment, that bit of works in the B2C segment. So people who do that drop ahead, and you can’t see it like that, because that’s not what the customer, in that case, the city is expecting. And that’s not the, you know, you’ll never deliver the outcome like that. We have to, you know, we have that we can’t have. They’re not interested in the internal boundaries of our organization and the internal boundaries. They’re interested in the outcome. And that’s what we promised them commercially. Some of that outcome has a societal purpose, so there’s a motion attached to it, as well as commercial detachment. And absolutely it’s it’s all about, have we got the right skills at the right time to do that work? And are people constantly learning? Because in two or three years time, skills we need will be fundable two or three years time, in 6-12 months time, the skills that we need will be different. Correct?
Rebecca Warren 28:23
Bill, I’m guessing you’ve got a thought or two on that.
28:25
Yeah, really just building on on what Chris said there. And maybe, allow me maybe two minutes, I’m gonna take a little bit of a step back, because this is a conversation I have with so many HR orgs around the world, right? And so if I take a little bit of a step back into like, the idea of a job. And the idea of a job in the industrial world was around. Organizations were trying to scale. They needed uniformity. They needed a way to actually manage 100,200 300,000 50,000 people, whatever the number was, and and the the entire organization was built around the concept of a job. And in a post industrial world, if you accept what I’ve been saying earlier, right where there are more jobs available than people that do the jobs, and the speed of change is happening so much quicker, in another radical way, compared to the industrial world, the idea of a job, it doesn’t go away, but it’s actually very limiting on the capabilities that the organization actually has on its people balance sheet. So the organization has actually many more skills and capabilities, but if you’re just looking at it from a job perspective, you’re actually leaving two thirds of probably the capabilities of a human being off to the side, right? And so it was about probably four or five years ago that all this conversation around skills started popping up, and everybody was like, skill, skills. Laura, Josh and I were like, we took a step back. It’s like, well, skills has always been out there. Why is this so important? And as we dug deeper and deeper, and it led to the publication of that post industrial paper, which, by the way, you can go out and download, you can get from Eightfold and get it from us. It’s available publicly for free. And what we found was, when you when you look at a person from a skills perspective, it actually opens the aperture so much wider around what that person can actually bring to the table and what they’re capable of doing. And I’ll give like just, just three numbers. And we did this in conjunction with Eightfold research, our research team and Eightfold we looked at hundreds of 1000s of resumes that had been uploaded into the system. And when you look at it from a jobs perspective, it’s fairly limiting. When you put the job kind of off to the side, you don’t get rid of it, but put it off to the side, three numbers popped up that I have told over and over again, and I’ll share it with your audience, and it’s 512, and 15, right? And for every five skills that the person has on their resume, or you believe you know about that person in your ERP system, because they held these jobs, they went to this course, whatever, right? There’s actually another 12 skills that can be inferred about what that person could actually do, because they had a life, probably before they joined your organization, they have done other things. And believe it or not, they do things outside of your organization, right? And so when you look at them, you know, Bill is more complex than the job he’s in today, right? And and so for every five skills that you believe you know about that that human being, there’s actually another 12 that may be available. So you just more than than doubled and tripled, you know, get the number of skills. And here’s the the interesting one. In a world of extreme change that we’re living in, there are adjacent skills, and that’s where the number 15. So for every five skills that you think, you know, there’s 12 more that can be inferred. And by the way, there’s another 15 that are adjacent, right? And in a world where we’re creating new jobs like we’ve never done before, and they don’t quite exist. Being able to infer that, you know, Bill, I know you’re an accountant today, but you might actually be a good match as a cyber security professional, not a perfect match, but maybe an 85% match, right? One industry is kind of stable and maybe shrinking. Another one is has explosive growth. Let’s have a conversation around my options. And does Bill want to go in a new direction? That’s to me, the importance of skills. And Chris, it looks like you’re going to weigh
32:10
in there. I mean, is it just, if I make it, it’s just a super important conversation. And sometimes, you know, sometimes I’m guilty of it. Sometimes we think of it in a still think, you know, we still think of this in a structural way, but the pace and change is so dramatic, and the skills that are required in somebody’s role, you know, change so rapidly that, yeah, it is Sometimes not possible to think of it in a structural way. Or sometimes you have to try and put structure to something that’s moving. You have to put the frame around something that’s moving really rapidly. So if I take our contact center in our B to C business, if I go back Customer Contact Center in our B to C to C business, if I go back six years ago, we were chasing a wage arbitrage around the world, offshoring work to more and more exotic locations. Today, we’ve on shored the vast majority of that work, and the nature of the roles has changed fundamentally. So rather than those being effectively COVID In a batch process where people would hand off one type of one section of a process to somebody else. Our energy specialists serve customers end to end. And the pace at which we’re deploying machine learning AI is so rapid, and the pace at which the world of the energy consumer is changing is so rapid that, you know, we’re deploying AI tools every week almost, that the nature of customer demand is shifting as P as the uptake of electric vehicles and solar batteries in the home heat pumps, etc, as that grows. One end of the spectrum, those customers become more and more sophisticated in the demand that they place. The basic tasks of the energy specialists become more and more automated. At the other end of the spectrum, sadly, there’s large proportions of the popular large numbers of the population in the UK live in fuel poverty. So people dealing with poverty, fuel poverty, the nature of that demand at the other end becomes more complicated all the time, and it changes seasonally. Therefore, there is this constant iterative process of people in those energy specialist roles you know, either having to upskill themselves, or looking to the organ or looking to the business to help them upskill themselves in order to be able to deal with that complex, increasingly complex demand where automation is taking out, is taking out more and more of the basic tasks that they would have performed. It doesn’t mean the work their jobs are going or the work is going. It means that, you know, they’re better able to serve that complexity, providing that they have the skills to do so, and we help them acquire the skills to do so, and therefore understanding the adjacency point that Bill made. And actually, in that world of increasingly complex energy consumption, what might they be suited to based on what adjacent skills they bring and what it’s it’s so important, and it’s almost live the way it happens. When I sit with the people in those teams, it’s almost a lot, you know? It’s a live process. It’s a living, breathing thing. Somebody with an electric vehicle rings in with a piece of demand that they’ve never rung in with before and they’ve never experienced before. We’ve got to serve them. We’ve got to figure it out. Yeah,
Rebecca Warren 35:52
Phil, do you have something to add to that?
35:54
Yeah, no. I mean, I think this is such a critical piece, because in Chris, I build on what you just said there and give another example, right? And so we do a lot of research around talent acquisition and what’s really happening there. And by the way, if there are any ta folks on this call, you are in competition with talent intelligence platforms. You are in competition with every recruiter around the world because they can see your people now, and they’re looking at it from a skills, not a industry and a job title anymore. So just understand the field you’re playing in. But one of the things that we talked earlier about, you know, what can the business expect more from the HR, and how can HR be more strategic to the business? If you take a look at the time, you know, to fill open recs, when they start to age out to a certain point of 45 or 60 days, and the business put out a job title and a description of that job that they wanted filled and you just can’t find that person. The strategic conversation then is to be able to go back to the business, say, Listen, I’ve got an 85% match. You know, you can have them tomorrow if you want, or we continue to wait another month or two months to find the perfect unicorn candidate. That is a great conversation to have with the business. It gives them a choice. They can decide on the perfect candidate, or they can decide on the 85% but the other way, then business can be strategic, and this is where skills comes in, right? Is if they’re an 85% match, then that requires another part of the HR organization, learning and development, talent development, to step up and help close that gap in a very quick way, right? So it’s not just a the business has an open need HR presenting choices to the business. And then, to your point, Chris, the internal structures of HR should be invisible to the business. It’s like you have a spot, you have work that needs to get done. How do we help you get that filled in the shortest amount of time possible? Skills provides another language, in a way to look at people differently than just job title and industry alone.
Rebecca Warren 37:45
Yeah, and Bill, I think all that is right. I think from my recovering ta practitioner hat, I think that conversation about 85% to 100% needs to happen right away, not even when the wreck has been open 45 to 60 days, and you can’t find that perfect person. I always told my team, if you’re looking for somebody who’s 100% of what that hiring manager is looking for, you basically hired a consultant, right? They’re going to come in, they’re going to do the work and they’re going to leave. You have to hire somebody that. That was always the way that I looked at business, you have to hire somebody at that 75 to 85% of what they’re looking for, because there has to be a reason for them to come and join to learn something new, to drive something new. And the hiring manager, in my perspective, should always be looking for, what does that diversity look like? What kind of things do I not know about that somebody might have in their background that could make me better, adding that diversity and that creativity. So I think that conversation happens right away. It’s going to take you right doing that planning. It’s going to take me approximately 180 to 200 days to find you the perfect person who may or may not stay long term, but if we find somebody who has most of what you need, and then engaging the business, engaging a hiring manager, engaging, engaging L, D, or whoever else could up skill and and train that gives engagement, that drives that connection, and that is based on skills, right? If you can think about the agility that they have and the ability to contribute to the organization, pouring into them and allowing them to pour into the organization. That’s the win with. So the other thing that you said, Chris, which I thought was great, is that idea of that organic growth, almost somebody in their role isn’t waiting for someone to say, from a different team, hey, you should take this course. Or maybe you should think about that. When we foster that idea of continuous growth, I may say, oh my gosh, I don’t know how to do X. Let me go figure that out, as opposed to saying, Well, I just won’t do that part of my job, or I won’t drive the business forward. So that idea of that organic growth and folks continuing to want to learn is driving those conversations. I want to tack on a thought here, as we talk about the skills based approach, and we talk about old ways of doing things, we talk about spots on an org chart as opposed to the work that needs to get done. How does HR need to think about changing the review process? Oh, no, I think I you know, you touch the Holy Grail, or the sacred cow, or whatever you want to call that the review process. How can skills take that from a twice a year process or a static process into something that drives that learning, that growth, those conversations, and takes it out of a process and puts it more into a regular conversation. I’ll throw that open to either one of you. But how could skills change the review process into something that is more iterative and continuous?
40:59
I think it’s important to differentiate between so there’s a review process, which I guess in most organizations, ultimately kind of couples performance and compensation in some way. But if I think about the work that people are doing and the feedback, certainly in our business, the feedback that they get, they’re getting constant feedback. You know, they’ve always on customer feedback. They have, you know, we have always on colleague sentiment, colleague engagement analysis, they can provide feedback on how they feel about working their customers are constantly providing providing feedback about the interactions that they’ve had. As I said, an example earlier, people will be constantly encountering customer demand that they’ve not encountered before, and they’ve got to figure it out, and they’ve got to figure out how to serve that customer. And therefore the knowledge tools and the knowledge platforms that we have are super important so and then simply, the way that we we try to work, is the way that we use operational excellence tools and so on is that the it can synthesize customer feedback with colleague sentiment, it can synthesize, we can synthesize what’s being captured in those knowledge in those knowledge platforms, and enable colleagues with one another and team leaders with colleagues to provide feedback that is to review, if you like, but to provide feedback that is much more practical, grounded in the nature of what people are experiencing, and is far, far more frequent than you know, doing something bi annually or quarterly, or whatever, that is inherently about looking in the rear view mirror. So if I’m talking about this is the work. This is how people feel, customers and colleagues. What have we learned from that? How does that translate into the skills that we need in order to be able to address that type of demand going forward and improve how our customers feel going forward? And that’s a much more practical live conversation, that’s much more meaningful, both to people working in the business and the business as a whole, than something that tries to look in the rear view mirror on a biannual basis.
43:36
First I would 100% agree. And Rebecca, we could have a whole nother one hour webinar on the performance management and an artifact of the industrial world, and doesn’t really apply in the same way, and it’s a proxy for many other things, but typically not people development. Even though we try to put the veneer of people development on it, it’s really not the purpose that most companies are using it for today. So let’s save that for another webinar, and we can have a good, healthy debate on that noted the important thing, though, and again, if Chris has talked about it, we’ve talked about it jointly, if you agree that we’re there in this post industrial world, what then is the role of management in helping to constantly develop and evolve the skills of their organization? This is not a static process. This is a very dynamic. It’s ongoing. And the best metaphor I can use is sports teams, right? And if you watch any coach on the sideline when they’re in the game and when we’re in business, we’re in the game every single day, every hour, right? What is the coach doing? It’s not about performance management. He or she is giving direct feedback every single time on what they’re doing, how to make them better in the moment, right? Yeah, and, and, you know, what skills do they need to get better at? What skills do people need to add into their inventory, and how do we facilitate it? By the way, that’s asking a lot of our managers. And every time we do analysis on the managerial roles, most managers feel ill equipped to do that on a daily basis. They’re really good at managing the work and the metrics, but the consistent development of people is something that they struggle with. Some did it incredibly well. The vast majority don’t. It doesn’t come naturally to them. So my our hypothesis is that, you know, in this world where there’s dynamic change, the world is evolving. Not only do managers need to be taught and supported in delivering on the metrics that they’re held accountable to, but they also, how are you developing your people to basically allow the organization to continue to grow? And what is the reward for investing time and giving, you know, the time for people to grow? Let me go back to my HR example. You know, when I talked about the amount of money that was being spent on HR, being able to go off and develop themselves. The reason that was the case is there was so much work that they didn’t have time, and I could not let them go for a two day course or a three day conference because of who’s going to do the work when they’re gone, when, in reality, that’s the most important thing we probably need to do in developing our people. And managers feel the same constraint I would love to develop my people. Can I actually afford the time? Am I rewarded for this, or am I rewarded very short term on making sure the work got done today and what happens tomorrow? That’s part of the strategic workforce planning. Another group of people are going to deal with it. I don’t see it as my responsibility. So that shift in mindset, if we can help with that, that brings HR and all the capabilities of HR with the manager, and it’s about helping the organization being more agile and resilient in the future.
Rebecca Warren 46:28
We’ve had a couple questions that have come in and Bill, you couldn’t have set that up better, because the questions that are coming in and and tying into what we’ve talked about with shifting the business is there’s resistance inside of the organization, both from managers in looking for skills as opposed to looking for a job to fill, and resistance from HR folks who have done it a certain way. You know, this happens in ta as well, right? Like we were hired because we found people this way, or because we interacted this way, and now you’re asking us to change, not ask a sub question of that, and then would love to get feedback like, is it because we haven’t done a full on change management education from top down that We’re making a business shift. Could that be some of the reticence to join something new because they don’t understand it, they don’t know where the business is going. Or do you think it’s something else where folks want to stay in their lane? They’re nervous, threatened about AR, AI, skills transformation, all of that. Like, I think I’ve just thrown a whole bunch of stuff out there. But as we think about resistance, where does it come from, and how do we knock that down in a way that feels empowering, as opposed to building belittling, for both managers trying to fill positions and for HR professionals who have always done it this way. Christine, throw that to you.
48:06
I deal with this every single weekend in the workshops and webinars that we do. So let me take a step back. I don’t believe this is a change management, and you can have as much change management as you want. That’s not the issue. Here’s the fundamental thing, right? The business has a problem. The problem needs to be solved, and what HR typically does, it leads with how it’s going to solve the problem, as opposed to this solving the problem. Let me give you the analogy that I found that seems to work with so many organizations. All of us have probably been through some sort of remodel, remodel of a kitchen, remodel of a bedroom, a bathroom, and so forth. You find a contractor, you lay out a design and you’re just, you’re just thrilled that you’re going to get a new bathroom, right or a new kitchen. Do you really care about the tools that the contractor is going to bring to the table to actually tear out the wall and do the laser measurements and all the leveling? HR tends to focus on the tools. Look at my shiny new tool. We’re going to attack this from a skills perspective. All you want is a new bathroom. All the business wants is, I’ve got to hire 10 people the next three weeks. Can you find me 10 qualified people, right? And so my my recommendation would be, this is not about trying to sell skills and sell you have skills as another tool in the toolkit for the HR professional that is there in service to solve a business problem. Lead with solving the problem and bringing candidates, as opposed to, hey, we’re going to stop looking at them from the old way. And I’m going to tell you to look at it from a skills perspective. Manager is going to go, I’ve got to deliver for my customers today. Just go solve the problem. So focus on the problem, not the tools that are being used to solve the problem. That would be my advice.
Rebecca Warren 49:41
Ah, interesting. All right.
49:48
Look, I completely agree with Bill’s point, point one, you know, it’s about fundamentally, you know, we are all here to deliver an outcome to the business. And you know, it’s deliver the outcome. People are really interested in the fact that, hey, that outcome was delivered in a better way. It was delivered more quickly. It was more effective then sure, share it. But fundamentally, it’s about, what about trying to deliver that outcome? The only other things I’d add is that often resistance to anything become comes from a comes from a couple of places. One is fear. I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know if I can do it. And you know that, in itself, is about skills that those people have. It’s about helping those people learn. It’s about positively reinforcing the change when when you see it, it also come sometimes resistance comes from a place in my experience of actually, I’ve got a lot of personal self worth out of doing this in this way. I invented this process and invented this thing. I invented this way of doing it. A lot of my intrinsic value is, is is taken up by doing it in this way. And and, you know, and therefore, again, actually, just, you know, helping people see that, you know, you can also add value. You can also get a sense of self worth after doing something differently. Whatever that differently. Maybe is important. But, you know, I’d always start where Bill started, which is, what’s the outcome? We deliver the outcome. That’s what matters. You first
51:33
give another example there, and this was two weeks ago, doing a workshop for an organization, and they were trying to figure out how to be more agile for the business, and the concept of onboarding came up. So TA has done this wonderful job. They finally found the right people, right but they have always onboarded just twice a month. And it’s great that you found the right person. It’s great that the business has been waiting two months to get this work done. You now have to fit into my HR process. We only onboard because that’s what we created, and it happens twice a month because we have to line all these people up. The business is moving so fast, they need to think, maybe continuous onboarding, maybe what’s critical, but you’re not meeting the need of the business, which is, I need a person today. Now I’m going to fit them into a traditional HR process. So Chris, to your point, you know, let’s you can reinvent and reimagine what those solutions are, but it’s about solving the problem for the business.
Rebecca Warren 52:23
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. And I think it’s going to take some time for folks to shift out of this is the way we’ve done it. This is my baby, right? This is the process I’ve created, or I feel like the reason I was hired, because I did it this way. It’s going to take some time to shift. But I think as we continue to tie the expectations to business outcomes, as opposed to individual metrics inside the department. What is that driving for the business? I think that’s where that shift changes to I’m going to check my job description and see if it’s on there, as opposed to what’s going to be the right thing for the business. And how am I growing myself as well as benefiting the business? So I’m watching time. I do want to throw one thing out here, and we may not get it all the way through, but I want to talk about the tech piece and the changes that have happened since the pandemic, since we started coming out of the pandemic, right? We all know how quickly, especially in HR, we had to pivot when we all of a sudden sent everyone home and work looked different, and we figured out how to stand up, you know, teams, or zoom, or whatever, inside of two weeks, as opposed to the two year phase in plan that had initially been put in place. I know my role in ta shifted completely different to trying to connect via text to 80,000 workers who were no longer in the restaurant, and a lot of them saying what this company does the text I’m like we do now. So the shift that happened so quickly and where we are now, from where we were when COVID started, we saw a lot of tech come out. We’ve got a lot of Tools, Options, things that are hitting the business. So I’d love to get your perspective before we wrap up with our final question on Is there too much tech hitting HR, hitting the business right now? Are people feeling overwhelmed? Are we trying to shift too quickly with everything that’s happened in the last couple of years? Chris, what are your thoughts on that?
54:34
No, I mean what know? And briefly, why do I, why do I say that? It’s not too much tech. But somebody once said, Somebody once gave any advice that said, if you, if you don’t, you don’t have to be a digital technologist. But if you don’t understand what the tech is capable of doing, then you don’t, then you won’t know whether or not that tech is capable of solving the problem that you’re trying to solve, or whether that’s the right tech for the business problem that you’re trying to solve. So I think perhaps sometimes it comes from, I think people in all roles across the business, including HR, some understanding of, actually, what is the tech landscape, what is the tech capable of doing? Where is it moving, and critically, can it solve, and is it the right tech to solve? And how does it help me solve the business problem that I’m trying to solve? And I think if you can think in that way, then it probably feels like a little bit less chaotic landscape.
Rebecca Warren 55:33
Yeah, I think that goes to Bill, what you were saying about solving for the outcome instead of focusing on the tool. But I’ll let you weigh in.
55:41
Yeah, no. I mean, one of the best books I’ve read in the last year was by the Founders of Waze, and has fallen in love with the problem, right? And when you understand, not the solution, because solutions can change, but fall in love with what you’re actually trying what is the problem, right? And and when you understand what the problem is, tech is reinventing the solutions to solve that problem. So if you, if you are the owner of that problem, where you have a your stakeholder in that problem, understanding how technology is, reimagining how you can solve that problem, then opens up the door for you. The challenge I see a lot of times with HR is they fall in love with the solution before they understand what the problem is that’s going to be solved. And so just spend a little bit more time understanding on the problem side of the equation, and then the solution will become more obvious if you understand the technology.
56:28
And it’s not unique to HR, we see it in everything that we do, which is, what’s the business what’s the customer problem that we’re solving for here? What’s the business problem that we’re solving for here then, okay, this is what. It’s not unique to each
Rebecca Warren 56:46
other. Throwing in those five whys right, why? Why? Why? And that you might get to the root of what you’re trying to solve for, instead of solving for a symptom. Great, great discussion. Okay, I have one question left for you, and each of you will have a little bit less than a minute to answer it. I would love to get the one take away that you want the audience to to remember what’s the one piece of advice you would give to HR leaders on developing and sustaining the C suite partnership? So Bill will go to you first, and then we’ll go to Chris, you
57:22
know, embrace the change and and and be able to demonstrate, you know, whether it’s technology or a new approach to solving the problem is actually impacting the business. When you start with the problem and how it impacts the customer, it’s a much more straightforward conversation than when it starts from a different perspective
Rebecca Warren 57:41
of that short and sweet, well done. I didn’t even have to write that much. I just got you encapsulated it. All right, Chris, what are your thoughts?
57:50
Shameless to steal bills. Quote from earlier. Have confidence if you add value, you deserve to be there. And there’s some fantastic there’s loads of fantastic people in HR who had loads of value. I have confidence in the capability that you’ve got.
Rebecca Warren 58:06
Love it. All right, thank you both so much. This is a great conversation. I took a ton of.
