People Intelligence at Cisco & The Importance of Trust - Roxanne Bisby Davis - #189

0:00Hello friends of the podcast and welcome to Directly Correct, a People Intelligence podcast with your host Cole Napper and today's guest, Roxanne Bisbee Davis, head of People Intelligence at Cisco. In this episode we will cover what Roxanne is seeing across the broader People Intelligence ecosystem and how she and Cole have similar job titles. So why did you settle on that moniker of people intelligence and how did it come to be? Her wonderfully unconventional career path with 26 years at Cisco? A year or two, I actually started in their middle school program and in the word to the company. Why she sees patterns in everything and becoming a person who makes complex, executive, data simple and impossible to misunderstand is you as a person like to see patterns in behavior and now let's get down to business. Hey, Directly Correct fans, this podcast is dedicated to you to help democratize people

1:04intelligence for the world of work. If you're looking to support the podcast, please make sure to listen weekly, subscribe to the Directly Correct Substack newsletter, sign up for the Data Driven HR Academy at datadrivenhracademy.com or just Cole's book People Analytics or check out everything else at ColeNapper.com. Before we get into it, a quick word about HR bench, the company powering this podcast. You know, when we all started in People Analytics, we wanted to do strategic work, building predictive models, workforce planning, advising the C-suite, and most of all, quantifying the impact for the business. Instead, we spent months building dashboards and reports that should already exist. HR bench eliminates that entire phase. Your HR IS connects, your metrics calculate, your benchmarks populate. This is not novel. This is day one, not quarter two. That means skipping straight to prescriptive analysis, storytelling, and taking action for the

2:08business. Want to learn more? Book a demo at HR bench.com slash Directly Correct. Find out more about the company powering this podcast and building the future of people intelligence. As always, all opinions are our own and thanks for being a listener. Well, Roxanne, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, Cole. I'm excited to be here. Now, one of the things that I like to subtly brag about is being the first chief people intelligence officer that's out there. But it sounds like I may have been in the running for that title based on what your career aspirations have been. Can you talk about that at all, Roxanne? Yeah, absolutely. So I have been Cisco's head of people on television. So not quite the same as the chief people officer that you are. But obviously, I couldn't be a chief people officer in a company like ours with the fluidity in this space. We have very specific guidelines about

3:14what that looks like. But I've been our head people intelligence for, I guess, about five years now. And it is something that we had worked toward for quite a bit of time because of the combination of pulling in all the different levels of intelligence that we have in the organization and just putting things underneath my remit to be able to help support the organization getting more insight, combining all the different things and seeing what much of that looks like for us. So why did you settle on that moniker of people intelligence and how did it come to be? Yeah, so in my tenure at Cisco, I've spent a lot of time understanding the behavioral activities for happening with the organization. But we were able and Cisco's invested in us bringing quite a bit

4:17of layers of intelligence together. And so it went away from just when I first started being the person who ran our annual cycle survey sort of perspective. And what we've grown into is a team of researchers, applied researchers, data scientist, individuals who are storytellers that are bringing insights and intelligence together and around just the full depth and breadth of the humans at work. And so it just felt like it was more broad than listening activity or people analytics. It was a combination of multiple disciplines. And so it just seemed like the right thing at the time. I have to give you your flowers that you had a lot of foresight in doing that. I do wonder. I mean, you're pretty new at Cisco, right? Like you've only been there a year or two? A year or two. I actually started in their middle school program and came over to the company.

5:21I've actually been there 26 and a half years. I have, I am like many of us. We started out. I have one year technically 11 months under my belt as a contingent worker. And then I converted over to be to being a full-time employee in 2000, in 2000. So I started in January of 2000 and then switched over in December of 2000. And I would say like any great big company. I've had several careers that have built on themselves to help me get to where I am now. When I got out of college, IOS psychology and that field was not broad-based. We weren't doing surveys in the company. We weren't doing any of those sort of employee listening activities. And then I've just had the opportunity to learn and grow here, surrounded by some really good mentors. But also I've hired really smart people

6:24that have been able to help us build what we do today. That's fantastic. Well, you know, one of the things that I think about is, you know, if somebody has had, you know, such such a great career at one company, obviously you've probably had to reinvent yourself a few times. I'm sure you weren't doing exactly what you're doing now in the year 2000. So how has that evolution occurred? Yeah. I actually, I didn't even know what Cisco was to be very honest. I just needed a job out of college. I had graduated in December of 99 and a friend of mine worked at the company. He was like, hey, come work at this great company. There's a lot of people doing really cool stuff. And I was like, okay, and I got hired into the recruitment organization. And then my next role came because I was walking down the hall and I had a leader say, does anybody know PowerPoint? I was I taught a class in college and they're like, great, you have a new job tomorrow. And I moved over

7:26to work with our marketing team within the HR function at that time. And then I started working with our comms leaders and for our head of HR and helping to do all the presentations and make sense out of what they were trying to communicate out to the employee base and found a knack of storytelling for them and being able to simplify messages so that the most, you know, the new engineer in our India office, for example, would understand what that message was and the intention of that leader. And that grew from there. The concept of surveying came into place and I was understanding all of our data systems, storytelling. Someone went out on leave and they needed to have somebody cover them while they were, whether they're gone and they happen to do our first surveys at our company meetings. And then the rest just sort of grew from there. And Cisco's always cared a lot about our people, about hearing from our people's voices, especially as technologies came into place and

8:30practices to support that. So I've just, I've stayed in this area because I love it. I care deeply about making sure everybody has a voice in the organization and making sure we're representing it. Knowing that, you know, we often talk about things and averages, but the reality is it's a range and so trying to represent that range as much as possible so that we don't just only serve those in the middle that we're understanding what both sides of the full spectrum looks like for our leaders to make decisions. Yeah, no, no, nobody's an average, right? Nobody wants to be an average. No, one of my favorite books by Tavros is the end of average, just that representation. And we don't think about it often and so, so frequently data is represented in that average area. And so, yeah, it's got to give voice to everybody. Well, one of the things you said a second ago was about the importance of storytelling. And maybe that's like a natural

9:33perclivity of yours or maybe a talent. How does one become a good storyteller? You listen. You listen more than you speak. So you really hear and ask questions and get curious and have your leaders get to the color in the context of asking questions that get them to really share the meaning, not talk high, not at the levels. So frequently our leaders have, or just individuals in general when they're presenting, they talk up in these high levels of theory. And it's not contextualized to the individual. It just sometimes can feel like word soup. And so, I really like to listen to what the content is supposed to be, extract out the meaning of pool references that can feel relatable to the majority of your audience and understand who

10:39your audience is if possible. Sometimes we walk into rooms and we think we know who we're going to be talking to and maybe it's shifted or they have expectations that you may be unaware of. And so, I think the second part is reading a room. And reading the room may not be physically in the room reading them. It might be needing to rush up on the rest of what's happening in that micro environment, bringing those different elements of context in. So, this is probably the big, big two pieces for storytelling. And then of course, the analytical aspect of being able to look at patterns and understand what that means, thinking about it from the human context, and then to get those, what's in it for me, so that the reader can feel like, oh, okay, I feel seen in this message. Yeah. When I think about the whiff of the what's in it for me, I think that's really important actually when we're talking about people intelligence. So, some folks, they hear like, oh, HR's

11:43getting an intelligence function, are they spying on me now? How important is trust in if you're going to be doing people intelligence effectively? That's a great question. I think about trust all the time. It's probably the one construct behavior, however you look at it that since even before I got into this industry that has perplexed me in many ways, because it's so individualized. Do I trust you when I first meet you? Do I, do you have to earn your trust? What does that mean from an institution perspective? What does that look like in fluid organizations where team members and leaders and org leaders and the function that you might be sitting in might be constantly moving, and so you're as an individual and for myself and particularly. I think about trust to the aspect of

12:45how does this move? How do I keep it? Is it always evolving when can I get consistency? All those different things because in particular when you think about what we within, we call ourselves people and communities here at Cisco. We're trying to understand the big T and trust, the overall aspect of trust within the organization. We know psychological safety is incredibly important. We did a best team study back in 2016 and the research coming out of that psychological safety was our second major construct that came in and that was at the team level. Being able to articulate that within the org so that teams could be their best in life, psychological safety was so important in that space. But trusting your leader is important. Trusting the organization that you work for

13:48is important that you think that they're going to do the right thing, that there is an essay do disconnect between leadership and such. And then also some of the perspective of just the environment that we were within. So I think that we'll always in the HR organization, I think there will always be skeptics that will question what the company is doing. I welcome that. I think a lot of people dislike it. I actually welcome it because it helps me with my storytelling and helps me with thinking about how do I help them at least the processes that I am responsible for and reporting on can can trust that documentation, the transparency and everything that we share in that space. Well, it's important that the trust is extended in both directions, right? So from the employee to the employer, but from the employer to the employee as well, correct? Yes, I think so. I think that the concept of reciprocal trust is becoming more in the layers of discussion these days. And we

14:54don't always think about that. And I think it's for a lot of companies, I need to think about what that might be as they're making decisions. How does that come off? Should be embedded and change management practices? How are the decisions we're making? What are the impact? The behavioral components of that for our people and trust just being part of that? And I think I don't believe that you're going to get full efforts from individuals if they don't trust the environment they're in. So it feels very foundational to me in being able to help support that. Absolutely. Well, you know, one of the things in prepping for the podcast that I thought was so interesting. And people poop who own an L, but I think it's actually it was pretty, pretty important at the time and having that continuity for that long is important. But you said you guys did your first census survey in 2005. We did. We, um, it was the full, full census survey came

15:56in 2006, but we started introducing just to be able to test technologies and all of that. We were relatively large company and, um, as you, as you can probably imagine, load bearing and could the survey handle and all that stuff had to be tested out first. But 2006 to 2014, 15, we ran a annual census survey. It was something that we gained a lot of insight out of and we were able to get the company familiar with this type of practice and understanding listening to employees and what it means to action on that. And then we rotated in 2016 away from annual and we went to quarterly types of listening. And that we had had practices for quite a period of time that allowed for team leaders to listen to their people directly. And then for us to do an understanding for the top of the house, sort of that corporate view enterprise activities like cycle listening,

16:56with a, a myriad of activities that we're doing for, to be able to have continuous listening and using all the different touch points to, to provide intelligence without having to do daily survey items, for example. Yeah. Do you think what I actually, I mean, this is not what we intended to talk about today, but you just kind of sparked me thinking about something. What do you think about these companies that send like thumbs up, thumbs down surveys daily out to employees and all that can like push notification type surveying and that type of thing? Yeah, I think if you have a culture that allows for you to action on that and you're closing the loop with your employees, then that's probably can work really well for that company. For companies that might, I don't know, might be really large, might not know what to do with that, might not be able to communicate out swift changes, for example, or to swiftly address concerns that come into it. It could just feel like you're asking

17:56for asking sake and I'm really cognizant of one, the cost of asking people to, to divert their attention from their workstream to responding to surveys. I think that is something that is a physical responsibility of mine to make sure that we're being thoughtful about length of surveys, who the audience is, doesn't need to be a census, can't it be sample all of that? But and can you respond to them? I'm curious in your space, I mean you see quite a few more companies than I do. I personally don't think that that would be something that we could operate on and close that loop as quickly, just because of the size that we are and the focus areas that, where we need to pay attention from a business perspective and I'm curious in your space what you see or thoughts. Yeah, I think I may be boatering this a little bit, but I think there's a famous

18:58Warren Buffett quote, which it's like the price of a stock on any particular day is like a weighing machine, but over a long enough period of time it's a voting machine, or maybe I got the backwards or something like that, but I always think about things like you know you check out at a store and they give you a receipt at the bottom of the receipts like a QR code to take a survey, how was your experience? And it's like anybody acting on this? No, that's just a weighing machine, right? It's saying like how much to things weigh that day, but over a long enough period of time if it's like a voting machine, you might not go to that store anymore, right? If you have a bad enough experience and I think probably something as similar as true for employee listening and how people experience their employers and that relationship is like, you know, I can tell you on a particular day, yeah, thumbs up, thumbs down, but is that really leading to me changing my behaviors or changing outcomes, or is the organization changing its behavior towards me as a consequence? And I think

19:58that's where things get really meaningful in the listening space. I don't know that that needs to be done by daily attention. Exactly. I think that there is so much intelligence that is already within the system that we can, or at least in my experience, that we can mine that information to be able to understand what that looks like through all the continuous listening activities that we do. There's so many touch points that we're asking of our employees, not sure that a daily activity would be necessary. And I also wonder would it, based on what you said, if it's a daily thing and I don't feel it daily, but you're asking me daily, could that backfire on us versus longer term touch points? Because sometimes these changes that are necessary in any type of company, they require a bit of time and trade off decisions or different

21:02things that may come into play. So it's a really good question, though. I had one for you, because we were talking about that, the chief people intelligence officer. And I know for years, I go to dinner parties or out and I meet people and they ask what I do. And I go to explain it. And I'm curious for you, when you're out and somebody's like, what is a chief people intelligence officer? How do you explain that to them? Well, that would be under the assumption that I tell them what I do. Somebody is like, I'm a pilot. Yeah, I like, you have to try pretty hard to get me to tell you what I do. If I've even said my job title, that's impressive. I don't know, especially in our friend group, locally, I'm pretty sure nobody knows what I do. And that's just kind of, it's kind of nice. It leaves it ambiguous. And it's like, let's talk about the kids or golf or whatever else is going on.

22:05It's just more fun that way. I don't know. I just kind of avoid it. Actually, in my friend group that's in this space, to much to some people's chagrin, I won't talk about what I do. I really want to know. And I'm like, yeah, I'm just not going to talk about it. So yeah, I don't know. I just kind of like to be a little mysterious, I guess, in that way. Mysterious? Okay. Yeah. Do you feel like that gives you an edge just in regards to being able to elicit more information from them to help support? No, no, no. I just don't want to talk about myself. That's really what it stems from. And if I thought, honestly, one of the few people on Earth that I actually like to talk about it with is person like you, right? Because like I feel like we're actually, you know, fellow travelers and kind of have a similar interest in this space. And I don't know if you remember, you know, but when we talked in the hallway at the, you know, unnamed conference where we were talking earlier this year, like I actually talked about like what I do in my job. And that's, you just didn't realize like that's

23:09like incredibly rare. I just, because it's like, I don't want to, I don't want to feel like a weirdo, you know? And so I don't want to feel like I'm like, you know, in the outgroup rather than the ingroup. And, um, and immediately when you share something very obscure, you're almost, almost like automatically outgrouping yourself. Yeah, that's, that's fair. I find if the general person asks me and it depends on how much of a conversation I want to get to with them. So I kind of can relate to that. I often will say that I'm an HR at a tech company and just leave that. And usually if you say you're an HR, people like, ooh, they either want to ask you questions like, I have this situation. Yeah. Or they want to stay away from like, oh, HR, um, it depends. But if, if I feel like it's somebody I want to give a little bit more context, I'll talk about behavioral science and just, um, I try to make work not suck, right? Right? The whole premise of how do I get

24:10insights to help the organization feel like it's a great place to work. If I really want people not to talk to me out of Sam and sales and they're like, oh, brash. Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. But, um, no, I appreciate you asking. Um, well, speaking of, of the things that are kind of related to this space, what is ITSG and that role have you played in it? Cause I, I've been racking my brain. I know I've had multiple guests on that are members of the group, but I don't think I've ever had anybody talk about it. And so I thought I might have you talk about it today. Well, that's awesome. I know you had Alexis Fink on that that long ago. And, um, that's actually where I met her. So ITSG is the IT survey group. So years ago, there was a consortium called Maitflower and they came together to talk about normative data and it was a cross section of companies in different industries. And ITSG broke off from that and it really was to focus on those

25:14companies that are just an IT. And it started with, um, we all did annual surveys. And in those annual surveys, we wanted to have normative benchmarking data, questions that were being asked across all of our companies that we could have confidence in this sort of, this is what other companies were and we had a, we, um, had a company come in and they helped us administer that. And it was really good conversation in a part of the industry that was just building and growing. Cisco became members, um, well, I actively became a member in 2012. We, I've been around for just a couple more years from that. And it's, it is a non-profit. So there's a board and there's different positions to hold. We, at the time, we met twice a year for conferences, um, one hosted by, in the spring, we would go to some destination and then in the fall, you would go to a company and

26:16they would host it. Um, it allowed for us to really have chat and house rule discussions. Um, although we didn't call it that at the time. It was, uh, we used Vegas rules. But, uh, it allowed for us to push on the things of what are creepy factors, which is really interesting. Because in some of the cases, the companies that were bringing them in, we were like, absolutely, you can't do that. But they, they've become commonplace in some, some organizations today. But at that, those days, we were like, you can't do that to employees. Um, but with transparency and openness about, um, what we can and can't do and having technology that supports a lot of things, I think is really cool. The way I teach ITSG today sits, I'm not an active member anymore. I've passed the baton onto other members in our organizations, Cisco's still a company, a member company. But we're not a norms bearing company because we do our survey practices differently. We don't do annual surveys. Many companies still do, um, it fits within what works for their organizations. Um, but the best

27:25element of it is the comparative benchmark discussions that you can have. The friends and the industry that you can reach out to to say, I'm starting an AI onboarding program. What does that look like in your organization? Are you doing it? What can I learn from? And you sort of don't have to try to cold call companies. You have friends that are in there that can make connections for your company and set. So I think it's incredible value and I just being able to have common language, um, and talk about the things that you're doing and spark ideas on stuff that you could do in your own company on a regular basis. So monthly meetings and, uh, biennial meetups and that sort of thing. So I think it, if, I think all companies should join, um, some sort of consortium like that because it allows for you not to stay in your own echo chamber and to, to make sure your pressure testing your ideas outside of your own company to see what it looks like. Because the reality is for much of us, um, we are talking about humans and our behavior. Just happens to be the

28:31behavior at the institution that we work at and that might look different based on our culture, but we're still at the end of the day, humans and behavior has patterns that are similar across all of us and then how that uniqueness shows up in the company can look different. One of the things that you told me, which I found fascinating, is you as a person like to see patterns in behavior and, you know, you pride yourself on bringing order to chaos and in that type of thing. And I think you even said like, you try to make like, fung sh way out of your life and things like that. So can you talk about that at all? Yeah, it's a little bit of a corkiness to me even starting from whenever I was a little kid. So my whole life, I didn't know what it was when I was a youth, but I always tried to create harmony in my environment and the environment around me. And so I would go to my friends' houses and I had a few friends who were really messy and my favorite thing to do was to go help them

29:35clean their rooms and to like make it look nice. I probably should have become like an interior designer. I know if I have a second life, I'd like to become someone who helps individuals who have a hard time with letting go of things. I don't want to maybe not to the extremes of hoarding because I think that there is some skill sets needed that I don't have at this point in my journey, but getting rid of things can sometimes be really hard for individuals. So what does that mean in professional organizing? But yeah, I'd help my friends clean their rooms and then as I grew older, if I walk into an environment that just feels chaotic, I will rearrange furniture mentally in my head. And depending on if it's someone I'm close to, I'll give a suggestion if they ask for it. Otherwise, it just creates the harmony in my own space. But my love language is definitely making order out of chaos. That works really well in a lot of cases because you can come to me with

30:36big messy problems that you're trying to solve. And I have the ability just to find the pattern, break down the different pieces, think about what it looks like, the storytelling components of it, what is the data that we need to be able to help support the outcomes that we're trying to get to, help people clearly articulate outcomes that sometimes can be the biggest sticking chaos point to start with. And then I like to see it all neatly tied up with a bow and then move on to the next thing. Is my bookshelf driving you crazy or you got any notes for me? Absolutely. I will tell you the first time that we met, I did rearrange and thought, okay, well, the horizontal books could be sitting in a pile together and you could make better use of that. And maybe you could do rainbow with I really like the way that looks aesthetically where people organize by color. But I'm guessing, tell me, is there a method to that madness or is it just, is it just all stuck up there? The upper shelf, there is literally no method. The bottom shelf, I tried to stick books,

31:43this is like a deep cut actually. I've tried to stick books of people that have either been guests on the podcast or are like kind of inspirations to me personally or just anything kind of related to people analytics or things that I might have talked about on an episode. So I'm just kind of like peppered them in there as having in the background. I thought that it's just kind of like a little bit of homage to, you know, some of the inspirations of the podcast. I like that. But they're sort of like all over the place too. It is all over. There are so many things. Okay, well, next time we chat, I will give you recommendations on how you can make it more aesthetically welcoming. I love it. I love it. This is awesome. But do you want to join me in Cole's Quarter Rocks? Yes. All right. Welcome to Cole's Quarter. If you, or let's start out with some rapid fire, if you, and you kind of answered this already, but I'm curious if you're going to stay the same. If you weren't doing what you're doing now,

32:46what would you have done with your career? I'd be a professional organizer. And is that a thing? It is in my area. Okay. There is a lot of individuals. I mean, there's a whole certification process you can go through and what that looks like, depending on what route you go. But there are a lot of people who hire individuals to come in and help them clean their stuff up. So watch out, Cisco. 26 years might not be 27 if your opens up for Roxanne. What's the place you've never been to that you most like to go and why? I really want to go to New Zealand. When I was in fifth grade, we had to do a country report. New Zealand was the country I was assigned. And I researched it with my moms in cyclopedias. So that was a really long time ago. It's like the hard book. And I'm just curious to see with what

33:50I learned in the in print and many, many, many years later how much it has evolved and shifted and what might still be the same. But it just seems like a beautiful little country that I'd like to spend some time in. Absolutely. If you were a character in any book, TV show or movie, who would you be in why? Mary Poppins. Oh. Because I feel like I walk around with a bag of tricks all the time trying to connect people or things or understand to be able to help make the world a better place. So I've got one big question for you. So obviously we're both very supportive of the con the moniker of people intelligence. Where do you see this feel going in the next year or two? Or maybe three years if we want to get too far out into the future. That's a great question. I think it depends on the organization that you're within. And their openness

34:54to being able to help, to help the organization be its best as it relates to their most, but I think, is most important asset to their people. It speaks to radical transparency to are the companies going to be open in our employees willingness to share their feedback and it has to be in an organization that they trust that they can share things, but advanced movement in that. When I talk about transparency, I think that we can do so many incredible things with the technologies in front of us. We just have to be open about what we're doing with them. So that there aren't questions in that space. I think that if those things work in tandem with each other, opportunities are limitless for the way that individuals can grow, the way that we can continue to advance technologies, the way that we can continue to interact with each other,

35:55because the human premium is still going to be essential within the workplace. We have to be able to know how to interact with each other and communicate in the elements of emotional intelligence, I think comes into higher play now as artificial intelligence is allowing for things to move faster. And I think that there is a lot of individuals who are curious in this space and a lot of individuals who are coming in. And if they keep the premise of let's make sure that we're being open about what we're trying to do, it just sort of skies the limit. How about you? Well, I'm actually before I get into my mind. I'm curious about that last thing you just said. So you said there's a lot of people coming into this space with a lot of curiosity, but they have to remain open. What does that mean? I think that I have observed in my conversations at conferences and forums that I read and articles that the patterns that I'm seeing

37:00is, oh, this is great. We have all sorts of things that we can do. What I don't want necessarily have to tell people that I'm doing it. And call it surveillance, call it creepy factor, call it. I'm just curious. So and I have the ability to do it. So I want to do it. And I think that being fully open so that individuals have choice will just continue to create openness and comfort levels. But when we start putting things into practice, whether it be in your neighborhood or your community, state, guidelines, those different areas, company, whatever that looks like, just be open with people with what your intentions are and what you're doing with it. And then they have a choice to participate or not. I love that. That's exactly where my head has been out. I think about this in terms of what we always thought or what like I'm naive in a lot of ways.

38:07I'm naive to how the world works. And what I always thought when people would make kind of, grand proclamations about the company would never surveil you. You know, the company cares about you. We believe in trust. It was not a kind of moral stance. It was more of like, it's kind of hard to spy on people's stance. And when the barriers to lowering for spying on people went down, you just don't hear as much of that. You know, oh, we would never do that anymore. And so a few examples that I've seen is, you know, companies in the past would say, oh, you know, we have really secure procedures for like emails and slack. And we would never read all of your messages that you're sending to each other and without telling you, you know, that would that would breach your trust. And then now that, you know, using AI to do all this effectively is like super easy and pretty inexpensive. You don't hear a lot of that anymore. And it's a really good point.

39:12And then kind of another example, I think I shared it with you. It just come out the I think the day that you and I chatted to prep for this. But like HubSpot was kind of caught taking all of, you know, like my understanding is each HubSpot instance is like localized so that you should not be able to, you know, whatever company share within that, you know, should be their own data. And HubSpot apparently was just taking all of that data and all of their communications with customers and pulling it together and running their own intelligence and not telling those customers that it was happening. And they kind of got a lot of egg on their face when that happened. And so, you know, in companies will try to like over legalize this. Well, it's like, well, it's, all right, we changed our terms of service. And so this isn't an issue anymore. But again, that's why I thought the the start of our conversation was so important about trust being key. And I think going back to again, my social science background of informed consent also being key.

40:18And I, I've talked about this before, what I call the asymmetry of trust, which is if you have one more powerful person than another person in a relationship, I an employer versus an employee, there's an asymmetry involved here that we have to tilt more towards giving the trust to the employee because they don't have the power in the relationship as well. I love that. Would I think is such an important aspect when we think about your behavior? If you have position of power in the room, you have, I believe, I believe you have the responsibility to make people feel at ease in the conversation. You have the responsibility to create clarity and help unstick things instead of sitting back and waiting for, for maybe the others in the room to do that for you or for the rest of the room. And I don't know how comfortable everyone is in that positional power doesn't always mean high levels of emotional intelligence. Oftentimes it means

41:23you're incredibly skilled at something and you've been able to work your way up. And so maybe that should be a company we could start in the future is calling it positional power training help educate leaders from that perspective. Yeah. Well, actually, I think that's, that's probably a good segue into the first, what am I reading article that we've got here. So I've got one from Richard Landers who's actually the current president of SIOP right now. And he had published a article in the journal, technology, mind, and behavior called psychology in the loop. So we hear a lot about this concept of the human in the loop when it comes to AI systems. But what about the psychology of that said human and how that the role that that plays in the process. And so he gives a snippet of some of this article he says, yet these strengths are

42:25also what makes psychology founder founder when working to understand technology because minds are inherently complex contradictory and hidden psychology tends to approach problems in terms of constructs referring to the abstract mental characteristics that cannot directly be observed. And therefore must be inferred through observation of behavior as a result psychology relies heavily on metaphor because there is no way to take a ruler to a person's brain measure their personality or emotion in contrast technology is instantiated in concrete systems and interfaces that exist in the physical world. When psychologists apply their metaphorical thinking to these literal technologies without fully understanding how they actually and materially exist psychology risk losing its voice in meaningful conversations about technology more broadly. I thought that quote was particularly interesting. And I think about this in terms of you know back to our conversation

43:27around people intelligence where a lot of you you mentioned your background is not in psychology but you you know your friends with lots of them and we take a lot of the things that we think we're trying to understand what's in people's minds. And how does that interface with how they're able to work more effectively have the right experiences at work you know have trust have all the things we've been talking about today. But a lot of the interface that we see is not actually about psychology it's about literal reality and you know what are the facts on the ground so I don't know what what do you think about this one and how does it relate to our conversation today. First I thought it was brilliantly written and the juxtaposition between the two coming together I think is right for the times. As it relates to the environment that part of that I started with right we have to talk about the range of things that we're seeing in the environment and not just

44:29talking about things to the average where do we talk about or look at like the conditions that the organization is setting and then how people are interacting with them. This is becomes a challenge I'm also a people leader and so I have a team and I have six direct reports and they are all incredibly unique and there is a oneness on me or a responsibility that I take extremely serious is I've got a former relationship understand that individual understand the context of the environment that they're in not just at work and the work that they're doing but whatever they share with me from their own personal realm. Create a rapport so that they feel safe to have conversations with me be able to understand where they're coming from if they have conflict ask the questions about you know what are the things that gave you a ton of energy last week and and what are the things that maybe you just wanted to put off so that I can help coach them in

45:32the space where they are. So I'm trying to get to the motivational aspects and the environment that is there in the psychological aspects without being a psychologist or psychiatrist and you know sitting on the couch and reflecting back at them but where I can help them just be their best in the environment that's a lot of work. And I think that we have a lot of opportunity where we look at leaders in the support which is fascinating too because we're removing a lot of layers within organizations I've been reading about that outside of companies but I don't think you can limit especially in tech companies you can limit the humans that are there to help motivate and engage the people who are trying to get the work done. Yeah you know you said something that you just made my real spin about you're tying some things you said earlier about you know people not wanting

46:34to be average and then what's going on with like the psychology and the loop and one of the things I've been noticing you know a lot of people call AI slop right it's just you know what it is and why I think it's so offensive to us is it's just averaging out everybody right if you just do the most mediocre average take on any particular subject or you know any particular like meme or you know you see AI slop showing up all over the place nowadays or email that you get from somebody you're just like man this is so off-putting it's because I feel like we're like flattening everybody down to average and that's what it feels like and so what we're removing is everybody's uniqueness in their psychology and their idiosyncrasies and their unique grammatical takes on things and and there's just like something about that that is just I don't know so off-putting. I hadn't thought about it that way I think it's a really interesting angle I think

47:38and my perspective on AI slop is so concerning to me because individuals one maybe don't have the best prompt engineering skill set and so they are just putting something in and hoping that it either either they don't have a skill set to be able to do right it or do the act to be themselves or they don't know enough about what they're trying to accomplish that they are reliant on the technology to do it because I believe AI can do things very quickly and if you are prompting it really well then it should be able to take on your thoughts you should be guiding it and then being able to review it but instead I have I have read things in the environment especially in social media which I think is super fascinating where I read it and I'm like make zero sense and that element of what you just said I think comes into play they've used

48:40something to to use a lot of fancy words mush together that try to normalize the average thought process and it doesn't make any sense. Yeah I do these things sometimes where you know I'm using log code work and I'm trying to give it like figure out ideas for how I can improve the distribution of my podcast so like something that's very like has actual answers and all that every time it's like you know what you could do you could use AI to write these news layers for you and then you wouldn't have to work on them anymore and I'm like no no I don't want to do that no that you're saying produce more AI slop no stop it. Yeah um I do wonder how many people though take that suggestion yeah when we see what's out there you know when we read them I want to look for original thought I think that's the beauty of humans

49:43and the nuanced aspect of your lived experience and something that AI doesn't have is the lived experience and where you're bringing that in and if you are especially well-versed in something or at least well educated in it and you're bringing an opinion there's probably opportunity in the place where you maybe are it's a controversial topic and you're trying to stay very neutral but you should be guiding that in your prompting that says what you're trying to get to because you're not trying to maybe ruffle feathers or very delicately approach a subject I think that can support it but just blindly sending stuff on yeah um takes me back to my college days obviously I didn't have any AI we barely had computers um but typing um typing these really long documents right you were required to have 300 pages or whatever for for a report and in the middle

50:44of it just writing something completely obscene to see if my professor was actually reading anything and would come up with it and and the sort of Easter eggs like did you find what I had to say to you and that the question I posed or something um and I never had one professor that um maybe might have found that uh inside of one of my one of my Easter eggs that I sent out there but I always shared with them by the way I gave you an Easter egg and and then would open the question that's funny that's really funny um yeah it's how somebody approached the other day it was something like yeah it was like a college student they're like how did people write a 10 page paper about a book before AI and the person said I wrote a 10 page page paper and didn't even read the book where was it oh that's fantastic like mine it was a different time it was yeah you know we're never going back to that I guess um but let me hit you with the the next article

51:45not really nor more of a summarization so Andrew Merritt who's been putting me go this really great sub stack lately he has summarized an article that came out by the national bureau of economic research called chaining task refining work in a theory of AI automation which frankly was a little too dense for me to try to cover it here and so I'm going to stick with his summarization where he talks about you know what decides whether a job survives contact with AI right does it hollow out does it vanish altogether does it get combined and and talking about task based models of automation um and how they play a role and and so I'm summarizing a lot here but essentially what he says is it's not about any task by task automation and isolations but you're really looking for is if there's clusters of tasks what the author's called chains where and and this is actually related kind of to the psychology in the loop we were just talking about where any kind of cluster

52:49where a human can start the the task or the cluster of task and then the the automation occurs and then a human can come in at the end at i.e. the chain of events that's going on here and so really if you're doing any kind of automation in this space sequencing is what matters the most in terms of human automation human automation rather than just taking a smattering approach of oh a particular task is more ripe for automation therefore we will do it but it doesn't really make sense in the sequence of tasks and I thought I thought this was such a practical and interesting perspective um for thinking about how to do AI automation at work and and what is the role that AI workforce transformation plays and and I'm I'm sure in an intelligence function you're being asked to kind of think about some of these things how did you react to this one Roxanne? You this one felt the most relevant to our current space and practices that we've been doing for quite a while so gen a i is what is hit the world but the perspective of automation and

53:56using AI technologies is not new to my team we've been using them for a long time um and just to be able to get insights out at scale we have been using automation for quite a while and we always talk about the art and the science so the science being the technology and the art being the human and how those two have to coexist in our space and what that looks like and means so um quality checks making sure but how we can use it to our advantage to speed things up um because you manually can't create uh 600 powerpoint presentations and then deliver them you've got to be able to put scripts in that allow for the in intelligence to be loaded correctly but you had to start from the beginning to tell it what scripts it needed to run and where to place that data and all the information then you've got to come back and make sure it's running correctly and test that it showed up the way that you wanted it to and then maybe have to rerun it if it didn't um if if things are coming in and then the the aspect of getting it out and delivered and then you go and have the

54:59consultation with the leader which is the human part so we've been applying that and I think it's the right direction to go it's a stretch though i don't know that's a stretch let me rephrase that if that isn't practices that you've been using and if you have been the human throughout the whole loop um being able to pause yourself to say where can i make things faster and i'm okay with it taking control and then where i come insert myself back in so just even getting workflows to individuals running workflows to pause and to look at that um is could can be a great time saver uh and realizing that it's not a replacement activity it's an enhancement activity i love that that's that's such a good point i think about it like one of the things i've been thinking about lately is and people were so impressed by this like a year or two ago which is can you just

56:04designate on a task by task level the level of automation potential for any particular task that's really good information and it also does nothing right and and so what i think a lot of people are learning the hard way right now is it's not enough just to say that there's automation potential that we have to figure out ways of seeing in engaging in the real change management associated with it that would go in and put the right procedures in place the right processes the right technology that would enable true productivity gains to occur while also maintaining the humanity the role and making sure that all this happens within a cost structure that makes sense for an organization and so AI potential is is almost like the easiest part of the equation to making true AI workforce transformation and i don't know if you've been seeing that and

57:08especially since it sounds like you were very early to this type of journey but to me it was like what people were fascinated by like a year ago is now seeing like yeah that's that's not going to get me there that's not going to get me to the destination yeah well i think the word potential can be dangerous in general i used to talk about in trainings we believe like oh i see rock stands potential potential doesn't materialize anything it's sort of like those questions like would you do something i want to know if it's happening yeah and so and in the aspect of that being able to understand the productivity of the the work that is being delivered because very in my experience an observation work is not individually produced it's collectively produced and especially in the environment and world that i live in so i try to attribute productivity to the product or the

58:08service being and then i look at it from a performance perspective for the individual and so um for what you're talking about in my perspective or first thought that comes into mind is the performance conversation has to come in you can put all the plans in place from a productivity perspective but the performance aspect is really where this lights up does the individual that needs to work in that part of the workflow that collectively interacts with others what's the barrier stopping them perhaps from bringing that into play do they need more education do they need more trust that it's going to help them be able to grow in their space do they work in environment where they just feel like their voice isn't heard and so or is um is their voice always been the thing that was their currency and or that they felt like they had a niche spot that now you're telling me something else can do this thing um i think of people who are deeply skilled

59:13on an activity and where AI can maybe do that activity faster um where they have to regain their confidence in being able to direct it comes into play i agree there's a there's a lot of danger and potential you know if no one's around and there's some good leftovers of the fridge there's a high potential i'm going to go eat it you know no potential is quite dangerous you know you didn't take your bait on that one that was fun i thought that was very funny well let me let me do it with the next one okay why suck in my embarrassment um so this is uh prior guess of the podcast Neil Morelli at Salesforce talking about an article from another prior guess of the podcast uh Doug Shagham from J&J uh they published an article called deployment of AI to infer and police skills insights from Johnson & Johnson's digital first workforce initiative in the journal of

1:00:15information systems and what what Neil uh talked about here is in this 2025 paper about what are the prerequisites to make the AI promise a reality inferring and police skill proficiency proficiency from behavioral data what they found from this study from Johnson & Johnson was a few things that the AI inferred in police skill proficiencies uh that which the business could map against the future state model um that you need to show the closing the gap between what we have and what we need um that they baked in human reviewers into the process for assessing the skill proficiencies and they'll compensate from kind of what AI models were missing and it did missing and then they had 300 self-enroll and upskilling programs within two weeks voluntarily after this program and then internal placements for open roles internally rose 8% year over year from 2024

1:01:19before this initiative was put in place so I probably over summarized that a little bit but what did you think about about this one Roxanne and the relationship to what we've just been talking about? Yeah I think skills attribution seems to be a nut that I I want to overly simplify um and I want to have it be owned by the individual of what they want to be able to come in and say that they can and can't do and can as a company can we provide a system that allows for them to understand what's needed and so if if the organization is really clear about where they're going and what they want to do and this is this is a hard one because I know many times through the years I've had leaders say like who do I need to hire in the future and am I what are we going to be doing in the future? Yeah. It's sort of what comes first perspective but I think of I think of problems

1:02:20we're trying to solve and can be really clear about what we're trying to solve in the organization articulate what is needed to be able to put that to solve the problem so I need I'll just very simply I'm trying to put together a bed frame and I need somebody who knows how to read instructions I need somebody who is strong because it's super heavy and I need somebody who can help give directions in that space then you put that out into the environment so where's your really good sort of work board that can allow for me to raise my hand and say I am excellent at reading instructions not super strong though so definitely can't be someone who lifts it because I've got a bad back right that I'm coming forward and I've got three hours next week that I can do this based on my schedule and I've already cleared it with my leader it's not taking me away from

1:03:25any other pivotal work it allows for this level of agency that talks about permission ability and time to be able to to to take that on instead I think a lot of companies when I talk to my peers we we just move people based on skills and activities happening in the background and that's what I think AI is trying to do right it's trying to bring these things into place that says okay we have all these different things and if it's getting down to saying this is what Roxanne can do where's Roxanne's voice and that to double check it to make sure that it's representing does Roxanne even really want to be known for doing that in the organization is that work that she wants to go do maybe it's a skill that drains her we have to take that into place too if it's a weakness of mine I might be good at it if I don't like doing it you're not getting the best engagement out of me is that good for productivity and performance almost like you need an ecology in the loop you know yeah exactly so I think that AI can help support us to get into these places and I I did like

1:04:27the article and I like the approach that J&J was trying to do and solve and I think every company is trying to do this right now because you want to be able to get that skills attribution faster but you've got to have the employees signing off on it and you've got to not be moving people without there without their desire to want to do it because think that can backfire on you yeah I think I'm really glad you said a lot of that stuff one of the things I've been thinking about is like how if you're studying the the concept of work and how it's transforming right now whether it's digital transformation or AI transformation what have you it's like a series of concentric circles right and it seems like people are over indexing to whatever data they have in front of their face so if they have skills data they think everything is skills if they have task data they think everything is task if they have compensation data all they take or if they have you know employee listening

1:05:27data the only thing that matters is people's sentiment and the reality and this is I think where the value of people intelligence comes in is about synthesis between each layer so you have things at the individual level the role the task the role the capabilities of the human being their actual motivations their beliefs all that then you go out to the to the team and then maybe to the process and then maybe to the you know the the business unit and at each level of that understanding you're going to have new data that needs to come in that needs to be synthesized at every level and that's how you're really going to focus on transforming the business so it's not just skills it's not just task it's not just roles it's all of the layers of the cake and so I thought you'd really appreciate that but um thanks for bearing with me today Roxanne this has been a lot of fun thanks for having me I appreciate it yeah I love the conversation I love the work that you're doing and the conversations that you're having you you're such a wide range of guests that are coming on the show which just

1:06:30talks about the wide range of this discipline in particular and those of us who are paying attention to people at work and the environments that we're setting what whether it be from the education that new IO spikes are gaining um or social scientists coming into this I look forward to seeing where this goes in the next couple decades uh oh I um hope to be I hope to stay tangential to it even and if I'm off helping individuals clean their house I'm sure my side hustle will always be staying close to what's going on in the human environment and making the world better yeah I remember one of our probably like a fifth episode of our podcast or something like that we had a guest on there like you guys are gonna run out of talk of topics and guests to talk to after like 20 episodes because there's nothing there's nothing new under the sun and I'm like I don't know I feel like everything's always changing and there's always more interesting people to talk to and more interesting things are going on and you know just kind of surfing the wake of all this AI

1:07:33stuff has been kind of crazy the last few years but there's always more to talk about I assure you so Roxanne has been so fast saying to have you on as a guest today if people want to reach out to you and get in touch where can they uh where can they find you can find me on LinkedIn I'm the only Roxanne Busby Davis out there so feel free to connect awesome well you've been listening to directionally correct of people intelligence podcast with your host Cole Napper and today's guest Roxanne Busby Davis thanks for joining me Roxanne thanks Cole