How Does Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Improve Performance Through People & Culture? With Beth Tyndall

Speaker A: You won the best, you got the best.

Speaker B: Absolute best.

Speaker A: The best. The best, the best talent and mountains of it. Mountains of it. Mountains on it. Everybody's got talent. I got talent. I got talent. I got talent. Welcome to the Talent Blueprint, your guide to building talent first skills based organizations. The Talent Blueprint is brought to you by bimari, the AI platform for workforce transformation.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome everyone to this week's installment of the Talent Blueprint. I am your host, Sultan Sydov. And today I am delighted to welcome Beth Tindall, the Chief People Officer at Ontario Teachers Pension Plan. Beth, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: Well, to kick off, Beth, I would love for you to tell us all a bit about you, your professional background and how you got to uh, the role of being Chief People Officer at otpp.

Speaker A: I would say it was a fairly straight line, which sometimes I think is less conventional than the alternative. I've been the Chief People Officer here for just over eight years. I have a background working in HR in professional services and three privately held technology companies. Um, so always with knowledge workers and seemed uh, like a perfect fit to come and join the team here eight years ago.

Speaker B: And how do you think about the things that makes your team at OTPP different to other people functions, other ways that you're looking at people and culture fit? Obviously OTPP is quite a unique organization. Are there things, factors that are OTPP unique that factor into what makes your role unique?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think there's probably a couple things. I mean, one I would say is the size of the organization is a real advantage. So you know, we have a fairly large profile, very strong brand and reputation. We oversee, you know, over $260 billion of assets. It's a large company. At the same time we only have about 1700 employees. So um, from a people and culture perspective, you know, you know, the team and I feel like it's that sweet spot of an organization where you can have access to a lot of the great thought leadership, the thinking, the tools, but you also really have an opportunity to get to know the talent and go deep into the organization. And so if I think about prior roles, often it was either startups where you're sort of growing and in recruiting and building, or more mature organizations that had a much broader scale where you can really only skim the top of the organization and then create some systems, you know, to sort of grow your talent within it. But I feel like we've got that really great balance here with uh, the size being our advantage. The second advantage, I would say, is our culture. It's like no other culture I've ever worked in. Incredibly collaborative, very much a solve problems together type of culture, where we have a single purpose and mandate, which is ultimately it's about retirement security for the teachers of Ontario. And so that really helps to galvanize where you've got one stakeholder group, you've got one purpose, and it allows everybody to kind of line up really nicely to that purpose. And therefore I think people are very clear on what their mandates are and how they work together.

Speaker B: I've seen you talk about that galvanizing clarity in the OTPP culture as a performance leverage.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Could you unpack a little bit about how you see performance connecting to some of these key cultural ingredients and how you foster that?

Speaker A: So we recently actually, uh, completed an enterprise strategy process which was an opportunity for the organization to think about five, 10 years out, taking all those macro global economic environment, uh, elements and trying to determine what we needed to do to really drive performance and again tying it back to the sole purpose we're here, which is really around retirement security. So the people and culture team had specifically a very strong role in performance in that we have clarity, uh, in terms of the fund performance that we need in order to create that retirement security. Um, and then we have a role to play from a talent plan perspective to think about what the levers are within the talent plan to ah, drive performance. So to give you an example, performance management, so not the sexiest of topics, but really, really important that we're making sure that our people have goals that are clear, they're outcome based, and that they tie in with that North Star. The second one would be around aligning incentives. Again, not the sexiest topic, but really, really important to make sure that the behaviors that we need to see and the performance that we need to see is recognized and reinforced. And then finally, the one that I'm probably most excited and most passionate about is around leadership. And what are those leadership behaviors that are really important for our people at all levels of the organization to ultimately drive performance?

Speaker B: The performance and behaviors you mentioned are obviously also connected to a very different external environment, especially in the last year to what we saw in the years before. Uh, different in terms of the tools people use, the technologies we have, but also the geopolitics that people are surrounded by. And I imagine those parameters would have an impact on what does it take to create an agile organization that is able to adapt with those times. Beyond the behaviors, are there other ingredients that you're thinking about in mapping how you look at talent, such as the skills people have for today, how those are evolving, and what are the gaps in sort of information about skills and people that have helped you address that?

Speaker A: Yeah, we're spending a lot of time actually thinking about the skills that got us here won't necessarily be the skills that get us there. And I think it starts with, I mean, firstly, I'd go back to culture before I even build on skills, which is making sure that you've got a culture of, uh, safety, Psych. Safety. Because the world's changing really, really quickly and that can have an impact on how people show up and the openness to embrace new things, new technologies, explore curiosity, all of the elements that we really need to see in our people. So if you don't have that, it's going to be even more more challenging. But then about how do we break down the role of, you know, the future investor? How do we break down, um, the role of the future finance professional and really understand what those elements are and what those skills are and how that connects in with being digitally fluid. And so building that into a leadership framework is one of the things that we're, uh, working on at the moment, which is really thinking about how, you know, what does that mean? How do you leverage technology to really augment some of those human capabilities that we need, but not necessarily always replace everything. But it's about making our people stronger, adding more value, and the expectation of our leaders to try to foster that within their teams.

Speaker B: What do you see as the biggest impact, uh, you can have as a leader in navigating this change?

Speaker A: I think the role of the people leader is one of the most important in an organization. It's the connectivity between an individual doing their work, being inspired, learning. And the role of the people leader is going to change in the sense that, you know, the emergence of new technologies, the amount of change, the macroeconomic headwinds we're currently facing right now, requires a leader who can help to navigate and sort of be the pathfinder for their teams. And so not to take that lightly, you know, that's a big responsibility. But also, as organizations, we have to help our people leaders through that. We have to give them the skills, the tools to be able to have the hard conversations, to be able to provide clarity, to be able to reinforce the good behaviors and, you know, talk about the things they could be doing differently. So I don't want to underestimate that really, really important role. We're spending a lot of time with them.

Speaker B: And one of the challenges we've seen many organizations have in truly empowering leaders to do that is clarity of the roles and expectations of a leader. And as a manager and a leader, you know, there's a lot of organizations where it's now sort of the blueprint that you are a player, coach, and nobody really knows what the sort of capacity of time you have to lead versus do or manage is. Are there things that have, ah, evolved or worked at OTPP to really create that clarity in leadership and management?

Speaker A: I think focusing on strengths has been a big area of focus for us over the last number of years for leaders to be able to look at their teams individually, but also collectively and think about how they best leverage the strengths of each of those teams. And so we've put, you know, a number of tools in place and we've had, you know, some assessments and things like that that help a leader be able to really define what those strengths are as opposed to constantly trying to focus on the things that they need to change. And to your point, like being really crystal clear on what's expected, expected, what the outcomes are, what the team needs to do. So providing that clarity to them, really, really important.

Speaker B: We found, especially in the last two years, the question of digital fluency in different parts of the workforce to pose some interesting new challenges in terms of people who are starting their careers versus later in their careers. Many organizations have started hiring less junior talent or graduate talent as people look for technologies to do some of those roles. But other organizations have started to lean into the unique digital native capabilities of people entering the workforce and how that brings fresh perspectives. Is that something you found ways of balancing in how you think about what skills are coming into the workforce versus how you're looking at, you know, people who have been in, uh, their careers for some time?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's something that we, that is absolutely front and center today. So have we got it all figured out? Nope. But I'm, I'm willing to listen to those who have. How do you strike a balance of bringing in early talent who are more digitally native than the people that are leading them, help them actually teach others in the organization and think about, you know, how they can leverage new technologies, AI, et cetera, to augment their jobs, but at the same time making sure that we're creating individual leaders of the future that have enough reps and have enough experience around the things that you can't replace. So the judgment elements, the relationship elements, how do we continue to foster those pieces to build Those teams of the future. And I think it's a balance. You know, it's something that's live, front and center from a discussion perspective. I'm not sure we've got it completely figured out, but it's hard to imagine a world five years from now where you're going to pluck people into the organization that have all of that if you haven't done some of the work at trying to train them up.

Speaker B: It's an interesting time to be looking at the question of skills. When the recent technologies we've started to see, such as agentic tools, have introduced a new paradigm to how we think about people not just using tools, but, uh, working alongside them. And it's something we started to see bringing in an interesting dynamic about what we are trying to understand to make better decisions in hiring and planning and talent functions. Up until now we've really been trying to understand behaviors, skills, performance. We're starting to see more companies looking at the tasks behind the work because technology is starting to perform tasks. And we are starting to also see organizations thinking about what kind of data do we have, what kind of process do we have that actually connect these decisions about how our, uh, people are supporting our organization and how tools are impacting that, uh, in a more dynamic way. Are there changes in your people and culture function the way you're looking at some of this data and how it connects to some of those business decisions that, that are also starting to come into the equation?

Speaker A: I would say we're having the right discussions about it and we have, you know, we have data from a bunch of different sources and so how do we move away from the role and the job title to thinking about the capabilities that are required for a job. So if I think about, you know, we get 80,000 applicants a year. That's a lot of applications of people who are interested in some job here at Ontario Teachers. So how can we leverage AI to ensure that we are filtering people into the process as opposed to filtering people out just based on, say, a job profile or a job title. It also requires our data function to have the right connectivity. And, you know, part of our new strategy is to ensure that we have the right data platform across the organization as well as the right talent connectivity and so that we're in a better position to be able to do that going forward.

Speaker B: And I know of course that, uh, AI is something that OTBP has been thoughtful in adopting in the kind of HR processes you're touching on. M not just in looking at the work, but Actually how you're optimizing the way your teams work. I know that there uh, are certain things you've been doing with bimari and hiring processes. But what have been some of the biggest learnings and hurdles as you, as you've been taking this forward looking approach of actually embedding AI in your own HR functions?

Speaker A: Well, I think the obvious thing to call out is something that we're very conscious of, which is ensuring that we are, you know, watching for bias in processes and making sure that we've got the right governance in place. And we are an organization that takes those things seriously and we have good advisory partners around us in the organization who help us think through all of the potential pitfalls, um, so that you don't over vector. And I think that that's really important to make sure, you know, ultimately these things should be helping us from a bias reduction standpoint as opposed to imposing bias on processes. But it's incumbent on us, the humans who use it to make sure that we're using it appropriately and ethically. So that would be one thing that we've spent some time on.

Speaker B: One of the areas I've started to see having the biggest impact from AI, uh, not just in organizations but globally is in access to learning. Of course, uh, Ontario Teachers is uh, closely connected to the world of teaching and learning. But I imagine it's uh, also a consideration you've had in terms of how you're approaching the development of your employees, how you're thinking about future leaders, how they prepare for a world with more technology, but also how they can use technology to drive those learnings. What have been some of the things that have been front of mind for you in that uh, universe of how we approach learning and development?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we continue to approach learning in a relatively balanced uh, model with the majority of the learning is, is going to be on the job. You know, another key element is going to be through relationships and making sure that we've got the right connections across the organization. And that in that regard I think our size continues to be an advantage for us. And then what are the tools and the actual learnings? And we recognize that talent doesn't necessarily have the same time that they had before to be able to sit in the classroom for days on end. So how are we offering up digital platforms so that there's on demand learning and for some of those, you know, micro learnings and we've got, you know, a relationship with a number of organizations where we're able to offer that, but we've got pretty high usage, actually. You know, curiosity is one of our values. So I think there's a lot of people here who are interested in upskilling, interested in new technologies that are coming and then thinking about, you know, how they augment the work that they've got in leveraging those technologies. But it's really offering it a variety of different ways.

Speaker B: And when you think about the evolution of the HR function itself, whether it's talent acquisition or the learning and development teams or elsewhere, what are some of the things that you expect to happen in the next couple of years that people should start learning and adapting to? I, uh, mean, you've obviously touched on some of the deep values that are going to set people up well for that. But what are some of the things that you think people need to learn and develop into in those functions?

Speaker A: I think that there's a ton of opportunity for the people and culture function to advance itself and think about what are some of the tasks in those jobs that are inherently in, you know, a more sort of traditional HR function and how do we leverage AI so that we are adding more strategic value in the conversations and the applicability of it. So I think that almost every job in HR will have a shift. And whether that's a, uh, payroll function, a job evaluation task, the role of a recruiter, the role of a benefits administrator, those roles are still important. But how they do their job, I think is going to change materially, ah, in the next three to five years.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's an interesting time because everyone feels that work is changing, um, but when you're sort of in the eye of the storm, I think it can be hard to see which pieces. And I do agree with you that there are certain tasks that are starting to clearly become things that technology is helping with. But I am, um, personally very optimistic, uh, from what I am seeing happen in, uh, the organizations we work with, OTPP being a great example of how people across all functions are starting to see things that we are starting to have more time for and where some of those efficiencies come. And, uh, it's an exciting time to be working with technologies in companies that embrace that and have that impact. When you think about going back in time now to your, uh, younger self, and if you wish you could tell your younger self one thing now, with the benefit of all the hindsight you have, what would be something that, that you wish you could have told yourself?

Speaker A: I could have told my younger self a lot of things, and probably I'm now telling my younger daughters the same things I might have told my younger self, who are, you know, just entering the workforce today. I would say where you start is not necessarily where you end. And that's even more true today than it was when I started my career. You know, I have a relatively traditional career. I started off as a tech recruiter. I made my way into generalist functions. I did some specialist functions, ultimately was business partner. But I stayed in the stream. And I just think that that's not indicative of the norm anymore. And so for people entering the workforce, I would say just be curious. You know, don't overthink the job. Think about what you're going to learn from it, what you can take from it. What you don't like is as important as what you like. Recognizing that every job has things that you don't like. But, you know, I think if you're. If you go in with an element of, I'm going to learn from these people, I'm going to gain some skills I didn't have before, I'm going to find out some things that I really love to do, I'm going to find out some things that I really don't love to do. And then you continue to grow from there. And I think overthinking, I would say to my younger self, like, don't overthink it. Don't worry about where you're going to finish. Just think about what you're going to learn. And the other thing I would say is, is make some mistakes. Mistakes are where you learn. And not every job is going to necessarily be the right one for the long term, and that's okay. You have the agency to change those things. Um, you have the agency to influence what you take from it. So I would say make some mistakes and, you know, be curious.

Speaker B: And in the spirit of curiosity and closing us out, what are you finding yourself drawn into today in terms of what you're learning and developing and, uh, adjusting with the times. After all of the experience you've acquired, it's, uh, it's clear that you're still pushing your teams and yourself forward. What are some of the things that you're excited about in your own ongoing growth?

Speaker A: I think for me, what gets me up, um, every day is, is the team. Is the team behind me. That's where I get the most energy. I still have lots to learn. I still make mistakes. I learn from others, and I especially learn from those people who are newer into the workforce. They're going to be teaching me as much as I teach them. But I think the opportunity and the excitement is actually to see how the function will change. And so those leaders that will be leading HR functions and people and culture functions 10, 20 years from now are ah, very different. I'll be doing something else. So I'm excited to see how the function evolves because I think the people culture functions has changed so much in the many years that I've been working in it and it just continues to sort of redefine its role in an organization and I think that that's going to continue. So it's kind of exciting to see the people behind me I would say.

Speaker B: Well that is a very sage advice for us, uh, to wrap on. Beth, thank you so much for uh, such an enriching conversation.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. The Talent Blueprint is brought to you by Bimari, the AI platform for workforce transformation. Learn more at bimari.com mhm.