L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - HR Deconstructed: Improving The Experiences and Well-being of Employees with People-centric HR

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

The Human Resources function has undergone many transformations, not least of which took place over the last 4 years. At any given time though, HR professionals from different industries and organizations are likely to have different ideas as to what their primary purpose should be. Beyond that, even those who might be in agreement as to HR's central function are likely to disagree as to how to achieve it. This week, Jon Ingham joins us to offer his insights on HR from decades teaching, writing, and practicing in the world of people strategy.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential and building a culture of learning in your organization. Today I'm speaking with John Ingham. John is an HR consultant, analyst, keynote speaker, and co-author of the book The Social Organization. He has been recognized as a top influencer and thought leader by several human resources

publications including HR Magazine, HR Executive, and HRD Connect. John's career spans multiple stints in academia, teaching people strategy and organizational development, as well as directorial positions in industry, including roles supporting thousands of employees for EY. For nearly two decades, John has been an HR educator to a plethora of industry leading professionals via private consultation, speaking, writing, and training through his strategic HR academy. Let's dive in.

Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with John Ingham. John, thanks so much for joining me. It's great to have you on the show. Great to be here. Thanks for the invite. Of course. I did a little bit of research on you before reaching out to you, and I actually found you kind of organically, I believe it was just on LinkedIn, kind of reading through a handful of other HR experts

their posts on LinkedIn and you seem to be in this sort of cohort with this cadre of thought leaders who Speak and teach about the profession of human resources from a just a very deeply analytical Perspective a deeply analytical approach you yourself are very what I think is deconstructivist I'll dive into what I mean by that probably in the subsequent questions, but your theoretical goal seems to be to determine what the end goal of HR actually should even be. I see you in some of your newsletters

and your writings kind of going through, you know, is this an inside out or an outside in approach that we should be taking? You actually post some questions that you pose to other HR experts on LinkedIn. And I do want to dive into a lot of that. But first off, I just want to ask you, is that sort of right of me to see your approach

and your work that way is really trying to determine what the end goal of HR should be? And is this what your sort of people-centric and multi-sided models represent? So yes, I think that's a really good interpretation of where I come from. I mean, we were just talking about, my main degree was in chemical engineering at Imperial College. I know you lived close by for a while. And I think it's that sort of, well, I don't know if it's the engineering perspective that still

colors what I do, but I think I did engineering as a degree because I'm interested in the way that things work. And clearly organizations are very different from, you know, sort of mechanical systems. But I think it is that key principle about trying to really understand the way that things work in order to be able to influence and build them more effectively that still colors what I do. And it's also something that I think more HR and L&D people need to focus on. The things that we do are complex, they're not simple, they're big questions that we have to deal with and try to answer. I think very often some of the biggest

questions in business actually and simple responses don't cut it. So both personally, cut it. So both personally, you know, I like trying to understand a better way of doing things. And I offer some of that thinking to people who are interested, because I think it's going to be useful for them as well. And in terms of my current focus around people-centric, or well, people-centric and strategic, which I call multi-sided HR. Absolutely. So my main focus for decades has been around helping HR, L&D act more strategically. I watched our growing focus around employee experience

and well-being and so on with a great deal of interest and sort of tried to understand what it was that we were really trying to do because I found quite a lot of the writing and thinking and action in those areas a little bit unfocused, which meant that I didn't really have very much to say around experience for a few years, but then sort of figured out for myself where I think what we're trying to do and now seek to offer a more insight-based, joined-up, higher-value approach to more people-centric ways of operating. So absolutely, that's a big focus of mine currently. It's the topic of my newsletter on

LinkedIn. And it's an area that I find tremendously interesting because it is so new. And there is so much untapped opportunity for organizations to work with their people differently. Yeah, it became a major interest of mine as well, just reading through your material, I really got sucked into some of your newsletters and just your even your posts on LinkedIn. You wrote one recently, I want to address that sort of on the lack of focus that you mentioned and addressing these big questions. I think they actually start with sort of the micro ideas that we seem to be working with in HR, because as I mentioned before, you have what I think is kind of a deconstructivist approach, which by that, I mean that you are looking at language that is commonly used in these worlds in business in

general, but also in the world of HR and probably L&D and leadership, executive education, those sorts of things. And you're breaking down those words. You're saying, what do we actually mean by activities, by the word activities, by the word capital? And then you're talking about inputs and outcomes and you're looking at the classic sort of business value chain and your goal in the social organization is where I was reading this from you and Dave Aldrich. The goal is to really demonstrate

with as much precision and clarity, what actually adds value to a business. And then from there, it seems that the goal is to determine, okay, what do each of these departments that we're working with and, you know, mostly HR, how do we add to that value chain and therefore, you know, further the business's goals? Yes. I just want to ask you, from the perspective of an HR professional in particular, how should one encourage their organization to seek parity and mutual understanding about language in particular? Because I've had so many, this is like my 50th or 60th conversation somewhere in there

on this podcast, and I feel like now having read from your material that I've probably had a lot of conversations using the same words, you know, big business words, or big HR words that didn't quite match up between the people that I was talking to. And I'm sure that's also true, you know, inside of organizations. So from an HR perspective, how deep do we go in teaching people a mutual agreed upon understanding of language? And what are the key places maybe to actually do that within one organization? Again, I think a lot of that probably comes from an engineering perspective, or maybe because I do lots of sort of organization design and designing processes. For example, I spent lots of time in groups trying to design a particular thing, but increasingly

understanding that the complexity, the frustration in the process is because we're all using the same words, actually we're designing different things and therefore, you know, nobody's sort of getting anywhere. So I do think clarity is really important, both to focus on helping undertake the right activities, to get what we actually want, and to sort of bring groups together to be able to focus on those things. So I absolutely believe and support and promote the need for clear terminology in HR. Now, I don't think we're ever going to get there across the profession. So occasionally, different groups have tried to promote a standard perspective on things like employee engagement, for example, because 200, 300 different definitions of what engagement means. We're never going to get that. The term is

too entrenched or used and used differently. We're never going to come up with a standard definition. And perhaps we shouldn't even try. One of the things which I think is very important in developing a lot of different aspects of people and organization, including engagement, is the different attributes will be needed by different organizations. And therefore, one organization perhaps can define engagement in this particular way, a different organization differently. And both of those things may be absolutely appropriate for those organizations. And therefore, standard definition, firstly, isn't feasible, and secondly, probably isn't helpful. What I think is important is that within

a particular organization, we have a consistent view about what we're trying to achieve, and therefore, what engagement means for a particular business, because otherwise, again, we're not going to get anywhere. And I think it's important to be able to talk about these things. Again, some organizations don't like talking about engagement or culture. They just think some of these terms are sort of too fluffy and not business-like and I just think that's stupid. And some organizations don't like using specific terminology for them

because they think again, these things are human and nebulous and social and therefore, it is true. Yeah, it's it's sort of unhelpful to use scientific terminology to refer to them. And my experience is that unless we have that clarity, both in terms of the terms, and the frameworks or models that we're using to connect different elements together, we just end up messing around, not really achieving very much. You know, if we can have the... And look, I mean, again, as I said earlier, organizations are different to engineering type systems. So the value chain model, for example, you referred to, I use an awful lot because it's helpful and helps us focus.

But I wouldn't suggest treating an organizational value chain in the same way as treating an organizational value chain in the same way as something in engineering. There probably are cause and effects, but those are much more complex. The relationships between them are sort of all over the place. And A may cause B, but B will cause A. But at the same time, you can broadly understand if we do this, we're likely to get that, which will lead to something else. And I think that clarity about the way that organizations in general and a particular organization more specifically, that's really important. I also think it's important to distinguish terminology from jargon.

So things like human capital, for example, I talk a lot about because I think it's important to distinguish terminology from jargon. So things like human capital, for example, I talk a lot about because I think it's an important term to get that clarity and that focus. Please don't go around talking to your employees about human capital or even worse, calling them human capital, partly because that's not what the term actually means. So, but yeah, HR conferences, HR books within HR teams, having that clarity, having that terminology is important. If we use it out of those contexts, terminology becomes jargon, that's unhelpful. Another moment in early in the social organization,

I actually wanna read a quote from it because I think this is kind of the next step up from that level of like minute or acute word based clarity or individual words. Okay. It's you wrote, when I look into the learning and growth perspective, I will always find plenty of objectives for activities, but very rarely anything for inputs or outcomes. And this is where that book starts is defining essentially those three things, activities, inputs, outcomes, because those are in each of the, you know, links of the value chain, I guess you might say. Those are the things that then lead into what comes next. And you define, first of all, those three things pretty clearly. But you after this quote, you go on to say, this is sort of a bias that we have.

We prefer tangible over intangible results, which, you know, no question there. That's, you know, I think we're all aware of that to some extent, but we still fall into that trap of doing things that we can see the results of, even if those results are not maybe long-term or significant. And this to me just kind of sounds like that question of in the

learning and development world, the return on investment, which is always a very sticky place. It's it's how do we demonstrate to the stakeholders that what we're doing by teaching our people has that long term outcome, we can always give them the happy sheets or the surveys, the satisfaction surveys that allow them to say that this was a good training. I feel as if I grew, I experienced this, but how do we demonstrate impermeably? How do we prove that this is actually going to create some sort of important change? So I just want to ask you, how do you think that we should adopt that, what you call like a strategic path focusing on the outcomes?

If those outcomes are maybe a little bit more nebulous, hard to observe, harder to measure, what do you think? And actually, I was thinking about this myself, because I mean, you've obviously been to ATD and New Orleans fairly recently. And I've only been to ATD once. I presented on a strategic approach to measurement a few years ago. And we're sort of talking about why the sort of Kirkpatrick model doesn't work that well. And also things like sort of Jack Phillips' approach to measuring ROI in L&D.

And both of those approaches, I think, are sort of halfway there. Where I think they fall wrong is sort of trying to put in too much. Yeah, I mean, I love models. I love frameworks. But frameworks should always be flexible and used flexibly and sort of used fairly lightly, I think, because so much of the way that organizations work is complex. So the value chain we were just talking about to me is the basis for measurement in L&D and potentially for calculating ROI as well. So we need to understand the outcomes we're trying to create

and whether that skills, knowledge, attitudes, whatever it is that we're trying to change a more capable organization, whatever it may be. Think through the activities that will do that, whether any inputs are required and sort of understand that value chain to give us that clarity and focus about what we're trying to do.

And my experience, and actually I got this from Kaplan and Norton's writing about business scorecards and business strategy maps, where they were talking about measurement in businesses sort of quite a few decades ago now. And in one of their books, they wrote about a spark of inspiration when they realized that when they were struggling with executive teams trying to understand how to measure something, actually the issue very often was the executives weren't clear enough about what they were trying to do. And once they got that clarity about the strategy, actually identifying measures was fairly simple. Another key source for me was the book, or I can't remember the author of that,

Hubbard, on how to measure anything. I think it's a really, really good book on measurement. And one of the things that Hubbard explains is that you can measure anything. Again, the key thing is the clarity about why something is important. As soon as you understand it's important, the real-be measures even if the thing itself is subjective and intangible and nebulous. To me, it's that the value chain approach. Once you understand the connections, the relationships, the cause and effect,

the complexity between all these different elements, identifying measures should be relatively simple and it's much better to measure L&E or HR in a particular organization that way than trying to bolt on something sort of constraining that isn't natural or intrinsic to the organization like some of Kirkpatrick's or Philip's thinking. And again, once you understand the value chain and you understand the inputs, and including in financial terms and the outcomes, which will have a financial consequence as well,

you know, the ROI sort of falls out of that, but tends to be more of a, perhaps a qualitative conversation rather than a quantitative number, perhaps. Hopefully there was something in that which helped answer the question. Please do. Yeah. I, another thing that I read from you is that, I mean, you, you at one point, right, I think it's in the book, you know,

there are net promoter scores, there are surveys, there are lots of things that you can do to collect simple data that is mostly qualitative but becomes quantitative. But you can also have conversations. You can always sit down with your people and learn from them about how they grew or their experience.

Focusing on sentiment, I think, is usually the goal as you write about it. But that's harder to do, is kind of what you say in that same paragraph. Having a conversation and tracking that for meaningful data that you then feed back into the system is just simply harder to do. And I mean, I'd love if you could have any,

if you have any advice as to how to take conversations and turn that sort of, you know, loose qualitative data into something impactful. For me, it really just seems like you have to have a system of, you know, leadership led, you know, by managers and by executive leaders. It really has to be from those folks who are maybe initiating the conversations

and then maintaining what they learned from them in some meaningful way, not only sort of in their practice as they help their direct reports grow, but also in a database that is then utilized by others. It really seems like kind of like a big data plate where you have conversations and you maybe AI will help with this in the future or something like that. Yeah, I was just thinking. I mean, to me, yes. So measuring qualitative data, yeah, I'd still say is quite difficult. But it's rapidly getting much easier, you know, with increasing, well, just analytical capability in general, but AI in particular.

It isn't always difficult. Sometimes this is amazingly easy. And the example which is in my head, and I'm not sure how helpful it's going to be, but it's there, so I'll share it. So I was doing some work with an organization, and this is, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago now, but they were trying to develop, I'd had a conversation with them about, well, actually, it was probably around social capital. So the same sort of thing that I wrote about in the social organization and sharing some case studies around that, including Whole Foods stores, which had this idea of creating love in the organization. And they got really interested in that and wanted to create love or sort of a deep sense of emotional regard for, between

colleagues in the organization. And I was having a conversation with a business executive and we got onto measures and started this really long complex, not particularly edifying conversation around how we would measure love. And I just didn't feel it was getting anywhere. So I just thought, look, if I came back in and had a conversation with you in 12 months time, and asked you if love had increased in the organization, would you be able to tell me if it had? And, you know, again, we hadn't quite sort of got to a consistent understanding of the terminology and what we were trying to do. But even so, they were all able to say, yeah, you know, it's difficult to measure, but we know if

it's there, we'll sense it, we'll know it, we will be able to tell you. So I said, well, invite me back in 12 months time, I'll go around the group, say yes, no, you know, I'll give you, I'll tell you what the percentage figure who said yes was, that's your measure. You know, do, I'll tell you what the percentage figure who said yes was, that's your measure. You know, do you, why, what would be the benefit in going into huge amounts of detail, setting up mechanisms to capture quantitative data, and then I present that data back to you and you probably ignore it and make your own minds up anyway. Let's just ask what's important, which is do you think it's increased? So, you know, sometimes actually qualitative judgments are very simple and often get at the heart of what's important. The CIBD

in the UK did some really interesting research around ROI in L&D, again, it must be what, sort of 15, 10 years, 20 years ago, which they're called the value of learning. And they suggested that, yes, sometimes you do need to calculate an ROI, but actually, you know, in most cases, the more apt, useful, important metric is simply the value, you know, in the minds of your stakeholders. So if you can get clarity what they're after and then find a potentially relatively easy way of measuring that, you know, there's often no point actually even trying to calculate ROI because it's not what your stakeholders are interested in.

I do think there's a lot of cases these days where a specific category of upskilling or rescaling is being pushed through. And I honestly think that those things are probably easier to measure than, you know, your traditional sort of learning and training where happy sheets were more commonly used. This does seem like a good piece of advice though, you know,

just thinking really critically, what are the questions that you might ask on a satisfaction survey? Something like, do you feel more love in this organization than you did a while back or something like that seems to be a more specific or a better question than, did you enjoy this training in this moment that you just took kind of an over time observation?

And again, it's about starting in that context in terms of a survey or something. It's about starting with that clarity in outcome. You know, so many organizations will try to measure love or experience or propensity to stay in an organization or progress against someone's potential or whatever it is through an engagement survey because the engagement survey is what they have.

But it really is putting the cart before the horse. Start with the outcome, figure out what's important, and then put in place a measurement mechanism and individual measures, survey items, and so on to be able to measure what's important rather than trying to sort of retrofit something that you've got. I've come prepared with something along these lines. So the conference board, if you're familiar with it, they do regular surveys where they talk to usually between a thousand and two thousand employees and then leadership from whatever category they're specifically chatting with

every quarter, every half of year kind of. Last month they released one that was very HR centric. They said that 62% of employees said their well-being is the same or worse than six months prior, despite increased investment in resources to address this. So I actually, I remember reading the same survey from last year and I think it was a pretty similar number. I talked about it in one of my prior shows. I might have to fact check myself, but I remember about half or a little more than half

were not feeling as good or feeling the same as six months ago of employees surveyed. The interesting thing beyond this in this survey, 95% of CHROs will maintain or increase their well-being investment for the rest of this year. And I think it was something like in the 60s, percent of CHROs are going to seek to create new programs that will support, you know, improved well being. You've talked about well being a good amount in your writings. I'm just curious what you think about this. Are we spending our budgets wrong? If it just like doesn't really seem as if this is working out well? Are we too focused on activities and not on those outcomes? What would you say

about this? Okay, so yes. So as you came to the end of that question, I was just starting to think how I'd bring that back to what we discussed earlier. Absolutely, I think that's the key. So firstly, what does well-being mean? What are you trying to do with your people? I guess the reason that I refer to it a lot at the moment is because of my increasing focus around this people-centric or multi-sided HR. And I see engagement very much as the sort of key focus that most organizations

had from a strategic HR perspective of trying to help their people get more focused on doing what the business needs. So it's a business centric rather than people centric perspective, whereas well-being or perhaps fulfillment or flourishing, there are different words around and they can be defined in different ways. But something around that is a much more natural term for the value that somebody receives from an organization for themselves, rather than what helps them provide more value to the business. So, engagement is a strategic HR concept, well-being a people-centric one,

but we need to unpick it and understand what it means. And I suppose my central perspective to people-ering HR is treating people as real customers, you know, figuring out what they want to need and helping deliver that for them. And so, you know, for me, well-being is, you know, is whatever your people want, both across the workforce, within groups, and as individuals as well. groups and as individuals as well. So we need to get much better at really understanding what it is we're trying to deliver. And again, as we've been saying, using something like the value chain, as soon as you've got that clarity about the outcome, then you can start to think, you know, what would be a sensible activity in this context? And it probably just isn't just a, you know, a well-being app or a, you know,

a more fun office environment or whatever. You know, it's, there are so many central aspects of organizations which we can change as soon as we apply that people-centric mindset to our organizations. You know, fundamentally, I think where many organizations are now is that we're still designing organizations and the work of an organization and the way that we treat our people to make the business successful and then we're trying to increase the experience of doing those things. But it's a little bit like sort of lipstick on the pig, you know, it's dressing up something

which is fundamentally still very clunky from a people perspective. Whereas what we really need to do is completely redesign what we're doing, creating something that works for business and for people at the same time. And I think if we do that, we get much closer to achieving engagement and wellbeing and really making a difference.

And so I forgot to say, the stats that you quoted from the conference board absolutely don't surprise me. You know, I mean, there was just so much work and so many pressure in so many organizations these days. Yeah, people are struggling and I really do think we, we, we need to find a way to, to, to break through and make employment feel different to people. And again, that's very much what I'm trying to do through this, uh, people centric, multisided approach to HR.

You wrote a three-part piece in your newsletter that I read through starting, I think end of last year until a couple months ago And you went through how you observed this conversation between Dave Ulrich Joe Pine and then your own little response to them and You in that piece you just described you described what you just described as well sort of outside in versus inside out I think which is are we creating value for our people within the organization or are we improving their capability to contribute to the organization, which in turn theoretically, you know, gives a greater experience for all involved because of, you know, increased benefits and just, you know, greater success of an

organization yields better experience. Hopefully, it should. I think we all agree on that. I'm curious if you ever got an answer from Joe Pine when you asked him something along the lines of, is it a company's responsibility to create, I think, memorable experiences within their workplace, within their work style?

Because I think it was Joe who talked about the importance of creating memorable experiences as a company through your product or your service, because that's how you differentiate yourself these days is you create a memory and then people will return. So I want to know what you think now because this was a while back, but in terms of crafting memorable work experiences, I agree with you. We're doing that with organizations that are still clunky and aren't really designed for that.

And I also think there's a generational difference between who's in the workforce right now. I would argue that the younger folks in the workforce are much more inclined to treat their jobs as a pretty distinct part of their life and do that thing where working at a company allows you to have fulfilling memorable experiences elsewhere in life.

So what do you think about this now that you've maybe had some time to stew over it now that we've been talking about it a little bit? Yeah, I, sometimes I, yeah, I mean, it was really just all part of that process and be sort of thinking through for myself what I think organizations need to do around experience and wellbeing and so on. And then, you know, trying to share that

as broadly as possible. And both Dave Ulrich and Joe Pines, who's the author of the Experience Economy, one of the leading books around experience. I mean, it's sort of written, I think around the 1990s. But some great thinking around what experience means. So I absolutely, he was a wonderful conference and I took a little bit of time to reflect on it

and try to work out for myself what I thought it meant. So I love Dave Ulrich's thinking and he very much connects experience to wellbeing, which I think is really useful. And Joe, yeah, his approach is to connect it to memorable experiences. And he has that focus because he recognizes that most of what we do around experience in many organizations is what he calls nice, convenient convenient and efficient. I think it is. Yeah, nice, convenient and easy, yes.

And he says, you know, just by making something nice, convenient and easy, it doesn't really touch the sides. You know, it doesn't do anything that's particularly important or transformational. Whereas if you can provide a memorable experience for somebody, you set yourself up for a much more impactful level of success, a higher level of value. And I suppose most of my reflection in my post was about that although there are many similarities between customer experience and employee experience,

employment isn't actually like buying something on the website. We have a much longer term perspective, and even younger generations who work may only be a small part of their lives. I still think it's a longer term. It's a different type of consideration. And I'm not convinced that there are absolutely some people who come to work for a fun, memorable experience, absolutely. But I think a lot of people, they want to do more than just something that's memorable.

And what I really like about Joe Pine's thinking, and he did write about this in his original book on the experience economy, but he's now writing a new book on transformational experiences. So for him, the next stage of building experience is to move on to helping people transform. And that to me has a much closer connection between what we can do with consumers.

We want to help consumers, customers transform, but also inside organizations, absolutely many, many people, I believe, join an organization to achieve some sort of transformation in their wellbeing, whether that's about learning new things or becoming healthy or moving somewhere in some sort of way. And I think there's a huge opportunity to connect with that and on a very personal basis to help people transform in a way which is meaningful for them, which is their own individual definition of well-being. So, sorry, so no, I didn't get an answer from Joe and I must admit I've

not taken the opportunity to follow up with him, although I should have done. I suppose partly because I think personally that I know what the, I'm not sure how, well actually I think I do know how Joe would respond to that question. And I think I have a different answer. My answer is no, organizations don't necessarily need to provide a memorable experience.

It's one way of competing, but providing something which is memorable is probably still better to provide a memorable experience. It's one way of competing, but, you know, providing something which is memorable is probably still better than providing something which is just easy, convenient, or... Sure. Or zero one. But it's still not enough. You know, the big opportunity for me in organizations

is to provide experience which is transformational. And that's where I think we should be looking. The conference board also reported that more than 80%, I have it here actually, 84% of US, this is the US as well, but I assume there's some parity in other regions, 84% of employees see their employer as at least partially responsible for wellbeing.

82% report that their organization is committed to their wellbeing. So it does seem like there's an agreement that, we're all in it together here. Like our organizations are doing something to some extent, or at least acknowledging that it is part of their job. And people are acknowledging that, this is important to my life, that this is impacting me.

Conference board also gives a handful of recommendations at the end as they generally do from their own sort of consultative team. One of the things that stuck out to me, they say that extending wellbeing responsibility and accountability beyond HR and to broader leadership might be the answer here, which to me just, it feels like, well, like no shit.

Everybody in the organization should care about everybody else. And in particular, one's leaders, one's individual person manager, people manager, should be putting in some effort to ensure that their direct reports are doing well, more than in the past because of where we are as a society right now. I mean, just very simply put, you know, we've

had a pandemic in the last five years and its business has been tough. That doesn't mean that leaders should be altering themselves radically to be caretakers. But it seems obvious to me that HR is not, should never be solely responsible for, the wellbeing of the company. Just having one department that is dedicated to that seems silly to me. But the conference board is saying, thread that through leadership,

thread it to the company more broadly, and also embed it into your sort of like communication and branding and just take on like a more, I don't know, full fledged well being focused, you know, style of being kind of and that that seems like a lot of work for sure. But, you know, starting with the idea that everybody should kind of embrace the value of spreading well being and focusing on that with their people that they're responsible for and that they're just around at work, and then

into communications and branding internally and all of those things. How do you feel about that idea, those ideas in general? Well, firstly, thank you for sharing that. I love a lot of what the conference board do, and I'd not come across that research. So, and I'm really, really pleased to hear that so many people think that their organization

does care about their wellbeing. And I think it's important that we do. The word they use is committed to their wellbeing, cares about. I'm not entirely sure, but in some way, you know, whether it's maybe superficial, it does appear that people think, yes, my organization is committed. So that's the data that we have. It's probably still a lot higher than it was prior to the pandemic, would be my guess.

I'm sure, yes. But I do think it's been challenged over the last couple of years in many organizations as well. And obviously, the many layoffs in many sectors, technology and elsewhere, probably hasn't helped. I mean, again, depending on the way you define well-being. But, yeah, so it's good that that commitment is perceived. I think what's lacking is perhaps still some action on behind that commitment or effective action. I suspect that, and I will have a look at the research, but I suspect that where people were asked, you know, is your organization doing useful things for you to help your well-being, the response might be a

little bit less. And I suppose that then colors my response to the second part of your question about responsibility. I completely agree, everybody in an organization should be responsible for, responsibility. I completely agree everybody in an organisation should be responsible for you know the well-being of the people that they're interfacing with, responsible for, are leading and so on. I think there is an important distinction between responsibility and accountability. So responsibility, you know who does what, accountability who has the as well, accountability who has the ownership, who has to make something work. And I know that I'm probably in a minority on this across the profession, both HR and L&D. Personally, I believe strongly that HR should take more accountability for the outcomes which are important, whether that's engagement, level of. And perhaps it's the chief executive, but the chief executive has already got a lot

of different accountabilities. Personally, as HR, I would stick my hand up and say, yes, that's me. You know, I'm accountable for this. And that's important. And that makes HR and L&D more important as well. I know lots of organizations and lots of practitioners don't like having important things like well-being being associated with HR because yeah once it's an HR thing that sort of makes people feel less attracted to it and but that's the fundamental problem you know

as long as HR and L&D you know as long as people see things which are HR things or L&D things in that sort of way, then we're never going to have the impact in organizations that we need. So, first of all, we need to change that. We need to find a way so that when people hear that something is an HR initiative or an L&D initiative, they understand it's important because it's an HR initiative or an L&D initiative or, you know, that they understand is important because it's an HR initiative. And, you know, so let's focus on growing well well-being, but let's focus on ensuring that where something is seen as an accountability of HR, that's a good thing, not a bad

thing. I think that's important as well. Absolutely. And then in terms of communication, yeah, absolutely. We need to be much more focused around wellbeing and one way of ensuring that is to be talking about it more and to make sure that people do see that the commitment is there and that they're thinking through for themselves. Because yes, I agree, you know, the employer needs to be responsible for these. But so is the individual. And a lot of what leads to effective well-being is personal.

And therefore, a lot of it has to be led by the individual. So by communicating its importance and what it is and what the organization is doing, you know, that by the individual. So by communicating its importance and what it is and what the organization is doing, you know, that helps the individual sort of step up and think about the things that they could do themselves as well. I want to wrap up with one last question about the deeper future. You are familiar with the work of Robin J. Suthasen and John Boudreaux. I think you've actually maybe done some talks or interviewed them or something along those lines. They're coming out with a new book or maybe it's just Robin, but there's a new book. I think it's the skills based organization October so we still have a bit of time later this year

But that's a big part of what they do and in particular I think what Robin does is focus a focus on skills talking about how AI will impact work and How we're probably going to be breaking down jobs into skills. And, you know, job descriptions may look very different in the future and how we work may look very different in the future, with a much greater focus on individual skills and how one can support an organization that way instead of just a simple description. that way instead of just a simple description. This to me brings up a lot of HR based questions. If somebody is working more as a skill based entity, they may have a much different experience with who leads them. They could have many leaders from various departments and be dealing with

different teams and different kinds of collaborations. It also just kind of alters the focus of, you know, who somebody is within an organization. And from an HR perspective, that to me seems like it would create challenges for all the things that you do and addressing well-being, addressing engagement. It just seems like it would it breaks down the organization in a new way that creates new challenges. And especially when you're talking about human-centric. So I'm just curious what you think about that. Ken, how does maybe a greater focus on skills in the future impact HR's ability to be human-centric?

Does that support or detract? Does it depend on how we react to these changes? What do you think? Gosh, again, so many sort of sub questions within that. So again, thank you for highlighting that forthcoming book. I must admit I've not come across that. And yes, it sounds right up my street. So I will look out for it. And I'm sure I will post my thoughts on it as it comes out. I mean, I mentioned the conference with Dave Ulrich and Joe Pine that I did sort of three posts on. I think John and Ravin's last book, I think I did four or five posts on that and the skills-based organization may get a similar number.

I think skills are important. I mean, I think they have been for decades, but clearly the increasing focus on upskilling and reskilling makes it even more so. The increasing opportunity for people contributing to their organization in different ways makes skills a more natural focus as well. I don't personally believe that jobs are going to disappear. I think job descriptions have or should have already changed significantly anyway, and skills absolutely needs to be a big part of that. Or sort of the role

description that someone has that enables them to participate based on their skills and so on. I think there's a lot more than skills as well, by the way. I personally think we need to focus on broader capabilities and interests and what a person wants to do as well as what they can do. But obviously skills is the tangible bit that we were talking about before. So yes, technology can manage skills more effectively, which is part of the reason we need to focus on them. But I do think that psychological issue that you referred to earlier,

that people focus on the tangibles and forget about the intangibles, is yet again another factor here that we're going so far on skills, but forgetting about all those other things we're going so far on skills, but forgetting about all those other things that make aligning people and work more important. And then how do skills impact the people-centric organization?

So I think it's really important that we do focus on people-centricity as well as a strategic approach to organizational management. But very often, I think you do find that the things an organization wants, a business wants, and people want are actually very similar. And I think skills falls into that camp. People want to upskill and rescale just as much as their businesses do. They may sometimes want slightly different skills, but there's a huge level of commonality between the two groups.

And therefore, I don't think skills necessarily changes people-centric HR that much because we should have already bought the skills or has always sort of needed to be part of the approach. I think what it changes potentially. I don't know. I mean, in my comments on John and Raven's last book on work without jobs, my major focus there was that everything they wrote about was absolutely appropriate. You know, the need to break down jobs, to look at using contingent workers, to use different technologies, including AI. And actually, their book on that already had a fairly people-centric perspective. I mean, one of the things I was really pleased to see is when they were talking about contingent workers, they also looked at good work for contingent workers. We tend to think about good work for employees, and we forget about contractors. But the thing that I thought was missing was the upfront bit,

which has been the focus of our conversation. You know, why is somebody working in the organization? What are they trying to achieve? What are the outcomes of the work? Because as soon as you can understand that, you can potentially increase the value that somebody is providing. And that's much more important, I think, than how you can then automate

or use different types of workers to do the work. You know, what is the work? How can we make the work more valuable? That should be the first thing. And I think the key sort of blend around skills and people centricity for me is it gives us one more way of doing that. How do we use skills and the opportunity to use,

for people to use skills as a basis to contribute in different ways as the opportunity to increase the value that people are able to provide both for the business and for themselves at the same time. So it's in a sense, I'm guessing I'm going to agree with most of what we're having rights about. But the missing piece, I suspect, may be that starting piece. Let's be clear about why we're using what we're trying to do with skills, and let's

ensure that that's a sort of mutual benefit for employees as well as the employer. Yeah, I think a lot of organizations are striving to become the place where their employees, at least their strongest employees, are going for upskilling instead of, you know, leaving and exiting or, you know, re-educating themselves elsewhere, staying within that organization and learning there. I mean, there are people who are dedicating their research to that entirely that I've had on this show, observing organizations that are doing that Michelle Weiss for instance learning and earning reentry pathways she has a specific term for this but you know encouraging people to

Alternate between learning and earning when it's something as serious as AI Based up skilling is what you need to do It does seem like organizations are kind of embracing that opportunity To to be the place where their people sort of learn and embrace new skills. And I hope to see that too. I think it makes the most sense. Me too. And by the way, I think that connects very nicely with that earlier conversation we were having about employee experience and transformation. There are other opportunities

to help employees transform and helping them learn, but learning is probably the most natural way to achieve that. So as we start to focus more on offering personal transformation to employees, helping them learn in their own context against their own objectives has got to be a sort of a bigger part of the value proposition we offer them as well. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well, John, I'll wrap up here before I let you go.

Can you just let our listeners know where they can learn more about you? Sure. Well, I do post quite often, not recently, but hopefully by the time the show goes out, I'll have been posting again on LinkedIn. So I'm just linkedin.com slash in slash John Ingham. John is just J-O-N, J-O-N Ingham. And most of my work takes place through a digital learning academy, aiming to support HR, HR and L&D practitioners own transformations and that's available at johningham.academy.

All right, wonderful. Thanks again for joining me. This was a great conversation. Thank you, really enjoyed it. For everybody listening at home, appreciate you tuning in. We will catch you on the next episode. Cheers.

You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. You've been listening to L&D in Action, a show from Get Abstract. Subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't forget to give us a rating, leave a comment, and share the episodes you love. Help us keep delivering the conversations that turn learning into action. Until next time.