Driving Workforce Agility at Scale: Maryjo Charbonnier

When IBM spun off its infrastructure services business into Kyndryl, it created the largest public company spin in New York Stock Exchange history—launching with 90,000 employees and a daunting reality: 60% of customer accounts were unprofitable, and revenues were shrinking. Amid intense pressure to reset the trajectory, Kyndryl’s then-CHRO Maryjo Charbonnier architected a workforce strategy that prioritized people, data, and adaptability. On the podcast this week, Maryjo shares her expertise on how to build a skills-centric enterprise ready for an AI-powered future.

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[04:22] Overcoming workforce skill challenges at Kyndryl[13:51] Defining company culture and values[16:45] Reducing and restructuring the workforce[24:58] Improving employee redeployment rates[31:05] Tackling vended labor challenges[38:21] Managing skills across job families[42:49] Finding allies in unexpected departments[52:10] Improving Kyndryl resource planning[53:02] Future workforce tracking challenges

Building a Culture First, Systems Second

While it may be tempting for HR to leap into systems and processes, Maryjo insists that everything should begin with culture and purpose. Kyndryl first articulated the culture they wanted to be by conducting research with customers and employees to distill the company’s values. These values of kinship, growth, restlessness, empathy, and devotion to shared success shaped the Kyndryl way and anchored every subsequent transformation, from talent architecture to performance management.

Shaping the Workforce with Skills Data—Not Just Headcount

Maryjo describes her central CHRO responsibility as keeping as many people employed as possible through responsible enterprise stewardship. That means managing the direct workforce and aggressively addressing contractor and vended labor. Instead of allowing easy backdoor entry for outsourced services when headcount was reduced, Kyndryl prioritized retraining and reallocating internal employees—a strategy that cut the vended workforce by 50% and drove up redeployment to nearly 80%.

Critical to this approach was creating a unifying global job architecture and skills taxonomy, merging inventory across employees, contractors, and service vendors. This required overcoming system fragmentation and forging new alliances with procurement, IT, and legal to track all labor, however it came in, and create transparency across all workstreams.

From Data Layer