Season 2, Episode 5: Shaping the New Reality: How Organizations Can Prepare for Success in 2021

Roberta Cucchiaro: Hi and welcome to the 5th episode of the Transform Talent Podcast!  This is Roberta Cucchiaro and Dominika Gałusa. This is our first episode of the New Year and we are going to talk about how organizations can prepare for success in 2021.   

Dominika Gałusa: Just a few months ago remote working became the new norm overnight even for roles that were “impossible” to do remotely. And now - there is no putting the genie back in the bottle! Widespread remote work arrived overnight, employees rose to the occasion, and most don’t want to go back to the old way of working. Organizations must become more sophisticated and be prepared to adapt to a new reality. Employers have an opportunity to reshape new hybrid workplaces and provide technology that give employees the flexibility they want, while supporting sustainability goals.  

Roberta Cucchiaro: 2021 brings with it three key workforce trends: greater workforce flexibility, a broader definition of talent sustainability and worker wellbeing, and digital transformation: meaning that every company must be a digital company.  

We are going to explore these three trends with three of our Global Leaders:  

Raleen Gagnon, Vice President Global Market Intelligence, Talent Solutions  

Marceline Beijer, Global Brand Leader, Talent Solutions RPO – Vice President, Talent Solutions Europe  

Dave Mancl, Director, Performance Analytics, ManpowerGroup  

Hi everyone, welcome to the Podcast! Let’s start with you, Raleen. With you I would like to focus on workforce flexibility, the first trend, and what it means. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on today’s workplace. This time last year, working from home was viewed as a fringe benefit by many companies. Today, January 2021, remote work has become the new normal. So I want to explore with you what this means for organizations that want to optimize their workforce, for talent communities and for skills shortages as well.  

 And the words that we're going to hear more and more in 2021 are, flexibility, talent availability, and remote ready workforce. So the first question for you Raleen is in this new reality, how can organizations select the best locations to find workers with the skills needed? 

Raleen Gagnon: That's an excellent question. And it's one that wasn't necessarily top of mind prior to the pandemic. So as you alluded to this happened very quickly and organizations reacted without having a strategy in place to quickly deploy folks remotely. Now, the question is how can organizations determine who should continue to work remotely in the future, regardless of when and how this pandemic falls back. And so with that in mind, one of the best ways an organization can approach this is using data, data within their organization and data in the marketplace. Understanding proactively which roles and their business today are best done remotely because not everyone that can work from home should, some roles truly do have higher productivity or better collaboration in an onsite environment. Whereas others have no disruption and frankly could be higher performing outside in a work from home situation. Once an organization knows how individual roles are classified, then they can determine moving forward, where is the best place to locate these individuals in the future? 

And there, you can start to look at a number of factors, you can think about where can these people be hired more cost-effectively and identify a number of locations where wages may be lower, but you also want to look at these sustainable pools of talent and know that you're sourcing and branding yourself in a community, but you'll be able to hire these skills for over time. That means you need to understand the migration patterns today. As people start to move out of higher populated areas in higher cost markets, where are they moving to? And using those two factors you can really tap into where do I have the greatest availability and access to sustainable talent with cost efficiency and cost savings, benefits. Other organizations are going one step further and looking at their diversity and inclusion initiatives as well. So DNI initiatives can be taken into account here, and you can actually look at the diversity and the demographics of different pools of candidates in the marketplace to increase other corporate benefits to the culture of your workforce as well. 

So I hope that made sense because there's a lot of data in the marketplace that can be assessed and then waited to make the right decision for a particular company. And I just wanted to add that when we start to look at remote workforce strategies globally looking at a resource like the Total Workforce Index, that ManpowerGroup Talent Solutions puts out, actually allows a company to take into account other operational factors as well. Because what we can do in that case is to determine what percentage of a workforce in another country represents remote optimal jobs? What countries may have limitations around technology or data protection and privacy that exist in the marketplace that a company may need to be concerned about? And so thinking about your global workforce and what those remote strategies look like, you may have to take a different approach with the data in some markets than you would in others. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: Well, it is fascinating to think that remote work has created opportunities for employers, or infinite opportunities actually, to tap skills beyond borders, right? So talent in the cloud. And all of a sudden we aren't talking about location, but just purely about talent and that could be anywhere. So, but at the same time, not all businesses have been able to shift to remote working in the blink of an eye. So what should organizations do and how to more effectively optimize their workforce in order to enhance productivity and provide that flexibility workers want, whether that's completely remote or a hybrid model? 

Raleen Gagnon: Again, for each organization that concept of promote optimization and workforce optimization in general is going to have a different definition. Some organizations are going to measure the success of their workforce optimization based on that workforce mix that they're gaining the flexibility they need out of their temporary and agency workers, or that they are gaining the risk mitigation out of the programs and models that they've put into place, for others it may be that they are looking to revitalize their workforce by leveling the balance between genders and between ethnicities, within their organization. And all of that comes down to first again, assessing what you see within your own organization today. When Dave speaks later about performance analytics and looking at your data in a different capacity, understanding not just general statistics of how your organization is broken down today, but how those statistics are contributing to the bottom line or the marketing initiatives or the productivity of a particular group. 

So within our consulting environment we engage with organizations, we have a series of intake calls around what is their definition of the fully performing workforce, the fully balanced workforce, what culture are they trying to achieve? And what are the key factors that we need to look at? I've had some organizations that were looking to develop new locations and bring in a culture from overseas into a new headquarters location within a new region. And in doing that they two years ago, we're already talking about diversity considerations in the various communities that they were evaluating for their locations. And what legislation or cultural impacts were going to affect their people that were traveling in from various parts of the world. Today, understanding how your culture is going to change if a certain portion of your workforce is remote means you have to rethink how your hiring managers are managing their people today, how your business leaders are measuring the success of their teams, because some teams have thrived and increased their performance over the course of the past year and others have struggled to do so. 

And that's not always related to what was happening in the economy or in the health constraints that they were operating in. It's often due to the technology that they have in place, the rigidity they may have around scheduling and deadlines that perhaps could be loosened to accommodate the fact that some of the workforce is dealing with children learning from home or closures of childcare options or another individual in their family being on a very different schedule than they are on, all of those things come into effect. So polling your people on a regular basis for their perspective and priorities and aligning that to all of the business data is really where you start to see how that concept of your future ideal workforce and what that ideal is, how that maps back to the organization you're at today and how far you have to go, to go from step A, where you are today to step C where you want to end up in the future. And frankly, understanding how much time they go into that throughout the course of it. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: Yeah. And well, I have another question for you that I know it's a topic very close to your heart, which is women in the workforce. And you mentioned briefly about it in the previous question, but so as women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, what do you think are the key lessons learned in 2020? And what should we prioritize as we move into 2021? 

Raleen Gagnon: I think we've seen a lot of challenges in 2020 with women's ability to participate in the workforce. But now we're seeing an opportunity as we move into 2021 to do something different. Because part of why we've seen that drop in employment amongst women in particular, because of the childcare gap with various daycare closures and hybrid or remote learning worldwide is because there was no other support system in place within the business environments and within standard business and employer practices to augment what their workforce needed. Divorce rates are exponentially higher today worldwide than they were just a decade ago. And so when we think about how that impacts many households and their ability to be in an office or their ability to work certain schedules, organizations hadn't previously created a flex schedule or had the ability to supplement or a benefit to supplement the cost of childcare or had remote and learning centers set up within their production facilities to support parents that were working in their shops, who may not have anywhere else to bring their children. 

And that was never in place before, but the need emerged and it became very apparent this past year. So now, as organizations are starting to bring people back to work or are starting to rehire, one of the key priorities we're talking about with clients daily is what do we need to do to bring our women back to work, to hire more women within our company, within our industry in general? What does that mean? Do we need to have pop-up learning centers in our communities that we help to fund? Do we need to negotiate discounts for our staff so that they can leverage these resources? Do we need to build these capabilities into our operating structure or does this not need to be in person? Is this hybrid learning approach, something that we should somehow supplement and provide for our people remotely? 

All of these are questions that I don't know that we have the answers to this yet. And again, for each organization it's different, but understanding that this is likely going to be a problem moving forward, even after the pandemic. And if we address it now, the next time it won't have a disproportionate effect on women. It will just be something that we all as a society need to address at the time. 

Dominika Galusa: So the role of HR has shifted dramatically over the course of the pandemic, creating the imperative for HR to carry a greater duty of care for employees, health, wellbeing, safety, and careers, even as rapid digital transformation is accelerating the need for upskilling and reskilling at rates we have not seen, about the second 2021 workforce trends that is sustainability and worker wellbeing. I'd like to talk to my very own boss, Marceline. The pandemic and social movements around inequities and are helping organizations refocus on what's most important to employees, health, transparency, and upskilling. I would like to focus first on health, Marceline. How can we avoid employee burnout? 

Marceline Beijer: Thank you very much, Dominika. It's a very interesting question and dear to my heart, because I think it's a very important feature of all leaders in future is being empathetic. So I think how can you do it is not one recipe, but I think it's very important to at first understand what workers want in general. And we have done as ManpowerGroup the surveys to understand that in a general sense, like security, sustainability of work, the work-life blend and wellness in general, of course. As a leader, you need to understand how to tailor that to your workforce, of course and that is I think, where it becomes very important to learn how to remotely be a coach to your people to change the leadership style in the new era, after the pandemic, even in the pandemic to be able to be coaching is a very important trend into keep every has to keep the workforce healthy. 

So it's not just about keeping them healthy and happy in career development. It's also too to help them understand the work life balance for example, and understand how to drive productivity even remote. So I think that is an answer to your question is how can you keep them from employee burnout? Make sure, just for example, and you were mentioning that we are working together as well, just sometimes have a little bit of fun and experience and not just block the calendar full day moment after moment. So really empathetic leadership is important here and also giving flexibility to your workforce. The interesting part is that not everybody is able to do that as a start because we've been trained as managers to be looking into productivity, looking into normal career building and so forth. So what I have been using in the past year is a tool that we have been developing in our company, which is called RightCoach. 

And it was a fun experience because I'm a busy leader as everybody can be, but being in the opportunity to use our own RightCoach, it gave me the opportunity to block myself an hour of coach that I could pick off a really look into what am I interested in? What do I need now? So to really just Google within the tool for the right coach for me, which is why it's called RightCoach probably, and also to block myself into his calendar at there at the time that I can make it. 

So and it was very helpful because, and then you get this spark of energy, this little tickle in how to do things. It's not the usual thing of how to block a half day travel somewhere. It's very helpful. And it has given me the support in my role. Everybody needs to learn. Everybody needs to be able to do some strong spurning, it helped me very much to understand what is needed now in this new era for my employees. And also to be able to give that, to learn myself and then to give it to hopefully to you Dominika here as well. 

Dominika Galusa: Well, thank you for sharing this and well, I see how so important it is especially in the light of the horrifying data I read about in Harvard business review. I just want to call out the numbers here. And I think we will be a bit shocked. So since the pandemic outbreak, 67% of people report higher stress, 57% are feeling greater anxiety and 53% said if you're more emotionally exhausted. Well, and that's why we need to have leaders that care. 

Marceline Beijer: And maybe here as well to add because we have an open conversation. What was for 2020 was one of the most remarkable things that happened to me in our team is that even though we were working remotely, we had this sort of social goals. And then even at any moment in time, there were people calling out and having the guts to tell the group on screen that they were having levels of anxiety and just sharing that with each other. And you cannot resolve everybody just all at once, but it was a remarkable experience because in the normal workplace and I've been around for a while I've never experienced it in that way that people were willing to share that in a group. So I think it's the new way of working and also the new transparency and honesty that people are doing themselves with also expecting of us. 

Dominika Galusa: I think you're right. As employee, I also feel more confident about sharing when I hear something like this coming from the leader. So I just would like to move to another question and I would like to talk about the link between diversity inclusion and employee your brand, and why should organizations should pay attention to that? 

Marceline Beijer: Yeah, well, you have business reasons and social reasons I would say, because we see what's happening at the social tension that is in across the world, differentiated in the different regions, but globally you can see the social tension. And I think it's very important to understand where it comes from and as a brand, give an answer to that because so let me first employ your value proposition that you have. So the employer branding, so to say the EVP, it's really important to show yourself who you are. And as I've been in marketing I have learned from the early days when everything became online is that you need to be authentic. You need to be where you are, you cannot sell a story. So the EVP employer branding in DNI era where it is important is to really show what your intentions are because the candidates are looking for them. They are looking to, what is my experience with this employer? How will it look like for me, I have a daughter who is cohort and the female. So what little she experienced in that company that she's applying for and why? 

So, it's important to have this employer experience also to have the employee experience I need to say and also, how does it feel? What is the culture of the company? Is it very ambitious or is it kind and social, or is it educational? So I think it's important through EVP to show you who you are and given the social tensions in the world, but also the new generations expecting different things from us. Like we just mentioned in the work-life balance, for example, it's really important in the EVP, in the branding of the company, towards the candidates to show yourself. And maybe one more remark if I may Dominika, what is interesting is that in technology, and I know Dave we'll come back to that, but digitalization technology is now offering many opportunities to have more unbiased recruitment than before. 

And I think that that is a very interesting one is if you know the company and you can really understand as a candidate, what the company is like, and it's feel the company through the soft experience of the branding of the company. And then there is a follow-up in the process of the opportunity to have an unbiased recruitment process. Well, imagine what it will do to the real DNI inclusion in the recruitment, over the companies globally. 

Dominika Galusa: Yeah. And especially it's a links with Raleen and Roberta saying that we're moving to remote work, and it will pay a greater importance in 2021. 

Marceline Beijer: It sure will, and you were just touching upon women in the workplace and enter the consequences of remote working, which is not always as beneficial of the balancing act. But on the other side, if you look at it from a different way, we are very much always looking also in the opportunity of the gig working here. So people want more autonomy, but also for example, women in workplace can use more autonomy to juggle around with all the tasks that they feel and have. And then for example, having the opportunity to have digital big platforms to tailor your own job to put it together in a different way than we've used to, imagine how that would feel and how we would give more autonomy to people. And then we are coming back to EST. I personally love the fact that manpower is working so actively to contribute to those kinds of developers. 

Dominika Galusa: Why are upskilling and reskilling key to future-proofing your teams and organizations? And I was also curious if you see Net Zero Employment emerging as the epitome of responsible ECG. 

Marceline Beijer: Very much so, thank you. It's an interesting question. Myself, being on background from parents who were teachers the reskilling and upskilling is very important for me. If you look into this it's not just for me, because there will be a huge gap in 2030. Research that we do has shown that we have unfilled roles of gap of 85 million. So it's a need that we start reskilling and upskilling people to fill gaps, especially also because there is, let me give you an example. We worked for an oil and gas company and they are changing, of course, they're under the ESG. They're changing their future themselves in going from the regular oil and gas towards more wind energy, for example, solar energy so that also requests different skills. So it's not just the skill gap that we will have it's also the development of skills needed for future roles and future jobs that we have to work for and support companies with and how we do that. I think it will ask for a new way of education. 

So the education will be more on demand. We'll be really more looking for micro certification. Companies are much more looking into on the Net Zero Employment. We are very much active at the moment in talent pools, building talent pools within the company, to be able to help people coming from a job, going into another job within the company and help them with many academies to train them in specific skill sets that are needed for those new roles. And if it's not in that company, there's also talent pooling across companies with the same effects. So where you see there is a trend from industries coming from just let me give you a quick example, industry coming from the entertainment industry, which is now obviously being hit by the pandemic. And then those capabilities of hosting people is now being very much used in call centers. So and it's an easy explanation but that kind of looking at what is the skillset and how can it be used from the old or decreasing economic areas towards new and increasing economic areas. And then really looking into both the soft factors as well as the heart capabilities. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: Well, thank you Marceline for that. Nothing is complete until we talk about tech as well. So the third trend we should look out for is digital transformation. And as I mentioned at the beginning, that means that every company should really strive to be a digital company. And for this topic, we're going to talk to Dave in. So in this new reality, one thing that's clear is a digital minded organizations with the ability to quickly assess, make insightful decisions will be more likely to not only survive this crisis, but thrive. And that's why digital transformation is so important. And I want to start off with the topic of assessments. So data and AI driven assessments are growing in use to help organizations predict performance and make open, ethical, and third decisions about their employees. So how should organizations use assessments and what should they pay attention? 

Dave Mancl: Great question and a super relevant topic. Organizations should use assessment and data, wherever it can improve the outcomes of decisions related to human capital management, mitigating bias requires transparency. The more we are able to provide transparent, evidence-based data to individuals and in terms of how are we making hiring decisions, how are we guiding talent strategy, et cetera, the more effectively those talent strategies will be, the more individuals will know what they need to do in terms of up-scaling developing new capabilities, prioritizing their time, so that they're performing optimally, et cetera. And the better off everybody will be. At the end of the day, a lot of workforce stress comes down to that every aspect of, I don't know what I have to do in order to be promoted. I don't know what I need to do to perform. I don't know what I need to do to fill in the blank, and at the end of the day that anxiety kills creativity. 

Creativity is a strategic differentiator in every organization and to an extent there's a lot of potential in artificial intelligence, predictive analytics assessment to provide greater transparency, reduce that anxiety and really boost their performance of organizations that adapt to. 

Marceline Beijer: I have a great example that I can explain quickly. I think Dave because I have a great example in an experience with so build on machine learning in those days, little bit AI, you can call it AI, but having an assessment through a serious game, we use that for call center business to really make a good and thorough assessment of new candidates. What we did is took the data of the whole workforce, took out the best performing agents, of course, to create a profile found out that in an assessment have to do not only the regular assessment kind of work that persons do, but also find out for example, in the call center business, eye, hand coordination and communication preferences. 

So through the role play of the serious game, we built up over the data. We were able to find the best suitable candidates and with that people were, there was less attrition because they liked their job much more. There was a better hiring because people like to play the game. And in the end for the business, because of the less attrition and more happy people, productivity was much higher. And that was just through using the data to really learn from what you're doing. So it was interesting to have that, especially what you say to make the combination between data and using the assessments for building up the data. 

Dave Mancl: That's a perfect example. If you look at the most frequent decisions that are made in any workforce, it's hiring decisions. Hiring or development replacements, succession decisions, the way that we are making these decisions by emerge is through intuition today. We may base some decisions on resume and CV data, but in reality, we're far from the detailed specifications every single individual we make. And we're not tracking these decisions enough to really base a sound prediction on them. And in a way that is how assessment can be used to improve those decisions when those decisions are improved, the outcomes of all business objectives category of as well. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: So as we talk about artificial intelligence, like you rightly mentioned, we inevitably also talk about data-driven decision making and predictive analytics, right? So the question is around how can predictive analytics, help organizations make work force planning decisions? 

Dave Mancl: Yeah. So, if you could look into the future and answer any question, what question would you like to answer? This is the promise of AI and predictive analytics. The challenge is to gather sufficient data and develop the logic in order to predict it. Raleen touched on some really good topics related to remote work. So a question every organization is likely trying to answer today is how will remote work impact organizational performance over the next three years? Several dimensions have to be considered. We have to consider it at the individual level. Individuals who are stepping into purely remote work, who require different skillsets and those two would be hired into a more traditional office space environment. Teams that are remote require different management capabilities than teams who are managed in person. 

And it goes on and on and on. I think it ripples throughout the organization and all of several different ways. But the bottom line is if you can measure it, you can predict it. And these are surprisingly these types of questions that organizations will need to have a better understanding of how to predict, can be predicted using data that most organizations already have, related to background characteristics of currently successful employees and the environments that we're changing into performance data, organizational strategies and plans and implementation of new technologies, et cetera. It is possible to use this data if it's being proven more and more, that it's an effective way to plan a workforce changes. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: And as we talk about artificial intelligence, and we talked about in the previous questions as well about upskilling and about workforce optimization, one word that comes to mind is Super Teams. And it's very interesting word. It sounds like it's coming from the future, Super Teams, and maybe it's a term not everyone is aware of. So I really would like to ask you what are Super Teams and why are they the answer to the future? 

Dave Mancl: Sure. Yeah, Super Teams. I think the way to look at the Super Teams are the symbiosis between human capabilities and artificial intelligence. At the end of the day, artificial intelligence is a technology not unlike a hammer to simplify it possibly far too much. You're looking at the teams who require to use of a tool such as a hammer versus teams who don't have it. Teams who have that tool will be more effective. And the teams who are more successful at adopting this inventing new ways to use it, being creative with how they explore the possibilities of this tool will be more effective in the future. I think, obviously it's far different than that. It's probably more analogous to personal computers and how personal computing has really revolutionized work and everyday life. It's a step change from that as well, where we're talking about rather than computers which require intensive programmatic logic, we're talking about computers that are able to learn based on data being fed to them by teams. Teams that are able to adapt to that sort of new paradigm and the way that technology can support the work they're doing are going to be more effective. 

And we're very, the acceleration of how fast teams and individuals are adopting this technology is like something we've never seen before. We're still arguably in a space where mostly tech enthusiasts that are really adopting AI and working hard to develop things and exploring the capabilities of it. But we're not far from a tipping point where every team, every company, every individual to some extent will need to have some competency or some knowledge or some ability to leverage artificial intelligence in their work. On the topic of Super Teams. 

I mentioned that it's symbiosis of human capabilities and technology. The analogy is it's like Jerry Maguire versus Moneyball if you remember the movies great movies, both. But Jerry Maguire very much emotionally driven and intuition based. That's kind of emotional pull to make these decisions and drive outcomes. Moneyball is this impartial, unbiased looking at everybody's capabilities, individually gathering as much data as we can experiment with it and really making decisions based on what outcomes we are trying to achieve versus the more personal intuition based judgment. That is really the world that we live in today. And I think we need to, and we will inevitably transition into the Moneyball world as we go. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: So yeah, I think the Jerry Maguire and Moneyball analogies is really about organizations that are creating all this data and they're generating all this information, but at the end of the day, it's not helpful in hiring and recruiting unless they have a Jerry Maguire right person that can come in and bring the passion and partnering with the teams. I think that is what makes it through the powerful. 

Dominika Galusa: I have one last question I'd like to ask our guests, if you could share three recommendations on ways to future proof an organization, what would they be? And I would like each of you to think quickly and show one each. 

Raleen Gagnon: I think one of the key recommendations that I would give to any organization, regardless of which stage in planning they're at, for how they're planning to re-envision their future workforce, it would be to make sure they look at data within their organization and the data and the external markets that they're hiring in. Too often, we look at pieces of information and we don't compare it to, or run it up against other factors that could influence the outcomes. And for our scenario models to even have a chance of being accurate in 2021, because of COVID, we really need to make sure we're looking across all of the information available to us, to test our theories and to have contingency plans in place. But being data-driven is more than a tagline. It means truly looking at all of the information at your disposal, reaching out to your partners like ManpowerGroup to determine what else is out there to consider that we may not have thought of yet, and just to make sure all of your eyes are dotted and your teeth are crossed when it comes to evaluating your options. 

Marceline Beijer: Be authentic and transparent as a company and pay attention to who you are and who you want to be in the era of social changes. Very important and look very consistently into your recruitment branding as well. So take notice, pay attention. 

Dave Mancl: Yeah. Echoing comments. I think the key to success will be experimentation in terms of aspects to introduce or to emphasize when we're making decisions about how do we create cultures that welcomed this experimentation and this openness, hire individuals who are adaptable and curious versus those who possess a specific skill that's needed today and hire leaders who are empathetic over those that are just purely ambitious. And that's a few ingredients that are going to be needed not exhausted, but I'm pretty confident those are a good predictions. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: Yeah, that's nice. And I like this calling them ingredients. So to make this perfect cake, we need to be data driven. Maybe we can say that transparency equals trust in an organization and then experimentation, like you call it Dave. So we need those to be able to hire the right people, be open, be adaptable and empathetic. So I think these are the key takeaways from this conversation, which has been really eye opening. I really, really enjoyed it. And I think it is fair to say that organizations that leverage data-driven insights from tools like the total workforce index, like Raleen was saying at the beginning, and look to top skills outside of just physical locations, such as talent in the cloud and organizations that care for their employees wellbeing and upskilled them are navigating this uncertainty mitigating risk and seizing the opportunity to grow. 

Dominika Galusa: And organization should have also embrace equality and sustainability goals. We'll keep on hearing more about it during this year’s Virtual World Economic Forum themed The Great Reset. And we also had our CEO Jonas Prising speaking about upskilling, reskilling and the future of jobs, with the Secretary General of the OECD and other leaders. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: So, that's much more to look forward to. So just because we have a bit of time left, and if you heard the other podcasts you know, what's coming. Just a fun question to just get everyone's personality out there. If you were stranded on an Island and you could only bring three things with you for survival, what would they be? Start with Raleen. 

Raleen Gagnon: Gosh, I'm bringing sunblock because I don't like being sunburned. I'm bringing a copy of Gone with the Wind because it is my favorite book and you can read it a hundred times through. And I would bring in, Oh goodness, I would bring ice cream. It wouldn't last long, but it would be worth it. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: At least you would be happy at the beginning. 

Raleen Gagnon: Absolutely. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: That's cool. Marceline, what would you bring? 

Marceline Beijer: Yeah, well, maybe I'm not allowed, but first of all I would bring my daughter, and then I would bring some do it yourself tools, if that would be allowed, because I love to do creation and find out how you can use and reuse things and last but not least paper and pen to be able to, and some bottles to communicate if I'm not allowed to do it digitally. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: That's nice. I like the idea of getting the tools. Few years in the Island, Marceline, and you get a solar power, the electricity and... 

Marceline Beijer: …something like that. It's the same as using the poster to cook on for six months, because there was nothing else in the kitchen available while rebuilding the house. 

Dominika Galusa: It's so interesting, Roberta. We have another person saying that they will bring a member of the family as a thing to an island. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: Yeah. Empathic. And you Dave? 

Dave Mancl: Well, given my haircut, I think the sunblock is a must. I was going to say ChapStick, actually. But these guys are so good. It's hard not to steal your ideas. My first inclination was actually bring my lazy dog with me who is very good company. And I think that would be needed on a stranded island scenario and something to catch fish with and something to cook it with. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: That's good. 

Dave Mancl: If I'm sitting on an island, I might as well eat well. 

Roberta Cucchiaro: Yeah. And you have a lot of fish around. Nobody wants to bring a boat. That's interesting. 

Dominika Galusa: To get out from there! 

Dave Mancl: …I think the Helicopter. 

Marceline Beijer: We don't want to leave, Dominika. We don't want to leave. We just want to stay! 

Roberta Cucchiaro: Holidays... Okay. So this has been fun. So thank you so much for joining us on our podcast and our fifth episode of the transform talent podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. And also to our listeners, if you did enjoy it, don't forget to subscribe in your favorite podcast listening app and leave us a review. See you at the next episode. Bye! 

Marceline Beijer, Dave Mancl, Raleen Gagnon: Bye!