What would your organisation look like if it worked more like an octopus — distributed, adaptive, and capable of sensing and reacting without waiting for instructions from the centre?

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Phil Lebrun and Jana Werner, Executives in Residence at Amazon Web Services and authors of The Octopus Organization, to explore why so many transformations fail to stick — and what a more adaptive, human approach to change actually looks like.

Join them as they discuss:

• What the octopus organisation metaphor is, and why it offers a different model to the traditional, hierarchical "Tin Man" organisation
• The three themes — clarity, ownership, and curiosity — that separate organisations that adapt well from those that don't
• Why transformation can no longer be treated as a one-time event
• HR's evolving role in driving and supporting transformation
• How to measure whether change is actually working, beyond vanity metrics
• Real examples of leaders and organisations putting these ideas into practice

This episode is sponsored by Valence.

Nadia, Valence's AI coaching platform, connects talent strategy to the work employees are actually doing — offering coaching from the frontline to the boardroom, and surfacing organisational insights that weren't visible before.

As the most widely deployed coach in the Fortune 500, Nadia is already helping global leaders like Nestlé, Delta, CVS, and Kraft Heinz transform talent at scale.

Learn more at valence.co/insight222

Resources:

• The Octopus Organization by Phil Lebrun and Jana Werner

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Is purpose at work as straightforward as we've made it out to be?

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Jessica Zwaan, VP People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built for People and Purpose and Work, to explore what the research actually tells us about purpose at work — and what that means for how HR shows up for people.

Join them as they discuss:

• Why treating HR like a product function changes the questions you ask
• What the research on purpose at work really reveals, and why the reality is more nuanced than the narrative
• What purpose washing is, how it happens, and what it can look like in practice
• What a more grounded alternative to purpose-led culture could look like
• Why really knowing your people is the foundation of all of it
• How perceptions of HR are evolving, and what's driving that shift

This episode is brought to you by Leapsome - the people-first HR platform that connects performance, engagement, and HR operations in one place, so you get a complete picture, not half the story.

See it in action at leapsome.com/demo.

Resources:

• Built for People by Jessica Zwaan
• Purpose and Work by Jessica Zwaan
• People over Perks, the Leapsome Community

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How do you rebuild a company's entire capability infrastructure — and fund the transformation through the savings it generates?

Zaka Farhat is Global SVP for Talent, Learning, Organisation and Capability Development at GSK, where she leads the company's enterprise-wide skills, learning and capability agenda. In this episode, Zaka shares the full story of how GSK rebuilt its capability infrastructure in 18 months - retiring more than 20 legacy systems, building a single skills and learning ecosystem, and funding the transformation through the savings it generated.

Join them as David and Zaka discuss:

• Why GSK's skills transformation began with a commercial question about capability and cost
• The five conditions for organisational readiness that had to be in place before any platform launched
• How GSK approached skills taxonomy, job architecture and inference, and what they had to redo along the way
• What personalised learning looks like at scale, and how skills data is now shaping workforce planning decisions
• What GSK chose to stop, and why decommissioning is the step most transformations skip
• How Zaka's team is measuring impact across three KPI layers

This episode is sponsored by TechWolf.

The world of work is being rewritten faster than HR systems can keep up. Skills age in months. Roles get redesigned quarter by quarter. CHROs have quietly become AI transformation leads, and the data they need to lead it doesn't exist in any HR system.

That's why the world's most forward-looking enterprises such as HSBC, AMD, T-Mobile, GSK, ServiceNow, Pfizer, have built on TechWolf.

As the data layer for the AI era of work, TechWolf gives enterprises the skills, they need to move faster and lead with confidence. Skills Intelligence, Work Intelligence, and Market Intelligence, in one layer. Visit techwolf.ai.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do the world's most forward-thinking organisations use skills intelligence, market intelligence and work intelligence together to stay ahead?

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, host David Green is joined by Mik Wornoo, co-founder and President of US at TechWolf, to explore how organisations are using three signals together to build a strategic workforce planning strategy that can keep pace with AI, and what that looks like in practice.

In this conversation, David and Mik discuss:

• What skills intelligence, work intelligence and market intelligence each bring to strategic workforce planning, and why all three matter
• What work intelligence actually means in practice, and how decomposing work into tasks is changing how organisations understand the impact of AI on their workforce
• How AI is actively reshaping roles right now, and what that means for strategic workforce planning, job architecture and redeployment
• Real-world case studies from organisations using all three signals to make smarter workforce decisions and align their people strategy with their AI strategy
• What it actually looks like to get started, and why the barrier to entry is lower than most HR leaders think

This episode is sponsored by TechWolf.

The world of work is being rewritten faster than HR systems can keep up. Skills age in months. Roles get redesigned quarter by quarter. CHROs have quietly become AI transformation leads, and the data they need to lead it doesn't exist in any HR system.

That's why the world's most forward-looking enterprises such as HSBC, AMD, T-Mobile, GSK, ServiceNow, Pfizer, have built on TechWolf.

As the data layer for the AI era of work, TechWolf gives enterprises the skills, they need to move faster and lead with confidence. Skills Intelligence, Work Intelligence, and Market Intelligence, in one layer. Visit techwolf.ai.

Resources:

TechWolf podcast

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it take to turn a 300-year-old bank into the UK's biggest fintech?

Sharon Doherty is Chief People and Places Officer at Lloyds Banking Group, and over the last four years she's been leading one of the most ambitious organisational transformations in British financial services - 300-year-old institution reinventing itself as the UK's biggest fintech.

In this episode, David and Sharon get into what transformation at that scale actually looks like from the inside - the governance, the culture work, the AI strategy, and the tough calls that only leadership can make.

• How Sharon thinks about her role as CPPO through three lenses: storyteller, tough lover, and disruptor
• The AI governance structure at Lloyds, including the control tower she runs with the CTO and the ethics committee underpinning every decision
• The cross-functional super agent Lloyds is building with Microsoft
• Why HR leaders should be fighting to get Places on their remit, and how ownership of the physical environment transforms what the function can deliver
• How Lloyds is approaching the shift from AI literacy to AI fluency across 80,000 people
• What Sharon thinks the world of work looks like in 2033, and the role HR must play in getting there

This episode is sponsored by TechWolf.

The world of work is being rewritten faster than HR systems can keep up. Skills age in months. Roles get redesigned quarter by quarter. CHROs have quietly become AI transformation leads, and the data they need to lead it doesn't exist in any HR system.

That's why the world's most forward-looking enterprises such as HSBC, AMD, T-Mobile, GSK, ServiceNow, Pfizer, have built on TechWolf.

As the data layer for the AI era of work, TechWolf gives enterprises the skills, they need to move faster and lead with confidence. Skills Intelligence, Work Intelligence, and Market Intelligence, in one layer. Visit techwolf.ai.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are your meetings actually working? Or has your calendar just become a system nobody knows how to switch off?

In this episode, David Green is joined by Rebecca Hinds, Stanford-trained organisational researcher, Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, and author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done.

In this conversation, David and Rebecca discuss:

• Why organisations should treat meetings as a product, and what that actually means in practice
• The concept of meeting debt, and why calendars accumulate bloat in the same way codebases accumulate technical debt
• What a 48-hour calendar cleanse involves, and what typically happens when organisations rebuild their calendars from scratch
• The patterns that show up most consistently when mapping how work actually moves between teams
• How AI is being used to improve meetings, and the ways it can make dysfunctional meeting culture worse
• What the conversation looks like in the room when CHROs start rethinking collaboration for the AI era

This episode is sponsored by TechWolf.

The world of work is being rewritten faster than HR systems can keep up. Skills age in months. Roles get redesigned quarter by quarter. CHROs have quietly become AI transformation leads, and the data they need to lead it doesn't exist in any HR system.

That's why the world's most forward-looking enterprises such as HSBC, AMD, T-Mobile, GSK, ServiceNow, Pfizer, have built on TechWolf.

As the data layer for the AI era of work, TechWolf gives enterprises the skills, they need to move faster and lead with confidence. Skills Intelligence, Work Intelligence, and Market Intelligence, in one layer. Visit techwolf.ai.

Resources: Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most organisations are asking how to get more from their people. But what if the real question is how to get more from the time they spend at work?

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Joe O'Connor, founder of Worktime Revolution, and Jared Lindzon, future-of-work journalist and author, to explore the research-backed case for the four-day working week, and what it means for how HR leaders design, lead and transform work.

Join them as they discuss:

• Why the five-day working week is a relic of the industrial age
• What the evidence from global pilots shows about productivity, wellbeing and retention
• Why organisations moving to a four-day week are also becoming faster AI adopters
• What it actually takes to make the transition work - and why culture and trust are the real foundations
• How HR leaders can shift the conversation from top-down mandate to shared, enthusiastic change

This episode is sponsored by TechWolf.

The world of work is being rewritten faster than HR systems can keep up. Skills age in months. Roles get redesigned quarter by quarter. CHROs have quietly become AI transformation leads, and the data they need to lead it doesn't exist in any HR system.

That's why the world's most forward-looking enterprises such as HSBC, AMD, T-Mobile, GSK, ServiceNow, Pfizer, have built on TechWolf.

As the data layer for the AI era of work, TechWolf gives enterprises the skills, they need to move faster and lead with confidence. Skills Intelligence, Work Intelligence, and Market Intelligence, in one layer. Visit techwolf.ai.

Resources: Do More In Four by Joe O'Connor and Jared Lindzon

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What’s the value of employee experience if you can’t tie it to business performance results?

In this special bonus episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, host David Green is joined Katarina Coppé and Jake Mealy, respectively Senior Partner and Chief Data Solutions Officer at Welliba.

Drawing on new research analysing over 25 million data points across the S&P 500, they unpack the direct link between employee experience and financial performance, showing why companies with stronger employee sentiment consistently outperform the market.

Join them to learn more about:

• Why traditional employee listening models are breaking down and what’s replacing them
• How external data can reveal competitive blind spots in attraction and retention
• The surprising link between employee experience and shareholder returns
• Why “fixing the floor” matters more than chasing high engagement scores
• How HR can bring employee experience into board-level and investor conversations
• Practical steps to move from insight to action - faster

Welliba, winner of the 2024 HR Unleash Global Startup Award, is redefining people, culture and organisational insights.

Using the latest AI technologies combined with behavioural science, their EXcelerate solution, instantly analyses all available public data, delivering deep insights into people and organisations - without the need for surveys. Discover how you can elevate your talent strategy, transform your workforce, and stay ahead of your competitors.

Learn more at offer.welliba.com/insight222-2026

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.