[Transcript]
John Duisberg (00:05):
Welcome to the Cooleaf Podcast where we explore the stories of leaders like you who are building people-first, workplaces that thrive. I'm your host, John Duisberg. In today's episode, features insights from Joe Cronin, Chief Human Resources Officer at ICON. ICON started as a small team of just five people in Ireland in 1990 and has since grown into a global leader in clinical research and healthcare intelligence with over 41,000 employees across 50 countries. Their mission is to accelerate the development of lifesaving drugs and devices where they partner with over 1000 customers and supporting more than 1300 clinical trials in 2023 alone. In this episode, we'll explore HR strategies for global team engagement in the age of AI and how ICON has maintained a strong people-first culture while scaling across the globe with innovative approaches for their employee experience. And as part of a community powered by ITA Group, we're committed to elevating the employee experience in everything we do, creating real connections, driving purposeful change, and making work more meaningful for people everywhere. If this conversation resonates with you, please rate and share this episode to help inspire more leaders. Thanks for tuning in and let's get started. Joe, thank you so much for joining us. Super grateful to have you and looking forward to the discussion.
Joe Cronin (01:31):
Yeah, me too. Hey everyone. Thanks John. Delighted to be here and thanks for having me.
John Duisberg (01:36):
Absolutely. Before we jump in, I do want to just for our audience, give a little bit of background on the podcast itself, kind of the why behind why we bring this community together. Cooleaf is an employee engagement, employee experience recognition platform or technology for ITA Group. And through the work that we do, we get to work with some amazing leaders across around the world, right? Amazing brands all around the world in terms of how they're elevating their people strategies, really just reinforcing the mission, the purpose, the values, the behind why their company exists, right? And so when we're doing this, we see these amazing stories and we want to put a spotlight on them. We want to share things that leaders are doing to invest into their people, to build that culture and keep that connection strong so that you as our guest and the audience, you can take ideas and lessons learned in these best practices and apply it to your own organization. So that's our mission, that's our goal with the podcast. And we have an amazing leader, Joe, to who's joining us to kick us off today. So thank you again, Joe. I'm going to jump in by first by asking you to just give our audience a little bit more background about ICON as an organization, right? Over 40,000 employees, over 50 countries around the world. So very, very large footprint, but also about you and your role from a leadership perspective at ICON as well.
Joe Cronin (03:16):
Sure. Thanks John. So let me talk a little bit about ICON, first of all, and then I'll dovetail a little bit into my role and what I do. So ICON, not maybe a household name and people may not have heard of us, but we are one of the world's leading clinical research organizations. So we work with pharma drug development companies, biotech, government agencies to advance drugs and devices. And our mission is a noble one. It's to save and improve lives through the development of clinical trials and drug development and discovery. We work through all areas of drug development from first in human right through to large global scale trials, do a lot of support work around laboratory work, et cetera. Anything in the pursuit of that drug development experience into consultancy pricing, real world evidence once the drug is finally approved by the regulatory authorities and unavailable for patients in the real world.
(04:17):
I joined ICON just over 10 years ago. I just hit my 10 year anniversary actually in the summer. It's flown by and hopefully I'll get to talk to everyone a little bit about what's kept me very busy and very engaged over the last 10 years. I'm the Chief HR Officer for the group. We are a people business. I'm very proud to say that we don't manufacture a product, it's our people and it's our people who make the magic happen with our customers. So we're truly a people organization. I'm going to talk a lot about culture and engagement and DEIB and areas like that, which are massively important for a people organization. And we've grown. We're going to talk a little bit, I think about how we've grown organically, but we've also grown massively through M&A over 30 different M&As over the last period of time within the company, which is exciting where we find ourselves today, as John mentioned, over 41,000 employees across 50,000 or very 50 countries.
(05:21):
And the reason for that is we need to work with patients on behalf of our customers and sponsors right across the world doing what we do. So it's a fascinating challenge from a HR perspective in terms of complexity of that and as we work through. And the final thing I'll say, which might give you a little bit more real life in terms of what we do as an organization and clinical research, as I said, maybe not so much a household name, but we work across all different products, third period of areas, et cetera, oncology, work across vaccines, CNS, rare diseases, et cetera. But one of the things we would be known for, which is in the public domain, we worked with Pfizer and BioNTech to the first Covid vaccine to the world. And that was, as you can imagine, something that was very necessary, something that required a huge amount of agility, something we'd not seen as a global community before, but something we worked very hard and quickly on with our patients and with our customers to bring that. So that's a little flavor of what we do, but something quite important.
John Duisberg (06:18):
Got it. Yeah. Thank you Joe. And congrats on 10 years, by the way. That's amazing. Thank you. And I think that just through our conversations you shared, the company started let's five or four or five people in Ireland in 1990 timeframe
(06:38):
To now 41,000 plus employees over 50 countries around the world. So that is an amazing story, amazing growth story. You mentioned M&A, so acquiring different organizations. I think just a few years ago in 2021, there was an acquisition that effectively doubled the size of ICON or thereabouts. So congrats on the growth and the business. I have to believe that challenges come with that in terms of what are your values mean to that person that's hired in a different country and they've never maybe been around some of the people who've been tenured and know the stories. And so talk to us a little bit about how do you instill that culture that has made ICON special going all the way back to those first early days in Ireland, and how do you reinforce that? How do you bring that to life in this big large organization that has this global footprint?
Joe Cronin (07:37):
Yeah, no, it's a great question, John. And and M&A has always been part of what we've done. It's always been part of our footprint. But as you say, and a lot of people on the call will be familiar with this industries consolidating. There's a lot of change and movement happening out there. And in our clinical research industry, there's been a lot of amalgamation within the industry, et cetera. So we acquired a company that was larger than us, and that might be one of my lessons. Don't be afraid of that if that happens. So when we acquired Puree Health Sciences, a fantastic company that was a big competitor of ours in our space three years ago, they had 20,000 employees and we had 15,000 on the ICON side, which is where I came from. And we became New ICON, but we very much fostered the journey of best of both because we wanted to make sure we brought that group in and brought them in.
(08:26):
Well, as we work through, I mentioned before as a people business and as a people, business culture is incredibly important to us. It really is how we get things done. I know that sounds a little familiar when we talk about culture, but that has always been in our DNA and the ability to really define culture does go back to our very beginnings. And we've always been very proud of that, the very best of what we've been with, the best of what we can become going forward. I think that's really, really important. And we brought that to that large acquisition as well. We were very careful to say, well, look, let's understand our culture. And we did look at our culture and reevaluate it and look at how we brought the best of both together in that context. And another thing I would say, which often doesn't come up when we talk about M&A is that when we look at targets and acquisitions, we do put a culture lens over it.
(09:13):
We will talk to the other side, even if they're a very small company with maybe only 50 or a hundred or 200 employees. And culture will be a consideration. Obviously, growth and revenue and EBITDA and everything else will be massive considerations as well. But we always consider that in terms of is this a cultural fit? ICON has a very, very clear set of defined values. Our values, collaboration, agility, inclusion and integrity are very clear. We've worked on those massively over the last number of years, tweaked a little bit when we acquired the legacy Puree Health Science business and fundamental to that because I think one of the important things in culture is that it's got to be something that resonates with everything. So everyone. So when you've got 50 countries and 41,000 employees across the world, we've really distilled it down into one core message, which is Own It at ICON.
(10:04):
And ownership sits at the core of that with the four values that surround it. So I think that's important to point out. First of all, John, that we've always tried to keep it really simple. We've always tried to keep it really alive and front of center because as we know, even in a global organization, and we are very centrally run, we are very globally run in terms of our projects. But in 50 plus countries, of course there's very different cultures and different personas and different beliefs and ideolog, ideologies, et cetera happening in each of those countries. But I do believe that a strong culture can terminate right across that. What have we done to make that happen? We've done a number of things. Culture and values, for example, has always been part of our performance management. I think that is incredibly doable. I think it's incredibly important, obviously the what of performance management is goals, objectives, et cetera.
(10:53):
And we run that consistently, again for over 41,000 people across the organization. But the values and the why and how you get things done are equally as important. So they're embedded in that. They're also embedded very much in our recognition programs, our years of service, our loyalty, our recognition, our teams of the quarter, different areas and different awards we run. But we do have a global recognition program, which I think again, is massively important. It's very much part of our development and leadership programs, not just the competencies and the skills required in terms of leadership and competency and technical development, but in terms of how we live our values and how we develop them as well is massively important. So as we do those acquisitions, it is important. We have a similar process that we adopt. We do believe in bringing acquisitions in and kind of integrating them quite quickly.
(11:41):
It's worked for us. We do believe in making sure that people are integrated into that culture and understand and have those conversations and talk about it. One of the things, John, I actually mentioned it because we're heading close to it now. One of the things we do each year to really bring the culture to life is a day in October. It's the middle of October. We do a day called Wake Up to Culture. Something we started six years ago when we really wanted to celebrate our culture, having done a lot of work and bringing the values to life and articulating them and embedding them in our processes, which isn't easy, and getting everyone kind of familiar with them. So we take a day out and in our business, and I'm sure lots of people are the same, who are listening in day out is billable hours, it's consultancy day hours, et cetera.
(12:27):
It's time. But our CEO and our leadership team firmly believe that it is a really important time to stop. So we take a day out, we follow the sun, it's called wake up to Culture because we start in our APAC region. I'm actually going to be with our phenomenal teams in India this year. As we do wake up to culture, we do a webcast to the whole region. And that webcast is very much customers, patients, employees, community stakeholders, people we're working with through the ICON Cares initiative and ESG, et cetera, in different communities and stakeholders, all our stakeholders who will talk about how the values impact them, how we live them, how we live them better, how when we live our best values, we make great inputs and contributions and really impact our patients, our customers, and ourselves. We then move that along through EMEA and also into the Americas. And every region has a webcast where we stop for a couple of hours, listen to the webcast, talk through it, and then each of the people, leaders across all of the regions take their teams through further discussion for the day. But it's a really strong acknowledgement of culture.
John Duisberg (13:37):
Yeah, I know. Thank you, Joe. I love the idea of having a designated day on the calendar with an itinerary of speaking in leaning in, bringing these values to life, but to do that at a global scale is mind blowing to me. I mean, that is a lot, right? And so this is an annual event and each region essentially kicks off their own portion as the day is going on and the webcast join in on India if I'm up so I can see and experience these different parts of the organization. Is that right?
Joe Cronin (14:23):
Absolutely. So look, it is very difficult as you can imagine, John, to get everyone in one place at one time. But we do our best to do that virtually. So for example, in India, all the teams in India will be together in our Chennai office this year. But Japan, Australia, China, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, et cetera, we'll all be dialed in. And where we have offices, we have offices in most of those countries, they'll all be together live listening to the webcast, et cetera. And in those areas, we'll do some fun things like we have what we call catch boxes. So we'll throw those around and people will just spontaneously, and there's some risks to that. But you've got to be confident in terms of getting people to talk about culture. And we kind of say to people, look, we're going to ask to have some fun with this.
(15:05):
Tell us what you like about the culture. Tell us where we're living our values. Well, and it's scripted to some degree and there's preparation, but we try and keep it really live and keep it really real in those webcasts. They're live, et cetera, as you work through. But it follows on then to emea as the sun continues to rise, it'll be in Dublin here in our global headquarters, and then it'll move on to the Americas and you work it through. So you literally are going all the way from Australia right through to Argentina, Brazil on the west side. And it does really connect us and kind of give that sense that every country is different, but we have a culture that we want to celebrate and talk about on this particular day. But again, the other point I would make, John, is that that's just one day to really celebrate it. Obviously we need to make sure culture lives in all the processes and fabric and DNA of the company all day every year, as I talked about earlier.
John Duisberg (15:56):
Love that. Love that Joe. Yeah, as you're sharing, I'm thinking, hey, for our audience ideas about absolutely you want to live that every day, but to have certain milestones on the calendar that they can plan for, I think is a great way to bring these different employees together that are geographically dispersed. But speaking of process, I know that digital innovation specifically around AI is an area that you and your team have done a lot of work in. And I know that folks in our audience today very interested to learn and just hear a little bit more, whether it be on the recruiting side or how you're streamlining job recs and postings internally. Give us a sense, Joe, talk to us maybe a little bit about the history of how you started using ai. Where are you today? Any kind of lessons learned? Were there failures along the way? Just would love to just learn from you around the digital innovation journey for ICON.
Joe Cronin (17:05):
Sure. Thanks John. And look, sometimes I think when you talk to people in our industry, you talk to leaders in and out of HR, I think we're all starting on the digital innovation journey and there's a long way to go, right? But it is really exciting in terms of where we can get to. It's taken us a while to get there and look, when I look back at my 10 years in ICON, a lot of my early time in ICON was spent building the infrastructure. And that would be a big lessons learned in terms of, I was fortunate in that when I joined ICON, there was a big desire to centralize HR, take it out of regions, et cetera, take it out of countries, really globalize it. And that has massively helped because you get a huge amount of consistency, particularly as you get into data and processes, et cetera.
(17:48):
One of the first things I did, which is always difficult, I'm sure lots of people will empathize with this, is create a career framework. We had job titles for every second person, and it was a little bit kind of do as you need to do. We completely streamlined that. And for 41,000 employees today, we have just 1500 job titles, which has been taking a long time to get to. But trying to get to that point where you have clean data, you have accurate process, and you can run on a globalized basis, that isn't easy. And again, that goes back to the point of why we bring acquisitions in quite quickly and work that through. We also implemented and look, it is not for everyone. It is got to be a cost decision. It's got to be a scaled decision, but we implement a workday very early on in my tenure.
(18:36):
But again, a global system which can capture global data and global process is really, really important. And again, I talked earlier about things like a lot of people will struggle with this in different industries, and I did in different companies having a global consistent performance management process, having global calibration, global reward processes, global policies, global recognition, global diversity, inclusion, belonging practices, et cetera. That has taken some time. So look, I'm a big advocate in our industry, in our business, John. It's a global business. So globalizing and centralizing I think is really, really, really, really, really important. I guess in terms then of once we had a lot of that infrastructure in place, what have we done? Recruitment you mentioned, and I would start with recruitment and maybe it's not as big a focus area for everyone on the call. It's a huge focus area for us.
(19:26):
We're a growing company. We have a lot of internal mobility. Thankfully again, our career framework allows us to do that. It's very transparent, it's easy to see where people can move and people can move into global roles regardless of the location they're in. So that's a big advantage. But we do do a lot of recruitment. We're growing quite quickly. It's a good problem to have. And where have we found AI helpful? And I can dig into some of this more in the Q&As or in detail after we found it incredibly strong in terms of applications we use a lot in terms of chatbots, which work well with Workday Recruit as anyone who will know, we have very much pioneered an approach where we're trying to make sure that the end-to-end employee and candidate experience is in Workday. I've had different ATS systems at different times, which link in quite well, but having it all in the same place provides a really seamless candidate experience where you can really get true onboarding induction and into the employee phase.
(20:25):
We've been very successful at using even simple things like Chat GPT for job adverts. It's amazing once you get good at it and start really educating your recruitment group in terms of how to do proper prompts and how to actually play with it and work it through, it'll get there 80, 85% of the time once you get through, you still have to check it. It's the same with copilot or any of these, but we've certainly found that Chat GPT has been useful in terms of giving us that real headstart on job adverts and really helping us streamline our job descriptions. We're starting to use it quite a lot. John, in terms of early screening, and again, you can imagine the thousands and thousands of applicants that are coming through the funnel that we have. Again, I'm not here to plug any technology provider, I'm just saying what's worked well for us.
(21:11):
We've partnered with HireVue, which integrate nicely in with Workday. And what we've done with HireVue predominantly is use it for early screening for those kind of top four or five killer questions. We have to tell candidates that we are using AI and are using data science to work through that process, and we are ranking them. And there's some challenges obviously in terms of making sure the policy and the ethics and everything is right on that. And we have worked hard to get that right. That gives our recruiters a lot more time and a lot more gain in terms of being able to really look and see who are the right people to push forward into the people leader interview process, et cetera. We're also playing at the moment with some gamification and some games assessment as we work through. I've been doing them myself and they're really, really interesting and we're piloting those in certain roles as we work through.
(22:02):
So it's been really helpful in that simple things like on-demand schedule for interviewing. If you've got coordinator scheduling interviews, there are tools out there, they're not terribly expensive potentially that you can look and use to try and get that burden off. So again, it's looking at every part of the process and see how you can automate it more and make the candidate experience better. Because as we all know, employees and candidates want to do these things on their own time. They want to do it on a Saturday morning or a Friday evening or Tuesday afternoon when they've got the time. And then we want to be able to screen and look through those answers and look through those results at the time that we've got the right time to work it through. We've also worked hard to get to things like contract automation and again, everything flowing through Workday in that respect. And also keeping in touch with employees and working it through giving managers and people, leaders, the ability to really send personal messages through that kind of really challenging period between interview, finishing selection offer through to onboarding. And again, the technology is really helping to get those messages out there. So I'll stop there. There's lots of examples. There's a few other things I'll probably mention later, John, but that's kind of where we've been most probably excited by the gains and the efficiencies and the better candidate experience we've seen in recruitment.
John Duisberg (23:21):
Yeah, no, thank you Joe. And I want to make sure we leave time for the audience to be able to ask specific questions. It sounds like at a high level, an emphasis on the front end, the candidate experience around the recruitment process and streamlining that, but also looking for ways to automate or streamline just manual process. So you mentioned scheduling, things like that. How can we apply digital innovation or AI to these manual touchpoints that can just be streamlined? So I like that approach. It's thoughtful. It's not trying to boil the ocean, it's just saying, how can we give more time to our candidate or to our employee when they're going through this process? So I like that idea. I definitely encourage the audience, we want to hear from you. We want to give Joe the opportunity to answer your questions related to his team's experience in AI as well. But while we wrap up our portion, before we hand it over to the audience here, Joe, one of the things that we always like to do is just give a final key takeaway or a best practice practical piece of advice. So for leaders who are listening to you today, what's an action item that you can leave with them as they're thinking about their people strategy, whether it be at a global scale or even smaller as they're looking now into 2025?
Joe Cronin (24:57):
Yeah, I think it's actually going to be, I suppose, given a couple of practical things in the last piece, John, I'm going to go a little bit broader here because I think for people who are dialed in, who are in HR or people who are not in HR, I think we're in such a fascinating time, but we're in a really complex time. When you look at Covid flexible working, it's been the biggest change in transformation of working principles. What's come out of that a lot and what I find and other people may find the same, we're in a point of quite a bit of confusion and contradiction actually is probably the better way to put it. And my advice is to kind of plow through that. And what do I mean by that? Employees want to be very flexible and have that time and remote working, and that's been a phenomenal improvement.
(25:43):
But at the same time, they really want to be connected. They want to be connected to a purpose, they want to be connected to the company, they want a global experience. They want something that's easy akin to a customer experience that's repeatable, that's really simple, et cetera. But they also want something that's incredibly personalized. And we've had to work on a strategy particularly for learning of just in time, just enough just for me. So that's just a couple of examples where I think there's a lot of contradiction. I think employees are, and candidates are finding themselves a little bit confused at the moment as well. I want to be really connected to my community, my family, et cetera, but also want this deep connection to the company I work for. I want a certain experience even in a company of 41,000 employees, employees still want a very personalized experience and want to know that what we are doing fits for them in the employee value proposition.
(26:34):
And I think data is going to help us with that. I think data and insight, and one of the things I didn't talk about in my last piece is one of the areas we're turning to now is trying to use that data to give us more insight around predictability. What are employees going to do? What are the behaviors and how do we put those data breadcrumbs together? We all have tons of data. So I guess in summary, as say from more of a high level point, John, I would say I think we're in a fascinating point of time, but we are in a time of contradiction where employees are probably adjusting to what the new normal is, post covid and all of that kind of piece. But I think it's a phenomenal and fascinating thinking challenge for us as HR or general leaders in the industries.
John Duisberg (27:14):
That's wonderful. Joe, thank you again, and I'm going to try to quote what you said. You said just in time, just enough. And just for me, just for me or just for you, I want to feel connected to the entire employee footprint at the same time. So I love the contradiction or the complexity in that, but also keeping it simple. But thank you so much, Joe. Really appreciate you sharing with us. As we wrap up today. Remember that the insights you've gained are only as valuable as the actions you take. Leadership and culture transformation begins with each of us as part of ITA Group at Cooleaf. We are dedicated to elevating human experiences at work and beyond. Visit us at coolleaf.com where you'll find a resources section specifically designed to help you lead with purpose and create a people-first organization. These tools are here to support you on your journey to building workplaces where people feel seen, valued, and inspired. If today's episode resonated with you, please rate and share it with your network. Together we can amplify the message of creating workplaces where leadership elevates humanity and drives meaningful change. Thank you for joining us and being part of our mission to transform workplaces. Until next time, keep leading with your heart and making a difference.