At Insight222, we are fortunate to work with some of the smartest and most progressive Leaders in the field of Human Resources. Isabel Naidoo, my guest on this week's episode of the podcast, definitely falls into this category.

Isabel is the Global Head of Inclusion and Talent at FIS, where she runs the Strategic Talent Agenda for the FinTech company’s 60,000 employees. One of the features of the work that Isabel oversees at FIS, is how the company has seamlessly incorporated HR technology to bring personalised, consumer like experiences, to its employees and how it has harnessed people analytics.

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

In our conversation Isabel and I discuss:

• How the new learning platform at FIS is delivering customised learning experiences and supporting wellbeing

• How FIS has built a successful people analytics and workforce planning function

• How the last 12 months have changed what it means to lead

• How having the right people data in place supports a business operating in a fast paced environment

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in how people data, technology and analytics can personalise HR programs, enhance the employee experience and drive better business outcomes. So that is business Leaders, CHROs and anyone in a People Analytics, Learning or HR Business Partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by charthop. To learn more, visit https://www.charthop.com/digitalhr.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Isabel Naidoo, Global Head of Inclusion and Talent at FIS, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Isabel, it is wonderful to have you on the show. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to your background and your role at FIS?

Isabel Naidoo: I certainly can and can I start by saying I am a fan of the podcast and it is an honour to be invited on, so thank you for that. So FIS, just to kick us off, is a leading provider of tech solutions to Merchants, Banks, Capital Markets, globally and we help our clients use technology in very innovative ways to solve business challenges.

We are headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. We are a Fortune 500 company and we have over 60,000 employees across the world. I just want to give that sort of context as we are talking David, to our listeners, so they know the world that I am navigating. The function itself looks after the strategic talent agenda for the companies, so I have a broad scope across People Strategy, Talent Acquisition, Talent Management and Career Development, Global Learning, Inclusion and Diversity, Employee Experience and Workforce Planning and Analytics. It is quite a mouthful by the way so if anyone has any bright ideas about how to shorten that intro, I would love to hear them. That should give some sense of scope of what I am looking after and I have really spent my working career in the Tech Industry, with a focus on Financial Services in particular. My background is in driving transformational change and in particular, the sort of build and deployment of talent strategies across the globe.

David Green: You look after roughly half of HR basically for FIS, is that a fair summary?

Isabel Naidoo: There are loads of parts of HR that I don't look after, like all the Business Partnering scope and Total Rewards and all the operational side of things and so on. So there is a whole bunch of stuff I don't look after, but we work very closely together across my colleagues and myself. But the fun parts of HR, can I say that? I hope my colleagues aren’t listening.

David Green: You can say that, I would say that is the fun parts of HR, especially with Analytics and Workforce Planning. So obviously we have known each other for a few years now, we bumped into each other at conferences, when we actually did conferences in a face-to-face environment. I know you are passionate about how HR Technology can support the talent agenda. So I would be interested to understand how you see the HR Tech landscape evolving and how has FIS’s approach to HR Tech investment changed, if at all, since the pandemic began?

Isabel Naidoo: I love conferences, but yes, I do remember those days. So, let me take the HR Tech landscape first. It is just such an exciting space to be involved in and I am so thrilled when I think about HR Tech because I feel like it is sort of finding its rightful place in the Tech world, it is like a coming of age thing almost. All of these companies seem to equate HR Tech with just an HRIS and then over time there has been this proliferation of exciting new technology and the sophistication is actually extraordinary. So, what I am really excited about is this ability to drive a seamless experience for colleagues because when new technology emerges, I think there is a temptation for organisations to run and implement as much as possible because there is an offering that exists and they want to go and do it. But in truth, it isn't always the strength of the individual offering that equates to success. In my mind, it is about how those technologies come together, that creates an experience that really helps organisations to drive increased productivity or whatever the objectives are. So from a content perspective, I think we are going to see more evolution in that space of the colleague experience itself.

That is kind of what I think might happen, I am not sure how you see it, but that is top of mind for me, evolving HR Tech. From a FIS perspective, we were really in great shape to pivot to this virtual world, when the pandemic hit because of all these investments that we have made in HR Tech over the last several years. And in fact, we took our organisation from only about 10% working virtually to over 95% in a matter of weeks and it was really thanks to that Tech that we had and of course all the collaboration and teaming and so on that went in behind that. But we already had a roadmap ready that we were planning to take a step back on for 2020 and think about, what is that colleague experience? How do we embed the technology and the usage of the technology? And that was really important to us. So we took the advantage, if you like, of the pandemic to leverage all the tech that we had implemented but to think about the embedding piece of it, how do we mimic the real world experience at work, which is something you have heard me talk about a lot. How to make it easy to use and seamless and I think that push to virtual working showed how important it was to make sure that we have the right tech in place. So we paused from future tech deployment and doubled down on making the experience as easy as possible. We launched some new technology relatively recently and we were helped by that, so some of it had the best timing in the world for us from that perspective.

David Green: It is interesting, isn't it, that HR Tech used to be implemented for HR, for the business and there does seem to be this pivot towards actually thinking about the user a little bit more and all the benefit that provides to employees or colleagues in your case, but also then the knock on benefit that provides to the business as well. The data that allows us to analyse and then even further improve the colleague experience.

Isabel Naidoo: I totally agree and I think when organisations are considering embedding tech or looking at new tech, that concept of co-creation and really using techniques like design thinking, to get behind the true problem statement or what are those challenges, how do you create that emotional connection with the customer that you have. Whether that is internal or external in any project that you are embarking on, it becomes so important because that is when you have a voice of your customer and that is when you can make sure that the solutions that you are creating really speak to that need. So that is definitely a technique that we have used always, actually, and I think increasingly becoming the way to do things if not already be the way to do things.

David Green: Okay, so let's maybe move on to some examples of using technology within FIS. I know that there are a number we could probably talk about. I think we have spoken previously about the learning agenda that you have got at FIS and I understand you have recently launched a new learning platform. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that is going?

Isabel Naidoo: It is going great actually, again with everything going on in the world, we launched on April 1st last year. We launched with the LMS Saba and use LinkedIn Learning is our key content provider. We actually marketed this internally under the name, We Learn, and it has just had such incredible traction. So to give you a bit of context, David, we had our prior LMS in place for over 10 years and we only ever reached 30,000 users maximum in total and within months of launching We Learn, we were up to over 40,000. So the uptake has just been phenomenal and what has been great is the platform has enabled us to create these really customised learning experiences for our colleagues. So we launched a whole host of new resources around thriving in a virtual environment, focusing on wellbeing, or leading in uncertain times for Managers, we were very, very specific about what was the time that we were in and what was required for our people. We coupled this idea of direct access to downloadable content, whether it is in the form of articles or Ted talks or courses and so on with content that we created, like One Pages or facilitated webinars that people could sign up for. It was interesting for me observing this, that some of the sessions that we put in place, particularly around things like wellbeing and thriving in uncertainty and so on, the places filled up so fast, we had to schedule more and more sessions and we are running all these waiting lists. So, I think that felt to me like the appetite for learning and people turning to resources in a time of really extraordinary stress, was heightened by the pandemic and actually that launch couldn't have been more timely for us. We run this virtual tech series in partnership with our colleagues in the IT organisation and we saw participation in them climb to over a thousand participants signing up for the sessions. It was a mechanism of support in many ways, I think for colleagues across the globe.

David Green: And as you said, the timing obviously in this case was very good. I think we have seen external research saying that the demand for learning has gone up, obviously the way that we are learning was already changing to become more virtual and we are not just sitting in a classroom or learning from a video, but as you said, looking at podcasts and the other mediums as well. So that is a pretty impressive take up. Obviously, there is a lot of focus about what it was like for employees to suddenly have to work virtually where they haven't maybe done that as frequently before, but to suddenly have to lead virtual teams, the challenge there is huge. So it is great that you are able to provide that kind of safety net for Managers and other Leaders, to kind of understand the differences perhaps between leading virtually and leading when you have got people in front of you.

Isabel Naidoo: That is exactly right and it is a totally new skill set for many who haven't done it before, so that is something that organisations had to step in and teach. I think the other thing is that virtual allows you to be much more customised. We always think about the future of work and the current work environment as something that is highly personalised and customised and needs to be and so that does enable you to do that in many ways.

David Green: And what role does Data and Analytics, I know it is something we are both passionate about, what role has Data and Analytics played within the learning platform?

Isabel Naidoo: Of course you are going to ask a question about Data and Analytics, I would expect no less. It is absolutely critical to everything we are doing, I think you have been quite close to our journey at FIS. We set out to build a workforce planning and analytics function about four years ago now and we had a mission, which still stands today, we always talk about informing decision-making through data and we have held true to that. So we have Visier which is a cloud-based analytics tool, which I know you are familiar with but I am sure many of our listeners are familiar with, and we have really been driving more data into that tool to enable insights. So of course we do robust dashboarding and tie that to our focus area as far as strategy and so on. But we also use analytics to inform our thinking on the effectiveness of what we are doing. So we can see if Managers with higher engagement scores are more likely to have higher retention on their teams, or Managers that engage with the learning solution, for example, are performing better. We can see if there is a correlation between people who go through a full induction and their first year retention. That is really where the beauty of Data and Analytics comes into play, in my mind, because I think the challenge with data is sometimes, especially for HR organisations, is it can be so overwhelming and there is a danger of paralysis by analysis. So I think trying to be really specific about the challenge you are solving for or the effectiveness of the solution that they are testing for, are really critical to making a difference and using it in a meaningful way.

But if you ask me what the role of Data Analytics, I say it is everywhere and everything. Without data, we are nothing.

David Green: As you say, it is less about the data and more about the insights from the data the so what, now what, and how the people use it. So here is the insight. What do we do with it? What is the impact of taking action?

Isabel Naidoo: I like that, so what, now what? That is a great expression, I might appropriate that.

David Green: Oh yes please do, it’s not mine. It is almost a mindset shift for HR professionals to embrace a more data-driven approach to their work and their work with the business. What are some of the challenges that you have overcome?

Isabel Naidoo: Well, I think that paralysis by analysis is one of them, because you come in and you have got all this data, HR has always owned a lot of data that is not new for us to have our hands on data. It is what we do with it, the "so what, now what?" So that is one element definitely.

I think the other thing is it has been such a massive boost for HR organisations, having data and analytics and insights at their fingertips. So it has really established credibility for HR as a function in many ways because the rest of the business always dealt with data and we followed marketing in that sense. I think when I think about that journey and evolution of where analytics has been, the challenge really is making sure that people know what to do with it.

So how do they get to that “so what, now what” mindset and how are they able to really use that data and insights and bring it in the right way. So we have really done a lot of work with thinking about what is the best model, do we build our workforce analytics teams centrally, do we try and train people in data and analytics? Do we say that analytics is a core part of everybody's responsibility to some extent, but then have a centralised team, which is a kind of hybrid model. That is where we have landed. So we have spent a lot of time over the past several years, really building up this capability across our HR function, rather than just in the analytics team itself. It has been amazing actually, watching people take it up and embrace it. I think it is all about being very specific about the tools that you use and being very specific about the challenge, otherwise it is just overwhelming and you don't need everyone to be a data expert. You can actually use technology to enable insights really beautifully, Visio does that for us, in fact.

David Green: As you said, it is that balance between having a specialist team and enabling as much as you need to enable the rest of HR and that helps you then to scale and create some sustainable capability there. Obviously I know a little bit about some of the stuff that you have been doing, certainly in those four and a half years, you have certainly made a lot of progress. Are there any outcomes or examples of the impact of data analytics that you can maybe share, because I think sometimes it is the stories that really bring it to life.

Isabel Naidoo: Yeah. I mean, we don't publish our people data, as you can imagine.

But in some of the key areas that we are tracking is employee experience, measured in Glint who is another one of our partners around engagement for example, we saw a massive impact last year. Higher than ever appreciation of Managers and engagement in general and they are key measures for us, to know that our strategies are working and without having that data, without having that insight, I have no idea how to even test to know whether we are making the right investments in the right spaces. So we use a variety of mechanisms on any initiative that we are running, to make sure that we have the impact that we want. I mentioned the design thinking and co-creation, we definitely use that principle before embarking on anything and I think if you do that, if you use the right problem statement, if you have steerco’s to manage and working groups of different voices, then you can really make sure that you have got the right voices at the table in order to design solutions with impact. So that is the starting point and it is no good measuring something if it wasn't the right solution in the first place. So that is a way of preempting a challenge later on. I heard this wonderful phrase recently, actually a talk, there is a speaker called Marco Tempest. He is actually an illusionist and he was giving this talk, he challenged the audience to consider how are you hearing the quietest whispers as well as the loudest voices, which is such a beautiful phase when you think about all this facilitation that we do and it really resonated with me. I think technology can enable it. I think data can enable that. So we use a tool called Miro, which really enables collaboration. One of the things that it does is it allows you to have lots of people posting their ideas through a sort of virtual ideas board, but you can do it without sophisticated technology as well. You can take a minute or two to ask if people want to jot down their ideas before a brainstorm, for example. When you think about the power of data and the power of analytics combined with this idea of finding these different voices and making sure that you are targeting the right people to engage and embark in these brainstorms, I think that is where it really comes to life for us.

It is not just about the outcome that you measure, it is how do you get to the right solution in the first place, to make sure that you are not doing wasted work really. That is how I view it.

David Green: Yeah and I guess what the benefit of that is that in the past, when we looked at HR programs, a few people decide what it is going to be and how are we going to roll it out. And I know because you kindly shared a case study in mine and Jonathan’s upcoming book, around how you actually use those sorts of techniques to actually change your performance management system at FIS. I know people will enjoy reading that when the book comes out in July, I think you have recently finished taking 600 Leaders through a virtual learning experience as well. How did that go?

Isabel Naidoo: We have, I am so proud of what we pulled off. It was last week, actually, so I am feeling a little bit jaded today for this, but it is good timing to talk about it because it is fresh in my mind. So we had over 600 of our Leaders attend one of our Leadership Summits, we do one every year and usually we do it in person. So we did a number of things to try and make it very engaging, we worked hand in hand with the marketing team at FIS, who run all the main sessions around this summit experience and they are a mix of prerecorded and live sessions. That team really kept everyone very engaged by leveraging tech and so on, we had VR experiences, we had given everyone branded Google Cardboard, yeah very cool, to keep people engaged around components of the things that we were talking about. Then people had the opportunity to experience some of our new products and solutions using the tech, so that was pretty good fun. But we did also actually introduce new tech to the organisation. So we have been exploring in the People Office, which is our HR function, we have been exploring the use of avatars in communications and learning. We actually showcased some of this onstage for the first time, which was a bit freaky for some but I think hugely exciting. That was our Marketing Team really driving that bit of it but the bit I am most proud of is that our Global Learning Team works on a series of 100, yes I did say 100, small group facilitated sessions. So we did 50 of them for the 600 Leaders in the first week, then they got to experience the power of strengths, CliftonStrengths and Gallup sessions to introduce people to their teams and so on. Then in the second week we did another lot of 50 sessions and we got people to try and solve a real business challenge. So we brought in these techniques around design thinking and ideation and so on, that I have been talking about, we brought them to all of our Leaders and we used Miro, that collaboration tool I mentioned. We ended up with 200 ideas per session and there were 20 sessions, so that was like 2000 incredible ideas all coming from these loud voices and the quiet whispers. Really when I reflect on that, David, I have said this before, I blogged about it earlier this year is you can use virtual to your advantage. We would never have been able to do something like we did last week, if we had been doing it in person. We actually organised people into these different teams and each of the teams had to generate ideas and pass that onto the next one. So we have got people ideating and handing it over and so on. We ran all these sessions concurrently over 20 hours, so we were actually able to use the idea of global different geographies and different locations to our advantage.

We called it a “follow the sun” activity, so people ideating, passing on the outputs and following the sun, it was pretty amazing. We got 10 fantastic proposals all directly informing our go forward strategy, so I am feeling pretty stoked by it and again, if you are sitting there thinking, oh my gosh how am I going to make this next thing virtual? Or how can I get it done? You can have collaboration and have teaming, you can have ideating, you can do all of it virtually and you can actually use it to your advantage in some ways.

David Green: Yeah, I think if we had to have the global pandemic or the biggest global pandemic of this century, we are fortunate in some respects that we have got the access to the technology that we have got now. Even if this had happened 5/10 years ago, it would have been a very different experience, an even more isolating experience I think. Another example is I know you have been on-boarding new people virtually and I know when we spoke a few months ago, you talked about how you have had to on-board quite a large number of people at very short notice at the start of the pandemic.

Isabel Naidoo: We did exactly. It is interesting because there were so many terrible things in the pandemic, absolutely terrible, but there is one sort of shining thing that came through for me in our organisation and that was just the collaboration and the teamwork. I remember when the pandemic was declared and we spent this weekend, we pulled together different groups of different people from across the organisation and we just all said, what do we need to do right now on this topic on-boarding. There were many other topics, of course, but this one topic of on-boarding and what are we going to do? We have got people joining and we need to make this an experience. This has got to be something really special, we are proud of our organisation and our culture and so we just sat down and designed it and made it happen. It was just incredible. The sheer volume that we had to deal with and that pivot that we needed to make and by the way, I will say another plug for data, but having the data at your fingertips in terms of knowing who is coming, where and when and who you need to mobilise and so on, was just imperative. I couldn't even imagine navigating what we had to navigate. And of course that is just one tiny example of all the things that we had to put in place but it has really been a extraordinary year in so many ways.

David Green: As we hopefully start to come out of the pandemic at some point this year, as the vaccine is being rolled out, but I think there are lots of good practice that we can take from the year or so of working virtually and apply that to whatever the next world is going to be. And we shouldn't forget some of the good things that come out of it and that example that you gave of having people collaborating around the globe and the “follow the sun” kind of ideation, let’s not lose that but let’s also remember what is great about being together as humans as well and get that balance right.

Isabel Naidoo: I can't wait to be together as humans too by the way, as passionate as I am about what we did last week, I actually had people say to me that it was more powerful than being in person. I have been pleased with it, but I really am looking forward to being with people.

David Green:  When you look back on that event, how did you manage to pivot from what would have been an in-person event to a virtual one? And what was the reaction from people?

Isabel Naidoo: How we managed to do it was again through collaboration and ideation. We partnered with an organisation within FIS called The Impact Labs Team, who really drive innovation for our clients and through our products. And again thinking very carefully about how do we create something that feels of its time and relevant to people. So the the business challenge we are solving for, was something that everyone could associate with and I think that really helps find something impactful that has meaning for folks and you will get engagement. If it is something that is too far out there, then you are not going to get people to engage. Then really in terms of how we drove it and made it happen, we looked at technology, we looked at data, we looked at co-collaboration, we looked at our usual things and just applied them to this different world. We had been helped by the fact that late last year we had run a Hipo Leadership Experience for a much smaller group, a hundred or so people virtually, which was the first time we had done that at scale. So we had all those learnings from what worked and what didn't work and how we could make that happen.

So I think really pulling together as a team, the camaraderie we had across the teams was just extraordinary but the participants experience was impactful. So I think that is really how you can see whether you are having an impact or not. I think so, we will see when the feedback comes out.

David Green: Actually something you just said there that I think is a good lesson for everyone in our space when it comes to rolling out new technology, I mean how often in the past that we just rolled something out across the whole company. Whereas I think now there is much more looking at running pilots, learning from those pilots, communicating some of that out and then starting to think about how we might roll that out across the organisation. I think that is the approach that you guys have followed as well.

Isabel Naidoo: Totally and actually with Miro which we piloted last week, we had used it in pockets but never at this scale across the 600 Leaders. Before we had even finished we had 60 requests from people saying, hey, I want to run a session like this for my team and my problem statement. So it was pretty amazing. I think if you can learn by doing, you can pilot stuff, you can get the right co-creation and so on, then doing something immediately. I think that is the best way to test whether the solution is valid or not.

David Green:  You posted a really thoughtful article recently on LinkedIn. It bought up a number of things, but how has the last year changed what it means to lead, in your role and then maybe with some of your peers that you are seeing, both within FIS and outside?

Isabel Naidoo: I have so many thoughts on this. I think you know how passionate I am about Leadership and the evolving expectations we have of our Leaders and these corporate environments that we work in and in any environment really. We talk a lot at FIS about this notion of transformational leadership and we have to use the same words, but we update our definition of what is expected by it and around it because colleagues demand more and more of us as Leaders and rightly so, but I think it is hard. There is no question in my mind that leadership is hard and it is hard to get it right and it is not enough to engage anymore, you have to inspire. It is not enough to check in on performance, you have to coach. All the things that really got someone to that leadership role, they are probably not enough anymore. And so we need to think really carefully about how we enable our Leaders and I think be mindful of that. When I think about last year, there are the obvious things like leading through uncertainty and complexity and even the advantages of being virtual, like we explored in that “follow the sun” challenge. But there were really two key changes. One is about vulnerability and how you show up. I think about my own experience, I have always been very, very private about my home life and it has been impossible to be private. I have three kids at home, literally at home, as you know the schools in the UK have been shut for some time and the interruptions have just been perpetual. The first time it is cute, the second time it is sweet, the third time it's annoying and I'm sure it is annoying for everyone and it is disruptive and I am embarrassed. Last year I was sharing this with one of my team members at the end of the year, we were doing a reflection and I said how exposed I felt with all the interruptions and she said, the team have really valued it. Prior to the pandemic, I always seemed to have it together and I was like this working professional with no mishaps and then last year I had this other side, so there is a vulnerability. That then got me thinking about this notion of the power of vulnerability. There is a marvellous Ted talk on it, actually and I think humanising leadership and thinking about vulnerability has really become more important.

And then the second thing that has changed really, maybe it has changed for some or become more critical for others, is really the importance of knowing your team. I have always led with individualisation, if you know your clifton strength, so that is the belief that people are unique, different and individual circumstances really matter and you have to be mindful of the different circumstances that people find themselves in and then adapt. Our Manager training is all around knowing yourself and knowing your team. I just think it has never been more important than right now, what does your team need? What is the impact that you are having? What are the needs you have? Because if you crack that, you can be a powerful Leader. I talked a little bit about this need for a customised experience and I think this pandemic world has really brought that home to us. We have to flex how we look after our colleagues wellbeing, what it means to you, David is different to what it means to me. So how do we create that environment where people can thrive, all people can thrive? I don't think we should ever go back to one size fits all. You talked about going back and what that looks like and that is one thing I definitely never want to go back to, organisations doing one size fits all strategies.

So that is two of my reflections but that is a complex, complex topic. It is hard. It is hard to be a good Leader.

David Green: It is probably going to get even more complex, as we hopefully move to whatever the post pandemic world looks like because you have to, as you said, be mindful of individual circumstances. There can’t be any “this team all needs to go back to the office” because that might not work. That might not be what people want and there is so much more complexity involved in managing a team which could be maybe remote, more hybrid, maybe some people will prefer to actually be in the office. I guess this is where data comes in again as well, to understand the wants from people and blend the needs of the business with actually what employees themselves or colleagues themselves actually want as well.

Isabel Naidoo: Totally agree. I think that is why thoughtful planning is so important, actually and have organisations take this time to really consider what their strategies are going to be and how they listen to the needs of their workforce, the needs of their business, the needs of their customers and sort of bring all of that together.

But yes, customisation I think is, as I have been saying for a long time, is where it is at for me.

David Green: So going back a little bit to what you said at the start, around colleague experience being at the forefront of how we think about things moving forward and that is where you at FIS are investing in the technology that supports that.

So you are regularly understanding from your employees, how they are feeling and actually then applying that in terms of any plans moving forward as well. It is so important and there are some companies that haven't made those investments as well. So hopefully that set you up quite well for entering the pandemic, which was of course was unexpected and hopefully you have also set yourself up well for coming out of it as well.

Isabel Naidoo: Absolutely agreed and working hand in hand with the other parts of our organisation as well, as we think about what employee experience is. You have probably been using this term life experience for people, what is our employees life experience that we started referring to and the role of an organisation is evolving so rapidly. You just take something like wellbeing, it would have been unheard of for an organisation to be thinking or asking about wellbeing, the way that companies do today. So the responsibility now that organisations are taking, whether it is through training, elements like benefits or running wellness challenges, whatever it is, it is a very fast moving environment. But this idea of the life experience I think, is going to become more and more prevalent for organisations.

David Green: And I presume that is one of them but what are the other lessons that you are holding on to from the last 12 months? And what is next on your talent agenda?

Isabel Naidoo: Well, next on my talent agenda is definitely exploring further that concept of life experience. Making sure that we get it right, because I don't think we have cracked it yet, but we are on that path and as I said in close collaboration with these other organisations across the business. If I think about lessons, what I am holding on to is it's just been such a hard year for so many people, it is heartbreaking the tragedies, the big and the small, but there are elements where we have tried to, in our workplace at least, find ways to accelerate some of our strategy. I actually blogged, as you mentioned, early this year on some of the lessons that I have learnt, which were just being done over this last year but over many years. I think the biggest lesson is that people are extraordinary. I always kind of knew that, I have always been a people person, but last year brought it back to me. The macro amazing things that people have done, that they have created and then the micro moments of just kindness and compassion, which have helped so many people through difficult times. So I have always been but am now even more firmly a people fan, which is probably a good thing in my job.

David Green: Yes, I would imagine it is quite important. I think actually, as you said a few minutes ago around the vulnerability side, I think we are seeing that Leaders are vulnerable. If we just look outside our organisations and look at the world and politics, we won’t mention individuals of course, but we can see that those Leaders who are actually more vulnerable and actually say that we don't understand what is going on or what we are going to try and get our way through this, those seem to be the Leaders that are having more resonance with people.

Isabel Naidoo: Completely agree. And there is power in it. It can feel uncomfortable if you are a Leader who has never, I was that person, I was never very keen to share about self and it has driven a different kind of relationship. So it is something to consider, how do you use that power? How do you use that power of vulnerability going forward but when it is not forced on you, when I don't have my children interrupting me, which they haven't done actually in the time that we have been chatting, which is great. How do I take that lesson forward is definitely something that I will be doing differently.

David Green: Well, we haven't had any children on the podcast yet, but you never know we might get our first at some point. Last question now, it is one we are asking all the guests on this series. How does having the right people data in place support a business operating in a fast paced environment?

Isabel Naidoo: How do you not have the right people data in place and operate in a fast paced environment, if I turn that question back I would be curious to know. I think it is key to everything that you do, you can measure impact, you can drive insights, you can improve performance, you can pinpoint where you want to place your efforts and for the HR community it gives you credibility. There is nothing that smacks credibility, like a good bit of data and insight. So I would say critical and not sure how I would do it without it really.

David Green: Yeah. Certainly from research that we have done, it is one of the, if not the fastest growing area of HR still, even in organisations that have had these teams in place for five years or more, they are still growing quite significantly.

Isabel Naidoo: You're generating all this demand as they see all the success that you are having and they want more of it. It is a great problem to have actually in many ways, but yes scalability is interesting and that's why things like technology can be so critical to help with that.

David Green: I agree. But then the challenge comes around prioritisation when you have got so many requests, what do you prioritise above others. I guess that is all part of the evolution of a people analytics function. Well, Isabel, it has been wonderful to have you on the show, we didn’t get interrupted by any kids either mine or yours so that's great. How can people stay in touch with you on social media?

Isabel Naidoo: I am active on Twitter, under the Twitter handle @IsaNaidoo or you can follow me on LinkedIn, where I post regularly and I love hearing from people. As I just mentioned I am a people fan, so I love that and I love expanding my network and community and I love learning from others so get in touch and let's stay in touch. I would say.

David Green: Thank you very much for being on the show and I look forward to seeing you again, when we can meet again in person.

Isabel Naidoo:  Thank you for having me. It has been a pleasure.