Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, everyone. Today I'm recording from Amsterdam, where I.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Just finished the HR technology conference over here and had a fantastic dinner and keynote session with, facilitated by Bo Dereksson from our team and two exceptional chief people officers, Uzair Qadir, the chief people officer of the BBC, and Esme Balk, the chief HR officer of Royal Schiphol Group, otherwise known as the Schiphol Airport. And what I want to briefly tell you about, by the way, we will be putting together some detailed case study information on both of them, but this was really about a much more expansive and refreshed look at the employee experience, very, very different from what we've been talking about for the last five years.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: And it's really important for you to.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Listen to these concepts because this is a very different way of thinking about the problem. Now, let me go back and just.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Tell you briefly about the history of employee experience. Prior to the word employee experience being.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Coined, which was probably about five years ago, we used to call this employee engagement. And employee engagement is a very old concept, really, going back, in some sense, to Carl Jung and other psychologists who studied the psychology of people at work.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: The idea behind engagement was that if we could create a psychological environment where.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: People felt comfortable, supported, included, and rewarded appropriately, they would do more work, in a sense.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: So it really goes back to the industrial model of work, where Frederick Taylor.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Famously measured as an industrial engineer the.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Number of steps that it would take.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: To carry ingots of steel from one.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: Part of the steel plant to the.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Other, and what was the optimum amount.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Of weight somebody could carry so we.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Wouldn'T hurt their back, but heavy enough that we wouldn't waste time, you know.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Taking too many trips.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: And, you know, all of these various studies that people did to figure out.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: What was making people productive, unproductive, what was making people leave the company, what was making people quietly quit or check out, and the psychological factors behind that.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: And so we developed a set of tools, basically consisting of surveys.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: I remember in the 1980s when I worked for IBM, we did an annual opinion survey, massive project. Every year it took months and months and months to do.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: And at the end of the survey.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: Every manager got rated based on the results of their team.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: The senior executives got rated by, you.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: Know, people's perspectives of the executives performance and alignment and strategy.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: And we rated all sorts of other stuff. I'm not sure how much that data got used, but it was this once a year thing.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: And IBM, like every other company at.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: The time, would benchmark its employee engagement numbers against the prior year.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: And maybe against other companies, but not really that well, because it was hard to compare, because every company had slightly different surveys. Then Gallup came along and tried to standardize this, and people started to use somewhat standard survey questions. And then there was this I consider sort of silly but famous discovery that the most important thing at work was.
[00:03:33] Speaker B: To have a best friend. I believe Gallup came up with that.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Maybe it was Marcus Buckingham or someone in his. And I looked at that and I.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: Said, thought to myself, that's ridiculous.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: I don't really have that many best friends at work. I have a lot of friends at.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Work, but I don't consider them necessarily my best friends.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: But sure enough, there were all these statistical correlations between this and that, and we used those to figure out, oh, if we increase pay by 2%, it's more valuable than increasing it by 3%, because between two and 3%, the relative contribution to engagement is very low. Zero and two, it's very high.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: So let's stop at two. Right? And hundreds of things like that. And we did it periodically, and the surveys were designed by HR, and people couldn't really give you random feedback a little bit.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: There were basically suggestion boxes in companies with little paper suggestion cards, but you couldn't really add too much information to the survey because you didn't really know how anonymous they were. And if you put something in there.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: That was controversial, it would get back to your manager that, you know, you were, whatever, complaining. But anyway, that was the best we had.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: And then over the ensuing years, we realized, after the technology got better and we had the Internet, we could do this more frequently.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: So we could do it every quarter.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Every month, every week, every day. And then companies started to do statistical sampling of surveys.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: So we could randomly look at every.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: Employee in the company at different days and see trends up and down in different groups, by different managers, by different geographies. And then we could look at engagement by tenure, and we could look at engagement by role and level and so forth. And we created this job called people analytics that was originally focused on this and then a bunch of other things.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: Because this kind of data had a.
[00:05:25] Speaker A: Lot of correlation to business results.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Sure enough.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: I mean, if somebody's really happy at work, they're probably in a good job, and they're probably producing a lot of outputs.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: So that's where this all started.
[00:05:36] Speaker A: And it's been around a long, long.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Time, much longer than I was here in HR. But when I found out about it.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: And started learning about it in the early days of my work, as an.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: Analyst, I thought, this makes no sense to me.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: Why are we benchmaking ourselves against other companies?
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Isn't this a never ending quest to.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: Make our company better and better and better? What do we care what some other company is? And that was really the nucleus of.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: My book, to be honest, irresistible.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: And then one of the HR executives at Airbnb, I think, coined the term, he said to me, and he wrote.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: A little book on this, that we have to stop doing things to people in HR. We have to do things for people.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: And when he essentially coined the phrase.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Of employee experience, he said, just as.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: We are analyzing customer experience, and by the way, at Airbnb, they were analyzing.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Guest experience and host experience, he said.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: Why don't we do the same thing for employees?
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Because as you know, the employee experience.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Is directly related to the customer experience. If the employees are unhappy, the customers.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Are going to be unhappy or poorly served.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: So that idea took hold and everybody started talking about it, and then it got into technology. And then there were employee experience platforms.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Which I had a lot to do with coining the name, and vendors like.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: ServiceNow and dozens and dozens of others, including Microsoft, Viva and lots of work. Vivo and lots of other vendors, built.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: Tools to facilitate the, not only the.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: Access to information for employees, so they could find software applications and other things in their company more quickly, but they could provide feedback on a regular basis. And now there's product like first up.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: That can communicate with employees anywhere on.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: A near real time basis through surveys or feedback or crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is where I make a suggestion, maybe anonymously, and then a bunch of.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Other people vote on it, and we.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: See if my suggestion is more important than somebody else's suggestion. And management can see what I'm, what the people in the company are really interested in doing. And it doesn't have to be about HR. It can be around operations and systems and service procedures and safety and everything else.
And underneath all this is this very important idea that I've talked about a lot. But not everybody understands that your employees know much more about your business than your customers. Everybody's all concerned about customer feedback, which of course, is very vital because the customers are the ones that are actually receiving your offering. But employees also know how that product was delivered and how hard it was to deliver it, and what kinds of issues they ran into in serving customers and thousands of other things.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Employees, unlike customers, are intimately connected to your company.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: Customers will give you feedback if they're.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Really unhappy, but they might just quit.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: And not come back. And you won't know why. Employees will usually tell you exactly what's.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Going on, and they know what's going.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: On from their perspective. And their feedback can be used for operational improvements, safety improvements, product improvements, service improvements, lots and lots of things. So this is way more comprehensive an issue than sending a survey once a.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: Year and analyzing it in some corporate.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: Headquarters with a bunch of statistics. That's why I want to talk about.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: What happened this week, because it's moved to a new dimension.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: Now, if you look at these two fantastic companies and just exceptionally good, strong, forward thinking, inspiring Chros. Now, we're talking about employee experience as.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: The core, in a sense, mission of.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: Everything we do in HR.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: Now, most of you know that conceptually, but how do you do it?
[00:09:37] Speaker A: I remember I interviewed the Chro of an automobile company in the United States.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: Back when I was at Deloitte.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: So it was maybe five, six years ago. And I was asking them how they segment their workforce for their employee experience strategy. And the Chro goes, oh, it's very simple. We figured this out. We have the employee experience for workers.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: The employee experience for managers, and the employee experience for executives.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: So we just have two, three programs, one for each.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: And I'm thinking workers, manufacturing workers, it.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: Workers, finance workers, sales workers, people who work in distribution centers, people who work in retail stores, all of that is one big group. That's an awfully big group.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: Managers, that's an awfully big group. So you can see we have had to evolve our thinking to get much.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: More granular and on the ground about this issue. Because if you work in a hospital or work in a retail organization store or a restaurant, or you work in a cruise line or an airline or.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: An airport, or you're a publishing company.
[00:10:48] Speaker A: An immediate company like the BBC, with journalists and creators and all sorts of.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: Technical professionals, every one of those people.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Have different experiences because they're doing different jobs in different locations with different tools. They may not have access to a computer, they may be under threat of.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Violence from their role or not.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: There might be safety issues, et cetera. So we got to go way, way deeper into this. And so what Esme and Huzair talked about was the very specific, innovative things they do, inspiring experiences, and the problems they've run into.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Now, very briefly, the BBC is one.
[00:11:30] Speaker A: Of the most highly regarded organizations in the UK.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Everybody who's ever worked there.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: I ran into some people that had.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Worked there while I was at the conference. Adore the organization.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: It's a national treasure.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: And Huzzair understands that. And he's really, in a sense, a.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: Board member almost in his role, because he has to worry about everything from legal and reputational risk, as well as all the employee issues and hiring and all the normal things we do in HR.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: And so they built a five level employee experience framework that revolves around the.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: Steps that companies go, that employees go.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Through as they join the company, as.
[00:12:09] Speaker A: They get engaged in the company, as they move around inside the company, and as they leave.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: And they meticulously measure the impact of.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: Individuals and managers on these five things through the performance management process. He didn't go into this detail at the speech, but he did the night before.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: So all of the performance management activities.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: That go on at various different levels.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: In BBC evaluate and coach individuals and.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: Leaders on these five aspects of dealing with other employees, whether they be subordinates or peers. And he also has innovated in several other ways.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: They've created a job searching and career.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: Development program where any employee in the.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: BBC can become interested in another domain.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: And they can take a gig project in that domain and they jump around and learn things and grow through those developmental experiences. And then they can decide they want to take a new role on and they can spend a higher percentage of their work in that role and then essentially test a new job and then.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Move into a new job. Now that whole area of self directed.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: And coach oriented career development and mobility is a massive driver of organizational performance. In our dynamic organization research, which I just finished looking through again the other.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: Day in preparation for existable, we found.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: That the companies that are overachieving their.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Business results compared to the companies that are underachieving against their business plans are.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Seven or eight times more likely to.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Have active management and executive led developmental.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: And mobility experiences inside the company. In fact, almost 30% to 35% of the companies that are achieving their business goals do this. Only 4% of the companies that don't achieve their business goals do this because any form of mobility, job sharing, job testing, career development, creates individual engagement and allows people to move into better jobs for them. It allows them to move into jobs that are better for the company, it allows the company to adapt, allows the company to be more resilient, it increases employee engagement. It's just good for a whole bunch of reasons. And in a company as diverse as the BBC, it's really valuable to do this. By the way, I know a lot of media companies in the United States.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: That don't do this at all. Yeah, I won't mention the names of.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: The ones I'm thinking of, but they're very siloed. The groups are completely like separate business areas and nobody ever moves back and forth. By the way, one exception to that is Comcast had a great interview with one of the heads of talent at Comcast the other day, and they have.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: A hipo program for what I call.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: Potential hipos, potential hypotensions who come out of college and graduate school and they move them around for two years into other parts of the business to learn.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: All of the media and technology business.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: Areas inside of Comcast. That is a really, really valuable idea that gets to the heart of the employee experience. Uzair also talked about the need to focus on mission and purpose and responsibility and ethics and all the things the BBC has known for, which are all part of the employee experience. And he has centralized. Incidentally, with a company that complex, it's, I think I forget, 70, 80,000 people or more. This is all centralized. You don't have balkanized HR departments. What happens in most big companies is there's an HR group for manufacturing, there's an HR group for facilities, there's an HR group for engineering, for R and D. And these groups, sometimes they're geographically located and they have their own vps of HR and their own teams and their own programs and recruiting. And then, you know, they do their own thing for employee experience. And that doesn't work because you don't have the scale to do it at an enterprise level.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: The second one I want to talk about is the Schiphol airport and Esme's experience there. Again, Esmere is just an exceptional leader.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: For many, many reasons. But she was telling us stories of a whole bunch of fascinating things that go on in airports last. Two years ago, there was a strike.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: Massive lines anger people spending eight to.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: 10 hours just to get into the airport. I know you all know what that was like during COVID and huge amounts of turnover among the staff turns out at her airport, and this is true probably at a lot of airports, a small number of the employees are full.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: Time, something like 4000.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: And then there's tens of thousands of people that are contractors or they work for airlines or they work for other companies. So she doesn't, before her taking the role, they didn't really have much responsibility or influence on these other people. Now she said, look, we really are responsible for the brand and the customer experience of everything that happens at the airport. So we're much more tightly integrated now across these other employers within our community, which is the Schiphol airport and surrounding facilities.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: She really did a lot to integrate these groups.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: For example, during COVID and the response.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: To COVID, they had a massive turnover.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: And demand for security professional. You know, how many security people are at an airport and security people need. It takes months of background checking to validate their capabilities and their experiences before they get hired. And then there's another three or four months of training.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: So it's a six to eight month.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Lag time between the time you actually.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: Find a candidate to actually hire them. And they had a whole bunch of.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: Different employment agencies doing this for the different contractors, and it was just not working and they weren't getting enough people. She single handedly brought all of these contractors together, by the way, who are competitors with each other, and got them.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: To agree to consolidate and centralize their hiring process. She developed an AI based recruiting system with a partner in the Netherlands that.
[00:18:07] Speaker A: Can, at the time, probably very more advanced now, can do pinpointed advertising and pinpoint candidate response for an individual's needs. So if you're a woman and you're applying for a job as a security professional, you get one employment, branding. If you were a man, if you're a younger man, if you're an older man, etcetera. She said it was really amazingly successful.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: And she dramatically fixed that pipeline. Worked with the government to speed up.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: The process of background checking. I mean, that doesn't sound like employee.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Experience the way we talked about it.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: In the past, it's so far away from this idea of surveys, but that is part of the employee experience because candidates are part of the employee base.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: And, you know, if you're not treating.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Candidates well, they're not going to apply or they're not going to join you and you're going to get lower quality.
[00:18:52] Speaker B: People into the company.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: So massive amount of work there. She also told this hilarious story that I thought is entertaining and important.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: You know, they have a lot of.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: Buses in airports, and the buses take.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: People from airport facilities to facilities, and.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: A lot of them are for employees going to the parking lots and to the cafeteria and things like that. She said there was one particular bus.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Route that was kind of short and boring and none of the bus drivers wanted to take it because it was just dull for them.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: You know, like the bus driver that.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Takes you from the airport to the rental counter.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: Not a very interesting ride.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: And if you did that all day, you'd probably get a little bit crazy. So they decided to use a self driving bus, and they apparently found one that worked really well.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: It was safe, and she was worried.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: That people were going to use it.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: And sure enough, they did use it, and they seemed to be happy sitting in it. And, you know, went from place to place to take them to this. I think it was might maybe a.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: An eating facility.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: I forgot where it was they were going. And she said, but what happened was.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: The other drivers were so irritated and.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: Threatened, in a sense, from the self.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: Driving bus that they would drive in front of it really slowly to get it to stop all the time, or.
[00:20:13] Speaker A: They would nudge it and bang into.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: It to get it to stop. And so it never really could get.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: To its location quickly because all the.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: Other drivers were sabotaging it.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: And we were telling this story, and I was laughing. I thought it was such a funny idea.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: And then I realized this is essentially.
[00:20:29] Speaker A: The problem we're going to have with AI. All the AI stuff that we're working on, which ranges from on one side being just a simple automation thing, to the other side being a fully autonomous, talking, breathing, moving thing, like a car or an application or a bot or something that feels like a human is going to feel threatening at some point on that continuum. So as you make your employee experience better and better and better, you've got to be careful that you don't threaten.
[00:20:58] Speaker B: The employees inadvertently and cause pushback on.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: The roles that are still human. While everybody thinks AI is going to.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Revolutionize the employee experience, it's not going.
[00:21:10] Speaker A: To be perfect and it's going to take some work. There is an AI system that I use in whole foods when I check.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: Out on Saturdays, where you scan your.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: Hand and it checks you out in 1 second, basically. And I asked the woman that I.
[00:21:25] Speaker B: See there every week, what do you.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: Think of this thing? She says, it's great. She says, I don't have to bother with these typing things in here and asking people for their credit card and less waiting for them to fumble around and figure out where to put it in the little machine. So that's one that's exceptionally good.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: But this truck turned, this bus turned.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Into be a little bit of a problem. So the story, the message here is.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: That in both of these companies, both of which are, from my perspective, exceptionally well run, employee experience is about operations. It's about day to day activities. It's about delivering the customer experience in.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: A way that employees can do their jobs effectively. It's about training, it's about inclusion, it's about belonging, it's about pay, it's about benefits. Sure, it's about all that, too, but that stuff that we used to survey people about back in the old days is a relatively small percentage of this. Now we're talking about getting close to the actual employee experience in your organization and addressing the operational issues they face. Kathy always tells me this funny story.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: At Kaiser, where there was a bunch.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: Of work going on in the nursing population, and at Kaiser, they had a.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: Whole HR team dedicated just to the nursing population, where it's very different and.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Their needs are very different.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: And she said, you know, we used.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: To survey them and ask them questions about pay and schedules and stuff.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: And she said, one of the things.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: That came up one day was that the way the patient rooms were designed.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: There was a closet that was blocking.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: The ability for the nurses to get their equipment, their wheeled equipment, in and.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Out of the patient's room.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: And it was always a big hassle.
[00:23:11] Speaker B: To get it in there because of this closet.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Now, that wouldn't have come out in some survey.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Probably would not.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: And it probably wouldn't come out in a round table.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: It might, but it does come out if you walk around and talk to people.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: And she said, once we figured that out, we went to facilities and we.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Figured out a way to redesign these.
[00:23:30] Speaker A: Closets and these rooms so that over time, we could get rid of this blockage that was making it so hard for the nurses to do their jobs. You guys have got stuff like that all over your companies.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Every company I've ever worked with, every company I've ever worked in has things that are driving everybody crazy that maybe.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: Were a good idea when they were first invented, and they're not a good idea anymore. And we sort of stopped talking about.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Them when we left them alone and.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: The employees are griping about them, or maybe they're not griping and they're just.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: Dealing with them, but we need to figure out what they are.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: And that leads me to a final.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: Point before I wrap up what we.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: Call employee activation, as we've sort of coined this evolution from the annual survey to the periodic survey, to the listening strategy, to natural language processing, to crowdsourcing.
[00:24:23] Speaker B: It'S reaching a point which we now.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: Call a destination called employee activation.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: Employee activation means we are no longer asking employees questions. We are giving them the opportunity and the agency to make changes locally.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: So if you work at T Mobile and you're in Hawaii and you're tired of people dragging into the store with wet feet and sand and making it impossible for anybody to use any of the equipment, you decide in your store with your manager that you're going to have a rule that says no shoes.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: No shirt, no service, please addressed before.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: You come in here because we don't want you wrecking all of our samples.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: And the T Mobile store in New.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: York City may not need that because they don't have that problem.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: They have a different problem.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: And no engagement survey would necessarily have pointed that out. And we see this all the time in companies.
[00:25:20] Speaker B: We did a session with a bunch of organizations a couple months ago.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: When we launched the employee activation research.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: We did, we had about maybe 200.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: People in the room and everybody was fascinated by the idea and they had lots of things to say. But the thing that struck me the.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: Most was that two thirds to three.
[00:25:40] Speaker A: Quarters of the people in the room.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: Were not HR people. And what they said is, we don't.
[00:25:44] Speaker A: Want HR involved in this.
[00:25:46] Speaker B: All they do is slow it down.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: We want to know as managers what we can do to make the work.
[00:25:52] Speaker B: Experience better, more productive, more safe, higher quality, and we don't need HR involved. How does that make you feel? It is a essentially wake up call.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: That if you're not working on operational issues in the employee experience space and you're sitting around playing with service now, trying to come up with some fancy journey or creating a survey that you think is perfect, maybe you're not doing the right things. So that was really the big message that I took away from the session this week.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: We're going to hear more from Uzair.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: And Esme in the next couple of months. I'm going to invite them to irresistible next year. You really have to meet them. They're just really inspiring in so many ways. So give yourself some thoughts on this. AI will obviously play a role in.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: All these things, but AI is not.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: A panacea for any of this. AI is just a tool that will contribute to many, many other things we.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Can do to make employee lives better.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: I can guarantee you that if you work this way and think this way as an HR professional, you're going to have a more fulfilling job. You're going to add more value to the company, you're going to understand your organization better, and you're probably going to come up with some really bold, innovative.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Things that you're going to be really proud of.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: And we would love to talk to you about your experiences in your company. Okay, that's it for now. Talk to you guys next week.
