Workplace Stories by RedThread Research

Are we kidding ourselves when it comes to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB)? There’s been a LOT of talk about it, after all: is it being matched by any real action? Is the action that’s happening even being driven by leadership, or is it somehow something we’re getting ground-level folks to do, kind of for free, along with everything else we need off them in the COVID crisis? Are there any numbers, what do they tell us—and are they any good? What does DEIB success look like… and what can I do to move the needle here? These are good, maybe even critical questions, for society in 2021. But we don’t know the answers—which is why we’re inviting you to come along with us on a journey to find them together. Welcome to Season 2 of ‘Workplace Stories’ from RedThread Research, which we have entitled, with some optimism, perhaps, ‘Integrating Inclusion:’ a series of conversations on this core HR and HR tech issue. And like Season 1, along the way we think we’re going to be hearing maybe just one or two stories from people on the DEIB front line that will inspire, inform and energize you, too, including from amazing guests like PTC’s Hallie Bregman and S&P Global’s Rachel Fichter. Because DEIB really is everyone’s problem—and everyone’s job.

What actually happens when your boss tells you one day he’d like you to teach a few people new digital skills… say, 25 million or so? You’re going to find out this week, because that really did happen to our great guest, Microsoft Global General Manager, Talent and Learning Experiences and Workforce of the Future Karen Kocher, who is leading the huge-scale Microsoft-LinkedIn global Skills Initiative. But important as that large-scale L&D experiment is, it’s far from all Karen wanted to talk to us about; think of the Skills program as an appetiser for a Learning and Skills banquet that includes life/career and pay advise, as well as useful notes on credentialing and what transitioning to a ‘learn-it-all’ culture entails at company street level. Quite a woman. Quite a conversation. And quite a Workplace Story.

Truism 1: McDonald’s employs a lot of people. Truism 2: it doesn’t care that much about those people, so long as they flip the burgers OK, right? That second one is totally wrong, as we find out in our great conversation with the giant company’s former CLO, the very engaging Rob Lauber. In fact, with its pioneering Archways Program, thousands of entry-level staff get amazing on-the-job training, but also money and support for up-skilling—upskilling that the corporation is perfectly OK with them using to move on, often to full-time education or valuable social careers like healthcare. Even more interesting: for every $1 put in the Archways Program, McDonald's directly benefits $3 back. Skills and what they mean (including some refreshing scepticism from Rob about what the robots really will take off us) has been Rob’s own ‘obsession’ over a storied career, so tune in for more on running training at mass scale—including some fascinating advise on what CLOs can do now, today, in terms of available company data. It’s enough to make you hungry.

“I think we have to help organizations get out of the way and let people unleash and unlock their capabilities in ways that does not require the organization to be at the center.” Sounds pretty optimistic? No surprise as whatever else he is, our guest this week, Greg Pryor, is an optimist—and we are too, given the power of the examples and the strength of the conviction he gave us in this hour of debate over the future of HR. Greg, People & Performance Evangelist at Workday, a tech firm that is shaking up the world of enterprise software and which we’re grateful to have as sponsor of this whole Workplace Stories first season, shares many fascinating insights into what he sees as a totally new age for human capital management that the pandemic has tipped us all into. These cover the gamut from bleeding-edge academic research on the future of work to the life lessons kids are teaching their parents out of playing Fortnite, and keep Stacia and fellow interviewer Chris engaged and often delighted. It’s a great conversation: use it to level up your thinking about skills. We certainly did.

For some reason, we don’t listen enough to what our peers in the non-profit world can tell us about skills. But when a practitioner there says something like, “We see anybody joining us as an empty vessel: a bit like in Men in Black, someone wipes your brain out at Reception, you come through and then we up-skill you. That means we forget you come with a commodity of a vast array of skills; that’s why we hired you, that's why you're supporting us—all of those things that we so much want, but we don’t have a way of actually capturing that and supporting that as a network,” we think a lot of ears will prick up in corporate L&D! If you agree, check out this deep dive into everything from skills frameworks (their seductions and their perils) to credentialling with Satnam Sagoo. Satnam works at British Red Cross, where she’s accountable for developing and delivering the organization’s learning and organisation development strategy—creating an L&D offer that meets the need of all 5,000 permanent staff but also what can be at times of crisis 100,000 temporary and external volunteers. Is this the most heart-felt of all our looks at The Skills Obsession? We’ll leave you to judge—it certainly moved (and inspired) all of us.

“I think that in the future, what will be really necessary in terms of skills are people that talk different languages of skills… talking different languages of different skill sets will be something really, really important.” Why is it significant that become more expert seems so fused with speaking restricted languages? And what does it mean to have ‘intentionality’ about skills? How do you start to really understand the skills needs of an organization you join in COVID? This week, these and many other thorny but critical issues get exposed via our debate with long-time friend and highly accomplished CLO and talent leader Nuno Gonçalves, who is now starting to do at global confectionary, food and pet care giant Mars what he did at European life sciences player UCB: implement a cross-company, future-focused skills strategy. It’s an excellent conversation with a truly passionate learning ninja who’s thought deeply about these problems; we think you’re going to love it.

Dr Madhura Chakrabarti is one of our favorite HR thinkers and doers, so we jumped at the chance to hear of the genuinely pioneering work she’s doing for the 29,000 people who work for her employer Syngenta, a leading Swiss-headquartered science-based agtech company that helps millions of farmers round the world grow safe and nutritious food, while taking care of the planet. Despite COVID, in early December Madhura and her small L&D team launched an innovative cross-company skills framework supported by a new learning platform implementation. This episode is a great chance to hear about the real practical challenges of creating such a framework and how hard it can be to find the right partner to help, as well as the importance of people analytics in general: you’re really going to hear from the HR data and skills coal face here. Making this experience even better: Madhura’s charm, professionalism and fierce intellect. Truly, some great Workplace Stories this week!

“When software releases went from Microsoft releasing once every other year to releasing 16 times a week, you know, like all that started to happen; our ability to keep up with the world around us really started to decline.” Whatever else he is (and he is many good things), Guild Education’s Matthew Daniel is genuinely passionate about skills. Scrub that: he’s agonized about them—and he’s even more agonized about the trouble we’re storing up for ourselves as a society around them. As we find out in our hour together, he fears we’re wasting a lot of time and missing a lot of opportunity chasing the wrong metrics about them, ignoring vast swathes of the ones our workforces (especially our frontline teams) have. But his agony does lead to positivity, and we think you’ll agree with him when he says the original purpose that got so many of us into L&D will help us win through.

“What I introduce [my students] to are the kinds of skills that allow them to navigate ambiguity.” If that seems like urgently-needed capability you or your team to have you’re in luck, as you’re about to find out a whole lot more about why you’d need such a thing… and why you won’t find it, alas, in today’s conventional curriculum (including corporate L&D). In the first full episode of our new RedThread podcast—our deep dive into what we’re calling capitalism’s focus on ‘The Skills Obsession’—we meet passionate educator, innovator and bestselling author Lisa Kay Solomon. Designer in Residence at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (‘the d.school’) at Stanford University, Lisa presents in her dialog with Stacia, Dani and Chris something of a masterclass in what thinking about the future actually needs to consist of—and how that feeds into her conviction that, “learning is the currency of possibility.”

This episode sets the tone for this season, with podcast hosts Stacia Garr, Dani Johnson, and Chris Pirie discussing why skills are so important now, how leaders should think about using them, and the challenges facing us all as we adapt to the future of work.