In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders, David Green is joined by Paulo Pisano, Chief People Officer at Booking.com, to discuss how Booking.com are using people analytics to drive strategic decisions in managing a global, hybrid workforce.

The conversation offers insights into how Booking.com leverages data to enhance employee experience, streamline talent management across its international operations, and ensure that its workforce strategies are both effective and adaptable in a constantly changing business environment.

During this episode, expect to learn more about:  

• How Booking.com utilises people analytics to inform its talent strategies across more than 200 countries;

• The role of data in creating and sustaining a strong company culture, particularly in the context of remote and geographically diverse teams;

• How Booking.com uses analytics to promote a 360-degree view of employee experience;

• The ways in which Booking.com tailors its employee listening initiatives;

• How a skills-based approach to workforce planning shapes the company’s talent management strategies, especially in the face of evolving market demands;

• The use of people analytics during the travel downturn caused by the pandemic;

• Paulo’s advice to future HR leaders on the importance of integrating data analytics into HR strategies for better decision-making and strategy formulation.

Sponsored by HiBob, the modern HR platform for how you and your people work today, this episode promises to be a valuable source for those looking to enhance their employee experience and talent management strategies through the lens of people analytics.

 For more information on HiBob, check out the website at www.hibob.com.

[0:00:00] David Green: The role of the Chief People Officer in the function they lead has arguably never been so important.  Chief People Officers are at the forefront of leading their companies through dramatic change.  They are at the fulcrum of redefining the future of work, reshaping organisational cultures, and creating environments where talent can thrive.  They are doing all this at a time of rapid transformation for the HR function itself.  So, in today's episode, I'm delighted to welcome Paulo Pisano, Chief Human Resources Officer at Booking Holdings and Chief People Officer at Booking.com, to discuss how he has helped steer the company's HR strategies during what can only be described as unprecedented times, especially given that Paulo assumed his roles a matter of days before the COVID lockdowns in March 2020. 

In our conversation, we will delve into how Paulo orchestrates a talent strategy that accommodates varied cultural nuances and work preferences; we'll uncover the strategies employed at Booking.com to maintain a cohesive company culture during the pandemic; and we'll also explore the concept of the 360-degree employee experience at the company, and how it extends beyond traditional work parameters to support holistic employee development and wellbeing.  With Paulo's extensive experience and strategic vision, we are set to explore some of the most pressing issues facing Chief People Officers and senior HR leaders today, and uncover the strategies that have helped Booking.com emerge stronger in these challenging times.  So, without further ado, let's welcome Paulo to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. 

Paulo, thank you for joining me on the show.  Before we dive into the conversation, could you give listeners a brief introduction to you, and maybe your background, and also your role at Booking.com? 

[0:01:57] Paulo Pisano: Thanks, David.  It's a pleasure to be here.  So, as you mentioned, I currently lead HR for, actually for Booking Holdings, and I double act as Chief People Officer for booking.com as well.  So, before Booking Holdings, I spent last couple of decades in the HR, OD, change management space.  I've done roles across a number of industries, starting in -- actually, started as a management consultant that then went into the HR route in financial services.  And then throughout the years, I did work in financial services, in media, in education, and in consulting, in energy, all the way to technology.  I started my career in Brazil, but thanks to work opportunities, I managed to leave and work in a number of countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific as well.  I qualified as an Executive Coach a couple of decades ago and I've been also able to dedicate some of my time advising and coaching, both in the corporate and the NGO space, from a coaching standpoint. 

Booking has been one of those happy accidents, although the timing of it maybe wasn't as happy.  I joined Booking at the beginning of the pandemic, so we can talk about that.  But it's been a happy accident in the sense that we came across each other and at a stage where Booking was looking to mature a lot of the work it was doing in the HR space.  But for me also, the opportunity to connect with a company whose mission is to help everyone to connect, to experience the world, to travel.  It has a deep connection for me, right, because travel has always played an important role in my life, in my upbringing.  So, it's a great place to be in right now.

[0:03:54] David Green: Yeah, and it's great.  I mean, obviously your background in consulting and obviously you're qualified as an Executive Coach, I imagine these are skills that are helpful to have as a Chief People Officer.

[0:04:06] Paulo Pisano: Definitely, definitely.  There's a few skills I'd say are more important to a Chief People Officer or an HR generalist in general than the skills you learn with coaching

[0:04:20] David Green: So, Booking operates over 200 countries, in my understanding.  So, how do you approach creating kind of an overarching talent strategy for a hybrid workforce that's both globally distributed and internationally focused?

[0:04:35] Paulo Pisano: Yeah, I mean look, the workforce of Booking has been geographically distributed from a long time, right?  So, we have a number of companies as part of our portfolio at Booking Holdings.  Booking.com is the biggest operating company in the group.  We have about 12,000 people around the world, and it is very diverse, right?  We hire all over the world.  We have about 140 nationalities.  So, in a way, the management of our workforce around the world is not something new.  It's not something that was fundamentally changed, I would say, from after the pandemic, for example, like many other organisations, but it's something we've gotten used to doing for a long time. 

Everything we do in terms of the management of the workforce, in terms of our talent strategy, is done to support our strategy as a business, right?  And I think that is probably one of the most important things, is that we don't think about a talent strategy without thinking in every step how it is supporting the strategy of the business, the goals we're trying to achieve in one year, in three years, and in five years.  I think that helps us articulate, clarify, focus the messages for our workforce, and therefore it helps us keep a pretty broad, pretty diverse and geographically distributed workforce, kind of no rowing in the same direction, if that makes sense.

[0:06:08] David Green: No, it makes a lot of sense.  And I think we've seen, looking at organisations across the world over the sort of last 10, 15 years, HR's kind of been on a journey from really, it was a support function, into being a strategic partner in many companies now, and hopefully in more companies as we move forward as well.  And I think what you said there is so important, connecting the people strategy to actually the business strategy, what the business is trying to achieve in the next three years.

[0:06:34] Paulo Pisano: Yeah, absolutely.  I think there's, and you have seen this, there's a percentage, and I don't know what the percentage is, but there's a percentage of any kind of HR strategy that you could argue is generic enough that it applies to any organisation that's trying to deliver value to customers in some way.  And I'd say the beauty of that, of that part of HR that doesn't change, is that it makes our roles very transferable, right?  There's a reason why I was able to move all the way from financial services to education, media, energy, and technology.  They're very different sectors, but there are certain underlying principles and needs and kind of requirements that are there, regardless of what the sector is. 

But then there's something about the uniqueness of the strategy of a given organisation.  What is it that they're trying to do at a specific point in time?  And that's where usually I see the breakdown between kind of HR strategies and business strategy, is that they are tempted at times to stay too much into the generic strategy, and by the way, there's nothing wrong with that.  It's like hiring great people, making sure, as they come in, you're on board and effectively you develop them well, you pay them well, etc.  But how do you then make decisions around what do you focus on; what do you double down your investment on?  For you to be able to make a good decision around that, you need to truly understand what is it that you're trying to optimise for, for a business strategy.  And then again, for us, it's been a journey.  I think we were not there a few years ago, and we've been getting better at opening those discussions, deepening the conversations with the business to explore trade-offs.  And now, I think we're much more focused than we were a few years ago.

[0:08:31] David Green: Yeah, yeah, really good.  Let's talk a little bit about the culture side now.  So, creating and maintaining a sense of culture in a hybrid and distributed workforce, it can be challenging.  Can you elaborate on how you've been able to foster a strong company culture, especially as more employees are working remotely and across different time zones?

[0:08:51] Paulo Pisano: Yeah, look, I mean I think like all companies, right, it's early days still, even though it feels like the whole pandemic thing has been going for a while, it's still early days.  I would say first link to what I was mentioning regarding the distributed workforce we have, and we have had for a number of years, this part of it, which is not new, right?  I mean meaning, if you have people in Amsterdam, even though we have, you know, it's probably our biggest hub across the group, those individuals, many of them, most of them, were used to working with colleagues who are in other parts of the world, colleagues that they don't see more than once a quarter or a couple times a year.  So, in a way, there's an element of this whole kind of hybrid work and remote work that is not completely new. 

What might be new is that if you and I were working on the same office, now maybe we don't bump into each other every day, but we had that kind of muscle developed to work with other colleagues from other places without being in person with them.  So, a lot of what we've tried to do is to reconnect with that, right, to remember and to remind each other in a way that we have those muscles and that we know how to do that.  I think the challenge is then you're scaling that, you're massifying it, and now it's no longer just a few working relationships, it's many more working relationships, sometimes within teams that were used to being together, that you have to reset.  Maybe reset is too strong, maybe it's evolve. 

So, to keep that connection, we do it in a number of ways.  I don't think there's a silver bullet, right?  We have internal communication, intranets across the group, we don't use necessarily the same across all companies in the group, Booking.com.  We use a platform, it's a classic social media type of platform.  We have a very high level of engagement from employees.  The beauty of those platforms is that you can track, monitor, measure, you know what's happening, you know what topics are coming up, you know how many people are viewing a video or post or liking it or commenting it.  You can track the sentiment, is it positive; is it negative; what's going on?  And we've been using that for a number of years, and we've developed a culture of high engagement across the organisation.  That's super-helpful to keep things connected.  It's helpful also because the way we've developed that, it's always focused on business, but we have perhaps a broader perspective on what do we mean by business. 

If you think about our workforce in the Netherlands as an example, we have a majority of employees working in the Netherlands who are not from the Netherlands, right?  We've been hired from all over the world.  You come in as a so-called expat and you have to get engaged with that community.  Maybe you're looking for schools for your kids, maybe you're trying to figure out how to buy an apartment, how to find someone to take care of your pet or whatever it is.  And we've been pretty kind of generous, so to speak, in supporting those types of connections and conversations, because they are around you connecting with your community internally at work, and with the community you do business in.  So, that's kind of another angle.  And then we're working deliberately on culture, meaning on mindsets, behaviours, the symbols in the organisation, the processes, there's a combination of things that come together that help people understand what is it that I need to do in order to belong here or to do well here.  And we don't leave that to chance, right?  We are deliberate in trying to shape those elements so that we can... 

You know, it's not just maintain the culture because you want your culture to be flexible so it can evolve, but you do it in a way that you're constantly conscious of how you're shaping the culture, right?  And then you can, if you're conscious about it, then you can make choices around kind of going left or going right.  So, it's a combination of those things that we're doing.  And I think it's early days, David, in the sense that if you ask me, okay, how do you measure that today versus how I was working four years ago, five years ago?  I don't know for sure yet, but that's an area of interest.

[0:13:21] David Green: I was actually at your offices in September and obviously, in your office in Amsterdam, your new headquarters, it's pretty new isn't it?  It's only been open a few months. 

[0:14:38] Paulo Pisano: Oh yes. 

[0:14:39] David Green: And I was just wondering that as you were going through the design of that office, obviously that was I guess during and coming out of the pandemic, were there certain things that you did in the office to kind of recognise that we were going to be in a slightly different era now when it came to hybrid work?

[0:14:58] Paulo Pisano: Yeah, it's a great question, and it's a natural challenge also.  That office, we started developing it like eight years ago, right?  So, you could argue also by the time we were getting ready to open it, it had been designed way before the pandemic was in anyone's radar.  The good news is, as we were in the pandemic, still kind of doing the development, we recognised there were some trends that were shifting.  We weren't sure about what was going to happen with remote and hybrid work, but we recognised there was a high probability that we're going to end up, at least for a number of years, in a more hybrid environment.  So, what that allowed us to do is to kind of rethink about some of the structuring of the workspaces so we had a greater variety of workspaces for different kinds of activities.  Yes, meeting rooms, yes, desks on the kind of extremes maybe, but phone booths, for example, that you can put a number of those around the floors.  We have seen those and we use an app that will tell you which ones are available so you can find it on the go.  Spaces for more focused work and quieter spaces, spaces for broader collaboration, feels like you're in a café or even using one of the three restaurant spaces we have to also sit down and people use those for meetings. 

The way we did it at Booking.com, for example, is we have a strong guidance or recommendation for people to spend kind of about 40% of their time at the office in a quarter.  So, I'm not saying two days a week, but some people will do two days a week.  Some people might not come for a week or two and then might come more.  Some people are coming more often, some people are coming a bit less.  We're trying to understand what's happening, what is that data, what's that information telling us.  And I don't think the info just tells you something.  I think the info invites questions that then you have to engage with teams and see if there are any patterns; are there certain job families that are coming more or less?  And then you compare what people are doing with our quarterly engagement surveys that have some dimensions around work to see if there are any kind of connections, any correlations.  Is there a story that's building up there that will help us make better decisions and better adjustments?  And I say that because it feels very dynamic still.  It feels like teams are still experimenting and trying to find kind of the right balance. 

To your point around Microsoft study, a number of other studies, right, that are helping they're helping people understand what kind of work makes most sense together or apart, one thing we try to get across in the organisation is that, it's not that I don't believe in those analyses of the kinds of work that are important, I think there's absolutely good kind of foundations for that.  But in a way, it's a bit of a, in my opinion, a bit of a reductionist view of the importance of being together at the office.  And we've used that kind of old phrase of, "No, we're not here just for us, we're here for each other".  And the reason that's important is, it links with your question around culture, right?  If I just take an operational or admin or kind of functional view of when people should be at the office or not, I may be missing a trick, right?  The perspective that the office becomes more valuable, it's the network effects.  The more people are at the office, it's more valuable for more people. 

So, early on, we had the classic issue.  People come to the office and they say, "Well, I come to the office, but I have to be on Zoom calls most of the day, but there aren't enough meeting rooms, so I'll go back home".  But then it stands to reason that, yes, we're global, but if more people are at the office, arguably, you might need to be in less Zoom calls because more people are at the office and you can meet.  So, how do you break that cycle?  And I don't think there is a formula to do that, but it's a mindset perspective.  It's saying, "Look, David, I don't want you to come to the office because it's in your job description or because it's our policy, I want you to think that when you come to the office, you're giving me and a number of other colleagues an opportunity to connect with you, to see you, to bump into you, to have a chat at the coffee line or to have lunch together or to swing by your desk and ask you a quick question".  That is very valuable, but that only happens if all of us are a little bit focused on that.  Even if, from a selfish standpoint, you'd prefer to be at home doing some kind of work, well, there's a value for the rest of us.

[0:19:43] David Green: Yeah, those serendipitous encounters, you don't get those virtually really, but you do get them if you're together.  As you said, the coffee line, the water cooler, which is obviously the word that we usually hear about that.  So, Paulo, you mentioned the importance of having well-rounded employees who can take work mindsets and behaviours beyond the workplace.  How does Booking approach the 360-degree employee experience?

[0:20:09] Paulo Pisano: So, we've become, I think, much more focused in the last few years around employee experience.  It's not like we didn't do it, but I think we've become more deliberate around it, and particularly from a perspective of the link that we were talking at the beginning of our conversation between HR strategy and the business strategy, right?  As a business strategy, we want to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.  And there's meaning behind each of those words.  "Making it easier", what does it mean, right?  To remove friction, to make travel kind of a good experience even before you start to travel.  "Everyone", it means it's fully inclusive.  We have customers that book $5,000-a-night hotels and customers that book kind of a $10-a-night tent somewhere.  And, "Experiencing the world", also what does it mean?  The experience, it's really around the full cycle, right, before you take that experience with you. 

When we think about that, we thought about how we build that mindset and that culture that's really focused at that.  Of course, it's focused externally, but from an HR standpoint we thought, how can we develop an experience internally that is somewhat coherent with what we're trying to do for the world?  So, as you know, as above, see below type of thing, right?  And it is hard, you know, the challenges around HR systems and integrating different HR systems and how not user-friendly some of them are.  So, we've been putting a lot of focus over the last three years on what are the small tweaks we can do that will make that experience for our employees and for managers and for leaders in the organisation, make it smoother, make it easier, make it more kind of value-add when they're connecting with things.  And it's a journey.  We're not there, at least we're not where we want to be yet.  But we've made good progress because we are thinking about that, and we're trying to eliminate unnecessary steps.  We're trying to simplify things, we're trying to integrate systems, reduce the number of systems in different instances we have.  So, that's one part of it. 

The other part, the other way to look at the 360 experience is this notion that you bring all of yourself to work and the lines, right, the boundaries between personal life and work are more and more kind of blurred in a way.  And we want to create a space where people have a great experience, not just while they're at the office, but particularly in the example of the high level of expats we have working in our offices, how do we help them integrate and connect with the communities; how do we make it easier for them and their families, when they're moving with families, to integrate and to feel really at home wherever they are?  When we think about development, for example, of course a lot of our learning and our development in the organisation is focused at helping you be more effective at doing your job or help you prepare to be more effective at the next level.  But equally, a lot of those skills are helping you just be a better person, maybe a better decision maker, maybe someone who is more aware of their biases before they get into situations, become a better listener, become a better negotiator.  Those are things that don't just help you at work, they help you in life in general, and that's the other angle of that kind of 360 way of thinking about our employees and their experience.

[0:23:44] David Green: Yeah, and obviously a big part of employee experience, and in terms of understanding it and improving it, is around employee listening.  How do you approach employee listening and how do you ensure that it's maybe not a one-size-fits-all approach?

[0:24:00] Paulo Pisano: Absolutely.  Absolutely, we take it very seriously and one of the ways we do it is exactly what we were mentioning on the intranets, for example.  The beauty of those platforms is that they allow dialogue.  It's not just top-down broadcasting, but you're connecting with the community.  You understand how they're engaging with the message, what kind of emotion it's generating, what kind of questions it's generating, what kind of misinterpretations or confusion it might be generating, and then it opens up space for connection and dialogue.  We started -- one of the silver linings of the pandemic, which was terrible in general and particularly bad for our industry, but one of the silver linings is I think we got a lot better at communication, so making communication more frequent, making it more accessible to people, making it more transparent, this notion of, "Hey, we're not just going to communicate when we have something to communicate".  Sometimes we just want to be there for people and say, we don't know, or we're not sure what's going to happen next, but be accessible and being vulnerable, but also creating that dialogue not just online, but on calls and now more recently, right, after we've reopened offices, also kind of in person.  And that means doing much more frequent Q and A's, ask-me-anything type of interactions, sending surveys for people to throw in their questions and vote the questions so we can prioritise those that got kind of most interest in that type of thing. 

We do do the engagement surveys.  We do it kind of once a quarter.  We have once a year, we do a deeper one, and the other three quarters, we do a very light touch, you know, five minutes just to get some feedback.  And then different parts of the business can run also listening exercises, either through surveys or focus groups, when they have something that's particularly relevant for them.  What we try to do, though, is to keep all the insights from those interactions funnelled into one space so we can cross-reference the information and develop insights that might help us either take more effective action for the organisation or just become better at communicating and engaging with people.

[0:26:19] David Green: I know that Booking has adopted a skills-based approach to workforce planning.  Can you explain how this approach is helping to shape your talent management strategies?

[0:27:22] Paulo Pisano: Yeah, it's very early for us.  So, we started it, arguably, beginning of this year, I would say.  We were planning last year, we started beginning of this year.  We still have a long way, I think, in the journey.  And a little bit of it, the first step that we're working on is taxonomy, right?  It's skills taxonomy, and it's getting a deeper understanding of what are the skills and the capabilities you need to get jobs done.  That's one angle.  The other angle is how do skills and capabilities, how do you group them together and form jobs?  Arguably, in the future, you may not need the construct of a job, you have the equivalent of what Reid was talking about in tours of duty or projects, or whatever it is.  I think we might get there at some point and maybe not in every role.  I think it might be a bit too chaotic if you go 100% there, but you find a better balance and you question, why are we grouping skills and capabilities in a certain way, not in a different way.  So, it's helped us clarify the skills that are needed to perform certain roles in the organisation or certain things, but also it helped us start questioning, what are those groupings and how we want to make that together. 

We are at the beginning of that journey, in that space, we're also running a couple of pilots on the marketplace, right?  So, using kind of the foundation of skills-based management, opening up opportunities for an area, a function, for example, to post jobs or kind of projects that might be 10% of someone's time or 20% or 5%, or it's a week, and then people can apply to that.  And we're learning through that process how to navigate the governance of that process, right?  Because on the one hand, you don't want to move people away without alignment with their management and their teams, or even like move 20% of someone's time away, that may make a difference.  But also, you're trying to make sure that you are not propagating a number of projects that might be kind of optional, in a way, and you are feeding optional projects because all of a sudden you have people or a certain percentage of people to do it.  So, you have to be very careful about that and very focused.  So, we are in that space in a kind of early stages. 

I do think it's going to provide us amazing opportunities for growth and development of our people, but it's going to really help in the mindset of the organisation on how to think about a body of work and how that body of work is helping us deliver something in the organisation.  I think that's going to be fundamental.  The big change we've been discussing from the past, because I was personally, I was reluctant or cynical, I would say, when our team started talking about this, because I know, and we all know how much time we've wasted on competency models, you know, 10 and 15 and 20 years ago, and this has a bit of a taste of that.  But I think that the biggest change we've seen now is the enablement of technology.  There's something in technology now that could enable us to not just do this better, but keep it up to date and maintain it better, and therefore make it something that's sustainable over time.  So, I'm excited about that, but it's early days.  We'll see, we think there's good potential, but we're early on.

[0:31:04] David Green: Next two questions, Paulo, I'd love to take you back to maybe when you joined Booking.com, right at the start of the pandemic.  How did you approach your talent management initiatives for your tech talent during that time?

[0:31:18] Paulo Pisano: Yeah, look, I mean the impact was massive, right, with our economy.  We were like, I think, 80% down on sales or something like that, people stopped travelling.  The biggest impact we saw in that kind of year-and-a-half to two years actually was in the, what we call the volume-based roles, so roles that are focused on customer service or credit, or even like some of the commercial and partner management, right?  Just the volumes were not there, not much was happening, and there was a big impact there, which ultimately in 2021 led to a little bit of a restructure like most other organisations did.  The difference for us, I would say, is that rather than jumping the gun and doing it too quickly.  We took our time, we tried to understand what was happening around the market, we tried to look at the different options we had, and that enabled us to, I think, cut less deeply than some other organisations and to do a process that I think was also, in average, a lot more constructive, because we managed to help the people that were affected by the restructure find rolls pretty quickly and pretty effectively elsewhere. 

But for tech and product, we were still focused on developing things and building for the future.  So, I would argue, in a way, it was easier in that space because in some ways, we removed some of the constant kind of immediate pressure that the teams have to kind of fight fires or do what's slightly important for tomorrow, and could kind of plan and do a few things for the future.  The flipside of it is that maybe we were also kind of on survival mode, so we weren't investing as aggressively in some of the technology kind of angle for the organisation.  So, there was a balance to be held.  What really helped us was to keep close, to communicate, to engage, to have open dialogue, and to make sure everyone's more or less aligned with what we're doing, why we're doing what we're doing, for how long we think we'll be doing it this way, and then we focused on that. 

We did not do as much in, for example, traditional learning and development.  We did not have as much in terms of internal mobility.  It was really more around focusing teams on, this is an opportunity now to integrate, to evolve, to improve the things we've been doing and to think about the future.  And it paid dividends because the investment of time that we had and the focus we had at that time helped us get really well positioned for when the markets started opening up for travel, we did particularly well.  There's a number of markets where we got kind of market share, we got more visibility or better positioning.  So, I think it paid dividends.

[0:34:15] David Green: Yeah.  And for you personally, Paulo, obviously joining just before the pandemic started, as CHRO, that must have presented some pretty unique leadership challenges for you.  How did you navigate those initial months and what lessons did you learn that have been valuable for your role as Chief People Officer?

[0:34:36] Paulo Pisano: Yeah, my timing was impeccable, right?  I joined 2 March 2020.  Two weeks later, I was with a group of cross-functional leaders where we were making the decision to close 200 offices around the world and sending people to work from home and figuring out even how to enable them to work from home.  In some areas, it's very straightforward, but if you're in customer service where you have systems and infrastructure at the office, how do we make it work?  So, it was incredible and very hard in the very beginning. 

It's interesting, the flipside of that is there's something that happens when you go through a crisis around focus, around clarity of decision-making, around de-complexifying things in the business that actually can be pretty healthy.  Maybe it's the equivalent now these days everyone's talking about longevity and the kinds of things you can do for longevity, including for example ice baths and whatnot.  And when you think about that, the value of that is strengthening your immune system, it helps you purge stuff that doesn't work.  There's something around that, that I think happened then, and that we were able to align with and to leverage in a way.  As I've mentioned, we got better at communications in the organisation, we became more focused, more visible, more connected.  That was welcome and we haven't stopped ever since.  We're like, "Okay, this is good".  We had some of our highest engagement scores at the beginning of the pandemic, after the pandemic was already going on.  And I think it was because we became more visible, more connected, and we were there available for our employees in a way that they had not seen us.  And they were looking for it as well. 

So that, I think, is one of the learnings for me, is the visibility, the importance of communication and engagement.  I think that's super, super-important.  One of the things you do constantly is you're picking up sound bites from across the organisation, and you're integrating those sound bites and that's helping you make a decision or influence a team from a perspective that maybe other functions don't have, right?  That's one of the benefits of HR being a horizontal function, is we have an alibi to get involved in everything.  And I think that the pandemic almost refined that instinct.  And I think now, with investment in analytics capabilities, it's a good combination, right?  I mean, intuition is important, but then having good quality kind of insights to support or challenge your intuition is also fundamental. 

[0:37:30] David Green: Yeah, and actually that leads on nicely to the next question, Paulo.  I had the pleasure of seeing Antonio, your Head of People Analytics, speak at the recent UNLEASH conference in Paris, and a very impressive story he was telling about some of the work that you're doing at Booking using people data and analytics.  I was wondering, two things really.  Firstly, what is the role of people analytics in supporting the work that you're doing in HR Booking; but also, how does it help you as a Chief People Officer as well?

[0:37:59] Paulo Pisano: Look, people analytics and my team knows that I'm obsessed on it, but not because I think you need that kind of hard data for everything you do.  It's about actually first helping us strengthen the mindset and the behavioural elements of analytics and kind of critical thinking around the organisation.  So, it's almost like how do I create demand for analytics through my HR advisory or business partners community and through our managers' and leaders' communities, right?  And you do that in a number of different ways, but part of the work is that.  And it's not just the analytics team that does that, but they help us do that, and that's the first step.  Once you create that connection, that demand, then of course you have to deliver and you have to supply for that demand.  And that means looking at how you can cross-reference data points, information, insights, sound bites, and start making sense of them, if not to give you a conclusion, to improve the quality of your questions, or to improve the quality of the experiments you run to test kind of a hypothesis. 

For me, that's super-important, the connection between the two, the capability, but the mindset, because more often than not, it's been my experience that organisations have a lot more data points already than they know how to leverage.  So, it goes back to if you're not really being driven by certain question marks, then you're not really invited to make those connections.  And that's how it's so important for me.  We are venturing into predictive analytics, we're running some models and experimenting to see how truly predictive they are.  But they've already helped open better quality conversations with managers, for example.  So, it doesn't matter if the predictive is working perfectly or not, what matters is it's allowing us to have a level of conversation with managers and leaders that we didn't have two and three and four years ago, that's already valuable, for example.

[0:40:11] David Green: Last two questions, Paulo.  Firstly, if you had one piece of advice for those listening, who maybe aspire to be a Chief People Officer one day, what would it be?

[0:40:22] Paulo Pisano: I advise, advise, advise.  The first thing is really make sure that you understand why you want to be a Chief People Officer.  That's valid for many other things.  And quite frankly, I've seen people that want to be in a certain role because it's like an autopilot, it's a default mode, and they haven't really asked themselves what is it about that, that really speaks to them to what they want to do.  And like any role, it has a variety of activities and responsibilities that might not be suitable for everyone or that people might not like.  I've seen a handful, not many, but a handful of colleagues that have made it all the way to Chief People Officer, only to not enjoy it and go back into, for example, Chief Talent Officer Role, which I joke that is the happiest role of all, because it's all about recruiting and growing and making. 

So, you've got to really ask yourself why you want to do that.  And the reason I think that's also helpful is that it will help connect with what are your spikes and what is it that you bring to the table from that role?  It's a very broad role, you can do it in lots of different ways, so understanding also, if you want to be a Chief People Officer, what's your angle; what is it that you've been practising and you've developed particularly well that may bring an edge to how you're going to create value from that role?  I'd say that that's fundamental. 

Then the obvious one also is you've got to get to know the business.  Again, it goes full circle to our conversation around strategy.  If you don't understand the business, how a company creates value and captures value, then it's very hard for you to make high-quality choices on how you're going to align your function to make the most possible impact in the organisation.  So, to understand what is it that's going on in that organisation at a given time, and at that time, what is it that's most important, I think it's very, very important.

[0:42:26] David Green: Yeah.  A Chief People Officer is a business leader who just happens to be running the HR function.

[0:42:30] Paulo Pisano: Exactly right.  Well, true for all C-suite execs, right?  You're no longer there representing your function or your business.  You're there as a leader of the organisation.  And yes, you have a connection and a responsibility or accountability for that part of the organisation.  But once you're there with that team, you're not there to defend that.  You're there to help that team make better quality decisions for the overall organisation.

[0:42:58] David Green: Coming to the last question, I can't believe it is the last question, but here we are.  And this is the question we're asking everyone in this series, and we're taking advantage of the fact that we're coming to the end of 2023 and about to enter 2024.  As we approach the end of the year, what do you think will be the key priorities for HR as we head into the new year?

[0:43:17] Paulo Pisano: Oh, I mean that's a good one.  I mean, we all look at some of those reports, right, with curiosity to see what are some of the general priorities.  I do think it depends a lot on the company, right?  It goes back to my point where there are some generalities we can talk about in HR, like how do we leverage generative AI across the organisation or for HR in particular; how do we simplify systems; how do we set up kind of talent acquisition in what's going to continue to be a more and more kind of competitive environment, particularly for tech talent?  So, all those things, I think they're going to be true in general. 

For us, we are really looking at integrating and simplifying kind of our systems or processes we're working with a number of partners on that already, continuing to build this strong employee experience that is more of a mirror or is more inspiring of what we want to do for our customers; that's going to be important.  Culture, I've mentioned, that's an ongoing journey, everything we do in terms of mindsets, behaviours, ways of working.  And the other one, quite frankly, I always go back to, and it's not kind of a new one in a way, but is management and leadership development.  I think that is probably the single most important lever you can develop in an organisation to deliver on better results and improvement, is having managers and leaders that are showing in the best possible way, that are growing, that are developing, and they're developing their teams as well.

[0:44:53] David Green: Totally agree.  Paulo, thank you so much for being a guest on the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  Can you let listeners know how they can find you on social media and find out more about your work at Booking?

[0:45:06] Paulo Pisano: Well, first, thanks a lot for the invitation, great to be here with you.  And I'm not very big on social media, so I mean I don't post a lot on LinkedIn or anywhere else.  People will see I have some interviews and some things.  If people google me, they'll find information, but yeah, I don't have a lot of stuff out there.

[0:45:24] David Green: You're being very humble, Paulo, but thanks very much for being on the show, thank you.

[0:45:29] Paulo Pisano: Pleasure.