Workforce Labs: Every Organisation Has a Boardroom. Very Few Have a Rehearsal Room.

In this episode of Edan Haddock – Total Talent, Edan introduces the concept of the Workforce Lab - a new way of thinking about how organisations prepare for the future of work.

As technology, AI and workforce expectations evolve at an unprecedented pace, Edan explores why traditional governance and annual workforce planning are no longer enough. Instead, he makes the case for creating dedicated spaces where organisations can experiment, challenge assumptions and prototype new ways of working before change is forced upon them.

Drawing on his experience as a Talent practitioner, Edan shares what a Workforce Lab is, how it differs from another committee, who should be involved, and why the organisations that learn and adapt the fastest will be the ones that thrive.

A thought-provoking episode for Talent, HR and business leaders looking to move beyond managing today's workforce and start designing tomorrow's.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Eden Haddock Total Talent. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Whether you're listening on the way to work, out walking the dog, sitting on a plane, or maybe you've got me playing through your headphones while you're trying to smash through your inbox. Thanks, really honestly, thanks for spending a little time with me this week. If this is your first time listening, welcome. This is a little different. There are no guests, there are no sponsors, nobody's paid to be here. It's just me, one practitioner, still on the tools, still recruiting, still working with leaders. And still making mistakes, still learning every single day. And then jumping behind the microphone every week to share those thoughts with you all. That's always been the point of this podcast. Not to pretend I've got the answers, but hopefully to ask a few questions that make us think a little differently. Today's episode started exactly like that. With a question. Actually, it started with a meaning. Now, before anyone gets defensive, this isn't about one meeting. It wasn't a bad meeting. In fact, it was a really productive meeting. Good people, good dis good discussion, smart ideas, lots and lots of action items, you know the sort, right? We we have those every week, we have those every day. Everyone leaves feeling like progress has been made. But I remember walking back to my desks afterwards thinking, we spend an awful lot of time talking about work, reviewing work, managing work, reporting on work, planning work, governance around work. Yet where do we actually invent work? Where do we experiment? Where do we challenge the assumptions we've all quietly accepted over the last twenty years? Where do we ask the really ridiculous questions? The ones that sound completely crazy at first. Until, of course, six months later, everyone wishes they thought of them first, right? But that question stayed with me, and over the following weeks it kept popping back into my head. And every time I was in another meeting, every time we reimagined AI tooling, or every time I read another LinkedIn post predicting the future of talent, I kept coming back to exactly the same thought. Maybe organizations don't need another committee. Maybe they need somewhere to rehearse. Now, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you'll know I love my music. I've always loved music. And not because it's perfect. Actually, quite the opposite. The best bands rarely get it right the first time. Songs evolve, lyrics change, guitar riffs get rewritten, entire albums get thrown in the bin and started again. What the audience eventually hears is the finished product. But nobody sees the rehearsal room. Nobody sees the experimentation. Nobody sees the arguments. Nobody sees the terrible ideas that eventually lead to the brilliant ones. Innovation doesn't happen on stage. It happens long before the lights come on. And that's when it hit me. Every organization has a boardroom. Very few have a rehearsal room. And I actually stopped and wrote that down because I thought there's something in that. We've become incredibly good at governance. And don't get me wrong, governance matters. Risk matters, compliance matters, accountability matters. None of those things are going away. But governance exists to protect today. Who's designing tomorrow? Think about your own organization. How many meetings happen every week? Hundreds, thousands, executive meetings, leadership meetings, steering committees, project boards, transformation meetings, operational updates, risk forums, budget reviews, status meetings, meetings about meetings. But now answer me this. How many of those meetings exist purely to explore the future? Not to approve it, not to budget for it, not to review it, but to explore it. To ask what if? Because what if might just be the most underrated question in business? What if AI changes this role? What if we recruited completely differently? What if leadership looked different? What if jobs disappeared? What if entirely new ones emerged? What if we stopped organizing work the way we've always organized it? They're fascinating conversations. But where do they happen? Not squeezed into the last five minutes out of an agenda. Not after everyone says, sorry, we're running out of time. Innovation deserves better than that. It deserves its own space. And that's what I want to talk about today. A concept I'm calling the Workforce Lab. Now, before any of you jump on LinkedIn later today and tell me that somebody somewhere already uses that name, well, great, right? This isn't about owning a name. It's about introducing a way of thinking. Because I genuinely believe that organizations are missing something. Not more technology, not another platform, not another framework. A capability. A capability to experiment, to prototype, to challenge, to test, to learn. And I think that's becoming one of the biggest competitive advantages an organization can have. And I'll tell you why. The world isn't changing every year anymore. It's changing every week. Think about the conversations we're having today that we weren't having two years ago. Generative AI, agentic AI, digital employees, prompt engineering, AI literacy, skills-based organizations, human and AI collaboration. These weren't mainstream conversations. Now they're everywhere. So I'll ask you something, right? If the world of work is changing every single week, why do organizations still only rethink work once a year through planning cycles? It doesn't make sense. We treat workforce planning like it's a budgeting exercise. We gather data, make assumptions, produce a document, present it, approve it. Then we put it on the shelf until next year. Meanwhile, the world keeps moving. You know, again, imagine a band rehearsing only once a year. Imagine recording one album, then refusing to write a song for twelve months. That's ridiculous. Yet that's often how we approach workforce strategy. We freeze our thinking. Then we wonder why we're always reacting instead of leading. For me, in our talent world and in the talent space, that's where a workforce lab comes in. And it's not another committee. Actually, it's the opposite of a committee. Committees exist to make decisions. Labs exist to ask questions. Committees reduce uncertainty, whereas labs embrace it. For example, committees will say, Here's the proposal. But labs will ask, what haven't we thought about yet? It's a huge difference. And really, I feel like our profession has become obsessed with certainty. We love practice, frameworks, templates, playbooks, benchmarks. And yeah, they're useful until they stop us exploring. There's something I've learned over the years. The biggest breakthroughs rarely begin as best practice. They begin as somebody asking a question everybody else thought was a little strange. And those could be things like, what if I removed CVs? What if candidates interviewed us? What if AI handled administration? Was crazy once? What if we measured potential differently? What if jobs weren't fixed and were more fluid? Every one of those ideas sounded unusual once, but now some of them are becoming reality. Not because somebody knew the answer, but because somebody created the space to ask the question. And that's why I think every organization needs a rehearsal room. Not somewhere to perform, but somewhere to practice. To test, to learn, to get things wrong. Because getting things wrong in a rehearsal room is better than getting them wrong in front of twenty thousand people. And that's exactly how I think organizations should approach the future of work. So if I've convinced you that organizations need a rehearsal room, what actually what what actually happens inside of it? Because as I said, this isn't another committee. It isn't another governance forum. It isn't another transformation office. And it definitely isn't another meeting where everybody spends 20 minutes deciding who's taking the minutes. A workforce lab has one purpose. To explore the workforce questions your organization hasn't answered yet. Not next year's questions, tomorrow's questions. And that's an important difference. You see, I don't think the workforce lab should own projects. I think it should own curiosity. Because projects eventually end, and curiosity shouldn't. Imagine somebody walks into the room and says, I've got an idea. The response shouldn't be, okay, go and write a business case, right? Or let's take it to the steering committee. It should be, let's test it. See, that's the culture I'd want. Small experiments, low risk, fast learning. If it works, brilliant, scale it. If it doesn't, fantastic, we've learned something. Move on. That's not failure. That's progress. And I think one of the biggest mistakes organizations make is believing that innovation has to be expensive. And it doesn't. Innovation is often incredibly small. It's changing one interview question. It's trialing AI with one recruiter. It's redesigning one part of the onboarding experience. It's testing a different way of giving feedback. Little experiments. That's how great ideas grow. Not because somebody had a million-dollar budget, but because someone was given permission to try. Now, if I were building a workforce lab tomorrow, I'd probably start with three topics. Not 30, three. The first would be AI. And before anyone rolls their eyes, because of course AI is everywhere, stay with me, please. Because I actually think we've been asking the wrong question. Most organizations ask, can AI make us faster and fair enough? But I think there's a much bigger question. What work should humans stop doing? They're completely different conversations. If AI can schedule interviews, great. If AI can summarize notes, fantastic. If AI can draft job advertisements, even better. And that doesn't make recruiters less valuable. It makes human conversations more valuable. Because of course, suddenly recruiters spend less time on administration and more time advising, building relationships, coaching leaders, understanding capability, doing the work only humans can do. That's the conversation I'd want inside a workforce lab. Not what tool should we buy? But what should good, great, in fact, human work look like in an AI-enabled organization? Now that's interesting. The second topic I'd explore, candidate experience. Not because candidate experience is new, we've been talking about it for years, but because I think we've accidentally designed recruitment around organizational convenience, not candidate experience. Think about it a lot of these platforms and a lot of these processes. We ask candidates to create accounts, upload resumes, re-enter everything manually, complete assessments, wait weeks for feedback, navigate complicated career sites. We'd never tolerate that experience if we were buying something online. So why do we expect candidates to tolerate it? Imagine if your workforce lab looked at every step of recruitment through one question. If we were designing this from scratch today, would we build it this way? I reckon the answer would be no to a lot of it. Maybe applications become conversations. Maybe I do remove repetitive administration. Maybe candidates get instant updates. Maybe interview feedback becomes a standard because of optional. Please, I hope it is, everyone out there. Maybe recruitment starts feeling less like a process and more like a relationship. That's the type of thinking I want happening. Not because I know exactly what recruitment will become, but because somebody has started imagining it. And the third topic, future skills. Not skills frameworks, not skills taxonomies. I'm not into all that. Future capability. What are the capabilities our organization is going to need three years from now that we don't have today? Not job titles, capabilities. They're different. Technology changes, job titles change, capabilities endure, curiosity, adaptability, critical thinking, communication, learning, judgment. Those things become more valuable, not less, especially as AI continues to evolve. And that's where I think talent has a huge opportunity. You know, for years we've measured ourselves by hiring, our time to hire, our cost per hire, our agency spend, offer acceptance. And again, don't get me wrong, important metrics. But maybe they're no longer the headline. Maybe talent becomes known for something much bigger. Helping organizations build capability before they desperately need it. That's exciting. Because it changes the conversation completely. Now, here's something else I've been thinking about. Who actually belongs inside a workforce lab? And the answer might surprise you. I actually don't think ongoing that it has permanent members. I don't think there's, you know, like a chairperson, a deputy chair, or standing agenda items. I think people change depending on the question. If you're talking AI, invite technology, legal, talent, operations, people experience. If you're talking future capability, bring in learning, business leaders, finance, analytics. The problem determines the room, not the organizational chart. Because workforce challenges don't belong to departments. They actually belong to organizations. That's another shift I think we're going to see over the next few years. Less ownership and more collaboration. Less this belongs to HR, more this belongs to all of us. And personally, I think that's a much healthier place to be. Now, before I wrap up, I want to come back to where we started the rehearsal room. Because I keep thinking about that, you know, nobody expects a band to walk onto the stage without rehearsing. Nobody expects them to create an incredible album without experimenting. Nobody expects perfection on the first attempt. In fact, the songs we end up loving, they've usually started as rough ideas. A scribble on a notebook. A guitar if somebody almost ignored. A melody that sounded terrible the first time. But then someone kept working on it. Organization should work exactly the same way. Create somewhere ideas can breathe. Somewhere people can ask difficult questions. Somewhere experiments are encouraged. Somewhere learning matters more than looking clever. Because the truth, the the future of work isn't going to be designed in quarterly governance meetings. It'll be designed by organizations prepared to experiment while everyone else is waiting for that certainty. And that's really what today's episode has been about. Not creating another HR initiative, creating a capability. A capability to keep asking what if. Before somebody else asks, why didn't we? I'm experimenting with Workforce Lab at Movember, and we're experimenting in a small way with workforce planning. We're making our start. That's our forum, that's our curiosity platform, that's our challenge platform, that's our collaboration space. So I'll leave you with one final thought. If you walked into your organization tomorrow and asked, Where do we rehearse the future of work? Would anyone know where to send you? If the answer is no, maybe that's your opportunity. Maybe you don't need permission. Maybe you just need to start the conversation. Because every great movement starts with an idea. Every great song starts with a single note. And maybe the future of work, of course, starts with one room. A room where curiosity is valued, where assumptions are challenged, where experimentation is celebrated, and where people are encouraged to imagine what's possible long before everybody else catches up. Thanks so much for listening. If today's episode made you think differently, I'd love it if you shared it with someone else in talent, HR, or leadership. Let's get the conversation going. And as always, there are no guests, no sponsors, just one practitioner trying to help move our profession forward. Until next time, stay curious. Keep challenging convention. And remember from today's episode every organization has a boardroom. The best ones will also have a rehearsal room. Thanks again for listening.