Rebecca Warren and guests Steve Goldberg and Raphael Clerici discussed workforce agility in an uncertain world. They emphasized the importance of employee engagement, which has hovered around 30-35% despite innovations. They highlighted the need for organizational agility, the balance between long-term planning and real-time adaptability, and the significance of cultural readiness for change. They also explored the shift from role-based to skill-based agility, the role of AI in making the invisible visible, and the importance of mentorship and knowledge transfer. Leadership was identified as crucial, with a focus on fostering a resilient workforce through engagement, investment, and empowerment.

Introduction

• Rebecca Warren welcomes participants to the webinar on workforce agility in an age of complexity and uncertainty.
• Rebecca introduces herself, mentioning her five-year anniversary at Eightfold and her role in the talent center transformation team.
• Rebecca introduces the speakers: Steve Goldberg and Raphael, asking them to introduce themselves and their backgrounds.

Speaker introductions

• Steve Goldberg introduces himself, detailing his 40-year career in HR, HCM, and HR tech, including roles as a practitioner, industry analyst, and advisor.
• Steve mentions his collaboration with Eightfold and his reunion with Raphael, who he worked with in Zurich 30 years ago.
• Raphael introduces himself, recalling his work with Steve in Zurich and detailing his career in HR, moving from HR tech to generalist roles and his current position at Umetsa, a European agency for weather satellites.
• Raphael highlights his unique background in aeronautical science and financial mathematics, which he believes adds diversity to his HR career.

Future workforce predictions

• Rebecca asks the speakers to share their predictions about the global workforce in 2035.
• Steve Goldberg expresses a desire to know if employee engagement levels will finally move up, noting they have been hovering around 30-35% despite innovation.
• Raphael is interested in understanding the motivators and values of the next emerging generation entering the workforce.
• Rebecca humorously adds her own prediction: moving to a four-day workweek and eliminating cover letters.

Workforce agility and complexity

• Rebecca discusses the shift from predictable career ladders to the current fast-paced, uncertain business landscape.
• Rebecca introduces the concept of workforce agility, asking the speakers to define it and discuss how they balance long-term planning with real-time agility.
• Raphael explains that agility is about coping with uncertainty and adapting to change, especially in a field like space technology with long-term projects.
• Steve Goldberg emphasizes the importance of organizational agility, the ability to pivot, and the need to balance speed and risk.

Balancing long-term planning and agility

• Rebecca asks Raphael how he balances long-term planning with agility in his organization.
• Raphael explains that his organization has a culture of retaining knowledge and a slightly higher hierarchy to facilitate knowledge transfer and mentoring.
• Raphael highlights the importance of balancing innovation with deep technical know-how.
• Steve Goldberg adds that culture plays a crucial role in assessing readiness for change and that organizations need to view HR as a place for research and experimentation.

Skills and knowledge transfer

• Rebecca discusses the shift from role-based to skill-based agility and how AI can help make the invisible visible.
• Steve Goldberg emphasizes the importance of making the whole person and context visible, including skills, aspirations, and ramp-up times.
• Raphael believes AI can help organizations understand hidden correlations and traits, which are crucial for successful skill transfers.
• Steve Goldberg highlights the importance of soft and behavioral skills, which are more important than technical skills in terms of continuity.

Operationalizing knowledge transfer

• Rebecca asks how organizations can operationalize knowledge transfer without creating panic.
• Raphael emphasizes the importance of a culture that treasures institutional knowledge and where people feel proud to share their knowledge.
• Steve Goldberg suggests making the value of knowledge transfer visible through employee value indicators (EVIs).
• Rebecca discusses the concept of reverse mentorship, where new employees and experienced employees learn from each other, creating a cyclical knowledge transfer process.

Building and maintaining leadership pipelines

• Rebecca asks how organizations can sustain leadership pipelines in today’s non-linear, fast-changing environment.
• Steve Goldberg suggests looking at leadership pipelines in a non-linear way, focusing on employees’ ability to thrive during change and their soft and behavioral skills.
• Rebecca emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and experimentation in leadership roles.
• Raphael highlights the importance of dealing with uncertainty and being a role model for the AI-plus-human approach.

Actionable advice for building a resilient workforce

• Rebecca asks for one actionable piece of advice to build a more resilient workforce.
• Raphael emphasizes the importance of maintaining employee engagement and investing in them.
• Steve Goldberg suggests thinking about readiness in the broadest possible way, considering mindset, skill set, and customer readiness.
• Rebecca concludes by summarizing the key points: engage, invest, and empower employees to build a resilient workforce.

Rebecca Warren 0:06 Hey, hi, and hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar, where we are going to be talking about workforce agility in an age of complexity and uncertainty. That’s a lot of words, but we are going to boil them down for you to make it easy to understand. Now, before we start any of that, I do have a couple of housekeeping things for you. If you want to do things, click on the widgets at the bottom of your screen. Poke around, see what happens. If you want to ask things, pop your questions in the Q&A; we’ll answer as many as we can live. Anything we miss, we’ll try to do a follow-up on after the session. If you want to read things, check out the resources section for articles, guides, and other nerdy goodness to get your brain firing. And if you want to learn things, keep your eyes and ears open. We’ll be dropping tips, examples, and insights throughout the session. All right, so first of all, we are going to introduce our fabulous speakers. Before they do that, I probably should introduce myself. Rebecca Warren, I work for Eightfold. I’m coming up on my five-year anniversary next week. Isn’t that bonkers? So I am part of our Talent-centered Transformation team, where we spend time talking about all things talent, and how do we drive our organizations through that lens, rather than looking at jobs or job descriptions or other things that don’t matter as much; we are all focused on talent. All right, I am going to turn it over to our two guests, and so I would love to start with Steve. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Give us your background, and then we’ll have you toss it on over to Raffael. Steve, you’re up.

Steve Goldberg 1:48 Thank you, Rebecca. All right, I’m Steve Goldberg. There’s bagel stores and TV shows named after me. No, I’m kidding. So I’ve been in the HR, HCM, and HR tech realm—and not just been in it, but been on all sides of it. I don’t mind dating myself; it’s always good to be able to date oneself at some point. And it’s been 40 years. So, 15 years practitioner, crossed over to PeopleSoft, headed up strategy. Five years as an industry analyst, the last 15 years an advisor to a lot of HR tech companies, and have had the good opportunity to collaborate at times with Eightfold, one of my favorite companies. I also want to mention that Raffael and I, this is a bit of a reunion for us, because we worked together way back when in Europe, when my family and I lived in Zurich. We worked for one of the financial services firms, and I must say that Raffael’s career has progressed much more than mine in the last 20 years.

Rebecca Warren 2:54 Well, I love that you have that connection. And so Raffael, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re working on now.

Raffael Clerici 3:02 Well, yeah, thank you, Rebecca and Steve. It’s really great to see you again, Steve. When I prepared a little bit for this intro, I thought back to when we met, and indeed, it’s like 30 years ago in Zurich, when Steve and I were working together. And I mean, I’ve covered ever since then, I stayed in HR—usually, like, you know, in the early days, more on the C&P and HR technology side. That’s how I met Steve. But later on, I moved into generalist roles, leading HR teams, you know, in industrial and service businesses. And most recently, here at EUMETSAT, which is essentially the European agency for weather satellites, we develop and operate the weather satellites. So it’s quite an exciting business. Maybe a unique feature is that I don’t have the classical HR background; I got my studies in Aeronautical Science and Financial Mathematics, so I may be a little bit the outcast in the HR community.

Rebecca Warren 4:26 I think it makes the best employees when the backgrounds look different, right? That diversity of thought and experience and career trajectories—and we’re starting to see that much more than we have in the past, because career paths aren’t linear anymore, right? We move around, we do things. My background is in talent acquisition. I was a practitioner for 20-plus years leading TA teams, came over and built out the Customer Success team at Eightfold, and now I’m in Talent Center Transformation. None of that actually makes sense, and my undergrad is in Youth and Family Ministry. So we’ve got all kinds of things that are happening, but I think that makes us better, and that makes our organizations, I think, more diverse and more effective.

Raffael Clerici 5:09 So, yeah, I use the phrase “diversity of lenses,” and that tends to resonate with people, right?

Rebecca Warren 5:17 Well, so let’s talk about what we think might happen in the future. I am going to ask you to pull out your crystal balls and answer kind of a fun question before we get started. Our worlds are changing so quickly. We think about where we were five years ago to where we are today; things are very different. So if you had a crystal ball that could only tell you one specific thing about the global workforce of 2035, what would you want to know? Tell me your one thing that you want to know about the workforce in 2035.

Raffael Clerici 5:55 Who is that to? Both of us? You want me to start?

Rebecca Warren 5:59 Sure, go ahead and start.

Raffael Clerici 6:02 I love the question. This answer may surprise people, even though it probably shouldn’t. I would want to know: will employee engagement levels finally move up? Because they’ve been hovering around 30 to 35% for years, even with all the fancy tools in HR, even with the nonstop innovation coming our way. Last Gallup survey I saw in the US, it was hovering around 33% employee engagement. Now, to put that in context, I think they asked the question, you know, “Where is your employee engagement in your organization?” and 33% answer “high.” So if only 33% answer high, I want to know if that is moving up, and why it’s moving up over the next ensuing years—with that, you know, hopefully, the crystal ball to be able to tell us that.

Rebecca Warren 7:03 Love it. That was a really in-depth answer. I was expecting something like, “Are we going to work in flying buses?” or something, and you came up with something really deep. I love it.

Steve Goldberg 7:14 I also relate—and most people do or should—engagement to retention or productivity. It’s my alternative ERP acronym: Engagement, Potential, Productivity.

Actually, quite interesting, if I may step in here, because I’m quite interested in generational trends. And what I was, you know, where I’m most interested—and this actually links nicely to Steve’s answer—is what motivates and what values does the next emerging generation have, which probably around this time will start entering the workforce? And we really don’t know them yet, but what will be their motivators? What will be their values? That’s kind of what I would like to know, and I think this will actually help a little bit to also better understand how our engagement levels will develop.

That’s great. I love that.

Rebecca Warren 8:15 All right. And I want to know if we’re going to be able to move to a four-day workweek and get rid of cover letters. That’s what I’m looking at. Maybe by then we’ll have figured out how to do that. All right, thank you for those answers. Super fun. All right, so let’s talk about the workforce and agility and complexity and uncertainty. Let’s talk about all of these things. And so for a long time, decades, we’ve built organizations on a foundation of predictability. And I was actually just talking about this with folks yesterday; we had steady career ladders, we had well-defined roles. We had skills that really were meant to last you for your career. Like, I think about my grandpa and his role. He was a truck driver for Wingert Pottery in Chicago, and that was his—he got out of the service, and he did that every day, and there was no question about promotions or anything else, right? That was his job. He came home; grandma had dinner at the table. Things were pretty linear and felt sort of logical. But today, our foundation looks very different. The pace of change, the explosion of AI, the complexity of the business landscape—we have absolutely removed the “steady” from “steady state.” So now we’re being asked to balance these two forces that seem like they don’t really go together: long-term planning, right, thinking 5, 10, 20 years down the road, and then real-time agility, because we might need to pivot on Monday because the market changed over the weekend. So we’ve got these different perspectives from both of you. Of course, I have an opinion as well. So you know, Raffael, you’re dealing with satellite systems where planning spans decades, and Steve, you’re advising companies dealing with rapid tech turnover that happens, you know, weekly. So let’s start with the mindset piece. So when you hear that phrase “workforce agility,” what does that actually mean, right? Is it a buzzword for working faster, or is it an actual structural change? So Raffael, why don’t I start with you, just to think about what does that actually mean, and then maybe as a tag-on question for you: how are you balancing, in your organization, the need for agility with the long-term, rigorous nature of what happens in space?

Raffael Clerici 10:53 Yeah, very good and deep question. Clearly, I mean, it’s not working faster. I think agility is: how are we able to cope better and address change or uncertainty? You know, be better able to cope with uncertainty. And I think the reality is today’s world is probably more uncertain than yesterday’s world. So it’s—I mean, you mentioned the term “mindset”—so I actually believe it’s probably a mindset. Now, in my organization currently, obviously, there are lots of technology changes. Some of it, how we adapt to these changes or the agility, is actually core technology decisions because our platforms have been developed for 45-year lifecycles, which has a certain HR approach underneath it, because you need to position yourself at the absolute forefront of development if you want to be 40 years down the road and still somewhat relevant. Now we are trying to reduce development cycles and infuse more change into our system on a more continuous basis. So this essentially drives the development cycle into a more agile way of running our business, which, of course, then has a corresponding result on people’s careers. I mean, on one hand, you probably lose some of this deepest know-how, and on the other hand, you gain challenges of seeing more perspectives. Ultimately, the core skills, I believe—the physics underneath everything—is still quite deep and relatively stable. It’s more how people adapt to the changes, while we still need to rely on very deep know-how and science. So this is essentially the difficulty: how do we ensure that people still acquire this depth of know-how that our business needs?

Rebecca Warren 13:37 Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, we’re thinking about knowledge transfer, but we’re also thinking about innovation. We’re thinking about: what does that look like? Not just “here’s the container of knowledge,” but how are we using that? How are we helping people stay on top of things? I think—I don’t know that we’ve all figured it out yet, right? We’ve got great repositories of knowledge. We’re working to make sure that we are developing digital twins so that we can understand what’s going on on somebody’s plate, in their head, in their workforce. I still think we’ve got a way to go to figure out how to make that feel more seamless. Steve, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that.

Steve Goldberg 14:18 I have a lot of thoughts on organizational agility. The reason why is because about four or five years ago, as someone that gives a lot of talks and does a lot of blogs, I decided I wanted to, in a sense, differentiate from other thought leaders by focusing on what I thought was the most reliable pathway to ascend the ranks within a vertical—and to me, it was elevating organizational agility, right? And you mentioned the word “pivot.” Raffael talked about skills. To me, it’s all about being out in front, knowing when you have to pivot, how you have to pivot, picking the best options, and executing well. So anecdotally, we all know many stories of organizations that did it well and that didn’t, right? IBM from mainframes to professional services and consulting; Amazon started as a bookstore; YouTube started as a dating site. On the other side of the coin, you have an interesting one: Kodak, which years ago, before it declared bankruptcy, they were $5 billion in revenue. They’ve probably done $1 billion since. Why? Well, they developed the first digital camera, but they never went digital. Oops. So, yeah, agility to me is really important. And the last thing I’ll say is calibrating: how far, how fast, how can you execute in a way that doesn’t bring a ton of risk to the business?

Rebecca Warren 15:54 Yeah, I think, you know, as we’re thinking about the world, right—the changing world of work—we used to call it VUCA, right? Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. And that talked about the world. Raffael, you know, you’d mentioned that, right? We’ve got a lot of things that are competing now. And we’ve had Jamais Cascio introduce this concept of BANI, right? Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. Which sounds like really big, scary words, but basically, it’s saying we need to think about the humanity in the world of work as well. So now our world is a little more fragile, it’s a little more anxiety-driven, it’s a little harder to understand. So we have to think about: how are we thinking about the world of work and keeping the humanity in it, making sure that we’re making good decisions, not just for the business, but for folks inside the organization as well? And so as we think about businesses that we may want to keep around, right, future-proofing what our businesses look like—Steve, I know you’ve created a test; I think you called it the “Ascension Test.” So tell me what that means when you think about businesses and their ability to succeed and survive.

Steve Goldberg 17:18 Thank you. This is a much shorter answer than my others. I will say again, I’ll refer back to what I said before, when I thought really hard a few years ago: what is the most reliable pathway to ascend the ranks within an industry sector, and what do people ascribe as the number one way or the top three way, but it’s not backed up by any research? So as an example, organizations that implemented really major cost-savings measures—I don’t know of any in 40 years that ascended the ranks because they saved money, as important as it is to save money and fund your initiatives, right? So elevating organizational agility was one, and then I said, “Well, let me round that out to an Ascension Test.” And the three that I came up with were: elevate organizational agility, improve employee productivity (because small upticks in the larger organization translate into big value creation—you can do the math yourself; use revenue per employee, bump it up 5%, it’s big numbers), and the last one is being an employer of choice, which I define as the ability to attract and retain the best talent. So that is my Ascension Test, and I’m sticking with it.

Rebecca Warren 18:39 Okay, say that again. So folks, if they were not writing it down the first time, they can get it this time. Say it again—your three points.

Steve Goldberg 18:47 The three, in my mind, based on my 40 years around this space, the most reliable pathways to ascend the ranks within a vertical—and there’s a lot of research to back it up: elevate organizational agility (and by the way, Accenture, if you check it out, their latest finding was organizations that are high in organizational agility tend to have a better than two-to-one chance of being in the upper quartile of financial performance in their industry), improve employee productivity (those small upticks translate into big dollars), and be an employer of choice (ability to attract and retain top talent). Raffael, does that sync with your thinking here?

Raffael Clerici: No, it’s an interesting model. And I mean, I’m thinking with my private sector hat on, and I certainly can subscribe to the model. I mean, I’m in a slightly different boat right now, where we are more a government agency. And while some of the model still applies, it’s maybe the articulation—especially also in the space business, where productivity is actually quite difficult to measure, and you may need to have a different talk about how to measure productivity, risk-adjusted productivity. In the space business, I have never been fully able to wrap my mind around this, but the agility and the employer of choice is directly applicable. And I think it helps. I mean, I’m in a lucky position where EUMETSAT is in a lucky position that we have a very strong employer brand in this sector, which truly helps us to maintain this intellectual force in this sector. Because once you lose this advantage, yeah, I agree that the possibility to ascend becomes very slim.

Steve Goldberg: Yeah, Rebecca, if you don’t mind, I just want to ask Raffael another question. So in the absence of a quantifiable measure that’s going to relate to compensation decisions and everything else, are you looking at how to measure the impact or the value they’re delivering in other ways?

Raffael Clerici: This is great. I’m just going to say it’s a very interesting question. And sorry, Rebecca, it seems you’re going off—this is our reunion. But I mean, in this business, it’s actually very interesting; we are measuring a socio-economic benefit, as actually many government investments look at. And interestingly, I mean Earth observation or meteorological satellites, it’s empirically demonstrated how much they improve weather forecasting, which in turn has a direct measurable impact on insurance over the life and death of people. So we do socio-economic benefits analysis, which yields a massively positive impact. Therefore, the activity per person seems maybe unreal compared to other industries.

Steve Goldberg: Of course. Oh, that’s great. Thank you for educating me. Good.

Rebecca Warren 22:41 Good question. So along those lines of agility and stability, how are you thinking—Raffael, I’m going to throw this back at you—how are you thinking about marrying that together? You’ve got projects that go for years and years, I’m assuming, and then yet you’ve got folks who are retiring and new people coming in. You’re getting them up to speed—how are you marrying these long projects with that institutional knowledge and also bringing in new ways of thinking and working during that project? I would love to hear how you’re putting those pieces together.

Raffael Clerici 23:24 Yeah, it’s difficult, obviously. I mean, one thing is, I mentioned before, we are lucky that we have high employee retention. So let’s say our succession is probably one—our succession planning is one of the more predictable planning processes which we have. But you need to rely on a culture of retaining knowledge. I mean, you cannot—once you have a satellite system in space, you cannot go back and check what you did. So you need documentation on one hand, and you need to rely on people to train other people. So, you mentioned maybe compared to other businesses, we have a less flat organization, but slightly more levels of hierarchy, because it gives us a certain knowledge transfer and mentoring. Because in some jobs, deeply technical, you do need to know what your predecessor was thinking when they put this together, and not capturing this is quite a massive risk for the business. The difficult part, of course, then is: how do you infuse innovation into the equation here? Here, you need to make sure that you have a good balance of bringing in new people, I guess as in any industry, as well as keeping the know-how of your existing staff.

Rebecca Warren 25:18 Yeah, I think that’s interesting. I think it’s a really good callout about culture. That’s what we are continuing to see: that we can put all of the tech, the projects, the things into the workplace, but if you don’t have a strong culture that supports the right behaviors, you’re not going to succeed, right? Adoption doesn’t work. Folks aren’t going to want to be part of your projects. As you said, you’ve got high retention; that matters as well. So that culture piece, again, putting that humanity back in there—that seems to be in a lot of things that we’re hearing; it’s the glue that keeps things together even when it feels uncertain. Steve, any thoughts on that before I move on to our next topic?

Steve Goldberg 26:05 I think culture is part of assessing readiness for change. Culture is one of the main disruptors of putting together companies’ transformational initiatives. You have to look at culture in terms of readiness for change. The last thing I’ll say is—and I think Raffael kind of alluded to it—part of the culture, or a core value of the culture, I think needs to be that change presents opportunities. While it also presents some uncertainty, maybe anxiety, it presents opportunities for the organization and for the person. And that core value, I think, needs to be underscored and reinforced.

Rebecca Warren 26:49 Yeah, love it. So let’s dig into the people question a little bit more. So historically, we have hired folks to an opening on an org chart. “You’re a project manager, you do these things, you sit in this box.” But people aren’t boxes. We are complex folks with skills and hobbies and capabilities and things that people might not ever know about us if we were just to look at our resume. So we know that data can illuminate what a person brings to the table, but we have to know where to look and how to surface that information. So Steve, I want you to share a little bit about your perspective as we think about moving from role-based or position-based to skill-based agility without losing the structure—right, like Raffael talked about, you almost need some of that hierarchy in the space that he’s in. So how do you shift without losing the structure? You’ve seen a lot of things in your time working with folks. Is AI allowing us to see the whole person and build that into our culture, or are we just really trying to reinvent an old box mentality?

Steve Goldberg 28:21 Thank you for the question, Rebecca. I—as someone that, I mean, my job, so to speak, I’m a one-person firm for years—part of my job is giving a lot of talks. And when you give a lot of talks, you’ve got to come up with memorable catchphrases. And one of my favorite catchphrases is “make the invisible visible,” which is totally aligned with what you’re saying. So if you think about at the macro or the micro level, you know: what skills are becoming more or less important? What are that person’s aspirations, and are they changing over time? If you move somebody from an adjacent job, what’s the ramp-up time? Which I still think is a white space for the HR industry, looking at ramp-up times. So it’s really the whole person, absolutely, but the whole context, which is very—a relative concept, right? So context is operating environment internally, externally, operating environment in the individual. I think AI is definitely able to learn what are the drivers and which are becoming more or less important in the overall context related to the person in the organization.

Rebecca Warren 29:45 Yeah, absolutely—skills in the context of work. What is that going to do for the organization? How are you going to be able to bring those things for the benefit of the company? Now, when we think about that, transferable skills—right, when I talk about myself, I’ve gone from a couple of different things that felt like maybe they didn’t match, but my underlying skills brought me over. So Raffael, in a more linear kind of way of thinking about work, are you able inside your organization to identify folks that maybe are—I’m just going to make this up—in an engineering role, but say, “Hey, I would really love to go over to finance,” or “I’m really interested in what’s happening over in marketing”? Are you able then to think about transferring folks into a completely different role, especially understanding the very specific requirements of some of your positions?

Raffael Clerici 30:47 Well, I would like to reflect a little bit on HR’s ability, generally, on understanding skills—skill sets of people and the skill sets of the “boxes,” as you call it. And from my perspective, actually, I believe the HR profession hasn’t been very good in truly capturing these hidden correlations in the past. And so I do hope, actually, that’s one of the areas where I do believe AI—because it’s just too much of a data set, so to speak, to truly capture this—AI will clearly open up for organizations like ours, but probably others, this understanding. I mean, one probably also needs to be careful that it’s not just skills, you know, it’s really the traits and the motivators of people. That skill you can train. I mean, it takes time, as Steve said, and we probably don’t have a good understanding of how long it takes. But I mean, it’s the traits and the motivators, I believe, where we need to understand to make such a move as you called it successful for both the organization and the individual.

Steve Goldberg: Can I mention one thing quickly, please? I think again, when I use that phrase or lens “make the invisible visible,” I think a big opportunity for customers and HR tech providers is looking at the competency level that’s truly needed to consider somebody a viable resourcing option. Because you don’t have to have an expert all the time in every role; certainly Raffael knows it and Rebecca you know it. So it’s: what’s the competency level for somebody to be deemed a valuable resourcing option? And part of skills also is soft/behavioral skills. And in my mind, that’s even more important. There’s more continuity in terms of the importance of that than any other skill—soft behavioral skills, they’re not going to go out of style.

Rebecca Warren 33:29 Yeah, we’re certainly seeing a lot of that in the companies that we work with and in the industries in general: that we’re shifting from that set of requirements on a job description to looking at what are those power skills—you know, communication, agility, ability to absorb information. Some of those skills we’re seeing a lot of organizations focus on, and then thinking about: what’s the potential to train someone, upskill, reskill, move into a different spot? So I do think that underlying sense of what does your culture look like, are you open to moving folks internally and building those behaviors that are going to help your organization stick, as well as move towards those organizational outcomes that you have.

Steve Goldberg 34:22 Hey, can I ask you both a question that I ponder from time to time? In terms of ability to thrive during periods of change: do you think that’s learnable, teachable? Do you think people can progress in terms of their ability to thrive during change?

Raffael Clerici: Let me go first. Steve, I think it actually probably comes a bit with practice. So yes, I do believe it’s learnable, but you probably cannot learn it in school or university. But I do believe that careers which have seen a lot will lead to a certain comfort level with dealing with change and uncertainty. So that’s my view.

Rebecca Warren 35:23 And it’s interesting, we had a comment come into the Q&A that dovetails with how I think about things. I think the answer is yes, if you have trust and transparency in your organization, bottom-up and top-down. Your employees need to feel safe to experiment, to try new things, to potentially fail at things and feel like it’s okay, and then they have to feel like their leaders have their back. And leaders have to be transparent enough to say, “We may not have all the answers, but we’re in it together.” So I think if you have that cycle of psychological safety, as one of our guests said, that makes it much easier to say, “I’m going to check this out. I’m going to do a pilot. I’m going to put my toe in the water because I know my organization has said it’s okay.” Now, we know some organizations have said, “Hey, we’re going to give you X number of hours in a week or in a month to just play around. Call that fun time, experimental time, whatever.” And then there are other organizations that say, “Just do it in the flow of work.” But if you have that safety and that trust and transparency, I think folks are more than willing to be agile for the most part, because they know that the organization has their back and they’re not going to lose their job or lose their importance to the organization.

Steve Goldberg: Thanks. That was unscripted, y’all! Unscripted, which I love. That’s how the agenda goes.

Raffael Clerici 37:03 It’s a jam session. I love it.

Rebecca Warren 37:07 So let’s take that to the next step, right? Agility is about keeping that wisdom, keeping folks inside your organization happy. We talked about AI hopefully helping to keep that institutional knowledge. So let’s think about what that means to operationalize that knowledge transfer—taking it one step further to say, “If I transfer what I know, I still have a role here in this company. I’m still important.” And how do I make sure that that information gets transferred correctly to the right places? So Raffael, let’s talk about that: how do you operationalize knowledge transfer so it’s not panicky for the folks doing the work or for the organization if that person were to leave?

Raffael Clerici 38:11 I believe this is deeply rooted in a culture. You need to have a culture which treasures institutional knowledge. And once you have this culture, it actually comes quite natural, because it’s like the DNA of an organization to ensure that you have some processes which capture the knowledge, but also that people feel proud and they consider it part of their job, if you’re an expert, to teach and share your knowledge with other colleagues. So here, I believe you need the cultural basis to make it as thorough as I have seen it in this organization, which is quite unique, frankly.

Rebecca Warren 39:15 I like that. And Steve, I have a follow-up question for you on that too. But I like what you said about—it should be embedded in the DNA of the organization to want to share. Instead of hoarding knowledge, we want to share it because we’re not afraid of our jobs; we want to learn and we want to grow. I think I have some things that are unique to me, but if I share them with someone else, maybe they can layer on something else and make it better. So I like where you say it’s embedded in the organization. Steve, what are you thinking?

Steve Goldberg 39:54 It prompts thought about years ago when I was heading up HR tech in investment banks. A long time ago, but we tried—the teams I was involved with—trying to introduce metrics that were innovative in a way. And one of them we called EVI: Employee Value Indicators.

Rebecca Warren 40:25 You’re bringing back memories!

Steve Goldberg 40:29 The EVI. So most people will look at a person in the context of their role, but there are so many other sources of value they are bringing that are, again, making “invisible visible.” They can be referring candidates that become great employees. They could be funneling good ideas to the ops team, sales leads to the sales team. That’s all part of value. But back to your question: knowledge—and being a mentor and transferring knowledge—clearly, that is a major source of value, and I believe it should be made more visible when employees are doing that.

Rebecca Warren 41:21 You know, you mentioned mentorship, and that’s something that has come up a lot in conversations that I’ve been having with folks lately, but less about a traditional mentorship relationship. Typically, we think about it: you go to someone who’s been with the organization a long time or has been in the workplace a long time, and you have a list of questions, and they answer the questions. It’s kind of a structured way of transferring knowledge. We’re hearing a lot now about mentorship—some people are calling it “reverse mentorship,” and I actually don’t think that’s the right term. But how are we thinking cyclically about mentorship, thinking about new folks coming into the organization and new ways of doing things? And how can we transfer that knowledge and mentor each other instead of saying, “Well, I know more”? We look at that sometimes as being that knowledge capture: “I have the knowledge, I’m going to impart it to you.” It’s more about: “Hey, you know things that I don’t know, and I know things that you don’t know.” So how are we thinking about being a curious learner? I think that’s part of what happens when you are more agile—like “I want to learn all the things”—as opposed to saying, “I have a higher title than you, I’m smarter than you, I’ve been in the workforce longer than you, so I win.” Right? How are we thinking about that reverse mentorship? I’m hearing a lot of organizations are starting to do that now. What are Gen Zers thinking about that is very different than what Boomers or Xers or even Millennials are thinking about?

Raffael Clerici 42:55 I find this a very important concept. And some of the best people have been able to actually adapt with changing circumstances; they have been extremely successful in listening to the newcomers and being able to actually leverage this unique group of people entering your organization and not being bogged down in “the way it was always done.” So I think it’s important. And mentoring is always a two-way relationship, by the way. So I couldn’t agree more; this is absolutely necessary for staying agile.

Rebecca Warren 43:46 Yeah. Okay, so let’s go to another facet of agility, which is deciding where you want to invest time, money, and energy for resources. And so, there’s a school of thought about: “We build it from within,” whether it is very technical, financial, or digital—we’re going to build it from within and keep everything in-house. And then you have organizations who say, “Hey, we’re going to go out and find the best resources, we’re going to find contractors, we’re going to outsource this project.” So I think that’s another part of agility that I think we’re still trying to figure out. Do we build, buy, or borrow? So what should we be thinking about with outsourcing right now? It’s about strategic value; it’s not just about cost. We’ve got people doing lots of different things. Steve, give me your thoughts: with the rise of the gig economy, specialized contractors, internal projects, external projects—does the definition of an “employee” need to change based on where we’re going?

Steve Goldberg 45:12 Thanks, Rebecca. I’ll answer it this way—and I won’t use—I’ll use “employee” in the answer, but I’ll reframe the question, if you don’t mind, to: what are the options when you have a skills gap or a resourcing gap? And let’s please keep in mind there are five. It may be more; educate me if there are more than five. But the five standard options for addressing or mitigating a resourcing or skills gap: get a regular employee, get a contractor, train the incumbent, move somebody internally, or outsource. I meet with a lot of HR tech vendors; I’ve not seen that use case talked about very much, but it’s under-supported in our industry. It could be for different reasons in terms of data models not addressing that. As a former HR person, I think it’s one of the most important use cases.

Rebecca Warren 46:20 So I like what you said: I may be asking the wrong question. The question isn’t “What are we going to call the employee?” or “How do we name that?” It’s “What’s the skill gap, what’s the work that needs to be done, and how are we going to get the work done based on what the organization needs?” So less about putting a title on it and more about what’s the work, where’s the gap, and who can best fill it in the time that we need?

Steve Goldberg 46:49 Yeah. Time to have a viable option and get that option up to speed, obviously cost. What are the cascading ramifications? If you move people internally, you’re going to create gaps elsewhere, etc. Everybody knows this, but it’s just something—and I would love Raffael’s perspective on it—I just think it’s a use case that’s deserving of more attention if you have all the right data.

Rebecca Warren 47:20 Okay, that’s a clear callout. And Raffael, I do want to get your perspective on that. I don’t know that everybody knows that, Steve. I think maybe most organizations should, but I’m not sure that that is embedded into organizations—about where do we find the best resource for the work. I think we might still be stuck in the “box” category.

Steve Goldberg 47:45 You say “resource,” I’m saying like, “What channel does it come from?” is what I’m referring to, right?

Rebecca Warren 47:53 Yeah. Raffael, what do you think about all this?

Raffael Clerici 47:58 Yeah, I agree with Steve that we probably don’t spend enough time—or maybe some of the businesses are starting to sort through some of those rather difficult questions. Amongst others, my organization. But one thing is: yes, we need to understand, of course, the gaps. But we also need to understand where humans or the organization—whichever organization—is truly adding value to ensure that we have some control over a certain capability. And so our model that we are implementing here actually looks at a four-dimensional model from the strategic side. But also, you know, what you addressed: where are we able to get it in the marketplace or do we even need to build it ourselves? But also, sometimes, and especially around innovation—buying innovation is sometimes better. So it involves quite deep discussions. And at least here, we have spent quite a bit of time going through some of those decisions and trying to put hopefully a more sound framework in place.

Steve Goldberg: And there’s inherent risks in all the options, and there’s advocates for the different options, right? And that leads to long discussions.

Raffael Clerici: Yes, every solution has benefits and risks, and no solution fits all. But I think historically, at least in this business I’m working in right now, we have been maybe slightly lax on the number of outsourcing, and then realizing that we may actually no longer control certain intellectual value chains that we need. And so this is certainly something where we take quite an active look now.

Rebecca Warren 50:35 Yeah, I like that. I think it’s a continual question that we need to ask, and it needs to be tied to the organizational objectives. And then, Steve, as you talked about: what are those skill gaps? So it’s not personal. How do we make it about the business and make sure that we’ve got the right resources at the right time? And I think what also comes out of that is communication, right? We have to be clear—again, that trust and transparency—let’s communicate what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It makes a big difference for folks; they don’t have a fear for their job or a fear for their value if there is trust and transparency. All right, I’m watching the time, and I’ve got one more chunk of a topic that I want to talk about. So let’s talk about leadership. We’ve kind of gone from the bottom up; we’ve talked about lots of different things. So now let’s talk about what leadership looks like in today’s day and age. We’ve got to think about leadership in the past—I don’t know if it’s fair to say it was easier, but it was more predictable, right? We had a better understanding of what leadership looked like when you moved into a particular role and the expectations. Now, leaders don’t have all the answers, as we just talked about. The target keeps moving, tech keeps changing. So how do we—I’ll throw this to you first, Steve—how do we sustain leadership pipelines, making sure we understand what that looks like for incoming folks, current folks? How do we make sure that we’re thinking about leadership pipelines in the right way in today’s environment? That’s a big, hairy question. So we’ll see how you go.

Steve Goldberg 52:24 I really like this question. I probably don’t have the most well-rounded answer. But what comes to mind quickly is—we mentioned it earlier—we live in very nonlinear, unpredictable times. Fast-changing, with innovation—not just with innovation, but customers have different expectations, employees have different expectations, etc. So I think we need to look at pipelines in a very nonlinear way. I’ll mention again: the ability to thrive during change. Employees are going to perhaps say to themselves, “My job may change and my job may go away, but I want to learn, and one way or the other, my skills are going to be marketable here or somewhere else.” And we need leaders that can identify and discern those qualities in employees. And if you can do that, then you as a leader will move yourself and the organization will find this the most impactful platform for you. So it’s not linear, and I think it has a lot to do with identifying the right soft and behavioral skills that fit into the old agility/adaptability model.

Rebecca Warren 53:59 Yeah, I think it comes back to that topic that we talked about too, where it’s not about the knowledge that you have, but it’s about how do you use the knowledge, and how are you a continuous learner? How are you continuing to ask questions? You’re not necessarily in that role because of what you know, but it’s how you operate and what you can do.

Steve Goldberg 54:19 And to go back to a word I think you used earlier: “experimentation.” In one of my talks, I talked about the HR leader of today and what’s changed. And one of the dimensions that I think has changed is that HR departments need to be viewed as a place for research and experimentation. Even if eight out of ten of those pilot projects don’t pan out, the organization has to encourage that. HR has to be an advocate for it, because the two that do work out as pilot projects could really propel that organization forward.

Rebecca Warren 54:53 Yeah. Raffael, what do you think? What’s the skill set—and you’ve seen this, right, you’ve been in your role for a while—what’s the top skill? I’m guessing it’s going to be a power skill. What’s the top skill you think that leaders need today that maybe they didn’t need 10 years ago, or maybe they didn’t have or hadn’t surfaced as much? What does that skill look like? And we’ve got a comment here about “leaders will have to be role models of the AI-plus-human in the loop.” What’s the skill that leaders need today? What do you think?

Raffael Clerici 55:30 I think it’s very difficult, but you know, it’s probably dealing with this uncertainty—whatever we call it. And dealing with uncertainty is probably a skill set in itself. And so I believe this is important. If it’s the most important one, hard to say, but it’s clearly an emergent one.

Steve Goldberg: Rebecca, I loved the comment that was posted: “the optimal balancing of people and AI.” And one thing I’ll add: avoid preconceived notions as to what the right formula is. Don’t adhere to preconceived notions.

Rebecca Warren 56:19 Yeah. And one of the things that we talk about—human in the loop—we’re starting to change that and talk about human in the lead. So how do we make sure that we’re keeping the humanity in whatever changes come our way? And back to what we talked about with culture and behaviors driving the tech, as opposed to the tech running away and people chasing after it in a panic. Okay, so we are coming down—got like two minutes left—so I want to ask a closing question. We’ve covered a lot of ground. We’ve talked about satellite missions, we’ve talked about AI, we’ve talked about skills, we’ve talked about culture, we’ve talked about proactive versus reactive. So what’s one actionable piece of advice that you would give today’s audience to build a more resilient workforce? That’s a lot of words, and that’s a really big task. But what’s one piece of advice that you would give if somebody wanted to start something next week? So Raffael, we’ll go to you, and then Steve, we’ll have you wrap us up.

Raffael Clerici 57:34 It’s an interesting question. And frankly, resilience for me is having an engaged workforce—one which is ready to experiment, to go the extra mile. So I would still—and I probably would have given the same answer five years ago—say make sure your employees remain engaged and are engaged, and then invest in them. Give them the space and empower them.

Steve Goldberg 58:00

Ultimately, I love it. I would say: think about readiness in the broadest possible way. I mean, of course you want to have it containerized in terms of different dimensions—mindset readiness, skill set readiness, are the customers ready to adopt, do we have the technology that’s going to support it—but think broadly about what readiness is all about at the individual level and at the macro level.

Rebecca Warren 58:44 I love that. And what’s interesting to me is that neither of you said, “Give them all the tech,” right? We’ve said, “Hey, let’s encourage good behaviors.” I love: “engage, invest, and empower” is what I heard you say, Raffael. And then you tacked onto that as well, Steve, in readiness in the broadest sense: how are we helping people think about all the facets of what that means? I think that is a perfect way to end this conversation, tying agility and humanity and skills and all the things together. So appreciate your time. Thanks for a great conversation. I’ve got notes. I wish we could talk longer, but we are at the end. So y’all, thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to hopefully having more engaging conversations around these topics soon. Round of applause for you, Raffael and Steve. Thank you so much.