Welcome to a very special bonus episode of The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Last week after a glittering seven-year tenure as CHRO and nearly 20 years at the company, Diane Gherson stepped down as CHRO at IBM. She will remain at IBM as a Senior Vice President and special adviser to the CEO, until she retires at the end of 2020.

Every field needs its standard bearers and ever since taking the reins as CHRO in 2013, Diane has been a pioneer, taking the HR profession to a new level and was deservedly recognised as the HR Executive of the year in 2018.

This news made it even more exciting that we’re kicking off an exciting autumn season of the Digital HR Leaders podcast today with a special bonus episode featuring Diane and I, discussing how IBM has infused AI and analytics into HR.

During her time as CHRO, Diane led the redesign of all aspects of IBM’s people agenda and management systems to shape a culture of continuous learning, innovation and agility. She has also digitally transformed the HR function, incorporating AI and automation across all offerings resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of net benefits.

You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation Diane and I discuss:

• How IBM has created a marketplace for talent, encompassing skills, personalised learning, career management and internal mobility

• A company wide jam that Diane initiated to support initiatives around returning to new ways of working at IBM

• The practical examples of how infusing AI and machine learning into HR programs can deliver significant value to the business and employees

• What HR needs to do to drive more value in the post-crisis world and why its the model for leaders and organisations to thrive in the twenty first century.

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested in how to set up the HR function to deliver significant value to the business and its workers, so that is Business Leaders, CHROs, Chief Learning Officers and anyone in a People Analytics, HR Business Partner or Talent Acquisition role.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Diane Gherson, Chief Human Resources Officer at IBM, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show Diane. Thank you very much for sharing your time with our listeners. Can you provide a quick introduction to your background and current role at IBM please?

Diane Gherson: Sure. David I am delighted to be here, so thanks for inviting me. I am Diane Gherson. I am the Chief Human Resources Officer at IBM, I have been in the role now for seven years. I grew up actually in consulting and went into HR about 18 or 19 years ago, out of consulting and joined IBM as a head of comp and ben and then after that moved into a series of other HR Leadership roles.

David Green: Great. As I said, it is great to have you on the show. We have been running the podcast now for about 15 months and we know that the majority of our listeners work in HR and many aspire to one day be a CHRO. I think it would be great if we could shed some light on the role.

Perhaps if you could describe a typical day, if there is such a thing, in the life of a CHRO of a Fortune 50 company?

Diane Gherson: Well, sure. I don't know if there is a typical day, I would say there isn't right? But I think for anyone who aspires the most important thing is that you have an agenda, because there is a tendency for everyone else to take over your day and then you can finish the day and go, I didn't accomplish anything that I needed to do. So, that is actually the most wonderful thing about being a CHRO is that you do get to define your day, you get to define your priorities and then you force fit your schedule against those priorities.

So I think it is a great thing to be able to do as a CHRO, I think up until then I was pretty much at the mercy of other people's schedules, but now that is the joy of being a CHRO.

David Green: Has that changed at all during the crisis? There was an article I think you featured in, in the Economist a few months ago and it talked about how the CHRO is almost like the CFO was during the financial crisis, where acting at the centre of the crisis for the organisation. Has that changed the role for you at all?

Diane Gherson: It really has, we are on constant calls, as I know all of your listeners are as well, to talk about the state of the emergency that we are all in, that has now become everyday life.

It started out very much as a crisis. We met every day and met for at least an hour. We were working out all the crisis issues, now it is more of a steady state, but it is still three times a week. So that is definitely a difference, how we meet is different of course, we are now meeting, in our case, on WebEx and so that is a lot different than how we used to meet, but I think other than that it is pretty much the same.

Working from home is, as I know it is for everybody else, just really hard to define the difference between work and home and I think we all are working much longer hours than ever. But that is the reality of living in Covid.

David Green: I think when a crisis happens, people kind of step up and they don't seem to mind working longer. There is maybe a bit more flexibility. I have seen studies out there that suggest people are working longer hours but maybe they are taking the time if they can during the day, especially if they are child caring and stuff like that as well. So it will be interesting, I am sure lots of research is already underway in the crisis and obviously some of those studies will be published over the next year, two years.

Diane Gherson: Yes, I think the other thing that is different is travel of course, because we are not traveling and that frees up a lot more time. One of my colleagues did something great, which we have been copying and that is that, he decided to spend a week in Asia Pacific. So he is in North America, how did he spend a week in Asia Pacific? So what did he do? He got up in the middle of the night and started his day and he did it as though you were doing a trip. So in other words, it is not just having one meeting, you have a series of meetings. You meet sometimes with large groups, sometimes one-on-one with people that you are mentoring, you have lunch with them, order in. Now it is the middle of the night in North America, but for them it is lunch so he ordered in sushi cause I'm in Japan and so forth. And literally went through an entire week of this in Asia Pacific and I think that to me is the kind of innovation that we need to have because we have to keep up those informal relationships and there is a danger that we are still in this transactional, I have a zoom call. It started at 10 and ends at 11 and we get done what we need to do. If you were in the room in the meeting you would have chit chat before and chit chat after. That is where you form those bonds that are so important in a company and so to be able to do a trip, a trip in quotation marks, like that you are able to simulate it, which I think is just a really great idea and something we are now all emulating.

David Green: That is a great idea, especially if you are in a global role and as you said, people on the other side of the world can actually get to get some time with you and that important informal time because unfortunately the way that zoom calls are, yes you might have a little bit of chit chat before you get going into the business, but it is not the same as being face to face is it?

So The Economist article I referenced earlier, it also referenced that four fifths of CEOs are worried about skills shortages. I know from my time at IBM, the Institute for Business Value found that the time it takes to close the skills gap through training increased from an average of three days in 2014 to 36 days in 2018, which is actually quite staggering.

Skills, I have heard it called the new currency, which I quite like. What is the importance of skills at IBM and how have you tackled this challenge?

Diane Gherson: Skills is central to IBM, we are after all a tech company and the shelf life of skills is very short in technology. So the way they talk about it as a half-life, which means that half of what you learned five years ago is no longer relevant, and in some areas it is actually three years. So that means you have got to continue to grow your skills and so for us as we pivoted into cloud, into AI, into cybersecurity, It was really important that everyone understand those skills and build those skills. So we made that really central, not just how we talk about the experience in IBM, but also having the right platform that was truly infectious that made learning a habit. Having leaders emulate it, actually publishing figures about how many hours leaders were consuming of skills and their badges. So this is all important in terms of building a culture where skills are important.

David Green: I think one of the products that you guys have built to actually help with that bit is Your Learning. Can you tell listeners a little bit about Your Learning and how it works and what employees like about it?

Diane Gherson: Yes, so Your Learning is, we threw out our old system and we just decided to do this instead, and it is a very simple system built on our cloud. It has internal and external everything, whether it is a YouTube video or whether it is a Stanford Business course or an MIT course or an internal course, it is all there. But, what is so great about it is it is personalised and it is built just like Netflix. So it knows who you are, knows what you did last time knows, what your career aspirations are and it has a recommendation engine that recommends to you what you should take next. Also like Netflix, you can queue it up. So for example, I was talking with someone the other day who said, this was before Covid. I used to go to get my nails done every Saturday and so I would always queue up learning while I was getting my nails done, because for anyone who gets their nails done they know how annoying it is you can't do anything except listen with your earbuds while your nails are drying. So there you go. So you can do it, you can fit it into your day and it is queued up for you and that I think has been really great.

The other thing is that we have badges and so badges give people the ability to move into new roles with their skills and that has been quite effective.

We have connected it to career in a really important way in that it shows what are the hot skills in IBM, where do we have demand. Also where does the market have demand. We scrape all of the postings that all of our competitors have out there for their jobs and so we are able to surface where is demand going in terms of skills and so people can then start aligning their career goals and their learning goals with where the market is going, which is quite helpful. Also it helps them understand that their current skills may not actually have a lot of traction in the market, which is also important to know and important to career discussions.

Then finally, it will surface jobs that are open inside of IBM that match your skills. So you can sign up for a service that comes and tells you every time a job opens where, David, here is a job that you have an 80% match. Do you want to apply or you can just go and look.

So it is all connected to the Your Learning platform.

David Green: I think that is the clever thing, it kind of pulls together that learning and mobility and then presumably on the back end workforce planning for IBM as well. I think in the past, I am not talking about IBM here, but in the past in organisations most of these things have been done separately, but these are kind of linking these talent programs together.

Diane Gherson: It is such a great point, David. We had learning in a different organisation from skills. What I did was I did a squad for six months and I pulled the Head of Learning into our skills organisation and magic happened, suddenly your career and your learning came together.

Suddenly we had all sorts of incredible innovation that hadn't been happening when learning was sitting in its own silo. So it is really important to do that, to shake things up a bit, to get that kind of synergy, because as you say, that is how the employee thinks, learning and career go together.

So yes, it is really important that we bring our own teams together to make things happen.

David Green: Yes and as an employee if you are going to take the time to take some learning you would want to see what career opportunities it can give and then also the demand for those skills that you will be acquiring within the organisation as well, potential career paths. So it is just far better for the employee experience really. Speaking of which, we have been hearing a lot about the crisis and Covid-19 acting as an accelerant to digital transformation and the future of work. Continuing that skills thing, what has been the impact on skills at IBM and what has been the response of HR?

Diane Gherson: Well, I think a lot of it is listening, listening and showing empathy has been the most important part of what HR has been about. The second part is making sure people are safe and that when they do come into an IBM environment that they feel safe. So those are, I guess, kind of at the bottom of the Maslow's hierarchy, safety being the most important thing. And HR hasn't spent a lot of time on that for many, many, many years and suddenly it rose to the fore front. So it drew on skills that many, particularly early professional HR folks, have not actually had to exercise. So it has been a great exercise in really causing HR folks to blossom in terms of their skill sets and listening. How they listen, how they co-create with their teams and also with the folks that they support has become a really important factor. Then on top of that, of course, we have had racial justice and social justice issues right on top of that and that just accentuated many of those very same things.

David Green: Yeah and actually continuing that theme really, I know that is something that I have seen when I was at IBM actually. Staying with the crisis, what have you done at IBM to support employees around return to the workplace, as well as the new ways of working that may well be part of the new normal whenever the new normal appears?

Diane Gherson: Yeah. Well, it looks like Covid is here to stay so we are beyond the point of thinking we are all going to go back to the office and it will be the same. We actually decided, back in the beginning of June, we decided to do an all employee jam and so each of our Senior Leaders held a conversation room and we had our employees come in and we had a series of questions for them that we discussed. One of them was what is the future of the office? Another one was, what do you value about working from home and what do you miss about the office? So we got a lot of input from our own people around how they would envisage going back to work when things are safer and that is an important element, right? Because if it is not safe, then that is a different discussion. But what we got was about two thirds of our employees really value the office as a hub and they value the office as a place to go to build a network, to learn from others, to be mentored, to build community and they really value that.

The other third would be perfectly happy staying at home forever and those tended to be people who were later in their career, had already built out their network, maybe didn't have a lot of career ambitions from where they are today but they are just as valuable as those mentors.

We had to remind them, well what about when you were an early professional, who mentored you? And so there is some of that that needs to happen, the give back.

So we are thinking about the office as, not a place to get your work done, we all know you can get that done at home, but it is a place for you to build community and to build culture.

David Green: Obviously IBM was one of the pioneers of remote working anyway back in the eighties or nineties. I think what is an interesting topic that we are seeing for some of the companies that we are working with is different people have different opinions, like you said, about wanting to be spending more time in the office or less time in the office, but there is also the types of work.

There has been studies saying that people feel more productive, but at what cost is probably the counter point I would make to that.

But the other thing is the types of work that maybe you can do remotely with more productivity and then there are the types of work where actually innovation and creative work is perhaps better in a face to face basis.

You can see a future where maybe people are at home two or three days a week, but they are in the office to do certain types of work.

Diane Gherson: You are absolutely right David. One of the conversation rooms that we had was about new innovation and it is really clear that serendipitous encounters are critical to innovation.

When you think about the work that we do right now, it is pretty much all preprogrammed, right? I mean, we have a Zoom call and these people were invited, we didn't bump into anybody and so these random encounters that cause people to think differently, to expand their networks and so forth.

There is some of that that you can do, certainly we have found that the use of Slack channels has been a great way to build out networks and you can have those random one minute conversations with people and so that tends to be okay, but there is nothing better than running into somebody in the hallway or the lunch room.

So there is that and we will definitely be thinking about innovation, particularly sprints to come into the office for that. One of the reasons is it is really hard to be on Zoom for hours on end right? So if you are working on it in a very compressed way on a project where you are on a sprint, you need to get something delivered.

You can't work for four days straight sitting on video, but you could work in an office for a day straight, even with a mask and six foot distancing and get it done and take breaks and so forth together. So we have been experimenting with that, but it is still early days.

David Green: I suppose when the crisis started no one knew how long it would last and I saw lots of stuff about returns to the office and the new normal and I thought we are nowhere near the new normal yet. We have seen some companies making big announcements about going either completely virtual or nearly wholly virtual but I think it is probably a little bit more nuanced than that, as you said, because A] different employees have different preferences, B] there are different types of work that needs doing. Then also different organisations have different needs, obviously as a technology organisation, IBM has created its history really on being a very innovative organisation so that time together is important.

Diane Gherson: Yeah, you mentioned IBM went remote early, we did and we learned a lot from it. What we learned was that we went early when there was the internet, right. People were mostly on the phone and they were multitasking. We didn't get their full attention, they confused the being on back to back meetings with being productive and so we realised that was not working. Plus we were moving to an agile way of working, which requires close collaboration and interaction all the time which is best done in person.

So what we had done with the early version of remote was we had taken what I would call an industrial model of work, where I do my piece of work, I throw it over the transom to you. You work on it, you throw it over the transom to Ian. That worked fine remote but then when we started doing agile work, it was less effective.

Now, what we found is actually there are much better virtual collaboration tools and we can do virtual, agile and that has really enabled us to do it very differently than what I would call, remote 1.0. Which is what we were doing, five or 10 years ago and that has made a big difference.

I will give you an example. We got a new CEO, as you probably know, in April and I had planned a three day offsite or two day offsite with the senior team, which is what one does when one has a new CEO. You figure out what do we like and not like, how do we want to operate together as a team, put together your own team manifest and so forth and of course that was in April. So what did we do? We actually did it virtually but we used Mural, which if you haven't used it is an incredible experience. It is kind of a white board and you are pulling off stickies and it is as though you are in front of a whiteboard as a team. We have got a tremendous amount done and we did it over a period of five sessions instead of two days. They were about 90 minutes or two hours each and we got a lot out there. We learned a lot about each other, we shared what we aspire to be as a team. It was the kind of thing that we never would have imagined we could possibly have done except in person, but we were forced by circumstances.

Now my senior team is really, really comfortable with using this kind of technology with their own teams.

So that is one of the blessings I think of being forced into it is Covid has really shaved maybe five years off of what we would have done under normal circumstances, just because we were put in that situation.

David Green: It has certainly forced us to adapt and embrace, as you said, maybe technologies that we wouldn't have embraced in 2020, maybe it would have been in the next five years. So really interesting.

I know we both share a passion for People Analytics, Data Driven HR and the use of AI in HR as well. Obviously IBM has been one of the pioneers of this. I know from my time at the company, the leading role that you played in that agenda as well.

As a CHRO how does AI help you?

Diane Gherson: Wow, that is a huge question, David. AI is how we lead, right? I mean, it enables us first of all to sense what is going on and in ways that you can't normally. I just talked about how we did a jam, we were able to feed back within an hour, here were the findings. So, to be able to look at negative versus positive, neutral, where do people agree or not agree. That was all using AI, so that is a great example of how it just gives you a feel for what is going on in your organisation. We didn't really have that before.

The other thing that it does is it improves the employee experience. So I talked earlier about personalisation, we now expect consumer grade experiences at work. But that is all made possible by AI knowing who you are, knowing what role you are in, feeding you a message that makes sense for you, as opposed to receiving a dear IBMer message that you might have gotten before that you would not even read because you are so used to them not being relevant to you.

So those are things that I think can really affect the IBMer experience, of course being able to use a chat bot that is 24 by 7 on your phone to answer questions and to do transactions for you. We have right now about 250,000 interactions a month using our HR chatbots and the experience is very, very high and people love it.

People love Your Learning, it has a NPS score of 53, which is better than most products in the marketplace. So people are giving feedback, we are making it better, but it is the AI that they love about it.

It makes managers better managers. It is giving managers advice about what size of an increase to give their people based on the demand for their skills, based on their performance and so forth, but really taking it all into account. That way enabling the manager, when they give the increase to the person, to say why. You were a high performer but you didn't grow your skills and the demand for your skills is low and the turnover rate for people with your skills is low and that is why you didn't get an increase this year, but let's have a conversation about what skills you need to grow in order to continue to grow your career and your pay.

So it has enabled that, it enables us to infer skills so that people don't have to sit down and go through massive questionnaires so that we can inventory them, it is in real time so that has been very helpful for workforce management. Of course it has enabled productivity using robotic process automation. I mentioned the chatbots, that has really enabled us to move our own HR employees to higher level duties and so from that perspective, it has really helped our productivity.

David Green: Yes, the inference of skills thing I think is very interesting because a lot of the organisations that we speak to, they have that problem that every organisation seems to have at some point that, a tool like LinkedIn knows more about their people than they do in terms of the skills that they profess to have. As you said, a lot of organisations then go through the process of asking people for their skills and trying to document that in. But that the inference thing is very interesting and I know it has certainly supported Workforce Planning and understanding people's agility to learn new skills that may be in high demand in IBM so you can actually target the right people to try and help them get into those roles.

Can you share a little bit more about that at all? I think that is something I know our listeners are interested in.

Diane Gherson: Yeah. So look, it looks at your digital footprint and so of course what is really important in IBM is skills aren't just what you know, but what you share. That is a very important value in IBM and so you are sharing it, It is in your digital footprint in some way. It could be in your project summaries, it could be in what your pipeline is if you are a seller, I mean it is all over. So what we then use is experts in each of the fields and each of the industries to validate it over a series of years. Just this year is the first time across all of IBM that we went to every single IBMer in the course of their career discussions to say, here is what we have inferred about your skills, not just what skills you have but at what level and we would like you to validate that. Interestingly, 80% validated them at a hundred percent accurate. Now, does that mean 20% of them were wrong? We don't know yet. We have still got some work to do on that. My hunch is are that maybe 50% were wrong of that but the others maybe were over evaluating their skills. So we are in the process of taking a look at that. We have got 350,000 employees, so that is not too bad. It is something that if skills were important to you it is really important to invest in, in my mind, because A] people do not have the time nor the interest to keep updating their skills in some massive inventory thing. Secondly there is bias that you get when people do that and even from the Manager who might have to validate it, which is another whole exercise that is not much fun to do. So in fact our view is that the human bias is eliminated through this process and that it is more accurate in the end and so that is pretty exciting.

It is a little scary to think about the fact that a machine is doing this and so I do think that transparency is important and I am so glad that we did that this year. I have been pushing for it for a while and we, for a variety of reasons, we just were not ready for it.

But I do think people do have a right to know what skills you attribute to them.

David Green: Yes, I definitely would agree with you there. We are going to talk a little bit more about HR itself and go back to a point you made previously. What technology and the personalisation that enables us is almost a huge shift in HR from, we used to have these one size fits all HR programs of the past and this is now very much more like a consumer like product or set of products that is allowing us to personalise it for individuals. That must have a huge impact on the employee experience?

Diane Gherson: It really does. I think the HR I inherited was very process bound. For good reason, HR hadn't been all that efficient in the old days and there was a need for re-engineering and globalisation, every country had its own recruiting system and so forth so that was all important. It became incredibly effective for HR and incredibly horrible as a user. Users were having to stitch together solutions for themselves so if you were onboarding, you would have to go to one place for your benefits and somewhere else to get your badge and somewhere else again to get your laptop to be connected to the internal internet and so forth. Every one of those processes might have been efficient, but the experience was lousy.

So instead of looking at efficiency, we actually adopted an experience lens and all of my teams are measured on net promoter score, which is how was your experience, whatever it was. And so that is one and the second thing is each of our functions no longer have programs they have offerings.

Now that may sound like that is just a semantic change, but it is a mindset change. When you talk about an offering, it means you have got someone at the other end of it and they might have a point of view about how it was received by them and that point of view is important. So talking about Offering Managers instead of Program Managers I think has also made a difference.

David Green: What has been the reaction of the business? There has been a huge shift in what HR is providing to the employees, but also a huge shift in what the value of HR is to the business. What has been reaction of Business Leaders in IBM?

Diane Gherson: You know HR is really viewed as having become a digital organisation, which makes them very proud because of course that is a business that we are in and we are using all of our own technology, so it is a showcase for how you can use all of it and that has been really important to our leadership team. The other thing is that the HR team is no longer buried in transactions. They are actually spending time on helping them be greater Leaders, helping their teams develop the skills that they need and adding real value to the business and I think we have moved from executing on the basics to truly helping talent become the competitive advantage in the market. Which is where every company needs to be, it is a talent game and it is not a question of just having enough talent, thinking about it as headcount, but having the skills that will enable you to be a better competitor in the marketplace.

David Green: Before we get on to the last couple of questions, you have talked a lot about listening to the employees, the jam I think is a fantastic example of that. One of the things that when I was at IBM I really loved was the Social Pulse and so I was thinking firstly to our listeners that don't know what Social Pulse is it would be great if you could explain what social pulse is and then maybe how that has helped the organisation during the crisis?

Diane Gherson: So sentiment analysis which is really the broad term for that, is just continuously listening to employees but not snooping. I really want to make that distinction. In fact one of the first things that we did when we started using it was to publish our own code of ethics around how we use AI in HR.

The headline was “just because you can, doesn't mean you should.” We are very serious about that in HR so when we are listening and I put that in quotation marks, we are listening for a negative or positive. We are listening for volume. So if there is a lot of volume around racial inequality, as an example, we know that is an issue that people care about.

If it is a negative volume and it is in a certain country or a certain location, we know that there is something going on there that the HR people need to get involved in. So that would be an example of how we do it.

We are also pulsing questions all the time and so every IBMer every few weeks is getting an email, I know that sounds very old but they do open their emails when it says, how are you doing? That is it, how are you doing? That has been really helpful because we can see demographics where people are not doing that well and overall I am pleased to say that generally IBMers are doing well. But we have groups that aren’t and that way we can put together interventions that are really going to help them. For example working parents, that is a group of people that are really, really struggling with uncertainty. Not anything more than that right now, because they have already struggled with all the other things for the last few months, but the uncertainty right now is killing them. So there are interventions that will help them manage uncertainty, there are things that we can do to help them with that.

So it is enabling us to be very targeted, very laser focused on the issues that matter to our people.

David Green: And again, I guess it is using similar techniques that we have used on the consumer side, just to listen, to understand and then to act and provide that safety net that people need.

Or as you said, if there is something happening in a country in the world in a huge organisation like IBM, you can make sure that you are applying the right resources to help solve the problem and obviously build on good things that are happening too. I think it is a good combination.

I think a lot of organisations have been doing a lot of surveys during Covid but I think it is having that balance between some of the passive stuff and the active stuff as well to really get a good picture of what is happening.

Diane Gherson: That is right and you need to have safe spaces for people to be talking where they really don't feel like they are being snooped on, for sure that is really important, but you do need spaces for people to have those conversations because if they don't have it internally they will be having it externally and it will effect your brand.

So you may as well make sure that people feel very safe voicing concerns, voicing what they disagree with and all of that, internally and make sure they understand that we are here to listen. We want to learn from this and work with you on it and that does help us in a world where we all live in a glass house.

David Green: We will move to the last couple of questions now. We recently celebrated our first year of the podcast and Ian, our producer, came up with this great idea, let's ask David anything special. Dave Ulrich actually posted a couple of questions. I attempted to answer them but I think you will do a far better job than me.

So firstly, what gives you the most confidence about the future role of HR in delivering value?

Diane Gherson: Well, that is a great question from David. I think we are making a difference in HR because we are now part of the business strategy. What that is that's culture and it is talent and it is leadership and they are to some extent, inextricably linked.

But when I think about culture, it is the norms that hold a company together. We talked earlier about Covid and how it can fray those norms, it can fray those relationships and the role of HR is to make sure that doesn't happen, that you always have the goodwill and the well of trust that is the foundation of a culture. That is really important right now in this era of Covid for HR to step up to that.

The second thing is talent is a competitive edge, as I said earlier. If you can find a way to make talent that competitive edge, whether it is through your up-skilling or re-skilling a machine, how you hire, how you select, those are all things that give you an edge in the marketplace and AI, of course, can help you with that.

And then leadership, again, Covid is demanding a different kind of leader and it is so obvious the ones that are stepping out and being the kind of leader that people need and the ones that are not. They may have gotten away with it before Covid but now it is so obvious.

So the servant leader, the one that is able to draw innovation from their people and give energy to their people is really important and again, the role of HR is to help develop those people and to help select those people and to reinforce those messages through how they are measured and how they are rewarded so that it becomes part of the culture.

David Green: And I suppose the question is, how do we measure the value of what HR is providing to the business? How do you measure the value at IBM, for example, and I guess it depends on the program or the intervention.

Diane Gherson: That is a really great question. How do we measure the value?

I mean, certainly I mentioned net promoter score and so there is a net promoter score of all the experiences that HR is providing. Whether it is what my experience was of being hired or being on-boarded or leaving. That is another one, even if I am leaving involuntarily. it is my experience with my career, it is my experience with any number of things that a company decides are those best moments that they want to make really memorable. So I think it is that. It is also the net promoter score of the employee with the company. In other words, would I recommend this company to another person, to a friend and that is the culmination of so much of what HR does. So I would say that is another really good metric.

David Green: If we look at HR moving forward what gives you the most concern? I am not talking about HR and IBM here, I am talking about HR as a profession. What are you the most concerned about HR as we look towards the future?

Diane Gherson: Great question. I think there is always a danger that HR shirks from the new stuff and sticks to the old stuff. A great example of that is in Covid, or digitisation is another one, or transformation. There is always a tendency for when there is a vacuum for other people to reach in and say that is ours. Right? It belongs in HR, all that stuff belongs in HR and we need to upgrade our skills to adapt to that and it means that we have new skills. I will give you a perfect example. We have super jobs in HR around front end developers, around coders, those people are in HR now, data scientists, I have 135 of those. I didn't hire them either, I mean I hired some of them, but most of them were developed. That is the new HR. So we need to keep adapting what HR is to the demands and the kind of work that we are doing otherwise we will shrink and we will be less relevant.

David Green: That's great. We talk about leadership. You mentioned that you had a CEO transition from Ginny to Arvind and it doesn't happen very often in IBM as I know. So as a HR Leader what are the leadership skills you need to thrive in our digital world? You talked a little bit about that in connection with Covid, but what did you think are the key leadership skills that you need in this new world that we are living in?

Diane Gherson: As an HR leader?

David Green: Actually lets just do general HR and then beyond HR as well.

Diane Gherson: A lot of it is listening and having an ability and a willingness to keep growing and that enables us to deal with every new unexpected event, and we have had many of them in the last few months. So that ability to adapt and renew and grow is I think the most important thing. I think as I mentioned earlier, the kind of leader that we need in this moment is a leader that is a servant leader, which requires democratising how decisions get made. It means tapping the wisdom of the crowd in all of your decisions and that is all made possible with technology now. There is no excuse. So it is a different mindset of a leader. My role as a leader is to make my people successful and to make decisions, tapping their wisdom. It is not to be kind of Solomon, making the decisions from on high and that is a whole different mindset as a leader.

David Green: Diane I think that is a great place to end it. Some very wise words to follow the pun with Solomon I think there as well. Thank you for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast.

Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media if you are active on there?

Diane Gherson: Sure. I am on LinkedIn and I welcome anyone to join and I would be happy to accept you into my network, I think is what we have to do when you invite me, so I would be happy to do that.

David Green: Diane, thanks again.

Diane Gherson: Thank you David, it was fun.