Transforming Work with Sophie Wade

Sophie addresses the disruption we are now facing in our working lives. How can we navigate unprecedented changes due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak and technological advances? Sophie explains evolving conditions and how to adapt both in the short-term—transitioning to remote working—and for the longer-term, making important strategic changes. She describes sustainable ways of working to adopt that will enable your company to thrive in a digitized, less predictable business landscape when things turn around.    Key Takeaways [01:00] How to approach the disruption we are facing in our working lives. [01:27] Sustainable ways of working that can handle short-term and longer-term needs. [01:52] Traditional work practices aren’t adaptable enough to handle current circumstances. [03:08] Short-term focus on transitioning to remote working. [03:47] Strategic long-term potential changes to be equipped to ramp up successfully when conditions improve. [04:53] Fundamental changes to our work conditions and lives primarily due to technology advances. [07:15] Why Sophie is well-qualified to provide clarity and direction. [08:16] How to approach your company’s unique situation. [09:21] Seven interrelated key areas to assess for action to transform and future-proof your company. [11:08] How technology is impacting our business models, revenues, operations and workers. [13:40] Shorter timeframes for projecting out and planning with more project work. [14:18] Companies undergoing fundamental strategic reviews to stay competitive in a digitized business world. [15:44] Employees needing to adapt and respond to faster, less predictable market conditions. [16:37]Learning new skills ongoing – the start of life-long learning. [16:55] Human beings resist change. [18:30] Culture and values matter especially during times of great uncertainty and change. [19:40] Questions to assess and actions to take relating to your company’s culture and values. [21:12] Leadership styles shifting: sharing more responsibility and using more empathy. [23;10] The importance of transparency—one of Atlassian’s core values. [23:41] Questions to assess and actions to transform relating to your company’s leadership. [26:04] The need to combine all generations’ expertise, skills, and creativity to compete effectively. [27:28] How empathy bridges generational gaps—increasing productivity at a ServePro franchise. [29:26] Questions to assess and step to take relating to your company’s intergenerational integration. [31:05] The increase of teamwork to respond faster to more complex projects. [31:48] The challenges of working effectively for teams including remote workers and non-employees. [32:17] How to manage and motivate distributed and blended teams. [34:08] Questions to assess and actions steps to transform your company’s remote teams and contractors’ performance. [36:04] New careers are self-directed, non-linear with shifts between work arrangements, functions and industries.  [37:44] How is your company projecting out future skills’ needs and helping upskill employees? [39:24] Questions to assess and steps to act upon relating to you and your direct reports’ careers and upskilling needs. [40:40] Updating historical approaches to policies, measuring productivity, and performance reviews. [41:46] Policies and other transformation efforts should be coordinated and consistent. [42:32] How to monitor and support employees through and beyond periods of unsettling change. [44:18] Questions to assess and steps to take to update your company’s policies, productivity metrics, and performance reviews. [45:38] Immediate Action Tip: Urgency to transform for immediate needs and longer term sustainability.   

Max Weiner is Founder and CEO at Resilient, a company that provides inclusive insurance options to low- and moderate-income freelancers and hourly workers Americans. It is difficult for hourly workers to find consistent work so they have benefits that can protect them from health shocks. However, companies are recognizing the benefits of taking a more holistic approach towards the well-being of all their workers.  Key Takeaways: [01:28] The growing emphasis on inclusive culture and values. [02:02] Hourly workers are seen as expendable and cannot gain enough hours to pay for health care coverage.  [03:34] What does the Future of Work look like for low income freelancers and hourly workers?  [04:46] What are some of the challenges of having a viable and sustainable work environment?  [05:18] The concern about wages and benefits for contract workers and what protection is needed. [06:57] What are the pillars of a stable society and economy? [08:12] Options for providing holistic support for hourly workers. [08:59] How to shift the full cost off hourly workers of protecting their wellbeing. [10:08] The challenges of overall financial health for workers without predictable schedules. [11:46] How benefits and insurance help individuals deal with health-related shocks. [12:57] Should the private sector solve this problem or is it time for the government to step in and help these workers?  [13:47] Companies are increasingly seeing the benefits of taking their workers holistically as financially stressed workers are less productive.  [15:07] Education and tools that nudge people to establish better financial habits. [16:07] Max shares how a traditional NYC taxi company is retaining drivers using Resilient. [20:02] How freelancer platforms could reward loyalty with insurance protection.  [24:43] The Business Roundtable announced the role of corporations is to maximize the interests of ALL stakeholders. [27:55] Proactive regulators in the UK and NYC are open to new innovation. [30:15] How technology benefits and enables inclusive insurance. [33:09] Low income Millennials want life insurance more than cash back. [35:23] The population that is underserved by the banking sector. [38:14] Immediate Takeaway Action: Stakeholder capitalism—consider the full spectrum of the workforce and how to support their financial health.   Resources: Imresilient.co Articles on Medium   Quotes:    “It’s in everybody’s interest to protect stakeholders and workers are a very large part of that and providing worker’s protections is not only fair, but it’s fundamental if you want a stable society.”    “As the world changes, [fair treatment of workers] is increasingly important for consumers and consumers will vote with their purchasing.”   “People really want insurance protections and will do quite a lot to receive them if you provide them in ways that are comprehensive and easy to interact with.”

Sean Hinton, Founder and CEO of SkyHive, explains how SkyHive uses AI to help organizations and individuals identify their current and trending skills and best align them in real-time with business and career growth trajectories. In this episode, Sean explains the myth and fact of automation threats and how companies can focus resources on reskilling their current talent to retain them and stay competitive.  Key Takeaways: [01:09] The half-life of skills used to be 10 years, now it is only 5 years. [03:44] Sean finds purpose and founds SkyHive. [05:29] We have had a hard time identifying our skills. [07:27] Sean defines the Future of Work in three categories: rapid digital transformation; digitalization of the workplace and classroom; and the changing nature of the worker and learner.  [08:25] More than 45% of existing full-time employees define themselves as independent workers.  [10:20] Compared to 10 years ago, 20% of any job now requires digital skill sets. Over the next 10 years, 65% of a job is anticipated to become digitized. [10:56] The myth and fact of reskilling: we have more time! [13:07] The number one barrier to the success of widespread automation is the reskilling of humans.  [16:11] How do we know what our company’s workforce is truly capable of? [17:22] Defining the Future of Work by skills and SkyHive’s creation of ‘quantum labor analysis’ to understand how skills needs are constantly changing. [21:48] What skills does the workforce of the future need? [22:30] How to find the skills gaps in your existing workforce and be able to adjust rapidly. [24:54] What it means to understand current and trending skills and jobs in real-time in the labor market and be able to acquire talent efficiently. [29:15] Careers are no longer linear. How can employees or people know what skill sets they should be focusing on?  [30:37] How identifying individual people’s skills reveals what each person is really capable of. [31:03] Matching relevant content to skills’ gaps allows cost-effective, focused training. [33:19] Displaced workers can identify new opportunities and options by identifying their skills and where they could be used. [35:19] Employees’ development enabled by applying their skills in different areas. [37:42] Mentoring as a means to develop and retain people. [38:55] Does anyone have 100% of the skills they need for a job? [39:52] How SkyHive’s technology identifies upward mobility opportunities quickly. [41:20] SkyHive can help identify jobs that don’t yet exist.  [43:52] What is the number one soft skill you should be learning?  [44:25] Soft skills are becoming increasingly important. [47:15] Immediate Action Tip: Discover and use your untapped skills.   Resources: www.skyhive.io Sean on LinkedI YPO.org   Quotes:    “If I ask anyone, ‘What are your skills?’ People would have a very hard time conclusively answering that question.”   “95% of job growth in the United States since 2007 is contract-based and independent labor.”   “We still have control over our destiny. The robots are not taking over any time soon.”   “If the employee is not seeing the opportunities in front of them and being engaged, you’ll lose them.”   “There’s a much greater multitude of engagement and less attrition and turnover the faster you can connect somebody to a mentor.”

Beth Porter is CEO and Co-Founder of Riff Analytics. Riff offers AI-enabled tools that provide powerful insights about individual behaviors and team dynamics, which improves remote working teams’ results. Beth explains the effect of different types of meeting interactions and how Riff nudges people to form better meeting habits so they can develop trust, all share their thoughts and feel heard improving collaboration and outcomes.   Key Takeaways: [01:36] We are often not set up for success in our meetings. [02:11] Behavioral science identifies turn-taking as critical for productive meetings [03:44] The two parts of the Future of Work: more complex, non-routine work using different skills and more remote working. [06:16] Relationships are becoming more important as we become more distant physically. [07:23] A shift from incentivizing individual work to teamwork. [09:08] The pros and cons of remote versus office working. [09:59] Community building is important to build trust for people working from home. [11:41] Beth’s early career as a math teacher emphasizing team-based work. [15:44] What is computational social science? [17:33] How is Riff Analytics using artificial intelligence? [20:00] What the dynamics of conversations tell us. [21:06] The impact of unspoken signals during meetings. [22:01] Engagement is measured and feedback is given in real-time about who is dominating the conversation.  [22:39] The effect of interrupting during meetings. [23:51] Feedback raises awareness in all meeting attendees. [24:01] Visualization of each person’s meeting participation. [25:12] Riff is a tool for promoting and practicing productive meeting habits. [25:53] Post-meeting surveys capture each attendee’s experience. [27:53] Original goal was to help online course learning where trust levels are low. [30:21] Riff increases social presence feeling as though you are meeting in person. [31:48] The relevance of trust and taking turns in conversation. [34:12] Successful patterns of different meeting interactions. [36:36] Riff nudges people to adopt better collaboration habits. [41:26] Immediate Action Tip: Understand that time is a collective responsibility—respecting and optimizing other people’s time as well as your own.   Resources: Riffanalytics.ai   Quotes:    “Research shows 71% of people find meetings unproductive and inefficient.”   “Everyone has something to share and it requires you to trust that if you give up your speaking time to others that something valuable is going to happen on the other end.”    “Optimizing time is a collective responsibility, not an individual responsibility alone. If you’re in a meeting with other people, it’s not just your time.”

Ben Brooks is Founder and CEO of Pilot, a software-based employee coaching platform. Careers are becoming more self-directed with people needing to be more self-aware, advocate for themselves, and make career development a priority. Ben explains how Pilot is reframing growth and development, enabling employers to support employees’ individual development while also improving competitiveness and retention.       Key Takeaways: [00:58] Every individual should plan to have 5 careers in their lifetime.  [01:52] Nurturing employees’ potential is key for engaging and retaining them. [03:40] The Future of Work is self-directed, which means a greater reliance on the human brain, not less.  [07:03] Future of Work transformation has just started -- we are going through the teething stage now. [08:22] Ben has had a varied career which he describes it as a zigzag.  [10:25] Why was Ben’s first job at Enterprise the most fun job he had?  [12:49] Why did Ben launch his career coaching platform, Pilot?  [14:54] Most people do not feel powerful at work.  [15:34] How to make employee growth and development a priority, not a hobby. [16:47] We need help to focus as the attention economy pulls us in too many directions. [17:56] One size doesn’t fit all for work or careers. [18:35] Coaching helps unlock people being able to advocate for themselves. [19:36] How Pilot handles the diversity of work across industries, organizations, and people. [21:30] How Pilot helped a top salesman not have to choose between his health or success. [22:25] Pilot enables users to focus on what really matters in life. [25:24] Ben has a holistic approach when it comes to growth and development, focused on addressing current dissatisfaction and growing where you are. [26:43] The commonalities in how to manage yourself as a professional and ensure the employee experiences suits you. [28:17] The benefit of personal agility. [29:42] A college degree is no longer sufficient.  [31:37] What employees need to future proof their careers. [32:55] Leadership is not a position. [36:09] How to manage your own inclusion by decoding and explaining yourself to others. [39:30] The intent to democratize coaching to support employees owning their careers. [41:59] The strategic role of HR and their need for data is supported by the product’s design. [43:02] Pilot’s initial non-enterprise version. [44:45] What are some of the biggest misconceptions of coaching?  [48:17] Immediate Action Tip: Look at any frustrations as an indicator to take action, advocate for yourself and own your life and experiences at work.    Resources: Pilot.coach Ben on LinkedIn Steve Jobs Commencement Speech Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World How Will You Measure Your Life? By Clayton Christensen    Quotes:    “The Future of Work is self-directed”.   “Most people do not feel powerful at work.”    “The intent to democratize coaching.”   “People seldom regret speaking up and advocating for themselves.“