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Work For Humans
Transform Your Team: Redesigning Work for Clarity and Value | Stephanie Reuss & Victoria Stuart
01:06:20
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- [00:04]
Stephanie Roos
We call our bubble chart a prioritisation matrix, and it's the bubbles of work that are both critical for an organization's goals and energizing for people where we need our human workforce to be focused. And the simplest way to find efficiency opportunities and how to motivate your workforce is by finding that bottom left quadrant of bubbles of work that are neither important nor energ and then stopping, reducing, reallocating, automating or outsourcing that work.
- [00:37]
Victoria Stewart
When we can identify work that is important across all functions and all areas of the business, then it's pretty easy to then start to understand, well, what proportion of our workforce or the work that we do is high value.
- [00:55]
Dart Lindsley
Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Here at Work for Humans. We can get pretty theoretical, but today's show is practical. If you're a longtime listener, you probably have heard me talk about using what we call the bubble chart to optimize the balance between company and employee needs. Today's guests, Stephanie Rus and Victoria Stewart, have built a company around that need, and it's given them a ton of of visibility into what works and what doesn't. Steph and Vic are the founders of Beamable. It's a platform that helps organizations get a much clearer view of what their people are actually doing, what energizes them, what slows them down, and what creates real value for the company. In this conversation, we'll talk about how work can be reimagined at the task level, why AI changes the nature of job design, and how visibility into actual work is the first step toward change. We also explore how to align leaders and teams on what matters most and what it means to optimize, not just balance the good for humans and the good for business, as well as the challenges and successes that Steph and Vic face in bringing this way of operating to the companies that they serve. As always, if you enjoy this episode, be sure to subscribe. And now, here's my conversation with Stephanie Roos and Victoria Stewart. Stephanie Roos, Victoria Stewart, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:31]
Stephanie Roos
Thanks daa.
- [02:32]
Victoria Stewart
Thanks for having us.
- [02:34]
Dart Lindsley
So Steph and Vic, you have both been building a practice around helping companies to optimize the good for the employees and the good for the business. Here's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about how you arrived at it, the philosophy behind it, how is it implementing it, who wants it. We're going to go through all of those things, the challenges, the wins. Because I think you're really on the front lines of something that's very important. So let's start with the background which is how did you arrive at recognizing the need to optimize those two things?
- [03:06]
Stephanie Roos
That's a great question. And we're learning every day more and more about it. But how we came to that a little bit of background. So Vic and I have been great mates since uni and we've traveled the world together. We've been housemates in London, but it was when we were working in Sydney in separate companies in leadership roles and Vic is an alum of yours from Google at the time in a leadership role there and I was running the Australia New Zealand Business for Corporate Executive Board that you might remember now Gartner. And of course in running these really high growth businesses we came across daily challenges in growing the business and managing teams and retaining those teams and being really invested in the success of both the business and personally for the people that were under our care. And so on the commute every morning I remember we used to chat on the phone and we'd try and work through these problems. And it was just very obvious to both of us that the way that we thought about getting work done was stale, was rigid and stagnant and built for an industrial age model where we had factory workers and it was very predictable and clocking in and clocking out and the jobs were just very well understood and very homogenous. But in the world that we were working in and trying to grow by multiples in terms of a business, it just didn't work anymore. Didn't give you enough flexibility for thinking about how the work is done. So even though we didn't come from an HR background, more of a business and a growth background and BIC obviously in engineering and so on, is that why, why are we operating on an FTE model? Why are we looking at boxes on an org chart with job titles that are all the same when each of those individuals is actually doing different work and bring different capabilities and love doing different things and maybe they want to work in a slightly different way and maybe they value flexibility and a lot of the stuff that you talk about, right, People pay their job to do different things. So we just had this moment where we're like, well obviously this isn't going to be the model for the future, so why don't we just try and fix it?
- [05:23]
Dart Lindsley
I actually think it's important that you weren't in HR and were you line managers at the time, like close to your teams or did you have Teams of teams. I think that might be important to why you saw it the way you did.
- [05:38]
Victoria Stewart
We were line managers and close to our teams. Steph had a more senior role, so oversaw teams of teams. But I think when you're working with people, regardless of their level every day, you do see the human aspect of work, but you also see the challenges of all the things that interrupt the expectation of what you're meant to achieve each day and every week and every month of every year that you're aiming to drive and strive towards these organizational goals as well. So I think that perspective is very helpful as a business leader to really understand the pressures that come from both. And I think what we saw was there is a challenge for leaders to be able to really accommodate those two when there's just a real lack of understanding and a huge expectation of the amount of work to be done, but not necessarily always organized in the best possible way as well.
- [06:46]
Dart Lindsley
Yes, I think that that perspective, that perspective of. I know this from research, from having interviewed a lot of managers about their experience of work. And what we learned was that they felt very torn by the demands of the two stakeholders, the demands of their teams and the demands of the company. And essentially they were not given the tools to balance those or optimize those needs. And I also know from having worked in HR and having been the sort of person who rolled out programs that we often rolled out programs that did not help managers to do that or that hindered managers from doing that. And so I think it's a very relevant part of the story that you were line managers or teams of teams at that time.
- [07:31]
Stephanie Roos
And I really feel for managers because they shouldn't be in that position. And the reason is that actually their employees, the people in their teams and the company, they want the same thing, but we don't have visibility into what's going on so that it feels that it's opposed. Right. So the magic, actually the pure magic of what we do, and we're so lucky to have been able to navigate to this, is that there is a huge amount of wasted effort that occurs in teams, in organizations, and that is dragging people back from doing the work that matters. But guess what? The company wants them to do the work that matters, and the people want to do the work that matters. But until we get visibility into what all of that wasted effort is and what that low value, low energizing, or work that isn't even energizing at all, until we understand what that is, we can't remove it. And actually we're at the precipice of something really big right now in the world because of AI, because there's a lot of wasted effort that can be reduced through process simplification and ways of working and many quick wins. About 20% of time we see. But AI is going to be a game changer. And we really believe that if organizations design for the humans that are left, that actually the future is very bright for the joy that people can experience in their job, the energizing work they can do, the lack of that drag for the organizational performance, and for managers who won't have to feel that battle between the two.
- [09:10]
Dart Lindsley
What were your first experiments? What did you first start trying to do? May have been failed experiments, may have been successful experiments, but what did you first try?
- [09:21]
Victoria Stewart
That's a great question. Our first problem that we sought to solve was to help organizations to take a role from full time to part time. Because what we felt, and just what Steph was saying before was jobs are often too rigid and organizations see it very challenging to adapt a role from being a full time role to being a flexible role. And so organizations said, we have a really hard time trying to do this, can you help us trying to do this? And so that's where we started. So we started with understanding the work that a full time role does, then thinking about that in the context of the team, and then thinking about how you reallocate or change the shape of that job to be reduced, but thinking about things like are they working on the most important work, what work could be stopped, reduced, reallocated, and those sorts of aspects that can then start to look at a possibility of reducing time spent in a particular role, but still achieving the outcomes that are required for that particular team as well and that job.
- [10:36]
Dart Lindsley
Were you able from the beginning to start thinking about not just what work was unnecessary, but what work gave energy to the team? A lot of times, especially the first client you get, is the one who says, I don't care what people think or how they feel.
- [10:54]
Stephanie Roos
No. One of the things about running a business, and I know that you'll understand this now, Dart, there's a lot of stress that comes with it, but you get to choose who you work with. And we are so lucky to work with the incredible humans that we do, and you know, what we find is that the people who want to do the type of work we're doing, you know, human centered work optimization and so on, they want to solve for the humans, they want to take that into account because they understand it's going to be the humans that set us apart. It's going to be the people that are left behind in our organizations that help us to compete. So when they're thinking about how do we redesign jobs for part time or to be more productive or to accommodate technology or parts of jobs moving around, then they're trying to think about how do we design for these people. So we consider things like what work is energizing, maybe what work is career building as well, what requires human effort from a strategic perspective. So we might be able to automate customer interactions, but do we want to for our business purposes, things like that. So we really need to think about work in a multi dimensional way. And I think that's what was wrong with the old model of work. We're thinking about boxes on an org chart. We've got a human its name and a cost and a job title. How many of those do we need? Pump it out. If we don't look sideways at our organization and look at what is the work being done, what's the high value work, what's the energizing work, where's the intersection of that? Where's the low value work? What could we offset through AI that reduces the work that's prone to human error? Things like this, then how can we ever design for a better workforce?
- [12:41]
Dart Lindsley
You collect a whole lot of information and then you represent it visually. What information do you collect and who do you collect it from? So to some extent what I'm asking about is what are the dimensions that matter and who tells you, not who tells you what the dimensions are, but who gives you the values for each of those dimensions.
- [13:04]
Victoria Stewart
There are two perspectives that can be brought in here. The first is a leadership perspective on work. So that's what do they think is the most important work for the business? So the work that is aligned to organizational goals, that's critical to business operations. They might be looking at informing where there might be human effort required, what work might be prone to human error as well as part of it. There are all sorts of different aspects that leadership might bring to provide their perspective on the work itself. We also invite employees to feed in on their perspective. And that's often not necessarily aligned with what leadership see that's really interesting in itself. But it's also their perspective on where they see bottlenecks or opportunities for improvement, because that gives them a voice into where it might be best placed to focus the efforts and uncover the most valuable areas for improvement as well. So both of those perspectives are really important when we're really starting to understand the work that happens in an organization. And of course, we do have an ability to understand all the different work that happens. And we use AI to as that starting point based on the size of the organization, the complexity, et cetera, to populate all the different activities that happen within an organization.
- [14:36]
Dart Lindsley
And so that's an important point, which is that you're not looking at whole jobs, you're looking at activities, correct?
- [14:44]
Victoria Stewart
Yeah.
- [14:44]
Dart Lindsley
And you're looking at activities individually and how much they contribute to the objectives of the company.
- [14:52]
Stephanie Roos
Yeah, that's right. We break down the work. What is the work that's being done? What are the big buckets of work that is being done? For instance, for a group of technical engineering managers, they're going to be doing some technical client work, they're going to be doing some people management, they're going to be problem solving at the project level. But then underneath that you've got various tasks. So we can very quickly get a predictive view of what people are doing because we have AI now. But what we want to do is then provide that lens from leaders and that lens from people. And that is very important, critically important for a few reasons. First of all, if you're going to go through any change exercise, we know that 70% of transformations fail. So if you can bring people on the journey and ask your actual employees, can you tell us how we can be better? Then you can go back to them with data points to say, you told us there were bottlenecks here, we're going to be automating that. Secondly, if you don't understand what people value in their jobs and what work they enjoy, what energizes them, there's a very high risk that you'll either outsource or automate work that is keeping your people there. So you could be triggering attrition, which is obviously very costly for organizations. And we had just an example of this the other day when one of our partners, our sort of consulting partners, their client had a view to automating assessment centers within the talent acquisition function, which is very large at this organization. And once they had the work diagnostic through Beamable, they actually discovered that that was the most energizing activity. So fortunately they had that human perspective and they were able to say, well, it's that human interaction, that's what people love. Thank goodness we didn't do that. So from an attrition perspective and from a change management perspective, it's important. But thirdly, the people who do the work know what is required to get the work done. So if you don't ask them about what do you do? Where are the bottlenecks? What could be more efficient? What's the important work? You're still flying blind when you're making decisions about what you want your teams to be doing and how you're going to be successful.
- [17:08]
Dart Lindsley
There's a couple of things in there I want to explore. So, first of all, I was just talking to somebody the other day and he said for the first time, he was bringing people into the company. And they said, oh, you know, our last company, all that stuff was automated by AI. And what they were talking about was the drudgery. It was an interesting. I'd never thought about this before, but the idea that that could become a sales point if you know what stuff really is drudgery and could be automated. So that was a surprise to me. You've got two things going on there, though, in how you're describing the employee perspective of the work. One is bottlenecks and one is what people value. And so here's how I frame that. When I think about that, and I want to see if it's the way you do too. There's the value you get out of your job, which is you want from any product, you want it to do the thing for you that you want it to do, and you want it at a reasonable cost. So some of the cost is stupid. Friction. And so is this the two aspects that you're looking at? You're looking at, what do people really get energy from? And then what is the opposite? Is it always bottlenecks or is it just often bottlenecks?
- [18:17]
Victoria Stewart
It's not always bottlenecks. There can be often there's surprises in terms of people didn't know that work was happening within teams as well. So it's not always just that there are process inefficiencies that people see friction in the work. It might be that it's just not the work that aligns to their passion or whatever it might be. Now, if we look at, for example, the management role, we recently did a study on managers. Very interesting to see that the expectation of the work of a manager is that they're doing a lot of coaching, managing even the expenses, and doing various different aspects of the work of the manager. But also that there's this aspect that they're doing a lot of the work that's more aligned to their technical, professional expertise as well. And in this research piece that we did, we found that managers overwhelmingly really enjoyed the technical aspect of the role that they did but didn't necessarily enjoy, the management and coaching aspect of the role. Now, that's not uncommon in terms of what we've seen across multiple different organizations. But that's just to say that it's not necessarily a friction point. It's just that people aren't necessarily always wired to be what is deemed a manager role. So that then brings up bigger challenge around how do we provide pathways within organizations or what is the role of a manager firstly. But then how do we provide pathways in organizations for those people who are not necessarily seeing coaching as the most energizing aspect of their role, but they're excellent technical leaders? These are the types of different perspectives that can be very interesting but also bring challenges to what does that mean then to solve for that?
- [20:13]
Dart Lindsley
Is there a way we can get both? Is it possible for the people who don't automatically love the management part of management? Is there a way to bring them along?
- [20:25]
Victoria Stewart
Yeah. And it's not that people can't do things that they don't love. It's just that what we know is people will perform better, they'll be more engaged, they will deliver more discretionary effort when they're doing work that they really enjoy. And that's a multiplier effect for an organization, particularly when it's aligned. They're doing work that is what the business needs them to be doing as well. So it might just be that we're really thinking about different Personas as we start to think of the jobs that we're offering to market as well.
- [21:00]
Stephanie Roos
I think that's important because one of the things that we've learned over the last few years is that solving for the human experience doesn't require an individual personalization of a job, which can be very, very hard for large, complex organizations. And the reason for that, and it's just come out through our findings, is that there are significant trends in the type of work that people want to do. And even though they have a personal experience with it, if you are wired to be an engineer, you're probably going to enjoy doing more work. So what we see is the energizing work all centers around. The majority of energizing work centers around particular work activities. And then the drudgery is normally felt the same way. So we just finished a study on engineers in an energy organization. So the energy sector needs a lot of help because they're transitioning to renewables. There's a skills shortage in many of their critical workforces. And so there is a burning platform to find capacity in those jobs. So these are the types of business problems that are actually spurring organisations on to reimagine how work is done. But we think the benefits will definitely be for the workers as well as for the organisation. So for instance, for these engineers, they wanted to look at, yeah, how do we free up capacity? So one of the big findings was that they spend 44% of their time on work that has a dependency on others for decision making. So this is a big trend we see even beyond engineering, which is that there's a lot of back and forth that happens in the way that we run our organizations today for sign offs and governance and then chasing up on sign offs and delegated authority and all of these types of ways of working that just create frustration and friction points and delays and they slow us down. Until we can quantify that though, and say this is the size of that, this is what it's costing the organization, then there's little incentive for an organization to actually fix it.
- [23:19]
Dart Lindsley
That leads to the question about what kinds of actions are spurred by having this information. So here's an example. You found out that 40% of what people are doing is essentially overhead. They don't like it and it's some kind of control that's being applied by somebody else. And so there's an opportunity to do something that's one kind of action that comes out of it. And what are some other kinds of actions that you've identified and are organizations generally able to take those actions? Are they the kinds of actions that organizations can actually do?
- [23:57]
Victoria Stewart
Yeah, so I think it really is split into your quick wins, low hanging fruit and medium to longer term plays. So the quick wins are things that are within the influence of the team or the manager. And so that means that we're thinking about things like ways of working, reduction of time on work that might just be team related, where they're not influenced or impacting other areas of the business as well. There's also the. One of the probably most powerful outcomes and really easy quick wins is around aligning on what work is most important as well. And this is really interesting because when you have that leadership perspective on what's important and you have a bottom up perspective from the employees or the team in terms of what's important will often see a significant misalignment, up to 65% misalignment in some teams. And what that's saying is that people aren't necessarily clear on what is the most important work that we need to get done in order to drive the outcomes and then really the way to solve that and the action for that is to be having a really open conversation around the work that we do and therefore really being a bit clearer around these are the most important aspects that we need to focus on as a team. But also how that cascades down to individual roles as well. It can often be illuminating for leaders to see as well what work people are deeming important. And often that can lead to really interesting conversations about what's required as part of their jobs to get some of this work done as well. So that can just be very useful and valuable conversations and outcomes from it as well.
- [25:51]
Dart Lindsley
Who tends to be right? Here's leaders saying, I think this is the most important thing. And the people on the ground are saying, no, I think this is the most important thing.
- [25:58]
Stephanie Roos
It's about the conversation, right? So it's very hard. And actually someone, one of our clients said this to me a couple of days ago. It's very hard to have this conversation without data. But once you've got the data there to say, listen, we thought this was the most important work. Why are you saying it's not? And having that open conversation with your team, again, who are the experts in the work? Because they do the work. Listening to that and then actually working through, well, what are our highest priorities? And why do you think that you can either reset? It's not. Leader is always right. On the flip side, why did you say that this work is so critical? I would have thought we could just stop that straight away, oh no, we need to do this work in order to achieve that work. I didn't even know that that was a dependency, you know, those kinds of things. So it's the power of the conversation. But then getting alignment is critical. If you don't have enough time in the day to get stuff done, which, let's face it, no one does, then if we're not aligned on what the most important work is, then how can we possibly move forward?
- [26:59]
Dart Lindsley
Who tends to hire you? What I mean is, who in the organization is the one who says that this is a problem we want to solve typically?
- [27:07]
Stephanie Roos
Can I put that on hold and I'll just quickly as well cover. I think Vic started to talk about those quick wins, aligning ways of working, obviously just meeting discipline and so on. There's a lot of quick wins there, but then there are also four other levers that we see. So one is process simplification. So once you've got that work data, you've actually got incredible insight into Each process and those tasks under each process. So you're able to see how much time are we spending there, Are we spending it in the right place? Secondly, role redesign. So just rethinking what do we want our humans to do versus AI, for instance. And it's going to be those tasks that AI replaces, not the job. So we actually have to break it down to this task intelligence in order to do that. And obviously you need to do that at scale. The next one is org design and OP model. So that's going to be a lever if you see things like duplication across multiple layers or spending too much time in management because our spans are too big, things like that. And then of course we have AI augmentation and technology. So the beauty of having the data is that you can then say this data is telling us that it's a ways of working lever or it's an AI opportunity. Vic's always said from the very start we need the data, it needs to be data, it needs to be digital and we need to be able to scale the solution if we actually want to have an impact.
- [28:39]
Dart Lindsley
On work for humans. We've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged instead of dead and dull. So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's 111f o l d.com I can imagine that AI could come in as a replacement of a task. I can also see AI coming in as an augmentation of a task. Are you finding that AI is any different from outsourcing? My question is, is what we're giving to AI today the same thing we might have given to a cost advantaged location 10 years ago?
- [29:44]
Stephanie Roos
I'll give you an example of why I think one of the differences, but it's a very good question. It's essentially saying, how are we going to get this work done? I think AI is probably going to be cheaper and quicker, but it also remains within the organization's control. So we recently had a chatting with some leaders who were saying that they have just outsourced a big component of their workforce, which was a cost decision. But actually once they started thinking about what work are we doing, what work is critical for our strategy and breaking it down from that perspective, actually realized we have just given away the ownership of our data and we've given away the opportunity to build a capability to collect and analyze data as well. And that is an asset that if they had have done that through AI, they would have been able to retain.
- [30:44]
Dart Lindsley
It's interesting because my team worked on a number of different projects through the years where we were doing outsourcing of a whole process and there were steps that we needed to keep in house for data privacy reasons. And so, honestly, if it had been possible to do those steps and keep them in house, that would have been great because it fragmented the work. And that was a part of the challenge. Right. Which is that we couldn't hand 100% of the work over to an outsourced solution because we would suffer privacy risk. And that meant that we had to have these handoffs which were inefficient. And so the idea of keeping those closer together and potentially running in parallel, really, which is that it wouldn't even look like a handoff, it would just be an instant action.
- [31:33]
Stephanie Roos
Yeah. Well, I think one of the important visualizations moving forward is being able to look at from an org chart perspective, what is the work that our humans are doing and AI, but how do they interact and who's responsible for managing and teaching it and learning? And then other interesting questions we're getting is then, well, how do we think about the performance of that? So what's the cost of that asset versus that asset? One being a human, one being AI? What is the performance of those assets and how do we continuously evolve? This is not a point in time. Sort of let's do an OP model change. It's going to take two years and then it's going to be in place for three years and then we'll do another one. This world is completely different. It's moving every month moving forward in terms of how we could be thinking about getting our work done. So I think, as Gareth Flynn said in a roundtable a couple weeks ago, who has been on your podcast said, this is just going to be a muscle that organizations need to build. They're going to need to be able to do this and have a view of the work and how to optimize it and how to assess technology and AI opportunities, but how to spot those opportunities as well. I think that goes to your question, who hires you?
- [32:50]
Dart Lindsley
Well, the reason I asked that question is who has the scope, who has the vision? And what I mean by that is what department are they in and what's their altitude. Because it could be line managers, it could be hr, it could be operations.
- [33:07]
Stephanie Roos
This space is up for grabs in terms of reimagining how work is done. The people that are closest to it are the heads of business units or the general managers, if you like, who need to be able to optimise their workforce in order to improve their performance.
- [33:24]
Victoria Stewart
They feel the pain.
- [33:25]
Stephanie Roos
They feel the pain, Yep. So they also really need to retain their best people, but they actually aren't the people who are asked to solve it. So they feel the pain, they have the need. But this is where we're seeing people and culture. HR teams really step up and this is the future for hr who I think can claim this space and really start to become the very strategic profit and revenue driving function that they've wanted to become. Because it is about the workforce. It will be about how we optimize for our people and retain and really drive people into the highest value energizing work. And then what work we select to pull off. And that has to be strategic. We can't just say, what could this AI tool do? Go, let's implement it. And you know what's really interesting? It's a chief people officer who needs to take that seat at the table with those general managers because they're peers. But actually there's some really critical roles within there that are starting to do this work. So strategic workforce planning has always been a little bit maybe robotic or driven by finance and more in the control of the cfo. Actually, this is the strategic stuff. This is what does our workforce look like in the future? How do we understand it today so that we can start to put that roadmap in place? And how do we maintain a constant view of that? What are our productivity metrics? What are our energizing metrics? How do we design better? And then also talent acquisition is starting to play a role here and we're seeing some of the most strategic TA teams. Instead of saying, what roles do you need filled, I'm going to say, do you actually need a role field? What can you do with your current people? How are you thinking about that? Is it a human? Is it AI? How do we solve for the people that we have currently? And if you're telling me that we should be automating all of our graduate jobs, what does that mean for our future succession plan, things like that?
- [35:34]
Victoria Stewart
Just to add to that, so who hires us in an organization? Just exactly what Steph said. But we also know that not every organization has capacity to be able to Solve everything. And so we also work with a lot of partners they hire us to essentially for them to be able to use Beamable with their clients, to be able to uncover all of these different challenges as well. So partners would be more like consulting organizations that are really trying to provide that deep visibility and uncover that blind spot for organizations that we've just been talking about. And I think just one really important thing to note, I guess, as we look at what is all of that high value work and how do we then automate or reduce or reallocate that really low value drudge work, the really big action to come out of this is not that we just reduce that time, it's then thinking about where do we redeploy that time? And so that's a really important aspect because that's great to be able to reclaim capacity, but then we have to be really intentional about where that time goes to. And often that can be where teams fail because they'll just continue to do more of the low value work without being intentional about really thinking what is that work that's going to drive the bigger outcomes? How do we ensure that it's high value for the individual, but also high value for the organization as well. So that's just another step or maybe the second step to really thinking about reducing or implementing AI or augmenting or whatever it might be.
- [37:19]
Dart Lindsley
Recently I was interviewed by the World Economic Forum and they asked about this idea of AI freeing people up to do higher level tasks. And I said I thought that was something we say to ourselves to make ourselves feel better and to make employees feel better. And in particular that I felt that if those higher level tasks were valuable today, we'd be doing them. And that what we're really going to do is we're going to reduce the workforce when it comes to it. And I say that because even if for a moment there's a time when people have the opportunity to work on higher level tasks that might be really valuable, the next time there's a slowdown, we'll just stop doing that. And so it may not happen instantly, but it'll happen eventually. Now I'd love you to tell me that's wrong. I would love to know that that's wrong. Or do you think that I was right?
- [38:16]
Stephanie Roos
I'll tell you wrong.
- [38:17]
Dart Lindsley
Oh, good. Okay, good.
- [38:20]
Stephanie Roos
Tell me the reason is that. Do you think companies are going to say, let's just keep doing the same amount of work that we're doing today, we'll reduce our headcount, we'll get AI to do the other stuff and then we'll just keep doing what we're doing today. Or do you think they're going to want to do more, more, more, grow faster, bigger, better?
- [38:40]
Dart Lindsley
I think that cost is much more visible than value. And the less legible the value, the more subtle the value which some of those higher level tasks are, the harder it is to see. And so it's not that people mean to do it, it's that they can't resist the easy cost saving.
- [39:02]
Stephanie Roos
Yeah. So it would be naive to think that people are going to keep the same job title and everyone's going to stay in the same jobs. But sometimes AI is going to do more work and then people are going to say do more of your high value work. But what we know is that there are going to be functions where there are cost savings and probably their cost centres because we can do that work more cheaply. Right. And that will impact jobs, but there'll be other functions that are critical for that company to grow. And so we'll take again engineers or it might be a salesforce where humans actually are required because it's relational work, for instance, or cyber to manage risk. So the value equation for organizations will change in terms of where their labor costs go. But I don't think workforces are going to shrink in aggregate. There's another perspective to this too though. So that's long term and as always it takes much longer to get to these places than what we anticipate because we see opportunity and we think it's going to happen overnight, but it doesn't. What's happening right now is some organizations are taking big sweeping cuts or a DOGE methodology. But actually there are a lot of organizations implementing AI where they're also missing a trick. And so they're neither reducing costs nor increasing their capacity. So classic example is introducing something like copilot and saying everyone has this now. So if that frees up, let's say an hour or two of the week, which is I think what it's showing, or even if they do something more significant that frees up 20% of people's time, what have they intentionally said? This is how we want you to spend that time to do it isn't being talked about. And interestingly, here's another layer, is that Australia's a great example. So what we know is that Australia is the highest consumer per head of AI at a personal level, but one of the lowest when it comes to corporate usage. We also heard a stat from, I think it was SAP who said that 46% of people who are using AI believe that the time that they reclaim from their workday is their own to keep because they figured out how to do their job more efficiently. Therefore, I can do a five day job in three. Good for me. I'm off to the beach. So the company doesn't actually take a strategic and intentional approach as to what AI people are going to use. Give them a license and agency to use it and to say, and here's how we will be reimagining the work that you do with you in partnership with you, so that you can contribute more value and work on more energizing work and more high value work, then it's a waste.
- [42:02]
Dart Lindsley
Think about that for a second. It's weird. So I just got off of an interview with somebody who studies time affluence and time poverty. And her argument was that giving people back a little time in their world will allow them to bring more of themselves to work, not necessarily more hours, but more wholly themselves. It's an interesting question. Do you find that the general managers you work with, do they care about energy? Do they care about how people experience their work beyond retention? I know that this is a big general question about very specific people, but do you find that they're on board with the idea of improving the experience of work?
- [42:51]
Stephanie Roos
If you're a leader and you've got people around you who are energized, that pumped to be there, they love the work they're doing and they're working on really high value stuff, are you going to enjoy your job more? Are you going to feel more confident that you're going to hit your goals and you're going to achieve what you need to achieve? Right. So we haven't talked about the bubble chart. We have to talk about the bubble chart. Okay.
- [43:18]
Dart Lindsley
Okay, we're going to talk about the bubble chart.
- [43:19]
Victoria Stewart
I was actually just thinking about this before as you talked about the previous interviewee, because there's two things to say here. So for general managers, they don't necessarily lead with, I want all my people to be more energized. And that's why we're going to engage you. No, they're really talking about we really want to get greater outcomes and a more efficient way of working so that we can achieve more with the same or less. Right. So that's really where they start with. But the bumper for them is essentially that they can then identify what's that high value work that is also that energizing work for Their people. And if we can really dial that up, then that's a huge multiplier effect for any outcome and change that they start to implement as well. And so that brings us to the bubble chart.
- [44:15]
Dart Lindsley
This is a perfect example of co evolution. And I was just touring your absolutely stunning country and I saw animal after animal that had co evolved into the same niche in different contexts. And so what you've developed is very, very similar to what my teams have developed in other companies. So how do you describe what it.
- [44:37]
Stephanie Roos
Is we call our bubble chart? A prioritization matrix.
- [44:41]
Dart Lindsley
Dang, that's way better. A prioritization matrix.
- [44:44]
Stephanie Roos
It's so weird how they look exactly the same. It's actually a meeting of minds and souls in terms of our vision for the future of work, isn't it? And it's the bubbles of work that are both critical for an organization's goals and energizing for people where we need our workforce, our human workforce to be focused.
- [45:11]
Dart Lindsley
So it's a two by two. One axis is important to the company, the other axis is energizing to the people. And the size of the bubble is how much of our time is going to it. And the placement of the bubble is where it lands on the x and Y axis.
- [45:25]
Victoria Stewart
Correct.
- [45:26]
Stephanie Roos
And the simplest way to find efficiency opportunities and how to inspire and motivate your workforce is by finding that bottom left quadrant of bubbles of work that are neither important nor not energizing and then stopping, reducing, reallocating, automating or outsourcing that work. So it gives you a very clear roadmap to be more efficient. That's also got great outcomes for your people. Now, if you have a different workforce challenge that you're solving. So for instance, where are my prime AI candidates? Then you also might want to layer on a few other dimensions that we've talked about. So what work or what bubbles of work require human effort? From our strategic perspective, what work is prone to human error? What work is critical for skill or career building, things like that. So it does come down to the strategy that the organization wants to pursue. And so it could be a multidimensional bubble chart. But the prioritisation matrix is very clear and helps leaders and individuals to align on where to focus their effort.
- [46:43]
Victoria Stewart
The beauty of it is in its simplicity. Because really what you're able to show here is a perspective on productivity in an organization. And what's quite interesting is when we can identify work that is important across all functions and all areas of the business, then it's pretty easy to Then start to understand, well, what proportion of our workforce or the work that we do is high value. It is a very standard metric that can be applied which is what organizations really struggle with when they're starting to understand and quantify productivity in an organization. So if we don't have that lens of what's important, then you're not necessarily going to be able to dial up time on that high value work. And that's a great productivity lever or indicator. But then as we've been talking about, the next layer is then to understand not only from the business perspective what's important, but then from the individual perspective what's important. Now, overlapping those two, that top right quadrant is the best productivity indicator from a work perspective for an organization.
- [48:03]
Dart Lindsley
Right. There's a really important quadrant which is the one that says really important to the business and everybody hates it. And then there's one not important to the business, everybody loves it.
- [48:16]
Victoria Stewart
The passion project.
- [48:18]
Dart Lindsley
This is geeky, but it's actually philosophically really important. Do you tend to produce the chart as representations of average experiences or do you pick the least happy person or the least energized person? Because there's different ways you can do it. You can say on average people think that this is energizing, or you could say some people just don't. And you could look at individuals and say, somebody's hating this work, most people are liking it.
- [48:49]
Stephanie Roos
We think that if the intention of the work is to optimize for the large workforce, then you need to look on aggregate. So the size of the bubbles represent the size of the work being done in that quadrant as informed by the group. So there may be bubbles in multiple quadrants and one's really small because most people find it energizing. So it's really big in the energizing quadrant. Right. So everyone to have a voice and be represented.
- [49:16]
Dart Lindsley
What you're saying is this is really important. A category of work can be represented twice on the bubble chart if people are perceiving it differently.
- [49:24]
Victoria Stewart
Yeah, correct.
- [49:24]
Stephanie Roos
That's right. So in aggregate you might be making a decision for let's say all of engineers or all of our bankers. Right. So we're going to make some better work. Design role design changes. Or we're going to make AI investments based on the sentiment of the entire group and the value of that work. But then actually what happens in practice is the clients then want a manager view of that bubble chart. So each manager can then, well, what does that look like for my team? Might look quite different for one team. Than another team. And there will be actions that are within that person's control, that don't require structural changes or anything else that they are able to realign and refocus people. In addition, you can drill down to that individual view if you want to. And the reason why that might be valuable is because there may be people who are in the wrong role. If they're not energized by the core work of that job, then what a great way to be able to say, what's the next career step for you? And what we know from research is that people who spend less than 20% of their time on energizing work are an attrition risk. So you're able to spot how many people are in that category, who's in that category, if you choose to populate it with names. But many organizations do it anonymously.
- [50:50]
Dart Lindsley
Does sharing this information generally reach all the way to the teams or does it stay in management?
- [50:55]
Stephanie Roos
It'll be the source of a conversation for teams because again, the philosophy is that we want to bring our people on the journey with us. We're going to stop making decisions about how our workforce looks, what people do, how we structure it from a top down perspective because we don't actually know what work is being done. We need to actually co design that with the people.
- [51:17]
Victoria Stewart
Yeah, it's a really important change management aspect of this. Right, is to say this is what we are today and then being able to really scenario plan, this is what we want to look like in the future and this is how we're going to get there. So this is a big part of the value, right, is to be able to then measure what progress have we made towards what we want to look like either as an organization or even as a team itself as well.
- [51:44]
Stephanie Roos
So Dart, we met a couple of years ago over bonding over the bubble chart philosophy and it was so exciting at the time when we came to see you in Palo Alto. I would love to hear though, what have you learned? What's your perspective? Why is the bubble chart so important?
- [52:00]
Dart Lindsley
We're incredibly aligned. Sometimes our language is different, but if you look past exactly how we're saying it, I think we're saying exactly the same thing. I've primarily used it not as a tool for the general manager to understand their organizations. I primarily used it as a tool for teams themselves to in real time understand what they're focusing on and why and what they're enjoying and not. And on a monthly basis readjust, because I don't love any kind of Metric that has to roll all the way up to the top of the company and then come up with some big aggregate answer and roll all the way back down to the bottom of the company. It's slow and it's too aggregate and it's uninformed. And so being able to keep both the visibility at the team level and the action at the team level makes it fast and highly individualized. So because of that, we've never built it as a tool that rolls up. And one of the things that means is that the work categories in each team are completely different. So from team to team, you'll have different work categories. You can't roll them up for that reason. And so the largest organization that we've ever done it was a manager who then became a director, and then she expanded to five teams, and then she had all five teams doing it. I think they got the data models the same in terms of the categories of work, so they were able to roll it up. But we mostly keep it down at the team level. So that's the only really biggest difference. It hasn't been about workforce transformations, like the sorts of things you're working on. It's been about individual team performance, where team performance means both doing the right stuff for the company and finding that work. Rewarding team performance means two things, but very, very similar.
- [53:52]
Stephanie Roos
And how lucky for those teams that get to use that philosophy and have those conversations around, what does the bubble chart look like now? What does it look like next?
- [54:01]
Dart Lindsley
Yeah. And managers are way happier because they're no longer caught between the needs of the business and the needs of the teams. They're in a position where they can have open conversations and everybody's working together to make it better. It really is fundamentally different from the way things used to be done, but it's very similar to what you're doing. So I was going to ask, what are your headwinds when you bring this into the company? What are the headwinds? How do you counter those headwinds?
- [54:30]
Stephanie Roos
The main headwind for us is is probably awareness for leaders to know and understand and be educated and see examples of. It doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to do it the way that it's always been done. We don't have to constantly feel that there's either the powers with the company and the employer or the powers with the employee that we're either looking after the interests of our people or the. The interests of our company. You can have both. And it's about removing that wasted effort. And so I think the conversation around AI gives leaders an opportunity to think about that.
- [55:12]
Victoria Stewart
Leaders love the detail, being able to see this, they love this perspective. They love being able to explore and be able to see this data because it's very hidden from them, typically. And as we've said, it's a blind spot for them. So it makes it easier for them to make decisions off the back of it once they have access. So with Steph's point here around, awareness is once they see it, that there's a real connection. But before, without seeing it, it's just challenging to really understand. And you would have seen this the same way with your philosophy. Once people see it and they see it come to life, it's so much easier to understand and digest and to see the impact as well.
- [56:01]
Dart Lindsley
Do you ever wish HR was a different kind of partner in these implementations? I'm saying that GM asks you to come in, you do this analysis. Now you're saying that there's opportunities to change the workforce and you could be seen as competition.
- [56:18]
Victoria Stewart
I think we're seen as a way for HR to elevate the conversation with the business because they're able to really support them and to in some of these big challenges that support the business in some of the big challenges that they're seeing within the organization and often, particularly HR as business partners, HR business partners are often having these conversations and trying to solve them, but without having tooling and support and data to be able to support that, then it is challenging. So I think in some ways it's an enabler.
- [57:01]
Dart Lindsley
Yeah, I like that. And you said something that I really agree with also, which is that it looks like math because it's represented as data. But I tell people it's not math, it's conversation. And that what it's about is creating visibility into things that we should talk about so that we can make them better, whether it's what energizes us or what we find rewarding, or whether or not we're aligned to what's most important. So that makes a lot of sense to me. I'm glad to hear it.
- [57:30]
Stephanie Roos
Another one of the headwinds for us has been providing the expertise in industry or functional areas. So more recently, the way that we've been solving for that is partnering with the people who know. So we've now established some incredible partnerships with people who are very deep in functional expertise or in industry expertise, who are then configuring beamable and rolling out very quickly, sort of using the tool to get the data and the current state and analytics and then reimagining the future, but bringing that strategy, that deep knowledge of the function and so together, I think that's really the most powerful way to have an impact on big teams, big workforces and to scale as well.
- [58:23]
Dart Lindsley
You're both listeners of the show and so you know what my closing questions are?
- [58:27]
Stephanie Roos
Big listeners, big fans, bit nervous being on Today.
- [58:32]
Dart Lindsley
It's funny, you know who I interview these days? I interview, it seems like people from Harvard and people from Australia. That's who I interviewed. Especially recently, it seems like everybody's from Harvard or Sydney or Melbourne, you know. Steph, what do you hire your job to do for you?
- [58:51]
Stephanie Roos
I've thought about this a bit because I knew you were going to ask it. I'm hiring this job to help me be part of the conversation on what work looks like in the future for the next generation and beyond. Think when I remember the exact place when Vic and I were like, well, if it's not going to be the FTE industrial age model, then what's it going to be? And why wouldn't it be us figuring out the best way to do that? And you can see all of the friction points and the real ramifications of the way that work is done today on people. And I felt that very personally in the past and I don't want that to be the case for people going forward. It doesn't have to be that way. So basically we've started this company so that we get to be part of that conversation. And reimagining the way the world is.
- [59:47]
Dart Lindsley
It's a very specific overlapping of two patterns that I often see. One of them is to make a difference that you care about, help people change the system, make the world work better. The other one is I hire my job to give me a pass to exclusive clubs. I want to be in the game and I want to be in the center of the game. And so sometimes you can hire a job to get you into that place. So that was interesting. Vic, are you the same?
- [60:18]
Victoria Stewart
Yeah, I think there's a big component of that purpose. Absolutely. And I think just to add to that, I think autonomy is a big part of what I hire this job to do. And that is the benefit about being a co founder of a business. We get to choose who we work with. And that's from an employee perspective. We have a phenomenal team. We get to work with them every day. But we also have amazing clients as well that we get to work with and. But we Also have the autonomy to choose where when we work, we do work remotely, which has its benefits. And obviously we work as much as possible together as a team as well because we know the importance of connection. But I think all of those things, just providing autonomy is a huge enabler for us to have the flexibility to be a parent that we want to be, be a co founder that we want to be, and to work with these phenomenal clients as well.
- [61:22]
Dart Lindsley
I have one that neither of you mentioned for both of you. I hire my job to work with friends.
- [61:29]
Victoria Stewart
That's a huge one.
- [61:30]
Stephanie Roos
That's the secret number one thing, Dart. We get to work together every day and have the most incredible interesting conversations, but also take each other through this roller coaster that is running a business.
- [61:46]
Victoria Stewart
It is an interesting one because not every friendship can work together correct. Like we do. Which is a testament to a phenomenal friendship and friend like Steph. But I think Steph started this conversation with we've known each other for many years. We've also traveled and experienced highs and lows across the world. And I think those things definitely put you in good stead for running a business.
- [62:18]
Dart Lindsley
If I remember correctly, you bought a car in your 20s while you were in college and traveled around the United States. How expensive was that car?
- [62:27]
Victoria Stewart
Well, this is the most important part as running a business is that we bought it for $2,050, but we sold it for $2,850 after running it into the ground. So we did make a profit. And I think that is why we felt that we could go into business.
- [62:52]
Stephanie Roos
It's actually not a coincidence though, Dart. So when one of your best friends is one of the smartest people on the planet, you want to go and do something in business. It's not actually that much of a coincidence that you say, get on board.
- [63:04]
Victoria Stewart
We need to do this together.
- [63:06]
Dart Lindsley
Right.
- [63:06]
Victoria Stewart
Such a lie. It's such a lie.
- [63:10]
Dart Lindsley
Vic, what does your job cost you?
- [63:12]
Victoria Stewart
Certainly time with friends and maybe a few years off my life in terms of stress. Let's hope not. There's a lot more to achieve. But yes, I think it does. But with this flexibility comes the ability to do things that we would never have been able to do if I was working in a corporate job as well. So there's trade offs.
- [63:38]
Dart Lindsley
Yes. How about you, Steph?
- [63:40]
Stephanie Roos
Sleep. Which is really important to me. And yeah, it'd be the stress.
- [63:47]
Dart Lindsley
How can people learn more about you and about Beamable?
- [63:51]
Stephanie Roos
Well, there's a little platform called LinkedIn that is very handy to connect on. Chatting with People there all the time would love to. Yeah. Connect with anyone who's interested in the conversation and who has a perspective on it.
- [64:05]
Victoria Stewart
And also obviously, beamable.com can you spell that? Yeah. So it's a funny one. We've got a lot of people saying be amable, but it's not. But it might help you spell it as well. So B E, A, M I, B, L E. So maybe just very quickly why we came to Beamable was Beam is really talking about beaming a light on the hidden inefficiencies, but also incredible talent within an organization. That's one aspect. And then the IBL is really thinking about the flexibility, agility, visibility and adaptability for an organization as well. So where aiming to solve for some of those challenges. But that's really the genesis of the name.
- [64:59]
Dart Lindsley
That's a really good genesis. My genesis was I could find the URL for my own company.
- [65:03]
Victoria Stewart
That is a challenge. That is a challenge.
- [65:06]
Dart Lindsley
I know. Well, thank you both for coming on the show today. I think it's very fascinating to hear somebody like when you hear people who are doing completely different things, you learn like whole new analogies or something like that. But when you're talking to somebody who's doing something very similar, you find these nuances that are very specific and might be something you've never considered before. So it's really great. Thank you very much.
- [65:29]
Stephanie Roos
Thank you, Dart.
- [65:30]
Victoria Stewart
Thank you, Dart.
- [65:30]
Stephanie Roos
And thanks for the work that you're doing because it really is driving a whole new level of conversation for the way that organizations think about work.
- [65:39]
Dart Lindsley
Thank you.
- [65:40]
Stephanie Roos
Thank you.
- [65:41]
Victoria Stewart
Thanks Darth. Thanks Dart. It's been awesome.
- [65:46]
Dart Lindsley
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.