Thinking Inside the Box
A show where we discuss innovative ways organizations, and their leaders overcome complex issues at work
Thinking Inside the Box
How Labor Economics Inform Talent Strategy - Katy George
In today’s episode, I chat with Katy George, McKinsey’s chief people officer and a leader in the firm’s Operations Practice. In her role, Katy is responsible for McKinsey’s global people functions, including professional development and learning, recruiting, human resources, performance evaluation, and people analytics. She is also a member of the Shareholders Council, the firm’s equivalent of the board of directors, and their 15-person global leadership team.
In recent years, Katy has focused on advanced technology development, adoption and the workforce development necessary to capitalize on innovation. And that was the starting point for a wide-ranging discussion that covered, among other topics, labor economics, global workforce demographics, and the shift to skills.
As organizations and their leaders reevaluate talent strategies that got them this far, Katy’s unique vantage point advances a discussion that puts the employee at the centre and delivers outpaced growth for those who deploy it.
This was another bucket-list conversation and I hope you enjoy as much as I did recording it.
Katy George
Since joining the firm, Katy has partnered with clients on their transformations, including operational performance improvement, operations strategy linked to business strategy, and operating model design.
She has led programs around product launch, manufacturing network configuration and plant performance, end-to-end sourcing and supply chain optimization, and quality system effectiveness. Katy has also worked with companies on digitizing their sales and marketing approaches, as well as their operations, making technology platform decisions, and transforming organization structures.
In recent years, Katy has focused on advanced technology development and adoption, and the workforce development required to capture the value from these new technologies. She coleads McKinsey’s partnership with MxD, a 250-member consortium of leading government academic and corporate organizations. Her industry experience includes work in the pharmaceutical, medical-device, consumer-goods, and aerospace industries. All her work includes a focus on capability building to support sustained performance improvement.
Prior to joining McKinsey, Katy worked as an associate analyst at an economic consulting firm. Her doctoral work focused on production system design and supply chain improvements in assembly industries. Katy works actively with Episcopal Relief & Development, an international relief and development agency.
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Matt Burns
Matt Burns is an award-winning executive, social entrepreneur and speaker. He believes in the power of community, simplicity & technology.
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Katy George: How do we codify our best practices around the rituals that teams use to quickly form and perform well? Uh, and so we call that the way we work. It's a set of rituals and we have, um, paired that with our People analytics team, uh, which is fantastic. And they, uh, are really measuring what is the impact of following these rituals so that we can do continuous learning and improvement on the rituals, um, but also that we can actually identify teams where we need to make an intervention to help them get better.
Matt Burns: Constraint Strive Innovation hey everyone, it's Matt, here for another episode of Thinking Inside the Box, a show where we discuss the innovative ways organizations and their leaders overcome complex issues at work. If you're interested in checking out our other content, you can find us, uh, at our shiny new website insidetheboxpodcast.com and on all your favorite podcast platforms by searching Thinking Inside the Box. And if you enjoy the work we're doing here, consider leaving us a, uh, five star rating, a comment and subscribing. It ensures you get updated whenever we release new content and really helps amplify our message. In today's episode, I chat with Katie George, McKinsey's Chief People Officer and a leader in the firm's operations practice. In her role, Katie is responsible for McKinsey's Global people functions, and that includes professional development and learning recruitment, human resources, performance evaluation, and people analytics. She's also a member of the Shareholders Council, the firm's equivalent of a uh, board of directors and their 15 person global leadership team. In recent years, Katie's focus has been on advanced technology development and adoption and the workforce development required to capture the value of the innovations themselves. And this was the starting point for a wide ranging conversation that covered everything from labor economics to global workforce demographics and the broader shift to skills as organizations and their leaders reevaluate talent strategies that got them this far. Katie's unique vantage point advances a discussion that puts the employee at the center of decision making and delivers outpaced growth for those who deploy it. It was another one of those bucket list conversations and I hope you enjoyed as much as I did recording it. And now I bring you Katie George. Katie, how are you doing today?
Katy George: Hi, good to see you. I'm m fine, thanks.
Matt Burns: I love that we're coordinated. This is obviously a good start to any conversation. A good omen for a fun chat. Uh, for those who don't know Katie George, a bit about your background, your experiences, and what's led you to today.
Katy George: Uh, so I currently serve as McKinsey and company's chief people officer. Uh, I uh, have been at McKinsey 27 years, um, and most of that was as a client service professional. So, um, I did a lot of work in operations and manufacturing. Um, but I always had a uh, real focus on people and in fact, my educational background is I'm actually a PhD in business economics with a focus on labor economics and work system design, um, in manufacturing context. That's the work that I did in my PhD. And so I've done lots of work with our clients, um, around how do you really engage, um, frontline workforces to make a real difference in productivity and flexibility and quality, et cetera. And along the way, uh, at McKinsey, I did a lot of, um, internal leadership roles, where I always focused on people. So, um, I was the office, um, manager of our Mid Atlantic office, where we did a lot of really cool things around, uh, colleague experience, and the link between creating really great engaged teams, um, and, um, really engaging, uh, and creating great experiences for our clients. I led our global operations practice, which, uh, includes manufacturing and supply chain, and all the stuff that I care about. And we did a lot of work around upskilling our own colleagues, um, to really introduce digital tools and digital expertise into the core of what we do with our clients, which is so critical. Um, and I think a common theme across every function and industry, and certainly in consulting, in terms of how you bring traditional functional expertise together with digital and AI and analytics. And so, two years ago, I was asked to rotate really kind of out of my client service role, for the most part, and, uh, lead our people function. So I now lead talent, uh, attraction and learning, and HR, and our professional development teams, and really working on how we continue to evolve and modernize our, uh, talent strategies, and how to really bring together all the great capabilities that we have in our people functions.
Matt Burns: It's a fascinating background, and I love that it's cross functional. Increasingly, we're seeing HR leaders who have backgrounds outside of the function, whether it's operations, marketing, finance, It, and we're certainly seeing more HR leaders jump into those portfolios, as well as we try and give leaders that breadth of experience I can imagine in your role, also, there's a lot of pressure. I mean, McKinsey is definitely one of those organizations people look to for guidance and insights and best practices. So to develop those programs internally, I think about the Cobbler's Children analogy, where you have to be able to support, obviously, your own team as they support your customers. I'm curious, with your operational background, with your labor economics background, how do you go about aligning your people operations strategy with your business strategy, and in particular, perhaps in a digital context?
Katy George: Well, this is something that we've been giving a lot of thought to. Um, we have a wonderful heritage, honestly, that I feel that I need to protect. Um, my team feels the need to protect around the way that we care for people, the way we develop people. People come to McKinsey because it's one of the best development, kind of one of the fastest high pressure yes, but also fastest development opportunities. We've always been proud of creating a lot of leaders who go on to lead lots of interesting organizations, uh, companies and nonprofits, et cetera, in the world. But we also have seen a real shift in terms of what our clients expect of us and, frankly, how we need to use technology and what we do. Um, and so there have been real changes in our business strategy in terms of our client service strategy is what we would describe it as. One shift is moving from being really great insight partners, we're the smart people, and we develop you a blue book, and then you go have to figure out whether it works or not, um, to being impact partners. And so we've invested over the last 15 years, et cetera, in really building out our transformation capabilities, our organizational change capabilities, certainly our, um, digital capabilities, to really help clients make fundamental and holistic changes, um, in the way they operate, to really take advantage of the great insights that we, with our clients, develop. And so that's meant that we need to change our talent strategy quite a bit as well. And we have, over the last 1520 years, hired many more functional experts, people from industry, lots and lots of technologists. We are, I think, the largest design firm in the world in terms of the designers we have, and all of that at the same time, continuing to bring in wonderful colleagues, um, straight out of college and out of MBA programs, people with law degrees, medical degrees, et cetera. So I think we have never had a more diverse kind of set of colleagues with different experiences, different backgrounds, different expertise. And frankly, we want to lean even more into that and become even more diverse, because that is what is the magic in terms of bringing those disciplines and backgrounds together, uh, for our clients.
Matt Burns: Well, and it's predicated on the assumption that you're able to aggregate those insights, because obviously, speaking with a diverse cohort of people, whether that's geographically diverse, whether that's functionally diverse, experientially diverse. You're right. We get better outcomes and better answers when we leverage that collective, as it were. And with your operational background, I think I'm always sure that you're suspending that, along with how do I operationalize this? How do I bring this to some form of consistency, repeatability application? I'd be remiss. I mean, we both have a data background. Your background is in labor economics. I'd love to answer this question of you, which is, we talk about the evolution of workforce demographics. Um, and studies show today that in North America and Western Europe in particular, more people leave the workforce every single day than enter it, demographically speaking. And we've seen a boom in the young workforce across jurisdictions. We've seen increased geographic migration. We've seen a push for greater diversity and inclusion work, life balance, hybrid work, remote work. I'm just curious about your thoughts on the changing demographics. So, whether that's through your lens or the McKinsey lens, how does that demographic shift and your move to digitization influence your talent strategies at McKinsey?
Katy George: Yeah, well, so you've really put your finger on I think two really important themes that we're leaning into. One is, um, how we continue to diversify our talent sources. So we traditionally, um, if you look back many years, had 500 sources, 500 schools, primarily colleges and MBA programs for the most part, that we recruited from. We're at 1500 today, and we'd like to get to 5000.
Matt Burns: Wow.
Katy George: And so we want to diversify. And we also are looking at people without college degrees. Uh, we're looking at hiring. And we have started hiring a lot more people from business. So we're lucky that we are still a real employer of choice. We have, I think, a million applications a year. Um, but we want, ah, an even more diverse set of sources of talent. So that's, um, one of the things that I'm really focused on, and that, of course, has real implications for how do we organize our recruiting teams to create more breadth, um, and not just more scale within, uh, certain schools. Um, how does it change our assessment approach so that we are not just testing for are you prepared for McKinsey case study interview? Because you're kind of in an environment where everybody's preparing for McKinsey case study interviews. How do we reach that person who's maybe never heard of McKinsey, um, who's a technologist or somebody with a very different background who might not know business language, et cetera. So we're really leaning into changing our assessment approaches. On the flip side, um, to your point, when you do bring in this really diverse talent, how do you, uh, help them work really effectively and very quickly in teams? We've always prided ourselves on really being kind of agile, even before that was a thing. Right. Because we put together consultants in a team that maybe have never met each other and they very quickly hit the ground running with a certain way of working and a certain set of values, et cetera, and are able to deliver value with our clients. But now we're trying to do that with a much more diverse set of colleagues of different backgrounds. Uh, and we're doing it in a hybrid world where some people might be sitting in one of our global technology centers and others might be sitting with our client in the client's office. And how do we do that? So we have been investing in something we call teamwork as a science, which is really codifying the best practices. Um, you will appreciate this, I think of it as our production system, um, our operating system. How do we codify our best practices around the rituals that teams use to quickly form and perform? Um, well, uh, and so we call that the way we work. And it's now a branded thing. And, um, hopefully most people at McKinsey know exactly what it is. And it's a set of rituals. And we have paired that with our People analytics team, uh, which is fantastic. And they, uh, are really measuring what is the impact of following these rituals so that we can do continuous learning and improvement on the rituals, but also that we can actually identify teams where we need to make an intervention to help them get better.
Matt Burns: Love that. And, uh, you're playing that art and science. And to your point, you want to create space for, obviously, diversity and inclusion innovation within teams so that you can meet your clients unique needs. And you want to have some consistency in approach so that you can provide a consistent experience both internally and externally. That's not an easy balance to strike, and I know that that takes a lot of thought and effort from you and your team to be able to execute that.
Katy George: M.
Matt Burns: Hey, everyone, it's Matt here. I hope you're enjoying today's conversation. And before we continue, I want to update you on my latest creative project, this Week at Work. Every Friday at 07:00 a.m Pacific Standard Time. That's 10:00 a.m Eastern and 03:00. P.m GMT. My good friend Chris Rainey of HR Leaders and I discuss the latest trending topics on the minds of executives globally. From organizational culture to technology and the future of work, we cover it all, and we invite some of our favorite colleagues to join us, from Dave Ulrich to Whitney Johnson, um, and executives from iconic brands such as NASA, Krispy Kreme, and WebMD. What can I say? We like to keep things interesting. And if you've been following us for a while, you'll no doubt recognize the fun partnership chris and I have developed over years. Podcasting together. We're not afraid to be real, share our own challenges, and ask the tough questions. Joining? Well, that part's easy. Follow me on LinkedIn, click the bell icon on the top right of my profile, and you'll get notified when we go live. And now back to our discussion. It also speaks to a, uh, growing trend that we see in the workplace, and that's the shift to skills. So, you referenced this earlier. Traditionally, organizations like McKinsey that were in the knowledge economy would look to the traditional post secondary institutions universities, colleges, workplaces. That would be good predictors of success. Now, because of a number of reasons, we've seen the shift to skills. Um, and that could be as a consequence of rapid technological advancement. It could be the necessity to acquire a workforce that's more proficient in certain types of skills going forward. Um, and I'm curious, it offers a chance to be more responsive and versatile to changing workforce conditions. From a labor economist point of view, I'm just curious how you look at that through the lens of McKinsey, through like, how are you thinking about this migration to skills? And how they can support your own internal mandates.
Katy George: Yeah, we, like many other organizations, are absolutely leaning into a skill based, uh, people architecture. And we're rapidly developing, uh, and building on, um, some of the places where we have done really good skill credentialing and have a skill based approach and really expanding that everywhere. That'll be a big change for us. Um, and one I think is quite exciting. Our global managing partner talks about wanting to be distinctive, not necessarily elite. And um, we, in our people function, talk about shifting our recruiting to be focused not on pedigree, but on people's potential. And so I talked before about changing some of the assessment tools and also some of the assessment criteria that we have, um, as part of that. But in order to really make that work, you need to be able to assess people's skills, where they are, where they start, and first of all, really celebrate and help develop the strengths, but also create personalized development programs, which in some sense, we're really great at. Most people develop through McKinsey by being staffed on individual projects. And we look at what are the skills they have, but also what are the skills they're trying to develop in making those matches with, um, different projects. And so we'll get better and better at doing that. And um, we currently have programs where people opt into intensive learning programs, um, that also include apprenticeship and certain types of projects in order to develop their strengths in specific areas. And we're continuing to build those programs and roll them out across the firm. So skill assessment, skill credentialing, uh, and a skill based kind of leadership development model that is the underpinning of our evaluation system. Um, and our system of election of partners and senior partners is something that we are really leaning into.
Matt Burns: That's wonderful. And I think back to Harkening, back to a friend of the show, Ross Sparkman. He's currently the head of Workforce Planning for Nike and has been Head of Workforce Planning at LinkedIn among other organizations. And I think about the adage of build borrow by and we're talking a lot about the building and the borrowing piece. When you're being intentional about creating cross functional opportunities, you're really allowing your workforce to explore those more experiential lenses to be able to your point, yes, create a set of skills, but also to boost engagement. We're, um, entering into an era now where those of us in the millennial generation, the Gen Z generation, we're less motivated by salary and retirement plans. We're much more, uh, motivated by experience and impact. And by doing that, you're creating an environment where even if people are willing to accept less compensation, you're going to give them the opportunity to gain knowledge and to learn and to build this toolbox of skills that they can apply both at McKinsey and if they should choose to move on other places, which is just incredibly invaluable in this period of time. I think about my background in HR and talent management, and we often strive to provide a similar environment. But one thing we came up against a lot, and it may still exist to a degree today, is we would work with managers that were a little bit resistant to provide their teams with opportunities to learn. We call it talent hoarding where we had leaders that may want to wrap their arms around key talent to make sure that they can have some continuity in their business and their teams. Um, for fear of losing them to the broader business or to other organizations, they may be a bit reluctant to provide them with opportunities to learn. Curious about your thoughts of how you manage that nuance and that confusion inside of organizations, um, so that you're able to help people provide those opportunities to learn and grow, which ultimately does drive engagement and know.
Katy George: Some of this is something that, uh, McKinsey's always been, I think, pretty distinctively good at. Right. Our secret sauce is that I'm successful. If I help everybody around me, my team become better and better at what they do, because then I have more followership, I get more leverage, I can do even more. So if you're working on my team and I'm in a manager, if I can actually help you develop really fast to do some of the things I'm doing, I can then go on and start spending my time, uh, acting more like an apprenticing partner. And that's the key to success. That's always been this wonderful kind of alignment of kind of McKinsey's incentives to, uh, actually building other people. I still remember one of my first managers kind of telling me, you know, I come from academics, which is not the same kind of culture. At least it wasn't when I was there. And know, you're now in a place where, uh, when the team succeeds, we all succeed. So it's all about helping the whole team succeed. And so that's really one of the reasons I've always loved being at McKinsey. It's a wonderful kind of nurturing place, but also with performance pressure. It's a place where you're always kind of feeling like you're working a bit at the edge of being very uncomfortable, but with a safety net because your team is all looking out for you. The shift that we're making is really to helping people self author kind of their skill journeys in a way that fits with their personal excitement as a professional. And there's so many different ways to add value as a consultant and as a, uh, professional at McKinsey. So what we're trying to do is, um, really help people see, um, how do they help embark on the learning programs, um, and take advantage of the development opportunities in a way that builds kind of their value proposition, uh, in a way that will help them at McKinsey and beyond. If that's what they choose to do. Uh, and that is, again, really linked to this notion of a skill journey. So what is a self authored skill journey, to your point? I think that is, uh, incredibly important for kind of this next generation, uh, of colleagues coming into McKinsey and also into the workforce. Everywhere else, as you say, people really want to feel like they have impact and some autonomy, and they want to see that they are mastering skills and developing themselves. And that's really important. It's also, though, I think, really helpful for us as an institution and for businesses, in that it creates a much more dynamic workforce. So we as HR professionals, can no longer really keep up with the incredibly rapid evolution of, uh, what jobs are and what skills you need to do them. We don't have time to go into some back room and create a lot of different interesting career paths that are very directive around how you use nai in everything that we do in our firm, or that one of our clients does. A self authored kind of skill based approach allows, uh, our colleagues to rapidly find out what are the interesting things, where are the ways that they want to add value to clients, develop the skills to do that, demonstrate those, and be celebrated for those in a much more dynamic way.
Matt Burns: It's the way of the future, and I'm not surprised to hear that you've made such a strong push into that area. I, uh, think it's also important to point out for those who are listening or watching, that while we're talking about skills that's not just limited to technical skills, and it shouldn't downplay the importance of what we call soft skills. Don't love the term, but it's colloquial. So I'll mention it. I was reading recently the World Economics 2023 Future of Work Job Report, and according to their findings, things like cognitive abilities are highly priced in today's market, which makes sense because now we're in day with information. So the ability to synthesize complex data sources, to curate the right information, and then to tell really compelling stories to our constituents never been more important than it is today. And whether that's, again, the analytical and creative thinking, whether it's resilience flexibility and agility. I'm curious how McKinsey is thinking about preparing its workforce for more of that soft skill development, pairing it alongside those experiential opportunities to learn functions, or maybe more technical disciplines.
Katy George: The kind of traditional integrative consultant toolkit. People who build trust with clients, um, who build trust with each other, who are able to connect dots, um, who understand organizational dynamics um, who bring that understanding of organizational dynamics to, uh, their problem solving around how to have real client impact and not just have good ideas, but actually have ideas that would be implementable, how to build skills and coach, uh, client organizations, how to help, uh, a CEO shape an agenda that would be high impact. These are the skills that have been kind of the traditional McKinsey skill set. And as we have added into this skill set all of the kind of functional and technology skills that are also now important, we also are recommitting to making sure that we're really helping our colleagues, uh, really build those as well. So, just as we are figuring out the skill taxonomy and skill accreditation for how to really celebrate someone who is a fantastic data scientist, we are doing the same for how to really break down what are the skills involved and how do we teach them and celebrate them for somebody who is a fantastic client counselor?
Matt Burns: Yeah. And you need to have, again, that blend of art and science to be truly effective in today's environment. I was doing research for the show. I had a chance to go through some of your recent LinkedIn posts, and I was struck by one in particular where you discussed the importance of fit for purpose workplace strategies as organizations are considering hybrid solutions. And the reality is, most organizations aren't McKinsey, they're small to medium businesses or different industries. And they may be struggling with the adoption of this type of thinking as they think about where do I start, Katie, in terms of taking that first step into this new world of work? I'm curious about how organizations should think about the challenge around fit for purpose workplace strategies. If they're trying to start that journey today, what does that look like? And then maybe in particular, what role do you see analytics playing in that conversation? Whether it's measuring current state, establishing future state, building, the case for change, et cetera, et cetera.
Katy George: Well, I mentioned before that we're really leaning into the notion of having an operating system called Way. We work really paired with analytics, and we have brought that to bear, and we call it teamwork. As a science, we've really brought that to bear to help our teams understand what are the best models in terms of hybrid. Should you colocate? Is it better to be virtual and have lots of flexibility, or is there some combination of both and what we found? Uh, many organizations are polling their colleagues saying, what is your preference? We see kind of the fight right, between leaders who want people back in the office because they really don't know how to measure productivity any other way. And they sense that being cold located is important for innovation and belonging and workers who want to be more flexible. What we have found and our approach has been, let's actually measure the outcomes and understand what different choices that our teams are making. We have the benefit of having about 4000 teams deployed around the world at any one time. And um, we can ask them, where are you? Are you colocated? Are you virtual? Are you at a client? Are you at an office? How are you thinking about the combination of how your time is being spent. And then we can measure outcomes, we can measure retention of those colleagues. We do a weekly Pulse survey where we ask everybody in our firm, I send an email out every week, how are you? And so I know how people are, and I can correlate that to are they colocated or are they virtual? And what we're finding, uh, and we have weekly team barometers and other ways of kind of measuring impact. Uh, we have client feedback from each of those teams. And what we're finding is that when teams are together about 50% of the time, they actually maximize kind of their achievement around positive, uh, client feedback. So, the customer feedback for us, um, we have, uh, highest, uh, retention rates. Uh, we have, uh, people reporting fun and feeling connected and belonging. And so the team experience scores are the highest. And we also are seeing and we're going to get better at measuring this, but we are also seeing better apprenticeship and skill acquisition. So we also ask our colleagues every year, who are your apprentices? Who are your sponsors, who are your mentors? Um, it's one of the ways we that, uh, hold our partners accountable for really being effective and active in mentoring and supporting other people. But it also gives us a kind of sense of what are the conditions for success in terms of creating great mentorship. And so what we're finding is that colleagues who primarily have worked virtually versus those who are at least a 50% colocated, have the same number of mentors and sponsors. However, the quality of the mentorship and the sponsorship, the quality of the opportunities that have been created for learning, are much better if you hit that 50% colocation mark. So all of these metrics, customer feedback, uh, retention experience, skill acquisition, are all better if you can hit this 50% colocation mark. But then what's really interesting is that if you continue to, uh, increase the amount of colocation, we don't see a continued linear improvement in those outcomes. Uh, and so there's real value in using the other 50% to really give people more flexibility, both to be quiet and concentrated on certain types of work to help manage kind of the demands of one's personal life and to minimize travel, minimize our carbon footprint. So we really are trying to ask each of our teams to make smart decisions about what model will work for them, rather than creating kind of standard one size fits all policies, um, but giving them the kind of information that I just shared to really help them think about, uh, what the right mix is. And what we're finding is this 50% is not at all kind of it's two and a half days a week. It's always Tuesday, Thursday and Friday morning together. It really is each week being planned differently based on what the requirements are. And we have, uh, started. To collect case examples of teams that are really being creative about what are, uh, the micro habits that they're using and how are they planning? And that, I think, is really also the direction of the future. And a lot of us have McKinsey, but also in my clients are talking about this puts a real premium on our frontline managers to be able to really think through now a broader set of levers that they have to drive all great outcomes in their teams. Um, but it means that they have to be trained and really develop some skills and leadership that they might not have had when they just defaulted to a standard way of working. And so this is also part of what we're doing in terms of really trying to build skills in our frontline managers, which we call our engagement managers, our team leaders, and also continuing to really invest in the analytics that give us the data to, um, help people guide, uh, decisions in a way that really drives outcomes.
Matt Burns: Well, I think that latter point is really critical, and I couldn't agree more. We put frontline managers in a really tough spot in 2020. Not by design, of course. Nobody could have predicted the Pandemic. And that being said, many leaders didn't have the experience to be able to manage remote and dispersed teams. Their approach was predicated on the assumption of colocation, and I can hold court and pop by your desk and give you some feedback, and meet you in the hallway for a water cooler conversation, and all those organic, I'll call them, conversations that cumulatively added up to value one thing. I was like a lot of talent professionals during the pandemic. I was very curious to see what other organizations were doing. And I remember looking a lot at Google in 2020. And not that Google is the gold standard, but they certainly do enough things right to have success. And one of them is that they have a very good sense of, like, you, their employee sentiment and productivity and attrition and those elements. And I was really surprised, honestly, that when 2020 kicked off, when they started to look at their workforce, the piece of the workforce, demographically speaking, that struggled the most was new employees, people that were new enroll, or new to the organizations. And I think I had this bias going into this, that people who were younger would be more digitally native, and therefore be more open to asynchronous or digitally enabled or hybrid work. But the actual fact of the matter was that they struggled the most to be productive, to be engaged, because they didn't benefit from, to your earlier point, building those team relationships that are so essential to establish just baseline expectations. Like if I need an answer to an internal question and I don't have a relationship with people, then I may have to either solve for it myself. I may not know who to go to for information. Whereas in an office environment, I can reach over the cubicle and say, hey, Katie, do you know where I can find this? Or who should I go to for that? And those meetings before the meetings, and meetings after the meetings, in the traditional sense, were really critical to build that sense of camaraderie and team connection. So I'm not surprised to hear that the sweet spot is a blend of both, nor am I surprised to hear that to your point, you shift the approach based on the team and based on the use case. And in some cases, you may want to have people together for an entire week. If it's deep brainstorming or strategic planning or team building like those things, you want to have people colocated. And if they're performing asynchronous work, that may be a stronger use case for more dispersion. Which also opens up the opportunity to your earlier point around opening your talent pool. Because now we're no longer bound by the requirement to hire people within 20 miles of an office. We can now bring in the top talent from all around the world where it makes sense. So finding that balance is really critical for HR leaders. And you guys have ceiling done a great job of that.
Katy George: We're working at it. I think we have insights now we're implementing totally. And, uh, sometimes the right model is one week on and one week off, right? They give you much more personal flexibility. It saves the travel that otherwise would be each week. You mentioned something else I wanted to go back to, which is we absolutely have found that the classes that we really need to invest in in terms of apprenticeship are the early joiners. Um, because so much knowledge is passed on by watching how other people work. Um, there is just no substitute for being in a team room and seeing how your manager gets something done or having somebody say, oh, wait, this is taking you longer than it should. Let me show you a shortcut that doesn't happen if everybody's sitting at home. Um, and just joining by zoom for team discussions. And apprenticeship traditionally has been in person and informal and COVID wiped out all of the in person and the informal. Um, and it really, uh, had a big hit on us and on many organizations on apprenticeship. And so that's something else that we are doing is really recommitting to what is two way apprenticeship and how do we ensure that people are purposeful about teaching others how they do things. Learning programs are wonderful. We can do a lot more digital learning programs that are very effective, et cetera, very engaging. Um, but there's really no substitute for on the job apprenticeship. And so that's something that, uh, we and I think a lot of our clients are really trying to recommit to and creating much more awareness around, because it used to just happen naturally when everyone was always together. If you're not always together, you then have to be more purposeful about it.
Matt Burns: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. One topic I want to go back to, we touched on that briefly, but I want to make sure we double click on it. And it's the role that you play, obviously, as McKinsey's Chief People Officer, you're supporting the internal mechanism, you're working with clients, and you also have obviously, a bit of a platform to share what's going on more broadly. You do this in a number of ways. So you're on CNBC's Workforce Economic Council. You've also been actively involved in the Episcopal Relief and Development Organization, as well as the Union Theological Seminary, two organizations committed to, among other things, social justice. So clearly you find purpose in that, and you're trying to leverage your expertise and your knowledge to be able to support those organizations that are doing great work in society. At the same time, I talk to leaders every single day that are increasingly finding themselves overwhelmed. We're in this new world where we're in this transitional period where we have a bit of the old way and a bit of the new way. And leaders of all stripes are trying to figure out how do they find purpose in their work and create space for the activities that fill up their cup, as it were. I'm curious, your thoughts. Why is it important for you to dedicate some of your finite time to causes that matter for you and then for other leaders that are looking to do more of that in the future? How would you recommend that they find time and space in their busy schedules to do exactly the same thing?
Katy George: Wow, that's a big question. Um, look, I just think that we are at this, um, incredibly unique moment. Those of us who have the privilege of working in the people space in that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is real. Gen AI is even bigger. Work is changing really rapidly. COVID and now kind of getting used to remote technologies and the ability to work remotely is changing things. Workforce expectations are changing. And so we have this window to really influence how work happens, which it influences so much about our lives. Our work lives, really, um, are a huge part of what makes us fulfilled as human beings or not. And so those of us who are privileged to be in this space have the opportunity to try to influence it in a way that creates unleashes, um, the most creativity and innovation and happiness, um, that we can. So I feel incredibly purpose driven by that and privileged, um, by that. I do think that you, um, mentioned this before. People also are taking care of the rest of the organization. And we've gone through times that are disruptive and challenging. And some of the reason to be excited about this moment on, um, people are also to try to address inequality in our world and how do we create a more inclusive economy. And that is all about creating more inclusive work. So it's very purposeful driven, but it also can be disappointing or exhausting or whatever. And if when you're taking care of colleagues, um, around the world, it can be challenging, right? What happens in the Ukraine and getting colleagues out of Russia and all of these things are challenging. So you can feel great about it, I guess. I think we all know figuring out how to carve out time to build your own emotional resilience, to get enough sleep to take care of your health, all of those things are just so important. Um, in order to fuel the energy that it takes, I also just get a ton of energy by talking to people like you and others who are in this space. Um, and so I actually have really increased kind of the amount of networking that I'm doing, because talking to other CHROs about what they're doing and why what they're learning, um, is just really energizing. There's so much innovation going on in this space right now, and it's fun to continue to be to energize and kind of fuel up with that and then bring those ideas back into our organization.
Matt Burns: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. And now is the time to build out your network, to share those best practices, because we're all, in a way, doing this together, and we're all figuring out the best roadmap for ourselves and our own organizations to that point. I'm just curious, for the interest of listeners that want to reach out to you, Katie, what's the best place to find more reach out, connect?
Katy George: Um, well, so, of course, McKinsey publishes a ton on Future, uh, of work. And so, um, if you go to Mckinsey.com and, uh, look at our people and organizational practices part of the website, you'll find lots and lots of articles, some written by me, some by our other colleagues around future of work. So that's certainly one space to go to, uh, to get more information about the things that I'm learning and working on.
Matt Burns: That's great. Thanks so much for your time today.
Katy George: Oh, you're very welcome.
Matt Burns: Thank you for having mer is a digital transformation consultancy working at the intersection of strategy, technology, and people operations. We partner with organizations, private equity and venture capital firms to accelerate value creation and identify the organization's highest leverage initiatives. And this can take place in many forms, from strategic planning and alignment to technology procurement, implementation, and integration, along with organizational design, process reengineering, and change management. With our proven track record of working with complex, high growth organizations, we provide a lens that goes beyond the balance sheet, increasing enterprise readiness, resilience, and value. For more information, check us out@bentohr.com.