Small Talk Window

For this episode of the podcast, we ask, “Why?” Why are you switching your learning solution or deploying one for the first time? The drive to focus anew on establishing a learning culture, implement a workable learning management system (LMS), or kick things off from scratch learning-wise at your organization is understandable. But you must first understand your "why." Your "why" affects everything downstream from the decision, after all—administration and governance, content strategy… you get the picture. Host Brent Skinner's guest is Barry Richman, a learning ecosystems expert formerly of Dunkin' Brands, explains why you must understand your "why."

Joining host Brent Skinner for this episode of "Small Talk Window" is Caitlin MacGregor, co-founder and CEO of Plum. Employer culture and employee experience can be really tough to get right. If you’re an organization that cares at all about any of that, you’re continually searching for ways to reconcile business objectives with the moral imperative of creating a great workplace. And, for a long time, leaders have been trying to do this by intuition, not with reliable data on their people. It’s because all the softer stuff hasn’t really been available, actionable—till recently. We're talking about data not just on productivity, but also on your people's behavior and innate skills, as humans. This is good news. Employer cultures properly informed by skills data naturally lead to better business outcomes.

Most of us have heard of firms like Gartner, IDC and Forrester. But what do we know about industry analysts, really? For this episode of the "Small Talk Window" podcast, Robin Schaffer, principal AR consultant at Schaffer AR, joins host Brent Skinner to discuss just what an industry analyst is and how the market—including the HCM technology market specifically—can best leverage them. Their role and how to work with them to your organization's benefit can be murky, certainly misunderstood.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of original sin in Western theology. Well, there is original sin in skills ontologies, too. It was the early 1950s, and the United States Army had established a behavioral science research and development institute. The objective? Introduce efficiency and standardization to the training process. Figure out who was best at what. A psychologist by the name of Paul G. Whitmore, founder of the initiative, made an executive decision that has dogged our discussion of people skills ever since. He classified them into two types—hard skills, which are easy to measure, and soft skills—which, at the time, were not at all easy to measure. This is the original sin of modern skills ontologies, says Mike Erlin, founder and CEO of AbilityMap and host Brent Skinner's guest for this episode of the podcast. We should lose the bifurcation and look at skills holistically. They’re all human skills, after all.

Kathleen Armbruster, director of talent acquisition at Studio Science and Brent Skinner’s guest on this episode of the “Small Talk Window” podcast, describes achieving a successful search in recruiting as being akin to finding treasure. Kathleen believes being a star recruiter isn’t just about knowing the mechanics, or even the strategy, of talent acquisition. She says you also need a support group around you, a circle of confidantes and peers who “get it”: as rewarding as recruiting can be, the day-to-day of it can sow doubt even in the most resilient practitioner. It is in these troughs that the recruiters who can turn to their network for pep talks and more not only survive, but thrive. Kathleen says the folks at recruiting software provider Qualifi, where she won the Recruiter of the Month Award in June, are a notable contingent of that support group for her success.

Many meetings are unnecessary, even accidents. There are plenty of other ways to gain visibility and experience togetherness without filling everyone's day with back-to-back-to-back meetings. Joining Small Talk Window Host Brent Skinner for this episode is Jamscape Founder and CEO Rene W. Schmidt, formerly of Uber. Their discussion explores how to satiate the desire for meetings without really having to have them. After all, today’s technology facilitates and cultivates the actual togetherness, collaboration, productivity and innovation that conventional meetings just can’t.

Just like the environment, social justice, and other assorted concerns near and dear to people’s hearts from a global perspective, global HCM is quote-unquote “glocal.” You must “think globally, but act locally,” and this is where the term “glocal" comes from. Joining Small Talk Window Host Brent Skinner for this episode is Rick Hammell, founder and CEO of Helios, a soon-to-be-launched global WFM play. He and Brent discuss why “acting glocally” just might be the number one thing global employers can do to protect and optimize the employee experience. Also co-founder and chairman of the board at employer-of-record Atlas, Rick does not disappoint, bringing a wealth of knowledge to the topic.

Think about the two main stakeholders in the world of work—the workforce and its employer. A natural pendulum sways back and forth between each of these stakeholder’s perceived and real needs. At times closer to where the employer would like it and, at other times, where employees would like it, this pendulum’s position always marks a compromise—conscious or not. Joining Small Talk Window Host Brent Skinner for this episode is isolved Chief People Officer Amy Mosher. Both stakeholders deserve validation in this relationship. Pulling in some interesting tie-ins with findings from isolved's Fourth-Annual HR Leaders Report, Amy and Brent discuss how the quality of the employee experience can be a direct outcome of how much validation each of these stakeholders gets.