July 2022
In the seventh episode of our ‘In Conversation with…’ podcast series for 2022, Partner Lucy Lewis speaks to Harriet Molyneaux, Managing Director at HSM Advisory.
As a future of work expert, Harriet shares her practical expertise on the big future of work trends of the moment. Harriet explores how organisations can embrace hybrid working to create sustainable high performance environments with productive and happy employees before turning to how employee voice can be harnessed as a check and balance mechanism for organisations.
Moving onto demographics, Harriet explains how the three stage life of education, work and retirement isn’t fit for purpose in technical high speed change environments, suggesting that it might be time to retire the word ‘retirement’. Finally, Harriet concludes with her thoughts on what the future holds for HR and how HR professionals need to evolve.
In Conversation With…Harriet Molyneaux
Series 2: Episode 7.
Lucy Lewis: Hello, and welcome to The Future of Work Hub’s ‘In Conversation With…’ podcast. I’m Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s Employment Team and in this podcast series, I’ll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspective on what the future of work holds.
We know the pandemic has accelerated longer term societal, economic, technological trends and we have a unique opportunity, a once in a generation challenge to rethink who, how, what and where we work, but although the pandemic has been a significant catalyst for immediate change, it’s only one of the many drivers of change in the world of work and joining me today is Harriet Molyneaux to discuss some of the most critical Future of Work trends and the legacy of the pandemic.
Harriet is Managing Director at HSM Advisory, a Consultancy founded by Professor Lynda Gratton, one of the leading experts on the Future of Work. Harriet is an advisor, a speaker and convener on the Future of Work and she is also a responsible business advocate. So welcome Harriet!
Harriet Molyneaux: Oh well thank you so much for having me Lucy I’m really delighted to be here.
Lucy Lewis: It is really great to have you. There’s such a lot I want to talk to you about but probably the best place to start is just asking you to introduce yourself and tell us a little about HSM Advisory.
Harriet Molyneaux: Yes, well thanks for that Lucy and as you say, I’m a Future of Work advisor. A responsible business advocate and have been within HSM Advisory for the best part of 10 years now, and HSM Advisory is a research and advisory group focused wholly on the Future of Work and we were founded by Lynda Gratton.
I really have two key focuses. The first is around building sustainable high performance in organisations. By sustainable, I’m actually not talking about your air miles there, I’m talking about creating environments where people can show off their best productive and hopefully happy selves over the long run, and I specialise in partnership models where I think the need for sustainable high performance is particularly strong.
I’m also passionate about business being a force for good and I do that through my work at HSM Advisory in inclusion, diversity, sustainability as well as sitting on the Board of Directors of the Responsibility for Justice; and that’s an international non-profit that works with large multi-national organisations to champion fairness, equity and effectiveness across systems of punishment and incarceration, and I think what’s so interesting for me Lucy is when I started out my career, I had a real either/or of the third sector, human rights and I started working in West Africa or big business and the sort of excitement of that; and I’ve seen over the past few years a real joining of the two, I think it’s been a really exciting time with the sustainability changes over the past three years, the social justice movement.
And HSM Lucy we were founded 14 years ago by Professor Lynda Gratton. We really started out as a research business so what does the Future of Work looked like, but actually as organisations stop wanting just to know what it looked like and started saying great and what do I do about that right now because it’s coming pretty close to us. We’ve moved into being an advisory company helping organisations put sustainable high performance at the centre of everything they do, and that could be from the work we’ve done with Sage, the platform company, as they moved from a financial services company to a tech company, or the work we did with Linklaters around work/life balance and flexibility.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you, now there’s so much to come back to. I definitely want to come back to the responsible business values purpose but before we do that and you talking about moving towards implementation, let’s start with that enormously hot topic of the shift towards hybrid working because we’ve moved from you know a year or two ago, businesses thinking yes we’ll try this as a newer way of working and now we’re seeing actually organisations really embracing it saying this is the future, we are going to do it and there’s a steady flow of surveys telling us that there’s a really strong correlation between employee satisfaction and the amount of flexibility their employer is able to offer them; but I wanted to ask you your views on what are the right ways about going about evolving organisational culture so you can really embrace hybrid working for a sustainable future?
hybrid working for a sustainable future
Harriet Molyneaux: Hmm. I think that’s a fascinating question Lucy and culture is absolutely key to hybrid working but I wonder if we could take a step back first and think what is hybrid working? What’s the point of it and I think what I hear most from our clients, interestingly I think it’s very much on CEO’s minds, I’ve never really spoken about ways of working to this level with CEOs as I have over the past year or two.
Really what are we trying to do here? Well I hear a lot about flexibility, about talent attraction and retention and I would argue those are important factors but they’re not the end goal. What we’re trying to do here is redesign work to create sustainable high performance and I’ll give you my definition again, that’s environments where people can show up their best productive and hopefully happy selves over the long run.
So, when we’re thinking about what organisations are trying to do, they need to be designing that is the end goal and then having flexibility to enable that. So how do you enable your employees to have focus, to have energy, to cooperate with their colleagues and to coordinate with their colleagues, so the more creative designs type of team work and then the more operational project management side of team work; and then what’s the purpose of flexibility within that?
It’s to enable that sustainable part of high performance but also when you give someone flexibility, what they experience it as is autonomy. So what people want right now is a greater sense of autonomy because interestingly whilst we’ve been stuck in our homes or working in very challenging conditions if we’re location fixed in terms of our work during the pandemic, in some ways many of us have experienced greater autonomy. Now why is that important to culture?
Well that isn’t traditionally the way that we’ve worked in many sectors and your sector Lucy is one which has been characterized by hugely ambitious, smart people who worked in relatively inflexible ways and the employee was expected to do what the employer or in the case of partners, what the organisation that they were a part of, therefore needed or expected them to do; and so we’re seeing a real paradigm shift in terms of what kind of culture do we need the mindset, how people show up, and how’s that going to enable sustainable high performance?
And when you think about that Lucy, a really crucial element of that is your managers so in your sector your partners, senior associates, in other sectors that middle management group because of course the way that people will experience that flexibility, and therefore autonomy, is through their touch point which was their manager; and if you talk to Lynda she would say that the role of managers is broken and that we need to redesign the role of managers. We need to redefine what success looks like as a manager in order to make this happen.
Lucy Lewis: And if we take that idea of autonomy and we move it into some of what you were talking about when you gave your introduction which was really fascinating, you know, rethinking what work means, why are we working?
You know again, we’re seeing quite a lot of talk around the idea that peoples’ expectations are changing, possibly that’s part of what’s driving the great resignation, but we’re also seeing greater focus on things like employee wellbeing, on trust, on fairness, values and purpose. Why we’re all coming to work. Do you think that the deal, if you like, between employers and employees is shifting, is changing and if it’s changing, how is it changing?
Harriet Molyneaux: Really interesting question and I’d say a short answer would be yes. We’ve seen a lot of trends discussed over the past three years Lucy and actually we haven’t really noticed any new trends. Lynda’s Future of Work research team sits here with us at HSM Advisory and we’ve been tracking trends for coming on 15 years now as a group; and these new trends that people are talking about, we just see them as an acceleration of trends, but I’d say one of the trends that’s been most significantly accelerated is this one around changing expectations of employees, and I have to say when I think about when I entered the workforce in my early twenties, what I expected of my employer is different to what I expect now. Of course, I was a junior employee in a large organisation. That’s not my situation now but we are seeing vastly different expectations from employees and actually that is shifting the power balance between employer and employee; and I think this was overdue.
It’s really interesting I was in a conversation with the Exco of one of our clients recently who said do we need to go with the wishes of our people or with the wishes of our business? And my view is that it’s quite tricky to disentangle the wishes of your people and for the majority of businesses your people are the biggest asset, also the biggest expense to the business, but that’s true for many businesses globally, and really hearing people, involving them in the decisions around the future of the business, and then moving in a cocreational, hand in hand way, to my view is a very good way of running a business and one that I think many organisations are starting to tap into at the moment.
Lucy Lewis: I agree completely and I think it’s really interesting. In terms of how you go about doing it, how you harness some of that change in expectations, you know we talk a bit about employee activism. How in practice do you go about harnessing that, so you do move forward in a more collaborate, innovative way to drive success, to drive sustainable high performance as you say?
Driving sustainable high performance
Harriet Molyneaux: Yeah, really interesting to mention employee activism and we are moving, we’ve been doing this for a while Lucy but we are moving into this area where through technology the role of individual in many different societies, not all but many different societies around the world where people have more of a voice, and actually organisations are expected to have a voice on many topics that they didn’t in the past from inclusion, diversity to sustainability in some cases to politics; and so I think the employee voice as I’ve said is an important check and balance for organisations.
So, I think be bold is what I’d say to leaders within organisations. Engage with employees. You will find that when they come together as a collective, actually the view is typically balanced. It’s reasonable. They self-direct one another and they’ll be additive to the plans that you’re making, and we actually do this quite a bit at HSM.
We have a crowd sourcing platform that we call Collaboration Jams where we bring together, the largest population we’ve invited was just over 500,000 people from an organisation in globally but actually that piece of work I mentioned around Linklaters, which is public knowledge, we did use that platform where you bring together every single employee, or invite every single employee to come and talk together on this crowd sourcing platform, a bit like an internal LinkedIn or Facebook, to talk about the future of the organisation over 72 hours, and to share ideas; and I think the outcome of this is either reassuring to an organisation that they’re moving in the right direction.
Maybe it uncovers the things that you simply didn’t know where happening and of course you want to know that, you want to be part of those water cooler conversations. Don’t be scared of uncovering some slightly uncomfortable truths or some really exciting opportunities because organisations spend a lot of time sourcing and hiring fantastic exciting interesting people so don’t then parent child them. Have an adult to adult relationship with them.
Lucy Lewis: That’s really fantastic advice and really, really interesting.
I’m going to change tack slightly but taking us on a bit of a tangent you talked about diversity and inclusion, and one of the key, kind of megatrends that we’ve been watching on the Future of Work Hub long before the pandemic, was about changing demographics. You know we know people are living longer. There are more generations in the workplace.
You talked about diversity and inclusion. That’s the top of everybody’s agenda and if it’s not, it absolutely should be, but sometimes this issue of changing demographics, that gets a little bit lost in the D&I agenda and I’m really interested in your thoughts both about how you’re seeing businesses dealing with this, but also how you think businesses should be dealing with it.
Harriet Molyneaux: That is such an interesting question and we’ve been, we track five megatrends actually so society, demographic changes, globalization, digitalisation and sustainability and so you can imagine we’ve been thinking about diversity and inclusion Lucy for about 15 years.
We recently completed a study into that topic with about 30 global multi-nationals. Thinking about where we are now because I’ve been very heartened by quite frankly the investment that organisations are making into diversity and inclusion since the past three years, the Social Justice Movement, the resurgence of the Social Justice Movement three years ago and I think there are really a couple of topics here. I think we used to talk a lot about diversity quite simply how can we get more diverse candidates into the workforce which is hugely important.
I’d actually like to uncouple diversity from inclusion. Inclusion, how is it that we then help people feel like they’re included in the organisation? Like they can show up and actually I want to add that third thought around belonging into the mix so I think sometimes people arrive and then become homogenized by organisations to become the, you know, insert company name X way and actually what we want to do is redesign organisations not only with, by our white cis straight male and you know originally organisations were primarily designed by that profile, but also to ask our more diverse people within businesses and that could be diversity of thought or a diversity metric.
What do you want this business to look like? What’s going to enable you to show up your best productive and happy self and what’s the shape of this space going to need to be to enable that? So, for me it’s about back to the drawing board redesigning what we’re doing and starting to think really carefully around how we’re going to think about this, and I’ll give an example. So many organisations that I work with that have a professional culture, it’s really a white professional culture where there’s only one type of hair, long straight hair or pinned back and people aren’t even able to show up with their natural hair, or if they do it might be looked at in an unusual way; and I think we just need to reshape the shape of our spaces to enable people to feel like they have a sense of belonging so they can flourish as they are.
Lucy Lewis: And in terms of the changing demographics, the different ways of working. We talked a bit about the empowerment that comes from autonomy. You talked about that in your first answer. We’re seeing an increase in, if you like part time retirement, people finding ways of continuing to work longer. Businesses feeling challenged by how that fits into, as you say, a kind of traditional model of the way that we’ve always done things. Do you think there are ways of really embracing that changing demographic that giving that autonomy that you talked about at the outset?
Demographic changes
Harriet Molyneaux: Such an interesting question and I think we speak so much about the multi‑generational workforce and I think it’s interesting perhaps just to think about different modes of life. I’m not sure that we necessarily want to equate age and stage quite in the way that we have done before; but again I think happily we’ve seen increasing focus on ageism in the workforce over the past really six months actually, you know you can’t really open up HBR or the FT without seeing an article about it currently, and I think the way that organisations are structured currently it is for populations from 20 plus years ago and I’ll share a couple of reasons why I think that’s the case.
We’re moving away from the three-stage life. By that I mean education up till 18 or perhaps 21 or 25. Then assuming that that knowledge body is going to last you for your whole working life, working in a sprint until you’re in your fifties or maybe early sixties and then retiring; and we’re seeing a breakdown of this for a number of reasons. Education taken in your early twenties simply isn’t going to last you even into your mid to late twenties if you’re in a technical high speed change environment. We’re seeing that actually we’re going to be living enormously longer. In my boss’s book, Lynda Gratton’s book, The 100 Year Life, actually there the thought is that around 50% of children born in 2007 in the UK will live till their over 100, or could live till they’re over 100. So we need to fundamentally rethink our lives and just start to think about can we rethink time? Maybe take some more education in our thirties. Perhaps not always be doing the stepping stone to the next bigger thing, and certainly not focusing on retiring and then dropping off a cliff and living that life of leisure.
I mean I don’t know about you Lucy but I’m actually not sure I’d enjoy that. I might want to slower pace of life but I don’t want, think I’d want to stop so I think perhaps we need to retire the word retirement and start to think about it a bit differently but I acknowledge that the way that we structure careers and jobs in organisations is so unable to take on that idea at the moment but that requires a fundamental rethink of what that looks like.
Lucy Lewis: And you talked about education. I thought that was really, really interesting you know our education reaches a sell by date quite quickly and particularly with the pace of change and we’ve been talking, you know a fair bit about that as part of the Future of Work Hub, and it leads to a discussion about skills and I‘m really interested in your thoughts about skills, partly because one of the things you said earlier was we need this total reinvention of leadership.
So, coupled with this idea that our education has a shelf life quite quickly and we need a reinvention of what leadership or what management looks like. I’m interested in your thoughts about the kind of skills that we need in the workplace, both the skills that we need in our leaders and our managers but also the skills that we need more generally in people coming into the workforce today.
Harriet Molyneaux: That’s a really fascinating question and I think I’ll probably start off with where we see the skills around leaders and managers sitting, and we’ve been running a study around the impact of virtual working and hybrid working on skills and capabilities and this will all come from that.
So, I hear a lot from organisations around the fundamental need to focus on technical and data driven skills and I certainly wouldn’t negate that. I think the number and array of skills around that area is quite frankly bewildering and it can be challenging keeping up with it, and there’s definitely a need; but they do have that shelf life as you put it Lucy.
I think the area that I don’t hear enough about is around those human skills. When I do hear the word human skills, I immediately hear people say the word empathy, and again empathy is important, but I think the landscapes a little more nuanced than that. So, our view is that to manage in this new world that we’re working in, and it is quite different from a working perspective, we definitely need those human skills which would be coaching and empathy and enabling. We need those performance focused skills which are things like creating and inspiring compelling narrative around creating a fantastic people experience, but we also need those enabling hybrid skills or practical skills if you’re not working in a hybrid way, which might feel a little bit more tactical, but actually are fundamental to making this work around creating team agreements.
Around understanding how people focus and how they have energy and how cooperation and coordination happens in the organisation; and it was really interesting, we run webinars on the Future of Work monthly. It’s an invitation only webinar but we run these webinars and we did a survey of about 400 senior leaders both HR, functional on that webinar, and they were 40% focused on creating a positive people experience. I think in response to the great transition or great resignation and I think it was 6% were focused on those more practice hybrid enabling skills and when they discussed human skills they were really just talking about empathy. So, I think an understanding of the level of nuance and complexity of those human skills, and also those human skills are fundamental to unlocking your practical skills. So, it’s no use having an amazing data set if you can’t draw insight from it and then create a really interesting narrative that enables people to move forward.
So, for my view the gap that we have at the moment is the human specific skills and how it is that we can build those out.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you. It’s a really interesting insight particularly because we’ve been sort of distant, physically distant from each other for you know for a while through the pandemic and the importance of human skills in that context is really, really interesting.
You mentioned HR and as we’re coming to the end of our discussion, I thought it would be useful to pick up on that because lots of people that listen to this podcast are HR professionals or people leaders; and one of the things that HR is grappling with is how do they need to evolve to really lead this change.
I wonder if you could share your thoughts on what you think the future holds for HR and how the HR professionals need to evolve.
What the future holds for HR
Harriet Molyneaux: The role of HR is a really interesting one isn’t it and I think it would be fair to say that historically in some companies and sectors, HR hasn’t had quite so much of a place at the table as perhaps some of their peers on boards and I think we’ve really seen a shift of that; and I’ve been really fascinated that in the meetings I’ve been at of Excos or partnership meetings, often the first ones that have been face to face over the past six months, they’ve been really exciting and energising at a number of our clients that actually it’s really been people issues that have been one of the top items of the agenda, alongside things like sustainability.
And my view is that HR needs themselves to bring in skill sets and capabilities which perhaps some HR departments don’t have at the moment. Skill sets and capabilities around data. I said that I did feel those were important around analysis but also around strategy and longer term thinking because really now for organisations to be a step ahead, they need to be thinking in a highly strategic and intentional way around people; and this is very complex and of course you need the operational elements of HR that’s fundamental to a business but you also need the people, organisation, values, employer attractiveness elements to be coming in as well so my view is to take a step back and for HR professionals to think do we have in our department the skill sets and capabilities that we need to be the strategic partner to our CEO? And have we gone and thought about how we can enable them, do the things that they’re trying to achieve?
So, I think it’s actually an exciting time for HR. I think this shift has been happening over a number of years, but I think now really is a chalice moment.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah I agree, and I think that’s a really positive way to look at it.
My last question, it’s something that I’m asking all our guests on this 2022 podcast Series, and we know the world of work is going to look really different in 10 years’ time, almost certainly in ways that we can’t predict; but if you had the power to ensure one change for the workplace of 2032 what would it be?
Future of Work
Harriet Molyneaux: One thing to change… That’s a great question Lucy and actually I’ve just taken a week off work and spent time with family and friends up in the Highlands above Inverness where some of my family are from and took a lot of time to read.
What I’ve been trying to do is read around life philosophies and ethos that perhaps aren’t quite as close as mine. So looking across to philosophies around life such as Ikigai or Zen, from other parts of the world and I think this also builds on Lynda’s idea around the breakdown of the three stage life.
But I think my reflection Lucy is that so many of us are working in a sprint towards retirement. Some of us are fortunate enough to be able to do that early, others are not but the majority of people I talk to right now, talk about the pace or the monotony of their work; and they’re really seeing this work as a stepping stone to the ideal state of retirement and leisure and Lynda and I have spoken quite a bit over the past three years about the lack of moments of joy and that’s important joy actually for us to reimagine ourselves.
So, my view is really try and rethink that mindset. Take a year out. Go back and get more education. Toggle up and down your career over your life but don’t always be trying every year to be doing something bigger or more and I think my change I’d like to make is to take pleasure in the day to day of what we do; and realise that we’re not always working towards a destination. Our destination is the life we’re leading right now so to try and lean in and enjoy the today and now a bit more than perhaps we are sometimes.
Lucy Lewis: Now I definitely empathise with that. I think that’s a really, really lovely way to finish. Thank you for those thoughts and thank you for joining us. I’d said I’d got a lot of ground to cover and I think we really did so thank you for being so accommodating and giving your thoughts on such a broad spectrum of things.
If you’re listening and you’d like to find out more about Harriet or about HSM Advisory you can visit their website www.hsm-advisory.com or you can connect with Harriet on LinkedIn. Thank you again Harriet.
Harriet Molyneaux: Thank you so much Lucy it’s been really, really great chatting with you.