While most people hungered for a return to ‘normal’ after the pandemic shut downs, many of the workforce trends that companies experimented with offer lasting lessons and value. From flexible work schedules to innovative sources of talent, the opportunities for hiring managers and prospective employees are as diverse as the roles that need to be filled.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Mika Cross. Mika is a U.S. Army Veteran and a workforce futurist. She was focused on distributed team workforce requirements two decades before the world went home to work in 2020 - in the aftermath of 9/11 - and continues to follow the associated trends today.

In this interview, Mika shares her expertise at the intersection of workforce requirements, distributed talent, and company culture:

• Some of the ‘diverse’ categories of people that employers might want to know more about and include in their workforce
• The lurking danger of ‘good intentions.’
• How taking an expanded view of talent sources and work arrangements can help employers, individuals, and communities
• Considerations around company culture that managers should be aware of as the shape and style of their workforce changes

Links:

• Mika Cross on LinkedIn

At 1:30 am on March 26th, the container ship Dali struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge and sent it falling into the Patapsco River. Six members of a construction crew lost their lives and the port of Baltimore has been partially closed since.

Dueling investigations are underway, with the FBI working to determine whether any federal laws were broken and the NTSB looking to reconstruct the accident and learn from it. The ship is still in place, with the bridge on its bow and the crew onboard, and The Army Corps of Engineers hopes to have the port of Baltimore fully open by late May.

How is this tragic situation affecting each of us - all of us?

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes back Kris Lance, Senior Director at Una, for a recurring monthly conversation about current news stories. Kris has experience in multiple industries and has his finger on the pulse of the trends and topics that procurement, sourcing, and supply chain professionals need to be aware of.

In this month’s discussion, Kris and Kelly talk about the varied responses to the bridge collapse and what we can take away from the situation as a whole:

• Whether the legal steps taken by the ship’s owner and management company are examples of the actions that give big business a bad name
• How humans tend to respond to the fast dissemination of news and the updates that follow
• Why some people may have lost their way based on their focus in the aftermath of the collapse

Links:

• Kris Lance on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to “The Sidekick”
• Episode 158: All Eyes Should Remain on the Red Sea with Kris Lance
• Episode 154: The Sourcing Hero Gets a Sidekick with Kris Lance
• Episode 150: 2024: The Year of the Dragon? with Kris Lance
• Episode 145: Looking Back and Looking Ahead with Kris Lance

Recognizing the need for procurement transformation sometimes comes from within procurement, and in other cases it is driven by management-level goals and expectations. Regardless of where the idea for transformation begins, few stones in the organization will be left unturned by the time it is over.

In this episode of The Sourcing Hero podcast, Host Kelly Barner welcomes Nataša Cikač. Nataša is the CEO of Cronata, a Croatia-based company that provides procurement transformation support and coaching.

In this interview, Nataša shares her perspective on effective procurement transformation - including a story or two:

• Some of the things that might cause a management team to start thinking about procurement transformation
• Why it is so important to document expectations before the transformation project gets underway
• The power of recognizing and articulating the ‘why’ for the change in addition to the need for change

Links:

Nataša Cikač on LinkedIn