Podcast
Podcast
- 25 Nov 2020
- Managing the Future of Work
PwC: Coaching change in times of crisis
Joe Fuller: Coronavirus has accelerated many trends in the future of work related to the adoption of more flexible working models, supporting employee mental health, and upskilling. Alongside the challenge of shifting to new remote working models, companies are faced with broad social dynamics, including a shrinking middle class, income polarization, and a loss of trust in business leaders. Organizations need the infrastructure, tools, and most importantly, the skills to adapt to this changing environment. Upskilling is particularly imperative as employers seek to retain the institutional knowledge and a network of relationships that incumbent workers enjoy, while responding to unprecedented technological change. What’s the business case for implementing upskilling and other initiatives to respond to these changes? How do such programs fit into a company’s wider purpose? Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. I’m joined today by Mike Fenlon, chief people officer at the professional services giant, PwC [PricewaterhouseCoopers]. Mike has led initiatives for digital upskilling, inclusive leadership, and innovation and scale. Mike and I will be discussing the ongoing transformation of work and initiatives related to maintaining employee well-being, how leaders can help avoid burnout among themselves and their teams, and how we de-stygmatize mental health issues that arise in the workplace. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast, Mike.
Mike Fenlon: Thank you, Joe. It’s great to join you.
Fuller: Mike, one thing we’ve heard very often since the onset of Covid is that it’s accelerating important trends in the workforce affecting the future of work that were already latent and noticeable in the economy. Do you agree with that characterization? And what do you think the most important of those were?
Fenlon: One, in the most fundamental way: purpose. Purpose has risen to the fore, interestingly, as an imperative around being clear what it is you stand for on multiple levels. I think Covid has accelerated that. We’ve had a lot of interest for years in well-being in the workplace—mental health, flexibility, diversity and inclusion, the disparate impacts of the pandemic on communities of color, for example. Digital. We almost overnight, for example, in our firm, went virtual. And while we had been accustomed to working at client sites, on the road, we had the digital infrastructure, if you will. It has clearly accelerated the imperative of businesses to have that infrastructure, the tools in place, the skill sets in place, to work seamlessly, really, from both a resilience standpoint and just quality of services. It also highlights, by the way, a lot of people are talking about this K-shaped recovery. And how do employees stay relevant? How do they upskill in this digital data-driven innovation economy? And I think the pandemic has accelerated that. And then a broader set of trends, no doubt as well, that have been shaping our strategies. You think about the increasing wealth disparity in our society, the erosion of the middle class, technology, digital—I’ve already talked about—demographic shifts, polarization that was there, certainly increasing nationalism polarization, pre-pandemic. And then all of that goes to trust—trust in institutions; trust in business, itself; business leaders.
Fuller: Let’s unpack that a little bit. Let’s first talk about what I’m going to characterize as the attitude of workers about their company—whether it’s trust or, for that matter, purpose—that my company stands for something meaningful, that I trust the integrity of leadership, that I believe the company does something that adds to the world. What do you see in the PwC workforce? And what do you hear from your colleagues that serve clients about those themes and what people are looking for and how they measure success, how they measure whether or not their organization is fulfilling those requirements that they’re placing on them?
Fenlon: I’ll use our firm as an example. And at the heart of our stated purposes is building trust, building trust broadly in society and, of course, in the services we provide our clients, but then also inside of our firm. And I really feel that trust, which is part of our purpose, not abstract at all, it starts with inclusive leadership. It builds trust and credibility. I also think transparency is another aspect of this. We issued, in fact, a diversity transparency report just a few months ago at the end of August, net-zero commitments around the climate. So being explicit and transparent around what your commitments are, and the purpose—not in the narrow parochial sense of shareholder value, but really how do you quantify or measure your impact more broadly with your stakeholders and with society, itself? Another example, skill sets. The obsolescence of skill sets, the imperative for really all of us to be reinventing, to secure our futures, to maintain relevance. And so to build trust for us, that means making very significant investments in upskilling, in digital upskilling, in our people’s skill sets. And then maybe the last thing, in the day-to-day work I’m doing serving my client, is there that atmosphere of what psychologists refer to as psychological safety? In other words, good leaders, strong leaders are building a climate of trust. They’re able to engender that sense of purpose in the work, itself. And partly that’s a function of the trust and the openness, the ability for each person to contribute to their fullest.
Fuller: When you think about that through the lens of Covid-19 and the fact that now most activities by management are being done remotely, are being done in two dimensions—in real time, in personal settings, like Zoom meetings or Microsoft Team meetings—how can a leader instill confidence in their organization along those lines, in terms of inclusion and transparency, when so many of the tools we rely on to do that as leaders are just simply unavailable, whether it’s travel or physical meetings with people, or even those chance encounters, where people have a chance to impress on their colleagues the sincerity and dedication they have to the organization’s purpose?
Fenlon: We’ve identified sets of practices—we call them “difference-makers”—that we think are really important for our teams. They were important pre-Covid, but they’re practices now that have taken on additional, maybe, urgency given the remote work we’re doing—the fact that we’re all engaged, listening more carefully to your team, finding opportunities to check in, focusing on well-being. You know, you’re talking about building trust, so it’s not just a matter of getting the technical work done now, but it’s also so important for us to be talking about well-being, for us to be talking about mental health, to talk about flexibility, as well. And I think those are some of the other aspects of the workplace today that have taken on much greater significance.
Fuller: Mike, you talked earlier, you talked about digitalization and increasing adoption of technology. That’s certainly something that we’ve seen across the board, both in our conversations with executives on this podcast and our research here at Harvard Business School. Of course, integral to that acceleration of technology is something else you mentioned: re-skilling—whether it’s couched as internal training or lifelong learning. Those are themes companies are constantly raising, but when you talk to practitioners about it, not a lot of people are satisfied we really understand how to do it effectively, whether it’s to motivate people to stay state-of-the-art or to be forward-looking in anticipating what types of skills we have to instill in our workforce now to be ready for tomorrow. How are you thinking about that at PwC?
Fenlon: You know, in 2017, we introduced a broad strategy called “Your Tomorrow.” One element of that was, well, how can I secure my future? And part of that means for us, as an employer, making brand-defining investments in digital upskilling, for example, but then also for me, individually, obviously taking responsibility as well to engage. Our goal in a large organization—remember we’re in our US firm about 55,000 and then globally about 280,000 in 158 territories—so a large organization. And we needed to do it at scale, but we also had to personalize it. We actually built an app called a “Digital Fitness” app and asked our people to engage by initially doing a self-assessment. And the self-assessment then created some specific learning paths based on my interests, based on my career, based on the jobs of the future that I wanted to aspire to, as well. We combined that then with a digital-badging program. So these are badges, credentials, that stay with you, even if you leave our firm. These are credentials you earn. We also built a core group, we call them “accelerators,” to serve as influencers. So this is kind of a bottoms-up approach now as well, citizen led. These individuals went through fast-track training, so they were given protected time for their education around their upskilling, but they were still in our practice. And then they did in-depth training—automation, robotics, analytics, as I say, AI—again, depending on their roles. Their mission was to accelerate adoption across our firm. So on the one hand, we’re doing broad upskilling that’s customized at scale, but we also introduced this group of influencers over time that grew to several thousand people. We used an app to make this easy, to make it accessible, to be able to access learning assets, courses, training. The other thing I’ll mention I think that’s so important for us as business leaders is, of course, this issue of scale. How do I scale change rapidly? And we created a platform—we called it “Digital Lab.” And this enabled our people. So let’s say, Joe, you build a bot, right? A, you submit that to the lab. You get recognized, by the way—there’s a leaderboard. It gives us quality assurance, because we’re going to look at your bot to ensure that it’s doing the things you say it does with quality. But then it enables us to share it quickly.
Fuller: Mike, I’d love to go back just for a second to this concept of the “accelerators”—and even the choice of that word. You said there were 2,000 of them. That’s an incredible commitment of both those people in the organization to set aside time for them to learn these skills. Why was that necessary? Can you tell us a little bit more about the design purpose of seeding those people across the organization?
Fenlon: This is about driving rapid change at scale. And now, serving as a coach, a teacher, someone who is helping apply their training in the moment on an engagement with an actual project—and in the process of that, building other skills. Many of them measured their success, not just in terms of their direct impact individually, but also their ability to influence, motivate, inspire, engage. Of course, we live in a hierarchical world, and hierarchy can be your enemy here. The insights, the skill sets, the knowledge are agnostic of hierarchy here. Basically now, the accelerator program has integrated fully into our culture, and we have many more people, actually, who were never admitted formally to the accelerator program, who have now completed that training on their own. So that was the idea—that it would create a momentum.
Fuller: When one thinks of firms like PwC, of course, one has in one’s mind’s eye a workforce with very high average educational attainment because they work on different clients or different situations or circumstances, very used to learning new material. So I imagine, at least demographically, many other executives or managers listening to this podcast would say, “Well, that’s pretty easy at a PwC, given that workforce in the nature of that industry.” Were there general rules of the road for this transformation through re-skilling at scale that you think are commonly applicable to companies?
Fenlon: We made it work for the unique attributes of our firm, but we’re certainly working with many of our clients around workforce of the future and designing strategies that make sense, given their unique attributes, as well. That said, the accelerator program was something we opened up to our whole firm. The point was creating some learning paths and giving people support and access, culturally creating some protected time for that, as well. These are true investments that have a return, but return on multiple levels, engagement, motivation, in addition to business impact. I think the fundamental point is that all of us have a workforce. That workforce, by definition, has a set of skills, knowledge, capabilities, but we’re in a world where you’re hiring. You can’t hire your way out of the ever-receding horizon of technology and of the kinds of skill sets you need to stay relevant. You’ve got to be making, finding a way to make investments, as well. That ties back to our conversation on purpose. Trust. Having a strategy or on up-skilling goes to your purpose. And investing in your people, the antithesis would be, I feel like I’m just a “resource” that can be disposed of, and I think that’s a disastrous path. So I actually think it ties right back to our conversation around purpose and trust.
Fuller: Certainly one thing that we’ve identified here as a flaw in a lot of companies’ strategies to maintaining their talent base is their tendency to rely on the spot market for talent. They’re going to hire what they need at the last minute, because they don’t want to make commitments to the expense of training or to have hiring skills too earlier, occurring expense too early. And that would seem to be becoming less and less of a tenable strategy, which is going to oblige companies to think more like you were thinking. You talked a lot, Mike, about essentially the logic for PwC and PwC’s obligation to think ahead and invest in this reskilling. What’s the responsibility of the employee to respond to these opportunities or to be active on their own account and trying to advance their skills and stay market-ready with skills that are in demand by their employer or the marketplace more generally?
Fenlon: It’s a shared responsibility. We’re never done. We use a phrase, we call it “infinite learning.” The stakes are real. And we maintain, by the way, a platform for the freelance market, we call it “Talent Exchange,” but I think for all of us, whether I’m a freelancer or whether I’m full-time colleague inside of our firm, I’ve got to take that personal responsibility. So we think there’s a social responsibility for businesses to invest in their employees that does tie to our purpose, as I say. But of course, I’ve got to take full responsibility. We all do. And that’s where we’re seeing, you’re talking about trends with Covid—and obviously education, itself. There are fundamental questions being raised about education, itself. Is it fit for purpose? Not just the cost, but the model, in a world that really demands lifelong education. So I think it ties together on a number of points.
Fuller: Let’s come back to something you touched on earlier, which is this whole issue of mental health, behavioral health, how Covid has affected that. And also that it’s another one of these trends that we’re seeing, prior to Covid, of growing importance. How are you experiencing that at PwC? How are you responding?
Fenlon: Before Covid, I remember being in a meeting with many university presidents and senior executives who had come together, maybe a group of 30 or 40 of us, had come together specifically to talk about mental health. And to a person, the university presidents talked about this as a top priority, perhaps for some their top priority. They were seeing demand for mental health services, that they couldn’t keep up with demand for mental health services—concerns around depression, anxiety. Similarly in the workplace, this predates Covid, if I’m going to fulfill my potential in my career, be at my best, it’s also about well-being—mental, physical, emotional, spiritual well-being. Spiritual in the sense of purpose, again. And we tried to open up that conversation again, by personalizing it. We asked all of our partners, all of our people, to do an assessment around their well-being and to talk about what their own priorities were, and then ultimately to come together and form team plans around well-being. We found one of the keys was starting with trust, creating opportunities for everyone to share some personal goals they’re comfortable sharing. And then for the team, itself, to have some well-being goals along those four dimensions of energy that I mentioned—so physical well-being, emotional, mental, spiritual. We found with mental well-being, of course, there’s a stigma often attached to these conversations around mental health. We’re trying to address this and to normalize the discussion. We’re seeing a real shift, where people are more open to talk about their interests, their concerns, accessing the resources we offer, which have also evolved. So using apps, for example, in the pandemic, we’re talking about telemedicine. Well, pre-pandemic, we were giving access to our people to text-based consultations, believe it or not, with mental health providers. So just texting. And then if it made sense, you could advance that to a video session with a mental health professional, or they could connect you with other resources.
Fuller: Well, certainly one of the lessons we’ve learned in our survey work of workforces is that in an organization where issues like this are discussable and where the leadership of the organization makes the effort to demonstrate that these are human characteristics, human issues, that the story of the company is not the one we traditionally associate with business success—you know, people marching through brick walls, or storming the hill, or beating the competitor, but rather stories of taking care of each other, looking out for each other. Those are the things that eliminate, or at least reduce, the propensity for people to hold back. And not even, not only not make their troubles or concerns known to their colleagues, but not even use the benefits a company provides to help somebody because they’re worried that somehow that will reflect badly on them. It’s a real tragedy. And that role-modeling at the top is the essence about it, whether it’s about self-care or care for dependents, whether they’re kids, parents in this day and age, people with comorbidities.
Fenlon: When you think about the impacts of the pandemic, by definition, we’re living in a time that produces lots of anxiety, uncertainty, feelings of depression, loss. I think for us as business leaders, this is, of course, the time when we need to look at our benefits and encouraging people to access those benefits. But it’s also a time—and this is the point I was trying to make—where it’s about our culture and really building resilience and management of our energy and well-being in our day-to-day work. We created something called the “well,” and we asked all of our people to be on a team plan and then to share their plan and in a way that I could go in and look at your team’s plan, you could look at mine, we can cross-pollinate. We did some recognition over the past few years as well to highlight where teams were having impact. We even did some independent research, because as much as we were seeing the benefits, we thought we should, like any investment, independently look at this. We worked with USC, actually, and found that teams that had plans, that were talking about goals, lo and behold, yes, they had higher levels of trust, better communication, better team collaboration, better relationships with their clients. There were lots of positive outcomes in addition to overall improvements in well-being.
Fuller: Mike, let’s expand this a little bit and let’s do the most dangerous thing one can do when discussing the future, which is to make predictions. What do you think the workplace of the future at PwC looks like? And how much of that will reflect learnings that the organization has taken on board as a function of this strange period of pandemic that we’re living through?
Fenlon: We’ve proven we can work virtually. We already knew we could, because of the nature of our firm, our people were at client sites, traveling, our offices are geographically dispersed. So we had that infrastructure, we had those muscles, we had those skills, but never at this scale. I think we’ve learned where there are benefits, but also shortcomings—where there’s a place, for example, where is it important to be in-person, as well. So I think if we talk about the office, for example, the office was already evolving to promote more collaboration, communication, speed, much less formal, more comfortable, a space you actually would enjoy spending time in. Now, as we look at the future of the office, it begs the question, “Okay, it’s perhaps more of a hub. We’ll be more deliberate about when we need to be together, but we want to pull through the benefits of increased flexibility, as well.” So there’s going to be a time, absolutely, when we’ll be getting back on planes, we’ll be meeting regularly in person, maybe certain times when teams need to come together. But we also think there’s going to be lots of benefits for increased flexibility, as well. If my day is such that being in an office there’s not really a value-add, then I’m gaining time back for productivity, for well-being, for flexibility in my schedule. It can serve as something that attracts talent to our firm. So this fall, we have about 4,000 individuals joining us. And beyond their internship, this is their first time as a full-time employee anywhere. And they’re beginning that journey in this all-virtual world. We redesigned our internship programs to make them all virtual, and then our entire onboarding process. And we’re doing much more listening. On a weekly basis, we’re serving our new joiners. In addition to their engagement teams, they’re part of much smaller teams, as well—specifically designed to help get questions answered, to help build a personal network, just to get to know people as people. To create that sense of belonging and connection. And then the nature of the work itself—whether it’s an important client relationship that I’m building, maybe it’s the preference of a client as well, because as you appreciate, that’s something we’re keenly sensitive to—how do our clients prefer to work? And then of course, our people have a say in all of this.
Fuller: Mike, we’re talking, of course, in the fall of 2020, actually on Election Day 2020, and an issue that is very much on executives’ minds is diversity and inclusion and trying to create better pathways for economically marginalized populations, particularly populations of color, to get on a course to higher levels of income and economic security. What do you think can be done to increase the level of diversity and have more-inclusive environments in those industries like professional services, you mentioned banking, investing, that have traditionally had such a hard time building a pipeline of diverse candidates?
Fenlon: We can talk about talent acquisition strategies, strategies around retention, progression. But it’s not enough to just say, “We’re going to have a diverse workforce.” We’ve also got to have inclusive leadership. And that means leaders who are equipped to really build on the benefits of that diversity. So that means everything from self-awareness, self-awareness around my own blind spots. We actually produced, in fact, with Harvard University, we co-produced a series called “Outsmarting Human Minds.” And it highlights the importance of self-awareness, the science of decision-making, of perception, and how bias can come into play. And then the specific skills around creating trust in a team. Ensuring everyone has a voice and can contribute to their fullest, and that I’m serving as an ally and advocate. One of the interesting dynamics—in fact, it’s in this series where we talk about it—is we’re actually really wired, Joe, to help other people, from an evolutionary standpoint. We’re primed for it. But the interesting challenge is, we’re often primed to help people who are like me, my in-group, versus out-group. And part of the blind spots, to make this very concrete, the work we do is to say, “Well, actually, am I somehow disproportionately helping others?” A dialogue that builds trust, drives learning, sometimes challenging, tough conversations, transparency, as well. Our people also want us to be engaged in society, to be making a difference in society. Quick example: Our chairman, Tim Ryan, really developed a vision and co-founded something called “CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion.” It has grown rapidly to I think over 1,400 CEOs who have committed to fostering dialogue inside of their companies, sharing what they’re learning, what’s working and what isn’t, doing work around blind spots, around unconscious bias, committing to have a plan that they share with the board. CEO Action just announced—my colleague, Roy Weathers, in our firm is leading this work—a public-policy initiative. So we now have I think about 250 fellows who have come from many of the different companies that are part of CEO Action to look at issues related to economic equality, education, health care, criminal justice. So the tie-in there to purpose, both internally and externally, I think is important.
Fuller: Well, certainly Mike, one of the things that we’ve seen in our research is that CEOs and other corporate leaders, boards, industry groups, including pan-industry groups like the Business Roundtable Conference Board, are really now thinking about all these measures as being ones not only that they should be thinking about to advance their own company’s strategy, but are really essential to supporting and reinforcing our society, that employers need to be thinking about the system’s effects in terms of their customer bases, the communities they are located in. And that if we don’t achieve some of these purposes, we’ll be undermining the surround. And even if your company’s in great shape, it isn’t much comfort if the economy and the political economy around you is suffering. Well, Mike, it’s been great to have you join us here on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.
Fenlon: Thank you, Joe. And as you said, these issues around purpose, the digital transformation of our economy, our workforce, diversity and inclusion, well-being, all being accelerated really by the pandemic we’re navigating. This is really an extraordinary time. It’s a great opportunity I think for all of us to be privileged in positions of leadership and business, and there’s so much we can learn from each other, as well. So I really appreciate the opportunity today to spend some time with you.
Fuller: Well, appreciate that. And good luck with everything you’ve got going at PwC.
Fenlon: Thank you, Joe.
Fuller: We hope you enjoyed the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.