Get Reworked

The future of the metaverse may be the topic of the day for many tech pundits, but the reality is that it's already here. The virtual reality, that is.

In this episode of Get Reworked, we talk to Derek Belch, CEO of virtual reality firm Strivr, about how VR is being used to train employees right now and what potential it holds for the future. We've entered a new era of VR technology, he said, and the recent buzz around the metaverse is only going to accelerate its use in the enterprise.

"The effect on the human brain is so real," Derek says. "If VR is done well, the brain can't tell the difference between a virtual simulation and real life. So I think that's the difference is we're in that cheaper, lighter, faster era. And this technology that used to be very cumbersome, very expensive, very heavy ... that's all gone."

Highlights of the conversation include:

• How an aspiring football coach turned into a VR training entrepreneur.
• When VR training is a good option for companies.
• The difference between VR and augmented reality.
• Why organizations that don't invest in emerging technologies like VR and the metaverse will be left behind.
• How Walmart used VR training to prepare employees for Black Friday and why he's bullish on its use for soft skills.
• What companies need to get started in VR for employee training and development.

Co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak also talk with Derek about his career as a college football player at Stanford, how the end of his coaching career was just the beginning he needed, and why he's both a tech optimist and realist. Plus, Siobhan's got jokes! Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].

The current moment is a powerful opportunity to reshape and remake work. But getting it right is both relatively straightforward and fiendishly complex.

In this episode of Get Reworked, we talk to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, information management expert and founder of advisory firm Deep Analysis about the road ahead. Organizations are poised to make giant leaps forward, he says, with powerful and useful tools to manage information and deliver better customer and employee experiences. But it's going to take a lot more than writing a check.

"If people aren't prepared to make bold moves to get rid of decades of junk, if they're not prepared to be honest about how miserably inefficient some of their processes are and get rid of them, or completely rethink them, then it's limited," Alan said.

Highlights of the conversation include:

• The problem with information management in companies today.
• Why it's long past time to clean out the digital junk in your data closet.
• Why you should approach customer experience and employee experience as one challenge.
• The No. 1 reason most business applications fail.

Plus, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak talk with Alan about the metaverse and web3, his side career as a DJ and what his photography background teaches him about digital transformation. Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].

Many organizations have been serious about diversity and inclusion work for decades, so why has so little progress been made?

In this episode of Get Reworked, we talk to Cynthia Owyoung, vice president of inclusion, equity and belonging at Robinhood and author of the new book "All Are Welcome: How to Build a Real Workplace Culture of Inclusion That Delivers Results." Cynthia shares insights and practical advice from her two decades of experience in a wide range of companies. The bottom line: If you're just making it an HR initiative, you're missing the point.

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"When we view this work as primarily an HR initiative or something that only sits within talent, I think we're missing a huge opportunity," Cynthia said. "And we're also not addressing the broader influences and context within your business ecosystem that is actually going to make or break your success in this space."

Highlights of the conversation include:

• The evolution of diversity and inclusion to incorporate equity and belonging.
• How DEIB work can go beyond HR to be a driver of business and growth.
• How leaders can overcome their discomfort to be an advocate for DEIB work.
• The future of DEIB work in the hybrid world of work.
• Why the Great Resignation is an opportunity to really make a difference in this work.

Plus, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak talk with Cynthia about diversity quotas, algorithmic bias and why businesses should stop hiring for culture fit. Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].

Could your TV be the answer to the challenges of the Great Resignation? It just might be, in part at least.

In this episode of Get Reworked, we talk to Meredith Sadoulet, vice president of talent, strategy and experience at Comcast, about the story behind the development of Xfinity X1 Career Center, a job search destination launched on the Philadelphia-based company's cable platform in 2021. Meredith led the small entrepreneurial team within Comcast to launch this new consumer-facing job search tool.

Listen: Get Reworked Podcast Full Episode List

"I can remember in the earliest days having some conversations with folks who said, 'I can't imagine that anyone would ever want to think about something serious like job search when they're watching TV,'" Meredith said. "Yet we had some market research and frankly, we had anecdotes. And we also had a gut feeling that there was an opportunity here based on what we were seeing with employment trends and a need for disruption."

Highlights of the conversation include:

• How Comcast discovered TV was a search destination for job seekers.
• What the Career Center does and how the company built it.
• How companies like Walmart are using the platform to meet their recruiting and diversity and inclusion goals.
• The effects of the Great Resignation on recruiting and job search.
• Lessons learned from operating as a startup within a larger company.

Plus, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak talk with Meredith about whether 5G is overrated or underrated, the enduring allure of business travel and bicycle racing as a form of relaxation. Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].

Before COVID pushed many workers into remote work, collaboration consumed as much as 85% of people's work time. In the post-pandemic world it's gone even higher, adding five to eight hours to the average work week.

We're collaborating more, which is a good thing, but we've entered overload territory.

In this episode of Get Reworked, we talk to Rob Cross, professor of global leadership at Babson College and author of "Beyond Collaboration Overload," about what that means and how companies can make sure they're collaborating in the right ways. As companies ponder their return-to-office strategy, understanding internal networks and identifying who your organizational super collaborators are is critically important.

"They're in my mind the really big flight risks that a lot of the organizations are using the network analytics to understand," Rob said, "because if you force them back what you're doing is not just losing a person, you're losing that network too. And so the impact is quite, quite significant."

Highlights of the conversation include:

• How Zoom fatigue is different from collaboration overload.
• How to drive better innovation from collaboration.
• The role of purpose and intention in building effective collaboration.
• How to build high quality relationships in remote and hybrid work.
• Who should take ownership of collaboration inside the organization.

Plus, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak talk to Rob about how actor Kevin Bacon is a model for the kind of networked connections we should be aiming for in organizations, and the pluses and minuses of New Year's resolutions. Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].

Remote and hybrid work is a golden opportunity to make real progress toward diversity and inclusion goals, but only if companies handle it right.

In this episode of Get Reworked, we talk to Joan C. Williams, professor at University of California Hastings School of Law and author of Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good, about that opportunity and the role organizations can play in interrupting bias at work. Here's a tip: Just having a conversation about it isn't enough.

"If you had a problem with sales, you wouldn't respond to it by having a conversation about sales, and then expect anything to change," Joan said. "You would analyze the sales process, figure out what's going wrong, develop metrics to establish baselines and measure progress, and then keep trying evidence-based strategies to achieve your goals. You wouldn't have a sincere conversation about sales and designate National Celebrate Sales Month and expect anything to change."

Highlights of the conversation include:

• Why diversity, equity and inclusion programs in many organizations fail to solve the challenge of bias.
• The places where bias in organizational systems show up and how that harms women and people of color.
• How to design hiring processes, performance evaluations and succession planning to be more equitable.
• Why change needs to come from the top and the bottom of the organization.

Plus, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak talk to Joan about why she has made studying and interrupting bias her life's work and talk about their bi-weekly live conversations with audience members on Twitter Spaces. Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].

Employee experience has become a primary objective for organizations as they look to retain pandemic-fatigued employees and recruit in-demand talent. But it's easy to get it wrong.

In this episode, Tom Dewaele, global head of employee experience at Unilever, shares how the London-based consumer goods maker creates a unified employee experience for 150,000 workers across 190 countries.

The journey can easily end up with efforts fragmented across functions and multiple competing departmental initiatives. The end result is frustrated employees.

"That's what triggered the thinking of starting to look at it in a different way, in a more end-to-end way and bring those different functions together under one single umbrella called employee experience," said Dewaele.

Dewaele, the winner of Reworked's 2021 Employee Experience Leader of the Year award, shares what others can learn from Unilever's journey over the last few years. Highlights of the conversation include:

• The importance of having a single, unified vision for employee experience across the organization.
• How Unilever started on its employee experience journey.
• What employee experience leaders can learn from customer experience.
• How to balance priorities across regions and departments and still find space for experimentation.

Plus, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak talk with Tom about Belgian fries vs. their French counterpart and urge listeners to get their award applications ready for the coming year. Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].

Hybrid work is the order of the day for many companies as they ponder their future. But what does hybrid work actually mean and how do you design it to work for both employees and the organization?

In this episode of Get Reworked, Jim Kalbach, chief evangelist at digital whiteboard company MURAL, talks about how the current moment is an inflection point for designing places where people actually want to work.

"I don't think it's a change in work that we've experienced during the pandemic," he said. "It's a change in lifestyle that we've experienced and because of that people kind of got a flavor of a different way of living and working. And I don't think they're ready to give that up."

Highlights of the conversation include:

• Why you have to be intentional about how you design hybrid and remote work.
• How to use small moments within meetings to create a positive culture.
• How user experience and design thinking can be used to create effective hybrid work experiences.
• The 5 P Framework for thinking about hybrid work, and why policy and practice should drive your approach.
• ​Why now is the time to reinvent how you engage with teams and embrace a playful mindset.

Plus, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak talk about the oeuvre of Nicolas Cage movies and how the journeyman Hollywood actor just might be the panacea for what ails the digital workplace. Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].

The past year-plus has been one giant, often unwanted and unanticipated, experiment at work. From emerging collaboration tools and AI-fueled bots to new working models like hybrid and remote work, organizations large and small had to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. New ways of thinking and working are a reality from the frontline to the C-suite.

It's also quite obvious that it's still a work in progress. In this kickoff episode to Season 2 of Get Reworked, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak take a look back at some of what's happened and review their own podcast experiment.

The past year has seen dizzying advancements as well as consistent reminders that it's often the management basics that have the most dramatic effect. Highlights of the conversation include:

• Big workplace themes from the 2021 Digital Workplace Experience series.
• Why the basics are so important in the workplace of the future.
• Favorite episodes from Season 1 of the podcast.

Plus, Siobhan and Mike renew their debate about whether or not raisins in cookies are a good thing. That and more hard-hitting commentary on what's next from the upcoming season of the Get Reworked podcast. Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].

From established tools like Slack, enterprise giants Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace, and emerging whiteboard tools like Mural, we have more ways to collaborate at work than we've ever had before. But that doesn't mean it's all sorted out.

In this episode of Get Reworked, Angela Ashenden, principal analyst in the workplace transformation practice at CCS Insight, shares why the technology is important but it's the human element that is perhaps the most tricky in the new world of collaboration.

"There is this increasing requirement on managers to learn new skills in order to cope with the changes in the way that teams work today and the way that people work," Angela said. "And as we go into this kind of hybrid work environment, then there's a number of new things that come into that picture as well."

Highlights of the conversation include:

• How collaboration is changing inside organizations in response to technology innovation.
• The ways management needs to change its approach to collaboration in hybrid and remote work environments.
• When asynchronous collaboration makes sense and when it makes sense to collaborate in real time.
• The critical importance of workplace agreements and policies that spell out collaboration expectations.

Plus, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak talk with Angela about her skepticism about the rise of mental wellness apps and reflect on their takeaways from the first season of the podcast. Listen in for more.

Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Drop us a line at [email protected].