Workplace Stories by RedThread Research

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 th...

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...

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...

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 peop...

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, he...

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 th...

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 thi...

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 wo...

“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...

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...

“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 al...

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...

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 a...

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 rea...

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 ma...

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, o...

“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 be...

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, cour...

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 an...

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,...

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...

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 brea...

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 t...

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 Initiati...

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, b...