Episode 112: Live Special from People Analytics World 2022: Linking People Analytics to Business Impact (Interview with Jordan Pettman and Tertia Wiedenhof)

On the show today, I am talking to Jordan Pettman Head of Organisation Analytics and Insight at London Stock Exchange Group, and Tertia Wiedenhof Head of People Analytics and Insights at Rabobank. This week’s show is a slightly different podcast from normal, as this episode was recorded live at People Analytics World 2022, which took place in London and online in April. Between us we explore the impact of the pandemic on the field of people analytics and the role of the Chief People Officer.

In this episode, we discuss:

  • The impact of the pandemic on the field of people analytics

  • The changing role of the chief people officer

  • The evolution and future considerations of hybrid working

  • The increased appetite for data-driven analytics

  • The best way for people analytics teams and HR to successfully work together

  • Jordan and Tertia share their thoughts on how HR can add business value, as we start to come out of the pandemic

Support for this podcast comes from Visier. You can learn more by visiting https://www.visier.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: So, we'll start as we usually do on the show.  Welcome to the show, Jordan and Tertia, and thank you for helping us to create this historic episode.  Please can each of you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your respective roles?  Tertia, let's start with you.

Tertia Wiedenhof: Yeah, sure.  I'm Product Owner at Rabobank in the People Analytics team.  So, what we do is people analytics research cases, and also employee listening, people data, reporting and dashboarding and HR innovation, so full scope of that.  Rabobank is a global cooperative bank, and we're headquartered in the Netherlands.

David Green: Thank you, Tertia.  And, Jordan?

Jordan Pettman: Jordan Pettman, I'm Head of Organisation Analytics and Insights at LSEG, London Stock Exchange Group, with a remit quite similar to Tertia's actually.  So, we look after data standards and the way that we integrate into our corporate data office and corporate privacy office and that sort of stuff, reporting business intelligence, org design, workforce planning analytics and employee listening.

David Green: And you've both been in the people analytics field for a number of years.  Tertia, I think you've been four and a half years in the field, so pre-pandemic as well, which will help with the next question; and Jordan, a long time.

Jordan Pettman: Long enough that I've had to use more hair dye recently!

David Green: There we are, hair dye and people analytics; that's a correlation for you, isn't it?!  So, let's start with this question, I'd love to hear from both of you on this.  We've heard a lot today at People Analytics World, and we've heard a lot over the last few months, two years in fact, about the impact that the pandemic has had on the field of people analytics in general, HR and also the role of the Chief People Officer.  Have you seen this shift in your organisations too; and do you think that business perception of people analytics has also changed in the last two years?  Jordan, can we start with you on that?

Jordan Pettman: I would say, for sure, and I think for anyone that's in the room with us today, they would know that this is absolutely something I saw, because I talked about it this morning.  But yes, I would say that the roles of the Chief People Officer that I've seen, in both current organisation and previous, definitely shifted as a result of, I guess, the heightened requirement of other business leaders to really be quite intimate with what information they could gather about their workforce.

If you think about when COVID first started and we started working hybrid, and our employees were all probably not vaccinated yet and catching COVID, there was a need for businesses to be able to start to manage employees' health information, not just their personal information.  So, I think the role of the Chief People Officer, and thus the support that we gave them out of people analytics, was pretty important, because we're often the custodians of data privacy around our employees' data. 

So, our ability to provide the business with mechanism to be able to interrogate information about their employees in a way that was around safeguarding them, around ensuring that they were able to come to premises if they needed to come to premises, in a way that was going to make sure that we didn't contaminate people who had COVID and didn't have COVID, and all that sort of stuff, I think it became really very important; particularly in business like Nestlé, where I was, loads of Nestlé didn't work from home.  Loads of Nestlé works in factories and distribution centres.

So, the role of the Chief HR Officer and their HR teams became really important, because without them in place to be able to use data about those employees, to make sure that supply chain continued to run, businesses would have ground to a halt.  So, yes, I think the role of the Chief People Officer has become far more important, or the spotlight, I guess, has been shone differently on the Chief People Officer, because of the power of the people data that they can bring to those kinds of business continuity conversations.

David Green: Yeah, as well as employee wellbeing, safety, it's business continuity, isn't it, essentially?

Jordan Pettman: Of course.

David Green: One organisation that I spoke to, a big pharma distribution company in the US, their people analytics team were able to pinpoint when they would need to shut down their distribution centre on the East Coast because of COVID infections, and they actually predicted it within a few days of when it happened, so there were able to put contingency plans in place so that the pharmacies and the hospitals on the East Coast were serviced; so, really important.

And Tertia, is it something similar that you've seen as well?

Tertia Wiedenhof: Yeah, I have really recognised it.  And especially for us, if you remember more than two years ago, from one day to the other, one day we were all at the office and then the other day, you wouldn't see anyone anymore, everyone at home.  I think that's when we realised that it's not like -- employee listening is not about HR, but it's about really, genuinely listening to what employees need.

So, our team was able to set up, I think within one week, a survey to sample the organisation, "Okay, how are you doing?  What is it actually you need?  How can we support you even more?" because those two basic questions, that's what we wanted to know, and then we saw the patterns emerge.  So at first, the first couple of weeks, it was all about IT setting up VPN connections.  Then, after a couple of weeks, it was about facilities, people recognising that for four weeks at my kitchen chair doesn't work, so I need a proper screen and proper chair.

Then, after a while, it became more HR topics, about connection with colleagues, more about the purpose of being online to the rest of the organisation, and it's really interesting that you see those shifts.  And listening to employees is not an HR topic per se, but using those data by more departments, that's really valuable, yeah.

David Green: And I think what it sounds like we're seeing in both the organisation you were working in, probably your currently organisation, Jordan, and at Rabobank, Tertia, is that people analytics enabled the Chief People Officer and the team to really do that work and have that impact.  And business leaders have now seen what people analytics and HR, good HR, can do and they want more of it; which, Tertia, leads on to staying with you on this.  Can you talk to some of the newer activities that you've been involved in as a people analytics team over the last year or two, and how you've seen some of this change impact your work?

Tertia Wiedenhof: Yeah.  Much was about hybrid work.  So I think already, one and a half years ago, we were all at home at the time, but we know there will be a time when restrictions will be less and we can come back.  Okay, what do people want?  So, we asked again and we saw that people don't want to come back for five days into the office anymore.  But now we can experiment, okay, how are people going to use the office?

We have opened the offices again, but there are no straight rules about, "You have to come two or three days to the office".  We really gave people a lot of freedom to it.  So, we asked people to check, "Which activities are you going to do?  Check with your team.  If it's about creativity or networking with colleagues, or meeting customers, of course you're welcome to come into the office, but you can also stay at home in your office if that's more useful, or you have to do highly concentrated work".

What's really interesting is, as of recently, our workplace IT colleagues and facilities colleagues are also reporting in the CHRO.  What it means, as a people analytics team, we can start using the data how the offices are used, and of course we don't want to do that in a creepy kind of way, because we don't want like a monitor in videos.  Do we really want to check what's working in this hybrid way of working; what do we need to adjust; and how can we help people even better?

For instance, a person who chooses to be only once every two weeks in the office, he or she is maybe interested a lot in improving home offices; whereas, people who are for five days or four days at the office, they may be interested more in commuting allowance, things like that, and you really want to customise more what people need.  So, yeah, using those data will open up facilities like that.

David Green: That's really interesting that you've kind of pulled the people, the workforce and the workplace data together, so I guess that's going to help you understand, as you said, how people are using the office, and potentially inform workplace design moving forward, depending on whether people are using the office for collaboration, for example.

Tertia Wiedenhof: If you really want your employees to thrive, it's not about, "This is an HR product, or an IT product or solution, or something of facilities", if you want to do the end-to-end and pre-journey as well, it's really cool to collaborate intensively with also IT and facilities; and our new setup allows us to do that, and it's really amazing.

David Green: And I guess moving forward as well, looking at if companies are being flexible around employee choice and on how many days they spend or don't spend in the office, then I guess down the line, we're going to have to be looking at, are you discriminated against, effectively?  If you're mainly working from home, how do we make sure that people that are doing good work, who are mainly working from home, aren't being overlooked for promotion?  And I guess that's where people analytics is going to help support those discussions and investigations.  Very interesting.

So, Jordan, how has LSEG approached the shift to hybrid working and people returning to the office; and what role have you and your team played?

Jordan Pettman: So I guess, LSEG is global, despite being the London Stock Exchange Group, wherein our return to office, the approach is obviously very different depending on where you are.  We are somewhat impacted by a couple of different geopolitical things happening at the moment.  Those of you with workforces in South Asia might know that there's all kinds of challenges with things like fuel shortages and rolling blackouts, and difficulty to get to an office, and difficulty to work remote.

Those of you with workforces in places like Russia and Ukraine, and others in central Europe, will know that there are challenges there as well.  So, we're running a pretty diversified return-to-office strategy, I guess.  But our CEO in our most recent Town Hall is actually really explicit that, as a business, we do want employees to want to be co-located and want to work together. 

Like many businesses, we took the opportunity that not having employees in offices provided us, to make our offices a nice place to be with collaboration zones; and his really clear message to all of us in the last Town Hall was, "Come back, but we recognise that working from home is a thing, and I quite like working from home, so we don't expect people to be back five days a week".

So, something that we've been really clear on is that we expect a return to office that is purpose-led, and we expect that purpose to be led by teams.  So, for me, our approach to hybrid is down to the decisions that I make with my team.  It's not driven by my ExCo member down through all of HR, it's about the way that we choose to work together. 

I think some of that triggers maybe less analytically-driven actions, but a range of actions that aren't just about whether you're in the same place at the same time, or at home; it's some of the behavioural stuff and in an employee listening kind of way, forcing us to be really open to both giving feedback about the way that we're experiencing hybrid, and then creating an expectation on those teams and leaders, like me, who need to set the expectation for what hybrid looks like.

I have a bunch of people in London, as you might expect at the London Stock Exchange, and a bunch of people elsewhere.  And new into our hybrid working, where our London people were coming back into the office, we'd be sitting in our meeting room and we've got all of the whizz-bang new technologies, that have the cameras that track people's faces when they speak, and it's all great.  And people at home, obviously, can dial in and it's all fine.  But we got really direct feedback during one of those meetings that my face was almost constantly behind the tub of wet wipes to clean down the tables!  So, even with the great technology, we still weren't able to see, and it's unfair on those people who were working remotely to dial into those meeting rooms, to still not see people. 

So, one of the actions that we've then taken is to deliberately listen to what those people have said, and all of us, despite -- remember those rules that if you were going into a meeting room, you'd leave your laptop at your desk, because if you had your laptop open, you weren't paying attention?  We've flipped it so that we all take our laptops and put our cameras on our faces, so that when we are speaking, we're not sitting behind the wet wipe container and we're able to be seen.  So, it's driven a real need to listen to our colleagues and change the way that we behave, so that the hybrid experience is hybrid, and not just someone working from home and not getting the benefit of being in the meeting room with everyone. 

I think some of the rest of it then is the way that we then do use some of the data about the way that people are coming back, to drive a bunch of decisions.  If we realise that there's a percentage of the population that don't require to be in the office in order to be effective, then perhaps our office doesn't need to be as large.  And so, if we're making bottom-line decisions around the way that offices are used, we're obviously able to use some of that hybrid data to help the business make sensible decisions about that as well. 

David Green: Again, if a Chief People Officer, or a CEO for that matter, has got people analytics as part of its armoury, it gives you a chance to experiment a little bit around hybrid working and test and iterate, learn and move on.  Is this one of the things that's really elevating people analytics in your two organisations?

Tertia Wiedenhof: I think it is.  And it is not returning to the office like we used to, so it is still an experiment.  Two years ago, we would all hope it wasn't a necessary experiment; now, we want this hybrid working.  But like Jordan says, if something isn't working, then adjust and try it out and talk to each other, and check what works for teams.  And for instance, what we saw is that in the past, people almost all, if they went to the office, it was to the headquarters or the regional office.  Now, we've opened up also a lot of our local offices, because two or three people were located from their house more closely to a local office; they might want to meet up in a local office, and it saves travelling time, it saves emissions, it's good for work/life balance. 

So, we're already seeing people are meeting more often in those local offices.  Well, that's really something that's useful.  But you don't have to be scared that something didn't work, because we all designed the hybrid working when we were still at home; it was like a theoretical exercise.  So now we're bringing it into practice, you can be sure that some things don't work out.  It's no shame; just adjust and see what works.

Jordan Pettman: We're afforded this tremendous opportunity to use the data that we've got available to us, whether it's about people's attendance in offices, or our survey data, or what have you, to really help the business and our CEOs and ExCos to understand, perhaps, the way that our cultures have shifted across the last two years, and whether that's a good thing and whether that's a bad thing, and whether our employees are able to maintain their own wellbeing and their work/life integration in a way that is appropriate, that delivers their wellbeing, but our productivity as well.

I remember a conversation with my boss at Nestlé, he was really challenged during COVID, because the way that he was able to maintain a sense of what was going on in his team, but also a sense of what was going on with his people, was that they'd go for lunch; it was the thing that we did in the Nestlé headquarters, you'd go for lunch and you'd know what was going on.  You don't do that if everyone's sitting in, if you're like me, your sweatpants at home eating microwave soup for lunch! 

The data that we have available to us gives us this opportunity to help those business leaders who don't have the opportunity to take their team to lunch regularly, to kind of say, "We can see from all of this passive data", that we might have access to through Microsoft or Atal, "to understand that our people are actually not taking breaks, or our people are not repurposing that hour that they used to commute for going for a run, or meditating, or hanging out with the kids, or taking the dog for a walk.  They're rolling out of bed and rolling into their emails".

We've got this opportunity to help those leaders understand employee behaviour, help them get their arms around whether or not employee behaviour is something that we'd like to see, whether it's harmful, whether it's generating wellbeing; and then make deliberate decisions around what outcomes our hybrid strategies are driving.  It's new for me, and it's super-exciting.  The opportunity to continually do brand-new things in the people analytics world is what keeps this exciting, and what keeps those of us who've got lots of grey hair doing it, I guess, because we weren't having this conversation two years ago; and now it's something that we're all talking about.  It's cool.

David Green: It's interesting a point both of you made, when Jonathan and I were writing the book and we were looking at the future of people analytics, and I'm going to come to that with the two of you in a minute, one of the areas we looked at was the societal benefit of people analytics, and we are thinking very much around the DEI agenda, not just within your organisations, but in the communities that we serve. 

But actually, you've raised a really important point around sustainability, because why can't we use people analytics to drive the sustainability agendas in our organisations as well?  That definitely is a conversation that links to hybrid work, and what you were saying about meeting locally as well.

Tertia Wiedenhof: We were speaking about inclusion, hybrid working, and what works for me can be something totally different than what works for you.  For instance, working in the evenings, for some person it will be a huge issue for work/life balance, and if you see it as a manager, you would say, "Okay, what's going on, why are you working all those evenings?"  For another person, it will be the opportunity to stop for a while at 3.00pm, get the kids out of school, eat with them, prepare dinner and then after that, when they go to sleep, work for a couple of hours.  Then, you have the perfect flexibility and it really works, so there's no one size fits all.

I think having the data available, and also the IT and facilities there and people there and combining those, not to do scary things with it, not to follow individuals, not to say, "You cannot do this or that", but to help people to thrive, I think that's really a great opportunity that people analytics can help with.

David Green: That's very interesting.  Just a bit of a side, but Microsoft published something a couple of weeks ago around the Third Peak, they're calling it now.  So, you get productivity peaks traditionally before lunch and just after lunch, and they found another one around 8.00pm, 9.00pm in the evening, where people were going on, answering a lot of emails and stuff, and hopefully then having a glass of wine and going to bed!

So, you've definitely both seen an increased appetite in the business for people analytics.  What are you, as people analytics, planning to do to support this demand and help those business leaders make more decisions based on data?  I'll come to you first, Tertia, on that one.

Tertia Wiedenhof: I was thinking about this, what can we do even more.  And I think at some point, I was doubting maybe we've even been too successful at conveying the message to leaders and HR business partners, "You have to use the data", because people tend to ask for more and more data, then they are here again, "Okay, we need more data, another survey", and we don't want again to run a survey, because you don't want survey fatigue.  So, "Did you already check the data that's there?" and also the question, "What are you going to do with the data?" and often that answer is, "Well, I know we have to use data, so I'm first collecting it and then I'm not sure.  I'll see when I have the data what I'm going to do with it".

I think it's so important to always give back to employees what you have done with the data, but also to dive deeper in data that's already there; and like Jordan said, using the passive data.  And I think at this point, we really have to think about which information are we going to provide to which level.  So, we really tend to provide senior level with strategic data; whereas, the more operational data will help the teams to talk about that, discussions about work/life balance, energy, asking each other for help, having the psychological safety, that's typical team topics to discuss there, on team level.  I think that's interesting, the discussion, who's going to get which data, which insights.

For us, as Rabobank, we're in this agile transformation, and that also means that having the teams to decide upon a lot of things, and in some cases even you can think of teams hiring new people, or making decisions on that.  But then also, if you want that, you need to have the information streams in order, and not only provide the highest level with all the data, but give them the more data for strategic direction selling.  So that's, I think, a new way of thinking, preventing the information overload, because there is a tendency to, "Okay, give us all the data", and then people don't have the time to read it.

David Green: And you're almost building more trust at each level, as you talked about, whether it's executives or employees, by giving them the right data to help them in their day-to-day work and organise themselves as teams, which I guess is a key facet of agile work.  Jordan, maybe you might want to speak to the shift from Nestlé to LSEG, and the design.  I mean, you're working at a data company now.

Jordan Pettman: Yeah, it's interesting, and I think we've kind of got a bit of a double-edged sword really, in that I work for a data company now, and that means that our leaders are all anxious to have access to lots of information, which is good.  That means that they're impatient to get lots of information.  And in integrating business, in both of our businesses, we're populated by data-literate, productive and competent people, who want to ensure that the business leaders can make the right decisions that they need to make, which often means that we find lots of people who've had a really great idea to create a dashboard that helps their leader to see that data and make some decisions with it.

Then, you look at the leader to their left, and lo and behold, there's a dashboard that's been created for that leader that is helping them to make decisions.  And maybe the calculations in those dashboards are the same, maybe they're not.  And maybe the way that the data made it to that dashboard is secure and permission-controlled, and maybe it's not.  So, I think there's this great desire to have more information, and then that responsibility on my team, but in the people function more broadly, to make sure that data privacy is governed at source, and that data consistency is something that we stand everything else upon.

So, there's that real, wanting to be the enabler, whilst also being the blocker essentially to other people misusing some of that data.  So, it's interesting, but I think the opportunity that we have to ensure that the double-edged sword doesn't cut us in both directions, is to focus on ensuring that our people function, whether it's business partners or talent managers, or what have you, are enabled to be augmented by the insight and information and tools that are available to them, rather than having that expectation that perhaps they've got to go and build that for themselves.

I think we heard in a sit-down a little earlier, the idea of an ExCo member taking a screenshot of a slide and then sending it to someone else, and having to scramble to go and reproduce it for their area.  I think, if we're successful in ensuring that our business partners and talent managers and reward managers sing from the same song sheets and use the same tool set, we have a real opportunity to accelerate the way that all of our business leaders use the same information in the same way to make the right decisions.

But there's part of that that then speaks to a need to move really, really quickly.  So, I think a big focus for us is, perhaps unsurprisingly, getting all of our data into a data lake that is governed through data privacy by design, that is governed through role-based access control, that then enables us to give business intelligence teams, elsewhere in the business, the ability to pull a headcount, and we don't need to give them permission to do that, because by role-based security, they're already allowed to.  It enables us to enable the people function at the same time as enabling other parts of the business to do whatever they need to, without getting in anyone's way.  It's different and new and equal challenges to Nestlé, but good!

David Green: It's always challenges, wherever you go. So, as we look further into the future, what do you think, and let's be honest, we wouldn't have predicted a pandemic, so I won't hold you to this; what do you think are going to be some of the other challenges that you're going to face?  Has the rest of HR kept pace with this new demand for people data?  Is this change putting pressure on HR skillsets, or even what the right operating model should be for how HRBPs and people analytics teams work together?  So, Jordan, I'll stay with you first on that one.

Jordan Pettman: Yeah, I mean I think I spoke a little bit about this this morning as well.  I think because we keep talking about analytics and data literacy being something that's super-important to the HR function generally, and because of the way that HR technology has developed, there's so much analytics that either is or could be inherent in the way that we run HR process, that the way that people analytics is going to need to continue to evolve I think is different to the way that it was maybe this time five years ago.

If we're living and working in a place where the HR skillset is going to become far more about taking a digitally-enabled set of HR processes to business, people analytics' obligation, I suppose, is ensuring that those HR folk that are digitally enabled are asking all the right questions right up the front.  I think I probably overuse this quote, but it's the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.  He says to Alice, "If you don't know where you're going, then any which road will take you there".

I think we talk about that when we start thinking about the data that we put into an HR solution, that we then get to the end of that HR solution and then can't tell people whether that learning intervention was effective, because the data that that learning intervention has produced doesn't tell us whether it is or not. 

So, as HR practitioners get better and better at delivering all these interventions that are driven through data, through technologies, I think our role in people analytics is going to become far more about making sure that we're right at the beginning of those processes, defining what goes in, rather than being bolted on at the and analysing what comes out the other end, because garbage in, garbage out?

David Green: That's the polite way of saying it.  I'm glad you said it that way!  And, Tertia?

Tertia Wiedenhof: Yeah, I think I've always said that in the end, if we are successful as people analytics teams, then we're not necessary anymore, because the rest of HR can do it themselves.  Pre-pandemic, our team was already working 50/50 in the other HR teams, and that is to help them further.  We have stretched that now even to 70%, and also you can say, who's going to do that and spend so much time?  But if you really want to create valuable and free solutions, then you really have to start with the data, and not design products that you think, as HR, or workplace IT or facilities, think that are interesting or good for employees, but you do have to listen to employees' use of data before you start designing something.

We are doing that with them now, embedded, and that I think creates a lot of opportunities.  Sometimes people are scared when I say, "When you're successful, you're not needed anymore, as a people analytics team".  Of course, I don't think that we want to turn every HR professional into a people data scientist, that's not the case.  But to have the data literacy skills to use data, to do the proper analysis; I think that's needed for everyone who designs employee solutions.

Jordan Pettman: I'm almost reluctant to ask the question, given that Insight222 have recently published the new operating model for people analytics teams, but I kind of wonder if this is heralding maybe a new operating model for people analytics teams? 

If the baseline competency of HR teams is fundamentally changing and the ask of people analytics teams is fundamentally changing, does it mean that we potentially have become less centre of expertise, and have become far more business partner focused, because we're still going to do some of the heavy lifting around analytics and predictive analytics and forecasting, and that sort of stuff.  But do we need to become less centre of expertise and more business partner?  I don't know, maybe that's some research you and Jonathan can do.

David Green: Well, it can be some research that we do in the organisation, yeah, but it's an interesting thought.  And yeah, as some of those skills disperse more into the overall HR population, then you could see that there could be a time when we're not putting up slides saying how much people analytics teams are growing; but I guess the future will tell us.

I'm going to start to wrap up now.  This is the question we're asking everyone on this series of the podcast, so I'll go to you first on this one, Tertia.  What do you believe to be the two to three things that HR will need to do to really add business value as we come out, and I say "hopefully" come out, of the pandemic?

Tertia Wiedenhof: Two things?  First, well if companies of course are talking about talent, where are we getting talent from, I would say, don't only look at your outside talent, but look at fostering the talent you have in your organisation, and help people to reskill, upskill.  Look at your internal transfers, and also I think about internal internship, and not only for people who are 23 years old, but also an internship when you're 30 or 40 or 50 or 60, to help people keep on learning. 

The other thing is, just like I said, the hybrid working, it is an experiment.  Be brave enough to adjust when things don't work; adjust it.  And also think about, we're talking about pre-pandemic, but I think at this stage, it's more like pre-government measures and not in all countries, but in a lot of countries, with COVID still out there, how can you create a safe environment for everyone, be inclusive that everyone can attend in your organisation?  That's also a really important thing for HR to focus on at the current time.

David Green: And, Jordan?

Jordan Pettman: So, I think point one is probably about getting out of our silo.  So, if we're talking about HR stuff, like organisation design, workforce planning, talent planning, etc, doing that in concert with people like real estate, because we're making decisions around the way that we use property; doing that with people like our finance team, because we want to be able to describe the way that our HR intervention is delivering to top or bottom line as well, I think that's pretty critical.

Then at the same time, we probably need to dial up our stewardship, I suppose, of things like inclusion and wellbeing, because as we come out of these current times, fingers crossed, there will obviously be a focus from particularly commercial business on commercials, and I think we probably need to be the Jiminy Cricket of our leadership teams, and make sure that we are bringing the human element forward.

I think the last thing that will be game-changing, because we ought to keep talking about skills, is to really get a handle around what skills are coming after the jobs that we know about now, so that we can start to connect employees with the skills that they should be developing now, the career paths that we can't describe to them yet.  I think it's those three.

David Green: Great, some really great thoughts there.  Thanks to both of you for being a guest on this special episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, recorded at People Analytics World in London at the Royal College of Physicians.  Please can each of you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media if you do that, find out more about your work?  Tertia?

Tertia Wiedenhof: Follow me on LinkedIn.

Jordan Pettman: And I would be LinkedIn or Twitter, mainly LinkedIn though.  Twitter is full of me liking other people's posts at sunsets!

David Green: So, I say thank you very much to Jordan and Tertia, and then I'll move over to the lectern to do the next thing.

David GreenComment