Trish 0:09 The HR Happy Hour Network is proudly supported by Workhuman. Every year, companies spin their wheels searching externally for senior leaders. Meanwhile, their next VP is already on their payroll, recognized by peers, but overlooked by the org chart. Future leaders by Workhuman fixes that using AI and real-time recognition data. Future leaders identifies your highest potential talent four years ahead of schedule, before they burn out, check out, or get picked up by someone who saw what you missed. Build smarter, promote confidently, build your best people, future leaders only from Workhuman. Learn more at Workhuman.com Thanks for joining us. Steve 0:53 Hi everyone, welcome to the At Work in America show. My name is Steve Boese. I am with a great friend of the show, great friend in the industry, Ravin Jesuthasan, and Ravin is the global transformation leader and partner at Mercer. He's an author, he's a thought leader. I hurriedly, before the show, grabbed one of my favorite books that Ravin co-authored, Work Without Jobs. We'll talk a little bit, not about this book, but somehow how this book was very prescient, as well as reinventing jobs, a book you wrote even earlier than that. But Ravin, welcome. How are you? Ravin Jesuthasan 1:28 Good Steve. It's lovely to see you again. It's been a long time. Steve 1:31 It has been, and it's, it's funny, though, that some of the things we were talking about, probably the last time we talked, or maybe one of the last keynotes you did at HR Tech a few years ago. Our challenges, in many ways, are still kind of similar, right? How organizations are wrestling with rapidly changing technologies, dynamic markets, hyper competitiveness, uncertainty in the world, right? That's, I guess always a problem, and just trying to, and HR folks as well, right, trying to figure out what their role needs to be, and how they can really best support the organization. There's a lot going on for someone like yourself who's sitting at this intersection of strategy and technology and organizational performance. It's got to be, I mean, you must be as busy as ever, I would imagine. Ravin Jesuthasan 2:18 It has been an exciting time, and you know, to your point, Steve, the stuff that John and I were writing, you know, originally we're back in 2018 It just feels like what we were describing with the changes from machine learning and deep learning, that's just exponentially changed with Gen AI and agentic AI, plus the kind of insanity of the world we live in these days, right? Where the volatility and velocity of change is just so elevated. Steve 2:56 Yeah, and every day, right, every day, if you follow, you know, business news or just news in markets or the workplace, almost every day there's another story about how these technologies are having just significant impact, whether it's on a specific company, whether it's on really policy and things that are happening, you know, in in the political scene, or you know the next big data center for AI is going to be built somewhere, and that's its own set of challenges, right, which is perhaps a story for another day, but yeah, we're all dealing with this, and organizational leaders and HR leaders certainly at that intersection of technology and people and performance, and one of the things that's really interesting to me were I was reading before the show, Mercer put out the Global Talent Trends 2026 report, which covers a lot of these issues and offers some really interesting recommendations for HR leaders and for organizations, but one of the real key points I thought was, hey, this is not just throw AI technology as powerful as it is, throw it out there and expect wonderful things to happen, and it could be that organizations maybe are caught up in that right now. Like, I'd love for you to maybe share some thoughts about, hey, let's think a little bit past the technology and think about some of the bigger challenges. Speaker 1 4:17 Yeah, you know, Steve, we've been saying for a long time, and in fact, the work that John and I did back in 2018 was to advocate for kind of a sort of a work-led approach to technology deployment rather than a tech-led one, and because companies are really good at spraying and praying with tech and kind of hoping that it lands, and this has become particularly problematic with gen AI and agentic AI, because the technology is deployed through laptops and phones that we all have. They don't need instructions, you know, all of the issues that traditionally got in the way of technology adoption. That box has been checked by the ease of use with this technology, and how it gets to us, and so the temptation to just democratize access, and then hope that if Steve and Ravin get it well, and we both magically learn, you know, use it in its most optimal fashion, that will magically raise the bar on performance for the organization, what we're seeing is the companies who do this well have really flipped the script. They have gone from just democratizing access to intentionally redesigning the work, and it's those organizations that see these exponential gains in productivity, efficiency. More importantly, they're also the ones who are able to redeploy their workforce to take on new growth, which has always been that more elusive element of performance, right. Steve 5:51 And this, you know, again, we mentioned this echoes some of what you guys were writing about in 2018 and 2022 about thinking about a job or thinking about what the organization's mission is, and breaking that down into, hey, what do we really need to do, and how best, right, can we accomplish that, but it's hard work, right, work redesign is harder, right, to execute, certainly, than just everybody's got a new license for XYZ technology, and let's hope something happens, you know, that's amazing and wonderful. How do you help organizations maybe launch that process of, like, let's look at our work and really think carefully about redesigning it to best exploit the capabilities of our people, as well as the potential of these, these tools. Speaker 1 6:47 Yeah, you know, you're absolutely right, Steve. It's, it is the less sexy part of the equation, right? But I think also, just thinking about our audience here, it's really where we've seen a number of HR functions lean in in a significant way, you know, we're both familiar, as I'm sure many of the listeners are, of the number of CHROs who have stepped into combined CHRO CTO roles or taken on, you know, AI enablement in their organizations, but I want to just give you a couple of examples, you know, I've got a couple of very large clients where HR has been really intentional about embracing work redesign, so large consumer goods company, the CHRO stood up a new center of expertise to actually turn all of her HR BPs into work architects, so having the HR BPS kind of eschew many of their traditional responsibilities and the hand holding they may have done with the execs to actually sit alongside these business leaders to say as work changes as new work emerges we're going to work alongside you to figure out what's the optimal means for getting the work done? Do we tap a gig worker? Do we tap our global capability center? Do we use AI and change the skill premiums that open up then more opportunities to redeploy work? But that's the new role of the HRBPs, which I think is really interesting. Steve 8:20 Yeah, and the report as well talks a little bit about how HR needs to evolve a little bit too here, right, and the role model it talks about the 30 year old model, right, of HR that many organizations, perhaps as many as three quarters, right, are still operating in, which is kind of the center of excellence, the business partners and maybe shared service organization, right, for a larger organization, and that needs to evolve. In fact, it almost needs to evolve twice, because, like, part it talks very clearly about being a partner or an advisor as HR is probably not going to be sufficient to help the organization really excel in this new world that that HR has got to really own that work design and that that sort of operating system of work, I guess. And do you feel like that's a big part of what you're doing now is helping clients in the on the HR side, right, evolve into those those roles? Speaker 1 9:19 Yeah, it's really kind of an interesting two-step, right, because as HR is leaning into playing this more, for one of a better phrase, evolved strategic role of being, you know, the steward of work rather than just a steward of employment, it's creating the pull-through for HR to step back and say, well, if we're going to play this more strategic role, what does what do our traditional capabilities look like? You know, what does workforce planning look like? What does service delivery look like? Because we can't do it all right. So, and so, in this instance, I think AI is both the demand generator for this new role of HR. But also the salvation for HR, because you know we're seeing AI agents transform so many aspects of service delivery, and my colleagues and I have been doing a lot more work on what that new AI-enabled operating model looks like for the HR function and beyond, because it is starting to blur the boundaries of where HR starts and stops. Steve 10:24 Yeah, HR becoming more embedded, both with IT and both inside the organization, too. And there's a gap there too. One of the really telling nuggets of data that's in the Global Talent Trends 2026 report was something like, I think it was only about 8% of leaders who were part of this survey, right, C-suite, you know, leaders who were part of the survey felt like HR was really a truly strategic embedded partner in the organization, which is low, a low number, and also down quite a bit from the prior iteration of the survey, I think it was down about 20, almost 20 points, and so that's really going to be an opportunity, as well as a challenge for HR folks. Speaker 2 11:09 Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And I do think we are at the, you know, I don't want to say the precipice, Steve, because you know this, this change in HR's role really started with COVID, right? You know, we saw CHROs step up. You know, Dien Gearson was from, formerly from IBM, was one was one to say that if the CFOs were the heroes of the financial crisis, the CHROs were the heroes of, you know, of the pandemic, and she was absolutely right. Yeah, right. You know, we challenged so many of our beliefs about what work looked like, where it should be done, who should be doing it. People were protected during, during a time of great, you know, disruption, and I see this as kind of a continuation of, you know, at least in the progressive organizations, HR being able to step up and sort of extend its, its remit, but, but I think you know, you also have to your point that statistic, right? You also have some of the biases of organizations coming back to where we started, of, you know, oh, AI, well, that's a tech problem, right? What's HR going to have to do with that, and you've seen with, you know, Tracy Franklin and Jackie Canny, and many others, these incredibly capable HR leaders stepping up and showing the organization the way, if you will, to get a return on their AI investments. Steve 12:36 Yeah, I think that's great. As I think about some of these issues around AI and redesigning work, incorporating these new technologies, I say to myself, it's just because I've sort of sat on both sides of this HR and IT thing in my life. It's much easier to figure out what the technology can do right than really understand people and how to work with them, and I love our friends in IT, of course, but I just don't think that that's right. Seeding this territory to IT people exclusively makes a lot of sense for organizations, for many reasons, and that would probably be just one of them. Ravin, you mentioned people, though. I want to pivot just a tiny bit and talk a little bit about some of the people data that's in the report, but also as part of this conversation, you know, you would think almost intuitively, like once we got through the pandemic and everything resettled and stabilized, and people went, you know, got back to work, went back to work, unemployment has come way down in most Western places, boy, people are still struggling, and the data around who's thriving at work and the members of the workforce who consider or describe themselves as thriving has dropped precipitously, including to an all-time low in this data series, anyway, at only 44% which is obviously fewer than half, and down a lot, just in the last couple of years. Ravin Jesuthasan 14:05 Yeah. Steve 14:06 I'd love for your thoughts on that. I don't know if really getting into the why is really important right now, but just acknowledging that that could be the case, or it is the case in many organizations, and what that implies for some of this transformation work we're talking about. Speaker 2 14:19 Yeah, you know, Steve, you're absolutely right. So, just to double click on that data, so we saw thriving fall from 66% to 44% in two years, to the point you made, and then the percentage of people not thriving almost doubling in that same period of time, and I think what's at the heart of it is, are these two forces right? Of we are probably in the most disruptive time in certainly the last 140 years. You know, the IMF estimates that global uncertainty is 3x not 3% not 30% but three times the historical 40 year average, and then when you couple that with, you know, the rapid advances in technology, you know what you see is an environment where, whether it's political dysfunction, the climate crisis, demographic change, certainly technology and AI, an incredibly disruptive sort of set of conditions that are deeply disconcerting for people, and I think you know what is really driving a lot of this is, in fact, that over the last two years, as these AI tools have been democratized, as you and I have used them, as people have used them, they're starting to see exactly two, they're seeing two things, the capability of the tools, and then how rapidly that's capable, that capability is evolving. Yeah, and people see, you know, boy, my job's changing right before my eyes. I can see where it's substituting some of the work, I can see where it's augmenting other work, making me super productive, and I can also see where there's new work being created, and I may not have the skills for that, and so the other thing that we saw, you know, that I think is tied to this lack of thriving is the fear of becoming obsolete, that FOBO going from 28% to 40% in that same period. Steve 16:21 Yeah, and that's real, right? It's, it's important, I think, for organizations to not overlook that. Look, people, people are very smart, as you said. We see how the technologies are evolving, how rapid they're evolving, how powerful they are, and we also read the news, right? I didn't look, I didn't read the headlines this morning yet, but it feels like every day we read about a tech company and many large non-tech companies talking about restructuring, talking about layoffs, and mentioning AI in that conversation, if not directly tying headcount reduction to, you know, expectations around AI, or to, or to fund AI investment, right, which is the even different story, right? Like, yes, indeed, but still it's really real out there. It's a.. I've got to get, like, a labor economist on the show soon, because they're late. The job market in the labor market in the US is befuddling to me a little bit, because we do see some numbers that are really good, but yet we talk about these kinds of reductions all the time, but I, and then maybe layer on that. Certainly, here in America, you know, where I'm sitting today, the affordability issues around just going through your life and trying to manage that, it's a, it's almost a perfect storm for people right now, and yeah. Speaker 2 17:44 Yeah, no, it absolutely is. Steve 17:46 Yeah. I think that organizations need to keep that in mind as we navigate through these types of transformations, but I think also Ravin, what comes into that is the organizations that are going to do well, right, the report talks about this, and I'm sure you agree, are going to be the ones that help their people through this in many ways. By so, I'd love to, for you to talk a little bit about that, right? This idea around, like, the skills, you know, conversations been happening in HR for a long time, but now it's really coming on to roost with these new tools. I'd love for you to maybe share your thoughts around how that plays into the discussion we're having around transformation. Speaker 2 18:28 Yeah, you know, I'm so glad you brought up the point about skills, Steve, because you know, as you say, for the, for the longest time, it's been HR that's been interested in skills. The last two years we have seen the C suite get completely obsessed with skills, because that is becoming front and center the big obstacle to this AI transformation. Because as the tech is being deployed, what business leaders are seeing, the skills I don't have for people to use this tech, the skills where the work has changed, and I don't have the people to do the work, so the skills thing has really come home to roost, but it's AI that is driving it and shining this bright spotlight. The other thing I will say, Stephen, you know, in the study, we, we have these four stakeholder groups, right? We've got obviously HR, we've got the C suite, we've got employees, but we also have investors who we, who we surveyed, and the thing that has been really eye-opening this year was the massive pivot from investors being largely disconnected from the how, you know, looking for the outcomes or the what to being a lot more prescriptive and demanding, for one better phrase, about yes, you're deploying AI. Great, good for you. Are you bringing the workforce along? Are you reskilling and upskilling them? Are you enabling this transformation to happen in a sustainable way? Because don't just. Come to me and say, oh, look, I'm deploying AI, and we've seen for the first time this year where companies have been absolutely deemed for coming out with this superficial AI washing of earnings reports, versus, you know, 18 months ago was like, you could AI wash your earnings and you'd get that, you know, three to 5% bump in the stock price, and now it's well, you know, what you don't really have a plan, you've not really been thoughtful about how you're going to bring your organization and workforce along, and mainly talking about, you know, deploying AI is wholly insufficient. Steve 20:39 Yeah, because without the right, we can't lose sight of the fact that much like prior technology, you know, disruptions or transformations that have happened in enterprises over the last 30 odd years or so, and there have been many, certainly they don't happen on their own, right, they get implemented, executed, planned for, and adopted ultimately by people, and this one will be no different. It seems okay. The technology is more powerful, and it's potentially more disruptive. I feel like if we went back through our archives, you know, 8 years, 10 years, 12 years ago, we'd find similar things we talked about, you know, around, you know, software as a service and mobile deployments, and before that, even you know, getting out, yeah, getting out of, yeah, you know, client server, right? I think some of those. Speaker 2 21:32 Yeah, I think what's really different this time, though, Steve, is we've, we're going from the technology being an enabler of the work, you know, like all of the technologies you mentioned, like, like machine learning, deep learning, where the technology helped people do the work, to now the technology actually is taking on the coordination of work, the orchestration of work with with agentic AI, the technology is actively substituting very large parts of it, so I do think that's what's a little bit different this time, which, to your point, is just amplifying the level of disruption. Steve 22:13 Yeah, I think as you work with organizations now who are, say, underway and really looking carefully about how to redesign work and incorporate new tools into their processes, and perhaps even, you know, have some disruption into their organizations. Are there are there any things that are coming up, say, either maybe not in your direct work, but just as you observe this and help advise against these things, are there things companies maybe are still doing wrong, or say you need, please be careful if you're going to be launching each of these things, you know, any, anything, any red flags that you, you'd love to maybe mention one or two of them. Speaker 1 22:54 Yeah, so, so the beauty and the curse, Steve, of these powerful tools is that they give us choices, right. So last year I wrote an article for the Sloan Management Review, and it was a piece of work I did with a large financial services client, and we actually redesigned all of their work for a 5000 person organization or a 5000 person business within this large global company and freed up 55% of their labor capacity, and I said to the CEO, you've got three non-mutually exclusive choices, you could take this as margin, and you know, maybe make your shareholders happy for a minute, but potentially could really compromise the integrity of your business model, and or you could take this as capacity for new growth, capacity to strengthen your business, capacity to actually move the top line, and or you could take this as an opportunity to design in space for learning and well-being into the flow of work, and actually address what is a pretty crummy 40% turnover rate with your workforce, and to his credit, he said, "You know what, I think we'll take a little bit of all three. Steve 24:10 Okay. Speaker 2 24:11 Which I thought was absolutely the right answer, because you know, mainly chasing freeing up margin, so we can go invest more in AI would have been hugely detrimental to the business. It would not have moved the top line. It would have, yeah, freed up some cash flow, but that would have been it. But to his credit, it was like, it was like, yes, it was, and, and, and, and, and I think that's where, you know, business leaders are really going to be under the spotlight around the choices they make with, with regard to the humans and their workforce. Steve 24:45 Yeah, I think that's a great story, a great example, Ravin, of the opportunities, right, that these kinds of transformations, if they're done carefully and thoughtfully, and I guess wisely, I'd even throw in there too, it opens up. Lots of opportunity, both for the organization, right? You mentioned they drove some cost out of the organization, so they were able to meet targets and reward shareholders. Great, they probably were able to redeploy some people, perhaps give them opportunity to do some different things, maybe do some upskilling, reskilling along the way, and then invest in their own capability, other one well-being, right, which again, going back to our conversation about people thriving, part of that story is certainly, yeah, part of it is the skills and an AI and a tech story, and part of it is other things, right, that contribute to folks just having difficulty thriving at work, and I think that's probably a model, almost, for, you know, maybe the best approach to these kinds of transformations. Yeah. Speaker 2 25:47 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sharing the gains right across your stakeholders. Steve 25:51 Yeah, what do you think's coming? Like, I don't want to make you like a forecaster or a futurist or anything like that, but I mean, we're halfway through 2026 the technology seems to be advancing every every day, and I guess we'll expect more of that in the next coming years. I mean, are you one of those folks who thinks, boy, we're really, this is really dangerous right now, maybe economy wise, and if we're not careful, we're going to have, you know, a couple million folks out of work, or are you more optimistic? How do you.. Speaker 2 26:25 I'll be, you know, I'm sort of actually on the fence of that, Steve. You know, I'm actually working on my, my current book, my seventh, which will come out next year with the MIT Press, and it's all about, you know, how we reset work organizations and society for this intelligent age, I think the choices and the power of these tools and the choices they afford business leaders is going to lead to many making some very short-sighted decisions. The one thing that I really bristle at, Steve, is this false equivalency between people and agents, you know, this notion of an, you know, of a, of a single workforce with humans and machines. I think we have a duty of care towards people that is unlike anything that we owe a machine, and, and I just really worry about this, this, this, you know, this conflating the two with this false narrative. So, I do hope we can be bigger than that, but I do think we're going to see a lot of disruption, and I think we're also going to see potentially a bit of a backlash. You alluded to that with the backlash to the data centers. Steve 27:41 Sure, it's on the news all the time. Speaker 2 27:42 Yeah, yep, you know, we're going to see a lot more of that. We're also going to see, you know, I think a lot more collective activism, you know, not unlike the SAG-AFTRA efforts to sort of rein in and put guardrails around AI and robotics. So, so I think it's going to be a very disruptive time going forward, because it, I don't think AI's progress will be completely unfettered. I think you're going to see some, some constraints get placed on it. Steve 28:14 Yeah, I think that's probably a great, I think probably a hopeful outcome as well. I think I'd agree with most of that, Ravin. It's, it's so fascinating what's happening, you know? Even just the other day, I saw, I think it was in the New York Times, they had a profile, like a celebrity profile article, which they will have done for forever, right, about an actor or a musician or whatever, and this was with the AI actress who became well known for, right, her name's Tilly Norwood. Say that, yeah, yeah. I didn't read the profile, I probably should, since I'm now talking about it, but I'm thinking, boy, that's unusual, right? That they would, Speaker 2 28:52 Yeah. Steve 28:53 sit down - I'm air quoting for folks who are just listening to this - sit down with it with an AI to do an interview like that, but I guess it's, you know, indicative of the times we're in. I'm looking forward to that book. Do you have a working title for the book, Ravin? The new one. Ravin Jesuthasan 29:07 Yeah, it's called Resetting Work and Organizations for the Intelligent Age, Work Organizations and Society for the Intelligent Age. Steve 29:17 Oh my gosh, I can't wait. I cannot wait. Well, I hope that we'll see you again once that's out, or slightly before, to talk about it again. I think you know, and this is not just me, because I respect Ravin so much. I've got to know him a little bit over the years, and read all his books, some of the stuff, including this book, Work Without Jobs, like incredibly influential, right, in the world of work, like to the point where the things you and John were talking about in 18 and 22 and you'll be talking about going forward, have had significant impact on the way some of the largest organizations in the world think about work and think about approaching building workplaces that can thrive for millions and millions of people, some. To congratulate you on that, of course, Ravin, and I'm so pleased. I'm excited for the new work as well. Speaker 2 30:06 Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate that. Steve 30:09 Yeah, great. Anything else, Ravin, we want to mention where we can find you, or any folks, we'll put a link to the Global Talent Trends Report in the notes. Anything else you'd like to share with the listeners? Ravin Jesuthasan 30:18 Yeah, you know, as you know, Steve, I'm very active on LinkedIn. A lot of my articles and research are shared there. I'm also on other channels like Threads and X, etc. But certainly the mercer.com website is an is an incredible resource for everyone, and I have my own website as well, ravinjesuthasan.com so would love for folks to follow me. Steve 30:44 Thank you, Ravin, so much. I encourage everybody to do that. I have been for years and years, and I'm so happy you were able to spend a little time with us today. Great to see you. Be well, and we'll see you very soon again, Ravin. Thank you. Speaker 2 30:56 Thank you, Steve. Steve 30:57 All right, thank you everybody for listening to HR Happy Hour Network. Remember, subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Steve Boese. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time. Transcribed by https://otter.ai