Dashboards Are Dead with Ankita Poddar

Across various regions, Anakin's work stands, workforce and allocation strategy, organizational designs, planning, leadership development, and culture for global distributed teams. Alongside her role at AWS, Annika serves as a non-executive board member with family based, is co-chair of the HR Network at the American Chamber of Commerce Island, and is a respective voice in the HR professor through her writing, speaking and mentoring. Her insights have been featured by organizations including HCI, People Matters, and OC Tana, where she's been recognized amongst Germany, India's top 50 HR influencers and a whole bunch more.

And Annika joins me today to discuss the evolving role of HR, the future of work, leadership in a rapidly changing world, and what it takes to help people and businesses thrive. Antica, welcome to the show today. How are you doing? I'm good, Bill.

How are you? I'm glad to be here. It's been a while since I've since we've planned this and actually got to it. Absolutely.

I'm delighted to have you. Um beyond my reintroduction there, why don't you just take a minute or two and uh tell our listeners anything I've missed? Tell them a bit more about yourself, your your career background, and what gets you up in the morning? Sure, my job definitely gets me up in the morning.

Um, I used to joke about how my day job and everything I do outside my day job also revolves around HR, and I'm trying to do a little less of that. So uh as you covered most of it. So my day job is an HR business partner with AWS. When I'm not doing that, I had an HR podcast, which I've winded down.

When I'm not, when I wasn't doing the podcast, I have an HR blog. So the HR business partner side of the story. Um, so yeah, like a lot of my life revolved around meeting and talking to people in the profession, which I love. I one of the things I say is that this is one profession where we can or probably the only profession where we can claim that we design the future of work.

I don't think any other profession can say they're doing that. So yeah, that's that's what I would add. Wonderful. Thank you very much.

So uh as we record this episode today in mid-June, it was about a month ago, a little bit less than a month ago, um, that you honoured us with your presence on the Disrupt HR Dublin stage. In a moment, I'm gonna ask you a question about the content, but just generally speaking, um maybe you can share with our listeners a little bit about what that experience is like. It's not an easy format. It's 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, and the whole thing can only be five minutes.

Um, some folks have told me it's absolutely terrifying, other people have found it exhilarating. Maybe you're somewhere in the middle. Tell tell us a bit about your experiences. A, I don't make presentations.

They're I haven't made one for a very, very long time, almost 10 years. And then to have a presentation where you have no control over the speed at which the slides are moving is insane. So I was terrified. Um, and I did put in some work prepping in.

It's like I didn't walk in unprepared, and I and I really enjoyed it. I think it was easier than I imagined because at some point you can just forget about the slides and talk. And like if you've done the practice at works, but just being there in the room with a bunch of people who um get you and are not just looking at your googly eyed or making fun of what you're saying is amazing. Like, I would any day walk into a room of HR professionals um and have a great time, and then disrupt HR just amplifies that a hundred X times.

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And now back to the show. Excellent. I'm glad you had a nice time. That means that we can bother you and get you back up on stage again in the future.

So you'll absolutely okay, done. I've got that on record to hear that listeners. Okay, so um your talk in Dublin was called Dashboards Are Dead. What prompted that message and what do you think HR leaders should be focusing on instead of simply tracking more metrics?

Well, you've opened the can of worms, not me. So you've started the discussion about AI. So we'll jump straight into it. Uh it is like the talk came out of me just going around and asking a whole bunch of people what they were doing with AI and the agents that they have access to.

And it was one of two things. When you look at the side of personal productivity, everyone was building their own little um executive assistant, which is great. I absolutely understand the appeal. I've built some of my own.

And when you looked at team productivity or enterprise level productivity, the number of people who were going away to build dashboards was insane. Like almost every other person I was talking to was building some kind of the ultimate unit unified dashboard. And I get the appeal of that too. It's like if you've had a lifelong dream and you've been given a genie in a bottle, of course you'd go and like attain that dream irrespective of whether the problem statement was still around.

But I think what we've some people have missed is like the problem statement has shifted. We require dashboards for a reason. I don't think that reason exists anymore because like agents are consuming most of the data instead of a direct human being, or will not too far away from now. Um so I d I do think like it's great if you're building a dashboard just because you want to get a handle on how to build AI agents and it's it's not an easy job, even with everything we have right now.

But I think if you were to really build something that would enhance enterprise or team productivity over a longer period of time, we can use that time and effort elsewhere because agents will read the data for us, they will help us self-heal a lot of these metrics. So I think instead of focusing on dashboards, our leaders need to focus on like, hey, how do we ask better questions to our agents that can actually get us the outcomes without really over rotating on building better dashboards?

So I I genuinely believe that dashboards are dead or will be dead if not already in a few years. Okay, wonderful. Thank you. So in your role over at AWS, you're helping shape workforce strategy across multiple regions and cultures.

What are what are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities that come with leading people strategy for globally distributed teams? We live in very interesting times. And I think anyone in any profession would say that, that everything we've believed to be true for a very long time is being shaken up. And that holds true for workforce strategy and when you think about locations also.

Like let's take some of the things we've seen people take for granted, including me. We've said that, hey, talent is reasonably mobile. If you wanted to move someone across locations, as long as both parties are willing, there weren't a lot of restrictions. When you looked at geopolitical stability, you said most countries were stable.

Like the embargoed countries would stay embargoed, not a we won't add drastically to the list, or we won't have to take a huge bunch of countries out of that list. Taking them out obviously would be a great sign. Both of those assumptions have shifted. Like there's no doubt that the world is moving towards the left for better or worse.

I won't comment on that. But it's not as easy to transport people internationally and just move them around. Like we need to think deeply about that. Location strategies, we need to look at a lot of other constraints.

Like, these are not abstract geopolitical concerns that are happening in isolation. They very much impact your location strategy and how you're moving people. And then there's of course speed. This is a third assumption, right?

Like we said, we've always had to run fast, but now we're running faster than ever. And I think hopefully you'll agree with me. I don't know, Will, if you will or will not. Um, you can tell me, but things move faster when people are in a physical room together versus a virtual room.

We've seen that happen again and again. So I think the we're going back and looking at every single thing we thought through about a globally distributed organization, and we are rethinking all of it. And that is both a challenge and opportunity. So, like, I'm very excited about where we head, but it's really like rewriting the playbook all over again.

Listeners of this show will know that I'm a big proponent of uh the fact that it doesn't matter where your workforce are actually. Um, if you've got the right technology in place, which means that you can have uh Teams meetings or whatever. That this show is not sponsored by Teams, by the way, listeners. Um then you can largely get around that.

I get that if you're in an office environment, there's a whole bunch that you can learn just by osmosis by being around other people. Um what I'd hate though is that organizations um take an approach where they only hire regionally, for example, um and miss out on on uh opportunities from further afield. Um but I do take your point as well, sometimes being in person. When you can make that happen, uh can be very powerful.

I would push back on those companies that are now insisting people be back in the office two or three days a week. Um I don't think that's perhaps necessary for a lot of roles. What what are your thoughts on that? I think we're learning.

Um we are these are all long-range experiments, so it it is hard to say, hey, we we will know exactly what's the right mix of in-person and virtual within um 12 months. By the way, all my opinions and everything I say here are of my own and not that of the organization I work for, so take that um as you will. But I genuinely think that right now in the world there are a million different experiments happening. And this whole mix of virtual and in-person is one of them.

I love that all companies are doing different things, which means we have more or less test environments. Um, I have personally seen accelerated decision making when people are together. That may not need to be a fixed number of days in an office. Like you could when there were big decisions, if you know, will take like five hours to really hash out and lots of arguments and tension in the room.

Maybe you put them together in a room in person for that day. I think there is something to be said about actually being around people in person versus you and me having a huge fight over the screen. I don't think that'll go well. Whereas in person we could probably manage it a little better.

So I I do I do see the merit. I do acknowledge that if you were if it was midnight right now, if you were in Sydney, you would be half asleep. I'd be at like my brightest, pushiest self, and we'd probably not have the same energy in the room. So I I do think they are these are real constraints.

I don't think that the only way to work around them is to actually be in person. I think that's a lazy excuse. But I think unless we know the right solution, people will revert to what they know best. So I do think of it as one giant experiment, then five years from now we'll be actually able to parse it out and say, okay, like this is the environment that's actually the right mix, this works, this doesn't.

Okay, five years from now, that is a great lead-in to my next question. Uh, which is you've worked closely with leadership teams on org design and succession planning, of course. Uh, what are the qualities you believe will define successful leaders over those next five years? Well, the first one will tie into my previous answer, which is just intellectual honesty.

I don't think any leader should be going out there and saying, I know the answer and I know this with like absolute certainty, because we are in a time where all of our answers are shaky at best. So I think the whole honesty of saying, I don't know, I'm trying to figure it out, and here's what I think is the right decision based on what I know. So I think it it is scary because for generations we've expected organizations and leaders to have the answers, so for them to turn up and say, I don't know, can be a huge reputational risk.

But I think leaders who can do that are gonna be successful. The second thing is I think making people feel seen in a distributed world is extremely important, and this is to do with empathy. I think a lot of employees today feel that the actions that are being taken is probably not in their best interest, and that may or may not be true. Um they don't feel seen, heard, or valued, and I think leaders who can do that and help people like I I was listening to someone a few weeks ago and they said human beings have like just two basic needs.

They want to be seen and they want to be heard. And if you can do that, apart from your other basic needs of having food to eat, water to drink, and a shelter over your head, like if you can actually make people seen and heard, you're in a winning position. So I think that's essential. The third I would say is systems thinking.

I've seen a lot of um big leaders out there, and just so that you know beforehand, I'm gonna state only five, so I'm not gonna go on a very long random list. Um so my third is systems thinking. I've seen like leaders reduce things to a single problem. Like I'm gonna take um Jack Dorsey's example from Block, where he's basically said, I'm gonna eliminate all managers, and he's reduced it to an information flow problem.

And if the problem was information flow, information flow, his solution is fantastic. But I think managers do more than just transfer information back and forth. So I do think um leaders need to adopt a systems thinking of saying, like, how does this one thing impact the ten other related things? Um fourth is comfort with an AI with AI as a partner, so they need to like use it themselves versus just talk about it.

And my last and most important one is and again, I'd love to know your thoughts on this, is the courage to slow down. I think we're all in a mad race, and I'm not sure we all know which direction we're running in. I think the leaders who can actually pause, reflect, listen, and steer earlier are the ones who will be more successful versus doing a mad dash and then realizing that they've reached a destination that's very far from where they ought to be. So those are my five.

Yeah, I'd I'd agree with that that that last point. Um, I think if you're in an organization that can um afford to give you that time to be reflective, that is awesome and that can be very powerful. I also think the reality is, I mean, you're based in Dublin, 99% of companies in Dublin are under 100 employees, and um folks have got to keep the business going and they've got to be making their revenue and all the rest of it, and they maybe don't get afforded uh those opportunities uh enough.

But if you can uh if you can build out time uh to be reflective um and and plan, um that's gonna set you up probably uh for the for the longer term if it's realistic. Um hey, one thing you said in your last answer is you said uh uh the actions being taken by leaders uh uh not uh necessarily in the interests of employees, or at least that's how employees uh feel at the moment. Uh employees' best interest is what you said. Um I don't know.

What what did you mean by that? And maybe can you offer some examples? And you spoke about systems thinking as part of the answer. Does that does that help readdress these concerns if if leaders are going along the lines of systems thinking?

I think there are two parts to it. One is the question of trust, right? Where employees feel like they can't trust their employers and that decisions there are not being taken in their best interest, and then employers feel that they can't trust their employees because of um just them not responding in a way that aligns with where the organization wants to go. And then system thinking is slightly separate in my head.

I think on so let's take the example of being in the office, right? Something that um if your employer told you to do, you would probably think that they don't have your best interest at heart. And I can definitely see why someone would feel that way. But if an employer said, Hey, I don't know whether this is the right direction, but here's based, like here's what I know.

Here's all the data I have. I think for the organization, this is the direction we need to go. And I understand your point of view, but walk with me on this experiment, and we learn, right? Like if we if we fail, we will change.

Like none of these are one-way doors, we can keep going back and forth. It might be a one-way door for an employee because they have to make decisions on where they live, how they work, how do they take care of childcare, and a whole bunch of other things. But I think if if there's an honest intellectual on coming back to if there's intellectual honesty in the conversation, employees won't feel that um the employers don't have their best interest at heart. They will understand that there is a business sense, and then if that does not allow align with what an employee needs, maybe they need to look at things differently.

I do think systems thinking comes into play here because then the employer when making decisions like these actually thinks about the multiple or orders of effects this decision will have. And those two hand in hand with having the ability to make people feel seen and heard makes this like one singular decision of just like, hey, we're gonna work from the office three days a week, actually be understood by a larger set of people versus them just fighting against it without knowing why.

Okay, thank you very much. We are already coming towards the end of this conversation. I'll just have to bother you and get you back on again in the near future. Uh, two more questions for you before we do wrap up.

Uh, looking ahead, what excites you the most about the future of work? Um, what advice would you give to HR pros who want to remain relevant, influential, and impactful in an increasingly complex business environment? It is an increasingly complex business environment for sure. But I will also say scary can be good sometimes and scary can be exciting.

Um, so what excites me the most is just being able to, when allowed, I know all organizations may not allow this, but I think to a very large extent, there is if there was ever a time to question our core assumptions and what we've built on top of those assumptions, it is now like the window of opportunity now exists for us to do what we thought we probably can't question in the past. So I think for me that's extremely exciting. And my recommendation to like if I was to give an advice would be um three things.

And I think part the first one's a little bit connected to the geopolitical um scene that I referred to earlier, but it is like so far we've been trained to operate really well inside the four walls of the organization. I think we now need to figure out how everything in the outside world impacts how we think about um what's happening within those four walls. So, like get really savvy with the external world. Um draw from other professions shamelessly.

Like our economists might have answers on what the right team structures are. Marketing might have great um examples from how they use behavioral economics. So I think we need to draw from other professions shamelessly, and because the window of opportunity to question assumptions exist, this is also the time to experiment wildly. Those are probably my three things.

Experiment wildly or like that. I think we might have to include that in the title somehow. Um okay, just finally for today, how can our listeners connect with you? Is that LinkedIn?

Do you want to share your email address? Are you super cool and all over Instagram and TikTok and places? Tell us more. Well, I'm not on TikTok.

I'm not I'm not the cool gang on there. Um I am on LinkedIn. I think that's the best way to reach out to me. And I would I'll leave the link to my blog.

I would love it if people um interacted with some of the pieces there. But like that's where you will go if you want to know what I'm thinking about at any point of time. Excellent. And I just add that um as we record this episode today, um, Ankita's talk is not yet up on the Diswap website, but it will be very soon.

So possibly by the time you hear this, uh, it's already live. And if it is, go check it out. Go to the Dublin page and uh check out her awesome talk. The first day for today.

Ankata, you are awesome. I appreciate you. You were brilliant in Dublin. Let's do it again.

Thank you very much. Any time bit, thank you for the live. As always, until next time. Thanks for listening to the HR test.

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