Listen to Victoria’s Conversation with Milan Taylor of Mercer:
How companies manage people and talent is rapidly changing—especially in the chemical industry where agility, performance, and well-being are now critical business drivers. Victoria Meyer is joined by Milan Taylor, partner at Mercer and featured speaker at the upcoming Chemical Summit, to discuss how workforce redesign, skill-based development, and the integration of technology like AI are shaping both challenges and opportunities for chemical companies.
Victoria and Milan explore data-driven insights around HR priorities, the importance of aligning KPIs with business strategies, and the growing pressure on leaders to address employee stress and burnout. They also address practical strategies for small and midsize companies to maintain agility and foster growth—even with limited resources. Whether you’re a leader looking to refine your talent strategy or aiming to future-proof your workforce, this episode offers valuable, actionable perspectives for navigating today’s workforce transformation.
Victoria and Milan investigate these themes this week:
- People-First Performance: Empowering line managers to drive results.
- Work redesign: Breaking jobs into skills and leveraging technology for agility.
- Managing AI adoption benefits and risks in chemical workforces.
- Addressing employee burnout and retention beyond just pay.
- Scalable Growth: Practical development strategies for companies of all sizes.
Killer Quote: “You can only deliver that business performance if you’ve got strong alignment all the way down the organization.” – Milan Taylor
Watch Victoria and Milan Taylor of Mercer on Youtube Here:
What Employers and Employees Really Want with Milan Taylor of Mercer
Welcome back to The Chemical Show Where Leaders Talk Business. Today I am speaking with Milan Taylor, who is a partner at Mercer, one of the premier consulting firms focused on people and talent, and that’s a bit of what we’re gonna be talking about today. Milan is also one of our key speakers at The Chemical Summit this year, which is on September 30th and October 1st in Houston, Texas.
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Visit thechemicalsummit.com to learn more and to register because you do not wanna miss the opportunity to attend The Chemical Summit. Meet Milan and other great speakers and guests of The Chemical Show and just change your view in terms of how you’re growing, leading, and thriving inside the chemical industry.
So Milan, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks for inviting me, I’m looking forward to the conversation and looking forward to the conference in September.
Absolutely. So what’s your origin story? I always love to ask people, how did you get where you are and how did you get interested in this space of people and talent?
I think like so many other people, you fall into it. I don’t think at six years old you say, I wanna be in people and talent. I was running a division for a large, multinational organization. I saw it firsthand, just how effective having strong people strategies led to better business results. So that’s my introduction into people and talent and it was very effective. So aligning business strategies with people strategies can drive significantly better outcomes for organizations.
Love it, and tell us a little bit about Mercer, because people may not be fully familiar with Mercer.
Yeah, Mercer is part of Marsh McLennan, a New York Stock Exchange listed organization, and at an enterprise level, Marsh McLennan manages some of the most compelling risks. So we have four organizations within the family. Marsh, which is in essence looking after asset risk. Mercer, which is the organization that I work for, looks after people risk. Oliver Wyman, looks after business and strategy risk, as a management consultancy group. And then Guy Carpenter look after reinsurance risks.
So together it’s about how do organizations manage, in a holistic manner, their risk profiles.
So I would not necessarily have thought of Mercer as helping to manage risk, but of course people are a company’s biggest assets, opportunities, and exposure.
Absolutely. It’s so critical to organizations success. And it’s often underlooked or undervalued.
Yeah, so obviously you’re talking to companies across the industry. What are companies and leaders talking about and asking Mercer about today? Where’s the focus?
This is with a lens on the chemical industry as well, I do a lot of work in that sector. There’s a consistent theme. It’s cost, cost, cost. Growth, growth, growth. And then simplify, simplify, simplify. So I guess enterprise wide across the chemical industry from a challenge point of view, it’s all about optimization. We weren’t surprised to see that from Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2025 chemical industry cut, the number one HR priority was getting line managers to drive performance. Set up their people managers to deliver. So you can start to see that. How do we drive costs, how do we drive growth, and how do we ensure that we get the productivity gain?
Across all industries that we researched, getting people managers to do what they need to do around driving towards went to number one. So it’s tied in with the current economic geopolitical volatility that we’re seeing.
Is that an implication that there’s a view that managers haven’t been managing effectively? Or is this a function of where we are in the 2020s with work from home and not work from home and the whole workplace dynamic? What’s driving that?
I think it’s being driven by the need for organizations in tough times or the industry having a lot of headwinds, really needing to drive with a laser-like focus performance. You can only deliver that business performance if you’ve got strong alignment all the way down the organization. So we’ve been doing a lot of work with firms in the industry, ensuring that the KPIs are actually meaningful, measurable, and deliverable and strongly aligned to the organization’s business plan strategy and, in essence, what they’re saying to the market of their stock exchange listed. So if you don’t have that alignment, it can have some pretty challenging consequences.
That’s really interesting. I guess this ties into this whole theme of how work gets done. One of the things, as I was doing some research before our call, that Mercer has been talking about and working on is work redesign, right? And I guess workforce redesign. So how does that play into this?
So I think if we pivot and talk about agility for a moment. Business leaders want their organizations to be far more agile so they can pivot far more quickly to external challenges that the industry or the economy faces. Agility, productivity, and efficiency are really key focus areas for C-Suite. I think the thing about agility through, through the lens of people is it’s not just about speed. We’d like people to think about agility being about speed and precision. So Skills gives you that map of where your capability is so you can redeploy your talent quickly. Think of it a little bit like a Formula One team doing a pit stop. You need to do it with precision, with speed and with intent.
So work redesign from our perspective in the work we do with clients in the industry is about improving workforce agility. And that’s really key at the moment. So it’s the continuation of the optimization story. There are quite a lot of areas to reflect on when you think about work redesign. Probably the first one is where does work actually get done? We are seeing a trend in more organizations offshoring to Global Capability Centers. Some have done it for many years, some have been piloting and are scaling, some are new into that.
That’s both for enabling roles, finance, HR, but also for technical roles and engineering roles. So more up the value chain, and that meets the cost mandate. But in terms of, what work will be done in that work redesign, the direction of travel is broadly moving away from jobs to skills. Skills we like to think of as the currency of agility. This sets up firms to drive far more quickly that efficiency they want from their workforce, and they can staff up new projects far more quickly. They can respond to external market factors more quickly, and also I think it enables intentional cross-functional mobility so employees can get different experiences as well. What’s in it for them is important.
So two things on this. Number one, I love this idea of skills because as a Gen X kid, no longer a kid alas, but I always viewed my career as transferable skills. What is my next role? I don’t know, but I have skills that are gonna take me to the next place. Certainly when I was incorporated it was like, what job do you want? I can’t tell you the title, but I can tell you what it should compose of. So that’s one piece of it.
The second piece on this, my cynics hat comes onto this workforce redesign. I spent a big part of my career at Shell, and it was like every 18 months we reshuffled the deck chairs, threw them up in the air and said, go post for your job again. That doesn’t feel very agile or encouraging for the employee. I assume the company got out of it what they wanted to get out of it. But I guess maybe the question then is, and I can point fingers at them, I’m not asking you to point fingers at anybody else, but what’s the characteristics of a good workforce redesign and how should it feel to the organization and to the people involved?
So there’s two things here, Victoria. One, how does work get designed and what is the composition of your workforce. So organizational restructures and corporate life. I’m sure many of the listeners or viewers will be familiar with the cadence of how that flows. I’m gonna pivot a little bit to how do organizations change the way that work gets done to drive better outcomes? I’m gonna give you an example, ’cause I think this will clarify this. So there was some work that we did for an oil/gas organization. An aligned industry to chemicals, that petrochemical end. We went in and then we deconstructed jobs to their core tasks. So we said, this is the job, but here are the tasks and here are the skills. Then we worked through what the impact of centralization of technology meant to those tasks. So think increased use of sensors and remote monitoring. And then we said, where could those tasks be done? So in this organization, maintenance moved from permanent on staff site to a shared services team that drove flexibility and efficiency tasks that were repetitive or transferred to automation or robotics that got the work done.
Then we then reconstructed those jobs through the lens of tasks and skills. In this example of how you redesign, no roles were eliminated. Instead the workforce was upskilled and for me it was in the results. So it sounds like great HR consulting, but what’s the business benefit? In this instance, that firm saw a 45% improvement on profitability driven by reconstructing their jobs and thinking about how things could get done in a different way. So instead of just looking at your organization and saying we’ve been doing this for 5-10 years. Take it down to the granular, understand what is repetitive, understand what adds value, and then reconstruct that and create the organization to drive that, and that will drive flexibility and efficiency as well.
Yeah, I could totally see that. In fact, within my own small business I’ve been doing this recently because I think this aspect of as a business grows and evolves, you just add stuff on. Oh, I can do that, and the right person may not be doing the right thing. Maybe it could be outsourced, maybe it could be shaped differently. Even to the extent that it’s the business processes we were following four years ago may not make sense today or the tool that we’re using has evolved. Have we evolved in terms of how we’re using that tool, and that technology.
That’s upskilling and reskilling. Just think about doing that on an enterprise wide level with 25,000 or 30,000 employees. Then think about the advances in AI and all the technology that’s being invested that you have to keep up to date. It’s a significant investment that organizations are making and that upskilling and reskilling, it’s not a one-off event. You have to keep up with software releases and understand how this all works together within your technology stack.
One of the other challenges I see, especially when we talk about a big organization, whether it’s 1000 people or 20,000 people, is the work doesn’t stop. Regardless of what I’m doing today, it needs to continue to be done. I can’t pause and say, we’re gonna take a day and we’re all gonna swap stuff around before we get going again because your plans will shut down, your customers will be unhappy, et cetera.
How do you navigate that aspect of evolution?
I think it’s about strong project management and also a strong dose of realism. There’s probably certain times in the year where you wouldn’t start doing these types of transformation programs, and there are probably certain environments where you wouldn’t. I’m a big fan of piloting and taking discrete areas of the business and driving through to see how easy or otherwise a transformation of something like work design will be. I think what’s different though, and what could be perceived as a challenging business transformation. You’ve got technology platforms that will do pretty quick assessments of tasks, giving you a view of how easily they can be automated, how much time is saved, what is the productivity improvement, and a lot of data.
So for example, Mercer, my organization, has a deep, rich skills library. That has skills and competencies, and what qualifications are required. That just allows organizations and our own consultants to really navigate very quickly what makes sense and what doesn’t when you’re looking at this type of work redesign.
What’s the role of technology in all this? So you started referencing it and I think about, the workforce of the future is certainly different than the workforce of the past and the way we do it. When I talk to companies, they’re struggling a bit with how and where to adopt technology appropriately, particularly AI.
I think AI is scaling quickly. Nobody even knew how to spell it two years ago, and now we’re worried about it replacing our jobs. I don’t think it’s ever gonna actually replace jobs because people still need people to think, create, et cetera. But how does that participate in this and what are you seeing and hearing from companies and clients and leaders?
Yeah, it is still an emerging technology. Organizations are still working through how they can drive that technology into their workflows and their processes. But I’m not sure that you can just throw AI at a team and say go figure it out yourself. I think there needs to be a bit of discipline there that goes well, if we look at our workflows, and the way that this team delivers. Where does it make sense to insert AI as part of that workflow? What sort of due diligence or peer review do you need to do to ensure that the AI is giving you the right data as well?
So I think if you want to really drive those levels of productivity and efficiency, you’ve got to really, again, embed it in a pretty granular way. I speak to a lot of organizations and they say, yeah, we are using AI, we’ve got Copilot. That is a true statement, but I think the evolution of AI will lead that statement to dust in the next x number of months as organizations start to figure out how they can really drive the power of this technology for their commercial benefit gain.
I spoke with a member of Marsh, so one of your sister companies, talking about AI and and the risk of it, and it was around this aspect of, companies need clear policies actually in terms of how to utilize that. Where do you see this fitting? Where do you see the decision on how to use AI, how to organize those policies fitting and aligning?Is it in HR? Is it someplace else in the business? Is it a combination thereof? What’s the best practice here?
Again, it is still emerging. My view would be that it’s probably owned by some senior stakeholders on executive committees. I think HR teams hold an inordinate amount of sensitive personal data of their employees, and you would want to ensure that is kept safe as well. I think a lot of organizations that I work with, have their own proprietary platforms. That creates that level of security. But we have data also that suggests that HR leaders still see the use of AI as increasing the risk in their organization and the industries, chemical, oil and gas, traditionally are quite cautious industries for very good reasons.
So I think they’re probably adopting a thoughtful introduction of the technology. So more on that. As part of the research that we’re currently engaging in the market for energy and chemical HR leaders, we are asking the question of, their personal usage of AI and then also, where their HR teams are in terms of proficiency of using AI and what they think that looks like and also their confidence in the responses they’re getting back from external platforms. So I can share that with you in Houston in September at the conference as well. It should be interesting to see where that lands.
Yeah, that’ll be great. I’m not sure anybody claims to be fully proficient, but maybe somebody does. What’s even interesting, I’ve spoken with leaders at some of the biggest chemical companies and energy companies and had this conversation probably about a year ago. The one that I’m specifically thinking about, the use of, for instance, chatGPT. That’s our thing. In fact, I’ve talked to a number of leaders who say, I can’t use it on my corporate computer, but I’ll pull it up on my personal iPad to do research on a company or do whatever tactic it is.
So I think it’s interesting, it’s fast moving but companies need to figure this out. In terms of this whole control aspect, hopefully people know not to put corporate data in a public system. But again, not everybody knows and recognizes that. But this whole alignment of, get with the program or you’re gonna miss out. That’s a little bit of where it feels like from an AI perspective. You’ve talked about doing this survey of HR priorities for energy and chemical leaders, and I’m super excited to hear more about that at the summit.
What about employees? What are employees asking for these days? I feel like there’s a little bit of misalignment at the moment, but I don’t know what you’re seeing.
Mercer conducted a US survey called Inside Employees Minds. We cut the data by role holders across all industries in the US but those that were involved in manufacturing, construction, skills trade, and the top factors that attracted them to their current employer. So this is about how I get that talent through the door. Number 1 was pay, probably no surprise. And then healthcare benefits in US perspective, no surprise. But there was quite a significant delta between those two. So pay was strongly number one. So it’s all about the salary, the remuneration.
I think that still holds true, but when we asked that the same group, what aspects of the work package they found attractive, so I guess that’s as they were in the organization rather than joining the organization. The top three by rank were pay number one, healthcare benefits number two, and retirement number three. But what we did notice is that huge, significant lead that pay had as they were coming into the organization dropped quite significantly. So I think there’s probably something there about organizations where they’re attracting talent emphasizing, what the value is of their healthcare benefits and their retirement programs as well as the base salary.
Then just to finish this one off, we then ask that group what would cause them to leave their current employer. And no surprise, number one pay, number two benefits, but number three, and I think this is really important, it speaks to what it is that employees across industries are thinking about, was being burnt out because of demanding workload. There’s something here. So remember back at the beginning we talked about the importance of line managers driving performance management being key. Cost, cost, cost. Growth, growth, growth. Simplify, simplify, simplify. I think what you’re starting to see in that is, that constant transformation, that constant pressure, that constant change in organizations as they navigate these economic times, is starting to be seen through that sense of workload, employee wellbeing, potentially some mental health challenges there.
I thought, maybe there’s something some other data. So I looked into our data sets and there was a North American healthcare survey Mercer did. I looked at the North American Chemical data cut for that.We asked were these employees actively looking for a new job. That also speaks to how happy they are, what they value. Only 30% of chemical employees reported that they were not actively looking for a new job.
So you’re saying 70% are actively looking?!
Yeah, 53% were actively looking and 17% sat on the fence.
That’s a big percentage.
That is a big number. And they join you for pay. That’s what they say. They stay with you for pay and benefits.
Well and it’s the retirement benefits that keep you there too, right?
Yup. They see in themselves, that the levels of pressure and overwork could lead to burnout. We see this in other studies that we do at Mercer as well. Then you see this propensity, potentially to leave organizations. We also asked that group from the Mercer Healthcare and Demand, so again, chemical institute, we asked them whether they felt stressed most days at work, because that kind of gets to how big or not an issue this is, and 53% agreed or strongly agreed that they were. So again, over 50% were saying they were stressed at work. The industry has always been so conscious about health and safety, ingrained in the DNA, but I do look at these numbers around employee self-reporting. They’re not saying they’re going to be, but the likelihood of being burnt out or levels of stress on a daily basis, and all the other things that are going on. Plus, the business as usual. I just wonder if organizations are doing enough to manage that wellbeing and that health aspect.
There’s so much that we can unpack here and we don’t have time to unpack all of it. But the couple of things that strikes me and, I’ve heard the stories recently, so first of all, I’m a believer that people leave people. So you get attracted into the company for a variety of reasons. It’s the external lens that brings people into a company, and it’s pay, and it’s what that company looks like and what you think the value proposition is, et cetera. And then you get inside and you’re living it. Pay may not be enough, especially if you can leave and get the pay, and let’s just assume those basic needs are met.
Then it is the people and the people are driving the workload and the expectations. And I think this is so true across all industries, chemicals and others, I spent some time last week with a couple of my sisters and one of whom was stressed out about work even though she was on vacation because her top employee left because there’s a sales role and the targets kept getting so high and he was already the top performer. As the top performer, what happens when you’re a good performer? They just set the targets even higher and higher, and it became untenable and he went to a company that wasn’t gonna hold him accountable to those same kind of untenable targets, and was able to get his bonus without egregious sales goals. So I think that’s an example.
So work life balance is important, right? And that’s a great example that you just gave, but also it goes down to KPI setting rights and that’s something that we’ve been working with organizations on, what are the right KPIs to drive the right performance? What’s the right KPIs that drive that bonus outcome, but also allow the organization to meet its goals for its stakeholders and shareholders.
So you’ve gotta get those things, you just can’t keep loading and loading. You have to think about how you calibrate this and how you balance it, and again, organizations have a responsibility for the health and wellbeing of their employees in a holistic sense. Look I think the industry does a relatively good job of that, but I think they need to keep on top of it on a regular basis.
One of the questions I had for you, Milan, is around this whole talent aspect. We talk about the workforce redesign and driving people towards skills and realignment, this whole aspect of agility and performance. And then from a people perspective, I do believe people wanna continue to grow, develop, improve their skills, achieve the next level, whatever that looks like for them.
Sometimes it also feels like the development opportunities, the ability to develop these skills or to get promoted or to get cross-functionally trained, et cetera, really favor the big companies. Yet we know the vast majority of companies across the chemical industry are small to midsize. However you wanna categorize that, they’re less than 1000 employees or less than 2000 employees.
How do companies who have a smaller number of employees, a smaller platform, a smaller scope, really get the same results for themselves and for their employees?
Yeah, it is a challenge. But I think organizations with a smaller number of employees have to be far more intentional in this space. They just cannot leave it to chance. They should emphasize skills growth, thinking about judiciously adding on additional responsibilities to the role. Look for ways to allow for cross team collaboration, like short term rotations, right? So somebody in finance might be interested in health and safety. Is there a role there? Can they move in one day a week for a couple of months, help on a project, get a flavor of what that can look like? That also can allow for some agility. You’ve gotta get that balance right, but you can team up for short term projects, that way.
I think being purposeful around mentoring and also reverse mentoring, I guess my point of view is just because organizations are small, doesn’t excuse ’em from developing and nurturing their staff. It’s about intentionality. You may not have these big full scale programs of an organization that has 50,000, but that doesn’t stop you from creating something that’s quite unique for your organization.
Small companies, they can’t by their very nature promise the next rung up the ladder, but what’s the next best thing they can probably do? I think they can help their employees by offering them the hammer, the nails, and the freedom to build the next rung themselves, right? So it is about that collaboration between employer and employee and making it very granular and very real in a small organization. I’m not saying it’s easy, but I think with that purpose and that intent, you can drive some good outcomes for employees.
Yeah, makes sense. I agree a lot with that. I like your idea of even just one day a week, working in a different space. Because frankly, you can give up that person, the other group can use the support. it’s a manageable construct.
Yeah. It is pragmatic.
Absolutely.Okay, I’ve got two final questions for you, Milan. Number one is, if somebody’s listening to this, if you’re a leader leading people, hopefully all people are leading people in one way, shape, or form. Whether it’s formal or informal. What’s one thing that leaders can be doing today, to improve agility, workforce, et cetera?
I would suggest two things. One is if you are not doing employee engagement surveys, if you’re not getting that real and raw feedback from your employees, get onto that, and get onto that quickly. Because I think organizations that create programs based on what they think rather than what the data shows them could be misguided in how they spend their money on developing their people. So I think that’s number one. And two, if they’re seeking that agility, think about piloting some of those jobs to skills that I referenced. Unsurprisingly, Mercer is big in both those employee engagement spaces and through the work of our transformation teams helping organizations move from jobs to skills.
Good. Alright, and then my question number two is, I love to ask people the leadership question, which is a little bit more about you. So Milan, if you were advising a young Milan Taylor just early in his career about some keys to success to help you get from where you were to where you are today.
What’s your advice?
Authenticity, number one, always be true to yourself. People will see through you if you’re not. Two, always be honest because people will not forgive you if they find that you’ve been, anything but that. And third, take the time to understand the people that you work with and the people that you work for. It’ll pay you back in dividends throughout your career.
Love it, perfect. Milan, thank you so much for this. I appreciate your time today and I’m really looking forward to seeing you at The Chemical Summit at the end of September.
Me too. Thank you so much.
Thank you, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Keep listening, keep following, keep sharing, and we will talk with you again soon.
About Milan Taylor:
Milan is a Partner, located in Mercer’s London office and is Mercer’s Global Energy & Chemicals Industry Leader. As such, Milan collaborates with over 600 Mercer industry colleagues & consultants and clients in developing and delivering Health, Wealth and Career consulting solutions, products and tools. Mercer’s Energy & Chemicals Vertical works with over 300 clients in both national and international organizations across the value chain of both industries.
Milan facilitates Mercer’s African Energy Forum (Virtual), Mercer’s Middle East & North Africa Energy Forum (Dubai) and Mercer’s Asia Energy Forum (Kuala Lumpur) as well as Mercer’s European Energy HR Strategy Network (London) These peer-to-peer industry networks meet twice a year and connect HR leaders in the industry to discuss topical issues and develop pragmatic insights.
Milan is the Mercer energy lead for the Mercer/Oliver Wyman joint venture on The Workforce for the Future and as such, works with senior leadership teams in organizations in understanding the Human Capital impact of digitalization, artificial intelligence and robotics. Milan is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Taskforce on Preparing for the Future of Work for Oil and Gas. Milan is a regular speaker at industry events most recently on Cybersecurity and HR.
Milan has also recently co-authored industry specific papers including:
- Lean Optimization in the Oil & Gas industry and the impact on HR
- From Engaged to Thriving Employees – Why Measuring and Cultivating Employee Engagement Matters Now More Than Ever for Energy Companies.
- Delivering the Energy Workforce of the Future – The vital role of analytics and vision
- Start Building your Energy Workforce for the Future Workforce, Today
- Women in the Pipeline – D&I in the Energy industry
- Resetting the Future of Work Agenda – Disruption & Renewal in a post COVID World (in collaboration with WEF)
- Global Talent Trends – Chemical Industry 2024