Work and the Future

Is hybrid work the best of both worlds or the worst of it? Even before the pandemic  organizations struggled to find  the right mix of having workers in the office or elsewhere and two years into it many are still trying to find the right model of work. To talk about this options, Linda Nazareth is joined on this episode by Prof. Nicholas Bloom, economics professor at Stanford University. Prof. Bloom  thinks there is a happy medium with hybrid work and discusses his own research as well what he has been hearing from organizations making decisions on the future of work.

Guest:

Links:

https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/bio

The post Episode 66: Is Hybrid Work the New Normal? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

How will work have to change to accommodate longer life spans? A child born today has a 50 per cent chance of living to one hundred, but even now we know the workforce is aging. In turn,  that means we need to change both organizational policies and our own actions. Ken Stern, host of the new podcast Century Lives joins us on this episode to talk through the issues as we focus on the likelihood of more years of life and more years of work life as well

Guest: 

Ken Stern is the Founder and Chair of the Longevity Project, which he founded in collaboration with the Stanford Center on Longevity. The Longevity Project fosters public conversation and research on the impact on longer lives on civil society. Stern is the host of multiple podcasts, including Century Lives and When I’m 64, from the Stanford Center on Longevity. He is also the chair of ASCEND, an organization dedicated to building a new leadership culture for American business.

Stern is the author of national bestseller, Republican Like Me (HarperCollins 2017) and With Charities For All: Why Charities Are Failing and A Better Way to Give (Doubleday 2013). He is also a regular correspondent on political and business issues for Vanity Fair and has also been a frequent contributor to publications such as The Atlantic, Slate, The Daily Beast, The Washington Postand the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Stern also leads the creative and business teams at Palisades Media Ventures, focusing on creating new and innovative programming for digital platforms. Prior to launching Palisades, Stern was the CEO of National Public Radio. During his tenure, NPR’s radio audience more than doubled, to more than 26 million weekly listeners. Stern also launched NPR’s world class digital efforts which included satellite channels, mobile and podcast services, NPR Music and oversaw the successful expansion of NPR.org. During a period of significant retrenchment at major news outlets, Stern led the dramatic expansion of NPR News, both domestically and abroad, and its evolution as a key daily news source to tens of millions of people.

Prior to joining NPR, Stern was a senior executive in American International Broadcasting. Earlier in his career, he held positions in Democratic politics. He began his media career with Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty in Munich. Stern, a lawyer by training, holds degrees from Haverford College and Yale Law School. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife Beth Cooper and their son Nate.

Links:

Listen to  the Century Lives podcast here

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How do we give graduates the skills they need to make a decent living and give organizations the tech skills they need to operate productively?  Ryan Craig is the Managing Director of Achieve Partners and he joins us to talk about ways to give students outside of tech programs the skills needed by companies, with a view to both growing the economy and putting graduates on the path to making a solid living and being able to pay back the debts incurred to get their educations.

Guest:

Ryan Craig

Managing Director

Achieve Partners

Ryanis a Managing Director at Achieve and University Ventures. Ryan’s commentary on where the puck is going in higher education regularly appears in the Gap Letter, Forbes, TechCrunch, Inside Higher Education, Fortune, HR Dive, and VentureBeat, among others. He is the author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College(Ben Bella, 2018), which describes the critical importance of last-mile training and the emergence of bootcamps, income share programs, staffing and apprenticeship models as preferred pathways to good first digital jobs and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. He is also the author of College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), which profiles the coming shift toward competency-based education and hiring.

Previously, Ryan led the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus where he was the founding Director of Zovio (NASDAQ: ZVO), originally Bridgepoint Education, the fastest growing online university in the U.S. His prior experience in online education was at Columbia University. From 2004 to 2010, Ryan founded and built Wellspring, a national network of boarding schools and summer camps for overweight and obese children, adolescents, and young adults. He began his career at McKinsey & Co.

Ryan received bachelor’s degrees summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University, and his law degree from the Yale Law School.

Links:

https://www.achievepartners.com/team/ryan-craig.html

The post Episode 64: How Do We Give Graduates the Tech Skills the Labor Market Needs? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

What do space missions and remote work have in common? A lot as it turns out, which means that there is a lot that remote workers and those who manage them can learn from looking at what it takes for astronauts to operate effectively when so far away from their base stations. our guest on this episode is Dr. Louis Brennan, Professor of Business at Trinity Business School at the University of Dublin’s Trinity College. Dr. Brennan has done extensive research on the business of space and he shares some fascinating and practical recommendations on how organizations can learn from space programs and how workers can learn from the experience of astronauts.

Guest:

Dr Louis Brennan is a Professor within the Trinity Business School and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He serves as Co-Director of Faculty at the Trinity Business School. An award-winning researcher, he has pioneered research in several areas of novel enquiry. Louis has published eight books including two on the Business of Space. His most recent paper “What Space Missions Can Teach Us about Remote Work”, co-authored with Tanusree Jain, was published by MIT Sloan Management Review. Louis has lived and worked in Asia, Australia, Europe and the USA.

Links:

You can learn more about remote working and space and the business of space from the links below

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-space-missions-can-teach-us-about-remote-work/

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230305922

https://www.routledge.com/Above-and-Beyond-Exploring-the-Business-of-Space/Brennan-Heracleous-Vecchi/p/book/9781138098206

https://theconversation.com/virgin-galactic-space-tourism-takes-off-with-bransons-inaugural-flight-164142

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How do you not just accommodate hybrid work but actually create an effective hybrid culture? To talk about the effective strategies for doing that, we are joined on this episode by Carolyn Byer, HR Lead for Microsoft Canada who shares her experience of leading a hybrid team during the pandemic and discusses the best strategies to create and manage a hybrid culture, not just through a crisis but for the long term.

Guest: 

Carolyn Byer 

Human Resources Lead, Microsoft Canada 

As Human Resources Lead for Canada, Carolyn works closely with President Kevin Peesker and the Leadership Team to develop and execute the people strategy for Microsoft Canada. She leads a team of HR professionals focused on developing Microsoft’s talent, organization and culture to accelerate the company’s own business transformation and impact the broader Microsoft ecosystem.

A strong business leader with proven experience in the c-suite and across all levels of management, Carolyn is a champion of Microsoft’s “learn it all” and growth mindset” tenets and is committed to continuing to grow Microsoft’s diverse and inclusive workforce.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Carolyn served in a variety of HR disciplines globally at IBM for more than 17 years. She has a Bachelor of Psychology from University of Guelph and a Masters in Human Resources from Rutgers University. Outside of work, Carolyn focuses on her family. She enjoys conversing with others and expanding her perspectives and can typically be found on a soccer field or a lake.

Links: 

The post Episode 62: How Do You Create an Effective Hybrid Culture? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

Virtual meetings bring people together but as they do they also shift power dynamics as compared to live meetings. Who will be the winners and losers in this virtual world? As we virtually bring people into our homes, how are we changing our work lives? And what does it all mean for diversity outcomes?  Our guest today is Laura Simpson, Chief Intelligence Officer of McCann Workgroup. She shares some interesting work done by McCann Workgroup on how virtual meetings are changing work and how we should prepare for what comes next.

Guest:

Laura Simpson

Chief Intelligence Officer, McCann Workgroup

Laura Simpson is Global Director of McCann Truth Central, the global thought leadership unit of McCann Erickson Worldwide, and dedicated to discovering “the truths that illuminate the world and help brands make their mark in it.” Laura invented McCann Truth Central, launched it in 2012, and has made it a respected source of actionable global marketing insights for clients.

Laura is a big-stage innovator, blessed with insatiable global curiosity, a love of discovery, and a pure delight in captivating audiences with thought-leading insights.

The Truth Central studies introduced so far have uncovered opportunities in a diverse range of industries. They include: The Truth About Youth; The Truth About Shopping; …About Privacy; …About Beauty; …About Moms; … About Politics; … About Wellness; About Age; and About Global Brands. Each combines market research, anthropology, and robust statistics to present as accurate and well-rounded a picture as possible about a given subject. The aim is to make them definitive guides for clients seeking to shape and grow their brands.

Truth Central studies have been covered by press around the world, and Laura has been invited to present findings to CEOs of major clients and to speak at the ANDA conference in Santiago, CES in Las Vegas and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, among others.

Previously, Laura was head of Trends and Insight for McCann London, and earlier, a global researcher for international research agency Synovate. She’s worked across such client accounts as L’Oréal, MasterCard and Nestlé.

Links: 

The McCann Worldgroup Website

MW Website.

The MW Leadership page

MW Leadership page.

The Truth Central page

Truth Central’s page.

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We put so much into our careers, trying to do our jobs well and impress management with our performance – but is that enough? The fact is that there are career skills that go beyond the scope of our job and a lot of people are not cognizant of them. Our  guest today is  Mark Herschberg, and as well as being  a startup executive for the past 20 years has taught for a class called ‘Career Success Accelerator’ at the Massachusetts institute of Technology. He has now written a book called  The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You andto a he is here to share with us how to develoip those skills and how applhy them to your own career.

Links:

Here are some links for Mark and his work

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hershey/

https://twitter.com/CareerToolkitBk

https://www.facebook.com/TheCareerToolkitBook

https://www.instagram.com/thecareertoolkit/

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All of a sudden  the term ‘The Great Resignation’ is everywhere as worker leave their jobs in droves  in the wake of the pandemic. The U.S. has seen this hit record numbers, and we have seen it in Canada and in other countries as well. There are  lots of reasons for why people are quitting, but one of the ones cited most often is that they feel unappreciated in their current positions. It is something to think about for companies, since the average cost to to replace an employee is twice their salary. So how can organizations show appreciation so that workers are not tempted to jump ship?  To discuss that we are joined on this episode by Steve Pemberton, Chief Human Resource Officer of Workhuman.  Workhuman has come out with a new report that looks at the issue that workers have right now, and how organizations can address them and avoid having the Great Resignation decimate their workforces.

Guest:

Links:

Steve Pemberton on  LinkedIn

The Workhuman blog post about the data.

The post Episode 59: Will the Great Resignation Lead to a Change in Workplace Culture? appeared first on LINDA NAZARETH.

If some of your workforce is ‘visible’ in an office and some are ‘invisible’ at home,  how can you ensure that everyone is treated fairly? There are many considerations for managers, particularly since hybrid work may disproportionately affect some groups of people, whether they are parents or older workers or anyone else; To talk about all of it, we are joined on this episode by Stephanie Dismore, Managing Director of North America for HP. Stephanie talks about the ways that  HP has had to pivot, the concerns she has  about the hybrid model of work, why it might be problematic when we are talking about equity, and how companies can perhaps circumvent that happening.

Guest: 

Stephanie Dismore

Managing Director, North America, HP

Stephanie Dismore is managing director, North America, at HP Inc. In this role, Dismore is responsible for leading all aspects of HP’s market strategy and managing the multibillion-dollar P&L for the company’s largest geographic region. She also oversees direct and indirect sales engagements across HP’s portfolio of products and services, for commercial, consumer and public sector customer segments for the region.

Links:

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How do you bring together workers from different organization with different corporate cultures?  Combining organizations  may make sense from a business point of view, but when you do it you are often bringing together many disparate parts. Doing it effectively means crafting a communications strategy to get everyone communicating with each other, and then putting out a coherent message to the outside world, which can both be difficult tasks for managers and for workers alike.

To talk about all of that from first-hand experience our guest today is Terri Buckley,  Director of Corporate Communications at connectFirst Credit Union in Alberta, Canada. connectFirst Credit is a company that is comprised of what used to be four different companies and four different corporate cultures. Teri had the challenge of putting together a communications strategy when the companies merged  in early 2020 when there were plenty of other challenges happening as well. She shares that experience on this episode, along with  some insightful takeaways  in terms of how the company relied on technology to get things done, as well as how people reacted and learned to adapt as  different corporate cultures came together.

Guest:

Teri Buckley

Director, Corporate Communications

connectFirst Credit Union

Teri Buckley believes when people bank locally, they’re making a choice to join a movement of hope for a brighter future by using finance to grow our communities and our local businesses. Over the past decade, Teri has directed this passion by driving connectFirst’s community investment and social responsibility efforts, then moved to support and inspire employees through her role as Director of Corporate Communications. Over the years, Teri’s visionary leadership and impact has been recognized through leadership awards offered by Canadian Credit Union Association and Alberta Community Co-op Association. Teri will continue shouting the credit union difference, as she steps into the role of Vice President of Brand and Community in November 2021.  

Links:

https://customers.microsoft.com/en-in/story/1417219888968683878-connectfirst-credit-viva-canada

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