On this episode of People Fundamentals, I’m joined by Jess Von Bank, global leader of HR Transformation and Technology Advisory at Mercer. We discuss the concept of “changefulness” as a mindset, how agility can become the core of a thriving workplace culture, and why empowering employees to embrace change is crucial for modern organizations.
At the heart of Jess’s message is a powerful theme: change isn’t a disruption to endure, but a dynamic opportunity to embrace and a catalyst for growth. “Changefulness is more of a mindset and an attitude that says we are expecting to change — and actually get excited about change,” she says. “We appreciate change as the strategy, not as the enemy.”
In this conversation, recorded live at Unleash World 2024 in Paris, Jess shares her perspective on building dynamic, people-centered organizations through continuous feedback, inclusive leadership, and agile strategies. Listen in as we uncover actionable insights to make change your cultural superpower.
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Building a culture of changefulness
Staying the same is a bigger threat to business than changing, Jess says. Stasis is a state of organizational inertia where growth and innovation stall, posing a significant risk to long-term success. It’s the absence of responsiveness to employees or customers, and can signal a lack of adaptability and transformation muscle. “If you detect stasis, that’s a risk to be managed because that means you’re not listening to your employees or customers,” Jess says. She explains how a leadership mindset that champions agility can create a culture where employees not only adapt to change but actively drive innovation.
Transparency and communication play a critical role in fostering this culture. Jess shares the example of a business leader who didn’t feel comfortable advertising career pathing options because the businesses’ needs were changing so rapidly that they were hard to pin down. But even when you don’t have a concrete answer, explaining why goes a long way, and prevents employees from believing that leaders aren’t thinking about their growth at all. “To say nothing looks like you’re doing nothing instead of being thoughtful and communicating,” she says.
You don’t have to have all the answers, but people do need to see that you understand their needs and are actively learning to address them. By embedding changefulness into everyday interactions and providing opportunities for employees to innovate, organizations can stay nimble and proactive.
Listening and adapting in real time
Staying responsive to constant change requires communication — ideally, continuous feedback loops that reflect real-time employee and customer needs. Surveys are useful, but often only engaged employees participate, which skews the results. Furthermore, a snapshot of engagement once per year isn’t enough to stay on top of needs. “It’s too late to change in the moment. We can’t change once a year. We have to be changing all the time,” Jess says. “So if you’re only serving and taking feedback and input once a year, you’re missing the boat.”
Instead, she advocates for creating dynamic, ongoing channels that include diverse perspectives and lived experiences. This approach not only surfaces more actionable insights but also builds a sense of ownership among employees. Jess stresses the importance of tying these insights to real outcomes. “Instead of striving for adoption, we should be thinking about adapting behaviors,” she says. “Are we changing the way people work? Are they working better than they were before? Are we getting better outcomes than we were getting before?”
Empowering leaders and employees alike
Leadership development is another cornerstone of a changeful culture. Jess notes that managers are often promoted based on technical expertise rather than people skills, which can leave them ill-equipped to lead effectively. “We don’t necessarily identify managers because they were great humans or people leaders, or that they’re even all that well trained or developed on leadership or communication or building trust or demonstrating empathy,” she says.
Jess also highlights the critical role of performance conversations, calling them both the most stressful and the most motivating moments in an employee’s journey. “Talking about your performance enhances your performance because you’re thinking about how it all connects and the impact you’re actually driving,” she says, urging organizations to focus on decoupling stress from these discussions while preserving their motivational value.
Finally, she underscores the importance of leveraging technology to support — not replace — human connection. Tech should never be the experience. It’s there to support the experience you design, Jess suggests. She advocates for tools that enhance empathy, trust, and real-time feedback.
Jess’ insights underscore the transformative power of a changefulness mindset. By reframing change as an opportunity, creating continuous feedback loops, and empowering managers to lead with empathy, you can build cultures that thrive in today’s fast-paced world.
Embracing change isn’t just building a strategy — you’re telling a story about who you are as an organization. By leaning into transparency, agility, and adaptability, you can shape resilient, future-ready workplaces.
People in This Episode
Jess Von Bank: LinkedIn
Resources
HR Technology’s Impact on the Workforce
Transcript
Jess Von Bank:
Changefulness is more of a mindset and an attitude that says we are expecting to change and actually get excited about change. We appreciate change as the strategy, not as the enemy. Change is actually how we move the workforce and the business forward. That is a definite attitude and mindset that is more of a culture than a tactic. And so when you think about becoming a digital enterprise, start there. Start with that mindset; the tactics will follow.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Hi and welcome to Betterworks’ People Fundamentals podcast. I’m your host Ashley Litzenberger, Senior Director of Product Marketing. Betterworks’ core belief in people fundamentals revolves around helping HR lead through constant change by focusing on core values like fairness, support, balance, and enabling growth opportunities for employees. These tenants empower everyone in the workforce to strive for excellence, foster creativity and recognize each other’s contributions. Betterworks believes that strategic HR leaders can translate these principles into action, shaping their workforce for the better and helping drive meaningful business outcomes. And in this show, we’re diving even deeper into these principles by listening to experts share how you can make them come alive at your organization.
In this episode, recorded live at Unleash World 2024, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jess Von Bank. Jess leads HR transformation and the technology advisory globally at Mercer. She’s deeply involved in reimagining how companies approach workforce strategy and employee experience. Jess offers her unique perspective on what it means to build a changeful culture, one that sees change as a chance to grow and evolve, rather than a disruption. We talk about how organizations can embrace this mindset shift by embedding agility into their practices and designing HR strategies that are not only supporting employees but helping them thrive. Throughout our conversation, Jess gives a practical roadmap for HR leaders who want to build workplaces that don’t just adapt to change but actively welcome it. She shares actionable insights on aligning workforce strategies with business outcomes, all while keeping employee well-being and engagement front and center. So join us as we explore how to make your organization more dynamic, resilient, and people-centered.
Jess has such a grounded way of explaining the shift organizations need to make to become truly digital. She talks about her dual role at Mercer, where she helps companies transform HR from the inside out, and brings a fresh perspective on moving beyond change management to a culture of changefulness.
Jess Von Bank:
My work at Mercer is a little bit twofold. I work on our HR transformation side of the business, and then I also support all of these vendors around us with advisory services, helping technology solution providers understand how their solutions create impact and results for the business in a way that really drives employee experience as well as business outcomes. And you know, a lot of that story telling really has to do with translating HR speak into business speak. What I find common in all of these conversations, whether we’re talking about AI, or talent strategies, creating sustainable talent models, whether it’s how to innovate, how the HR function can innovate itself, how they can bring forward a workforce experience that feels more modern and what people would actually expect — regardless of the conversation, it all boils down to companies essentially learning how to become digital, how to be a digital enterprise.
And when I think of digital, there are specific attributes we talk about, especially when we’re advising companies on how to modernize the function of HR, how to modernize workforce experience. There are attributes to being digital, but it’s before you can actually get to that, it’s really a mindset first. It’s understanding how to be agile, how to create a culture of changefulness. We talk about change management a lot.
When we talk about transformation and innovation, change management is applying tactics to accept change like here’s a new playbook. Here’s an update to our employee policy. Here is this. I mean, it’s a very tactical approach to get change to stick. Changefulness is more of a mindset and an attitude that says we are expecting to change and actually get excited about change. We appreciate change as the strategy, not as the enemy. Change is actually how we move the workforce and the business forward.
That is a definite attitude and mindset that is more of a culture than a tactic. And so when you think about becoming a digital enterprise, start there. Start with that mindset, the tactics will follow.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Jess makes such a powerful point about the importance of avoiding stasis. It’s a reminder that in any organization, if you’re not actively cultivating an environment where people can be part of continuous growth and innovation, you risk creating a culture that’s stuck, unable to evolve or respond to real needs.
Jess Von Bank:
If you detect stasis, that’s a risk to be managed, because that means you’re not listening to your customers or your employees. You’re not creating a culture of innovation. You’re not building change muscle and transformation muscle, which means you’re sort of doomed. You’re on a path to doom if you detect that kind of stasis.
And so it really is a leadership mindset. It’s a culture that needs to be practiced and observed. You have to create a culture where people expect and support change, where we champion change, and where you actually, you know, create opportunities for people to be part of innovation, to create feedback loops where they can tell you how they think about an initiative, or how they think it might go better or do better. Like let people be a part of the— create a movement around it and let people be a part of it.
I hear change fatigue so often I can’t even explain and usually it’s from technology leaders or program leaders who say we can’t do that right now. We have enough on our plate. We have too much on our plate, and our people won’t accept this other new thing. Or I can’t. I don’t have the capacity or the ability to do this right now, and that’s really the wrong mindset. We have to create enough agile, nimble sort of capability to go where we need to go, and to respond in the moment to what the organization needs or what the workforce says they need in order to thrive and be successful.
Ashley Litzenberger:
The point is that change isn’t just a strategy: It’s a story that needs to be told clearly and often. Creating a culture of agility requires more than just policies. It calls for open communication, transparency and ensuring that everyone understands and feels part of the vision.
Jess Von Bank:
I like to remind people that good HR is good marketing. We have to talk more. We literally, and it doesn’t matter if you have the right answer or a fully baked answer. You just have to explain to people. I just have been running Stage 2, the strategic talent stage here at this conference, and introducing speakers and moderating panels. And somebody asked one of the CHRO of an Italian company called Fedrigoni, how do you talk about career pathing to your complex, multi-generational, diverse workforce?
And she said, I don’t believe in career pathing, and here’s why, and here’s what we explain to people who say, what’s my career path, what are my long term opportunities? How are you going to groom and develop me? And she said, the reason we don’t talk that long-term and that concrete is because there’s too much changing, and the organization is very dynamic, and we’re high growth, and we grow through M&A and she said, we don’t, we don’t really believe in that as it’s traditionally thought of or described, and here’s why that doesn’t make sense for us.
But to say nothing looks like you don’t have an answer, or you’re not thinking about career pathing or career development for Gen Z, for example. And so to say nothing looks like you’re doing nothing instead of being thoughtful and communicating. Here’s how, yes, we’re thinking about that. Here’s how we’re thinking about that. And so to answer your question around changefulness, I think communication, transparency, being authentic, goes a long way. Yes, it’s top down. Leaders need to say our culture should look and feel and behave like this.
We need to create dynamic agility and flexibility. We want people to be innovative and creative because we know we can’t stand still. We know we need to keep moving. And most importantly, we need you to keep moving with us. And so if we want our workforce to be part of this agile, dynamic moving forward sort of behavior, then we have to tell them, number one, tell them this is who we aspire to be, and you’re part of that. And this is how that looks in everyday behavior, in manager-employee interactions. This is, you know, this is how we act this out every single day. You literally have to execute on everyday behaviors if you want something to be part of your culture, and that goes for change as well.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Making change a real part of culture means giving people the freedom to act on it and not just talk about it. Jess dives into the importance of building tangible support for innovation, ensuring that everyone, from frontline employees to executives, knows what it means to embrace agility and the true business impact of doing so.
Jess Von Bank:
I like to refer to this as putting meat on the bone. And you have to do it in both directions. You have to translate and sell up the ladder, but you also have to translate and sell that everywhere else it needs to go in the organization. So if we say this as part of our culture, this is the way we operate. This is what it looks like in everyday behavior. Then you have to make room for that to be possible.
If you say we have an innovative culture, great. What does innovative look like here? Does that mean it’s okay for me to experiment? For me to run with pilot programs? To explore emerging tech? To evaluate the things that we have in place today that might not make sense for us anymore, and to propose new ways of doing those things? Or am I going to be met with resistance?
You have to play that out and say, “This is what that looks like for us to say we’re innovative, or we’re changeful, or we’re agile.” Like, okay, what does that look like in practice? And do employees know that those behaviors are not just accepted, but encouraged? So that sort of, you know, putting meat on the bone in terms of, make it real, practice it with each other. Lead with it. Enable your managers to do, you know, to execute in that way, but also up the ladder into leadership and the C-suite.
And I think that’s where HR as a function falls short, to be honest. You control and strategically guide and manage the number one asset of the business, which is the workforce. And it’s almost irresponsible not to flag risk, or not to advise kind of macro and micro trends that are impacting your ability to deliver your number one product, which is a viable, sustainable workforce that produces the business results your CEO would ask you for. So if you’re not sort of flagging things like, listen, we can’t operate this way, or we can’t be so static, or we can’t be so overly rigid in the way we do things, and here’s why, here’s that, here’s how that plays out long term.
And listen, business speak is nothing more than speaking the language of shareholders. This is how it impacts our ability to put out product, to innovate new product, to evolve customer experience, to produce profitability. This is the impact that we see playing out. If you kind of just do that quick translation every time you speak, you know, sort of up in the organization: This is the impact on the business. It’s really your responsibility to, sort of, you know, be looking for those trends that produce that impact.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Building a dynamic culture isn’t just about high level strategy, it’s about continuously tuning into what’s actually happening on the ground. Jess goes deeper into how organizations can stay responsive by not only listening but consistently adjusting to meet the real and evolving needs of a diverse workforce.
Jess Von Bank:
Workforces can be so complex in a lot of ways. If you’re a large organization, you probably have five generations of workers in the workforce at the same time. If you’re geographically diverse, if there are different operating companies and lines of business and so on, that you have micro-cultures and sort of things to consider. And so there’s a lot of things that go into that. And again, back to the very reason for being agile, for having a dynamic, you know, sort of operating model that creates an ability for you to listen and respond.
You can’t really understand how to best, you know, build, buy, or borrow the workforce you need, and then how to develop, retain, skill them for the long run. You can’t really keep your finger on the pulse of that unless you’re also set up to listen and iterate and evolve and continuously optimize what you’re doing. And if you’re not tying your tactics to the right measures of success, knowing what’s working and not working, it can’t be like a once a year evaluate, sort of like how we do performance reviews. Once a year, we’re going to look in the rear view mirror and try to remember everything we did and whether or not it turned out okay?
Same thing with our talent strategies, our business strategies. You can’t wait and evaluate when it’s already done and happened, the water is under the bridge. You have to constantly ask yourself, Is this working? Is this optimized? Is there a better way to do this? We strive for adoption of things too much. Are people using the tech, tools, systems, things that we rolled out to them or announced to them? Instead of striving for adoption, we should be thinking about adapting behaviors. Are we changing the way people work? Are they working better than they were before? Are we getting better outcomes than we were getting before? So instead of striving to like, force people into, you know, ways of working, or systems and tools we give them, are we actually leaning those solutions to them in the flow of work and the way they want to work? And are we listening to them to make these things more valuable and more impactful? I mean, back to the concept of a digital enterprise that is the kind of, you know, dynamism and agility and continuous, you know, learning and improvement that we need to build into our way of operating if we’re going to move organizations forward.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Real engagement means hearing from all corners of the organization, and not just the voices that are already tuned in. Jess highlights the importance of moving beyond periodic surveys and instead creating ongoing channels where everyone, not just the most engaged, can share feedback that shapes the workplace in real time.
Jess Von Bank:
No shade to engagement surveys or the people who create and provide them. They have a role to play, but that can’t be your only way of getting a pulse of what’s going on. In fact, the people taking those surveys are engaged enough to take the survey. Your most disengaged people might be like, Are you kidding me? I’ve already shared this feedback, and if you’re now asking me to put it on a survey, like, you know, there’s problems with that. Plus, it’s too late. It’s too late to change in the moment. We can’t change once a year. We have to be changing all the time. So if you’re only surveying and taking feedback and input once a year, you’re missing the boat. You’re leaving a lot on the table, and you’re sort of wasting that huge window of time when you could be evolving in more real time.
I tell people all the time, when you’re evaluating technology solutions or you’re looking at updates to your programs and your policies, or you’re making micro improvements to things you’re doing and delivering to the workforce, the first thing is to not forget all of the stakeholders — like, literally get more voices, diverse input, lived experiences, user feedback, personas in your workforce. Like, literally understand a wider breadth of stakeholders than you probably think you have, and get their voices early on in the actual solution, evaluation, and testing and feedback cycles. Let them design and help deploy and create those you know, those feedback and even governance programs — get more people involved who are part of the impact that you’re hoping to achieve, and keep them involved.
Ashley Litzenberger:
It’s easy to overlook the varied needs and backgrounds of different workforce segments, especially when we rely on broad assumptions. Jess encourages us to dig deeper and think more intersectionally, recognizing that if we understand who makes up our workforce and what they need, we can open doors to greater inclusivity and adaptability.
Jess Von Bank:
It depends on who you— if you’re looking at this at an employer level, who’s in your workforce, or who do you want to have in your workforce? And then, what is their persona? What work are they likely doing today? How much time have they spent in the workforce? How much, you know, manager involvement or peer interaction do they expect?
I said this all the time during COVID: the largest group of diverse employees you can possibly target and attract, when you think about diversity, is working moms, and a whole bunch of employers forgot about working moms. And guess what we did during COVID? We absolutely decimated jobs for working moms because all of our support systems disappear: child care systems, school systems, you know, all of these things. And so we absolutely decimated work for a huge demographic of people who wanted to continue participating in some fashion, but they had to work on their terms. And so maybe there are generalizations, but my biggest caution is find out who you already have working for you, or who you might be forgetting that could be a valuable— whether it’s early career, re-entry to the workforce, whether it’s you know, we’re going to see this with AI. We’re going to displace a bunch of jobs, and some sectors and segments of work will be more affected than others.
Who holds those jobs today? Understand that. And is there potential talent? Are there pools of talent that you could actually attract because they’ll be displaced, they might be interested in reskilling and redeploying themselves. And what matters to them? What support would they need? What kind of skilling support would they expect? And are they a viable talent pool for you? And so it’s really sort of thinking more intersectionally. Don’t forget to think about demographics more intersectionally than we do today. It’s not just a gender thing. It’s not just an age thing.
We think about neurodivergence. One of the things I love about AI is that it democratizes knowledge, information, content in more ways than we did before. That’s incredibly exciting. I know we like to think about all the things that can go wrong. Think about all the things that could go right if we’re able to share more content, knowledge, information, tools, resources in more, you know, multi-modal ways than we have before, or just faster than we did before. You know, think about accessibility. Who could benefit from this? That’s a fantastic question to ask. Who could benefit from this, if we get this new innovation right for more people. Those are the better questions I would I’d love to hear us all asking each other
Ashley Litzenberger:
Understanding the diverse needs and backgrounds of employees also means rethinking how we support and develop managers. Jess points out that while technical skills get people promoted, truly effective leadership requires empathy, communication, and time to coach, qualities that often go overlooked yet make a tremendous impact on team performance.
Jess Von Bank:
A lot of managers were promoted into a manager job because they were a high performing individual contributor — which is great. So they have a lot of expertise. They have a skill set that is relevant and translates they understand the performance expectations of that specific role. No problem with that.
But we don’t necessarily identify managers because they were great humans or people leaders, or that they’re even all that well trained or developed on leadership or communication or building trust or demonstrating empathy, like we think about all of the qualities that really make a good manager. We don’t necessarily always look for that or promote that. We promote high-performing individual contributors. So don’t forget all of the qualities of leadership that they should be armed with: communicating authentically, transparently, how to demonstrate more empathy in applying you know, they’re often applying programs and policies and, you know, articulating strategies Great. How do you make that real for people? How do you take time to coach and remind people and nudge behaviors?
The good news is, speaking of AI, we can create a lot of support for them to, you know, understand sentiment and provide nudges, or even provide coaching to have better one on ones, or performance reviews, like we can actually support them through tooling, which is kind of cool. But I think the biggest thing is to create the time and the capacity.
Managers are so focused on doing their own jobs, they often don’t feel like they have enough time in the day to provide all of the leadership and coaching and good communication and slow down to be empathetic. We need to give them the capacity to actually do that and realize that the payoff is higher performing, better retained, you know, happier employees. Instead of, you know, feeling like we’re taking time away from the managers’ performance, you’re actually pouring gravy on everybody else’s performance when you do that. So the return is there, since we obsess over return, but we really have to give them, you know, sort of the time and the tools and the ability to lead the way they want to, and we need them to.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Investing in our managers’ development is just one side of the coin. How we handle performance conversations is another critical piece. Jess shares insights from Mercer’s research, revealing that while performance reviews can be stressful, they’re also deeply motivating when approached thoughtfully. This prompts us to rethink how we can reduce stress while keeping these conversations inspiring and impactful.
Jess Von Bank:
We did a study at Mercer about the impact of some of our HR tech and tools and all these things we put in front of the workforce. And we asked workers, what do you actually think of these things, and are they impactful? Are they valuable? And around performance conversations, it was rated the number one most stressful thing at work — call it an employee journey, or a transaction, or whatever interaction — number one highest stress moment, because it’s often tied to comp decisions.
But it also came out as the number one motivator when I think about if I’m even mentally preparing to have a performance conversation, I’m more motivated, I’m inspired, I’m more sort of embedded and invested in the work I’m doing and what. So even the idea of thinking about a conversation related to performance is inspiring and motivated and actually enhances performance.
The idea of talking about your performance enhances your performance because you’re thinking about how it all connects and the impact you’re actually driving. So the challenge is, how do you remove the stress? Do you decouple it from the conversation? Think about, you know, just how do you remove the stress? Whatever that looks like, while you retain all the good stuff that comes from having those coaching conversations. Should you be having them more often? Should they be coaching, not necessarily performance evaluation, every so often? You know, mix some informal coaching conversations into the formal process.
But I think that’s again, if you sort of listen and seek to understand, what is this doing for us? Is the way we’re approaching performance working for us and producing the intended impact? And then again, a digital company would say, Well, what are all of the ways we could approach this to have a better outcome?
Ashley Litzenberger:
It’s easy to get caught up in the tools we use, but the research highlights that the real impact comes from the experience we design, not the tech itself. Her point underscores that technology should serve as a support and not the focal point. This allows us to focus on what truly matters: how employees feel about the process and whether it drives meaningful outcomes.
Jess Von Bank:
You know, none of that feedback had anything to do with the technology you might or might not have been using to drive your performance review or evaluation process. Tech should not be the experience. The experience is what you design, and then you mold the tech or you design, you configure your technology to support that. So the feedback had nothing to do with, “Do you like XYZ system?” It was how do you feel this performance process is working and happening for us? It should never be rate the tech: rates the outcome. Is it having impact? What do you like, [or] not like about it? Back to that again, back to being digital. That’s how it should feel.
Ashley Litzenberger:
As we wrap up today’s chat with Jess Von Bank, let’s think about a few ways we can bring her insights into our own organizations. First, lean into a changeful mindset. Jess showed us that treating change as a growth opportunity rather than a disruption, can shift the whole culture. Encourage your teams to embrace each new development as a step forward.
Second, make listening and constant improvement part of your everyday approach. Jess reminded us how crucial it is to stay tuned in to what employees and customers need in real time, not just once a year. Think about ways to create ongoing feedback loops to keep up with what truly matters and how to design processes based on inputs from a broad array of stakeholders.
Finally, prioritize transparency and open communication. Communicating clearly, even if things aren’t fully decided, builds trust and keeps employees connected to the big picture. These strategies are all about making resilience, adaptability, and engagement part of your organization’s DNA. By nurturing a changeable mindset, listening actively, and fostering transparency, you’re setting your organization up to thrive well into the future.
Be sure to stay tuned for our next episode of the People Fundamentals podcast. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube music, and if you like what you hear, share it with your friends and colleagues. We’ll see you again soon.
