[UPBEAT MUSIC]

Welcome listeners to the new shape of work podcast, our very first episode for 2025. New challenges, new year, new opportunities, I'm really excited to see what this year is going to have in store. I foresee it's going to be quite a roller coaster. And Gord, I'm really excited that you're here with me again. And you're actually going to be with us quite a bit throughout this year because I think you're going to be sharing some of the host duties this year.

Yep, that's right. So, Kate, first of all, thank you for having me. Thank you for offering me the opportunity to co-host with you in 2025. I could not be more excited both to share the hosting duties with you, but also to talk with our listeners about all of the exciting developments that I'm sure we'll see over the coming year. And very happy to join you for the kickoff podcast today.

Absolutely. I'm thrilled about it because I do think talent trends, reward trends are converging. And with all the new innovations coming out with AI, we need both are networks and both our brains to debrief and discuss them.

And on that point, I think we closed out last year with me having the opportunity to grill you on the rewards trends that you're seeing. So I do feel it's only fair that we flip it this time. And maybe this time, I'll hand over the reins to you and you can interview me on talent trends. What do you think?

Perfect, perfect. And again, I'm so excited to have the opportunity to change seats and have the chance to grill you for a change, but really, especially given that you've taken the lead on our Global Talent Trends survey from the very first year and that we've just closed out our executive outlook study. And I find it's really hard to believe that we've been doing Global Talent Trends for 10 years now. So it's hard to believe.

And thinking back, I'd love to maybe start off by just asking you what do you think have been some of the biggest changes over that period of time? What maybe has surprised you the most as you reflect on the last 10 years? What are your biggest takeaways or reflections?

All right. Well, what's that phrase? Time flies when you're having fun. I can't believe it's been 10 years, Gord. And maybe I'm glad that we're still keeping this podcast and audio recording rather than a visual one because I think I'm just in denial there.

But no, it's been an honor and a privilege to run the research, and we always learn so much from it every year. I love your question there around of what's the trends within the trends. Nice question, Gord. Look, if I think back over the last 10 years, the most stable trend that surprised me initially, and now I'm kind of used to it has just been the convergence of views about how people think about the world of work and what people want from the world of work.

When we started Global Talent Trends, there were massive differences between employees in different countries across the generations, even differences in what the genders wanted on flexible working and things like that. And over the last five or six years, these differences have almost evaporated. And we've seen significant convergence in what a Gen Y wants in Bangladesh and in Boston. And I just find that fascinating.

It's because, like you, I've lived and worked in many countries, and I know the values are really different. But I think it does talk to the more digitally-connected world we now live in. But I do worry we've lost something with that diversity of voice that we used to have.

Yeah. No, I think that's-- it's so interesting because even when I travel, I start to feel that way as well. Everything starts to look the same.

You see the same retailers. You see the same-- you see the same-- everybody's got the same technology now. So it has become a lot more uniform, like the world of work and society. But it's interesting that that's flowed into people's perceptions or people's desires or what people are looking for out of work.

Yeah, absolutely. Gord, one other trend that I find really interesting is what's the gap between CEO views and HR's views on what they think will make the difference in the year ahead. When we're in a crisis here like COVID, we find that CEOs and HR are highly aligned on where we need to focus.

And then when we get back to our businesses and we stop talking to each other, we see a real difference in where they want to prioritize. And I just think that's interesting because it just shows how different populations interpret the market signals. And it also just reminds us that when we don't keep up constant communication across the c-suite, we start to veer off in different directions.

And then the last one that, I think, is of interest maybe to this group is the move towards the employee experience. Because we know we used to talk a lot about, what's this L&D doing? What is talent doing? What is reward doing?

And as we start to take that view of we're in service of improving the employee experience, those HR practices converge. And every year when we look at the companies that have grown fastest or the companies that have more people who say they're thriving, they are the ones listening to their people, caring about their culture, measuring their outcome in terms of how does it impact the employee experience. And I think that's a really exciting development.

It leads to more exciting, I think, careers in HR. And I think we have more of an impact as a profession. If you think about skills, for example, we wouldn't be able to have the impact that we had in skills unless talent, reward, learning, and business leaders were all on board with the same vision. Because it's not just about reskilling and redeployment, it's about can we measure the gap of where we are now and where we need to be.

It's about we want to incentivize skills pathways, we want to reward skills demonstration, we want to match skills to experiences. That's like dancing all over the traditional HR landscape. And that, for me, is the biggest change that I probably see has been building momentum.

Yeah. And it's interesting because even I think you can go further. And that's not necessarily the topic for today's discussion, but as we talk to organizations about leveraging the potential of AI, they're also really realizing that they need an integrated perspective where all the different groups within HR are working together because some own some parts of the data, others own other parts of the data. You need to take a holistic view. So really this idea of breaking down the silos in HR and having HR work more in an integrated way together is clearly, I think, becoming a key to success, as you said, for leading organizations.

And on that note, Gord, if you move from the portal environment we all live in today, portals and spreadsheets, do that prompt-based conversational AI experience, it's not going to matter who owns the different jurisdictions. It's going to matter whether you can find the information quickly, whether it's tailored to you, all of that good stuff, which, yes, we could have a whole podcast on data hygiene.

Yeah, that could be another topic this year. So thinking back to 2025 then, what are some of the notable findings that you're seeing in this year's survey and the implications for CHROs and chief people officers?

Gord, you know I don't say this every year. Some years I'm like, eh, kind of the same. Definitely not this year. Real marked changes in what HR is prioritizing.

Oh, wow!

Last year you and I were talking-- a lot of it was focused on rewards and pay equity. And that made sense because there was a lot of legislation coming in, a lot of gaps. Cost of living crisis was pinching. So that absolutely made sense.

This year they've dropped down. The constants are probably skills in AI. Skills in AI were in the top three last year, then top three this year. But this is the first time I'm sharing it out loud, number one is something I have never seen in the top 10.

Oh, really?

The number one HR priority for 2025 is improving managers skills--

Interesting.

--especially around goal setting, feedback, performance management. That has shocked the number one spot globally. Again, that convergence of views across HR. But I say it's a marked difference. It was number 12 last year.

Wow!

It's a list of 22. So number 12 to number 1, I don't see that very often. And I think globally, as it's captured the top spot across 15 countries, 14 industries. And it's top for midsize and large organizations. So that's a pretty strong voice that something's not working.

Is it?

Yeah. And then of course, third, fourth, fifth is skills, AI, strategic workforce planning, which we saw last year. We expected it. But a big shift.

Interesting, interesting. Yeah.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Sorry, go on.

I was going to say one of the things that makes me think of is so in my role as rewards, one of the big topics is over the last year that I think will persist into next year is around pay fairness and pay transparency. But one of the things that, when I'm speaking with organizations, that they're coming to the realization of it's not around compliance or doing the pay equity calculations. They can all do that, and they're figuring out how to do that. The real challenge they're facing is enabling managers to have meaningful conversations with colleagues about their pay.

And that's where they're finding they really have challenges. So even from my kind of view of the world of a rewards perspective, it completely resonates that manager enablement and improving manager skills is shooting up because that's becoming the key barrier. From a pay transparency, employee engagement, making employees feel good about the experience, it all comes down to the manager.

We spent the whole of last year talking about this. We talked about the importance of trust and transparency. And the way that you build that trust is having a manager that you feel you can have honest conversations about where the business is going, what's our views on flexible working, return to work, and how is my compensation being evaluated, and how are skills being factored in, all of that good stuff.

And managers are having to do that across lots of boundaries, temporal boundaries, digital boundaries, generational boundaries. They've got full-time employees, part-time employees. It's a lot more complex.

And I think you and I were both talking about it a lot, but it just wasn't getting on the priority list. And it's kind of a soft thing to have on the priority list. Everyone wanted AI to be at the top.

But now I think it's risen its head. And so I think they're going to be-- I also think that during those COVID years, a lot of our skills around gold cascade, giving good performance management just atrophied a bit. And maybe we're inheriting some of that.

And there is a concern, though. Because when I look at-- we give that same list of 20 talent priorities or 22, I think it is, to CEOs and CFOs. And we say to them, which of these talent initiatives will move the needle? And of course, what I love doing is then comparing them to see whether they're on the same page or not. And this year is a year where we have that divergence that I was talking about.

Interesting.

So when we look at the top priorities for the c-suite, which is in a different study-- this will release, I think end of January, early Feb-- the top priorities were, number one, rolling out new HR technology or optimizing our existing platforms that move from position 16 to number 1.

Wow, that's a huge group.

Again, staggering shift. Improving our sustainability accounting metrics and reporting was number two. That was number two last year. And number three is also the same, rethinking talent strategies in light of increased use of AI in the organization. So those in two and three are the same.

Number four though has moved up, which really surprised me, is the delivering on the World Economic Forum good work standards, which, of course, we work very closely on. And that's actually now 22 out of 22 for HR. It's absolutely not on their priority list. Whereas, that focus on our brand and sustainability is a really big theme for the c-suite.

I do wonder with them saying we'll get a big return from rolling out new HR tech maybe is the time to be pitching to them on that. But yeah, quite I think. And yeah, the AI one, I think the biggest theme coming from the c-suite is-- and the c-suite and HR has been we were very ambitious at the beginning of year in terms of what the productivity gains were and all the proof of concepts and pilots, and very few of them have delivered a return as yet. But the c-suite, particularly CFOs, really believe that future value is going to come there, and they're putting a lot of priorities.

And then the other one is skills. That skills momentum is snowballing. That whole transition from traditional jobs to skills-based approaches is across the data on both sides.

Interesting.

Although only I think it's 20% of HR felt their business was making progress on some of the AI things. A huge 96% believe they've made considerable progress on world class in many of the areas related to skills. So a big shift.

And I think it really has moved out from it's about reskilling and upskilling and more into the more sophisticated how do we design our talent and reward practices around skills? It moved from 8 to number 3 in HR's priorities. So a bit of a shift.

Interesting. And the other thing that I'm finding is that those two are actually very closely connected. Because as organizations realize that AI is going to change the world of work, it's also going to change the nature of work and the fundamental way that jobs get done.

And so if you're going to be able to achieve the benefits of AI or leverage AI to benefit your organization, you also need to think about how does that change the skills that we need, the skills that we have, who we compete with for those skills, what we need to pay for those skills. So you actually need to do the skills work either first or in tandem with that because you can't get all the benefits of AI unless you're also thinking about how does this change the way we will work, the skills we'll need, all of that kind of stuff.

Yeah. And I would go even one step earlier than that. I actually think you need to do the work redesign. So how can work look different as we bring in the capabilities of humans and machines together? And then once the work has been redesigned, we can remap it to skills. And that, I think, enables us to be more accurate.

And Gord, what I would say is, obviously, this is a Global Talent Trends pulse here. And what we did is we looked at the four trends from Global Talent Trends that were set in 2024 and said, how much progress are you making against them? And that first one, which was human-centric productivity, which combines skills and AI together, was the toughest one to make progress on. Those companies that were making progress were streets ahead.

And do you know what they were most ahead on? It was on the work design. Because I do think you have to get that right, otherwise, the list of skills you've got to do ends up being huge and gets outdated pretty quick. And I don't think that helps anyone.

Yeah. And one of the stats that I really loved from last year's study was that almost two thirds of organizations were implementing new technology like AI or AI-enabled technology or automation without thinking about how the work of humans needed to also change or how to drive adoption--

Absolutely.

--or all that kind of thing. And if you don't think about them together, you're not going to get the benefits of the AI investments that you're making. And so I really agree with that point. And happy to see that we're starting to see some evidence that for those that are doing well, they are thinking about work redesign, enablement, all of the things that you also need to do in addition to not just purchasing technology or implementing technology.

So maybe shifting the focus a little bit, what are you seeing the c-suite talking about as they forecast for the year ahead? Are there any notable differences between CEOs and CFOs? What are they prioritizing for the coming year?

Let's start with business confidence because that for me is always the most telling headline. And we've just got the results in. And we actually did the study post the US elections so it's right at the very, very tail end of 2024.

And executives are feeling really optimistic. 75% are expecting growth of more than 10% this year, which is probably the highest we've ever seen it. I think it was like 30% last year, even lower the year before.

Latin America, Caribbean, and CFOs more broadly, are most bullish. Leaders in Europe and North America are a little bit more tempered in their growth. But it's still up year over year right across the board. Industries where we're seeing most confidence in growth are automotive, chemical, energy, manufacturing.

And Gord, you're not going like this stat, but if I look at all the data, probably the area where there is the least confidence with regard to growth and progress is professional services followed by financial sectors. They're predicting lower growth. They've got higher concern about the speed of their AI adoption.

And really surprised me, we were just talking about skills two minutes ago, they are not as advanced on being a skills-powered organization in professional services as you and I would probably predict. I don't know. It made me wonder whether it was like cobbler's shoes or something. But yeah, that was probably the industry results that made me cry a little bit.

Interesting. Oh, wow! And where were the differences between the CEOs and CFOs that you saw?

There is a difference actually, this year. CFOs believe that future value is really going to come from AI. On every single dimension when we talk about where AI can deliver value, CFOs are much further ahead than CEOs, which is a reversal of the trend that we saw a couple of years ago. So I think that's fascinating. They really believe that future growth and value will come from AI, agility, and productivity.

The CEOs, though, are placing bets still on agility and AI, but they also believe that making sustainability a key part of their competitive advantage will pay dividends. And most notably, it was if we can focus on renewable energy, if we can build more sustainable talent practices, if we can build so-called green skills. And that is a big difference between the two.

So I think you can see that CFOs really, I think, are very interested in what is the cost of labor and how can we look at the efficiency and the opportunity there. Where CEOs, I think, again, are saying we need agility, but agility so we can pivot into new growth areas. And we care about our brand sustainability reporting and how we're making progress on some of these commitments.

Yeah, very interesting. Not surprising though that the focus of the CFOs is more on improving productivity, getting the benefits of AI because they're obviously the ones controlling the purse strings often. They're saying, if we're spending this money or we're making these investments, I want to see the benefit. I want to see the ROI. I want to see where we're gaining productivity savings or whatever the case may be.

And so thinking of that from an HR perspective, one of the challenges that I'm certainly hearing from a lot of the HR leaders that I speak with is that their view is that they will have potentially lower budgets going forwards, or there will be more pressure on them to do more with less to demonstrate that they're getting the benefits of investments in technology, to demonstrate that they're becoming more productive within the HR function. And so if a CHRO needs to really refocus their investments, where do you think they'll get an outsized return on their time, their money, the overall investments that they're making, both in their teams and in people in general?

Good question. Good question. And I did specifically look at the data last night to answer that. But I agree with you. I'm hearing the same concern as well.

And it's going to be a bitter pill to swallow if some of these growth ambitions do translate, but I agree with you. Everyone's being asked to do more and that's going to mean, we all need to get better at prioritization. We all need radical rationalization about where we spend our time, as you said.

And you mentioned ROI a few times. I think we just got to get better there. I do believe that in HR, we need to own that narrative. Because when we're investing in human resources, outcome, the way we measure the outcome needs to be different to other forms of expenditure.

Earlier, you were talking about you can't implement AI with skills. And when you were talking, I was saying, yeah, because we did that last year and we had burnout through the roof. You can't just layer on more.

And as you and I both know, when you are having to optimize your costs or make cuts, reductions in force, things like that, different strategies have different impacts on engagement and morale. And I think that more qualitative perspective needs to be considered there. If you squeeze a balloon in one place, it pops up elsewhere. And I think sometimes we haven't been sophisticated on that.

I was at a conference at the end of last year, and I had a chief people officer talking about the way they intend to measure their impact in 2025 is on what they call time release. They said, we've taken all our priorities and we've said we've quantified them in what time we give back to the business because the business is best to invest that in areas of growth. And I thought that was really interesting.

They've had real problems with burnout. They've had a lot of feedback that there isn't enough capacity in the system to invest in new initiatives or to pivot if trade and tariff laws change. And they were saying, that's going to dampen growth if we can't unlock that. So I thought that was interesting.

And earlier, we were just chatting about EX. If improving the EX is the outcome, then why are we measuring tech implementation? It needs to be tech adoption. We know it needs to be more about how people feel inspired to use it and not do workarounds.

If it's talent shortages or skill scarcity, then accelerating talent movement internally or quantifying the dollar savings when you use internal talent on gigs versus outside services spend or the quantum of difference between if we reskill and redeploy versus riff and then hire again, all of them are going to be much more material to the business case. And I just think we can do a better job on that. Anyway, that's not what you asked me. You asked me about if you had to prioritize, where would you rationalize? And so I just did some analysis.

Because we looked at those companies that beat out their competitors last year versus those that had more stagnant growth and there are definitely some areas which, to your point, had that more outsized impact. Let me just give you the-- and the big differences were on trust and transparency. We mentioned the skills, AI, well-being, and interestingly, investment in HR tech.

So the headlines on trust and transparency, high-growth companies so companies that grew more than 10% were 1.4 times more likely to have focused on pay transparency last year. And they were 1.3 times more likely to have reduced the equity gap in real dollar value. So I think people were listening to you last year, Gord.

[LAUGH]

That's always good to hear. I love it.

On skills, they're more likely to be rewarding critical skills. That was something we saw come in last year, 1.8, nearly twice as likely to be doing that. And they were also using skills to deploy talent internally. So again, these might be the client's that are sophisticated, have talent marketplaces, but using skills there.

Well, what I love about that is-- what I love about that is it requires you, if you're going to reward critical skills, it requires you to understand not just all the skills, but which ones are critical. So it's not just mapping all your skills. It's really thinking about which ones for your organization are most important for the different jobs that you have or the different roles that you play.

So that issue of criticality, I really like that. Because it's not just about all the skills. It's like the ones that are most important in your context, which will differ from one organization to the next.

Yeah, and I think tech firms have done a really good job on that, but some of the rest of us haven't. And just because it's hard, I think we need to do it and it doesn't have to be perfect. The other thing is, I think there's probably a lot of our listeners on here thinking, oh, well, look, that company has got like pay for skills AI built in or they've got an internal talent marketplace. I think you can move the needle on these things in a very low-tech way if you've got good talent review processes if you know-- where you are saying, hey, given where we growth, what are the two or three skills you predict? And sharing that, you can get the uplift. I think even if you've just got internal gig posts being shared, you can get the benefits there without having to make a sizeable spend.

The other one I said, was well-being, 1.6 times more likely to have redesigned work for well-being. I think that goes back to your point earlier, is we've actually got to redesign the work rather than add to it with AI and other things. And then more likely, nearly twice as likely to hold their managers accountable for their team's being on things such as burnout, turnover.

Again, this doesn't cost anything to do. But the cost if we get that wrong, I think, are quite substantial.

I love that too. And again, it goes back to some of last year's findings where people were saying that they're overwhelmed by the volume of new technology that's just being thrown at them. And then they're left to try and figure out what to do with it on themselves, because their actual work has not been redesigned. If you're going to get the benefit again, and I feel like we're saying this over and over so this will be the last time I mentioned, if you're going to get the benefit of the investments you're making, you also need to think about how do we change the work so that people actually can work less, or actually can focus on other things, or actually can get the full benefit of the enablement that the technology is intended to deliver.

Gord, if we can make working less the mantra for 2025, that would make me very happy.

[LAUGHS]

Yeah.

And finally, the other thing I would just pull out from those high-growth firms is they all said that increasing the digital competence within the HR team was game changing. So they found that if they spent on state of the art HR tech and trained their people, it made a difference. If they brought in digital skills, whether they hire digital proponents into the HR team or whether they did lots of upskilling, it really made a big difference.

And I think this was important because if you remember a few minutes ago, Gord, I was talking about the c-suite ranking. We think that investing in HR tech will deliver a return this year. So I do think there's a bit of a convergence there. So maybe if you-- this is the year to pitch for that tech spend. Or if you've got tech spend, pitch to get some outside support to make it more optimal or get greater adoption.

And if you're trying to rationalize spend here, then just make sure you've got the tech skills on the team. Whether it's reverse mentoring, hiring tech proponents, talking tech regularly, we've got to build our competence up there. Along with the tech is, I think, the gen AI piece. Only a third are using it today, but those that are using it are seeing real impact.

67% say they've seen efficiency gains. 59% see improved innovation. So I do feel that we can't neglect to invest there. And that's really tough because low-growth firms have significantly reduced their investment in AI and high-growth firms and doubling down on it. And I think that's going to divide futures.

Yeah, I really agree with you. And it's interesting because I was having a conversation with a CHRO just yesterday. And she is in what you would call a low-growth industry. So she's not in a high-tech company.

She's not in a really fast growing organization. It's more of a traditional organization that's a lot of blue collar workers and a lot of labor. And I won't go into too much detail identifying her. But one of the things she said is like, again, to the point of you don't need a huge budget for this. She said, I've just made best friends with my IT group.

So she said, because I know that they've got the skills and the competence that I need to start to build within my organization. So she said, I go visit them every day. She said, I've made best friends with the CIO and his team so that I can get them to help me on key projects. And then they're starting to cross train people on my team, and then they're doing some of the mentoring.

Nice.

So she does-- she hasn't had to get a whole new budget. She hasn't had to go and hire a whole bunch of new people. She's sought out those capabilities from other areas within her organization.

And she's just said, hey, I need some help and that's how she's starting to upskill her team. And then she's starting to show progress. And then that builds a track record of success and then she's building momentum that way. So even when you don't have a lot of additional funds to invest or you're not growing at a really rapid rate so you can't add to the team, there's ways you can do it if you're thinking creatively and if you're looking for the right skills, and then thinking about how do I bring these skills into my HR team one way or another?

Yeah and there's a quid pro quo. I'm sure some of those IT teams would benefit with some support on the people skills side as well.

Exactly. Yeah. I can't imagine how that would be true, but yeah.

So maybe thinking about employees and skills and stuff like that, I'd love to hear, if we shift gears a little bit, bringing in your crystal ball, how do you think this year will feel for employees? Will it be different? What will the experience of a typical employee be like if you think about 2025?

This is a post here so I don't have all of the employee data that I normally have. But between you and I, I think it's going to feel tight. I think it's going to feel pacey, and I think it's going to feel tight. And I don't think there's going to be a lot of logic as to why.

Similar to what we saw last year when employee confidence was down and people weren't moving jobs, even though there was lots of positive business indicators out in many markets, I think we're going to see more of that. There'll still be that cautiousness despite this optimism that I was just telling you about from the c-suite. And I think that is stemming from just increased risk and uncertainty and companies not wanting to be exposed.

We've got many new governments who've just come in so they're right at the beginning of their term. So they're going to be setting new policies around the world. They're going to be taking those bold moves.

If companies don't have the capacity to pivot as a result of some of those decisions, they're going to get caught out. I mean, I'm here in the UK at the moment and we've got an increase in national insurance costs for companies. That's really changing the dialogue about we now need to look at the quality of growth in various businesses.

Similar to what we're talking about CFOs earlier, we need to question what is the cost of labor. And that's going to be more of them. So I think that makes sense.

And I don't know if you caught the World Economic Forum, I think it's executive outlook or executive perspective. It was right at the end of last year, Gord. But in that study, they get asked to identify the top five risks in the next 10 years. And I think economic downturn was the number one risk in 5 out of the 10 regions. I know it was in North America.

And then inflation, I know, was really big in other markets. Middle East certainly came up there. And I know here in Europe, it was around labor and talent shortages. These are really big concerns. And I think they are falling through, which is why we see this focus on we've got to be more agile.

We've got to have more agile and sustainable people practices. We need to drive up productivity. We need to be making the tough calls now so that we've freed up capacity to reinvest in when there's opportunities. And I think we also believe that there's going to be a lot more carve outs and divestitures this year.

So I think all of that means there's going to be pacey movement, lots of realignment. And I also mentioned to you earlier about this sort of AI gap given that the companies that are in those fast-growth areas are really spending a lot more this year and looking a lot how do we augment our processes and our systems with AI. And they're moving at a pace.

And then those that are lower growth are really pausing some of that. And so I think depending on which industry you're in, the influx of AI and new ways of doing things is going to feel very different. And I think that has some implications.

Yeah, no, I'm sure that it does. And I think it's even for companies in different industries. Again, the ones that are embracing both AI and work redesign to really enable people to change the way they work and be more productive and be more successful, we're really going to start to see a divergence in the ones that move faster ahead and the ones who start to stagnate. And I find that both exciting and concerning.

So for the ones that are able to really get the benefits of AI and workforce transformation, they'll really start to be I think the winners. And we're starting to see some examples of that already. And those that don't, they're going to then say, oh, well, we haven't gotten the benefits of our investments so now we're maybe going to disinvest or not spend as much.

And then I worry that they're going to just continue to fall behind. Yeah. So maybe then if you had to talk about the top three HR developments for 2025, what do you think they would be?

Major developments is interesting and I might have misinterpreted what you meant on this. But just listening to what we've just talked about, I do believe that this year's data, which was a pulse year, confirms the trends we coined in 2024. And firstly, we've got to make progress on delivering human-centric productivity.

So we've got to remember that, ultimately, this is going to benefit humans as well as corporations. And so I think there is a-- being good stewards of humanity is part of that journey. And I think HR has to lead the charge on that. You can see that the c-suite are really still putting a lot of bets on AI delivering radical transformation of how effective and efficiency we can do.

And what we know is that those that move the needle last year did two things differently. They're more likely to intentionally redesign work to take advantage of AI, which is what you mentioned earlier, Gord, if I look at the actual graphs here. And then two, they more aggressively moved to skills-powered organizations, which, again, we've just been talking about here.

And I think they appreciate that we can't have one person in a fixed job. That belongs to a bygone era. And they recognize back to your point earlier about data hygiene, we need a better talent science if we're going to match people's skills and motivations to future opportunities.

And so I do think the more companies can be on that journey around, let's have a talent science so we've got valid data driving our decisions about people and doing the work on the job. This job needs to change. What do we stop doing and what do we start doing? Because if the job is not a workable job or if you're moving people who's not motivated by something into a job they don't want, that's going to be a zero-sum game.

Or if you're not even clear on how that job will change. I think that's part of the ambiguity that people have difficulty with, is they know their job is going to change, but it's not clear to them how or what skills they'll need or what training they should be doing because the employer hasn't done a good enough job of really clarifying that for them.

Yeah. And I think it's more than just clarification. I think it's change management. And that's going to be my third one. I'll come back to that.

The second one, I think, is that cultivating a digital-first culture. I predict we will start to realize the return from AI this year and start to see those innovations. But it's not just-- and we'll move away from incremental efficiency improvements that we started to see in our small pilots this year to actually, how do we scale things across the enterprise or how do we govern what's actually going to give us a commercial return? So I do think everyone needs to be approaching their part of the business with that digital-first mindset.

And it's going to put pressure on internal systems such as how do we do product development today? How does the digital team operate? Because you need the business acumen and you need AI to be in service of solving business problems.

So I think HR is going to have a lot of org redesign work coming out there and a lot of rethinking how we develop new products and solutions and improve our speed to market. As I said before, those HR teams that are role modeling digital ways of working, I think, are better placed to lead on this. But I think that would be a big one.

And third one is that corporate immune system. Everything we've mentioned, trust, equity, risk, well-being, all of that is still there. And I predict we're going to see a resurgence of interest in what makes a great leader and what does good change leadership look like. With all this talk of AI, humans are best placed to inspire and lead other humans. That's not going away.

But we're not getting it right. The stats on burnout, toxic workplaces, challenges in goal cascade that we heard from the c-suite and their desire to have more governance because they don't believe the business can pivot, all of that just tells me that we've got that wrong. And so I'm hoping that we'll have just more appreciation of how important it is to have the right leaders in the right role, those that can empathize, curious, learn, influence, inspire, all of that.

I think last year we spent too much time talking about tech skills, and I'm hoping that will come back this year. It will also help with something that you and I have been talking a lot about, which is longevity. Because as lifespans increasingly outpace health spends and wealth spends, we need to make sure that we have multi-generational workplaces. And yet we had so much ageism come through in the data last year.

This year, 80% of executives say their leaders aren't doing enough on this front. And I think that if this third area does get the recognition it deserves, there'll be more respect and valuing of what more experienced workers bring to the equation. What are your thoughts?

Well, no, my thought is that this actually almost brings us back to where we started in that so much of this comes back to the manager and whether it's the leader or the front-line manager enabling those managers. Because we also have to recognize that with turnover in organizations, with retirements in organizations, a lot of people might be new managers or new leaders. And so they may not have the experience of how to lead well, how to create an engaging experience, how to help redesign jobs or enable people to change their roles or helping the change management process in their organizations. So that issue of manager enablement becomes central to so many of these other things as well, which maybe why it's shot up in the rankings so high, as you indicated very beginning of our discussion.

And it's in both studies, which I think is fascinating for different reasons. But if I put my assessment hat on, the way we've traditionally assessed leaders is just not fit for the current time. We need leaders with a risk management mindset. We can lead leaders who can manage multiple paradoxes. We need leaders who can work across these different boundaries.

That's not what we've measured. That's not what we've appointed. And I think we've got to get that right this year. So I'm looking forward to maybe a resurgence in interest in what makes a good leader. But we will see.

Yeah, we will. And you just referenced our two great studies that are being released very soon. The first is the Global Talent Trends update as you talked about. It is a pulse year, but still there's a lot of great updated data in there that I think is going to be super interesting for our listeners and for me.

I'm so excited to get my hands on it. It is one of my favorite times of the year. And then our executive outlook research, which will be published soon. So where can people learn more about both of these?

Yeah. So I think the-- mercer.com page is the best place to go. The 2024 Global Talent Trends is still available up there now so you can get to hear the biggest trends. I think we have validated that these are the four biggest trends because we know those who made progress on them have reaped a lot of benefits. So that's up there.

I suspect probably end of January, beginning of February, we'll get the 2025 updates fed into that. And the executive outlook, I think, is coming out the third week of February. So we're a little bit ahead.

This is very much hot off the press. But yeah, this year's findings are fascinating. And honestly, Gord, we've just scratched the surface.

We really have. So look, thank you so much both for all of the insights that you've shared today. I feel like we could go on and on, but I think our listeners have a set amount of time. So we'll close it off here.

Thank you for inviting me to join you, giving me the chance to interview you today, but also giving me the opportunity to co-host with you for the balance of the year. I'm really looking forward to it. So again, thank you so much.

Yeah, and it should be an exciting year. We've got some fantastic clients joining us this year. I think we've got chief well-being officers, chief innovation officers, all sorts of exciting things. So Gord, looking forward to hopefully doing some of these with you, but also hearing some of your sessions.

And listeners, thank you for joining. If you've loved this session, I invite you to listen to other episodes that we have in the series, or follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to 2025. And Gord, thank you for joining me today.