Moving organizations towards virtual work environments is progressing in fits and starts. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations have curtailed work-from-home and other virtual work policies. Virtual work raises challenging issues while, at the same time, presenting opportunities for efficiencies, cost-effectiveness, and reach that the traditional place-based workplace cannot match.

In this episode, we explore the concepts and challenges around whether a workplace actually still needs to be a place.

AMPLIFY Girls, since its inception, has been a unique organization in this regard. It has been purposely organized around a virtual structure. Both for efficiency and to extend reach cost-effectively across the members of the organization, being virtual from the outset has enabled AMPLIFY Girls to focus quite simply on how to make a virtual organization work.

In our Q&A spotlight, we explore the insights of a thought leader in workforce management, delving into their experiences in building and sustaining effective workforce strategies.

Katrina Sam is the Head of Performance and Reward at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), with over ten years of experience in multilateral development, compensation, talent management, and data science. She designs and implements policies and programs aligned with the Bank’s vision and goals. Prior to AIIB, she served as Director of Human Resources and Administration at the Caribbean Development Bank. With a 20-year career in human resources, she has provided services across the Caribbean and spent nine years advising on internal HR practices at one of the Big Four accounting firms.

Most organizations resort to time as a proxy for experience—time in the job, time in the company, time in the field. But you know that people develop at different rates, so time isn’t a very good measure of experience! But what is the alternative to time? Education? Performance?

We know intuitively that people with more experience are capable of delivering more in their jobs, and are more valuable to their organization. But it’s really hard to measure experience without an objective framework. Many organizations struggle to accurately measure employee knowledge and experience to make fair, data-driven decisions across critical HR areas. These measures drive key decisions across all areas of HR, including recruitment, compensation, development, and more.

In this episode, we will introduce our job-based framework for measuring employee knowledge and experience—Community™ Skills. The framework provides a powerful standard that organizations can use to shift to a data-driven approach to workforce management that is transparent and fair.