Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Today I'm going to give you some insights on organizational redesign, job redesign, AI redesign, AI transformation from a week of many, many conversations with companies and a big article I'm going to publish this week today, I think on the move from skills based organizational strategies to task and activities based organizational strategies. So as most of you know, and I think you're probably hearing this from your own companies, there's a massive focus on organizational productivity and efficiency going on in every industry today. The consumer Sentiment Index dropped to a, I think 20 year low. The stock market's been dropping, a lot of uncertainty coming out of Washington, and of course the expectations for AI are enormously high. So if you want to really understand this and the four stages of AI, read through the rise of the Super Worker read or some of the stuff I've been talking about in the last couple of weeks. But this is pretty consistent everywhere I go. And you know, we've had at least five calls, maybe more this week with companies specifically saying we need to either stop hiring and double our growth with the people we have or reduce the headcount by some percentage because we think AI is the solution to our productivity gaps and how do we get there from here? And so we've had a whole bunch of conversations with companies about this. And so let me give you, you know, 15 or 20 minutes to think through this and there'll be lots more to talk about. Come to the Unleashed conference in Vegas in a few weeks. We're going to be doing workshops on this. I'll be talking about it, you know, in a lot of future articles and podcasts and things, and we'll show you more. A lot of this is going into Galileo. So first of all, you know, historically we've set up our companies into job families and these job families are functional. So we have it job family, sales, marketing, finance, hr, operations, logistics, distribution, research, et cetera. And people basically put their careers into these job families. And most of our careers have been spent in one or two job families. Some people move around a lot like I do, but not that many. And then within the job families, we have this proliferation of job titles that is oftentimes created in a very random fashion where a hiring manager decides they need somebody to do XYZ and they create a job title for XYZ and, and they send it to HR and we open a rack and we try to find somebody who knows how to do X, Y, Z. And so when you look at a job architecture of a large company, you see lots and lots of Job titles that are duplicative, unclear, vague. And you can sort of see when you look at the whole thing, a lot of opportunity for productivity improvement. You see the same job title in different business functions and different geographies and you kind of wonder yourself, should that be consolidated, should that be centralized and so forth. And at the top down level, the CFO or the chro or the CEO is very likely to say, our revenue per employee is behind our peers. Our product life cycle isn't moving fast enough. We're losing business in this area. Why are we, you know, in this particular market segment when it's underperforming? You know, they're likely to ask a lot of questions about productivity. And you're then going to go as an HR team and you're going to look at this job architecture and you're going to say, wow, how do we clean this up? And right now, you know, thanks to the marvels of innovation, we've got some amazing new tools. Gloat just announced a new system called Mosaic that allows you to take work and decompose it into activities and projects and tasks and find people and skills that know how to do these activities and tasks and then crowdsource this using AI. Rejig. A very interesting company is crowdsourcing and developing very detailed task models for job titles driven by AI inference. So you don't have to do job task analysis by hand anymore. You can sort of forget all that consulting work and you can use Rejig to figure out what the tasks are in different jobs, almost very highly accurately with them. And then you can decide where the overlap is and what to do about it, and drop draup. Another company that does this, that not only looks at organizational benchmarking and job analysis by function, but also looks at technologies and workloads and can say, you know, your company is focused on these technologies, your peers are focused on these technologies. Maybe you're not using the technologies of the platforms that they are, and maybe that's something you want to consider as well. And what this means to us in HR is we're suddenly being asked to get involved in all sorts of interesting projects to improve the productivity, downsize, redesign various parts of the company, including hr. Now, the first warning I would give you, which came up out of a lot of the calls we had in the meetings this week, is don't let this become a solution looking for a problem. In other words, let's not, you know, this happens all the time, but it's a little bit something to just be Aware of, rather than taking an AI tool and saying, how can we use this? Which by the way is part of the process of getting to know how these tools work. There's a healthy reason to do that. You also should be simultaneously doing what I call the tops down or bill and I call the top down analysis, which is what are the big problems in our company we want to address. So if we're a software company and we're trying to reduce the headcount because we think we can be more productive, we should do that in the context of where we want to grow and how we want to grow. And one of the companies we've been talking to recently is a software company and they're very aware of their productivity challenges and they're doing a lot of cool stuff to try to fix it. But they're also saying to themselves, well, in the middle of that, we also think we're selling our product to the wrong customer set. And so some of our lack of productivity is turnover of the customer set because the product we have is not necessarily appropriate for this particular segment of the customer base. So we could actually improve productivity just by changing what we sell to who and our product roadmap. So don't let this only be a bottoms up approach, but also look at a top down approach. Now, another example to sort of highlight this. One of the clients I talked to this week is a media company. They do advertising and marketing services and all sorts of, you know, creative stuff for their clients. And they have a large population of media professionals in different parts of the world working with different clients on different things. And that's a complicated job. I mean, you have to do creative design, you know, targeted marketing, customer brand analysis, development of campaigns, advertising positioning, buying ads and analyzing ads. I mean, this is very, very complex. You know, business they're in and there's many thousands of people that do this stuff. They're looking at this population of employees in this media management part of the company doing a task analysis of them. They happen to be using rejig to do this. And they're saying to themselves, wow, you know, there's a lot of overlap and a lot of complexity here that we could probably automate. Let's get together and talk about it. But in the context of what? In the context of improving revenue and value, not just in the context of let's do a project to reduce the number of people in this function. So that will help you build a business case for this transformation work that you want to do. Instead of getting too bogged down in the technology opportunities and the job design. Now the second thing I want to talk about relative to all this job architecture stuff is the bigger picture of layoffs. And I wrote an article on this a couple of weeks ago and it's a very interesting topic because it keeps coming up on CNBC and all the on the national press is one way of improving proving productivity is to let a bunch of people go. And you see this going on a lot in tech Salesforce workday, very well run companies, I mean on the outside at least are just simply saying we've we're going to do a layoff and that's going to improve our productivity. And the discussion under that broad statement is we're moving to AI. We need people that know how to do AI. So we're going to reallocate resources from A to B. That is a long tried and true policy of improving productivity. I mean this has been going on for a lot longer than I've been alive. Companies have been doing layoffs. GE did it. I mean there have been hundreds of books written on this. And what most of the research shows is that when you do a broad based purchase personnel reduction, you really do damage the culture and performance of the company because you tend to lay off people that have a lot of experience. You tend to lay off people that have a lot of reputational value. You lose a lot of skills. The employment brand is damaged, the customers are wondering what's going on. And it's just painful to the organization. And there's a shock of the people that remain what I call the survivor syndrome. I had, I went through quite a few layoffs in my career and in both. And I told my wife this the other day. It's kind funny. Two of the layoffs that I lived through, I was one of the only people left in the office floor that I worked in. So I came into work one day and I was, there was no one there except me. And I remember, you know, kind of thinking this is kind of depressing for me to work here when there's nobody else around. So there's that kind of stuff, but it's never going to stop. CEOs and CFOs operate this way. So one of the things that I think we have to think about as an HR team is what is our culture and experience in downsizing in productivity improvements in the past. Some companies, Seagate is a good example where they've changed this. Have a history of letting a lot of people go when products are discontinued. This happened a lot When I was at IBM in the 1980s, when a lot of the legacy products were being discontinued, the business units in IBM that sold legacy products, like, like the SNA networking stuff and things that just became out of date, they just closed down plants and they didn't really redeploy people. It was too hard, it was too complicated and they just gave people, you know, pretty good packages and, you know, IDOs.
[00:10:12] We don't need to do that anymore. I'm not saying it won't happen. It's certainly happening over at the federal government. But if you are familiar and used to doing it that way, I think this is an opportunity to challenge that experience and go back and say, well, there's another way to do this. We can redeploy people, we can reskill people. We can also grow out of our productivity gap. And I think another way to think about this is rather than thinking about growth as being dependent on hiring more people, why don't we think about growth as improving the talent density of the people we have? There's always people that need to leave. There's people that retire that, there's people that were a bad fit, there's people that don't get along, there's people that have family changes and moves and so forth. But so there's a certain amount of attrition. That's normal. But one way to get over this kind of cyclical firing thing is to say, listen, the workforce is under a lot of stress. It's hard to find great people. You know, you're never going to find a guru AI person without spending a whole bunch of money trying to recruit them. Why don't we improve the skills and capabilities of the people we have and grow ourselves out of this productivity gap? My opinion is that is a much healthier way to run a company. There will be times when you make mistakes and you have to get rid of a bunch of staff. But I would not automatically think of that as a solution to a productivity problem. Okay, so that's a little high level thinking. Secondly, getting under the covers. So the article that I'm putting out today talks about gloat, rejig, drop and some of these new tools and what's going on in hr and you know, just hang on to your seats because this is going to be a big, A big deal is we're moving from this, you know, 10, 15 years discussion of skills, skills, skills, skills, skills to work jobs, tasks, activities. And it's a different concept. It's not a replacement, it's a different Concept skills apply to people. And so the big shift that we've gone through the last decade is going from a job based company to a skills based company. And instead of thinking jobs as fixed encrusted containers which people fall into, we think of jobs as roles in dynamic, more generalized descriptions. And people bring their skills to the company and develop their skills and do things in their roles. Sometimes it's a formal job, sometimes it's a gig job, sometimes it's a temporary assignment using the skills they have. And I know a lot of you have done a lot of work on this. And we have this wonderful industry of data and tools and AI to use and infer and identify skills. In fact, the skills technology is so good now that with the new version of Galileo, which has a reasoning model in it, we can assess skills in large panels of candidates with a tool that costs $39 a month. So you don't have to even spend millions of dollars to do this. But that's not going to work when you're redesigning the company. You need to think about the work. So if you think about the work that we do, the sales, the product engineering, the customer service, the hr, whatever work is made up of activities and tasks. And maybe you've written all those things down, maybe you haven't. I mean, sometimes people don't write them down, they just sort of assume person in the job knows what they are. If it's an operational job, you probably have written it down and you're probably measuring each tasks. If it's not operational, it's probably a little more, you know, kind of ad hoc. Well, now we've got tools using AI. It's just emerging that can show us what these tasks are by crowdsourcing data across thousands and thousands of job postings that have this job title. So if you look at what rejig does or drop, they can tell you what the tasks are within a job title or job family based on what thousands of other companies are doing or asking people to do in those roles. So it isn't as hard to figure out what the job tasks are as it used to be. It used to be a consulting project and lots of consultants did this, including performance analysis and needs analysis. People in L and D. L and D people did this because in order to build a training program, you have to know what it is people are doing in this job and you have to ask them or investigate what that is so you can train them on how to do it better. So we're about to be as HR People filled with data about tasks and activities that we can then take a look at and say, okay, well maybe some of this stuff is kind of, you know, first of all, we shouldn't have people doing it all because we have platforms that do some of it. Maybe AI can do a lot of this automatically. Maybe we should buy some new AI tools that do these things and maybe we should create shared services or groups of people that specialize in these tasks so we don't have everybody doing them on their own. So what's going on now is you have the opportunity to help the company rethink the actual jobs and tasks that people do to improve productivity. And this is going to be a really interesting evolution of org design that we do in hr. And I think it's going to hit you guys fast. You're probably all getting involved in this now. And so I want to educate you on it. I want to explain what we're learning about it, and we're going to put a lot more information in our academy about it. Now one of the things that you learn when you get into this is that task analysis and job analysis does have to be done in a business context. As I talked about earlier. Where do you start? It would be nice to start with the jobs and the tasks that are of the highest value to the company. I mean, it might be kind of fun to redesign the job tasks of a recruitment scheduler, which might improve recruitment, which might then improve revenue. But make sure you have a reason for going after this job family that is a good business reason. I mean, the example that I'd like to kind of bring up is in a large insurance company, claims processing is a huge endeavor with lots and lots of people involved. If you just think about claims processing and the inefficiencies and the potential waste and cost overruns that might happen in claims processing, that justifies a lot of job task analysis and AI. And so one of the large insurance companies we were with has actually built a whole digital twin to do that. Sales is another example where there's lots and lots of inefficiencies in companies that could be, that could improve. And I think part of the thing we need to do in HR is make sure there's a business agreement that we're working on the job areas that everybody believes will be strategic to the company based on what we're trying to accomplish.
[00:16:47] And that's why a lot of this job design and job redesign is going to be both top down from the top agreement on this priorities and the focus and bottoms up. Asking people what they do using tools like drop and rejig and Gloat, and then getting into these specific projects of redesigning the way we do work. The last point I want to make is something that I think is really, by the way, all three of these companies are really innovative companies doing incredible stuff. Um, I want to talk a little bit about Gloat for a minute. Something Gloat did that really blew my mind. That really, really hit me. This new offering they have called Mosaic. It's part of their platform. What it does is, let's suppose you're a marketing exec or marketing manager, and you have to put together a conference or an event. And, you know, you got like, three, four, five people working on it. You go into Gloat and you say, build a marketing event. And what it does is it goes through the database of activities that Gloat's developed over the years, and it shows you the steps involved in building a marketing event. And you might have forgotten about some of these steps. And not only does it show you what the steps are using AI, it shows you the skills required in each step, the platforms that are most likely to be useful in those steps. And if you're implementing Gloat in your company, the individuals in your company that have done these steps before and what skills they have. And so not only have they decomposed work from a design standpoint, they've decomposed work from an operational execution standpoint. Now, this is a big idea. I don't think the Globe people have even come to grips with what the potential of this could be, because everywhere I've ever worked and I've had, I don't know, eight or nine companies, I've run into situations where we're trying to do something and the people that are working on the project don't really know how to do it very well because they haven't done it that many times. So they're kind of sitting around on the whiteboard making a list of things to do. And, you know, maybe I've done it before. So I know a few things they don't know and somebody else has done it before, and they know a few things that none of us have thought about that can be done with AI. So this thing called Mosaic from Gloat, which I don't think they've completely figured out how to position it yet, is a way to do dynamic, real allocation of resources into work to improve productivity, too. So let me stop there. Lot of things to think about. We're going to talk about this a lot at Irresistible. I would sign up for Irresistible now. We're going to fill up pretty quickly this year. We have a lot of case studies on this coming. We have some incredible announcements of our own to make there. And we will talk about this more in the coming weeks. And as you sort of think about the economy and your CEO and your other people in the company, think about where your business is growing. This is an area where you have to get focused. And we are more than happy to help you think through what your process is and how you do these kinds of work, redesigning your company. If you'd like our help. Thank you very much. Have a great weekend. Talk to you guys next week.
