2023 is here, and to kick things off, we have brought to you an episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast that you will not want to miss.  

Ian Bailie, Insight222’s very own board adviser and SVP of People Operations at Crypto will be taking the lead and hosting today’s episode. He will be accompanied by David Green, the main host of the podcast, Diane Gherson, former CHRO of IBM and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, and the infamous Dave Ulrich, Professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business and Co-Founder of RBL Group 

Today’s conversation takes a slight twist to the traditional HR trends predictions. As, David, Diane’s and Dave’s each unique perspective come together to discuss the biggest shifts they believe that are set to disrupt the world of work in 2023 and beyond.

The conversation will cover:

• A recap of the development of the predictions and trends of 2022,

• How HR can get started in the shift towards a skills based approach to talent,

• HR’s role in creating certainty in world of uncertainty,

• Overcoming the paradox and disconnect between employer and employee needs, and HR’s mediating role,

• The skills HR need in 2023 and beyond to really make a difference.

So if you are looking for some inspiration on how to seize the window of opportunity in 2023, then this episode is for you.

Enjoy!

Support from this podcast comes from Gloat. You can learn more by visiting: gloat.com

David Green Happy New Year, and as we look forward to 2023, welcome to a very special episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  For those who have been following this podcast since we started in 2019, you will know that every year we like to kick things off with a discussion between me and Ian Bailie, Board Advisor at Insight222 and Senior Vice President for People Operations at Crypto.com, on the top HR trends to watch out for in the coming months.

There is a 2023 edition of the 12 HR Trends for 2023 on LinkedIn, but for this year and for this inaugural episode for 2023, we're going to switch it up a little, as this time it's not just me and Ian, but we're also joined by the wonderful Diane Gherson, former Chief Human Resources Officer at IBM and now Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, and the father of modern HR himself, Dave Ulrich, Professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business and Co-founder of RBL Group.

Together, we'll be talking about some of the biggest shifts and trends we are likely to see in the field of HR and what HR professionals need to do in order to adapt and succeed in this new world.  And with Ian as our host, and Diane, Dave and myself coming together with some different perspectives and experience, this is sure to be a very interesting and thought-provoking discussion.  In Diane's words, "This is the moment for HR and people analytics.  This generation of HR leaders has been appointed by history to define the workplace of the post-industrial era".

Hopefully, that's whetted your appetite so without further ado, let's hand it over to Ian to kick off the conversation.  Enjoy.

Ian Bailie: First of all, David, I'd like to come to you and revisit some of your predictions from last year.  Now, the good news is you did pretty well; many of those predictions have come true, such as the move to hybrid working, the rise of investment in work tech and an increase in the impact and the business value of people data.  So, David, what are your thoughts when you look back at your predictions from last year?

David Green: Well, even though you were very kind, Ian, I still think if Nostradamus was still alive, he wouldn't be quaking in his boots!  But on a serious note, I guess trying to predict the future is always difficult, particularly in the 2020s, where the only certainty seems to be lots of uncertainty.  Last year, when I sat down in October, November, I couldn't have predicted the war in Ukraine, couldn't have predicted high inflation, energy crisis and potentially a global recession now as well, so I've got my excuses in.

But to answer your question, yeah, I think as you said, actually not too bad.  I think a number of these trends or predictions have been playing out over a number of years.  You mentioned the people analytics one, which was about people analytics being about the business, something I know Diane and Dave would both agree with; we've seen that with the research that we've been doing at Insight222 over the years, that the importance and the influence of people analytics on the C-suite to make decisions is increasing all the time, probably still not where we want it to be, but it is improving, and the best people analytics teams are solving business challenges and actually delivering outcomes for the business, but also for the employees as well.

So, there's probably a couple on there that are still in the early stage.  I think one of them was about HR taking the lead in sustainability; I think we're still some way from that happening in pretty much all companies.  And I think partly that's why I tried to take a different approach this year and invited others with far more expertise and knowledge than me to contribute, if they wanted to, to the 2023 trends.  I had a great response, CHROs, Dave, Diane obviously, but people like John Boudreau as well, so really good selection, which then made it as much of a curation perhaps as a prediction.  So, yeah, it's an exciting time I guess for HR, but probably also a challenging one as well.

Ian Bailie: Yeah, and it does feel as though a few of the trends that we did see finally land in 2022 were ones that we've seen building for a while.  If we come to you now, Diane, why do you think 2022 was the year for some of these areas to finally gain traction?

Diane Gherson: Well, yeah, as you say, some of them have been gathering steam for quite a while, and I think the unfreezing event of the pandemic and the beginnings of realising that we could refreeze in a different way has enabled it to accelerate.  But we're still not there.  All trends are more than a year, right, they're maybe five-year trends, and we saw business models changing, companies being disrupted, their being digitised; all that happened before the pandemic and I think the new piece that David really picked up on in his predictions last year is the piece about the people and having some agency around the kind of work that they want to do, and how and when they want to do it, has really been the chorus on this.  All the other changes were happening, but that piece was missing before the pandemic.

It's really a combination of trends that had been going on for a while, and then that newer one that happened, and I think now today we're facing a situation where there is a shortage of skills, and particularly in some industries and healthcare in particular, caregiving, and so their agency is that much stronger in terms of being able to define the kind of work they want to do and how and when.  So, I think we're starting to see it happen a little more quickly in some industries than others.

Ian Bailie: And as David mentioned, I think there's just been so much that has gone on this year that maybe we couldn't have predicted.  There's been a lot of uncertainty going on in the world.  We've been through a global pandemic, where HR really came to the forefront to help organisations navigate through that uncertainty, but now that hopefully we're seeing that pandemic receding, we're still seeing a lot that companies are dealing with. 

As David said, there are a lot of forecasts coming out from economists at the moment around whether we're on the brink of a recession in many countries, we saw that there's the war in Ukraine that continues, we're seeing rising inflation, a cost of living crisis, significant layoffs going on across many companies as well.  So, with all of this going on, this role of HR is arguably more important than ever.  So, if we come to you now, Dave, how do you think HR can continue to play this pivotal role, and help to create some certainty for employees and leaders in a world where we're just seeing so much uncertainty?

David Ulrich: You know, I love the discussion so far.  If I could put a capstone on it, context is the kingdom and the context is changing in ways we don't know; that's technology, it's energy, it's inflation, it's all those things that are changing.  Content them becomes the kingdom, or the action, that we have to manage, or the king that we have to manage or the queen.  I think David said it beautifully, "The only thing we're certain about is uncertainty".  I'm going to put an addendum to that: in a world of uncertainty, don't chase the uncertainty, focus on certainty.

What I love to say to folks is, "What are we, in this unchanging and uncertain world, certain about in HR?"  Let me hypothesise a few things.  We are certain that the way we manage our people makes a difference.  We just talked about some of the trends, the skilling trends, the employee primacy trends, the people agency trends.  We're certain that if we mange those things, we will make a difference.  We're also certain that if we build the right organisation, not just the human capital, that's the people, but the organisational capability; if we build a sustainable organisation, ERG; if we build an agile organisation, an innovative organisation; if we build the right culture, we'll succeed.  And we're also certain that if we manage leadership, we'll be more effective.  

So, my sense is, in HR, one of the trends in the future is, how do we focus on certainty in the face of uncertainty?  And when we can focus on what we know around talent, organisation and leadership, no matter what happens, I can't predict next year, who could have predicted the Ukrainian War, the energy crisis, the technology innovation?  But I can predict, and control to some extent, the certainty of what human capability provides.

Diane Gherson: Could I just pick up on the comment about layoffs, because you did mention that, Ian, and I do think that's not foremost on a lot of HR people's minds.  I think it's a bit of a relic of an old business model, and I think it is up to HR to help rethink what the new one is.  I think layoffs were a function of when human capital was really viewed as headcount and not skills, and companies were optimising for efficiency rather than, for example, flexibility or adaptability, as Dave has just talked about, but the finance systems haven't really caught up with that yet and HR tends to be subservient to the finance function in that respect.

I do think that the rise of opportunity marketplaces in particular, and managing based on skills, we saw it happen in the pandemic, where people were being redeployed because there was no job for them during the pandemic, and they were being redeployed into new areas because they had the skills to do those things.  Of course, in some cases, the reason that companies are cutting back is they simply cannot afford those people; but in today's world where there's so much turnover, you have to imagine that you can have a sustainable model, where you can have more of a project-based organisation, not a job-based organisation, that's based on skills, not headcount, and then the prospect of a layoff becomes obsolete.

Now I do agree it has to depend on some level of turnover, because if you don't have that and you can't afford all the headcount, then you are going to need to do something, but I think it's a bit of a kneejerk reaction right now, based on the old model, and we've already moved in so many ways to the new model.

Ian Bailie: A lot of companies are thinking about how to move to this skills-based approach.  As you say, I think the pandemic forced their hand a little bit and helped accelerate that, which I think is a good thing.  What advice would you have for companies that are considering moving towards that approach?

Diane Gherson: Well, look, a skills-based model is founded in a concept that people have to continuously learn, and that skills become irrelevant over time, so that's the first thing.  It has to be anchored in a learning culture, so it does require constant learning, so it has to start at the top with role-modelling from the top around learning, and then of course the whole wrap-around services of personalised learning for the employees.  But to the skills piece, then you need to take all of your HR systems and replumb them to skills, as opposed to the other things that you might have plumbed them around before, like maybe headcount.

For example, you might set goals around skills, managers have goals around the skills of their people, that they have to grow their new skills; their performance is based on the skills improvement of their people and the relevancy of the skills on their teams, not just the individuals themselves.  And so, you're baked therefore into your performance management system, and your pay, you'd only pay for skills that are relevant to your future, you might not give an increase to people who don't have those skills.  So again, you're building it into the reinforcement system, your recognition system.  You've got to have obviously celebration, and so many companies now have certification and badging and people putting on their LinkedIn profiles, and so forth, if they require a badge in this new area of coaching, or whatever.  Then back to managers, managers need to develop those skills too, so their skill base needs to continue to improve. 

So, having a handle on what skills people have, what they need, what the gap is and how do they close it, and then to have all of your HR systems really enforcing that; and then the plum of course on the pudding is, of course, that they get to be able to take new jobs and new roles when their skills get to this new place.  So, they're offered jobs just like they might be from some other company; internally the company says, "Ian, you've now gotten to this new level in data science.  Did you know these five jobs are open and you're qualified?"  So, it's a continuous improvement in skills but as I said, the currency is skills for everything.

Ian Bailie: Dave, I'd love to hear from you around, do you see this shift to skills as something that all companies are going to be able to achieve; and should they, or is it at risk of just being another one of these HR trends that we love to get obsessed with, and it will get replaced by something else in the future?  How do companies think about this balance between skills and jobs?

David Ulrich: As you said so brilliantly, I don't think this is new.  We've talked about skills and competencies for generations.  Where I think it changes, and I think it becomes critical, is it's not just about the skill, it's about the task to be done.  So, in HR, we've done a lot of what's called "workforce planning", full time, part time, agile work.  Now what I think we start with is, what is it we're trying to do to succeed in the marketplace?  What does my company have to do to succeed in an uncertain market; what do we have to be certain about?  Then to say, what are the tasks that need to be done?

The beauty of focusing on work tasks, not work skills or workforce, is a lot of those tasks will be done through technology.  The task could be done by a full-time employee, a part-time employee, a contractor, which we've seen; but a task could also be done by AI, by technology, and I think, Ian, we'll see more of that, which again goes back to Diane's brilliant point, is that if you're an employee, you'd better learn the skills to accomplish the task that the market will require because if you don't have the skills to do what the market expects of you, you're not going to be able to be a successful employee.

Ian Bailie: David, I know you spend all day every day talking to practitioners who are dealing with challenges like this.  What are you hearing from those folks that you're speaking to; how are people tackling this?  What are some of the things that they're thinking about to be successful in this?

David Green: Well, definitely we're seeing more and more companies shifting towards a focus on skills.  And actually, it's really interesting, this series of the podcast is focusing primarily on this topic.  This is the first episode of five, and obviously we're delving into other topics as well, so I've been recording a lot of these recently. 

For instance, next week's episode is with Sue Cantrell and Michael Griffiths of Deloitte.  They've been doing a lot of research around the skills-based organisation and as I think both Diane and Dave have said, this is a significant shift and potentially changes the way we think about and how we deliver HR.  You talked about there the thread that links all of those HR programmes together that we've delivered for 140 years.  I think Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau, they published that great book, Work Without Jobs, and I spoke with Ravin, we did an article together a couple of months ago, and he talked about, we've got 140 years of learned behaviour to potentially look at. 

But what's really interesting with the Deloitte research is, they actually did a survey across a number of different organisations and they looked at workforce planning and learning and performance and comp, and they looked at where are companies today on this, and none of those HR programmes scored over 20% in terms of companies that were primarily looking at the skills-based approach today, but 90% of the organisations that participated said that they are intending to move towards this skills-based approach.  So, I think you're right, it is going to be something that's going to play out over a while. 

Diane, to your point about the redeployment, we saw that with Unilever in a previous episode, when they talked about how they redeployed people from a part of the business that was very quiet because of COVID, to a part of the business that was suddenly more busy because of COVID, so it does give that flexibility to do that.  I think what this can potentially do for companies though is it's good for employees, because it hopefully helps them develop their careers and gives them purpose, maybe puts the S in the ESG bit as well potentially.  But Standard Chartered, actually they mentioned that they were able to unlock productivity of over $2 million from a pilot opportunity marketplace they ran in India. 

So, if we're sitting here in five years talking about the trends for 2028, I think we'll be talking about it again.

Ian Bailie: And, Diane, just one final question on this topic of skills, when you think about what enabled you to be successful with it at IBM, was it because it was driven from the senior leadership from the business angle, or was it that you were driving it from an employee angle, or maybe both; I'd be interested to know where the catalyst for it came from?

Diane Gherson: Yeah, it was definitely from a business perspective.  I mean, we were changing our portfolio 50% in three years, so that did require a new set of skills for our employees.  And I think the role-modelling from the top was really important.  I mean, from the very top, we were all talking about, "That Cloud course was so tough, third module, wow!" and people realised, "Okay, it's not just us that's being asked to do this, it's everybody", and I think that made it a sense of, "We're not doing it to you, we're all in this together", and that I think was a really important message.

Ian Bailie: If we think about some of the other predictions that David had put together for 2023, there's one that is there that was also very prevalent in 2022, and that's around this topic of hybrid working, again another one I think we're going to be talking about for quite some time.  We have this interesting situation where there's a lot of feedback from employees saying they're more productive when working from home, they like this flexibility that they have, but we're also seeing this increasing trend of a lot of business leaders that have the opposite view and they're now starting to try to bring everyone back to the office, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

So I'm wondering, are we seeing this bigger disconnect between what workers want and what the business leaders want; and how does HR fit in the middle of this?  Diane, I would love to come to you first on this one.  What do you see HR's role to be in all of this?

Diane Gherson: I think we tend to think about employees as one set of people and I agree, there's now a new licence for self-care, people are more likely to say, "I want to build my work around the life I want to lead", as opposed to the other way around.  I mean, there's definitely some shift that's happened.  But I would say that there are people who are in different chapters of their career, and some people are willing to go for a hustle culture, and there are others who are in the work not necessarily for the money, but for the career.  Maybe that is different, they're not as interested in the hustle culture and they won't go for a company that is now requiring that, which maybe they belonged to that hustle culture before, but they're backing away from it.

Companies have to figure out what are they attracting, what model are they attracting.  So, there's room for much more homogeneity, we just have to do a better job matching what people want with what the business requires, one; and two, in some cases the business requirements need to change because they're not necessarily requirements, they're just what people are used to.  So, I would say those are the two things that I see going on.

Ian Bailie: Dave, I'd love to hear from you around, do you feel HR is ready to help the business in this concept of trying to understand what people need?

David Ulrich: Let me go back to Diane's comment first.  I think what we're seeing in the world today, because of that uncertainty, what we are certain about is the navigation of paradox.  The paradoxes are going to be inherent, long term, short term, top-down, bottom-up, full-time employ task versus non-employ.  I think in the navigation of paradox, we have to have both competition and caring, and how do you navigate the tension between those two? 

We have to have workers who work full time and work part time, who work in an office and not an office.  I believe in navigating paradox, you begin to look for common ground, what are we certain about?  I'm going to be contrarian; I think hybrid work should not be about where you work and how you work.  To me, those are secondary questions.  The real questions are, "What are you working on; and, why are you working?"

I think it matters less where you're working.  Am I in an office; am I at home; am I in a coffee shop?  Why am I working?  And I think the emerging answer, and I'd actually be a little challenging, we haven't mentioned the marketplace, we haven't mentioned customers.  If a company doesn't succeed in the marketplace, there is no workplace, and again I believe that so strongly that I think one of the trends in HR, and now it's going to get into the disclosure data, we have a whole list of things we could do.

David identified trends and people have added, there's probably six lists I've seen of all the trends of the future: DEI, people, personalisation, reskilling.  For me the question is, "Where do I focus scarce resources?  How do I decide where in that list of great opportunities should I focus?"  The common answer is, "Do a survey.  Go ask ten people" or, "Listen to David Green's ideas and then go do what David said".  By the way, that's risky!

David Green: Very risky!

David Ulrich: I think the answer to that question is, "What will help us succeed in the marketplace?" and the marketplace could be a customer, could be an investor, could be a community.  That's the issue of disclosures.  Right now, companies are being asked to disclose to the investment community, to the customer marketplace, to the social community, "What are we doing?"  What they're doing is disclosing politically appropriate things, "How many people had days of training?  How many people wore masks?  How many people had safety?"

The question we should be disclosing on is, "What will create value for all investors, for all customers, for all communities?" and for me, that's the Holy Grail, the gold at the end of the rainbow; it feels like Sisyphus climbing up a mountain.  But for me, one of the issues is, I look at an HR person listening in to this as, "There are 10 trends".  We actually came up with 63 in one of our lists, "There are 63 initiatives for the future!  Where do I focus and how do I decide where I focus?"  And it's not because some other company did a good job, "What will help my company do our job better?" and that's the initiative we prioritise and the disclosures we should be doing.

Final caveat on that, and I've gone too long, the answer to that generally is you copy somebody else, you do a best practice that you hear about.  You do a survey, you interview ten people and they tell you what they think.  What we're now finding is that we can use AI data and scrape what companies disclose.  We just scraped the data from 5,700, actually 7,000 Securities Exchange Commission reports in the United States; we could scrape anything.  Using artificial intelligence, we can now tell the company what they are disclosing that they're focused on.  And using good statistics, we can show which of those initiatives have impact on outcomes they care about.

So, we're beginning to turn this from an art form with survey bias and a whole lot of biases, observation bias, into a bit more of a science.  Now, we're at the very beginning of that journey.

Diane Gherson: You know, David, you said something about, "We forgot to talk about the market", and that's such a great point.  One of the things that has really struck me, that I think we all need to really think about is, we're customers, but we're also employees; and as customers, we demand so much of the companies we work with, right.  We want things to be on time, we don't want to wait for things, all of that, and look at how waiters and waitresses were treated in the restaurants and how they left in droves, look at how the healthcare workers were treated in the hospitals and how they left in droves.

So, on the one hand we're talking about, "Hey, you've got to make life better for these guys"; on the other hand, if we don't become less relentless about our demands as customers, we're going to have a problem.  So, I think part of it is on us as customers to change our expectations, if we want the world of work to be more humane.

Ian Bailie: David, when you think about all of the different ways that people have started to gather intelligence from the employee base and start to tailor initiatives, what are some of the ways that you're seeing companies really pick up on some of the things that Diane and Dave have mentioned?

David Green: You're right, employee listening has really stepped up in the last few years.  Companies like IBM, when Diane was there, were already doing this on a continuous basis; Microsoft's another example of a company that's been doing that.  But I think increasingly, companies are moving away from just doing that once-a-year survey to look at getting feedback from employees on a regular basis, some as much as doing it daily, like they are at Microsoft to a sample of people there; but also looking at other data, looking at some of the other data that you've got, looking at some of our collaboration data to understand how often are people collaborating; how much time are people spending in meetings.  Does a lack of focus time, for example, does that correlate with people saying that they feel less productive and less comfortable about their work/life balance, as it has in some organisations that have published around that?

The underlying thing I think between all of this is we need to have, and I'll quote Satya Nadella on this, "We need less dogma and more data".  So, that whole question around hybrid, as Dave said, it's less about where people are working on a Tuesday, and it's more about answering questions like, "When does in-person matter; for what and who?  Why are we more or less productive or innovative or agile when we're working remotely or from the office; and what's the impact on customers, stakeholders?  And if we have a flexible policy, how does that help us retain and attract the best talent to our organisation, which enables us to deliver the outcomes that we want to deliver to our customers?"

Those are the sorts of questions that we need to be looking at, rather than unfortunately a lot of CEOs saying, "I want people in the office four days a week because I need to see them.  They're not productive if they're not in front of me".

Ian Bailie: David and Diane, if you had 100 units to invest in human capability, talent, organisation, leadership, where would you invest it next year?

Diane Gherson: It depends on the strategy, it depends on what the business requirements are.

David Ulrich: Nice, thank you.  And how can you determine that; I mean, how do I know where to focus?  I'm an investor, do I do Bitcoin?  By the way, not now.  How do I, as a thought-leader, help an HR person figure out where should I -- and maybe it's skills, maybe it's culture, maybe it's agility, maybe it's innovation.  That's a question we've been struggling with in a real way, so I'd love your counsel on that.

David Green: I think that's where the data comes in, isn't it?  I mean, when we were talking about skills, Diane said that IBM invested in that because they were changing 50% of the portfolio in three years, so I presume Diane, you'd identified there was a gap between the skills that you had and the skills that you needed and you wanted to close that gap over that three-year period?  And I think it's, what do I do; what are the most important priorities for the business and what are the people elements that are most likely to affect that, and let's focus in those areas.  And I guess that's going to be different for different companies, which is why as you said, Dave, be very careful about following the shiny objects; because Company X has done this, it doesn't mean that it's going to be relevant for my organisation.

David Ulrich: We teach a course at the university and at the end of the two weeks, people have a plan and somebody says, "I'm going to go back and build a leadership agenda, a culture agenda, a DEI agenda".  And in the last course, I said, "We have failed you", because when you and HR walk into a business meeting, I don't think you start with that agenda; I think you start, "Diane, I'm going to push a little bit, not just with the business strategy, I go beyond it.  I think strategy is a mirror, I look at that as a window.  Who are our customers?  What do they need; what do they want?"

Marriott says, "The customers are the future.  At Marriott, we give people food, we give people hotel rooms.  Guess what, the outside market -- that's why beginning outside in is so critical, we're going to have older people, they're going to be in retirement centres".  Somebody walked into the Marriott team and said, "For us to get into the older people business, retirement centres, this is what we need to do, and I hope in HR, our first comment when we're meeting on an investor day is not a data point about an HR programme, but what is it we need to do to succeed in the marketplace, and then to show that a DEI or leadership or culture change or skilling or employee experience or work/life balance, these are the initiatives that we think, giving the data, will have the biggest impact on those outcomes".

I love Diane's comment.  I call it, "Now is the time".  I have in my office a picture of Martin Luther King.  His famous speech in 1964 started with, "Now is the time".  I think now is the time for HR.  I've never seen, in my career, and I'm older, I've never seen more attention to the HR agenda, not by the HR people, but by business people and investors and customers and regulators.  When there's variance, there's opportunity to improve; when there's no variance, you're not going to differentiate yourself.  Everybody knows how to cook French fries in a -- why did I do that?  I guess I'm obsessed with food.  But everybody knows how to do some stuff.  When there's no variance, you're not going to differentiate. 

This is an incredible time for a company to vary.  We looked at 2021, human capability around four dimensions: talent, organisation, leadership.  We scaled 7,000 companies.  We have two years of data with 7,000 companies reporting.  They're exactly the same.  Companies are reporting the same ambiguous folderol because they don't know where to differentiate.  I find that just fascinating, that if you want to begin to differentiate, not just your disclosures but your actions, this is an incredible opportunity to do so.

That data, by the way, is really telling.  What companies reported, round one, is the same that they're reporting round two, because they're not learning where to focus their attention.

Ian Bailie: I want to pick up on this point of, "Now is the time for HR", and we've covered a lot.  We've talked about some of these trends that have been around for a while, that are getting more traction now, some new ones emerging as we go along; we've talked about this importance of really focusing on the strategy, on the business, on the customers, how you win in the marketplace, all of these different areas.  So, you've got these broader themes that are emerging for probably everyone in HR, but you mustn't just follow the trend, you've got to think about what this means for your business, for your company, make sure you focus in on that way as well.

So, Diane, how do we help the HR practitioners that are listening really think about tactically, what can they do tomorrow to rise to the challenge to really capture this moment for HR?

Diane Gherson: Well, that's not a simple question!

Ian Bailie: In two minutes, that's fine!

Diane Gherson: Yeah.  So, I think the people analytics function is going to be extremely helpful to understand much of what we've just talked about, right, which is what are the new requirements of work.  And you talked earlier, David, about how some companies, Microsoft in particular comes to mine, I think also maybe Dropbox, have identified core work hours, and other companies have identified what it means to have focus time and to isolate focus time.

These are things that we never even thought about in the Industrial Era.  We were 5 days a week, 40 hours, come to the office and we're done.  But now, and for good reason, we're having to get a lot more specific about, "When we say work, what do we mean?" and, "Is there an optimal meeting time; and, what should meetings be for?" and, "How much focus time do people need; and how do we make sure that happens?"

All of these things, I think people analytics skills or capabilities are really going to help us with because, like it or not, we have to redefine what the workplace is going to look like, because of all the things we've just talked about.  We have the data, we just need to figure out how to analyse it and come up with some good answers, but we need to ask the right questions.  So, it's really about outcomes and how we organise work around outcomes, and then assign people to projects inside of those outcomes.

Those are all just top of mind, thinking about what this new work is starting to shape into and we're seeing it.

Ian Bailie: So, analytics is clearly going to be incredibly important for the function moving forward.  David, when you think about other skills that people need to navigate this paradox, as Dave said, what else do HR professionals need to be thinking about?

David Green: It's interesting, because in our annual research we did at Insight222 this year, I mean it went to 184 organisations and one of the questions that we asked is, "Does your Chief People Officer mandate people analytics as part of the core HR strategy?" and 90% said yes.  Then we asked, "Do you have a data-driven culture in HR?" and only 49% said yes.  So, there's clearly a gap to close, and I know Dave's done some research in this area as well with the HR capabilities assessment; but when we asked HR professionals themselves and HR leaders and business leaders, it came back as three areas. 

One of them's very interesting actually, because it kind of covers a lot of what we've talked about in this podcast: business acumen, having better business acumen, being able to ask the right questions, to your point, Diane, so we can really drill down on, what is the challenge that the business is trying to solve, to deliver the right outcomes for the customer perhaps.  Then the other two are around being more data-driven and more experience-led, which I guess is more the personalisation and HR professionals understanding how they can use technology to provide better experiences for employees. 

As an example, we're working with a very large, global financial company at the moment, and we're helping to upskill nearly 1,000 HR professionals now on topics like be able to do data analysis, not detailed data analysis, but how to interpret data and do basic data analysis; storytelling; stakeholder influencing, so they can actually influence people in the business to make decisions and take actions on the inside.  But also, linking what they're doing in HR to the business, so to your point, Dave, HR not being about HR but HR actually being about the business and about customers and about stakeholders.

So, it's a very interesting time, but we're talking about reskilling an organisation, and HR and learning functions are at the centre of that.  So, as HR professionals, we don't only need to futureproof skills within the organisation, we need to futureproof skills within our own function as well.

David Ulrich: You know, we've done research on skills in HR over 8 rounds of data with 125,000 people, and it's not self-report, it's other people reporting the skills they see in the HR people, and then correlating those skills with the outcomes.  So it's not, "I have a skill" it's, "Did this skill lead to an outcome?" 

The take in our last round during COVID was fascinating.  We've always defined HR skills as an adjective and a noun, "strategic partner, credible activist, trusted advisor", there was always a noun and a moderator.  Our model this year is verbs, and I think the issue is, it doesn't matter where you work.  So, we focus HR skills on, "advances the business"; that's a verb, "accelerates the business, mobilises information", what David just talked about.  You've got to mobilise information, it's not just having access. 

In fact, in our previous data, we found that HR people with the ability to analyse data analytic skills had the least business impact, and it's because they were looking at HR data not business data.  So, five sets of nouns: accelerate business, advance human capability, mobilise information, foster collaboration and simplify complexity.  You won't remember those details.  The detail is, it's a verb not a noun, it's not your role, it's what you do as an action within your role, and that's the stuff that we're finding really begins to show an impact on business results.

Ian Bailie: I love that, and I think that's a great place to wrap up.  I want to thank you all for taking the time today, this has been a great conversation.  For those listeners that have been listening in and want to follow your work, Dave or Diane, I mean we already know how to get hold of you, David, so I won't come to you; but, Diane, if you could go first and then, Dave, it would be great if people could find out how they can find you on social media and follow any of your work.

Diane Gherson: I'm on LinkedIn.

Ian Bailie: LinkedIn is good; and for you, Dave?

David Ulrich: Same thing.  I've written a lot of books.  I decided two years ago that books take -- David Green would know this well; they take a year to write, a year to get published and six months to get out and they're out of date.  I decided not to write a book, but I post on LinkedIn every Tuesday and I make a lot of comments.  David, I love your posts and, Diane, I love your posts, and I love to engage.  I think LinkedIn is a great global watercooler.  I hope you'll follow me and I hope you'll make a comment and disagree with me!  I've got some folks that are really good at disagreeing, and I've never looked at who the respondent is.  It's what I love about LinkedIn, it democratises ideas.

Ian Bailie: There we go.  I encourage everyone to go and disagree with Dave immediately on LinkedIn!

David Ulrich: That's so good!

Ian Bailie: Excellent.  Well, thank you all so much for being on the podcast today, it's been an absolute pleasure.