SIOP 2024: HOT TAKES

What's still top of mind after three days of sessions, dialogue and debates

It has been a jammed pack few days filled with learning, connecting with old colleagues, and presenting at SIOP this year. My heart and mind always feel full after these events.

In case you missed it, I want to share a few spicy takes on what was discussed this year so we can continue the rich discussions here on LinkedIn !

1.??The real reason remote work isn’t taking off in so many organizations is due to executive anxiety.

I got the opportunity to attend a few sessions regarding the discussion of return-to-office (RTO) and am disappointed we aren’t further along in this dialogue. The root concern seems to be around navigating executives in organizations who express anxiety over “innovation” and “culture” in distributed work. My sense is RTO really isn't a productivity issue but a leadership mindset issue.

Rather than doing the hard work of transforming the way work is done, CHROs seem all too eager to land back on a consistent schedule of ~3 days a week onsite. Consistency and transparency of policy are favored over empowering individual agency and experimenting with new ways of working.

And, maybe the spiciest thing stated on a panel from an executive was ensuring their college-aged child would have an in-person environment to meet a future spouse. Yikes! But, this somewhat ad lib statement, highlights a generational gap where younger generations digital lives are often as rich as their physical ones. This tension within organizations is real as those in positions of power are usually the furthest removed from the emergent frontiers of a new way of doing things.

So, I encourage us to do better in this discussion and get smarter around the data and analytics that we have in order to make the business case on what’s really working and not.

How are you currently measuring and thinking about innovation and productivity today? I'd love to learn more about how people are quantifying these in order to make the connection we need to where people work. My hypothesis is that over time, as we all get better at this remote work thing, is that the correlations will be small and rather insignificant between where we work and innovation and productivity.

2.??Diversity backlash was a hot topic this year. And most white organizational leaders simply don’t know what to do with this conversation.

I fear we’ve relegated diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts to people of color and tasked them to figure this out for us within our organizations. In 2020, one of the hottest jobs was a Chief Diversity Officer. We’ve given most of these roles tight budgets and sought overnight results to solve for issues that run centuries deep. I also worry so many of the well-intended DEI investments were actually borne of guilt rather than the desire to see true power shifts within our organizations. Are we ready to shift the power within the top of our organizations and board rooms? There isn’t nearly enough representation as it is and conflating "woke initiatives" for those that seek to make the workforce more inclusive certainly isn’t helping. Would love to know if you are in DEI today how you are navigating this environmental tone shift? My sense is the conversation about diversity backlash is still too tactical and focused on blocking and tackling within an organization rather than the much harder work of power rebalancing within organizations. Let me know what you think.

3.??I am worried that the majority of social scientists don’t understand AI nor care to do the up-skilling we all need to do in order to work alongside of it.

AI is out in the wild and there is no going back. As I/O psychologists our goal should be to tame this new technology in such a way that it brings out the best of individuals. We should be actively redesigning work considering a skills-biased technology change in order to move as many people up the value chain as possible. And let’s just be brutally honest. Research suggest that Gen Z would rather go to Chat GPT for coaching and development than their direct manager. Our jobs also depend on it.

I/O psychology is on the brink of a major disruption as big data causes us to reconsider everything we know about measuring people at work. The problem I foresee is that data engineers and data scientists who are not trained in the deep human-centric theories and frameworks of humanity at work will lead the next wave of work disruption because of their ability to work with AI and big data. I love data scientists and deeply respect their coding and mathematical abilities but worry about a future workforce experience devoid of humanities-based foundations. If we don’t keep up as a field alongside AI, my spicy take is we may be headed into a future of work that is data rich but lacking humanity. ?

Thanks for reading and I wrote this in the spirit of truly wanting to continue the dialogue coming out of SIOP. Every coffee chat and dinner discussion was rich based on the topics above. SIOP event does an amazing job spurring dialogue, debate, and the growth of new knowledge. Let me know what you think of these hot takes. Let the dialogue continue!

#futureofwork #siop2024