#245 Shaping The Future | In Conversation with Shomaice Zowghi: Be in the Room Where It Happens

I think probably for me was when I moved from advising on issues as a lawyer, um, or an advisor to sh- trying to shape the environment that created the issues.

And as I moved into leadership roles, probably in HR and industrial relations where you start to design structures or negotiate big enterprise agreements or run sort of change and transformation processes, or even working in diversity and inclusion, that's where I think you realize you're not just responding to problems, although there's always gonna be some of that work.

Mm-hmm.

But you also have the opportunity to, um, try and influence whether the problem happens at all.

And so I think a, a true strategic CPO is really, um, like a workforce architect, and they should be thinking about what capabilities, um, do we need in the future for the workforce.

Do we build or automate or buy those capabilities? And how fast can my organization respond to change that's happening to us?

Mm.

Um, and what risks are inside my workforce, especially around psychosocial.

Um, and also, like, what is the employee experience and how can I optimize it? So, you know, your old approach, very reactive, very service-oriented, but the modern CPO should be spending time on these proactive elements and having a seat at the table in strategic discussions.

Um, but as I said, you, you can't make fetch happen without [laughs] executive support.

Your CEO and your board need to want a strategic CPO, and I'm lucky that my current organization does.

So I just wanna pause for a minute because I think you said this to me the other day, and I was curious about it.

You just made an observation that you think a lot of people misunderstand psychosocial.

What...

Tell me about that.

Um, I guess, you know, there's been a lot of legislative changes around this type of risk, um, driven by the Commonwealth and the state safety regulator, and so now we have pretty clear guidelines that talk about, um, what organizations and leaders need to do to manage psychosocial risk.

And, you know, it's, it's things that, um, go through the whole employee life cycle.

It's things around, you know, role clarity, um, upholding organizational justice, ensuring there's proper reward and recognition systems, ensuring that your complaints management process, um, is something that's trusted by employees, and that there is action when risks are raised.

And so, um, I think this is not something new, but the regulator has, um, a little bit more emphasis on it right now.

And towards the end of last year, we saw the first safety prosecution, um, which is a, a very sad case, um, involving the Department of Defense, and, um, it really clearly demonstrated that leaders are the first line of defense, and their ability to lead with care and empathy in the, um, oper- operationalization of people policies is gonna be critical to their success.

And so, um, in the past, we, um, haven't necessarily seen those sort of outcomes, so now our laws have teeth and the Commonwealth regulator is demonstrating that they're gonna use those teeth.

Mm.

So I think it's, um, an issue that all organizations are grappling with at the moment of how do we, um, bring together all the right people to effectively manage this risk, um, in a dynamic way.