People at Work

When a podcast guest says “This isn’t a fairytale”, I buckle up because I know we’re in for an interesting and useful conversation.

In today’s People at Work episode, Gonçalo Silva, CTO at Doist, tells the story of this fully remote company’s growth and culture journey over the past decade.

Even though Doist is doing a lot right, there are still obstacles in their way and a team to take care of from afar. Oh, and did I mention they’ve also had to adapt to cope during the pandemic? Granted, they’ve had a head start with the remote work gig, but the struggle has been real for them too.

The hero in the story is trust. Everything they do, how they work, how they make decisions, centers on trust. The success of their asynchronous, remote, fully distributed team depends on this.

This interview is real and refreshing, with many insights that can help those of us adapting our workforces to fully remote or hybrid arrangements. Give it a listen and let me know how you enjoyed the ride.

About our guest:

Gonçalo is the CTO of Doist, working remotely on Todoist and Twist. He’s obsessed with building the future he wants to work in, where location is irrelevant to being part of a highly productive team. He loves to work odd hours, but wonders if there’s even such a thing within a fully distributed team.

If the pandemic has afforded us anything, it’s a fresh perspective on a major part of our lives: work. Where we do it, how it’s measured, what we’re prepared to put up with, and how we expect bosses to behave (I could go on).

Happiness at work expert Aoife O’Brien advocates for a fresh perspective on work itself, and where it fits in our lives. With her research and personal work experiences, she believes we shouldn’t embrace work and life, work-life balance, or any other way to stitch those two parts together.

Instead, let’s simply think about life, and all the parts and contributors in that experience. This helps us make smarter decisions about what we want from our lives, what success means to us, and how we choose to spend our time.

Listen in on how Aoife suggests we can achieve happiness when we adopt this mindset. We also talk about how organizations can make a shift to whole person support structures, and the role that individuals play in their own happiness, wherever they find themselves.

Don’t worry, this isn’t another blog post bemoaning the reality of the great resignation. It’s very well understood that we’re facing more turnover thanks to the pandemic. Now it’s time to talk about how we can avoid a revolving door of talent.

Yair Reimer believes the strongest strategy to keep people engaged and active in your organization is to communicate. And realize that over-communication is impossible. For Yair, communication includes clearly sharing company updates, asking for feedback, listening, encouraging everyone to speak up, and training leaders and managers to ask hard questions.

In this episode of People at Work, Yair shares what he’s putting into practice at Intoo, to create a workplace culture where people want to stay and contribute. Beyond communication, it’s about finding joy in the day-to-day and treating everyone like equal, whole human beings.

About our guest:

As a CEO of Intoo, Yair helps global companies increase retention by developing the potential of their people, transforming performance, and transitioning skills. Yair once attracted over 75k applicants with 1 job advert in less than a week.

Learning about leadership on the front lines of armed conflict is an extreme way to get clear on what matters when leading people. As a former US Army Special Forces Commander, Sean Patton understands what it means to be a quality leader, because his life (and those around him) depended on it.

Being a quality leader means taking a whole person approach. In the average workplace on any given day, it may not feel mission critical to be a quality leader. But, Sean believes we need to think about quality leadership as the determining factor in a business thriving or failing.

In this episode of People at Work, Sean talks about how he’s adapted his military experience into the corporate world. He outlines what he believes quality leaders need to embody, and why each of us needs to be a quality leader in every aspect of our lives, all the time.

About our guest:

Sean helps clients create more fulfilling and profitable futures through mindset mastery and servant leadership development. He’s a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt and 2019 Masters World Champion!

How do you know what people feel about working in your organization? Better question still, when was the last time you asked them? I’m not talking about annual engagement or pulse surveys. Those might have their place, but they’re not the tool to truly get to grips with what’s going on for people in your organization.

The best way to do that is through stay interviews. Angie Bergner has been conducting quarterly stay interviews with every employee at Veris Insights long before the pandemic. It’s her most critical lever to understanding how people are doing at an individual level, as well as what’s emerging as issues or victories at the team and organization levels.

Angie joins People at Work to share why and how she does stay interviews. This is an excellent primer on key components, things to consider, lessons learned, and most importantly, how to use what you hear to take action.

While stay interviews aren’t going to solve every problem (or stop people from leaving), you’ll get ahead of things by knowing what’s going on, and being honest about what you can improve. Regardless how long people stay with your company, it’s the experience they have while they’re there that counts. For that to be positive, open communication is critical.

About our guest:

Angie is a people leader committed to bettering the world of work at all levels. Her approach to coaching, whether individuals or organizations, is to unlock everyone’s growth mindset. Angie approaches every person, session, and workshop through the lens of DEI and the lens of long-term impact.

You don’t often hear gratitude for younger generations at work. But I say thank goodness for their fresh perspectives, desire for transparency, and constant desire to better themselves and their circumstances. This will ultimately make workplaces and leaders better.

But how do we retain and manage young people against the context of The Great Resignation, so that they stay with us and add to our workplace cultures and their own growth?

Molly Bruttomesso thinks about this every day. At Wunderkind, she’s building a culture that accepts that people don’t stay as long as they used to. Instead of bemoaning this, Molly and her team are structuring the way they work to embrace the best of everyone, and help prepare them for their next best thing.

In this episode of People at Work, Molly talks about how this involves intentional career pathing, robust values alignment, learning opportunities, asking for ideas, and acting on feedback… and much more.

Most of us are challenged with the revolving door of people at the moment. If you want to hear some down to earth actions on how to keep people, even for the shortest time, take a listen. You’ll also want to take a look at your culture and make sure that it’s not hastening people out the door. Molly has some tips for that too. 

About our guest:

Molly leads the Customer Success and Client Partnerships teams that drive extreme value and maximum performance across the 350+ E-commerce clients. Molly began the movement of the rock t-shirt and blazer as the new tech casual. Move over gray t-shirts.

Very few people raise their hand and volunteer to do the tasks nobody else wants to do. But Robert Kohlhepp did just that. He started at Cintas 50 years ago with 60-odd employees and finished his career there with over 40,000 people. Robert has seen Cintas grow through its ups and downs, making his many years of experience and advice so much more valuable.

Robert believes establishing compatibility, facing conflict head on, and being direct helps bring a company’s culture to life. Much like a marriage, a company’s principle objective, corporate characteristics, and management style need to be compatible with the individual in order to create value.

Treating your customers and employees right while maintaining professionalism are some of the things that seem to be forgotten about in the midst of the constantly changing work environments.

Listen on for some tips on the essentials of building an effective corporate culture and how to retain employees in this new world of work that we’re in.

About our guest: 

Robert J. Kohlhepp is the Retired Chairman of Cintas Corporation. He joined Cintas in July 1967 as controller. Over a span of 50 years with Cintas, he was promoted to positions of General Manager, Vice President and Treasurer, Executive Vice President, President, and CEO, then served as Vice-Chair and Board Chair until retiring in 2016. Additionally, Kohlhepp has served on several association, corporation, nonprofit, and university boards.

Resources: 

Working from home can get monotonous, so how about changing it up once in a while? VEL is a hyper-localized tech-forward coffee shop concept supporting a hybrid workforce. Here you can work in a transactional setting and be more efficient while co-working.

Mo Hamzian, Co-Founder & CEO of VEL, took his love for working at coffee shops and turned that into a work experience that offers flexible privacy and psychological safety. It gives you the opportunity to experience the energy of other people working in the same space as you.

Mo joins us to chat about what the future of the workplace looks like. Are there better alternatives? What are the benefits of co-working vs. working from home?

The nature of workplaces has been shifting and will continue to do so. Mo encourages you to discover how you think about work itself. Do you go to a gym because of the equipment or does it depend on the ability to customize what fitness goals suit you?  At VEL, more than renting a co-working space, technology, and snacks, they focus on selling a productive work experience.

The transition from a disrupted workforce back to “normal” is slow for a reason. Mo believes that hybrid, flexible, dedicated co-working spaces are here to stay as employees crave more interesting and supportive ways and places to work.

About our guest: 

Have you heard anyone say “I love that learning platform”? No? EdApp is here to change just that through their constant functional learning.

EdApp is a workplace learning tool that delivers bite-sized education while maintaining high levels of engagement. CEO and Founder, Darren Winterford, identified that e-learning was broken and that COVID played a role in accelerating that because of how disconnected people are.

However, the increased usage of smartphones in workplaces is providing the perfect opportunity for microlearning. Imagine if a push notification asked you for 5 minutes of your time to give you a refresher on your sales training. Way better than a 90 minute video taking you through the whole process, right?

Changing attitudes towards content creation, consumption, channels, and adoption of learning material is key to harnessing the power of microlearning. The old way of learning in organizations isn’t effective: it’s not engaging, it’s inaccessible, and it doesn’t help people learn.

Listen to Darren speak about why enforcing a continuous learning culture through microlearning within your organization is essential in order to be successful.

About our guest:

Remember the black squares on Instagram showing support of Black Lives Matter? What action took hold after companies proclaimed to care about DEI in the workplace? Even though awareness has likely increased, meaningful change is in short supply.

That’s what’s driving LaTonya Wilkins to get below the surface with leaders. Leaders have a critical role to play in shifting workplaces (and society at large) towards deeper inclusion and caring about diversity. Unless we get to the core of change, we’ll see little progress for DEI.

LaTonya chats to me about why we should be skeptical about what’s been done, what mechanisms we can use to change from the core, and what’s helping and hindering DEI as we shift to hybrid workplaces. If you’re trying to get past the DEI checkboxes and external posturing in your workplace, this is the podcast episode for you.

About our guest:

Imagine you’re delivering a town hall presentation on Zoom to your entire organization. Now think what you’d do if a potato head filter appeared instead of your face. And try as you might, you can’t remove it.

Would you be flustered and embarrassed or would you embrace the moment to be a real person in a jam? A humble and vulnerable leader would accept the fate delivered by the Zoom gods and have a laugh, before proceeding with the presentation as a potato head.

This is a real story shared by Zina Sutch and Patrick Malone on the latest episode of People at Work. The topic of conversation is a new era of leadership based on self-awareness and humility, stripping away ego, power, and titles to reveal human beings who happen to lead people.

Once you’re able to connect with yourself first, you can then start to show concern, interest, and even love for those around you. Then you’ll tap into the bottomless well of creativity, problem solving, ideas, trust, and loyalty.

With deep insights from their book, “Leading with Love and Laughter”, Zina and Patrick make a strong case for heart-centred leadership for yourself and others. If you’re evolving as a leader in the context of the ever-changing world of work (who isn’t?), this conversation will get you well on your way.

About our guests: 

Zina Sutch has been leading development and diversity programs for the US Federal Government for 20 years, and currently serves in the Senior Executive Service. Patrick Malone spent 23 years in the Navy and served as an officer in the Medical Service Corps. Zina is a faculty member and Patrick is director of the Key Executive Leadership Programs at American University.

If the pandemic has afforded us anything, it’s a fresh perspective on a major part of our lives: work. Where we do it, how it’s measured, what we’re prepared to put up with, and how we expect bosses to behave (I could go on).

Happiness at work expert Aoife O’Brien advocates for a fresh perspective on work itself, and where it fits in our lives. With her research and personal work experiences, she believes we shouldn’t embrace work and life, work-life balance, or any other way to stitch those two parts together.

Instead, let’s simply think about life, and all the parts and contributors in that experience. This helps us make smarter decisions about what we want from our lives, what success means to us, and how we choose to spend our time.

Listen in on how Aoife suggests we can achieve happiness when we adopt this mindset. We also talk about how organizations can make a shift to whole person support structures, and the role that individuals play in their own happiness, wherever they find themselves.

About our guest:

Aoife O’Brien is a Happiness at Work expert. Her background is in data analytics in the CPG market research industry, and now she uses her strengths to help organisations to increase culture-fit to create happier working environments where employees flourish. Aoife has lived and worked in several countries and has travelled to all 7 continents, mostly independently, with camera in hand!

2019 seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? And in the world of work the rate of change over the past two years is probably the highest it’s ever been. With more people than ever considering new opportunities and companies able to hire across a wider geographical area it can be hard to stand out. But in order to attract and retain top talent you really need to start building a strong employer brand.

On this episode I chatted with Joe Mullings about a wide-range of topics related to these changes we’re facing. We spoke about:

• Work from Anywhere (WFX)
• Generational effects on those who are starting their career fully-remote
• The many inequities of hybrid work
• How content creation and brand building have been democratized due to demographic shifts
• Why HR shouldn’t be the ones hunting for new employees
• And much, much more

I got a lot out of this conversation and I hope you do too. Enjoy!

About our guest: 

The people at Wilson Sporting Goods have been navigating a world of work turned upside down, much like the rest of us, over the past 20 months. But, they’ve made a few critical decisions along the learning curve to help galvanize their new way of working together.

At the core of their new hybrid work culture is constant communication. Geoff Watts joins me on People at Work to share what this looks like in practice. Connection at every level, starting with individual employees, is their sweet spot.

Not only does this ensure that people are heard and given space to shape their own work experience, but it enables tremendous value creation for employees and consumers. And that leads to a crystal clear understanding of the company’s vision, and every person’s role in achieving it.

We’re living through interesting times, and the need to look after our people increases daily. Geoff also has some thoughts on employee care, retention, and satisfaction, against the backdrop of “The Great Resignation”. As he puts it, the grass is greenest where you water it.

Give this episode a listen and you too can tend to your lawn, and ensure that your people don’t need to head to the other side to see if it’s greener.

About our guest: