Building the future of work | with Ranjit de Sousa

Yeah, absolutely Johnny, and first off, thank you for having me on the show. Very jealous obviously that you are in Barcelona and I'm sitting here in a hotel room in the middle of rainy Germany. But yeah, so it's like, what and why am I doing what I'm doing today, right? So what I'm doing is really helping ventures in that work tech space, and this is kind of the space where these companies are defining what the future of work will look like, helping these ventures scale, get bigger, you know, thinking through the go-to-market, the strategy, getting the funds to grow. And then at the same time, helping large corporates think about how they can integrate that tech into helping create a better place to work. Because if you think of it, we spend most of our waking hours definitely at work, and an incredible amount of people on surveys show this again and again, actually think that work sucks, right? So you gotta make work suck a little less. And a lot about what is happening right now is exactly about that. So I've always been fascinated by the topic and that intersection of work and technology. But I think the last couple of decades and especially now the last few years have absolutely changed and catapulted us into the future in terms of how we work, when we work, what we expect from work. And I would even go step further and say we are seeing the biggest change in the world of work that we've seen the last 150 years since the first industrial revolution. And a lot of things that are happening now are probably going to be around for a long time to come. So, really fascinating moment in time and a place where I thought I could have a lot more impact if I'm really working at that intersection between the ventures and large organizations.

It's a couple of thoughts, fascinating question, right? I think the first answer that I always give when this topic comes up is we don't know, right? We only have two years of data at scale, if you want, around what works and what doesn't. And these two years of data, and what worked often rested on the fact that over decades, social capital had been built within companies, right? Teams had been built, there were codes of how to interact and how not to interact, how to collaborate, how not to collaborate. And so in the very initial phase of working fully remotely, a lot of things worked because of the social capital which had been built. I also believe that a lot of things did not work or were highlighted in terms of what was going wrong when people moved to a fully remote environment, when it came down to gaps in leadership which existed before, absolutely existed before, but were even more damaging when people started working in a more remote environment. So I don't think we have the experience so far to really say what works and what doesn't, but we can say that there is definitely a need to build and continue building social capital, and that can happen in office, it can happen in a hybrid environment, or it can happen remotely. You just need different types and tools for that, right? And whatever environment you are in, but especially if you're in a remote environment, you have to have good leadership. So for me, those two takeaways are very clear. But now exactly what kind of setup? A lot of companies are trying to prescribe two days per week in the office, three days per week in the office, no office at all. What really works and why it works for which organization? I think there we do not have the data and we don't have the evidence as yet. It's going to take a lot more time for that to kind of pan out and for us to have more insight.

Yeah, I would think that all of this was already present before the pandemic, and the pandemic has just been an accelerator or a catalyst of a lot of the trends that were happening before. And if you take a step back and again kind of buy into the idea that this is the biggest change that we're seeing since the first industrial revolution, I think there are probably two or three major trends that we've been seeing which have influenced this. One is that we've gotten into market cycles which are moving at such great speed that you can no longer drive strategy top down. And that also means that organizations need to be structured in a very different way, deconstructing the large enterprise so to speak. That means you need to be able to delegate a lot more decision power to your frontline leaders, and that was all happening already pre-pandemic. The second thing is what I would say is the Netflixization or the always-on-demand requirement for all businesses, and that has probably been really catapulted into the future through the pandemic. People have spent so much time on Netflix, have become so reliant on Amazon Prime, that they want to replicate those experiences at the workplace and in every kind of interaction with business. And then the last thing is the total transparency that social media creates. Now, obviously, granted, there are a lot of negatives there too, but the transparency that has been created also means that we can hold leaders accountable in a completely different way, and that level of accountability also means that leaders need to behave, have to behave in a different way than perhaps previously when that transparency wasn't given. And all these trends were absolutely present prior to the pandemic, but again, I think the pandemic really was a catalyst and catapulted us five or ten years further into the development of what's happening. And the skills gap in that context is just one other evidence point of that happening. So there was a skills gap, there was the war for talent we've been seeing that way before the pandemic. But again, the fact that technology has become even more important in every single business, that the skills which are required to develop great product, to market great product, to sell great product, and especially when we're talking of product, and you're at this conference in Barcelona which revolves all around SaaS product, right? When it comes to SaaS product, those skills, they're rare skills and can't be found everywhere, and so that has just been exacerbated, that skills gap, and the requirements to go along with the skill shift has just become an imperative. And if you look at surveys asking CEOs what is the top barrier to growth in the short and mid-term, the skills gap has become one or two top priorities for CEOs across the globe.

Yeah, I think there are a couple of angles there, and especially when it comes to solving the skills gap that you speak of, when it comes to higher-skilled folks. The fact that you can bring in technology that democratizes learning or gives accessibility to learning in the moment, on your mobile, when you actually need it, that allows you to reskill and upskill people in a much easier and on-demand manner. Talking about that on-demand imperative I mentioned a moment ago. So that's where technology definitely helps. If you think of the potential of also augmenting learning with other technology, bringing in very targeted assessments, bringing in coaching which ensures the sustainability of the learning, again democratizing that all through technology, has a huge impact. On the other end, it's more also a question of matching demand and supply, right? And finding the places where there are people who have the aptitude, the attitude, the willingness to take up certain jobs, and matching that with the employers who are willing to pay sufficiently, pay attractively enough salaries or hourly pay. And matching that obviously is also made a lot easier through technology. So I think it both ends, in both problems that you were describing, Johnny, technology can play a key role. But there is technology is the tool, right? So it's not going to solve your problem. So just throwing some kind of learning management system or some learning content at people, or trying to access a matching technology, it's just not sufficient if you do not know what skills you're lacking, if you do not know what your what skills you actually need, and if you do not know what kind of environment you are able to provide to people, what is actually attractive, and how are you going to attract those people. You know, the best tools are not going to solve the problem.

So I would frame this a little differently, right? So if I was in the shoes of that CPO and I have a sizeable tech budget, I would actually not be focusing on three or four specific categories, right? Because exactly because of that noise that you mentioned and the amount of innovation which is happening in the market, I think if you're going to prescribe something top down and say, you know, okay, I want to have these and these diagnostic tools in place, or I want to look at the employee experience as Josh Bersin calls it, from an end-to-end perspective, and I need one platform for that, you are most likely going to lock yourself in to something in an area where there's so much evolution or maybe even revolution that you might come to regret it once you've actually gotten to the point of implementing this across the organization. And you will also want to avoid right now, I would say, putting your bets on one specific topic because there are so many relevant topics as you have just mentioned. So I think the approach that I would take would be one much more of experimentation and trying to find pockets within the organization where significant progress can be made by looking at one or two topics and really experimenting around it. So say you have an area where you know that a lot of people have skills which are being depleted and they're going to be redundant in a couple of years, it's on a fairly short time horizon, but you also know that a lot of these people have the attitude and aptitude to be reskilled. Well, that's probably an area in a very focused manner where you want to experiment with different reskilling tools, upskilling tools, implement a few diagnostic things to see what actually gives you the best visibility of where you have skill gaps and how you want to close the skill gaps. But don't do this across the entire organization, do it in a very focused way, maybe at a department level, maybe at a country level, but in a controlled experiment. And then there is another place where you say, look, this is where we've just made a small acquisition and acquired something, and this is the perfect place to test new employee listening tools, where you want to get feedback on a weekly basis, for example, in a merger or an acquisition situation. So let's use that place to test and experiment with employee listening tools, and that allows you to actually learn and course correct and see which of these tools can even be deployed at scale versus saying top down, you know, I want to have a 2x platform because it's very hot and it's early in the hype cycle, and therefore we want to spend a lot of money on it. And so I think this is a very different way of approaching things, and one that many corporates don't necessarily follow. But that experimentation and doing things really in a very focused manner before you take anything to scale is probably the way to go, and gives you a lot more insight and more bang for your buck than if

Yeah, absolutely, and it's a great frame. And if you put yourself in the shoes of a CPO right now, what I hear a lot when speaking to organizations is that the culture, the purpose, the why people should be joining or staying at an organization—that is one of the big problems to be solved. You mentioned this earlier, right? When you have a lot of people joining the organization in a remote state and you have not been able to build social capital the way you were doing previously in an in-office setting, it becomes even harder to build that purpose and that culture. So that is definitely one big problem to solve. I think the second thing as a CPO, which might sound a little contradictory to what I was saying earlier when it comes to experimenting and combining different technologies, is you need to spend some time thinking of your tech stack. Because even in an API-driven world, which allows you to plug and play things in a much easier and more seamless way, you do need to spend some time thinking: what does my tech stack look like and what kind of experiences am I trying to cover or solve for by each layer in my tech stack? This might not necessarily be a way that a people organization or an HR organization typically would have looked at the world, but I do think thinking of that tech stack and what you're trying to solve for in that context is absolutely key. So you know, how do you build culture, how do you build and sustain the tech stack, and then I think the third big thing is leadership. I come back to that again and again: leadership being the killer app. How do I ensure that I get good leadership—I'm not even saying amazing leadership, but good leadership—in place? How do I support my frontline leaders in their decision-making, help them get the right frames to both lead the people and make decisions at speed and at scale very often? And how do I ensure that the principles of good leadership permeate through the entire enterprise organization? So those would be kind of the three topics I'd have top of mind next to whatever else, as every CPO will tell you, all the fires that are burning that need to be taken care of at any given moment in time.

Well, I think it starts at the top, right? And I think the question to ask is—because very often when it comes to purpose, there is a lot of talk, right? People try to also look at purpose from an ESG angle or from an HR angle. But purpose is really driven by what is fundamentally the problem that we as a company are trying to solve for, what customer, what stakeholder. And especially in companies which might have seen a lot of growth very quickly, or in companies that are very large and very diverse, the organization, but especially the leadership, might have just lost sight of what is fundamentally the problem that we are trying to solve for customers. And that problem statement, in my view, needs to inform what the purpose is, because you want to attract people to your organization who want to solve that problem, who want to make the life easier, better, more fun for your customers every day. So actually figuring that out, for me, is at the core of defining the purpose and the culture, and everything else is like the onion around it.

Way too little. I think it is often delegated to somebody in IT. But actually having somebody who looks at the entire employee experience and says, look, these are kind of the parameters we need for our tech stack along the employee experience, these are kind of the layers and the topics we need to be trying to solve for—that doesn't necessarily mean prescribing the exact technology, but also ensuring that you don't have too much overlap. You always have a bit of overlap between certain applications, but you try to minimize it. It's clear for people that if I want to pulse my team, this is how I'm going to do that, and if I want to be messaging with the team, then I'm going to be using this application or this type of application. And you get that clarity and you have somebody who can orchestrate all of that. That makes a lot of sense. Because what you can often see is that employees—and this is not necessarily just large organizations, it happens very quickly also in pretty small startup environments of maybe five or ten employees—that you add up all these applications and then people are using the stuff in parallel. So you're messaging in Slack but that should actually be done over email, and then we have some kind of project management tool—Asana, Trello, I don't know what—and now what goes in there? So getting a bit of an organizing principle around this makes a lot of sense, and having somebody orchestrate that even more so.

Yeah, and I don't think there's a clear answer to that, right? I think you're going to have to have both. You're going to have to have the experimentation, you're going to have to have somebody defining certain parameters. I think what you don't want is to centrally prescribe it needs to be this application. I think that's where you run into a problem. But if you just have applications being plugged into your environment without any kind of framework or any kind of parameter set, then you're also not going to be able to even measure what success means. Is this an effective application or not? Is this an application where we can say the experiment was successful or not? So you need those parameters. You need to be able to have a landscape where you say this actually serves to solve for this problem.

Yeah, and I think there's a book which was recently published which casts a bit of a more critical eye on the Jack Welch era. So probably there's a bit of a question mark of how sustainably successful even that leadership style was at that time. The way I would frame it is I think good leadership needs to cover probably five things. One is coaching—coaching your team, coaching the individuals in your team—and that neatly segues into collaboration. So coaching is around the individual, the collaboration is how do the individuals work together effectively at a very technical level, where asynchronous work makes sense, where it should be actually working together at the same time, but also what kind of modes of collaboration do you want to use. That segues nicely into culture—defining what kind of culture, what kind of values do you want to have within the organization. And that links closely to community rather than thinking of what are the relevant stakeholders, how do we actually integrate with stakeholders. And most importantly—and that comes back to the point we were discussing earlier on when talking about purpose—how do you actually put the customer at the center? How do you ensure that you relentlessly, as Amazon puts it, are thinking about the customer? So for me, good leadership centers around those five key topics and five Cs if you want. When it comes to empathy, to deliver on any of these five topics you require empathy. You need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the person that you are speaking to or the person who you are listening to. I think Adam Grant put it even better—it's more than empathy, it's compassion. So it's not just putting yourself into the shoes of the counterpart, and that might be the customer, it might be your colleague, but it is also trying to actually help them solve that issue. So I think this, for me, is kind of the essence of good leadership. And it is not something which is some newfangled thing which is relevant just now—it probably has been relevant throughout the ages. And if you want to have sustainable success, then those are five or six elements which are absolutely critical in every situation.

Yeah, absolutely. So LinkedIn, super simple, right? And you'll find me on LinkedIn. Who? On the one hand, founders in the work tech space who really want to make the difference in shaping the future of work and who want to have the dialogue or maybe also get in touch with other resources besides me. And people, business leaders, I would say—could be CEOs, could be CPOs—who are really thinking about the future of work and who believe that solving for the big skills gap, thinking through what the workforce should look like and how people in the organization should be interacting with each other—that this is critical to business success. Yes, those people—I think I might be a good sparring partner, might be somebody they might want to speak to.

So I'll break the rule, Johnny, and have two pieces of advice. So I think the first thing is—and this is very much in line with what we were speaking of today, and this is something I learned from one of my previous bosses—was to pick something that I want to learn every day. And that has really helped me. This might be something really small, just a piece of information, a bit of knowledge, or it could be an actual skill. But having that piece of learning every day, I think, gives you so much joy. And it is something which I've seen my children do so naturally, and for some reason we as adults sometimes lose that over the years. So going back to that curiosity and really wanting to learn something every day—that would be my first piece of advice. And the second piece of advice is: choose the right football club to follow. Because unfortunately, you get to choose that very early in your life and then you're stuck with whatever you've chosen for the rest of your life.

Oh, you got to tell me.

Cheers, Johnny. Take care.