Josh Greenwald

▶0:01HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Josh to the Built By People podcast. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you can share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:54GuestWell, thanks, Dave, for having me on, and I really enjoy your podcast. It's great to hear from some of my former Bank of America colleagues, Carolyn Roach and Todd Cunningham, who were recently on your podcast. My career spans over 25+ years in HR. Like some of the listeners, I didn't know that I was going to end up in HR until I got into it. I come from a family of psychologists and entrepreneurs, and looking back now, seems to make sense that HR was a natural intersection between the two. Took my first HR role out of college in a retail HR rotational program with Macy's, which was a great building block experience where they throw everything at you from negotiating labor contracts to high-volume recruiting to complex associate relations. After getting my MBA, I went into OD/OE consulting and spent a good portion of my career in financial services. Starting with Liberty Mutual and then the next 18-plus years toggling between talent and CHRO leadership roles at Bank of America and TIAA. I then shifted into healthcare where I was a CHRO for Elevance Health, which is a great experience learning a new industry and the opportunity to join a board of an early-stage digital therapeutic company.

▶2:09HostJosh, can you tell us more why you think it's important to build more durable talent strategies?

▶2:17GuestYeah, I, I think this is such an important question, and it's such an important topic right now. With the pace of change intensifying every year, I think many organizations are nearing or at a tipping point. In today's environment, a talent strategy can be obsolete within a year. There's a nearly 40-year-old HBR article entitled "Muscle Building the Organization," And I think the concept of building repeatable and scalable muscle in HR is more important than ever. And it's amazing, something that's nearly 40 years old, I think is really in vogue for today's environment. If you look back at the last 5 years, we went from the Great Resignation to COVID to inflation, back to the office, aggressive growth and efficiency targets, and now AI transformation. The pace and intensity of change at the organization and the individual level continues to amplify, and companies are faced with the challenge of remaining competitive, leveling up talent, building resiliency while mitigating burnout. They need to build more durable and future-proof talent strategies to manage this huge shift that we're seeing with business.

▶3:29HostJosh, as a CHRO, what do you think are the major headwinds challenging how businesses need to adapt and How can HR respond?

▶3:39GuestYeah, I, I think there are 3 broad thematics. So the first is I just talked about, which is continual business transformation. The second is having the ample supply of learning agile leaders. And the third is really about creating a sustainable talent and human-centric culture. So I'll touch upon each of those 3 things. So starting with the first theme, continual business transformation. So if you were to look at the 2024 Accenture Pulse of Change Index, the rate of change has dramatically risen since 2019, 183% over the past 4 years and 33% in the past year alone. So the index measures things like technology change, talent, climate, economic, geopolitics, and consumer and social change. And the most significant is technology change, followed by talent change. So as businesses race to embed AI and transform the business, the traditional functional silo structure is being upended. Businesses are increasingly designing around the customer journey, supported by more hub-and-spoke operating models to leverage common data platforms, and drive more localized decision-making. Teams are becoming increasingly interdependent and hardwired to deliver together, requiring the discipline to define role clarity and create shared accountability where matrix teams will be rewarded for winning together, not in their own silo. That may sound pretty straightforward, but most organizations struggle to do this. And quite honestly, being the product of two psychologists, I think it runs counter to the tribal nature of human behavior. With more automated processes, there'll be a greater convergence between the frontline manager and the frontline producer roles, which then begins to collapse the mid-level and the frontline leadership roles, streamlining the organization. This is going to be a huge paradigm shift. There'll be a right-sizing and upskilling of frontline associates with frontline transactional work becoming increasingly automated, with the opportunity to reskill a new generation frontline employees who are going to be much more tech and data savvy, and they're going to be skilled problem solvers, helping the customers along in their journey. I think the second thematic is around having ample supply of the right kind of leaders. And I'll talk a little bit more about what I mean by the right kind of leaders. Leadership will be needed more than ever to architect the organization of the future and navigate and rally the workforce through ambiguity. Building muscle around knowing, growing, and deploying your talent in a systematic and a repeatable way will help build a leadership pipeline. That's a long-game strategy and it takes commitment. So it really starts with truly knowing your talent, and that will be more important than ever. So organizations can build a talent inventory system where they really understand their supply and demand of talent. And those that do will have an immense competitive advantage. So if you think about just a simple shopping experience, let's say you go to Best Buy looking for a TV. You have certain specifications you're looking for. You walk into the store, turns out they don't have the TV in stock. They look in their inventory management system, they say, good, you know, good luck. We have this in our system and it's 5 miles down the road and you can pick it up and we have it waiting for you right now. There's no reason that HR organizations can't do the same thing around understanding the capability and the supply and demand of their talent. And being able to tap into new sources of talent and not over-rotating the same talent will create resiliency. And that is a trap that many organizations get into is because they don't know talent typically deeper than a couple layers in the organization, and they go to the same usual suspects, which creates burnout and also creates a poor associate experience for those who want to step up and do more. So redefining role profiles to focus on skills, critical skills, driving more objective skill-based assessments, leveraging AI to do skill-based matching will dramatically improve and increase the talent supply. Building a repeatable muscle to grow and deploy your talent and skills at scale will deepen the talent pool. It may not be sexy, but there's no substitute for assignment management. Particularly early in career to grow talent, to develop breadth and depth of skills. It's arguably something every company can do and doesn't require a significant financial investment. When I think about my career, being able to toggle between COE and HRBP assignments across multiple business lines, it helped me to build empathy for my business partners. There were things that I didn't realize I was doing until I sat in the shoes of that person. It helped me much better understand the customer journey and see the macro enterprise view more clearly. It will be equally important to build muscle to develop leader skills, leadership skills that are going to be in high demand and arguably short supply. Things like critical thinking, emotional intelligence, basics like financial and operational acumen, which you can't take for granted. This concept around customer obsession and doing everything around really delighting the customer and designing around the customer. And digital and process mindset. So keeping development simple, focused, and relevant on experiential development, just-in-time skill building, and microlearning will be competitive differentiators. And the last point I want to make is about culture. Creating a talent-focused and human-centered culture is really the glue to building sustainability and resilience. So there's the old adage that measurement creates culture. So to make this more durable and sustainable, organizations will need to adjust their scorecards to directly incentivize, reward, and celebrate leaders for developing and rotating their talent. So, technically, many leaders arguably are disincentivized from sharing talent because it makes their jobs more difficult. Why would they want to give up their best person? If you redefine scorecards, you overtly celebrate and reward leaders in your culture for sharing talent, that will change behavior. And culture is rooted in values. The Container Store has a value that I've absolutely always subscribed to, which is one great person equals three good people. Say it again, one great person equals three good people, which I think most people would agree that when they have that great person, they can do the jobs of 3 good people. So it is, it's so critical to ensure that you have your best people in the most critical roles, but it's hard to do because again, people don't want to give up their talent. So differentiating development practices for high potentials, you think about the talent who consistently demonstrate learning agility and thrive on new responsibilities. From what we call your high pros, you know, your deep subject matter experts who may be more on a fellowship track, from your core performers that just may need more development and deepening in role. All these things will help build sustainable high performance and really future-proof your strategy. Empowering leaders to be transparent, authentic, and caring will absolutely drive discretionary effort and loyalty. I think somewhere early in corporate America, or maybe it was in business school or both, it was frowned upon to be human with your workforce. I can tell you from experience, this differentiates great places to work. And this is going to be particularly important as there's likely going to be a dip in engagement associated with the fear of job loss, right? So there is, with AI transformation, that is, and significant corporate restructuring, That is the number one thing on employees' minds right now. This concept of return to office in mass, you're seeing a big shift. It's not surprising. That is also going to be something to pay attention to. And then there's this sort of what feels like a continual churn and frenetic pace of change. When you talk to HR colleagues, the pace, as I mentioned in the beginning, just doesn't stop. And so while organizations are shifting to a less, you know, overt position on DE&I, creating a sense of psychological safety and belonging are more important to them.

▶12:13HostJosh, what are the implications for creating a future-proof, more durable HR organization?

▶12:20GuestFirst, I think we have to address what I would call first responder burnout. So HR is the first responder for change in the organization and the continual acceleration of change and transformation. Has been taking a toll on the organization's first responders. Whether it's HR or the rest of the organization, the demand for mental health and wellness benefits are, are at an all-time high. At one of my former organizations, the CHRO would institute self-compassion days every couple of months to encourage HR colleagues to recharge in ways they deem most appropriate. HR organizations are often the last to be invested in, hardest to change, and a late adopter of technology. However, AI is a huge breakthrough and it gives— it will build scale and capacity by this concept of leveraging digital labor to deliver transactional service delivery. And it's going to be a win-win for everybody. So HR spends a significant amount of time and energy and gets a lot of dopamine from delivering transactional customer service, often diluting the focus of HR VPs and COEs from focusing on more enriching and value-added transformation work that the business needs. Using the parallel of the business, think about many contact centers are the first adopters of AI. They see the work that they do around delivering customer service, and they're leaning in AI to drive digital containment, to increase personalization and simplification, and also drive efficiency in capacity in the organization. So HR really is no different in many ways. So HR, you know, has a real opportunity, and there's new, there's technology, there's ChatGPT technology out there right now where you can, we can create a digital HR assistant experience that can be supported by a tiered service delivery model, with a digital agent as the first line to personalize commodity-like services like policy retrieval, baseline coaching, high-volume service requests to make associates and leaders more productive. So creating this tiered service delivery model, it's no easy task, by the way, but is really important. We'll be shifting HR VPs and COE consultants from fixed coverage models to more pooled pods of problem solvers. That'll create buoyancy and provide rich rotational assignments. While HR executives are still going to need to remain as a strategic advisor to the business executive in the field, but having the ability to, to be able to tap into this pooled and flexible resource pool of talent is really going to be critical. So skill development is really equally important just for the, as it is for the business. And in particular, what the business really needs, in my opinion, is around performance and talent management consulting because they need that help to transform. And then there are going to be new roles that are created within HR that are going to be developed around content and data management and user experience to rewrite those policies and procedures that were written like 25 years ago that nobody really understands. How to navigate, to be able to feed the large language models and evolve the digital experience. So this concept of delivering the brilliant basics via AI and creating more nimble and flexible resource models will enable resiliency and durability, and, and I think will absolutely enrich the experience of HR professionals.

▶15:59HostJosh, what advice would you like to share with our audience?

▶16:05GuestOrganizations can only transform as fast as the workforce is willing and ready. Wellness and change fatigue will continue to be top of mind for CHROs and the business. Where appropriate, experimenting with 4x10 schedules, offering holistic wellness benefits that make the workplace a destination rather than a career stop, and taking a balanced approach relative to hybrid work will be competitive differentiators. In my experience, particularly relative to return to office, one extreme position or the other just doesn't work out. People need flexibility, but also businesses need people to be co-located to drive more nimble decision-making in a more cohesive culture. And I think lastly, model being human, authentic, and transparent with your workforce. Your organization will run through a wall if they know they care about you as a person.

▶16:59HostJosh, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶17:04GuestI really enjoyed it. Thanks so much, Dave.