Ep. 053 - Anna Mindelöf - Building a highly efficient people experience team and why HR needs to embrace the new paradigm
So, for my final episode of the year, I sat down with Anna Mindelöf, Chief People Officer at Fiskars. I was SO pleased we made this happen and meet up in Stockholm. Some of the best episodes are often organic and just conversations that flow naturally! This is exactly what we managed to capture for you! We explored a wide range of topics - her journey into Fiskars as CPO, the changing HR industry, AI and our own human experience - making the point that YOU are the most important thing in your life!
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Connect with Anna
https://www.linkedin.com/in/annamindelof
EP. 053 Transcription
[00:00:00] Steve: Anna, welcome, welcome to my humble abode and the experienced designers.
[00:00:05] Anna: Thank you so much.
[00:00:08] Steve: I love these ones because they are, In person in real life and they're always better not setting expectation on podcasts in real life But they are actually a little bit better when they're not on the screen.
So look, thank you for joining I know we've I know we've tried several occasions to get our diaries synced up But good persistence. It shows that we're both determined people and persistent, which is lovely.
[00:00:33] Anna: indeed. Yeah, very nice being here.
[00:00:35] Steve: good stuff. Anna, you are the chief people officer of Fiskars group. And I was curious, my question to you, just to kick off, just rather than, Hey, what's your intro?
That kind of stuff. We're going to get to know you as part of this podcast anyway, but I'm curious when you went for the job interviews, What was sold to you? What was pitched to you in terms of the the brief and the opportunity and why did you accept the role? What enticed you?
[00:01:04] Anna: First of all, I come with experience from strong brands. Fiskars, Fiskars Group is 14 brands. So it's a house of brands. So I came into the interview with, um, several amounts of interviews, I would say, but the first one run by the executive search company, and the second one by the executive search company, also to then later on meeting the CEO, Natalie, and for the first time in my life, someone did research on me.
Before they went into the interview. So she's an engineer. So she has been scanning all podcasts all, everything that you could found about me on LinkedIn or wherever you find info. And I didn't expect that. So she started the first sort of intro with, Hey, finally I get to meet you and it feels like I already know you.
I was like, Whoa, that was a little bit strange. I'm usually done interviewing, not you. So that was a good intro because it's also felt that she knew a little bit more about who I am. I'm a person who likes to be both doing strategy, but also being with the people on the floor. And the task.
The sort of message from her on what is needed to be done is work with talent management, make sure we can change the culture in a way and transform the culture into a more agile, um, speedy organization.
and make sure that we know who our top talents are in the organization.
[00:02:47] Steve: Yeah.
[00:02:48] Anna: And that's my background. So of
[00:02:49] Steve: course it was an easy, yeah, absolutely. Yeah,
[00:02:52] Anna: this sounds good. And then on top of that Fiskars Group is Finland's one of Finland's absolutely oldest companies next year celebrating 375 years.
So it comes with history. It comes with its legendary in Finland. Everyone knows, I think it's 96 percent of all Finns knows what Fiskars so you can imagine when here in Stockholm, where I'm located, we have a small office on Kungsbro plan. And when the Finns are arriving to the Stockholm office, they usually, I have had people in my team coming, saying, asking other people, So where is the Fiskars office on the street?
And they're like, they don't even know what Fiskars that's pretty common. So you know some of our products, and when I start to talk about the brands. People know about the brands, and that's why I joined. I love the brands. It's like all those brands with plenty of years history in there with people in production sites, their relatives, parents, siblings, cousins that has been working for the same brand for years and years.
But that's also a super big advantage, but it's also a biggest challenge. That.
[00:04:06] Steve: Just to give the audience some context. So I love some of the brands as well. I would say a lot of the Nordics would probably have a plate, a bowl or something in their cupboard that relates to one of those brands.
Yes. Just to reel some of them off, we have George George Jensen, Royal Copenhagen, which I love Wedgewood. There's some Bri, Brit, your British ones in there as well. Royal
[00:04:26] Anna: Food and Waterford. Royal Dolton. Royal Albert. Amazing. WE have Royal Copenhagen
[00:04:33] Steve: Italy,
Mumin,
[00:04:36] Anna: yeah.
HaCkman Ska, I think I mentioned all except George Janssen, which is the newest kid on the block just bought them actually. And we are now merging them and bringing them in.
[00:04:50] Steve: And I'm going to come on to that because the acquisition, it's been an acquisition trail in terms of its strategy and targeting very specific brands. And I think that M& A piece is always really important because isn't there an old stat of kind of 80 percent of M& A's fail because of cultural integration.
The people aspect is one of the biggest challenges because of the lack of. Lack of preparation, I think, and consideration to it. So I think that's also something. I'm curious because I know you, and I remember seeing this on LinkedIn when you joined, um, you, you were hiring a lot. And I just, I, yeah, I'm just curious.
Like what did you, how'd you go about building a team for a company like this with so many different brands that adds complexity, of course. And the structure and yeah, like, how'd you think about that? How did you go about thinking about the roles that sit within there, both in terms of meeting the business where it's at, but also future proofing it as well.
Because obviously external market, which we would definitely get on to in terms of some of the things that are happening right now.
[00:05:50] Anna: Okay. Okay.
[00:05:51] Steve: So yeah
[00:05:52] Anna: before I started, I also had a pretty intense onboarding with some management consulting Company that was already supporting us and we had a survey out and we asked, how do you as a leadership team and senior leaders look at HR and also we asked HR management team, how do you look upon HR?
And then we found that there was some few points where they were really aligned. And then we had some points that was like HR themselves thought they were awesome. The managers were not that, they didn't think it was awesome. And what do you do with that? Everyone was aligned with that we need to Do something with recruitment.
We need to upskill people in the organization when it comes to recruitment. We need to work with our employee brand. We need to make sure that we cut costs from all of those external headhunting companies that is, um, pitching that they are the best for us. So that sort of was the start. We also could see that we thought we were pretty good in spotting talent, but we didn't work with talent development at all.
We, I could also see when I looked into engagement surveys that we had a bit of a challenge when it comes to personal growth in the organization. People loves to work for the company, but they can't see the next step. So using data. To make sure that we are attacking the right problem. And I also looked into, of course, all the data we had was engagement survey results.
We had exit interviews. We had information about the onboarding, et cetera. And then
I presented the new organizational setup and I had the sounding board in this management consulting company. And I said, I want to have, I want to build either this or that. And the first one was more of a traditional HR unit, uh, still with something that could be called people experience.
And then it was one which was everyone should work in projects. We are just going to have a completely agile setup. up in HR. We will create community of practices. We will co collaborate and co create everything, but no one will support a specific part of the organization. And with that said, that would mean that the leadership teams in the organization would not have one HR contact.
And that was obviously a little bit too modern. for Verifiska's group was at that point. So then I decided to not do what I usually do. And I actually listened to what they said, trusting that they had a little bit more knowledge about where the organization were. In 10 years ago, I would have been like, why not?
I will do it anyhow. And this time I decided it's probably not a good idea to start with failing the first thing I do. So I started to listen more. And. Try to evaluate. the way forward. And I changed a lot of things in the HR management team. I started to talk much more about skills for the future and what we will need.
And I started to build this people experience unit. And from the beginning, my thinking was So all series should be in there and if you call a series, then it's total rewards or comp and ban that already existed and it still exists as it was from when I started and we had leadership people in, that's it,
and we had very traditional leadership trainings with one company that has been working with Fiskars Group for more than 10 years creating classroom trainings.
It's extremely boring. I was like, yes, and we can do it like that or we can cancel all of that and we build something new. And then I started with recruiting a TA head and built talent acquisition and employee branding. And we have a complete global team. So it's also, it was also a lot about making Fiskars Group international also from an HR perspective.
[00:10:16] Steve: perspective.
[00:10:17] Anna: Of course, for those who are listening who do not know how big we are 8, 000 employees, a little bit less than 8, 000, we have production, we have around 400 stores worldwide, and of course office people. And we hire everything from gloss blowers to silversmiths to the best of e-commerce people worldwide.
And retail store managers
Yes.
[00:10:47] Steve: How do you headhunt a glassblower?
That's quite interesting. You don't really headhunt
[00:10:52] Anna: them. So that's also a story I can't tell since I love everything with the story. But then if we go back to the buildup of the PX unit then so I started to build that and then I need to have some other skills in place compared to what I had.
And of course I have I'm like plus 50, right? So I have a lot of context from before. I can also say, this is a person I worked with before, this is the competence we would need, who is he or she knows if they don't want to join, who do they know that I actually can recruit and get the skills
Uh, and then making sure that when you recruit, you also You have the diversity in there from a nationality perspective gender of course but also all of the other diverse diversity parameters in place to make sure that we are a little bit less biased when it comes to the recruitment process.
[00:11:55] Steve: Yeah.
[00:11:56] Anna: So today I have a Director of Talent Acquisition and Employee Branding. I have a Director Talent Performance and Learning. I have just recruited, he has not started yet a People Analytics, Workforce Planning, Processes and Systems guy. And And then I have total rewards, and we'll soon start to look for a leadership person.
And all of those are now the PX team, and until in September, I had the person who was the vice president of People Experience, but now I have decided she Choose to leave
for another opportunity, and now I'm not going to replace her. So we are going to work in an agile way. So I have a project manager in place, and she's going to support us there.
And it will be on rotation responsibility for building up.
[00:12:47] Steve: And some of that agile work and bringing some of the value into the organization just in terms of, and this is how I'm certainly how I've seen so far in organizations, particularly people experience teams and building both capability, but also impact and also reputation more so as well to shift that legacy HR perception.
And
Where's the directorate coming from? Because obviously you have a work, you're going to have data. The data guy coming in is going to be extracting data. And I don't mean to always reference like a hierarchical thing, but say from the bottom up from the people listening aspect, which will drive some decision making on where to bring value.
But then there's a senior leadership business direction in terms of that direction, that piece as well, bringing value to both ends,
[00:13:34] Anna: Yeah, so I think one of the challenges HR.
people in general have HR units, HR leaders is you come in with a certain competence and you want to do what you're good at. So that means that if you hire a person like me who has a lot of experience in talent management, of course, that's what I want to use.
But that's not necessarily what is needed for the organization. So what I would like to do is I would like to work with the problems that the business have
and make sure that we know before the business that you will have a problem in this specific store because this is how you recruit or this is how the environment is whatever problem arise and then we are going to work with.
Solving those problems for the organization. So instead of being reactive, we will be proactive and we will be able to say in that specific business unit. Here's your challenge. You don't have enough people with that kind of competence in three years. You will have, I don't know, an aging workforce in your part of the organization and you need to work with growth opportunities and make sure you bring in the right people.
[00:14:45] Steve: Yeah, amazing.
Yes.
[00:14:47] Anna: And today it's not like that. Today it's still, okay, so now this person is leaving and we have no one who can replace him or her. You probably know that a little, he or she has been there five years. It's likely that the person needs to take the
[00:15:01] Steve: next
[00:15:03] Anna: So being more proactive, using the data and making it easy for leaders in the organization to use data.
We are having Workday, so nothing is easy. And it's scary when you come into an organization and you, that's what I did. I never worked with Workday. It's a fantastic system to have in place but it's the biggest obstacle also. And the reason for saying that is that what We have been doing my perception people can argue that's absolutely not the case, but I think many organizations are using the systems and processes and hind behind, so we can't do that.
We can't meet the people because I'm here behind work day now, and I need to fix this in The system and the processes are there and should be built to support the experience of the people in the organization and what so it's more defining what kind of experience do you want to have and you want your people to have in the moment that matters, which is like
But when you, your first day, the pre boarding, the onboarding, when you meet your manager, when you have meetings, when we celebrate things, when you come to work, whatever kind of moments that you define is the most important ones.
That's the important stuff.
[00:16:20] Steve: Totally agree.
[00:16:21] Anna: And I think that's the biggest challenge I see in HR. And I've been questioning back and forth for years now, how should the HR team look like?
And and been thinking back and forth, been Experimenting a lot with recruiting people who have absolutely no HR experience like come here.
You have that experience. So we can learn from you
Why do you need to have 25 years of experience within HR in order to be an HR director? You don't need that but you need to have led people you need to Have worked maybe in the same area So if I recruit someone who is going to support one of the brands, it's good if you have some you know, experience from that before.
And I guess if it's a lot of HR people listening to this podcast,
they will be like furious and say, Oh, this is demotivating to hear. But I think, I do think we need the mix. I do think that it's not, I don't think there is. Any person in any part of an organization going forward who can survive if you have only worked in one profession during your full working life, because you will not have the perspective.
so When I talk about internal mobility and job rotation, I'm saying HR people needs to do stint outside HR. Super scary if you never have been outside HR. And we want to bring in the business people to HR too.
[00:17:54] Steve: Okay. Loads of questions on this. Okay. I've got, I'm just going to backtrack slightly and ask something cause you said to me earlier about 10 years ago, I would have done it this way, but now I do it this way.
I just want to pull that thread a little bit because I think that also demonstrate a little bit how you've evolved as a HR people professional in yourself. And also that, your background is talent management and development. So that piece, and of course that, yeah. There is a tendency to lean into that, of course, and bring that expertise into the field.
How are you supporting yourself in that? How are you evolving as a human being, as a person in working in this field? Because if this ties now into my point now around HR function and the profession is what's important to those that might be listening now, slightly furious at what we're just about to talk about.
I have talked about because ultimately. We do need to mix it up. And I think actually the last thing HR needs right now is more HR. I think there needs to be, we need to step outside, we need to step outside and start to be brave enough to be okay. What else can we learn outside of our context that we think we could bring into our world?
And of course, there's things like productization, there's employee experience, there's experience design, there's design thinking, there's agile, there's all of these buzzwords, but still as an individual sitting in Right now in HR, and we haven't even gotten to AI yet, my word, it's hard for them right now.
It is. Really hard.
[00:19:17] Anna: It's also crucial to I think the best advice I can give is Would be Do not be a know it all person. Try to be a learn
Person. And we will talk about work life balance. It's nothing called work life balance any longer. It's work life integration. So you need to understand that you need to find your path going forward.
So that means if you need to, you can't work at all during the weekends. Fair enough, then set that up for you, make it work. If you do not, if you only want to work a specific amount of hours, try to set that up. But I think you need to be, if you're going to work in the HR space going forward, you need to be Knowing your own boundaries much more than we have been doing before.
So my question is rather back to people in HR. Why do you work with HR? If you work in HR because you like to like people, I often get that answer. I like people.
Eh, good. And what do you want to do with that? And a lot of HR people, when I interview for a lot of positions at the moment. They are telling me I'm not a numbers person.
Then this is not the right person position for you because everyone in HR needs to understand numbers. You need to understand the business. You need to be able to analyze the data. And if you can't analyze it, you need to use AI or someone else who is helping you to understand what is said. That's going to be necessary.
So even do you can have a position that is more. People centric in the future. You still need to use the data in order to be able to know what to focus on. So best advice to HR people is, you asked how
[00:21:08] Steve: Yeah, as well I was asking, and I'm going to just flip this back, yeah,
[00:21:10] Anna: oh too much. I'm I have started to listen less to HR
gurus.
And the know it alls, the ones that, all of those, the Marshall Goldsmith ones and the Dave Ulrich ones and the ones who have been there forever. I'm listening more to, to, to entrepreneurial companies that comes with new stuff. So the younger generation. And.
But I have one preference that I'm telling everyone in my team.
If you still are not listening to Josh Bersin, then you are, you do not know what modern HR will look like in 5 to 10 years. You need to listen to what he's saying. And you can say it's only for the U. S.
It's only for the big companies and you need to listen to what he's saying and understand because he can also help you only need to listen to his podcasts and then you will understand this is where I need to listen, this is what is relevant and this is what is not relevant and so I use that and I read too many books.
I'm I'm networking less now.
I did before COVID, probably because I was really ill during COVID. So I'm still a little bit hesitant to meet too many people at the same time, but listen to people who run businesses and learn their language and try to be a person who listens more. Then you speak.
[00:22:53] Steve: speak. Yeah, and also, find your thing.
For some people, it's podcast. I listen to Stephen Bartlett's Story of a CEO, of course. And there's very few episodes, very few. But I've listened to and haven't written something down from it
[00:23:09] Anna: It's
Another advice that I would give, I don't know if it's mainly Swedish people or Danish people, or whoever who's listening to this uh, when you network, make sure that you are not only going to the Swedish or Danish or Finnish associations and meet people in your country.
Okay, because the They are not going to be the one who are giving you the insights for the future. It's just what's happening now, what they know. And that sounds like it's not that we are not updated in Sweden or in Finland or in Denmark, but you can't build your network only with Danish people in Copenhagen.
It's nice. But if you want to develop,
[00:24:01] Steve: yeah.
[00:24:01] Anna: then you need to do something else. You need to listen to people on global level who works and acts and meet people with other kind of backgrounds than yourself, who grew up differently from you and comes with different perspectives.
[00:24:17] Steve: Yeah. Can we just go back to the HR evolution piece?
Yeah. So we've got the data.
[00:24:23] Anna: Yeah.
[00:24:24] Steve: Are there any other pillars, like one or two pillars that maybe we can share or just discuss around that people could lean into to evolve their practice? To
[00:24:35] Anna: To build something similar,
[00:24:37] Steve: Yeah, somebody sitting in more of a traditional HR role, they have a curious mindset, they're listening to this game, okay, yeah, okay, I need to do something.
There's the data piece and of course there are learning opportunities and things out there just to go and just start being
[00:24:50] Anna: Where do you start? There's
[00:24:52] Steve: piece. But I'm just wondering, is there any other aspects that they need to think about to amp up or evolve or develop on business acumen you mentioned as well?
[00:25:03] Anna: I think it's one thing that is a little bit contradictory to what I said because I was learned
So
I think if you talk to people who have been working with me and what I'm sometimes very surprised about is, I'm like a five year old child. I'm like, what is chat GPT? I have no clue. Let's go in and try to find out.
So I'm doing to learn.
And I'm even like, sometimes I'm pretty proud that I'm even teaching some of my people in my team who are like, not 30, but at least 20 years younger than I am. And they're like, no, but I don't really know how to do this. No, neither did I. You just need to go and try. So don't be so afraid of trying new stuff because we will
Always fail. I'm failing like so many times. I have no clue. Then I try again. And then I try again. And I'm like, Okay, so when you build something, it doesn't need to be 100
[00:26:01] Steve: right.
[00:26:01] Anna: When you build your organization, everyone has been asking me during this. The ones who have been with the company for a long time in HR, some of them are still there.
And I'm super happy that the people who dared to, stay true to they want to work for Fiskars Group. I might think that this Anna who is coming in seems really weird and I don't really know where the journey is going, but I'm willing to take the risk to be on that journey. And after six months, some of those people came to me and said, I didn't have a clue, but you told me to trust the process.
And now I understand. And that's because. And I also said several times that
everyone
thinks that if we are just done with this change, we will be done. That's not how it's going to be. We are going to change constantly. And if you can't accept that, You can't, it's not possible to be on this journey. So it needs to be, we are doing this until we do something else.
And we are going to continue build and change and evolve together. And I think you need to buy into that.
[00:27:12] Steve: Yeah, and I think this also links a little bit about going inwards on yourself.
I think, I think it was really interesting what you mentioned about setting your own boundaries, establishing if you don't want to work weekends and that's okay. But, and I think a lot of that has been disrupted. It has, period. I know I feel it at times. But I also know that what's my commitment?
What's my mission? What impact do I want to create? And actually You know, is it a thing about work life balance, work life fulfillment? I tend to call it I know I'm at a stage in my life right now where I can dedicate more time to my work and that's just my reality. But I think for those that are maybe a little bit of flux and not really, struggling a little bit is maybe instead of seeking externally to just anchor a little bit more back internally to go, okay, let me just because we haven't got infinite time here.
What is it I want to dedicate to? What? What do I want to dedicate to? How and when? And just really anchoring that and getting that really clear, I think, first is my thought, because we tend, because there's so much going on in the world right now. There's so much attention. There's so much, obviously, AI that it can be massively distracting if you're not coming at it from a really good grounding within yourself first, even though there's a lot of disruption and maybe feeling of,
[00:28:33] Anna: I do think If you look into what I said before, the work life integration part I think we have a tendency in today's society to think that everyone, it's more important what everyone else think about what you are doing that what you are thinking.
And obviously, good leaders care about you as a person. So if I have direct reports, who dare to say It's not for me any longer. I don't want to do this. I need something else. I'm super happy. . And what, how would that look like? Let's look into how that would look like. . And, uh, we have a tendency in the society to also say that everything needs to happen between, you are like 28 to 40 before you're too young, and afterwards you're too old.
So everyone needs to be in that sort of. Thirty to four. It's not possible, come on. I have even people who I have on interview sometimes who tell me, I will only take four months parental leave. I'm like, are you insane? You have one year in Sweden to be on parental leave and life is long.
Please acknowledge that this is going to be a much bigger portion of your life than you think right now.
[00:29:53] Steve: Yes.
[00:29:53] Anna: Which I Obviously, I'm not always saying that to people, but that's my belief. It's not a 60 meter stint race. It's a marathon.
[00:30:05] Steve: Yeah, agree.
[00:30:06] Anna: So please be aware, take care of yourself. It's that mask on the flight, right?
You put it on yourself first and then you put it on the kid or the person who's sitting next to you. And HR needs to practice that. Am I the best role model for this? Not at all. I'm working for too long hours. I love my job. I love to work with
people who challenge me. I do not like people who is that's fine.
Let's do that. I'm just adjusting. I want to hear why is it not a good idea? And how can we do it differently? And then sometimes, of course, I'm like, but come on, no, it's too much resistance here.
[00:30:51] Steve: But
[00:30:53] Anna: a Constant reiteration of how to define us as a team.
[00:31:00] Steve: You know what? I I know you, when you share some posts when you're traveling, I can feel that in your posts that you enjoy that.
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:31:08] Anna: Yeah. That's good. That's the intention. Yeah. Yeah. And I always try to bring my brilliant people I have hired and who I work with because it's not all of them I've hired. And so I'm always trying to invite them to events. I am obviously more senior and I am a C suit person, so I get all the invitations.
They are much better than I am. So those people should sit on the podcasts and, on the panels.
[00:31:36] Steve: Absolutely.
[00:31:37] Anna: Those people are the future.
[00:31:39] Steve: I'm going to come to your office. We should do a live at your office with some of your team.
[00:31:43] Anna: yeah, that would be cool. I'm not having anyone, everyone in my team in the office. I know,
[00:31:47] Steve: but we can wait. We'll do something. Make it work 100%. Next year, I'm actually going to be doing I'm going to be going more into organizations, into the organizations.
I've got a couple of really good ones for the first quarter of the year in different parts of the world where I'm going to spend time with the whole people team. And yeah, because I want to, there's some amazing work going on in the world and I just think there's a, there's an opportunity to just raise them all, not just one
[00:32:12] Anna: Exactly.
[00:32:13] Steve: So I'm really into that. So quick we
[00:32:16] Anna: we are completely derailing or are we on track?
[00:32:18] Steve: we are so on track. Okay. So I'm.
I
don't think any podcast is ever complete without at least a conversation about AI, because we're right in the midst of this right now. And I don't think anyone knows where it's going to go just yet necessarily, but I'm curious around where do we think around HR and organizations around
[00:32:44] Anna: I was just in the presentation with.
[00:32:47] Steve: with
[00:32:49] Anna: If you don't know what sauna labs is, you need to know that's a need to know. Also your person is talking about sauna labs in one of his podcasts.
[00:32:58] Steve: And he's using Sana power Galileo as well,
[00:33:02] Anna: and how can you be that good? So you actually are naming.
[00:33:05] Steve: naming
[00:33:07] Anna: chat bot or a tool, Galileo. Amazing.
[00:33:11] Steve: But it goes to show, I will support with Josh, but Josh, because I listened to. How many pods has he got? I think, I've, I listen to him like 15 minutes with each episode.
[00:33:21] Anna: them, Yeah.
[00:33:21] Steve: Dum, super tight, super clear. But
[00:33:23] Anna: But don't listen to it if you're tired because you need to be sharp. And you need to have a pen and write down, okay, so he's saying this or that.
[00:33:31] Steve: That's
[00:33:32] Anna: Almost every episode is brilliant, almost ever. But of
[00:33:37] Steve: But it's data led, it's research led, it's in the trenches, in the ground.
[00:33:42] Anna: What was the question? AI, AI, yeah. Oh yes, I love it.
[00:33:47] Steve: More, more a topic. Let's just explore it. Like how have you been, just how have you been exploring and using?
[00:33:54] Anna: I'm a tech nerd in general I would say. Very not happy when I came into the company and I got an iPhone 11. Why are you guys offering me an iPhone 11? That's not good employee branding. So that needs to change and now it has changed, but I haven't changed the phone yet. AI. Yes, I met a brilliant person yesterday. She's super young. She founded a tech company six years ago. She's only 22, 23 years old. She Employed 50 people. She sold the company and she has no university degree yet. She just did this on the side and then started and sold. Absolutely fantastic. And she um, I asked her how she built this and everything was built with AI.
Of course. So that's a sort of good segway into. Who need AI and for what? And she said to me yesterday when I met her name is Ida.
She said, sometimes companies with a more mature
leadership team think that it's either AI companies and others. But that's not the case. Everyone in the future needs to work with AI and understand it.
So that's a alarm clock for those who feel, Oh, I don't have it. I have no clue. And it's the same there. Just start using it. And what I did was that I pretty early Actually pretty cool together with our CFO in the company who also loves AI. Have you heard about the CFO?
[00:35:31] Steve: That's a bonus.
[00:35:33] Anna: bonus. So we said we need to do something in the leadership team.
We need to start talking about this. This is the future. So we brought in people in our organization who are a little bit more advanced and also external. competence to talk about AI with us. And I'm, yeah, I started to use ChatGPT super early, as soon as I could. And I use it for everything. I'm even telling people, so have you asked Chachipiti, like, why would, why they think it's a little bit an overkill sometimes, but I do that.
And I think the use, when you start to use it, you understand how one part of it's just a small part of AI. It's an old way of doing things. It's just that everything is exploding now. Um, but the best usage is when you are a. Subject matter expert in something and you can build something in a couple of seconds.
And then you can say this is right or this is probably not at all what I wanted. So you need to be the one who is. It's taking the responsibility for the answer that the chatbot is giving you. And I'm using that for doing job descriptions, putting OKRs in place, agendas, getting information about who is a great speaker for different
[00:36:56] Steve: you name
[00:36:58] Anna: Yeah, you name it, we are doing a lot of things in the early phase, externally, not so integrated yet into systems for us, but that's coming now. Also for our LMS platform, etc.
[00:37:11] Steve: I, I Had a bit of a revelation last week cause I interviewed the British Red Cross and their people experience team. So they're starting on their people experience and doing some amazing work. And so I gave the transcription to chat. I asked it to summarize it for me, which it did very easily.
Then I asked it to create multiple LinkedIn posts for me, which it did really easily. Then I adjusted it. So I think it gets it to 70 percent and then you put your tone on it. Then I asked, then I took segments of it and said, can you put it into Dali and say, can you create a a comic book four step comic book displaying that process?
And it put, and it created. This visualization, because I'm also, I'm trying to find ways of how to take a conversation like this and put it into a visual format so that it can engage from a post perspective or something. And for that stuff previously, I would have, and this took me less than 30 minutes.
For all of what I've just described, I think what was interesting was historically, I would have had to have hired someone to listen to the podcast to then draw something. It's insane. The speed of which we're
[00:38:22] Anna: I actually did something, we had an external guy in for the HR management team during, I don't remember, February, maybe February, March, something.
And then I took the full HR management team thing and we recorded in video just with the iPhone. , some teamwork that we did, and then I used a AI tool to transcribe it and get it down to text. So I did all the meetings notes with AI support. And then I took that and you could text the video also with this tool.
And you can get it summarized and then I put everything in ChatGPT and just did a sum, a summarization of it, a summary of it. That was cool. So that makes it much faster. It's a little bit tricky with the technique stuff, technicalities in the beginning, but you learn it. So it's
[00:39:21] Steve: It's bleeding into, all of our existing tool marketplace.
I was at CIME this week here in Stockholm, S. I. M. E.
[00:39:29] Anna: Oh, was it this week? Yeah. Oh.
[00:39:31] Steve: yeah, it was on Monday, Tuesday. I went to the Monday and it was really interesting. NATO, there was a guy from NATO speaking, which was super interesting on a macro global level. What's happening, especially for Sweden. But it was also recognition of when they showed the marketplace of all the existing toolkit tools and then their adoption.
So it's just bleeding everywhere right now from Canva into Descript
[00:39:52] Anna: tools. And I would say that the challenge is where do you start?
[00:39:57] Steve: That's my, I was going to ask you
[00:40:01] Anna: do not dwell on that one. Just start. No, just do that. Just start. Because otherwise you will, we are all behind. No fear of missing out because you are going to miss out, you can't know everything.
[00:40:15] Steve: Just to give a context, how quick this thing's moving, because I think that was something that clicked for me on Monday. Because I was like, okay, I'm a fairly blind, optimistic, I love this stuff. So I'm, I feel like I'm fairly connected to it, but I'm definitely not at the forefront.
[00:40:30] Anna: It
[00:40:30] Steve: made me stop in my tracks on Monday where there was a speaker who shared a video of him talking at home and it was and he was just did by a couple of minutes.
And then he said that was all generated by AI and the whole room was like what? And you couldn't tell the difference. You could. You had him visually in real life and then on the screen and he said, this is as of today and bearing in mind that the pace this will improve in the next three months.
as, as much as it would have previously in a year. So it's now evolving at such and my brain was starting to just scramble because I was trying to even comprehend that what I've just seen is changed already in a week, in a month, two months, to the extent of what would normally take a year, two years.
How on earth do we keep up with this thing? And I think that's,
[00:41:18] Anna: Yeah, this
[00:41:19] Steve: is bigger than the internet. This is bigger than anything we've ever had.
[00:41:22] Anna: will change how we work, think, act and live.
[00:41:28] Steve: But this goes back to, I'm gonna go back to our mantra at Wunder, more human experiences. And is this not the time to ground more into more human now, more than ever, while this tech is going off on one?
Because we have to really get ground in us as humans, right? What are we, what are our needs? What do we want our human experience to be? And how can this enable some of that? And support us. I know people are talking about augmentation of this thing and these words that we're labeling and using at the moment as justification or to try and make us feel easy that we're going at it in the right mindset.
But it just goes back to my point. I think maybe it's easy to get swept up with
[00:42:10] Anna: then I need to ask, when you say that, when you say more human, what do you mean?
[00:42:17] Steve: So for me, I'm having my human experience. We're individually every day I wake up, we have our, it's time based typically. So actually, if we then looked at maybe something like the wheel of life, what is my human experience looking like every day?
What's my career? What's my knowledge, my learning, my family time, my health, my all of these components of our wheel of life that spins around every single day.
And
if we were to say actually, do you know what? I actually want to spend more time proactively on my health, or I want if that's your jam, you want to do that, or I want to I want to have more time to do X if it's a time based thing now in the health industry, which is getting completely mental with AI and data, this is enabling a whole new level of personal.
I've got the aura ring and this is enabled So much. I've learned so much about myself just with this piece of tech not sponsored by them, by the way but that, that, for me, this technology enables me now to have,
[00:43:11] Anna: Not everyone who's listening knows what the ring
[00:43:13] Steve: is. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
So this, so the Aura Ring is a, is basically a ring that you wear and it monitors everything. Sleep is a really big one. It also your rhythm of sleep and what's your rhythm of sleep when you're in and out of it. Oxygen levels, your activity, the pace of activity, even those when you're stressed.
So you have a diagram when you're actually in stress periods or in middle.
[00:43:35] Anna: But not everyone will think this is a good thing because if you're now sitting listening to this and then you have three small children at home and they are not sleeping means you are not sleeping.
So Do not buy one of those rings, just go with the flow, try to survive, because we are more, a little bit older and our kids are not
below
10 any longer.
So that's the difference, right? And it's super stressful to have those. I have my My watch, which the same is, and I'm looking at it all the time and, Oh, I only have 37 minutes of activity today.
That's not good. I need to increase here. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. But the human experience for me, just to conclude what you're saying. So you talk about work life integration. That's the human experience.
For me, it's not about that. For me, the human experience is how you meet people, how you personalize things, how you make sure that people feel safe, how you make sure that here I, I have your back feeling.
That's for me the human part. So when we meet and greet, we either do that virtually, because someone is lucky enough to be in Spain instead of Stockholm, and it's minus seven in Stockholm today, so that's why I'm laughing, and it's damn dark in the afternoon and morning. So it's more about How do you make sure that people feel that you see them?
And if you, as an employer, can do that, then you will be successful. Because everyone will know there is a place at the table for me, and if I'm not there one day, someone will notice. buT it's also about how can we help people to have, how can I support you so you can create your own best life? And life experience. Um. And that's something that should be teached in schools in Sweden, and it's not. So we have a lot of weird subjects in school, but we never talk about life management.
[00:45:55] Steve: No. And finance as well,
[00:45:57] Anna: And finance is one, because finance, being, is one of the biggest topics right now in Sweden. So one thing that I forgot to say when you asked a little bit, so what do you look at, and how do you learn, and how do you stay relevant, et cetera.
And for me, that's I think it's some sort of fear to be made extinct or something because, and also it comes a little bit with age. I have a lot of friends who are in my age who are telling me it's not that many years left to work. And I'm like, what
[00:46:28] Steve: I'm like,
[00:46:30] Anna: I'm going to work until I'm plus 70. If I can, I'm not sure I can nevertheless.
So just also what you look at, and you said something about NATO, I'm heavily and too much interested in politics. So that means I'm interested in the society. I'm interested in how we build a good society. I'm interested to also see now how the heck can we destroy so much so fast with the two wars going on.
And
a media that is having a Big, negativity bias. We always only talk about the bad stuff. We never talk about the good stuff. So if you grow up luckily the young people are not watching ordinary channels in the sort of ordinary
TV media any longer. They are smart enough to not do that.
But nevertheless, so I think it's this, to conclude what I'm after is that what I'm always trying to do to stay relevant is talk about the big perspective, the huge perspective,
and then being able to go from that big perspective to the small perspective, which is the individual part, which means what do you need?
And what do I need?
And we always
care about. People always care more about themselves, that's just how it is, it's human behavior, so it doesn't, like when you make someone redundant, or you make a lot, a big group of people redundant, they don't care why, they want to hear uh, what's going to happen with me, am I, the only question you will sit with is, what's going to happen with me, will I have a position,
[00:48:22] Steve: Yeah.
[00:48:24] Anna: So it is about the individuals and it's also about the how do we want to create a better world going forward?
[00:48:30] Steve: And to your point earlier, when you're stuck in the weeds of workday and
[00:48:36] Anna: Yeah, I just hate it.
[00:48:37] Steve: you just, and there's no,
[00:48:39] Anna: And it's execution.
[00:48:40] Steve: we need to bring that
[00:48:41] Anna: And how do you know that you're executing on the right things? We don't know, we just execute. It's, you can work 24 7, without any problem.
[00:48:50] Steve: Yeah.
[00:48:51] Anna: aNd now people can't see what I'm doing, but I have something that I learned, that I'm now holding up my hand, and then I'm on one side towards Steve, and saying, if I'm saying yes to you, it's no to me, but if I turn it around and say no to Steve, then it's a yes to me. So if you need more Me time you need to start to say no to
[00:49:12] Steve: Yes. and
[00:49:13] Anna: it's actually not that painful when you have started
[00:49:16] Steve: like,
[00:49:18] Anna: I'm going to prioritize me.
I'm the most important. You are the most important person in your life That's the longest relationship you will have right?
[00:49:28] Steve: With
[00:49:28] Anna: so make sure you like who you are and
Yeah, I don't know.
[00:49:37] Steve: Anna, that's a beautiful way to end it. Thank you so much for sharing your most valuable asset, time. I'm really grateful for your contribution and yeah, sharing your perspective and giving us a bit of a glimpse into your world and how you think and the experience that you're having right now.
[00:49:52] Anna: thanks. Thanks for having me
[00:49:53] Steve: So welcome. Thank you.