Workplace Stories by RedThread Research

According to Gina Jeneroux, company culture sets the foundation for skills readiness. If a company culture isn’t supportive of innovation and creativity, is it ready to support an initiative to focus on skills? Skills should be infused into everything you do in your organization and supported from the top down. Gina has spent almost 40 years in the financial services and learning industries. She spent the last few years running BMO’s corporate university and serving as Chief Learning Officer. In this conversation, she shares why a focus on skills is necessary, why company culture plays an important role, and how to get buy-in from company leadership.You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...Connect With Red Thread ResearchWebsite: Red Thread ResearchOn LinkedInOn FacebookOn TwitterSubscribe to WORKPLACE STORIES

Welcome to the newest season of Workplace Stories. It will come as no surprise that we’re devoting season 11 to continuing our conversation around skills. Why? Because there are still questions to be answered. In these opening arguments, we’ll share the questions we’re being asked, what we’re looking forward to, and we’ll give you a sneak-peak of some of the amazing guests we’ll be having conversations with.Connect With Red Thread ResearchWebsite: Red Thread ResearchOn LinkedInOn FacebookOn TwitterSubscribe to WORKPLACE STORIES

Jennifer Rogers is the Executive Officer in the Learning Technology Standards Committee at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which has 427,000+ members in over 190 countries. The IEEE is the world’s largest trade organization and the professional home for engineering and technology communities worldwide. Jennifer is an unrelenting advocate for the potential that exists in others, which is why she’s a perfect fit at IEEE. IEEE is working together to figure out skills across an industry. They’re also focused on skills development and education at all levels through college and a professional career. In this conversation, Jennifer shares what a skills-based organization looks like, how they organize and validate skills, and how their approach focuses on both the present and future.

According to Yelena Mammadova, Ed.D—the Associate Director of Learning, Skills Transformation Initiative at McKinsey—McKinsey seeks to bring impact to clients and create an organization where they attract, excite, and retain exceptional people. The primary goal of her department is to accelerate talent development. Yelena strives to connect human development and technology in her role. She is one our first guests who’s talked about generative AI and how it’s embedded into their skills effort. They’re using AI to connect and map skills information. Secondly, they’re integrating skills with their people analytics teams. They’re starting small and experimenting. Most organizations build skills models around the job architecture currently in place. McKinsey is taking a different approach. They’re developing assessments for skills so they know how to organize the people around the work they have.Learn more about their unique approach and their utilization of generative AI to father and efficiently utilize skills data in this conversation.

Transitioning a large company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to a skills-based organization could be a daunting task. That’s why focusing on scope and purpose was an important place to start for Vandana Bhagtani and Kaye Slay. In this conversation, Vandana—The Director of Technical Talent Management—and Kaye—The User Experience and Adoption Lead for Talent and Learning Systems—share how they’ve worked together to develop a strategy for transitioning HPE to a skills-based organization. They also share why they chose to focus on a particular group and narrowed their scope further to talent acquisition and people development (all the while leveraging technology and AI). They’re at the start of their journey and will evolve and develop as they transition to a skills-based organization. Subscribe to WORKPLACE STORIES

Shannon Custard—the Global Competence Development Manager at Ingka Group—is responsible for leading their global learning organization consisting of over 177,000 workers across 30+ countries globally. As they began the transition from a competence-based to a skills-based organization, Shannon wanted to focus first and foremost on frontline populations. They believe that frontline population learning equity is important and often neglected. So they focused on solving the skills problems for the frontline employees to then extrapolate to the corporate population.Through the process, they almost completely scrapped and redesigned their onboarding process to make sure the frontline team members had the skills necessary to be successful. When you help people reach success soon, it makes an impact.In this conversation, Shannon shares more about the process of transitioning to a skills-based organization, why the Ingka Group believes it’s important, and the impact it’s making on their frontline population. Resources & People MentionedThe Future of Jobs Report 2023IKEAConnect with Shannon CustardIngka GroupConnect on LinkedInConnect With Red Thread ResearchWebsite: Red Thread ResearchOn LinkedInOn FacebookOn TwitterSubscribe to WORKPLACE STORIES

Megan Bickle is the Director of Culture, Employee Engagement and Employee Listening at Western Digital. In Megan’s experience, roles can be viewed as a collection of skills. Viewing roles this way allows organizations to be more responsive to the evolving needs of the business in terms of the skills needed for development and hiring. Megan believes that job architecture is essential to becoming a skills-based organization. Skills were a part of their overall integrated talent management strategy, infused throughout the organization. Capability models and job structures were built in tandem. In this conversation, Megan shares her experience building a skills-based organization as the Global Talent Management and Organizational Development Leader at GE Digital. You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...Learning more about Megan Bickle [4:45]What a skills-based organization is [6:03]Why job architecture is important in skills-based organizations [9:04]How a capabilities-based architecture works in practice [18:06]Accounting for the evolution of the skills themselves [22:13]How learning/development dovetails into talent practices [24:34]Managing the ownership of the architecture [28:19]The lightning round [33:07]How the skills effort evolves over time/lessons learned [36:48]How people analytics were involved in the process [39:30]The strategy for assessing employee skills [42:37]Why Megan does the work she does [48:32]Resources & People MentionedBOOK - Good to Great by Jim CollinsConnect with Megan BickleConnect on LinkedInConnect With Red Thread ResearchWebsite: Red Thread ResearchOn LinkedInOn FacebookOn TwitterSubscribe to WORKPLACE STORIES

The world of skills is evolving rapidly thanks to technology and data which is why we are devoting yet another season to the skills odyssey. In these opening arguments, you’ll hear how we’ll shape the season, why we’re focusing on skills again, who you can expect to listen to, and what we are most looking forward to. Press play to start a new season of Workplace Stories. Connect With Red Thread ResearchWebsite: Red Thread ResearchOn LinkedInOn FacebookOn TwitterSubscribe to WORKPLACE STORIES

The importance of creating skills-based organizations is no longer a theoretical discussion: it’s now a practical reality. To ensure that businesses reach their desired outcomes, it is necessary to ensure that their workforce has the skills needed to get the job done.Brian Richardson and Brian Hackett are deeply entrenched in helping business leaders discuss and develop the skills initiatives needed to improve their organizations’ metrics.In this in-the-weeds discussion, we learn from both Brians’ breadth of experience to hear what it takes for businesses to bring skill building to the forefront.Connect with Brian Hackett and Brian RichardsonConnect With Red Thread ResearchWebsite: Red Thread ResearchOn LinkedInOn FacebookOn TwitterSubscribe to WORKPLACE STORIES

Peter Tulumello is changing the culture at one of Canada’s largest grocery retailers. As a grocery chain, Sobeys has a large segment of frontline workers and with it, their own unique pain points.To understand the problems that the frontline faces, Peter recognized that he needed to get into the stores to understand frontline workers’ day-to-day roles. Listen to this interview to hear how Peter identified major problems and came up with valuable solutions. Connect with Peter TulumelloPeter on LinkedInConnect With Red Thread ResearchWebsite: Red Thread ResearchOn LinkedInOn FacebookOn TwitterSubscribe to WORKPLACE STORIES