[Music] foreign Kent from servicenow and definitely want to thank you all for being here I am was previously Chief transformation officer I did that job for about two years which basically means that I spent my time with customers and before that I implemented servicenow's hrsd Human Resources Service delivery at Lowe's Home Improvement so implemented a portal and service management shared services for 330 000 people that was fun and then prior to that I led large-scale Transformations at Bank of America and at Lo and at UPS so I've been working for a very long time I'm a little tired but very happy to be here and appreciate you guys joining us today but I am thrilled the star of the show to have with me today my new friend Kim I'm gonna let Kim introduce herself has an amazing background in the HR space and Beyond quite frankly mom to two boys which I always find fascinating I have one daughter anybody have boys in the room I just can't imagine raising boys but my goodness how much fun they're fun yeah definitely so Kim thank you for joining us and if you don't mind just take us through your your background and kind of what you're doing these days sure good afternoon everyone I am uh Dr Kimberly Steed I'm the associate Deputy assistant secretary for human capital with the Department of Health and Human Services I've recently joined HHS maybe in the last eight months from the Department of Treasury where I was responsible for strategic planning program evaluation and a few other employee driven strategic programs uh prior to working in the federal service I also spent some time in private sector as a recruiter for both Technical and Manufacturing environments and then prior to that I was in the military for eight years I spent the majority of that time doing military personnel and a short stint doing protocol which is a fancy word for events planning love it anybody else use the word protocol events planning I love it that's the old HR right events planning party planning we called it in the in the Pro in the in the private sector definitely but we're thrilled that you're here we're going to talk a little bit about this topic of skills and the skills Gold Rush like what does that mean today and how are we going to be able to mine this Workforce that we have in federal and quite frankly around the globe where today Kim and I were talking earlier boy the uh the employees have just put themselves in the driver's seat coming out of covet haven't they are you guys seeing that in your own organizations where they're a little Bolder about the demands they're making the expectations that they have from you as an employer sound familiar so what are you going to do about it right how are we going to make sure that we're taking advantage of the talent that we have and Kim's going to share some of the uh the insights that she has and and where she's thinking about taking her organization which I'm I'm super excited about so Kim I'm going to start off and and talk to you a little bit about um this whole move to skills-based talent management so you mentioned hiring you did hiring before um you know career pathing I think about internal Mobility people come to a company and they want to move around and have the opportunity to grow their career um and and frankly just getting work done productivity how can we make sure that we're managing our Workforce in a way that is most productive um what do you think is going to be the most challenging for the public sector making this shift into more of a skills-based talent management philosophy sure thank you I think uh for me what I see is the most challenging is career pathing because you need to balance uh having an employee understand where they can go with their career while meeting the mission and also identifying and capitalizing on hidden skills which I think is something that at least in the federal sector we don't do a great job of identifying hidden skills and then using those skills when we need them and so I'll give you a quick example at a prior Department I worked at we did a competency assessment and my manager talked to me about the results and I had assessed myself on competencies that I didn't currently use in that job and so he took them down to zero and who I thought to myself well I still have the skills just because I'm not using them in this job it doesn't mean that I can't do it at some other time so in other words if he hadn't seen them you don't have them right okay and that's exactly what it's never happened to any of us right yeah that is exactly what he said I haven't seen you demonstrate those skills so I don't know that you have them and I'm thinking to myself what's on my resume but okay and so I just think that as we look at employees and how to best um support them we need to understand the whole employee and everything that they bring to the table there's a ton of skills that we get um outside of the workforce that can be applicable on the job in unique circumstances like I said earlier I spent three years doing events planning it has nothing to do with what I do today but it's still a skill that I can call on when I need to and so having employees understand not only what they can do within your organization but what they can do across the federal spaces another Avenue that I think as the federal government we really need to look at because skills it's not necessarily a bad thing when an employee goes to another Federal agency you need that exposure to make you more well-rounded and to really understand how the government runs and so helping employees understand that they can go to other agencies and that skills are transferable into other careers based on the competencies I think really helps employees Envision a full career in the government and when you think about the fact that an employee can Envision a full career in the government meaning that there's a lot of things they can do over the course of their 30 plus years that they want to work in government what does that look like so when you when we get to this place of being able to do skills-based management what's the impact going to be I think the impact will be great for the government because it will allow us to keep employees within the federal space as opposed to them leaving for experiences that they don't feel that they can get within the federal environment yeah and it'll just make the government stronger any of you guys dealing with that your people feel like they need to leave to go get experience elsewhere in the in the private sector why is that anybody want to share what you're seeing in your own company pursuing their interests so they can't pursue their interests inside the government sure they can right sometimes yep I totally agree with you thank you for sharing that yes so we got to get there quicker in some cases right to Kim's Point got to make it attractive full disclosure my daughter is in the Air Force um you know and she'll be coming up on her commitment pretty soon in a couple of years you know I don't know what she'll do well she will the government be attractive to her right will she want to stay and continue to serve or will she thinks that she has to go to private sector to do the you know the cool things or get the experience that she's looking for you know the good news is with what Kim's talking about if we can paint a picture for people like my daughter right who today is a pilot that's not who she is her hidden skills are much broader than being a pilot right you've got kids that come up you know through the ranks and have a lot of experience doing other things and you know they look around and say I don't see anybody doing what I think I want to do that's probably just because they haven't had exposure to it like your ball sat in that exposure to your skills previously right yes it's so interesting I can remember um you know being at I was at Bank of America for a long time in my career and I can remember having conversations people moved around a lot right and and I thought it was wonderful but it was interesting because when you were looking for somebody specifically for a project or a job you know you talk to your peers and said hey this is the profile the person I'm looking for and this is what we're talking about right but if I couldn't go have that conversation voice to voice there were no systems that gave me information to go find Kim who had done event planning what'd you call it protocol protocol sorry I'm gonna have to remember that I would never know Kim had protocol in her background if that's what I was looking for if she hadn't done it while I was watching right that's what we're talking about I love that example definitely and and thinking about hidden skills I mean think about what are the you know what are the opportunities we have to open you know to bust open the door on hidden skills and let people bring their entire self to work in a way that gives us both benefit the employee and the employer right so Kim over the last five years there has been according to what I'm being told a lot of turnover and I don't think that's just in the public sector definitely it's in the private sector as well um and and certainly you guys mentioned it maybe a loss of key talent to the private sector from the public sector um think about your experience as a leader what is driving this in your opinion it's a loaded question I'd love to get others answers too right so I think these insights are important right to tell us if we're going to be able to address the problem we got to get to the root cause right yeah I think federal employees are tired you know they're consistently under resource they're tired of doing more with less and oftentimes working in federal government can be seen as a thankless job it's an easy target and so it drives a lot of um desire to leave and we haven't done a good job of attracting early career talent and so we're not poised to deal with um the retirements and the departures that we see and so I think it's just an unfortunate uh set of events that have led us to what we've seen in the last few years in terms of departures from the government you know it's interesting too and I think about the private sector I hear so much about what does a company stand for right and we've heard this over the last five or six years in particular with all the things that happened prior to covid and companies were willing to take a stand like this is what we're all about this is what we stand for had nothing to do with their business model it was all about trying to attract people into their organization or retain the people that they had when I think about what the public sector does I mean you guys have some of the most noble missions in the world right but we don't hear about the the agencies in that way sometimes so I think to your point you know how do we think about that differently to maybe think about stemming that tide of of turnover any other thoughts from you guys on what's driving turnover okay so can you guys hear in the back how about leaders who are willing to embrace transformation does that sound familiar can I get a hand clap for that anybody want to see that thank you for that what about anybody else yep you know okay and I think that's the back of what she was saying so I think there's to your point about people coming in and standing for something the federal government's mission is very Noble and for most every Department can stand on something that they do the benefits I think the the real stress around the of how quickly something can be done I want to make a difference like they just don't stick around the average 20 to 26 year old maybe two years wow maybe two and a half and then they're gone not because it isn't no Boomerang effect they don't come back when they go to corporate and figure out that it's the same it's a great point I thought I saw this on the other hand anybody else want to talk about yeah in the back workplace balance yeah watch what they think they're seeing because the private sector is that pendulum is definitely shifting so it's really interesting because you know you have this concept you know you hear your whole life about The Grass Is Always Greener but I do think some of this is exactly what Kim is saying like how do we get this um you know in a place where people see us differently right see the opportunities differently we see the people differently and which is really what we're talking about when we think about skills based anything else on turnover anybody wants to add yep been able to use servicenow as a platform to try and capture data on these how have you been able to get so like how is Services platform helping solving problems because I think all of us can sit here and talk about our experience like you all had them and we've all seen them and we all want we're all so motivated to make progress on them I was wondering if you had any experience um not yet on the skill side but we are entering into the four-way of using servicenow to help with the onboarding experience to make it more user-friendly for new employees when they come onto the agency and actually extending the onboarding experience passed you know like the first month so that they um acculturate into HHS uh better and more and have a true picture of everything that HHS has to offer you know HHS has over 90 000 people we have eight different unique missions within HHS and so helping employees understand while you may be working at CDC right now you could also have a career at NIH you could also have a career at FDA and so allowing them to see the family of HHS and not just the office that they're in at the moment I think that's a big part of what we're hearing from companies today at servicenow is what can we do right I was telling Kim I can remember at Bank of America at least 20 years ago I had to fill out a skills assessment anybody else fill out a skills assessment here literally the one I did was like the bubbles like on the SAT like seriously who's going to do something with that took me forever it was I mean it had to have been 50 pages long I don't know but I never felt like anybody took that information and and helped me get my next assignment with that to Kim's point if my manager hadn't seen me do those things they weren't thinking about me in those areas so servicenow is on the cusp of coming out with a with a product that will do just that take skills um and and skills inventory and map them to the needs of the organization so we are getting asked this by every company we talked to starting in the c-suite to say what do we need to do to transition to the next phase of work the next way of working the next you know partially remote Workforce the next you know gen whatever that's coming up how do we attract and retain early in career um and it's interesting because the whole concept is just because you have a job today with with these 10 skills that are required doesn't mean that that's the job you'll have next and it'll probably have a different 10 skills that are required so how can I get information about you as an employee not only what you bring to the table but also what training I provide to you that also gives you skills how can I take that information and automate that I get something assigned to me Kim gives me some training that I have to take that's HR maybe as a recruiter you know what are the skills inherent in that training that I can add to my resume if you will not my job experience resume not my timeline resume but my skills resume and so what we're being asked by bios is help me go from A to B these are the skills I needed yesterday these are the skills I'm going to need tomorrow so even if you think about how do we accelerate the pace of work getting done you know any of you using citizen development on your servicenow platform that's accelerating the pace of work getting done like you're putting work at the front line now you governance around it I get it you have to do that I can tell you I had a friend of mine whose son grew up with my daughter and he looked at me was working at Lowe's when I was there and he said Miss Kelly why is it so hard to do work at work yeah I'm like it's a great question he said I literally take information from a spreadsheet I copy and paste it into a system it does something over there I take the answer and I copy and paste it back into the spreadsheet he said that is the dumbest thing I've ever done how long do you think he stayed at Lowe's about a year he's on to his next job by the way he's on his third job since then graduated from college five years ago this is what we're talking about right so Kim if you think about taking the question about skills assessment being able to apply it to turnover being able to apply it to the future of the organization what's the impact you're looking for having an employee understand not only the skills that they need for their current job but the skills that they need for their future job and understanding that um those skills can transfer into other types of careers I think is the the thing that employees want to know the most about I might have a set of skills that I use in HR but I could also use those skills perhaps in budget or in policy development and so it really is just taking a competency or skills based approach to um to the way we do work and so and mapping it across you know the entire employee life cycle so that those skills are clear in the Recruitment and attracting phase of the process as well as the Performance Management and the development of employees so that you're talking about the same things throughout the employee life cycle so that employees really understand what's needed on the job but then also balancing the development and growth of that employee with what they need for the job and where they see themselves in the future so being able to like some were talking in the audience know what might be ahead of me for a career like I can look two or three steps ahead and say here's something I want to Aspire to or here's some things that I may want to do in the future when you think about where technology is going with that that's exactly what we were talking about and one of the things that um you know that we're doing with the platform currently is taking that skills intelligence and really putting it into a couple of different categories one would be functional if you think about kind of role based developments that's what Kim was saying what what job am I in now what training do I need what skills do I should I bring and what skills do I have a gap in that I can easily close and then the second one is more around kind of the power skills leadership skills management skills it's really preparing the the leaders for the future and giving them the ability to prepare their people and then the last one I would say is leadership itself so you think about now that I've learned how to be a manager now I'm going to step into a role of leading at the company level more about strategy more about where we're taking the organization so how do I optimize the workforce how do I make sure that I understand big picture the skills that we have on on campus if you will today and the skills that we need to have for tomorrow and imagine if you could take all that skills information have it in a dashboard right here's what my company needs today here's the people that are upskillable right Kim's had this kind of work before or similar work it would be a small step to move her to the next level of skill what about people that are already ready to be promoted because they've done this in other jobs or they've exhibited this skill in other jobs taking chance right maybe maybe do a um a skip level and and give them an opportunity to have a stretch assignment for a change but if you don't have that data if you don't understand what the job requires for the next move and what the person brings to the table it's hard to make that match it's almost like a match.com for skills if you will it is but I would also say managers have a huge role in that they have to be willing to accept that the person might not have a hundred percent of everything that they need and it's okay if they have 85 or even sometimes 70 percent because no one person is oftentimes going to come to the table with everything that you need and managers are always looking for that one unicorn that doesn't exist yep very true we keep looking though don't we we did so if you think about some of the key Talent practices that you and your teams are starting to experiment with what can you share some of those with us I'm sure I would say we're really looking at building early career Talent attracting and retaining people that we can grow within HHS and across HHS and really putting in the support not only on a skills base but looking at the employees from a whole person perspective in the sense that we're strengthening resilience programs that we have we're putting in Frameworks to address mental health and recovery so that people understand that we see them as more than just getting X thing done for us by xdate and so I've found that in talking to some of the younger staff that we have at HHS that they are really looking for opportunities to do different things similar to what the gentleman in the audience said earlier you know they want to go on details and try things out and so we're putting together the detail programs and things like that um yeah and putting people into a job doesn't have to be so risky right yes um kind of the trial before you buy right exactly there's rotational assignments maybe uh we were talking about um new things that you're experimenting with thank you yeah no problem thank you yeah so those are some of the things that we're looking at in terms of direct impact on employees but as an organization we're really looking at focusing on our call support employees through their environment of hybrid work not only for employees but also the tools and resources that managers need to support employees in this hybrid environment as well as senior leadership like what are the the things that senior leaders need to do in order to set a culture where working in Kansas is the same as working in DC I think we learned a lot through covid right and I think it was interesting to me because when when we did kind of go to our Corners right and everybody went home I don't think a lot of us thought about the need to upskill around collaboration did any of you do upskilling around collaboration because all of a sudden you went from maybe people being 100 in the office to people being 100 remote or some mix in between what'd you do to to get ready for that did you guys do anything interesting well I wasn't at HHS yeah when colbit first kicked off but I will say it at my prior agency at least in my office we were very intentional about uh meeting virtually through zoom and WebEx and having meetings where we focus solely on work and then having meetings where it was just casual water talk we either played virtual Bingo or talked about a book or a movie just to connect in the same ways that you would in the office when you're walking around the block just getting to know your colleagues so that every meeting on Zoom wasn't focused on well where are you with this project yeah I think it's interesting because even that we I think some of us took for granted that all managers would know to do that right have those meetings that were intentionally team building meetings and you know not just the grind of getting work done every day anybody else have other thoughts on upskilling opportunities that they took advantage of early on in covid and I'm using this example intentionally right now right because what it made us do was think about it and so my question to you would be why aren't you thinking about it now right because I don't think I think we've got to not have that impetus of something like covid and something as drastic as going from fully in the office to fully remote to make us think about skills and so Kim said a lot of things in there you know we we went to zoom meetings and we did some Zoom meetings that were you know Less business focused and more team building those are all intentional ways of building skills and intentional ways of driving expectations um and in some cases we just did it and some people did better than others any of you work for managers that didn't do those funds team building yeah a couple of us did let's be honest right every time you got on the zoom it was like holy cow I don't think I could stand another 20 minutes of this right um and then you heard you heard your friends talking about oh yeah we had a wine and Cheese party over Zoom I'm like are you kidding me like who are you working for um so but I think those are manager skills right those are things about the culture that you want to drive through those expectations you mentioned onboarding earlier you know that is part of the skills Gold Rush like how do you make sure when somebody enters your organization they feel good about how they get work done right it's not just about how telling them how to sign up for their benefits it's not just about telling them how to find their way to the parking garage right it's about how to get work done I think we've kind of lost our way um you know in making sure that we're being very um maniacal and very intentional about skills definitely so I love hearing your ideas are there any anybody else experimenting with ideas around skills and uh skill mapping and skills assessments not necessarily skills mapping when you talk about upskilling and talking about what skills I need today versus tomorrow I think we have to do a better job at pushing our employees to meet what we're going to do tomorrow yeah where we work at we started implementing service now and because I was a data scientists in the Computer Sciences before I didn't necessarily work in service now but I haven't been acting for picking up applications they have a skill that's called a skill let me see if my boss will pay for complaining for me to become good at service now and I got so well that I became a search now technical lead even though that wasn't my skill set before right you know so so just knowing that I had that skill set oh she has a natural catch it off to learning software or building platforms or doing web ads let's see if she can learn this so she can be an asset to the company and like a liaison between our contractors and teaching us how to do as well that's a way to like [Music] so not to do 100 plug for servicenow but remember my friend's son I was telling you about that worked at Lowe's for about a year I didn't tell you the rest of the story I told him to go on the servicenow website and learn how to create an app and I said take that Excel spreadsheet and that system that you have to go back and forth in and just create an app take it in and show your boss but don't you dare tell her where it came from and he did he literally learned over a weekend how to create an apple on the servicenow platform took it into his boss and guess what they adopted it I mean nobody asked him to do it right are you creating that culture where skills matter are you creating that culture where people have the opportunity to demonstrate their you know their own interest in doing something more doing something uh you know different than what they were doing today that's a critical part of it whether it's citizen development or temporary assignments or you know any other way that you can figure out how to bring out the best in that person is going to continue to be attractive for them and I mean I can remember doing that you know 40 years ago when I first started working I went after the things I loved to do and and probably the best advice I ever got from somebody was to say there's three things that you need to think about whenever you're thinking about going to work somewhere what do you love to do what are you great at and what does the company need and it's where those three things intersect that the magic happens and that's what we're talking about with skills right whether they're skills for today or skills for the future what are you great at top ten percent nobody's better than me right I'm in the I'm the best of the best here you love doing it and the company needs it it doesn't get any better than that right so Kim last question for you and this is this is kind of a a little bit of a trick question because we've talked a lot about a lot of this already but do you have the right people processing Technologies to enable new practices and new protocols for the skills based management capabilities that we all need to development what do you need what's it going to take resources yep first and foremost and a commitment from leadership to to do it because that's a hard um ship to turn and so just getting using a lot of change management to get people on board to see the vision buy into the vision and then work collectively towards that vision is um kind of The Perfect Storm yeah and I think on top of that what I would say is do you have the data to prove it right so if you're going to make this investment in skills and you're going to say that it's going to you know show a decline in turnover or ability to attract earlier in career and keep them longer like what are those North stars that you're really shooting for that doing something around this area is going to really make a difference you got to stake yourself out in those areas right and believe that being able to Define where these skills are going what people need to be able to do and given them the tools to do it whether it's becoming a citizen developer over the weekend or whatever they're passionate about you know being able to measure it is going to matter yes and I think taking a risk-based approach to mitigating a lot of the things that we see in employee data will help inform what we do to kind of get to where we're going but uh the other thing that I see that's really missing across government not necessarily tied to a system is the ability to forecast and so and really using the data and multiple pieces of data to tell a richer story yep yeah that's great I often find that managers and some leaders will glean onto one piece of data and they take that one piece of information and they use it for all the decisions that they make but oftentimes when you bring convergent data sets together it's a completely different story yeah so just getting people comfortable with understanding the root cause behind what data is telling you is key and so just having that infrastructure in place where you have an organization one where people trust the data is key very good well Kim thank you for sharing that I want to encourage you all to think about the skills-based management practices that we've been talking about I do think they're the way of the future all the people that are in our organizations and quote commercial here to talk to your servicenow account executive about skills based capabilities that we have coming soon so super excited Kim thank you so much thank you thank you all for coming