In February last year, this week’s guest, Phil Rhodes, Head of Learning & Leadership Development at WM--which you may now better as Waste Management, and who are the very helpful people who handled your garbage all the way through Lockdown—was not long in post when his suggestion of a coaching program was met with the observation, ‘Phil, trash companies don’t do coaching.’ Well, maybe they should all start, as the first rollout got a 96% approval rating with either ‘life-changing’ or ‘valuable’ level ratings. And as you’ll discover on this episode, mentoring and coaching, at multiple levels, for both truck driver and regional manager, emerged as a transformational tool for the company. Was it just a way to get through the pandemic, or perhaps the key way Hybrid can be made to land for everyone? We’ll make you listen to the episode to get the answer—but you’ll not hate us for that, as along the way you’ll get so much great insight on everything from the history of Southern Africa to new ways of thinking about effective frontline worker support. Warning: no, they didn’t train new folks how to drive the big vehicles online. At least… tune in to find out more!

This week’s guest is Michael Arena, who brings the unique perspective of leading talent development and management for not just major New Economy global brands like Amazon Web Services, but also stalwart Old Economy blue chips like General Motors and Bank of America. Along the way, he’s also done serious research and training in network analysis and the power of social science to truly understand what’s happening with today’s corporations. That combination of frontline management and crisis response and a lens for viewing all our recent challenges in people practices, gives him, we’d argue, the right to be heard on what he thinks is really happening out there for both individuals (and especially a voice often left out of the Future of Work conversation, the leader) and teams as we progress through what he jokes is both, Dickens-wise, ‘the best and the worst’ times to be in work right now. If you’re still sceptical, a few minutes on his evidence of bridging and bonding social capital and its impact on the Hybrid Workspace we’re seeing evolve around us will change your mind: and we say that as Data ‘Til I Die! converts. Social capital is a tool, we predict, that you’ll soon be using as much as Michael is in his new role in Connected Commons.

If there’s one word that sums up this week’s episode, it’s conscious listening. Yes, that’s two. But it’s actually the on-ramp to the real word we mean, and which is fast emerging as the theme of this Season 5 of Workplace Stories as it evolves: intentionality. That’s because our guest--RJ Milnor, Global Head of People Analytics and Chief People Data Officer at Uber--says it was conscious listening and thinking by he and his team about the WHY of his company was asking people to work for them, as opposed to where, that helped him craft a working Hybrid Work policy that works. Which, of course, is also another way of describing being intentional about RTO. We love RJ’s deep-thinking approach to these big questions--his commitment to listening to the people he’s trying to help, his rigor around tools and data, his willingness to experiment and flex. And we think you will too--plus get some clues about how to start the road to unlocking the Hybrid Work puzzle box from today. Hint: get conscious listening… and then get intentional.

Today, we hear from an HR leader at the absolute heart of the Hybrid evolution, Dawn Klinghoffer, Vice President of the HR Business Insights team at Microsoft. Dawn’s really helping set the agenda of what gets called in the show the ‘Pandora’s Box’ of workplace change the pandemic is sparking--which she sees, not as a source of trouble and confusion, as in the Greek myth, but as a way to get energy, meaning and empowerment placed at the center of every employee’s experience. Pandora-like, though, the changes Dawn wants to see can spark fear and disruption--fears which she discusses frankly and openly, and which she also so brilliantly encapsulated in a recent landmark HBR piece. We also hear about her fresh thinking on people analytics, data, and the employee-manager relationship, as well as practical tips on making Hybrid start working in your environment. To us—and, we think, by the end of this 56-plus minutes—Dawn's work here is a great example of HR is really for: to help us all be the best humans we can be. Worth your time.

Is it time to retire the concept of a job? Is it holding us all back—especially if we really want to make Hybrid Work a success? That’s a new, and we think highly useful, concept from today’s guest, author, academic and futurist John Boudreau. In the episode, John tells us how we want to move away from thinking about work as one job and job holder at a time and one degree at a time, to a system that allows the parts to freely connect, so tasks and projects can connect to atomized or deconstructed worker capabilities like Skills, which can be gained through an atomized set of things like experiences, partial degrees or credentials. John—a well-known HR scholar who’s Professor Emeritus of Management and Organization and a Senior Research Scientist with the Center for Effective Organizations at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California—says his thinking here is that we’ve been using the wrong unit of analysis in ‘the job,’ and that a new operating system of work is needed that should be instead be based on deconstructed elements of a role in terms of tasks rather than being based primarily on the job as the atomic unit of HR analysis. As you’re about to find, this is all set forth in his new book with fellow researcher Ravin Jesuthasan, Work Without Jobs, whose top concepts we try and explore, like what it might be like to ‘melt’ a job down to see what it’s made of and who could do bits of it instead, as well as a very new way of thinking about ice cubes. We’re so honored John agreed to be our lead-off guest for the Season, as we think it identifies many key themes and frees up some real opportunities for fresh Hybrid Work thinking we’ll all find useful. Just be careful you don’t melt while listening.

We've completed one sort of Odyssey (at least for now). Now, it's time for an Adventure. That's the message from our customary opening new Workplace Stories from RedThread Research Season scene-setter this week, where the guys reveal that our next set of engagements and learning from experts and practitioners in the world of HR and the future of work is the current supernova-hot topic of Hybrid Work. If you really are just out of your COVID bunker, we refer, of course, to the idea of how we might re-orient ourselves to a workplace where employee expectations about ‘presenteeism’ have changed a lot… whether they have that much really for employers, well—let's see. Also covered: how RedThread's working with its team and clients to make our own changes to support Hybrid. To set us up, a review of how powerful employees are right now on their side of their see-saw (for how long), some Intriguing guest names get dropped, starting with this week’s co-dropping Episode 1, well-known HR Scholar and author John Boudreau, how this Season links surprisingly quickly with previous Workplace Stories surveys, and expected recurrent themes like the role both human diversity tech will play in all this as it unfolds. There's even a gag or two (you're going to love the one about printers), all putting us in the perfect mindset for the John episode deep Hybrid Work conceptual dive. Warning: the episode contains shocking information about certification. Still not sure Chris has recovered.

In the Ancient Greece of Homeric times and mores, the concept of gifting, or gift-friendship, ξενία (‘xenia’) was central. Assuming your fellow Greeks would observe xenia allowed you to travel in the hope you’d be good for food and shelter for the night from strangers on your Odyssey; in exchange, travelers would leave a parting gift in thanks. At many points in The Odyssey, we see xenia in action, like when Eumaeus the Swineherd shows it to the disguised Odysseus, noting guests always come under the protection of Zeus. Well, we’ve reached the end of our own Skills Odyssey here, and so we thought it appropriate to give you, our fellow travellers, some xenia back: and it’s in the delightful shape of this bonus episode with our great final conversation with a CLO making experiments and achieving early results with a new approach to Skills, GE Healthcare’s very honest and informed David Sperl. It’s a conversation that covers his use of machine learning and analytics—again, underlining how key these practices are now in serious HR—as well as how dealing with challenges like replacing a zoo of older HR IT with one new global replacement just as is his division is being divested by its parent. He does a great job sharing learnings and best practice; it’s a bit of xenia in its own right—as Dani says in the episode, “That's one of the things that I really like about HR: if once you solve the problem, you can share that with other people, because it's going to work different in their organizations anyway.” And as she goes on to say, in this Odyssey we've seen tons of people being very honest and transparent with us about what they're doing—which is xenia all of us can treasure. Please also note we have yet another gift to close the Season, though, which you will hear about right at the beginning. Now it’s time to head back to shore--but we’ll be back very soon with more things to inform, help and challenge you.

Something’s happened to this week’s guest, Meredith Wellard. And it’s actually something quite wonderful; you can hear it in her voice, animating and energizing her. It’s a mix of excitement at possibility--and almost relief that a lot of checks she’s been trying to cash all her years in HR, L&D and talent management can finally be honored. Her secret? It’s the immediate impact on her organization, Deutsche Post DHL Group (she’s an Australian living and working in Bonn, Germany), she’s getting from a new machine learning and data analytics-powered approach to Skills. She and her team—as you’ll learn over the sound of Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ and your oars ,as you race ahead on this leg of our almost-concluded Skills Odyssey—have used that tech to create a unique career marketplace. You’ll soon know why she wants to call it that instead of a ‘Skills’ one) that will eventually be the friendly, automated, and incredibly well-informed training and new job (or even new career path) digital assistant for all of its half million global workforce. No wonder she’s inspired: and we think you soon will be as well.

Deloitte is different. It’s different for, of course, its unique approach to solving customer problems, as well as its sheer size and scale. But in the context of a Skills Odyssey, it’s also pretty unique for having a) an ‘agency’ structure that makes it peculiarly receptive to new ways of organizing around Skills, and b) an openness to try new things. It’s also full, of course, of very smart people… we’d know, as both Stacia and Dani are alumni! But today’s guest, Chief Learning Officer of Deloitte’s US operation, Eric Dingler, isn’t interested in the past. In fact, he’s pretty critical about what Deloitte (and the rest of us in L&D) didn’t get right historically (“a talent/career model-level role hasn't allowed us to be as agile as we need to be and enable our organization to be as agile”) around career development. Instead, he’s very, very much about the future. In our discussion, you’ll see that for yourself as we cover a wide range of topics, from what it’s like to be in the CLO cockpit for a 145,000 person end of a half million-strong people organization, the central importance of agility as the lens Deloitte wants to see things through going forward, the role of data and analytics—even how he knows what L&D does really can touch so many people, making a better world for us all. We’re really glad we spoke to this fellow Skills Odyssey voyager; we suspect you will be, too.

Manisha Singh is a leading voice in everything from HR technology to people analytics, AI ethics to doing practical work on the future of work. And as someone who built what may well have been one of the very first ever talent marketplaces during her years at global energy equipment giant Schneider Electric, she’s also got incredible street cred for any Skills discussion. If that wasn’t enough, her years moving through the HR ranks at places like Tata and AXA would also mark her out as someone worth a conversation with… but now she’s capping all of her achievements so far with impressive work at British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology brand AstraZeneca. Where, among other things, she is quietly working away on doing her bit to design ‘a future that loves us all.’ A brilliant phrase, for sure. But what’s great about Manisha, who we’ve been wanting to compare Skills Odyssey notes with for soooo long, is that’s not just epic, Homeric poetry: she’s actually doing the steering and the navigating. Oh, and just for good measure, you’ll also hear why she thinks Skills could be the way we solve The Great Resignation. Oh yeah.

We came off this recording session thinking, Have we just literally seen the future of work? A world where how Skills has become the core to everything, and instead of performance management, we do performance enablement? And where the employee is the one that triggers the conversation, and salary is never just based on what I did last year but for the future of what I can do for you? And where the very praxis of making stuff is not about one company’s team coming together, but many actors and partners and even ‘employees,’ but in a very different sense of what that means now? You can tell we’re feeling it; you might even say we’ve been drinking some of the heady wines Odysseus plied the monstrous Cyclops with to enable he and his companions to escape its clutches. But like proper Greek heroes, we never let these spirits overpower us. Instead, we want to focus on the insights and best practice of what today’s guest, Guillermo Miranda, Digital Transformation Executive and CLO at Boeing, tells us about the future. A future that he and his team are building right now… and which, charmingly, perfectly, and hard-nosed business fittingly, involves cake decorators. We always knew we needed them: boy, how little we knew.

This week, it’s all about numbers, scale, and achievement. In terms of numbers, how about a Skills-based, AI-enhanced framework that is keeping 250,000 employees happy and appropriately paid? And which saves the company an estimated $100m per year, money avoided by avoiding expensive churn and not paying beyond market rate—even for scare capability? And as for the achievement, the spotlight in this episode is on Anshul Sheopuri, Vice President & CTO, Data & AI At ‘IBM Workforce,’ Big Blue’s immense global HR function, where he’s led the work on using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and lots of data to improve hiring, compensation and even DEIB policies across the company. So important is this idea of ‘Skills-for-pay’ and ‘Skills as currency’ that he sees it as a ‘silver thread’ unifying people processes and practices… which of course we soon correct to a ‘red thread’! We’ve been looking to meet with Anshul for a long while, and we’re glad we hung on in there, as this is an excellent conversation with a true subject matter expert who’s using tech to really make a bunch of positive change for his colleagues. A really interesting piece of best practice you could start looking at right away is using employee digital footprint to see what their Skills really are. Sadly, Stacia never got the AI help with tonight’s dinner she thought she’d get, but hey—you can’t have it all.

“We really just almost assume that, self-evidently, Skills matter--and then went to try to build a Skills library. It is only then that we start to think… what for?” Talk for any length of time with this week’s ‘Skills Odyssey II’ guest, Sun Life’s Robert (Rob) Carlyle, and these kind of zingers just keep on coming through… along with solid thinking about why doing anything with Skills that isn’t ‘wholesale’ (think, ‘big’) and at scale is a waste of everyone’s time, why it really doesn’t matter if you want to say ‘competency’ versus ‘Skill,’ and many others. You get all this in this week’s in-depth conversation with a real Skills practitioner striving at enterprise level, as well as, heck, a book report on Homer as Tarantino and what the Odyssey actually can teach us all about careers and acquiring knowledge. Don’t say we never spoil you.

Well… we’re still not home. The fabled Ithaca of Skills nirvana is still somewhere in the distance. This journey we’re on—this Skills Odyssey—continues. But we still are getting help on the voyage from Dani, Stacia and Chris Pirie from The Learning Futures Group, who are going to share another set of conversations with metaphorical sailors, explorers and other mythical characters also trying to work out how to avoid the workplace Sirens, tired Cyclops ideas and unhelpful Circe tech that might not help us. This week, dive in yourself to get set up with what the trio of plucky HR and workplace practice thinkers see as the main themes of this, our second look at all things Skills as sponsored (again! Thank you!) by our friends as Visier and Degreed. We also get a catch-up on how RedThread as a business is building capability and acquiring momentum, as well as reflections on previous ‘Workplace Stories’ seasons. Delightfully, we also get some terrific business and life development book recommendations from all three. It’ll be nice to have some reading matter down here below deck.

A lot of people we talk to are hesitant about starting their Skills Odyssey. They’ve got a good reason: they feel there’s just too much ocean out there between them and getting to the good place of Ithaca/success. But if you don’t start somewhere, you won’t get anywhere, so you kind of have to dive in. That’s the view, at least, from our guest today, Tim Dickinson, Global Head of Learning Systems & Innovation at European life sciences firm Novartis, a global healthcare company based in Switzerland that provides solutions to address the evolving needs of patients worldwide—and which, fascinatingly, has made ‘Curiosity’ a core corporate value. A key clue on how to do that jumping: decide if you want to focus on ‘Skills’ in general or the ones the organization sees as critical right now. As Tim says himself, his job is all about improving learning and improve knowledge sharing through technology, and then driving that knowledge-sharing and Skills-building throughout the organization. Don’t know about you, but that sounds like a job we’d really want: and we think you do, too.

“How you are able, as an organization, to reconfigure resources like Skills and have the ability to allocate the right talents in your organization at the right time-- I think it's also a competitive advantage.” So says our guest this week, Patrick Coolen, Global Head of People Analytics, HR intelligence & Organizational Design, and we don’t think many people would disagree with him. But how to allocate? Based in Amsterdam, Patrick is leading the charge on Skills at ABN AMRO, a large Dutch-headquartered bank, to do just that—make Skills a competitive resource for his enterprise—so he has some ideas and experience to share on what he and his team see as the answer. The result is one of our most interesting traveller’s tales so far on the Skills Odyssey, encompassing everything from pragmatics on how to start with people analytics, the usefulness of Emsi data, a good deal of Dutch common sense and a rather beguiling metaphor on, er, soup. Trust us: you’re going to go with it!

Setting up this week’s conversation, Dani promises that this one’s a “must-listen for anyone who's trying to figure out how to make Skills work in their organization.” Bold claim? Not when you realize we’re talking about what a 200,000 person, multi-billion-dollar financial services leader is trying to do with Skills both operationally--and with the help of tech from HR system market leaders like Degreed and Workday. That’s the project as far as our guest, Christopher Funk, Senior Vice President - Talent and Performance Management Platforms over at Citi, is concerned, for sure. It’s a very honest, very detailed, and very open conversation from someone already a way across the seas of The Skills Odyssey; we invite you guys to decide if all that really does make it a “must-listen.” As Dani also says, we’ve all been in too many conversations where 45 minutes is spent arguing over if Skills are a skill or a competency or a capability or a trait or a characteristic; Mike’s got a useful answer for that one, too. So overall, we’re pretty sure Mike cashes the check.

Today’s guest, Mike Groesser, is not just a VP at his employer, Fidelity Investments. He’s also something called a Learning Squad Leader—terminology that may clue at least some of you that we’re dealing with an organization that’s embraced Agile pretty hard. But this isn’t a conversation about that interesting development methodology. It’s actually one (with many rewarding twists and turns) more about the main topic of the Season: Skills—and more specifically, what it looks like when you decide to pay its people more if they can prove they’ve built them, what that looks like at ground level, and most intriguingly, if they build in a non-linear fashion or not. Mike’s an excellent guest, deeply passionate but also very honest about what he’s seeing; definitely one for both the Skills thinker and the Skills practitioner. So: you.

In L&D, we talk a lot about creating the conditions for learning: isn’t that kind of definitional about what we do? Well, maybe we need to tear up the rule book and start thinking a bit harder about what that means in a much more digital, much more automating, much more diverse, and much more unstable world than maybe we all got comfortable with. That’s certainly our read on what Vidya Krishnan, one of RedThread’s favorite learning thinkers and practitioners, is doing over at Scandinavian telco giant Ericsson. And, you’ll be relieved to learn, while Skills is absolutely the key she’s using to unlock some big doors there, marked things like ‘Future’ and ‘Becoming Your Own Career CEO,’ and data the rocket fuel, she says, maybe like you do, that it’s a journey she’s on… maybe, indeed, an Odyssey. But it’s one we can all start, she reassures us in this, one of our best conversations for a long time. Oh, one last thing: you might be wanting pizza near the end. Don’t worry, you can tell the boss it’s for Skills research.

Is today’s guest the epitome of a people analytics scholar practitioner? Well, let’s do the math: relevant PhD? Check. Six years figuring out how to interest Silicon Valley engineers to come work for an industrial firm by drawing up a whole new company-wide Skills matrix that actually reflected what needed to be done? Check. And working in academic contexts persuading quants that while data and machine learning are great, it’s those human skills that will actually help them most—as well as (and how awesome is this!), working out how to use data to build a more just world? Check! We’re so happy to finally get self-styled People Data Enthusiast Heather Whiteman on the show, now she’s at last fully unpacked in her new Seattle base (we tried for the first Skills season): and it was for sure worth the wait, as we get not just detail on practical ways to make Skills frameworks deliver, but also the message that people analytics aren’t to predict the future—they’re to change it. Monkey psychology’s loss definitely our gain, then.

For ten tough years, the king of Ithaca tried to find his way back home from the war--and along the way, he had quite a few obstacles to face down. The good news is he got there in the end: and in a similar way, we think many HR practitioners out there also feel they are on a long journey, full of perils and set-backs and detours, but driven by a similar mission to get ‘home,’ when it comes to really making Skills a tractable thing for their organization’s own ‘Odyssey’ into the future. Hence the driving design principle for this, our third season of Workplace Stories, and the second dive we’ve taken into the wine-dark sea of Skills: that we can help our fellow voyagers by sharing the stories of adventurers, explorers and ambitious navigators just a few leagues ahead of us all in the water. To set sail, in this boat-side chat between Red Thread’s chief petty officers Stacia and Dani and our faithful Ship’s Carpenter Chris, we dip our figurative oars in the Mediterranean and set some possible destinations. Listen, at least Odysseus’ faithful dog Argos recognized him, even if no-one else did, when he finally got home; we are sure there’s a great pooch ready to jump on your lap when you make it, too. And her name’s Success.

“Honestly, in order to make this a reality I believe HR needs more technologists and analytics professionals as a whole.” Now you might expect a RedThread-head to come out with a sentence like that--but it’s in fact from our awesome guest this week, Phil Willburn, Vice President, People Analytics, at HR tech firm Workday. But Phil also believes, as you’ll hear in this fascinating three-way chat between Stacia, Chris and Phil, that data, while absolutely the key ingredient to making DEIB real, isn’t the only thing you need to make the cake come out right; you also need to be able to tell a compelling story—and be able to listen to the stories of others. Maybe listen, really, for the first time ever. But, as Phil reminds us so well in this episode of ‘Integrating Inclusion’… you do have to start.

What’s it feel like when your identity is all about promoting Belonging and a global pandemic comes along that for a time completely wipes out your market, forcing you to lay off hundreds of valued colleagues? Perhaps more importantly: how do you navigate that crisis in a way that’s faithful to your purpose and DEIB commitments? The answer we hear today: with some vulnerability, authenticity, courage, transparency, compassion, empathy—and a dash of curiosity. Welcome to the world of Airbnb’s Director of Learning, Kate Shaw, who shares with us some fascinating insights into how DEIB’s being made to not just work but thrive at her company. Kate’s one of our favorite people, and we think she’ll soon be yours, too: after all, she’s someone fully dedicated to a mission of making work better for everybody. And if that isn’t what you need to make Belonging work… what would?

What if the ways you’re trying to measure the ground-level impact of all your DEIB work in your workplace environment are incomplete? That’s the possibly concerning warning from academic and author Professor Rob Cross--our guest this week, and the co-author this Summer of what we believe to be a highly important intervention that flags the importance of ONA, organizational network analysis, for any serious attempt to understand what the team feels and does day-to-day. But we got a lot more from our dialog than that, insightful as it was. We also hear some interesting findings about the growing strain on us all from the natural human desire to be helpful, which Rob warns translates into insane workloads. We must do something about this and design our work better to accommodate it, he believes, as collaboration is addictive, something we need to acknowledge—as well as figure out how the people, of all backgrounds, who are thriving are negotiating our new world of microstresses and DEIB opportunity. Heady stuff: you’re going to want to turn off Twitter for this one.

Sometimes you feel you’re in the eye of the hurricane: so much is happening in terms of our wider society in terms of changing expectations, changing ways of working, changing life choices. Add the potentially explosive compound called ‘Diversity’ into all this, and it can start to feel a little hot in here. But, advises this week’s special guest and DEIB and L&D expert practitioner Jesse Jackson, CLO for JPMorgan Chase with a special focus on the Wall St’s giant’s consumer community banking business: when it comes to getting DEIB right, it’s not heat you want: it’s light. This is a really fascinating chance to find out from a person deep in the midst of all the changes we’re talking about, but also deep in a blue-chip financial services firm that always has to see things in terms of achievable ROI. We’ll let you decide if you agree that’s what Jesse’s achieving: us, we’re hunkering down in the place where it’s always the most interesting… that hurricane’s eye. Because that's where change happens.

Are there three sets of people in Inclusion: the folks doing the ground-level work on DEIB, maybe the researchers way off in the academic stratosphere, and then the people actually affected by these issues on a day-to-day level in the workplace? If so, could we simplify this and remove a layer? If you think that’s a good idea, then listen today to someone who is doing all she can to fuse the first two roles there—Rachel Fichter, a PhD who also works for a Wall St financial analytics firm, S&P Global… but who sees herself in a fascinating new kind of role in HR and analytics: DEIB scholar-practitioner, helping her firm Integrate Inclusion while also diving into the literature on Belonging in the Columbia U stacks. So: quite a woman. And quite a DEIB thinker. You’re going to like this Workplace Story.

We love data, and we think it needs to be at the heart of all HR, especially in DEIB. But like this week’s guest, global talent strategy and analytics leader Hallie Bregman, we also know that data really only comes alive if it is part of a narrative. “I’m not going to give you data,” Hallie tells her colleagues at major Boston-based IT firm, PTC. “I am totally driven by data, I eat, sleep and breathe it all day long. But I'm going to tell you a story, and then I'm going to help you build a strategy around that story.” Such a smart way to put it—and this is one smart lady with so much to say that’s useful about DEIB, people analytics, ONA, NLP and so much more. We knew Hallie would be a hugely important contributor to this first official episode of the new Season of ‘Workplace Stories;’ hope you agree—and find a way to use her insights to make your own DEIB ‘story’ a success too.

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.