Are you ready for the skills-powered future? Ensuring your job architectures are future fit

Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50.

Welcome to this, the second of our four webinars celebrating the skills-powered organization.

In this session, we’ll be looking at how organizations can reshape how they manage talent and skills to be prepared for an uncertain future.

At the height of the pandemic, companies as diverse as Verizon and Bank of America saw the benefits of having skills-powered architectures to redeploy talent at speed and scale.

Verizon redirected nearly 20,000 store-based employees to leverage their skills in other roles.

Bank of America redeployed 30,000 employees to deal with the influx of calls and digital customer inquiries.

But that was then. What can organizations do now to reshape how they manage talent and skills to be future ready whatever the future brings?

Well, to examine the rise of skills-based job architectures and their impact on organizations and people, we are joined by Lauren Mason, U.S. workforce solutions leader at Mercer, and Jessica Kennedy, partner at Mercer, and Jennifer Acosta, global skills strategy lead at the consumer health company, Kenvue.

Lauren, Jessica, and Jennifer, welcome.

And a huge welcome to everyone joining us from around the world. Please do let us know where you are joining us from today and send in your comments, thoughts, and questions at any time. We do want and try to make these sessions as informative and interactive as possible. So please do get in touch.

Well, let’s kick things off with, I guess, the key question behind this series. Perhaps, I could put this one to you, Lauren.

We’ve seen companies moving to a more skills-based approach to work and less jobs-based. What do we mean by skills-based job architecture?

Lauren Mason:

Yeah. First, I think it’s important to start with what is a traditional job architecture and what purpose did that provide. That’s really about defining clarity and how jobs are defined based typically on the nature of work that they do and the level of contribution that they provide. That’s really been driven by how we optimize our data within an HCM system and really provide that linkage or clarity among talent programs.

But as you think about how this definition of jobs has been defined, it’s really quite narrow. I find it especially fascinating if you look at, for example, pay equity legislation that talks about what is equal work. They define it as substantially equal skills, effort, and responsibility. Skills are very much at the heart of how jobs are defined.

That is essentially what skills-based job architecture is about. It’s really about putting skills at the heart of how you define your jobs, so that a job is essentially a combination of the tasks or the type of work that they perform and the skills needed to perform those tasks. And what that does is transform your job architectures from really being about more of a data architecture to truly a tool to engage your talent.

It’s interesting. We recently did a study with clients on job architectures and what they found and how they are using them. We looked into those organizations that have high-performing job architectures that said they are meeting their business needs and their intended objectives.

It was interesting that for those organizations, they were four times more likely to utilize skills and enable career mobility with their job architecture. And even more interesting is we linked that to financial performance based on public company information and found that those same organizations, with those high-performing job architectures, delivered on average 5% more shareholder returns.

There’s huge value in this for organizations, but it’s all about putting skills at the center of how you’re defining your jobs.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, it sounds as though… It sounds like a more granular approach to the whole talent landscape.

Once upon a time, the basic unit of analysis was a job. You had a job and it was, as you say, a cluster of skills. But it sounds like this is a more modular approach. We’re breaking it down a bit more into rather than just crudely talking about jobs, we are really talking about skills which of course once you unbundle them from being jobs, you can deploy them a lot quicker.

Lauren Mason:

Absolutely.

Des Dearlove:

Why is this suddenly important and more relevant now? Why didn’t we do this 130 years ago? Where did the idea of jobs come from in the first place and why has it taken so long for us to begin to break it down?

Lauren Mason:

I think the reality is that part of the challenge we’ve had in the past is really not having the data available in a cohesive structure that can link to jobs and how they’re defined and then the technology to really power it.

That’s been the real transformation for how organizations can now embrace that to really deliver more through their job architecture, to really, really drive more from that in terms of better engagement of their talent, better outcomes for the business, more agility, and so forth.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. Okay.

Jessica, let me come to you.

What Lauren was talking about a little bit there was it sounds like this is very much of we needed the fourth industrial revolution in order to be able to do some of these things. But can you describe some of the key factors of success when you are implementing? When implementation goes well, what are some of the key success factors?

Jessica Kennedy:

Thank you.

Yeah. I’ve noticed over the course of my work really five key ingredients when we see successful implementations.

One is really bringing all of the stakeholders to the table.

So it’s not just talent, it’s not just total rewards or just technology but really every stakeholder within HR, all the various COEs that will have a shared ownership and use of this tool, because to Lauren’s point, it’s so much more than it used to be and thus, it’s going to activate so many more use cases across HR.

Number two is leadership support.

We often find that there’s a lot of momentum from the business for this. They are clamoring for skills to make sure that they can fill their roles quickly with the right talent and the right skills, and also have a better intel into their own internal talent marketplace so that they can build and rescale and upscale and use people and deploy people to your very specific examples at the beginning of the call.

Do you have the right business case? Why are you doing this? To Lauren’s point, what are the objectives you’re trying to achieve versus it’s just the next trendy thing? My fifth one will be this takes a lot of work. And so why are you doing this? Is the org ready? Do you have the stakeholders, the commitment? Have you aligned your technology strategy? Are you actually ready to go forward and do this? Are employees asking for it? Do you have that foundation in place?

And then I tease the last one, but incremental progress.

Don’t let perfection get in the way of starting. It can seem like a very large task. Be comfortable with a pilot. Be comfortable with attacking a smaller segment of the organization where there’s high demand or high velocity of change in skills. Gain momentum through that way, have a success story to show, “This is what it will look like, this is what it will activate.” You want to provide stakeholders to help me move this along within the organization.

Lauren Mason:

Yeah. And I’d just like to jump in and add on to what Jessica said in terms of engaging the business.

If you think about the traditional job architecture work that’s done, it’s been largely for an HR tool but in engaging the business, it’s really about how you leverage that to help them meet their goals. And if you think about… You gave the example, Des, of the agility that this can provide.

A good example today is as businesses make these transformations, instead of quickly aligning different people based on their skills to the work that needs to be done, what often happens is they’re laying off talent and then hiring new talent and you lose that company-specific knowledge that those employees had and you’re slower to adapt to that change.

And then the other aspect is the fast change of skills and the advent of AI. This is really where this can drive that change of what are the skills that are needed for that work and who best is positioned to deliver on that, whether it’s AI, whether it’s someone, a lower skilled worker so you can stretch the supply of your talent.

I think this is an area where particularly HR and the business have to come together and you’ve got to make that case for the business that are not already aligned, into why this is so critical and get their engagement in it so that it’s truly activated in the end state to be that tool that drives that change.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. I’m going to bring Jen in because you are out there doing it for Kenvue. What was the appeal of being skills-based in Kenvue in the first place?

And I should say some people obviously will know Kenvue in its old incarnation as Johnson & Johnson or part of Johnson & Johnson. So just to give some background, because it’s a very old company. It’s been in business for a very long time, it’s just the name may not be so familiar to some people but…

So what’s the appeal given that long history and huge success that it’s had over all the decades? Why change to a different way?

Jennifer Acosta:

There were a lot of reasons to want to shift to become a skills-powered organization.

For Kenvue, it came down to three things.

One is a desire and a need to future-proof our business, to build a more agile way of managing our talent so that we can keep up and keep pace with the rapid pace of change in market forces and external demands, and we can be adaptable and respond quickly in the way that we deploy our talent to the most important work.

A second was around a need to develop a really compelling employee value proposition given the position we were in.

You just mentioned that we are a spin-off company of Johnson & Johnson and we’re much smaller and more focused on specifically consumer health products than was the broader Johnson & Johnson. We need to be able to bring the employees along who came over on the spin-off and get them excited to stay at Kenvue, to stay engaged with Kenvue, to continue to develop their careers at Kenvue, to retain that skilled talent, and we also need to have an attractive proposition to attract new talent as well.

And so we knew that we wanted a core part of our employee value proposition, which we call the Kenvue promise, to be around growth. We knew we wanted to make Kenvue a place where talent comes to grow and while growing their skills are also able to make an impact and contribute to the growth of Kenvue as a new company, it’s a very exciting opportunity to be involved with the growth of Kenvue.

And so based on that focus on growth, we knew we needed to shift to become skills powered. We needed that skills data and we needed it tied to the work that was actually being done at Kenvue to be able to really fuel those career opportunities, connect Kenvuewers to those career opportunities, and equip them to be able to have those enriching careers.

And the third was-

Des Dearlove:

Go on.

Jennifer Acosta:

Oh, did you want to jump in?

Des Dearlove:

No, no, no. I’ll build on that point. Sorry. Yeah, let’s have the third one.

Jennifer Acosta:

A third was in alignment with the skills powered approach and all that. It brings in alignment with that with our desire to be leader led in the way that we approach investments in talent, investments in learning.

Our leaders want to be able to make the decisions but which skills we focus on, where do we invest in upskilling, where do we bring in more talent, etc.

And by building out a skill centered ecosystem like we’re doing, we’re equipping leaders with the data to understand what are the skills that we’re going to need in the future, what skills do we have, where are the gaps and what are the best ways to fill those gaps.

We’re also putting the actual resources and the learning content and the learning opportunities at their fingertips as well, so that they’re able to lead their talent strategies aligned with their business needs.

In the past or maybe in other situations, you see learning functions, making decisions about priorities for the organization, it creates a very one-size-fits-all experience and often, for many people it doesn’t feel clearly applicable or connected to their day to day jobs.

This creates the opposite experience where our business leaders are driving the priorities for their area. There’s a clear connection between strategy and where we’re investing in talent and where we’re investing in learning.

That was the third reason that we decided to become skills powered.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, my point… Sorry for interrupting earlier, but my point was I can see how in a spin-off situation where there has to be change and you’re bringing skills across into effectively a new organization, albeit that it’s, as I say, got a long history. I can see how logical it is to switch to this system.

But we were talking earlier, I think Jessica was saying or maybe Lauren was saying, that you shouldn’t let perfection stop you from making a start. Incremental change.

Where would you say you are, Kenvue is, now in this process and what is the status of your ongoing joint project? Perhaps that’s actually a question for Lauren or Jessica.

Jennifer Acosta:

Any of us.

Jessica Kennedy:

Yeah, I can-

Des Dearlove:

I’m just thinking who’s got that because you have the view of other projects and transformation, so you probably have a better idea of where you are in the process. It seems logical to put that question to one of you.

Jessica Kennedy:

Yep, that sounds good. I can start, Jen, and please jump in.

Jennifer Acosta:

Sure.

Jessica Kennedy:

For that reason exactly, we actually started with their operations group. They’re going through and trying to think about jobs differently to make sure they can match the demand that they need and retool processes now that they are this newer-ish, more nimble company.

We started there. We had great leadership buy-in, a lot of support, and we again needed to show, “Here’s what you’re going to get out of it, here’s how we were able to implement this and execute on a large and very important population, and then learn along the way and change our… Test and learn and change our process so that we can continue to fold in the rest of the organization.”

Right, Jen?

Jennifer Acosta:

Yeah, absolutely.

We are wrapping up our job architecture build at this point. There’s obviously much more work to get done.

I’ll just mention that it was really a unique opportunity to get to start just from the foundational job architecture.

So many of my colleagues that are building skills strategies don’t have that luxury because tearing out and rebuilding your job architecture is incredibly disruptive, when you think about all the things that tie to job architecture. Even just pay. You don’t want to cause disruption to the way employees are paid, whatnot.

We have this really unique opportunity because we were a new company to start from scratch, to build the job architecture from scratch, to understand the work that’s getting done at Kenvue and then to build our skill taxonomy through the process of understanding that work and the skills needed for it.

That’s where we’re going next. So we built the job architecture and now next we will map skills to that job architecture and through that process we’ll create our Kenvue skill taxonomy that will become our one common language of skills to be used across all of the use cases that we use skills with skills data.

Once that is done, our first priority is around skills powered learning and careers. So we’ll be enabling skills powered personalized learning. We’ll be rolling out a internal talent marketplace where Kenvuewers can be connected to opportunities ranging from not just learning content, but mentors and coaches and gigs and stretch assignments, all there to help them both build and apply new skills and move towards their goals, whether that be upscaling for their job or moving into a new role.

That’s where our focus will be for the first phase of using skills and skills data.

Moving on beyond that, we will roll out more of a formal career philosophy and career pathing approach. And then longer term, as our data starts to get stronger and stronger, we will be positioning ourselves to really make decisions about talent investments based on that data. Deploying talent to new roles, more strategic workforce planning, succession planning, those types of use cases.

Des Dearlove:

I just spin this around a little bit now. We’ve heard about it from the professionals and what it’s like from the inside. What does it look like for Kenvue employees? What are they experiencing? How does their world change? How does their worldview change or has it changed so far with this approach?

Jennifer Acosta:

So it hasn’t changed yet. I haven’t experienced anything quite yet, but in a few weeks we’ll be launching our new learning technology platforms. That’ll be the first taste, thinking of skills. It’ll be just a preview of what’s to come.

But the first way they’ll experience skills is a lot around transparency. For the first time ever, they’ll have a very clear understanding of what skills and proficiency levels are expected of them given the role that they’re in. They’ll be able to have really meaningful and data-driven conversations with their leaders about how they compare to those skills, where there might be gaps that they should focus on, etc.

And that same transparency and the skills will help them better understand what types of career options might exist for them longer term. And then they can build plans, growth plans, to start moving towards becoming more and more ready with the skills they need to pursue those career paths that they aspire to.

It’s really transparency and data that we haven’t had at people’s fingertips before.

And then I talked a bit about that internal talent marketplace. That’ll be a huge game changer to have democratized access to stretch assignments to mentors.

In the past, at most organizations, that was the type of thing that, well, if you were in a particular maybe department, there was a mentorship program but other departments didn’t have it, or if there was a stretch assignment that someone had and they happen to know you, they might invite you to take it but it wasn’t visible to everyone democratized in the same way.

Those are some of the earlier experiences that we expect that our Kenvuewers will benefit from.

Des Dearlove:

No, that’s a really interesting point. Democratization of career opportunities and being able to have that transparency to look into the organization and understand how to match your own skills and skills development with what actually is required going forward.

Jessica, Lauren, what are the big things you’ve learned from the journeys that you’ve been on obviously with Kenvue but also with other organizations? What surprised you and what other points that you’ve taken on that perhaps you didn’t anticipate at the beginning?

Jessica Kennedy:

There really are two kinds of key things and Jen hit on the first one, is making sure your underlying foundational job architecture is ready.

Are your job families and subfamilies defined in a way that will work to activate the skills?

To Lauren’s point, when they were developed originally, they were developed for more compensation planning purposes and HR data, and now in order to actually connect them to skills, we need to make sure that they’re granular enough without being too granular so that we’ve crafted and developed all of the various subfamilies that are needed so that employees, to Jen’s point, see themselves and that architecture and understand that that makes sense, that resonates with them, that the definition makes sense.

What happens when that foundation is not established and transparent, it creates frustration with the SMEs that we’re using to validate, because then the skills are not connected in the right way. The AI and the humans that are actually connecting these skills are only as smart as the families and how we’ve designed them. So make sure your foundation is right.

The other key thing we’ve learned, and Jen is proof of this, is actually a, whatever you want to call it, skills at scale or skills owner but somebody needs to be accountable for this work, because as we’ve said already, it is a lot of work to get through this first big pass but then to make sure that you’re administering it, maintaining it, making sure it’s evergreen, and the governance, Jen has her work cut out for her, but that’s why I’ve seen with our other large complex and even smaller clients, that is a true key to success.

Lauren Mason:

Yeah.

Des Dearlove:

We’ve got some great questions.

Lauren Mason:

Sorry.

One other thing I would add in how this has evolved over the last few years and how I think it’s gotten easier to do skills at scale is initially when all of this came out, as I mentioned earlier, it’s around the technology and the data that comes from AI that has really enabled organizations to have that.

But a lot of that initially was these massive data sets of skills and really a bottoms-up approach to say, “For this job, here’s this laundry list of skills that apply to that,” and that’s pulled from job postings and things like that.

But it’s very broad, very difficult to make informed decisions about it. But when you layer it on a job architecture, it’s more of a top down versus bottoms up approach. And so that allows leaders to say, “Okay, if we look at finance, what are those skills that are most important?” And then as we look at the different types of work below that, what are those skills that are most important and then at the job level.

It’s really that skills with structure that’s so important, and that’s what also allows career mobility because you’re focusing your efforts on a common set of skills that are most important rather than 50,000 skills that are out there.

It’s really that skills structure and that top-down approach that makes this so much easier for the business to validate, to adapt, and really make it work in a way to make sure you’re focusing on those skills that are most critical versus this massive laundry list.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, we got some questions coming in from people watching, and there’s a good question from Jeremy here. He says, “Thanks Jen.”

This one’s coming your way, Jen. Just to give you the heads-up.

How is your skills framework structured? Is the focus purely on technical skills or does it also cover, for example, human skills?

Jennifer Acosta:

Both. Absolutely.

We put some guidelines together to create that consistency across the way we map skills to jobs and each job will have 10 to 15 skills mapped to it. Of that 10 to 15, three to four will be core behavioral skills, similar to what you’re calling human skills here, I love that term by the way, and the rest will be functional skills tied to the work done by the job.

Jessica Kennedy:

And if I can just jump in there to piggyback on to connect what Lauren just said and what Jen just said.

We started by making these decisions, how many skills, what type of skills, and then to Lauren’s point, layered them down from this top-down approach.

Jen just said three to four human skills org wide that will vary in proficiency by level. Then we attack job family by job family, subfamily by subfamily.

It’s this layering approach to make sure that, to Jen’s earlier point, it makes sense to employees, the skills they’re seeing for a software engineer subfamily makes sense and connects to the skills and overlaps with the skills in an appropriate way for another subfamily within that family.

This is both a streamlined approach, to Lauren’s point, but also provides that connectivity so that when the users are going in and interacting with it, it’s logical.

Des Dearlove:

I like the phrase human skills as well, but what are we talking about here? Sometimes, they get called soft skills, they get called those sorts of things, but what sort of things are we talking about that you would include in this sort of work?

Jennifer Acosta:

A lot-

Jessica Kennedy:

Want to take that one, Jen?

Jennifer Acosta:

Sure, absolutely.

The core behavioral skills that we’re talking about are skills that are mapped to our Kenvue way, which is our declaration of what Kenvue wants to be and the core behaviors and values that are important to being a Kenvuewer.

And so there are things like having an owner mindset, having a daring spirit, so leaning into innovation, and also bringing external perspectives and scientific perspectives together to drive decision-making and innovation in the organization.

The types of skills that we will see as core behavioral skills will be the types of skills that would lend themselves to doing those things well.

Curiosity, creativity might be examples.

If you can’t tell, we haven’t done that skill mapping quite yet, but those are the types of skills I might expect to show up there.

There’s also leadership skills. That’s another thing that organizations have to figure out. How does that fit into the puzzle?

We didn’t talk about my background, but this isn’t my first skills lead job and so I dealt with this in past organizations as well. And it’s just a tricky balance because how many things do you want to really put in the job profile before it becomes overwhelming, but at the same time, people leadership skills are really important for your people leaders to have.

In my last organization, we didn’t have them on the job profiles but we had a strong understanding based on the job architecture of who was a people leader, and we had them go through certain people leadership programming and learning opportunities and all of that to make sure that we were driving consistently this set of people leadership skills.

Des Dearlove:

I love that the human skills are tied to the purpose and the core values of the organization. They could have been quite generic, but actually talking about things like curiosity and having that science-based view, they’re obviously very appropriate to what the organization does, which obviously is fantastic and ties to the purpose.

On your last point about not overloading, not having too many different categories, we’ve got a question from Andrew and he’s asking, “How do you determine the ideal number of skills per job?”

This might be… Again, I’ll open this up to any one of the three of you who fancies taking the question.

Jessica Kennedy:

I can start and then Jen, you can-

Jessica Kennedy:

Yeah, okay.

So we have to start by figuring out how we are going to use skills. At the very beginning, you asked when is this successful or how is it successful, bringing all these stakeholders together.

So when you get everyone together and you start to identify those use cases, you need to make sure you have enough skills to actually activate those use cases. But to Lauren’s point, not 50. It needs to be a manageable number. We typically say 10 to 15, maybe 15 to 20.

Some job families like engineering, for example, may lend itself to just needing more technical skills. So you want to provide a range, but you need to put yourself in the shoes of the person that’s going to be using this data.

Yes, we want to provide, to Jen’s point, more transparency than employees have ever had before, but we don’t want them to be so overwhelmed they’re now suddenly paralyzed. It is that nice balance and making sure that we can activate all these use cases, but we’re not overwhelming at the same time.

This 10 to 15-ish number is typically what we see when we survey our organizations.

Lauren Mason:

And I think just to tie back to Jen’s comments around those core behavioral skills that apply across the organization, that’s where you really want to have something that is memorable for your employees and how it links to your organizational purpose and values.

It’s often less of an individual skill but a cluster of related skills so that they know, for example, okay, always act with empathy, but you’ve got those individual skills that sit underneath that in terms of what that really means so that when you’re designing the training programs behind it, you’ve got that link to the external market in terms of how do you train for that individual skill but adapt it in the way that is most relevant to your organization. Again, it depends a bit on the purpose and what you’re trying to solve for.

And I think, too, as you look at those different use cases, there can be a smaller number of skills for different purposes. For example, for performance, there’s probably…

While you may have a larger set of skills to enable career mobility, you might focus on a set of critical skills that are most important for that individual or for your organization to capture the performance of the job, versus understanding the broader set of skills so that you get that career mobility and you capture those other skills that maybe are less important and less critical to the day-to-day objectives of that job, but might be something even an individual has but from past experiences so that they can know where they can go and navigate across the organization.

While it’s generally 10 to 15 per job, you have to be really thoughtful about what you’re driving, for what use cases, and then also make that clear to employees so they understand it.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. Now, I’ve got another question coming in here, and this is a question that crossed my mind as well, because I’m old enough to remember all the competencies-based stuff that happened back in the mists of time, back in the 1990s I think it was.

So we’ve got a question here. What is the difference between the skills-based job architecture and the competencies-based job architecture?

Who would like to take that one?

You’re not all rushing!

Lauren Mason:

I’m happy to jump in and start.

I think when you look back to competency-based architectures, particularly on those technical or job family-specific skills, they were quite broad and they were more about how someone does the work, not necessarily the skills that they need to do the work, and so that really limited their applicability to serve a broader purpose because that drove more of performance management. It’s more of the how.

Whereas when you look at career mobility, for example, you need that technical skill that sits underneath those in order to drive where they can go within the organization and all of those many different factors.

Competencies were more fit for purpose for performance management, but not the broad use cases that we talk about when we talk about skills-based architectures.

Jessica Kennedy:

And if I can add to that, what we also say is that competencies are more internally focused, really custom to the organization, to Lauren’s point, where skills are more externally focused. They’re connected to job postings and information and where organizations have a tie to what the market is telling us around emerging skills and skills that are in demand. And again, that balance between the two is important.

Des Dearlove:

What I’m hearing as you’re talking is this notion that skills equate better with mobility. We’re talking about the things that will allow you to travel across the organization if necessary. These things happen and you have to go back into the jobs market.

Whereas the competency thing, if I understood correctly what was just said, is more rooted in that job and in that role than getting that job done whereas the skill, it’s like it’s liberating, it opens up, it’s freeing rather than constricting. Am I overinterpreting?

Jennifer Acosta:

I would think about it a little bit differently.

We define skills as expertise areas that Kenvuewers apply to do their job well, and competencies, we don’t use that term at all within Kenvue, but our behind the scenes learning definition is a cluster of skills and other attributes, like personality traits and abilities, that together drive success in a broader longer term sense.

A skill can predict if you’re going to be successful in this job. A competency can predict if you’re going to be successful at Kenvue in five years.

I think that’s a little bit how I would think about it.

But I also just want to say something just really real and non-academic for a second, which is in real life we are not that clean and precise about labeling something a skill versus a competency, and I think we all know that’s true and accept that to be true.

Because at the end of the day, what this is about is understanding the strengths of our workforce and how we can best deploy them and use them to both drive success for the organization, but also personal fulfillment. And whether we do that through a skill or competency matters less.

The AI has changed the game a little bit in terms of being able to create that data without having to go through the types of processes that we did before. We had to really be precise about these things and it was a very long process and much less agile, hard to change, etc.

And so it’s really our ability to be more agile with skills that I think is also making this more successful and tie it into technology so we can better use the data.

Des Dearlove:

I’m glad to hear you say that actually because real life is very fluid and we have to be agile. And if we get too hung up sometimes onwards or making a big distinction between one word and another word for whatever reason, we can lose the spirit of it and the meaning of it.

I’ve got another question. I’ve got lots of questions coming in now.

A question from Yvette and she asks, “Many organizations have multiple generations from Gen X forward. How do you think about deploying a skills-based approach with individuals who may feel they already have the skills? This includes training or evaluating senior leaders on their skills.”

Because I’ve just read something recently where someone was predicting that something like 60% of us will need to re-skill in the next… So even if we think we’ve got the right skills for now, and assuming that we are right about that, it’s quite possible we’re going to have to re-skill anyway. But let me put that question out there to the three of you.

Jessica Kennedy:

I can start and then Lauren and Jen, please feel free to jump in.

I think we’ve touched on this a little bit before. It’s really how you communicate your value proposition to your employees.

To your point, exactly, the job you have today is just the job that you have today. The pace of change is happening so frequently. How are we here to help you continue to keep your skills fresh and know how to move throughout the organization? It’s through skills.

How are we connecting you to mentor, to Jen’s point, and new projects and gigs and continuing to stretch? Our data shows that people are burnt out, our jobs are not designed in the appropriate way.

How can we redesign and rethink about it through the lens of skills to help continue that employee value proposition and continue the good engagement with our employees in the jobs that they’re in today?

Lauren Mason:

I just want to add on that point around redesigning work in line with workers’ expectations, because that’s a big shift that we’ve seen in a post-pandemic environment where employees, and this is true across all generations, where their life outside of work has become more important because of the crisis that we’ve been through and they’re more focused on how do I build my life around work versus how do I progress. It’s become less central as part of their lives. And then we’ve got the burnout epidemic.

Workers’ expectations about work have evolved. Data shows that people are working fewer hours.

That’s one of the things that I think is often overlooked in the skills discussions is how do you redesign work to make work better, because that is critically important and particularly, when you think about those areas where there is a shortage of workers, where there is high demand, high intensity of the work.

A good example of that that we often see and we often work with clients around is nursing.

Nurses are burnt out. They’re understaffed. A lot of the work done is okay, what specifically, within the tasks of a nurse, is the tasks that need to be done, what are the skills that are needed, and what really requires the credentials of a nurse versus that which can be done by someone else.

That’s really where you get to that equation of not only how do we optimize productivity, but how do we stretch the talent that we have and how do we better engage talent and make work really work for them.

I think that’s something that often gets overlooked in discussions. It’s really about making work better for people.

One of the things I often tell our total rewards leaders is because when you’ve got issues like massive retention issues or things of that nature, they come and say, “We got to pay the problem. We got to fix it with pay.” You can’t fix broken work with pay. It’s just a Band-Aid and it’s not sustainable.

You really got to take a step back and look at what is the real problem. The answer often is redesigning work which gets to what are the tasks, what are the skills, and how do we best optimize that.

Des Dearlove:

No. That’s-

Jennifer Acosta:

I love that.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. Just go ahead.

Jennifer Acosta:

And it’s such a great point to fit into workers’ expectations because you talked about workers are working less hours. It might be actually that they’re working less hours at a full-time job capacity because they’re building a side business, doing more of a portfolio career. And to the extent that we can shape work differently to support different kinds of careers that people might want to have or different ways to shape their career, I think that’s another huge benefit of moving in this direction to meet people where they’re at, to meet the skills and desires of our workforce in the future.

Lauren Mason:

Absolutely.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, I think in the past we’ve tried to jam people into the shape of a job rather than fitting work and looking at it from a point of view of the human needs and how we’re actually shaped. Work should really be shaped around us, not the other way around, I think. But anyway.

I’ve got some more questions coming in. A good question from Andrew. We had a question from him earlier, but how are you measuring the skill proficiency levels?

Because I guess that’s the next thing as well as mapping. You’ve got to actually then measure in terms of what you’ve actually got within the organization and what level people are at.

Jennifer Acosta:

Sure.

When it comes to jobs, we’re using Mercer’s five-point proficiency scale. We bring in… Mercer comes with an expert point of view based on client data and external trends.

And then we have subject matter experts read it over and say, “Yes, that seems right. You do need an intermediate level of proficiency on that skill to perform this job well,” or “No, maybe you need a little higher…” Etc. So our subject matter experts who are either in comments of the job or lead people in this job, they will validate those skill proficiencies. But I suspect the interest was more in people because that’s a really hot topic.

How can we really know that if Jennifer says that she has an intermediate level of proficiency in project management that that’s real? Maybe she’s making that up. Maybe she thinks she’s intermediate, but if she really knew what that looked like, she really isn’t at that level, etc.

Here, I don’t know that there is a perfect solution for this.

At Kenvue, we will ultimately be using a combination of AI skill inference that will give us a starting point, employees validating and refining that inference and adding in their proficiencies, and managers then validating those skills and proficiency levels based on their observations.

Is that perfection? Is there no error? Absolutely not. There’s still a lot of… It’s all human ratings.

I know that there are some organizations that are experimenting with some other approaches like coming up with a point of view to develop an algorithm that makes some assumptions around how proficient you’d be at a skill based on how many jobs you’ve used it in, how long you were in those jobs, what level those jobs are at, etc., that might be something that’s available by the time we really need it in a few years. That might be a direction we go in.

But the other thing to think about is how accurate do you really need this data based on what you’re going to do with it.

I talked before about how we’re getting started with using skills in the learning space. So what are we doing with these skills? What decisions are being made with the skills? What learning course you get recommended? Very low stakes decision.

And so it’s okay if we just use self-report skills. It’s okay if the skill for efficiency rating is wrong. The worst thing that could happen is you get a learning recommended to you that’s too easy or something.

Now as we start using the data about skills and skills proficiency to put people in different jobs to select who would be the best person for a job opportunity over other people, to decide who might go to a highly desired high potential training, things like that, that’s where the stakes get higher and that’s where we need more rigorous data.

So more perspectives, like I talked about, validated by my multiple perspectives, maybe complemented by objective or externally validated assessments. It really depends on the particular use case, but I think that’s the framework to think about it through. What are you going to do with the data and how high stakes are the decisions you’re going to make with it?

Lauren Mason:

Yeah. And totally agree with that.

The skills measurement is a very hot topic right now. It’s very much evolving, but you really have to get to, like Jen said, how are you using that information, because if it’s navigating careers and performance, just that qualitative type of aspect really works well for that and that’s where most organizations are starting.

But if you’re making staffing decisions, you may need a higher level of rigor in terms of qualifying or certifying someone based on your learning and development. If you’re looking at making hiring decisions or promotion decisions, you need to make sure that using a more objective assessment that you know is not biased because there’s risk there.

That is a complicated landscape that has to be put together if you’re doing everything. But again, it’s a spectrum of the level of rigor based on where your use case is and then how you’re evolving as you move forward.

Jennifer Acosta:

And you can get started without having it figured out as long as you’re not going to do super high stakes things right at the beginning.

Lauren Mason:

Right.

Jennifer Acosta:

I think that’s the important thing, because it can be really intimidating at times because people ask a lot. How do you know it’s accurate? It’s okay to say, “It’s directionally correct and that’s enough to serve our immediate purposes and we will evolve it. We’ll get better over time.”

Des Dearlove:

And if you’ve got an organizational value that’s around curiosity, then that makes perfect sense to live that well by being curious about it.

I’ve got a question from Jeanette. We’ve been talking a lot about the agility and the fluidity and Jeanette’s question is, “Would you consider this approach more fluid in the organizational structure as part of continued growth through cross-functional teams?”

Jessica Kennedy:

I can start and then Lauren or Jen, you can jump in.

Yes is the short answer.

Jessica Kennedy:

So as we’re seeing that talent models look different. You’ll hear us talk about fixed, flex, and flow talent.

Jobs look different. They don’t all fit in this box. Skills enable the work to flow to talent based on the model that they have. Quite often organizations have this, I keep referring to engineers and I don’t mean that… There are other examples.

But oftentimes, different sub-band lives within the IT space will flow to projects or gigs based on how their team’s set up. They may not call it a flow talent model, but it’s happening organically because that’s the best way to get the most productivity out of those teams.

Skills just enables us to identify who’s best fit, to Jen’s point, for that work to support this more fluid, agile world that we are all living in at the moment.

Des Dearlove:

Did either of you want to add to that or should I take another question?

Lauren Mason:

The thing I would add to that is that comes to really  harnessing those cross-functional skills that sit today in different silos and pulling them together and as Jess mentioned, flowing it to the work that needs to be done.

That’s often in those critical skill sets that are in short supply across the organization like data science and analytics. Everybody’s got those all over… You got them in HR, you got them in finance, you got them in all these different segments, but there’s not enough to go around and they’re not honing their skills together because they’re so disparate within the organization.

It’s about how do you create those centers of excellence that flow to business needs when you need them to get that level of agility and also stretch the talent that you have across the organization.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. Now, I want to get practical. I want to get practical here. We’ve got a question. Based on your experience, all of your experiences, what advice would you offer other companies that are just starting down the SPO route? How do you get to grips with this? How do you start if someone’s listening to this perhaps and thinking this sounds like the direction we should be going in?

Jessica Kennedy:

Jen, do you want to start?

Jennifer Acosta:

I think it depends on the particular context and situation.

But I think a great way to get started is pick a business problem and develop a skills-based solution for that problem. Test it, learn from it, understand what you can scale from it, etc.

Recognizing not what Kenvue’s doing because we are in a unique situation as a spin-off and we need a job architecture. We need to put some infrastructure in place.

But I think in a more common situation where a company is a little bit more mature and maybe not in that situation, I’d focus in on a business problem that I can do a proof of concept with and test and learn and gain championship and scale.

Jessica Kennedy:

That’s one way.

The other way I would say is, and we touched on this before, find one area of the business that’s really driving momentum and was really asking for this. Get buy-in, show proof of concept, to Jen’s point, and continue to gain momentum that way.

We’ve seen a lot of success in that approach. It can be really daunting to try to do it all at once, so how can we segment and find a win, and then get leaders out there talking and employees talking about it and then it gets very contagious. Everyone really wants it. And so they’ll start to help and really buy in to the approach.

Lauren Mason:

I’d echo that.

I think if you look across your organization, there’s some functions that already started down this path and it’s taking those believers, taking those champions, starting with what they have and helping them amplify it to, again, get those wins that allow you to expand across the organization. I think that’s what’s most important along with what Jen mentioned in terms of starting with a problem. You don’t need to do this because everybody else is doing it. You need to do it to solve a business issue.

Des Dearlove:

Okay. We’ve only got a couple of minutes left. The time has flown as I thought it might.

If someone… Right at the beginning, we talked about the importance of having all stakeholders on board. And then just now you mentioned the buy-in point, which obviously is an important one. I’m going to ask each of you very quickly, if you’ve got to sell this to your CEO or to a CEO, what is the one big selling point? What is the one big message that you would lead on in order to get them to engage with this? Because a lot of people listening to this will probably have precisely that challenge.

Let’s start with Lauren. How would you sell it to a CEO?

Lauren Mason:

I think the key thing here is agility and optimize your talent and often at a lower cost. I think many of the key selling points for leaders are really about how do you get the cost impact built in as well as the agility to align with their strategic goals.

Des Dearlove:

That’s good. Jessica? Jessica Kennedy:

Adding to what… Plus one to what Lauren said, but increasing productivity.

Making database decisions at that macro level with information that you’ve never had before.

I know we’re quick, so go ahead, Jen.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. Jen? Jen has gone-

Jennifer Acosta:

I think those are my top two answers as well.

I throw in the employee value proposition as a third compelling reason.

Des Dearlove:

Fantastic.

Listen, I’m afraid that’s all we have time for, so a huge thank you to Lauren and Jessica and Jen and to all of you for listening and some fantastic questions.

Please do join us for the third in this webinar series, which is in two weeks’ time on October the second, when we’ll be looking at the great redesign of work.

And then finally on the 16th of October, we have, I’m always struggled to say his last name, Ravin Jesuthasan and Tanuj Kapilashrami crystallizing the key messages from their book, The Skills-Powered Organization, The Journey to The Next-Generation Enterprise, which is published by MIT Press on October the first.

So there’s a lot to look forward to, and I hope you’ll be able to join us next time.

Jennifer Acosta:

Thanks, Des.

Des Dearlove:

Thank you.