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HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.
Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.
There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.
HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”
Rebecca Taylor (00:01.538)
Hello and welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host, Rebecca Taylor, and I'm here with Girish Ganesan, the Chief People Officer at S &P Global. Thank you so much, Girish, being here. I'm so sorry. How are you?
Girish Ganesan (00:13.273)
I'm good Rebecca. Thanks so much for having me.
Rebecca Taylor (00:17.802)
I'm very excited because I know we, think, were originally supposed to talk a few months ago and then we had to reschedule because of life and things. So I feel like this is like highly anticipated and I've really been looking forward to connecting with you.
Girish Ganesan (00:29.409)
you know likewise and unfortunately with everything going on and also my travel we had to reschedule this but I'm so glad we finally made this happen.
Rebecca Taylor (00:38.722)
Me too, me too. And just to kind of get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your role, about S &P Global for those who might not be as familiar with it, and a little bit more about the people who you support?
Girish Ganesan (00:51.417)
Yeah, of course. So SMP Global is about 42,000 employees across 41 countries. Our market cap is about 160 billion. we provide benchmarks, ratings, essential intelligence across a variety of different markets, and also workforce solutions for those of you who may not know us. My role is that of the chief people officer. So what that really means is I'm accountable
for the workforce strategy of the company and the employee experience of our 40,000 employees to service all of our customers and our stakeholders.
Rebecca Taylor (01:30.734)
So the whole employee experience of 40,000 people, that seems very easy and not challenging at all. So when you're talking about a global workforce of that size, can you tell us about some of the challenges that come with managing a workforce that big?
Girish Ganesan (01:36.791)
Hahaha.
Girish Ganesan (01:48.793)
Yeah, you know, certainly keeps me and my team busy with everything that is going on. But on challenges, you know, there are probably three big...
categories that we're navigating as a company, but I also think it applies to a variety of different industries with everything going on in the world. First is, I would say pace of change versus organizational readiness. Technology, especially AI, is moving faster than most organizations can absorb. We certainly feel very proud at SMP Global with everything that we are doing in order to keep up with that pace. But the real challenge is in tech itself. It's helping people adapt to
new ways of working, new expectations, and in many cases, new identities in their roles. And related to that is skills versus roles. Like we've historically organized jobs around traditional job architectures, but work is increasingly becoming unbundled into skills and task. And that creates a gap. Our systems, our structures, even mindsets haven't fully caught up yet. The third, I would say, is human
connection, particularly in a fragmented world with all sorts of geopolitical issues, also hybrid work, global teams, external uncertainty, mean people are asking deeper questions about sense of connectedness, trust, and purpose at work. So for us and for people teams, the job today is not just about talent management, it's about really orchestrating that change at scale while keeping the human experience intact.
Rebecca Taylor (03:30.188)
Yeah. And it feels like as soon as you start to get used to one piece of change, everything's changing all over again, right? I feel like the volume of change right now is just so much different than a change management framework can even really keep up sometimes.
Girish Ganesan (03:44.045)
very much so.
Rebecca Taylor (03:46.809)
So do you have any, I wouldn't say tips or tricks, because that's too much of a silver bullet kind of thing, and there's never a silver bullet in situations like this. But if you had one thing that you're working on right now or that is kind of driving this change, helping people to build trust, form connection, what's something that your team is doing that someone who's listening to this might be able to kind of do for their own company too?
Girish Ganesan (04:11.501)
Yeah, you know, I don't know if there's one thing, to be very honest. list is long because, you know, change is absorbed differently by different people. But certainly, I think in categories of three. So again, you know, I feel like there three things that come to mind as I think about this question. First is making change tangible. So not just talking about AI or transformation in abstract terms, but showing people what it actually means for their day-to-day work. And SMP Global, for example,
Rebecca Taylor (04:15.053)
Yeah.
Girish Ganesan (04:41.435)
we have focused on getting down to task and workflow level like how AI augments a researcher of the future, a developer of the future, a ratings analyst of the future, not just broad concepts. That's extremely important because people tend to react better if they have context and when you talk in practical terms, particularly as you go deeper in the organization. Second, I would say is investing heavily in learning and it's not a one-time initiative but
ongoing muscle that we have to build and we have leaned into this through things like rolling out an AI Academy for all our 40,000 employees because we also want to create a level playing field because AI is becoming a life skill not just a professional skill, right? It's seeping into every aspect of our society and now moving towards then a more role specific capability building beyond clear creating a level playing field so people can understand, you know, what the future holds for them in terms
terms of the skills that they would need in order to be successful. And third, I would say, and this goes back to the response to the previous question, and I think it's the most important one, is leading with humanity. The change can create anxiety, and the best leaders acknowledge that, they stay visible, and they create space for dialogue, and that's what we believe in, and I believe in. And one thing I often say is that if I was to look at combination of all of what I have said, learning is the currency of relevance, but humanity is the multiplier that's gonna
make sure that you know with everything that organization is doing around change that it sticks.
Rebecca Taylor (06:18.038)
I love that humanity is the multiplier. think that's such a, it's such a good way to put it, cause it's, you know, it's true. It's like folks are going to be learning about all these different, you know, all these different components and pieces, but if they're not tying it to how they interact with each other and, support their own humanity and their work, then you're not going to have the culture that an organization is going to need to do well.
Girish Ganesan (06:40.121)
Exactly, you know, we're a small community part of a big society. So at the end of the day, we need to be sure about how we are a connected tissue as an organization. And that comes from human connection and humanity. And particularly as tech is disrupting how we work in a professional environment, not losing the value of the human skills as much as AI skills are important, is that balance is
to so important as we move forward because I do fear that if the focus on human behavior and human cognitive ability is totally lost, even integration of AI in your workforce is not going to be successful and it's not going to give you the ROI that you need.
Rebecca Taylor (07:28.482)
Yeah, yeah. And speaking of those human skills, you you talked about investing in them and really mastering them. So what are some of those really important human skills that you believe are the ones that need to really be invested in now?
Girish Ganesan (07:41.081)
It's a long list, but some of the things that we are focused on is definitely judgment, creative thinking, systems thinking, how do you connect the dots, emotional intelligence. Those are some of the most important ones. And we call them power skills. So our learning curriculum also balances the two. So as much as we are focusing on investing in AI skills, we also have Learning Academy that focuses on these power skills around the
same time because we want to make sure that our employees get the benefit of both as we transform this organization.
Rebecca Taylor (08:19.49)
Yeah, I love that you said judgment too, because that's sort of the, it's the part when you're using all these tools, especially in HR, if you're using tools to surface insights about things that are happening in your workforce, there's the line between doing some, doing the recommendation that an AI tool might, you know, might tell you to do based on the the data that it has, and then having the right judgment to figure out, is that really the right move? Let me figure out if.
the data that supported this decision or this recommendation is valid and is accurate. Because I completely agree. think judgment and critical thinking, to me, they kind of go very much hand in hand. But they're the skills that are really, really important to make sure that we're not leaning too much on AI tools that are still being developed. Because they're still just in their infancy. We don't know what they're going to look like in even six months from now. So we still have to maintain an element of knowing.
you know, the right business decision and tying what we're finding to that, the bigger picture.
Girish Ganesan (09:18.285)
Yeah, look, the generative AI tech tools are getting very, very sophisticated by the minute, right? But I think the reality is we moving beyond the question of which jobs will be replaced by AI to much more nuanced reality. How work gets itself redesigned, tasks get automated, augmented, or newly created, and that changes how roles are constructed in the organization and what's going to be required
from humans versus AI. And at the same time, we're working and operating in a world with multiple disruptors, right? There's AI, but there's geopolitics, there's climate, there's demographic shifts. So future of work is not just being shaped by one force, and hence those human skills are equally important.
Rebecca Taylor (10:08.088)
Yeah, I think it's a really, really good point is like, it's not just AI. It's, you know, there are so many other factors that are influencing our world that we're all just trying to navigate and figure out as people and as professionals. And, you know, there's the, the more support that we can have from an organization to learn those skills, to kind of navigate those things, the better the organization is going to be. Cause you're just going to have people that are more capable, more empowered and more functional sometimes, right?
Girish Ganesan (10:35.287)
Very much so.
Rebecca Taylor (10:37.686)
So here's a question, and maybe it's sort of building on the concept of the human skills of it. So I was at a conference recently that was an HR conference that naturally they're talking a lot about AI. And a lot of the presentations on the stage were from CHROs of big companies and of medium-sized companies talking about how they've leveraged Claude to automate some of their work, or they're really kind of getting deep into the weeds. And it felt like there was sort of this really
big sort of sense of urgency to adopt, adopt, adopt or die. Now, I think that there's, I think that there is sort of this sense of urgency that we all have to have with AI, just because with AI and with any kind of change, right? Because I specifically talk about AI because it's just moving so fast that if we're not keeping up, it's gonna be a lot harder to keep up. But how do you as an HR leader, especially of a huge global organization where there's gonna be technology governance in so many different areas, right?
How do you balance that urgency with intention and with the education that folks might need to do the things that you need them to do?
Girish Ganesan (11:47.405)
Yeah, you it comes down to, and you're right, you know, there's a lot of talk about AI, even though there are other disruptors in the world that are impacting businesses across industries. It's because AI is sort of a common factor and probably the most destructive force in the professional environment.
And a few things matter, right? Like first of all, articulation of what the focus is of the organization and what is that strategy in showing people to not star in where we want to be as a company. And then related to that, how are you going to bring people along and having some structured way of articulating for them as to what is it going to take for us to go on this journey? So as I talked about, you know, move from jobs to skills, like we have constantly
repeated this mantra like in the organization and building a real understanding of the skills in your organization and creating pathways for people to evolve. That's where things like internal talent marketplace that we're going to launch become powerful because then it shows people the future and connects people with opportunities, not just roles. Second, similar to what I talked about, you have to redesign work, not just roles. Don't just layer AI on top of existing processes.
Rebecca Taylor (12:53.751)
Mmm.
Girish Ganesan (13:03.927)
And we have an internal generative AI platform that we have launched to all 40,000 employees. And we've got close to 22,000 prompts that are already being created by our own employees, which are now part of a Spark store. Our internal generative platform is called Spark Assist. So every prompt that is created goes on a Spark store. And our employees have started sharing that amongst each other. Because how that helps is it mobilizes the organization in getting comfortable with
utilization of AI and they are closest to the minutiae of the workflow within this organization. So it's really helping us rethink, you know, at the task and the workflow level. The third, which I would say is
Rebecca Taylor (13:38.338)
Yeah.
Girish Ganesan (13:49.217)
Right now, not being talked about as much, but I do think it is one of the most important factor that is going to make organization transformation successful is investing in your people leaders. At scale, transformation happens through them. And we have to put a lot more focus on our people leaders, not just at the top, but also in the middle and frontline leaders by equipping them with not just tools, but with confidence through lead, through ambiguity and change. Because if you haven't experienced this,
Rebecca Taylor (14:00.686)
Mmm.
Girish Ganesan (14:19.201)
speed and level of change without education and training, you're not going to be able to lead your teams through the journey that the organization needs to be on. listening is underrated. And lot of people leaders just focus on what they have to deliver for their KPI. But as you manage change through a world that is moving this fast, you can't just assume what's going to work for your teams. And that's why you have to build that agility and change muscle. And it comes from investing in our people leaders.
doing that. We've got 7,000 people leaders across the globe and we're putting all of them through a Change Leadership Academy.
Rebecca Taylor (14:56.046)
That's awesome. I think that's something that I agree that every company needs to be doing that because they're the ones who your employees, the employees who report to them trust the most, right? That, you know, employees will trust their manager. They'll confide in their manager more than they'll confide in, you know, other leaders within the organization statistically, right? There's obviously exceptions for everything, but so empowering those managers to kind of know how to show up for those teams. And I think, I think it's also about giving them grace, giving them some grace and some space to know like, Hey,
These skills that you're learning might be new. The pace of change is faster than we've ever experienced before. There's a lot that we're all kind of learning as we go. It's okay if you make some mistakes here and there, but let's figure out how to solve them together. I think that's the piece that, you know, is so important for a lot of people who are kind of just trying to keep up and do a good job. don't believe that anybody starts their workday by saying like, today I'm gonna fail.
Today I'm gonna do the worst job ever. So it's great to hear that you're providing them learning, that you're giving them sort of that space and those resources so that they can have the tools and the practice to kind of exercise the tools that they need.
Girish Ganesan (16:06.233)
It's no different than when you bring in someone from the outside into your company, there's an onboarding process. And similarly, if some of our people leaders haven't been through this level of change, the organizations have an obligation to invest in them. And you're also right, as much as employees in a company look up to what the CEO has to say or the rest of the executive leadership team has to say, they do look to their immediate manager because they know they're the ones who influence their performance and their career path in this company more immediately.
Rebecca Taylor (16:16.43)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Rebecca Taylor (16:37.484)
Yeah, yeah. And there's also a different expectation that employees have now of their work and how they want their manager to show up and the level of transparency that a company needs to provide, right? And being able to navigate that nuance at the ground level is really, important to kind of help those teams continue to have trust at the top level. We can't be transparent about everything, right? That's just not possible, especially for...
a company the size of SMP Global, right? 40,000 people can't know everything about everything, right? But it's about helping them to have trust in the information that they do know and have because they understand how those decisions were made and they trust the person who's communicating that decision and that person who's overseeing that level of change. And that's usually the manager.
Girish Ganesan (17:24.515)
Yeah, and you're right, Rebecca. When you're in 41 countries, it's also about contextualizing that change at the grassroot levels. And some of it also has cultural nuances, depending on where you are in the globe. And your manager is the closest to that.
Rebecca Taylor (17:41.251)
Yeah, yeah. So I'm curious about there was something that you mentioned earlier about sort of breaking down the workflows that it takes for someone to do the job, the actual job description. But you also talked about breaking down roles in terms of skills. So it sounds like you're building a true sort of skills matrix and figuring out what skills are in the organization and where they live and how people are going to use those skills to perform their jobs. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Girish Ganesan (18:06.243)
Sure, you know we're building towards a skills-powered talent marketplace using a platform called Eightfold, which many companies use to collect learning, gig work, mentoring and roles like all in one place. And the goal is to make career growth much more dynamic and transparent and also provide agility whereby our employees can actually think about career path in a different way because the way job architecture and career ladders exist today, that will all
sort of will need to be redesigned as we go forward because the emphasis will be on more on skills and how you build portability of your skills in future for the variety of different sort of new opportunities that might emerge. And that's really our focus right now. I've often said in many organizations, LinkedIn has more information on their employees than they might internally. And my goal is to flip that for our own colleagues for their own benefit.
And that also makes internal redeployment and providing internal mobility opportunities to our colleagues much more easily.
Rebecca Taylor (19:14.22)
Yeah, I love that. Especially when you mentioned internal mobility. is the third conversation today in different contexts that HR leaders have talked about sort of the focus on internal mobility. And I think that it's gone so underappreciated for a long time. The strategy was always just recruit for open roles and climb that career ladder and figure out how to move up. this is really kind of a time where everything is changing. The workforce is changing. The way we work is changing.
You know, if you can have sort of folks within your organization learn what opportunities there are and have the skills and the ability and the resources to move laterally or diagonally sometimes, that's just, it's refreshing and it's exciting to hear. So I love that.
Girish Ganesan (19:56.077)
Yeah, and you know, and as we deconstruct jobs by getting down to task and workflow level to understand how the whole AI human integration is going to work at the workflow level, it's also giving us insights around what skills would be needed. And then our learning curriculum sort of needs to evolve as a result to make sure there's skill gaps. You know, we are investing in our learning academy on the basis of that, versus, know, traditionally, there's an assumption that is made that these are the capabilities
capabilities that organizations need to invest in and sometimes we just go casket out a learning program to all 40,000 employees and this will just allow us to be more curated and be more role specific based on some of the changes that we're going to notice.
Rebecca Taylor (20:42.958)
It's the era of personalization, right? It's like we really can personalize at scale now, which is really cool.
Girish Ganesan (20:48.077)
Very much so, and that's where I think the power of AI is to scale personalization, whether it's learning recommendations or career paths, or even how we support managers in real time. AI is becoming the new coaching tool that can be scaled across a large scale of your people leadership or even employees, and many organizations use that, and those are the things that we are also experimenting with.
Rebecca Taylor (21:11.18)
Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because we're experimenting with a lot of that at All Voices too, even where, you know, we're an employee relations platform, right? So that can be sometimes there are situations where you could use a little bit of coaching and a little bit of guidance. And, you know, a lot of how we're thinking about Vera, who's sort of the support, you know, your support AI assistant throughout your whole experience, you know, they'll be pointing out.
this policy make me look a little bit vague. So here's a way that you could like do it a little bit better. Just those little sort of coaching moments in the moment where the work is happening is kind of becoming, I think the norm. It's really cool to see, because you forget things when you're going from one big training into then applying it to something. So if you can get some coaching that shows up in the moment that you need it, there's a lot of really cool platforms out there doing that too for different contexts.
Girish Ganesan (21:56.985)
Very much so. you know, at the end of the day, AI or any other form of tech transformation should really help us remove friction and not necessarily create more. And that is also about making work more human and not less. And that's really our goal here. We do want to increase our speed to market, whether internally or externally. But that has to be with a balance around how to make sure that human in the loop and
focus on power skills and personalization is maintained as we sort of move forward.
Rebecca Taylor (22:31.022)
Yeah, yeah. Well, if you could believe it, we're actually just about at time. So my last question for you is, do you have any closing thoughts for anyone who's listening to this and kind of trying to also navigate, you know, many different seasons of change within their organization, within their world, any closing thoughts you can offer to someone here?
Girish Ganesan (22:48.291)
Well, first of all, thanks again for having me. And given that this is for largely the HR community, I would say this is a very exciting time to be an HR professional. Like how many of us can say that we're part of such a humongous transformation within our organization, but also just generally in the society. It's also a very daunting time. So, you know, stay connected as a community because nobody has all the answers. And I certainly have a network of CHROs that I call because
This is the moment to also share practices across our companies to make sure that we're doing the best by our people.
Rebecca Taylor (23:26.595)
Very well said. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here, Geras, and for sharing all of your wisdom and tips and tricks and just perspective for anyone who's curious and wants to learn more. I encourage you to submit your questions here. We're happy to kind of answer anything else you might have after you listen to this. And thank you everybody for listening and hope you have a good rest of your day. Bye.
Girish Ganesan (23:46.349)
so much.