Workplace Stories by RedThread Research

We start our new S6 of Workplace Stories with an overview of the theme of the Season, how it links to the previous five, then talk to Liz Wiseman, CEO of the Wiseman Group and author of New York Times bestseller about how leaders can build connections to and between people, and more broadly to the organization, 'Multipliers.' As we hear, Liz’s purpose is to make work better for everyone by creating organizations where great leaders multiply intelligence, rather than draining it from the organization. What inspires Liz is working with and watching senior leaders to learn what good leadership looks like, and how anyone can be a smart leader that doesn’t shut down smarts of others. We then hear her views on how at present, many organizations are in the process of trying to recover from a period of enormous disconnection. Now, in a world of Hybrid and Remote Working, what must leaders do to build and facilitate connection? This is essential in creating a sense of purpose and community, both in and out of the organization, and to help leaders need to provide context for people’s work. For Liz, this has to be about explaining what the impact of work is, and how it connects with wider purpose, as without this, people can’t feel a sense of fulfilment in their work. She also shares her view on how people don’t want to be managed in general, they want to be led. Rather than doing a job, leaders are people who see what needs to be done. This is important in the context of the Great Resignation – employees must feel connected and a sense of purpose even if removed from their workplace and work friends. Finally, she offers practical ways to start The Great Reconnection.

In this, our final episode for the Adventures in Hybrid Work Season, we end strong with a great sit-down with people analytics innovator and Head of Talent Analytics & Transformation at Panasonic USA, Lydia Wu. It’s the right last conversation for now on this important topic, we think, as Lydia gives us so much frontline reporting on the key issues we’ve identified in our conversations, like the importance of data and really listening to what your workforce actually wants in terms of return to office instead of what you think they want, which we’ve heard from others—but also topics we maybe didn’t get so much on, like the importance of the DEIB factor in Hybrid, and what we should be doing for managers in all this, not just the main employee base. The fact that Panasonic—which really isn’t just ‘the microwave people’—has such a wide spread of job roles, both desked and deskless, is also really important to think about. It all matters—and as Dani says in the episode, maybe it’s time to stop saying ‘Hybrid Work,’ because now it’s all now just… what Work is?

In February last year, this week’s guest, Phil Rhodes, Head of Learning & Leadership Development at WM--which you may now better as Waste Management, and who are the very helpful people who handled your garbage all the way through Lockdown—was not long in post when his suggestion of a coaching program was met with the observation, ‘Phil, trash companies don’t do coaching.’ Well, maybe they should all start, as the first rollout got a 96% approval rating with either ‘life-changing’ or ‘valuable’ level ratings. And as you’ll discover on this episode, mentoring and coaching, at multiple levels, for both truck driver and regional manager, emerged as a transformational tool for the company. Was it just a way to get through the pandemic, or perhaps the key way Hybrid can be made to land for everyone? We’ll make you listen to the episode to get the answer—but you’ll not hate us for that, as along the way you’ll get so much great insight on everything from the history of Southern Africa to new ways of thinking about effective frontline worker support. Warning: no, they didn’t train new folks how to drive the big vehicles online. At least… tune in to find out more!

This week’s guest is Michael Arena, who brings the unique perspective of leading talent development and management for not just major New Economy global brands like Amazon Web Services, but also stalwart Old Economy blue chips like General Motors and Bank of America. Along the way, he’s also done serious research and training in network analysis and the power of social science to truly understand what’s happening with today’s corporations. That combination of frontline management and crisis response and a lens for viewing all our recent challenges in people practices, gives him, we’d argue, the right to be heard on what he thinks is really happening out there for both individuals (and especially a voice often left out of the Future of Work conversation, the leader) and teams as we progress through what he jokes is both, Dickens-wise, ‘the best and the worst’ times to be in work right now. If you’re still sceptical, a few minutes on his evidence of bridging and bonding social capital and its impact on the Hybrid Workspace we’re seeing evolve around us will change your mind: and we say that as Data ‘Til I Die! converts. Social capital is a tool, we predict, that you’ll soon be using as much as Michael is in his new role in Connected Commons.

If there’s one word that sums up this week’s episode, it’s conscious listening. Yes, that’s two. But it’s actually the on-ramp to the real word we mean, and which is fast emerging as the theme of this Season 5 of Workplace Stories as it evolves: intentionality. That’s because our guest--RJ Milnor, Global Head of People Analytics and Chief People Data Officer at Uber--says it was conscious listening and thinking by he and his team about the WHY of his company was asking people to work for them, as opposed to where, that helped him craft a working Hybrid Work policy that works. Which, of course, is also another way of describing being intentional about RTO. We love RJ’s deep-thinking approach to these big questions--his commitment to listening to the people he’s trying to help, his rigor around tools and data, his willingness to experiment and flex. And we think you will too--plus get some clues about how to start the road to unlocking the Hybrid Work puzzle box from today. Hint: get conscious listening… and then get intentional.

Today, we hear from an HR leader at the absolute heart of the Hybrid evolution, Dawn Klinghoffer, Vice President of the HR Business Insights team at Microsoft. Dawn’s really helping set the agenda of what gets called in the show the ‘Pandora’s Box’ of workplace change the pandemic is sparking--which she sees, not as a source of trouble and confusion, as in the Greek myth, but as a way to get energy, meaning and empowerment placed at the center of every employee’s experience. Pandora-like, though, the changes Dawn wants to see can spark fear and disruption--fears which she discusses frankly and openly, and which she also so brilliantly encapsulated in a recent landmark HBR piece. We also hear about her fresh thinking on people analytics, data, and the employee-manager relationship, as well as practical tips on making Hybrid start working in your environment. To us—and, we think, by the end of this 56-plus minutes—Dawn's work here is a great example of HR is really for: to help us all be the best humans we can be. Worth your time.

Is it time to retire the concept of a job? Is it holding us all back—especially if we really want to make Hybrid Work a success? That’s a new, and we think highly useful, concept from today’s guest, author, academic and futurist John Boudreau. In the episode, John tells us how we want to move away from thinking about work as one job and job holder at a time and one degree at a time, to a system that allows the parts to freely connect, so tasks and projects can connect to atomized or deconstructed worker capabilities like Skills, which can be gained through an atomized set of things like experiences, partial degrees or credentials. John—a well-known HR scholar who’s Professor Emeritus of Management and Organization and a Senior Research Scientist with the Center for Effective Organizations at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California—says his thinking here is that we’ve been using the wrong unit of analysis in ‘the job,’ and that a new operating system of work is needed that should be instead be based on deconstructed elements of a role in terms of tasks rather than being based primarily on the job as the atomic unit of HR analysis. As you’re about to find, this is all set forth in his new book with fellow researcher Ravin Jesuthasan, Work Without Jobs, whose top concepts we try and explore, like what it might be like to ‘melt’ a job down to see what it’s made of and who could do bits of it instead, as well as a very new way of thinking about ice cubes. We’re so honored John agreed to be our lead-off guest for the Season, as we think it identifies many key themes and frees up some real opportunities for fresh Hybrid Work thinking we’ll all find useful. Just be careful you don’t melt while listening.

We've completed one sort of Odyssey (at least for now). Now, it's time for an Adventure. That's the message from our customary opening new Workplace Stories from RedThread Research Season scene-setter this week, where the guys reveal that our next set of engagements and learning from experts and practitioners in the world of HR and the future of work is the current supernova-hot topic of Hybrid Work. If you really are just out of your COVID bunker, we refer, of course, to the idea of how we might re-orient ourselves to a workplace where employee expectations about ‘presenteeism’ have changed a lot… whether they have that much really for employers, well—let's see. Also covered: how RedThread's working with its team and clients to make our own changes to support Hybrid. To set us up, a review of how powerful employees are right now on their side of their see-saw (for how long), some Intriguing guest names get dropped, starting with this week’s co-dropping Episode 1, well-known HR Scholar and author John Boudreau, how this Season links surprisingly quickly with previous Workplace Stories surveys, and expected recurrent themes like the role both human diversity tech will play in all this as it unfolds. There's even a gag or two (you're going to love the one about printers), all putting us in the perfect mindset for the John episode deep Hybrid Work conceptual dive. Warning: the episode contains shocking information about certification. Still not sure Chris has recovered.

In the Ancient Greece of Homeric times and mores, the concept of gifting, or gift-friendship, ξενία (‘xenia’) was central. Assuming your fellow Greeks would observe xenia allowed you to travel in the hope you’d be good for food and shelter for the night from strangers on your Odyssey; in exchange, travelers would leave a parting gift in thanks. At many points in The Odyssey, we see xenia in action, like when Eumaeus the Swineherd shows it to the disguised Odysseus, noting guests always come under the protection of Zeus. Well, we’ve reached the end of our own Skills Odyssey here, and so we thought it appropriate to give you, our fellow travellers, some xenia back: and it’s in the delightful shape of this bonus episode with our great final conversation with a CLO making experiments and achieving early results with a new approach to Skills, GE Healthcare’s very honest and informed David Sperl. It’s a conversation that covers his use of machine learning and analytics—again, underlining how key these practices are now in serious HR—as well as how dealing with challenges like replacing a zoo of older HR IT with one new global replacement just as is his division is being divested by its parent. He does a great job sharing learnings and best practice; it’s a bit of xenia in its own right—as Dani says in the episode, “That's one of the things that I really like about HR: if once you solve the problem, you can share that with other people, because it's going to work different in their organizations anyway.” And as she goes on to say, in this Odyssey we've seen tons of people being very honest and transparent with us about what they're doing—which is xenia all of us can treasure. Please also note we have yet another gift to close the Season, though, which you will hear about right at the beginning. Now it’s time to head back to shore--but we’ll be back very soon with more things to inform, help and challenge you.

Something’s happened to this week’s guest, Meredith Wellard. And it’s actually something quite wonderful; you can hear it in her voice, animating and energizing her. It’s a mix of excitement at possibility--and almost relief that a lot of checks she’s been trying to cash all her years in HR, L&D and talent management can finally be honored. Her secret? It’s the immediate impact on her organization, Deutsche Post DHL Group (she’s an Australian living and working in Bonn, Germany), she’s getting from a new machine learning and data analytics-powered approach to Skills. She and her team—as you’ll learn over the sound of Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ and your oars ,as you race ahead on this leg of our almost-concluded Skills Odyssey—have used that tech to create a unique career marketplace. You’ll soon know why she wants to call it that instead of a ‘Skills’ one) that will eventually be the friendly, automated, and incredibly well-informed training and new job (or even new career path) digital assistant for all of its half million global workforce. No wonder she’s inspired: and we think you soon will be as well.