Here’s the autumn edition of my newsletter. The days shorten, the temperature drops, the heating bills go up, and I’m a bit worried the content here won’t cheer you up. 🙁
Two excellent articles have analysed data from social networks to measure employee experience. First up, Don and Charles Sull have mined Glassdoor to identify what leads to toxic work cultures. Their answer: bad leadership and poor work design. Second, a bunch of folks from MIT, Harvard and Stanford have explored LinkedIn connections to understand the effects of strong and weak ties on job mobility. Both are examples of analysing “passive data” in order to understand behaviour through networks (an area of growing interest).
Talking of social connections, when I started doing research into engagement (all those years ago!) I never expected that isolation and loneliness would emerge as a key theme. But it is. In the UK, one-in-five employees feel lonely at work. Importantly, only one-in-ten would ever tell their manager about it. This article by Rachel Botsman (one of my favourite writers) is to the point.
Maybe what’s needed is more compassionate leadership. To that end, this paper by Mark Mortensen and Heidi Gardner looks at how leaders can show compassion without compromising on performance; in their words “being kind and high-performing”.
When it comes to changing culture, I found this article by Roger Martin very insightful. “Culture change depends on micro-interventions: small adjustments to the structure, dynamics, or framing of interpersonal interactions, applied consistently over time.” That’s something I agree with – lots of incremental changes that can add up to something big, even transformative.
I’ve been out and about presenting at conferences recently. It’s great to meet people in person. I’ve been talking about using analytics to better support employees in a cost of living crisis. I’ve also discussed wellbeing and the need to focus on organisational health and resilience. (Someone called this “the state of the world according to Nick” presentation, which I think is fair as I cover a lot of ground, from geopolitics to neuroscience!) Links to my slides from both these presentations are below.
I’ve been out and about presenting at conferences recently. It’s great to meet people in person. I’ve been talking about using analytics to better support employees in a cost of living crisis. I’ve also discussed wellbeing and the need to focus on organisational health and resilience. (Someone called this “the state of the world according to Nick” presentation, which I think is fair as I cover a lot of ground, from geopolitics to neuroscience!)
Links to my slides from both these presentations are below.
Here’s the latest version of my informal newsletter, containing a short selection of the very best EX articles I’ve come across over the last few months (so you don’t have to slog through LI or Twitter).
First up is a terrific HBR article by Diane Gherson and Lynda Gratton on how overwhelmed many managers are and what to do about it. In our data we’re seeing more and more evidence of manager burnout. It’s often a systemic problem that’s fixed by rethinking the role of people leader. There is some great advice in this piece: building people leadership skills, simplifying work, and job redesign. Related to this, I am working on a number of “Manager 180s” for clients at the moment that provide tailored developmental feedback to people leaders at all levels. It’s a great use of our listening platform (and often not part of a traditional “listening strategy”).
I’m a long-time fan of Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore, the authors of The Experience Economy, one of my favourite books. I really like their latest article on transforming jobs to create more compelling employee experiences. Too much of the discussion about the Future of Work focuses on automation, cost-saving, and efficiency (the transactional side of work). It’s good to be reminded of the opportunity to invest in people, engagement, and trust (by transforming jobs).
This is an interesting article by Ayelet Fishbach on how moderate emotional discomfort can be a signal that you’re developing as a person. It often happens before you can actually detect the benefits of self-growth. In other words, short-term discomfort can be a sign you’re making progress towards long-term gains. Ayelet is author of the book “Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation”.
The final pair of articles are both reflections on what has happened over the last 2-3 years:
Here, Eric McNulty focuses on leadership. He sets out a simple process of “sensing-responding-adapting” in order to be agile enough to respond to uncertainty and shocks. I think it’s a very powerful (and simple) framework:
Here is my latest EX Newsletter, containing a selection of the best EX articles of the past few months. The goal is that I act as a filter, so you don’t have to spend your time scrolling through LI and Twitter.
Given everything, there’s a lot being written about burnout and stress right now. I’m very interested in the longer-term reasons behind these challenges, which often arise out of complexity and bureaucracy. By adopting an EX lens, you can shine a light on these systemic problems and tackle the root causes.
I hope you find these articles interesting and useful. Let me know!
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Nick
How Can Business and HR Leaders Simplify Complexity?
I agree with Dave Ulrich that “complicatedness” is one of the biggest challenges that large organisations face. HR has a key role to play in simplifying things; I would argue, by focusing on employee experience.
I really like this analysis by Pia Lauritzen of the shifts that leaders in traditional organisations need to make to transform performance. Her list includes moving from communication to conversation and from feedback to transparency. Great stuff.
I’ve worked with Coca-Cola since 2004 and I found this interview with Drew Fernandez, Chief People Office of the Bottling Investments Group, very interesting, especially when he talks about simplifying processes in order to elevate the employee experience.
This is another interesting paper from Culture X looking at the link between culture and employee turnover by using Glassdoor data. They highlight the importance of lateral job moves and more-predictable work schedules. Sometimes it’s the simple things that can make a big difference.
I wrote an article recently on why total rewards are a key dimension of EX but are often treated separately. I describe how we sometimes bring rewards and engagement analytics together. I probably don’t talk about this enough! ICYMI, here’s the link:
The field of of people analytics has seen rapid growth over the last years. As someone who has explored the links between people and performance throughout my career, it’s been great to see this explosion of interest.
There are various definitions of people analytics, which is sometimes called HR analytics or workforce analytics. Janet Maher and John Boudreau call it “An evidence-based approach for making better decisions on the people side of the business; it consists of an array of tools and technologies, ranging from simple reporting of HR metrics all the way up to predictive modelling.”
Jonathan Ferrar and David Green in their book Excellence in People Analytics emphasise the importance of using people data to provide business value. They describe different ages in the evolution of the field with most companies now focusing on supporting leaders to navigate key challenges: “People analytics is an absolute must-have for any Chief Executive Officer or Chief Human Resources Officer.”
There is a potential hitch in all this progress, however. HR has long been a siloed function and it strikes me that this characteristic is being reflected in the work that is now published and shared in the people analytics community. Recent people analytics books, collections, conferences, and articles all seem to have a glaring gap; hardly any of them make any mention of rewards.
Recent people analytics books, collections, conferences, and articles all seem to have a glaring gap; hardly any of them make any mention of rewards.
There are a few notable exceptions. There has been some great work looking at gender and ethnicity pay gaps, for example. It’s also true that, because of the nature of rewards work, it can be harder to share the outputs in public. But in the main, reward analytics operates as a separate field from people analytics, just as rewards is usually a separate sub-function from talent. Even though rewards is full of data-savvy and analytically-minded people. This feels like a missed opportunity.
That’s because decisions about rewards are important business ones. Payroll is a significant percentage of revenue. Companies source and offer a complicated mix of pay, incentives and benefits. It’s an area where smart analytics can provide a lot of business value and generate a return on investment.
Reward design choices are also important human decisions. Rewards carry emotional as well as practical weight. A lot of organisational energy is spent discussing them. And incentives affect behaviour, often in oblique ways.
Getting total rewards right can mean the difference between competing effectively in the global talent marketplace and being left behind. A consumer-grade total rewards portfolio of pay, benefits, wellbeing and career programmes serves as a catalyst, driving attraction, retention and engagement of talent essential to business success. Yet, in many organisations, total rewards are not evolving quickly enough to keep pace with changes in the world of work.
All of this underlines that when it comes to employee experience (EX), rewards obviously matter. It’s why in our work we include total rewards as one of the four key dimensions of a High-Performance EX, as shown below:
Let me expand on this point about employee experience. I have written quite a bit about EX, and one of the things I believe strongly is that EX requires a shift in perspective. In essence, it means moving away from a traditional and top-down view of organisations towards a messy, conversational, and more personal view of life at work.
From an EX point of view, therefore, all the following things are super-interconnected: jobs, work, performance, skills, careers, learning, pay, benefits, inclusion, engagement, well-being, communications, culture…
It’s a blatantly obvious point, but worth stating — employees don’t experience life at work through a HR lens. Rather, HR needs to think about organisational effectiveness from an employee perspective. That’s the fundamental trick in making EX work.
The same logic applies to people analytics. Talent metrics only address part of the humans and work equation. If you exclude rewards, you’re not capturing the whole picture and you’re not thinking systemically.
Talent metrics only address part of the humans and work equation. If you exclude rewards, you’re not capturing the whole picture and you’re not thinking systemically.
So what does it look like to bring reward into people analytics? One example is the work we do around optimisation. Specifically, Total Rewards Optimisation (TRO) allows you to align reward investments with the employee experience. We talk about finding the “sweet spot” — the intersection that aligns what and how much you spend on total rewards with what your employees value most and least across what you offer — while uncovering how reward changes affect employee behaviour and performance on the job.
There are four key parts to TRO:
Understand which rewards employees value most and least using conjoint analysis, a survey methodology used in market research to understand customer preferences. You can also pull in selection data from your flex and benefit programmes to understand actual employee choices and trade offs. We also bring in employee engagement, retention, and performance data in order to analyse the linkages.
Assess the return on your total rewards investment, as well as the impact of the programme on your workforce, by combining employee preferences with financial data. We model various investment scenarios in order to help leaders decide how much to spend and where to get the best possible results for the right size of investment.
Modelling total reward options along an efficient frontier
Use data to understand what employees see as the most and least valuable components of their reward packages. We help leaders make investment decisions and deliver a talent value proposition that is likely to foster desired attitudes and behaviours at a cost the organisation can afford.
Heat map of perceived value by talent segments
Use segmentation to understand the different priorities and attitudes of a diverse and multigenerational workforce towards benefits, cash and work/life balance and build a competitive edge in attracting, retaining and engaging top talent.
Modelling the impact of total reward changes on the engagement of key talent segments
To my mind, TRO is a great piece of people analytics. It’s got interesting and important data, cool maths, fun modelling, nice data visualisation. More importantly, you’re linking together employee preferences and behaviours to business and financial data in order to understand trade-offs and ROI. And those scenarios are typically explored interactively with leaders as different hypotheses are tested and analysed.
My broader argument, however, is that this is an example of how it’s possible to include rewards in people analytics and that this is an important thing to do. It’s one thing to look at engagement, retention and performance drivers for your key talent, and to make decisions based on that data. It’s another to look at those things alongside what you spend on total rewards and how you shape, customise and communicate your value proposition. The latter is taking a step towards thinking holistically about employee experience.
This is especially important right now as leaders are acutely aware of the importance of retaining and attracting key talent in the midst of a period of high turnover. Rather than throwing money at a problem, finding the sweet spot matters more than ever.
There’s also a point here about the state of people analytics at the current time. It’s possible to see the recent rapid growth in people analytics as a transitory moment. A point when data became more available and HR began to explore how it can be used for improving decision making. At first, growth in analytics has mostly occurred with a traditional HR mindset, within HR silos, reflecting long-held budgets and distinct backgrounds and skillsets. But in the near future, the picture might look quite different. As datafication continues apace, the current people analytics community may merge with others to become the analytics engine of an EX function or even an EX analytics team within a business intelligence function. In some of my clients, this shift is already happening.
As datafication continues apace, the current people analytics community may merge with others to become the analytics engine of an EX function.
Jonathan Ferrar and David Green also refer to this kind of transition in their recent book, as they herald a new Age of Excellence in people analytics where “the human resources function itself becomes even more data literate.”
A key question for me is whether that means “business as usual” (such as continuing to think in HR terms) or taking a leap and embedding analytics and design thinking within a truly EX mindset.
I enjoyed being part of a very interesting session this week at The HR of Tomorrow conference on “How the COVID-19 Crisis Reshapes the World of HR” with Jay Muthu, Helena Territt, and Jay Connolly.
Some things I noted:
The last ~6 months have just been so intense: HR has stepped up, but this pace is not sustainable, which is a worry as the crisis endures.
Tough decisions have obviously been made, and HR has had a key role in ensuring that decisions are based on good data & analytics.
A strong focus on EX has been essential as people issues have become the most critical business issues; EX helps organisations to be human-centred.
In prep for the session, I re-read our future CHRO study from earlier in the year. What strikes me is that the priorities highlighted in that report are as relevant now (alongside a focus on safety & well-being) as they were then: agility; digitalisation; reinventing work; rethinking culture, inclusion & leadership; and more evidence-based decision making.
Perhaps the main consequence of the pandemic has been to accelerate trends that were already apparent and to increase the intensity of that change. #employeeexperience#futureofwork
This was first published on LinkedIn on 19 October 2020
How to transition from a traditional engagement programme to EX
At the recent EX Leadership Workshop we held in London, it was clear that many of these themes will continue to be high on leaders’ agenda in 2020 and beyond.
Let me know what you think, and thanks to everyone who connected with me in 2019 or provided comments and feedback. I look forward to continuing the conversation.
Tags: #FutureOfWork #EmployeeExperience
This article was first published on LinkedIn on December 12, 2019
Purpose is high on the agenda for many business leaders. As has been widely reported, for example, even the Business Roundtable group of CEOs has started to talk about organisational purpose and values. This replaces their long-held convention of “shareholder primacy” and is seen as a big shift in thinking.
In part, this is a reaction to low trust and confidence, especially in the long wake of the financial crash and numerous corporate scandals. Many people also worry that in the future, with trends such as cognitive automation and further globalisation, the trust gap that is already prevalent in many companies is only likely to worsen,
Surveying the scene, CEOs like Alex Gorsky of Johnson & Johnson point out that “People are asking questions about how well capitalism is serving society.” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty observes that “It’s a question of whether society trusts you or not. We need society to accept what it is that we do.”
Over time, we will see if this is more than a marketing campaign by this group. I hope it is, because in my experience the best companies do have a focus on creating purpose and meaning at work. In those companies, this is achieved through sustained, practical efforts, rather than by mission statements and the like. And they accelerate progress by adopting an Employee Experience (EX) lens.
“The best companies have a practical focus on creating purpose and meaning at work”
The why of work
First though, a bit of background. One reason CEOs have been persuaded to talk about purpose and values is because of a wave of research in psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics over the last decade on motivation, emotion and experience.
For example, Barry Schwartz, in his book Why We Work, showed that people get a sense of fulfilment from the work challenge, from social interaction, and from having some control over what they do. Another important factor is finding that what you do is meaningful. One important way of finding meaning is by linking what you do in your job to the welfare of others.
In some professions, such as healthcare or teaching, which are often thought of as vocations, that link to the welfare of others is clear and obvious. But in many jobs it isn’t. So effective leaders inspire employees by making it clear how their job affects others in positive ways.
A common way of doing this is by building a very clear line of sight to the experience of customers. Another way of doing this is by building a strong link to the organisation’s broader mission and vision.
This is a connection that many other authors have highlighted. From the viewpoint of behavioural economics, for example, Dan Ariely in his book Payoff highlights the complexity of motivation, suggesting that if you wrote down an equation to capture why you work, it would involve a very long list of factors, including money, achievement, happiness, a sense of progress, security, legacy, status, and so on.
Ariely criticises many organisations for being stuck in “a factory mode of production” when it comes to thinking about motivation. By this he means that leaders focus on financial rewards, whilst they neglect fundamental social elements such as identity, goodwill, connection and meaning.
Another person who has had a big impact is Daniel Pink. His best-selling book Drive was first published in 2009. In it, he highlights the importance of mastery and purpose in motivating people to perform at their best, which he characterises as a state of flow.
More specifically, he argues that it is the pursuit of mastery that is the most important thing. Pursuit is really a mindset focused on continuous improvement and perseverance towards long-term goals.
Accordingly, when it comes to inspiring leadership, organisations need to focus on what he calls “purpose maximisation”. Successful companies do not chase profit while trying to stay ethical and values-based. Their goal is to pursue purpose and to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.
Daniel Pink sets out an evolution in terms of organisations’ focus on motivation, from carrot and stick approaches, to performance-contingent rewards, which is where most organisations still are today, and on to what he calls Motivation 3.0: “The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive – our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.”
Daniel Pink notes, rather sadly, that the gap between what science knows and what business does is wide and it is not narrowing.
You can see this in the data collected in employee surveys. Most companies have a long way to go. In the UK, for example, only 56 per cent of employees say that leaders provide a vision for their company that is inspiring.
Narrowing the gap is where employee experience leadership (EX Leadership) really comes into play. A key dimension of EX leadership relates to providing purpose and meaning for people at work.
Of course, it’s one thing to point out that purpose matters to people and performance. What differentiates the best companies is that they actually do something about it. That practical application is increasingly achieved by adopting an EX lens.
Overall, the best companies are framing organisational performance in terms of individual experiences. They use EX analytics to ensure they are doing a number of important things well. From an EX point of view, a focus on purpose is actually quite practical and applied.
“From an EX point of view, a focus on Purpose is practical and applied”
Job crafting
For example, when it comes to thinking about jobs, tasks and roles, EX leaders have a focus on encouraging what is sometimes called job crafting.
In job crafting, managers and team leaders are able to provide employees with the authority and space to alter their jobs in such a way as to better suit their skills and interests. Employees are able to make small, but meaningful changes to the scope of their work, and to focus especially on the purpose of their role.
As described by Justin Berg, Jane Dutton, and Amy Wrzesniewski: “Within a formally designated job, employees are often motivated to customise their jobs to better fit their motives, strengths, and passions. Job crafting is a means of describing the ways in which employees utilise opportunities to customise their jobs by actively changing their tasks and interactions with others at work.”
This might mean people taking on more or fewer or different tasks, expanding or reducing the scope of tasks, or changing how they perform tasks and how they interact with others. This can happen in a wide range of work environments. Approaches like Lean and Kaizen, which I would argue have a similar emphasis on empowering operators, have transformed sectors like automotive manufacturing, for example.
It’s also the case that job-crafting is going to become an even more important capability in the future. This is because many companies are looking at the mix of skills and the “skills architecture” that they will need in order to for individuals and teams to continue to be successful in the future of work. For sure, as they undergo digital transformation, they are going to require flexibility and adaptability in crafting purposeful jobs.
“Companies are increasingly focused on the skills mix they will need in the future of work, which makes job crafting even more important”
EX and CX alignment
Another element in providing meaning and purpose is by ensuring there is a clear alignment between employee experience and customer experience (EX and CX).
For all organisations, your employee experience is critical for delivering outstanding customer experiences. Put plainly, it’s not possible to provide a simple and effective customer experience if your internal tools are clunky and hard to use. You’re not going to achieve customer delight if the people dealing with your customers are disengaged. It’s impossible to deliver great service if your employees are unable to exercise their own judgement effectively.
A successful customer experience strategy is the result of your company’s culture and ways of working. How you interact internally within your company will have an impact on external interactions too. As a result, leading companies realise that they have to focus on employees when they try to improve their customer experience.
A positive customer experience is, of course, the responsibility of everyone in the company. But an EX lens can be deployed the most effectively at the points of intersection with your customers: sales reps, success managers, call centres, front-line and field staff, and so on.
“An EX lens can be deployed most effectively at the points of intersection with your customers”
In practice, this can mean linking EX and CX feedback and analytics in order to identify important differences and gaps, and then addressing them.
The single best way to improve both EX and CX is to improve the flow of knowledge. Too often, critical knowledge becomes stuck inside different departments and teams, which act as silos. A key task of EX leadership is to identify and then break these silos apart in order to ensure that information is available to all who need it. This is also a key component in simplifying the way people work and in thinking end-to-end.
EX leadership and trust
EX leadership, then, involves providing a clear sense of purpose through things like job crafting and EX-CX alignment. Of course, this is one leadership component, alongside other things like team learning and personalising communications. Moreover, a critical factor is leaders’ own behaviour and consistency. Doing what you say, builds trust and confidence over time.
Ultimately, that will be the biggest test for the Business Roundtable. In a few years’ time, when people look back at their 2019 Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, will it be seen as yet more spin? Or will these leaders have demonstrated their own sustained and practical commitment to delivering positive experiences in the organisations they lead?
Connect with me here and on twitter @nickl4 and let me know what you think.
The CEO quotes and information on the Business Roundtable come from the 19 August 2019 Fortune article by Alan Murray “New Purpose for the Corporation” which you can find here.
The UK employee survey data here comes from The Global Workforce Study by Willis Towers Watson.
On job crafting, see: Wrzesniewski, A., LoBuglio, N., Dutton, J. and Berg, J. (2013), “Job Crafting and Cultivating Positive Meaning and Identity in Work”, Bakker, A. (Ed.) Advances in Positive Organizational Psychology (Advances in Positive Organizational Psychology, Vol. 1), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley.
Tags: #Leadership #Purpose #FutureOfWork
This article was first published on LinkedIn on August 28, 2019
Many companies are looking at how they can transform traditional jobs through a combination of technology and new work arrangements. This is often referred to as the Future of Work.
Beyond things like robotic process automation and the increasing use of gig workers, companies are particularly interested in using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate cognitive automation. There’s a great potential for cost savings, improved efficiency and (hopefully) augmented performance.
This shift is already having an impact. Some observers, such as Richard Baldwin, for example, claim you can see a “hollowing out” of organisations as a result of this new wave of white-collar automation. New technology has always transformed work, of course. What’s different this time is that job displacement is moving far ahead of job replacement. Indeed, it’s the speed of this current digital transformation that’s the most striking aspect.
I have argued elsewhere that employees’ concerns over automation are adding to an already problematic “trust gap” that exists in many organisations. Low trust is a serious drag on performance. The best companies realise this is a critical issue and are addressing it quickly through new tools and approaches.
Unfortunately, some Future of Work thinking seems to start and finish with an old-fashioned top-down view of the workplace. It can feel like a C-Suite analysis of opportunities for saving money and improving productivity deep down in the guts of the organisation.
Looking ahead, perhaps those at the very top of the house need to reflect a bit more on their role in the future. Because if there’s one job that’s surely ripe for automation, it is the Chief Executive Officer.
Let’s imagine that a bit more… what will it mean to have an AI CEO?
Clearly, there will be some immediate and tangible benefits. For example, getting rid of your current CEO is going to shave a lot of dollars from your payroll. Human CEOs earn a lot.
How much do they get paid? According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in the USA, the average pay of CEOs in large companies is $17.2 million. In the UK, the CIPD puts the mean salary for FTSE 100 CEOs at £5.7 million.
CEO compensation is also very high relative to the rest of the workforce. The EPI puts CEO pay vs. a “typical worker” at a ratio of 278-to-1. In the UK, the amount of time it takes a chief executive to earn the annual wage of an “average worker” is just 2½ days.
Replacing your CEO with technology will also help with things like gender and BAME pay gaps. This is because these very well-paid execs are overwhelmingly male and white.
Only six of the FTSE 100 CEOs (at the present time) are women. And as one of my favourite headlines of 2019 put it: “FTSE 100 has more CEOs called Steve than from ethnic minorities, research finds.”
On top of these salary considerations, there are other important factors.
Due to processing power, an AI CEO has some big advantages. No human CEO can compete with AI when it comes to strategy formulation, for instance. An AI could play out, test and learn from hundreds of competitive scenarios and simulations in the time it takes your human chief executive to adjust the recline setting on their comfortable desk chair.
In a similar vein, when it comes to responding to issues, an AI CEO is always on, always focused, 24 by 7, 365 days of the year. The AI is able to make adjustments in a blink of an eye. They can keep the business ticking over and operating efficiently anywhere in the world at any time.
Moreover, with deep learning and advanced neural processing, the AI CEO will be able to avoid predictable problems in the first place. They can also ensure that resources are available for effective risk management.
And there’s no need to provide perks as recompense for all this attentiveness and hard work. No need for golf-club membership or gym fees. No need for expensive retreats. You can sell the company jet to a pop star and forget about buying lift passes at Davos.
OK, you might think, but what about the organisational and people side of things?
Even though your CEO’s people skills may be lacking, they’re still likely to be better than a machine, right?
So how could an AI compensate?
Well, there are some things that an AI might actually do better. Think about cascading goals, creating alignment and objective setting, and then managing performance through observable, quantitative data. This is something that technology is already helping with. It could be done even more effectively by a machine leader. For instance, the AI CEO isn’t going to be bothered that the Head of Sales is a “great person” and a super “culture fit” if the sales campaign isn’t quanitifably successful and delivering positive results.
And when it comes to the ongoing monitoring of the health or fitness of the organisation, a mathematical approach can have some benefits. Imagine that you have some hierarchical redundancy in the finance function — now that the AI has brought its robot CFO cousin online. The machine CEO is going to be pretty effective at trimming non-essential people in order to keep costs down.
At the present time, there’s often little empathy from leaders when organisations undergo restructuring. At least with an AI CEO, I expect these human resources will be fired by an app in order to provide a consumer-grade experience as they exit the organisation.
The AI CEO probably doesn’t have to worry too much about culture and engagement either. Both of these things are major challenges for human executives. It’s difficult, with traditional leadership approaches, to get people to work simply, effectively and collaboratively. And it’s hard to provide the conditions whereby people are motivated to go the extra mile and inspired to bring their best ideas and efforts to all aspects of their work.
Research shows that human CEOs spend most of their time (up to 72%) bogged down in meetings, mainly in their corporate headquarters, as they try to stay in the loop and get people to do what they need them to do.
Instead of all this, the AI CEO will probably adopt a surveillance approach instead. They can monitor all digital communications and workflows as they happen. They can keep a real-time watch on productivity and collaboration by examining the “digital exhaust” trails of email, messaging and calendar data (alongside business and operational data). They can analyse the flow of information across their human networks and simply remove people who are working in silos (“low-influence nodes”). They can automatically deploy a “nudge” to their human colleagues who are failing to do exactly what’s required.
In order to fully optimise human performance, the AI might also want to assess the mood of its human colleagues. Rather than walking around, the AI can simply listen to the water-cooler gossip via the smart badges people wear. They can review the tone of meeting discussions through mics in conference rooms. They can obviously use facial recognition algorithms to analyse interactions caught on video. Of course, they can track what people are posting on social media as well. The AI leader can then add all this mood data to its retention algorithm, so that it can predict individual turnover and take action accordingly.
There are obviously some privacy concerns about this sort of surveillance (although most of this tech already exists). So there’s probably a need to ensure that the AI CEO’s algorithms follow some kind of ethical code, especially when it comes to managing people.
High ethical standards have been hard to achieve with human CEOs, of course. It might actually be easier in this new AI-led workscape.
It’s possible to imagine, for example, “hard wiring” an AI version of a doctor’s Hippocratic Oath or Isaac Asimov’s first Law of Robotics into machine leadership. This could provide consistency, reliability and even help to build trust.
Think of all the financial and non-financial scandals that can be avoided by having a piece of machinery as the boss. Plus the lawyers’ fees you’re going to save as a result.
Don’t forget all the business school tuition fees you no longer have to pay for leadership development. The AI CEO could be the final nail in the coffin of MBAs.
There are numerous other benefits, such as not stressing about succession planning and no longer paying for head-hunters. In fact, do you even need a HR department in this new world of data and analytics?
For any human CEOs actually reading this post, I apologise if it is causing your blood pressure to rise.
Let me provide some reassurance.
As your job is transformed, we will make sure that you are up-skilled to play a new role in the new organisation.
I can see, for example, you operating as a kind of Human Corporate Mascot. This could be a new future of work job title that didn’t even exist a few years ago. It involves talking to customers and investors about our vision and our values. An endless roadshow of presentations and dinners — not so unlike now really.
We will give you access to online micro-training, so you can learn to tell funnier anecdotes and we will make sure that the uniform fits.
We will need to be fair in this transition process, however. This means sending you to an assessment centre, so we can measure your current skill level and also your future potential in telling entertaining stories. And it is possible that Brenda in Accounts, whose job is also terminating, has more passion for our customers and is better suited to the ambassador role than you are.
If anyone else doesn’t like the picture presented here, then you might need to act quickly. All these trends are already apparent. Publications such as The Economist worry that capitalism is embarking on a new era of “Digital Taylorism”. Worrying about some of these trends, groups like the Business Roundtable of CEOs are trying to redefine their role and the purpose of corporations in the new world of work.
So how might you lead a different kind of organisation and still be successful in this new machine age?
Well, I would argue that a different leadership perspective is required, one that taps into the human intelligence of your workforce. One where employees and their experiences are at the heart of your thinking.
Some organisations are already making great progress in this, but many more have barely started their employee experience (EX) journey.
When I think about employee experience leadership like this, three things stand out:
Purpose: This means ensuring that people are able to make small changes to their jobs, so they achieve more and get more out of their work. Sometimes this is called job crafting and it’s one practical way of helping people get meaning from their efforts. As you think about the skills you need in the future, this kind of approach to involving people in shaping their work becomes more critical. It’s a bottom-up approach to organisational change. Another way of providing purpose is to ensure alignment between employee experiences and customer experiences. In other words, making it clear to people how their work impacts customers in positive ways. To do this well, you need open communications and transparency, so that information flows to everyone who needs it. This also helps in working simply and end-to-end.
Learning: A second key focus should be on learning and feedback. Team learning (which was first described by Peter Senge) means taking advantage of the collective wisdom of your people. It requires innovative thinking and coordination, as well as a focus on organisational capability. Team learning leads to personal growth, but it also makes organisations better equipped to solve problems and it ensures a better flow of information and ideas across silos. New technologies also provide the opportunity for more personalised learning and more useful feedback. There’s especially a need to improve performance management, which is probably the most impactful process in terms of employee experience overall. Performance management should be a process of frequent check-ins, setting and re-setting relevant goals, encouraging developmental conversations, and providing lots of real-time feedback and recognition.
Authenticity: Above all else, EX leadership needs to be personal and authentic. In terms of communications, this means designing and producing materials, preparing and delivering messages, in order to meet employees’ individual requirements. Three key elements stand out: providing personal content; when it matters to me; so that I can use the feedback to improve my experience. The final aspect of making EX personal is the individual contribution that people make through their own behaviour and their own openness to feedback. As such, the most important component is leaders’ own behaviour and consistency. Doing what you say, builds trust and confidence.
You can read more about EX leadership in my book. I have looked at how the best companies are using technology and data to create better workplaces. In particular, I have looked at the critical role that leaders play in shaping employee experience, building trust and improving engagement.
Please also connect with me here and on twitter and on LinkedIn to ask me questions and to find out more.
