• Wellbeing
    美国劳工部发布职场人工智能使用原则,保护员工权益(附录原文) 今天5月16日,美国劳工部发布了一套针对人工智能(AI)在职场使用的原则,旨在为雇主提供指导,确保人工智能技术的开发和使用以员工为核心,提升所有员工的工作质量和生活质量。代理劳工部长朱莉·苏在声明中指出:“员工必须是我们国家AI技术发展和使用方法的核心。这些原则反映了拜登-哈里斯政府的信念,人工智能不仅要遵守现有法律,还要提升所有员工的工作和生活质量。” 根据劳工部发布的内容,这些AI原则包括: 以员工赋权为中心:员工及其代表,特别是来自弱势群体的代表,应被告知并有真正的发言权参与AI系统的设计、开发、测试、培训、使用和监督。这确保了AI技术在整个生命周期中考虑到员工的需求和反馈。 道德开发AI:AI系统应以保护员工为目标设计、开发和培训。这意味着在开发AI时,需要优先考虑员工的安全、健康和福祉,防止技术对员工造成不利影响。 建立AI治理和人工监督:组织应有明确的治理体系、程序、人工监督和评估流程,确保AI系统在职场中的使用符合伦理规范,并有适当的监督机制来防止误用。 确保AI使用的透明度:雇主应对员工和求职者透明地展示其使用的AI系统。这包括向员工说明AI系统的功能、目的以及其在工作中的具体应用,增强员工的信任感。 保护劳动和就业权利:AI系统不应违反或破坏员工的组织权、健康和安全权、工资和工时权以及反歧视和反报复保护。这确保了员工在AI技术的应用下,其基本劳动权益不受侵害。 使用AI来支持员工:AI系统应协助、补充和支持员工,并改善工作质量。这意味着AI应被用来提升员工的工作效率和舒适度,而不是取代员工或增加其工作负担。 支持受AI影响的员工:雇主应在与AI相关的工作转换期间支持或提升员工的技能。这包括提供培训和职业发展机会,帮助员工适应新的工作环境和技术要求。 确保负责任地使用员工数据:AI系统收集、使用或创建的员工数据应限于合法商业目的,并被负责地保护和处理。这确保了员工数据的隐私和安全,防止数据滥用。 这些原则是根据拜登总统发布的《安全、可靠和可信赖的人工智能开发和使用行政命令》制定的,旨在为开发者和雇主提供路线图,确保员工在AI技术带来的新机遇中受益,同时避免潜在的危害。 拜登政府强调,这些原则不仅适用于特定行业,而是应在各个领域广泛应用。原则不是详尽的列表,而是一个指导框架,供企业根据自身情况进行定制,并在员工参与下实施最佳实践。通过这种方式,拜登政府希望能在确保AI技术推动创新和机会的同时,保护员工的权益,避免技术可能带来的负面影响。 这套原则发布后,您认为它会对贵公司的AI技术使用和员工权益保护产生怎样的影响? 英文如下: Department of Labor's Artificial Intelligence and Worker Well-being: Principles for Developers and Employers Since taking office, President Biden, Vice President Harris, and the entire Biden-Harris Administration have moved with urgency to harness AI's potential to spur innovation, advance opportunity, and transform the nature of many jobs and industries, while also protecting workers from the risk that they might not share in these gains. As part of this commitment, the AI Executive Order directed the Department of Labor to create Principles for Developers and Employers when using AI in the workplace. These Principles will create a roadmap for developers and employers on how to harness AI technologies for their businesses while ensuring workers benefit from new opportunities created by AI and are protected from its potential harms. The precise scope and nature of how AI will change the workplace remains uncertain. AI can positively augment work by replacing and automating repetitive tasks or assisting with routine decisions, which may reduce the burden on workers and allow them to better perform other responsibilities. Consequently, the introduction of AI-augmented work will create demand for workers to gain new skills and training to learn how to use AI in their day-to-day work. AI will also continue creating new jobs, including those focused on the development, deployment, and human oversight of AI. But AI-augmented work also poses risks if workers no longer have autonomy and direction over their work or their job quality declines. The risks of AI for workers are greater if it undermines workers' rights, embeds bias and discrimination in decision-making processes, or makes consequential workplace decisions without transparency, human oversight and review. There are also risks that workers will be displaced entirely from their jobs by AI. In recent years, unions and employers have come together to collectively bargain new agreements setting sensible, worker-protective guardrails around the use of AI and automated systems in the workplace. In order to provide AI developers and employers across the country with a shared set of guidelines, the Department of Labor developed "Artificial Intelligence and Worker Well-being: Principles for Developers and Employers" as directed by President Biden's Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, with input from workers, unions, researchers, academics, employers, and developers, among others, and through public listening sessions. APPLYING THE PRINCIPLES The following Principles apply to the development and deployment of AI systems in the workplace, and should be considered during the whole lifecycle of AI – from design to development, testing, training, deployment and use, oversight, and auditing. The Principles are applicable to all sectors and intended to be mutually reinforcing, though not all Principles will apply to the same extent in every industry or workplace. The Principles are not intended to be an exhaustive list but instead a guiding framework for businesses. AI developers and employers should review and customize the best practices based on their own context and with input from workers. The Department's AI Principles for Developers and Employers include: [North Star] Centering Worker Empowerment: Workers and their representatives, especially those from underserved communities, should be informed of and have genuine input in the design, development, testing, training, use, and oversight of AI systems for use in the workplace. Ethically Developing AI: AI systems should be designed, developed, and trained in a way that protects workers. Establishing AI Governance and Human Oversight: Organizations should have clear governance systems, procedures, human oversight, and evaluation processes for AI systems for use in the workplace. Ensuring Transparency in AI Use: Employers should be transparent with workers and job seekers about the AI systems that are being used in the workplace. Protecting Labor and Employment Rights: AI systems should not violate or undermine workers' right to organize, health and safety rights, wage and hour rights, and anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation protections. Using AI to Enable Workers: AI systems should assist, complement, and enable workers, and improve job quality. Supporting Workers Impacted by AI: Employers should support or upskill workers during job transitions related to AI. Ensuring Responsible Use of Worker Data: Workers' data collected, used, or created by AI systems should be limited in scope and location, used only to support legitimate business aims, and protected and handled responsibly.
    Wellbeing
    2024年05月16日
  • Wellbeing
    BetterUp Manage: Pioneering AI-Powered Platform For Leaders BetterUp公司最近在其Uplift大会上推出了一个名为BetterUp Manage的领导力发展平台,这一平台采用人工智能驱动的评估和个性化学习方案,彻底改变了专业发展的途径。该平台具有高度的可扩展性和可定制性,能够与Workday、Oracle和SAP等主要系统无缝连接。BetterUp Manage不仅为领导者提供服务,也支持任何寻求发展专业能力的个人。通过整合最新的人工智能技术,BetterUp Manage为传统的领导力培训行业带来了革命性的变革。 这次大会中,BetterUp还邀请了英国的哈里王子Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex 和亚当·格兰特,哈里王子是BetterUp的首席影响官。。。 This week I attended the BetterUp Uplift conference and I really was impressed. This is a company that exploded into the market with an innovative coaching and employee wellbeing network built around an assessment called the “whole person model.” Through a set of shrewd marketing and sales strategies BetterUp established a leadership position in this market, growing to a billion dollar+ valuation. This success encouraged many competitors to form and now the market for AI-enabled, targeted coaching is large and crowded (vendors include Torch, CoachHub, Growthspace, Sounding Board, Bravely, and a new breed of AI systems). Essentially what BetterUp did was democratize business and professional coaching. Before this trend coaching was a rarified, expensive offering reserved for under-performing leaders or high-potential executives. Today, with BetterUp, anyone can go through a meaningful assessment, get assigned a relevant coach, and start a coaching session in minutes. The system is well designed and easy to use and BetterUp’s coaches are all trained (most of the coaching vendors use a lot of the same certified coaches – they are not BetterUp employees). As a corporate solution, BetterUp goes much further. The data collected through assessments is available for analysis (anonymized) so companies can find pockets of stress in the organization. You can look at assessments by team (minimum of 10 people), tenure, level, and other factors. This lets companies like Chevron or Cisco understand the issues new employees or new managers have, for example. In the last few years the company moved into wellbeing by offering a solution called BetterUp Care, which targets benefits buyers. But the more strategic and interesting offering is the new platform I saw this week, now named BetterUp Manage (it was originally called Connect). BetterUp Manage is the first highly personalized, scalable management development platform I’ve seen. It brings together AI-enabled assessment, personalized learning, coaching, and AI-driven narrative support. It’s quite an impressive product, much of it was developed by the team at Motive, who was acquired by BetterUp in 2021. BetterUp Manage is an out of the box personalized leadership development solution. And you don’t need to be a “leader” to use it. The system steps you through the Whole Person assessment, then asks you questions about the types of soft-skills issues you face (many specific scenarios), and then gives you a customized learning path, week by week, along with a professional coach. Since it’s built on an AI platform there is very little manual work behind the scenes so it’s enormously scalable. Large companies will want to customize it and BetterUp is prepared for some of these requests. And the system connects to Workday, Oracle, SAP to automatically understand your role and level. The reason I’m so excited is this: the management training industry is a confusing, messy, red ocean. There are thousands of consultants, coaches, books, courses, and executive education programs. L&D executives have to constantly build custom solutions, evaluate vendors, and hope that an offering will stick. This pure complexity, coupled with the fact that every company is unique, has led to many specialized leadership development firms (and some big ones like Franklin Covey). So what most companies do is mix, match, and custom-build leadership solutions. And they’re not simple: we developed a model we call the 4-E’s to understand this: Education (courses), Experience (developmental assignments), Exposure (mentoring and coaching from leaders), and Environment (a company-wide focus on leadership values and behaviors). All these elements play a role in developing leadership skills. Companies like IBM, Cisco, and Marriot can afford to custom build these solutions, but many companies don’t have the focus. BetterUp Manage is a way to personalize, scale, and democratize this solution and leverage the increasingly important role of AI. I met Alexi Robichaux almost a decade ago and his passion and energy still drives the company. While BetterUp is a bigger company going through the growing pains of any $billion valued growth business, the culture and passion for clients is clear. Remember that buying L&D solutions is not as simple as buying a product and turning it on. Every training solution, platform, or program you buy must be carefully aligned with your company’s culture and rolled out with care. Otherwise people simply say “another training program from corporate I can ignore.” BetterUp, for all its startup-like innovations, has overcome this problem. Customers value the system, they get strong adoption from employees, and the company works hard to advise and consult. It has always been interesting to me that very few content companies ever become very big (Skillsoft is the only one that never seems to stop). And the reason for this is simply the nichey, highly diversified needs of many industries and companies. BetterUp, as a platform-centered company delivering a high-touch solution, has the potential to break this paradigm. It has enormous potential, given the rapid acceleration of AI behind the scenes. I consider BetterUp one of the “Trailblazers” I talk about with clients, and BetterUp Manage is definitely something to watch.
    Wellbeing
    2024年04月12日
  • Wellbeing
    Josh Bersin:2024: The Year That Changes Business Forever (Podcast) The podcast "2024: The Year That Changes Business Forever" by Josh Bersin explores anticipated transformations in business by 2024. It highlights the impact of AI, labor shortages, and evolving organizational structures. The podcast delves into the 2023 economic performance, changes in employee engagement, and the necessity for businesses to adapt strategically. It emphasizes a shift towards dynamic, flatter organizations and the critical role of systemic HR practices in shaping future business landscapes. Josh Bersin探讨了2024年企业预期的转型。这些转型由AI的应用、劳动力短缺和组织结构的变化驱动。播客讨论了2023年的经济表现、员工参与度的变化以及企业为应对未来挑战所需的适应策略。它强调了向动态、扁平化组织的转变和系统性人力资源实践在塑造未来商业环境中的重要作用。 In this podcast I recap 2023 and discuss the big stories for 2024, and to me this year is a tipping point that changes business forever. Why do I say this? Because we’re entering a world of labor shortages, redesign of our companies, and business transformation driven by AI. We’ll look back on 2024 and realize it was a very pivotal year. (Note: In mid-January we’re going to be publishing our detailed predictions report. This article is an edited transcript of this week’s podcast, so it reads like a conversation.) Podcast Begins: Interestingly, the entire year 2023 people were worried about a recession and it didn’t happen. In fact, economically and financially, we had a very strong year. Inflation in the United States and around the world went down. We did have to suffer rising interest rates, and that was a shock, but it was long overdue. I really think the problem we experienced is we had low interest rates for far too long, encouraging speculative investment. Now that the economy is more rational, consumer demand is high, the business environment is solid, and the stock market is performing well. The Nasdaq is almost at an all time high, the seven super stocks did extremely well: the big tech companies, the big retailers, the oil companies, many of the consumer luxury goods companies did extremely well. And the only companies that didn’t do well were the companies that couldn’t make it through the transformation that’s going on. On the cultural front we had the Supreme Court overturning affirmative action in education, which led to a political backlash on diversity and inclusion. The woke mind virus by Elon Musk and similar discussions further pushed back DEI programs, which has made chief diversity officers life difficult. We’re living through two wars, which have been very significant for many companies. I know a lot of you have closed down operations in Russia, and anybody doing business in Israel is having a tough time. And we’ve had this continuous period where every piece of data about employee engagement shows that employees are burned out, tired, stressed. They feel that they’re overworked. Despite this employee sentiment, wages went up by over 5% and people who changed jobs saw raise wages of 8% or more. The unemployment rate is very low so there are a lot of jobs. You could ask yourself, why are people stressed? I think it’s a continued overhang of the pandemic: the remote work challenges, the complexities and inconsistencies in hybrid work. And something else: the younger part of the workforce, those who are going to be living a lot longer than people who are baby boomers, are basically saying I don’t really want to kill myself just to get ahead. I want to have a life. I want to quietly quit. If my company don’t take care of me, I’m going to work my wage, meaning I’m going to work as hard as I’m paid, no more than that. And that mentality has created an environment for the four-day work week, which I think is coming quicker than you realize. And unions, which are politically in favor, are rising at an all time increase in about 25, 30 years. Inflation and the need to raise wages to attract talent leads to pay equity problems. This domain is more complex than you think. You can read about it in our research and in 2024 it belongs on your list. 2024 will also see enormous demand for career reinvention, career development, growth programs, coaching, mentorship, allyship and support amongst the younger part of the workforce. And that means that if you’re in retail, healthcare, hospitality, or one of the other industries that hires younger people you have to accommodate this tremendous demand for benefits. These are things that became very clear in 2023. But let’s talk about the elephant in the room:  the biggest thing that happened in 2023 was AI. AI has transformed the conversations we have about everything from media to publishing to HR technology to recruiting to employee development to employee experience. As you probably know, I’m very high on AI. I think it’s going to have a huge transformational effect on our companies, our jobs, our careers, and our personal lives. AI will improve our health, our ability to learn, the way we consume news (note that the NYT just sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement). Almost every part of our life will be transformed by AI. I know from our conversations that most of you are trying to understand it and see where it fits. And many of you have been told by your CEO, “we need an AI strategy for the company as well as in HR.” And the AI strategy in HR is one thing, but the bigger topic is the rest of the company. So HR is going to have to be a part of this transformation: the new roles, jobs, rewards, and skills we need. This year I’m very excited that we introduced Galileo™, which about 500 or so of you have been using. We’re going to launch the corporate version for everybody in the corporate membership in February, so corporate members stay tuned (or join). Galileo brings AI to HR in an easy-to-use, safe, and high-value way, so it will help you get your strategy together. It’s basically ready to go. Then later in the year we’ll launch a version to the JBA community and more. AI, despite all the fear-mongering, is already a very positive technology. Where are we going next? Well as the title of this article states, I think this is the year that changes business forever. And I’m not trying to be hyperbolic, I really see a tipping point. Let me give you the story. For about a decade I’ve been writing about the flattening of organizations, breaking down of hierarchies, creating what I used to call the networked organization. And this is now mainstream and we’ve decided to call it the Dynamic Organization. And what we mean by this, as you read about in the Dynamic Organization research or in the Post-Industrial Age study, is that the functional hierarchies of jobs, careers, organizations and companies are being broken down for really good reasons. The reason we have functional hierarchies, job levels and siloed business functions is because they’re patterned after the industrial age when companies made money by selling products and services at scale. The automobile industry, the oil and gas industry, the manufacturing industries, the CPG industries, even the pharmaceutical companies are essentially building things, bringing them to market, launching them, selling them, and distributing them in a linear chain. And that “scalable industrial business model” is how we designed our organizations. So we built large organizations for R&D, large organizations for product management and product design and packaging, large organizations for marketing, large organizations for sales, large organizations for business development and distribution, supply chain, and so on (including Finance and HR). And all these ten or fifteen business functions had their own hierarchies. So you, as an employee, worked your way up those hierarchies. When I graduated from college in 1978 as an engineer, I went into one of those hierarchies. For each employee you were an engineer, a salesperson, a marketing manager, or whatever and you worked your way up the pyramid. And at some point in your career you crossed over and did other things, but that was fairly unusual. That wasn’t really the career path. You worked about 35-40 years in that profession and then you retired. And a lot of companies had another construct: management and labor. Management decided “what to do” and labor “did it.” And all of these designs helped us build most of the HR practices we use today, including hiring, pay, performance management, succession, career management, goal setting, leadership development, and on and on. Today, if you look at how the most valued companies in the world, they don’t operate this way any more. Why? Because it slows them down like molasses. If you have to traverse a functional hierarchy to come up with a new idea it takes months or years to create something new. Today value is created through innovation, time to market, closeness to customers, and unique and high-value offerings. The “hierarchy” wasn’t designed for this at all. Here are a few dogmas to consider. We used to think that all new ideas come out of R&D. That’s crazy. Of course R&D is important, but some of the most innovative companies in the world don’t even have R&D departments, they have product teams. The Research Department at Microsoft didn’t even invent AI, the company had to partner with OpenAI, a company that has less than a thousand employees. Here’s another one to consider. Deloitte consultants used to talk about “innovation at the edge,” otherwise known as “skunk works.” We used to advise clients to “separate the new ideas from the scale business” so they new ideas don’t get crushed or ignored. Well today all the new ideas come from the operating businesses, and we iterate in a real-time way. So there’s another industrial organization structure that just no longer applies. So what we’ve been going through in the dynamic organization, and we’ve studied this in detail, is that we’ve got to design our companies to be flatter. We’ve got to simplify the job titles and descriptions so people can move around. We have to organize people into cross functional teams, we have to motivate and train people to work across the functional  silos. We have to build agile working groups, we have to redo performance management around teams and projects, not around individual goals and cascading goals. We need to build pay equity into the system so you’re paid fairly regardless of where you started. Let’s talk about pay. One of the problems with the hierarchy is you get a raise every year based on your performance appraisal. And after a few years your pay may have been quite a bit different than somebody sitting next to you simply because of your appraisals. But you may not be delivering any more than them. That wasn’t fair. If you came into the company with a background in marketing, you made less money than somebody who came into the company with a background in engineering. But five years later you might be doing the same stuff but making different amounts of money. And then there’s gender bias, age bias, and other non-performance factors. In a “skills meritocracy,” as we call it, pay equity has to get fixed. We’ve got to have developmental careers and talent marketplaces and open job opportunities and mentoring for people. And these people practices are the facilitation of becoming more dynamic. And the problem of not being dynamic is what happened at Salesforce, Meta, and other tech companies last year. Salesforce hired thousands of salespeople during the last upcycle after the pandemic, and then a year later laid most of them off. Meta did the same thing. Google’s probably next. These companies, operating in the industrial mindset, thought that the only way to grow is to hire more salespeople, more engineers, or more marketing folks. But the quantity of people in one of these business functions doesn’t necessarily drive growth and profitability. What matters is how they work together and what they do, not how many of them there are. This old idea that we’re going to grow the company by hiring, hiring, hiring is gone. It doesn’t work anymore. It’s still a part of the growth part of the company, you’re always hiring to replace people, to bring new skills, et cetera, and to bring new perspectives. But in a dynamic organization, a lot of the growth comes from within. People grow too. Even the word growth mindset has become overused. We need to have an organizational growth mindset so that we can grow as an organization. A great example of this is Intel. Intel lost their way in the manufacturing of semiconductors and also in the R&D. Now they’re reinventing themselves internally and their stock is skyrocketing. They didn’t hire some guru to tell them what to do, they know what to do. They just need to get around to doing it. Google has more AI engineers than OpenAI, Anthropic, and all the other little guys put together, but they didn’t execute well. Now they’re executing better. They brought their AI teams together into cross-functional groups and they’re sharing IP from YouTube with other business areas. I bet they stomp many of the others in AI once they get it going. That’s part of being a dynamic organization. You as HR people know better than anybody how dysfunctional it is when there are multiple groups in the company doing competing things and they’re not working together because they don’t know about each other, or they don’t talk to each other. There’s no cross fertilization or they’re protecting their turf. All of these are the things that get in the way of being a dynamic organization. And the reason it’s relevant in the next year is this has taken hold. Things like talent marketplaces and career pathways and skills-based organizations, skills based hiring, skills based pay, skills based careers, skills based development, et cetera…  these are not just HR fads, they’re solutions to this big shift: making companies more dynamic. Despite their value in the past, hierarchical stove-piped companies don’t operate very well anymore. Now this isn’t an A-B switch type of thing. This is an evolution, but it’s taking place very quickly. And the reason we came up with this concept of Systemic HR is we in HR have to do the same thing. The HR function itself operates in silos. We’ve got the recruiting group, the DEI group, the Comp group, the L&D group, the business partners, the group that does compliance, the group that worries about wellbeing. We’ve got somebody over here is doing an EX project, somebody over there is doing a data management project, a people analytics group. Okay. Those are all great functional areas that belong in HR. But if they’re not working together on the problems that the company has, and I mean the big problems, growth, profitability, productivity, M&A, etc., then who cares? Then you’re at level one or level two in systemic HR. We built the Systemic HR initiative around business problems. And that’s how we came up with the new HR operating model (read more details here or view the video overview). I think Systemic HR will be a very big deal for 2024, and there are many reasons. Not only are we living in a labor shortage but there’s another accelerant, and that is AI. For those of you that have used Galileo, and I hope you all get a chance to use it this year, it’s absolutely unbelievable how AI can pull together information, data, text from many sources in the company and make sense of what your company is doing. You know as well as I do, if you’ve worked in sales, if you’ve worked in marketing, if you worked in finance, these are siloed groups. Few companies have a truly integrated data management system for all of their customer data match to their sales, data match to their revenue, data match to their marketing.  Customer data platforms are a idea, but it doesn’t really happen very often, and it takes tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and many, many systems to do that. Well, AI does this almost automatically. So when you pull together a tool like Galileo, and you use our research as part of the corpus, and you add data about employee turnover, for example, in your company, or pay variations, you’ll see the relationship between pay and turnover just by asking a question. You don’t have to go spend months doing an analysis and trying to figure out if the analysis is any good. And that’s happening all over the company in sales and customer service and R&D and marketing – everywhere. So this more integrated, dynamic organization is happening before your eyes. In 2024, this is the context for almost everything we’re going to be working on now. The other context is the labor market, which is going to be very tough. You’ve read about from us and others about how tight the labor market is now. Unemployment in the United States is 3.8%, and it’s not going to get much better. Even if we do have a recession, which is questionable, there aren’t enough people to hire. The fertility rate is low, and even if every company gives employees fertility benefits and they all have babies, it will take twenty years for these people to go to work. So all of the developed countries: US, UK, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Nordics, China, Russia, the fertility rate has been low for a long time. The World Bank sees working population shrinking within ten years in almost every developed economy. Since hiring is going to get harder and we’ll see fewer and fewer working people, companies have to be much more integrated in hiring. And we all have to look the Four R’s: Recruit, Retain, Reskill, Redesign. This puts HR in the middle of a lot of job redesign, career reinvention, and a serious look at developing skills, not hiring skills, and using the tools we have as hr professionals to help the organization improve productivity without just hiring and hiring and hiring. I measure the success of companies by two things. One is their endurance: how well have they fared over ups and downs? The second is their revenue per employee. Companies with low revenues per employee tend to be poorly managed companies relative to their peers. Of course there’s a lot of industry differences. When we went through our GWI industry work: healthcare, consumer goods, pharma, banking, we could see the high performing companies were very efficient on a headcount basis. And we found out these companies are actually implementing Systemic HR practices. The other driver that we’re living in a service economy. Interestingly enough, in the United States, more than 70% of our GDP is now services. So the people you have, the humans in your company, are the product. And if you’re not getting good output per dollar of revenue per human, you’re not running the company very well. And this leads to many management topics. How are we going to build early and mid-level leaders? How can we rethink what employees really need? The topics of employee engagement and employee experience are really 25 to 30 years old. They need a massive update. How are we going to implement AI in L&D and replace a lot of these old systems that everybody kind of hates, but we’re stuck with? What’s going on with the ERP vendors and what role will they play as we replace our HR tech with AI powered systems? How will we implement scalable talent intelligence? In a world of labor shortages talent intelligence becomes even more important, whether you think of it for sourcing and recruiting or an internal mobility or just a strategic planning initiative. How do we all get comfortable with AI? And then there’s this issue of Systemic HR and developing your team, your function, your operating model to be more adaptive and more dynamic. So I look back on 2023 I feel it was one of the most fascinating and fun and enriching years that I’ve had. I am always amazed and impressed and energized by you, by you guys who were out there on the firing lines, dealing with these complex issues and companies with old technologies and all sorts of changes going on and how you’re adapting. I continue to be more impressed and more excited about the HR profession every year. I think a lot of people who aren’t in HR think we do a lot of compliance and administration stuff and we fire people. That is the tiniest part of what we do. 2024 is going to be an important year. You as an HR professional are going to have to learn a lot of things. You’re going to learn about Systemic HR issues, you’re going to learn about AI, and you’re going to learn to be a consultant. There’s no question in my mind that over the next decade or two dynamic organization management is going to become a bigger and bigger issue – how we manage people and companies. And I don’t mean manage like supervise, I mean develop, move, retain, pay, et cetera, culture, all of those things. I leave 2023 very energized about what’s to come with AI. And if you’re afraid of AI, just take a deep breath and relax. It’s not going to bite you. There’s nothing evil here. It’s a data driven system. If you don’t have your data act together, you’re not going to get a lot of good value out of AI. I talked to Donna Morris at Walmart last week; I talked to Nickle LaMoreaux at IBM; and I talked with the senior HR leaders at Microsoft. They’re all seeing huge returns on investment from the early implementations, and seeing hundreds of use cases. We’re going to have a lot of new tools and lots of vendor shakeout. (Check out what SAP is up to and where Workday is going.) Stay tuned for our big Predictions report coming out in mid January. That report is my chance to give you some deep perspectives on where I think things are going, recap things that have happened over the last couple of years, and give you some perspectives for the year ahead. As always we would be more than happy to walk through these things with your team. I hope you have a really nice holiday season and you take a deep breath. The world is never perfect. It’s never been perfect. It wasn’t perfect in the past. It won’t be perfect in the future. But the environment you live in and the environment that you create can be enriching, enjoyable, productive, and healthy, and fun if you decide. And I think we all have the opportunity to make those decisions. It has been a pleasure and an honor for me to serve and work with you this last year, and I’m really looking forward to an amazing 2024 together. –END OF PODCAST– Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of the World’s Most Enduring, Employee-Focused Organizations  
    Wellbeing
    2023年12月30日