Episode 8

Cia: Welcome to Employee Activation, the HR podcast that takes you into the minds of some of the world's brightest workforce strategists to find out how they make both their employees, and their organisations thrive. What does the future of work really look like? With AI and automation transforming roles across every industry, we're being forced to ask some big questions.

What tasks still belong to humans? How do we design work for a world where machines and people operate side by side? And most importantly, how do we prepare our workforce to thrive in this new environment?

I’m Cia Kouparitsas and today I'm joined by Pav Bilkhoo, a workforce transformation leader from Lace partners in the UK. Pav works with some of the world's most progressive organisations to reimagine what work looks like in the age of automation.

Today, we'll explore what it takes to redesign work, match the right people to the right tasks, and build the mindset and skills needed for a future that is already here.

Pav, welcome to the podcast.

Pav: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Cia: Now Pav, let's start with your story. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your career so far, and how you found yourself working in workforce strategy and transformation, which I would say is arguably one of the most exciting areas of HR, at LACE Partners.

Pav: I agree that it is the most exciting part of consulting at the moment. So I am a proud HR professional. I've spent the last 15 years working with HR leaders to do all sorts of interesting things. So firstly, lots of transformation of the function itself. So new operating models, new ways of working, and new technology primarily. And then I had the opportunity to do more work with the centres of expertise. And that's where I realised you get to solve business problems that leaders come to you with and start working with the broader workforce. And I got hooked. And I have been doing talent and skills work ever since, and whether that's part of transformation programs or actually just individual projects to make work meaningful for people.

Cia: I love that. And before we jump into the skills and skilling revolution, I just want to ask, is this an area that you've seen significantly just explode in recent months, years?

Pav: Yeah, and we can talk a bit about that if we if we go back to kind of Covid years and where the future of work came from.

But I think people now are being pushed by, you know, national governments to think about productivity. I think there is a huge amount of excitement around AI. And those two things are really coming together and culminating in lots and lots of good conversation. Not always action, but definitely good conversation.

Cia: Absolutely. So with those conversations that you're having, what would you say are the most common challenges or blockers that organisations are facing when they are trying to prepare for reskilling the future of work, all of those things.

Pav: And I think we almost need to unpack that future of work terminology as well. Like it was totally propelled forward during the Covid years and that many of the financial services, technology companies I was working with, certainly at the time, used Covid as a context to rethink how employees use workspaces, and that was quite liberating for them. You know, cost came into it and they were actually able to, you know, say, how much are we going to use this sort of office space? And then in parallel, different types of organisations like retailers, hospitality, consumer product businesses, they were focused more on redeploying skills that they had during that time.

And so they were thinking about concepts of skills, how you can get work done and which skills were adjacent. And now, as you rightly say, is introduction to this podcast. The future of work has come to mean something slightly different. It's all about AI's impact on jobs and that work human relationship. And this is something that most organisations, as I say they are, they are starting to think about, starting to grapple with. What's the biggest blocker? The biggest blocker is which time horizon should we use?

And I mean, we've never lived in such an uncertain time. So it's not an easy question to ask. And the recommendation that I use with lots of my clients is focus on the next two years. You've got tangible examples of where AI can help your workforce, and you've got some real insight into pockets of your workforce where AI is going to be most disruptive so you can start making decisions, not just planning or having lovely discussions about concepts. And once you've done that two year time horizon, you might feel confident enough to start thinking about something that's more three years in your time horizon, maybe five. And when you're thinking about 3 to 5 years, it might only be relevant to certain parts of your organisation. So yeah, I guess the advice is start with something that's way more tangible that you can get your heads around and you can get your business to buy into.

Cia: I think that's such a good shout. First of all, calling out that the future of work is this buzzword terminology that we all use. But what does it really mean? Because its definition by definition changes constantly, because the future is the future. But I love the idea of the time horizons as well, because I think you're right that we've all got line of sight and budgets and organisational goals for the next, you know, two years beyond that who knows what the world might look like as well. I know we can have the best of intentions with planning, but as we've seen with AI, automation, augmentation, things are changing at a pretty rapid rate. And I would love to use that to segue into this idea that, you know, how work is getting done has been largely shifted with AI, and particularly starting to automate some of those repetitive and routine tasks.

How quickly do you think organisations need to review and redesigned how work is structured in light of all of this technological change?

Pav: In my experience, and this is best practice, we need to be reviewing how work gets done at every opportunity, not just during a transformation program, not just during a specific project. But I know that it's quite hard if you haven't got that kind of innate or that muscle built around work design. You're always thinking about organisation, design or restructure. And but there are just so many advancements in technology that can have an impact, as you say, on how work gets done. And all these little bits of automation start to make a huge difference when it comes to designing meaningful work.

And so you can start to remove unnecessary tasks, making the best use of skills that you have today. And I think that message hasn't quite got through yet. It feels like when you're talking about work design, it's a huge undertaking. It requires you to unpick job descriptions. It requires you to have a huge ontology around skills and a taxonomy that people buy into.

But really, if you think about it, people are using Copilot. People are using ChatGPT every single day is that if you put that into the context of how people do their jobs and therefore how they become more productive and can release capacity to do different things or reskill themselves. That just builds that muscle around redoing or reviewing work. So one thing I say to my clients is every time a leader says to you as an HR professional, I want to do an operating model change or I want to restructure my team because somebody's leaving or somebody's going on maternity leave.

They have to think about redesigning work firThst. They might even find that they don't need to restructure, because a whole task has been moved to a different way of working, or you're using extra capacity because you've converted that piece of work into a project. So you've made the role more productive without having to do something more drastic.

Cia: Do you support at both the organisation level as well as that individual leader level? Because I'm sure many organisations, you know, a large and they've got progressive teams who are there to solve these kinds of problems.

But then you've also got smaller organisations that may not have those budgets, and you've got individuals trying to do it, like how would you recommend that balance goes.

Pav: There's got to be different solutions for different sizes of organisation. You're completely right. So where you've got your big hairy organisations, ones that I'm used to working with, they often have an HR function or an org effectiveness function that is really working with those business leaders on a day-to-day basis. So it's easy for us to influence the methodologies and approaches that are used by those teams.

For slightly smaller organisations, and those ones, those smaller ones tend to be a bit more tech savvy, a bit more progressive. We will work with individual leaders where HR just don't have the capacity to start those conversations. There might be smaller teams. So we can support across the board. But you know where you want to make meaningful change, it's always at that leader level. It's just, you know, when they see some real productivity gains or they see some value, they are more likely to evangelise that to their peers.

Cia: I love that, and certainly supporting the manager is something that we're very focused on at WithYouWithMe as well. And I think I'd like to explore that a little further, because when we are looking at changing work and individuals with current skill sets who are needing to evolve and align with the needs of an organisation, there are a couple of different ways to look at it.

I know at WithYouWithMe, we talk a lot about, you know, understanding the current skill and capability level, but also understanding potential for individuals to grow new skills and move in different areas. How do you think about it? Is there a way of organising work that naturally encourages employees to build skills and embrace continuous learning?

Pav: What a great question. But also the idea of potential rather than experience is why we love WithYouWithMe. And the concept of potential is such a huge part of becoming skills based and doing that at all levels of the organisation, because it's really easy to talk about potential when you're thinking about early careers, when you're thinking about school leavers and what you want to infuse in these often young people into an organisation to make them productive.

If we went back to your question around, you know, how can we encourage this more naturally in an organisation at all levels. Doing new things, doing new things will force you, to continuously learn. And that's the beauty of change, and it's a necessity when it comes to a role that will change or a role that is more project based and real time learning is now very commonplace in most organisations, whether they like it or not, whether it's a cheeky YouTube video or something that has been put in place by the organisation. But it means that that real time continuous learning is not a huge time investment.

And I guess if we go back to it, you know what happens in those real time learning situations? It's very specific to the particular problem that somebody is trying to solve at that moment in time. So it feels natural. It feels natural because you're doing something new. It feels natural because you're learning on the job and you're using that really practically. That's the only way to make it a behavioural change.

It also needs to be encouraged. So I think if we go back to your original question around blockers and you know, how we make it more natural, we have found, particularly in large corporate organisations, the role of the line manager can sometimes be quite an inhibitor of making continuous improvement or continuous learning possible. Number one, line managers often like to tell you exactly what to do or how to solve that problem. So it inhibits that curiosity muscle that we all have when we're children. And so it can be a blocker. But I do think any sort of change, anything where you're being thrown into a different situation, just makes that natural inclination of curiosity possible.

Cia: Yeah. I want to come back to that, to the blocker and the line manager. But before we do, I also love, you know, something you were saying reminded me that it's a really powerful tool to be able to empower the individual to have some control over their career in what many believed is quite a scary climate.

You know, we have a lot of customers who have call centres or marketing teams that are being impacted by technology, with roles becoming more automated, and to be able to support those individuals in the team to understand what else they might be good at and where they could direct their learning to shift to different roles in the organisation. It gives that individual the empowerment and the confidence. But for the organisation, it's often better in the long run to retain that institutional knowledge, to have those employees deployed somewhere else into the business, as opposed to having to make large scale workforce structural changes.

So that then takes me to this idea, because I want to explore balancing the need for immediate performance with this long-term goal of building a resilient future workforce. Because you mentioned line managers before, and I think that's a challenge for organisation. When you've got a line manager who just wants the person doing the job they need to do today, but then you've got the strategic imperative of the organisation to be evolving the skills for tomorrow.

How do you balance that?

Pav: I totally understand that that problem. And we do see it all the time. But in my mind, it doesn't need to be a trade-off. I have worked with a pharmaceuticals company. I won't mention them here, but they were looking to embed skill development into the performance and talent process and specifically objective setting. So anything that you are upskilling yourselves in or anything that you can demonstrate a new skill in was rewarded and it was recognised.

And that's the only way that an employee can feel like they're doing the right thing by either taking that extra time to do that, you know, online course, or they've they can feel energised to put that skill on whatever system that is being used because it is recognised. And the key to success here is that skill or whatever people are spending their time on has to be relevant for the organisation. It can't just be a passion project, it can't be a skill that, you know, they want to learn woodwork in their spare time.

That's not relevant for the organisation, but if it is relevant and you can be clear about how that particular skill development or that particular project that somebody has invested their time in is specific to the direction of the organisation. It has to be transparently rewarded and recognised through the performance process. So HR has a lot to answer for in terms of how they embed some of these sorts of short- and long-term skill building into normal HR processes.

Cia: I love that, and I think it's a good, point to make before, I want to really focus on some practical tips and tricks. And the first one I think this is going to flow really nicely is for organisations who are starting on this journey. You know, they're starting to explore automation, AI. Their roles are changing. Their workforces are changing. What's your advice on where they begin with this transformation journey?

Pav: I just say to clients, start somewhere. Experiments and pilots are your friend. They help you build a case for scaling across your organisation. But having worked with lots of large organisations across industries, I can tell you there'll be lots of experiments going on already.

And you speak to your peers and other functions, particularly technology, and they might be able to show you tech being used, for example. And finally, once you recognise where that's happening, you can start playing with things like Copilot. You can start playing with things that other parts of the business are, you know, having experiments with.

And you can do that together or you can do it independently. But I struggle to believe that there isn't stuff that's bubbling up, particularly in large organisations. For organisations where there's, you know, this is the first time they want to embark on something, I would say just start really small, start with one area where there is excitement around new technology or new ways of working and really capitalise on the value that that experiment has given you.

Cia: We speak the same language. I love a proof of concept. And so what role should HR play in driving this change? Because you mentioned, obviously the need and the demand can often come from other business units.

How can HR partner with the business or tech teams to really make this kind of thing stick?

Pav: And I feel really passionate about this one as an HR person myself. But HR have to take some responsibility here and we need to embed, as we talked about skill building or skill development into normal HR processes. Talent, performance, reward. If there isn't a skill building angle here, then you aren't embracing the future of work as far as I'm concerned.

It's also true that HR professionals in some way, shape or form, whether that's your business partnering team or your org effectiveness team. They are involved in org design projects, and so it's up to us to start speaking to business leaders about, you know, how we can make individual jobs more meaningful. How should we be embracing technology and automation? How can we make use of the best skills that we have today? And what's the skills of the future that we need to prioritise and start building?

So those conversations do often start with HR and the business together. So equipping HR as a part of a consulting firm, you know, it's up to us to start showing HR folk, what are the questions that you need to ask to get on this journey. But then HR really need to embed and embrace skills.

Cia: Can you share a real-world example of a company or an organisation that has redesigned work effectively? You know, what do they do differently and what kind of results have they seen?

Pav: I'm going to use a cliched example because it is an incredible thing that they've done. And the famous example is Unilever, because they have done so much thinking about what's right for each part of their business. They're incredibly diverse. What they've been thinking about is how work gets done, but for each segment of their business, because they are so big, because they are so broad and shock horror, it's not just one approach. So they implemented flex experiences. That's project-based work so that they can increase productivity in, in particularly some of their kind of white collar type jobs, some of their design jobs.

And it's all about boosting, as I said, productivity, but giving people license around, you know, what experiences do I want to start in undertaking? How do I do that when you don't have to change my core role? So I get to experiment, I get to build my skills, but I don't have the uncertainty of what does that mean for the longer term? So is it, you know, a great place to start for that type of their workforce?

If we look at their manufacturing and engineering part of their workforce, a completely different approach. That was very, very much skills based. And where they were looking at what are the manufacturing and engineering skills of the future? And they did some upfront investments in things like upskilling and technologies to help those parts of the business, you know, and that's large-scale investment. But they recognised very quickly that there is not just one solution to this. And different workforces need different levels of commitment when it comes to skills and when it comes to the future of work.

And the reason why I continuously use this example is because organisations see having different types of workforce as a blocker, and one of  necessarily need for other parts of your business.

Cia: I love it, and it also is a really strong case for putting the human at the centre, isn't it? Everyone is an individual, and as an organisation you can set your goals, you can set your frameworks and processes. But to have that more personalised approach for the division, but also at that human level is going to just reap benefits for things like retention and engagement and graduation rates through these training programs. And I also love that they're using that 70/20/10 model of not just formal structured training. There's on the job learning. There's mentoring, there's coaching.

It's a great example.

Pav: Yeah. And I think where and I should stop talking about blockers, but I but I do think it will resonate with people listening because this is a difficult change for, for organisations to get their head around. But I speak to organisations that might have highly safety critical workforces, and then they have lots and lots of, you know, retail staff or, you know, white collar back-office staff. And so they fall at the first hurdle because the, the highly safety critical roles require a level of depth when it comes to skills and competencies that is maybe unachievable for the rest of the organisation. And then they stop there.

And that's where I try and use, you know, Unilever use Standard Chartered to say, look, they are they are segmenting their approach by their workforce. It can be done. What is true of your highly safety critical roles is not true of where you need the biggest productivity gains, which is somewhere else in your business.

Cia: So true. Now Pav, our final question, one that we ask everyone.

How do you activate your employees or your customers employees to help them realise their potential and really align their aspirations with the organisation's goals in this era of constant change, what's your tip?

Pav: Another great question because the employee perspective is often forgotten about in favour of organisational or cost benefits when it comes to work design or skills-based organisations. So, you know, first, we as leaders need to instil confidence in our workforce. They have to understand that it is possible to make work meaningful, and they can achieve their aspirations within the organisation. Now, that is not easy to do. I think we have gone through many, many years of a) uncertainty but b) the organisation as is not the, kind of cuddly, nice place to be. They're not always on the side of employees. So I think there's a lot of trust that needs to be built within organisations for employees to really thrive. And then I think once an employee can see that this is possible, we have to show the how. People aren't naturally just going to know how to jump into something different.

So I would say upskilling or mentoring are the best ways to align an employee with the aspirations that they need for the future and I think that mentoring type relationship will allow someone to thrive through something that's quite new for them.

Cia: Such a valuable discussion path. Thank you so much. I think a lot of our listeners are going to walk away with a much clearer picture of how they can prepare their people and their organisations for this future of work concept, and for those wanting to learn more about Pav’s work or explore the resources available through LACE Partners, you can head to our website that's withyouwithme.com, and visit the Employee Activation Podcast page. You'll find practical tools and insights to help you really start to think out and build out a workforce plan that's ready for what's next. So thanks again for joining us, Pav, and we'll see you all next time.