This episode features an interview with Josh Bersin, Founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company. Josh is an analyst, author, educator, and thought leader focusing on the global talent market and the challenges and trends impacting business workforces. He studies the world of work, HR and leadership practices, and is often cited as one of the leading HR and workplace industry analysts in the world. In this episode, Shawn and Josh discuss the post-industrial workforce, building dynamic organizations, and creating superpowered HR through AI.
This episode features an interview with Josh Bersin, Founder and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company. Josh is an analyst, author, educator, and thought leader focusing on the global talent market and the challenges and trends impacting business workforces. He studies the world of work, HR and leadership practices, and is often cited as one of the leading HR and workplace industry analysts in the world.
In this episode, Shawn and Josh discuss the post-industrial workforce, building dynamic organizations, and creating superpowered HR through AI.
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“AI is not magic. It's not going to do everything perfectly out of the box. Just like every other technology we've ever implemented, we're going to have to take care of it. We're going to have to make sure it has good data, we're going to have to train it, we're going to have to optimize it. I think the big thing is this is a high-powered, highly capable technology that needs your help. You need to tune it. You need to have IT involved. You need to look at data management, data security.” – Josh Bersin
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:26): Josh answers rapid fire questions
*(05:31): Josh explains The Josh Bersin Company
*(08:56): Josh explains the Post-Industrial workforce
*(15:24): The importance of employee activation
*(23:43): Creating dynamic organizations
*(32:27): The role of AI in revolutionizing HR
*(38:23): Pitfalls of AI
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Links:
Learn more about The Josh Bersin Company
Learn more about The Josh Bersin Academy
Learn more about Irresistible Conference
Learn more about Dynamic Organizations
Connect with Shawn on LinkedIn
Shawn Pfunder: Hey everybody, today on Cohesion, we're joined by Josh Bersin, founder and CEO of the Josh Bersin Company. He's an analyst, author, educator, thought leader, focusing on the global talent market and the challenges and trends impacting businesses and workforces around the world.
Shawn Pfunder: Welcome to the show, Josh.
Josh Bersin: Thank you, Shawn. Great to be here.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, I'm, I'm super, super excited. I've been looking at a lot of your, a lot of your work, not all the way back to 1989, but some of the more recent stuff that I'm really excited to chat with you about. All right, well, let's get started. I have some, I have some rapid fire questions, and I know These types of questions will not always give a perfect example of who somebody is.
Shawn Pfunder: I promise I won't ask you what your favorite breakfast cereal is. Uh, but some relevant ones, you can answer these like, uh, you can answer these like a, like an auctioneer if you want, just to get them out of the way as we get going. Are you ready? Yes. Right on. Great. All right. First one, what is a common myth about your job or field of expertise?
Josh Bersin: People think HR is really easy. They really do.
Shawn Pfunder: They do. And now you just have to talk to people and make sure they get paid. Right? Right.
Josh Bersin: Right. Just be nice to people.
Shawn Pfunder: Just be nice to people. What's an insult you've received that you're proud of?
Josh Bersin: My father, who's passed away, thought I was crazy to go into HR because he was a scientist. He didn't realize that I was actually becoming a scientist in HR.
Shawn Pfunder: He thought you were, that's a great insult.
Josh Bersin: He was very proud of me anyway.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, no, it's fantastic. What type of science did he do?
Josh Bersin: Physics. He worked on plasma processing and etching of semiconductors.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, wow.
Josh Bersin: Well, Which is particularly, he's pioneered that whole technology. physics cause and effect to a certain degree.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. That sounds an awful lot like what you're working on.
Josh Bersin: A lot of what this is social science are trying to apply other forms of science to organizations. So there's a lot of science in it.
Shawn Pfunder: Very cool. What are the top five most opened apps on your phone?
Josh Bersin: Twitter, email, calendar, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg, I think Twitter's probably at the bottom.
Shawn Pfunder: Twitter's at the bottom, but the first one that you said.
Josh Bersin: Email is definitely number one.
Shawn Pfunder: Email's number one? Wait, you got no like, Candy Crush, Super Mario, coming up in there?
Josh Bersin: No, I play Clash Royale a lot.
Josh Bersin: Games like that.
Shawn Pfunder: I do like me some Clash Royale. We'll have to exchange usernames. You'll destroy me, for sure. That is a fun game. There's, and then what's the last book that you read for work?
Josh Bersin: I'm reading Reed Hastings book about Netflix. It’s a couple of years old. It's great. I forgot the name of it.
Josh Bersin: I don't remember. It's got a red cover, but it's really interesting. Netflix is a very pioneering, still a very pioneering company in management and culture.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, you just talked recently about Netflix.
Josh Bersin: I did, and I'm doing more research on them. I think they're developing and inventing things that just about every other company needs to take to learn how to do.
Shawn Pfunder: I remember that. I remember that cover. It looks like the logo of Netflix, right? The red cover. Yeah, that's on there. Well, I'm going to. I'm going to pander, well I guess it's not really pandering if I'm not asking for money or trying to win favor, but I'm going to pander for a moment. So I've been in this world, HR, communications, employee experience, for a long time, like 20 years, and looking over the stuff that you've been working on and the things that you've done, I, maybe you're not the Taylor Swift of employee experience and employee engagement because you've been doing it a lot longer than she has.
Shawn Pfunder: Maybe the Bruce Springsteen, you just got this great long history of work albums, if you will, or art or craft that you've been working on for a long time. And if I were to meet Bruce Springsteen, I guess I would ask him, like, besides where does he get those? Fantastic vests that he wears. What's his latest album?
Shawn Pfunder: What inspired him to work on it? And why does he keep going? He could just retire and live in Costa Rica. So for you, like, tell us a little bit about your latest album. So this is Beat the Josh Bersin Company. Tell us a little bit about that and what you do.
Josh Bersin: This company is essentially the third company that I've been going through in this process.
Josh Bersin: I entered the HR domain in about 1998. 1999 in the training industry, built this little company. We sold to Deloitte. I worked at Deloitte for about six and a half years and then retired from Deloitte in 2018. And so I've had three chances to learn how to do great work for HR, getting a chance to do it in a different way.
Josh Bersin: And what we do is we do lots and lots of research through interviews, surveys, statistical analysis of best practices in all different areas of management. We're also analysts. So we talk to all the vendors and technology providers in HR, which is massive. And then we really talk to hundreds and hundreds of companies every week through phone calls and video calls.
Josh Bersin: And then we put together education material, best practices, tools, and sometimes just Connecting the dots for HR leaders primarily, but sometimes business people too, on how to run their companies better. And because of the period of time we're in coming from the, when I left Deloitte, the pandemic had not started, but very soon after it did.
Josh Bersin: Through the pandemic, through the emergence of AI, the digital technologies that have transformed work, there's been a lot of change. So I'm having more fun now than I have in the past, because there's just so many things to think about and tell people and share, so it's very. Rewarding for me. And, and then of course, the other side of this is that the role of humans at work is taking on more and more importance.
Josh Bersin: If I go back to my early days when I was doing this and I'm, people used to always ask me, how does GE do this? Cause everybody wanted to copy GE. GE had a little bit of a replaceable part strategy where the people could be replaced regularly. It's not like that anymore. Every company is very dependent on its skills, its culture, its ability to operate with and keep the people aligned with the transformations taking place.
Josh Bersin: So I feel like we started a fairly tactical business that was supporting training in HR people. And now we're really helping CEOs and CFOs and HR leaders make, run their companies better, frankly.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, well, you've mentioned this in some of your other work, it's the, I think you call it the post-industrial workforce.
Shawn Pfunder: So it's not the higher, things are bad, fire.
Josh Bersin: You're paying attention. No, you read this stuff, Shawn.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, listen, I've been around to see that before, where you're like, we're in a growth mode. Or something happens and you get rid of everybody and it made the, it's really interesting your approach to solving that kind of problem.
Shawn Pfunder: Like what other things are you seeing as far as employee experience to try to address that as we, as we move forward? Because not everybody has.
Josh Bersin: So the post-industrial age concept is very simple, and that is that most of the management practices and HR practices and hiring practices and pay practices that we have today have been dragged along through the industrial era of business, when people were a part in the machine, basically, we had, we had Manufacturing machines, distributions, railroad cars, trucks, and humans.
Josh Bersin: And the humans were considered labor and they were replaceable. You would obviously train people to do good work and there would be management and leadership and all sorts of benefits and things. But generally speaking, the companies scaled through technology and that went on for quite a while until the early 2000s when all of a sudden everything got digitized and all now companies make money.
Josh Bersin: Through time to market. Services, customer intimacy, innovation, creativity, brand, things that are not mechanical or scalable in a linear fashion, services if you're a hospital. And so almost every high value asset a company has to do with people. So in some sense, people are not an expense anymore and they still look like an expense on the P& L, but people are really an appreciating asset.
Josh Bersin: So what I've been writing about for the last few years, including the book that I wrote, is about how to manage the people part of the company as a strategic, accelerating, And most great CEOs understand this, but the HR practices weren't designed for this. So there's a lot of old management practices that are coming along.
Josh Bersin: One of which is, if we want to grow, hire more people. Well, that's hard to do when the labor, when the unemployment rate is 3.7% and you're competing for the great, with the great people for everybody else in the same market who wants the same skills. And, by the way, if you hire a whole bunch of people too fast, you're going to slow down the productivity of the people you have, and probably the company will take some time to absorb those people because nobody's productive the first week or even the first month they start a new job.
Josh Bersin: So in a post-industrial age You optimize growth through productivity, skills, job design, new technology platforms, finding different ways of working together, deciding what markets you should be in and shouldn't be in. And I think in some respects, and I talk to heads of recruiting about this all the time, and heads of recruiting are oftentimes treated as this, as if they're a fulfillment center.
Josh Bersin: They say, I want to give you a bunch of job racks, please fulfill these. That's right. Well, what we should be asking is, are you sure you need to hire those people? And why, why are you asking for this type of person versus that type of person? That work has to go on inside the company by the management team, not just by HR.
Josh Bersin: And I think that's a different model. And the reason, Shawn, we were talking earlier about Netflix, the reason I think Netflix is such a great example, Netflix with 21,000 employees. Is a 250 billion market cap company generating twice the revenue per employee as Google. And they do some very special things there that other people can learn from.
Josh Bersin: So they're not the only ones, but in this new era, being able to manage people in a different way is going to really differentiate different companies. And I think small companies in many cases will outperform big companies in many industries because of this shift. And at the big companies are struggling to figure out how to operate like the small companies.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, some of this sounds similar to the flattening of an organization or the previous servant leadership model where you treat your employees like volunteers because they could leave at any time.
Josh Bersin: But it's more than that. That was a. That was the beginning of this, the beginning of the war for talent was to be nice to people and develop people and have a growth mindset and all that, that was fine.
Josh Bersin: But there's more than that. I think one of the flaws of that model is you're saying to your employees. We're going to be really nice to you. We're going to give you unlimited vacation and free food and all sorts of great stuff. And we expect you as an individual to optimize your performance and do more as an individual.
Josh Bersin: And so there was this really, to me, epic survey by Microsoft last year. Or the year before, I think it was last year where they found that 87 percent of employees believe they are as they're operating at peak productivity, but only 17 of executives, percent of executives also believe that because the key to growing a company is not each individual doing more stuff is figuring out how to organize ourselves.
Josh Bersin: So that we can work together in new ways and use new platforms or do things differently based on what's happening in the market. So it's not, so that that's where employee experience is going is it's going to focus on productivity as a group, not productivity as an individual. Because, I'll give you an example, so, Starbucks has had all these issues with labor unions, and Howard Schultz got hauled out in front of Congress, and all, they were, they give great benefits, they have really a great employee experience, but it is hard to work in a Starbucks store.
Josh Bersin: According to the research I read, there are 170, 000 permutations of coffee in a Starbucks store, and the Starbucks employees are tracked by the number of customers they serve per minute or per hour. So they're, so that's really a difficult job. Giving them more money and more benefits isn't going to fix that.
Josh Bersin: That's an employee experience problem. And, and I think that's part of this new era. And that's why employees are what we call, we have this new theme, we call it employee activation, where employees are saying, Hey, look, you guys, you don't understand what's going on. We know what's going on around here. And we're going to tell you what needs to happen instead of waiting for you to figure out what our problems are.
Josh Bersin: That's the problem at Boeing. That's why Boeing It's threatened, frankly, for survival in some respects. The employees were speaking up about the quality problems at Boeing and the management wasn't hearing it. So these are all themes of operating in a post industrial economy. Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: Do you think the main thing that employees wanted, there's a few things, but they, what you suggest with employee activation is that they want to have, they want to have a voice in their future, the company's future.
Josh Bersin: Employees want to, they want a career. They want to be paid fairly. They want a job that is achievable and meaningful for them. They want to work for a company that's a well meaning company. And when something is broken or doesn't work, or it's bureaucratic or wasting their time, or they don't get along with some manager, or, or there's something that's unsafe, they want to raise the issue and they would like somebody to address it.
Josh Bersin: And I don't think, I think 99 percent of employees do this because they want the company to be better. Because as I've talked about before, employees. Are the, in some sense, the most vested stakeholders in the company. And customers can always buy products from somebody else. Employees are stuck there. So when employees speak up, they have very important things to say, and they don't say it in a survey.
Josh Bersin: You can't just survey them. They can't tell you exactly what's on their mind in the survey. So, so this idea of activating employees is a big idea. It used to be called management by walking around years ago by HP. It used, well, you can't walk around when everybody's virtual, but yeah, but it's got to happen.
Josh Bersin: And I think strong companies are very good at it and they just are wired that way.
Shawn Pfunder: That's interesting. I. Previously, I think when social media first started getting big, we switched from this buyer beware to seller beware. And it sounds like with what we're starting to see, especially with the shortage in labor force is this, Hey, if you're going to perform well, if you're going to keep talent, if you're going to be able to diversify the skills and in a certain sense, just make workers more productive and you're going to have to figure out a way to keep them, make them more productive and find meaning.
Josh Bersin: So we did a huge amount of research on organization design last year and the year before. And the theory of, when I was at Deloitte, the theory of our org design was you hire a consulting firm.
Josh Bersin: They come in, they look at the spans and layers, who's doing what, they do job, they do work analysis, and then they put it into some big number crunching thing and they come back and say, here's what you need to do. You need to get rid of these guys, do this to these people. What we actually found is that most.
Josh Bersin: Employee groups, if you give them the opportunity to work on an organization redesign. Want to do it themselves. They know what's not working cause they're doing it. So we have this wonderful example of a company that sells drills and hammers and building parts. And they had product lines for each one of these different kinds of construction equipment products.
Josh Bersin: And so each product line had salespeople, product people, marketing people, P& L, manufacturing and so forth. And sure enough. They were all slowing down, they were losing market share, they were having a hard time keeping up. And the reason they were, and the employees basically redesigned the organization, is they said, our customers are not buying drills and hammers anymore, they are buying solutions to problems.
Josh Bersin: When they buy a drill or a hammer, we don't want them to just compare it against the commodity alternatives. We want them to, we want our products to help them build a, you know, better window or a wall or floor or whatever it is they're trying to do. So we need to take all these products that we have and sell them in This solution orientation, and so the, the employees, so some, one of the senior leaders was smart enough to say, you guys, why don't you guys get together and talk about how we reorganize this?
Josh Bersin: So they reorganized it into these solution groups that work on these different contractor needs and all of a sudden their margins shot up and they started to win market share again. I don't know if an external consultant would have even thought of that.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, that's, no, I don't think so. I would have thought of that.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, how do you do that? Like, what does it look like to gather that? Because it's not just a survey. It's not something where you just hop on Slack or hop on Teams or whatever and ask people a bunch of stuff to prevent it from getting to, say, social media, where they're going to tell people what your company should be doing in order to get better or blind or somewhere else.
Shawn Pfunder: How do you foster that? Are there tools you use?
Josh Bersin: Yeah, you have to do a lot of things. You have to have town halls, you have to go meet with people. You have to have resource groups, but you do have to do some surveys. Open crowdsourcing is a great way to do this. We basically have like suggestion boxes online where people can vote on other people's suggestions.
Josh Bersin: And then the other part of this is you have to empower managers to make changes. You can't wait. For the HR department to filter through a survey and send the information back and then expect something to happen. This one meeting we were in, we were talking to about 150 people about this, different operational problems that come up in different companies and how they get the data about what the information from the employees.
Josh Bersin: And one of the companies said, we keep, we don't even want HR involved. All they're going to do is slow us down because they're going to do some survey and then they're going to sit on it. We want the line managers to look at the information directly. Forget about HR, HR can vote, join us if they want, but this, and this is actually, I talked to the CHO of Boeing about this during the first 737 MAX problem, not the second one.
Josh Bersin: And he said, the number one change we're trying to make at Boeing is listening and we're forcing leaders and we're training them and we're putting in place processes. So before they make any decisions. They have a quiet time to listen to the employees about what's going on. Now, that sounds silly because it seems so simple.
Josh Bersin: But sometimes a lot of things get in the way of that.
Shawn Pfunder: I wonder what, any thoughts on what prevents that from happening? I know you could ask a leader, you could ask a CEO, you could ask somebody if that's important and they say, yes, it's important.
Josh Bersin: Well, what usually gets in the way of it is two things. One is the business targets are very aggressive and so nobody has time.
Josh Bersin: The second is lack of. Empowerment and lack of psychological safety. If my, if I'm a sales leader, for example, and all my sales guys come to me and say, Hey, this product sucks. The price is too high. Nobody's going to pay it. Or the colors are no good or what, where there's something wrong with it. Do I have the guts to go to the guy or gal who's responsible for that product and say, Hey, by the way, we can't sell this.
Josh Bersin: Yeah, ugly baby. He or she may not care. They may say, Oh, you're just one. Yeah. You guys, maybe we need to replace you with somebody that knows how to sell this better. Why? We'll give you more training. So you'll really know how to sell them. Right. I'm not saying one side's necessarily right versus the other, but you have to be able to have those conversations.
Josh Bersin: Yeah, and then do something about it, not just have the conversation and say, well, thank you for telling me that I'm going back to my old job and I'll do it the way I always have. That's actually, Shawn, the most interesting research we're publishing now, and I'm going to be giving a speech on this in New York next week, is something we call the dynamic organization.
Josh Bersin: And there's all sorts of aspects to it. But the essential story of that is that. Change is taking place all the time in companies. We used to think change was episodic. It's now continuous. If the product price is too high, It's because maybe the competitor changed their price yesterday, or a new competitor entered, or we had inflation, or the government did something, or, or who knows what else could have happened.
Josh Bersin: So we have to design our companies so that they're not always changing, but, but they're always ready to respond to things that might happen at any point in time, as opposed to you. We got this thing done. Let's lock it down. We'll revisit it next year because we're going to just execute on it this year.
Josh Bersin: That sounds great. It makes sense theoretically, but the world changes so fast now you've got to be able to make small changes along the way. That means employees need to speak up, managers need to hear them, and somebody needs to be delegated the responsibility to do anything, do things with that information.
Shawn Pfunder: Being able to be dynamic like that, wouldn't that require, oh, that affects so much, because even hiring at this point, so you knew you could hire before, and you say, I just need somebody that's able to do, I don't know, this dates Ruby on Rails, or needs to be able to do just that. That's all they gotta do.
Shawn Pfunder: But now you've got, A mixed skill set. If you need people to be adaptable, they have to be able to, they have to be able to switch and do something different. And oftentimes I run into that.
Josh Bersin: The core of the Dynamic Research Organization started there. When we first started the research, we were just looking at mobility, internal mobility.
Josh Bersin: And then when we started going into it, we realized this is much, much more than that. It's how people are paid. It's, it's employee listening. It's diversity and inclusion. If you have a siloed group in a company that nobody talks to because the rest of the company thinks they're Yeah, I don't know, underperformers or whatever it may be.
Josh Bersin: Right, right. Okay. You got a problem right there. And that happens all the time in companies just because of the culture. So yeah, and I, when I was thinking about it as I was writing it all up and thinking about this speech, I think that we've just entered a kind of a change has changed. The nature of change and the speed of change has changed.
Josh Bersin: People have been talking about this forever, but just, it's true. And, and with this labor market, you can't lock things down and hold. I made a comment. I had an interesting meeting with a bunch of heads of recruiting the other day. And we were talking about all these issues because they always feel like they're stuck at the, in the middle of this.
Josh Bersin: And I said, well, imagine what would your job be if the company said, we're not going to do any recruiting all year. No more people. What would you do as a head of recruiting? Would you lay everybody off? And they're like stunned. You'd probably become consultants. You'd do other things in the company that probably need to be done that you wanted to do, but you were stuck fulfilling recs.
Josh Bersin: And that's what happened at Facebook. You've, you've seen the data from Meta. They laid off 22 percent of the people in the, the profit went up by 200 percent and the revenue went up by 16 percent and they're probably getting more done.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, that's, that's interesting. It's like we're hiring liberal arts majors, that sort of thing.
Shawn Pfunder: Like you. One thing I remember is going to school to learn how to think or to learn how to get things done instead of the specific skill set that you come in with. So you could hire somebody, like the way that you see it, do you see it as possible that you hire a developer to come in? And that happens now, they go into leadership roles or they become interested in something else, but they switch roles completely to go somewhere else.
Shawn Pfunder: Are you seeing more of a This is, this might be a term that's out there that I haven't, but the full stack employee instead of the full stack developer.
Josh Bersin: Absolutely. To some degree, yes, there's two things that have happened. One is people are now taking their skills from industry to industry and job to job much more than ever before because there's a lot more skills based hiring and skills based promotion.
Josh Bersin: So, I think the data was that. Last year, 45 to 50 percent of the people who changed jobs changed industries, so they don't feel locked into a job function or a functional hierarchy like they did before. So if you're really good with numbers, you could be a financial analyst, you could be a sales analyst, you could work in IT, you could become a data scientist, you could learn how to become an AI engineer.
Josh Bersin: You can do statistical work and research. There's a lot of things you can do with that skill. So, so there's this much more option to take whatever skill you have and re and move it in different places. As far as full stack, I agree. I think my career and many of the people I've met that are very senior.
Josh Bersin: The reason they've been successful at the later parts of their careers is because they did a lot of different things during their career. They didn't just do one thing the entire time. And so companies are creating leadership models where they're really encouraging people in some sense, forcing them and saying, look, if you want to be a specialized engineer, that's great.
Josh Bersin: But if we don't need that specialty anymore, you're going to be in trouble. And there's all these other things we also need. So we would encourage you to move around and understand these other domains. It'll give you more perspective on the work you're doing. And it'll give you more value to us to help us on different kinds of projects besides the one thing you know how to do.
Josh Bersin: And I think most people love that. I told you my father was a scientist and I think because he was a very core physicist, he was able to do a lot of things with that in his career because he applied it in a lot of different ways. So, so I think the full stack, but T shaped, it's called T shaped careers, what it's usually called.
Josh Bersin: There's a deep domain of expertise and then you have a lot of horizontal things that you've also been learning over the years. I think that's the way to, to basically have a great career.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, you'd stay likely to stay with a company as you hear about things like gender of AI. So if you're a, if you're a developer, if you're a writer, if you're a designer, you're a marketer, you hear about those things and start to freak out.
Shawn Pfunder: A little bit, even if you're not having the conversation with, with your boss, with your leadership, with the executive team. But knowing that you're at a company that is more like, I'm hiring you for the talent, the way you think, your skills that you have.
Josh Bersin: The way you think is everything. It is really, that's one of the reasons that engineers tend to do pretty well in business is because they're taught to be problem solvers.
Josh Bersin: Are you able to deal with a complex, uncertain situation? Can you understand data? Can you put together the signals from multiple sources? Those are, every meeting you go to, this happens to me all day, people, you see it in their faces, they're trying to figure out what to do. Yeah. And then somebody says, aha, what if we did this?
Josh Bersin: And everybody goes, how'd you think of that? That's a really good idea.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. No, it's that happens when I used to run into that writing content, like SEO content. And I always wanted to be clever. I always wanted to come up with some hilarious thing and try to sound like Kurt Vonnegut. And it just never, like, the simpler it got, you would find that this article performed better than anything else that you've written.
Josh Bersin: Yeah, and it was the article you wrote on the five best ways to blah, blah, blah, right? That's exactly it. And one that you didn't think about.
Shawn Pfunder: You just, you knocked it out.
Josh Bersin: You just wrote it in five minutes, right before you were going to eat lunch one day.
Shawn Pfunder: So we're going to get to AI and just, of course, we have to talk about that. Uh, it's such a big thing. It's going to affect like all of the tools, everything that we use when managing people, HR, businesses. But before I do that, this might be a little bit more of a personal question, but you stuck with this over a long period of time.
Shawn Pfunder: And you mentioned that like those of us that have been in a career, have tried different things. We've morphed into different places. I'm just curious. Why are you stuck with it all this time? You're at a point now you could go be a gentleman farmer in Costa Rica. I've heard roosters on your podcast recordings when you get out there.
Josh Bersin: I love what I'm doing. I enjoy every single day, every single minute of it. I am at the age where I can't do it quite as hard as I used to, but I work pretty hard because I like it. I take, I've learned I have to, at this age you just have to take care of yourself. Health wise. And it's a never ending, challenging, interesting problem that's accelerating in importance.
Josh Bersin: And I can see, I can, on a given day, I can talk to Workday about their AI strategy. I can talk to a startup about some new talent management thing. I can talk to the CHO of a big company about their business issues. I get to learn all sorts of interesting things and talk to all sorts of engineers. I get to run our company, which is a challenge in and of itself.
Josh Bersin: So I'm having a lot of fun. I don't feel like I've. Even begin to tap where this is going to go. And every year it gets different.
Shawn Pfunder: It sounds like you've found your guy.
Josh Bersin: Yeah, I did. I don't know. I feel very fortunate. Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: Meaning and purpose. That's that's amazing. Well, uh, AI. So, as we've talked about these things, these new problems that we're running into, there's labor shortages coming up, what employees are demanding more of, this employee activation, employee activism, you've mentioned in the past is tied to that as well, our employee experience, doing more with less, productivity not being just a time based thing but actually result driven.
Shawn Pfunder: I'm mildly, I'm not freaked out because I'm a nerd when it comes to the AI stuff. I'm super excited about it. I know a lot of other people that are, but talk to me about how AI, I guess, is going to be used or how you think it's going to be used to solve these problems or within this type of space.
Josh Bersin: Sure. Well, let me, I think there's three, three sort of legs to that. First of all, I've been in tech for a long time, so I was, I worked at IBM in the mainframe days, the birth of the PC, the birth of client server, the birth of the web, the internet, the cloud, the mobile computing. So there've been like eight or nine of these big things.
Josh Bersin: This one is the biggest of all to me because this technology obsoletes a whole bunch of the old ways we did things. Databases, transactional systems, knowledge management systems, learning, they're all going to be revolutionized. So this is a very big thing and it's just starting. As far as what it means to HR and what it means to careers.
Josh Bersin: It's going to have, and it already is having dramatic impacts on every area of people management. How we recruit, how we source people, how we decide who's ready for leadership, looking at people's, looking at signals from people that, that will help us understand their performance, understanding pay inequities, all of these data, the problem that HR people generally have.
Josh Bersin: Is we have all this data on people, but we can never get it all in one place and we can never make sense of it. So all day we're making judgment decisions about people with limited data, who to hire, who to promote, why is this team underperforming? Who should be the manager? This guy quit, who should take their job?
Josh Bersin: These are very difficult, important decisions, and we don't have very good data in some cases, or we have. Surveys or assessments, all that data can be radically improved and better used by AI and better understood in a much quicker way. And then the issues, the transactional service delivery issues in HR, what are my benefits?
Josh Bersin: What are my options? For leave, all that can be done by AI, so you don't have to build 200 million employee portals for people to find things. You look at the training industry, all the money that's spent on video authoring and video development, and creating tests and assessments and simulations, that can be done by AI.
Josh Bersin: So it's just everywhere. As far as what it means to individuals, though, the third side of this is, it's a little bit scary. But actually it shouldn't be. I don't think it's that different from the first time Multiplan or Excel hit the market in the PC in the 1980s. When everybody looked at it and said, Oh, we're never going to need an accountant again.
Josh Bersin: Well, it didn't automate what humans do. It just automated the routine part of what humans do. And this is going to be the same way. It feels like it's automating human work, but we're going to realize there's a whole bunch of human creativity and thinking that goes on that requires the AI to be successful.
Josh Bersin: So like in my case, so we created this AI product called Galileo. And we just, I forced our company to do it. Nobody wanted to do it. And I forced everybody to get into it. And now we, we can generate a 1500 word report or article on a topic in like one minute. And it's pretty good. It's not great. It's not a hundred.
Josh Bersin: It's not perfect, but now the analysts can, we can take a video recording. Of a client conversation or a vendor, we can put it into Galileo. We can immediately write an outline of what they talked about. We can write an article about it. Now we don't do it that way yet because we don't think that it's going to be quite the, quite level of quality, but the speed at which we can do work is radically accelerating now.
Josh Bersin: So that's just our example. I think there's writing an RFP, evaluating an RFP, looking at survey data, evaluating survey data, looking at pay data, evaluating pay, there's just dozens and dozens of use cases here that are going to be really exciting for HR.
Shawn Pfunder: You've mentioned this before, one of the impressions I get is almost it's creating cyborgs. We're like super power individuals. So the super powered HRBP, the super powered, right?
Josh Bersin: That's the analogy that I use. You've seen that picture of Superman that I have on some of my slides. I think the way we have to think about it from a business standpoint. Is every individual worker, whatever they're doing for their job, all of a sudden has more power than they ever did before, particularly white collar workers.
Josh Bersin: So once they learn how to use the, if we get good tools into companies and we teach people how to use them, they're going to be much more productive and we're going to need that because we're not going to have as many people to hire anyway. So it gets back to this issue of employee experience and productivity that AI is coming along at just the right time.
Josh Bersin: When companies are looking for ways to be more productive. Now it's going to be a little rocky for a while. Some of the tools work well, some of them don't. You've got to play around with five different things to find out which one's going to be the right one, but that's going to shake out pretty fast.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Anything you're seeing. This is so hard because as soon as you start to talk about AI, like you just get together in a room, you get a couple of, get a couple of drinks and the people and they're like, Oh, we could, we use this to measure employee sentiment. We've had a problem doing that all along. Or recall whether or not employees know about these things and the things that are going on and everything is coming up.
Shawn Pfunder: But do you see, Well, maybe one big trend that we're going to see related to AI in the coming year?
Josh Bersin: Yeah, I was just talking to, to our engineering guys about this morning. The big trend is AI is not magic. It's not going to do everything perfectly out of the box. So just like every other technology we've ever implemented, we're going to have to take care of it.
Josh Bersin: We're going to have to make sure it has good data. We're going to have to train it. We're going to have to optimize it. I think the early days, the New York times article, the first New York times articles was that it was going to ruin our lives, and then after we got over that, everybody thinks it's just like spectacular that it can create a video.
Josh Bersin: Well. Yeah, except it's not really the video you wanted and you can't edit it. So, but maybe not quite as nice as you want it. I think the big thing is this is a high powered, highly capable technology that needs your help. You need to tune it. You need to have IT involved. You need to look at data management, data security.
Josh Bersin: Like we're building, we have in Galileo, we have multiple models in Galileo, making it smarter and better and better at asking questions. It doesn't just work out of the box. So, so I think that's maybe the, something that will demystify how magical it seems to be. It feels like magic until you go to, until you go to Google, like I had a query on Google Gemini the other day.
Josh Bersin: I asked it to do something for me and it goes, well, I'm going to show you how to do this yourself. And I said, well, aren't you supposed to do it? And it said, well, I'm not really trained to do it, but if you'd like, I'll come back to you in a few hours and let you know if I can do it. And I was like, what?
Josh Bersin: And I won't mention what it was, but these things are fairly immature yet.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Well, hallucinations at that level, where you have the AI just getting it completely wrong, that could be, I don't think it's catastrophic.
Josh Bersin: But very confidently tells you something that's not true. So like we've dialed ours down to zero.
Josh Bersin: We don't want it to hallucinate at all. Yeah. Because we don't want to take that risk. But yeah, so I think the big thing with AI is if you get comfortable with the fact that it's a tool, it's not a human being, and it does a whole bunch of things really well, but it's never, but it's not really perfect.
Josh Bersin: You'll see it as a fun, enjoyable, in fact, there's going to be a huge number of careers managing, training, caring for these things, tweaking them, integrating them into companies, lots and lots of great careers here. Learning how to use them, learning how to write prompts, etc.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, prompt engineering. That's a new career, a new direction we might be able to go.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, this is, this is really great, because I think what I'm sensing from what you're talking about when we talk about the superpowers, it's this blend. Nobody's getting rid of humans, despite, I saw some research that you posted a couple years ago about how people trusted robots more than humans. When it came to some of the things they might ask, they're just worried what the reaction will be.
Shawn Pfunder: But this sounds like it's going to be better.
Josh Bersin: Well, the one that I, the one that I think about every week, once a week, I go to Whole Foods and buy a bunch of food for the house. And when I check out, I always have the same woman there to take care of me. I use that hand scanner. I don't know if you ever use it where you put your, I don't have to get my wallet out, I don't have to get my phone out. She does it, she just boop.
Shawn Pfunder: She just boop. We're going to use that from now on when we talk about AI and HR and new places. Boop. Well, Josh, listen, this has been really fantastic and really great personally for me just to be able to talk about these things. I love talking about these things and especially to somebody that's a, that's an expert has been around, dare I say wise, when it comes to the human interaction and working with different people.
Shawn Pfunder: Before I let you go, we want to let our audience know where we can find you online. Where should we send people to learn more?
Josh Bersin: So we've got two, two, two primary web places: joshbersin.com has all of our research and articles and information on things. And then bersinacademy.com is our online professional development academy for HR people.
Josh Bersin: And then we're having a big conference in May. This is our third year. May 20th through 22nd called Irresistible. If you're interested in coming together with a bunch of HR people, we'll have about 450 people there in LA at USC, but those are the big. I'm pretty easy to find.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, it'd be easy for me to get, get my book signed, right, at Irresistible Conference.
Josh Bersin: Sure, or wherever you are, Shawn, I'll probably be traveling around, I might be in your town.
Shawn Pfunder: Right on, even better. So don't forget me when I approach Bruce Springsteen at the conference to try to get my book signed.
Josh Bersin: Well, thank you, by the way, Shawn, thank you. Thank you for your in-depth research and understanding what we've been doing here.
Josh Bersin: I really appreciate the part, the questions, because I know you did some research on it.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, yeah, of course, eat it up. I did, I did try to use ChatGPT to learn more about you, and it hallucinated like crazy. I'll have to send you what came back. It was great. I was like, nah, I don't think that's the guy I'm talking about.
Shawn Pfunder: So I'll, I'll send it over. Well, thank you. Thanks again. Thanks again for joining us.
Josh Bersin: Thanks a lot.