Following an eclectic series of roles at Walmart, WPP and Accenture, Jacqui Canney is now Chief People Officer at IT systems provider ServiceNow, where she leads talent strategies for more than 20,000 employees. In this episode of People and Strategy, Canney speaks with host Tony Lee about how generative AI is impacting HR, how to leverage Inclusion, Equity and Diversity (IE&D) as a business strategy, and her advice for those pursuing the C-suite.
Following an eclectic series of roles at Walmart, WPP and Accenture, Jacqui Canney is now Chief People Officer at IT systems provider ServiceNow, where she leads talent strategies for more than 20,000 employees. In this episode of People and Strategy, Canney speaks with host Tony Lee about how generative AI is impacting HR, leveraging Inclusion, Equity and Diversity (IE&D) as a business strategy, and her advice for those pursuing the C-suite.
Tony Lee:
Welcome to today's People and Strategy Podcast. I'm Tony Lee, vice president of content for the Society for Human Resource Management in the SHRM Executive Network, which is the premier network of executives and thought leaders in the field of human resources.
I'm excited to speak today with Jacqui Canney, chief people officer at ServiceNow in New York, where she leads talent strategies for more than 20,000 employees. Before joining ServiceNow in 2021, Jacqui served as the global chief people officer for WPP, the world's largest advertising and PR company. And before that, she served as chief people officer at Walmart. Jacqui started her career by spending 25 years at Accenture, where she pivoted from auditing initially to HR. Jacqui, welcome to the People and Strategy Podcast.
Jacqui Canney:
Thank you. So great to be here, Tony. Thank you for having me.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. No, it's our pleasure. So it's interesting, your experience spans many different organizations and industries. I'm just wondering how has that background helped you so far at ServiceNow?
Jacqui Canney:
Well, thanks for the question. Accenture, where you mentioned I was there 25 years, was absolutely the best classroom for me to learn so much about business, about transformation, about change, about agility, customer service. One of our core values at that time was stewardship, leaving things better than you found them. So imagine that over that 25 years of learning and schooling and then seeing how much people strategy became part of the success of that company. When I started, it was 25,000. When I left, it was 400,000, and now it's like over 700,000. So they've just been scaling and proving excellence along the way while adapting to all the things that come, whether it's macroeconomic technology shifts, and I got a front row seat to that.
And then going to Walmart was an amazing opportunity. I got to work with Doug McMillon, who is also a great leader, and he wanted to change retail, and he wanted to change Walmart. And he knew doing that would be through the experience of the associates. So how could we change the experience of working at Walmart so much so that it was a more digital consumer grade way of working, that that would translate into customer service, innovative ideas, how to serve a customer no matter how she wanted to shop. And that was a tie in there.
And then getting to work with Bill McDermott, Bill and I met when I was at Walmart and I got a glimpse into how he was a CEO at SAP and his relentless focus on culture, his belief in leadership through innovation and the capabilities needed to make his organizations flourish were just all like... As I look back, there was this red thread of those big organizations of having a great leader, having a vision, having a desire to transform and grow, and then knowing that your board's aligned, your people are aligned, but more importantly, your talent strategy is created to enable that. And I think that's really the most important thing.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. No, it makes perfect sense. So I'm curious from a career standpoint, people who are listening are often wondering, does it make sense for me to just keep trying to climb the ladder at the company I'm at or should I jump ship and try and get experience at different companies? You've done both of those things. So what's your recommendation for folks who are trying to make it to the C-suite?
Jacqui Canney:
Yeah. I think it's constantly asking yourself, "Are you growing and are you learning?" Starting with does your values align with the company? And if you're growing in you're learning and your values align with the company, you can stay and have an amazing long run like I did at Accenture. I never thought that I would leave that company, but the opportunity when I met Doug was really something that I knew I could only really experience by taking that role. And that's what had my decision to move on. And I left Walmart, not because I saw this other greater opportunities, and maybe you know this or not, is that I was commuting for a long part of the time I was there, and my family was mostly in New Jersey. And the job itself in Walmart is a 200% job, right? For all the work to be done, the engagement that it needs. And I didn't feel like commuting was the right thing.
So talking to Doug about that was really... He was greatly, he cared about 2 million people, but he really cared. He knew how to care about one person, and at that time it was me and knowing what I needed to do. So my shift wasn't about am I growing, am I learning? It was the choices that you make also for your personal life and what do you need at that point in your life? And they're still friends of mine.
But when I, as I said, got the opportunity to work at WPP, which was my next role, I shifted industries. I got to be in a marketing media and advertising holding company which was thrilling in so many ways because of the impact that organization has in our impressions. They were responsible for one in three ads that we see every day or impressions that we see. So the people strategy to make those ads and impressions more inclusive, more equitable, was really exciting to me as we hired and built the talented people that worked there.
And then obviously coming to ServiceNow, that was again, an opportunity to work for an amazing CEO in technology to create technology that I craved using over 30 years along the way. So for me, that's how I made those decisions, but I could see why people are thinking about, "Do I have to keep moving to jump to the C-suite?" I don't think you do if you're in the right place, but you should take a risk at the time when you're ready for it.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. And risk taking is part of being in the C-suite, right?
Jacqui Canney:
Yeah.
Tony Lee:
Knowing when to take risks. So you've landed at ServiceNow and apparently you've already had a pretty good impact. You led the development of their People Pact, which is designed to help employees, quote, "Live their best lives, do their best work, and fulfill our purpose together." So can you explain what that effort is?
Jacqui Canney:
Sure. We didn't really have a constructed, articulated employee value proposition when I got here. And that was one of the first things we all agreed we needed. A north star to guide the work of the people team, the work of the company, all around our culture and our talent. So the People Pack was actually created by our own employees. We worked with them, we workshopped, we surveyed, we listened, and we turned all of their feedback into these three points. So I love that it's built by the people for the people and it's been a really great, as I said, north star.
So how are we putting that to work? Since I've been here, hired 6,000 people. We committed to no layoffs. We've run our company on ServiceNow. We have a lot of pride for working on our own platform to show that we can deliver something for our 22,000 people, but also make it so amazing that our customers wanted to, particularly in the human resource space. And as we scale and grow, my team is focused on how are we developing our people? Who are we recruiting? How are we choosing who we hire? Working that whole talent system so we can build up and provide to the 22,000 people, this unleashed potential because insatiably curious. How are they learning? How are they growing? And it's just been phenomenal. And we're not done yet. We have super ambitious goals. So this People Pact is going to guide us for the next five years as we become, as Bill says, the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century. It's a lot of words, but you get it. It's a pretty big ambition.
Tony Lee:
Yeah, that's quite the goal. So great. Well, it sounds like you're in the right place to help make that happen. So let's dive into some specifics. Things that have been, both CEOs and HR have really been wrestling with. Return to office. It's been a touchy subject at a lot of companies, especially as leadership is taking steps to try and bring employees back that maybe don't want to come back. So how are you handling it ServiceNow?
Jacqui Canney:
Since COVID, I joined during COVID, we've been keeping flexibility and trust at the center of all these decisions, when to open offices, when to close them, all the things that were going on at that time, and safety, obviously being at the core of all that. So now that we're back to offices have been reopening in 2022 for us, we have a great culture. We absolutely want to have that. We are continuing to work with flexibility, empathy, and trust, and we have personas that our people aligned to with their managers. You can be a flexible employee, which means you're in the office one to three days a week. Preferably, we try to center on two. You're a remote employee, you were probably hired in a role that you can work from home all the time, or you're an employee that comes to the office all the time for a variety of reasons.
And globally, we have more than 90% of our people in that flexible category. So we continue to work with that, that the personas are working for us. If somebody's in a persona that doesn't work for them or their job is shifted, we have these open conversations that move people between those personas. And so far, I think that's been working for us. I know that in some cities, our attendance rates are higher than others. I'm in New York and I take personal responsibility to help lead this office so that there are moments that matter that bring people into the office, not just this is the persona you signed up for, whether it's social events, learning opportunities, community events, philanthropic events. We build a programming around that. And like many of us talk about we believe we have to earn the commute, it's not just telling people that they have to come in. And I'm excited about where we'll go with that, but it's definitely a balance for us and other companies.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. And what you hear some CEOs say is that when you have the majority of employees not in the office, it's harder to maintain a company culture and seek innovation and even the spur of the moment hallway discussions. How do you feel about that?
Jacqui Canney:
Yeah, I miss it too. When I go in the office and I get to run into people, I enjoy that. I really do. That's how I'm wired. And I think that generally most people probably feel that way. Collaboration is important and innovation is at the core of our company. So is it the in-person? Is it the hybrid? Is it the ability to collaborate and innovate across time zones and miles and offices and different... We have to get better at that. I don't think that this is going away. So to be the ambitious company that we talk about, we need to have focused internal time together, shoulder to shoulder, as Bill would call it, and we need to be really great at this when we're not together, still innovating and collaborating. And I think being a people manager has never been more difficult. And that's where I find is the unlock. So we spend a lot of time helping our people managers get more confident in leading teams in this hybrid world. And like I said, I don't think it's going away. So we need to get stronger and better and more confident.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. And especially when people managers themselves are hybrid or remote, it's a real challenge. So ServiceNow has been noted for celebrating diversity and equity and inclusion throughout every aspect of your business. And I'm curious, a lot of companies are reevaluating their DE&I efforts, especially following the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year about affirmative action and college admissions. Has that had any impact or are you guys reevaluating DE&I in any way?
Jacqui Canney:
Well, DE&I has been a very long-term purpose strategy and a part of the success of this company. And we're going to continue to double down on our commitments in 2023, not back off of them. And I am still working to understand what this ruling will mean, like lots of us in the CHRO job and how it applies to our company. But I can tell you that we're absolutely continuing. As I said with the People Pact, it's how do we have our people live their best lives, do their best work, and fulfill our purpose together. And I believe that a core way of delivering on the People Pact is absolutely strengthening our diverse workforce.
A large percentage of our hiring actually is in our early and career population. So that's people coming out of university or with little business experience. So we're continuing to keep that as a wide funnel. We partner with lots of great organizations, including our historically Black colleges and universities that we're partnering with. We work with other organizations because this is so important to us that I... We're not backing off is the long answer to a very easy thing for me to tell you.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. You talked about line managers, people managers, and they're the ones that seem to have the greatest difficulty with DE&I training, and even just trainers coming up with programs that really resonate and help address unconscious bias and what have you. Is that part of your outreach to people managers, getting them to understand the importance of DE&I more?
Jacqui Canney:
Yeah. And I believe DE&I is woven into all of our HR work. It's not a separate strategy, it's integrated. And I have a great partner named Karen Pavlin who helps me in this work who teams with Bill McDermott, who absolutely sees us as important as I do. So this isn't like an HR strategy, it's absolutely part of the business strategy. And when we build out our strategy for the year, the operations for the year in HR, we weave in DE&I along the way. So when we have recruiting, what our recruiting imperatives are, our recruiters are trained, our hiring managers are trained. It's part of making our numbers. It's part of the fabric of the way we work. And when we think about our development, we're making sure that our development programs are reaching to all 21,000 and 22,000 people that they see themselves in a way to be able to be successful to grow and develop.
So I don't think of it as DE&I to the side and HR programming to the other side. And that the two parallel, they're very integrated. And that's why I think our people managers, when we teach them, it's about how do you build trust? Well, trust does come from diverse workforces. How do you recognize wellbeing in your team or the need for helping someone who may be struggling with that? That's also got DE&I into it. How do you pick who is your high potentials? Are you giving people the best shot? Are you using data to make those decisions? Are you keeping all the voices at the table heard, whether they're on the screens or in the office? So it is a very complicated job, but we spend great hours with our people managers, absolutely giving them the tools, the experience, and hopefully the confidence to drive their important work.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. No, that's great, Jacqui. Thank you for sharing that. So let's pivot away from people. You're a technology company, generative AI is here, it's being embraced by a lot of companies and perhaps feared by some other HR professionals. Let's just start with what ServiceNow's take on generative AI and how are you implementing it in the HR side?
Jacqui Canney:
AI has been part of our technology strategy for years. Generative AI absolutely is probably if I... I'm not the technologist in the team, but because I like to be with them and understand it, and I think technology is really important to CHROs. This is the biggest innovation in tech in the past 50 years. And it's part of every conversation I'm in, whether it's at the board table, the executive table, the CHRO table, we're all still talking about it and learning and experimenting. And our company did our latest release with Vancouver. You can hear how generative AI is powering up a lot of our products, actually in all of our products. And having a understanding of how AI is assisting our customers, assisting our teams inside is really the exciting thing from my perspective. It's about creating time. It's creating smarter decisions. It's about putting relief into time so that we can have more intelligent productivity, not just productivity, by moving faster, by giving more personalized experiences.
So we're weaving it into everything. In particular, there's a product called Employee Growth and Development that was co-created by the team inside, my team, the CIO team, and the product team where you can look at skills and using AI and machine learning be able to say, "Here's how someone's skills are progressing. Here's the learning that they probably could take or grow from. Here's the experiences that they could get. And then this is how they're going to be able to grow in their career through their development plans, learning resources and it's all in this one single platform." That's the tech catching up with what I believe human resources has been trying to do for a long time. And it's pretty cool to see it in action inside our own company.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. That's very exciting. So there are caveats, of course. I mean, the EEOC came out with warnings. Be careful, don't let implicit bias work to your AI. How are you addressing that? And just basically the limitations of AI?
Jacqui Canney:
Yeah. This is the part where I think humanity and trust has to be part of how you are using AI in your company. And in our company, we have a group of us that are focused on that so that we are still maintaining our values and our culture while being innovative with the most current technology. And I, in the HR space, have great HR leaders that are basically almost like the HR business partner to the way we use AI, making sure that it isn't violating anything that we would be not proud of here, but using it in a way that is augmenting what we are proud of. And I think that's the key. You can't release it. You can't release AI into your company and into the world without having the caretaker of the AI. And my team takes that very seriously, particularly as it relates to our human resource area.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. So we're almost out of time here, but the typical question, what keeps you up at night? It's funny. When I talk to CHROs, I often hear two camps. One is there's a recession coming and the other camp is we can't keep up with the growth. Where are you falling?
Jacqui Canney:
I would say I'm in the second. Can't keep up with the growth is probably what will keep me up at night. I also think this is such a critical time to be in our roles. We're balancing the operations of a human resource function. We are growing ambitiously, we have macroeconomic environments that are unpredictable, we have amazing opportunity with technology, and we're the stewards of the culture. And if you put all that together, I joke around that sounds like Tuesday, it's a lot. It's a lot on our plate. And it does keep me up at night because I'm naturally a worrier but I have confidence that our team, my team at ServiceNow, and a leader like Bill McDermott, we are accomplishing those goals. It's just making the plan, working the plan, and sticking to it. So hopefully, I get a little rest occasionally.
Tony Lee:
There you go. Well, Jacqui, this has been great. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. We really appreciate it. And for listeners, you can follow the People and Strategy Podcast wherever you listen to your podcast, and you can learn more about the SHRM Executive Network at shrm.org/executive. Also, listener reviews have a real impact on a podcast visibility. So if you enjoyed today's episode, please take a moment to leave a review and help others find the show. And finally, you can find all of our episodes on our website at shrm.org/podcast. Thanks for listening and have a great day.