• Guest Speaker
    Sarena Lin
    Chief Transformation and Talent officer with Bayer

The New Shape of Work interview series addresses the challenges and uncertainty brought on by the coronavirus with a focus on how to transition to a more agile workforce for the future.

One of the challenges of our time is marrying a significant transformation ambition with the simultaneous need to focus on the employee experience. At its core, transformation is more than just business model transformation it is also about people. We can start the transformation journey by thinking about the needs of our people and our cultures to help us define the path forward.

In this episode, we hear from Sarena Lin, Chief Transformation and Talent officer with Bayer, on the critical role of understanding where we want to go and developing approaches that allow employees and leaders to develop the skills needed to drive transformation forward.

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Interesting moments from the interview:

  • Allowing working virtually and remotely

    "If return to office is not handled correctly, I think one concern is that we end up going backwards in terms of gender diversity where you have more female leaders up for that flexibility and working virtually and remotely. And you will have other leaders, potentially male leaders, saying let me go back to my old ways of working and showing up in the office."

  • Embracing both flexibility and hybrid working

    "The responsibility is now on the organizations like ours, and also on the leaders to say - how do you embrace both flexibility and hybrid working and use this opportunity to really step up on the leadership challenge of creating that inclusive environment, regardless of the mode of working, regardless of physical presence?"

  • Benefits of virtual working

    "[The] pandemic taught us that for talent to have diverse experiences, really, we don't need to have to have them uproot their entire family and sent to a different country for a couple years anymore. All of a sudden, the idea of advancement looks very different. And the idea of work also looks very different because we see that people actually could juggle multiple projects from very different parts of the organization in a very different way. Because again, virtual working enables people to work with different teams almost simultaneously."

  • Flexibility that meets the employees’ personal interests

    "How do we create a platform where employees can indeed chart that future need so that there is a path to develop the skill sets? We need enough of a frame and flexibility that meets the employees’ personal interests and objectives, but, knowing that if they are able to follow a certain broad path, then they can develop the skill set that businesses are looking for the next three to five years."

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