The Myth Of Meritocracy & How To Create An Inclusive Workplace Culture

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Joanne Lockwood: So I think all of these things stack up to create this myth where meritocracy wins and it's fair, but the reality is, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many, it obscures the complex realities of the systemic bias and inequity in our society.

David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We're on a mission to build a better world of work and to help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I'm your host, David Rice.

My guest today is Joanne Lockwood. She is an inclusive culture expert at SEE Change Happen. We're going to be chatting about meritocracy in the workplace today.

Joanne, welcome. 

Joanne Lockwood: Hi, David. Thanks so much for inviting me. I'm looking forward to this all day. 

David Rice: First off, just tell us a little bit about you, the work that you're doing these days and how you got to where you are today. 

Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, thank you. So I call myself the inclusive culture expert. So my focus really is working with organizations of all sizes on the primary focus of culture, because I'm a great believer that when we talk about EDI, DNI, it really starts with the company ethos, the company culture, then that pushes back through to belongingness and then inclusion and then diversity and then equality from that.

So I think the key thing for me is all about this creating inclusive cultures. What I talk about within that is positive people experiences, because that's what we're trying to, that's the end result. Every interaction I have with you as an organization, as a customer, every interaction I have with you as an organization, as a an employer, or whatever my relationship is with you, I want it to be positive that can come down to part of the brand values, the whole culture and whole ethos that you and the people who represent you portray to me as a consumer or as an employee.

So, yeah, that positive people experiences for me is the output of EDI initiatives. It's making sure that my experience is positive. And I think from a personal perspective, I also talk about the fact that I have to take personal responsibility as an individual for my interaction with you being positive as well.

So if we could follow that through the chain, that's if we start with that end in mind, outcomes are generally positive. So that's why I instill and I work with people in the talent acquisition. So looking inclusive and accessible talent pipelines for one of a buzzword of using that or the employee experience, employee engagement, and then customer experience as well.

So that's kind of where I focus the, like my conversation. 

David Rice: So we're talking about meritocracy today. And when you mentioned this to me on call beforehand I jumped at the opportunity because it's one of these ideas that gets sewn into narratives around DEI and the workplace. And I've always just found it a bit, I guess, for lack of a better word, amusing.

Because, as I was reading an article on your website and you noted in it, it truly is like a myth. For the audience who maybe isn't as familiar though with the reasons why that is, can you kind of take us through the case for why it is a myth? 

Joanne Lockwood: Well, some of the the soundbites you'll often hear, on first impression, meritocracy aligns with this cultural ideal of fairness, hard work equals reward.

The harder I work, the more reward I get. And we kind of think, well, hang on a minute, if I work hard, it's fair. If people aren't working as hard as me, therefore they should get less than me. So it's kind of like this is inherent ideal of fairness. The more I do, the more I get. I think the trouble with that is it creates this perception that we're narrowing success down so that it's within anyone's reach, anyone could achieve.

I can, so why can't you? And I think that is not obviously the truth in all this because we have systemic biases, not just by impersonal biases, but biases in the system, whether that's you're from an LGBTQ+ background, you're a woman, you have a disability, you're neurodiverse, you come from a different ethnic background or race, all of those things add this layer of complexity to your identity, to the, your ability to thrive in the environment.

Yeah, often the environment you're working in is designed by people who are not like you and for people who are not like you. And even, we think about the majority, even the white man who tends to have privilege in society. Even the white man has intersectional characteristics, maybe they're queer, maybe they have a disability, maybe they have child care responsibilities, et cetera, there's a whole lot of things.

It offers benefits to people who have the least complex identity or lived experience. So this myth anyone can achieve it if you put work hard enough. So it's the socioeconomic and structural inequities that mean that that is, that I miss if you like. And I also talk about the fact that the danger is also is who decide, who decides in an organization, what is meritocratic?

What is the important thing to achieve? And I often find what we're doing is we're valuing past performance, we're valuing people like me, we're valuing culture fit and fit into an organization. So if you are outside of that bowel curve of normality, the further you stray away from the center of that line, the more likely you are not to fit someone's definition of good enough.

And the obvious candors often get recognized. We see it all the time where some people favor extroverted, go getty, salesy type personalities over the quiet, methodical, head down, get on with things who don't make a big song and dance about their success. They often get overlooked. So we're often recognizing noise in front of us.

Again, one of our human biases is to see this as successful behavior. So I think all of these things stack up to create this myth where meritocracy wins and it's fair. But the reality is, in my opinion, and the opinion of many, it obscures the complex realities of the systemic bias and inequity in our society.

David Rice: Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. It's always funny because I've been asked the question before, like, don't you think DEI comes at the expense of meritocracy? And I'm always just you're assuming that's a reality. 

Joanne Lockwood: Yeah. The other challenge I'd put on that is, we talk about people, oh, you only got that job because you were black. You only got that job because you're a woman. You only got that job, if it was a fair and meritocratic society, then the white man would have carried on getting the job because obviously that person is better. But yeah, that's the kind of perception. 

David Rice: Yeah, that's the underlying assumption. 

Joanne Lockwood: That's the underlying assumption. I find that really disingenuous that what we're doing is we're telling people the greatest impression, if we hire for diversity, we're hiring for second best because the person we've hired isn't the obvious choice. Therefore, if they're not the obvious choice, maybe they're the second base choice.

And what we're doing is we're giving them a leg up because they're second to make them first. I think this is the other myth we need to bust is that higher for diversity, higher for difference, people with different lived experience isn't the second best choice. It's not the choice that you would have made in the past when you were carrying on being a monoculture promoting people in that monoculture.

So we need to flip it and say, hang on a minute. Actually, we need to look at people's 100 percent of their attributes, and it's not just hard skills, there's soft skills, there's people skills, there's all these other factors in there. Where when we're looking at raw meritocracy about this person who has the highest technical capability, they may not have the best managerial, they may have the best empathy, they may have the best people skills to do that role.

So again, I think what we need to do here is unpack that meritocracy and bust that myth about high for diversity is higher for second best as well. 

David Rice: One of the areas where Provost shows up because you mentioned talent acquisition space earlier, is sort of the, I think it shows up in teams who set the standards for what a new hire should look like or what experience they ought to have.

And that tends to come from this sort of place of privilege. It's people who already have the job that define who should be in the job and oftentimes what yields, what that yields is them sort of looking for people who look sound, maybe resemble in terms of education, who they are. So how do you sort of break this cycle of bias that has formed in some cases over very long periods of time?

Joanne Lockwood: Not easy. Let's say that it's not easy. It's ingrained. It becomes endemic in their, in people's thinking. I was doing some work a little while ago with a well known, very well known global old media company who produce lots of animated features as well as lots of other things around the world. 

And the conversation I had with them was, in their requirements, they hire the cream of society or the cream of talent. And that very word hiring the cream directs you to think, ah, top universities, top degrees, top families, top backgrounds, top all this kind of thing. So the cream almost implies it's this very thin veneer, the layer that is almost unachievable, except for that privileged few.

And I think what we have to try and recognize is that by having that mentality that you're hiring the cream, we're not looking at what that really means. We need to mix that jug of milk up and move the cream all over the place and start, yeah, start thinking about it differently. So I think what we have to recognize here is privilege accelerates you far more than you ever realize. 

I think of privilege like a pension fund. If you start paying into your pension when you're very young, that accumulates over your life and that wealth pot is enormous, is compounded, it's incremental and compounded throughout your life. And privilege is very similar.

You may have some privilege that you've been born into and that's accelerated your first 5, 10, 20, 30 years of your life, your growth, your career. And yes, you may find someone who comes from a less privileged background who gets a college sponsorship. They get involved in some sort of accelerator program, but their privilege only starts when they're 20, 25, 30.

They're already lagging behind the person's been investing in that part of privilege for 20 years before them. So they're always playing catch up. And we also see where women have to make choices between starting a family, between the nurturing that family and building their career. And we often see women dropping out of the talent market, out of employment for those very reasons.

Then they don't come back in until midlife forties, when they can take that, for that to break for their family and reinvest in their careers. So we're going to look at some of these things around privilege, about how that really stacks unfairly combined with the meritocracy. We see countless cases where people who hold these privileges have accelerated careers in the 5500, in the top employers.

We tend to see this very similar type of people. And that's not to say they're bad at what they do, not pushing them down. I'm saying there's a lot of unrecognized talent from different lived experience that we're not seeing. Again, that higher of the second best kicks in or if you're looking for, I don't know, a C-suite chief financial officer, for example, for an organization and you're looking for that cream.

You're going to be looking at peer organizations like yourselves and try to cherry pick people from those organizations and you will not find many people of color. You will not find many people who are women in that in those tiers. They may be in smaller organizations. They may be in not number one positions, maybe number two or number three positions.

So if you're always picking at the cream, you're not seeing the talent that's emerging lower down that sort of like growth path. And I think we need to encourage organizations to invest in accelerating the careers of people who have potential. Not just have done it before. Yeah. We have, we've got to have confidence that we're safe by our hands, but it's making sure that we are building into our talent acquisition, a growth plan, a nurturing plan, a stretch zone for people to grow into, not just that hit the ground running, another myth, hit the ground running, whatever that means.

It means we're in trouble or we need to need someone to come here and sort us out maybe. But yeah, there's this perception that we have to have someone who's fully up to speed. But the reality is that anybody who's onboarding, it's going to take three to six months to become fully functional in that organization.

And if you're training company awareness, you're training process awareness, you're getting to grips with the customers and however you work. At that point, you can also upskill, you can also nurture people, you can also mentor people to fit those roles as well. So I think the companies who are looking to hire, they need to also hire for growth and for stretch. You can nurture great talent. 

David Rice: I'm going to think they saw one of the articles I was reading and really liked, he mentioned complacency finds its footing in privilege. And I think it's a line that'll hit home for anyone who's been on the wrong side of privilege, essentially. But getting people to recognize where they have experienced privilege because it comes in so many different forms, that can be a little bit difficult.

How have you approached that in your work? And what are some of the things that have proven most effective in terms of how you communicate that to people? 

Joanne Lockwood: There's another phrase is when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. That's the other problem as well. When you're so used to having a clear lane in front of you.

No cars, just, you've got the open road and you're so used to that. As soon as somebody else comes in front of you, you feel kind of, you're trapped in, you're feeling like there's nowhere to go. So I think it's recognizing that the privilege isn't a dirty word. It's not an insult. It's not a slur. It's not something to be ashamed of.

I think many people feel they get accused of having privilege. They go, well, hang on a minute. No, I haven't I've had a tough life. I've had to work hard, whatever that may mean to them. But yeah, we've all done stuff. We've all had a life. I think it's trying to open people's eyes that it's not what you've done, it's what you haven't had to go through in order to be where you are.

You haven't had to overcome being part of a single parent family. You haven't had to overcome not having parents at home when you came home from school or college. Not having to fork out for your own education. So you haven't had to do all these things. So privilege is about what you haven't had to go through more than what you have been through, because we've all been through something.

I think we can get people to open up to see privilege as being something they have, without something, without stigma, without being, trying to push shame on people. Then we can make them open up to think about how they can leverage that privilege for the benefit to create equity in society and also in the workplace and in the processes.

Because one of the things I always get challenged is that privilege opens doors, but also shuts doors. The example I use is in the UK, women were given the vote in about, I think, 1918. And I use the word given, men allowed women to vote. And that sounds quite abrasive to put it in those sort of terms, but men were the only people in our parliament, in the government, men were the people who had to have the discussion, they had to make that decision, and they had to vote to allow women to vote.

So what we have to learn from that is, no point, and again, I'm going to use another UK, British example here, of a castle. If you think about an old fashioned British castle, the people of privilege are holed up in the castle. They're standing there, they've got their armies, they've got their soldiers, they've got their shields and their swords, and they're standing on the ramparts around the top.

And the people who don't hold the privilege, the peasants, the people from the farms around, they're not happy, they want some of this. And what happens is they run up to the castle with their axes and their, their ladders, they're trying to climb up and all the people on the top do is they pull the drawbridge up and they pour oil over your heads. And all that happens is the privileged people stay protected in their castle and everybody else bangs their head against the wall.

So what we need to do somehow is create an environment where it's not threatening, where we can lower that drawbridge down, we can put a table on the drawbridge, we can all come around and sit on that table and have conversations in a non threatening way so the people who are disenfranchised, marginalized, voiceless, however you want to describe people, have a seat at the table. And people who have the privilege are able to listen to their concerns and create that equity and keep that drawbridge down and make the systems work for everybody.

But at the moment what we're doing is we're butting heads, we're storming the castle without lowering the drawbridge because people feel threatened and how do we stop that threat? And it's not easy. It's not easy. Once you've been marginalized, once you're used to being oppressed, your reaction is protest.

Your reaction is going out there and trying to take what you think is fair. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. I'm just saying that often that all that means is people are going to barricade themselves in. I think that's what we see in this current climate where we're seeing a real negativity around DEI initiatives, the, we're talking about wokeism and anti-wokeism and pushing back and saying, hang on, what about me?

I'm being marginalized as a white person. Now, hang on, this isn't fair. So that's what's happening with, they're in that castle, but bringing that bridge up and saying no, I can't let you have any more. It was taking what's ours now. I think that's what we're going to try and change that narrative is trying to bring that down and focus on that as I would call it.

Positive people experiences, not DEI, because that's become a kind of a toxic word at the moment, toxic phrase is, it's being leveraged by politicians in a negative way at the moment. 

David Rice: I wanted to just talk about a little bit, another line I saw in your writing, which I really liked and said merit cannot be divorced from context.

I love that. I'm wondering in terms of sort of institutionalizing empathy, what advice do you give leaders to help them and management teams seek to understand the context of those people's lived experience and how it impacts them at work? 

Joanne Lockwood: Something that comes down to a term or phrase or something called cultural intelligence.

And we can mix that also with things like emotional intelligence. So if you're you haven't heard of that phrase, a cultural intelligence, I always describe it as being competent in situations and environments where you are not the dominant characteristic, your lived experience, whatever that may be.

So as a white person in a black community, as a, an able bodied person in an environment where there's a large proportion of people with a disability in some form, maybe you're a straight person in a gay bar, whatever that may be, suddenly that you're feeling uncomfortable because you don't understand the norms.

So cultural intelligence is all about having this drive to try and find out more about different communities, different lived experience, different cultures. And of course, if you don't have that drive, you're never going to want to change. So it's about trying to find that why, that, that spark that kicks off and go, yeah, you're right.

I need to find out more about different people. So we've got to try and encourage that's a, that need for knowledge and the drive. So once we have the drive, we can then start thinking about how do we find out more? What do we do? So the next stage of the cultural intelligence is around finding knowledge and that can be through self learning, YouTubes, seminars, meeting people, talking to people, research, whatever it may be.

Of course, if you've got the drive, you want to find out more and if you want to find out more, it's going to become self fulfilling. But the danger with that, if you're not careful, is unless you make sense of that, unless you put that into context, you don't necessarily have a way of being helpful, you can have a lot of ideas.

But you can actually be counterproductive. So the next stage really is contextualizing it, finding out about it. And then from that, you can build a strategy. I can now enact, I can now advocate, I can now stand up, I can call it out, I can call it in. I can recognize where people need more support. And if you mix that with the emotional intelligence, which is around self awareness, self management, building relationships and picking up social cues, all those kind of things, if you mix those two together, you become far more sentient and aware of people around you and their needs. 

And again, that positive people experience, as I talked about in the beginning, if I care that my interaction with you needs to be positive, then I'm going to look at what makes you and what makes you special. And we move away from this, I'll treat people as I want to be treated. Actually, I'll start to treat people as they want to be treated. I treat you as a person with a disability, not in a negative way. But in a way that recognizes the equity you need in our conversation in life and in support. So I think by mixing these two sides together, the EQ and the CQ, it gives us the tools and the competency to better interact with people because everyone's unique.

And I can't give a manual that you can look up on page six and say, Oh yeah, you're this sort of person. This is how I need to deal with it. I now have those tools, how I can speak, how I can engage, and hopefully what it will allow me to do is lean into the conversation. Because often we lean away, we often think to ourselves, I'm not sure what to say, ah, they're a person in a wheelchair, do I kneel down, do I crouch, do I, how do I talk to them, do I mention the wheelchair, do I mention the fact that they've got one of their limbs missing, I can't stop looking at it, what do I do?

So again, by being more socially aware of that situation, then you're not focused on the wrong thing. You're focused on that person as a human being, as a person you're trying to have a conversation with and talking to them as if you were anybody else. And I think that's why people are worried. That's the biggest, I think one of the biggest barriers is this fear of getting it wrong.

Fear of saying something wrong, fear of doing something wrong. And if we can encourage people to be more competent and confident in human interaction, that will take away some of that barrier. 

David Rice: There's you see a lot of chat right now around, how work is changing. AI is coming into the picture for a lot of orgs.

It's sort of changing how folks view, certain roles, certain skills that are needed. And the skills that are maybe going to be increasingly valuable, aren't maybe as technical as they were in the past. I think there's a lot of folks that feel like soft skills will have more of a impact in the workplace moving forward. 

From a DEI perspective though, I'm wondering, do you think that's a good thing? Is there going to be sort of a measurable way where people will try to make those things about merit? Because right now I'd argue that thinking about, when we think about soft skills, it's sort of in a subjective light. So I was curious to your thoughts on that.

Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, I mean, we look back in history, we've the invention of the wheel, the invention of electricity, the invention of cars and transport. We've seen major steps forward in technology. We look at them as part of our infrastructure that we have every day. 

But we've seen great leaps forward and we've always evolved our workforce, our societies through this technological changes. And, the IBM PC was launched in 1984, people didn't have computers. They didn't walk around with these black arrows in their hands. They weren't communicating, didn't have Google, didn't have GPS. So we've come a long way and the rate of change is obviously accelerating.

And with AI coming on board, we're accelerating faster. So, inevitably, we are going to see people being left behind. People who don't necessarily have the drive, the competency, or the willingness to want to adapt and change. That's fine. They are, hopefully, are doing a very productive, worthwhile job with the skills they've got.

We're seeing our Gen Zs, our Gen Alphas coming through into the workplace. They will be doing this stuff natively, that they've got these skills. They're ready to do it. And in some respects, they will fill those entry levels in the same way that I did in the '80s with my computing skills in a world where people didn't have them.

So we will see people accelerated through that rank. We'll see new startups, we'll see another Facebook, another Deliveroo, another Uber coming through, another SaaS platform coming there delivering this sort of product. So, but we do have to recognize we're going to create a digital divide. We're going to leave people behind if we're not careful.

In terms of soft skills, we've got to be careful with AI that it doesn't have inherent. And at this particular time in 2024, it doesn't have inherent soft skills. I saw Sam Altman and his crew working on those, humanizing AI and some of the technology they're bringing out now. So we have to recognize that as humans, we need to add that humanity into the process. 

So in the TAM acquisition, yes, we can use 10 guy and other solutions, some of the AI systems to sort of filter people's CVs out. But they have to, we have to make sure that they are humanized. We're making sure that we're not allowing AI to make decisions for us that we don't understand.

AI has bias. We know AI has bias. If you, I deliberately, when I'm using AI, try not to use gender at all when I'm doing image prompts, when I'm doing other things. And I notice it has a male bias often. So if I want it to have a more balanced, I have to specifically put in there a female character or a female this or use she/her pronouns within my prompt in order to direct AI to come up with a more feminine balance.

So yeah, we know that, and we know that some of the image recognition was better on white skin than it does on black skin. We know that some of the other things we've seen all these biases in AI and tech before. So yeah, it's important that we have humans in the process because if we start dehumanizing, then what is left for us as a species, if you like, if everything is done without human contact, we need that belongingness, we need that sense of purpose as who we are.

We can't all go on holiday and live on the beach all the time. So I think, yes, it's important that we keep humans in the process. Yes, we optimize. Yes, we can use AI to do early sifting. We can do pattern matching. We can take out some of the the more mundane skills, but I think what we need to do is breed artisans.

People who are creative, people who are artistic, people who are self starting, people who can ideate. I think what businesses really should be looking at in terms of their workforce planning is people who are thinking more around what can this person bring in the future. Where are we? 2024, 2030, six years away.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to predict the world is going to be completely different in six years time. We look back six years, we look back 10 years. When was the iPhone launched? 2011 or something like that? Round about that? Yeah. Facebook 2007, I think, when the first version came out. Society has changed immeasurably just in those leaps and bounds, in the way Uber has taken over in terms of delivering food and delivering people. 

Tesla, SpaceX, all these kind of technologies are coming in there now. So I think we have to recognize that we can't hire people for yesterday. The workforce planning has to hire people for tomorrow. So we're looking for people who are adaptable, learning, have learning potential.

We have people who have had some of the soft skills to interact with each other. People who can visualize it and ideate. Okay, then of course, they're going to be people who don't fit into those camps and they, we still need to make sure they have productive and satisfying and rewarding careers as well.

But if we're looking forward to be innovative and be at the forefront, we do need to start hiring differently. Not the old model of 'what have you done?' It's actually, 'what can I, can you do?' 

David Rice: Earlier, you mentioned how, DEI has become a sturdy word, it's getting picked up by politicians and thrown around and, like I think where I live in the United States, it's definitely just become just very much part of political rhetoric, right?

But most of the people that I speak with in HR, they don't see DEI going away there. It maybe becomes under a different name, or maybe it's just managed differently, but the principles will remain in place. I'm curious about your thoughts on this and sort of the future of what it looks like and with the companies that you consult.

Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, I mean, we saw this, I suppose, starting about four or five years ago, where people saying DEI needs a seat at the boardroom table, it needs to be a chief diversity officer on the board. It doesn't need to sit under HR, doesn't need to sit under TA, et cetera, et cetera. I still believe in a lot of that because it has to be on the table at the board around inclusion, around positive people experiences, I would say.

I think we need to recognize that if we're not careful, we end up with fragmented approaches. Too often we see corporate culture, corporate ethos, this is the way we want to be as an organization getting diluted by not having accountability for inclusion for that culture all the way down. So I think it does need to have a seat at the table, but as you say, because the perceived toxicity at the moment around that buzzword, those DEI buzzwords, maybe what we need to do is re-look at the output. Because people are saying, I think the key thing people are saying is we've thrown all this money at it and it hasn't delivered any results.

The results maybe are micro results, they're incremental results, or they're attributed to something else, but it is having results. We're seeing greater representation, we're seeing the companies who are forward thinking having more women, more people who are black, more people with disabilities, more people working from home, working remotely.

So we are seeing some of those well being initiatives and those hiring decisions being made. But I think a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon, George Floyd, Me Too, these kind of movements without truly having an end in mind. There was no ROI. It was just quick, throw some money at it. We need to be performative.

We need to show the market what we're doing. I don't want to get called out for it. I don't want to go, if I throw money at this, I'm going to get my get out jail free ticket. So I think what we need to do is step back and start looking at the outputs, the return on the investment, the ROI or return on inclusion.

And quantify that at the beginning of these initiatives, not going into it and go, well, we haven't realized any, we haven't realized our investment. Well, what was the investment you were hoping to realize? Well, I don't know. I was just hoping that it was going to be obvious on the balance sheet. So I think what we need to do is look at how it is.

I have a great belief that we have to balance the the logos and the pathos, that you have to balance the logic, the spreadsheet, the balance sheet, the ROI with the people experiences. If we're not careful, we end up to focus too much on the return without remembering the return is also the people. So I think as long as we can balance the two we remain authentic that we're not doing it just for profit, just because we have to, just because we're doing it to keep up with everybody else.

We're doing because we truly value people we hire. And again, we see organizations who are really people first, people focused. Getting that competitive advantage. They are the employer choice attracting and retaining the cream of the talent. If you want to use that, I'll use that word again. So I think, yes, we need to do that.

I do think organizations need to think about their culture, their brand, their values, and their people experiences. So that HR, TA, customer service, brand marketing, all the various directorates within an organization are all aligned on that vision. And I do still think it needs someone to be the owner of that vision.

If it's not brand and marketing, if it's not comms, if it's not HR, it's not customer service, who is it? And that probably still is a chief diversity officer at somewhere in the business, but with a realistic return on that investment in that role and that spend, if you like. 

David Rice: Before we go, I do want to give you a chance to tell people about where they can connect with you and find out more about what you're doing.

Joanne Lockwood: Thanks, David. Yeah, it's been a great conversation. So Joanne Lockwood. You'll find me on LinkedIn. If you Google my name, there's not many of me. So I tend to occupy a lot of spots in the first couple of pages, my website and my business is SEE Change Happens. So it's SEE, which stands for Smile, Engage and Educate.

So seechangehappen.co.uk or there's joannelockwood.co.uk as well, which is my professional speaking website as well. So I do a lot keynote speaking, so LinkedIn, my YouTube websites, Google me, and I've got YouTube channels and other things out there. But you can find all those index from LinkedIn or from my website.

So yeah, please do connect, reach out, say hi, mention this podcast and I'd love a conversation with you. 

David Rice: The final thing is we have a little tradition here where I can hand it over to you and you ask me a question before we end. So I'll turn it over to you. You can ask me anything, doesn't have to be about this topic or it could be, it's up to you.

Joanne Lockwood: Yeah. So I'm UK based, you're US based. Where do you see the significant changes by the year 2030 from your lens? What are we going to be seeing in 2030 that we've, what's your magic wand? Your fairy dust? Where are we going to be? 

David Rice: You just mean in terms of the workplace in general? 

Joanne Lockwood: Well, anywhere. Yeah, just something significant that we haven't, what do you think is going to come out of it?

David Rice: Yeah, I do think we're in this moment where perceptions are changing pretty quickly, whether it's perceptions of technology or the way that we, the processes that we follow, everybody's sort of got this feeling. I, my sense of it is there's a lot of feeling like things are broken, whether it's, again, the process that you're doing for something.

A lot of people feel like things need repair or things need a new way of thinking. And I do think that, the technology that we're looking at now is going to cause great disruption for a period of time. But new opportunities will arise from it. New things will find a way human beings always do.

Right? We're pretty resilient species. So I think what's going to be interesting is the next 3 to 4 years. And I think when we get to 2030, we'll be on sort of the back half of like a turbulent period and maybe starting to, the newer generation that's coming in, the Alphas, that will be a whole nother thing.

Like how we view Gen Z and a lot of folks have had this big, like, Oh, Gen Z, this Gen Z, that you always, I swear to God, you can't go a whole day without seeing a headline Gen Z wants this or that. But then it'll just become about Alpha. They talked, there was a lot of attention on millennials that were the same way.

So I think that's going to cause its own little brand of chaos for a little while. And we'll be on the back end of that shift though, I think, or like that shift will be happening and then the technology and we're just going to, I think around 2030, we're finally going to find a rhythm with some of this chaos.

At least that's my hope, the rest of this decade might be a little chaotic, but I'm hoping that by the time we get there, we've sort of found our new ways of working and a rhythm to work that makes sense for people's lives. Because that's been the constant conversation for the last few years where it's like, and I talked to a lot of people in HR spaces, in tech spaces, and a lot of people are just like, I'm tired. Like I'm tired. The world is a lot to take in. And then our sense of like life balance here, particularly in the United States. And I'm starting to see like Bernie Sanders talking about the four day work week. There was another guy from the department of labor to in the speech about a four day work week.

I don't know if that's ever going to happen, but I would say that it's going to become such a part of the narrative that I'm hoping by the time we get to 2030, we as organizations have realized like, okay, a 35 hour work week is perfectly reasonable because the last five hours on a Friday, nobody does anything anyways.

So I don't know. I think there's going to be a lot of interesting discussions about like work and how it fits in our lives and what's actually necessary and what are the skills that you need to continue to evolve and some that are just going to kind of shape where you fall in the organization kind of thing. But I don't know. 2030 seems like so far away right now. 

Joanne Lockwood: I think you're right about the perception things are broken and I'm, from a UK perspective, I see things getting very capacitive, people are pitching each other, there's this real polarization. Probably fueled by social media, unfiltered X, and other things where people are having opinions and they're not conversational, they're literally throwing stones at each other.

I think we're living in a world where there's so polarization, that's why it feels broken. Because there's always an attack on somebody happening. That's the struggle. 

David Rice: Yeah. I mean, from my perspective in this country I've actually had people ask me, like, do you think like another civil war is possible?

And I'm like, I mean, anything's possible, but let's not confuse what happens on Twitter with what's happening in reality. Like, these are two very different things. If you put those two people that are throwing stones in the same room face to face, they may not get along, but I bet you they start seeing each other in a different light. Because when someone's humanity is actually in front of you and it's not behind the keyboard, it changes everything.

And I still think that's true. I still think that people are better in person. I try not to put too much onus on what goes on online because people have said horrible things about me online. 

Joanne Lockwood: I have that same feeling. 

David Rice: Where I just had to shake it off. 

Joanne Lockwood: Just don't log into Twitter. That's the secret, isn't it? Just don't log into Twitter. Don't read the comments and, 

David Rice: never read the comments on anything. That's a rule that I have. 

Joanne Lockwood: But you never reply. Never engage. Never tell anyone you've read it. 

David Rice: Yeah, exactly. Don't acknowledge it. 

Well, Joanne, I want to thank you for coming on today. This is a good, this is really a good discussion.

Joanne Lockwood: Pleasure. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks David. 

David Rice: All right listeners, if you haven't already subscribed, head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe to get our newsletter. You'll get more updates from us on everything from DEI to talent acquisition and all the HR disciplines in between.

Until next time, enjoy a good book. Summer's here. It's going to be a warm one.