In this HCI Webinar, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Francoise Brougher about rethinking the workforce of the future. Francoise Brougher is a pioneering technology leader with more than 25 years of experience scaling category-defining companies and driving AI-first business transformation. She currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Pebl (formerly Velocity Global), where she is leading the company’s reinvention as an AI-first global workforce platform. Under her leadership, Pebl is reshaping the Employer of Record industry by combining 10+ years of compliance precision with AI-driven simplicity, speed, and transparency, empowering companies to hire and manage talent across 185+ countries. Francoise has a proven track record of building and scaling global organizations responsible for multi-billion-dollar revenue growth. She took both Square (2015) and Pinterest (2019) public as the executive leader of GTM strategy. Earlier at Google, she scaled SMB Global Sales and Operations into a 15B+ business, pioneering the application of machine learning to customer engagement. She currently serves on the boards of Qonto (Chair, Compensation Committee), Too Good To Go, and as a Board Observer at Alan. She started her career in Japan, working for L'Oreal in a manufacturing plant for three years, where she installed a Computer-Assisted Manufacturing System. After her MBA, she joined Booz Allen and Hamilton in Paris and San Francisco.

In this HCI Webinar, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Simon T. Bailey about his recent book, Resilience@Work: How to Coach Yourself Into a Thriving Future. Simon T. Bailey is the world’s leading expert in Brilliance. His groundbreaking research, State of Working America Report Thriving in Resilience and Brilliance, solidifies his insights in his 11th book, Resilience@Work: How to Coach Yourself Into a Thriving Future. With Disney Institute as his launchpad, he’s left an indelible mark on 2,400 plus organizations in 54 countries, including American Express, Deloitte, Visa, Signet Jewelers, and Taco Bell. He has made a remarkable impact on 120,000 professionals who’ve experienced his pioneering courses on the LinkedIn Learning platform. He’s also been recognized as Success Magazine’s Top 25, alongside Brené Brown, Tony Robbins, and Oprah Winfrey, as well as being on leadersHum Top 200 Power List.

This video discusses how modern workplaces, despite being equipped with numerous productivity tools, inadvertently sabotage employee focus and productivity through constant digital distractions. These distractions—such as chat pings, email notifications, and frequent meetings—fracture attention and prevent deep, meaningful work. This state of persistent interruption is termed “digital distraction,” a widespread, yet often overlooked problem that drains cognitive resources and reduces organizational effectiveness. Contrary to popular belief, increased connectivity and communication do not equate to higher productivity; instead, they create a paradox where tools designed to help work become the primary source of disruption. Highlights 🧠 Digital distractions at work erode attention and undermine productivity. ⏳ Task switching costs employees over 23 minutes to regain focus after interruptions. 📧 Clear communication charters define tool usage and response expectations. 🛑 No-meeting days and quiet hours create protected blocks for deep work. 👥 Leadership behavior is critical in modeling and enforcing focus-friendly culture. 📊 Shift performance metrics from busyness to quality and outcomes. 🔒 Individuals can become “indistractable” through timeboxing and managing internal triggers. Key Insights 🧩 Digital distraction is a systemic workplace epidemic: The modern work environment, saturated with multiple communication platforms, creates a fragmented attention landscape. Despite intentions to enhance productivity, the proliferation of tools like Slack, Teams, and email actually compete for cognitive bandwidth, leaving employees in a constant state of fractured focus. This systemic issue demands organizational intervention rather than blaming individual willpower. ⏳ The neurological cost of multitasking is substantial: Research by Gloria Mark reveals that regaining focus after an interruption takes an average of 23 minutes. This “attention residue” effect means that even short, seemingly benign distractions snowball into significant productivity losses. For tasks requiring deep concentration—such as coding, writing, or strategic thinking—the impact is even more pronounced, as these activities rely on sustained working memory and uninterrupted focus. 📚 Communication charters provide clarity and reduce noise: Defining clear rules around when and how to use communication tools can drastically reduce unnecessary interruptions. For example, designating email for detailed, non-urgent communication with a 24-hour response window, and reserving chat for quick, urgent questions, helps employees prioritize and manage their attention. Explicit guidelines eliminate ambiguity and reduce the pressure to be constantly responsive. 🛡 Protected time blocks are essential for deep work: Institutionalizing no-meeting days, quiet hours, or default shorter meetings helps create psychological safety for employees to focus without guilt. These measures acknowledge that focus is a collective organizational resource, not an individual luxury, and that uninterrupted periods are critical for meaningful productivity and innovation. 👔 Leadership behavior shapes workplace culture: Managers who respect boundaries, avoid sending late-night emails, and visibly protect their own focus time set a tone that allows employees to do the same. Without leadership modeling, policies become ineffective, as employees feel pressured to be always available. Leaders must embody and enforce focus-friendly norms to build a culture of sustained attention. 🎯 Outcome-based metrics foster healthier work practices: Measuring productivity by busyness or responsiveness incentivizes constant distraction and quick replies at the expense of quality. Instead, organizations should prioritize goal attainment and the quality of completed work, trusting employees to manage their time effectively. This shift reduces the hyper-responsiveness culture that fuels burnout and distraction. 🔄 Individuals can reclaim attention through intentional scheduling: Becoming “indistractable” involves mastering internal triggers that lead to distraction and using techniques like timeboxing to allocate specific focus blocks in the calendar. Treating these blocks as inviolable appointments prevents interruptions and builds habits that protect cognitive resources, empowering employees to navigate a distracting environment more effectively. Like and share if this helped — try one strategy this week and tell us the results! #DigitalDistraction #DeepWork #AttentionManagement #Productivity #OrganizationalPerformance OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - The Hidden Cost of a Hacked Brain 00:00:46 - Why More Tools Mean Less Work 00:02:22 - The Organisational Playbook 00:03:41 - The Manager's Role in a Distraction-Free Culture 00:04:40 - Building Your Indistractable Self 00:05:18 - Quick-Start Checklist For Leaders 00:06:09 - Stakes And System Redesign

Abstract: Digital distraction represents a persistent challenge to organizational productivity and employee wellbeing in contemporary workplaces. This article synthesizes research on attention fragmentation, task-switching costs, and cognitive load to examine how digital tools—while enabling connectivity and collaboration—simultaneously undermine sustained focus and deep work. Drawing on established cognitive psychology research and organizational behavior studies, the analysis explores quantified impacts on individual performance, team dynamics, and organizational outcomes. The article presents evidence-based interventions including structured communication protocols, psychological safety frameworks, and capability-building programs that organizations have implemented to address attention management challenges. Forward-looking recommendations emphasize cultural norms around focus, distributed decision-making authority, and continuous learning systems that balance collaborative connectivity with concentrated cognitive work.

This video explores the common leadership tendency to seek simple, quick fixes—referred to as “Fixies”—to complex organizational challenges. These quick solutions, such as cost-cutting, new performance systems, or remote work policies, offer the allure of immediate, tangible results and a sense of control. However, the video argues this approach is fundamentally flawed because organizations operate as complex, interconnected living systems rather than simple machines. Quick fixes often ignore the nuanced realities of human behavior, organizational culture, and systemic interdependencies, leading to unintended negative consequences such as decreased morale, loss of critical knowledge, and deteriorated service quality. Highlights 🔍 Leaders often seek quick fixes for complex organizational problems, driven by pressure for immediate results. ⚠️ Quick fixes oversimplify organizations, ignoring their complex, interconnected nature. 💡 Success of management initiatives depends heavily on context, culture, and leadership quality. 🧠 Psychological biases and social pressures push leaders toward adopting trendy but unsuitable solutions. 📉 Quick fixes can cause long-term damage like employee burnout, loss of knowledge, and declining service quality. 🎯 Sustainable change requires aligning initiatives with core strategy and investing in managerial capabilities. 🤝 Psychological safety and team empowerment enable adaptive, experimental approaches to change. Key Insights 🔄 Complexity over Simplicity: Organizations function as living systems where changes create ripple effects, unlike simple machines. A quick fix that does not consider this complexity is doomed to fail because it overlooks dependencies and human factors, resulting in unforeseen problems. For example, mandating a full return to the office may damage morale and productivity if it disregards employees’ new remote work habits and personal challenges. 🎯 Context Determines Success: The effectiveness of any management tool or policy—be it remote work, downsizing, or performance reviews—depends on the specific organizational context. The same policy can have diametrically opposite outcomes depending on culture, leadership quality, and the nature of work. 🧠 Psychological and Social Pressures: Leaders are influenced by cognitive biases like confirmation bias, which make them favor success stories that fit their beliefs while ignoring failures. Additionally, external pressures to conform to industry trends (mimetic isomorphism) drive adoption of popular but ill-fitting management fads. 📊 Short-Term Metrics Create Perverse Incentives: Organizations tend to favor initiatives that produce immediate, quantifiable results, such as cost savings or productivity spikes. However, these metrics mask long-term damage including loss of institutional knowledge, lower employee engagement, and deteriorating customer experience. 👥 Managerial Capability as a Critical Lever: Effective execution of any change depends on skilled managers who can act as coaches, provide constructive feedback, and manage change empathetically. Many quick fixes fail because they rely on top-down directives that bypass or overwhelm managers, rather than building managerial competence to lead nuanced, systemic change. 🔧 Tailored Work Design Enhances Effectiveness: One-size-fits-all policies (e.g., uniform remote work or rigid performance review systems) fail to accommodate the diverse nature of work tasks. Deep-focus work benefits from remote settings, while collaborative creative tasks thrive in-person. 🤝 Psychological Safety Enables Learning and Adaptation: Cultivating an environment where employees feel safe to express concerns, dissent, and share feedback transforms change from a rigid mandate into a collective, iterative learning process. Treating initiatives as experiments #Management #Leadership #StrategicCoherence #SystemsThinking #OrganizationalDesign OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - The Seductive Trap of the Simple Solution 00:00:45 - The Seductive Trap of the Simple Solution - Consequences 00:01:45 - The Seductive Trap - RTO Example and Wrap 00:02:34 - Why the Same Fix Works Here, But Fails There 00:03:08 - Why the Same Fix Works Here - Downsizing and Reviews 00:03:53 - Performance Reviews - Human Factors 00:04:31 - Context Factors and the Medicine Metaphor 00:05:11 - The Hidden Forces Driving Flawed Decisions 00:06:14 - Conformity, Metrics, and Capability Gaps 00:07:00 - Capability Gaps and Execution Bias 00:07:30 - The Real-World Harm of Well-Intentioned Shortcuts 00:08:01 - Spillover to Customers and Hollow Rituals 00:08:39 - Bureaucracy Without Coaching 00:09:25 - Shortcuts Erode Trust and Strength 00:10:00 - From Tactics to Systems - Strategic Alignment 00:10:47 - Ongoing Development and Task-Based Design 00:11:35 - Guardrails, Coherence, and Psychological Safety 00:12:20 - Learn Fast, Adapt, and Build Trust

Abstract: Management practice often relies on isolated interventions—cost reduction, performance systems, workplace policies—that show surprisingly weak main effects when studied empirically. This article examines why conventional management levers frequently deliver disappointing results absent contextual enablers and strategic coherence. Drawing on organizational behavior, strategic management, and empirical research, the analysis demonstrates that tactical choices decoupled from managerial capability, organizational context, and strategic logic reliably underperform. The evidence suggests that durable performance gains emerge not from binary either-or decisions but from integrated systems that align leadership competence, resource allocation, and stakeholder value creation. This article synthesizes research on contextual moderators of intervention effectiveness, documents organizational consequences of decontextualized decision-making, and provides evidence-based guidance for designing interventions that build systemic capability rather than pursuing isolated efficiency gains.

This video explores the evolving nature of learning within modern organizations, emphasizing that learning is no longer a finite event but a continuous, integrated process embedded within daily work. Traditional models of discrete, formal training sessions are now insufficient in a rapidly changing professional landscape shaped by new technologies and shifting market demands. Instead, organizations must blend formal learning—which is structured, planned, and objective-oriented—with informal learning, which occurs spontaneously through everyday interactions and hands-on experiences. Highlights 📚 Learning is no longer a one-time event but a continuous, integrated process embedded in daily work life. 🤝 Formal and informal learning are complementary, not opposing, modes that together create deeper skill mastery. 🍳 Real-world examples like Microsoft and Pixar demonstrate successful blending of structured courses with hands-on, peer-supported learning. ⚖️ Equity in access to informal learning opportunities is critical to avoid reinforcing workplace inequalities. 💻 Technology can democratize learning but must be designed inclusively to avoid excluding less digitally savvy employees. 🌱 Managers are essential in cultivating a learning culture by coaching, providing psychological safety, and encouraging collaboration. 🔄 Organizations should build communities of practice and shift from measuring course completion to assessing skill application on the job. Key Insights 📖 The Death of “Finished Education”: The idea that education ends with formal schooling is obsolete. The workplace is now the classroom where continuous learning is mandatory due to rapid technological and market changes. This paradigm shift demands organizations to rethink how they support employee development, moving away from episodic training to ongoing learning embedded in everyday tasks. 🔄 Symbiosis of Formal and Informal Learning: Formal learning provides the “grammar” and “vocabulary” of a discipline—structured knowledge, theories, and procedures—while informal learning brings these concepts to life through real-world practice, experimentation, and social interaction. 🌍 Examples from Industry Leaders: Companies like Microsoft and Pixar exemplify how to harness this integration effectively. Microsoft combines formal technical training with hackathons and collaborative projects, enabling employees to apply new skills immediately. Pixar’s “brain trust” meetings embed learning into daily workflows through peer feedback, fostering a culture of continual improvement. ⚖️ Equity Challenges in Informal Learning: Informal learning often depends on social networks, chance interactions, and inclusion in high-profile projects, which can inadvertently exclude marginalized groups such as women, minorities, remote workers, and lower-status employees. Without deliberate action, informal learning may perpetuate existing inequalities. 💡 Technology’s Dual Role: Digital tools and platforms can be powerful enablers of learning by providing access to courses, facilitating cross-department collaboration, and offering AI-driven personalized learning paths. However, technology also risks deepening divides if employees lack digital skills or if algorithms reinforce biases. 🌱 Leadership as Learning Cultivators: Managers are pivotal in creating a learning-friendly environment. They must shift from directive supervisors to coaches who foster psychological safety, encourage risk-taking and failure, provide timely feedback, and model knowledge sharing. 🤝 Building Communities of Practice: Beyond individual coaching, organizations should nurture communities of practice—groups sharing expertise and challenges in a profession—to sustain informal learning. These communities serve as forums for exchanging tacit knowledge often absent from formal courses, promoting collective problem-solving and innovation. 🔍 From Tracking Completion to Measuring Impact: Traditional metrics focused on course completions are insufficient. Organizations must evaluate learning by how effectively new skills are applied in the workplace and incorporated into performance goals. Encouraging employees to set and discuss learning objectives regularly fosters ownership of personal development and aligns learning outcomes with business success. #WorkplaceLearning #HRD #LearningAndDevelopment #TrainingTransfer #EmployeeDevelopment OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - The Unending School Day of Modern Work 00:01:06 - From Event to Everyday 00:02:29 - Planned and Unplanned 00:03:26 - Informal in Action and The Chef Analogy 00:04:26 - The Chef to Culture: Making Learning Stick 00:05:45 - Braintrusts, Climates, and Leadership 00:06:40 - Managers as Gardeners; Equity and Tech 00:07:48 - Designing for Inclusion and Technology 00:09:25 - Inclusive Tech and Practical Steps 00:10:43 - Train the Managers; Communities; Culture and Close 00:12:06 - Culture Shift to Application and Final Call

Abstract: The evolving knowledge economy has fundamentally transformed how organizations approach workplace learning and development. This article examines the dynamic interplay between formal and informal learning dimensions within contemporary work environments, drawing on established human resource development (HRD) scholarship. While formal learning remains essential for structured skill acquisition, informal learning increasingly drives adaptation, innovation, and competitive advantage. However, the traditional dichotomy between these approaches obscures their complementary nature and interdependence. Through analysis of theoretical frameworks and organizational practices, this article demonstrates that effective workplace learning requires integrating both dimensions within expansive learning environments that balance organizational performance objectives with individual development needs. The article synthesizes evidence on learning conditions, transfer mechanisms, and contextual factors while highlighting critical considerations including equity, knowledge control, and learner agency. Implications for HRD practitioners emphasize the necessity of systematic needs analysis, strategic alignment, and cultivation of learning-supportive organizational cultures that recognize workplace learning as simultaneously spatial, social, and developmental.