Workplace Stories by RedThread Research

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.

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.

Deloitte is different. It’s different for, of course, its unique approach to solving customer problems, as well as its sheer size and scale. But in the context of a Skills Odyssey, it’s also pretty unique for having a) an ‘agency’ structure that makes it peculiarly receptive to new ways of organizing around Skills, and b) an openness to try new things. It’s also full, of course, of very smart people… we’d know, as both Stacia and Dani are alumni! But today’s guest, Chief Learning Officer of Deloitte’s US operation, Eric Dingler, isn’t interested in the past. In fact, he’s pretty critical about what Deloitte (and the rest of us in L&D) didn’t get right historically (“a talent/career model-level role hasn't allowed us to be as agile as we need to be and enable our organization to be as agile”) around career development. Instead, he’s very, very much about the future. In our discussion, you’ll see that for yourself as we cover a wide range of topics, from what it’s like to be in the CLO cockpit for a 145,000 person end of a half million-strong people organization, the central importance of agility as the lens Deloitte wants to see things through going forward, the role of data and analytics—even how he knows what L&D does really can touch so many people, making a better world for us all. We’re really glad we spoke to this fellow Skills Odyssey voyager; we suspect you will be, too.

Manisha Singh is a leading voice in everything from HR technology to people analytics, AI ethics to doing practical work on the future of work. And as someone who built what may well have been one of the very first ever talent marketplaces during her years at global energy equipment giant Schneider Electric, she’s also got incredible street cred for any Skills discussion. If that wasn’t enough, her years moving through the HR ranks at places like Tata and AXA would also mark her out as someone worth a conversation with… but now she’s capping all of her achievements so far with impressive work at British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology brand AstraZeneca. Where, among other things, she is quietly working away on doing her bit to design ‘a future that loves us all.’ A brilliant phrase, for sure. But what’s great about Manisha, who we’ve been wanting to compare Skills Odyssey notes with for soooo long, is that’s not just epic, Homeric poetry: she’s actually doing the steering and the navigating. Oh, and just for good measure, you’ll also hear why she thinks Skills could be the way we solve The Great Resignation. Oh yeah.

We came off this recording session thinking, Have we just literally seen the future of work? A world where how Skills has become the core to everything, and instead of performance management, we do performance enablement? And where the employee is the one that triggers the conversation, and salary is never just based on what I did last year but for the future of what I can do for you? And where the very praxis of making stuff is not about one company’s team coming together, but many actors and partners and even ‘employees,’ but in a very different sense of what that means now? You can tell we’re feeling it; you might even say we’ve been drinking some of the heady wines Odysseus plied the monstrous Cyclops with to enable he and his companions to escape its clutches. But like proper Greek heroes, we never let these spirits overpower us. Instead, we want to focus on the insights and best practice of what today’s guest, Guillermo Miranda, Digital Transformation Executive and CLO at Boeing, tells us about the future. A future that he and his team are building right now… and which, charmingly, perfectly, and hard-nosed business fittingly, involves cake decorators. We always knew we needed them: boy, how little we knew.

This week, it’s all about numbers, scale, and achievement. In terms of numbers, how about a Skills-based, AI-enhanced framework that is keeping 250,000 employees happy and appropriately paid? And which saves the company an estimated $100m per year, money avoided by avoiding expensive churn and not paying beyond market rate—even for scare capability? And as for the achievement, the spotlight in this episode is on Anshul Sheopuri, Vice President & CTO, Data & AI At ‘IBM Workforce,’ Big Blue’s immense global HR function, where he’s led the work on using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and lots of data to improve hiring, compensation and even DEIB policies across the company. So important is this idea of ‘Skills-for-pay’ and ‘Skills as currency’ that he sees it as a ‘silver thread’ unifying people processes and practices… which of course we soon correct to a ‘red thread’! We’ve been looking to meet with Anshul for a long while, and we’re glad we hung on in there, as this is an excellent conversation with a true subject matter expert who’s using tech to really make a bunch of positive change for his colleagues. A really interesting piece of best practice you could start looking at right away is using employee digital footprint to see what their Skills really are. Sadly, Stacia never got the AI help with tonight’s dinner she thought she’d get, but hey—you can’t have it all.

“We really just almost assume that, self-evidently, Skills matter--and then went to try to build a Skills library. It is only then that we start to think… what for?” Talk for any length of time with this week’s ‘Skills Odyssey II’ guest, Sun Life’s Robert (Rob) Carlyle, and these kind of zingers just keep on coming through… along with solid thinking about why doing anything with Skills that isn’t ‘wholesale’ (think, ‘big’) and at scale is a waste of everyone’s time, why it really doesn’t matter if you want to say ‘competency’ versus ‘Skill,’ and many others. You get all this in this week’s in-depth conversation with a real Skills practitioner striving at enterprise level, as well as, heck, a book report on Homer as Tarantino and what the Odyssey actually can teach us all about careers and acquiring knowledge. Don’t say we never spoil you.

Well… we’re still not home. The fabled Ithaca of Skills nirvana is still somewhere in the distance. This journey we’re on—this Skills Odyssey—continues. But we still are getting help on the voyage from Dani, Stacia and Chris Pirie from The Learning Futures Group, who are going to share another set of conversations with metaphorical sailors, explorers and other mythical characters also trying to work out how to avoid the workplace Sirens, tired Cyclops ideas and unhelpful Circe tech that might not help us. This week, dive in yourself to get set up with what the trio of plucky HR and workplace practice thinkers see as the main themes of this, our second look at all things Skills as sponsored (again! Thank you!) by our friends as Visier and Degreed. We also get a catch-up on how RedThread as a business is building capability and acquiring momentum, as well as reflections on previous ‘Workplace Stories’ seasons. Delightfully, we also get some terrific business and life development book recommendations from all three. It’ll be nice to have some reading matter down here below deck.

A lot of people we talk to are hesitant about starting their Skills Odyssey. They’ve got a good reason: they feel there’s just too much ocean out there between them and getting to the good place of Ithaca/success. But if you don’t start somewhere, you won’t get anywhere, so you kind of have to dive in. That’s the view, at least, from our guest today, Tim Dickinson, Global Head of Learning Systems & Innovation at European life sciences firm Novartis, a global healthcare company based in Switzerland that provides solutions to address the evolving needs of patients worldwide—and which, fascinatingly, has made ‘Curiosity’ a core corporate value. A key clue on how to do that jumping: decide if you want to focus on ‘Skills’ in general or the ones the organization sees as critical right now. As Tim says himself, his job is all about improving learning and improve knowledge sharing through technology, and then driving that knowledge-sharing and Skills-building throughout the organization. Don’t know about you, but that sounds like a job we’d really want: and we think you do, too.