Episode 83: How Can Organisations Provide the Right Environment for Employees to Learn? (Interview with Janice Burns)
This week’s podcast guest is Janice Burns, Chief People Officer at Degreed, who is passionate about the importance of learning and that the impact of learning isn't limited to remaining within the four walls of an organisation. Throughout this episode, Janice and I discuss:
Janice’s key strategic roles moving into the Chief People Officer role
The concept of guided freedom and why learning leaders should think differently about facilitating learning
The role of coaching and mentoring in professional development
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Degreed, to learn more visit degreed.com.
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.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Janice Burns, Chief People Officer at Degreed to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show, Janice, it is great to have you on. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your role at Degreed?
Janice Burns: Yes, I would love to David. I am Janice Burns, as you said, and I am the Chief People Officer, which means that I am responsible for the human resources function at Degreed. But more importantly, I am responsible for facilitating the execution of our business strategy by providing our leadership team with people and culture solutions that will help accelerate the execution of that strategy.
David Green: And you came to Degreed, we are going to talk about two elements of this because it is quite interesting. You came to Degreed pretty much just as the global pandemic started in 2020, but prior to that you spent 28 years at MasterCard, I believe. And the last eight as Chief Learning Officer. So quite an interesting link there between running learning for a big global organisation, like MasterCard, and then coming to an organisation that has helped in leading the discussion around the evolution of learning in the marketplace, through its technology.
Janice Burns: Yeah. So, you are correct. I spent most of my professional career at MasterCard. I held a variety of positions. I started my career on the business side, in marketing and product management, and somewhere along the lines I moved into HR. I have been an HR business partner, Head of Talent Acquisition, a Chief Diversity Officer and my last role was the Chief Learning Officer at MasterCard.
It was in that role that I was introduced to Degreed and really fell in love with the company, both because of their innovation in the space of learning, but also their approach to business and their clients and being true partners, not vendors, in helping MasterCard achieve with their learning objectives, but help me achieve professionally with my goals.
So, when I got to the point that I wanted to do something different, wanted to align my work a little bit closer with what I saw as my purpose, Degreed seemed like the perfect home to come to, and it has felt like I have come home.
David Green: Brilliant. As we said, you joined Degreed just as the global pandemic was starting.
We had Kat Kennedy from Degreed on the show, around a year or so ago now, and she was talking to us about how Degreed had grown quite significantly during the initial first six, seven months of the crisis.
As you said, you are responsible for connecting the people and business strategy together, and supporting Degreed’s continued growth, which is fantastic.
What would be really good to understand is what are some of your key goals moving into the Chief People Officer role? And what you hope to achieve and maybe some of the challenges that you are facing, as any organisation is because we are still in this remote hybrid world?
Janice Burns: This is a great question. So, when I joined Degreed, I joined in an enterprise leadership role, but as an individual contributor. So, I joined as the Chief Career Experience Officer and my role was threefold, it was to provide thought leadership in the area of learning strategy, up-skilling strategies, and career mobility strategies. And it was working with clients and prospects on helping them to reimagine how they thought about those three areas. And then finally my favourite part of my role was being a positive disruptor to the product organisation and keeping them focused on the end user.
That was very fulfilling, but when I moved into the Chief People Officer role, and I think the thing that attracted me to this role, when the CEO asked me to move into this role, I started the role at the beginning of August. So, we are two months in now. It was that I could drive greater business impact, that I would have a seat at the table, not just a seat at the table to talk about people solutions but a strategic seat at the table to drive the business strategy. And then after helping to formulate the business strategy, thinking about the people and organisational implications, and developing solutions from there. So that inspired me.
It also inspired me that I could continue to practice what I provide thought leadership in. You know, so many times you get thought leaders who are great academically and philosophically, but they have never done the job, or they did the job so long ago, what they are saying may not be as relevant. But to be dealing with the challenges and speaking on possible solutions to a broader audience, is really something that motivates me.
So that is the answer to the first part of your question.
The second part of your question in terms of my goals as the Chief People Officer, one is the facilitation of our strategy and the execution of that strategy.
The second is really thinking about, how do we create career elasticity for our employees? How do we keep them positioned so that they can continue to grow and thrive in their careers? Whether they are at Degreed or whether they are someplace else.
The third is, and this is not necessarily in the right order. Really maintaining the health and wellbeing of our employees. I think that has become much more of a priority for all companies, since the pandemic. And health and well-being are not just physical health, but it's physical, emotional, mental, and social health and wellbeing and financial health and wellbeing.
And then finally it is making sure that we are making a social impact. The pandemic made it very clear that companies can no longer just be concerned about what is happening just inside of the walls of their organisation. We all have a responsibility to society, to help uplift and maintain the health and wellbeing of people, regardless of where they are. And most importantly people who are at risk in their careers and economically because they don't have the skills and education to compete in today's marketplace. So really pulling that into our overarching people culture and organisational agenda is key.
David Green: Great and I am going to come back to that societal impact later, because I have just written that down as a real point of interest to come back to.
Obviously, I am really interested to get your view on this one. In your view, having been a Chief Learning Officer and now being the Chief People Officer at Degreed, how should responsibility to up-skill be split between the employee and the employer?
Janice Burns: I think that the employer has to create the condition for their employees to be able to learn. And whether that condition is about making sure that they have the time to learn, the tools and resources to learn, and the guidance necessary to learn and up-skill, those are the conditions.
I think that the employee is responsible for their curiosity, their willingness, and putting the time into the learning process. And so, it is a partnership between the two.
I had a philosophy at MasterCard, and it holds true here at Degreed, it is called guided freedom. And what that means is that I believe that an organisation is obligated to give people the tools and resources to learn the things that they need to learn, to perform well in their jobs and to grow in their careers and they do that by giving them the proper guidance.
But they also have an obligation to give employees the freedom to learn what they want, when they want, and how they want to learn. And we shouldn't limit people in terms of what they are learning, because the act of learning itself, regardless of if it is directly applicable to the role that someone is in or not, is something that helps to fuel innovation and creativity and imagination.
And so, this guided freedom principle worked really well for us at MasterCard, I think it is working for us here, but it is something that I would encourage learning leaders to think about. Our job is not to control learning, it is really to facilitate it by providing the right conditions.
David Green: Yeah, I really like that. It is almost like help people develop themselves as employees and maybe have careers within the organisation, but it is also help them to develop as people as well. For example, learning a language isn't necessarily important to their current role, but that is something they passionately want to do, then provide the means to help them to do that.
Janice Burns: Yeah, absolutely.
David Green: And I guess as employers we also have a responsibility, particularly in larger organisations, to help guide employees to learn skills that could potentially be really important to their careers within the organisation.
So if you are in an organisation there are certain skills that are going to be needed in more plentiful supply in the next two to three years and you have got employees that potentially could gain those skills quite easily, because they have got adjacent skills, by helping provide that information, as you say guide them, but still let them have the freedom to choose whether to do it.
That is where you are coming from, yeah?
Janice Burns: Absolutely.
I look at careers in two ways, the opportunity to grow within the organisation that you are currently employed in and then the opportunity to continue to grow throughout the lifespan of your career. And so, it is important to communicate to your employees the skills that are critical for your business, and for the future of your business, so that they can be guided towards either learning those skills or enhancing those skills.
But I also think it is important to let employees understand what are the skills that are trending in the broader marketplace. What are the skills that they need to think about for the future, so that they can maintain career elasticity, and also to help them to think about how to evaluate their marketability and manage and design a career that is going to keep them marketable. Because let's be honest, most people are not like me and will not stay with an organisation for 28 years. And so given that people will have multiple jobs throughout their career, we have an obligation to teach them how to navigate those waters.
So that is what I am trying to do within the organisation of Degreed and what I tried to do at MasterCard.
David Green: Yes, because as an employee, if you know you have got certain skills that are in demand, or certain skills that you could acquire that could be highly in demand or you can enhance, then as you said, that can be helpful in developing their careers within the organisation, but it is also helpful for their careers full stop, as you said that elasticity to potentially move between different organisations.
We can't really have a podcast episode at the moment without talking about the events of the last 18 to 20 months or so. How have the events of the last 18 months, both the pandemic and the bigger spotlight on diversity and inclusion, impacted learning experiences and the workforce’s commitment to up-skill?
Janice Burns: There have been so many ways that it has impacted the organisation, I think most organisations, Degreed in particular.
Degreed was founded on this belief that people should have access to the economic marketplace, not based on the degree that they have, but based on the skills that they possess. And so, the platform was created to help people grow those skills in whatever way they wanted to and grow those skills in a digital platform.
So, during the pandemic, most organisations went to remote status, they had to quickly find a way to deliver learning digitally. And that was very beneficial for us, from a business perspective, but it also provided us with an opportunity to help up-skill clients and prospects on how to create learning experiences in a digital environment and to help talk to their employees about how to think about learning differently and how to take charge of your own learning, not being reliant on an organisation to tell you what you needed to learn.
It also made us very conscious that there are so many people at risk because they don't have the skills that they will need for the future. Particularly frontline employees, employees who are in roles that we know are going to be automated, and that is not necessarily our employee base but many of our client’s. And so, helping organisations to think about how to re-skill those at risk employees, has been very important.
From a diversity and inclusion perspective, it made us think about inclusion much more holistically. So oftentimes when we talk about diversity and inclusion, we talk about the things that we can see that make people different or make people diverse. But in this environment, you begin to realise that geography creates diversity and can make people feel more included or less included. Both geography in terms of where they are in the world, especially if your organisation is concentrated in a particular geography, or lack of proximity due to the fact that we are not all physically together anymore, and everyone is dealing with that.
It also brought up issues of social justice because along with the pandemic there were a lot of things, particularly in the US, going on around social justice. Employees started demanding that their organisations have a voice, live the values that they preach. We at Degreed, just became much more focused on our diversity and inclusion, and social responsibility efforts and included our employees in that. And our employees began to teach each other through conversation, through creating narratives, through creating their own pathways to educate the organisation and other employees on various areas of diversity and inclusion, belonging, and impact.
And then finally, wellbeing became such a big issue for us. We have a business resource group that's dedicated to wellbeing because the lack of social connection created a vacuum for people that caused them to feel, not only disconnected, but depressed, to feel stressed, and helping people understand that acknowledging those feelings was really important. Seeking help for it and knowing that we are all in this together I think has helped us and our employees get through this.
We saw in our employee engagement survey, that those areas we actually did much better in, than we had done in previous years. But like everyone, I think we saw a decrease in overall engagement just because people are feeling a little bit less socially connected with one another.
David Green: Yeah, I see. That is the one thing that is difficult to solve for people working remotely, even if we moved to a more hybrid way of working.
It's interesting in many organisations that we speak to, I speak to on the podcasts, and we speak to in the work we do, the pandemic has almost helped a little. I mean, it is a health crisis and let's not forget that we wish we hadn't had it and obviously anyone that has been personally affected by it have our best wishes, but it has helped spark more focus on inclusion, on wellbeing, and learning in many organisations. And I guess one of our challenges, as human resources professionals, is to make sure that that focus continues beyond the crisis.
To come back to your point earlier, around one of your goals as Chief People Officer to improve and make an impact on society. What are some of the things that you have been doing at Degreed to help to do that? And maybe to extend on that, what are some of the things that you are seeing, in some of the organisations that you work with at Degreed, in terms of making that impact on society?
Janice Burns: So definitely extending learning opportunities beyond the traditional target groups. I am seeing our clients and us helping our clients find solutions to, not only help their at-risk employees and help them find future roles within the company by up-skilling them but acknowledging that all of them will not be able to find a future role inside of their company and so up-skilling them to find future roles outside of their company, has been a huge piece of this.
Partnering with NGOs and governments, because this issue of what we call the skills revolution, is bigger than any company, it's bigger than any industry, and it's going to take a partnership between the private, public sectors, and the government, to really be able to address the crisis. And so, we are partnering more with NGOs as well, to look at those types of things.
I think what we have also seen is our clients understanding that the social contract between employer and employee has changed. And if you do not think about both, the skills of your employee base and how you can differentiate yourself by showing that you are dedicated and will make an investment in their future and in their career mobility, if you can't demonstrate that you really do care about the greater good and are willing to stand up to that and that you will invest in their safety and wellbeing, you will not be competitive in the marketplace.
I think with now, what everyone is calling the great resignation, you are seeing that. You are seeing people decide to exercise their option of where they take their skills. I always talk about, in the past, the employer was kind of had the advantage because they could choose who they hired and offer whatever job they wanted to. And now the employee has the advantage because they can choose who they want to give their skills to and offer their skills to, and if they don't find that they have the right conditions and the right upside for them, and it's not just about money, they will take their feet and move someplace else. And because of this skill crisis, they can demand a much higher price for those skills.
So, it is an interesting market, but I think we are getting to a more balanced relationship between the employer and employee.
David Green: Yeah, and let’s hope so. It is interesting, the great resignation, you could also reverse that and say it is a great opportunity for those employers that do provide opportunity to employees as you say, develop people as employees, not just for your organisation but for others, then you might attract more talent into your organisation as well. So, it could act as a bit of a differentiator between those that attract more talent and those that lose talent. So, it could be very interesting.
Janice Burns: That is an excellent point. So just an aside, I recently posted a job for an executive assistant, to support me as I moved into my new role. And, you know, you expect a handful of people to apply. I think within the first week we had a thousand people apply for this one role and I was amazed.
But I think it goes to that point of, people are attracted to organisations that they think represent their values and will provide them with opportunity. And hopefully, I played a little bit of a part in that, that people who could go onto LinkedIn or whatever, could see something about me that they wanted to work for me. But I think it's more about the organisation, the culture and the atmosphere, and the reputation that the organisation has. So, for those organisations that are seen positively in the marketplace, yeah it is a great opportunity to bring in fantastic talent.
David Green: And I think that lends nicely to the next question, as a former Chief Learning Officer and now Chief People Officer, can you tell us a bit about your own personal approach to learning and what advice would you give to any listeners that are struggling to balance work and learning?
Janice Burns: I talk about this all the time because I think sometimes people get overwhelmed when they think about learning something new. They see it as a big chore where they have to carve out huge amounts of time and then it feels overwhelming because like, where am I going to find all of this time? Right.
And even if you think about spending two hours a week learning, at a minimum. If you carve that up into chunks, in to 10-minute chunks, it becomes quite achievable. If we think about, on any given day, how much time we waste looking at television or engaging in some nonsense conversation or just wasting time eating foods that maybe we shouldn't be eating, that time could be spent reading an article, looking at a video, doing a quick review, and there are a number of apps where you can review an entire book in 15 minutes, you can find the time to do those things.
And so, I have done a couple of things. Exercise is really important to me, and I schedule that into my day. While I am exercising, I am learning something. I'm either listening to a podcast, or I'm looking at a video, or I'm reading a quick article, or listening to an audiobook.
I am skimming industry news, every single morning, to see if there is something new out there that is related to the digital learning space, that's related to up-skilling, that is related to my role, and sometimes things that have absolutely no connection and I am either reading it right then or saving it, and luckily you can save those things into Degreed and read it throughout the day, to keep me up to date. I keep a notebook and I will just write little notes to myself. If it is particularly interesting, I will share it with my team or with another member.
And then occasionally I will sign up for an online course, usually an online course where I can manage my time and I'm not stuck to a particular time. But that is how I spend my time learning and I am sure I spend at least four hours a week doing that, but it is not in one big chunk, it is small chunks over the course of the week.
David Green: Yeah, it sounds similar to me actually. I always think that you have got to invest the time to learn, and it will help, I find it helps me the same day a lot of the time, but if it doesn't help you the same day or the same week, it will certainly help you in the months to come. We do seem to do something very similar if I have got 10 to 15 minutes I am not going to go and look at the sport when I am having my cup of tea in the morning, I am actually going to focus on an article or a podcast that I can learn from. But yes, carving out that time.
Janice Burns: But that requires curiosity and I think that is one of the things that we don't talk about enough. There is debate of whether or not curiosity is a skill or trait, I tend to think it is a trait, but it may be a skill. But if you aren't curious, I don't think someone can force you to be curious. You have to have that desire to want to learn more about the world and to become more knowledgeable and if you don't have that natural desire, it is going to be hard for you to learn to up-skill because I don't know how anyone can put that inside of you.
And so that is one of the things that I think we need to talk about more, is curiosity. How do we foster curiosity? I think you can foster it; I am just not sure it is a skill that can actually be developed, but we can have a debate about that.
David Green: That sounds like a second podcast to me. Self-curiosity, shall we say, and carving time out for learning, as you said, not necessarily big chunks but 10, 15 minutes at a time. What is the role of coaching and mentoring in professional development?
Janice Burns: I think it is extremely important. So, I think about the Deloitte model, when they talk about learning, and they talk about learning from the perspective of education. And so that is acquiring new knowledge. Then they talk about it in terms of experience and that is about how you apply that knowledge. What types of activities do you get involved in, to apply that knowledge?
Then they talk about exposure. And that is, how do you engage with people who can put that knowledge into context for you? And that is where I think coaching and mentoring play a big role, is providing that context, is also fostering that curiosity by asking questions, that causes the person to have to pursue another route to get the answers. It is not about giving them the answers, it is about asking the question that inspires them to go find their own answers.
And then their final E, is the environment. And the environment goes back to the conditions that the organisation creates for you. But I think as a leader, both an enterprise leader and a people leader, if you are not constantly coaching and mentoring, you are not doing your job, because your job is to help people continuously grow and improve their ability to perform. And you can't do that without you pushing them, a little bit, stretching them, a little bit, asking questions, and then providing them with context. And that is what I think happens in a good coaching and mentoring relationship.
David Green: Yes, I agree with all of that. It would be interesting to see, I’m not sure if it is something you are doing at Degreed either for clients or internally, but what is the business value of an effective coaching and mentoring scheme?
Janice Burns: Yeah, I think the business value is that it accelerates someone's ability to perform, because you are providing them with context, because you are stretching them further than they would naturally stretch on their own. People learn and perform better with a little bit of stress and intention and that is what that stretching does, and that questioning does, which helps them to increase their performance capability, but it accelerates them getting to that next step in performance.
David Green: And it is interesting you say that you have talked about it being a core responsibility of leaders and I have seen several organisations, Microsoft is one that has gone public on it, what are the leader behaviours that drive engagement and performance? One of the ones that they identified was the more one-to-one time managers were having with their direct reports, the higher the engagement of those team members and the better the performance ratings. Which seems to talk quite nicely, so you're not doing your job if you're a leader and you're not getting the results that you could be getting if you were doing it as well. So quite interesting, seeing that play out in other organisations as well.
What advice would you give to other HR professionals or other Chief People Officers, or senior HR leaders on listening to this, who are looking to establish a successful coaching and mentoring program?
Janice Burns: Yeah, I think going back to the Microsoft example, they have to establish it as a core expectation of their people leaders and their enterprise leaders.
And I say people leaders are being responsible for a team of people directly and enterprise leaders being responsible for larger parts of the organisation. If that's not a core expectation and a core expectation where people are held accountable for it. Held accountable by how they are measured, both by their superiors, by the board, by their employees, then it's not real. So that would be one.
The second would be to provide the leaders with tools, resources, experiences, to build those coaching and mentoring skills. It does not come natural for everyone and so you have to be pragmatic about it and provide them with those opportunities.
And third, they have to experience being coached and mentored themselves. No one ever gets too old or too senior to be coached or mentored and you are more likely to do what is being done to you. So, making sure that it is a reciprocal relationship, that they are coaching and mentoring, and they are receiving coaching and mentoring, I think helps that expectation stick and become real within an organisation.
David Green: And I guess as people functions, as well as providing the tools as you said, if we can also do analysis and provide insights from data that shows the business value of doing it and the value to employees of doing it in terms of engagement, maybe it has made them less likely to leave, maybe it's performance, maybe it's linked even through to customer outcomes, then we can really reinforce not only is it the right thing to do, but it actually makes business sense to do it.
Okay Janice, we have come to the last question, and I think we could carry on talking about this for a while, particularly the point we had earlier, which is almost a whole new podcast in itself. And I know this is something you will be particularly passionate about. So, this is a question that we are asking everyone on this series, how can HR help the business identify the critical skills for the future?
Janice Burns: Extremely important question. And I think there is actually a pragmatic approach to doing that and it is something I do spend a lot of time talking about.
First of all, going back to that question of curiosity and learning, HR people have to spend the time understanding what is happening in the marketplace, by reading, by talking and networking with others, to see what skills hot skills are, what skills are declining skills, and to know how to classify skills. And I classify skills in three big buckets, power skills, functional skills, and hot skills. Power skills are those human professional skills that are transferable in any role, and they are power skills because they maintain themselves throughout the course of your career. The power your career.
Functional skills are skills that are more specific to your functional area of expertise, they are core knowledge areas that you need for your functional area of expertise, and they can be transferred in the right situations, but they are not transferable to all jobs.
And then hot skills are those more transactional skills because they are hot for a period of time and then they may decrease in their value, but they have a higher price point.
And so, as an organisation and as an individual, you need to understand what that portfolio of skills looks like and what is the value of those. As a HR person, you can't ask executives, what are the key skills you need for this strategy? Because they are going to tell you what they know, and what they know isn’t what you know about what is actually happening. What you have to be able to do is to take the strategy, dissect it and figure out what are the things, the critical things, that must be done in order to execute on that strategy because skills are what people do. And so, a better conversation to have with an executive is just that, tell me Anne / tell me Joe, in order for us to increase revenue in the next 8 months, what are the most critical things that people have to do? And what will cause us to fail if they can't do it? From there, you can determine what the key skills are. You can validate those skills by looking at market data and then confirming that with the executive. And then you focus on how you build and fortify those skills and you focus on the business outcome, not on traditional learning metrics and HR stuff, because the businesspeople do not care about that. They care about business outcomes and as long as you can agree on the business outcomes, and you can develop a solution that is going to get to the business outcome, you develop a great partnership where you show real value. That business leader continues to come back to you because you are providing them with a service, strategic leadership, and insight that they can't get on their own
David Green: Brilliant answer. I think that summarised it perfectly and it is a great way to conclude the discussion, Janice. And I think, as you said, the most critical part of that is it's connected to the business outcome. That is what business leaders care about, not the number of learning hours delivered, which we all think is really important because we work in HR, but it is not as important as the outcomes you are trying to affect.
So, Janice, thanks very much for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. How can listeners stay in touch with you, maybe follow you on social media and get an insight into some of the stuff that you are learning? But also find out more about Degreed, as well?
Janice Burns: Thank you for asking that question.
They can get in touch with me on LinkedIn, I am active on LinkedIn, I hate to say I'm not really active on other forms of social media, it is just too noisy for me.
And then they can always get in touch and find out what is going on with Degreed on LinkedIn, on our website, on Instagram, on Twitter. We are very active as a company in almost every form of social media. Janice is just active on LinkedIn.
David Green: Because you are using your time that would be on social media, to learn.
Janice Burns: Exactly. My daughter is trying to help me be a TikTok queen and that's not going to happen anytime soon, but I am working on the skill.
David Green: My daughter is also trying to teach me to be on TikTok, as well, and she hasn't succeeded yet. So maybe we can compare notes, in a few months, then Janice?
Janice Burns: Maybe our curiosity about it isn't high enough yet.
David Green: Janice, I have really enjoyed our discussion. Thank you very much for being on the show.