Your Workplace Strategy Says One Thing - Employee Behavior Says Another

All right, everyone. Welcome to today's live program with Achieve Engagement. My name is Zach Diez, President at Achieve Engagement, and as your community lead, grateful that you're all here with us, taking time out of your busy schedules to sharpen your craft, to level up your knowledge and your skillset in order to make a bigger impact on the world of work. I think the world of work is in deeply need of all of you, and I'm grateful that we're here learning together. I'm really excited for this conversation today. Before I do that, though, I want to reaffirm a couple of things for today's hour. One, I would love to make this an ultimate learning experience with all of you. I think there's a lot of power in spending time together as peers, unpacking these things from multiple different perspectives, sharing how we're doing things within our respective companies, or how we've seen some of these things not work or maybe some of the blind spots that we should look out for. So one, as we're going through this program today, I would encourage you all to lean into the conversation. Lean into your own perspective of how you've navigated these things or made decisions around some of these things. So as we're going through that, put it in the chat. I would love to see some of those thoughts. On the flip side, this is also a great time to unpack any things that you're navigating or dealing with right now. So if you have questions or things you would like us to answer or talk through as a group, also put those in the chat or the Q&A function, and we can work those into the conversation as we go. We'll also have some time at the end dedicated to unpack these things together and so forth. And I love that activity already happening in the chat. If you haven't already, I'd love to see where you're calling in from. I see we got some Toronto in the house. Jeff with us in Toronto. Anita, my good friend, good to see you again in Chicago. We've got Moorhead, Minnesota. I'm not sure where that is, Tina, but welcome in. Robert in Chicago as well. We got some Iowa in the house, Long Beach, South Dakota. Jamie, good to see you in here. Okay, yeah, we got some Chicago friends, some more Illinois in the house. Sacramento, Yalina, welcome in here. This is awesome. All right. One of the other things I would also love to pose, and I'm just curious of how some of you are structured today and what type of work environment do you currently have. Do you have fully remote? Are you hybrid? Are you in the office? Is there certain RTO policies you recently rolled out? Are there certain hybrid policies where it's a couple of days in, a couple of days out? Is it more flex than that? What is it for you? Put in the chat right now the current structure of some of these things for you right now and just introduce it. I just want to get a feel for what some of you are looking like at this moment within your workplace. And I would even be curious if you want to add in the chat as well, are you actively making any decisions around this? Has this been a conversation with the executive team? Do you have a leader that's pushing for RTO? Have you already done that and you're picking up the pieces of that decision? Where are you for some of these things right now as well? I'd love to see that. What do we have going on? Beth, "Hybrid workforce, depending on role." Okay. I think we're going to dig into that a little bit today, like how certain roles or departments have to be in the office or on the floor, depending on the business or the industry you're in. And some are like, "Hey, you don't actually have to," so you get more flexibility and how that impacts the culture and the employee experience. Let's see here. Holly, "Fully remote." Carla, "Fully hybrid workforce." Kathy, "On-site." Jamie, "We are all in office." "Four-day on-site, one-day remote as the standard for those who are within one hour distance." Okay. Let's see what else we have going on. "Mainly in the office," Tina. Jolene, "Hybrid. Depends on the department. We're pushing for a new conversation." All right, Cece. Maybe today can help you with that conversation. "Hybrid, four days in, one day out." "All on-site for most of our system of hospitals and doctors..." Okay, that makes sense. "But for a few divisions, hybrid or remote." Okay. We've changed some of the company's view. All right, Anita, hopefully we armed you with some ammo to change some views or at least refine the views, right? I think a lot of times we're doing it from a lack of data and intelligence, and we want to do it from a more empowered perspective that's actually strategic and rooted in intelligence. So that is what we are here to do today. Before I introduce these two amazing gentlemen to join me on the virtual stage, I also want to give a huge shout-out to our partners on this program and actually a larger series that we're running with our community at Achieve Engagement, and that is OtherShip. So I want you to make sure to check them out. I'm going to put them in the chat here. If you haven't learned about them already, give them a glance. Reach out to them, connect. Learn a little bit more how you can find a partner maybe to unlock some of this workplace intelligence. And I think for some of you, and I've already seen this in the chat, you're probably curious, right? We're having these conversations. Leaders are coming with their own perspectives. But what is your workplace data actually telling you? And we're actually partnering with some of our community members to connect them with OtherShip and some of their enablement resources to build some more clear visibilityinto how their teams are actually using the workplace, so you can be more intelligent with some of these decisions. So, Othership is actually doing a certain research cohort right now with our network that all of you can participate in if you're interested, and this could bring some value. It's completely sponsored by Othership, so it's free to do. But they'll receive live views into workplace utilization, how people are actually booking and using certain spaces and things like that to get more insights from users, more collaboration patterns, things like that. So if you're interested and you want to participate in that, one, you can put "I'm in" in the chat right now, and we'll save the chat, and we'll share that with them to reach out to you. Or you can book a meeting directly. So either put "I'm in" in the chat right now, or at least if you're interested in learning more about the research cohort that they're doing, we'll make sure to follow up. And then you can also book a meeting for the cohort directly if you're ready to take that step as well. So, that being said, let's get to the fun part of today's program. I hope you have your notebooks out. I hope you're set aside to think through these things as we have this discussion. As I said, ask questions and bring them back to us, and we'll make sure to work that into the flow. But we are joined by two incredible individuals. Christopher McCormick, awesome friend, mentor, colleague, active member of our leadership network at Achieve Engagement, as well. He's CEO of Visionary Consulting. Chris, welcome to the Virtual Stage here with us. It's awesome to see you. And then we have Jeff Waldman, who is also founder of Scale HR, Social HR Camp, new friend of the Achieve Engagement community, all the way from Toronto. We're super lucky to have Jeff with us as well. So let me stop sharing. And Jeff, we'll let you come. All right. Good to see you up here, and appreciate both of you taking some time out of your busy schedules. So let's jump into it. I'm really excited to have this conversation. I think a lot of times organizations are making short-sighted, biased decisions when it comes to these larger impacts of the workforce. So we'll get into some of that, but let's do some quick introductions. I'd love to hear initial thoughts and just some of the things you're currently working on. And Chris, why don't you kick us off as an active member of ours? Share a little bit about yourself and what are some of your initial thoughts as we jump into this discussion today? Sure. Thanks, Zach. Thank you very much for having me. I'm one of the founding members of Achieve Engagement, I think. Must have joined the group as we were beginning, a little over almost two years now, right? Yeah. So glad to be a part of the community. I've gotten a ton of value out of being a part of the community, both in person and through sessions like this, so thanks for having me today. As Zach mentioned, I am the CEO of Visionary Consulting. I run my own HR consulting firm. I have clients that run the gamut from medium to small-sized businesses, startups, corporations. I do executive coaching for C-suites. I've got clients right now that are working through workday implementation issues. I've got other clients that are working through payroll issues and staffing models that are not working correctly, and so we're working on some things there. It runs the gamut. Every day is different. I've got two sisters who run a series of hair salons in Texas, and no day looks the same, which is also something that I love. And it also lets me see a lot of challenges across the board. And when I think about this sort of mandate of return to office or even thinking about workforce intelligence, are people making decisions with the right data and with getting the right framing in mind? And so oftentimes I'm seeing that that is not happening. They're going with their gut, or they're trusting one person as a leader who has a personality that says, "I want to see everybody in their chairs." And the generational differences that are at play there, too, come into as a factor in how they're starting to run the business or thinking about the future of the business. And if we really look at it, I go back to the pandemic, when most of the time, unless you were a frontline person who was considered a necessary frontline worker and had to be in front of people, everybody did their job, even customer service, claims, all that, were doing a great job and doing it well, and running it efficiently from home. So this sort of mandate is becoming less and less about why, because they're not answering the why. It's just about, "You will." And I think people are missing something there. I think that is giving people a lack of... It's eroding trust, which is already being eroded because of AI, and people are scared and have fear, and there's all sorts of things. We'll unpack all of that more. But I'll hand it over to Jeff to introduce yourself before I start taking us off on a journey. Well, thanks for kicking us off. I'm excited to expand on some of those items. And yeah, it's really interesting how some companies did really respond after the couple of years of COVID and the pandemic, where productivity levels relatively either stayed the same and in some cases rose, and they still made decisions to return to the office. So it's just like, okay, how are those decisions being made in those scenarios? But Jeff, welcome to the network. I appreciate you being here with us as well. Yeah, share a little bit about yourself and what some of your initial thoughts on this topic on how some of these decisions are being made today. Yeah. First of all, thank you for having me. I really appreciate being here. And so I'm a former HR leader. I've been in this space for over 25 years. I've worked with large, medium, small-sized companies. I don't practice HR anymore. I still advise quite a few HR leaders here in North America, but we primarily work with emerging HR technology companies, and work with them on brand awareness and lead generation. And so obviously, still in the community. We also have a lot of other assets like events, podcasting, and other types of events, and so forth, that are for the HR community. We do tend to be a little bit biased toward the technology space, and so a lot of the tech companies in North America, and also globally as well. So I was leading HR for a small tech company here in Toronto during the pandemic right when it started, and this was probably the biggest issue. Obviously, we went virtual overnight, right? But we were well-positioned from a technology standpoint, and that was the real kicker, sort of right out of the gate, was that companies that had the infrastructure to support that won, right? And those who couldn't do that, they were scrambling. And so fast-forward six years from now, we're still having this conversation about, is it hybrid, virtual, work in the office, why, when, how? And I think what's happened is we've gotten a bit confused as to why we're doing this, as Chris said. And I'm really excited about this topic because it gets right into the nitty-gritty of what people need to be thinking about, and getting rid of all the noise that is clouding our judgment around that. It really doesn't have to be complicated, but there are a lot of factors as to why this is complicated, and I'm looking forward to that. And honestly, it comes down to, I think, two things. One is personal experience of leaders. They're used to a certain way of doing things, and some of the, I guess you can call them old school leaders, still like to have that optics of butt in chair. And I know a lot of those people are out there. And the other thing, too, is around data, is around having proper intelligence about what people in your organization are actually doing and why, and to how they're engaging, both physically in the office, but also virtually, using all of your virtual tools, whether it be Microsoft Teams or that sort of infrastructure, Google, Slack, it doesn't matter what it is. And so I think blending those two things together and really getting a solid understanding of how people do their best work is really what it's all about. And of course, if you're making a car, you can't do that from home, so I get that. I'm talking about organizations that can work from anywhere, right? My business is virtual. We have people all over the world. I don't have to have an office anymore. So anyway, I'm really excited. Thank you for having me, and yeah. I'd love to talk about some of the maybe unintended consequences that come with that first scenario, where it's more like leadership-driven decisions versus data-informed decisions. And we'll get into more of the, like, okay, how do we make more data-informed decisions? But before we get to that part, we find that a lot of organizations are basing these big decisions about the organization and the strategy, the frameworks, around their own personal experiences, which makes sense in many cases, right? Like, we saw what made us successful. So that recipe works, so let's apply that recipe to the rest of the company. Mm-hmm. But as you shared, and Chris, you started talking about this, this can erode trust in many ways. It has a lot of consequences when we make more of these top-down data-light decisions. So, Jeff, I'll pass it back to you to kick us off, and then Chris, I'd love for you to jump in on this. But- Sure ... what are some of those maybe unintended consequences that, for some of the people in the chat who are like, "I'm trying to have this conversation with my leadership team right now. I want to make them aware of certain blind spots they should know when they're trying to make these quick decisions as a team without any data." So what are some of those unintended consequences we should be thinking about? That's a great question, and I think, just before I answer the question fully, as pointed out, Zach, talking about what leaders actually lean on to, when they're making choices, obviously personal preferences. It could be, what are our competitors doing? Media headline, executive personal beliefs. And so the question is, what data actually informed these choices, right? Mm-hmm. And so many organizations can't even answer that question. And so when a leader can't answer that question to the employee, why? You just started that process of that downward spiral of mistrust, right? You're dealing with adults here. And so if they're asking you questions, then you should be able to back it up with a solid answer, right? And if you can't, that's a problem. And so if you only have anecdotes, they're going to make anecdotal choices, right? So, an example, it's a classic one. When a leader sees the half-empty office on Friday, concludes that, well, nobody's coming inThe employees see on Tuesday that it's fully crowded and it's jam-packed. They say that the office is in chaos. Both are technically true, but neither actually tell the entire story, right? And so this isn't about the actual intent, but leaders are trying to solve a problem. The challenge, they may not have enough signal. But the intended consequences are you lose complete trust if you're not able to back it up with a solid answer to the employee. This is why we're doing that. That's the biggest thing right there. They won't believe you. And then as we all know, if you have mistrust, it just snowballs into a bunch of other things. So that's the key thing, is the unintended consequences, and you can cope with those. Turnover, productivity issue, lack of communication, engagement suffered, all those types of things. Mental health, burnout, whatever it is, right? But it starts from that core thing of the employees' lack of trust. That's the biggest one right there. Sure. Yeah. And I would just say, you said mistrust, Jeff, and I would say mistrust leads to mutiny. And if we think about the title of the webinar today, it's about what's really happening versus what behavior we're seeing. And so all of these mandates that have happened, yes, you may have your mandate, but are people actually following it? Are they showing up? What are your badge swipes saying? And if the badge swipes are saying, "You're telling us to come back to the office," and we're saying a big you-know-what to you, saying, "We're not going to do... We'll make it work how we're going to make it work." And are there repercussions? Are leadership teams actually getting the signal? Are they changing their perspective? Are they using that data to inform a new perspective or a new policy, or are they just continuing to say, "We want you in the office because we said we want you in the office, and be in your chair. Do this. Do what we tell you to do"? And then nobody's doing it, and there are no consequences. Then it's like, well, then don't even have a policy. If you're not going to hold people accountable or if you're going to say one thing and then people are doing the other, and you're not taking that into consideration in your new framing or your new reference, what's the point? And I think it goes back to simply when we think about that trust piece, I go back to thinking through when you're thinking, you can't be efficient around building trust. And I think that's a misnomer. And I think people are trying to be so efficient and so this or that, and especially with AI and efficiency models and everything that's all about trying to be faster, better, quicker, more efficient. I go back to, and Jeff and I were talking earlier about French. So I studied French in high school and college, and "The Little Prince" by Saint-Exupéry, and Jeff's wife is from Montreal. I think about that book and the little prince in the book, "The Little Prince," there is the businessman. And the story is he is a very serious man, and he has no time for nonsense. He's all about productivity. The little prince notes, like he's looking at him and seeing that he's writing down all the stars that he owns and he's accountable for. And he is really looking at keeping track of all the stars. He doesn't do anything for the stars other than note that he owns all of them and then locks them in a drawer. And he's trying to be efficient about how many he has and what that looks like, and never checks in on the health of the stars or any of the thing. And so it becomes almost laughable when you think we're trying to build cultures where people trust you, and we're already eroding trust with AI, and we're saying things are going to replace you as human beings in your jobs, and there's not a lot to look forward to in that vein. And so the more and more these policies get put in place without any intelligence behind them, and they're just more of a gut feeling of one person or one personality, that's where you run a big risk of your top employees are going to start looking for other jobs. Your top employees are going to start looking for ways to basically sink the ship because if you're not in line with it, you will find a way to take it down. Because if you helped build it, you know how to take it down. You know where the bodies are buried. So what are you doing to keep those people, your core engaged people, engaged and listening to them? And if you're not doing that, you've lost the mark. Yeah. Quick, to jump in here quickly, you talked about the policy, and so my entire career, I've always told people, when you write a policy and you roll it out, that's not the end of the job. You're not finished. That's just the start of it, right? And so when I do my advisory work, I ask, this is probably one of the biggest topics is this hybrid virtual thing. And I go, "Well, so when you roll out the policy, what does it say?" And they tell me. "So how is it working for you?" "Well, we don't really know." I'm like, "Well, so need to find that out. You need to talk to people and get good, solid data as to what's really the impact of this policy. Is it working? Is it not working? If it is working, then why? If it's not, then why?" Right? They haven't done that work. And so when you roll something out, there has to be a change management. And if we've learned anything over the last couple of years about AI, it's not the technical parts of AIIt did change management. You can't just give someone a tool or give them a policy and say, "Go do it." It doesn't work that way. Well, look, it can work that way. But in this case here, that's just the start of it. The policy is just the start of it. And if it's not working, if you see everybody that's in the office and their doors are closed and they're on Zoom calls all day, you've got to ask yourself, "Well, what's going on here?" Because if the point is to have people come in and collaborate and talk, actually talk to each other face-to-face, like at a table or- Yeah ... what have you, and that's not happening, then you have to dig into why. So, that's just my bit about the policy stuff. Yeah, and there are two things I just want to add. I know, Zach, we can move on really quick. I just want to- No, you're good ... on the total policy piece that a client that I worked with, this is about, I don't know, 18 months ago. They were, the healthcare system, rolling out an emergency contact policy, a new thing of like, we want you to get emergency contact information at every step of the process, whether it's somebody coming in the emergency room, somebody coming in for their annual visit, somebody doing this or that. It was the policy, make sure you get this stuff. There was no traction, like the smallest little fraction of effort that got put into that because people were like, "I'm too busy. This person's got a gunshot wound. I'm not going to ask them their emergency contact information while we're doing triage here. We're doing this. We're doing whatever." It's when they got to the storytelling about telling the story of one patient who had their emergency contact information who ended up surviving, one patient who they didn't have who ended up dying. And when they started to have the leadership team start to tell the story of why this is so important, you may not think it's important at the moment, but if we know this person was here with us six weeks ago because they had a major concussion, or they had a car wreck and a trauma or an injury, that's going to impact how we're going to treat them when they're coming back in the door the next time. And if we don't know that information, and we are just going off of six-year-old information, chances are we're not going to give the best treatment to that person. And so when they started to make it human and tell the story, they started to see 45, 50, 60% traction in that change management effort. But it was all about getting to the root of the why. And if people understand the why, then they're more apt to get on board with the change management or understand why they need to do X, Y, and Z. It's that we're missing the why, we're missing the story behind why policies are in place, why things are being asked, et cetera. So I think that's a huge place from a change management perspective where we, as HR leaders in our space, have the opportunity to coach and guide our leadership teams. If we do want compliance, if we do want these things to happen, we need to come up with a really good reason for why we're asking for the change. Otherwise, it makes no sense, and it's just you eroding trust in a system that's already pretty fragile. So Zach, I'll pass it back to you. Yeah. No. I appreciate how we're expanding on some of these unintended consequences, but I also love where we went where if you are going to make this decision, then let's do it in a way that's actually going to be effective and drive maybe some actual traction, build trust and results if this is what we're going to do. Yeah. Even if it's data informed or not, let's at least do it well. And so I'd love to actually, let's go into that piece a little bit more. I'd love to expand on that, and then we can go back to, okay, if we want to be more data informed, what are the data we should be looking for? So we'll circle back to that. But I would love to be like, okay, if we're going to make these decisions, whether it's hybrid, RTO, whether it's data informed or not, let's do it well. And that means there's certain follow-up decisions and strategies that we need to do that goes beyond just rolling out the policy and the announcement, right? Yeah. And I think about even last year in Q4, and I find that RTO decisions tend to get rolled out, like in certain key timelines. Like it's at the kickoff of the year or maybe a midsummer type new second half year policy, right? So I expect July, there's probably going to be some rollouts of this. But either way, I remember in Q4, probably three or four HR leaders came up to me and were like, "Hey, Zach, don't tell anyone, but I'm actually looking. We're rolling out a RTO policy starting January 1st. I'm helping obviously roll this out because I'm the HR leader, but I'm already looking." Right? So, and then you think about the leaders who are supposed to reinforce this within their teams. If they're also getting that driven to them and they're going, "Okay, this sucks. I don't want a RTO. I'm supposed to reinforce it on my team, but either I'm going to not enforce it because I don't want to do it," or they're already on the way out, and now you have a whole department and team also that's not being reinforced in this. And now it's like, so it just kind of reaffirms, there's a whole secondary amount of decisions and work that needs to be done for this to even be somewhat successful. Yeah. So what are some of those follow-up things? Mm-hmm. And, Jeff, I'd love to, yeah, I'll pass it over to you to kind of kick this off. And I think you mentioned even some of our pre-conversations about how when RTOs happen, and it sucks because either you do end up going into the office and no one else is actually there, so it's not being reinforced, or it also sucks when you go into the office and you're all just doing virtual stuff anyways and you're not even engaging with anyone when you return. But, so yeah, Jeff, I would be curious, what are your thoughts on some of those secondary follow-up- ... work and decisions that need to be done for any of these decisions to be somewhat successful. Yeah. I just want to comment on just something first to that. But when it comes to... Did I lose my train of thought? I had a comment. I had a point. It'll come back to me. But I wanted to just... Oh, yeah. So, what Adam mentioned already, that there's the policy is done first, and then you're sort of questioning the policy, and that's not... Oh, my point was that when you're doing something like this, I don't think anybody has actually mentioned this yet, is that you can't have a blanket policy or a process for everybody in your organization. And so obviously, some companies are small, some are large, and all teams do what different things. And so it's really important that you customize whatever it is to the team, right? And so if you're a marketing team, how you do something like this must be different than if you're on the production line building cars. I'm just using that as an extreme example, right? Because what the people in each of those two groups are doing are quite different. Right? So those groups have to be involved. You can't just say, "We're doing A, B, and C," and then go to the leader and say, "Do it." That doesn't work that way. You have to really make sure that you actually include the business unit, the department, the leaders in this process, and you have to explain why. So I just wanted to just sort of point that out. So that's the first thing. And if you don't do that, nothing you do afterwards will even work. Right? So that's the really important first thing. I think the other thing, too, is you need to answer this question, why are people coming? Why do you want them to come into the office? And so that's where you get into the intelligence side of things. So collaboration, onboarding, maybe you want people to be onboarded physically. Mentorship, strategy, all these types of things need to be answered. Relationship building. All of these things have to be thought through, and those need to be your guiding principle into how you roll it out. And so, like I said earlier, if people are sitting in their offices on Zoom calls all day, then you haven't really achieved anything. So you need to have clear, established objective and goal as to why you want people to come in, and use that to drive what you do. I know of a leader, they're in the retail space. His reason for people coming into the office, corporate services, is because that's what I've been doing for the last 41 years, and I believe that works. Problem is, is that HR doesn't have any data or actual intelligence to sort of combat that, right? Yeah. They don't have their why. They don't have any objectives. They have no goal. They kind of talk about it, but they can't really go beyond on that. It's just talk. So you have to actually figure it out, what are our objective, customize it, tailor it for each department, and then actually seek out the proper intelligence and data to support that. So if you can do that, then I think those are sort of the follow-up things that need to be in place. Yeah. Something I'll also add to that, Jeff, is there can tend to be views of inequity in the system because of different departments and different needs. So if you say people need to be here to make the cars on the line, one of the last in-house roles that I had was for a biotech group, and so you can't have people working at home from a lab. But they did actually work out a way to have core lab days. So you don't have to be on-site every single day, but these are the core lab days. And on the core lab days, we're actually going to ask other people who may be in a finance or an HR or a support function role, supply chain, to be in the office, and we're going to actually have you-- We're asking you and requesting that you do more of a team sprint days with each other, co-collaboration in office, working together. No meetings, no regularly scheduled staff meeting, blah, blah, blah, unless there were a couple of those. But mostly, you're in a lab. You're in your lab running your sprint, just like the lab people are. So that we're creating some of that equity in the system. We're not asking just one group to always be here because you're customer or client-facing, or you're in a production role. We're trying to make sure that we're creating that overall equity in the system, and that's something that I feel like tends to also get overlooked when we're making these decisions, is that, well, we have to have the people in making the cars out on the line, but these people, they're back office people. They don't have to come in. How do you start to give people the sense of why we want them to come in, when we want them to come in, and make it meaningful when they are there, so that they're not sitting in their cubicle having a Zoom with 14 other people who aren't in that office? So making sure that we're doing it in a meaningful way that makes people understand the purpose, the why, and really, what are the outcomes we're trying to drive? At the end of the day, the business is all about outcomes. It's not about your feelings or your personal wants or needs. It's like we're here to do something that's driving an outcome from a business perspective. And if we can link it to that, and we can link the why to that, that becomes way more... of why I signed up to come join your company than why I didn't. And it's not about me personally, it's not about my whatever. It's literally about the business running as efficiently as possible. It's about the business meeting its metrics. It's about the business being the best for our customers. It's about us showing up in the marketplace in the right way. It's all of those differentiators, and when we can start to articulate that in a really meaningful way, people will be on board with whatever you're asking them to do. But you cannot have lazy thinking, and you cannot be like, "Well, I'm a leader from whatever generation, and we always were in the office, and we had to do this." Well, good for you that you had to walk up hill both ways to school with no shoes in the snow. Nobody cares. Nobody cares that you had to do that. That's not the time that we live in now. So you can't use those same old adages or stories to get people to think that that's going to work now. It just doesn't. I think what I like about what you expanded on there, Chris, is there's this element of co-creation and connecting these decisions to the separate teams or departments and creating deeper reasoning and strategic thinking around how you're deciding these things. Yeah. Because what I think Jeff pointed out nicely was a lot of times you roll out this blanket policy, it gets mandated down, but then organically some teams will go all in on it because they have a leader that's all about it, and now their team specifically has to follow that mandate. Then you have other leaders that are not bought into it, and then they don't reinforce it, but then you also have other departments that get special privileges, usually ends up being sales or something like that. Yeah. Where they get special privileges because whatever, they don't technically need to be here and they're sales or whatever. And they make all the money. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's when you try to take these blanket approaches but don't have these follow-up decisions and conversations, then all these different types of organic, they happen organically, unintentionally, but also toxic to potentially the cross- Yep ... relationships because you're like, "Okay, well, I guess we'll allow this to happen over here, but this group..." Then all of a sudden you get into really hairy- Yeah ... situations. Those unintended consequences- Yeah ... that you mentioned before, yeah. So- And that can become the toxicity that does drive people to go, "You know what? I'm out." Yeah. And that's when it becomes really an opportunity as a leadership team to say, "Where are we going to make exceptions and where are we not going to make exceptions? And why do we make exceptions? Who, what?" And we're transparent about why those exceptions are in place. We're not hiding it because I think that's where people get into trouble is you have one leader who goes, "Okay, well, my team is a sales team, so I'm going to make an exception that none of them ever have to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And then you find out about that, and that leader gets to just sort of do it because they've got great sales numbers, but their other peers have their sales teams coming in and doing certain things. So we can't let those anomalies off the hook without actually having consequences for those actions, because that's when people start to jump ship, or that's when people start to take the boat down because they're like, "I don't believe this because my peer in another region never has to come in, but I have to come in at least twice a week. But they get to do whatever they want, whenever they want to do it." Mm-hmm. So it's that you got to have a balance, and you got to make sure there is equity in the system that makes sense. And when there's not, you have to be true to yourself and to your employees about why there's not equity there, the reasoning why, and why there's that exception. And as long as you're transparent about it, people will have a lot more buy-in for it than they will feeling like people are getting away with something just because they have high numbers. Yeah. I think that goes back to the very earlier point that it's not being lazy about strategizing, right? It's much easier to spend more time engaging with all of the different groups and departments up front to make sure that they're part of this process to come up with the solution. Because if they're not part of it and they get told later on, just imagine we're all adults, and if you get told by somebody you must do A, B, C, and D, and then I go, "Okay, so please explain to me why," and they have no answer for you. And on top of that, you don't really understand, this doesn't work. This won't work for us, right? What do you think is going to happen? You're going to have massive conflict right off the bat. So then why would you leave it to chance and spend the time and actually think this through properly? Set out your objective, get clear reasons why, do proper change management communications all the way through the organization, and be fully transparent about it. I don't understand why this has to be a secret. So, and look, it's not about touchy feely. It's about including all of the different groups appropriately so that they're part of the solution. So, I think that probably the bigger downfall, I think, I've seen, and that goes for anything. It goes for any major organizational changes or enhancements. You're rushing ahead. Work top-down. So anyway, yeah. Right. So we're coming up on 15 minutes here left, so I want to make sure we get into some of the tactical, like, okay, how do we become more intelligent? What are the actual things we should be looking for? What are the data sets we should leverage? How do we capture it? We already talked about some of the more, I love the more grassroots stuff. Like, talk to your people. Mm-hmm. Have conversations with them. Okay, that's a data set, the conversational open text engagement type feedback. Okay, so we capture that. What does workplace intelligence actually start to look like in practice? So I'd love to unpack that with the both of you a little bit. Yeah, I guess I'll open up the floor for both of you. What are some of the things that come to mind or that you've leveraged before to help us slow down maybe in the strategic thinking phase and leverage data so that we become more intelligent with some of these things when it comes to our workforce? You want me to start? Go for it. Jump in, Jeff. I was going to check and see where you wanted to go. Yeah, go for it. Okay. So I actually came up with, I was working with a bunch of people six years ago, actually, when COVID started, and we were looking at, so how do we figure this out? And so what we came up with was you need to have real intelligence in three different layers. Okay? So just kind of going to walk through it. The first one is operational. So what that means is things like attendance, booking data, where people are, is the space being used at 50%, 10%, right? Those are check-ins, all that kind of stuff to where people are. Are they online? Are they working in the office? So that's layer one. Layer two, behavioral. Okay? Things like collaboration pattern to where people are collaborating, when, who where, rhythms of teams, right? So how they're working together. Office usage patterns. Okay? You're starting to get into the behavioral side of things, of how people are actually acting at work, physically in the office, but also virtually as well. The third layer, human. And so Chris, you actually alluded to this, belonging, isolation, engagement, manager effectiveness, all of these things that really get into the root of the actual person, so your employee mental health, all those types of things. Okay? So those are the three things that you need to collect. You need to get intelligent. What tends to happen is most companies only start with the first layer, and they go, "Oh, we have everything we need. We know how our space is being used," da, da, da. But very few have all three, okay? Mm-hmm. And so when you connect those signals together, all three layers, you stop managing space, and you start to improve the design of your organization. Okay? And I think that's what I'll say, and I seem to have worked. That's always worked, but it's a matter of being able to collect that data and use it in a way that you can actually make better choices, so. Mm-hmm. Beautiful. And I would echo everything that you said, Jeff. I would also say there are a couple of places you can also think about looking, which is your employee programs where people need to take a leave of absence. Is it something that is stress, work-related? Is it some, like, looking at some of those data points to say where are people feeling burnout or where they need to take mental health breaks, or are you offering the right set of core benefits, which include mental wellness and mental wellbeing, and are you doing sort of rituals in the office where you have practices of going to a gym and doing mindfulness or doing yoga or offering things on site in your campuses? Some of the times, I've seen sometimes people come to the office because there's a really great wellness program, and they want to come in and do their yoga in the morning and go do their thing at work, go to the gym in the afternoon, go do their thing, and then go to their class after. It becomes this thing that they built into their schedule because there's such a great benefit for them to be able to come to the office and leverage those things that are on site or on campus or on wherever, that that is a pull enough. If you think about gym memberships alone, you could be like, "I don't have to buy a Peloton. What?" SoulCycle is very expensive. It's just all those things that we don't always tend to think are reasons why people might make those decisions that actually are unintended benefits, not just unintended consequences. Where do we look at what those things could be as well? And again, back to, I think the people leader and the employee conversation is the most critical to having any of this work, and if you don't have a people leader who is having regular ongoing conversations about development, career, the work, the accountability, the things that need to be happening in the system that are ongoing, frequent, and meaningful, that's always going to be the challenge. So I think having the right people in that leadership role and shepherding that change management through that group of people is always going to be the lever that will have the most value and will have the most benefit. And then you have to look at where their engagement scores are, where their buy-in is. And if they are not bought in- They'll sink the ship faster than you can even begin, because none of their people are going to be on board if they're not on board. And if they're not going to follow the policy or hold the people accountable for a policy, they're going to be modeling something that you don't want to be happening in your ecosystem, and they'll do it pretty quickly. So I think that looking at the health of your people leaders, looking at the health and indicators of what's happening beyond just some of the basic metrics, like retention and some of those things, employee engagement, all of those things. We have to look a little deeper, we have to dig a little deeper. And we have the ability to do that, I think, with AI and large language models, we can get to deeper insights way faster than we ever could before. Yeah. The opportunity to integrate these data sources together and have- Yeah ... powerful insights has never been easier. It is so much more cost effective and easy to do than ever before. Yeah. And I think that's one thing that's exciting for, I think, hopefully a lot of you listening and people leaders. One, you don't need to rely on just sending out another engagement survey. You can leverage all these different signals and data sets that you pretty much already have. Now, you can also build or leverage certain partners to integrate that together to have a more intelligent snapshot and insight on how these things are playing together. And what I really liked about what both of you really reaffirmed was, one, having depth and layers to it, and not just starting at surface level indicators or data sets. And then also the segmentation piece I think is really important. Being able to segment and piece it together from different departments, and teams, and roles, and levels, and all those different things is going to help you pinpoint and be more prescriptive and strategic with some of these decisions. Versus, again, what Jeff was talking about, avoiding these blanket policies and strategies for the entire workforce. Mm-hmm. And, I think that's what's really exciting about what OtherShip is doing with a lot of our members and through this research cohort, is helping you access, and if you're not already, capturing some of these data sets and then bringing it together into some actual workforce intelligence. And it makes me think about two weeks ago, I was in Austin for a conference, and I stayed with one of my best friends there, and he's a software engineer, has a hybrid policy, so has to go into the office a certain amount of days of the week. And I remember sitting there one morning when I was working from home, and it was 11:00 AM, and he was finally going into the office. I was like, "Is this when you usually have to go in?" And he's like, "Well, usually we just go in over the lunch because we basically just have to scan the badge, and that checks the box for our day in the office." Mm. "And then we leave after lunch, and I work from home the rest of the day." So I think that is such a great example- Yeah ... of how, if you're just measuring layer one metrics, you're not actually getting the insights and the intelligence you need- Mm ... for how people are working, actually. Are they booking spaces? Are they actually having a presence in the office? Are they just going to the gym and then going home? Or are they going to get the free food at the lunch- Yeah. That's it, yeah ... and getting in and- The food truck ... and then leaving. I go to the gym, I go to the food truck, and I'm out. Bye. Exactly. Yeah. So I would definitely say for those of you that are like, "Hey, we want to unlock this intelligence. We haven't really figured out how to integrate the data sets or even capture some of that data," I would say leverage OtherShip's cohort to start. Start there. It's free to do. Sign up for it, or at least learn how they're doing it, and maybe that'll inspire and consult you on how you might be able to do it yourself. Either way, I think there's a lot of power there. And you can get some of those signals and be more intelligent with a lot of that work. So, okay. We got about five minutes left here, and one of the things that I think we didn't get to, but I would love to maybe close out with, which is our last theme we identified, which is the mindset shift that has to happen first. And we talked about, one, okay, if the mindset's not shifting, they're making the decision, how do we at least do it well? So we unpacked that piece. We unpacked the data piece of, okay, if we want to be more data intelligent, how do we do that? But even regardless, to even get to that piece, we still have to drive a mindset shift with the CEO or whoever is some of the decision makers around some of these. "In my day, this is how we did it, so this is how we're going to do it." There's a paradigm shift. There's a mindset shift there. So I guess, what's some closing thoughts that you have for our community? These are HR leaders, people leaders, who are going to try to have this conversation with their leaders, and they want to frame it up in a way where they at least become open-minded about these different types of tactics. What is some of the advice or strategies you would encourage them as they try to consult and take that role on internally? Can I start with this one, Jeff? Yeah, please do, Chris. Go for it. I'll start with this one. If you've read anything in the headlines recently, you'll see two or three mishaps that have happened at graduation speeches, because you have these leaders standing up and going, "AI is the new revolution of..." And they get booed. Totally getting booed off stage. This is your keynote speaker you brought in. Clearly not related to the audience that they're speaking to, not related to the struggles that this graduating class is dealing with. I would encourage leaders to ask... the people in their family and the people in their life, including their children, what their perspectives are. I think a lot of times they're looking at their peers or their board members or their C-suite leaders to get their perspectives and decisions, and they're not going outside of that circle. The easiest way to get outside of that circle is to get to people in your real life who are dealing with different challenges and struggles, that are generationally different from you and have different perspectives and different viewpoints. And when you can start to do that sort of just quick scan of your inner circle, your best friends, family, their kids, the kids that go to school with your kids, whatever, you start to get a whole set of data and insight that will give you a different perspective really quickly. And it's a quick, easy, down and dirty way to get information and reality put in your face where you actually can go, "Oh, I am antiquated in my thinking," or, "I haven't thought about that perspective," or, "I need to consider this or that," et cetera. Yeah. I appreciate that. It's like we naturally put ourselves in circles or spaces that confirm our point of views. Yep. Social media is so great at that, actually. It literally surfaces content that you're most likely to engage with. It's just confirming you over- It's the algorithm ... and over again, right? Yep. So how can you just challenge them or challenge ourselves to just push yourself in different perspectives and just start to open up that awareness so that you can be more curious and open about the potential ways, right? Yeah. So thank you, Chris. Yeah, Jeff, what are your thoughts? Honestly, I think one of the biggest things that I've always said in my career is that HR is a business function, okay? We're part of the business, right? So we have to, as an HR leader, we have to persuade leader, CEO, the leadership team, to move away from personal opinion, instinct, and to really start to look at some of the data, be intelligent. And that's your job, right? And that's part of the problem, too, is that a lot of HR, generally speaking, we were not great at data, right? And so that's where it starts to break down, and so we have nothing to back up our argument with. And so, once you start to have that and you're starting to see patterns, you're showing evidence, and you're showing things that are fact, factual data from their organization, not about what the media is saying, not about what the board is saying, not about what the competition is saying. Who cares what Netflix is doing? Who cares what this company doing? I don't care, because quite frankly, we're not them, right? So the idea is that you need to, it's our job to, you can talk about the philosophy and theory and all that kind of stuff, but we have an employee population, right? We need to understand what they're doing, how they're behaving, what each of the departments need. You have to come from that point of view because once you do that, the leader can't say no to that because they're like, because if they say no to that, that means that they're basically voting the app back. So, and if they do that, then you have a bigger problem. So- Yeah ... just last point. Policy tells people where to work, okay? Intelligence helps leader understand why work works. Mm-hmm. So if you think about that, you hit me with that off. I love that. That's a beautiful quote. I guess one thing I'll close with, and I appreciate you bringing that up, Jeff, of the data piece and it's a lot harder to make solo decisions when there's a movement happening beyond you, right? And if you as an HR leader can almost build an engagement and a movement around their perspectives and what's going to help them thrive and be most productive and engaged, and there's a whole energy around that, that's a really hard thing to make a decision against, right? So I encourage you all, again, tap into that intelligence. I really love that quote, Jeff, so we'll close with that. Thanks for everyone joining. Let's give it up for Chris and Jeff for leading this conversation with us today and bringing all that amazingness to our community. Yes, high fives. Woo-hoo. Added the SHRM codes in the chat. Make sure to connect with them. I shared the LinkedIns there and mine as well. And then make sure to connect and follow OtherShip. They are, again, doing this cohort right now to help organizations unlock this type of intelligence. At the very least, it can unlock some maybe new frameworks and strategies that you can take action on. So thanks again, everyone. Have a great rest of your day, and we'll see you at the next one. Thanks, everyone.