Skills-Based Pay: Risks & Rewards

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kelly: Today’s bonus episode is brought to you by Visier, whose purpose is to reveal the human truth about your workforce and contribute to a better future. Visier is the market leader in workforce analytics with more than 15,000 customers in 75 countries around the world. For more information, visit visier.com.

You’re listening to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. This week, we have a special bonus episode for you. Earlier this year, I had the honor of teaming up with Hitch Works, recently acquired by ServiceNow, to host a panel for their skills intelligence accelerator titled Skills Based Pay Risks and Rewards.

To explore this interesting topic, I was joined by three incredible women. Dr. Yustina Saleh, Krista Stueben and Nancy Romanyshyn.

Dr. Yustina Saleh VP of research and value at Visier, founding member and advisor of Equity Cities, and former two time Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby guest from season one episode eight and season one’s holiday bonus episode. If you haven’t listened into those, I highly suggest you do.

We were also joined by Krista Stueben lead data scientist at Pay Scale and Nancy Romanyshyn the director of pay strategy and partner success at Syndio. With a special guest appearance by Kelley Steven-Waiss, founder of Hitch Works and also former Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby podcast guest from season three, episode 10.

During the live panel, we were joined by an audience of CHROs and their talent leaders who are on their skills based enterprise journey and understand the daily challenges of helping leaders grow their talent and move the needle on fully optimizing the talent within their organization. We are excited to share the recorded panel with you today. Hope you enjoy.

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, depending on where you are. Welcome to the Hitch Magnet Group Skills Intelligence Accelerator Session Skills Based Pay Risks and Rewards. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to join you in your skills journey to discuss this interesting topic.

My name is Kelly Ryan Bailey, my almost 20 year professional journey has focused on evangelizing skills as the currency of the labor market and using data and technology to create innovative skills based hiring and learning solutions for individuals, companies, educators, governments, and initiatives. I am the founder and CEO of Skills Baby, home of my consulting workshops and thought leadership.

I also host a podcast called Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby that explores life skills leaders use in their journey to success and global innovations in skills based hiring and learning. I hold an advisory role to the Adecco group’s innovation foundation. I am a board member of Adept ID, and I also co-own a number of other companies, including Growth Network Podcasts, FOS capital, and World in 2050.

I am honored to be your moderator for today.

So I wanted to go ahead and introduce the rest of our group today. And it seems only fitting that after international women’s day, yesterday that we have a full female panel for the day.

So we have Dr. Yustina Saleh, the VP of research and value at Visier and also a founding member and advisor at Equity Cities. Yustina oversees product prototyping and innovation as part of the research and strategy team at Visier. For over 20 years, she has been on a quest for connecting people and value. Her life goal is to help people and organizations unlock their unique niches and then find and be found by their perfect matches.

Her past roles include the labor market information director for the New Jersey Department of Labor, where she spearheaded the rapid reemployment response efforts and created and deployed to the first real time labor demand supply tool in the US. And she’s also been an advisor to many states labor market information offices.

She also founded the analytics division for Burning Glass Technologies, where she created skills occupation and education taxonomies, and a wide array of labor market workforce and education products. She also created the Intel chip of skills-based hiring career pathing and precision training and powered a wide array of hiring regional planning and educational analytics products at Emsi. And she’s also been the chief product and analytics officer for Profinda.

We also have Krista Steuben with us today. She is the lead data scientist at PayScale. Krista holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics. She has worked as a data analyst and data scientist in public health, as well as in compensation and has published articles in top scientific journal.

At PayScale, Krista leads the machine learning team that powers PayScale’s comprehensive compensation management software. Ooh, that was a mouthful. Krista and her team have built patent pending tools that leverage the world’s largest salary database to quantify the impact that skills and other factors have on pay across jobs, industries, and countries.

And lastly, we have Nancy Romanyshyn, the director of pay strategy and partner success at Syndio. Nancy is a fair pay thought leader, speaker and compensation expert with 25 plus years of experience, both in-house and leading broad based consulting engagements. She joined Syndio from Willistowers, Watson, where she led their North America fair pay team for five plus years.

Let me tell you guys, I think I can go without saying that we are all lovers of skills based on these bios. So before we jump in today, I hope you guys don’t mind that I give a little bit of a foundation on this discussion and then we’ll jump into chatting with the panel a little bit more deeply.

I know this is a slightly controversial topic, maybe still a slightly new topic but I wanted to talk about some of the changes that we’re all experiencing in the world and that have, especially, they’re not new, but they have especially been accelerated by this moment with the pandemic. So some of the stats that I wanted to point out a little bit of the latest in terms of inflation. In January, we saw annual inflation rise to 7%.

This has been the biggest gain in 39 years. We’re also seeing US wages that are up an average of 4.7% over the past 12 months. I don’t think this will be new for any of you out there hiring folks or retaining folks, but these salaries really have been doubling, even tripling and that’s either by staying internally or receiving a counter offers elsewhere.

Of course, as the great resignation that we were in the thick and the middle of this and the latest jolts figures that came out in January also showed that 4.5 million people would voluntarily leaving their positions back in November.

We’ve also got something going on that I refer to as this, broadly speaking, we’ll talk about talent shortage. And so really there’s a number of different factors, again, that have been progressing over time, but really seem to be quite prevalent right now. Things like lower birth rates, we haven’t seen this so much in the US as within just recent years, but we are starting to see lower birth rates.

Obviously we’re seeing the retiring of the baby boom generation, which was the greatest generation. And of course, with this pandemic, we’re seeing a ton of women leave the workforce unfortunately, typically due to other factors like caregiving. It truly is a talent marketplace and with some of the other factors that I just mentioned, you can imagine that this is really drumming up a lot of changes when it comes to compensation.

I’m sure you guys have heard some of the rumors out there of knowledge workers unionizing. I know this has been happening in a lot of major organizations. We have seen this at Google, Amazon, et cetera. And of course we have man, this is something that a lot of us on the panel today know way too much about, but the jobs are changing so quickly.

It’s so funny because pre-pandemic, I think this is like the most perfect example, not many of us maybe were as adept on zoom or some of the other technologies that we are so used to using in the virtual world today. And you can see how quickly some of these jobs change in just the short period of time related to new technologies that were required.

Of course, this is happening more broadly and that’s just one example. And then lastly, I just want to say as we jump in here, I don’t want to share all these stats to say, Hey, this is doom and gloom. This is the state of the world, and I think it’s important that we understand what’s going on and admit that there’s a problem.

But of course, when there is a problem, there is a big opportunity. The group here today may not have all the answers. We’re the first to say so, but we’re here to share what we’ve learned and we hope that we can better solve these problems together. So let’s jump in. I’m going to welcome Yustina, Nancy and Krista to our stage so that we can chat.

I would love to hear from each one a little bit more about your organization, because I gave a quick bio about your background, but I think all of us would love to know a little bit more about each organization. Yustina, would you mind jumping in and telling us a little bit more about Visier?

[00:10:20] Yustina: Absolutely. Absolutely. So Visier is a people analytics platform. Visier, we’re able to pull data from HRIS systems, from the talent management system, from ATS systems, you name it, all the data. We bring that in one place, curate it, and start to provide analytics, products and tools on the top of that.

So you can very quickly understand what’s happening with my performance? What’s happening with equity? What’s happening with my diversity? What’s happening with resignation? And so we’ve been really leading the chart on this research. And a lot of the research we’ve been doing is around the intersection of equity and resignation, equity and diversity.

And it’s obviously now, we all know that there is a lot of bad news with people more and more leaving the workforce, but there are also a lot of opportunities with all these people leaving organizations will internally. We’ve seen also that women are moving a lot more inside the organization. But if we don’t really do something intentional about it, is it a good movement?

Not all we tend to think all mobility is good, but no, not all mobility is good. So how do we really gauge that and see what direction it is, and really understand compensation in a much broader way than the dollar sign. I think we will be able to unlock a lot of opportunities that we haven’t harvested.

[00:11:52] Kelly: Thank you so much, Yustina. Krista, can I kick it over to you to hear a little bit more about PayScale?

[00:11:57] Krista: Yeah. PayScale is on a mission to help job seekers, employers and employees get business right, and make sustainable pay a reality. So we provide compensation management software and that management software is based off multiple data sources.

And we also have advisory services that can help customers create and manage a comprehensive compensation. I know that is a mouthful to say. Strategies and practices. So at PayScale I’m leading the machine learning team. So we developed the models that are going to power these products. So PayScale has the world’s largest salary database, and it has data from crowdsource resources from employees, we have HIS data from companie, and we also have that traditional survey data. And the focus of my work is to leverage all of this different data and use that to measure the impact that spills and other factors have on pay.

[00:12:58] Kelly: Thank you so much, Krista. Nancy, tell us a little bit about Syndio?

[00:13:02] Nancy: Sure. And I’m just so excited to be here today to say with all these amazing people.

So Syndio is a data analytics platform that addresses workplace equity. So we help and actually teach our clients to conduct pay equity analysis, diagnose issues with their pay program, design and delivery, hire new employees using salaries that are both externally competitive and internally equitable, and understand labor flow so they really understand how to target efforts to improve opportunities at their organization.

It’s really an exciting time I think really when I am listening to what each of us is doing, I just think this is a really exciting time for HR because we have the benefit of software technology to really drive a lot of what we’re seeing with analytics in a way that we just haven’t had before.

And those are the types of insights we’re really trying to bring to our clients so they can really take action.

[00:13:54] Kelly: So great. Thank you so much, Nancy. I’m really excited too, although I’m going to be asking the three of you questions I don’t want you to feel at all like you can’t jump in and chat with each other, so please make sure you do give me a little nudge if I don’t see you right away, but let’s start off.

Yustina, I know this might feel like a bit of deja VU to you. One thing I didn’t mention when I said that you had worked for the DOL and the state of New Jersey was that this was during the financial crisis and the great recession or the last recession we’ve had here in the US. They say, history tends to repeat itself.

How is this time different? What have we learned? Maybe what have we even unlearned?

[00:14:35] Yustina: Yeah, this is really interesting because at the time also like some of the similarities are the jobs were changing. There were industries that are completely going out. Manufacturing turned into a knowledge base industry at that time.

Finance was going under a lot of regulations. So a lot of the talents that came from the freedom outside of regulation were no longer needed. And people were losing their jobs right and left. So how do you really understand the labor market in an agile way, and this is what drove me to we need skills.

And I was Kelly’s client because the company she was working at was the first to actually provide skills. So just understanding things at the occupation level was not enough. And then from there here comes the pandemic and it is like we’re losing jobs every day, 500,000, 5 million every day.

And then all of a sudden we can’t find talent. So that level of very quick change and the jobs that you lost are not the same as the jobs that you are getting back. These people are dislocated different ways, but now they are afraid to go back to work. And still the focus is how do you understand these roles and how do you look outside the box?

 There are a lot of people outside that you can hire from, but this is a time when you need to look inside and see, how can I invest in my people? Where are opportunities? Can I harvest the opportunities for internal mobility? Only 30% of people who are looking for jobs, look inside. Something is wrong here because there’s nothing outside anymore.

And people, it’s a vicious cycle because they leave because their talents are not recognized. They leave because they went into the training and no one saw it. They leave because their value is not appreciated. So it’s a very different dynamic. We’re all powered with a lot more knowledge about our value. Check a lot of data is out there on the online compensations and when this is there is misalignment, it becomes a vicious cycle.

So it’s very different I think.

[00:16:47] Kelly: So interesting. We’re going to dig into that a little bit more, but one of the other things we’ve noticed that changed, Nancy, I’m going to direct this one to you. We know that the experiences that employees and potential employees expect is very different today and what are they looking for? What are they expecting from HR?

[00:17:06] Nancy: When we were preparing for this, I’ve really I’ve been reflecting on it and it’s opportunity, right? They’re so accustomed to a consumer experience today that they really want to bring internally. And that’s what they expect their employee experience to be.

So we have employees that are savvy, they do their research, just like you’re saying, you’ve seen it. There’s so much information that they can access and it’s frustrating when they can’t access that information internally about what opportunities exist, how they can Excel, how they can build and really have a greater impact within the organization.

So those are the things that I think there’s a disconnect right now because they’re just so accustomed to that, having all of that information about, goodness, everything they buy. Nevermind something as critical is, why am I paid what I’m paid? How can I advance? How can I build up my skillset?

So that’s, I think really one of the things that’s really coming to the forefront and then just piggybacking on what a lot of us are saying. In the last 10 years, it’s extraordinary when you really look at the companies that have come into being and the skill sets that have come with that.

So there are jobs that did not exist 10 years ago. And I think we’re just seeing that rapid development and shifting around of roles. So that sort of being fluid and being more nimble about how people can grow in our organizations. It’s a huge challenge, I think for HR, because we often rely on systems, just like you’re saying, you seen it that tend to be more job based, and we really need to get more skills based.

[00:18:45] Kelly: Whenever I think of that consumer experience, I can’t help but think of Amazon knows what you want to buy before you would even, and it’s like, why can’t that be like that? I agree.

Krista, so at PayScale, you’re working with skills based compensation modeling. Why is it important to consider skills? I know we’re hitting on it a little bit, but I’d love to hear just from that data perspective a little bit further.

[00:19:08] Krista: Yeah. So the most basic level skills just provide an extra dimension to compensation modeling and that improves our pay estimates. But ultimately what that allows our clients to do is to compete for and retain this highly skilled talent.

So to successfully compete for this top talent, especially in such a hyper competitive labor market, it’s essential to factor in what are the hot skills for your job or for your industry? And so these are skills that are really high in demand, but low in supply and as a result are commanding very high pay premiums.

So for example, right now we’re seeing a 17% pay premium for construction workers who also are skilled in welding. And we’re seeing a 13% pay premium for retail workers who can also speak Spanish. And a 17% pay premium for our healthcare practitioners who are still in emergency medicine. So those are the skills that are really important for those jobs right now.

We see some of the largest pay premiums inside the tech field. So in the tech field, there’s certain programming languages, certain frameworks, that can provide very steep pay premiums. We’re saying 20% pay premium if a software developer knows the Ruby programming language. And a twenty-five percent pay premium for a software engineer that knows Scala.

So if you want to have a software engineer who knows Scala, but you are incorporating this 25% pay premium when you’re trying to hire or retain, you’re going to have a very difficult time doing that. And another thing that is helpful with skills is that by incorporating skills in compensation modeling, you can defend jobs against these adjacent industries.

And especially like Nancy was saying, things are changing all the time. Skills within different industries are also changing. As we’ve seen in the last couple of years, people are moving to jobs with completely different job descriptions, in completely different industries. But the reason why they can change is they have the skills that are now needed there.

So being aware of all of your competition is important when you’re hiring these skills. one other thing that is really important for considering skills is when you’re thinking about new jobs that we don’t have data for yet. So with how much change has happened in a short period of time, we have new jobs popping up.

So contact tracer, COVID-19 tester, even something like a video conference technical support for the schools and the doctor’s offices that all of a sudden are remote. So we don’t have data for these new jobs, but if we can understand the underlying skillset that’s powering these jobs, we can look at jobs with similar skill sets that are paid and see how they are paid and use that information for these new jobs. Basically benchmark salaries by simply the job titles, without considering the additional value of specific in demand skills, you’re going to risk losing your most desirable talent to a competitor who’s willing to pay for those skills.

[00:22:21] Kelly: That’s a really good point and so fascinating those specific stats too. Thank you so much for sharing Krista. I want to dig into that a little bit deeper. In order to consider skills based compensation, what type of infrastructure within an organization do we need to have in place? And Krista mentioned some of those data points, what other things do organizations need to make sure they’re ready to consider this?

[00:22:43] Yustina: The easy answer is you need to deploy skills to be able to peg your roles to skills and then see how it moves. But this is what a lot of organizations just went ahead. Let’s deploy skills and problem solve, everything is great. But wait, there are skills in your internal mobility system, another one in your ATS system and another one in your learning and development system.

Another one. And they are all speaking different languages, the taxonomy, even the way it is created is very different. So to be very honest and blunt, if you are not synchronized across that, you really can’t do any skill based planning whatsoever, because the idea is to see like here is where I’m going strategically.

Then how much of that do I have in house? So your talent management system needs to be skillified. Then what is going out there the market? So the external labor market needs to be speaking this same kind of skills. It needs to be pegged to one kind of taxonomy. If I know that there’s shortage outside and also inside, I’m not going to find that cybersecurity analysts with ethical hacking anywhere without paying the salary.

Then I look inside, how do I do that? The learning. Where maybe they already learned the skill, but it didn’t sink into your HRS because we don’t do that now. So the infrastructure needs, this has been something that I’m very passionate about. The harmonization of systems, the harmonization of skills, the harmonization of roles.

It really doesn’t matter who has the right skills role taxonomy, as long as you have a way to synchronize it. What is required to really bring systems together and move forward together to make our nation more competitive, which God knows, we need a lot right now.

[00:24:43] Kelly: I love that. Thank you so much. Nancy, just going back to some of the work you’re doing at Syndio, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching compensating skills fairly. Because it sounds like there’s so many different factors to include in so many various different jumps. You mentioned fair pay earlier, so we’re just going to go there.

[00:25:02] Nancy: No, absolutely. And I love really the answers from both Krista and Yustina cause I think it, it goes to the complexity of the issue. So what we end up finding when we’re helping our clients conduct pay equity analysis is that unpacking of skills that we haven’t really formalized, maybe what we pay. And so it’s not actually captured yet, but it’s definitely coming out as we’re analyzing pay. And we have the conversations with our clients about, oh, that’s right. We do value this and that’s what distinguishes this from this.

And so you start to unpack that and oftentimes a finding coming out of say an initial analysis is to say, you really need to formalize this. This needs to be called out and identified. I don’t know of any one company that’s really done it across the entire enterprise. You tend to see in a specific area, where they’re doing that, really calling out those skills and in creating those textonomies really well. But I think in this day and age, as you’re saying, we really need to be more creative about how we’re cultivating talent internally.

So that we’re really affording all of those opportunities in an equitable manner because we know truthfully right, there are certain patterns around who is going to leave, who is not going to leave. There’s a lot more to the employee experience than chasing say the highest salary.

And then quite honestly, that’s not sustainable for organizations. So it’s good again, Krista, you calling out a lot of those premiums skillsets and it’s so fascinating, but at the same time, a lot of organizations have to take a step back and think about what is our strategy though? Because we can’t compete with every single organization that’s willing to pay three times for this role.

That’s not sustainable. So we really need to be selective and think about what are the skills we can build internally. How can we do it in an equitable way though, and afford everybody the right, the same opportunities to do that. And really be, I think creative too, in terms of how people succeed at our organization?

And that’s one of the things too I think that’s come out of a lot of our work with clients. Where it’s helping them understand that, if you continue to go along this as the career path that you need to have in order to get to X position, you are never going to make progress. And that means you really are only gonna have one profile of employee who can play that game.

So wouldn’t it be better if we look across careers like a lattice, there’s opportunities. We know that typically different groups of people have different career trajectories. So there are some that go up into the right, and then there are others that go like across. And what they’re doing is they’re actually building out skill sets.

And I think what we’ve seen actually recently, too, especially in the pandemic is the acknowledgement of skill sets that we build outside of work. Like being a parent and what management skills, for example, you learn in having to, crisis management. So I think a lot of us experienced that firsthand during the pandemic.

I think the more employers open up to that it’s going to benefit everybody because we’re going to we’ll achieve true workplace equity and very successful organizations cause I’m going to have now really super engaged employees who are part of having a real impact on the business.

[00:28:22] Yustina: Like we’re seeing that the comp keeps creeping up in a vicious cycle, but if you ask employees, no I didn’t leave this organization for higher pay.

I left the organization because I wasn’t seen, I wasn’t valued. It’s not the pay. It’s not the pandemic. There is a lot more going on that people just had time to reflect, I need to be seen or I’m going to go somewhere else. That freedom is the whole point. And the more we understand about compensation, yes. What is the offer prize? But it is there needs to be a little bit of a pause and not do it so late. Just as Nancy said, there was a lot of data out there. We see when people are at risk of leaving.

[00:29:05] Nancy: Yeah. Yeah. And I think Kelly, it goes to, how should companies deal with sort of this wild west that’s being created? I think it goes back to, again, just like you were saying, we need to engage leadership and think as a company, what is our goal? What are we trying to do? What is our philosophy around rewarding employees?

What do we value as an organization? And let’s now define salary, the wealth of data that are out there, but what is our market? How do we define market?

Who do we compete against? What is talent? Thinking creatively about where we’re getting talent. And then thinking through what are some strategies we can do to better engage those employees to first identify, I think, like you said, ideally Yustina, who we think is at risk and then how do we engage with them?

And it’s too late, if they’re leaving and they want that salary. And as you said it’s not about wages. It is in some cases we’re seeing, I think Kelly, like you said, the right sizing of revenue share of happening with the labor market movement that we were seeing.

But in addition to that, it’s really about all of these other things that go to culture. Do I belong at this organization? How am I impacting it? What is my value? All those things that, again, our new era of employees, they are really demanding. And I think for the better. Again, I think we’re going to create, we’re going to see better organizations, but it comes back to let’s just go to the basics.

Let’s define those compensation elements. What is the role of compensation? What is the role of learning and development? Of employee engagement? What are other parts of rewards versus cash?

[00:30:41] Kelly: I’m so glad you guys called this out. And so is Kelley in the chat because it is so true.

A lot of times we talk about the particulars, we talk about the financials. There’s just a lot under the surface. I feel like part of me wants to stick here for a second and talk about this just because, when we have this conversation around skills, especially when we talk around about leadership and why most people leave is regarding the not feeling valued or maybe even a bad situation with a leader.

Let’s talk a little bit about some of the skills that, maybe are not as measurable as others. We’ve talked a lot about technical skills and premiums there, but I’d love to hear first off, Krista, are you seeing anything related to, I don’t even like the word soft skills, I know we’re all used to hearing it.

I call them life skills, foundational skills, whatever you prefer, but you guys know what I mean?

[00:31:34] Krista: Yeah we definitely see premiums for these softer skills or these skills that are harder to have a definite measurement for. I don’t have any statistics off the top of my head, but they’re definitely things like critical thinking skills and problem solving skills.

And really especially right now, communication skills. As people are trying to break these barriers for like scientists trying to explain their work to the public, that’s something that we’ve seen right now is that having those communication skills to the public is just so important. It’s something that you can’t say, oh, this person is 90% able to communicate. There’s a lot of wiggle room there. But you can definitely see that is something that’s important to these different positions.

[00:32:22] Kelly: Yeah. Yustina, Nancy, are you like, what are your thoughts here? And also I keep thinking about, tangibly speaking for our audience, there’s a lot that can’t be measured.

And I think we often, we are all data people as well. So like we often want the yes or no, we want the answer. We want it to be very specific. This is a little bit more fluid. How do you know?

[00:32:45] Nancy: I can start and Yustina, I love you to jump in. I keep coming back to probably cause my background, when you think about a job evaluation framework, those frameworks do have those types of terminology if you will. At least gives you a sort of a starting point in terms of how a company values a role across a number of different factors.

And so I’m thinking for instance, Krista and communication, right? If there is a difference between a research scientist who’s doing that work versus the research scientist who’s expected to communicate the work. And you can evaluate say roles differently, but it goes back to though being consistent about it, just like you were saying Yustina. And really, thinking again as a company, what do we value? What are the needs that we have? So we may have a group of research scientists who it was okay for them not to have to communicate as much, but now we’re in a day and age where they have to. So this is a new skill set now.

And then we’re going to see maybe a departure, we’re going to start to see some folks are going to be good at that, some folks not so much. And so then as a company, what do we do? And I think we value both and then we figure out ways to then, do we monetize that value? I don’t know. But that’s, again, that becomes a philosophical decision, but I think you can do it with even existing frameworks, but I think it’s helpful to have a consistent framework. Yustina,?

[00:34:09] Yustina: I agree. I agree. Makes a lot of sense. And on the top of all that, there is a part about institutional knowledge. How you get the job done that no one measures? Like that person was able to build relationships here and here and knows where the bodies are buried.

What are the blocks that you can anticipate? Who will be a friend on this project and how do you deal with that person versus that? There is the official part and you communicate that you can detect it now. And in an interview, tell me about your critical problems skills. When is a situation like all these, you can start to detect a little bit about it here, but when it comes to institutional knowledge, there is a shiny object outside that has, oh, those skills, that person looks fantastic.

Whereas I get the job done inside the organization, no one sees it. But then there is another part that there are some people, and I’m going to say this very bluntly here, like females don’t tend to go into the informal channels as freely as males. Like there are some informal routes that are specific to certain peoples, who has access?

When we’re talking about inclusion and equity, who has access to what channels? We gotta look at these things to really be able to value people and understand their superpowers and superpowers are not just the technical skills.

[00:35:42] Nancy: Yeah. I agree. It’s about intentionality, and rethinking. And that’s often what comes out of again, when we’re doing analyses and it’s why do we have the representation that we do? Why do we have, we see it all the time, right? There’s functional segregation, certain folks are in certain roles and certain areas of the organization, and then you translate that into, and that’s the career path that’s going to go up, and I think it’s that constant looking internally as well as externally.

But really let’s understand what’s going on internally and I love that point about access. How can we be intentional about opening up access? Let’s call out, this is how stuff happens. And really qualify it and be brave and say, is it the way stuff should happen? Or are we inadvertently, often unintentionally, now creating a nice glide path for only certain folks and not others. So I think, I believe in the power. I do not have the analytical background, not nearly as my counterparts here on this panel, so I tend to be a little more creative about data in that regard.

Or should I say looser? But I think we can work toward capturing it. It won’t be as perfect as we want it but I think we can capture those things. Like you’re saying, it gets the job done, institutional knowledge. And I think it’s important to call out that quality in somebody, and really capture that. But I totally agree. It takes work right. And it takes a language, that we all agree to in order to call that out and capture it and then track it.

[00:37:19] Kelly: Oh, true. I’m just so thrilled by this conversation and I just think there are so many various pieces that are coming out from this, especially around what I’ll again, I loosely call soft skills just because everyone’s comfortable with that term.

 You all know how much I love listening to podcasts, right?

I especially love going for long walks and tuning into my faves. One of my latest favorites just happens to be Visier’s new podcast called The Human Truth. In each episode, they take a closer look at a popular workforce statistic from the headlines and ask, where’d it come from? Is it true? And why should we care?

On the inaugural episode of Visier’s new podcast, they are pushing back on the widely floated idea that no one wants to work as a cause of the great resignation. My longtime friend, and one of the guests on the episode you’re listening to right now, Dr. Yustina Saleh, co-hosted the first episode with her colleague Visier’s VP of People Analytics, Ian Cook. Here is a clip from Yustina.

“So they say there is a generational element to working and some people say millennials, don’t like to commit. They will take a job and then start hopping from one job to another. There are a lot of stats out there to confirm that they are less likely to stay and always looking for a different job. Only 36% stay within the same organization for 12 months. So what’s with all this hopping?”

Ooh, what is with all the hopping? Check out this episode of Visier’s new podcast, The Human Truth, wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you enjoy it, make sure to subscribe and give them some love by leaving a review and sharing with your friends.

There’s something that comes up quite often when I’m talking with employers and I wonder your thoughts on this because we’ve been talking about skills that maybe have a little bit more difficulty being measured, but I’m always asked the question, how do we get to proficiency level of skills?

How do we assess skills from these various, maybe even outside of a formal work environment scenario, so that we can make better decisions? If again, assuming we’re all talking the same language, all those good things.

[00:39:43] Yustina: I have an answer that some people will not like, because I think we are looking for precision.

And is it level three or four? Do we use the managers who would put it in or should it be the person and it is self-reported? I can’t take it into consideration if it is not measured and that I am a data scientist that really cringe when you over quantify that shouldn’t be quantified.

There are other ways like you, you want to see how critical that skill was for the role and did you perform it right? And it comes collective of skills, like you are, you’re a data scientist have been using Python for a number of years and you got the job. You got to look at the projects, you gotta look at the talent, but that ops session, how important is this skill for their roles? Like it’s a data science role. I think it is important to have Python.

How important is communication to the role? When we are starting to corner skills in this way, like skills was supposed to be an medium of communication, not an end.

And when we made it into an end and it’s all that it is like a panacea for all the problems and let’s quantify it, give a score, all that is what happened? We are just trying to bring color and we took all the color and made it into black and white because this is what we’re comfortable with. The efforts to show proficiencies are not wrong, but you’ve got to take that with a big grain of salt and look at the person as a whole, with the roles, with their history, with what they bring to the table and all those adjacent skills that no one can really quantify then you’re able to really say, is that important or not? Is that person proficient in it or not without being stuck with it. So I know I’m being controversial here.

[00:41:42] Kelly: I completely agree with these comments. I was like, I love to hear this from you. And this is always the way that you’ve talked about data to me and open my eyes. The thing is, it’s just not only about that. We have to look at the color.

Let’s open it up. I do have one question in the chat we have been talking about skills as a supplemental factor to traditional pay models. Is there a future where skills is the entire basis of pay? Maybe Krista can kick us off with this one?

[00:42:14] Krista: I think maybe there is a future, but I think that it’s still quite a ways off. First of all, just how we’ve been saying it’s difficult to measure these skills it’s difficult especially, when it’s not as technical there’s difficulty there.

But even if we’re thinking about the other factors that go into pay, yes, there’s job title, but there’s so much more. There’s like your geographic location can really affect what your pay is. Maybe as we go more and more into remote work, that will be less of a factor, but I don’t see that as happening in the very near future.

And then other things like your years of experience that can get with this like institutional knowledge of there’s something that maybe it’s not a skill, but it’s just your experience can influence what your pay is. And then, yeah, I think that, especially those two factors, I think skills could become more and more a basis of pay, but I think that there’s still going to be other factors that influence pay.

[00:43:15] Nancy: Yeah. I would just add to that, I completely agree Krista, the other thing is quite honestly, the government doesn’t want you paying just based on skills. The government tends to like jobs. And so I think we can’t discount some of the limitations we have, depending on the markets in which we’re operating and what is required, in terms of how regulatory bodies interpret say work.

But hopefully to your point, Krista, where I see that balance, where there’s going to be more emphasis and we can figure out better ways to engineer it, I would think for lack of a better term so that we have that emphasis on skills.

[00:43:53] Kelly: I’m gonna say a completely out of the box response to that question that I think Yustina is gonna say something too. But in my mind, I’m like if we break down all of the roles I could see a time where maybe it’s not just skills, but it definitely wouldn’t be all the way to the job. Because a job is really just a collection of things and we want to call it something, but just like we want to call something black or we want to call something red. Like we tend to want to have one thing when these are fluid. So roles as they’re shifting and changing all the time, their title shift and change all the time. Maybe the title, maybe that was the way it was. I know Yustina’s done a lot in this area and she might have something to say more about that too.

[00:44:36] Yustina: I don’t know if that should be a goal and that will actually really bring the equity that we’re looking at because skills is very messy.

And instead of having 1000 categories that are messy, we now have hundreds of thousands of messy things that sometimes come together and sometimes don’t. And we rely on how employers are describing roles, and we all know that they are not well-informed and it takes a lot of curation to really say, it’s oh yes asked for SPSS for data scientists here.

No one uses it, but you are using the same job description from 10 years ago and it keeps popping up. So there is a lot of work on skills to become more and more powerful as a venue to really understand roles. But I think I would caution against it becoming yet another degree proxy, occupation proxy. Something that people just go and latch on and say, We are skill-based and fair. It doesn’t happen automatically. It shouldn’t be a goal to just substitute one taxonomy with another, gotta look at the person holistically. And we are, I hope we all agree that we are way more than a bunch of skills that we know to write on our right resume.

[00:45:57] Kelly: That is a good one, Yustina. Okay, we have a question in the chat. How do you navigate equality in an organization when retaining talent and recruiting new talent continues to change with the current talent market?

[00:46:10] Nancy: I would love to answer this one if I may. I think that’s where, again, as we described where the worlds within which each of us are working, it’s no coincidence that we’re all in technology. We’re all working with data and it’s about just continuingly looking and monitoring that data. So I think, first and foremost, you have to know what’s going on inside of your organization. And we’ve been actually working with a lot of clients on that lately because we, you can see the differences in when people were hired. In 2020, you could see the differences in salaries, it’s playing out.

We don’t know what’s going to happen, so we’re going to be a little conservative. And then 2021, Hey, the spring work, oh wait, maybe we’re over this thing. Yay. And then, oh, maybe we’re not. You’re really seeing that play out and these hundreds and thousands of hiring decisions and everybody just shifting around.

So I think it’s really setting up an infrastructure where you are able to bring in data real time and really look at it and what you’re doing, and then continuing to come back to these philosophical sort of questions, right? Like we just, we can’t throw money at people willy-nilly, we really need to be a little more intentional.

And then if we are, if we do decide what this role really does cost this, then who else is in this role? The impact needs to be both internal and external. Yes, we’re hiring the new candidate, but yes, we do need to then bring folks up and that needs to be kind of part of that story. So I think the more that we can set up an infrastructure where you have these different activities and things within HR, but they’re integrated, and we’re all really working with one another, very closely. I think that’s really what we’re finding.

We actually have functionality where we are helping our clients use their pay equity analysis to actually inform what they’re offering for the purposes of bringing in, say that external pay data, but having the internal equity information so that they have a sweet spot of, okay, now I know I can hire people and I’m still in alignment with our current pay practices as well as what’s externally competitive.

And that kind of having that integration and that working together of compensation and talent management is so critical I think to making sure that you’re really being intentional and equitable in what you’re doing.

[00:48:32] Yustina: And if I may, this is a perfect point. Again, a lot of what is happening in organization random, during the pandemic, people were hoarding toilet paper and other products.

There is some evidence that they were also hoarding on talent. That the replacement rate was 170%. And there’s no, like, real strategy behind connecting these dots. So really pegging the internal data with external data is very important.

You understand yourself as part of a bigger industry, a bigger community and start to gauge, how was this role changing? Am I changing as fast as the market, or am I holding my talent back? And by that, I’m also hoarding them and then putting them in remote set-ups where I don’t talk to them, and then they resign and then I need more, but I don’t know what I’m looking for.

And it becomes a really vicious cycle. So a really strong way of integrating internal and external data, integrating talent management data. It’s not just about engagement and all. The data needs to be synthesized as show the story of these roles, how they’re changing and it has to be done in a very dynamic and predictable way. Cause you can just say here’s a role, like you need to know if this is, if I add this skill is it good, is it going to make the role more competitive in my organization or I’m adding it just to look sexy. So that there’s a lot of that happening and we want to understand the dynamic.

[00:50:08] Kelly: Good point. I have a couple of other questions for you guys from the audience. Nancy, I think you went ahead and answered Kelley’s question in the chat here. Do you want to comment on that?

[00:50:19] Nancy: Yeah, sure. I think it goes to really how you were framing our discussion, right. In the beginning of all that’s changed is changing. You look at the CHR role and CHR role was a role that existed a little bit, maybe about 20 years ago.

And in the last 20 years has just really risen. And now you see this chief people officer, it continues to change. And I think that’s for the reason that human capital is a critical component now in a way like never before, in terms of how leaders are thinking about their organizations.

I think I mentioned when we were prepping around, talent management is on CFO’s sort of list of things they’re worried about. And when I saw that a couple of months ago, I was like, boom, there you go. It’s the line item. Because they know they’re preparing for all the great resignation and the great reshuffle.

So I think being able to be savvy about how you’re presenting this is our human capital management plan. We know their leadership is demanding more in terms of metrics or transparency around that. How are we managing it? How do we know that our organization is healthy?

And I think certainly skills development are planned for, how we’re going to say address, like you were saying, Kelly, here’s the critical skillsets we need for the business. We’ve seen that. We have acquired this entity or we’re going to innovate here or we’re penetrating this new market.

So what are the skills we need to do that? And what’s our plan around talent management, I think is, those are the conversations that I’m hearing actually a lot when I presented to boards on pay equity, actually. So it’s usually here’s the pay equity analysis. Yep. This is what’s happening and no shocker here, the story really is around representation and then the conversation flows nicely into, and this is what we’re doing to address representation across these different areas of our organization. Here’s the talent management plan.

I’m excited. I think it’s a great time, for all of us that are in this space, because I do think leadership’s really listening to what’s coming.

[00:52:28] Kelly: It’s so good to hear when it gets on the list of those folks. So can we get the definition of the use of equity and equality. Yustina said intention for equal access versus pay equity. So I think let’s just clear that up for our audience.

[00:52:45] Yustina: And not versus, I will say in addition to. Like pay equities is definitely important, but how are we measuring pay equity if you are not really recognizing the technical skills as well as the non-technical skills. So here’s equity, but there is inclusion. Who has made decisions on what? A lot of us now we’re sent to work remote.

Organizations started hiring more and more across the globe even, but there continued to be like, the headquarter is here. And so inclusion on certain decisions and access to that was not equitable. And you don’t even hear about it. So all these informal, like I think we need to formalize how, decisions are being made and still keep things fluid because yes, you can’t take away the value of this water cooler conversation, this conversation over coffee.

Yes, a lot happen. But there needs to be I think part of the effort is training around how do you make these, even the followups to be more inclusive. And to be honest I’ve been there. I’m going to be very honest about it that I don’t want to travel.

Travel is a big risk for me. I don’t want to get sick, but maybe I should risk my children and my own health to get the access I need. And it’s lovely that we sometimes cover under pay equity and we say we’re done, title, pay, we’re A OK. Access. I’m a mix. Some of us are we at the table when decisions are being made pays just as good. Okay. Let’s just not get like this happy little solution.

[00:54:35] Nancy: I agree. It’s funny, we have some clients that are tracking remote versus in office for the purposes of more diagnostics to make sure that they’re paying people equally, just by way of example.

And I love that. I think it’s it really, again, it’s just this constant sort of self-reflection. Let’s make sure that our pay programs of delivering in the manner we intended and that we’re not creating patterns that are reflective of behaviors that are unintentional like Yustina, oh, you’re not going to travel.

Now you don’t, like you said, you don’t have access to certain things and now it’s going to impact your career. But yeah, and we often define it, equity, pay equity technically is equal pay for equal or substantially similar work. That doesn’t necessarily mean title, it could be broader than title. But right.

It’s just looking at that. It’s not looking at say pay gap or opportunity equity, which is a whole other thing that’s really about, again, some of the other things we talked about, the other analytics around representation and who’s at what level in your organization, in what function, and you need to look at everything. You really do.

[00:55:43] Kelly: Well. I am just, you guys, this is just so interesting. There was one question that I’ve had on my mind, Krista, that we didn’t get to earlier. What are some of the technical challenges of the modeling pay while including skills that we can talk about, and also just what results are you seeing and how the clients are using it, just so that we get it?

[00:56:05] Krista: Yeah. So we’ve talked a lot about a lot of this challenges of dealing with skills from the other end of when you’re working to make your pay strategy. But there’s also a lot of challenges from the modeling perspective. And we’ve talked about there’s challenges with measuring skills, but even if that skill is measurable, there’s still challenges with incorporating that in modeling.

And the biggest challenge with including skills and modeling is just the large dimensionality of it. When you’re looking across all jobs and all industries, there’s so many different kinds of skills. And so at PayScale, we have over 3000 skills and our database and that number just continues to grow.

While it’s great to have so much information, it can lead to this technical challenge. So in data science, we have this concept called the curse of dimensionality. With every data set, there’s a width and a length to the data set in PayScale’s data are the length of our data is the number of individuals that we have data for, and the width is how much information do we have about that individual?

So what’s their job title, their salary, their industry, their skills, all of that information. And to make good models, we need data that’s longer than it is wide. So for every skill that we use to estimate compensation, we need to have multiple observations of that individual with a skill coupled with their compensation.

So any one individual is only going to have a handful of the three thousand stills that’s available. Maybe they’ll have three, four or five, but no one’s going to have 2000 skills. So it’s a very what we call sparse data set. To model this, we either need a huge number of individuals or we need to use powerful statistical methods to address this. So at PayScale, we’re lucky that we do have this really rich large dataset, so just knowing that large amount of dimensionality for skills is just, it’s something that’s statistically a challenge to work through. And then something else that’s challenging when working with skills is this concept of multiple skills.

Pretty much, no one comes to a job with only having one skill, they come with a whole suite of skills. And so going back to an example, I said earlier, for a software engineer there’s a 20% premium for Ruby programming and a 25% premium for Scala programming. But if you’re hiring a software developer with both skills, you don’t necessarily want to do okay 20% for Ruby, 25% for Scala.

Okay, they’ll get a 45% pay raise. The problem with that is that 25% premium for Scala is already included in the 20% premium for Ruby. So another part of my job is to ensure that the pay scale skill software can calculate the actual pay premium when you’re considering all of the skills that an employee has.

So you’re also asked a little bit about kind of the results that we’re seeing. Something that we’ve really noticed from our modeling is that there’s different kinds of skills for a particular job. So there’s these essential skills, these are skills that are non-negotiable for a job. This might vary a little bit for a particular job title depending on the company, what that company really needs for their particular job.

But each job will have these non-negotiable skills. And these skills will really determine that market range for the job. But then there’ll be individual employees that come with specific skills that are also useful, but they’re not necessarily necessary for the job. They just give this extra benefit.

And so when we’re thinking about these useful skills, that could land an individual higher on the range for that job. So there’s kind of these jobs for the skills, but then there’s the skills for the job, but also these skills at the individual level. So for example, a skill that might be essential for like a commercial truck driver is they need to be skilled in safety compliance.

They have to be able to drive their trucks safely. And so that skill is incorporated in the market range. But if a commercial truck driver also has hazmat experience, that’s a useful skill. And so that could increase the pay for that particular individual. And something to keep in mind is that the same skill can have very different impacts on pay depending on the job that they’re applied to.

So for me, machine learning is a very hot skill for a data scientist. And so there’s a pay premium for a data scientist, but if a commercial truck driver knows machine learning, they’re not really going to see any difference in their pay, even though it is a hot skill. And similarly, hazmat is really hot skill for truck drivers, but luckily I don’t have to worry about having hazmat. And if I go to my manager and say, I learned this hazmat skill, I don’t think they’re gonna really care at all.

[01:01:15] Kelley: Krista, one thing I was going to ask you, and it may be from a data scientist lens while you’re talking about this, but I know a lot of our community is worried about re-skilling and up-skilling.

And if you’re a compensation leader, I know when I was on the practitioner side this was something I was really grappling with is, when people step forward and develop or grow a skillset in the role that is both important to the company because it’s strategic to the company, it’s strategic to the role perhaps, as a role is developing. Should we be compensating people for growing that skill set? And I know this probably has a lot hanging off of it, but if we’re all talking about really skilling and upskilling, what’s the incentive for a person, other than learning and being marketable, to grow that skillset. And should we look at compensation against that?

[01:02:19] Krista: If it’s a skill that’s important to the business, then I think that it should be incorporated into the pay in some way. It should be compensated in some way. And so there’s a couple different ways that we’ve seen our clients incorporating that.

So one is adding that pay premium to the base pay, that’s one way to do it. Another way is giving like a periodic bonus. So as long as the talent has this hot skill, as long as the skill is hyper competitive in the market, on maybe a yearly or quarterly basis giving compensation to reward that skill.

And then there’s also the possibility of giving kind of a one-time cash offer. So that could either be when they’re being hired, they can get additional bonus for bringing that skill to the company. But that can also happen if somebody learns the skill, they can learn the skill, show that they have developed this skill, and get a bonus on top of that for, learning that skill.

[01:03:19] Yustina: I want to add here that, I think roles are changing very quickly and there is no way for the employee to see how these roles are changing. Unfortunately, also managers tend to not see the changes that are happening in the role, put blinders on their team.

Not because they’re bad, but because there is no flow of information. So until you really see a connection between the business strategy, the teams, the employees who are doing that and see that there is a trickle. And then see that, even if it is not valued as a compensation, it is valued that I recognize I am expecting you to go and learn skills.

And then as they are learning skills, they are also seeing that there is internal mobility happening as a result of them learning that. So I was a business analyst, and really data science was not one part of it, but I learned that data science Python, learning python really gives me a push, even though my manager doesn’t expect it.

Now that I see how the role I got a feed. I got a nudge that this role is changing and you have an equitable pay kind of system that says here at the benchmark for a business analyst with Python is X rather than Y. So it’s not, that you get pay increase because you learned a new skill, but because now you are more valuable in the organization as such.

And then there are internal mobility opportunities that are created, that you can navigate that it’s not a taboo for you to go into for other teams. There are so much to it. It cannot be done on a retail basis. You learn a skill, I will add five bucks here, in my opinion, I think it needs to be something bigger that I see you.

I see a role. You did something that will make the organization more competitive. As a result, you are more competitive, your market value and the organization is now higher. It triggers something automatically that says, this is your worth today. And you don’t have to wait for this magical performance review and it does happen once a year. That needs to go. We need to be more agile.

[01:05:31] Kelly: How do we communicate that and make those role changes and trends more transparent to people in a way that is relevant and useful?

[01:05:42] Nancy: I’ve seen, I put actually in the chat, where you have high potential programs.

So there are some times formalized programs where employees across a variety of different functions even are potentially tagged as being enrolls that are having a higher impact and they’re encouraged to develop certain skill sets. So you see some of that. And I use formalization kind of loosely.

That’s the only thing I think it goes back to access and opportunity but you do see that, and I know in pay equity analysis, in fact, I have sometimes duped it out a little bit with attorneys, because they, oh, it’s inconsistent. We don’t want to use that as a control.

And I’m like, like it does drive pay. I just want to look at it. Like we don’t have to remediate against it, but I do want to see if it’s having an impact. And oftentimes it is. So I think I could see a further formalization I think around and the communication around, let’s assess and understand every role in the organization, wouldn’t be part of ACA high potential, but are there ways that we can identify those roles functions?

And then I think Yustina to your point, right where the skill sets that we would associate with that and then formalize that development and acquisition. Because it occurs to me that folks in those roles do tend to move across functions and that’s exactly what they’re doing.

They’re really being deployed in a manner that they are learning the business with this idea that they are going to be running, a portion of the business, a segment of the business.

[01:07:15] Yustina: To be honest, there are no tools right there that communicates that information correctly.

There is a very big perceived dichotomy between strategy and people. So most of the career pathway tools are warm and fuzzy make me feel good, kind of stuff that are completely disconnected from the organization. And until you really see that I am part of the organization as a whole, and I can increase my value and satisfy and fulfill my preferences and interest through a proper dialogue between my interest then, and the interest of the organization. You’re assuming that there are 95% that are not. One is speaking Chinese. The other is Latin. They are not communicating.

[01:08:01] Nancy: I love that, Yustina. I think you’re right.

And I think it goes back to what you said earlier around developing an infrastructure, a common language and a platform so that you have a more fluid communication because it’s a big miss.

[01:08:15] Kelly: There are a lot of efforts within an organization that are just volunteer-ish efforts like leading ERG is. But the exposure and the new skill development outside of your day job is just so immense in those types of roles. So how do you orgs acknowledge and compensate for that in your guys’ opinion?

[01:08:35] Nancy: Yeah. I think this is an emerging area, and Krista I’d love it, I’m not certain if you have maybe some data on it and not to put you on spot, but I think like this is an area that I think is definitely emerging in terms of companies are beginning to formalize, like in Monetize, what folks are doing in this space.

We know that we often see on anybody’s career pages, here are all of our ERGs. Yay. Look. And then as you said, Kelly, there is the leadership, the acquisition of leadership skills and say the recognition. So helping leaders recognize that people are developing that skill set.

So they may not have say P and L responsibility or former leadership over a team, but because they’re demonstrating leadership as part of leading this employee resource group, that should be taken into account in terms of their own careers. I think Krista, it’s not a lot yet, but I know I’m seeing here and there companies are beginning to monetize, like formally say, yes, we’re going to pay you more for doing this.

[01:09:36] Krista: Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that. I don’t off the top of my head I don’t know the exact number, but I’ve seen that for some places like having an additional stipend of, if you’re leading these kinds of groups, leading this kind of work, having an additional stipend, that’s not incorporated necessarily in your pay, but as long as you are, or not included in your salary maybe, but as long as you’re continuing to lead these programs, having that additional pay or having set aside hours during your Workday.

So a lot of people will do all this work on their free time and they’re not compensated for it. But having a section of your day devoted to your job for these hours is to do this diversity and equity backhand. That work is being appreciated and is being compensated completely.

[01:10:26] Kelly: And to add to Krista, I have seen a lot of organizations do that just for regular social impact volunteering outside of the organization as well.

Man, would I love to see the ability to understand the skills you learn in any of those be prevalent. And I think board involvement as well. I think we can just like, plus one on all of that, because anything really that, there are plenty of even, Nancy pointed out earlier, as a parent, the skills. There’s so many opportunities outside of a formal work environment where we are learning an immense number of skills.

Just all of us, collectively and this first time in a global way where we have all dealt with this major change to our life. and the skills that we had to build to transform through that time are huge. We’ve talked a lot about transparency and the information that people get in terms of mobility.

But one thing that struck me when Krista was mentioning some of the challenges around modeling. A lot of us in the room here are likely working with various organizations to help provide data systems, et cetera, et cetera, to help us through this process.

And what about the transparency when it comes to, there’s ethical AI is like hot topic right now. What about the transparency in the data that we’re using in the systems that we’re using in the AI that we’re using so that we can understand where we might see bias? Especially in making some of these major decisions.

[01:11:59] Nancy: I love that. Going back to some of the things we talked about in terms of the employees we have today, that level of transparency is critical. And I think employers haven’t been historically comfortable sharing, sort of everything, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

And I think we’re getting to this point and I think to your point, the pandemic really forced it where there’s a level of vulnerability employers have with their employees. I think it was because we’re all zooming out of our homes. We got to know each other in ways during this pandemic, significantly changed the employer, employee relationship. When you think about that, I think it means that we have to be, like you’re saying Kelly really almost not skeptical, but right.

But look critically at the AI that we’re using. Are we creating AI that’s just going to perpetuate the patterns we’re trying to disrupt? How are we using technology? What are the data that we’re using and honestly bring employees into these conversations more. They need to be part of the conversation.

They want to be part of the conversation, and it’s the only way we’re going to build trust, and be able to succeed together. We need to figure out ways we can hear from them and have adult conversations, because otherwise they’re filling in. They’re very smart and they have access to lots of data too.

And they’re just going to fill in with their own idea of what’s happening. And if it’s not actually in alignment with your intentions as an employer, then there’s a gap and you’re going to lose that trust. Yeah, I think we need to be just again, intentional, but also transparent and talk to our employees, figure out ways that we can engage with them.

[01:13:37] Kelly: I actually really love that call out on trust. We’re coming close to the end of our time, but in the chat here you can see, Nancy, I feel like you may have made the comment regarding the CFO worried about talent management, do you think it’s really just man, it’s the line item or?

[01:13:54] Nancy: I think in part, that’s the CFO, so it’s about money. But I also think it’s risk. It’s recognizing, think about the attention we’re paying to risk, climate risk, people risk. We’re in a situation right now that’s fundamentally changing our economy. As a CFO, if I’m concerned with sustainability, if I’m focusing on that, if I understand my fiduciary responsibility to the organization, like I have to think of all of it. So I’m looking at talent as, yeah we need to quote of course do the right thing.

I’m worried about the line item element of it. But I also recognize that human capital is a major component of our operation and we need to make sure we’re managing it well. And I’m going to want to know what are those metrics so I can understand that we’re doing that well. So I can be responsive to our investors and our shareholders and all those good things.

And that’s what starts to me is what’s so exciting about it. Cause I feel like all of us, We all knew how strategic focusing on people was. But now it’s getting reinforced more and more.

[01:15:01] Yustina: If I may add to this, I think I’m excited that it made it to that line item, but there is more because it’s actually people belong to your balance sheet.

Not that item on European. And how was that? And how do you really get to the eyes when you understand capabilities, you start to see, like, the potential and right now, if you’re just looking at drop codes and whatever you don’t see what people have, people are connected to work.

You don’t see the product that they have created in the past. You don’t see that actually this person and this group can have the potential to create this new product, this new vision, this new. That is when really it turns into a capability into an asset. But to piggyback on that, like what does it take to turn skills into capabilities really?

When you connect outcomes and that diverse teams together, they have a greater capability. As shown and outcomes, it’s not oh, be nice hire this person of color. It is no, we need this because our business is dependent on it. That level of connection, it doesn’t happen yet.

But like in our AI, instead of being passive, let’s report. We want our AI to say Hey, this person has the skills you’re looking for and also diverse, which also will make your team more productive. That’s the level that we need to be aspiring for.

[01:16:40] Kelly: I love that. People are our greatest asset, as they say. We have one last question you guys.

Speaking of soft skills, high performer data scientist profiles, and Amazon can be very different from those of say Google, what would be the effective way to identify the right talent considering differences in culture?

[01:17:00] Yustina: Oh wow. Oh, wow. I think you start to see when I did skill shapes in the past and start to see roles vary from like a Google embedded software versus an Amazon embedded software, you start to see differences in them and some soft skills start creeping in here and don’t creep in there. You start to see the value.

But again, there is a limitation to that, which is another reason like you want to deal with skills a little bit more cautiously, because a lot of that is just the manager how they ask for skilled and not every skill they asked for is what they need or how would communicate. So that takes us to that level of integration of data that you want to bring in.

What’s the value of the enterprise as a whole, which is the perceptions, what employees do their turnover, how willing are they to do volunteer work in that organization. These are kind of data that needs to be brought in so you really understand the compensation at a much more holistic level, that the value of the employee, the value of the organization, where it stands in the external labor market, we need that in our inner city.

[01:18:19] Kelly: Really good point there, Yustina. Listen, I wanted to firstly thank all of our panelists for sharing this amazing and wonderful knowledge with us today. I know you guys will be interested in keeping up with their work and maybe even have some additional questions that you want to shoot their way so you can find them all, we are all very active on LinkedIn as it turns out. So not surprising the work social platform, but you can find us there if you do have any additional questions. We would love to continue learning about your skills journey so keep us posted.

Thanks for tuning in to the special bonus episode of Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, a Growth Network Podcast Production.

Today’s bonus episode is brought to you by Visier, the global leader in people analytics. To learn more, visit visier.com. If any part of this episode resonated with you, we would love for you to share it with a friend or colleague who might feel the same. Feel free to reach out to me @ Kelly Ryan Bailey on social and learn more at skillsbaby.com.

Thanks again for spending some time with me and most importantly, have a great day.