The Stretch – The Evolution of the Chief People Leaders

Kevin Fyock:
Hello and welcome back to season two of The Stretch, a podcast brought to you by Aon that explores the latest breakthroughs and emerging ideas in workplace health and benefits. My name is Kevin Fyock, and I lead innovation for Aon Health Solutions. In this cutting edge podcast series, we discuss revolutionary approaches to employee wellbeing. We interview thought leaders in spotlight organizations that are setting new standards in employee benefits and health. On today's episode of The Stretch, we're going to do something a little bit different. Over the past year, we've been fortunate to have discussions with leaders in healthcare, technology, and academia to understand different problem solving approaches within an enormously challenging medical and care delivery system. And many of these solutions directly impact employers and their members. So we thought, why don't we take an opportunity to press pause and dig into that specifically. And so with that, let's examine the evolving role of the chief people leader.

In recent years, organizations have come to rely on their people leaders more and more, and it's not hard to see why. Of the key challenges facing organizations, many of them are people related. People leaders play a critical role in how organizations address issues like rising healthcare costs, workforce transformation, and building trust with employees. Because of these items and the volatility we're seeing throughout the world, we wanted to focus on this incredibly important role, and we've titled today's episode, The Evolution of the Chief People Leader. We have a very special guest joining the podcast, Aon's very own chief administrative officer, Lisa Stevens. Lisa, thank you so much for joining.

Lisa Stevens:
Kevin, I am absolutely thrilled to get to spend this time with you.

Kevin Fyock:
Wonderful. Well, hey, Lisa, for our guests, we'd love to hear about your background. Could you tell us about sort of your career journey, how you came to Aon?

Lisa Stevens:
I would love to do that. So first of all, I definitely do not have a traditional background in human resources. I actually spent majority of my career as a P&L leader in banking, so financial services and joined Aon almost seven years ago. It's hard to believe it's been that long. And about a year into my role in Aon, I had come in to help operationalize Aon United, which was a fantastic way to get to know the organization and to see how incredibly dynamic Aon was and all the things that it does and the impacts it has. And our CEO, Greg Case came to me on the question of would I ever consider a role in HR? And I remember having a conversation with my husband and him saying to me, "You talk about culture and people 95% of the time and have done that for as long as I've known you."

He's like, this seems like the perfect thing. It had never occurred to me how much it did matter to me. And I really do believe that I have the best job on the planet in terms of the opportunity to get to work with the amazing colleagues we have every single day. And so for me, the role really has been life-changing, literally life-changing. And in the time when there's been quite a bit going on in the world in the last seven years, as you and I both know, to get to be part of serving the colleagues and our communities and our clients and their families is a pure joy and honor.

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah. Lisa, that's great. And I love the transition from financial services to Aon, an amazing background. And I have even colleagues and clients that I've worked with who have had similar trajectories working in vastly different industries and transitioning to the HR side. So this is phenomenal. So maybe we could pull on that thread of evolution and transition and maybe you could walk us through the evolution of your role specifically over the last five to seven years.

Lisa Stevens:
It's pretty amazing. And I feel very fortunate to have a really, really great group of fellow chief people officers that I've been on this journey with for the past six years of being in the role. And to a person, I think COVID created a landscape that none of us expected or anticipated with the HR function around the emphasis of people. And so there's a humanness that I think organizations maybe had lost or hadn't had due to like technology and all the different things that happened. And suddenly we were all growing into our homes with kids running around in the background and dogs barking and the unpredictability of what was going to happen. And it was around the world. And it was a platform for HR organizations, again, around the world to really embrace how do we engage our people in different ways than we ever have before?

And it just brought an element, I think, to the role that has really brought us to where we are today, which is being much more thoughtful, much more predictive about what are things we need to do to support people? What are things we need to do to support our organizations to have people show up to be the best that they can be every day? And in that evolution, we've seen all sorts of things happening, right? Like the levels of burnout are so much higher than they've ever been before. The mental health challenges that every firm is focused on and dealing with that we hadn't seen in the past, and then just the volatility and the lack of certainty. And I think that's a big one, like there's a lot of uncertainty constantly coming at people. And so the people organization's role, our role is really to create certainty, to help people to be able to, and no pun intended, Kevin, but to really help our colleagues, just like our clients, to be able to make better decisions about how they're going to move forward, but also not getting frozen and continuing to move forward.

Kevin Fyock:
So Lisa, I love that because you touched on a handful of very specific risks, right? You mentioned mental health, you mentioned burnout. You even mentioned dogs barking in the background, maybe not the standard risk that we deal with, but a risk nonetheless. So maybe could you help us a little bit with opining on some of the specific risks that maybe you've seen take on more significance throughout your career, but maybe especially within the past seven years within your tenure here at Aon?

Lisa Stevens:
So I mean, there's a ton going on right now. I mean, again, Kevin, we could spend like a whole podcast just on the last three days of what's been going on in the world and what's the impact is. But I would say that I do think the COVID impact is huge. It's huge for our function. It's huge for every leader of every firm around the world in terms of the new workforce that's coming in. If you think about the workforce coming in right now, all of them spent at least probably one year or close to one year of their lives learning in a bedroom or on an iPad or in some way that wasn't the social interaction that you and I were given when we were at that age, right? So just think between the ages of like 15 to 22, what was the experience for the college student, for the university student, for the high school secondary student, and then just those whole interactions. So that's one that's huge. So we cannot ignore that.

What are we doing to onboard the new workforce that's coming in and understanding that there was a gap for them of social interaction that did not take place for a few years, tie into that technology, tie into that the fear of missing out, the fact that at any moment in time I can look on my phone and I think that someone else has a better life or something else that's happening. So the imposter syndrome issues that come in. So that I think is a big one for us, like how are we onboarding and bringing in this new cohort of workforce and really engaging them on the things that matter to them and that are important to them that are different than the generation just right ahead of them. So our generations have gotten smaller too in terms of that. So I'd say that's one.

And then I think it's traditional things that we're dealing with, like the pay transparency issues that we see around the world that we really have to be... I love it, by the way. It's hard, but it's great, right? Because this is about inclusion, this is about belonging, this is about fairness. And bringing equity and clarity to people around, like I want to know, am I being valued the same as other people from what I'm putting forward? And then I think the transformation around skill-based hiring is huge. And the opportunity for internal mobility, what we've seen in the last three to four years has been phenomenal. A lot of that has to do with generative AI and the ability to use AI. Even in our own AI database, we can look at 46 million different job postings and then pull skills out of it, generated by AI to say like, Kevin is amazing at the job he's doing today, but you know what? He would be a phenomenal marketer, communications person based on the skills. And I think that's been a big evolution for us as well.

Kevin Fyock:
And I think what I love about those different risks is they're connected quite a bit, right? And I also love that you touched on COVID. There's this COVID hangover and oftentimes we talk about, well, post 2020, the pandemic is behind us, but you're spot on, Lisa, that I think the workforce impact has been so tremendous that we're only realizing some of the impacts to your point around training and around integration. And younger people who are starting different careers, they've done all their learning and development entirely virtually. So it's a problem. So I appreciate you pointing that out as a pretty macro risk. So Lisa, I've been at Aon for a few years now, and I know, we know that we place a tremendous emphasis on data. And we oftentimes describe ourselves as a data-led advisory firm. So as a leader here at Aon, I'm curious within your role, how do you approach our focus on the idea of prediction and tracking as a method to respond to some of the people risks that you mentioned?

Lisa Stevens:
And I again, there's so many things about our organization that make it such a phenomenal opportunity to be in the role I'm in, right? Because I get to be the incubator and I get to be the one that benefits from all the work that your team's doing or that our talent team's doing or that our wealth team is doing. And even in some things that our risk team is doing, right? To understand like where we're going when a catastrophe happens and how quickly we can respond because we're such a data rich organization that can provide us with, okay, where and how are we going to invest our energies or our resources, both from a people perspective and then from a monetary perspective. But a consequent management framework has been huge for us in terms of using that data to be able to help us to make sure that we have really strong people risk processes that are in place to protect our colleagues, to protect our colleagues also on their conduct, on the conduct of our leaders.

We've done a tremendous amount around inclusion risk. So really driving how are we building a diverse workplace, which includes how we're looking at what we're doing around promotions, what we're doing around hiring, retention, recruiting, and then how are we making sure that we're attracting and retaining the top talent? How are we making sure that through the data we can see that we're taking our high potential colleagues and we're developing them, and again, providing them with opportunities to do different things inside the organization based upon their skills. And so that colleague development piece is really, really important too, again, an opportunity for us to be able to attach, again, different things that we're seeing through our data on, could be around sustainability. So we're big on the human sustainability piece with our colleagues and understanding where do we have opportunities for that. And then just overall landscape around engagement is big.

Like even, Kevin, I would just say as of late, we did a global survey around the world that I'm using, which says that only one in three employees right now feel comfortable in wanting to adopt AI and wanting to learn and use AI. So we have a massive gap right now on where we are with generative AI and people using generative AI. So based on that data, what do we need to do at Aon to get to a three out of three, like where every employee feels comfortable seeing the benefits of AI. And we could talk about that more if you want to later, because I think that's a big opportunity for people, organizations around the world to really be focused on the change in management around helping their employees with that.

And then just overall colleague wellbeing. I mean, this is, again, I started with this at the beginning, but the things that we're doing around our employee assistance programs and making sure where we see trends, we're able to go into different countries, different segments of the population and say, these are resources we need to provide and put in for our colleagues. I could get another whole episode with you on this topic, but again, we're making decisions based on the information that's being brought to us. After we get the information, we're going out with programs and then we're getting data to make sure where do we have to pivot? Where do we have to switch? What do we start doing? What do we stop doing?

Kevin Fyock:
So Lisa, your comments specifically around artificial intelligence sort of resonates with so many conversations I've had with clients too, where I think one, employees oftentimes don't know where to start. Employers don't know where to start too, but the desire to do something is great, but there's a gap between the do something versus understanding sort of how you can actually put those solutions into motion. So the score you referenced on our own survey, I think is very consistent with conversations we're having with clients. And obviously I loved your comment around colleague wellbeing because it's something I spend so much of my own time doing. And so maybe with that, we could transition to more benefits focus. And we know, my team knows, I think our whole organization knows that benefits are really central to an employer's employee value proposition. We have realized that they have just a really outsized impact on an organization's people strategy from how it rewards to how it incentivizes employees.

But you've said this several times since we started talking, the workforce is really changing pretty rapidly. And as employees are evolving and as the workforce continues to transform, in your view, how can employers make sure that they're responding to the needs of not just the business, but maybe even more importantly, the people that work for them?

Lisa Stevens:
Like I could take it from a CFO perspective here too. Healthcare costs are 21% in the GDP, and you could tell me this, but I think the average is 9% increase every year.

Kevin Fyock:
It is, and it's trending even higher too, Lisa. It's like the talk that we're having with our clients now.

Lisa Stevens:
So I mean, this is such a big deal, right? It's a massive investment. So a couple of things and I will just say, I do think this is really big is the analytics that we are getting. So as a client of yours, the analytics that you're providing us to help us on how we're using our benefits and shifting them around. So like take the health risk analyzer, what do we need to do for certain populations in our organization? So it's not about spending more money, it's about where are we spending the money, right? And you're helping us with that ability to do that, which plays into all sorts of things, right? When you think about benefits and the evolution of the world. But a big one is women's health. Clearly, I mean, Kevin, there has not been enough focus on women's health for a very, very long time.

And so our ability to put a big emphasis on menopause, if you think about something that's an eight to 10 year timeframe, like the education we need to be putting and benefits we need to be putting in front of women to know what are the things that you need to be doing in your early 40s so that when you get to your 60s, you don't have osteoporosis. Those weren't conversations that companies were having. It's our accountability and responsibility to do that. We need to do it through the programs that we offer. And two, how are we helping people deal with elder care? We've got a really, really big focus on childcare. We need to have the same focus on elder care. And what are we doing there to help and assist our colleagues again around the population? We're able to do that because of, again, the data that we're getting from our colleagues on the things that they need.

They need to see that we're putting out there for them. And I would just say this whole opportunity for us on the benefits piece to be agile and also to recognize every time I talk to you, it's like there's something new we need to be thinking about and where do we want to be first to market and where do we want to be fast followers?

Kevin Fyock:
Yeah. So your comment on both women's health and elder care, I think two really good examples and even hearkening back to your comment around inclusion risk, right? So the idea of finding ways to be more inclusive with the benefits that you're offering, I love those examples. And we keep talking to our clients about both of those and so many other opportunities. And you also mentioned, I love how your initial reaction was you could answer it like the CFO because we are in a realm where we have enormously high healthcare trend. Virtually every single employer is dealing with this now. And this is a global issue too. It's not just the United States. But I think my concern, Lisa, and I would love your perspective on this too, is when we talk to our clients, it's not just about year over year medical trend, but it's about leverage trend over a five-year period.

And when you have trend of 10% for five years in a row that amount to 50 plus percent over five years, it becomes a total rewards. It becomes a human capital conversation because inevitably we're going to have concerns with things like wage suppression. And there's only so many dollars that every organization has to spend. And when healthcare trend is massively outpacing every single one of those other items from a benefits pie and from a total rewards pie, it enters an entirely new risk, a new people risk associated with even just compensation and how wages could be suppressed.

Lisa Stevens:
Again, we can spend a long time on this, but there's so much to unpack here about the entire colleague, right? And the full, like how are you addressing the full colleague? How are you addressing the different generations? So two things. One is that you think about artificial intelligence and generative AI. We say like AI isn't going to replace people, people who understand the newest AI are going to replace people who don't, right? That's the opportunity. But also where and how are we leveraging AI to create better balance, better wellness for people. So again, how are we using that to, how are we seeing that as a benefit? But that's coaching and leading and learning. And then it's saying, okay, we're flipping this on its head. You spend way too much time with people having access to you. Now we're going to give you tools and things that are going to make you super efficient so that you have more downtime to be with your family, to be exercising, to be spending time, the wellness piece.

But it's that whole employee, right? That we have to really be thinking about that it can't just be the health benefits, right? It has to be the... What are all the other things? The other thing that people don't, and I was with a CPO yesterday and they call them regeneration days. And we have our global wellbeing days inside of Aon. Those are one of the most popular things that we do because everyone's pretty much so not everybody can be down, but everybody, you're not getting the emails, you're not getting the traffic. That's super important to this next generation of workforce too, right? And so we have to be thinking about those things too. How are we managing time off? How are we managing the safety of our colleagues? All those things play such a big role. And there's a lot to unpack in terms of like how do you create that full experience for your colleagues beyond the benefits, but then it feeling like it's benefits?

Kevin Fyock:
Lisa, I completely agree. And while I sit within Health Solutions, the conversations that we're having more and more is it's a human capital conversation, right? The examples you give on leave and our amazing wellbeing days are perfect examples. It rounds out an entire offering and makes an organization stickier and it makes people really bring their best self to work every day. So why don't we pull on that thread a little bit around this notion of a thriving employee. So we've said time and time again at Aon that a thriving organization does rely on a thriving set of employees. And maybe to say it another way, when you support employees, and you've mentioned this and things you've said today, you're inevitably supporting the business. And as someone who's spent the past couple of years at Aon, I've seen how our organization has really shown up to support its colleagues. So would you mind sharing a few examples of how, in your opinion, we've shown up, how Aon has shown up for its employees?

Lisa Stevens:
So, and again, it's our colleagues, it's their family members, it's our communities. I think that it's embedded in the culture of the organization we are. And because we're also a company that spends a tremendous amount of time helping people manage risk, and there's so much risk going on, we are a role model, I think for what we do for our own colleagues. And so I can think just most recently about the fires in Los Angeles and the impact that that had on both our colleagues and our clients and their families. And our opportunity to bring in our physical security team along with our reinsurance team who has the data and analytics that was able to help us like pinpoint where were our colleagues' homes in danger? What information did we need to get to our clients? The combination of that human element, again, with the data and information we can use, we were able to act really fast to help our team.

So the things that we're doing in Ukraine, right? I mean, most recently coming up with a $350 million package to really help them rebuild during the time of war, to the things that we did internally for our own colleagues and families. So we were one of the first companies and then we helped other companies, right? To get all the women and children moved into Poland and then to figure out a way to keep our colleagues that had to stay and their sons that had to stay safe. And we were able to do that with the data and information. Our physical security was able to pull from our risk teams that we're able to help us to figure out, like here's how we're going to get them over the border and here's the things that we're going to do to create safety. But those are just two... I mean, there's things happening around the world all the time. I could pull a bunch.

But the comprehensive approach we're able to take because of what we do every day for our clients makes it really, really special for Aon as colleagues for us to be able to really put a very, very dynamic, comprehensive approach around how we're going to help and support them in these uncertain times.

Kevin Fyock:
I really like those two examples. And I'll say, especially from a Ukraine perspective, that was the time that I probably felt proudest to be an employee at Aon, just our response to our colleagues, right? But then also how we sort of answered the call just from a broader risk perspective. So I mean, just kudos to you and the whole team for how we respond to that, but a very prideful time to be at Aon. So with that, why don't we come back to benefits again. And again, the health solutions guy, we have to keep bringing it back to benefits, right? So as our conversation is nearing a close and we're talking about how we're supporting employees and thinking about them in a materially different way, one topic that comes to mind in virtually every conversation we're having with our clients is GLP-1s. So I would love your take, Lisa, on how we're thinking about GLP-1s and how maybe the support with these pharmaceuticals could ultimately translate to workplace success.

Lisa Stevens:
Yeah. And Kevin, I'm going to embarrass you for a second because a little more than a year ago, I was at a conference where you were speaking and you were talking about the explosion of GLP-1s and you predicted where we are right now. And I remember that very, very clearly in terms of like, you can't go anywhere without people wanting to have a conversation about this. This I think is another... I mean, again, talk about the Ukraine example. I would say this is probably one of the things that I'm most proud of as an Aon colleague is our ability to take, again, data and information and be an incubator for all of you to be able to say, "Here's the things that we're doing. We're a 60,000 person firm, so the opportunity for us to try things and do things is really important."

So things that we know because of Aon and because of the amazing data and analytics that we have to be able to drive decisions is off of the 50 million person base that the health team had put together. They've been watching over a 100,000 patients, people who have been taking GLP-1s now for more than 22 months. And then there is a ghost control group, a digital twin that they've been following, same claim, same demographics, everything. And that information has been what we have been using to make the decisions we've been making about what we're doing for our colleagues and their family members. I'll get to the punchline in a second. But back in third quarter, we made the decision that... And we were already offering GLP-1s to our colleagues, but we made it more accessible and more affordable to all of our colleagues starting in North America, and then we'll roll it out to the rest of the world. So we starting with about 15,000 colleagues where they have easy access, their family members have easy access, as well as monitoring opportunities.

So an ability for them and for us to monitor, making sure that they're taking the drug consistently. Because one of the things that we know is that in order for GLP-1s to work, they have to be taken consistently. And then how do you deal with the side effects, the nausea, the other things that can happen. And so having access to that and understanding that is super important too and dosing and all those things, and I'm not a doctor. So our job is to make it available to our colleagues and their family members, which is what we've done. And I'm really proud of that and I'm really proud of where we're at. What we're seeing in the market though with my peers, as I've peers that have been doing this for one year, two years, and they're like, it's so expensive. The drug is so expensive in the United States in particular, and they're really struggling with it. And we've seen some really large firms actually cancel their programs that they have and always when it comes to obesity and the treatment of obesity. So we're talking obesity, not just diabetes, right?

So just focused on the obesity piece. Our data, again, a base of 50 million people, we have over a 100,000 that we've been watching that have been on it, is that when you hit 18 months of being on the drug, you actually bend the curve. The cost actually starts to go down in the opposite direction by almost 10 points. And so there's a massive reason to stay with it, but the price goes up so much in the beginning, Kevin. You see a massive swing because the drug, one is expensive. And two, hey, you all of a sudden you're starting to go to the doctor more and you're starting to find other things that you want to be treat or take care of that maybe you haven't done before. But once you hit that 18 months, we're seeing a decrease in all sorts of onsets to different things that come into play.

And I won't get in all that. I'm not the medical doctor here to do that. But the data that has been put in front of me as the buyer, as the person that's buying it and doing it is, we need to keep making this available to our colleagues. And we're helping companies to be able to make that same decision versus you're seeing an immediate cost in the beginning. And we talked about healthcare costs, but if you actually, if this can actually help to control healthcare costs long-term. And I'm not even talking about less days of being absent, more engagement, more productivity, this is just based purely on claims and on costs per person. So massive opportunity for us and for the world, quite frankly, to put information and data in front of organizations so they can make the right decision about how they want to do their benefits.

Kevin Fyock:
So Lisa, I so appreciate you sharing and sort of commend how much you've leaned into this. I also love this as a use case in a representative example of how pharma, how innovation within medical care broadly has changed so rapidly. And so I think as you talked about how employers can respond, in this case specifically the GLP-1s, there's a thread to say, this is setting the foundation to help us better respond to the emerging list of gene and cell therapy drugs that are enormously expensive, but absolutely life-changing drugs. So while I may have predicted along with so many other colleagues sort of how this is going to be the main conversation that we are having, I'm an optimist in that I think it's, again, setting the foundation to allow us to be more nimble and respond to other innovations that are absolutely life-changing. So again, thanks for sharing. I think that's great.

Lisa Stevens:
And I totally agree. So I just want to say there's so much more coming, right? I can't wait to hear your next podcast because maybe there'll be more on that. There's so much opportunity for people to live lives feeling better and being more well than before. I don't even know how else to put it based upon what's happening with medicine, but navigating it is a lot.

Kevin Fyock:
It's very challenging. And I think it even goes back to what you said before on. It just helps somebody bring their best self to work, right? Being able to show up and feel better is, to your point, ostensibly going to impact productivity and reduction in absenteeism. You were just talking about claims costs, but there's so many other benefits to this and other sort of opportunities to innovate when you think about the colleague at the core. So Lisa, maybe one last question for you. All of our guests, I asked them a similar question, maybe I'll do a bit of a different spin for you. You've illustrated for us the role of the chief people leader has evolved drastically in the past five to 10 years. And normally I ask the question, how do you think it might shift and transform in the next five to 10 years?

But you've sort of alluded to the fact that maybe we even need to talk about the next five to 10 days rather than the next five to 10 years. So I would love you to look in your crystal ball and tell me sort of what you see on the horizon.

Lisa Stevens:
For chief people leaders, I think that the role continues to get more and more dynamic and our responsibility and our accountability to the world for us not to lose sight of our humanity. And to remember the lessons of COVID and remember the lessons of us bonding together across organizations, across communities, across the world, that's our obligation is, as we go through all this change, as we go through all these uncertain things that are happening, how are we connecting people back to purpose, connecting people back to the good of the world, the good of the things that they can do? And I see more than ever that organizations, companies, businesses have an absolute obligation to keep that thread alive around the world, and it starts with the people organization.

So I see that in the next five to 10 days and five to 10 years of, and again, I use the AI as an example of like how do you turn that into something exceptionally positive while managing all the risks that go around it, but being able to see a vision of the good people can do and the good that companies and organizations can do and having your people feel connected and part of that and feeling like they belong, we've got to just hold onto that. And that's why it's been so important in the last two years and we can't lose that. And we've got to stay out there as vigilant as possible on it.

Kevin Fyock:
Well, I can't imagine a more optimistic way to end the podcast. So thanks for that. I think my big takeaway is I'll remember lessons in bonding because you're right, I think there are some very great lessons that we've all been through in the past five years. So thanks for the optimistic and to our show. So thank you so much for joining and lending your expertise. This was a lot of fun, Lisa.

Lisa Stevens:
Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin Fyock:
And to our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the evolution of the Chief People Leader. This is the sixth episode in season two of The Stretch, a podcast dedicated to the ideas that are revolutionizing the world of workplace health and benefits. If you've enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to check out the previous episodes. And if you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast so you can get the latest updates. Thanks so much and goodbye.