People First, AI Enabled: Human Sustainability at TELUS

[MUSIC] Welcome to ATD's Talent Development Leader Podcast, featuring monthly conversations with the greatest influencers in the talent development field. We cover the latest trends, hot topics, and future focused ideas that current and aspiring TD leaders need to know. Learn more by visiting www.td.org and searching for Talent Development Leader Podcast. [MUSIC] Today, I'm joined by Allison McElane. Allison is a distinguished learning and development, diversity and inclusion professional dedicated to driving progressive cultures to meet company, customer, and employee goals for strategic growth. She is a dynamic and authentic leader with expertise in human capital development and diversity and inclusion, and a trusted advisor to the executive team on today's leadership and cultural challenges. She holds a PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University of Guelph. Allison is Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer and Director of Development, Learning, and Engagement at Tellus. Tellus is an ATD best of the best award winner. Hi, Allison. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me in the pleasure. Today, we're talking about human sustainability in the age of AI. When we talk about human sustainability, we're referring to the capacity to improve the well-being of people by focusing on their health, skills, safety, purpose, and overall flourishing. Ensuring that individuals and communities can thrive both now and in the future. I'm excited about unpacking this topic with you. I know you have a lot to say and a lot of good practices at Tellus that you can share with us. First, I wanted to mention some recent data I read about employee engagement in organizations today, which is certainly very relevant to our topic. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace, global employee engagement declined to 21% in 2024, with managers experiencing the largest drop. This marks the first drop in four years, and only the second decline in engagement in the past 12 years. Certainly, Gallup has been reporting on employee engagement trends for years, but what I find exciting is how employee engagement has evolved, and today it focuses on a human-centric approach, utilizing tech like AI for personalization and efficiency, prioritizing employee wellbeing and mental health through supportive environments, and fostering a strong sense of belonging and inclusion with an emphasis on diversity and equity. Now, Allison, I understand human sustainability is a primary focus for you and your team at Tellus. Can you speak to this intersection of employee engagement initiatives and human sustainability at your organization and some of the strategies that you're using to prioritize and develop your people? To kind of put this in context, I'll take you back just a little bit, because I would say Tellus actually started on a journey. I don't think we were calling it necessarily human sustainability before, but we've been on a journey specifically around engagement, mental health and wellbeing, diverse and inclusion for many years, and like many organizations, you know, a couple years ago when that little thing called COVID happened, it made us all stop and kind of take a different look at it. And so, leading up to that, I would say we talked a lot about kind of, you know, the VUPA world, volatile and certain, complex and big US. But around that time, you were starting to hear more about the Bany world, so the brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible. And I think that's what we were also starting to kind of see with team members as they were going through this massive change in us as an organization had to kind of step into that as well. So, we started to talk about human sustainability. Everything that you said when it came to the introduction there as to what human sustainability is, that really spoke to the environment we were trying to create for our team members. And when I take a step back and look at what the team is doing around human sustainability, I think it's really about how we're creating value for our team members. And it's kind of changing up and rewriting the old employee contract. So, I think many organizations have always kind of looked at it as to, you know, what can people bring for us, right? I like, how can people contribute to this organization? And part of what we started seeing is really kind of flipping that on the head to say, "We already know." You know what I mean? Like, we're grounded in the knowledge that our people drive our success. And they're really dedicated to creating that long-term value for the company. But on top of that, how can we as an organization help our team members flourish so that they're better off for having worked at Tellus? Not just today, but throughout their lives. And how can this help communities across the globe? And so seeing that larger kind of social purpose in the way that we're working as well. When we started kind of flipping that contract on its head and not just looking at how employees were creating value for the organization, we started really diving deeper into things that we already knew were good for the organization. And that kind of connects us back to engagement, right? Like, all of the drivers of engagement, having meaningful work, you know, a reason to show up every day at work, feeling belonging, and that's the tight tie to diversity and inclusion. Having flexibility, and that could show up in a variety of different ways, not just about kind of hybrid work and things like that. Leaders and team members feeling appreciated for what they bring to the table. You know, having an environment where team members are able to show up and feel supported for their well-being, their mental health, their physical health, etc. And really at the heart of it, just like feeling safe and having trust within the organization. What we've seen time and time again is that when a team member feels valued and able to show up as their true self at work, they are going to do better work for us as an organization. There's a business benefit behind this as well. And so when team members feel engaged, they're more likely to want to, you know, stay at the organization. They're going to want to put their best foot forward. So that's why this is not just something that we're doing because it's the right thing to do. But we can see kind of how that whole circle happens of, you know, both the business and team members benefit from having this kind of a new employee on trapped in place. I think it's interesting too and different to continue to focus on human sustainability as times change, as context changes. I think when COVID hit, it was for a couple years after, it was really an employee's world, right? There was a lot of focus on well-being and human sustainability and creating environments of support for employees and belonging, etc. And then I do think the pendulum has shifted and I think that's just over the years what we see, kind of the back and forth, where it becomes then once again more of an organization's world and the employer is more in the driver's seat or could be essentially. But I think that's when it's most important to continue on that journey, to continue to uphold and value those elements of human sustainability as you've described. One of the things that we talk about a lot at Tellus and I think your description there is a perfect kind of example of it in action is balance leadership. In that example, I see that in organizations as well where the pendulum might swing back or forth and I think often what we find is that it's the balance between both sides of that, right? Like we can't go so far that the organization is just leading forward without concern for the humans that work for us, right? How do we make sure that they are better off for having worked with us? But on the flip side, you can't go so far because we still are a business and need to get things done. And so that's why finding that beautiful balance between, make sure that at the end of the day, both sides get what they need. It's great. And that's the sustaining part of it. If you can strike that balance, you'll weather all of the kind of storms or the swings. Yeah. So aligned with these strategies that you've described, you've shared that Tellus has a human-centric approach to AI, particularly around building a future where humans are working in conjunction with AI. So certainly this is one of those trends that we look at being introduced and kind of shaking up the workplace, right? And even that focus on humans and I would love to hear what Tellus is doing, how you've dealt with this and how you've even evolved your own journey with AI to tie back to what we were just discussing. A lot of this human-centric approach to AI stems from our focus on human sustainability. So the one quote that kind of always comes out for me and I'm sure you've heard it from others. I've tried to research and figure out where it originally came from, and I think it might be former IBM CEO, Ginny Rametti, who said it, but the idea that it's not AI that's going to replace jobs, rather it's humans that use AI are going to replace those that don't. And I think that really encapsulates kind of that human-centric view of how we need to go into AI. So I don't think it's a question anymore for folks. We already know that AI is going to transform the nature of work. We're seeing it happen live in real time right now. And so our expectation is that yeah, it's going to create new jobs, but along with that, it's also going to really emphasize the uniquely human skills that we have that AI can't do to the same extent. So things like creativity, having judgment, having emotional intelligence. And so for us, it's not just a debate about whether or not AI is going to eliminate jobs, but it's rather more about how are humans going to adapt and leverage AI within a redefinition of what their job is. For S as an organization, we've really focused on emphasizing the idea of continuous learning and what we call a digital mindset. And we focused on this digital mindset because to us like yes, is AI a big transformational impact to the organization right now or short? But Gen AI is kind of the tool of the day. There's going to be something tomorrow or the next day or the next week. And so it's really about creating that kind of growth mindset, the adaptability, the curiosity to not be afraid by these technologies, but to kind of dig in, learn more and adjust with it. As I said, like this technological landscape is just going to continue to evolve and change. We started very early on encouraging our team members to go in and play with AI to find ways to integrate it into their everyday and really look at it kind of almost like a coworker rather than something that you need to be afraid of. We use that kind of like idea around coworker as one of the reminders of always keeping a human in the loop. One of the things and there's more and more research coming out and I think this is so important from a talent development perspective which much of your audience will be focused on is that as AI transforms the workplace, it really makes it also important for us within the talent development realm to start rethinking how we support and train team members. So there's some recent research out there by Amy Edminton. She just put out an HBR article about it. I want to say in the last couple of weeks, but there are real risks that organizations are already starting to see if they've gone through and just started eliminating especially entry level is what you tend to see as a starting place, right? Entry level jobs because that can be very shortsighted from a long term organizational perspective. It's the entry level jobs that give people the experience to get the middle level jobs, that give them the experience to get into the senior jobs. And so you start taking out those entry level jobs. How do you start to build those leaders of the future? Because they're not now getting the opportunity to try things out and experiment and take risks in really low stakes kinds of scenario that they're going to experience, you know, even more so when they move up that ladder and get into more senior position. And so that's why we're really kind of rethinking how do you keep the human in the loop for those really creative, critical reasoning type tasks. MIT stands in research where you actually see a decrease in neural kind of activity for folks that are using AI. The difference tends to hit entry level more significantly. So let's just say you're doing some research, right? And a senior employee and a more junior employee pull the same research. The junior employee doesn't have the experience and so they're more likely to just say yes, yes, yes, and take it at base value and not question it. And so in doing that, they actually come up with more results. The more senior who has that experience is going to look at that through critical and be like, no, that's not going to work. Like great idea, but we need to tweak it. We need to play with this. And you can see the difference there of how those critical reasoning spill result in a better outcome for the team member and the organization. And so that's why we're really focused on this idea of human in the loop when we develop any of our projects and our use of AI. And I'll say just even personally, I've experienced that, right? When I do research with AI, I'm much more likely to just like put in a question and think, okay, I'll read it later, or you know what I mean? Or I'd give it through and it doesn't sink in. I see that with my kit. So we need to start thinking as a talent development community about what does it now mean to upskill and re-skill people where some of the things that we've taken for granted for years may not be happening in the same way. That's fascinating. And I think that's been one of my, you mentioned your kids, one of my concerns for children growing up with AI is that, you know, I feel as an old person, you know, that's this context or baseline of these skills that I can refer to that helped me when I work with AI, but just imagining a future for people who grow up, you know, AI natives, I guess if you want to say, and I don't really know what that looks like or what the implications of that are, but I think it's super thoughtful that you all at tell us have such a long term perspective on things which is really wonderful knowing that as you said, there's always going to be a shiny object like right now it's AI or a new trend. So how do we teach the skills like adaptability, resilience, growth mindset, which do sustain, which are long term effective and build value when it's something next? - There's little techniques as well. Like I'll say for my daughter, she's in high school. And so there's that balance of wanting to use AI 'cause she knows that's the wave of the future, but then unfortunately mom does this kind of work in her spare time. And so then I'm also sitting over her shoulder. And so I'm not afraid of AI. I'm not afraid of her learning how to use AI. I just want her to use it properly. So what we do a lot of work with or conversation around is you can't trust everything that comes out of it. So you can do some research with AI, but then go back to the original sources and dig in a little bit more. Verify what you're seeing, what you're learning. Don't trust everything that AI tells you as well. So you can go back and question it. If you're reading something you're like, "Huh, that doesn't feel right." There's a reason for that. So dig in and ask the AI more questions. Use it like almost like a, I don't know, brainstorming partner as opposed to just taking the first thing that it says. And I think that was even something that we saw with our team members is that at the start, if they'd cromped it once and if they didn't get what they wanted, they were like, "Oh, this isn't a great experience." And they'd give up. Whereas over time, they're now seeing that it's not gonna answer your full question. You need to go back and forth and almost have a conversation with it. The same way you would with a friend that you were brainstorming on this topic with. - Can you talk more about when you think about AI being a complement to humans, to employees at Telus? And what that looks like. You've moved from kind of the initial couple years ago, knowledge sharing, awareness building, to focusing on this AI human complementary working relationship. So prioritizing the human side of the equation a bit more, the skills, like creativity and growth mindset that we need to develop. What lessons have you learned along the way in this evolution? - That's a great question. And it's something that we're continually kind of like looking at and reassessing as we go. But if I was to kind of give you a high level experience, we were super lucky. I couldn't have planned it any better if I actually knew that Gen AI was gonna drop at the time that it did. But we just happened to have all of our senior leaders away at a senior leadership forum at Stanford in 2023 when Gen AI had originally the big announcements were coming out. And I say that because that really helped us to solidify the approach that we ended up taking over the next couple of years. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And having that kind of like entire senior leadership together in that special moment in time and giving them information about how this will transform work really kind of solidified the focus for us as an entire organization. Everybody was bought in from day one. All of the senior leaders were bought in from day one. And so from that, we started off with some of what I would almost call like basic housekeeping. Our leaders came back and they immediately developed an AI board. And immediately developed some in-house AI tools so that we made it very clear to our team members really early on that we were looking out for the good, the bad and the ugly that can come with AI that we are creating spaces for them to experiment safely and very open about what that experience would be. And so as you said, the first couple months for sure but even now we're still in this space to a certain extent has really been on the awareness builder, right? Like just what is it? How do I play? And so we started doing that in ways that felt really less risky. Like we didn't actually start with business impacts. We started with silly things like plan your vacation and use AI. Are you buying a new appliance for your house or buying a car or something like that? Use AI to do research. So they were using it in more kind of personal, less risky ways and just seeing like how do you go in? How do you prompt? How do you learn? And it just made it feel more kind of, I would say like accessible to people. And so that started to spark more curiosity. I mean, you always have the folks that are on the cusp of cutting edge and in there and ready to go. But that helped a lot of those that might have been a little bit more hesitant and kind of later on that transformation cycle to say, wait a second, this is kind of cool. I can see myself using this, right? That's how we really started to kind of build that digital mindset and comfort with the tools. Where we are now is looking at a patient now, how do we actually start to transform role and how do we start to kind of transform the work that we do with it. But again, taking a very human centric approach. So it's not just about eliminating work, but it's about how do we redesign the roles with AI? McKinsey's put out some research that the expectation is 60% of occupations could see about a third of their tasks automated. but very few roles can be. fully automated. That is so important for people to understand because that's part of the approach that we've taken where it's not that we're trying to eliminate roles. It's that we can really change the way that people are working and find the right places to use AI and the right places where humans need to be in the loop with the AI. But also, what are the uniquely human things that will never be taken over by AI? And so how do you redesign the roles around this? And I think from a business perspective as well, there's kind of the question for you about if all of us go in and say, okay, you know, AI create me my talent development roadmap for the year. What's going to happen is we're all going to come up with the exact same talent development roadmap because AI is going to create homogeneity in what he's giving out. And from an organization's perspective, we don't want to lose our competitive advantage. And the competitive advantage is how do we think about talent development? How do we integrate this in unity mean like our values, our human sustainability, like how does all of that get worked into it? This is why it becomes even more important for us to focus on those uniquely human skills like the judgment, like the collaboration, like the creativity, because we already know that there's huge business benefits for us for having diversity of thought at the table. And you lose that if you hand all of that over to AI. So it's not about AI transforming an entire process, but we're starting to have deeper conversations about breaking the process down into tasks and looking through each task to say, this one AI can't help with, but this one maybe AI can. And so how do we redesign that with human in the loop to make sure that you're getting the best out of that step? Then you look at the next step. So if you look across an entire process, maybe it is 60% that AI augment, but there are still touch points throughout where we have the ability to change it. And so when we're redesigning, we're really taking a step back to have that blank piece of paper to say, what's the actual problem we're trying to solve with this process? Should this process even still exist in the world as it is now? How do we break it into its component parts, taking it step by step, and then always having that and how does the human stay in the loop so that it's not just AI taking over between, you know, automation and AI, can we transform different processes 100%. But it takes that full redesigning and reimagining what the process would be. And, you know, fun fact, AI can actually help you with reimagining what that process can be. So you can do the brainstorming with AI, but always making sure that you're looking at where the places where human need to be part of that. It's interesting a few years ago, with a group of talent development execs at a conference, we had the conversation around starting with that blank piece of paper, as you mentioned. This was before AI was on the scene in the way that it is, but it was this idea of if this wasn't the way you've always done it, is that how you would do it today. And I think the opportunity with AI is that you can really have that mindset. You can start with that blank piece of paper. You can re-imagine and you have these really powerful tools to help you do that in a way we haven't in a long time. And I think what a time to be alive for talent development professionals, when you can automate some of the things and then focus on helping your people to develop those core human skills, the creativity, the problem solving, the power skills, if you will. That's the fun stuff, right? Every human is different. So having the multiple perspectives and diversity to really take something what AI would make homogeneous and then make it what would work for your organization, give it that competitive advantage, et cetera. So it's just a really powerful way to look at it. One of the things that we were seeing early on is the view as well that it was kind of like AI was being done to us. Do you know what I mean? So there was kind of that overwhelming. We don't even know what we don't know. So how can we figure out a new process when we can't even re-imagine what AI can do for us? Yeah. We also had spent some time with our leaders helping them on their futures thinking capability. Because I think that's a large part of this too is making sure that everybody feel empowered through this process so that they're not feeling like it's just something that's being done to them. I don't have a crystal ball. So I can't tell you what this is going to look like for talent development. Do I have some idea? Yeah, for sure. I've been in this industry for long enough, but I have some gut instincts there. I'm doing lots of reading and I'm learning along the way. But the thing about the future is that each and every one of us are an active participant in creating what that will be. And so you know enough already as a leader, and whether it be in talent development or any other area of the businesses that you work in, you know enough to have inklings as to where you're going to see changes, where you're going to see transformation. And so this is an opportunity for you to actually take steps towards that and create it in the way that you want as opposed to sitting still and having it done to you. That's where we tell us can then, you know, make sure that we have humans in the loop along that because we want to make sure that we're focused on this human sustainability as opposed to seeing things be fully automated. And then at the end of it go like oops, we can be thoughtful ahead of time. That's great. Taking ownership. I like that. For our talent development, leaders, practitioners listening to this would love to get really practical about how you would tell us how your team has involved AI in reimagining some processes, you know kind of from point A to point whatever, but how you've kind of broken that down. Perhaps a talent development, unique talent development process, and incorporated elements of AI to re-imagine it. I'll give you an example that's actually a couple years old. And so I say that because I would probably even do it differently today than we did it a couple years ago. But I think it's a great example for this audience given our conversation. When we first came back as Gen AI was kind of hitting the scene and trying to think about how do we support our team members with that awareness and building that digital mindset, we decided to put together a video for all team members. So this was something going across the entire organization. And we did partner with a vendor called base two to help support us in the development of this. But we were very open with them that we wanted to experiment with AI through the entire process. And so what we did was kind of broke down each stage of the quote unquote development process and said how could AI support us here? So you start with the needs analysis. So like did we meet with a bunch of stakeholders for sure? But we also asked AI, what do you think about it? And AI gave us some different ideas that we included as part of our research. When it got to the scripting, we threw down some ideas of what we knew we wanted in there. And then we gave it to AI and said develop a five-minute script, you know, like here's the parameters. AI gave it back. We looked at it and was like, maybe not that. We gave more feedback. It was interesting, right? It wasn't perfect the first time. And so going back and forth, then we landed on a script that we were comfortable with, had all of our stakeholders sign off on it. When it came to the storyboarding, a lot of the imagery that we put in the storyboards, we were like, hey, AI, can you give us this? Some of it we like, some of it we tweaked, you know, brought it together, gave it a feel, all of those things. So all of these steps, it wasn't a one and done. It was like this iteration back and forth thinking through how could this do it differently? We played with different voice, different male female, different accents, things like that to figure out what's the one that brings the kind of experience that we're looking for with this, with the concept that we're putting together. In the end, I would say probably 60, 70% of it came from AI, but it was humans that were doing those final kind of tweaks. And the reason why I'd share this as an example is because what was really fun with it is it was a course teaching people about digital mindset, helping them to understand that AI is actually nothing new. Like, you know, we were giving examples of what you're used to already with AI in your daily lives. And at the very end of it, then we kind of like, you know, pull back the curtain and shared this entire video was done in conjunction with AI. And they saw how we played with video voices. We, you know, adjusted pictures and imagery on the screen how we wrote the script. So it was just this kind of cool example of how we were able to break this down to change the way that we did it. It cut down on the time to delivery, but also it was a great learning experience for our team members because one of the things that we still see is that people still can't even imagine the possibilities. So the more examples that we can give people on what we said or how we prompted or different applications for it, the better. And so I thought that was kind of a cool experience of how we're breaking things down differently. Oh, our listeners will eat it up. We love use cases. It's so helpful. So yes, thank you for that. Curious you mentioned, I don't have a crystal ball, obviously, but I do have thoughts or predictions or inklings of what AI might mean for talent development in the future. Would love to hear some of your insights on that. You know, it's something that I've been thinking about a lot for obvious reasons about how do we start to kind of rethink this talent development life cycle, but through that AI lens. My heart is very much in the kind of learning development, diverse inclusion kind of space. And so how do I need to start to evolve my practices to kind of support this workforce of tomorrow. I talked a lot about it earlier on, you know, again, I don't know what, you know, quote unquote, it looks like yet. But the idea of how do I upskill team members who are coming to the table without experiences that I would have seen up until now? How do I make sure that I am reinforcing some of these uniquely human skill that maybe they haven't seen before? Also, how do I do this in a way that's going to evolve because we are a global organization. So I have to think through the cultural implications. I have to think through language implications and all of that kind of stuff at the same time. A fun thing to do for Friday, right? And so one of the areas that I've been really focused on recently and learning a lot about, and I'm sure you and many of your listeners have kind of had this situation as well, is that often the AIs that exist right now, so the chat, bots or, you know, co-pilots, whatever you want to call them that exist right now tend to be very, I'll say like simple, they're really good at a singular task. But when you look at these kind of leadership problems, they're much more complex than that. A singular bot just doesn't cut it for a lot of the work that I'm doing. And so we're starting to look at, and this is where my geeking out is probably not fully accurate, but my understanding of this world, we're starting to look at what's called like multi-agent AI. What that does is it allows you to build all of your super smart co-pilots that are focused on one area, but actually bring them together so that they work together as a team to come up with the best answer in a certain scenario. So you can get that best of both worlds of the true expertise in one area and the complexity across multiple areas. That's an area that I'm playing with right now for leadership tools where I have to be thinking about cultural nuances and mental health and well-being and tell us cultural components. But how do I include all of that in a way that will support our leaders? And then the second thing that I would say that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about and I, you know, talked about it a little bit with my daughter is this idea of how do we make sure that we're still keeping those critical reasoning skills involved through the process? Because most of the co-pilots that exist right now give you the answer. You ask it a question and it's like, Hey Anne, great question and here's all of your research. Here's the answer. But we know that that might actually impact our ability to critically reason moving forward. It stops us from thinking through. We're just like, okay, great. Sign off, right? And so how do we create those tools using AI so that they don't just give you the answers? But they become more like a thinking assistant where it can actually ask you questions to dig in more before simply giving you responses. So it forces some of that critical reasoning as you're using the tool and you still end up in the same place where you have the kind of like co-brained stormed idea. But it's making sure that it like lights up those critical reasoning skills before it just hands you an answer. Those are kind of the two areas that I've been like looking into and playing with and trying to understand more because I think those are going to be really helpful in the talent development area in particular as we move forward. That's so fascinating and I love that you were, as you said, kind of self-proclaimed geek in this, but that you have the experience that you've experimented. You don't have the fear factor. I mean, all of that, the freedom to, as you said, AI isn't owning you, you are owning it. And so I think that's such a refreshing perspective and also just your continual focus on empowering the humans on your team and your organization. Really just a North Star, I think for all of us in talent development, I so appreciate your perspective, Allison. Your practical examples has been so informative today on the podcast. What a treat to spend this time with you. Thank you so much. If you're having me and you know, I always enjoy our chat, so I appreciate it. If any listeners have additional questions or want to follow up with you on anything that you shared today, what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you? Best way to reach out to me would be through LinkedIn. And if they have additional questions, etc, that's where they can find me and that we can start a separate conversation. Thank you for listening to this podcast by the Association for Talent Development. 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