Episode 160: How to Build a Thriving Workforce Ecosystem (Interview with Elizabeth Altman and Robin Jones)
Step into the world of workforce ecosystems as Elizabeth Altman and Robin Jones, esteemed co-authors of the influential book 'Workforce Ecosystems: Reaching Strategic Goals with People, Partners, and Technologies' join David Green on the Digital HR Leaders Podcast.
In this captivating episode, prepare to uncover the practical insights behind redefining traditional workforce management and embracing the dynamic potential of modern workforce ecosystems.
Discover an exciting array of topics, including:
The hidden facets of a thriving workforce ecosystem
The interplay between workforce ecosystems and broader business strategies
The shifts and changes required for HR leaders to transition to ecosystem orchestration
Navigating the complexities of integrating diverse talent pools, from contingent workers to full-time employees, for optimal performance and engagement
The key considerations for integrating technology into the workforce ecosystem
Listen to the Digital HR Leaders Podcast and embark on a transformative journey toward a future of unparalleled success.
Support from this podcast comes from Worklytics. You can learn more by visiting:
www.worklytics.co/DigitalHRLeaders
[0:00:04] David Green: I want to start with some thought-provoking questions that will hopefully set the stage for this week's episode. What if the traditional boundaries of the workforce no longer apply? What if the key to unlocking strategic success lies not within the confines of your organisation, but in the interconnected web of talent, technology, and partnerships that make up your workforce ecosystem? These questions challenge us to rethink how we approach people management and workforce dynamics.
That's precisely what we'll be exploring today with our incredible guests, Elizabeth Altman and Robin Jones, two of the four authors of the groundbreaking book, Workforce Ecoystems: Reaching Strategic Goals with People, Partners and Technologies. Elizabeth and Robin bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. Elizabeth is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Guest Editor of the MIT Sloan Management Review, Future of the Workforce project. And Robin is a leader of Deloitte's Workforce Transformation Practice. Together, they have joined forces with their two other co-authors, David Kiron and Jeff Schwartz, to develop a fascinating and highly educational book that dives deep into the concept of workforce ecosystems and how they can shape the future of organisations. And today, we're going to uncover those secrets and discuss the practical implications for HR leaders.
So, whether you're an HR professional, a business leader, or simply someone interested in the evolving landscape of work, this episode is for you.
Today, I'm delighted to welcome Elizabeth Altman and Robin Jones, two of the four co-authors of an important new book on Workforce Ecosystems, to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Liz, Robin, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you both on the show. Before we get started, could you both please share a little bit about yourselves, what you do, and maybe how you know each other? Liz, I'll start with you.
[0:02:29] Elizabeth Altman: Great, thank you very much and it is a pleasure to be here, so thanks again for inviting us. As you said, I'm Liz Altman. I'm a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in the Manning School of Business. I teach mostly strategy and also some organisational behaviour. And in terms of how Robin and I know each other, it's a bit of a funny story and maybe we'll get to it a little bit later, but I became guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review for the Future of the Workforce, and that's a project that is sponsored by Deloitte, and we work in collaboration with Deloitte. And while Robin and I started working together, I believe in maybe March of 2020, it was only a few weeks ago that we finally met in person in Dallas at Deloitte University.
So, we wrote an entire book together, and I think maybe close to ten different types of publications, all with the magic of Zoom, and now have actually broken bread together, as we say!
[0:03:27] David Green: Thanks, Liz, that's a great story. I wonder how many stories there are like that because of what happened in March 2020. Robin, over to you.
[0:03:35] Robin Jones: Thanks, David. And just to add to Liz's story, we also got puppies together from the same breeder, so we bonded well before we broke bread together! But thank you for having both of us, David, and I lead Workforce Transformation in the US for Deloitte Consulting, and I've been in that role for four years. It was a business that we launched just five years ago and has been an incredible first-chair seat to our clients, who are experimenting and facing and juggling a really dynamic, transforming workforce across their organisation. So, it was through that research that Liz described, that through MIT SMR where we all came together, along with David Kieran and Jeff Schwartz, to produce research focused on the future of the workforce. And we'll get into it more in this podcast, but lots of interesting questions that we've been exploring together.
[0:04:36] David Green: Well, it's great to have you both on the show. And I know, Robin, I had a couple of your colleagues on earlier in the year, Michael Griffiths and Sue Cantrell, talking about some of the work that I know you've been involved in around the skills-based organisation, which I guess we may touch on a little bit in our conversation. But it was one of your former colleagues that actually kind of prompted us to reach out to you to get you onto the show, Jeff Schwartz, who is also one of your co-authors on the book, and I know a former colleague at Deloitte, Robin.
So your new book, which kindly arrived in the post on Friday, and as you can already see, has got Post-it Notes all over it from me, so I haven't read all of it yet, but I have read some of it; it's very, very good. So the book, Workforce Ecosystems: Reaching Strategic Goals with People, Partners and Technologies, and when Jeff was on the podcast, we were talking about the past, present and future of talent marketplaces and during the conversation, he referenced the topic of workforce ecosystems, and the book the three of you wrote was published a few weeks ago with David Kiron as well, so I'm really pleased to have you on the show. Robin could you share a synopsis of the book and maybe what motivated you all to write about workforce ecosystems?
[0:05:41] Robin Jones: Sure, happy to. So as I mentioned, five years, we as a firm have been focused really on the workforce itself and all the nuances and all the shifts that have been happening. And so this goes well beyond the COVID pandemic and built upon the Human Capital Trends report series that we've created over more than a dozen years. As you mentioned, Michael Griffiths has been a key contributor to that in the last couple years, as well as Sue Cantrell. And so, this has been a really collective focus on studying the trends that we saw unfolding in the workplace, where employees wanted more agency in what they did. They wanted more flexibility, again, well beyond the pandemic; they wanted the organisations that they worked for to have stand for something; social injustice took a new life, and they wanted to be a part of firms that had purpose and represented strong, positive social capital; they wanted differentiated careers that really matched not just their own personal goals, but that in their families as well, and of course more and more people are in the workplace, dual-income families and the like.
So, we were watching this need and desire from the workforce to want something really significantly different than what the organisations were offering to the workers. I often say there was a mindset well before of, you get what you get and you don't get upset, from the leadership and the organisations. And HR was really focused on just making sure there was risk, administration, compliance, harmony, but also just kind of not too far to where the employees really wanted more. So, that was really the impetus that we started. Of course, you fast forward to the pandemic and we saw this come to life in a very quick way and a very real way pervasively.
While we were doing this research together, we started to ask the question of our researchees, our interviewees, to say, "Well, who is your workforce?" And that was where the light bulb went off. It was the starting question of, "Well, that's an interesting question, it's actually quite evolved. Well, it's so much more than the permanent employees, it has external, we now have technology playing the role of people, we're playing technology with people". So, it just became this very open space for us to explore the research. And we'll get into more of that, but that question of, "Who is your workforce?" is the thread that we pulled in this research and in the book itself. And it was quite eye-opening, and eye-opening in the sense that many of the people we interviewed were either starting to think about it for the first time and didn't have a handle on who their workforce was, or their leaders were asking the exact same question and recognising it's much more expansive than it once was. So, we'll get into that more.
That led to the book itself, and we did contemplate the structure, but it really falls into three parts. First, it's introducing a workforce ecosystem. We literally coined the term, and we're starting to see that term take off and take hold in our clients and in an organisation, so that was pretty exciting, and we defined that in the book. The second part is about orchestrating workforce ecosystems, and we intentionally chose the word "orchestrating" as opposed to "managing", because you really don't have this direct report, the controls that you have; the incentives aren't exactly aligned with an external workforce as it is an internal workforce. And all of the tangible and intangibles kind of need to be rewritten for the different types and categories of workers. So, it was less of a managing, controlling, and more of an orchestrating type of play and dynamic that we were seeing. And then, that's really about the integration architectures. We have technology, how you access them, aligning the interests and the like.
Then the third part is about developing socially responsible workforce ecosystems. This third part of the book is our forward-looking view. It's our "What if…?" Now that this is taking off, what can you do with an ecosystem and what can you leverage in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion in creating more diverse workforce compositions? How do you bring and make sure you're doubling down on ethics across the workforce? And just some perspectives on what we think the future might hold.
[0:10:24] David Green: Great, I love the three sections that it's built into. I'm going to ask a follow-up question now, it might be you, Robin, it might be Liz. I'm going to read just one line from Donna Morris, who obviously just for listeners is the Chief People Officer at Walmart, just to your point, Robin, about that question, "What is the workforce?" And there's a great quote here from Donna in the book, "I believe the workforce is the composition of all the people who contribute to the strategy or the business objectives of an organisation", which I think is a really nice, succinct way of putting it.
But before we get into a bit more around the concept and how, I get it, and I'm sure listeners will, that it's clearly something that is a concept that's becoming more and more important, how would you define a workforce ecosystem and what is it actually composed of?
[0:11:12] Robin Jones: Yeah, so we have a few definitions in the book, but I'm just going to simplify it. It's really the total workforce, if you step back, internal, external, technology, different contract models. Think about anyone who's doing work on behalf of the organisation to add value to the organisation, and for the organisation itself to advance the mission, to advance the strategy, to advance the business as a whole. And it's really that simple. It's looking beyond your typical just internal permanent employees, but also looking beyond just your freelancers and your gig workers. It's your consultants, right? It's your ecosystem partners who have workforces coming together with your workforces on project teams or initiatives. So, it is truly the most expansive group of workers and technology coming together to create value and do work itself on behalf of the organisation.
[0:12:17] David Green: Yeah, that's really interesting, because obviously some companies outsource certain parts of their work, so that's clearly part of the workforce ecosystem. And obviously we're hearing, you can't pick up a newspaper, if people still read a newspaper, or a digital newspaper, without reading something about technology and how that's going to transform the workplace, and clearly that's going to be an even more growing element of the ecosystem as well. Liz, before I move on, is there anything you'd like to add to that at all?
[0:12:44] Elizabeth Altman: No, I think Robin did a great job of both summarising the concept and the book. We talk about as a total workforce, we talk about also as an extended workforce, you hear people use that term, so we use that term as well. And I think we took this much broader perspective and really opened the lens on who and what one considers a workforce and how those various actors contribute to creating value, both for the organisation and also for themselves. And I guess maybe that's one piece I'll add is, if you look in the book and our articles in our more formal definition, we are very clear that the definition includes both individual and collective goals. So, it's very important to us that we take not only the perspective of the organisation at the centre of the ecosystem, but also all the participants, because if those participants aren't also hitting their goals, then it won't be a long-term sustainable workforce ecosystem. So, I guess that's one other point.
[0:13:48] David Green: Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think might even link it to the next couple of questions I think, Liz. So, so staying with you, Liz, how does the concept of the of the workforce ecosystem relate to the wider business strategy, and why is it not just an HR discussion?
[0:14:04] Elizabeth Altman: Sure, yeah. So, I'm a strategy professor and have been teaching strategy for a little while, and so this is one of my favourite questions, I will say. But when we first start thinking about strategy and often strategists, I also used to be a strategist in a large corporation, think about competition, think about capabilities, think about trade-offs, long-term decision-making, and come up with strategic goals and objectives, strategic plans, and then think about, okay, well, given these strategic goals and objectives, now who do we need to accomplish that? And generally, the traditional path has been to think about, so who do we need to hire? How many FTEs do we need?
What we're seeing now is two things happening. One, people being much more open to who do we need, in what ways; what are the appropriate types of relationships we need to have, both with people and technologies, right? But the other piece that I think was very surprising to us was the extent to which we think people are now, as we say, flipping the switch in terms of how they're thinking about this, right, or I think we said, flipping the script. And so thinking more in terms of, what are the capabilities available to us? And given those capabilities and given these people, and technologies with these people who we can work with, and these organisations we can work with, what does that mean for what we can offer in terms of products and services?
One of our favourite examples, which I think made it into the book, was we were talking to executives at a large creative agency and they were saying that, "We realised that some of our interns and our contractors had incredible TikTok skills. But nobody really in our kind of core workforce was focusing on building their TikTok skills. But once we realised this, it actually did help us think differently about how we were serving our clients and who we could leverage to serve them well". And so, though it may seem like a slightly silly example, and of course, a younger generation will have those types of skills, I think it is a different mindset around strategic planning when you're thinking from the ecosystem and from the ecosystem perspective, then back into the organisation. And so that was a great learning for us and I think is pretty exciting as we look at other organisations.
[0:16:45] David Green: What do HR leaders or people analytics leaders, who are increasingly responsible for workforce planning at least, looking to shift away from traditional workforce management to orchestrating a workforce ecosystem, need to start doing; what needs to change?
[0:18:05] Robin Jones: Yeah, so I'm going to build on Liz's TikTok story and give you three more examples. They just give you a sense of who we interviewed, many of whom are very cutting-edge, out-in-front CHROs, and how they were thinking about this as we got into the most expansive discussion about their workforce.
The first one was Susan Tohyama of Ceridian. And again, the skills question came right to mind for her in that she said early in the pandemic, they had to literally scramble to figure out as they had to shift their business quickly, move into and out of new services and capabilities, they had to scramble to figure out, "Who has the skills we need to pivot in the way that we have to pivot as quickly as we can?" And that was eye-opening for them. They wanted to look not just at their internal, they wanted to look at their external, the people who had been doing work for them and could make the pivot, and wanted to engage in that way. So, they went right to a talent marketplace. And that's been the focus of theirs, needing skills, needing to identify them and didn't have the infrastructure set up to do that; that was the trigger for Ceridian.
Novartis is another example. Novartis, very innovative, cutting-edge organisation, and their question is, "If we were to step back and say, for all of our managers who need to source people or resources and technology to do work, how do we make it easier for them to make decisions around whether they buy, build, or borrow; and where do they access the people to do the work?" HR has always been in that very, very difficult position of someone else sets the strategy, that then defines people and skill and job requirements, and then they have to scramble to go hire or find them as quickly as possible. And so this is an organisation, Novartis, and many others we interviewed, where they're saying, "We don't want to be in that reactive mode. We want to be much more proactive and meeting the needs of our business, our stakeholders, when they need it as they're contemplating it", as Liz said, "at the strategy stage".
So, they went into that mode of, if you simulate for a manager, use the persona of the manager, I want to create a new body of work, let's create this environment to make it super-easy for them to find the skills they need, the people they need, the duration they need, and put project teams and the like together.
Then the third example, which I think is super-interesting, is Unilever. And Unilever is experimenting with different employment contracts. And they're trying to move as far away from just your traditional standard employment contracts to again meet some of the trends and shifts that we mentioned earlier that are taking place. People want more flexibility, the dad who's now going to pull back on their career to help raise the family but doesn't want to step out completely, maybe wants to pull back to 50% of their time and do something to advance their skills and develop in other ways to prepare for another track of their career, either within, in this case, Unilever or somewhere else. But that's the kind of creative, getting to the heart of what the workers want, and rethinking employment contracts and to rethink the total composition of the workforce. I think that's really the opportunity for HR.
[0:21:40] David Green: That's really good, Robin, and for those listening that are interested in what Robin was just explaining about Unilever, their U-Work initiative, we had Placid Jover, who's the Chief Talent Officer now at Unilever, on the podcast about a year or just over a year or so ago talking about that, and Jeroen Wels, who I think you interviewed for the book, Robin and Liz, he was talking about that in the episode with Jeff Schwartz earlier this year as well. So, it's nice to link things together on that. No, really, really interesting.
Staying with you, Robin, you talked about maybe different ways of approaching it from an HR perspective, workforce management perspective. In the book, you also mentioned that in order to effectively orchestrate, and I'm going to use that word because I like that word as well, a workforce ecosystem, there needs to be a shift in leadership behaviours and mindsets. I think it's a great quote that Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic actually says, he says that, "20% of leadership behaviours need to change", which is quite significant. Please can you expand on this and share with listeners how leaders can adapt their strategies to lead in this evolving ecosystem?
[0:22:39] Robin Jones: Sure, I'm happy to answer that, and then I'm sure Liz will want to weigh in as well. I mean first of all, leaders now are managing an environment where they have less and less control, control of stable markets, because they're not; control of the organisation, because they're evolving so quickly; control of the workers, because their desires and wants are so different. So, we've really shifted where leaders are in this space where they have to inspire, they have to motivate, they have to meet the needs of their people, their teams, all the things I said earlier about they have to really represent the core values of the organisation and reinforce that. They need to stand for something that the organisation stands for, they need to support their people when they want something that is non-standard. And so, we've really seen the pressure on leadership to kind of go way above and beyond.
In many ways, in many examples, it's unbelievable the amount of demands on our leaders, to just like flying in an aircraft and the flight attendant keeping everyone calm, putting their air masks on and the like, that's the sense of what leaders have had to endure over the last several years for sure. So, now we just piled on this notion of, it's not just the teams that you've been assigned on an org chart that you're responsible for, you have to lead across, you have to influence across, you have to, again, orchestrate many moving parts, connecting projects, initiatives, strategies, and teams.
So, this is definitely an important imperative for leaders to understand the new context within which they're leading. And unfortunately, and in the book and why we've written the book, is there's not a lot of rules of the road, there's not a lot of best practices. So, there's a lot of experimentation and we're seeing a ton of resources and sharing of tips, tricks, best practices within leaders in different forums. But we're all in this early-days experimentation, trying to learn from each other. Liz, would you add anything?
[0:24:57] Elizabeth Altman: Sure. I mean I agree with everything you said, not surprisingly, since we've talked about this a lot, but let me add one or two examples. I've spent a lot of time with the US Military, so I taught at West Point as a visiting professor, which is the US Military Academy for Army Officers, and through those connections and colleagues, I was able to arrange for interviews with two US Army Generals, and we learned a lot by speaking with them.
One of the reasons we decided to speak with them was we realised, while this is of course important for corporations, we think it's also important for nonprofits, for government organisations, for higher ed, for the military as well, and that we could learn from non-corporate executives, executives in other contexts. So, we had these great conversations with two different generals. And in both cases, they explained to us that these days in the military, leaders have to lead ecosystems, right? The people who they're leading often don't work for them, they're from either different services or different branches, or they may be from local communities or different governments. And so they've had to think a lot about how do you get a group of people to quickly coalesce towards accomplishing a mission. And in many ways, that's what we're seeing now.
So, Robin mentioned values-based leadership, right, value-centric leadership. People talk a lot these days about purpose-driven work and purpose-driven leadership, and I think we're seeing that more and more. When you need to pull together a group that maybe 50% of the members work for your organisation and the other 50% work for other organisations or work for themselves, then you really need to focus much more on how do you get everyone aligned towards a mission; how do you make sure people share the same values around these particular topics? And so, we're seeing it more and more. And I think this question about what's different, we've talked a lot for many years about leadership without authority, and it's much more persuasive and all this, but I think we've hit next level in an ecosystem environment, what does that mean; what are the skills; what are the best practices; what should a leader think about?
Then, how do we do leader development? We have all these courses, we have all these discussions about leadership development that don't really fully address the notion of leading within an ecosystem context. And so also as an academic, as we're thinking about training next generation, as we're thinking about helping to re-skill, there's a lot -- I'm working on a book chapter right now for a different book, with one of my doctoral students actually, who happens to, come to think of it, be an army officer. So, there's a lot of question about what's appropriate leadership in an ecosystem context.
[0:27:59] David Green: It's interesting, because we had Heather McGowan on recently, Future of Work Strategist, and she was talking -- some of the stuff that you're talking about, the ecosystem element, the workforce ecosystem element, definitely came into some of the conversations we have with Heather. She was talking about the need for leaders to be more empathetic, to be a bit more transparent maybe than they have been in the past, be a bit more open around maybe where they don't know the answers, which is very different from how leaders have been taught historically. And I guess a lot of that comes into what you're saying, you know, cross-functional teams, but not even just cross-functional teams, teams where you've got permanent employees, contractors, people that work for themselves, people that work for consulting firms; it's just a different type of world. And as you quite clearly and well articulated, very, very different and far more challenging perhaps, or different perhaps, than leading 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
[0:29:00] Elizabeth Altman: One other point I just raised that I'm reminded of in listening to your comments, is we talked a lot with people who we interviewed and we've written a bunch about diversity, equity and inclusion, which of course DEI practices are a very big topic and very relevant to this whole conversation. And we believe that a workforce ecosystem structure leads to generally better outcomes around DEI. Now, I say that very hesitantly because we don't have formal quantitative empirical data on that yet, but I'm interested in continuing to pursue that. And I think it's fair to say, this is a much more open, inclusive, integrative type of a structure. And by its nature, it brings more people in and it allows more people to participate in various ways. So, it makes sense for us that it should be beneficial from a DEI perspective.
We can also see that there are lots of risks associated with it. And if you look at the third chapter of the book, we start to highlight some of what those risks might be and where concerns might come into play. So, we're not naïve in thinking this is going to solve all of these problems, but I think it's important to bring in this discussion because again, when we circle back to a discussion of leadership, it does also of course involve these DEI topics.
[0:30:32] David Green: And I'm guessing as well, and I'll get to the next question around the contingent workers, because I mean there's some really specific questions around that, if you're in a big organisation, and you mentioned obviously two of the examples, Novartis and Unilever, massive organisations, different businesses within there, there's going to be some parts of the business where an ecosystem is even more prevalent than it may be in other parts of the organisation as well, which probably adds yet another layer of complexity to it. So, this question I think is particularly interesting.
I saw you publish recently an article, I think it was in MIT Sloan Management Review, and it gave the example of Cisco, I think on this, but how can organisations effectively navigate the challenge of coordinating and integrating their workforce ecosystem, when some contingent workers prefer less integration and others desire more involvement? And you might touch on here the different ways that organisations manage their contingent workforce as well.
[0:31:26] Elizabeth Altman: So, I think I'll start this and then Robin can certainly layer on as well. So, while I'm thinking of it as well, you mentioned the article we published about using Cisco as an example of contingent workers in SMR. I will tell you that this morning we released the second article, which is an excerpt from the book, or an adaptation from the book, that will be in the print version of SMR this summer issue, and is also online as of this morning, which is essentially a condensed version of Chapter 6, which is on integration architectures. Topics I'm going to mention are online this morning. So, we talk about integration architecture. Let me maybe just step back on that because I think that will address this question.
We went around and around about terminology and basically this comes down to, how does an organisation coordinate amongst its members of its workforce ecosystem? And there are two elements of this and we think there probably could have been two chapters about it, but we pulled them together. One is, how do you coordinate internally? This gets into a discussion of jurisdiction, which I'll come back to. And the second is, how do you coordinate with your external partners? That's the contingent worker discussion.
First, the first part of this conversation, I think it's worth saying, and I think Robin mentioned it a little bit earlier on, but just to put a fine point on it, when we first started talking with HR leaders particularly about this topic, and then with strategy leaders and CEOs and others, we realised that traditionally, employees are, I say managed, they're managed by their managers, but they're overseen by the HR function, as you and your listeners well know. However, contingent workers are generally not managed or overseen by HR. They often come through procurement or finance or some other function. Then you get into this question of, first of all, who knows how many people are working for the organisation, which turns out to be not that simple a question; and second, how do we take this broader, more integrated approach?
I think that there's a quote, definitely in one of the reports and I believe in the book, about managers saying this is like a hot potato, "Who's responsible for it? I'm not responsible". HR isn't responsible for it, business leaders aren't responsible for it, strategy people aren't responsible for it, procurement is responsible for it. But we had a great quote by someone who said, "Procurement really is responsible for procuring pencils and other obviously much more important items. But somehow they ended up also procuring people basically, because they ended up managing the supply contracts". That's not good, unless it's thought of differently. So, this question about how an organisation internally thinks about all of the different members of the workforce ecosystem, and we are seeing cross-functional approaches.
So, we use Cisco as an example because they've put in place a whole organisation and strategy around managing this, including a cross-functional governance steering committee, which seems to be working very well for them. So, that's the internal integration architecture. And then the external gets to this question of, well, if you include complementors, say, so if you include developers, if you have an app store, so I often use the example of just a smartphone. Today, all of us use smartphones and they're not useful unless they have apps on them. And so, who makes those apps? Not the employees of the company. Who are making the smartphones? Those apps are being developed by external companies that aren't really partners in the traditional sense because they're not suppliers, you don't have a strong contractual relationship with them. They're part of an app store, right, and they're part of a developer ecosystem. Well, who manages that? That's normally an entirely different group.
So then the question is, should that be part of a broader discussion of a workforce ecosystem? I mean, it's not exactly the same as outsourcing and all these, but it needs to be a part, from a strategy perspective and a senior executive perspective, certainly an overall discussion, of who is doing the work that creates the value for customers. We have lumped that into this broader discussion of integration architectures, because you see different examples of how to do this. Even within smartphones, Apple does it differently than Android, for example.
Though that feels like a very different type of discussion and maybe a strategy discussion of how you manage complementors and how you manage partners, we've rolled it into this broader conversation because we think it is very important at the C-suite level to think about how's the work getting done and where is it getting done and who should be doing it, and then that begs this question of, and how should it be managed in a much more coordinated way.
[0:36:49] David Green: No, that's really helpful, Liz, and sorry, Robin, I think you want to add something?
[0:36:43] Robin Jones: Well, I'll just add what Liz is getting to and we're seeing this play out with the clients that we serve, is it kind of gets right to the heart of organisation design, organisation structure, and all underpinned by the notion that humans have wants, needs, beliefs, and the like, and they are essentially all becoming free agents. Even your internal permanent employees are starting to develop this mindset of a free agent. And as you look at what Liz just described, what's happening in organisations is organisations liked efficiency, they liked order, and so we had functions and we had clear roles, responsibilities, accountabilities.
That's all being blown up right now because you've got people who may be aligned to one group working on projects with another group, who are working with people outside the organisation, and so you've lost that clarity or that nice, neat, order orderly structure that then, when companies are in the economic environment we're in right now, they want to go in and do traditional cost-cutting, spans, layers, skills and the like. That is not a clear-cut answer anymore because the structure itself that's designed on paper looks really nothing like the way the work is getting done.
[0:38:12] David Green: No, really good. Robin, I'm going to move to technology now on the next question, because I think it links in quite well here. Clearly, technology is a huge part of the workforce ecosystem, but what considerations should business leaders and HR professionals be aware of when integrating technology into an organisation to support their workforce ecosystem?
[0:38:35] Robin Jones: Yeah, so we write a whole section on this, a whole chapter. And first of all, technology is a huge topic overall, and when we really contemplated this, we broke it down into what we thought were five broad categories that really need to be considered across the spectrum of your workforce ecosystems. And I'll just step through that, David, just to give you a quick snapshot of what those five categories are, because they have different purposes.
The first one is what we call work tech, and that's the technology that's really driving productivity, automation, collaboration. These are the tools we use to do our work. Think spreadsheets, think diagnostic tools if you're a medical practitioner, and I would put generative AI or ChatGPT as specifically going to be in that category, just at the beginning of that. The second one is around workforce tech. And these are the systems that help manage workforces and help workers. So, traditionally, this has always started in HR, but they're going in kind of two different directions. They're going more expansive with HR technology, think Workday and VNDLY have come together. Now that's managing both internal and external workforces, and you have a whole range of technologies that are helping HR functions get their arms around the total workforce beyond the traditional HCM systems.
The second part of that is of course, as Liz described with Cisco or many others that are trying to put a unified way of orchestrating internal and external workforces, they go right to the topic of technology, "How are we going to connect the systems from procurement, from HR, and from other places in the organisation to really get a total view of the workforce?" The third category is what we call workplace tech. And this was obviously popularised during the beginning of COVID and the pandemic. Zoom, you think about Microsoft Teams, but every one of the technologies that were emerging before the pandemic, and are going to continue to advance to really unify and integrate physical and virtual work and make teams more productive in the collaboration.
The fourth one is an interesting one and I see this already starting to become a really key concern of our clients, is credentialisation and verification tech. Now, ChatGPT, or I should say generative AI, is going to layer on a whole new level of dimension to this, which we're already seeing. But these are the ones that are really helping organisations truly verify who the workers are, what skills they have, what career experiences they have, and then really have more assurance around where they can be deployed across the organisation and represent the business. So, this one is going to be huge, I think, but it was already something that is super important just with the external workforce as well as the internal now overall.
Then, the last one is where technology is actually the participant in the workforce, and we've talked about that. It could be an augmentation tool but it also can be any technology that is performing work and maybe performs as a digital FTE and needs security and access or an RPA bot. So, all of these convergence of technologies have been coming together and it's been not a simple answer, but we tried in the book to really frame out five key categories, all of which have relevance to the workforce ecosystem.
[0:42:21] David Green: No, that's really helpful actually and presumably HR has a role to play in each of those five areas to a greater or lesser degree?
[0:42:30] Elizabeth Altman: Absolutely, for sure.
[0:42:32] David Green: Kind of next area, so we looked at technology, we're going to look at employee experience, we're going to start with employee experience, but we're going to think about maybe we need to think of it from a slightly different perspective now. So, in essence, is it accurate to say that it's no longer solely about employee experience, in the sense that we maybe always thought about employee experience, but it's actually about the overall workforce experience? What are the differences between the two? And I think, Robin, you're going to start that and, Liz, I think you're going to add something on it as well.
[0:43:04] Robin Jones: Yeah. We interviewed Kathy Benko, another former partner of Deloitte. She happened to be our Chief Talent Officer in one of her last roles at the firm. She sits on the board of Nike and WorkBoard and SolarWinds, and she lives of course in Silicon Valley, but she has her finger on the pulse of this. And she saw what we saw, the exact same thing. And that is, yes, workforce experience is incredibly important and more so than it ever was, but the tie that binds for organisations is really the culture.
It goes back to the leadership discussion we had earlier about what role leadership has in shaping culture. It is trust and transparency and creating flexibility and a workforce experience where people can grow and thrive. That, to us, is really becoming the new secret sauce for really integrating organisations and really creating the stickiness that you want. And the stickiness is both retention of high-performing employees you've hired, but also access and retention or traction, and retention of people who are off balance sheet as well and on these different contract models.
So, we're always looking for the right people to do the right work at the right time, but you also need to create this culture and foster that to really create this desire for people to continue to want to invest their personal capital, which is their time, which is their time investing in skills, experiences and growth, which again adds to their capital as individuals. That is such an important aspect of getting it right. I think, David, you're absolutely right with the question. It's not two separate things and it's not one or the other; it truly is, you have to get to the heart of the experience that they want, what's getting in the way, what's causing frustration, what roadblocks do they keep running into and they just are tired of them, and really remove those and then really invest deeper in the type of culture you want to create for the entire set of people who are working for you.
[0:45:29] David Green: And, Liz, I think you were going to add something on this one as well.
[0:45:33] Elizabeth Altman: Sure. So, I think what Robin mentioned is very important about this notion that you have to think about culture in a much broader way. We had a kind of surprising conversation with one CEO and then it was echoed by some others, where we started to realise that there's a presumption that homogenous culture or a similar culture is good, right, and that even when we're talking about it, we say, "Oh, the culture needs to be not only employees, it needs to be across the workforce ecosystem". And there's this underlying assumption that that means that we should have one smooth, seamless culture across the organisation.
So, this particular CEO, Kori Covrigaru, of a company called PlanOmatic, this company relies heavily on a large ecosystem of contractors. And he said that in the beginning, they were really working on pulling those contractors in, how did they make them feel like they were part of the organisation? So, they had them come to gatherings, they laughed about sending them T-shirts, but it's really including them in the training and including them in the whole thing. And he started to get feedback from some of the contractors who basically said, "Look, I appreciate everything you're doing, but I really don't want to be a big part of your culture. If I wanted to be a real active member of your culture, I would ask to be an employee. I like being a contractor. Please send me my assignment, I will do my assignment, I will send you back the outcome and you will pay me", in this very transactional way.
He started to realise that he was trying to force a culture fit that didn't make sense, that there are times when contractors want to be more part of the mainstream culture, but there are other times, and you said it earlier, that this may depend on the context, it may depend on the organisation. But there are plenty of contractors who like being contractors, who want to be contractors, who do not want to be treated as employees. And of course, then you get into the whole legal question of what does that mean; and what are the implications; and how that varies by geography.
So, I think we just need to be careful because I've now had a number of these conversations where the assumption is that, "Oh, you have a workforce ecosystem, you need to create a much more comprehensive culture, and that means we need to figure out how to treat everybody the same". And I think that last leap is an incorrect leap. And so we just need to think more about, what does it mean to have some maybe values, again purpose, mission, some elements of the culture that are consistent, but other elements of the culture that are totally appropriate for the various different members and participants, contributors in the workforce ecosystem.
[0:48:33] David Green: Yeah, and yet another area of complexity that's added, I guess, that ability to turn the knobs up or down depending on who you're dealing with, I guess.
[0:48:44] Elizabeth Altman: Well, back to the leadership conversation we had before. We probably didn't mention this specifically, but I would say, and this is another major leadership challenge for leaders operating in this organisation.
[0:48:58] David Green: On the note of HR becoming more strategic partners, because what both of you have said throughout the last 40 minutes or so is definitely pointing towards that, how does this new way of thinking about the workforce enable HR to step more into that strategy creation role, rather than the more traditional one that HR has sat in, the strategy implementation role?
[0:50:13] Elizabeth Altman: Sure. Well, I'll start with this, but also I think Robin sees this every day in talking with her clients and out in her work. But we're seeing more and more HR being part of these cross-functional conversations. And again, I'll go back to the example we used with Cisco, so where HR has a real seat at the table, but is part of a broader strategy conversation about who do we need, what do we need, what is the role of technology going to be, what is the role of contingent workforce going to be, and how do HR members and HR leaders have that conversation with their peers from other functions in a much more integrated way. So, I think it's consistent with everything we've been saying before.
[0:50:58] Robin Jones: And I'll add at Deloitte, we've been running a quarterly survey with Fortune with CEOs and, "What are the top issues, topics that are concerning you as a CEO?" And for about three, two-and-a-half, three years running, and even now that we're kind of like beyond the heart or the height of the pandemic, the number one topic that is at the top of the CEO concern list is talent, and it's all things talent. And it's both in the war for talent that we were just in, as well as the talent that the labour markets moderated in some pockets. So, it's interesting that it's starting to endure the times.
When I think about the opportunity that creates for HR and HR leaders, the CEOs are really begging for that collaboration, that perspective, that insight from a strategic perspective and a strategy formulation standpoint, as opposed to just implementing what others at the leadership table are creating. So, I just think it's a real call to action and opportunity and they're desperate because again, we are navigating uncharted territory in all things workforce, work and workplace, and that CHRO and CEO and Chief Strategy Officer and everyone at the leadership team is struggling through this and it's really that opportunity for CHROs.
[0:52:28] David Green: Which leads probably quite nicely, I think, to the question that we're asking everyone in this series, Robin, it's the penultimate question today as well. How can HR leaders build a data-driven and digitally-literate culture in HR, and maybe you might talk about the importance of that to really realise the opportunity that the workforce ecosystem provides?
[0:52:49] Robin Jones: Yeah, well we've hit on a lot of it now and I think maybe it's close to home, but as a consultant, our teams are asked by business leaders to come in and bring outside perspectives, bring data, bring insights, bring knowledge about the kinds of challenges they're having but also the kinds of solutions that they could apply. And I just think that HR has a real imperative now to be those consultants, to show up with that, really be well-read about what's happening in the workplace and how it's shifting, how these new technologies, for example, are encroaching very, very quickly and permeating, not in a negative way, but in an opportunistic and value-creating way. But also bring the data and the insights.
If you think about the stakeholders that HR has, it's the people that are working for the organisation and it's the leaders who are trying to manage through the organisation. And they want simplified answers, they want it simple, they want it quick, they want confidence that what is happening is real. So, our clients in HR are really stepping into a very data-savvy mode, their HR teams are being completely upskilled around insights, analytics. But what's unique about HR is you have to still have that really strong combination of human-oriented capabilities and perspectives and empathy, as well as now the data analytical, inquisitive mindset about how people are working and performing in these large, fragmented, and systemic organisations. So, it's become such a dominant set of skills that are needed throughout.
I would add, and I mentioned it, this notion of experimentation is really important. There are no best practices yet, there are no standard way of doing these things. We are completely shifting into a new mode of working and running businesses and organisations, and extracting value and making people thrive in their careers. And so, the experimentation mindset is incredibly important in HR and to have that agility that it brings. And I would say you can't have experimentation without data, analytics, hypotheses to really know what you're going after and be able to play out what's working, what's not, what do we need to tweak. And as we mentioned before, we just talked about different people. You can't have a one-size-fits-all solution.
So, if different people want different ways of engaging with the organisation, you now have to be completely nuanced and focus on the different pockets as well. And again, I don't know how you can do that without that combination of being human-centric, but also being data- and analytically-centric.
[0:55:55] David Green: I completely agree. And it's interesting, we recently published some research at Insight222 looking into elements of creating that data-driven culture in HR. And we saw the really important role of the CHRO and the HRLT in modelling that approach themselves, kind of setting that benchmark, I guess, for the rest of HR to follow. And we actually also saw the importance of the people analytics team, almost the leader there, having at least being responsible effectively for upskilling the rest of the HR professionals, particularly HR business partners obviously, who are the ones having the conversations and understanding the ecosystem and making sure that they tweak things perfectly for different parts of that ecosystem as well. Very interesting.
So, as we come to the end of our conversation today, I think it'd be really helpful, Liz, if you could summarise some of the key points, maybe, that the HR professionals and leaders listening can take home and maybe start acting on today.
[0:56:56] Elizabeth Altman: Great. Yes, so we've thought about this and I think we can boil it down to three key messages. One is that truly the definition and structure of a workforce is changing. Whereas it used to be internal permanent employees, now it's internal permanent employees also with external contingent and technology in a much more integrated way, and we would say in an ecosystem structure that has interdependencies and complementarities and is all interconnected. As we've been talking about here, that isn't just an HR discussion, that is of course important for HR, and of course HR is central to this whole discussion, but that really this is not just about sourcing and retaining workers, but rather about the strategy and the leadership and management practices changing, technologies enabling and driving this, and what does that mean from an HR perspective in conjunction with all of these other business conversations.
Third, and we touched upon it a little bit here, that of course there are all kinds of ethics and corporate social responsibility issues that come to the fore, many of which existed before, but workforce ecosystems add on new complexities. In some cases, they help situations; in some cases, they add new risks to situations. But they're very affected by regulations and compliance. Regulations are changing, but often not changing as quickly as practices. And this, of course, is hugely variable by geography, by region, can be local, state, federal, etc. So, I think those three are the key messages.
[0:58:40] David Green: Any final words from you, Robin, before we wrap up?
[0:58:43] Robin Jones: No, I just think we always go back to the first question, "Who is your workforce?" And Liz, I think, just threaded the importance of that question, asking it, understanding it, kind of threads through all of those takeaways. So for me, that's the starting point on this whole topic.
[0:59:02] David Green: Well, Robin, Liz, thank you so much for being guests on the Digital HR Leaders podcast and also for co-authoring this book, Workforce Ecosystems. I think really thoughtful and I'd definitely recommend any HR leaders, HR professionals out there, particularly those involved in workforce planning, HR business partners should definitely make the effort to read the book. Can you let listeners know how they can get in touch with you, follow you on social media and find out more about the book and your work? Liz, I'll start with you and let Robin wrap up.
[0:59:31] Elizabeth Altman: Sure. I'm very available on LinkedIn. I post a little bit on Twitter, but I would say LinkedIn is the best way to follow me. And if you go to MIT Sloan Management Review, this book derived from a project, an ongoing multi-year project that we did there on the future of the workforce, and we have a landing page there from which you can get to all of the reports. There's an infographic, there's an interactive data tool, so I would suggest looking also at SMR. If you go to the future of the workforce page, that's a good launching point.
Of course, the book is available worldwide through the MIT Press. If you're outside the US, just go to the MIT Press website and the grey buttons will pop up where you can get it in your region and in the US and all the Amazon and all the various booksellers. We're very interested in feedback and people's comments and thoughts; this is an ongoing conversation. We really look at this as kind of the beginning of a conversation about this topic. So, you see that I'm active on LinkedIn and I'm very interested in hearing from people and hearing what people have to say. And I will just say thank you again for having us, it's been a pleasure to be here, and this this work with Deloitte and with SMR has been fabulous so far, and we're looking forward to continuing to have the conversation.
[1:00:48] David Green: Thanks, Liz. And, Robin?
[1:00:50] Robin Jones: Yeah, very similar channels. I won't repeat what Liz just said about where you can get the book and find all the reports. There's a couple additional ones. For me, I'm very active on LinkedIn as well, not so much on Twitter, but LinkedIn for sure. You can connect with me through there, through Deloitte Consulting; and as well as most of the publications that we've written with MIT SMR, Liz and the whole author team have been republished in other ways through Deloitte Insights, which is one of Deloitte's premier publications.
You mentioned, David, at the top of the hour, you had Michael Griffiths and Sue Cantrell on. They are prolific publishers of not only this topic but others, so a search for any of us at Deloitte Consulting in Human Capital is where you can find us, and again any of the Deloitte channels or MIT SMR, MIT Press.
[1:01:46] David Green: Well Robin, Liz, thanks very much. All that's left for me to say is take care and hope to meet you both in person soon.
[1:01:54] Elizabeth Altman: Great, thanks again.
[1:01:55] Robin Jones: Thanks, David.
[1:01:56] David Green: Take care.