Breaking HR Silos: Technology Won’t Save You, but It Can Empower You – Jess Von Bank

[00:00:00] Nena Dimovska: Today, we’re thrilled to have Jess Von Bank, a true rebel and unconventional leader in HR transformation, digital experience, and workforce technology. With over 20 years of experience, Jess now serves as Global Leader for HR Transformation and Tech Advisor at Mercer. A mother of three, she’s not just reshaping the workplace, but paving the way for a better world for the next generation.

[00:00:27] Nena Dimovska: Today’s conversation will explore her refreshingly unconventional insights on talent strategy, DEI, and building a digital first culture. Welcome, Jess.

[00:00:38] Jess Von Bank: Thank you so much for having me. I love that intro.

[00:00:43] Nena Dimovska: Thank you. Now, Jess, given your extensive experience with enterprises, could you share your perspective on the state of talent management today? Where would you place most enterprises on the journey toward adopting tech based and data driven practices?

[00:01:01] Jess Von Bank: Well, that’s a great question to start. And you said the state of talent management. I’d love to talk about the state of talent. And I love your intro because you said a true rebel, which is kind of funny that I find myself in the space of HR. When I introduced myself, I say I’ve been in talent my entire career, which is 23 years in the industry now. And I started in talent acquisition. And even when I started in talent acquisition, I kept saying, drop the A, drop the A. Like it’s, we do talent development, talent management, talent acquisition. We have all of these disciplines in the field of talent. And the problem with that type of thinking is that it’s very siloed.

[00:01:46] Jess Von Bank: It’s very north-south. Especially in talent acquisition- you are at the front end of the talent journey into the enterprise. And then there was this awkward, like relay handoff of the baton to somebody inside the business who was supposed to continue that employee experience and all of their development and nurturing.

[00:02:10] Jess Von Bank: And the reason I always said drop everything that comes after talent, because it’s all talent. And if you’re able to think more east-west and really pull the thread of the talent journey, the employee experience, what you learn and understand about people when you’re attracting and nurturing them into the organization, and then, as you continue on their journey. That alone would be a great start to how we think about talent, which is one person with one seamless and connected experience and journey throughout your entire organization. Unfortunately, the way we’ve set up the discipline of human resources and all of the, you know, sort of multidisciplinary, all of the sub functions under that. We have very disconnected and siloed approaches to how we support and enable people throughout their journey. And people can feel that, unfortunately. We feel that disconnect when we’re hired, for example, and we’re made all of these promises up front about culture and DEI promises around inclusion and a sense of belonging. Perhaps even the way we’ll be developed and grown in the organization. And when we’re handed off into the business, if that doesn’t feel like the same thing we were expecting, that feels rather friction full and jarring and honestly, sometimes like an unkept promise. So in terms of, to answer your question, how are we progressing in 23 years in this space, which I consider the whole people space, everything we do for people in our organizations. We’re making progress, but we’re still at this tipping point where we really, really have to learn to break things in a healthy way, break things for good and create more seamless, connected, frictionless experiences for people for their own good, but also for business benefit. We’re leaving so much transformation on the table.

[00:04:18] Jess Von Bank: You know, your

[00:04:20] Nena Dimovska: perspective on emphasizing talent and as you said, disabled or disconnected talent strategy just captures that gap so well. And it just strikes me that so many companies today often know what they want, but just struggle with the why and how and what you’ve shared – I think that it just highlights the importance on, you know, starting with purpose and then aligning talent management to broader business goals.

[00:04:47] Nena Dimovska: Now, just as technology transforms the way we work, some argue that many HR processes still need a fundamental rethink. Which do you think require the most urgent reevaluation?

[00:05:02] Jess Von Bank: I’m going to respectfully disagree just a tiny bit. I really, really believe that technology does not change the way you work. You change the way you work.

[00:05:12] Jess Von Bank: And that’s a little bit of the trip ups that we keep making when we put technology in place to try to get people to work differently, adopt a piece of software to make them thrive or more effective.

[00:05:27] Jess Von Bank: We expect technology to do the work that we should be doing. And let me explain that just a little bit more. Technology is absolutely critical. Absolutely critical to most of the people processes we put in place. It’s literally the way we keep our promises. If you say you’re going to develop people, it’s really hard to do that in an individualized way at scale. If you say you’re going to appreciate and recognize and reward people, you have to know who they are and you have to know their moments of contribution so you can recognize and reward them. You have to know their learning journey and their career path and interests so that you can keep grooming and developing them along the way.

[00:06:09] Jess Von Bank: It’s really hard to do all of those things at scale without the support of technology. And you definitely can’t measure the impact. Is it working? Is it producing impact? We want Is it making a difference on the business? But unfortunately, we over rely on the technology to be this like magical thing that just does it on itself.

[00:06:29] Jess Von Bank: Even the best technology in the world is not going to transform your business alone. We forget to execute change alongside the technology. And actually explain to people how we want them to work, how we want the business to operate more effectively. We forget to explain like how we think about people. Do we encourage internal mobility in our organization? Do we want people to move around to different gigs and assignments? That’s a belief system that you have to, you know, that leadership needs to embrace and everybody needs to exhibit in everyday behaviors. You can put a technology in place that supports mobility.

[00:07:13] Jess Von Bank: But unless you actually believe and act that way and incentivize that kind of behavior, make leadership accountable to that kind of behavior like you’ve got to do that cultural work first. And really have a belief system around that and market that and support it and promote it. And then the technology can be successful in managing that at scale for you and measuring the impact of that. And so that’s why I explain and sort of, respectfully disagree. Like, don’t expect and don’t try to let the technology change the way you work. You’re going to fail. And then you’re going to point to the technology and say, it didn’t work. When in fact you didn’t do the work that was required for it to be successful.

[00:07:57] Nena Dimovska: That’s such a key point. So, technology doesn’t do the work that we should be doing, but it’s yet critical to keep our promises, as you say. And I couldn’t agree more. You know what you’re suggesting is an invitation to move beyond the existing belief system and build new belief systems to embrace what’s necessary for our people.

[00:08:20] Nena Dimovska: And I really love how this challenges HR to be braver and bolder in, you know, how we manage work. So with the, let’s say growing attention on skills nowadays, what would you say are the most effective ways to better prepare for maximum impact? How can companies strike the balance between upskilling their existing talent, acquiring new talent and incorporating these AI agents in our talent management strategy?

[00:08:52] Jess Von Bank: Yeah. So skills is an interesting, you know, again, having worked in this industry for 23 years, it’s really interesting to me to see this migration towards skills, but it makes sense. I can see why we are because we’ve been struggling, I think, to achieve agility. We’re not very nimble. So let’s think about it this way.

[00:09:15] Jess Von Bank: If the business were to look at the CHRO, just like they look at a CFO and they say, I need the following things out of our business. I need us to be agile, nimble, lean, operationally lean. I need us to be profitable. Like that’s a mandate. If I were to look at my CHRO, I would say, build me the workforce that is effective and nimble and right place, right time, today. But also think ahead. This is where the business is going. This is the skill set, how I need talent to move in the business, how I need to deploy and activate people to the right work at the right time. That’s a mandate. Just like they would look, you know, just like a CEO would look at any officer in their organization and say, this is what we need for the asset that you manage, whether it’s the, you know, the capital of the business, which is also the human capital of the business. And this is how we need it to operate for us. To be effective and profitable for us to be innovative and for us to grow and scale over time. So the CHRO for some time now has had difficulty fulfilling that mandate. The talent model we have in place is not sustainable. It’s very rigid. We fill single requisitions.

[00:10:35] Jess Von Bank: With single head count with complete blinders on. We don’t understand where else in the business they might be better suited or how they might be redeployed. We do, but from a from a data and mobility standpoint, we don’t have these systems in place. We are not able to think far enough ahead because we’re too busy firefighting and reacting to sort of the needs of the moment and backfilling different parts of the business and that kind of thing.

[00:11:02] Jess Von Bank: So we’re sort of stuck in this reactive state, very tactical, very one requisition, one head count at a time. And we don’t leave ourselves enough time to think ahead for the business and say, this is how we need talent to look and feel and operate and move around within the business. We need the mechanisms in place to be able to redeploy them at a moment’s notice. We just don’t have that structure in place. There’s very little agility and very little of our our talent decisions are based on true intelligence about what the business needs and what people need and want. And so that’s a long way of saying skills make sense. From that standpoint. It feels a little bit like putting oil in an engine that desperately needs oil.

[00:11:52] Jess Von Bank: Like the wheel, you know, all of the pieces of the engine are getting a little, they’re kind of grinding to a halt in the way we’ve been doing things so far. So it’s a little bit like getting blood to flow, getting the, you know, the circulatory system sort of moving. It creates a lot of agility, a lot of flexibility when we break work down into… instead of like rigid, you know, sort of requisitions with very specific job descriptions and requirements and that kind of thing. When we sort of break that down into the tasks that need to be performed and the types of skills that are required to be successful at completing those tasks. We’re sort of breaking down rigid units of things, which is people in jobs, into more flexible skills and tasks and all of the ways work can get done and all of the skills that could be built to get that work accomplished. So I think it’s the right thing. I think it’s the right approach. We’re all hoping that this is you know, sort of the holy grail to create more productivity, more efficiency, more sort of long term agility and options from a strategic workforce planning perspective. But I’m going to go back to a comment I made earlier. You can’t put a piece of technology in place and say that we’re a skills powered organization overnight. If you’re moving down a skills path, the first thing to understand is how much potentially breaks in a good way. But how much potentially breaks if you literally move sort of the fundamental unit on which you build everything to do with talent. If you’re sort of changing the Lego blocks that you’re building with, then you have to make a lot of decisions. Are we hiring for skills? That changes a bunch of things. Are we creating career development and learning pathways? Based on previously acquired skills, future potential necessary skills for the business that changes those strategies. Are we going to manage performance? Performance evaluations and coaching, you know, sort of opportunities based on skills that changes a lot of things you’re already doing. And then do you pay for skills? Do you actually reward people differently based on their ability to accrue skills and use skills for work?

[00:14:24] Jess Von Bank: And what does that look like? How do you determine somebody is successful at skill attainment and skill utilization? Compared to completing a bunch of requirements and a job description or a task list so you can see how the thinking changes when you move to skills and sort of a fundamental understanding of people and how they work. So you have to be willing to have those conversations and say, okay, interesting. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Move with this skills model. How much does that break? And in what order should we break and rebuild and reform things to get us to that spot? If you break things in the wrong order, you’re out of business. You know that that won’t feel good to anybody. But if you sequence and prioritize this as a true transformation, I think you can make, you can make good progress.

[00:15:18] Nena Dimovska: Yeah, I mean, you’ve touched on something profound here. So the mindset is about replacing the reactive state. As you say, the rigid state without having time to think ahead of the business with business intelligence, with long term agility, creating this ecosystem with opportunities for managers to reimagine how we create value in our companies.

[00:15:43] Nena Dimovska: But that puts a lot of pressure on the manager. Now, how can we say? How can technology here empower the super manager in every manager to enhance their capabilities to enable them to lead their teams effectively in this necessary digital transformation? What should be a manager’s priority to accelerate progress toward the future of work?

[00:16:11] Jess Von Bank: I honestly think this this, the AI era that we’re in, where everything is, all of our workflows and automation are becoming super rich with data and hyper intelligent. We’re getting predictive analytics we didn’t have before. I just think it’s so, so exciting for so many reasons. And I think managers stand to gain more than almost anybody else, because we’ve put managers in this really awkward position of knowing and understanding the vision of the business. And having some some mandates or some understanding about how they bring people along on that value journey. How do we make people impactful and contributing value aligned to the strategy of the business and the direction we’re going? That’s sort of a constant state, you know, right of, of like nurturing. It’s almost like planting a garden and nurturing it and trying to harvest value out of assets that require grooming and care and tending and all of these things. And we’ve put them in, in this terrible state of constantly needing to read the minds of, you know, business leaders and where are we going and what are we doing and how do we keep people aligned and then having almost no real time data and insights about what’s actually happening in the workforce. It’s incredibly difficult still today. Still today. It’s incredibly difficult for most managers to get an accurate in the moment headcount report. For one part of the business on to know how many of them are FTEs and how many of them like we just haven’t had a great handle on our data and data is like you have, you’re dead in the water without data, especially if it’s not actionable.

[00:18:03] Jess Von Bank: If it’s not real time. Accurate enough to support decisions. If we’re not able to see whether or not that decision produced the right outcome. This is like, it’s like having a real time, like think about driving your car. How would it feel driving your car if you had no dashboard of gauges telling you how fast you’re going, RPMs, does your engine need oil?

[00:18:27] Jess Von Bank: Are you low on gas? Like, how is it all performing? If we have no real time data, but we’re driving this workforce down the road… Like why have we done this to managers? And so when I think about the way technology is evolving, especially the support of AI and automation, real time kind of analytics and understanding of how the business is operating, how people are operating. We’ve put managers in a true superpower position to say: I can finally see what’s going on, what’s not happening, where the gaps are, what people need.

[00:19:04] Jess Von Bank: I know how to fill those gaps. I can report to my business leaders what’s actually happening with some level of insight and accuracy. I think it’s really cool and really exciting. I think we’ve been playing too many guessing games until now. And that puts us in a constant laggard position.

[00:19:23] Jess Von Bank: Now we can lead instead of being laggards. Yeah, spot on.

[00:19:27] Nena Dimovska: I mean, as you said, it’s so very exciting. These agentic AI or manager agents, they can really empower managers to become super managers by, you know, providing, like you said, objective, real time data in the flow of work. My bet is that such tools will enable managers to also personalize their approach to create psychological safety and, you know, drive performance through trust and inclusivity.

[00:19:56] Nena Dimovska: So the priority here is to use technology to deliver on this actionable insights to, you know, just, and also reminds me that leadership today isn’t just about having all the answers, but also, you know, asking the right questions to create this space for psychological safety, where, you know, people can grow.

[00:20:19] Nena Dimovska: And while we’re around this area, people nowadays prefer to work on their own terms while feeling connected to purpose and each other. So what advice do you have for managers balancing both people’s needs in a performance upsets market? So what are some of the key elements of flexibility and belonging needed to support a high performance culture?

[00:20:45] Jess Von Bank: Yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting. I think that the nature of employment is, is shifting in some pretty interesting ways and it’s how we view our relationship with, with one another from an employer perspective and from the perspective of the employed. Um, most people who work need to work. It’s our means to an end.

[00:21:09] Jess Von Bank: We need to make a living, pay bills. So there’s sort of the necessary aspect of work, but it’s also not a bad thing. It’s how we create fulfillment and a sense of purpose, how we create impact and feel like we’re contributing to something bigger than ourselves. So there’s, you know, we need to work, but also we want to work and we want it to feel good.

[00:21:31] Jess Von Bank: And we want to feel a sense of connection and purpose and all of those things. How we view the employment relationship has been shifting from this place of employers calling all the shots. And knowing it, and acting like it. To people saying, wait a minute, I think that I can be more productive.

[00:21:52] Jess Von Bank: I can be happier. It’s not just I can be happier. I deserve to be happier. Work doesn’t need to feel anything but good. What does good feel like? It feels flexible. It feels like I’m working on my terms. It feels like it shouldn’t be so stressful for me to sit down and understand how to contribute value for me to get good positive feedback, knowing that I’m doing the right work that the business needs. And so even just feeling like we have a voice in that conversation is a shift. I mean, that’s a huge generational shift that I don’t think we, you know, we give enough credit to. So it feels less transactional and more relational. We both have skin in the game. Everybody can win. Everybody can win. I can love what I do. Contribute value. Have positive impact. Work like an adult. Which means work on my own terms. That might mean some flexibility. That might mean hybrid work. Who knows? Lots of organizations are experimenting to see what works for everybody. But I think the most important thing is business doesn’t lose when they let people win. It can be incredibly… it should be if you’re doing it right. Incredibly profitable for everybody when you create happy employees. Who create and support happy customer experiences who are creative and innovative, they’re invested in the growth and the future of the business. Because they like being here and they like supporting that. So if you can really find that balance of letting people thrive, asking people what it would take to make them both happy and effective and really create that culture and that experience for people. I promise your customers are going to win. I promise they’re going to drive innovation. They’re going to come up with new customer ideas. They’re going to support the growth of the business. A profitable business. Like I promise all of these things will be true. We don’t have to grow the business at the sake of people. We can grow the business for and with people. That’s a different way of thinking. We’ve always designed work for profit. We’ve never designed work for people. I think if we do it the other way around, the profit will not only be there, it will increase.

[00:24:16] Nena Dimovska: That’s a very nuanced perspective. And it’s a very interesting one.

[00:24:21] Nena Dimovska: It’s also a business imperative for creating a more equitable and thriving future for everyone. So thank you, Jess. Thank you so much for sharing your valuable insights and inspiring us all to take actionable steps. Thank you

[00:24:39] Jess Von Bank: so much for having me. This was so much fun.

[00:24:41] Nena Dimovska: Yeah, likewise. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in, subscribe for more insights and we’ll see you in the next episode.