This week, I was in New York for a mix of client meetings, dinners, and The Charter Workplace Summit, hosted by Charter.I’ve attended this conference for the past few years and am also a paying subscriber to Charter’s premium offering. Their reporting consistently impresses me, thoughtful, well-researched, and covering a diverse range of topics across HR, talent, and the future of work. It’s one of the few newsletters I make a point to read every week.
The summit featured a mix of panels, interviews, and conversations. While it’s impossible to capture everything, here are a few highlights that stood out.
The Rise of The Chief Work Officer
In a session titled “The Rise of the Chief Work Officer,” moderated by Jacob Clemente, Parker Mitchell (CEO of Valence) and Amy Reichanadter (Chief People Officer at Databricks) discussed how AI is prompting HR leaders to reimagine how work gets done, creating new ways for humans and machines to collaborate.
Reichanadter emphasized the growing need for agility in organizations, but also within the HR functions, sharing how Databricks has had to rethink traditional processes like headcount planning (they use it for GTM and Eng, but not in other functions/business units.) She also highlighted one example: the rollout of an “EquityBot” for 8,000 employees, a task that would have once required far more time and resources, but was streamlined and scaled efficiently through the use of AI.
Mitchell and Reichanadter noted that as organizations reimagine how work happens, the nature of knowledge work itself is changing. For many employees, the focus may shift from producing outputs to evaluating and improving them, a significant evolution in how value is created.
Leading Through Change
In the session on Leading Through Change (Moderated by Jolen Anderson, past Edge of Work Guest) Betty Larson (Merck) and Laura Fuentes (Hilton) discussed how they were finding ways to lead during times of change and uncertainty.
Betty shared about the importance of acknowledging that during these times, while trust is key, due to the complexity and challenge of managing changes, you’re probably going to get it wrong or make mistakes, and you’re going to have to commit to the work of rebuilding and renewing trust on a consistent basis if you want to keep the transformation going.
She also talked about the importance of leaning into culture values and paradoxes during these tensions, and as an example, she highlighted Merck’s desire for precision and perfection with the mantra “perfect when necessary” underscoring the importance of being precise of when to get it right, and when to move fast.
Laura talked about the importance of being open and curious and even observed how over the course of the weekend, she went from being nervous and skeptical about AI to playing with an LLM and being all in after using it for an entire weekend.
Company Culture as a Driver of Performance
In a conversation on company culture as a driver of performance, Anna Binder (former Head of People at Asana), Sam Simmons (LPGA, past Edge of Work guest), and Katie Burke (Harvey) shared lessons learned and concrete examples of how they’ve navigated the link between culture and performance. They also offered a few of their own “hot takes” and red flags on the topic, here are some of my favorites and key highlights.
- How you exit people, and how you treat employees who “meet expectations” says more about your culture and definition of performance than anything else
- If someone is 100% confident in something, especially in these times, that is your red flag to be skeptical
- When it comes to culture programs, (or for that matter, anything you do in HR) ask yourself: “does the brochure match the reality?” Just like a resort brochure, and program, strategy or culture related guidance can look or sound nice, but what actually happens in reality?
AI and Entry Level Workers
In a session led by Joe Fuller (Harvard) on AI and entry-level workers, Fuller highlighted several recent research studies exploring possible futures for knowledge work and entry level workers.
In one study (Brynjolfsson et al., “Is AI the Canary in the Coal Mine?”), researchers found that entry-level workers in AI-exposed industries were being impacted at significantly higher rates than those in industries less affected by AI. In another study from Fuller’s own research team, the findings suggested that AI can help level the playing field for lower-skilled employees, indicating its potential as a tool for augmentation rather than replacement.
Fuller also previewed upcoming research that will examine, in greater detail, how generative AI may affect different levels within organizational hierarchies. Regardless of the outcomes, he emphasized one clear takeaway: retaining employees with deep expertise and experience will become even more critical in the age of AI.
(As an aside, Fuller easily won the award for best lighthearted humor in a research-heavy session. He is low-key very funny!)
The Jobs And Skills Of The Future
In the session on the jobs and skills of the future, Katie Barney (Smartly) and Bijal Shah (Guild) talked broadly about roles and skills they could see becoming valuable over the next few years. They discussed two potential possibilities and paths writ large, one as the “rise of the generalist” whereas AI enables (or forces) workers to take on a wider ability/set of skills, as well as the “T” shaped professional with both focused depth but also breadth.
A Note on Charter and This Conference.
I’ve attended the Charter Workplace Summit for three years now. Each year, I go to a handful of conferences, and at some point, I’ll share a guide on how to choose the right ones, and how to make the most of them once you’re there. But for now, I want to give a quick plug for why this particular event stands out.
There are several reasons I keep coming back. First, Charter consistently curates an excellent mix of speakers, panelists, and voices. While most participants work broadly across HR, talent, and the future of work, the organizers do a great job of bringing in people who approach these topics from slightly different angles. It’s a god blend. Familiar enough to feel relevant, but diverse enough to expand your perspective and expose you to new ways of thinking.
Second, the sessions are thoughtfully facilitated. As a facilitator and podcast host myself, I may be biased, but strong moderation truly matters. A skilled moderator shapes the flow of conversation, balances insight with momentum, and draws out ideas that go beyond the surface. As Matthew Boyle of Bloomberg noted in his LinkedIn post, many conferences are full of smart-sounding but generic comments, but Charter’s sessions consistently deliver thoughtful insights that I don’t always find elsewhere. My perspective is that it’s the product of good preparation, thoughtful questions, and moderators who know how to guide a conversation at just the right altitude, and who are comfortable with being the “guide on the side.”
Finally, the summit’s scale feels just right. a few hundred people, which is small enough to have meaningful conversations and see familiar faces, yet large enough to meet new people and hear diverse perspectives.
If you’re a talent or people leader, or work anywhere in the broader future of work ecosystem, I highly recommend checking it out.