HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
Leading with Purpose in the Luxury World with Gena Smith, LVMH
Bob Goodwin welcomes Gena Smith, North American CHRO for luxury powerhouse LVMH, for a masterclass in leadership development and cultivating excellence across iconic brands like Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, and Tiffany.
Gena shares her unexpected journey from small-town Texas to leading human resources for one of the world's most prestigious luxury groups. A pivotal study abroad experience in Greece awakened her passion for people and culture, establishing a personal benchmark that guided her career choices: "Any role had to have an international dimension and I had to be working with people." This philosophy ultimately led her to LVMH, where she now champions a culture built on creativity, innovation, excellence, and entrepreneurship.
Gena's conversation with Bob explores how LVMH maintains the delicate balance between preserving brand heritage while pushing creative boundaries. "We don't want our brands sitting in museums," Smith explains, highlighting the tension between honoring each brand's DNA while ensuring contemporary relevance. This balancing act requires diverse perspectives and trustful environments where creativity can flourish.
Leadership development emerges as a cornerstone of LVMH's success. Smith details their comprehensive succession planning process that examines potential leaders across all 75 brands, paired with targeted development experiences. She emphasizes that leadership must be approached with the same intentionality as any business objective: "You actually have to want to be a great leader. That has to be something that's important to you."
Looking toward the future, Smith discusses LVMH's "HR New Deal" initiative, which positions employees at the center of their career journey with access to opportunities across all brands. While acknowledging technology's growing role, she returns to a fundamental truth that transcends industry or era: "At the end of the day, we rely on talented, motivated, inspired, engaged people to drive our business."
Ready to discover what truly lights your fire professionally? Tune in to this insightful conversation about finding your passion, developing leadership excellence, and creating environments where people and creativity thrive.
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Speaker 2:Hey everybody, this is Bob Goodwin, president of Career Club, and welcome to a special episode of HR Chat brought to you by HR Gazette. Special shout out to my friend, bill Bannon. Thank you so much for allowing me the opportunity to guest host here for a bit. Today is a special episode because we're very pleased to have the North American CHRO for LVMH, gina Smith, with us. If LVMH doesn't ring a bell for you, I think there are iconic brands like Louis Vuitton, christian Dior, tag Heuer, tiffany might ring a bell. So, gina, welcome.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you, bob, it's so nice to be with you today.
Speaker 2:No, likewise. You know it's funny because I was sort of writing that out a little bit. I think iconic brands is like massively overused. You guys are iconic brands. That's a pretty and I didn't even, but I didn't do half of the amazing brands?
Speaker 3:No, we have about 75. So you definitely did not come near half of them.
Speaker 2:That's right, yeah but I mean just an amazing, amazing portfolio of brands. One of the things that I enjoy when I initially met you was just learning a little bit, and this will help our listeners just learn a little bit more about your career journey and how you ended up in such a plum job.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thank you. Well, yeah, I mean it's sort of a strange story. I mean, I grew up in Texas and I don't think I, you know, when I look back on my career, it wasn't necessarily by design, be a head of HR, and although I had always had an interest in the fashion and luxury space, I mean, you know, I remember being a little, you know, a little girl in Texas and looking at, I had stacks and stacks of cosmopolitan magazines and you know, I was sort of, you know, passionate about fashion and and dreaming about New York City, for sure, and certainly other cities like Paris, but it definitely didn't feel attainable to me. And I was fortunate, when I was in college, to have the opportunity to do a study abroad, in Greece. I went to Crete for the summer and it was really a pivotal moment for me because it was the first time that I had really been outside of Texas. And you know, I always, I always say that you know, I was confronted with this very, very different alphabet, very different language, very foreign country, and yet I never felt more alive and, in a way, at home.
Speaker 3:Alive and in a way at home, I connected with so many wonderful Greek people and again working at a five-star hotel in Crete, meeting people from all over Europe, and I just felt alive and I just knew that I wanted more of that. I didn't exactly know what that was, but I wanted more of that. So I came back home, I changed my major to international business, I was able to change my studies so that I was able to go back and study in Athens at an American university, and over the next five years I really spent a lot more time in Greece. But I discovered during that summer that what I loved was people and culture, and so when I look back on that moment, I think it was really the beginning of my passion for human resources.
Speaker 3:Obviously, people and culture. I just didn't realize it at the time, and you know that became the benchmark that I used for any job or career decision that I made after that. Any role had to have an international dimension and I had to be working with people. If it was a role, especially early in my career, where I would be sitting behind a desk and not having the opportunity to engage with people and again, especially international people I knew it wasn't going to be something that I was going to be interested or passionate about. So I think it was a good guide for me and helping me make decisions that I think actually, you know, got me here eventually.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I think that's amazing. One of the things that I really liked about your story is there was an element of experimentation. As young people, we young people tend to not know what's available to them, right, and so you need to try new things, you need to go to Greece and see if that lights your fire or not, right? But we sometimes we don't know what all is available to us and we just sort of get, you know, kind of railroaded into certain things. And so I'm a huge advocate Anybody who's a parent of a young person, a young person themselves go experiment, like go see what's out there, try different things, because, like Jeannie, you just never know. That's the thing that lights you up, and now you've got direction of like now I know what I want.
Speaker 2:I love what you said. I want more of that, exactly.
Speaker 3:Well, exactly, I mean, you know it's sort of a process of elimination. And how do you eliminate you? You discover things that you like and things that you don't like. And I agree with you, unless you're putting yourself out there and you're testing, and you're trying and you're learning, there's no way for you to know. And you do have to put yourself. I mean, it was very scary for me to pick up and go to Greece and be confronted with something that was so foreign, literally, but it was also so exciting and so liberating. And then when you are able to sort of conquer that, that's even more liberating and more exciting.
Speaker 3:And then you know that you can do more and more. You continue to push and challenge yourself. But I agree with you. I'm always encouraging people to try as much as you can, especially in the early days, but actually always.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. And just last little piece on what you said, because it really resonates, which is as you stretch your boundaries, you need bigger boundaries. And so you learn hey, I actually can't do this. So what's next and you know it's a little bit like you know start running a mile Now. I'm doing 5Ks Now.
Speaker 2:I'm doing half a minute. I'm stronger than I thought that I was and I'm making myself stronger than I was, and I think for women especially, you know, like everything is an option. If you will, let it be an option to you and go try stuff. I'm going to be a proud papa for half of a second. But I don't know if we've ever talked about this, gina, but my daughter lives in Norway and international business and she took a job in Oslo 10 years ago and hasn't moved back home since and has built a life over there and a family and but, like you said, different language, a lot of different, some different letters in the alphabet, but everything was different and when we go over there it's what you said. You can see if she's thriving over there.
Speaker 2:That's amazing, yeah. And so again, you know the experimentation is good, but part of it is, I think you just said, with the process of elimination it's also a little bit of a test for negatives. Like I know, I don't want to do that and I think, as a young person, maybe that's the most important thing At least figure out what you don't like.
Speaker 2:Exactly you may still be kind of building to what you do, get fired up about, but at least don't go do stuff, like you said, sitting behind a computer that would just like crush you Like. If that's what I had to do every day. So let's keep going. So, lvmh, if you had to describe the culture of LVMH in one, two, three sentences, what would you say?
Speaker 3:I mean, LVMH is really a culture built around creativity, innovation and excellence, I think, and entrepreneurship. So a few more words, but those are the values of the group and I think those words really exemplify who we are at the core of LVMH. So how do those values come to life at the company? I mean, that's what we try to live and breathe and make them come to life every day. So the goal, of course, is to embed each of those values in the group, at the group level, which is where I sit at LVMH, but also within each of the brands and they really are the values that bind all of these 75 brands, all of these 75 maisons together.
Speaker 3:I think, in fact, when we created these values it was a bottoms-up exercise and we did this. I guess now it's been about 10 years. We really went around the world talking to all of our employees to take from them what did they believe LVMH was and what did they want LVMH to be. And we sort of came to this both from the top, coming directly from the family, from the Arno family and from the family of all of the founders of our, of our brands, who are creators and are innovators, but then also from our employees. And the way that it comes to life is the way that we create our product, the way that we develop our retail stores, the way that we develop our HR philosophies. I mean, we try to embed each of those values in every single thing that we do. And you know it starts with how do you recruit people that are aligned against those values, right?
Speaker 2:You're anticipating my next question. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Am I getting ahead of you?
Speaker 2:No, this is perfect.
Speaker 3:But you know, if you're not, if you don't bring people into the organization that really align against those values, aspire to embody those values, you're not going to be able to embed and to deliver those values within the organization. So we put a lot of emphasis on the type of people that we bring into the organization. In some cases we're looking for very concrete experiences, but in some cases it's much more about bringing people into the organization that really share the values and live the values of the group. Because we can teach you about luxury we can teach you how the LVMH way, let's say but we can't teach you to have an appreciation for excellence and to really care about creativity. We can refine and hone that in you, but if it's not something that's important to you or that you value, if you don't really care about it, excellence is all about the details that go into everything that you do.
Speaker 3:And in our world it is about the details. And that again, it doesn't matter if you're working in a retail environment, where of course it's all about the retails, or if it's in a product environment or if it's in HR, because for us, the way that we service our employees, the way that we come out with new products or, sorry, new initiatives. Again, there's a level of excellence, there's a level of excellence, there's a level of creativity. We're not trying to just take things off the shelf. We're really trying to build programs that are bespoke for our culture and are delivering solutions that fit with the needs of our business, that support what we're trying to deliver to our employees. So it's really about trying to embed all of this into the culture so that it comes alive at all levels. But it's you know, it's an ongoing and very iterative process, as you can imagine.
Speaker 2:How do you tease that out in an interview?
Speaker 3:Well, you can certainly look for very concrete examples. So we spend a lot of time asking people to share with us examples of how have you demonstrated this. Give me an example of when you've had to be creative, you done that. How have you demonstrated that? Or even asking people how do you define that? What does that mean to you? What does that look like for you?
Speaker 3:You know, again, excellence, I think, is another one, and I'm always really careful when you talk about the word excellence, because we, you know, we try to stay very humble at LVMH. We're never saying that we are excellent. What we're saying is that that's the aspiration that we have is to deliver excellence. Again, you know, we believe that our products and our brands and our customers and our employees deserve that. But if you want to be able to deliver that, you have to remain very humble, because excellence is it's it's ephemeral right. I mean, it's something very difficult to achieve.
Speaker 3:So I think, when you're talking to people, you're, you're, you're trying to understand how have they demonstrated that and what does that actually mean for them. So, again, asking them to define that and it's very funny because you know, you can, you could, almost I can. I'll be kind of comical here for a moment, but you could. You could have the conversation with someone who's telling you how much they value it, but then you look at their CV and maybe they have a lot of typos, for example, on their CV. You know, and you would know, that actually in fact you don't really value excellence. Right, that's a very clear demonstration, and you don't want to be hypercritical of someone, but those are the little details that actually really matter and mean we're not looking necessarily for perfection, but we are looking for somebody who pays attention and really cares about excellence.
Speaker 2:No, I think it's awesome.
Speaker 2:So, with creativity being very high on that list, given the nature of what you all do and we've talked about this before. But I think it's really an interesting thing to go revisit, which is when you've got again iconic, truly iconic brands that have really deep roots and mean a lot to people, not the least of which would be, like, the folks who own those brands. I don't mean the consumers, which it does, but also, you know, on the business side for you all, how do you manage the tension between creativity, entrepreneurship which I think kind of goes, you know, adjacent to that, without breaking the brand by accident? You know it's because you're always pushing boundaries being created, that's the nature of creativity. Yet know it's because you're always pushing boundaries being creative, that's the nature of creativity. Yet at the same time, we don't want to break the thing by accident. I can see there being some pretty interesting discussions internally when somebody's very passionate about doing something that they believe is creative and somebody else might feel with their entrepreneurial gene going. I don't think that's a great business decision.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, listen, it's very tough, especially because the word creativity and in fact creativity can also be very subjective. Your creativity and your definition of creativity and my definition of creativity might be very different. And we certainly have those tensions in the group and I would say that to a large degree, we encourage those tensions. We think that those tensions are actually really important and in fact, those tensions allow us to get to the optimal answer, the optimal solution. So you need to have and again, that's where and maybe I'm getting I'm not trying to get ahead, but that's where the topic of diversity becomes really, really important. Because if you have, you know, if you have everybody that's sitting around the table that all have a similar background, a similar understanding, a similar set of experiences, they're all going to bring sort of a similar point of view to a creative process. That isn't necessarily going to get us to maybe a disruptive outcome or to sort of the next iteration of what we need to do, because we're also trying to. We are an organization that wants to be on the forefront of creativity and innovation. It's not just enough to be creative and innovative, but it's about pushing those boundaries, as you said, and really being on the forefront, and that's what's expected, I think, in an industry like ours, which is bringing something that should be timeless, but it also should be surprising and delighting the customer and something that you've never thought of before, you've never seen. So we have to.
Speaker 3:You know, we always talk about the tension between modernity. You know the past and the present right. So we have a lot of tensions in our environment, in our world, and, again, how do we manage those tensions is the challenge that we live with. Manage those tensions is the challenge that we live with. A lot of it comes down to people, because you need to be philosophically aligned again and how you see the world and how you think about the brands, and it always goes back to we always revert back to the DNA of the brand.
Speaker 3:We spend a lot of time going back to the DNA what? What really is the DNA? When the founder created the brand? What was the spirit? What was the DNA? What really is the DNA? When the founder created the brand, what was the spirit? What was the DNA? What was the meaning behind that? We never want to be veering away from that Because, in our experience, when you start going too far from really the DNA. That's when you start making mistakes, that's when you start confusing the customer or confusing the brand, and it doesn't make sense anymore. Because the other tension, of course, is you have to be creative and innovative. You want the brand. As one of our executives has said many times, we don't want our brand sitting in museums, right?
Speaker 2:That's a great line.
Speaker 3:Right, we want them in museums, but we want them living and being in the culture of today.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:But also we need to make sure that they're relevant for tomorrow. So again, a lot of tensions that we have to manage through.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so I want to draw parallels for people who are listening, who are not in the luxury goods space. I think everything you're talking about holds true, because you need to be innovative. Right, we have to constantly be reinventing the business. Business models change, technology changes. You've got new generations of people coming into the workforce like nothing is static, and so everybody, in some form or fashion, is in a state of air. Quote creativity maybe with a small C compared to a capital C and LVMH, but creative nonetheless. And in part of creativity and risk taking is, things don't always work out Right. Sounded like a good idea, but it didn't quite work out the way that we had hoped. How do you create enough safety for lack of a better word that allows people to push boundaries? But also, heaven forbid, this thing doesn't go the way we think it's going to go. You're not going to get fired or whatever.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that creating a safe environment where people feel like they can take a risk, and and again, that's probably where we're a little bit fortunate Because, again, we are a company and it does start with our owner, founder, chairman, ceo, mr Arnault, who believes so much in creativity and innovation. By the way, he's also an extremely pragmatic businessman, which is part of the reason he's so successful. It doesn't happen by accident, as we know, so he's very. You know, there's a lot, a huge amount of analysis that goes into what we do. I wouldn't necessarily say consumer research or customer research. It isn't that type of analysis. That's not necessarily how we work. But there are other types of business analysis in terms of the way that we look at and try to measure.
Speaker 3:And, again, you have a number of people that are trying to really assess things that we're doing, because there can be significant cost in some of the creative initiatives that we're doing, because there can be significant cost in some of the creative initiatives that we launch. But I think that we spend a lot of time. Again, it goes back to people. So you're trying to bring in people that are aligned with the values of the group around creativity and innovation and so part of their role is to cultivate creative teams and creative environments. Right, and how you do that successfully? You can't do that successfully if you haven't created an environment. You can't create an environment where creativity can thrive if you're not able to create a trustful work environment. So for me, those two things really go hand in hand. We do spend a lot of time through many of our different learning and development initiatives, especially through all of our leadership development programs, talking about empathy from a leadership development, talking about the importance of inspirational leadership development programs, talking about empathy from a leadership development, talking about the importance of inspirational leadership, motivational leadership. I mean we really embed that in all of our programming around leadership and again, we're assessing that as a criteria when we're promoting leaders, when we're thinking about who are going to be the next leaders of the organization. That's embedded in all of our succession planning. We're making decisions of who is going to be, who are going to be our next leaders, based on their ability to drive creativity, to build trustful work environments and teams.
Speaker 3:But you know it's not a perfect science and sometimes it doesn't happen and I wouldn't want to sit here and tell you that it works perfectly in all of our brands all the time. But we try to react actually when we see that it's not working, because for us the cost of not having creative and innovative workforces in our industry and in our business is far greater Because it's such a disappointment to the customer. Our customer is not going to pay a premium for mediocre product or for the same product that we've been delivering year after year. Right, that's not what they're expecting for us. So the cost is really significant on multiple levels if we're not able to deliver that. So there's a lot of work that goes into trying to build those types of leaders and those types of environments in our organization.
Speaker 2:I want to talk about leadership and people development. I think you know I do another podcast with Johnny Taylor from SHRM and we just did an episode on. You know there's a lot of layoffs going on. A lot of it's happening in people or middle management rather, and so either you've got people now hey, congratulations Bob, you just inherited a team. You've never managed people before. Or congratulations, Gina, your team just went from 10 to 20. And you're almost setting those teams up for failure if they either don't have the skills to be great people leaders, or just their scope is so much nobody can really do that, which potentially fosters another round next year of layoffs, Because now, unfortunately, some of those people are going to be considered low performers, not because they are, but because they weren't supported properly, and I would love to hear you talk a little bit about how you all think about those things at LVMH.
Speaker 3:Well, it's funny, before I say that, I was at a. I was at an HR dinner the other night a couple of weeks ago and one of the one of the heads of HR was talking about I can't remember if it was their company or another company and they they basically realized that you know, there's a huge amount of people that actually don't like leading teams in general, they really don't. And so they actually had gone through and they had given a number of their managers the opportunity to opt out of leading teams. They had basically just given them the chance to say, okay, you can continue leading teams or you can take a step back and become an individual contributor. And they had a huge amount of people that raised their hand and said I don't actually want to lead teams anymore. I would rather take a 20% decrease in my compensation and not have to lead teams, which was, in a way, a bit scary if you think about it, because I think the importance of leading and managing is so important on multiple levels.
Speaker 3:But for us, I think we again, we try. We have so many leadership development programs, and when I say so many, it's not that we have, but we really try to invest a ton. I mean, we have a very rigorous succession planning process. We meet multiple times and we go through every single brand and every single leadership team. So we're really looking at the leaders, their direct reports, we go pretty deep in the organization and we go literally person by person, and we talk about the individual in the role, we talk about all the people that we believe that could be successors, and we're sort of fortunate because we can look at successors within that business, that individual business, within that business unit again, or within the entire spectrum of all of the LVMH brands. And then, of course, we're really talking about okay, what are the gaps in terms of leadership or in terms of skills, capabilities, and then how do we get that person ready?
Speaker 3:If so, if we have, you know, these three leaders that we're trying to prepare a succession for, and we have these, you know, six people that we believe could be candidates, just to be concrete, and we think that the timeline is, you know, three years what do we need to do concretely to get those three people? And so we have a number of different programs, we have different experiences. So we can, you know, we can invest in their development through our programs, through certain experiences, through a number of different exposure programs, that we have to give them access to other leadership mentors, coaches. So we try to target it from so many different ways. But it's definitely an ongoing challenge and I always say to leaders that when you're putting your objectives together, you have to make leadership an objective like any other objective. You actually have to want to be a great leader. That has to be something that's important to you, that you prioritize as much as any of the other objectives that you're setting for yourself, because it doesn't just happen by accident.
Speaker 2:No, I think that's great and the fact that you guys are very intentional, very deliberate, you do it with excellence, because you talked about, you're going pretty deep into the organization, so you're getting into the details, if you will, you know, really resonates. One of the things that we hear sometimes is maybe a little bit of tension with finance on some of these things where the air quote ROI is, you know, maybe less clear or you can't just draw a short straight line to why are we doing this. What advice would you give people in terms of good collaboration with finance and maybe it can be specific to L&D kinds of things or just more broadly.
Speaker 3:I mean, of course, any way that you can show the business impact, and it's not that easy to show how the business performance is directly correlated to learning and development programs.
Speaker 3:But I think one of the things that we've been able to demonstrate, for example, which I think does help, is retention, because we know that the cost of turnover is significant for any organization and we definitely are able to quantify that.
Speaker 3:And so we were able to demonstrate that just the leaders that are going through the programs, the engagement, the retention, the decreased turnover and, by the way, which now you're making me think, which we haven't tracked but I think would be interesting Maybe we should look at the turnover of not just the leaders but their teams.
Speaker 3:Maybe the teams, the turnover of the teams, could also you could see a decrease in that over time, because I do think and we hear it from our leaders, I mean that some of the programs are extremely intense and they have significant coaching for a, you know, up to a year or even two years in some cases after. So you know they come back with year or even two years in some cases after. So you know they come back with very concrete objectives that they need to work on because they've had, you know, 360s before they've gone into the programs. They come back, they work with their teams, they give them the feedback, they share openly what they're working on and we see very, very concrete changes in some of the leaders after they come back, because the programs go very deep with them and they're pretty transformative, and I would imagine that you do see a decrease in turnover of some of the teams because you see change behavior in many of the leaders. So now I'm going to I'm going to see if that's another KPI that we can look at.
Speaker 2:Go ahead. No, I was going to say but that's always.
Speaker 3:The challenge is because a lot of it is subjective, and so how do you prove, especially in difficult economic environments which we're probably getting into these days, how are we going to demonstrate the importance of continuing to invest in our talent, which is-.
Speaker 2:And that's exactly, and that's exactly what I'm getting at. And I would suspect that if you do do that double click on these hypos that not only do we see higher retention, but I bet you will see that high potential folks be, get high potential folks and so that you've got pods all of a sudden, that kind of crop up because you've invested in somebody who now knows how to invest in the people under their care, right. So, yes, retention is a baseline, or at least it didn't leave. But I would argue that you probably see that they're actually some of your best performers are coming from those teams.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would certainly hope so, right After making all of those investments. And again, we know that it's transformative because we see the feedback, we hear the feedback and then we see some of these people go on and have these incredibly successful careers with the group. So it's very powerful.
Speaker 2:Well, that probably leads to another thing, which is a form of retention, which is internal mobility and again, would you say, 75 different brands across the portfolio. Clearly a lot of opportunity to move around and learn different parts of the business. Is that something that you guys encourage and, if so, how?
Speaker 3:Yes, it's a huge part of our HR philosophy and we track it. So we have all the KPIs around. Internal mobility at all levels We've always looked at with the executive population, which is a sizable number. I mean we have about 230,000 employees around the world. We've always excuse me we've always said that we want to have at least two thirds of all of our executive moves happening internally. So we always have felt that it's important to have a percentage coming externally, because we need new ideas, new ways of looking at the business and, by the way, we've been on a pretty high growth trajectory over the last few years, so we haven't even been able to develop people as fast as the business is growing. But in general, within that whole ecosystem of LVMH, we want employees to be able to take advantage of the ecosystem. So more recently we've been much more deliberate.
Speaker 3:We launched an initiative last year that's a global initiative that we launched in a very aggressive way. It's called the HR New Deal, which is centered around this topic, called the career compass, and the philosophy is that we want to put talent at the center and we really want our talent to see LVMH as a marketplace for their career across all of the brands to allow them to build whatever skills they either want or need to develop, and we are in the process of launching a talent marketplace. It should be launched next year. We're working and I'm part of the global task force that's building that out and it's really a collective effort. So what we're saying to employees is that it's the responsibility of you at the center. You're responsible for driving your career, but you do it in concert with HR and the manager, right, so everybody is there to support you on that journey.
Speaker 3:But making sure that employees have the tools to be able to find all of the open positions that are available within the group, have access to that, have the freedom to pursue that, which we're still working on. We're not totally there because managers are still sometimes hesitant to let their people go, or timing is sometimes an issue, but we're really in the process of opening up that widely so that people all of our talents have the ability to pretty much explore any opportunity that they want, as long as they're in good standing and have been in the role for at least a year 18 months, I mean. We wouldn't want people and the more senior you go. Obviously there's going to be a few more criteria, but it's a huge initiative that we're launching to really be able to leverage our incredible talent pool that we have at LVMH.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that all makes total sense. I want to be mindful of the time as we kind of look forward and, as you said, we live in very kind of interesting times these days and I like to say today is the slowest day of the rest of your life because the pace of change, the magnitude of change, like it's just becoming so pronounced that you just don't know what a day is going to bring. But with all that, as you think about the next few years and how HR is changing I mean, somehow we've gone 33 minutes without saying the word AI but I'm just sort of curious how you see whether it's economics, technology, other things what's the future of HR look like from where you sit?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean certainly HR, AI is a big part of it, and certainly everything that I just mentioned to you around the talent marketplace and the career compass and everything that we're doing. Ai is basically powering all of that. But what I think is really important to remember is that, at the end of the day, we play an important role, but it's, you know, as an organization. What we need and we can't forget is that we rely on talented, motivated, inspired, engaged people to drive our business, and I think that it's up to us as an organization to make sure that we're cultivating cultures and environments where people can thrive, people can grow, people want to work, people feel engaged, people are compensated fairly and appropriately and people have the opportunity to, you know, realize their absolute best potential in an organization.
Speaker 3:So, with everything that's going on, I just think that we can't forget that, at the end of the day, it's still about the people, and they're the most important asset that we have in any of our organizations, and I think sometimes it's easy to lose sight of that. I mean, I think now about all the simulations and all the work that's happening around the tariffs, but it's happening because we have amazing people in tax and finance that are making that happen. I mean, yes, technology is helping, but it's the brilliant minds of our people that are driving the process right. So for me, it's always coming down to people, and how are we creating the right environment for our people to thrive?
Speaker 2:Awesome, right environment for our people to thrive Awesome. I'm going to suspect that you might have inspired a person or two to think about how can I work at a cool company like LVMH. If somebody was interested in exploring career opportunities, what's the best way to do that?
Speaker 3:Well, there's two things I would recommend. Number one is to go and register on InsideLVMHcom, which is a website that we created specifically. It's really targeted to early career professionals and it's sort of a one-stop shop to give you access to masterclasses. There's an LVMH luxury certificate that you can take. You can register for positions. There are internship opportunities available. There's so much information there that you can learn, and we continue to update that and provide access to all of our different brands and maisons. And then, of course, there's the website. There's the website where we just updated our website. You can go there. You can look by geography, you can look by function, you can look by city and you can look all over the world to identify what types of roles that you're interested in. Obviously, you can look all over the world to identify what types of roles that you're interested in. Obviously, you can reach out to any of us on LinkedIn. We're very engaged, we're working a lot with LinkedIn, but really, those are the two places that I would start the LVMH careers website and InsideLVMHcom.
Speaker 2:Awesome. This has been amazing, gina, is there anything that we haven't said that you would just want to make sure that you leave the listening audience with, or reinforce, no, again.
Speaker 3:I think we covered so many things and I always love our conversations, bob. I think again, it's just you know, the world is in a very challenging space right now and I think there's a lot of conversation, so many different topics right now, especially happening in North America, and we see, you know, a lot of things under attack in North America in particular. You know, at LVMH, you know we continue to stay very focused on our values. Our number one value is that people make the difference. You know we're very committed to all of our policies and philosophy around diversity, equity and inclusion and our commitment to creating the absolute best environment for all of our talent and our people. And that could be mental North America and beyond. You know, continue and support these really, really important initiatives and remember how important they are for our people, our communities and for our businesses.
Speaker 2:Awesome, Gina. Thank you so much. This has been phenomenal.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Yes, and thank you, HR Gazette, for the opportunity to guest host another episode of HR Chat and with that we'll see you all on the next episode. Thank you again, Gina.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Thank you Bob, Thank you everyone.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
