Jennie Carlson is the Executive and Chief Human Resource officer at US Bancorp.  They are the 5th largest bank in the US, with 67,000 employees.  Jennie has been with the company for 15 years and able to provide valuable insight in this week's podcast. The HR department has a pyramid of shared services.  The normal HR functions such as payroll, employee relations, and recruiting are along the baseline. As the pyramid climbs higher, talent development, advancement opportunities are the focus.  At the very top, the message of how US Bancorp can use people and talent to drive the strategy of the organization cascades down and drives the actions of the entire department.  Other topics this can include are organizational design and fostering a great employee experience to lead to a great customer experience.

The role of HR has evolved over the past few years.  The department has seen a shift from an ‘order taker’ mode to become strategic partners that help set the corporate strategy and the organizational design. Employee experience is a huge focal point.  This can include technology, flexible work arrangements, and employee engagement.  Jennie shares how US Bancorp uses engagement surveys from their employees, which they use as a marker for continuous improvement. 

Traditional HR Metrics include employee engagement, as well as, other topics such as retention and exit interviews. Moving forward, US Bancorp is moving their analytics team from HR to strategy.  This allows data to be pulled from the same sources, but it is being looked at differently, from the lens of the customer analytics department.  Jennie believes that analytics should be deciphered in the best suited department.  Companies that have larger marketing and customer analytics departments may be able to provide newer insights than smaller HR departments can.  This can allow cornerstones of data, like the employee survey, to be drilled down as much as possible.  Another area is making sure they are keeping in line with their ethical culture.  The future of analytics also allows for characteristic and trend tracking in many employees.  Keeping ahead of trends allows companies to gain a full picture of what is going on inside their company, allowing them to continuously improve to create a better organization.

What you will learn in this episode:

• How HR Is Leveraging Analytics
• What Type of Data is Collected
• Analytics for Hiring
• Skills Needed to Build an Analytics Function
• How HR Can Work With IT
• How US Bancorp Provides Value to Their Business Partners
• How Transitioning Employees for Flexible Work Effects Management

Link From The Episode:

Learn More About U.S. Bank 

(Music by Ronald Jenkees)

Anka Wittenberg is the SVP and Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at SAP, a software firm based in Walldorf, Germany.  She holds master’s degrees in economics and international business and is a mother of three.  That last note is what helped launch her career since holding two master’s degrees was not enough to get her an interview with the larger firms in Germany just because she also had small children.  This one difference between Anka and the rest of the workforce is what opened her eyes and showed her the need for more diversity and inclusion in the workforce.   This observation has helped Anka become a guest lecturer, author and advocate for true diversity and inclusion in the workforce.

Being the Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer for SAP means that Anka oversees the sustainability of people and the diversity and inclusion of everyone.  What exactly does that mean? That it does not matter the sex, culture, ethnicity, age, or physical ability of a person but ALL types of people need to be included within the workforce. The uniqueness of your workforce begins to emerge when you include people from all walks of life you begin to see the diversity.  SAP has a goal of having 25% of their leadership roles to be filled by females by the year 2017 and by the year 2020 their goal is to have 1% of their workforce positions filled by autistic people.  Along with this diversity and inclusion you must work on the sustainability of the people within your organization. 

One of the biggest changes that is happening today is the change within the corporate culture and thinking with regards to diversity & inclusion.  Organizations are beginning to change their thinking on how they are training and sustaining their employees by focusing more on the holistic picture.  Due to these changes organizations are beginning to see the business impact within employee engagement, improved customer satisfaction and innovation. 

What you will learn in this episode:

• What diversity & inclusion Means.
• The four subcategories of diversity & inclusion.
• What the is the business impact of diversity & inclusion.
• How organizations are changing their corporate culture.
• How SAP is implementing various programs to be a completely diversified & inclusive organization.
• What the key points are in an employee’s experience.
• What is unconscious bias?
• How can organizations can focus more on diversity & inclusion.

Link From The Episode:

Diversity And Inclusion At SAP 

Anka Wittenberg on LinkedIn

(Music by Ronald Jenkees)

Beth Taska is the EVP of Human Resources for 24 Hour Fitness, which was founded in 1979 and has over 400+ locations and over 23,000 employees serving 4 million club members.  She has held the CHRO (Chief HR Officer) title and Senior HR positions for corporations such as Clearwire, Gap and Sears.  Beth’s career path was not of the norm, she holds an undergraduate degree in Political Science and a graduate degree in Public Administration and worked for several municipalities around the Chicago area before beginning her career in the HR world. 

The CHRO role at 24 Hour Fitness includes onboarding over 17,000 people each year from the very inception when someone begins with 24 Hour Fitness and training these people.  There is a duality with recruitment here because there is a large part of the 24 Hour Fitness workforce that uses their position as a stepping stone and part of the workforce includes people that want a longer tenure with the company.  24 Hour Fitness practices relationship based leadership and practices positivity and making a difference in some fashion with their members and their employees. 

In this episode Beth will discuss the differences that relationship based leadership can make within an organization and how that affects employees.  What true leadership is and where it comes from, some of the simplest behaviors can make the largest impacts on an individual which in turn can make large impacts for an organization.  How doing a 5 minute “Gratitude Circle” first thing each morning with everyone sets the positive tone for the work day ahead.  What 24 Hour Fitness strives for each of their members with relationship based selling and how they turn that into a positive for their bottom line.  How they deal with having mostly female members versus male employees.  Beth discusses all of these things and explains the impact that being vulnerable makes for everyone within an organization and how to be vulnerable.

What you will learn in this episode:

• Beth’s story
• What is Relationship Based Leadership?
• What is Relationship Based Selling?
• Four traits that leaders should have.
• How to work with employees want a long tenure and employees that want a short tenure.
• How to bring vulnerability to the workplace
• Are work families a good thing or not what, exactly what is a work family.
• Why it’s important for leadership to be viewed as human versus mechanical

Links from the episode:

Beth Taska On LinkedIn

BethTaska.club

(Music by Ronald Jenkees)

Bask Iyer is the chief information officer of VMware and serves as the company’s senior vice president. Prior to VMware Bask was the chief information officer for Juniper Networks and held the same position at Honeywell and GlaxoSmithKline Beechcam. He is an industry veteran with more than 25 years experience within the Silicon Valley based technology firms and more traditional Fortune 100 manufacturing companies.

VMware was founded in 1998 in Palo Alto and is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and virtualization software services with approximately 20,000 employees and 6 billion in annual revenues but they manage to retain that “start-up” feel. With that in mind VMware strives to stay on top of the latest technology “wave” and to do that you need talent, the right talent. More to the point with today’s technology and millennial talent: “Yesterday’s news wraps fish”, what you did last year doesn’t matter today. So VMware and Bask are constantly changing with the times and needs to recruit and retain great talent.

The best talent asks “Why am I here?”, they don’t settle and they want to change the world. To keep this talent, you must have the assignments to capture their ambitions, you have to keep the organization’s innovation continuing to grow and change. Simple tricks such as a ping pong table, free food or a great cafeteria will not keep the talented millennials with your organization because they are not learning and growing with these “shiny perks”.

What you will learn in this episode:

• Why Millennials – Why Does The CIO Care About Millennials?
• What Is It Like To Work At VMware?
• Shiny Perks – Is That All You Need To Recruit And Retain Millennials?
• Multi-generational Work Force
• What Millennials Care About and What’s Important To Them
• How Millennials Are Shaping Tech Decisions

Link From The Episode:

Bask Iyer on Twitter

(Music by Ronald Jenkees)

Andrew Wilson is the Chief Information Officer at Accenture.  He leads the company’s global IT operations, where his work helps Accenture enable businesses with increasingly advanced technology. Andrew also aids all of Accenture’s 400,000 workers (this includes guest and contract workers) by making sure all of the technology is running, keeping them connected, productive, and happy as well. Post- Millennial digital services, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat, has set the bar on what Enterprise services must deliver for their employees and customers. Legacy technologies, such as email, are still being used, but are not the focus as the digital experience grows.

Accenture offers their own report on the state of technology industry and what it means for enterprises.  This is released in an annual report called Technology Vision Report.  Building and elaborating on prior year reports, new major themes and trends are brought to focus.  Enterprises can navigate this report and apply new technologies to their businesses to get a leading edge in technologies ever changing landscape.

The prospect of what can be accomplished digitally is changing because technology has a greater range into our lives than it ever has before. Digital is everywhere, it is pervasive.   Andrew is working on creating platforms that mirror our current social media platforms, integrating new technologies such as adding holograms.  There are new ways to train, deliver content, even finding your way around through an organization.  Not adapting to these new ways of work can cause organizations to become irrelevant. 

What you will learn in this episode:

• What is the digital worker?
• Facebook and Snapchat – How and why people like Andrew are focusing on social technologies
• The digital culture shock
• The 2016 Technology Vision Report
• How Accenture digital worker internally
• The importance of employee experience in today's workplace

Links From The Episode:

Technology Vision 2016

Andrew Wilson on Twitter

(Music by Ronald Jenkees)