At Work with The Ready

In the nearly five years since launching this podcast, our inbox has received one type of question more than any other: “If I’m trying to change a system that just doesn’t want to change, how do I keep going? When should I admit defeat and leave?” As people who function as “professional resistance” in organizations all over the world, this questions always hits us hard—because change itself is har...

The RACI matrix (as well its cousins DACI, DARCI, etc.) aims to neatly categorize stakeholders into roles—who’s responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed for every decision your team makes. We spend a lot of time filling out those RACI boxes, because it’s supposed to give us order and predictability—a single source of truth for all future choices. We’re all about achieving real clarity, bu...

“Ask Us Anything” episodes were a Brave New Work tradition, and we knew they were going to live on in this next new chapter of the show. What we didn’t know was how much harder the questions would be this time around! Turns out, after nearly 200 shows our audience is pretty sharp and asking some very specific questions. On today’s episode of At Work With The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin loo...

For decades, traditional consulting (think “management” or “strategy” varieties now synonymous with the Big Three) has been a go-to move for organizations looking for a shake up. Need a bulletproof vision for the future or a new org restructuring that’ll win over the C-suite and shareholders? You can’t beat their analytical prowess, strategy design, and slick presentation. But too often clients wi...

For decades, face-to-face working has been the default way of working. Launching a new project; untangling an OS problem; updating a team on progress made in the last week—our classic go-to for all those different kinds of work is blocking off time on a calendar. When in doubt, just corral everybody into a room, real or virtual. But this “one-size-fits-all” approach is coming up short as work evol...

Every time something changes at work, someone’s bound to be upset. Digital transformations take resources from analog teams; restructuring a department can take authority from one group and give it to another; removing a step from a workflow can eliminate a role altogether. Any change, including those meant to make things better, will create winners and losers and that’s bound to kick up a hornet’...

Ask anyone about organizational silos and they’re bound to tell you they’re bad. When we run Tension and Practice exercises with clients, “We work in silos” often shows up as Tension No. 1 holding a team back. Yet like a moth to a flame, we keep gravitating toward them, building walls that are higher and more insurmountable than ever before. What gives? In this episode of At Work with The Ready, R...

You can’t throw a stone on LinkedIn without hitting at least one post about return-to-office policies. From CEOs to employees, from thought leaders to maybe even your mayor, everyone is taking a side, doubling down, and yelling into the void as loud as they can. Where people work is being treated as the most important issue—the existential sea change that will either make or break a company. In re...

1:1s (or one-on-ones) are a ubiquitous part of our daily working lives. These two-person meetings (a manager + a direct report = a classic 1:1) are meant to be a space for diving into individual challenges, fostering trust, building stronger relationships, and providing a forum for feedback and recognition. When designed with intention, they can be great. But at some point, 1:1s jumped the shark....

It's January! New beginnings? Ambitious plans? Giant commitments to change? They’re on everyone’s mind. Companies included—since now’s the time when glossy PowerPoint decks are so eagerly rolled out. And those PowerPoints? They’re always brimming with promise for the year ahead. But there's a glaring disconnect between those slides (all 73 of them) and eventual success we often don’t address. Beca...

Whether it’s in front of clients or in front of a mic, we talk about change all day long. Having fewer, better meetings; learning to productively disagree; overhauling and evolving the HR function; exploring four-day work weeks—the podcast has covered miles and miles of transformational ground in 4 years. However we don’t often talk about how we’ve changed. And after six seasons and 162 episodes,...

In July, we began exploring what HR’s current reality looked like and how People teams could evolve into a better, brighter, more adaptive future. Thirteen episodes, three guest interviews, a record breaking AUA, and lots of unexpected hot dog talk later, we’ve reached the end. And while endings can be bittersweet, this miniseries, proudly co-hosted by two org design nerds, is transforming that fe...

HR departments struggle to be all things to all stakeholders while delivering on the most strategic priorities of the business. But when we dig into the OS of HR, we find a resource-constrained function that contains multitudes. Long range people priorities are deemed negotiable, HR’s domain expertise isn’t respected, and the function acts as a service-provider when it should be guiding the organi...

“Ask Us Anything” episodes are some of the most fun to make, so we knew we had to include one in our Future of HR miniseries. In the spirit of a well-meaning (but often toothless) HR feedback box, all the questions are anonymous. On today’s episode, Rodney and Sam look at what arrived in our mailbag and try to solve listener questions. But did they beat the Brave New Work record of answering more...

Spooky season is here, so it seems fitting to share a horror story. Because there’s a monster draining time and energy from most of our organizations. This sneaky shapeshifter can take any form, show up at any time, and is one of the more destructive, chaotic forces we’re forced to deal with at work. We’re talking about the monster that is org debt—and HR has been trapped in a maze with it for dec...

We’re living in a data-rich time. Searching for a study or report on, say, the benefits of a three-day return-to-office policy? You’re mere clicks away from convincing arguments with shiny graphics and spicy pull-quotes to post on LinkedIn. But there’s also never been a worse time for data, with a glut of conflicting information being confidently shared from unreliable sources. Most frustrating, e...

Was it ever possible for our first AI episode to not be a two-parter? Probably not. So we’re back today with more thoughts on AI and the Future of HR. In this miniseries, Brave New Work’s Rodney Evans is joined by friend-of-the-pod and Ready OG Sam Spurlin to dive into how HR can become more resilient, efficient, and equitable. Last week, they dove into the AI pool to begin filtering out the noise...

One midnight scroll through LinkedIn is all it takes to be overwhelmed with AI stories and hot takes. There’s a massive amount of confusion, apprehension, excitement, and just general noisiness to make sense of, some which is created by AI tools themselves. But as more and more AI-powered solutions promising to revolutionize HR flood the market—and as more and more employees spiral with worry that...

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A company hires a change agent (think anyone with “org effectiveness,” “change management,” or “strategy and efficiency” in their title) with promises of how they’ll be the one to revolutionize the company’s future. Several months later, the change agent realizes the company is fighting them at every turn. Despite all the talk, these roles often have minima...

Since last fall, we’ve spoken/joked/laughed/cried with hundreds of HR leaders and change makers about the Future of HR and the industry’s evolutionary tipping point. And despite spending time with many inspiring CPOs and CHROs, there’s none quite like Hebba Youssef. Along with being Workweek’s Chief People Officer, she’s also the author of “I Hate It Here”, a no holds barred newsletter unpacking H...

The role of HR Business Partner is often a tale of two experiences. On the one hand, HRBPs are some of the most empathetic and passionate people you’ll ever meet. On the other hand, they’re stuck on the hamster wheel of busywork, bouncing from crisis to crisis without the authority to prioritize their energy—and without the respect from leadership to make a real difference. Look up “burnout” in th...

In this miniseries, Brave New Work’s Rodney Evans is joined by friend-of-the-pod and Ready OG Sam Spurlin to dive into how HR can become more resilient, efficient, and equitable. Last week, Rodney and Sam teamed up with Future of HR team member Meg Saxby to explore our new maturity model, assessment, and the six key capabilities every HR department needs to learn, strengthen, and evolve to succeed...

After decades of dealing with stagnant practices, burnout, and competing agendas, HR might be tempted to trade in the old family minivan for a flashy new race car and just put the pedal to the metal. A car’s a car…right? While we’re big proponents of “start by starting”, without the skill, confidence, and ability to take tight turns or use the paddle shifters (you’re still with us, right?), you’ll...

One of the toughest work tasks? Convince someone else to back your idea. And if you’re in HR, it’s exceptionally tough to get buy-in from other functions. Maybe your coworkers think they know better because you just handle “people” stuff—and how hard is that? Maybe the CFO will only open the company chest for something with ROI they can track. Or maybe the CEO is hyper-concerned with legacy or the...

It’s no secret things haven’t been working in HR for… a while. When you include the last few years of navigating a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, dysfunctional hybrid work policies, rounds of layoffs, and unprecedented economic churn, it’s easy to see HR has been pushed to a breaking point. Human Resources? They feel anything but human. Trapped between competing mandates to mitigate risk while also...