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Our next speaker leads Mercer's Global Work, Skills, and Transformation Services. Ravin Jesuthasan is a well-known speaker and author on the future of work. He's a frequent presenter at the World Economic Forum. And he lectures at universities such as Caltech, NYU, USC, and Oxford. Ravin is the author of six books and hundreds of articles. And he's been recognized as a Top Management Thinker by Thinkers50.
And by the way, the article that he's just published with us last week is doing quite well, Ravin. I didn't get a chance to tell you it's got over [INAUDIBLE] views now. So congratulations on that. And in the session, Ravin will join me for a conversation about his ideas from his recent book, The Skills-Powered Organization. Welcome, Ravin.
Thanks, Abbie It's lovely to be here with you.
Great. So this whole topic of skills-based work is a really hot topic right now. How should business and HR leaders rethink work and skills as AI takes on a bigger role?
Abbie, the time for skills to be the currency for work could not be more present, I guess. As we're seeing with AI-- and certainly, MIT has some direct experience with this-- the half life of so many technical skills are shrinking so quickly and so need for us to continuously keep reinventing work. In the article, I talk about the need to take and have a work-backwards view rather than a tech-forwards view.
And I think that's really what's driving this need for us to make skills the currency for work, the need to understand how work is changing because of these technologies. What skills are being rendered obsolete? What skills are changing in application? And what new skills are being demanded of talent as AI's progression accelerates? and the need to be really intentional in our redesign of work to keep shining a spotlight on these changing skills and how talent can be connected to work and to use AI in the most productive manner possible.
This concept of deconstruction and reconstruction of work is-- it's a lot to get your head around. Could you share an example of a company that is making this transition? How have they actually gone about that work of deconstruction and reconstruction? And what benefits have they seen?
Absolutely. We've seen this with quite a few organizations. Organizations, Abbie, lead with, as I mentioned a second ago, this tech-forwards mindset. Oh, boy, here's this really new piece of [INAUDIBLE] toolkit, Gen AI, and I'm going to give people a bunch of licenses to pick your vendor choice and then hope that the work will change.
And what we saw with a number of organizations that we've worked with, one that was highlighted in this article, was they introduced the tech, didn't fully start to see the benefits of that new piece of technology until they actually redesigned the work around the capabilities of the technology, so starting by deconstructing the work, identifying, what work could be substituted by the technology? What work might be augmented by the technology? And what work, frankly, might the technology allow us to push to someone else?
One of the great benefits, I think, particularly of AI, it's the reduction in the experience premium is something that we're seeing play out significantly. And so not only do you see the direct effect of the technology, secondary and tertiary impacts are being able to move work to a more junior employee, being able to move specific work to a shared services or global capabilities [INAUDIBLE], and then the opportunity to reconstruct more impactful jobs.
So with this financial services company, we saw not only did they get the full benefit of their business case for technology, i.e. it allowed them to free up a bunch of capacity, a lot of redundant work, but it also had the added benefit of being able to free some of their more senior talent up from the [? triage ?] and operational issues they were fighting and being able to push that work to junior talent that was augmented by the new technology Gen AI capability, allowing that senior talent to now focus on improving the customer experience, improving the onboarding of new customers, also identified creating opportunities to shift to work from that was analytical in nature, as some of the mid-level roles, to a global capability center and thus streamlining pathways.
And so not only did they free up close to 50% of their capacity, they improved their employee retention levels. Their turnover rates shrunk by more than 50% from where they were. And they were able to onboard more customers more efficiently and effectively.
Fantastic. And these details are in the article that you wrote as well. So if people want to learn more, they can look at it there and in your book, of course. So when you think about that work, let's go down a level. And what is the first practical step that a company should take to start building this kind of work design capability?
Yeah, Abbie, I'll actually, instead of one, [? I'll give ?] three because we ended our last book, The Skills-Powered Organization, that was published by the MIT Press, with the last chapter was the three steps that companies can take. The first is establishing an economically grounded and enduring [INAUDIBLE] for this journey of reinventing work and becoming more skills-powered. And so a North Star would be first.
Second is experimenting in what we call narrow and shallow, so experimenting in narrow zones, where I could take a workflow. I could take a particular new technology and reinvent work around it and create a proof of concept that becomes a part of that North Star for the rest of the organization and then going shallow by taking a particular talent process and saying, what does it mean for talent acquisition, career mobility, internal development and deployment to be truly skills-powered? And what does that end-to-end process now look like? And how do we start to activate it and test and learn from that experience.
And in the third step is-- it's so easy to [INAUDIBLE] to the tool set and forget the mindset and skill set that needs to come along. And so the third step is about addressing all eight of the change enablers that are required to become a skills-powered organization. How do we change leader behaviors? How do we move the HR function along and re-envision its role? How do we rethink governance for work? How do we rethink tactical things like budgeting, which are so tightly index to jobs and job families and functions to versus the need for talent to flow to work more seamlessly?
Yeah. So you mentioned the impact on the HR function. And I know we have a lot of HR and people leaders in the audience today. So how do you see all of this shift affecting their own responsibilities?
I really think it's an exciting time for HR, Abbie. What this calling for is a shift from that traditional mandate of being a steward of employment, what a couple of my clients have said, ensure the silent running of the enterprise and show that we, as business leaders, have the right people with the right skills in the right jobs at the right time and at the right cost, of course, to becoming more of a steward of work and of humanity at work as these technology tools increasingly start to substitute very significant chunks of work, so being that steward of work to help business leaders re-envision and reinvent both work and the human experience of work in an increasingly machine-augmented operating model.
Yeah. There's so much change going on. And it's great to have folks like you, Ravin, who are watching this closely and getting experience from the companies that are on the ground making this change happen. So thank you so much for joining us and really appreciate your work.
Thank you, Abbie. My pleasure.
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