Fairness at Work -Culture's Essential Ingredient with Dr. Wilson Wong OrgDev episode 51

What makes a workplace truly fair?
How does our own sense of fairness shape our reactions to decisions, interactions, and how we treat others at work?
Fairness isn’t just a feel-good concept—it’s a critical factor in building trust, maintaining engagement, and driving performance. But getting fairness wrong can be costly. When employees perceive unfairness—whether in how decisions are made, how people are treated, or how rewards are distributed—it erodes trust, undermines morale, and fuels disengagement.
So, how can managers, HR and organizations apply fairness in their work to create a culture where everyone thrives?

💼 About our Guest:
Dr. Wilson Wong
Strategist, Futurist, Data Scientist, Wong On Work

  / wilson-wong-07b71a1 

Dr. Wilson Wong is a data scientist, futurist, and strategist with over 30 years of experience in applied research, focusing on leadership, culture, futures strategy, and human capital management within organisations. His work spans policy, investment, and academia, supported by expertise in data analytics and insights. He has worked with diverse clients, including the Metropolitan Police, Standard Chartered Bank, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and international bodies such as the UNDP and UNEP, applying futures methodologies to enhance organisational resilience.

A Visiting Professor at Nottingham Business School and Adjunct Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, Dr. Wong also chairs the International Journal of HRD Practice, Policy & Research. Formerly Head of Insight & Futures at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), he has influenced thought leadership at the European Association of People Management (EAPM) and the World Federation of People Management Associations (WFPMA). A UK human capital metrics expert to ISO and member of the UN Millennium Project global futures experts network, he co-edited Human Capital Management Standards: A Complete Guide and remains passionate about driving strategic, evidence-based change in organisations.

Thanks for listening!

Distinction is an evidence-based Organisation Development & Design Consultancy designed to support modern, progressive organisations to bring out the best in their people and their teams through training, consulting, and coaching.

Our professional and highly skilled consultants focus on delivering engaging, results-focused and flexible solutions that help our clients achieve their business objectives.

Find out more at https://distinction.live/how-we-can-help/

💡 Stay Connected:
Looking for a consistent source of leadership & OD tips? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter by clicking the link below and receive valuable leadership tips directly in your inbox:
https://distinction.live/keep-in-touch

We'd love to connect with you on Linked In:
linkedin.com/in/danibacon478
https://www.linkedin.com/in/garinrouch/

Transcript

Transcript:
(00:00) hi and welcome to the org Dev podcast so what makes a workplace truly Fair how does our own sense of fairness shape our reactions to decisions interactions and how we treat others at work fairness isn't just a feel-good concept it's a critical factor in building trust maintaining enagement and driving performance but getting fairness wrong can be costly when employees perceive unfairness whether in how decisions are made how people are treated or how rewards are distributed it erose trusts undermines morale and fuels
(00:32) disengagement so how can managers HR and organizations apply fairness in their work to create a culture where everyone thrives so to help us navigate this incredibly motive subject we invited the brilliant Dr Wilson Wong strategist futurist and data scientists who's devoted three years to exploring this incredibly important subject to fairness at work Wilson is the director insight and Futures at the brilliantly named Wong on work here he applies Futures and research methodologies to support strategic things for organizational
(01:01) resilience prior to his current role he was head of insight and Futures research at cipd and his extensive International experience working with G&P Commonwealth Secretariat ISO and multilateral negotiations at APAC level as well his groundbreaking work is underpinned by extensive academic experience he has a PHD in economic psychology and has three master's degrees that's that is a new record for this for this podcast master's degrees in economics and consumer psychology critical theory and
(01:33) an MBA as well he's also an Adjunct professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and a visiting professor at Nottingham business school as well and the quality of his work and research has been recognized with the president's medal for contribution to management policy by the British Academy of management so Dr Wilson thank you so much for joining us today we're really looking forward to speaking with you [Music] just tell us a bit about the work you're doing currently then a lot of it is kind of advisory and one of the fun things I
(02:06) did this summer was to look at the future of professions and how professions are likely to be valued or not valued assessed or not assessed and how this is uh signal to the marketplace so they the the client wanted to look at how the technologies that they have currently to to Define a profession is changing and uh how uh the Technologies of learning the access to knowledge the use of artificial intelligence all change the definition and scope of what it means to be a profession so that was one of the projects others were looking
(02:50) at things like U like this like fairness you know and and how that it can be justified within a kind of corporate change environment and I've also been doing some work on the iso side looking at an incoming new edition of iso 30414 which is on human capital reporting and as you know the EU regulations for uh sustainable reporting have already come into law and part of that is looking at sustainable human capital so organizations who are looking into measuring sustainable human capital uh looking to experts like myself
(03:32) working in this field to both measure develop and sustain their human capital across a range of uh scenarios so that the that they and their organizations are more resilient what an interesting array of work um I think when we were preparing for this podcast it's where did we start there's so many things we can talk to you about we honed in on fairness I'd love to know because when you talk about it you're quite passionate about fairness and what it really inspired you why why is it so important it's I think it start it
(04:00) because I could see that when organizations draw up their policies procedures and and when they want to change some of these things everybody's up and downs going it's unfair you know even a simple thing like an office move where you're reallocating death space and caral spaces can be you know Atomic in its effect you you just go just chill the right word isn't it yes you know you just go it's not not a big deal you know whether I get a window or not but it is a big deal right so so you find that I
(04:36) wanted something a little bit more analytical so I worked with uh Paul Sparrow at Lancaster he said okay there must be in different disciplines different ways of looking at uh justice Equity fairness and how these are are used to frame different conversations and where this Frame is clear and transparent to both parties you have a common ground to negotiate but if the parties are using different frames in the negotiation they're just talking across purposes and you're just wasting each other's time you both go
(05:16) away frustrated so there must be a better way of doing this so hence this this piece of work that's really helpful and what's the frame what's the model or the framework that you kind of use to help organizations understand fairness doing the kind of review of literature in philosophy economics sociology uh psychology we we developed what we called um lenses of fairness and how people looking through different lenses will see the same issue differently uh and the argument that we started out was in HR because at that
(05:51) time I was a senior researcher hired by cipd to to do OD research and uh I said let's go back back to broats let's look at how people perceive what is fair and looking at HR there were really only I suppose one t lens and HR uses for fairness and they and for HR the main thing that they go for is organizational uh justice right and that consists of the right um input output so you have the right procedures so uh the procedures have to be for example when you draw your procedures for something they must respect the people involve the
(06:36) parties that should be a a consistent transparent set of rules that's applied equally the facts that you use in running through this process is accurate and that the parties see this process as legitimate so there's procedural Justice and then there is uh a distributive justice so how do you look at the input output Dynamics you know we are very familiar with Performance Management so the more effective you are the smarter you work the harder you work all this matters and and whether or not you you tick off your kpis right you know so so
(07:16) those are are you're rewarded fairly because you have done what is on your list to do there are different ways in which uh distributive justice can play out so you could say on for some things an organization will say we'll just give everybody the same you know like some years you haven't got much in the bonus pot you just go everybody's going to get the equal slice you know uh not a percentage but everybody gets a thousand or whatever regardless your performance regardless of of how hard you um or you
(07:49) could redistribute the the bonus part by saying okay let's base it on need or deprivation so you tilt the pot so that the lower uh less wellp paid staff get a disproportionate percentage um and those are different ways in which you achieve distributive justice and the last bit of this that HR is concerned about is the issue about interactional justice so how are employees uh treated and communicated with so whether there's a consultation whether there's a dialogue um and then the transparency and accuracy of the explanations where
(08:32) you make a decision as to how you should process this thing so this is the world of HR and this is what they focus on as a profession in in determining organizational fairness but there are many other lenses which can slip them by and they can suddenly find that people are unhappy about something because they're using a lens outside um this organizational Justice uh uh lens fabulous and what's what sorts of so those other lenses what are the common ones that get missed um for example if you think about uh um uh Dei
(09:14) so you know diversity Equity or equality and inclusion so there you're looking at several things at the same time you're looking at one lens which is about capability so the capability lens looks at where you've come from and how you have been disadvantaged through things that are beyond your control so for example if you're born in a place where the schools were just rubbish you didn't have the opportunity to Horn your potential you didn't even even have electricity in your school you know stuff like that and
(09:53) and that impedes your life experience it impedes the vocabulary you have for entering the world plan it impedes the kind of socialization you might need to understand some of the rituals and culture of of of a workplace and so capability looks at the distribution of opportunity within society and uh you you want to see who has access to these valued resources so when you look at Dei you may want to look at taking a capability approach by going those who come from a uh who come from a socially disadvantaged background or
(10:36) they come from a region where they have experienced 90% unemployment for the last 30 years you give them uh kind of leg up you give them the the opportunity to develop their potential equalize the access to opportunity right so that's one way to look at it then another lens that may be applied uh because we live in a very polarized quite uh divisive uh uh world at the moment with social media also enhancing those voices but not to say that these voices are unfair or unjust or or unjustified you think of uh feminist discourses right
(11:22) that for the last century you've been fighting for equality of pay equality of ACC ESS you know and if you look objectively we should find that women should be equally represented on on boards right I mean there should not be any reason in a developed economically developed country where all children are educated until the 18 why we wouldn't see more women sitting on corporate boards so something else must be in play there and so the interpret interpretivist lens look looks at things like uh discrimination
(12:03) narratives what kinds of things are blocking access um so it applies to people who are LGBT plus it applies to people who are ethnic minority it also applies in the debate around the kind of colonial narratives you know because of course we had a period where a lot of wealth was transferred from the global South to the global Northwest you know so you can see that in the uh the recent climate change uh debates you know how they're saying you should help us the South to decarbonize by because you have actually
(12:42) benefited hugely from the Industrial Revolution you have contributed all this carbon into the atmosphere whilst we are still in an agricultural mode so we contribute 0.1% to the planet's carbon but we're paying with all the floods typhoon whatever so the the developed world is looking okay so what is fair now because we've had generations of activity here and that's another lens you know the kind of uh generational fairness right if we rape and pillage all our resources today destroy and kill off the the the ocean
(13:19) is it fair to the Next Generation who will have fewer opportunities fewer resources to survive a more hostile world you know is it right that we have all the benefits now and then forget about future generation so all of these matter in the workplace but uh they're not within the the scope I think or or radar of most HR practitioners simply because that isn't the discipline we that we were trained in you know it's it's a little bit outside the the uh discourses that I use to frame the knowledge the body of knowledge for HR
(14:00) because I guess organizations are full of good intention from the from the point of view of the the practitioner whatever and HR most often feel they can't do right for doing wrong in these circumstances because professionally they're trying to do the right thing but then you're bringing in a time element as well so PE if People's element of fairness it can build up over time can't it so they can keep relating how fairness feels them and go back years can't they so an episode that an HR
(14:25) person is dealing with in the moment is actually part of something that's much bigger for someone else it it's a real dilemma isn't it yes and the thing is you can see that time is relevant because you find corporates now are being judged for decisions that they took maybe two decades ago you know and uh uh they may have done something in the best possible light at the time and the and you know within the kind of philosophy and ideology of that time and we have seen that in discrimination cases we've
(14:58) seen them in in uh cases where they have given undue preference to one side or the other side given more risk taking to one side over another group and 20 30 years later they go right it's time to have this class action case to to to redress some of these wrongs um and it's it and so organizations not only have to think about what is acceptable today within uh the organization but what is accept able within society today with all the different factions but also how this is likely to play out in the next
(15:38) decades because and that's why part of my work is so much on the future of work looking at monitoring some of these social trends that are shaping opinions judgments laws uh and and how these are likely to be then become the future benchmarks of what is just it's fascinating I was watching the one of the talks that you gave on this and you said that your colleague said don't go there don't do it Don't Go Near fness so when you start a process of researching like that do do you kind of start with a hypothesis and then start
(16:13) to see all the different fact like what is your process for uncovering such a huge area and did it quickly become much bigger than you anticipated I think it started with the recognition that uh the issue of fairness is very badly handled not just by hat are by by politicians by corporate leaders just a lot of people don't seem to have a grasp of how to engage with a discussion on what is fair and uh what I noticed in terms of Psychology was that there were different frames of reference that people were using and those frames were not always
(16:54) articulated from the outset and so when you are trying to establish a connection to find Common Ground understanding what those frames of reference and those lenses you might apply from the outset makes a big difference to the discussion you you just think of something like executive pay and the other reason why this came about was because this was in the wake of the financial crisis this was done you know where Banks were bailed out by the state that debts and losses were uh capitalized as public sector debt to be
(17:33) born by the taxpayer so if you look at the the Dynamics from a distance you go these are profit-making agencies under capitalism if they make a bad call they should go bust right and then a new entity appears and then the losses are it's self-regulating that's what capitalism is supposed to be you you make a good call you make profit you make a bad call you you go bust but but instead what we got was a narrative that Banks were too big to fail and therefore the little person on the street you know earning just a few thousand pounds will
(18:10) have to bail out Bankers who are earning a quarter of a million a year on base salary alone right and then their bonuses could amount to a million a year so suddenly the whole question about what was fair became really very real because people had no money in their pockets and they were bailing out Bankers you know and of course not all Bankers are taking home a million pounds they are a lot of normal people who work in Banks who PID wages just like the rest of us but for a long time Bankers were very bad word because it was just
(18:49) the gut feel was it was so unfair and that also prompted me to go well unfair by what metric by what frame and I started looking at things like executive pay for example right and how executive pay after uh people said o Talent is scarce you know we because of scarce Talent we got to pay them gazillions right because they they happen to be serious and they and uh and you just go okay when is that fair when they earn 260 multiples of the least paid person in the organization and you go okay the job justification for that is what we call
(19:32) it's called tournament Theory and so you know if I go out with my hunting gear and I bring home the hunt I bring home that great big deer for to feed the whole village I should be rewarded with the best cut of that deer right so I am expanding the pie I am bringing back something you didn't have before trouble is of course you know executive pay the executives are only one part of an ecosystem right if if they don't have a great marketing team to build the brand if they don't have connections and
(20:06) networks that I can tap into leads that I can follow up on or even the uh kind of golf membership in the right Club so that I meet the right TI network individuals to do this business with all of this is part and parcel of an enabling ecosystem but we reward the individual it's almost like the misattribution to success isn't it and a lot of organiz are successful despite the CEO not because of and yet the reward goes that way doesn't it and and reward is one of those real sort of sacred cows in an
(20:38) organization isn't it a lot of organizations don't necessarily go there just because it's quite a challenging place to be and it's it's political you know it's you know it's Justified as rational but when you analyze it you using things at tournament Theory then then you ask yourself well you know but wasn't he was wasn't he the nephew of Lord Ross child you know you know and you just go so how much of that is ability and how much of that is just the Silver Spoon that's
(21:10) rattling around you know so so it's not so easy to justify and of course HR has been justifying executive pay for youngs right they've followed the narrative that was created with talent scast talent narrative but by analyzing it by saying okay this is how I've Justified it and why they've actually expanded the pie so that your bonuses come from this expanded pie but when you have companies that are not doing so well with the pie is shrinking and they're still getting bonuses that's when the theory falls
(21:45) apart and perceptions really important here as well isn't it people's perceptions of fairness over the reality yeah yes and and also pain thresholds because if you look at something like uh distributive justice right is within the the calculus you just go do I give everybody the same even though the needs are different and so what you find is that some people end up with far less resources than they need to survive so in society we have children with special educational needs and we go no no distributed Justice equal equal
(22:21) everybody gets uh10 pound State subsidy per child regardless of your need it's not unfair if you use the equal lens but if you base on need is incredibly unfair so you see how very quickly you know some of the assertions made by corporations that oh we are equal to everybody everybody's treated the same and just go well actually you didn't treat the same Ro Ross Charles nephew the same way did you that's that's where I started Garen so it was um trying understand the phenomenon and recognizing that actually
(23:02) in organizations there was a a crying need to be much clearer about how you want to negotiate fairness and to be very clear about what frame of reference what lens you were using and whether or not that lens is acceptable to the the parties HR professionals kind of in just the nature of their work leads to two problems that they're resting with almost isn't it so their actions may be good for some but not for others and some actions which are required by certain duties or rights may still harm some people so they're kind of damned if
(23:36) they're doing damned if they don't so if we've obviously studied the phenomena what what's the antidote then what what are the sort of the various tools or buttons or levers that HR team can sort of pull upon to help navigate their way through and both we also mean OD because there's a lot of OD practition for sure for sure just looking a little bit more about the OD process when you when you're trying to do something call adjust transition from one structure uh to another structure or one purpose to
(24:08) another purpose you're going to find that the language of winners and losers will come in but actually it's not about winning and losing you're looking at how you again we talked about this before procedural Justice transparency whether they're treated with respect and many organizations have done organizational change well not because everybody gets what they want but because it is very clear what is possible and the the frames of reference are outlined from the beginning so you go if we are looking at uh the
(24:44) redundancy this is the frame of reference we're looking at this is how we're going to calculate it and this is the pi that we're working towards in order to ensure sustainability for the new entity that we are creating in terms of the work force strategy Workforce plan which um it's very interesting because I worked with like mod on their Workforce strategy and there are many in many organizations there many sacred cows there are a lot of things that's go oh no no we can't touch that no no we can't break that
(25:16) rule and you just go you're just by not putting it on the table to discuss you're tying your hands and your feet and possibly your tongue as well in the whole process and you're dooming the process so that you have more people who are angry with you more people who feel this is unfair and it's badly run put it on the table and go this is something we need to talk about and this is the frame of reference we're going to use to discuss it and that's why the research actually looks at the different lenses
(25:46) that you can begin to apply within these contexts and you're right your damn if you do your damn if you don't because there's no there's never an answer where everybody win there's never an answer and most people understand that but it makes no sense to tell everybody you're all going to win somehow and we we're not going to not win you're not going to lose out because when you go through times of uncertainty it's not the winning that is the main thing on people's mind is whether I'm going to
(26:21) land up in the Bottom Rung somebody's got to be there but the fear is that you land there and so if if you if you are fearful or if if the group is fearful of the the person in the lowest rung you cut the pie so the lowest rung who could be you is protected to a minimum standard and that's how you cut the pie and in the theory it tells you that the motivation for doing that is because you could end up there and in society when we look about the social welfare the social safety net if you think of the
(26:59) kinds of things where they talk about uh people who are not working as scers and that kind of of uh uh thing it's only spoken by people who could never imagine that they would end up in that position right that you know through a divorce you lose your house or whatever and you suddenly find yourself out in the street homeless nobody imagines that they're going to be in that position but if you put yourself in that shoe you probably would cut the resources different right yeah and no know and and it's such a
(27:33) fascinating field and you're you know that's this is just one very small SLI of your research career today what what was your journey into your role as a futurist and a strategist and a a data scientist like what what led you down this pathway okay so as a futurist many years ago um I was the Gopher for a workshop run by uh shell because they are you know the kind of top scenario planning Corporation in the world um they made their reputation when during the first oil crisis they had a scenario where they simulated what would happen
(28:11) if the oil price tripled and what kinds of contingencies they would have to build into their system to weather that and because they were the only oil company with that contingency plan they jumped from one of the smallest oil companies to one of the uh top three you know within a short period of time and I think that period they made at the time in the 70s they made like a billion based on that contingency plan so when they were running this this uh uh workshop and it was a workshop for the civil servants so it was just to give
(28:45) them a taste of how scenario planning is done how you collect data how you look at Trends and so on and intelligence and because I was the the the person making sure this happened you get making sure the right people were invited the workshop join instructions the usual I was very Junior then but it was fascinating and I kind of got bitten by that bug and over the years I've assiduously trained in the methodologies of futes work so there are something like 30 over different methodologies and many of them require computational data
(29:19) computation so uh hand in hand with that um I started working more with data and then uh um because of my PhD had to do a lot more advanced statistics which is only one Slither of the kind of work you would do in in Futures and over the years I've managed to to work with like Singapore government government Malaysia to look at their national uh Workforce plan and how they needed to look at not just the talented but also those who are unskilled how do you protect citizens when when some citizens will always be
(30:02) in the unskilled Workforce area how do you create entrylevel positions in the economy so that they remain economically active because what you don't want is a population that's unemployed idle and potentially explosive for social for social National Security I've worked with quite a few organizations helping them to use some of these methodologies to look at at their talent planning their uh critical skills trajectory uh when they're trying to change from one business model to another business model whether or not
(30:41) the their foregoing future Opportunity by closing down a particular function and a particular capability and five years later they find that that is the thing that will give them a new Golden Goose so thinking that trajectory is take a me both into Futures research Futures analysis uh focusing on future work but my kind of interest is how that affects human capital the flourishing of people in organizations and how do you ensure that the plans don't inadvertently create a much worse work environment when you do transformation
(31:21) so you just go why transform if the work that you create is is of poorer quality why and do you feel that talent's so important it's too important to just be left at HR do you feel it's an organizational issue yes in short I think that HR has got limited tools at its disposal and if you look at the life uh cycle of an employee coming into an organization just just looking at employees for the moment the touch points for that employee quite far away from HR I mean you have the processes and the proc procedures which you hope
(31:59) your line managers follow and you hope that your leaders are modeling the values that they say they are that they exposee but rarely do you know you find that HR doesn't have that many leaders I mean when was the last time you saw HR make the leadership accountable for their behavior you see crisis after crisis corruption after corruption so many corporate examples of how the corporate Behavior has been so poor were but HR sometimes stood by those bad behaviors and sometimes have felt powerless to do anything about it but in
(32:38) theory they are supposed to be one holding leadership and Leadership behaviors to account you know you think of the post office just UK contemporary example and the role of HR in that environment the whole actually not just HR the role of the professionals at the helm the legal team the you know the operations team the prosecutions team the HR none of them you would say exhibited the the behaviors necessary for protecting human capital how do we shift the dial on that so we see we see the same pattern played out in different
(33:16) organizations in different scenarios where would you say we start to to shift the dial and make that that change make it different okay here I would say that I have a slight vested interest in that I love data evidence right so moving organizations to a more evidence-based management practice makes sense and uh and holding them accountable to the evidence so you make a professional judgment on the evidence but if you don't go and collect this data about your people about your business to make decision then you're
(33:50) not you're not behaving as a professional manager or leader ought to be I think uh that would be a sea change in in the kinds of conversations that the professionals will have with each other and with their uh employees and with the other stakeholders because you're going I have limited information this is what I've got based on this frame of reference this is how I'm going to try to make this fair or just and this is the strategy we're going to apply to make sure that the cake grows or that we uh reduce the number of
(34:26) people eating the cake you know so so that those decisions are evidencebased with a A View to a particular future that people buy it so people who leave the organization go like yeah that makes sense they need to go there and I don't want to go there or they need to go there but I don't feel I can pull my weight in that direction so that I think covers the the the OD side um and uses the tools you know of fairness um to the best advantage of an organization I'm just going to ask you question so you
(35:05) say you've got a particular focus on human capital is there something within that that's capturing your attention at the moment that you're you're kind of really interested in currently well something I guess you know topical would be the issue around flexible workings you know in in all its guises right so the one of the positive out comes of the pandemic was to demonstrate that perhaps maybe one in five of the working population can have choices about flexible working or working in different
(35:40) places and that could mean time place uh way you want to work so many many different dimensions to this to this uh flexible working and the crisis now is that we live in a capitalist consumer model so cities survive on people spending time and money in those cities um and lots of livelihoods depend on this rhythm of spending we find that uh cities are now less busy uh I mean I was in Tokyo 40 million people no traffic jams at all the whole time I was there ubering around it was the most incredible feeling to know that there are 40
(36:32) million people in the city and many of them are going to the offices still they have enough flexibility so that the system just flows organizations uh with their mandates to bring people back to the organization are finding it really tough because people even though they're contractually bound to the place realize that they can be just as productive somewhere else Bahamas whatever so you know you find that uh there needs to be a new contract a new way of looking what's fair especially since some of the
(37:06) workforce cannot work flexibly they have to work a pattern your drivers your security people um people who are doing catering you know U people who are running nurseries they can't just go oh sorry your children can be virtually here you know it's not going to work so how is the deal going to be fair for both parties and it's about being imaginative about what it is that is possible because what you want what you want from your Workforce is productivity you want creativity and you want Innovation right if they deliver this
(37:46) together with Oodles of Social Capital so their relationship is good what is the what is the deal you place out there to make sure that these things that you need from them are there so you do need them to come together because you need the social capital you do need them to come together so that there is the creative conversations problem solving conversations and Innovation what you don't want is to bring them at the office just to have them on headsets on calls where there is zero positive uh input to the things that you
(38:25) want as a business right so so you have to go back to basics is what I'm doing contributing to Social Capital uh contributing to uh Innovation contri contributing to productivity engagement if they're not then you're working against yourself right and and that's where again going back to the issue of fairness you negotiate based on the lenses of fairness how I'm going to to be I cannot treat everybody equally that's that's just not possible because of the Dynamics of flexible working but
(39:06) what is the deal where everybody goes yeah yeah yeah I can I can live with that and and if you get flexible working maybe I'll get an extra day of uh leave per year because I have to work 9 to nine every day or something and so you create these these uh uh baselines but they're based on trust because you've outlined the difficulty that you're in and you just go let's try to find something that works for all of us and for you I'm going to use this frame of reference because this works
(39:38) for this group of employees and for this one I'm going to use this frame of reference because it makes sense and at the end I get what I need to keep my business thriving and you get a a some part of the deal not everything you want but some part of the deal actually gives you a better quality of life um I guess the the challenge is that sometimes you might a manager might perceive that as a hyper-personalized workplace like you're treated that way you're treat that but that that's perfectly manageable in
(40:07) today's workplace and if good discussion takes place I guess one of the things you're talking about there is the abilities or opport organizations's ability to have good dialogue and open dialogue and make agreements and keep to them as well yeah but it doesn't have to be hyper individualized I mean on a day-to-day level the line managers do that anyway but as an organizational level you will look at particular groups where they have particular work patterns particular needs and what the outputs the desired
(40:38) outputs are so what is the trade what is the deal with this group so I need you to maintain service level 247 onsite so how do we work together so that this is maintained but you also get something because the rest of the the the group is is working in at home right so it's in a way we are going through a sea change in attitudes towards work as well and we mustn't forget that work is is just one particular Dimension to meaning and purpose for individuals so the Catalyst was the pandemic but it opened up a lot of people's minds as to
(41:27) what really mattered you know certainly it's true in a lot of the kind of Western Democratic economies in Japan I can see that it they have gone back to a more traditional way of working but that is also by consensus you know so it's not that they forced them to go back to the office they wanted to come back to the office to be part to be counted as part of the organization to be seen as uh visibly as pulling their weight within an institution so there is no one siiz fits all it's it's about
(42:07) building a Way Forward together just like when we talk about you know how do you engage a Workforce the worst thing you can do is to issue everybody with a mandate to say you are coming back for three days or else we're going to dock your wages we're gonna is you know you you may train a puppy that way but that's not how you would treat your employees in the 21st century you've commissioned you've LED and you reviewed an enormous amount of research about organizations and human capital what are
(42:39) some of those myths that exist out there that are just sort of seen as com practice or that's just the way things are that the organizations or R people or HR people might just be getting wrong one of the things that I do encounter when I go to conferences is that people say you know I'm a really go 100% of my Workforce has gone through unconscious bias training I have to pause and go I know you mean well but we've studied the literature for a long long time and there is empirical evidence strong empirical
(43:14) evidence that unconscious bias training has no effect unconscious bias training cannot exist in isolation it must be part of a whole culture shift within the organization with behaviors modeled and cared stick put in place consistently so if you think that you can just put everybody through unconscious bias training you take that box and everybody is going to be fine one you're deluding yourself and two you're doing a disservice to your Workforce because that their work life is not going to get better how does it come to the point
(43:57) where that's that lives and people investing so much and they feel that it's done where does it break down do you feel because at the core of it was an initial good thought wasn't there but it hasn't worked necessarily the thing is I don't think it's I don't think it's not that it hasn't worked but it doesn't work in isolation and organizations when they approach something like discrimination with a tick box of mentality you find that nothing changes right and you're surprised that nothing
(44:33) changes and I'm going why would you be surprised you know if your board is is entirely male and your sea Suite all middle-aged men and you're telling the rest of the organization that you're an equal opportunities organization right and that everybody including think the CEO has gone through not uh through unconscious bias training and I'm going that's not enough it's it was never ever going to be enough and I think even people who design unconscious training packages see this as part of a journey
(45:16) of change but most organizations have seen this as the be all and end all of their obligation and the mythology has grown up around this mythical thing that if I took this box I would have covered myself and things would get better because people are more aware there may be but behaviors won't change unless you change the whole cultural environment around it a question for you when you look back at your career so far what what are some of the biggest lessons you've learned this was this was something that happened
(45:49) when I was a child and was my aunt who who um in those in the old days a camera only had film right and he only had so many frames and uh she had uh One Snap to take a photograph of my pet dog and uh while playing I saw the camera took a photograph and then realized that that was the last shot right so there was no dog in in the camera real and I just said no it wasn't me um but it was so obvious because you're playing with a camera and when you take a photograph when you develop it it is so uh clear that you know you can see
(46:36) who's playing with it right so so you know one I was terribly bad at this but two I just realized it was such hard work to to to begin to cover your tracks and um that became something that uh guided my career choices um that I wanted to always maintain Integrity so I could sleep nights and uh I wasn't prepared to um to pad things out I would call it out as it is and if you wanted to spin it that's your choice but I would call out the data as it is so whatever I I found I would just go this is this is what I
(47:25) found I don't know whe it's any good it is useful and not but this is all I can say about it and uh in my career I've been called many things um and uh the probably the most polite thing that people said is that I'm a glass half empty person because I wouldn't spin I would not spin some something that I have uh found discovered or or uncovered or whatever I just go well it is what it is uh and I think that has been helpful in the sense that I've stayed true to to my promise to myself to maintain my own integrity and never
(48:14) to have a sleep this night of uh something I I said or done uh but it's also been career limiting in other ways where and has been a real cost where I've had to um turned down a double promotion because the motivation for that promotion was for me to uh issue um notice of dismissal for half the team because they had a conflict with the director who promoted me you know stuff like that and and I took on the job and then once I realized the the the agenda I just go so my promotions not because I've proven myself but because
(48:58) you needed someone to do this Hatchet job for you and I very quickly turned it down so there had been a a considerable times where there had been a cost to to that and you know even CEOs ask me to do something illegal and then you just go uh I need to think about it but I need that in writing right and then they go and then you find that it's never sent to you in writing but that your performance suddenly goes down several notches even though you know that what you've done is the right thing because I said no I
(49:38) don't want to go to tribunal on your behalf right it's not worth it I wouldn't do that for my parents I wouldn't do that for you I just wouldn't so so these are the kinds of things that have that have um guided me um and also of course um I I I I'm very much attracted to the puzzle if something is interesting intellectually interesting uh that Curiosity will take me there and I haven't planned my career in a really planful way is these opportunities where so an organization comes to me and goes I think we have
(50:15) this problem and but we don't know how to measure contain shape it so that we can do an intervention and I go let me go and dig around let me just just have a look and then and then you find out you go like this is what you look like and the fness research was was one such exercise where we developed a um a fairness instrument okay it's a bit long it's very academic but it's about 45 minutes but it allowed me to see the the landscape of unfairnesses within the organization and there is actually an
(50:52) academic paper where we could see that if the if the fairness comes from a particular relationship the outcome could be uh resignation leave the organization exit or it could be I withhold a effort so the the unfairness has got clear uh organizational consequences but it's also based on the relationships the proximity and the particular part of the organization that you come from so employees have a relationship with HR they have a relationship with the line manager they have a relationship with the senior management and depending on
(51:35) who makes that decision who executes the decision uh the individual makes different choices so that survey which we did was incredibly powerful because we did uh a pilot with an with a government agency and they could see they could see which bits were were uneven and which bits were fine but when I do go to other organizations that go we really don't want to know because that exposes um us to to having to have these difficult conversations and I go well if you want to do change proper change management those conversations ought to be had
(52:16) anyway you've done a lot of Learning and Development you've got your you know your three Masters and your PhD so what does learn what are you doing currently to kind of keep your learning going what does that look like for you um I just did a certif certificate in um AI governance and uh that draws kind of my background as a data person so it it stems from data governance but it's more than that it's how do you apply AI loose in a way on the data that you have so you must have an data governance architecture
(52:54) that's quite robust so I've done that and in the process of um preparing for an exam uh for the U non-executive Directors Association you're you're opening up a world to a lot of people watching this going okay I've now got I'm developing a an understanding of the need to to bring some rigor to my work to challenge my assumptions to look at data in different ways know are there any sort of books or podcasts or anything that you would recommend or they've had a formative impact on your
(53:22) sort of perception or way of thinking if you want to stay grounded on on um lives and working lives there is a book by St deel called working and although it was done quite a few years ago it's a compilation of testimonies of how people work how the experience work and um how they feel about what they do all day and every now and again you know when I when I feel feel as if I'm going into a space that's too conceptual too hard too rarified I'll pick this up just read one of the stories and it brings me down to why I
(54:10) want to do the work I do and why I need to rewrite the blog I've written you know so that it makes sense to uh people who will make a difference to the workplace so that's one book and then there's another but this is a quite an old classic it's by Robert Chilla is called irrational exuberance I don't know if you've heard of that before and it is about how um we are often irrationally optimistic about outcomes so you find like like when we build a a project on on highspeed rail or something it just go oh we can do it
(54:47) it'll only take 10 Years it'll only cost 10 billion you know it's fine and then you find that it takes a hundred years and it takes a 100 billion you know and and how we make decisions is shaped by that irrational exuberance because we have a very and that was my PhD it was on um how the psychology of time and timing affects decision making and because we don't have the discipline to frame our temporal distance properly we discount the the risk in the far distance uh distant future and so we end
(55:29) up making very poor long-term decisions for ourselves for our organizations even for our children sometimes so that's that's one book that I I sometimes go back to just to remind myself that I'm also just as um likely to be to be irrationally exuberant not withstanding the fact that people regularly say I'm a half glass empty sort of person so um there's another book called Risk by Dan Gardner and it gives you a a calculus on risk so that we are not immobilized by it we understand that some risks you cannot mitigate they're
(56:13) just part of being alive it gives you a perspective on risk which I really find very empowering so that's another book and now that we are in a uh this AI bubble thing the book that I do go back to and it's uh a really fine book it's written by Carl Benedict Frey it's called the technology trap and there Frey who wrote the first paper the first very influential paper FR and Osborne on uh jobs that will be uh destroyed by automation you know this is about 10 years ago so he's written a book where
(56:52) he's reviewed the whole experience of the Industrial Revolution and how it took about 35 years before the good jobs came so when uh automation replaced horse the steam engine replaced horses and all the people working with horses and carts and their feet and everything it took 35 years before you needed skilled people on skilled jobs to appear and it took two generations 70 75 years before the benefits trickle down to the working class so if you take that as a kind of cautionary tale about our transition with
(57:37) AI you know when governments talk about just transition you have to ask yourself ajust transision for whom because AI will destroy jobs they will also create jobs but there will be a lag and so what are we going to do during that period when the new jobs haven't arrived the new skills haven't been formed uh the machines are are humming away replacing people in their workplaces do we give them uh a minimum wage what what do we do to ensure that Humanity Society survives this transition because it will happen and if
(58:23) we don't manage it well we will have civil strife because nobody wants to be permanently at the bottom of the pile final question because you've actually spent a long time actually thinking about the OD profession as a hall with all this new technology coming through and and just the shift in organizations what advice would you give to someone considering a career and organization development or just at the beginning of their career now I don't know about you but I was I guess trained in the kind of
(58:51) uh the classical uh OD in the classical OD way so edar shine you know beyond and I still turn to those those um Scholars because there is something very enduring about human behavior and group Behavior identity and belonging uh the the want and desire to participate in a group all of these and and the kind of interpersonal Dynamics I don't think those will change enormously as long as organizations want people in their organizations they don't want like a an organization which is run entirely by sensors and and robots so if
(59:44) you want if you have people in the workplace you will always need organizational design and organizational development specialist to Think Through what is it that will create the optimal interface between technology and the outcomes that you want where is it that their specific uh skills and capabilities bring uh quality to the workplace and to the um to the business because what you want is to generate real value not because you're dis intermediating cost but because you genuinely are creating a product or a
(1:00:28) service that people value right and that your Workforce and your brand is valued by Society um and if if that's the case then you need to begin to think about uh how you structure how you organize your people so that they bring that value to Market they bring that value to each other they understand that there is a real purpose to the existence of this organization not not an organization and I think that's where uh you find It's Tricky when you have you work for an organization that goes around buying up
(1:01:11) companies disaggregating them and selling off the asset stripping right it's very hard then to go y generating value right but if I'm a pharmaceutical company and I've just developed a new vaccine against something and uh the the fair thing to do is is not to charge over the so you let's say you make a 100% profit instead of 100,000% profit on the on the vaccine you can be proud that you've that you're slowly eradicating something uh in in the the global South that has existed for generations and you're adding value to
(1:01:50) society so without OD you just have the tradition models right that kind of hierarchical command and control I would like to think that we have so many more tools at our disposable so many different models to enhance meaning and purpose and and value signaling to to society that uh some that an OD specialist can bring because they are the ones that go don't forget this is why you're here this is why your you're designing this organization this way to bring and enhance value both for the worker as well as for society and and I think it's
(1:02:36) a it's a marvelous profession because you have a chance then to reflect back to your clients why they're doing this in the first place so important well Wilson I want to say a huge thank you I'm feeling thoroughly provoked and a lot of things to think about as well it's been a brilliant and it's so great to hear that someone uh with such integrity and skill and knowhow and expertise is helping show the way the mle Maze of human capital research as well so so thank you Danny Danny for you what what still out for
(1:03:09) you from the conversation today as always so many things it was a fantastic conversation I think the importance of articulating the framework the the frame of reference we're using when we talk about fairness and how important it is for people to be transparent and open about that to to avoid talking across purposes I love what you said about the importance of evidence based practice if that going to shift the dial on behavior and ownership and accountability in organizations and uh I got three or four books to add to my reading just so it's
(1:03:35) always a good podcast when I get some book recommendations so yeah so if if people want to follow your work Wilson if if you want to know a little bit more about what you do and and understand the challenge and difference that you can make so what's the best Pap to reach out to you and any more information about w at work I think because I'm still building the website so maybe my LinkedIn link to my LinkedIn profile and to share my email which is Wilson atwork.
(1:04:02) com if anybody wants a conversation about something that they've heard seen so a huge thank you to everyone who's joined us on this watching this incredibly interesting podcast today and a huge thank you to Wilson as well being so generous with your time and your insights as well um if you enjoyed the podcast please feel free to hit the like button and subscribe Wilson joins a brilliant collection of first class practitioners from across the world and so if you have a question or anything that Wilson is share with with us today please put it
(1:04:27) in the comments below and please reach out to Wilson on LinkedIn and to follow his blog and to follow his work as well because it's always incredibly interesting so thank you so much Wilson thank you Garen thank you Danny thank you [Music] he