A Conversation With Tom Libretto, President of Employee Recognition Platform Workhuman
Last week, I caught up with Tom Libretto, president of the employee experience platform Workhuman, at Workhuman Live, the company’s annual conference for HR professionals, in San Diego. In our conversation, he spoke about hot workplace issues like technology’s impact on companies and their people, the wrangling over RTO — and ultimately, what’s keeping HR managers up at night.
Tom joined Workhuman 10 months ago after serving as CMO of Pegasystems, an AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation platform. Before that, he was the global head of digital experience at JPMorgan Chase.
Here, highlights of my conversation with Tom.
TC: Tom, what’s keeping HR people up at night?
TL: I think it’s a confluence of all those external factors happening, at times it feels, simultaneously, whether it be cost reductions impacting workforces, whether it be still-unresolved working environment policies like hybrid or remote or in the office, compounded by all the anxieties around job loss. All these things rolled together are really difficult for an HR organization to tackle given that they also need to do their day job, to make sure that every single employee that is either at a company or coming into the company feels they have the full support of that organization.
TC: And so much of that falls at the HR department’s feet, right?
TL: Everything ends up being “a people problem” — independent of whether it started that way or not.
TC: That includes the ongoing conversation around AI and its impact on the workplace, and employee anxiety around AI and, really, any new technology. How do you see AI’s role at work in the long run?
TL: I can’t remember a single, seismic tech innovation that didn’t start with an element of, the world is going to fall apart, it’s going to lead to massive job loss, or whatever. Like in the robotic process automation space, the fear was that when it scaled, it was going to lead to massive amounts of job loss. What ended up happening was, it compelled a lot of organizations to rescale their workforces and put them on a higher value of work, and the net reduction in jobs never happened. I think that, with AI, there’s that fear of the unknown.
TC: The return to the office has not been without its speedbumps, to say the least. There is so much conflict still between what employers want regarding RTO and what employees are demanding — which is, flexibility and freedom. How do you see this shaking out?
TL: I think it’s the Wild West, particularly because there’s no blueprint. We have never done this before, so everyone’s trying to make it up on the fly and then figure it out very quickly that, OK, we took a hard position there — that backfired, so let’s soften that position. Now feels like the right time to reenergize people [to want to return] to an office environment. … I think every company is struggling with that at the moment, a situation that was exacerbated, perhaps, by the amount of remote hiring that happened over the pandemic. Location wasn’t an issue, so HR departments were almost frothing at the mouth: “We’re going to get the best talent, wherever they are.” … So, the employee mix now is very different than it was two or three years ago, which makes it even more difficult to determine what the right policy decision is.
TC: Let’s talk about DEI in light of that workplace uncertainty. The perception is that diversity, equity and inclusion was put on the back burner in the height of the pandemic, and now it’s happening again because of business’s economic concerns. Meanwhile, companies are under more pressure than ever to not just have a DEI policy in place but to show actual results in hiring and promotions. Why do you think DEI continues to be such a tough problem for companies to crack?
TL: DEI improvement is an evergreen journey, and I think the expectation for a lot of companies that were either compelled by good intention or by government reporting requirements initially went into the sort of mindset that, we’re going to create a program that’s going to last three years, and by the end of it we’re going to be good. I think every company has found out that that’s actually not what happens. It has to be a conscious part of the cultural contract of an organization, with their employee population and the markets that they serve, that is a forever proposition.
TC: DEI certainly has been one of the hot topics at Workhuman Live.
TL: A conference like this gives a voice to important issues and gets more into the art of throwing it out on the table and figuring out what to do about it. Having forums like this, to gather people where there can be that creative thinking, that comes up with very practical ways to chip away at issues, is such a valuable opportunity. Everybody can learn.
