Get Reworked

In Brief Technology with intention beats chasing shiny objects — Madhu Narasimhan's focus is caring better for patients, removing friction for teammates and easing nephrologists' work. Tools that don't serve that purpose get set aside. In healthcare, "approximately correct" isn't good enough — She requires security, governance, auditability, traceability and explainability from any AI platform. She also keeps a human in the middle across the three areas where DaVita uses AI: software, administrative and clinical. AI is only one part of the strategy, not the strategy — Madhu's job also covers data governance, cloud modernization, care orchestration, human-centered design and AI-boosted cyber threats. "Approximately correct" might work when you're writing the first draft of a report, but it isn't acceptable when it comes to people's health. DaVita Kidney Care CIO Madhu Narasimhan shares how she keeps that focus with any tech decision, how she separates the AI that's useful from the froth and why the ideal result of AI use in the company is to give caregivers back two minutes of time they can spend with patients.

In Brief Every workforce challenge is a human challenge — Whether it's 700,000 airmen or a mid-size company, you're solving the same problem: aligning finite people to more requirements than you have resources for. Use the data you already collect — The Air Force tracked about 180 HR data fields but made decisions on roughly six. Unlocking the rest showed real skill sets, not just headcount. Creativity isn't innovation — Creativity tweaks the recipe. Innovation creates a new dish the world adopts. Innovation needs real permission to experiment, break things and fail forward. Shawn Campbell's final role in the Air Force had him planning a $64 billion budget for congressional approval that affected 700,000 Air Force members around the world. Despite the scale, he says the challenges around organizational management, design and process improvement mirror what private sector companies face: "How do I use the finite humans that I have to reach the best objective for my organization?" Across his career, that meant a more refined approach to people analytics, a culture built on trust and, while helping launch the U.S. Space Force, a start-up mentality to hit an ambitious deadline.  Show notes: Shawn's book, "The Mission of Leadership"

In Brief 'AI is just an enabler,' not a silver bullet — Saju Sadasivan discusses the five-to-six-year slog of fixing the foundation first: content governance, ownership and untangling competing taxonomies. Rush any of that work and the smartest model will still return garbage. He funded a five-year project one proof-of-concept at a time — Each phase had to justify its place and show value to unlock the next. Getting people to share during layoffs means changing the pitch — When jobs feel at risk, people hoard what they know. Saju reframed sharing as a way to offload repetitive work, and built a dashboard showing content creators how often their articles were used and praised. Recognition drove them to contribute more. No one glorifies the pre-work, the necessary steps that feed into the ultimate success of a project. We jump to the ROI, ask about the productivity gains, want to see the final result. Reworked 2026 IMPACT Technology Leader of the Year, Saju Sadasivan, won his award in large part on what one judge called the "strong foundational work in areas such as search and taxonomies," long before any technology came into the picture. He formed a cross-functional Knowledge Management Council to make sure the strategy would be supported throughout the business. He also brought in a taxonomist and a knowledge graph expert to ensure people would find the information they needed.  Saju spoke about he and his team's award-winning work, as well as how he sees AI changing knowledge management, what motivates him to do the work he does and why the opportunity to consolidate tech excites him. 

Reworked's The State of the Digital Workplace 2026 report landed with some good news and some bad news. First, the good news: 82% of leaders surveyed called the digital workplace a critical or high priority for their organization. Now the bad: only 19% said the employee experience their digital workplace delivered was frictionless.  "Where things have really fallen down is making those systems work for employees, or making it work on the level of the employee job experience," said Sarah Kimmel, VP of Research at Simpler Media Group, Reworked's parent company. On this episode of Get Reworked, Sarah digs into the gap between the two and explores the similarities and differences between the current AI digital transformation and the one organizations went through during the pandemic. 

Julie Averill has been a CIO at some of retail's biggest names: Nordstrom, REI, Lululemon. At each, she combined big technology bets with a deep commitment to team culture and psychological safety. She's also the author of the recently published book, "Chief Impact Officer." In this episode of Get Reworked, Julie discusses why her bet on her team built lasting trust, why she thinks psychological safety is a prerequisite to high performance and how the biggest risk around AI isn't the technology, it's how leaders are treating their people. 

Katie Turner-Carr is a big believer in the power of data. By reshaping how her organization gathered, interpreted and acted on data, she helped strengthen workplace culture while delivering on business goals, work that earned her recognition as Reworked's Workplace Culture Leader of 2026 in the IMPACT Awards.  In this episode of Get Reworked, Katie discusses her award-winning work and explains how her team balanced analytics, storytelling and human insight to help leaders make better people decisions. In Brief:  Employee listening works best as an ongoing system, not a one-time survey event — Katie Turner-Carr shifted her firm from disconnected annual surveys and a "thousand action plans" toward a more intentional listening strategy built around trust, context and continuous dialogue. HR becomes more strategic when people data is connected directly to business outcomes — The creation of a people analytics function and executive culture forum helped leadership move from anecdotal decision-making to enterprise-wide insight. AI is most effective in HR when it accelerates insight while keeping humans in control — Katie's team used AI for sentiment analysis, trend detection, communication personalization and identifying potential attrition risks, but maintained strong human oversight for judgment, privacy, governance and interpretation.

Innovation is a word that's often used but rarely understood. But research out of the Upwork Research Institute sheds light on what innovative companies have in common.    Upwork Research Institute's Kelly Monahan joins Get Reworked to discuss her research into how innovative companies approach hiring, AI use and distributed work as a cohesive business operating model — and why that helps them deliver change under tight budget restrictions. "The three things we all need in a job is we need autonomy, we need to feel like we're learning and mastering, and we also need to feel connected to community. And those three things I think are in really rare regard today for the ways we think about innovation. I would rather ask, well, do you have autonomy? Do you feel connected to your colleagues? Do you feel like you're contributing to something bigger than yourself than necessarily perks? Again, in a perfect world, you'd have both firing on all cylinders, but I think we overlook at the intrinsic side," said Kelly. Highlights of the conversation include: How workplace innovators maintain culture across a blended organization. Why Kelly doesn't see innovation and efficiency as being at odds. How self-determination theory applies to workplace motivation and satisfaction.

The more technology changes, the more things stay the same.   That's one takeaway from my conversation with Northern Trust Asset Servicing's Shaelyn Otikor-Miller. She joins Get Reworked to discuss the journey the company went on to launch Dynamics Copilot and how closely — as big a change AI may be — the rollout resembles previous technology launches. "It does make you question what's the next phase we're about to go through? What's the next corner we're painting ourselves into? What I'm noticing is that there's a lot of passion and concerns around AI and where all the technology is going. I think we just need to slow down the mindset a bit and realize it's just another phase. It's another part of the journey," said Shaelyn. Highlights of the conversation include: The hurdles Shaelyn's team tackled to prepare for the Dynamics Copilot rollout. How they handles the change management side of the rollout. An overview of how 25+ years of technological changes have changed the workplace — and what things stay the same.

Our online tools facilitate learning new practices and exchanging information at the same time they interrupt our focus and fracture our attention.   Finding that balance is a motivation for Laura Pike Seeley, knowledge program leader at global architecture firm HKS, Inc. She joins Get Reworked to discuss how the firm strikes that balance through a blend of knowledge sharing practices and approaches. "Digital workplace design is critical here, right? Most of us spend an enormous part of our day working within the digital workplace and the tools that it connects us to. So this environment can be full of flashing lights and distractions, or it can be an environment that guides you through the noise to find the connections and the ideas that matter most to you," said Laura. Highlights of the conversation include: How HKS Inc balances live knowledge sharing lessons and static knowledge hubs to account for employee needs. The differences between knowledge management practices in a consumer packaged goods firm vs. an architecture firm. How she finds the balance between information overload and open exploration and knowledge sharing.

For anyone who's ever had an application reboot in the middle of a meeting, who waited days before they received access to a business critical application, whose computer shuts down whenever they try to upload software — this episode is for you.   Frank McAloon, VP of digital workplace and security delivery at CVS Health joins Get Reworked to discuss the cross-departmental coalition he built to improve the digital employee experience for their 300,000 colleagues. By moving these IT tasks under a bigger umbrella of leaders, he's connecting IT efforts to business results and speeding time to resolution. "Overall, the success that we're trying to have with the XMO is to reduce stress on our colleagues, making them more productive, making sure they are more streamlined in what they're doing and ultimately helping our clients and customers across everyone that works with CVS. The happier our colleagues can be and the more efficient they can be, the better it is for everyone," said Frank. Highlights of the conversation include: How he and the XMO office approach prioritization in an organization with more than 300,000 employees. How CVS Health is using AI to identify potential problem areas for colleagues. Why Frank sees a future where IT help desks are no longer needed.