Clarity as Currency: Exploring Essential HR Strategies for Success with Dr. Dieter Veldsman

Neil Morrison: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Aspire to Inspire Podcast. My name is Neil Morrison. I’m the Chief People Officer at Staffbase. Today I am joined by Dr. Dieter Veldsman, who is the Chief Scientist at AIHR. Dieter, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Thank you so much, Neil. Thank you for having me and I look forward to our conversation.

Neil Morrison: Yes, definitely. Look, maybe we can start with the fact that you have a super cool job, the chief scientist. AIHR is the Academy to Innovate HR, and you’re their chief scientist. On the assumption that you’re not actually experimenting on humans, what is your job? Tell us.

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Contrary to popular belief, I don’t sit in a lab somewhere with crazy hair which you can see would be a challenge for me in any event, doing experiments. In the context of AIHR, being the chief scientist means I do three things. The first one is I work with our strategic client base to think about what are some of their biggest problems that they are facing in HR and in their business, and how can we think about solutions for them. Secondly, I have the opportunity to do a lot of what we call applied research.

That’s things like thought leadership around where do we see certain trends going within HR and how can we make that real and practical. That feeds into my third responsibility, which is then how do we convert that for our member base into practical, tangible tools that they can utilize, whether that’s a resource, whether that’s a course or an article, or a blog post. That’s really what it entails in terms of being the chief scientist.

Neil Morrison: Fantastic. I’d love to find out more really about how you got there and your career. Before we do, tell us a little bit more about the academy itself. How did the Academy for Innovating HR start? How long has it been around? What is it you really are on a mission to do?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: I think the easiest way to think about us is that we are a global career development platform for HR professionals. We believe that the future of work is going to look very different than today. We want to play a part and contribute towards preparing HR professionals for the future. Whether that’s through skill set, mindset, tool set in terms of making sure that we work with HR teams and individuals to set them up for success. The business started about nine years ago. Our two founders who are still with the business started a blog on People Analytics. At the time, it was the raging topic, but nobody knew much about it.

The blog grew from there, and people started showing a lot of interest, asking the question, “It’s great to read about this, but where do I learn how to do it?” The blog turned into a book. The book turned into an online course. Fast forward nine years down the line, we’ve had about 45,000 HR professionals come through the academy. Fifty-plus courses, very robust other ways of also looking at content. That’s really what we are about. We firmly believe we want to play a role in, how do we set HR up for success in the future.

Neil Morrison: Fantastic. I think HR has been on a journey since its inception, and they’ll likely never be the destination. Understanding, that actually is a really important part of the journey right now and how HR positions itself to create value. I’m looking forward to picking your brains about that during the conversation. Tell us how you got then to your current role because you’ve had quite the career in various roles in different parts of the world. Tell us more about your own career journey.

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: No. Thanks, Neil. Maybe to rephrase and also respond to your last comment, I firmly believe that there has never, ever been a more exciting time to be in HR than today with some of the shifts and the changes that we are seeing. We’ll elaborate a little bit more on that. I think that’s such an important point to make around the fact that, there’s so much opportunity around certain things that’s starting to shift and change. It leads me a little bit into my own career story as well in terms of where I come from. I’m an organizational psychologist by trade. I started out working in big corporate. At the time, I was very interested to see how organizations would work, and how do we do things at scale.

I started in the big corporate environment and organizational development and in change management. Then from there, it was in the financial services industry. I said, “I want to learn something else in an industry that’s completely different.” I went into a very niche boutique technology consulting business, still looking through the people lens and looking at what is the people impact of some of the technological changes that we were bringing towards organizations. That got me very interested in organizational design.

I wanted to then start understanding because a lot of the things that I was seeing at the time when we start resolving things like conflict and inefficiencies in the organization, I had this hunch that a lot of it had to do with their core organizational design not being clear and being figured out. Then I started really deep diving into organizational design, eventually started my own consulting business in organizational design, which with other partners, then grew into a fully-fledged HR consulting business. From there, moved on into the HR technology domain. I was part of an HR technology startup where we built employee engagement, surveys, platforms, tool sets for a number of years.

At the time, that was also part of my further study. I did my doctorate in employee engagement. Then for my sins, fell into the mergers and acquisition space post that, which I think was one of the most eye-opening parts of my career to see how you take things apart and put it back together. How does that work from, an org design, a people point of view? How do you just practically do it because it’s so complex and so immense? I really enjoyed the complexity that sat within that.

My roots were always in the people function. I then returned to the corporate environment at that stage as the people executive, looking after most of the centers of excellence for a multinational insurance business, eventually grew into the group CHRO role. Three years ago, I then left to start up the thought leadership side for AIHR at the time and then shifted into the chief scientist business.

It’s been a little bit of a nontraditional career journey if I can call it that way, but it’s always been driven by, “Am I doing challenging work that is interesting for me? Am I doing meaningful work that even though meaning is subjective, is it something that I find valuable? Then lastly, is it impactful work? I see that it’s making a difference.” That’s what I try to utilize to guide my career decisions up to now.

Neil Morrison: Great. The idea that you started from a focus on organizational development, org psychology, what is it you think that inspired that curiosity or that decision to pursue a career there?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: I’ve always been fascinated by human behavior. Just to try and understand what sits below the surface around why we really do the things that we do and how that plays out in day-to-day life. On the other side, I’ve always been very interested in economics and business so looking at trends and looking how things are developing over time and just the mechanics of how does a business achieve its purpose and what does that look like? How do you set it up to execute such great things that some of the organizations are doing today? For me, organizational psychology was actually a way to start bringing those two fields of interest together.

On the one side saying, it is about the human being and the human behavior, but to put them in a particular context, which is within the workplace. I really found that I thought from my perspective, and this is obviously different for everyone, but that could be a place where I could make a meaningful contribution. Then over time, I think my interest just started to deepen as part of that. I think org psych is such a broad field, which is one of the fantastic things about it. You can apply it across so many industries and dimensions. That’s initially what drew me towards the field is this combination of human behavior with actual organizational dynamics and how those two intersect and play out.

Neil Morrison: You mentioned as well the deeper work that you did within org design. We’re in, I guess, an operating context, I would say pretty much globally right now, where, of course, efficiency of organizations is a hot topic. I was reading a perspective that you and AIHR offered around the slow cutting of organizational size, maybe not being the future decision, even if it’s a short-term temptation. I’d love to know your thoughts on org design right now. Are you seeing any great examples out there of some really innovative approach to org design that still achieve very much this need for efficient, optimized notion?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Great question, Neil. I think there’s definitely, when we start looking at what’s happening in the market with things like the impact of generative AI on the workforce, and you look at things like how the labor market is just starting to change, I think organizations sit in this really difficult situation that we’ve always had the notion of having to do a lot more with less so that efficiency drive has always been there. Today, the questions that we’re asking there is much more difficult to decipher. We’re asking questions here around, as an organization, I’m now competing with everybody else also in the digital space, so what does that look like?

We’re also starting to ask questions around consumers that want something very different from us as a business. I think org design and companies that are doing it really well don’t see org design as an event. They see it as a continuous process that brings together people around a table to make intentional decisions about what we are and what we are not going to do. The reason I say that, because org design, very similar to performance management, the practices we all need, but everybody hates, is those things that start uncovering where we don’t have clarity within the organization. I think companies that are doing it well now ask the difficult questions.

They say, but every decision we make will have certain consequences and will have certain benefits. What are we prepared to live with? What is really important for us to really start pushing through the decisions that we make? I think org design is much more about that holistic process as opposed to what people think it’s about in terms of, where accountability sits and decision-making happens in an organization and processes and structures.

It’s actually a lot more about the logic of the organization and who we want to be. I think that org identity piece is starting to become so important in a world that’s fast-changing and continuously asking different things from organizations today. We’ll continue to do so, because I think organizations are going to have to face quite a few challenges over the next couple of years. Those that do it well will seize the opportunity on the horizon. Those that don’t, there’s enough competition out there that they’ll definitely be in trouble.

Neil Morrison: You talked about the organization’s logic, who we want to be, maybe also what we want to do. Your perspective reminds me of a conversation I had very recently with Greg Creed, the former CEO of Yum! Brands on this podcast show. He talked eloquently about focus. Really, I think, trying to join the dots here, you talk about who we want to be and what we want to do, maybe even what we need to do. Then the next step is how should we design ourselves to achieve that? It comes from focus rather than a need to be more efficient financially, necessarily.

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Yes, no, spot on, Neil. For me, and we’ve been doing a lot of work over the last couple of years around how do we help organizations understand their own identity? When I talk about identity, I don’t mean brand. I don’t mean how we show up logo-wise and how we position in the market, but almost what is that underlying thing that gives us purpose and gives us focus? How does that then play out in our practical day-to-day through our culture, our processes, the way we engage with customers, the way we make decisions about our people? I definitely think we don’t have enough conversations in organizations around why we do certain things.

I think we tend to gear a lot more towards the what is it that we now need to do? Especially in a fast-paced environment, I think we sometimes lose out on that sense-making, self-awareness piece that is so crucially important. I tell a lot of our clients, “Spend a bit more time there, invest in that. I promise you, you’ll make up time in the process later.” We’re all aligning in the boardroom, but when you get to level six, seven, eight in the organization, if the rationale, the why, the purpose, the identity piece was not clear, they start making very different decisions that you’re going to have to fix in the longer term as well. I think they definitely play together.

What I love about what’s happening at the moment in your comment is also around the fact that different multidisciplinary domains are starting to come together to have this conversation. In the past, we’ve designed certain strategy in some organizations. In others, it’s set in human resource management. On the other side, I think OD sometimes sits on its own, or on the other side, it sits in HR. If we have all these diverse perspectives with the business leaders around the table, I think we reach much better answers to the real questions we need to ask.

Neil Morrison: Earlier on, you talked about performance management tools being one of the things that we know we always need, but no one really wants to use. I can’t help but think also change management is in some ways similar. People think about change as a one-time thing, but we all know we’re in a constant state of change. You talked earlier about some of your professional career really digging deep into change and change management. Again, I think the question for me is, what practices around change and maybe communications within change have you observed to be really impactful?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: There’s also, whenever I think about successful change approaches or change navigation or management, whichever way you want to call it, it has to happen at different levels. I think organizations that do it well understand that at organizational level, they almost need institutional change structures, if I can put it that way. How responsive is the organization to what’s happening out there and how quickly can they rally people behind that? All the way right down to how do we build more resilience within our workforce to help them cope and deal with change as it comes along? I think change management is one of those interesting things.

When you ask a lot of people, they’ll say, “It’s just about, why is change management coming instead of management doing their job around communicating certain things?” I think it goes slightly deeper there around how do you create change resilient organization and what are some of those practices that you do put in place? Change management has to be proactive in my view that prepares people for what is to come to be able to deal with the unknown and with the uncertainty that at times will come with it as well. I think leaders that do that really well understand almost– When I was CHRO, my team often asked me, what is my job?

I said, my job is to create a runway for you so that the changes that you want to bring actually lands within the organization and people are prepared for it and they know how to position it in the context of the story that we are telling. For me, that’s change management to a large extent. How do we guide organizations with regards to that? That has to be built on a foundation of trust. I think one of the biggest things that we forget and it’s a phrase that I often use in some of my strategies is think human first. On the other side of every policy practice process, there’s a real human being.

You need to understand their context and where they are currently and be able to resonate with them in that particular moment if you want to inspire them, to get them to attach to a particular area, or if you need to break really difficult news that has to happen in the context of a trust relationship. For me, it’s almost like a bank account that you need to build in the organization. The more positive balance you have, the better it goes, but when difficult things happen, it will detract and withdraw from that.

I think that’s really important on the change management side is to take a holistic approach. It’s not an intervention and it’s not a project that you are driving or it’s not a system that you’re putting in. It’s changing the way that the organization thinks about its own adaptability, being able to execute things and being resilient, and being to know and see and have that belief that we will see this through because we have the trust in ourselves and in our own skills and capabilities.

Neil Morrison: I think it’s a great analogy, the environment of trust, the credits and debits associated to that over time. You talk about organizational resilience in the context of change, but what else? What other strategies have you seen or if you’re advising clients around building organizational resilience, what other things to focus on beyond trust?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Definitely, I think the first thing you need to start with is understanding who your workforce is. When I talk about who your workforce is, we often fall into the trap in HR and in organizations of looking at our demographic profiles and looking at the beautiful dashboards that we build and tells us what our distribution is. My question there would be is, do you really know who the people are in terms of what they are facing and where they are currently within their lives? Somebody going through certain things outside of work will respond very differently to somebody that is not at that particular life stage.

Now, I know it sounds like a very simple thing to do, but it does really change your perspective if you have a bit of an understanding around who is the employee. Most often, the decisions made by leaders and the people that sit around that table is not representative of what the rest of the workforce is, who they are, what they’re going through, and what is important to them. When building change resilience, my question is always, do who your people are? Can what they are going through and what is important to them? Do what they care about and what are the things that threaten or frighten them?

Then from there start putting certain things in place to alleviate some of those concerns where you can, or at least acknowledge that certain things are happening. We live in an age where job security is really an important thing for a lot of employees. It’s really a difficult thing to ensure for a lot of organizations. Then what is your narrative so that you start talking about that in dialogue? I believe organizations change through dialogue, but dialogue has to happen as I’ve mentioned in the context of trust. An organization to make it practical where I see it works, leaders are visible. They know who the people are that is their followers. They understand that leading is a privilege. It’s not a right.

If you start thinking about changing that particular mindset, I think the practices that you put in, whether that is a regular town or whether that’s a platform that we utilize to communicate and get two-way dialogue going, if you get those elements right, that forms the foundation beyond that, I think that sets you up really for success in that regard. On the other side, I also want to make the comment, that I think these organizations also understand well what are their capacity and limitations beyond that.

They know when they’re pushing hard, what does that look like? They know they can’t do that forever, so they try to balance that petrol in the tank of the organization, and they are very open about those types of conversations. If they say, “We’re going to have to push hard for a while,” what is the reason for that? What’s the benefit that sits at the other side? We know we can’t do that indefinitely, so what plans are we making for the future not to be in that situation?

I think a lot of organizations say, “Productivity comes at the cost of wellbeing.” I don’t agree with that. I think there are two sides of the same coin, but they both feed each other. People can only be productive when they’re well, and they can only be well when they’re productive and challenged in work. You have to have that dual mindset, I think, if you really want to build resilience in an organization for the long term.

Neil Morrison: This is fascinating. You talked about narrative and dialogue, and of course, being part of a communications company, that really speaks to me. Certainly, when we’re working with clients and customers, that’s a big part of the dialogue is how well set up an organization is to build and then nurture their own narrative to drive change or transformation. Often I think when we think about change, we really build up to the moment that the change starts. There’s a lot of energy and engagement around the launch or the big reveal or unveiling of the plan, but the real hard yards through communications is nurturing that trust, building that why, the context for afterwards to really embed the change journey.

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Yes, I can’t agree with you more. In today’s day and age, especially where we have things like distributed workforces, and we have multiple generations in the workforce that consume information in different ways, I think organizations do need a dedicated, intentional, call it employee feedback, call it employee listening, call it employee engagement or dialogue. You do need an approach and a strategy that is very intentional about that around when are we going to listen? Where are we going to have these dialogue moments? It’s not just going to happen the way that it always did in the past. I’m a firm believer in co-creation.

Somebody has to take accountability and make the call, but during the course of the process, you can co-create with people and get their ideas. Something that fascinates me at times in organizations is we employ adults that have responsibilities outside of work. People have families, they have mortgages, they buy cars, and all those types of things. Then at times, in the moment that they get into the organization, depending on where they sit in the hierarchy, sometimes we have this bit of an idea on either they don’t have great ideas about where we can go, or there’s certain things that they should not know. I think you really need to think about what is that telling you about your organizational culture?

Obviously, they are confidential type of things as well, but there should be an openness and a transparency to say, “If we co-create together and we prepare that playing ground for the future together, then certain practices become a bit of a non-negotiable.” Things like dialogue, getting feedback, being visible, et cetera. I think that is the thing that good companies are doing well. They realize that has to happen, and they move very differently away from, “This is the formal organizational paper, how it works.” They actually have an understanding that the real way an organization works is through relationships, networks, influence, et cetera. I think that’s really powerful if you can get that right in your business.

Neil Morrison: I think I’m talking to the doctor of engagement given that was your thesis, but it makes me think about engagement for what purpose. I think organizations really need employees to be engaged to the level that they have agency and a desire to act. That they’re actually motivated rather than simply engaged. How do you disseminate between the two? What examples do you have from working with clients in that sense of employee-led change through high levels of engagement?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: That’s a great question, Neil. I think when you start thinking about employee engagement, there’s obviously a lot of debates out there in terms of what is it? How do we measure it? Why do we measure it? How do we drive it? For me, I think the moment when we start reducing employee engagement to a single metric or a survey or a score, I think we’ve missed the boat already in terms of that. As I’ve said before, I think employee engagement really is that continuous process and dialogue around how do you connect people firstly to work? When I talk about that, it’s about meaningful work. People want to do something that matters.

With that, I don’t mean that in every single job, for some people, a job is just a job, but how does it feel meaningful? They can see that they make a contribution through what they do. I think the second level then is that you have to look at is the individual in the context of a team. Do they have a team that they can rely on? Do they have a team that they can trust, that they feel like they belong? Is that led by a manager that they respect? Is that led by a manager that treats them in a fair manner that they can look up to? A lot of the research tells us that more than 80% of your engagement levels are influenced by your direct manager and your relationship that you have towards that particular individual.

I think it is about investing in what that looks like. Then at your next layer, then how do you create that environment in the organization that is a workplace where people want to work? That doesn’t mean that has to be a physical thing. I’m a very big supporter of the whole experience-based movement around what does work experiences look like and how are we a lot more intentional about that? I think all of that plays into engagement that is a longer-term commitment, attachment, and willingness towards driving value in the organization. You have to think about it in those three levels. I sometimes smile, we talk a lot about purpose. Then I’ll ask you what gives you purpose?

Your answer will be very different than mine. Why do we think in the context of an organization it works differently? You need to find people’s connection to why they matter and how they get meaning in work, in relationship, in the organization, and what we’re trying to achieve. I think the companies that have a good, again, I’m going to come back to narrative today, but in the companies that have a strong narrative about that and that realize and understand that at its crux, it is the work engaging.

Are we leading our people in a good way? Are we building teams that can rely on each other? Are we actually creating a place where people like to work and feel respected and feel like they can belong and be included? I think that leads towards engagement because engagement is an outcome. It’s something that happens when you have a whole bunch of other small things that just clicks and works within the organization.

To your earlier point, that has to be a continuous process because life changes, people change, they have different priorities, certain things happen, certain realities that we have to deal with. I think we have to change the mindset a bit around the fact that employee engagement is a practice and a process over time. It’s not a metric that we do. It’s not a survey that we do. It’s not at a particular point in time. I think that opens up a lot more doors as opposed to, “Oh, show me the report which division is red today.” I think it’s very different than that.

Neil Morrison: Yes, a point really well made. I suppose, you’ve mentioned it already, this idea of the future of work, which we’ve been talking about now for a while. Of course, there’ll always be a future of work wherever we are in history. I’d love to get your thoughts on the future of work as we look to the horizon now. Of course, a lot of your work confronts that notion. What are those, either through the examples that you work with clients or your applied research and insights, what are those big questions or big opportunities that you really feel are surfacing around what is the future of work? What does it have in store for all of us?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Maybe to start off with a couple of trends that I think is on the horizon that people need to keep an eye on, and we are also doing that in our own research as well as some others, is, I earlier made reference to how labor markets are starting to change. What I mean by that is people are getting older. They want to work longer and due to medical advances, they can. Other people need to work longer due to financial reasons, et cetera. Whilst on the other side, we also have a growing population, so there’s a big component of the youth that wants to enter into the workplace and into the work market and will want to do so over the coming years.

When I talk about how the labor market is changing, we are facing with this real challenge around what does employability look like in future, and how are we going to grow economies and opportunities fast enough so that there’s a viable future for people when they start thinking about their own careers in future. If we don’t do that, we’ve seen that around the world, it leads towards a lot of inequality as well as social uprising if we can’t provide that realistic perspective of a hopeful future for people. I think that how the labor market is changing and how it influences our talent strategies as organizations is going to be crucially important.

I think there we need more collaboration around people working together to start stimulating growth at grassroots level. Second one links to that is around the big skills mismatch that we’re seeing. You can ask the question, but why we may have all these people do we still have vacancies that go unfilled? I worked with a client a couple of weeks ago. They’ve got more than 1,000 open vacancies, which is probably almost 60% of their workforce. I’m like, “How do you operate in this particular one?” They’re just saying, “We can’t find the people.” Yes, automation, AI is going to solve certain elements, but there are certain human skills that we do need to think about and develop in future.

For me, that whole notion around what succession is going to look like, what skillsets do we need to develop? Do we think differently about giving people access to work, which is where a lot of the skills-based type of thinking and skills-based organizations come in? Combining that with generative AI, the big one at the moment, that everybody’s thinking about and talking about, I think we’ve reached a little bit of a point there where everybody’s been chasing it because it’s been the shiny new thing for the last two years or so. Now people have caught up to the bus and they say, “This is really nifty, but what do I actually do with it? How do I really leverage it? What is that going to look like?”

I think there’s some work we need to do there on how’s that going to influence how people work and how people utilize AI as a companion and how does it unlock productivity? That’s really, that promise of a different type of workplace in future that I think if we do it well, we can definitely unlock. Then the last one is really for me around this changing concept that people have with work, around why they work. We talk a lot about a concept called work-life fit, not work-life balance because work-life fit means you’ve got one life. Work fits into it somewhere, and you want to make certain decisions about that. Those decisions are very subjective to you. Any decision you make has got certain consequences.

If I decide work is a really important part of my life, it’s a vocation, I want to spend all my time there, certain things will happen. If I’m on the other side of the spectrum and I say, “Work is only something I do to enable other parts of my life,” there’s certain consequences of those decisions. It’s not right or wrong, but organizations need to think a lot more about flexibility around how do we give people autonomy and choice pertaining to how they work and what that looks like, even though, and that doesn’t refer to remote working at all, even though flexibility is this concept around I want to be able to decide, I want to be able to have choice around what things are going to look like.

For me, those things are really important when we start thinking about the future of work. The future of work for me is a lot more about the human and technology era if I can call it that. I think there is a very strong notion that we need to think about there around what does our sustainability in future look like? What do workplaces in future look like? How’s that starting to change? How do we create a viable future for people as part of that. Future of work, I think, has become a term that people throw around very loosely.

A lot of people only associate it with technological differences and change in future. I think it’s going to be guided a lot more by certain global tensions that we will also see over the coming years. There’s already quite a couple out there, and that’s going to influence the way that people live their lives, and that will influence the way that people work and why they work and what workplaces are going to look like. For me, that’s how do we prepare people for that?

Neil Morrison: Maybe we stay with the human side of the future of work then for a moment, because, thinking about the aging generations being part of the workforce for longer and how to really maximize that, as well as new generations joining the workforce. I think it’s fair to say that the world is maybe as connected as it’s ever been, but arguably maybe as lonely as it’s ever been. How do in that context, within the human experience of the future of work? What do people really need from a communications and cultural perspective?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: I think you put it beautifully around the fact that I think loneliness is one of the biggest challenges we will face over the coming years for, especially people starting out in their careers as well, and then people that reach the latter part of their lives and their careers, I think as people start shifting and moving a little bit older. Loneliness works in a bit of a U shape if you look at what the research tells us, where very often when people just enter the workforce, they tend to be quite lonely. They don’t have the connections. They don’t have the networks. They don’t feel like they belong.

They go through a phase where that changes, and then when they start moving and shifting out, they start feeling, “My season has come, what does that mean for me as we start shifting and moving?” To get back to your question, I believe, how do we create human connection through work? How do we teach people healthy habits that they can also take ownership of their own wellbeing within the context of work? Ultimately, it’s a mutual thing. From an organizational point of view, my responsibility is to create an environment where people can thrive. From an individual perspective, it’s me deciding and also taking ownership of the fact that I want to build a career in a particular organization.

I want to be well, I make certain contributions and I participate. I think something that sometimes happens, and I don’t think it’s a generational thing, I think it just started to play out in the way that we work, is around the fact that people feel they don’t have to participate in their own happiness. They rely very much on others to define what that looks like. We hear a lot of blame in terms of my organization doesn’t do X, or I don’t get Y. I think that has to shift. That can only shift, as per some of our previous things, around a very different dialogue and conversation, and working relationship.

I think loneliness is something that we really need to think about because it’s extremely difficult also to pick up in an organization. Usually, when you pick it up, it’s pretty late. I think organizations have to, and especially on the human resource side, think intentionally about how do we combat loneliness in our organization in an authentic way? It doesn’t mean that I throw a get-together every single Friday because I don’t want people to be not to participate. It goes deeper than that, how do I create real authentic connection?

Neil Morrison: I’m glad you made that last point because whenever you hear wellbeing at work, I think it’s also really easy to think about yoga Tuesdays and healthy snacks in the kitchen areas. Nothing wrong with either of those things, but I would love to hear your thoughts around what’s really at the root of wellbeing at work. I think it’s easy to look at some of those examples because it’s harder to tackle maybe how a role is designed or the experience I have based on who my manager is maybe that could have far greater impact on my overall wellbeing. I’d love your thoughts.

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: No, I agree with you. I think the yoga Tuesdays and the snacks in the kitchen, they’re all great things that gets incorporated into the physical experience of work. It shows what we are interested in and what we care about as a business. At its root, when you go a little bit deeper, I think some of the examples that you’ve utilized, for me, the first question would always be how has that job been designed in a way that it is meaningful? Something that I really struggle with in some organizations, I call them pickup jobs. I’ve picked up a little bit of this. I’ve picked up a little bit of that. There was nobody that could do that, so I picked that up as well. When you string it together, this is not meaningful.

This isn’t something that can excite anyone or make them feel and see that there’s a bit of a contribution that they need to make. I think the second component in there is really around how do you start tapping into some of the key components around motivation. How do we appreciate people? How do we recognize people? Doing that in a way that how do you set them up successfully with things like, and I know it’s hygiene factors, but the tools and the policies and the things that they actually need in their environments to be able to do their work.

There’s something really interesting that’s starting to happen where the workforce is giving feedback that all those, can I call them experience benefits that was like the slide that we come down and the ping pong table and the things that we’ve spoken about now matter a lot less to them around job security, having fair work, having an environment where they feel they are treated with respect, working for a manager that really listens to them and that has their best interests at heart even though they might be fair and tough on performance as well. I think it’s about focusing on those things, for me, is the job well-designed, and is it meaningful, and is it contributing and do people know?

Do people see a future for themselves around the fact that they are being listened to and developed? With that, I don’t mean everybody needs to be developed for the next role. Some people don’t want to, which is also okay. Is the environment allowing them to do their job in a reasonable way? That’s where I think the capacity piece comes in. Challenge in a job is great. I think it pushes people. Anything that goes overboard will then typically start declining that as well. For me, it’s that ebb and flow that we need to watch out for when we start thinking about what does wellbeing really look like? Last point I want to make on that is that wellbeing also has to be both proactive and reactive.

As an organization, you have to have proactive things in place that helps people gain access to tools to proactively manage their own wellbeing. Then there will be situations where there has to be a reactive response type of component that can help people that are already in trouble from a wellbeing point of view. As an organization, we need to be very vocal about our commitment towards wellbeing. We need to back that up with proof points around how we are taking care of our people with regards to that.

It’s not having an EAP program. Again, that’s great. You need something like that, but what happens in the day-to-day components of wellbeing? How are we replacing the petrol in the engine? How are we making sure that when things go tough, we accommodate in a different type of way? I think those are the things that really matter at its core when you start thinking about wellbeing.

Neil Morrison: You’ve talked about trust again within that and in the context of job security, and its impact on a sense of well-being of the individual. One of the things I think we’re observing is just this trust issue. This trust erosion is far greater than just the internal experience of work. It’s a societal issue. It’s one rooted in our view of leadership defined in a far broader context. Do you think then there’s an inherent pressure on the employer-employee relationship, this notion of being in control of trust, having more security here becomes even more heightened and more important to the individual because it’s something we can’t all guarantee in the external context?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: I think you’re spot on. I think trust is built through consistency, and it’s built over time. There’s no quick fix for, formula for trust that we do two, three things and now everybody trusts each other. I think, unfortunately, we are living in a macro environmental stage where trust is pretty low. I think there’s also a lot of, depending on where you are in the world, people have lost trust in certain formal structures, whether that’s in companies or whether that’s in government or whether that’s in general. I think that is something that has to start playing into that.

I think when organizations think about their employee engagement and how they think about their employees, that has to start playing into that because context matters. Context is really super important. sometimes I used the example earlier on, when we’re measuring engagement. Some places in the world, engagement is going down and then we’re all up in arms. Then we’re like, “Okay, but look at what’s happening politically in that country at the moment.” Obviously, it will go down slightly. The question should be, what are you doing as an organization to provide additional support and speaking to these things at this particular point in time?

I think there has to be more intentional focus on how do we build trust, my bank account analogy that I utilized earlier. I think leaders especially need to be very aware around how some of their actions will be perceived, with regards to that. Trust is about doing some of the simple basic things well and doing it consistently over time in a particular way. It doesn’t mean that we don’t do difficult things. It doesn’t mean that we don’t make hard decisions, but it is about how we go about that, how we bring people into the fold, how we communicate to them that in a particular way, how we listen to their concerns.

I’ve met great leaders that have had to do really difficult things in terms of layoffs, et cetera, actually gaining trust through the process around how they handled it with people and how they still saw people’s humanity and dignity on the other side of that conversation. Versus some of the very public things that we’re seeing at the moment where people are just being let go in a seven-minute call without anybody that they even have a relationship with. I think that has to play in, but I think it is a bit of back-to-basics.

If you can’t give answers to things like sustained employment, et cetera, be open about what you can give answers on and keep that dialogue going so that people know, “Oh, okay, they can’t answer me now, but there will be an answer coming pretty soon,” and then don’t go quiet. I’m a firm believer organizations run on rhythms, routines, and cadence. Make sure that those things are in place so that dialogue is intentional and start shifting and moving in a structured manner. I think that’s so important today.

Neil Morrison: I think it’s another good highlight of not getting blinkered by the moment that you’re building up to, understanding that there’s a narrative that needs to last far beyond that moment. That might need to be over communicated. I think that when we think we’ve done a great job of communicating and we’ve beaten the drum of the messaging and we’ve embedded it in different modes and methods and rhythms and routines like you say, maybe we’re 30% of the way there. Embedding more, talking more, listening more is really the root of that sustained trust and engagement, I guess.

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: No, I agree. I think that’s why I like the terminology around thinking about employee dialogue and employee listening because I think it is really about listening in a two-way type of street. It has to be intentional. We need to know why we listen and where we listen, obviously with, the trust components and transparency components built into that. To your point, I think some organizations make the mistake where they think communication is just about sharing information. It’s actually not.

It’s about making sure that people are in the know and that they understand and make sense of information and know what that means. Then they’re actually willing to expend energy into what they’ve just heard. Whether that’s positive or negative energy, they want to engage with it. I think that’s the important part that we need to get right, as opposed to just sending out communication and those types of things. I think it’s much more to it. It’s a little bit science, a little bit art, I think, to get those things right.

Neil Morrison: Well said. This is great food for thought. Now, AIHR stands for Innovation in HR. I’m curious to know, as you look at HR capability, as you see it, what do you think those shifts are, either that the HR community is placing on themselves or maybe the business is placing on HR? What’s the big from and to shifts that you think we should all be leaning into?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: I think there’s a couple of things that has been really positive in the HR domain. I think firstly, HR is a tough gig. It’s a difficult role, and it’s a difficult function because you deal with quite complicated things. For those that are in the profession, I think they see a lot of impact and meaning through it. I think that narrative is also starting to go slightly broader. I spoke to a CHRO the other day and they made the point to say, at some stage, we were having this argument about having a seat around the table. Now they’re having the argument that I don’t want to seat at all the tables. I need to only sit at some of them.

I make that point because we see definitely HR’s role in the board, HR’s role in the executive boardroom is starting to change quite significantly. The conversations that is also expected to come from an HR point of view when we start thinking about things like ESG, environmental, social governance type of issues, that’s coming into the fold a lot more. I think the strategic conversation around what talent needs to look like in future is being held at the board and at the executive level where it’s no longer just a succession process for our critical talent. It’s a broader conversation pertaining to that. I think those changes in the CHRO domain is really positive to see.

I think it’s filtering down also into newer type of practices that’s coming into the organization, into HR specifically. We talk a lot about data-driven HR. It’s been around for a very long period of time, but I think we’re starting to mature it and starting training that a lot more in our practices and how we do certain things there. I do believe that through some of the changes in technology, we’ve been talking about it in the HR domain, certain things will be automated or certain things will be taken away. I think we are only now at that stage where the technology is actually caught up with our aspirations for it.

The real question we have is how do we, and if I think about it almost in that tactical layer, start innovating in HR. How do you think about the personalization of benefits, for example, because that’s an important thing for people. How do you think about new innovative policies when, maybe to tap into my example earlier of the aging workforce, a company we work with actually implemented a grand parental leave policy? They said, “Why? Just because it’s not your direct individual, family structures look different in different parts of the world. That might be a very crucial time for somebody to be able to spend time with family.”

It sounds like a small innovation, but that really makes a difference if you look at who your workforce is with regards to that. I think these things are shaping what HR will become in future. I think it’s also positioning us in a very different light, much more complicated in terms of the multidimensional stakeholder landscape that we do need to look at. I definitely think at that board level, very different role that we play today, and that has to filter down into how we think about our investment in HR, what HR gets involved in, and then how those practices evolve in future.

Neil Morrison: Then AIHR stands for really supporting; HR professionals build those competencies, the capabilities, and skills to be able to innovate effectively, on behalf of their organization, their people. What is it that you think the critical, maybe new skills or newer skills to refine for the HR world really are?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: We talk about five core skills that we think all HR professionals need, today and shifting and moving into the future. Some of them aren’t necessarily new, but I think they are playing out very differently today. We still talk about business acumen, but we talk about it in the context of also connecting it to your own priorities and seeing what’s happening in the market beyond your own organization. Data literacy we talk about, and it doesn’t mean everybody in HR needs to be a data scientist. It just means how do we start incorporating different evidence and using data to tell impactful stories to drive business decision-making? We think that’s going to be crucial.

Now we talk about the fact that digital agility, how do I leverage technology and work through technology for success, as well as developing my own digital mindset around being open to experiment with some of these new things that’s changing. People advocacy, how do I drive cultures of wellbeing and productivity and how do I manage people risk? Then really execution excellence around how does HR show up? How do we deal with the complexity? How do we influence? How do we manage some of the relationships there? I think some of those skillsets aren’t necessarily new.

We’ve been talking about them for a very long period of time. I do think though that the human skills side of things are really progressing quite well where people start saying, “That’s what’s going to make the difference.” If you think about the adoption of AI, yes, sure, you need to learn how to do prompt engineering. You need to learn how to do data analysis, but what you actually need to learn is to do problem solving.

What you actually need to learn how to do is to how to evaluate information and see whether it’s valuable, true, applicable, or not. Those are human critical thinking type of related skills. I think that’s super important for HR to be able to get under the belt in future. Then as we start shifting through, the technical skillsets will complement that. At its base, those are the things that we believe is really important.

Neil Morrison: I think it’s really encouraging actually to hear that whilst we might initially think so much of the innovation around our experience with work is going to be enabled through technology, in fact, actually, it’s the human skills and how we apply those in the right context that could well be the glue in some way or the real momentum behind the future of work.

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: Yes, I think it’s great to reflect on that because as I said at the beginning, there’s never ever been a better time to be in HR than now. On the one side, it’s because some of the skill sets that we already have is starting to become a lot more important and sought after. On the other side, the places where we apply those skill sets are becoming a lot more open and receptive to it. I think that’s a very nice combination when we start thinking about that. It does not mean that there’s not work to do. When what our data tells us is that digital literacy and data literacy in HR is still pretty much on the low side, it doesn’t mean that people can’t do it.

It just sometimes means they don’t have the confidence in themselves there in those domains or they’re not that interested in it. It’s not necessarily they preference around being able to do certain things like that. There’s also interesting insights around how business acumen develops over time and how we actually don’t expose junior HR people to the business side of things. We tell them, “Come and learn your process, whether that’s in a recruitment or compliance or whatever else.”

Then when they start to want to shift into an HR BP role, we say, “Oh, by the way, you need to learn everything about the business that you’ve been in for the past couple of years to be able to do this job effectively. There’s definitely work to be done. I think we need to do a lot more work around HR careers specifically, how we develop HR careers intentionally from the get-go. We are one of those professions where it’s extremely unstructured. We just did a study of 3 million HR professionals and 92% of them said they got into HR by accident.

It wasn’t an intentional choice. They come from administrative, education, social sciences in general. That does mean it’s great for diversity, but on the other side, we find this challenge that there’s no baseline skill set when we say at HR, “This is what it needs to look like here and this is how you navigate that,” which means people don’t see the opportunities and the possibilities in their own careers and building a sustainable career in HR. I think there we need to do some work.

Neil Morrison: There’s so much food for thought here. Maybe before we wrap things up, Dieter, as you look at the human experience in the world of work right now, if you had to boil it down to maybe the thing that you think people need most, that they maybe aren’t getting today, what do you think that thing is?

Dr. Dieter Veldsman: The thing that people need most probably in the world of work today I think is clarity. What I mean by clarity is, the world will always be ambiguous as we go forward and will always be uncertain. I think clarity about how as organizations we are tackling it, and how we are going to drive and deal with some of the complexities in the future. I think clarity can take different forms, but it’s the starting point of the conversation. From there, I think it can go into things like care and it can go into things like competence and confidence. I think there has to be the starting point around what clarity around where we are and where we want to go and what the potential risks are and the potential opportunities.

I think that allows people to make very different decisions about what they have appetite for and who they want to work for and why they want to work for them, et cetera. I think if organizations can create that clarity in different ways and different means, like we spoke about, your employee engagement and communication strategy is crucially important in that, I think that helps a lot because you don’t have all the answers. If anybody says they have, then there’s something broader we need to discuss there. I think that can be really valuable.

Neil Morrison: This was so insightful, Dieter. Thank you very much. I appreciate all of your thoughts, and I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Aspire to Inspire Podcast, and we’ll see you again soon.