At our recent Powering High Performance through Skills and AI webinar, Mindbeat’s CEO, Elisa Krantz interviewed Tanju Kapilashrami, Chief Strategy and Talent Officer at Standard Chartered Bank to learn more about her experience and understand some of the learnings from Standard Chartered’s journey from jobs to skills.
Why are traditional job-centric models becoming obsolete and why do you think skill-centric approaches are the future?
For the last 140 years, work has been organised around jobs. It has been driven by a one-to-one relationship between workers and their roles. With the acceleration of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, how talent connects to their work and how organisations are set up doesn’t seem relevant anymore.
A couple of years ago, we started talking about skills being the new currency of work and HR professionals being the custodians of skills, not jobs. What would happen if you deconstruct work and flow talent around skills rather than roles? What would be the impact on productivity or an individual’s career?
There’s the obvious link here to productivity and performance within companies but it also impacts the increasing gap between education and employability.
Education institutions aren’t producing the skills required for the future of work. So what role should businesses play in bridging the skills gap? And, more importantly, what skills will we need for the future of work?
It will be a combination of technical and human-centric skills that will help us make the most of this fourth industrial revolution.
How has a legacy organisation like Standard Chartered transitioned to become more skills-based?
We are a 160-year-old bank headquartered in the UK, with 100,000 employees across emerging markets. Our pivot to become more skills-based couldn’t start with a blank sheet of paper in a start-up environment. We’re a legacy organisation with a complex construct of roles and reporting lines. So we started with the idea of jobs.
We analysed jobs that would disappear in three and five years, along with emerging roles created by shifts in technology and business models. Then we looked at those emerging roles and the likely skills needed to do them.
We discovered it would be $45,000 cheaper to reskill someone into a future role instead of recruiting new talent. For the first time, it set an economic case for reskilling.
It led to our analysis of skills adjacencies where we proved that we already had 80% of the skills required for future jobs in the company, which meant we only had to invest in reskilling for the remaining 20%.
During this process, we launched a talent marketplace where people with multiple skills could work on different gigs internally. The gigs are advertised and anyone with the required skills can volunteer their time to be part of a new, exciting piece of work. People who want to be part of exciting, purposeful work that will keep them relevant for the future of work are genuinely interested in participating.
We now have a talent marketplace in 50 markets. There are 28,000 people, actively matching their skills to purposeful and impactful work and upskilling in areas they’d like to grow their careers in. It has led to Skills Academies and Standard Chartered hiring based on skills. But it has also changed the language of the company away from job descriptions and reliance on experience to future-facing skills and how to source those skills.
When I meet CEOs I ask them: ‘How much coding skills do you have within your legacy business?’ They’ll answer by only telling me how many engineers they have. Most legacy businesses can’t tell you how much technology skills, coding skills, and data skills they have because the inventory has always been mapped based on jobs rather than available skills.
The moment you start recognising the skills that individuals bring to the table, you’re able to unlock a huge amount of productivity.
How do you measure the success of this skills-focused transition?
The success of the program is clear. We report in monetary terms every quarter on how much productivity we’ve unlocked in the company. We tell the stories of innovation, delivered by crowdsourcing skills for company-wide projects. Plus, we track internal deployment rates for future jobs versus hiring costs and high-performer attrition rates.
I understand you’ve also now removed performance ratings at Standard Chartered
I’ve believed for many years that traditional performance ratings only manage the year-end bonus process and give senior management an excuse for why someone hasn’t hit their targets. Performance ratings don’t build high-performance cultures because they remove honest two-way conversations and relegate everyone to a score.
We want to build a culture of continuous feedback and learning. A skills-based organisation can’t grow without a deep learning culture, a strong sense of curiosity, and a two-way feedback process.
It’s our third year without performance ratings. We know that where leaders are engaged in regular feedback conversations, where objectives are clear, and where people have access to real-time coaching, satisfaction with performance management has increased significantly.
Many of the jobs of the future will require AI-based skills. What are your views on AI and its impact?
I see technology and AI-backed solutions as a massive opportunity to democratise, access and deliver at scale. What we’ve achieved with our talent marketplace wouldn’t have been possible without AI for example.
As machines get better at being machines, humans can get better at being humans. If you deploy technology well, you can augment humans to focus on the stuff that only humans can do. Everything else can be automated.
Our poll asked for the biggest challenge of moving from a job-centric to a skills-powered organisation. Time and making this a priority above other priorities got almost half the vote. Do you agree?
Making it a priority over other priorities is critical. If you don’t take action now when the workforce is fundamentally changed in the future, it will be expensive and you’ll be less inclusive as ‘sunset’ jobs employ more women. Prioritising a skills-based future will overcome these issues.
What have been your biggest learnings from Standard Chartered’s skills-based journey?
I have learned a lot about effective change management. That’s been my big upskilling. I grew up in a world where effective change management was writing good communications, so I’ve had to upskill myself on what good change management looks like.
It’s a real skill, and it’s a discipline. In large organisations, the amount of time, senior leader bandwidth and investment in change management needs to change.
Early on, we spent too much time trying to convert the hearts and minds of the most senior people in the business. But the people who drive real change are leaders deep into the company. They may be fairly junior but can harness the power of your workforce. The more you democratise conversations, the more you’ll find change agents and ambassadors at different levels who can lean in and support you in driving cultural change.
To watch the full recording of Elisa’s interview with Tanju Kapilashrami, email [email protected]