"The real primary responsibility of leadership is to create an environment where all people can really thrive," said Edith Cooper, the Summit co-chair, co-founder of Medley, and board director of Amazon and PepsiCo, to Charter editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney in the opening keynote of the Charter Workplace Summit '24.

She emphasized that modern leadership must prioritize the success of the entire workplace, not just a select few. "Not some people – not a subset of the subset – but a broader community because that's when excellence happens." 

Summit co-chair Katy George, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of HR Strategy, Analytics, and Workforce Planning, echoed this point. "Leaders have to put themselves in situations where they and their teams are being challenged, rethinking things, taking big bets, and pivoting really fast," she said.

These insights resonate with the event's theme, The New Leadership Playbook. However, the Summit covered much more, including sessions on critical topics like hybrid work, flexible work, innovation, well-being, AI in the workplace, and strategies for improving work from both individual and organizational perspectives.

As HR leaders, we understand how vital these topics are to you. That's why we've compiled five key insights from the Summit for you. Let's dive in.

1/ Hybrid Work Improves All Aspects of Employees With The Right Practices

In the session titled How Hybrid and Flexible Work Can Unlock Performance, Innovation, Connection, and Wellbeing, Brian Elliott, co-founder of Slack's Future Forum, Laura Watt, EVP of HR at Diageo North America, and Prithwiraj Choudhury, professor at Harvard Business School, shared critical insights on how hybrid and flexible work arrangements can significantly enhance organizational performance, innovation, employee connection, and well-being. 

Drawing from their extensive experience and research, they highlighted the importance of adaptive work strategies in the modern workplace.

These are what they’ve learned:

Hybrid Work as a Norm

Choudhury emphasized that hybrid work is firmly entrenched in today's workforce. Citing data from Stanford researcher Nick Bloom, he noted that as of last year, 28% of workdays occurred remotely, and this trend is expected to continue. 

He stressed that the success of hybrid work models largely depends on how healthy managers are equipped to support their teams in this environment. 

Poor management practices can lead to underperformance, while strong practices foster employee productivity and innovation.

Each teams needs tailored flexibility work schedule

One of the central messages of the discussion was that flexibility works best when the specifics are decided at the team level rather than through blanket company policies. 

For Diageo, ensuring employees spend 40% of their time outside the home (whether in the office or meeting with stakeholders) promotes connection while maintaining autonomy.

Leveraging Offsite Meetings

Choudhury encouraged organizations to think beyond the office as the only meeting space. He proposed using offsite locations or client sites for gatherings, depending on team needs. 

This flexibility ensures that meetings are more purposeful and aligned with team goals rather than being tied to office spaces.

‍Inclusive Family Leave Policies

Laura Watt shared Diageo's progressive approach to family leave, offering gender-neutral parental leave and extending these benefits to unionized workers. 

She explained that this inclusive policy was a tool for attracting and retaining talent and a reflection of the company's values. 

Diageo's decision to implement the policy across all levels of employees, rather than waiting for union negotiations, demonstrated their commitment to supporting families.

Trust Makes Flexibility Works

For a company to work and thrive effectively, especially in the context of work flexibility, the principle of trust is the most important thing. Leaders should trust their employees, Watt said. 

And here are some best practices to make hybrid work beneficial to all employees, according to the experts:

• Your teams need to have a say not only when but also where they meet: Basically, let your employees decide both where and when to meet up. According to Choudhury, “the office is not only one of the locations” that employees should meet, and other locations may be more “in line with what the team needs.”

“A sales team could meet on the outskirts of a sales conference. You could meet at a client site for a professional services company." - Prithwiraj Choudhury

• Employees’ expertise are vital for leaders to make adjustments or/and build their companies’ flexibility policies: Watt cited a case study at Diageo who took the company’s six-month gender-neutral parental leave three months after joining the company. Guess what? His own experience brings insights back to the company regarding the building of a flexible work schedule for everyone. 

• Leaders should build trust with their employees first. According to Watt, a decision can only be made effectively when there is trust in the relationship between the leaders and their employees. Her company realizes that employees have different needs for flexibility at different stages of their lives.

“This employee has now been with us for years, and not only does that individual talk about policies, he can actually give us his lived experience.” - Laura Watt

"We want to be able to trust our employees. And we want them to trust us, in terms of how we operate and that we treat each other like adults in the conversation." – Laura Watt, EVP HR, Diageo North America.

2/ AI Plays A Vital Role in the Future of Jobs, Skills, and Education

In this session, titled AI and the Future of Jobs, Skills, and Education, Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, shared his insight on the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in reshaping jobs, skills, and education. 

As AI continues to revolutionize various sectors, this discussion focused on AI's potential to improve productivity and change the way people approach work and learning. Here’s Khan’s sharing:

‍AI as a Communication and Alignment Tool

Khan highlighted how AI could significantly improve communication within organizations. He admitted high-level strategies and policies aren’t always communicated well by direct managers, and he envisions AI could help out in this. 

"(AI) could even say, ‘Hey, the product management team and the engineering team are interpreting what you mean by ‘portability’ slightly differently, Sal. Which do you mean, this or that?’ And I say, ‘Oh, I mean this,’ and then it can message.” - Sal Khan

In short: In the long run, AI could recognize when teams interpret terms or strategies differently and prompt clarification when needed. This type of alignment could prevent misunderstandings across all levels and streamline workflows.

Hard-to-Measure Skills Get Easier to Measure Thanks to AI

Khan also noted that AI could make it easier to evaluate skills that are traditionally difficult to assess (his language: “intangibles”), such as salesmanship or management capabilities. 

Similarly, AI simulations could be used to determine how individuals perform in scenarios that require emotional intelligence, negotiation, or leadership. 

“If you really care about someone's salesmanship…you could probably have someone go through AI simulations now and glean a lot more than you could do currently just looking at someone's resume and doing five rounds of interviews.”

This would help organizations better gauge potential hires and internal talent beyond the limitations of resumes and standard interviews.

Khan’s Tips for Best Practices:

• Khan advised company leaders to foster a culture of exploration (also one of our AI change management and AI implementation best practices), where employees regularly test AI capabilities and share their findings. In an example, he tells his employees to take time out of their week to use Gen AI tools and come back and share stories with others about what worked and what didn’t. “It doesn’t have to be a stick. It should be more of a carrot of highlighting the people who are doing really cool stuff,” he said.

(We also have for you a list of Generative AI Top 150.)

• Khan advised to take advantage of AI to allow your employees as individuals to take on multiple roles and experiment with tasks traditionally handled by specialists. You can do it, he said, by letting a marketer who’s having some ideas use AI Marketing Tools to create mockups and test concepts without needing to rely on a designer or developer. 

(Check out our 10 Daily AI Cases for Business Leaders.)

3/ AI Can Improve Your Work In Jaw-Dropping Ways

Led by Helen Lee Kupp and Nicole Sterling, these two experts walked the audience through how to build a culture of AI experimentation and use this technology to unlock/solve your work problems. 

They came from Women Defining AI, which equips women to adopt AI in impactful ways. Helen is a former Strategy & Analytics leader at Slack and co-author of the WSJ Bestseller "How The Future Works," bringing a wealth of experience in guiding companies through exponential growth and reimagining work for the AI era.

(Check out our Women in AI: From Impostor Syndrome to AI Trailblazers discussion with Helen Lee Kupp and Nicole Sterling.)

Let’s dive in to see their tips and insights:

• You can use AI to gather different perspectives. It’s simple: since most of us have a limited amount of time and number we can reach out to, it’s hard for you to consider as many perspectives, and just as importantly, receive perspectives you might have failed to consider. LLMs like ChatGPT can help, as Sterling suggested you can ask ChatGPT to consider the impact of a parental leave policy. An example of this would like look this, according to the two experts’ sharing back in May:

Prompt: As we evaluate our current project of [insert project], let's identify any missing elements in our brainstorming and consider the situation from various stakeholder perspectives. Reflect on the needs, concerns, and expectations of [insert stakeholders]. Also, identify stakeholders we’re not thinking about. Think about the key assumptions, potential risks, and alternative approaches we might not have considered from each stakeholder perspective. Provide feedback on how we can improve our planning process and ensure alignment with our long-term vision and values, which are [insert vision and values].

• You can use AI to practice difficult conversations, like handling a tense situation, giving feedback to another colleague, or salary negotiation. As demonstrated by Sterling, you can take advantage of ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode, where the AI can “pretend” to be, for example, an angry customer and you a customer support agent. You then can ask the tool to identify at least two areas for improvement to handle the situation. A prompt example:

Prompt: I want to practice giving feedback to a colleague of mine. [Here’s the context]. Set up a scenario for me and run through the simulation to practice a feedback conversation. At the end, please wrap up with any suggestions on areas I can improve on.

• Use AI to help yourself process huge amounts of data and informatuion. Kupp demonstrated this using Google's NotebookLM, which can turn any academic article/paper into a podcast featuring two AI hosts, allowing you to listen to their casual discussions about the paper's topic. 

(We mentioned the use of NotebookLM in our #43 of Stay Ahead newsletter. Here’s how to make Google’s NotebookLM your productivity booster.)

• Use AI to build simple apps. Sterling herself used Claude to build a total compensation simulator by giving her all of the necessary codes. 

“This idea that I can now build for myself without asking for engineering resources… and can be solving for my own problems, that’s huge.” - Helen Lee Kupp

And here are our guides on how to use AI to work better and more efficiently and see which 100 Top AI Tools for Work can work seamlessly with your human workforce.

4/ Use "Fun Factors" To Combat Burnout In Your Workplace

Titled Release Your 'Hungry Ghosts' - How You and Your Team Can Go From Burnout to Inspiration, Daisy Auger-Domínguez, former Vice Media Chief People Officer and author, offers valuable insights into combating burnout and fostering high performance within teams. 

She shared her leadership philosophy on transitioning from cultures of overwork to environments that inspire creativity, high performance, and sustained productivity. Some tips from the experts:

• Fun as a Tool to Combat Burnout: Auger-Domínguez highlighted the importance of fun in preventing burnout. She shared how introducing a sense of humor and playfulness into stressful tasks can help teams reframe their approach. For instance, she recalled a situation where a recruitment task felt tedious until the team shifted their mindset to view it as an opportunity to meet exciting candidates, transforming the experience into something energizing.

• Embracing a Beginner's Mindset: Auger-Domínguez encouraged leaders to adopt a "beginner's mindset" to maintain a sense of optimism and curiosity. She pointed out that approaching challenges with the same excitement as when starting a job or project can help unlock creative solutions and prevent burnout.

• Creating a "Happy Folder": One of her practical strategies involved creating a "happy folder," where leaders can store positive feedback and reminders of their purpose. She uses this folder as a resource to revisit during challenging times, reminding herself of the impact of her work and re-sparking her motivation.

“We have to work, we have to grind – it’s called labor for a reason. It is what it is. But how do we find joy in those moments?” - Daisy Auger-Domínguez, Chief People Officer, author

Check our guides on how to address disengaged employees and create happiness at work. 

5/ Talent and Transparency Help Your Boardroom Thrive

Public company board members like Edith Cooper, Grace Zuncic, and Lauren Tyler – who serve on some of the largest global companies like Amazon, PepsiCo, and Cencora shared their insights on how people management impacts business outcomes and board effectiveness.

One key takeaway is that talent management is paramount for business sustainability. Succession planning has also emerged as one of the top priorities for boards. Organizations need to continuously nurture their leadership pipeline to ensure long-term success, especially in industries undergoing significant transformation.

"If we don’t have the talent, we don’t have a business." - Lauren Tyler

Another important aspect discussed was the role of networking and patience in securing board positions. Grace Zuncic emphasized the long-term value of relationships in getting a board seat. "It doesn't have to be now. It just needs to be the right thing, and in time it will come," she advised. 

The session also shed light on how senior leaders should approach transparency and openness with their boards. “Your board members want the best for you and the entire company,” said Tyler. 

Some best practical takeaways for senior and HR leaders:

• Boards are now more engaged in HR matters, including succession planning, leadership development, and fostering a diverse talent pipeline.

• Patience and long-term relationship building are essential for securing board seats. The right fit (both in terms of the company’s mission and the individual’s expertise) is more important than speed.

• Senior leaders should foster a culture of openness with their boards. Being transparent about challenges and actively seeking feedback from fellow board members can improve decision-making and strategic alignment.

The Bottom Line

The underlying theme of the CWS event is clear: the future of work is defined by everyone involved in the workplace, both the leaders and the employees – with the help of AI. While AI continues to revolutionize industries, businesses must focus on fostering environments of trust, creativity, and collaboration. 

Leaders are tasked with guiding their teams through these transformations, prioritizing adaptability, and encouraging experimentation with AI while nurturing uniquely human skills such as communication, emotional intelligence, and leadership.

You can download the playbook of the event here. 

Please feel free to reach out to me here if you have a story to share, want to provide feedback, or ask a question.