Workplace Stories by RedThread Research

Ashley Goodall has spent 20 years in various roles in HR, covering everything from performance management to leadership. He spent six years at Cisco as the SVP of HR. He left Cisco to write his book, “ The Problem with Change ,” which was just released. In it, he addresses the problems that accompany change.  To write his book, Ashley interviewed people around the world, asking them to tell their...

The mission of Microsoft is to empower every person in every organization to achieve more. An enterprise-wide skills focus is one way they’re fulfilling their mission. It’s about moving beyond job titles and fixed roles to give freedom and flexibility to apply skills and expertise where they matter the most. And it’s all in service of creating an environment where growing one’s career is the top r...

“Skills are like oxygen, invisible but necessary.”  This mindset shift is the brainchild of Vidya Krishnan, the Chief Learning Officer, and Peter Sheppard, the Head of the Global L&D Ecosystem at Ericsson. Much of their job is identifying the oxygen and making it visible so they can do something with it. To do this, they’re taking a top-down and bottom-up approach. They’ve worked with senior l...

How do we define work and the skills needed to do the work? The way we view and assess skills is often through assessing and appraising someone’s output. But the problem is that most organizations aren’t capturing the right data and using it to gain insight. According to Matt Donovan—the Chief Learning and Innovation Officer at GP Strategies—Job descriptions and skills in general describe the base...

GSK is a global biopharma company with a purpose to unite science, technology, and talent to get ahead of disease together. They aim to positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people by the end of 2030. In her role as the VP of People Data & Analytics, Angela is responsible for generating value from their people data. She has the opportunity to shape thinking and inform strategy. Her job i...

Sandra Loughlin is the Chief Learning Officer and the Global Head of Talent Enablement and Transformation at EPAM, a software engineering and consulting firm. Unlike many of the organizations we’ve spoken about, EPAM has been on a skills journey since its inception over 30 years ago. Building a skills-based organization has been the backbone of everything they do. In this conversation, Sandra shar...

When Oliver (Ollie) Drury joined Booking.com, they dove into digital transformation by simplifying their tech stack—and reducing variables—using a middleware to stitch everything together. That enabled them to have a simpler set of variables from which to create their skills ecosystem. Their driving goal was to solve skills for the entire organization. In this conversation, Ollie shares how they’r...

According to Gina Jeneroux, company culture sets the foundation for skills readiness. If a company culture isn’t supportive of innovation and creativity, is it ready to support an initiative to focus on skills? Skills should be infused into everything you do in your organization and supported from the top down. Gina has spent almost 40 years in the financial services and learning industries. She s...

Welcome to the newest season of Workplace Stories. It will come as no surprise that we’re devoting season 11 to continuing our conversation around skills. Why? Because there are still questions to be answered. In these opening arguments, we’ll share the questions we’re being asked, what we’re looking forward to, and we’ll give you a sneak-peak of some of the amazing guests we’ll be having conversa...

Jennifer Rogers is the Executive Officer in the Learning Technology Standards Committee at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which has 427,000+ members in over 190 countries. The IEEE is the world’s largest trade organization and the professional home for engineering and technology communities worldwide. Jennifer is an unrelenting advocate for the potential that exists...

According to Yelena Mammadova, Ed. D—the Associate Director of Learning, Skills Transformation Initiative at McKinsey—McKinsey seeks to bring impact to clients and create an organization where they attract, excite, and retain exceptional people. The primary goal of her department is to accelerate talent development. Yelena strives to connect human development and technology in her role. She is one...

Transitioning a large company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to a skills-based organization could be a daunting task. That’s why focusing on scope and purpose was an important place to start for Vandana Bhagtani and Kaye Slay. In this conversation, Vandana—The Director of Technical Talent Management—and Kaye—The User Experience and Adoption Lead for Talent and Learning Systems—share how the...

Shannon Custard—the Global Competence Development Manager at Ingka Group—is responsible for leading their global learning organization consisting of over 177,000 workers across 30+ countries globally. As they began the transition from a competence-based to a skills-based organization, Shannon wanted to focus first and foremost on frontline populations. They believe that frontline population learni...

Megan Bickle is the Director of Culture, Employee Engagement and Employee Listening at Western Digital. In Megan’s experience, roles can be viewed as a collection of skills. Viewing roles this way allows organizations to be more responsive to the evolving needs of the business in terms of the skills needed for development and hiring. Megan believes that job architecture is essential to becoming a...

The importance of creating skills-based organizations is no longer a theoretical discussion: it’s now a practical reality. To ensure that businesses reach their desired outcomes, it is necessary to ensure that their workforce has the skills needed to get the job done. Brian Richardson and Brian Hackett are deeply entrenched in helping business leaders discuss and develop the skills initiatives nee...

The world of skills is evolving rapidly thanks to technology and data which is why we are devoting yet another season to the skills odyssey. In these opening arguments, you’ll hear how we’ll shape the season, why we’re focusing on skills again, who you can expect to listen to, and what we are most looking forward to. Press play to start a new season of Workplace Stories. Connect With Red Thread Re...

Peter Tulumello is changing the culture at one of Canada’s largest grocery retailers. As a grocery chain, Sobeys has a large segment of frontline workers and with it, their own unique pain points. To understand the problems that the frontline faces, Peter recognized that he needed to get into the stores to understand frontline workers’ day-to-day roles. Listen to this interview to hear how Peter i...

What happens when a mechanical engineer tackles an L&D problem? A completely redesigned learning environment. On this episode of Workplace Stories, we interview General Mills’ Valerie Digman. Valerie describes how she helped solve a frontline training problem and improved efficiency by 5%. If you’re interested in improving efficiency and rethinking traditional training methods, you won’t want...

We’re all humans, so the needs of workers are similar across the board. John Brothers has learned this from his time as VP of Talent at Acuity. On today’s episode of Workplace Stories, John recounts his experience working through Acuity’s cultural and business mindset shift and how that has affected the frontline workforce and beyond. Connect with John Brothers John on LinkedIn Connect With Red Th...

Improving the employee experience starts with data. Rotana’s Andrew Wolhunter understands that and uses Rotana’s qualitative data to retain frontline workers in a competitive market. Andrew has an enthusiasm and infectious energy that he not only shares with his coworkers at Rotana, but he also shares this excitement with us on today’s episode. Listen in to learn how Andrew is using data to lead t...

Frontline workers face unique challenges so organizations are making changes to empower them. On this season of Workplace Stories, we’re exploring the unique challenges and positive situations happening on the frontline. On this episode, we chat with Tabatha Cronin to learn how Cargill is supporting its massive frontline labor force. Listen in to learn how Cargill dug in to understand the motivati...

Welcome back to our ninth season! We are excited about these upcoming episodes. In this season, Stacia and I focus on the frontline by discussing frontline workers with thought leaders from many organizations across various industries. Frontline workers have typically been a part of the workforce that has been swept under the rug, but during the pandemic, they were thrust to the forefront of peopl...

Frontline workers can have an outsized influence on the success of an organization. They are often the only interface our customers have with a brand. At RedThread Research, we have been diving into how to support frontline workers more holistically which is why this season we are focusing on the unique challenges that frontline workers face. We’ll also explore the changes organizations are making...

A lot has changed for managers and organizations over the last three years. So, what can be done to successfully navigate those changes so that managers can be successful and organizations can continue to thrive? The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) is designing a new framework for their managers to help them better understand what they can be doing to intentionally lead their staff. T...

In this episode of Workplace Stories we talked to Moderna’s Noah Rabinowitz and Nkiruka Ogbuchiekwe. We explore ways that managers and other leaders can question conventionality by recognizing and thinking through false dichotomies. Listen in to hear how Moderna is building its systems by putting its company culture first and by constantly questioning traditional ways of doing things. Learn more E...