Adam Torres and Brent Kedzierski discuss the human condition at work.
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Show Notes:
What is the state of work today given, workforce and societal trends? In this episode, Adam Torres and Brent Kedzierski, Global Senior Program Marketing Manager at Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence, explore the state of the workplace and Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence.
About Brent Kedzierski
Brent is a dynamic and sought-after keynote, author, and thought leader. He has been featured and cited in prominent publications, including Harvard Business Press, Chief Learning Officer Magazine, Workforce.com, BBC News and more.
At Shell Brent was an award-winning, innovative learning and development executive who was the driving force that envisioned, designed, and operationalized many of Royal Dutch Shell’s most critical global learning transformations of the 21st century. The initiatives he led in multiple leadership roles, culminating in his serving as Head of Learning Strategy and Innovation, earned the company recognition as a world-leading human resource management and learning organization.
Prior to Shell, Brent’s leadership experience spanned high-risk, tightly regulated industries (e.g., nuclear, justice, military aviation, and healthcare), governmental entities, Fortune 500 companies, lines of business, areas of operation, and global regions (North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa).
About Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence
Hexagon’s Asset Lifecycle Intelligence division helps clients design, construct and operate more profitable, safe and sustainable industrial facilities. We empower customers to unlock data, accelerate industrial project modernization and digital maturity, increase productivity and move the sustainability needle.
Headquartered in Madison, Alabama, USA, our 2,400 employees are located on five continents and serve customers in over 80 countries.
Hexagon’s Asset Lifecycle Intelligence division is part of Hexagon (Nasdaq Stockholm: HEXA B; Hexagon.com), a global leader in sensor, software, and autonomous solutions whose technologies are shaping urban and production ecosystems to become increasingly connected and autonomous – ensuring a scalable, sustainable future.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Brent Kedzierski on the line and he is the global senior program marketing manager over at Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence.
Brent, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. It’s great to be on with you. All right. So I’m glad to have you on today and we got a lot to talk about. So, we’re definitely going to get into just to get us kicked off. Let’s get into Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence. tell us a little bit more about the company and what you do.
Yeah, it’s a software company that helps industrial facilities and build their cohesive tech plan with various technologies, whether it be AI and procedure management, digital procedures, digital solutions that are fitting industry for and the digital transformation that all the industry is trying to go through.
My specific role at Hexagon is really coming in from Shell where I was the head of. Learning strategy and innovation. It’s really about the human aspect of it, the human centricity of these products, because what we found in industry is, you know, 80 plus percent of any kind of digital investment fails to meet its objectives or deliver the expected results or, you know, really get the value out of the investment in the effort.
in. Predominantly, that’s because technology is really focused on the technology aspect and not the acceptance and adoption by end users. What does that mean to improve the human condition at work? I know that’s part of your mission and part of what drives you in our previous conversations.
What does that mean to improve the human condition? Well, I always look at the human condition having four elements. So Every person is fallible. I hate to admit it. I’m fallible. You’re probably fallible, too. Easy there. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Easy there. No, I’m just Yes, you’re correct. Now you bet. I absolutely am.
Continue. So we are fallible pieces of work. You know, everybody’s a perfect mesh, as we say. A wonderful mesh. And the good news is, though, that people are very adaptable, they can change, they can come to some kind of realization, and they seek growth and evolution and actualization of themselves.
And the third thing is, people are social beings, they want to see themselves reflected in society, in their, tribes and work groups, and they want social proofing, they want to know kind of where they stand in the world and around them. And the last thing is they really need purpose and, if people, don’t have purpose, everything kind of falls apart, their energy and their effort, their focus and concentration, all these kind of things they’ll fall to the pressures of the, environment around them.
But what you want to do is you want to have them thrive, and that’s what the whole idea of taking a look at the human condition, taking a look at human centricity, and what that means, and how do you deliver it, and then how do you help people really connect better with their jobs and the people in their jobs.
it all makes sense. And I’m curious now, I guess the next obvious question would be what, do you think the state of the workplace is today? Like given current societal trends or just, just what’s going on in general. Cause this is what you’re working on day in and day out.
What do you see? Well, it’s funny. I have a favorite book that I have read several times called the fourth turning and it’s by a guy. Neil Howe. And it basically asserts that, there’s 100 year cycles approximately. And in these cycles, we have four seasons. So we have a spring or what’s called an awakening.
And then it goes into a summer where everything heats up. And then kind of it goes into a fall where it cools down. And then a winter where it freezes and the cycle hits a peak. And if you look at like the U. S., for example, you know, if you and you can look at this 100 year, 120, 80 year, periods in terms of like 1620 and you had the, you founding of people coming in.
Then you had the Revolutionary War and then you had the Civil War and then you had the Great Depression and World War Two. And then in 2008 you had the Great Recession. And so in 2008, we started this kind of winter of our this season. And what you’re seeing is you’re seeing that there’s a thing called teacup.
So technical advancements were hitting a break. Now, you see, with a I, it’s starting to bust open things economic. issues you’re seeing, you know, the trade wars now we’re having you see the political upheaval, the social upheaval consumerism, the change for, you know, higher touch, higher concept solutions.
And what’s happening is all of these things are hitting ahead. And the prediction is by 2030, 35, so much upheaval that we’ve got to Reinvent ourselves and have a new awakening or spring and that’s what we’re heading to and if you look at the state of work, you know, 80 plus percent of workers are disengaged.
We’ve got an epidemic of mental health issues and physical health issues with, obesity and drug abuse and, you know, high blood pressure and heart disease and, again, They say that your direct line manager can have more impact on your mental health and well being than your spouse.
They spend a lot of time with that manager. That makes a lot of sense, by the way. Go ahead. So they say that, doctor primary care visits are predominantly related to stress. And doctors don’t have the time to really Help people manage their stress so they medicate them because that’s a faster, cheaper, way to just solve the problem.
And so, you’ve got this bit where people are really, really just unhappy. see work related suicides and just the shocking statistics that go around. So, what we want is solutions that workers help to build a better quality of life at work. Bye. when we talk about these things like connected workers solutions, there’s like three things go on.
So, you know, it’s the old 80 20 rule. I’m sure you’re familiar with that. Where 80 percent are related to essential drivers, like do people have a perceived usefulness to the solution? Will they adopt the technology because they think it’ll enhance their performance? They’ll do a you know, help them do a better job?
Things like real time analytics and all those kind of things. And then do they view the solution as something easy to use? You know, is it intuitive? does it reduce their resistance and to improve their adoption. And then the advantage, the relative advantage that they see, an advantage to the solution like remote assistance and things like that.
But then there’s things called engagement drivers. So how do you get people in? solution. And these are things like user involvement, letting them build trust and ownership of a new solution and, you know, whether they’re properly trained and supported in it. And then the last thing is what we do is this adoption catalyst.
So, once you, once the people say, I think it’s really useful, I’ve been involved, I kind of own it, but you know, now, Can you do pilots and trials to build their confidence to hands on experience? You know, can they observe success stories? You know, can they see visible results? So that’s what we’re trying to do.
And that’s why, for example, like at Hexagon, when I look at any kind of solution, I’m not looking at it. from just the technical functionality and capability. But how does that translate to the wellbeing and then the betterment or the work, what I call work anatomy, it helping people eliminate unnecessary and productive meetings?
Is it helping people find and curate and make sense out of information faster? Is it help improve decision making? Because when you think about it, 60 plus percent of all work, Is not about doing the work, it’s about talking about doing the work. It’s about planning and debating and mm-hmm
You know, and that’s something that, you know, we wanna get away from because ultimately we, we wanna move to a four hour workday and a four in a four day work week. And if you get rid of all the waste that’s in. Today, people can increase the productivity in their output, so they’re getting more done in less time.
Let’s talk about the investment and, and in this, in this space. So the digital transformation investments, especially around like the, the connected worker side of things. Like, do you find this, this lags or like, like talk about that a little bit. Yeah, what’s happening is, I mean, when, you know, when Industry 4 came into the scene, I think it was around 2011 it was all around these nine pillars of technology.
So, you know, blockchain and, and cyber physical connectivity and, you know, Internet of Things and all those kind of things is nine pillars. And what companies did is they, they were shooting the big fish in the barrel. So, they were basically using these things to try to improve safety. So, instead of, you know, somebody climbing a big tall tower, they could use a drone.
So get them out of, heights or confined spaces or do the repetitive work. And so the last 10, 15 years, we’ve been getting rid of what I call the big. These of work. So the doll 30 dangerous, difficult, demanding physical activities that were out there and companies were really looking at the big kind of operational buckets of their, factories and their workplaces.
And so they’re really trying to get rid of those things. And they were using technology to do that. Well, as we’ve evolved, we’ve learned because of all these failures, you know, digital transformation, you know, because of the 80 percent failure rate we found that, it doesn’t work well because the end users, the humans, you know, don’t always interact well with the new technologies.
They’re fearful of it. They think the technology going to take their job or diminish their value. So they resist it, and they resist it because of those things I said earlier, you know, they’re not seeing it relatively useful or easy to use or intuitive. And really the tech people. You know, they were engineers, they’re technical people, they’re not human specialists.
And so they didn’t really know how to, you know, engineer things from a human perspective. As now, so as we evolve, and we’ve had all these practices, use cases, trials, pilots, and proof of concepts, we know the technologies work, but what we’ve got to do is shift them to work with humans. Hmm. And so what do you see next in this space?
Like, what does this evolution look like ultimately? What’s the goal? Like, let’s dream for a moment. There’s a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of visionaries that listen to this show. Let’s dream for a moment. What, like, what’s the goal? What do you see next? Or what should be the goal?
Well, again, you know, work produces so many bad things, but it also can produce really good things, you know, when it’s designed well. And, you know, I know that I was looking at a study done by Gartner, and, you know, there’s six big, Buckets of work that comprise work and whether people are doing a good job in terms of performance.
And there’s three environmental factors. So there’s, you know, does the human being have very clear performance expectations and feedback? Well, you know, Gartner’s asked the question to managers and the managers. Oh, yes. These workers, we give them really clear expectations and really great feedback. And the workers said, we don’t get any good feedback.
And the expectations are ambiguous. They’re changing and reprioritizing all the time. We’re jerked in and off of these items and this work, And then they ask them, well, the next thing is in the environment, you know, do they have the right data, the information, the tools, the resource, do the job.
And once again, the manager said, yes, they got everything they need. And the workers say, no, we don’t. You know, it doesn’t let us be flexible in our work. You know, we are stuck. Rigid, rigid scenarios and the last thing is, you know, do the worker have great incentives to perform and engage in the work?
Well, you know, how many times does the best person get dumped on to do all the work? You know, so it becomes performing good is starting to be viewed as punishing because, oh, Betsy, she’s the best at this, and so we’re going to keep sliding all this admin work under her desk. Because she does it such a great job.
Well, Betsy hates doing that and she wants to grow into other areas, you know, so, and then you work at the, like the individual level and, because of automation, the skill portfolio is drastically and radically changing, where. You know, to sit in your office, stare up with your eyes to the right, and just think was viewed as a really bad thing, you’re daydreaming, you’re not working, well, it’s actually a good thing, because we don’t give people enough time to think in their jobs, or about their jobs.
And so this is this whole thing about, in today’s environment, rapidly, people must be able to be critical thinkers. And even if you go to our universities today, they’re not teaching students how to be critical thinkers and Understand, you know, various dimensions of how you can look at something and they’re given this, a straight linear line, you know, not an exponential wave and so the skills are changing to critical thinking collaborative skills like working with other humans because organizations are going from these hierarchies and these silos to matrix.
So instead of just seeing your tunnel, your, tower, you have to now work in a multi integrated supply chain, for example. And then the last thing is people have to work to be more creative because that’s the one thing AI can’t really do too well is be creative. Now, if you ask it the right questions, it can help you be creative, but, it’s those things and the last thing is really behaviors.
the behavior is the new currency and that’s what I did at Shell with a lot of this thing called distinctive competence. You know, it’s all about your behaviors. Can you do something more consistently with better results? And effectiveness than someone else, and it really comes down to the distinguishing factor in work is, not so much skills and knowledge, but the behaviors that kind of transforms from those.
And then the last thing or the last two really are this, is human capacity to support work. So this is getting into like the efficiency. So how can these new connected systems, these technologies help people make faster decisions? better decisions? How can it help them take a look at the mass bulk data and make bigger, better sense out of big data?
And so they can do more things and do things faster. And then the last thing is, you know, are we designing these work structures that really motivate people to perform? do we you know, is people, do they jump out of bed in the morning, want to go to work or do they roll over and hit the snooze?
I see it. I see it. This is exciting, though, because this is it’s really the future of the workplace. It’s the future of the workplace. It’s also the integration of technology in the workplace, what that looks like quality of living. I mean, we think about the past and whether it was the industrial revolution, whether it was, you know, further back from that, there’s a consistent, constant evolution of trying to really, I mean, all these Things put society forward.
In my opinion Brent, this has been a lot of fun having you on the show today and getting to explore really the condition at work and what’s next. That being said, if somebody is listening to this or watching this and they want to learn more about your work or learn more about hexagon asset, life cycle intelligence, how do they do that?
Well, they can go directly to the Hexagon a LI website and you know, I’m on there. I’ve got lots of articles and things that are published there to get a deeper focus on this. they can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love my LinkedIn family and I like to be connected to those folks and people that are, have the same curiosities that I do.
Mm-hmm . So I think that’s great. Amazing. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes. So you can just click on the link and head right on over and, check out Brent’s work. Speaking to the audience, if you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, new interviews, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. Really appreciate it. And Brent, thanks again so much for coming on the show.
Thanks a lot, Adam.