Before coronavirus, businesses were leaning toward transformation, but most weren’t ready to embrace the disruptive thinking required to reimagine how work is done, how work is managed, and how HR is structured. Now, the transformation timeline has been condensed, and leaders are being challenged to “reimagine their way out of crisis.” In this webinar, we talk with the Chief Innovations Officer from HERE technologies and the Chief Solutions Officer from Outmatch about the future of HR, assessing your company’s readiness for change, and managing the talent supply chain.
1. If you’re on the fence, thinking “I’m somewhat ready and open to change,” now is the time to address your workforce strategy and grab that chance to catapult forward. (12:30)
2. You can look at the talent market like the stock market. With stocks, you want to “buy low.” With potential candidates, especially those who might not have considered your organization before, you want to “nurture now.” (16:00)
3. Employees, like consumers, want digital experiences customized to them with solutions to their needs delivered in real time.Especially as people work from home and see each other in their “natural habitat,” digital experiences can be more real and more human than ever. (22:00)
4. We’re heading towards the “next future,” where workis democratized, performance management is crowdsourced, the org. structureis flatter, decision–making is distributed, and employees have choices and ownership of “Me Inc.”
5. We don’t all have the brand, like Google or Apple, to carry us in the market. Being poised for the future of work and offering employees the opportunity to “choose their own adventure” is attractive – and not just for Millennials. (31:00)
6. We grew up in a world where there was one blue ribbon, and we all had to fight for it. That’s the mindset that’s causedcorporate America to hoard vs. share talent. The abundance mindset shifts from “fear of running out” to seeing and tapping talent across an enterprise. (55:00)
Furloughing employees wan’t unheard of, but until the COVID crisis, it had never been done at this scale across industries. Many leaders are in uncharted territory. We talk with the VP of Human Capital at Life Time and CEO of Executive Women’s Forums International about the playbook for bringing people back, ways to re-purpose talent that doesn’t fit exactly where it did before, and caring for employees’ emotional well-being while also staying attuned to diversity issues.
People are grieving. Some are grievingfor loved ones affected by coronavirus. Many are grievingfor the way things used to be. People will continue grieving, especially as they return to work and don’t see all their co-workers there. Be sure you’re beingempathetic to how people are feeling. (15:15)
Think of department managers as ER doctors. “You need them to know how to stop the bleeding or reset a bone, but if somebody needs a specific surgery, call in the expert.” Make sure to provide that backup support, and your managers know they’re supported. (28:30)
When deciding who to bring back, use objective measures so that your diversity mix stays where it needs to be. Leaving these decisions up to “whoever managers like best” could adverselyaffect parents with children, for example, or other groups. (39:00)
Be quick, but don’t hurry. As you look to re-purpose talent (like in John’s example of using recruiters in the Care Center), be surethat people are trained in the new environment, comfortable, and know when to escalate issues they’re not ready to handle themselves. (45:30)
One of the most important qualities that’s going to be needed is learning agility. That’s going to take higher priority in the justification of who you bring back than technical expertise. Going forward, you’ll be evaluating people’s potential, as well as what they’ve done to date. (48:30)
Have a “high tolerance for repetition.” Being methodical will help things run smoothly,but remember to be human andextend empathy to every time you work the process, no matter how many times you work the process. (59:00)
Guests/Speakers:
Tanis Cornell, Chief Executive Officer, Executive Women’s Forums International
John Brennan, Vice President, Human Capital
Robin Stenzel, Chief Solutions Officer, Outmatch
BRIANA: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our session on “How to Manage Furloughs and the Return to Work.” You know, when I first started researching this topic, I found some Google search data on the term “furlough.” So based on how much search traffic a term gets, Google can track interest in anything over time. So, for everyone on the call today, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that over the past few weeks, the term “furlough” has hit peak popularity, which means in the history of Google, there has never been more interest in furloughs than there is right now.
In September 2013, interest in furloughs was about 35% what it is today, and then after that, the line pretty much flattens to zero with small pops of interest in January 2018 and January 2019. Fast forward to January 2020, and that’s when search volume for furlough hit an all-time high.
Just a few short months ago, furlough was not a part of everyday conversation. Maybe you’ve been in a certain type of business where furloughs were done, maybe they were more common, but the word itself was used so infrequently that millions of people had to go to Google and ask what it meant.
So, when it comes to ending furloughs and bringing people back to work, some of you have been here before, many of you haven’t. That’s why I brought on John Brennan from Life Time Fitness, Tanis Cornell from Executive Women’s Forums International, and our very own Robin Stenzel from Outmatch to talk about what the process of bringing people back might look like, how to repurpose talent that doesn’t fit exactly where it did before, and how to navigate all this while still looking out for employees’ emotional well-being and the impact on diversity.
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So, again, I’d like to say thank you for being here. I don’t expect you to leave the session today feeling quite as Zen as the guy here on the slide, but I do hope that by coming together, voicing concerns, and sharing some insight, we can provide you with a place to pause, regroup, and prepare for whatever tomorrow brings.
My name is Brianna Harper and I’m your webinar host. I’m also your resource for any questions you have during the session, after the session, really any time. We planned about 45 minutes of content for you today. After that, we’ll open it up for a Q&A. So, I’d love to hear how you’re navigating and answer your questions, so please feel free to chat in that questions queue whenever something comes to mind.
After the session, I’ll send out today’s slide deck and the link to the recording. If you have any questions that we don’t get to today or you think of anything that you want to ask after the session, please reach out. You can find me at bharper@outmatch.com and @OutmatchHCM on social.
[Pause]
Really quick before we begin, I want to show you what’s coming up in our future of work series. So, two weeks from today, we’ll continue the conversation about bringing people back and rebuilding, this time with the focus on HR readiness and how to equip your teams to be more agile, more creative, more in line with business strategy than ever before.
Then on June 10th, we’ll talk with leaders in the service industry specifically those who rely on face-to-face interactions with customers about how they’re coming back and what’s changing in their businesses. And finally, on June 24th, we’ll look at how diversity and inclusion has been reshaped through crisis and what D&I efforts might look like going forward.
One last thing, today’s session is valid for one professional development credit for the SHRM-CP and the SHRM-SCP, so look for that activity ID from me at the end of the session today.
[pause]
We have three excellent speakers and thought leaders on the call today. You can see their faces right there on webcam.
Tanis is the CEO of Executive Women’s Forums International. She is creative and is a part of many leadership forums across many different business communities, so she has an ear to the struggles that leaders are facing right now, and she’s specially tuned to the impact on women and diverse groups.
Tanis, would you tell us a little bit more about yourself?
TANIS: Good morning, I’m Tanis Cornell, the CEO of EWF International. And we are at heart a leadership development company. We work across all kinds of industries and job functions, but we do have a special focus and an expertise on programs to develop women leaders and willing to help companies build their pipeline of women leaders, so that then they look down for potential promotions, they have an equal number of qualified women and men to choose from.
BRIANA: Thank you, Tanis. We also have John Brennan who is the VP of Human Capture at Life Time. When I reached out to John about doing this webinar, he said that they were actually reopening their first club the very next day, so this is incredibly timely for him, and he’s going to have a lot of great advice and insight to share.
John, would you tell us a little bit more about you?
JOHN: Yeah, thank you very much, pleasure to be here. So, I’m the Vice President of Human Capital at Life Time. We’re best known for having just over 150 health clubs around the United States and three in Canada. We’ve also expanded into the co-working space in the last two years. And we also are now moving into the living space as well. We’ve got 40,000 team members, and as of about April 1st, 38,000 of them went on furlough. So, this has definitely been a large impact to us.
BRIANA: Yeah, thank you, John. And we also have Robin Stenzel who’s going to moderate the discussion today. Robin is the Chief Solutions Officer at Outmatch. But before Outmatch, her career was in HR leadership, so she’s been in your shoes and she has a ton of experience navigating through challenges like we’re facing today.
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So, Robin, tell us a little about yourself.
ROBIN: Thanks. I’m excited to to have this discussion. So, as Briana mentioned, I’m the Chief Solutions Officer at Outmatch, so I work with our product or go to market teams. I also work with our human capital and what are we doing and how are we growing talents within the organization. And as you mentioned kind of early on, so the furlough is this term that we hadn’t used a lot. I came out of the airline industry where it was popular, but super interested to hear kind of Tanis’ and John’s perspective as we think about furlough and how it’s really kind of taken over a much broader industry perspective. So, thanks for having me.
BRIANA: Sure. Thank you, Robin. Thank you, John. Thank you, Tanis. I’m so excited to have all of you on the call today. Let’s get going.
[pause]
The first thing I want to do is a quick poll. So, I will launch this for everybody if you’ll please put in your answer.
So, what we want to know is “Where you are in your return to work journey?” I know that everybody’s navigating this at a different pace and there’s different guidelines in different states and for different types of businesses. So, this is really going to help us understand where you’re at and bring the conversation for you.
[pause]
So, I’ll leave this open for just a few more seconds. Looks like everybody’s voting now.
[pause]
All right, still getting a couple last votes in, and then I will share the poll with everyone.
[pause]
Okay, I’m going to share this with everyone. It looks like planning to bring furloughed employees back and also a split between didn’t do many furloughs but focused on reopening work spaces.
Robin, is any of that surprising for you to see?
ROBIN: No, I think, you know, as we look at just different states and being in different places, as you read, we were having this conversation earlier this morning and a lot of reading around, people actually pushing back bringing people to work in more positions where they’re able to work remotely, so as people kind of think about what does that look like. So, yeah, I think today, whether you’re in the process of — whether you furloughed someone or bringing people back or just thinking about bringing people back, I think the conversation should hopefully be helpful to you.
BRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. So, that’s a perfect segue into our conversation. Robin, I’ll hand it over to you.
ROBIN: Thanks so much. You know, so as we look at this poll, you know, I think as we think about this, people are in the process of thinking about bringing people back to work. Maybe they didn’t furlough, but they’ve got to rehire, refine workers that come back. But there’s a lot of things happening. And so, John, I’ll kind of push this to you as you think about the fact of reopening your Life Time facilities, different states, different regulations, different things going on as it hits to occupancy rates, social distancing, thinking about the health of your employees, how are you all managing all of this as you start to reopen clubs and bring people back to work?
JOHN: Yeah, so our prototypical club is about 120,000 square feet. It’s got about 300 team members, 65% of them are part-time, and there’s nine or 10 different departments within each facility. So, we’ve worked with our operations team and put together our guidelines with a low, moderate, and risk callback strategy. And it’s not as simple as just having those three different strategies, but it’s three strategies in nine or 10 different departments.
And so that’s where we’ve looked at social distancing. We’ve looked at how do we ensure that our team members are safe? How do we make sure that our members feel that things are clean and safe as well? So, that’s been more of the broad starting point. Then after that, we’ve got our legal team that we meet with four days a week, and they just give us updates on where every state and in some cases, where each county is at, so then it helps determine where are we going to green light or where we’re going to move forward. And as everybody knows, this stuff changes and it’s not day-to-day, it’s hour-to-hour, and sometimes minute-to-minute. So, we leverage our legal team for the latest updates with that.
Then, once we actually have a green light, then we have — within our human resource team, we have a care center that we reach out to our team members, first of all, just to check in to see how they’re doing and then also just to gauge their level of excitement or anxiety with coming back to work. While we’re doing that, our marketing team reaches out to our members to do the same. And as long as we have positive indicators in those areas, then we move forward with pulling the trigger and starting to reopen facilities.
ROBIN: So, you kind of mentioned a few — few groups here as this kind of become your task force, so you talked about your care center within HR, a legal kind of advising you from the hour-to-hour pieces that are going on, and then your marketing group, would you consider that your task force at Life Time or do you have others that are sort of involved as you make these decisions?
JOHN: Yeah, I would say that that’s — that’s a very broad way of saying it’s our task force. Now, there’s a lot of people involved in this, so it’s not as if everybody involved is in — are in these meetings, but we have representatives from those groups and if necessary, we pull in other departments as well, but those are largely the task force.
ROBIN: Great, thanks so much.
As you think about some of this, Tanis, you know, as we bring people back, you know, it’s not just, “Doors are open, come on in, let’s start work.” We’ve got all the things that we just mentioned with John, but there’s also kind of the physical space that we were talking about. There’s this emotional component. I was talking to someone earlier today who went to pick up something at our offices in Dallas and said, you know, as the elevator door opened, there was someone on the elevator and while it said four people could go in there, he thought, “You know what, I’m going to let this pass and go.” That’s for the physical side, but there’s an emotional side to that as well. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what that means for employees and how do we care for their emotional well-being. John mentioned it a bit from their care center calling and checking, marketing checking on customers, but what does that look like, and have you thought about that as you’ve helped coach and counsel different organizations?
TANIS: Obviously, our first concern is the physical safety of people coming back, our clients and customers that may be on our facility, but it’s really interesting, I’m going to preface my comments by a recent poll that one of the large mental health providers did a survey, and what was reported to them is that 2/3 of employees that they surveyed said that this time during COVID-19 was the most stressful time in their entire career, and 88% of employees said that they were experiencing moderate to severe stress. Now, that stress is caused by a lot of different things. It can be caused by having to suddenly work from home and they’ve never done that before and there’s children and pets underfoot. You’ve got spouses that are also trying to work from home. You have children that you’re trying to teach. There are a lot of things that are creating that stress, but there’s also a lot of fear and anxiety about people’s physical well-being that is causing that stress. And so, we have to understand that employees are experiencing things they’ve never experienced before. And it’s not just employees, it’s the leadership of our companies who are also experiencing things.
So, as you think — I think one thing companies have to consider is what resources they will make available to their employees from a mental health perspective, maybe even bringing in mindfulness coaches that really can work with their teams on managing their stress, but also think about equipping and training the management in your organization because they’re now having to deal with employee issues they probably never dealt with before, and most of them don’t have that experience on how to deal with the mental health and mental stress that a lot of these employees are going to be feeling. So, equipping them with some training and development to manage their employees and managing the stress of their employees is a great contribution that employers can make to their leadership in terms of how they’re dealing with people coming back.
You know, there’s a lot of grief that people are feeling. That grief could be over employees that have lost their job, their friends and colleagues. They may have had COVID-hit friends and family in some way. They may have experienced a family or a friend loss due to the virus. So, people are actually feeling grief as well as us. So, I think that we, as employers, have to be extremely empathetic to our employees as they’re coming back to work. And there are now a lot of privacy issues that are at play or some employees just aren’t going to feel comfortable coming back. You may have employees that have underlying conditions that makes them fearful about coming back into the workplace and they don’t necessarily want to share that with their co-workers, that’s a privacy issue, and so, companies are going to have to be very sensitive to that. And I think lastly, that if companies can really demonstrate gratitude to their employees and how thankful they are for the dedication, for the patience of their employees, that’s going to go a long way just in shoring up the emotions that people are feeling as they come back.
ROBIN: That’s great. You — you talked a bit about, you know, this is sort of the first time for a lot of us and we’ve got managers who need training, HR who needs training, there’s privacy. You know, as we go through this, sometimes we forget — you also mentioned executives — and sometimes we forget those people are at the top. There’s probably a lot of HR professionals on the call. How can we help and support those executives who may be worried about everybody else? How do we sort of support the top, you know, kind of that those at the top? Do you have any suggestions or thoughts on that?
TANIS: I do think we have to encompass the senior executives because they are facing all of the same things and sometimes more stress. They’re the ones making decisions on who to furlough, who to lay off, how to move the company forward. So, it really encompasses all employees including all the way to the executive level. And whether it’s private counseling help, whether it’s coming together as a group and having those discussions, whether it’s pulling in mindfulness coaches to help them manage their stress, I think there are a lot of things companies can do, but I do think that HR is on the forefront of helping their companies find the resources that their particular environment needs. And it really varies from industry to industry. You know, in John’s industry, people have to come — basically have to come back physically to an office. In other locations, you may be able to have people work from home for an extended period of time. So, this is going to have to be carefully thought out by each company and the specific circumstances they’re facing.
ROBIN: And just one more question for you, Tanis, on that is as you think about this, you mentioned sort of these companies that can extend that — that time at home, we’ve started to see companies like Google and others — Twitter, saying, “Hey, people may never have to come back.” What is that impact do you think to emotional well-being and how do we manage that? Because while there’s sort of this freedom of working at home, that connectivity, some of us when we did a quick survey within Outmatch, we thought people misses seeing their co-workers every day.
TANIS: They do miss seeing their co-workers, so I think you have to create experiences for people to come together, have discussions, and those experiences don’t always have to be about the business. I talk to a lot of people who are doing various kinds of virtual happy hours with their teams, and they’re just doing it even in groups of six or eight. You know, when you have 30 people on a call, it’s hard to really interact, so they’re breaking that down.
I was talking to a colleague that in California recently that they’ve done a lot of online training and they have really kind of flipped and what they are doing with companies is they are helping to create fun experiences and kind of some competition and contests virtually for their employees to help them have some fun, to help them build that kind of their — their feeling and working together as a team. So, those are things I think HR really has to think about too is how can we bring that collaboration aspect into a virtual team.
ROBIN: Okay, great. Thanks.
You know, John, I think that, you know, kind of mentioned not everybody has the luxury of sort of letting people work from home. And as you talked about, you know, your business and as we think about it, you know, really your employees are there on the frontlines and 38,000 of them being impacted, I think was the number that you shared with us out of 40,000. So now, it’s about bringing those people back into work, and we talked a bit about the safety of that and what that looks like. What’s been the process that you’ve used to start to think about, “How do I call people back to work?” And then how do you sort of incorporate this idea that Tanis talked about sort of this emotional well-being and what sort of the — the tone as you’ve been talking to people?
JOHN: Yeah. So, like I mentioned before, we have the low, the moderate, and the risk chart that we use for some general guidelines, and part of that includes what are the things that we’re doing to ensure that our team members feel as safe as possible. So, we use that as our starting point, and Tanis brought up a great point about, you know, the emotional well-being thing that we have to realize too specifically with our company. With our 150 locations, for the last month, we’ve only had two active team members. We’ve had a general manager and a facility operations manager in the building. We have another eight department managers that have been on furlough themselves. So, we’re asking those eight to come back and essentially lead the charge when the reality is they’ve been incredibly disconnected from what we’ve been doing as a company.
So, we have to make sure that when we bring them back — there’s good news and bad news with this. We have built a playbook that’s 430 pages of the process and procedures that we’re going to do. That’s great, but if I’m a manager that have been — I’ve been gone for a month, and here’s a 400-some page book, and oh, by the way, I have to start calling people to encourage them to come back. It’s — I mean, that’s a challenge right there.
So, we’re trying to make sure that we give them plenty of time to, number one, feel comfortable themselves about what we’re doing before we ask them to reach out to their team members to invite them back to work. And then as far as inviting our frontline team members back, the process, there’s been a couple parts. We anticipate lower traffic from our members when we reopen. And based on what we anticipate, we’ve modified the schedules for each one of our departments. So, we’ve put that together for our managers, so they don’t have to think about, “How should I plan for the workforce?”
The second thing that we’re giving to our department managers is a roster of their team, but we’ve gone through and force rank the roster because what we know is we can’t bring everybody back right away even though we would love to do it. If we bring everyone off of furlough, but don’t have hours for them, there is a chance we could jeopardize some of the benefits that they get, and we just do not want to run that risk. So, the strategy that we’re using is we have a forced rank roster for each department in each club, and we’ve looked at it as objectively as possible. Now, we want to be consistent with departments across our company, but not necessarily consistent within every department. And what I mean by that, some of the departments that criteria is based on the number of hours that somebody has worked or the tenure that they have with the company. In other areas that are revenue generating, they might be performance metrics.
So, we have actually given our department managers that have been gone for a month, here is the new schedule to follow, here is the roster that you have, and here is the process then to start at the top of the roster, here is a script for you. And based on the reaction from the team member, that then has the decision tree of, “Where do I go next?”
So, we’ve tried to be as methodical as possible, but the part that I’m going to go back to is what I started with when we have leaders that have been gone themselves, we’re going to make sure that they are comfortable, not only with what they’re feeling, but with what they’re then communicating to their team.
ROBIN: And so, John, what process have you put in place then? So, if I’m a manager and I’m coming back, and I start going through this process and everything’s going well, and then all of a sudden, I start to feel maybe some of this anxiety or some nervousness or uncomfortableness that the Tanis talks about, what do I do at that point?
JOHN: So, we’ve actually had a couple situations like that. The good news is — well, we opened up one club last week, and we have two more that’ll open up on Friday, and we have another 20 that are slated to open up on Monday. Of approximately 200 managers that we’ve called back to work, there have only been five that have declined or said that they don’t feel comfortable coming back right now.
We have had a couple situations of managers that said they were excited to come back. They’ve come back in and after a day or so — this is reality and reality sets in. So, with one specifically, we were able to just talk through the issues, we had our care center be able to connect with them. And we put any –any concerns that they had, we put those at ease and now they’re in a good spot. We have had a couple people that have then opted out, and we want to be as respectful as possible although this is the challenge, I think a lot of people are going to run into. You want to be very respectful. You want to be very empathetic. However, if it’s not for either the team member having the disease themself, caring for somebody with it, or childcare issues caused by the pandemic, it really puts you into a tough spot where if the manager themselves will not be coming back, we need somebody to step into that manager role. Well, the manager that stepped away, how long do you hold on to that spot? And for the person that stepped in, if they’ve done an incredible job, are they going to feel punished if we then remove them from that?
I’m not saying we have all the answers with it, but those are some of the challenges that we’re — we’re neck deep in right now.
ROBIN: Yeah, it’s a great point. Now, I like that you were talking about this. You talked about this playbook that you have, right? And a little daunting, 400-and-some pages, I’ve been away, I’ve got my playbook, I’m going to look at it. But then, you almost created a playbook within a playbook it sounds like by creating the rosters and the conversation to have, so that people didn’t have to just sort of come in blind. They’ve got the guidance, but it was a little bit more bite-sized chunks. As you kind of think about this and as you’ve been experiencing bringing people back, have you found that to be a little more helpful to have sort of these consumable pieces, maybe different than your normal standard operating procedures?
JOHN: Yeah. And — and, you know what, I’m not saying that I’ve embellished. It is over 400 pages [giggles], but the good news is if I’m a department manager in one area, I don’t have to read 400-some pages. There are probably 20 pages that are company-wide. There are probably 30 pages that are unique or specific to my area. And so, it’s a much smaller area that they really need to focus on.
But still, being able to have that specifically in this time, our managers, they remember what our standard operating procedures are. This right here is specifically not called an SOP because this is not standard. It might become the standard, but this is anything, but a standard operating procedures manual. This is really what has changed since you’ve been gone, and what is it that we need to do to operate and operate in the right way moving forward with everybody’s best interest in mind.
ROBIN: That’s great. Yeah, I mean, I think it kind of gets back to that — that first question we were talking about is how do you do this in a safe way, and what does that look like, and what are all the rules? We were — we were talking about that again and kind of this morning with a group and just saying, you know, there’s like six pages of how to kind of enter back into an office. So, it’s great for people to have that and be able to look into it and to your point, have those areas to reference.
JOHN: Yeah, and — and —
ROBIN: Um —
JOHN: — one other part with it. So, in the playbook, it has the script for when they call their team members back and anybody that has worked with a script, it’s nice to have it. The script works great until the first question is asked to you. [laughs] So, we’ve tried to make very clear that we have a back-up team and that’s essentially our care center, which is made up of a group of people that used to be in our talent acquisition group. We’ll talk probably a little bit more about that later. But we’ve partnered one of our recruiters with every department manager really to kind of ride shotgun while they’re building a schedule.
And so, our department managers, we almost look at them like an ER doctor, you need to know how to stop some bleeding, you need to know how to reset a bone, but if somebody needs a specific surgery, call in the expert. Managers, you’ve been gone for a while, you’re comfortable with most of this. If there’s something that you’re not comfortable with, don’t worry, we’ve got people to back you up with that.
ROBIN: That’s great. And I think kind of to that point, we talked about like easing people’s tensions, right? Just to know that you’ve got that extra support, somebody who’s an expert to help you is really great to have on hand and to sort of know where to go. And I think that also helps us. Tanis mentioned, you know, she talks about privacy, right? And your — your HR folks really helping kind of as your managers go through that piece as well because you can to your point, everything’s great, and then someone asks you a question that’s not on the list of things that I looked at, and now what happens? So, thanks for sharing that.
You know, Tanis, one of the things — and John mentioned this a little bit — as you know, kind of as they look at people coming back, you know, if you’re not caring for someone, you don’t have the illness yourself, or you don’t have some sort of child care that’s impacted, what does that mean? And so, as we look at this, we know that, you know, it’s now almost — if it’s not summertime, it’s going to be summertime very closely for your school and your schools are probably not opening. Daycares are coming back sort of having these same questions. Summer camps, if they’re going on, maybe in a limited fashion, but certainly not in the way that maybe you thought that they might.
This concern and sort of some of the research we’ve been seeing is now what starts to happen to the diversity that — that organizations have built? We spent the last years, you know, really focusing how do we bring people back, how do we have a diverse workforce. And now what we’re seeing is through this virus is women and people of color being most impacted. And so, as you’ve been talking to people, what have you seen and what are you hearing and kind of how are you thinking about coaching folks as they really think about their diversity initiatives and sort of bringing people back?
TANIS: Well, you’re right. I’ve been doing a lot of research and then listening to a lot of what, you know, clients are telling us as well. And I think what’s happening right now with most companies, they’re kind of in an either or. Companies are either in that area that they’re just trying to figure out how they’re going to survive and all of the focuses on how we’re going to survive. On the flip side of that, there are — there are companies that their workload has increased exponentially. Think about the banking industry with all of them are just desperately trying to process all of these PPP loans. And I talked to bankers who are working 16 to 20 hours a day literally trying to do this.
You know, when you have that kind of stress on the organization, and they’re very few in between, it’s kind of one or the other right now, when those kinds of stress around the organization, this is when diversity can easily get lost because there’s so many things that you’re focusing on that just goes on the back burner. And so unless that’s really built into the DNA of your organization, it’s very easy to get lost. And you know, there are a lot of companies that give lip service to it, but there isn’t necessarily any kind of metric tied to the performance around diversity. And so, those are the things that I think HR departments are going to have to help their organization to say. As we look at this, we’ve got to continue to be focused on the diversity aspect of bringing people back and giving people opportunities because it’s not going to be business as usual.
Companies are going to shift their priorities and their focus. People may not come back and do exactly the same job that they did before. They’re being retooled for new jobs, and how you become inclusive of people of color and women as a part of that process will be important to not lose the gains that we’ve made thus far. And so, it does need to be a part of the overall planning strategy for companies, you know, when — when they come back.
[pause]
It is interesting around… and John mentioned the whole childcare issue, this is a huge issue because, today, even when we talk about gender equality and families, it’s still the brunt of the childcare, especially for young children typically falls to women. And there are single fathers certainly, but there are more single mothers than there are single fathers, and it will really impact, you know, single mothers and fathers. So, I do think we have to be sensitive around how are we going to accommodate those workers because that could really impact the whole diversity opportunity for women and people of color.
I think there’s a couple of paradigm shifts that COVID will bring to the forefront though. On the flip side of that is companies have now had first-hand experience to see how flexible work hours and working from home can actually work. I think companies have been pleasantly surprised in a lot of cases that, hey, we can actually have people working from home, we can actually have people working flex hours because now, our parents have had to become teachers as well.
So, I think that’s played into it, which will help companies think through this and have had some experience with this now and how it might work. And then I think we’ve had to see fathers really get involved in being primary caregivers during this time, and really experience what that means when you’re working from home and their children underfoot and you’ve got a spouse that’s working as well, and you’re also having to play tutor to your child. So, I think that it will be interesting to see long term if we see any kind of paradigm shifts and our collective thinking around, you know, childcare responsibilities for both men and women. But it is something that will fall I think more heavily on women, it’s something companies have to be concerned about.
ROBIN: You know, it’s interesting that you talked about the — the shift, I think kind of that, both the paradigm shift of who does what, what does that look like, but also just from a productivity standpoint, and kind of preparing for this, I was looking at some of the research and, you know, it showed just, I think, was 8% of people who, you know, worked at home periodically, maybe 2% full time, you know, not thinking of gig workers, but true someone who was employed onsite by an employer and what that looks like.
And there was always sort of this concern around connectivity, which we talked a little bit about, you know, human connectivity, certainly technical connectivity for some people, but then also productivity. And there have been a couple of different studies. One showed something that in the US, something like US workers working three hours more a week now that they’re working at home, kind of that connectivity, sort of as, you know, for many of us it’s right in front of us because our workspace, we kind of make shift into now it’s our dining room that we’re passing all the time or kitchen or what that looks like.
I found another side this morning that I thought was interesting is that even if we were 5% less productive, if we start working at home and we start to have real estate costs that could save up to 20%, we can still be profitable and productive as a business. I don’t know if that’s anything as you kind of looked at some of the research some of the conversations you’ve been having and sort of the shift and how leaders you’ve been talking to are thinking about their businesses.
TANIS: I think there is no doubt that the work-from-home movement that has really forced upon us is not going away and it will continue. I think companies will — because they had first-hand experience now and they are feeling more comfortable with it, that we will see more people working from home. And I have — I’ve also observed that level of work. You said people are working three hours more. You think about a supervisor that normally can pull their team that is together physically into a room and have a conversation in a room, you can do some of that on — on Zoom or other technical capabilities, but a lot of it is a lot more one-on-one, which is more time consuming for management, but there are obviously costs associated with this. And I do think it’s going to give companies a chance to evaluate that. And I think you’ll see a lot of jobs that may permanently they work from home jobs because they figured out that people can be just as productive doing that job remotely.
And it’s also, I think about all the new tech — I mean, you think about Zoom and what they’ve had to do to just keep up with the demand, but I’ve also seen a lot of new technology coming out. There’s someone we have on our advisory board that had launched actually an application prior to this for a virtual office space, and it literally is a physical, you see online what looks like a physical office, and you can knock on people’s door, it kind of runs in the background, and it’s a virtual office space. They literally have not been able to keep up with the workload. And so, companies are going to start using those technologies and realize that, hey, we can be efficient with these technologies. I think we’ll continue to see new technologies crop up that will help facilitate this work from home.
ROBIN: I think the interesting thing in kind of getting back to our diversity side is that, you know, as we start to think about working in different ways, it opens up our talent pool. So, again, we’re not just looking for the talent pool in certain geographies, we can look a little bit broader, but not — again, not all of us can do that, you know, as John and his club, it would be a little strange to show up and no one would be there to greet you. I’m a Life Time member and I always look forward to someone kind of welcoming me as I walk in.
So, if you guys think about this a little bit too, from a diversity perspective, you shared with us just some interesting stats on lifetime and diversity and bringing people back a little bit. Maybe you could share this with the — with the group on what your workforce looks like and sort of what the anticipated kind of bring back looks like as well.
JOHN: Yeah, and, you know, there’s — there’s so many different ways that you can look at diversity, you know, whether it’s gender, ethnicity, age, you know, and the list can go on. One of the areas that — that we’ve tracked very closely is around gender. And company-wide, we have about 1,500 managers, and those would either be general managers or department managers, and 51% of them are female.
And so, the good news with this, you know, the first 200 that we’ve called back, the handful that have said no, first of all, they’re not all female, and none of them have been because of childcare issues. And that was one of the concerns that we had because we definitely want to have these strong leaders come back. And so, so far granted 200 is a small sample size out of 1,500, hopefully, that’s an indicator of what we’re going to see.
The other thing, we want to make sure that we are as fair and as objective as possible with all the team members that we bring back. And that’s why we put in the objective measures within each department. I’m not saying that our leaders would ever do anything maliciously, I don’t want them to have to pick and choose who’s going to come back to work because then there is that favoritism. We have our objective measures and we have absolute confidence that — that right there keeps our diversity mix exactly where it needs to be versus leaving it up to our managers to decide who am I going to bring back since I can’t bring everybody back.
ROBIN: Yeah, I mean, if you think about that, it’s great. — You go ahead, Tanis. Sorry.
TANIS: I was just going to say that kind of validates the point that I was making about. It’s built into the DNA of how you operate. And that’s why it’s successful.
ROBIN: Yeah, but you’ve kind of helped pick out that unconscious bias. Also, that’s just assumptions, right? We sometimes just assume something about someone we know. We know you have kids at home, so therefore, I’m not going to call you because I don’t want to bother you. You take them out, but hey try it and see what happens, which I think is great, kind of as Tanis said, just part of the DNA and as you kind of move forward with that.
And you also talk a little bit about your care center and sort of like, you know, as again, and we all talked before this we found really interesting because kind of repurposing people and skills and roles during this time. Can you talk a little bit about the care center, what it is, kind of who you’ve got in there, and the strategy behind it?
JOHN: Yes, so we have always had a team of 12 to 14 people just to handle questions that our team members have. Well, right at the start of this, when we put such a huge number of people in furlough, there was — there was a large concern that the 38,000 people, they are just not — they’re not going to know exactly what’s next. And if, you know, if you think about the — the evolution of unemployment benefits, that changed so rapidly in just a couple week period.
States quickly waived the one-week waiting period. You didn’t have to prove that you’re out looking for other work. There’s now the federal grant and even the Cares Act, what companies does it apply to. We we’re just afraid that our team members would be off to find these answers on their own and we didn’t feel like it was the right thing.
So, within human capital, we’ve got a couple different areas. We have your traditional human resource. We also have a talent acquisition department, talent management, and then education, so it provides all the training and development. We took people in the talent acquisition, talent management, and our education department and started to cross-train them and built a larger care center.
So, what we wanted to make sure that we did was reach out to every person that was put on furlough. So, over the next three weeks, we called 38,000 team members. I can’t say we talked to every one of them, but it was just to make sure that they understood what the next steps are for them not involving when are you coming back to work because we didn’t know the answer to that. But are you aware of the unemployment benefits? Do you know how to go in and sign up for them? What about the other things in terms of mortgage relief, loan relief? We didn’t become financial planners, however, we at least wanted to make sure people were aware of the things that were out there for them.
So, we were able to take people from other departments outside of our traditional HR call center and really expand us, and the good news is we’ve been able to not just reach out one time, but we also have a program that’s called Life Time Lifts, and really what it does is it provides dollars for people that incur financial hardship. We’ve had over 7,000 team members that have applied for this and we’ve been able to give out just over 5 million dollars with it, and our care centers have been able to follow up with all of these team members to let them know how we’re able to help out.
Fast forward now, as we’re getting ready to open up cur facilities, our care centers is reaching back out not to ask them to do work right away, but first of all, it’s the care center we’ve talked to you before. How’s everything going, anything you need assistance with, and, oh by the way, in the near future there’s a good chance that the club is going to open. What’s your level of excitement or anxiety of coming back? So, we’ve able to get a gauge of how people are feeling. So, our care center has really expanded and in a strange way it’s helped to accelerate one of the things we’ve wanted to do for years, which is start to cross train people, to almost become more HR generalists. We’re not there yet, but now we’re further down that path.
ROBIN: So, many great things about that I think, you know, just imagine being a talent acquisition professional and all you see is outflux of employees, right? What does that do to sort of your mindset and what is your job look like and starting to worry about that? And so, it’s the ability to take that team as well as your talent management and learning teams, and put them in — and again have some semblance of HR, you now, exposure and maybe acumen, but really kind of bringing them in to be able to help with your workers. Someone has just heard this and said, “Gosh, that’s great, I do wish I had done that.” Do you think it’s too late to put a care center together?
JOHN: I don’t think it’s too late, I think it is — it is very — it’s very apparent to me. You just have to be careful. You want to know who you want to be. You don’t want to have too big of an appetite. Whatever it is that you want to do, I would say two things, one, start small and then second, you can be quick, but don’t hurry. Make sure that it is well thought out, so you don’t cause either more damage than good or there are unintended consequences.
What I mean by that is for — for some of our people in education or talent acquisition, when they start to make these calls, we made it very clear that here is where you can take the call. And if the questions are at a point where it needs to be escalated, great. We now have a smaller group of people that can handle that. So, we were very cautious not to put them in a position where they had to answer something and they were guessing or they just felt very uncomfortable. Because this is something to think about talent acquisition.
Everyday you’re talking to people that are excited because you’re usually talking to them about new opportunities. Well, now, that trait of empathy is so critical when you’re talking to somebody that isn’t looking for a new opportunity, they just found out that the job that they have isn’t there anymore. So, it’s just amazing how the calls, you can have a strategy, but that emotion really comes into play and you have to be careful especially if people aren’t — they haven’t either brought up in that arena or they’re just not that experienced with it.
ROBIN: I love how you kind of just came back to something you had talked to us earlier about with your managers. It’s just, again, you’re sort of your — your analogy of a hospital and sort of the ER doctors and then kind of to the specialists. It seems like you’ve got this in multiple places within your organization to really make sure that people get the right information at the right time and the right support that they need, which is really great.
JOHN: Yeah, and the last thing that I’m trying to do is tell everybody that this thing rolled out and it was perfect. You know, just about as — as frequent as the state and the counties change their guidelines with what’s happening and moving forward, we had to change about as many times within our care center to make sure that we’re doing the right things, avoiding the wrong things, and trying to stay up-to-date on what’s actually available and out there.
ROBIN: I think that’s a great point and really kind of leads to probably our — our last sort of formal question for the day and I’ll pass this to you, Tanis. You know, this idea I think John just talked about agility within the business, right? We — we put something in place and then we have to shift, and then we shifted it again and we we’re continuing to shift, and that’s shifting both what we’re doing, how we’re doing it in the skills that we need to do this.
As people are kind of coming back to work, they’re finding out that maybe, I — my work looks different, maybe I don’t need all the employees I had before or maybe I need them but I need them to do different things just as is John kind of mentioned, you know, retraining and retooling people along the way. What advice that you would give to people as they start to evaluate the work that needs to be done as well as the people that they need to do it?
TANIS: I think your senior leadership team has to really come together and evaluate what are the priorities for the company going forward. Knowing that it’s fluid, knowing it’s John — as John stated that it may change next week, based on changing circumstances, but to the best of their ability, really prioritize what — what are those activities and strategies for the company moving forward.
For some companies, there will be many, many changes. They just can’t operate, or services, or products that they have had are really not relevant and they need to put their focus on new services and new strategies. And so, that evaluation has to take place and then it has to be over communicated through the organization. So, as John talked about, you have a criteria that you’re working from when you look at who you need to bring back. And sometimes it might not being obvious people that you would think about. One of — we had mentioned this when we were preparing for this call that one of the strongest qualities is going to be needed for great employees moving forward is learning agility, the ability to quickly absorb changes when necessary, learn new things, move forward, and be adaptive. That’s going to be really critical to our environment and going forward.
So, that quality may take a much higher priority, and the justification of who we bring back, perhaps a technical expertise would be, “Hey, does someone have the capability to learn what they need to know?” You’ll be evaluating people’s potential as well as you know what they’ve done to date because the future may look different. So, I think it’s up to senior leadership to really quantify and communicate what the new priorities are and equip their people with the right — the right reasons and the right objectives in terms of how to look at who they’re bringing back.
ROBIN: That’s great. Yeah, I think as you can write as you think about that — that agility sort of seems to be a theme that has been woven throughout this conversation today.
Briana have we gotten any questions that maybe you’d want to throw to the — the group?
BRIANA: Yeah, we do have a question here — “By furloughed sales reps, am I prevented from hiring a new sales rep until I return my furloughed staff?”
[pause]
TANIS: That’s an HR question that I would not want to venture into. [laughs]
JOHN: Yeah — I — I mean, I’ll take a run at it. I — I would want to — I would want to have a very compelling reason as to why our current staff is not being leveraged first. If it is a new role, if there are new duties, then you might be able to make a case for it, but of there is somebody on your existing team that has been put on furlough and they are even somewhat capable of doing that, you have to be very careful not just from a legal perspective, but even from a morale perspective of the — the team members or employees to have whether they’re on furlough or not.
ROBIN: I’m just going to add to that, if it’s a new territory or something like that could be the other piece of that, or is someone you had furloughed back to some of the things John mentioned earlier maybe was unable to come back to work or that emotional component that we’ve talked about. They’ve said, “Hey I don’t want to, so I’m going to bring somebody new in to sort of handle that time.”
But then I think, you know, John also talked about when you do that, what happens when the other person says, “Okay, now I’m ready and now I’m comfortable,” and so you really have to think about what that’s going to look like. And the — the last thing I’d say on that is, you know, if you furloughed people who you don’t want to bring back, I think maybe furlough was probably not the right thing, so now how do you think about, you know, what does a layoff look like but.
JOHN: Well, and I’ll jump in with that too. We’ve had several of our managers that when we’ve walked them through their rosters to call people back, they’ve asked, “Do I really have to bring this person back? I didn’t really like them. They didn’t perform very well and it’s been a great challenge.” Great. Let’s see what the file says because do not use this pandemic to be able to mask your deficiency leader with what you either have or have not done up until now.
So, we’ve tried to be careful — careful with a couple things. One, there had better be a true objective reason why you wouldn’t want to bring someone back, but then secondly if — if somebody doesn’t want to come back, we’re not going to pressure them; however, there’s no guarantee that the hours that they’re looking for will be available when they do choose to come back. And we’re not using it as a threat, we’re not trying to strong-arm anybody. The reality is we do have a business to operate. We’re not going to terminate them; however, if they decline the hours that we’re extending, there’s a good chance that when they call back, we might not have exactly what they want. If they do, great, but we’re not going to promise it.
TANIS: I think companies will have some opportunities to snap up some really great talent from some of their competitors. And so, once they’re going to have to weigh that carefully against what John talked about is what do you want your culture to be about and how is that going to impact overall the culture that you have in the way you’re treating your employees. So, there will be opportunities, but they have to be careful considered.
BRIANA: That’s a really good point —
ROBIN: I think, um —
BRIANA: Go ahead, Robin.
ROBIN: Yeah, I think just that the last kind of thing to add to that is, you know, one of the things we’re seeing companies as we talked about companies who are really busy and companies who are kind of surviving, there’s kind of in between, “My business is okay.” “It’s not great. I’m not taking off.”
We’ve seen a lot of those really focused on — on talent and getting to know, to Tanis’ point, talent in the market. So, I’m not hiring right now, but when I get the go-ahead to hire, I want to have a relationship with that person, so those people who are really kind of forward thinking about particularly hard to find roles kind of things like maybe like sales. Now, again, you’ve got to encompass that into what — what did you do with your workforce as this pandemic broke out.
BRIANA: I have another question here about — “Is there any contingency planning, to address a potential second COVID outbreak where you might have to reverse the coming back and then kind of start all over again?” How are you guys thinking from that?
TANIS: I think companies have got to be realistic that it is a possibility, so they need to be thinking about, you know, what that could potentially look like. I think succession planning is really important, so that you have backups for critical roles in your company whether it be through illness or whether it be because someone doesn’t want to come back. Whatever the reason, I think now more than ever, succession planning and how you fill those roles and have a plan in place to keep those critical roles filled, it’s going to be very important moving forward.
BRIANA: Yeah —
JOHN: Yeah, it is — as little as we really want to discuss a second wave, the conversations that we’ve had, it might just be a modified version of what we did towards the tail end of March, beginning of April. So, unfortunately, we have the play that we ran and we do something very similar to that.
BRIANA: Yeah —
ROBIN: I’ve seen, some businesses talk a little bit about. They were doing this kind of to end of February, beginning of March before things really kind of started to shut down, but this idea of, you know, as you bring people back, not bringing back whole departments to work on the same place. So, you know if your finance department is critical and they all kind of sat together even if you have them socially distance, really not even having them in the same area of a building. So, again, that contingency planning of how people work in various different places other than should keep them remote or again dispersed them through where you can have been one idea that I’ve heard from some folks since we’ve had conversations.
BRIANA: Yeah, I’ve got — let’s — let’s do one more question before we move on to some final thoughts and wrap up the webinar.
John, you mentioned that you’re getting a lot of positive feedback from employees and many employees seem excited to come back. The question I have here is kind of the flip side of that so — “We’re sensing a lot of resentment from employees who have been working throughout the difficult time and we’re expecting challenges with bringing building the team again”.
So, how would you address that, you know, if you were not getting a positive response that you’re getting now?
JOHN: Well, one of the first — one of the first markets that we look to reopen was in Georgia, and we actually — we stopped. We stopped what we were planning because of the reaction that we got from both our members and our team members.
Now, it’s tough because, you know, we rely a little bit on revenue and since April 1st, we haven’t had any revenue coming in, so when you first knew you have an opportunity to open up your first couple facilities, there’s a pretty big appetite for it. But based on the feedback, it just was not the right time and so we hit the pause button on that and then move to a different area that we had a much more positive reaction from our members and our employees.
So, that’s — I don’t know if that’s truly answering the question, you know, it’s interesting because when it comes to building a team back, you know, 38,000 of our team members are in our clubs and we only have two people that are active right now. So, I don’t — we haven’t had any pushback from our managers because I think they’re all just excited to be back to work now. We haven’t heard anything yet from a corporate perspective although I anticipate running into that. We might not — we might not be able to bring everybody back at our corporate office for a little while, and so just that thought of couple of things, one having to rebuild your team even if that means slowly bringing them off of furlough or we talked about the agility before. And if we have now team members that have to be more agile, it makes it more difficult for a leader sometimes to manage them. So, we haven’t run into those issues yet although I wouldn’t be surprised if — if they come up in the next week or so.
BRIANA: Yeah, thank you for sharing that.
Let’s move on, I’ve got two kind of wrap up questions here, but let’s just do one of them before we drop off the line today. So, what I want to know from both of you Tanis and John, obviously this is a massive undertaking what we’re dealing with right now in terms of bringing people back to work and re-opening offices and — and working through furlough challenges. So, not that this is ever going to be, you know, finally wrapped up with a bow on it, but what would you say after some of the dust has settled here, “What is the next big thing the business that should be focused on?”
John, let’s start with you.
JOHN: Yeah, so — it’s — I know that you’ve talked about with the dust settling, but I do want to be very careful with this because, you know, 38,000 people trying to bring them back off a furlough at the right time and again we won’t do it all at once. Even though we have a very defined process and it’s a logical process, I don’t want it to feel like a process. And that — that word empathy that’s come up a couple times, I’m reminded of a quote not that I’m trying to date myself, but from the Eagles that they was Don Henley, you know, they have a high tolerance for repetition. And I want our leaders to have a high tolerance for repetition and do it in an empathetic way because we have to do it 38,000 times. And if we don’t do it right, the next big thing that we’re going to have to think about is rebuilding our whole business.
If we do it in the right way, now I think we can get even more aggressive, because we’ve laid a really solid foundation with going from having almost nobody working to getting everybody back.
BRIANA:Yeah, it’s a really good point.
Tanis, what would you say?
TANIS: We’ll tag on to that by saying that, you know, purpose still matters. And so, I think it’s really about helping your employees grasp the purpose for which they’re there, the purpose of the company, the mission of the company, and how their individual role contributes to that overall purpose. Because that’s what keeps employees engaged pre-COVID and post-COVID. Is understanding, you know, where they fit in, where they contribute in the overall purpose and mission of the company. And so, that’s still got to be a focus, it’s not just on tasks, it’s also on the greater purpose and a greater culture of the organization. Without letting your culture get lost, the task of the moment.
BRIANA: Absolutely.
Thank you, Tanis, that was a great final thought. Thank you, John. A lot of good things to think about as we move forward here. Thank you again for joining the call, Tanis, John.
Robin, it was great to have you on the conversation and everybody in the audience. Thank you so much for sticking with us through the full hour. I’ll see you for the next one.
Organizational anxiety – whether it’s caused by a global pandemic or a more isolated event, like an acquisition or restucture – creates noise and in a company and takes a toll on leaders. We talk with executive coaches from Sandler Training and Executive Women’s Forums International about common stress responses, re-imaging “the plan,” and how to come out a better leader on the other side.
Before anything else – even if the answer is “I don’t know” – you must address employees’ essential needs (“Is my health at risk? Am I going to keep my job?”) Until you do, nothing else will be heard. (16:00)
The phrase “I’m curious” is powerful because curiosity unites both sides of the brain, allowing you think logically and be creative in your solutions(19:30)
A plan is a pre-ordained track. It’s not the law. Think about the precepts of the plan and ask yourself, do they still old true?(22:30)
Pushing yourself to re-imagine may require an act of “creative destruction.” (34:30)
Don’t interpret “leveling out” as a sign of “we’ve made it and we’re done.” You’ll need reserves for the climb back up, so equip yourself and your staff for the “whole course.” (45:30)
“Being fine” may not be a permanent state. Still check in with people who seem to be handling anxiety well. (57:00)
Bill Bartlett President and Owner of Corporate Strategies
BRIANA: All right, so let’s just keep going with our — with our intro, and we’ll get — we’ll get Bill fixed up here in just a second.
Uhm — [pause]
So, while the initial shock of a new global pandemic and economic disruption and shelter in place orders isn’t so jarring anymore, there’s still this low-level crisis vibration in the background of our organizations and our lives. So, one of our guests today, Jennifer Carter and I were talking a few weeks ago, she’s the one that called attention to this vibration, which is the thing that hangs in the air even after the crisis has subsided. So, because it’s always on, it starts to feel normal, and we may even forget that it’s there, but it creates a ton of noise in an organization and it takes a toll on leaders. So, I thought it was the perfect time to discuss not only how to lead through crisis, which is what we’ve been doing for the past few weeks, but how to lead through anxiety and uncertainty, which is a situation we can find ourselves in whether we’re experiencing crisis on a global scale or not. So, I’m really excited about our conversation today.
Anxiety can be a tough topic, but I promise it will be insightful because our two guests, Bill and Jennifer, have a ton of experience coaching leaders through situations like this, and they’re both extremely knowledgeable on the topic.
So, again, I’d like to say thank you for being here. I don’t expect you to leave the session today feeling quite as Zen as this guy on the slide. But I do hope that by coming together, voicing concerns, and sharing some insight, we can provide you with a place to pause, regroup, and prepare for whatever tomorrow brings.
My name is Briana Harper, and I’m your webinar host. I’m also your resource for any questions you have about the webinar, during the webinar, after the webinar. We’ve planned about 45 minutes of content for you today, and we’re going to open it up to Q&A. So, I’d love to answer your questions here and how you’re navigating. So, please chat into the questions queue any time something comes to mind.
After the session, I’ll send out today’s slide deck and a link to the recording. If you have any questions that we don’t get to today or questions that you think of after the session is over, please reach out to me. My email is bharper@outmatch.com or you can find me on social @OutmatchHCM.
So, really quick before we begin, I wanted to show you what’s coming up in our future work series. Two weeks from today, we’ll look at how companies are planning to end furloughs and bring people back to work. This is uncharted territory for a lot of leaders, so we’ll talk through best practices and some things to think about. Then on May 27th, we’ll talk with leaders who have been managing virtual teams for years and leaders that are new to it, and share some lessons learned from the past few weeks.
And finally, on June 10th, we’ll look at how diversity and inclusion has changed through all of this, you know, not only our office spaces and our physical interactions different, but crisis has a way of reshuffling the deck. So, we’ll look at the implications of that. I hope to see all of you back for upcoming sessions.
One last thing, today’s session is valid for one professional development credit for the SHRM-CP or the SHRM-SCP, so look for that activity ID for me at the end of the webinar today.
Like I said, we have two wonderful guests on with us, and you can see their faces right there on your webcam. They are speakers, they’re entrepreneurs, they are executive coaches. It’s really hard to sum up in just a few words, all their experience and all the great things that they do.
So, Jennifer and Bill, I’d love to have you tell us a little bit more about yourselves.
Jennifer, let’s start with you.
JENNIFER: So, hello everybody. Thanks, Briana for giving us this opportunity. I’m thrilled to be with you today. My name is Jennifer Carter, I am president of EWF International. We are a leadership development company based in Dallas and we’re focused on increasing the number of women in leadership — business leadership and ownership, and helping companies invest in their leadership pipeline to drive more financial performance and innovation. My professional background started in marketing and branding and then I transitioned into more culture management, culture transformation, and an organizational strategy basically helping companies do new things and hard things even when they don’t want to and helping to motivate employees.
Briana is a graduate and alumnus of our emerging leader program, which is how she and I know each other, and she’s done an excellent job. I want to commend her and the entire team at Outmatch for the great job they’ve done navigating this and putting this webinar series together. So, thanks for having me.
BRIANA: Thank you, Jennifer. Bill, over to you.
BILL: Briana, thanks for having me. I’m Bill Bartlett. I’m the Owner and Chief Revenue Officer of Corporate Strategies and Solutions. We’re at Sandler Training Center. My focus is executive coaching and performance development in the area of sales and leadership, so we work teaching people how to sell and how to lead.
I’ve authored the bestselling book, “The Sales Coach’s Playbook: Breaking the Performance Code,” which we find that coaching is an important part of any leader’s quiver and they have to be able to use coaching to help people grow especially in today’s world. My client list is a mix of small and independent businesses, all the way up to Fortune 500. I work in Hollywood with some professional actors as well as sports. And so coaching is something that’s kind of spreads across all lines.
My goal is to increase productivity and profit by high performance behaviors, winning attitudes, and new techniques that allow people to compete in the world today. So, thank you for having me.
BRIANA: Thanks, Bill. I am so glad both you are here. Let’s get going.
The first thing I want to do before we get into the conversation itself is to launch a quick poll. So, I will put this up on everyone’s screen, if you’ll just take a second to put in your answer, and then we can talk through that. [pause]
All right. So, that poll is open for you to cast your vote. You know, we’re all experiencing some form of anxiety right now. So, it’s just we wanted to know how you’re responding to it or how your organization is responding to it. You know, are you stuck and waiting for things to pass? Are you seeking the right course of action, but maybe not sure what that is? Are you taking some sort of action? This is going to help us frame the conversation and just make sure that what we’re talking about is relevant to where you are. [pause]
So, it looks like we’re getting answers in. I’ll leave this open for just a few more seconds, and then we’ll close it down. [pause]
Right now, it looks like — we’ve got a split between seeking the right course of action and taking action. So, let me share these results with everyone. [pause]
All right, so it looks like a slight leader in the anxious and seeking the right course of action.
Jennifer or Bill, is that surprising to you in any way? Is that what you expected to see from people on this call?
BILL From my perspective, what we typically experience is 20/60/20. We find in that anxious and taking action about 20% of people in companies are in that mode, but 60% are in that middle trying to figure it out, and other 20% are kind of stuck in the bottom there. But you notice in this poll and you’ve done the right thing, everybody’s anxious. It’s just some are dealing with it differently.
Jennifer, how about your thought?
JENNIFER: This is exactly what I expected to see given the progression of where we are, particularly in the States. You know, we’re about six weeks into this in terms of direct impacts for most people and this is, you know, the initial kind of shock and blast wave has rippled through households and individuals and organizations, and people are starting to, you know, stop feeling paralyzed and starting to agitate for more action, but there’s still so much uncertainty, that it’s difficult to be really decisive particularly emotionally in a time like this.
So, I would have expected a split, you know, a slight majority in the middle range. I’m encouraged to see that people are starting to move forward and starting to take action. My expectation and I’m sure yours — you can echo this or correct it, Bill — is that people will pivot pretty quickly as they experiment and try things that will work in this uncertain environment and that and of itself is something that you have to pay attention to manage additional anxiety that’s from the response itself.
BILL: You nailed it with that thought, and then one of the things that we’re seeing in that top group there of taking action is these people are committed to not allowing the anxiety that they’ve experienced to get in the way of their growth. And so they’re working with their staff differently. They’re working with their clients differently. And we see them standing out as people that even before this had a plan they were committed to.
BRIANA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you everyone who put in their answer. I’m going to close this down and get us going. [pause]
All right. So, you know, we all know that anxiety isn’t only experienced when there’s a global pandemic. This is kind of a unique scenario that we find ourselves in. And Bill, when we were first talking about this webinar topic, you said that anxiety comes from not knowing. So, can you just expand on that for us?
BILL: Yeah, one of the things that we’ve learned is we experience heightened vigilance when we’re uncertain of what’s happening, and that hypervigilance that we go through creates a spin cycle in our brain. And so, the mind wants to have certainty, and when it can’t find certainty, it begins reprocessing information over and over. And that information tends to create either positive or negative stress, and we’ll deal with that later, but I think that’s the main issue when we have uncertainty, fight-or-flight mentality kicks in at a certain point because there’s an unknown attacker that we’re trying to defend against.
I’m a fly fisherman and I fly fish out in Yellowstone every year. It’s one of my favorite things to do. And one of the things that we know about trout is they tend to be in areas where grizzly bears are in Yellowstone. And so, one of the things that happens while I’m walking along the stream is many times, I see bear prints that are in front of me going in the opposite direction, thank God. So, that sight of the print and the size of the bear that’s probably made it creates that hypervigilance. So, now every time I hear a twig break or a leaf fall or anything like that, my mind goes into a what-if scenario that puts me into that high anxiety, and if I allow it to happen, it ruins the rest of the day of fishing.
BRIANA: Yeah, I love that analogy. And I think we’ve all felt what that feels like that you — it’s this heightened awareness, you’re attuned to everything. And that takes a lot out of you to — to be in that state. It makes a lot of sense.
BILL: You know, we as human beings are wired to worry. We tend to live the life of worrying. We call it MSU, and MSU is not Michigan State University. It’s make stuff up. We tend to make stuff up and it doesn’t exist and, you know, we have this incredible bias for retrospection and comparing present to past or what is to what was, and in that comparison, it’s never the same. So, many of us believe that the past is a precursor to the future, and we tend to live that life as if it were true.
BRIANA: Yeah, yeah. That makes so much sense, uhm —
JENNIFER: Yeah, I think I’m going to jump in real quick just with one more thing. I love what Bill — I love — that’s a great analogy and, as usual, you articulated that very well. I think part of the reason of the uncertainty is also so powerful is that we are fighting all possible battles simultaneously. So, when you have an identified threat, you can be vigilant, but you’re — it has a directionality to it. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to respond in a logical way, but it means that it has a direction to it.
One of the things that’s really challenging about such uncertainty, and this notion that it’s invisible in some way, is that we as humans and as leaders for the business, we’re constantly assessing threat, we’re assessing risk. And if we can’t quantify that risk, our response typically ends up being that we’re analyzing all potential problems simultaneously and trying to solution in multiple directions at the same time. That takes a lot of emotional and intellectual horsepower when we’re already kind of overextended in that way.
And leaders need to be aware of the fact that their employees are doing that too, and they’re not just doing that on a professional basis, they’re doing that on a personal basis as well. And that, you know, constant being in the battle, that constant vigilance creates a lot of emotional exhaustion, which can show up in really kind of impactful ways in the workplace.
BILL: One of the things that we see is the fog of anxiety. And so one of the visible signs are employees who are in that fog who are normally high performers and so locked on the goal in that direction. All of a sudden that fog or that blur, you can sense it because the unsureness of action is a direct result of it.
BRIANA: That’s a really great segue into our next question.
So, the message that we’re hearing through all of this is that we’re in this together, you know, while we’re separated by distance, we may feel alone, we’re all experiencing this together, which sounds like a really positive message and a good thing that we can have the shared experience.
But, Jennifer, I’d love for you to talk a little bit about what can happen in a company when everyone is experiencing anxiety at the same time.
JENNIFER: Sure. Well, we touched a little bit on it in the last conversation just briefly, you know. Anxiety shows up in a variety of ways, and one of the ways that it shows up particularly when it’s chronic anxiety — I know Bill is going to address the difference between positive and negative anxiety in a bit. I’m not going to scoop him on that —
BRIANA: [Giggles]
JENNIFER: But one of the things that happens when — when there’s chronic anxiety, like we’re experiencing now, that low level hum you described, that vibration earlier, is that it reduces our cognitive ability. It reduces our emotional reserves. It creates a level of organizational vigilance where people cannot hear messages in the same way. So, we as leaders cannot assume that just because we told them something — this is always true, but particularly true in a crisis — we also can’t assume that because they’re indicating understanding, then it’s going to stick.
So, when organizations are in kind of structural anxiety, we’re talking specifically about a global pandemic at the moment, but this also shows up in mergers and acquisitions, market changes, reductions in force. There’s a whole host of things that can create organizational anxiety, even positive thing, you know, pivot to meet a new market challenge, growing your staff. There can be a lot of structures that create this organizational anxiety. And what happens is people revert back to their essential needs. In an environment like this, they’re really concerned about, you know, “Am I healthy? Is my health — my employer — err — my family healthy and my home secure? And am I going to keep my job?”.
And if leaders don’t address those things first, nothing else they say matters. Even if the question is I don’t — even if the answer is “I don’t know.”
The other thing that the organizations have to think about — and this is universally true, but it’s gotten exposed in a really specific way with something like a global pandemic that’s a shared experience, right? There is — when everyone’s kind of fat and happy, we don’t get to see what’s under — happening underneath the covers. And I know Bill and I both have experience in, you know, coaching culture and thinking through those things. This has been a challenge before that.
Leaders have to understand that they have to manage anxiety on three levels. One is you have to start with the individual, so each person whether they’re a leader or staff or just a person in the world, you have to manage your own anxiety. And that means identifying, understanding, coming up with really constructive coping mechanisms, even just acknowledging it that, you know, we are not alone, but not using that as a way to say, “I’m just going to be anxious because everybody else is.”
Then the next level out — if you think about like a target, the middle individuals, the next level out with the team or staff or peers or immediate circle out, you have to think about how you can positively influence those around you and help manage their anxiety. And then leaders in business have to really think structure — err — strategically around their organizational anxiety. What are they going to do from a cultural perspective? What are they going to do from a touch perspective to acknowledge that it exists? This is not something we can ignore, and then deal with it on an organizational level. And that’s not just a, we’re going to do these things and check them off the list.
If we have to think about how do we narrow the list of things that our organization hold priorities because people are going to be able to hold less information in their heads, how are we going to optimize our processes to meet people where they are while still thinking about, you know, making money or keeping our organization whole. And so at an organizational level, the anxiety is not something that you have to say, “Well, we’re just going to let our managers deal with that. We’re just going to let our employees deal with that.” You know, we’re going to — we call that the, “We’re going to pray for them,” method, right? But you can’t just send them out into the world. As a leader, you have to realize that that that is as much a threat to the organization as the virus itself, as the event itself. And so thinking about it in those three circles is really valuable because that helps companies better understand the interconnectedness of individual staff to their broader culture.
BILL: What we’re finding is that — you’re 100% right on that — is that anxieties that filter between management and staff, and so staff hears everything through their anxiety filter. And what we know is that most managers aren’t equipped to deal with anxiety, and so they try to blunt it or negate it. They don’t try to deal with it. And so, you know, we can teach managers the simple signs to recognize it as well as some questions to ask, and, you know, “I’m curious why you feel that way.” The phrase “I’m curious” is the only phrase in the English language that unites the right and left side of the brain. And so when we look at curiosity, it allows us to think logically, but it also allows us to be creative in our solutions. And so, I think managers have to be focused on “A” the signs but “B” what they do when they sense it.
BRIANA: Bill, I love what you just said about curiosity in the statement. I’m curious, I actually hadn’t heard that before. So that’s — that’s a really great little nugget right there. And Jennifer, I love how you broke down anxiety into these three levels, I guess these three buckets because it’s not just that you experience anxiety personally inside yourself, it’s being experienced on your team, it’s being experienced as a company. And each of those levels or buckets, there’s a response that’s happening there, and you really need to be aware of what those responses are and then kind of be able to choose the direction that you want to proceed and rather than let the anxiety kind of take hold of everything for you.
So, that was really great stuff from both of you. Thank you.
I’d really like to zoom in with this next question on a little bit more of the personal side of this, how we — how we experience anxiety within ourselves and how we manage anxiety within ourselves. And I think one of the most challenging things is, you know, letting go of the plan because we had a plan at the beginning of 2020 and that entire thing got unraveled.
So, Bill, can you talk about what makes this so challenging and, you know, what we can do to get unstuck from old plans and old beliefs and old ways of thinking?
BILL: We can split this into — into two sides and one will be dealing with the plan, but the other one will be dealing with the beliefs of the plan, and the challenge that we face is our life script. We have a pattern of dealing with things in our life. It’s the way we write into our life and with the subconscious mind can’t take a joke. So, if you tell it to be anxious, it will be anxious and it will continue to do it until something impacts it that it shouldn’t.
And so when we look at dealing with your life script, life scripts create head trash and head trash is that negative energy that Shad Helmstetter talks about in his books where 70% to 80% of our thinking is negative and it tells us we couldn’t do things or we shouldn’t do things or we should be wary of things. And so, you know, once we have that type of thinking, we tend to lock ourselves down into a smaller space as we can occupy, because in that small space, we can at least protect ourselves.
The challenge of a manager today is 180-degree thinking or opposite thinking and working with people to think opposite once they see a head piece, a head trash, or life script that’s not productive. And so, how do we get people to think opposite? And in that thinking opposite, what we find is this, that they can free themselves to think what if the opposite were true, one of the things that will happen is they can free themselves to act, but as long as their belief is, “I have to only do it this way,” they get locked into it. So when we look at a plan, we take a look at a plan is nothing more than a preordained track that we’ve created. It’s not — it’s not the law, it’s just something we’ve built.
And so, we have to teach people as part of planning to embrace the unexpected and adapt accordingly, that no one could have predicted that we would be in this circumstance that we’re in right now, but at the beginning of the year, everybody had a brilliant plan for the year, I’m sure. What happened now is that brilliant plan is out the window. And so, if we didn’t think at the time, what if something insane happens to the plan, how would we react? Right now, we should start thinking about that, and we shouldn’t try to make our plans 10% different or 10% better. We should sit down and take a look at the precepts that we use to create our business plan and say, “Do they still hold true?” And, by the way, we’re going to find that half of them don’t, and we do facilitated learning. We teach people in face-to-face classrooms. And the challenge that we face is that might not happen again for a while. So, if we don’t adapt our business to the thought that if that doesn’t happen and we still have to make the money that we’ve been making, how would we act? Then, we’re the problem because we’ve locked onto a plan that no longer exist.
A couple other last points — and I’ll be curious as to what Jennifer has to say is — you know, that the concept of never imagined — never imagined is really something that has to be part of our life right now and that most people don’t sit quietly and think thoughts that they’ve never imagined before. And that’s why we get locked into the permanence of planning, that every plan should have a mind map associated that isn’t linear, and in that mind map, the what-ifs, the curiosity, the unexpected should be incorporated into it because those are the things that really give the plan to life going forward.
BRIANA: Yeah, I think there was — there’s so much great stuff in what you said just now.
Jennifer, is there anything that you would add to that?
JENNIFER: Oh, I love Bill’s perspective. He and I did not get the chance to know each other prior to this, but I really enjoyed meeting him virtually because I think he’s so — he’s so insightful on so many things. So well said, Bill.
Two things to piggyback on what he said. One, there’s a great book called “The Power of Bad”. So not only do we, you know, tell ourselves negative narratives, the impact of negative experiences and fear lingers in our brains much longer, and it creates a negative bias — a negativity bias even in the best of circumstances. This is not exclusive to trauma or difficult time.
So, I think leaders need to be aware of the fact that you can’t prove a negative, but you also need to figure out ways to overcome that approach, right? So, not the 90 experience, but reframe the way that people see those experiences. And that’s just to echoes, you know, from a different direction, what Bill was saying.
The other is to reinforce what he said, you know, many companies prior to this struggled with this notion of how do I measure productivity and how do I think about impact. And many companies, you know, go very tactical on that. What I mean by that is if there’s a list of things to do and they check them off, or if someone’s at their desk between 9:00 and 5:30, or whatever, then we’re going to check them as productive.
One of the things that’s really disrupted that is this distance has eliminated this more authoritarian way of checking productivity. So, companies are having to reevaluate what is the approach that they’re thinking about to decision making, not the decisions that are made. They need to make a decision, but the approach to that and that’s — that’s very similar to what Bill was saying, in that companies need to be really intentional about that. What we equip managers, which by the way, the majority of managers in the world have never been trained, never gotten leadership development training, never gotten any kind of development. And so now is the time to really make sure that they’re properly equipped because empowerment is not a strategy. We need to make sure that the equipping part hangs with that because, otherwise, it flips to abandonment.
So companies really need to focus on the approach to decision making, rather than sticking to, as Bill said, the plan and trying to, you know, improve it or pivot it really go back to the fundamentals and say, what is it that we do well, what is it that we’re trying to accomplish, what are the true risks we’re trying to manage. When you’re assessing risks in an organization, you know, the spectrum is usually something really minor to an asteroid hitting the planet. You don’t plan for an asteroid hitting the planet because if that happens, you got to your plan, you got to your problems and your business, but you also don’t plan to the minor thing.
So we’re further out on that scale than we’ve been probably as a modern society in business. And one of the reasons I say that is people — people don’t have a plan that are out of it, like what Bill said, but they do need to think about their organizational capacity to make good decisions. So, not just what happens when a global pandemic happened and if you were having that conversation three months ago, kudos to your team.
BRIANA:[Giggles]
JENNIFER: But what do we do with business disruption? What do we do, you know, with succession planning? So, it’s the approach and that’s one of the major psychological differences between individuals, viewers, staff, individual contributors, and senior leadership is they have to think about it more functionally. And as HR leaders, and I know that the majority of your audience is likely in HR, we really have to be laser focused on how do we help leadership distill down that approach to decision making, be really intentional about thinking about it, because that helps — even that just helps lower anxiety. Because now at least we have an approach to thinking about it as opposed to just saying, “Let’s see what’s sticks,” you know, rather than just throwing things to the wall.
BILL: I love that thought. And when we look at plans, one of the things we find is most plans have metric benchmarks that they’re trying to achieve. Most metric benchmarks are out the window now. The people are shifting their plans now to more behavioral benchmarks. How do we act because behavior is a leading indicator and metrics are lagging indicators. If we can shift our thinking to — from an HR standpoint and a leadership standpoint, how do we reshape the metrics of the company through behavior, we’ll be better off and we’ll be able to be more adaptable to what’s going to come and to create more certainty out of what’s going to come. Behavior creates certainty.
BRIANA: Yeah, I think you hit on some really great — great points even in this next question that we have coming up, which is, you know, what do we need to return to quickly? You know, what did we have before that we kind of had hit pause on because of crisis? What do we need to get back quickly in order to kind of regain our momentum? And then what are some things that maybe we just leave behind? I mean, you both touched on some performance management methods and, you know, how we can adapt those things.
So, Jennifer, could you elaborate a little bit on this?
JENNIFER: So, I think that the aspiration to return to normal is something we need to push off. I think that we need to be able to say, we’re going to return to stability or we’re going to return to a new version of us. I think there is not an organization on the planet — literally on the planet — right now that will emerge from this in the same — in the same vein as they went in. I don’t care how big and stable you are, it will change the way we do business.
I think one of the most valuable things — and I’ve been encouraged as I speak with many of our clients and partners and colleagues — that companies are starting to think about things that will help them be more stable. What I mean by that is, they’re starting to really be intentional about “Okay, let’s set a way to prioritize,” rather than just checking things off the list or, you know, focusing on activity, let’s — and I love the metrics comment that Bill made if you spot on there — you know, we are really focusing on experimentation. And there’s a big school of thought around this. There’s a great book called, “The Lean Startup.” It’s applied to, you know, startups and innovative organizations and innovative initiatives inside big companies, but it’s really applicable now because in many ways, a lot of big businesses and even mid-size and small businesses are back to a situation where we function like a startup.
The reason I bring that forward is that means that the communication challenge of making sure that employees understand the approach to decision making, the approach to problem solving, that we’re measuring learning. Those who are very outcome-focused, goal-focused are going to feel untethered because there’s no clear way to win. And this goes back to what we were talking about the nature of anxiety and uncertainty is if you’ve got high performers that you set a goal in front of them and they crush that goal and they get a lot of personal meaning out of that, you’re going to need to reframe that for them and create a system where they can reframe that. And so organizations are going to have to put metrics around how are we going to experiment with new business models, with new approaches, with new metrics, with new behavioral assessments, with new performance management, not blow the whole system up, but think through what’s important to us as an organization, what’s important to us as a core competency.
It sharpens the conversation that HR has already been having, but I think that the organizations that are going to survive and thrive during a rebound, whether that takes six or 12 or, you know, 18 months or 12, 24 months, are going to be the ones that cannot just focus on the previous business model and how to shift it that are going to really get laser focused on what is it we’re trying to accomplish, what is the value we provide for customers or stakeholders, and how can we think about that in a new way. And so, to put a very fine point on it, I think the things we need to eliminate are focusing on activity instead of — instead of impact.
I think the things we need to really focus on is what are our organizational priorities. Making money is not an answer because there are lots of ways to do that. That is not focused enough. We have to say, here’s the value we’re delivering for customers in this new world, and here’s how we’re going to get there. And employees need to understand how what they’re doing at home connects to that because without that, people lose their sense of purpose with part of the motivation for them foreseeing and high performers is they feel like they’re not getting traction. And that’s really destructive for organization because they don’t understand — it feels like you’re rolling that rock up the hill again. And so really defining a concrete way for people to feel a part of a larger initiative is crucial.
BILL: One of the things that ties — I think that was brilliant. I like everything that you shared there because it really gives HR a chance to dig deep into what — how they see the organization, how they can impact it, and one of the things I’m working with my clients on is the quote, “if you want to see the future created,” and so now company should have future casting teams that sit down in small groups of teams that think “what if,” and start looking at the future in a brand new way. These aren’t people who are looking to make the company 10% better. And in my company, we run a program called creative destruction, which means every six months, we look at the company as a puzzle sitting on a blanket, and each member of the company takes a corner of that blanket and snaps it, so the pieces go up in the air. And when they come back down differently, we look at it as a different company.
Now, that doesn’t mean we blow the company up every six months, but it means it gives us a fresh look at how we’re doing things. I think that the future casting content right now for small groups within every company is the key to creating the future that they want.
BRIANA: I think that’s a great way. I love the — the puzzle analogy. It sounds like, you know, an actual strategy, you know, a workshop that’s repeated and it gets perfect because we were talking earlier about being stuck. And not just stuck, you know, inside our own heads, but stuck organizationally, like there’s no need to reevaluate anything, so, you just, plow ahead, and it may not be the right direction or the right activities.
And Jennifer, I love your —
JENNIFER: Briana, let me jump — let me jump in real quick. I’m sorry. —
BRIANA: Go ahead.
JENNIFER: Bill sparked a thought for me as well. I love — I love what he just said and I think I’m totally going to do that for our organization as well. It’s a great strategy. But one of the things that is really crucial for leaders to know in this time, and that is to look at this as a transformation.
The reason I say that is because it changes the mindset in a transformation environment and that means that you’re going from one culture to another or you’re changing market, you’re responding to a market threat, whatever that is. What that means is you have to accomplish the work and provide the value in a new way.
Everyone has been forced into some form of a transformation. Some people are being very proactive about it, some people are being entirely reactive, and all companies will fall on that scale. There are two things that leaders really need to understand about that, and there’s quite a bit of data to support the psychological shift here and I’m sure Bill can speak to this as well.
One is, there will be what has been dubbed “the valley of despair” in a cultural transformation and although it is kind of terrifyingly name, a leadership goal in a transformation is to shorten that valley. So, if you as a leader are seeing this dip, first of all, it’s predictable. It is known. You know, we see that kind of slump and, of course, the severity and suddenness of this, I’m not trying to dismiss the enormity of this circumstance, but what I’m trying to reassure leaders out there is this is not — this from an organizational perspective is not a brave new world that we know nothing about. It is something that has triggered a phenomenon that existed before. And there will be a dip in morale, in productivity, in revenues, that would have been the case, even if this was just a market change, or an acquisition of a new audience or a product launch. This will happen, it just wouldn’t have happened in the same way.
So, that’s the first thing. If you’re freaking out about it, we appreciate that. We understand this is scary and that’s real, but it is a predictable thing and you’re not alone in that. Your job as a leader is to shorten that valley. Your organization will go through it. It is a reality about human psychology. What you can do to help shorten that is recognize that your first job as a leader is to help manage your employees’ emotional landscape, to think through what can I do as a leader to speak to their immediate concern even if the answer is “I don’t know,” and reassure them and solicit their help in solutioning things to these problems and providing solutions. So, a lot of leaders will try to insulate their employees from uncertainty.
Unfortunately — and Bill said this very well earlier in a different way — employees will speak into that gap, the most negative thing they can think of. So, if — and this happens when there’s a merger or a reduction in force or a change in leadership. It happens. Employees will fill a void with negative things, and we’ll tell ourselves stories. And we’ll make things up, as he said, make stuff up. And so, leaders need to understand we are managing a cultural transformation that was forced by a global pandemic. This has a predictable cycle. And your first job is to manage your employees’ emotional anxiety first because they cannot hear you if you don’t do that first. It doesn’t matter anything else you say. If you don’t start there and your first gesture in every meeting, every communication, every interaction isn’t reassurance, some kind of transparency, vulnerability — leadership vulnerability is really crucial to create connection right now, if you don’t start there with everything you do, it doesn’t matter what you say next because they cannot hear you.
BILL: You are spot on. You nailed it with your thinking about change. Human beings don’t change, they transition. …came up with a roadmap for dealing with sudden death many years ago, and I took and expanded it to how we deal with transition in an organization, and Jennifer, your point of the valley of despair, everything begins with shock goes into denial and then resistance, and that’s where that valley exists. Many employees are stuck there, and so now it’s up to our leaders to make sure we get them to come out of it.
So, how do we come out of it? With exploration — exploration of the upside of a new action, of a new activity, of a new direction. And so, even in that exploration, they’re still in that valley, but little by little, they’re gaining confidence that there’s a world they can create. And from exploration, we go to commitment and adaptation. I think we fail as leaders when we expect our people to go from shock to adaptation overnight. That’s the change model. It just doesn’t work.
BRIANA: I think what both said is —
JENNIFER: — very, very true.
BRIANA: Yeah, very helpful too because I think as people who are in the war room and they’re rethinking the business plan and the strategy, and to your point Bill, about you don’t just want to make it 10% better, you really have transform. It’s important to remember what your employees are and aren’t hearing out of that because they’re not in there with you. And it’s so important what’s communicated and how its communicated. So, I think both of your kind of action items, things that people can actually do are so helpful.
And I think it’s interesting that we talk about transformation because this was a topic of conversation even before the pandemic. I mean, companies were all about digital transformation, cultural transformation. This stuff was happening or maybe we thought it was happening, and then we really kind of got brand new urgency into not just transformation as a business strategy, but transformation as something we were forced into that we just had to figure out in the moment, and then we’re still figuring out. So, I think all of that was really helpful.
And I also heard both of you say, you know, this idea of kind of finding clarity and defining meaning through all of this because I’ve read — in preparation for this webinar, I’ve read a quote that said, “Action is the antidote to anxiety,” which I thought was interesting, and I think I could agree with that, but also what I’m hearing from both of you is it’s not just any action, right? It’s the right action and it’s maybe not even the action alone, it’s just the getting rid of that uncertainty, however you can do that.
And I think —
BILL: You know you’ve nailed it. I think, but we’ve talked — Jennifer, you and I — awhile back about stress, the concept of where stress comes from. And stress is either positive or negative, right? And so, when we’re in negative stress, it means we’re stretched and our belief system won’t change. And we’re kind of believed that even if we do our best work, we’re never going to get out of the situation were in.
And so the other side of that is positive stress. When we look at positive stress, it comes when we’re stretched, when we know if we have our A game and we’re executing. We’re going to set new barriers. We’re going to be those shiny night on the hill. Well, you can’t live in negative stress. We have to find a way to teach people what positive stress is, that it will give us that edge we need to complete due to both of your points.
BRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree.
JENNIFER: Absolutely, and I’m going to connect with what Bill just said, which I think is so smart to another point we talked about earlier and that is that, you know, we’re talking about this kind of linearly, and Bill and I both agree that organizations need to understand and managers need to be prepared for the fact that this is cyclical.
So, you know, this is going to be a series of iteration as companies figure out how to evolve whether it’s, you know, evolution transformation. Whatever metaphor we want to use here. We’re not going to come out of this in a linear fashion. This is going to be a series of decisions and cycles emotionally for leadership and that’s exhausting in and of itself.
So companies whether — global pandemic aside, one of the things we see in transformation is whether they’re Fortune 500 or small businesses, is that when you’re halfway through the process, facing the climb, right? So you’ve gone into the part of the valley, you’ve gone in the valley floor, and you’re facing that climb, a lot of organizations mistake the valley floor, if you will, stick with me on the metaphor, for normal.They think, “I’m so glad that’s over, we’ve stopped declining, we’ve leveled off, that’s great,” and they forget that there’s an energy that’s required to emerge on the other side. If you think about, you know, climbing Everest, for example, you have to prepare for the decline. You have to prepare for the return trip because you can’t just think about the mountain top. There’s a — there’s a way to climb up the other side. I say that because many organizations right now are overextended, they’re feeling super stressed. People are dealing with personal and professional stress. Much of it’s going to be chronic and negative, and they’ll have moments of really positive stress, right? They’ll have moments of emerging from this and doing really great thing and the danger for leadership is for them to be like, “Whoa! I’m glad that’s over.”
What will happen is that people get tired. They’ll push and then they’ll rest, and then they’ll push and then they’ll rest. And we as leadership need to end it — we need to understand how to spot, as what Bill said this earlier on managers, how to spot the sign of our staff and organization slipping into a stasis of negative stress of that moment because what happens in a transformation is that many companies that don’t successfully do that sit down in the middle. They get tired, they stop pushing, they assume they’re better. It’s kind of like stopping taking your prescription because you’re feeling better. We need you to take the whole — the whole course, right? Just because you’re feeling better doesn’t mean that you’re done.
So, I think. you know. for the HR leaders out there, first of all know. that you’re doing a great job. I know that that’s a lot of emotional energy to push especially through video. It’s going to take longer with fewer nonverbal relationships and ways to communicate. It’s going to exhaust people, so you guys are doing great. You’re doing a very good job. Give yourself credit for things you’re doing well. Don’t just focus on the things you’re not.
The second thing I would say is remember that you’re — you’re going to continue to go through these cycles. Give yourself and your staff grace to do that. This is not going to be linear recovery. It’s not going to be something that we all look back on, you know, at least in the short term, even the middle term like, “Whoa! That was a thing. Do you remember when that was a thing?” I think we’re going to — it’s going to linger for a while. I think there’s going to be a lot of strength worn out of it, but when you’re in the trenches, it’s hard to see beyond the next stair. Understand and equip yourself and your staff not for the experiences, for the cycle of experiences
They fear managers. Hey, this is going to continue to happen. Do not consider a personal failure if you’re high performers come out of this start performing and then you see another dip. Like don’t say, “Ugh, I’m failing.” You need to say, “Oh! This is just leveling up.” It’s the next iteration of that. What can I do to make sure that I have the reserves to help them push, give them a moment of grace to experience what they’re experiencing, and then equip them to step to the next level because we’re going to see multiple layers of this cycle of high performance, negative performance, high performance, negative performance. And people need to give each other grades from a scheduling perspective, from the performance management perspective, for a personal care perspective to go through that for quite a bit of a period of time.
BRIANA: That’s a great call-out because I think in times like these, people tend to make blanket statements. So, just kind of saying I failed at something is not the right approach. That’s really helpful and I love your prescription analogy and I think that was perfect.
We’ve got — let’s see — about 10 minutes left in our discussion today. If you have questions, please chat them in, and I’ll have Jennifer and Bill answer your questions.
So, while you guys are putting questions in, I’d like to throw one more question over to Bill. Just because no one wakes up thinking that, you know, I want my business to be pushed to the brink and I’d like all my well-laid plans to get upended. You know, nobody asked for this situation, but it’s the scenario that we’re in. And if you’re looking for a silver lining, you know, you could say that this is an opportunity to reset perspective and let go of things that don’t serve us and emerge stronger on the other side.
So, Bill, could you talk a little bit about what are those things, what are the attitudes and the behaviors that will not only help us navigate the crisis right now, but help us make us better leaders on the other side?
BILL: One of the things that — that we have to be able to do is silence our inner critic. Our inner critics are very loud at times like this and wind up nurturing our being. If you were raised in a more critical environment as you know from transactional analysis, you’ll tend to be more critical and more nurturing environment, you’ll tend to be more nurturing, but the challenge is this is the time for us to nurture our employees. This is the time for us to nurture ourselves and to look for signs of criticism that is heaped on.
Small goals to increase traction are really the key and so, you know, we know that 2% of human beings basically are goal setters and 98% are problem solvers, but this is a problem that can’t be solved. This is only a goal that could be set, that can be — that we can move against. And so, if we take a look at human resources working with people on setting goals or if we look at managers I’m working with people on setting goals, one of the biggest things we face is what are those goals look like.
Well, I’m a big believer in self-worth and so identity versus role is the thing that Sandler teaches. And identity is who we are and role is what we do. Most people to solve problems like this work on what they do, their role, and that’s not going to solve it.
So, the challenge is working on yourself under the heading three and two. Every day of your life, you should be working on three behavioral goals and make you stronger in your position and two identity goals that make your beliefs stronger about yourself. And, so again, we have to work on the being as well as the doing and so that’s one major issue.
Second, I agree that — that behavior is the key. It’s one of the things I’ve led my business on. But here’s the challenge, we told people to work from home. We said it’s simple, just take your job and go home. Well, that’s never simple, so leaders have to write; it blows up at that point… Leaders have to work on behavior playbooks. Behavior playbooks, are you building a roadmap for your people and whatever they do. So, if it’s work from home, what’s the work from home playbook? It’s not simply take your laptop and work out of your bedroom. So, how do we build that behavior playbook and help them define what the new behavior norm will be?
People aren’t going to be 100% effective anymore, not for a while. If they’re — if they’re 40 to 60, we should accept that because they have children at home. They have other things that are tearing at them. And so, how can we accept the model of — let’s say 60% effective and staying feel good about that, but make sure the other times you have, you’re working on keeping yourself strong in this process
BRIANA: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought up behavior because that was a question we got here in the Q&A. Can either of you shed more insight on what behavior metrics might look like in a sales focused organization?
So, before I throw this question over to both of you, I just want to do a quick plug for Outmatch. You know, one of the things we do is a talent assessment and — well, we don’t measure behavior, we do measure personality traits. So, these are the things that predict behavior. And if you’re looking at something like a sales role or, you know, right now, we even have a leading in crisis assessment that I’m happy to share with everyone on the call where you can take this assessment and see, you know, where you are strong and where you might be able to close some gap in the context of managing crisis.
So, I just wanted to throw that out there before each of you share a little bit more about what a behavioral metric might look like.
BILL: Yeah, I can attest to that. Your confidence in your behavior models that you measure are amazing. We’ve been using your products for a long time, and it really is predictor of so many different things, but it also gives us that roadmap to be able to help people grow.
Going back to your behavior question, if we look at sales, you know, the behaviors will modify but they won’t change. The number one behavior that any sales person has to have is prospecting or lead generation. And the number two, one is building relationships and again those are things that can happen right now. The third is qualifying opportunity and so we need to be able to qualify what opportunity is because everybody won’t qualify to do business with. And then the fourth is make presentations up close as opposed to just spraying presentations out there.
So, now we look at those top four behaviors, they’re not going to change, and I think the issue is we have to teach people how to execute them in the virtual world for a while until they can get back into a face-to-face world.
BRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. And I thought it was interesting. I’ll just pull one more chat we got in. One of the questions — a couple of questions that got are, you know, “Is this session being recorded?” and yes, I will send this out to everybody tomorrow with the recording and slides, so you guys will have all of those follow-up resources.
I think it was interesting — we got a comment earlier in the presentation when we were doing a poll about how you’re experiencing anxiety and someone said, “I’m not experiencing anxiety.”
So, before we move to our final thoughts of the presentation, I would like to get your take on that, you know, either someone’s not experiencing anxiety or that’s their experience of not experiencing it.
So, you guys could just talk to that quickly.
JENNIFER: So, may be that that person isn’t feeling what they would quantify as anxiety and that’s a legitimate — that’s a legitimate place to be. I think part of what we’re pointing out as well and the way your quest– the poll was framed to this, is that you were asking about it potentially on two levels. You were asking about it as a personal experience and them you’re asking about it as an organiz– what’s the mood of the organization.
I think one of the things that we’re pointing at is, you know, that just because individuals aren’t experiencing what they would consider high levels of negative anxiety. We do know that organizations are feeling very stressed, and that many people are feeling a leveling of what we were calling anxiety or at least a response to uncertainty.
And, so there’s absolutely a range, you know. Some people are feeling more paralyzed depending on their response to uncertainty, their response to threat. Others are feeling much more capable. And we need those capable people to step forward and help fill that gap. But, you know, from an organizational perspective, we have pretty good data just in past crises, and also from just experiences being able to assess these things in environments like this that this kind of huge shock will create organizational anxiety.
BILL: One of the things that we know is that psychologists tell us everybody experiences anxiety, but some have a built-in mechanism to deal with it mitigated. So, it may be there, but whoever asked the question may have a natural slant toward dealing with it immediately, and so it never gets below grassroots level.
BRIANA: I think it’s a perfect way of —
Go ahead, Jennifer.
JENNIFER: I’m sorry, Briana. I was just going to say one more thing in because of — I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you please. Go ahead.
BRIANA: Go ahead.
JENNIFER: Sorry, one quick thing. You know, one of the things that I’ve spoken to a lot of leaders about is exactly what Bill just said. You know, some people have a natural mechanism for managing their anxiety. One of the things that leaders need to be aware of for themselves and also for their high performers who have stepped into the gap and seem to be doing really well is that there’s also a natural emotional tendency to be really productive, and then hit something of an emotional wall, and see a dip in that and then, and then be really productive.
I tend to be that way personally where I have first a really high producing, you know, being a problem solver, you know, jumping in and solutioning and as a leader, I’m great at crisis for that reason. I’m pretty bomb-proof through my experience. But I also have moments of like that blast away from myself. And so, I think we need to be really cognizant of that in ourselves and also in our leadership, and be watching for that cycle, because if you’ve got someone who’s not experiencing anxiety or who’s coping really well, that may not be a permanent state. So those who you assume are fine, who are demonstrating being fine, still check in with them. You know, make sure that you’re checking in with people because those are the people who might do this silently.
BRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree.
Yeah, and everybody reacts to it differently, so just because you’re reacting in some way doesn’t mean that other people are reacting in that same way. So, it’s as if you need a road map for navigating not only your own anxiety, but the anxiety of the people that you interact with so often.
So, really quick before we shut down the presentation, I chatted in that SHRM activity ID for anyone that needs it, but I’d like to leave us with, you know, one piece of advice from each of you. What would you like our audience to leave with today either to remember or an action item that they can take in terms of leading through anxiety?
Bill, let’s start with you.
BILL: I asked people to take out a sheet of paper, just a plain sheet of paper. Draw a line down the middle of it, split it in two. On the left side, write controllables. On the right side, write uncontrollable. And we pretend to believe that everything’s out of our control at times like this, but what we’re going to find when we do this exercise is it’s not. We can control our behavior, we can control our beliefs, we can control our skill. Some of the things that are out of our control, we just have to release and let go away.
So, that sheet of paper is a great roadmap for people to understand the reality that they’re dealing with.
BRIANA: That’s great advice. Thank you, Bill.
Jennifer, what would you say?
JENNIFER: I would recommend a similar activity with a slightly different focus. I would recommend that leaders do an exercise where they identify the key stakeholders in their lives, and what I mean by that is themselves, their families, their teams, their organizations, and go through and catalog what do they think the other person is most concerned about., the top three of what the other people or themselves are concerned about. Call those things out by name, which helps eliminate the fear factor and focus people’s energies because one of the most impactful things we can do right now is what we call professional empathy. That means that you understand the other person’s perspective and how to help manage to those anxieties, those emotions, those opportunities. And we don’t often catalog in an intentional way what other people might need.
In our emerging leaders program, we talked a lot about understanding how your leadership thinks, what they’re concerned about on a day-to-day basis, how their performance is evaluated in order to be a more efficient — effective communicator because people hear things through a “what’s in it for me” filter always. “What’s in it for me?” That’s not selfish, it’s human and that’s okay, but as leaders, make sure that you can catalog what do you think they’re most concerned about and then look for patterns and help that guide some of your communication initiative.
BRIANA: Thank you so much, Jennifer. Thank you, Bill. Thank you to everyone in our audience who stuck with us through the hour.
It was a great discussion, so I’m still glad to have our guests on and have all of you with us today. So, please come back for our next webinar and be sure to grab your SHRM code before you leave.
After years of growth and low unemployment rates, there’s no question that the COVID-19 pandemic changed the hiring landscape almost overnight. By mid-April, the number of unemployed reached 22 million, wiping out a decade of gains in just four weeks.
At the same time, the crisis created a boom in certain pockets of the economy, including essential businesses and businesses that had (or were able to quickly pivot to) an online model.
Since the crisis began, our data shows a spike in the number of companies using video interviewing software. This tells us two things: that hiring is still happening, and that video is key in supporting the shift to a digital model, one that may stick around long after the outbreak ends.
Other early adopters include baking and financial services, education, sports, and IT. Here’s a look at what’s happening in the top 4 industries:
HR and staffing
It seems only logical that HR and staffing would be among the first to adopt video interviewing, as they represent a cross-section of industries. Outside of specialized staffing where demand has fallen, companies continue to rely on these services during the pandemic.
While the staffing industry has shown it’s ability adapt to a digital model, there’s concern about hiring managers, who are in uncharted territory. As Human Resource Executive magazine points out, “Managers typically receive training in the basics, but now, we’re in a whole new world. How do we help them through the nuances of video interviewing, virtually onboarding new hires, building a virtual team?”
Getting the right tools in place makes this transition easier, especially as hiring slows in some industries and picks up in others. And should remote work become more popular on the other side, the organizations that took the time to prepare will be well-positioned when the hiring resurgence happens.
Manufacturing
In manufacturing, supply chain disruptions have some companies ramping up production to meet increased demand. Similar to HR and staffing, manufacturing touches multiple sectors, including many on the frontlines.
Reports USA Today, GE Healthcare is hiring additional manufacturing employees to help meet the need for personal protective equipment like face masks as well as ventilators, CT machines, ultrasound devices, mobile X-ray systems and patient monitors. The same is true of cleaning supply manufacturers and others creating newly necessary items.
The only problem is, as MarketWatch shares, “In the manufacturing industry, many employers are actually struggling to fill openings because the positions have become more technically sophisticated than they were in past decades.”
Here’s where the right recruiting technology solutions can help these organizations source, screen, and assess potential candidates, working to make sure reqs are filled with the right people, even when in-person interviews aren’t an option.
Health and medical
Since the U.S. declared a public health emergency at the end of January, health and medical organizations have been working around the clock to find workers to take care of patients.
The Office of Personnel Management even implemented new guidelines as part of its COVID-19 Excepted Service Hiring Authority initiative to expedite the hiring process. States like California have changed the rules to “free up more doctors and nurses,” contacting those already retired and relying on the support of advanced students.
The health and medical arena are also in the midst of digital disruption, as telehealth becomes increasingly useful.
Between the need for qualified talent and a call to move patient interactions online, video is apt to serve a larger number of organizations in the coming days, weeks, and months. No surprise that a quick Indeed.com search for “healthcare” in the U.S. yielded close to 65,000 openings, ranging from medical assistants to patient care specialists.
Retail
Though retail as a whole isn’t doing too well, with temporary and permanent closures across the country, there are pockets of hiring going on. Most of this activity is taking place in grocery and hardware stores, both of which are considered essential in most states, including the hardest-hit like New York and New Jersey.
Convenience store chain 7-Eleven is hiring 20,000 for positions across the U.S. The parent company of Safeway and Acme is looking to hire 30,000 new associates. In March, Kroger was planning to hire 10,000 new workers but ended up hiring more than double that. Tractor Supply Co. and Ace Hardware are following suit, while online retailers like Amazon continue adding to their workforce, hiring 100,000 in March and another 75,000 in April.
Even for temporary roles, high-volume scenarios necessitate a structured approach to hiring, one that makes it possible to interview multiple candidates in a short time frame.
When the pandemic ends…
It will have changed recruiting and talent selection as we know it. If you’re considering making digital hiring part of your strategy, you’re in good company. No matter what industry you’re in, digital hiring will provide a way for you to continue operating in crisis, or support you on the road to recovery.
The Senate approved the largest emergency aid package in US history – a $2 trillion stimulus for coronavirus relief. Because this legislation is new and still changing, we brought on public affairs expert Joe Kefauver to talk through the key points of the stimulus. We also discuss what to consider as you re-evaluate your people management strategy and what long-term effects we might see on the global economy.
Rather than look at it as a ‘bridge’ until we get back to normal, we should be evaluatinghow our talent and businesses will change coming out of this – because who we invest in and how we operate may be very different on the other side.
As coronavirus continues to disrupt the economy, leaders are faced with the impossible challenge of caring for their people and keeping the business alive – which means continuing to sell in a time of crisis. We talk with 3 sales experts and business owners from Sandler Training about how performance and productivity have changed, and how HR can partner with sales to keep the revenue engine running.
Use these 6 competencies to identify successful remote employees – especially helpful in today’s stressful times
Remote work isn’t a new phenomenon. Some companies have been hiring remote workers for years. The old fashioned term for remote work was “telecommuting.” Remember that? Telecommuting was exciting! “You mean I can spend the entire day in my PJs?!”
Today, remote work is strategy, and getting more strategic by the day. Even before the coronavirus pandemic changed our work lives forever, companies began shifting some work to remote employees to help save costs, make schedules more flexible, and even increase their talent pool.
The challenges with managing and hiring remote workers will only get more complex as companies fundamentally change their hiring practices in a post Coronavirus world. The biggest problem with hiring remote workers is the hiring process itself. If you are using the same process as you use for on-premise workers, you are either not happy with the outcomes or losing good candidates who simply don’t want to put on an “interview suit.”
Using your existing process, how do you know if your candidate is self-directed enough, can build relationships remotely, or is agile enough to learn at a distance? In other words, what are the knowledge, skills, personal characteristics, and competencies that lead to peak performance?
Here are 6 key competencies that we have found are the most telling of success in a remote role:
1. Adaptability
Open to new ideas and ways of doing business as well as adopting to change willingly.
2. Resilience
Responds to challenges with composure, optimism and hardiness; perseveres and exhibits healthy stress management strategies.
3. Learning Agility
Learns quickly, applies newly learned information and skills to innovate and adapt, and uses feedback to improve.
4. Communicating effectively
Expresses thoughts and ideas in a clear and effective manner.
5. Relationship management
Builds and maintains meaningful and positive connections with others inside or outside of the organization.
6. Teamwork and Collaboration
Cooperates with others through mutual trust and accountability to accomplish shared objectives.
If you are hiring remotely or realizing that remote hiring will be a key part of your post-Coronavirus strategy, you should seriously consider measuring for these competencies.
Talent assessments and video interviewing can help you identify and measure these competencies so that when you do hire that remote employee, you’ll know they can handle the work in their PJs all day long…
Crisis management, to many of us, is a process. A plan. But in today’s world, it’s also a set of skills that leaders must have as they navigate the unknown.
While coronovirus has disrupted all our lives, leaders carry an extra-heavy weight during crisis. Right now, they’re doing everything in their power to keep the business alive while also supporting disrupted teams, being a watch dog over employee health and morale, and having to make impossible decisions to part ways with people they care for.
Yes, we’ve seen crisis before. There was the sudden tragedy of 9/11, the Great Recession of 2008, and too many natural disasters to count.
But this – a pandemic spreading across the globe at terrifying speed, nations issuing shelter-in-place orders, disruption shutting down public institutions and our economy… No previous-crisis experience could have prepared us for this.
Which is why crisis management processes and plans aren’t enough. Business also need leaders with crisis management skills, including:
1. Communication
In a crisis, the need for clear, concise, and timely communication is more important than ever. There are new policies to communicate, along with state-of-the-business announcements, town halls, and team check-ins. Leaders must be ready to engage the right people at the right time and inspire action.
2. Resilience
Navigating crisis isn’t a pleasant experience, but leaders who respond with composure, optimism, and hardiness will gain the trust and support of their people. No matter what adversity they face, they’re able to think quickly and decisively, remain energetic, and persevere through challenges.
3. Innovation
Outside of crisis, innovation can take shape through ideas or experiments that help the business stay sharp or get ahead. But in crisis, innovation becomes about survival. Leaders must be able to embrace challenges and change calmly while thinking outside the box to drive the business forward.
4. Structure
In a crisis, structure, normalcy, and routine are the first things to go. Leaders must re-establish structure by adapting strategies and processes to the current and changing needs of the business. Structure doesn’t mean being rigid or inflexible. It means anticipating problems and addressing them quickly.
5. Influence
In times of uncertainty, leaders must still be able to make decisions with confidence. They may not have all the answers, but they proactively gather input from diverse sources so that they understand how all groups are impacted. This is how they build influence, get buy-in, and drive change.
6. Support
Above all, support is what people need most from their leaders during crisis. Leaders must provide clear direction, positive connections, and decisive judgement – not only to keep productivity up, but to help people see the light at the end of the tunnel and find meaning in the work they’re doing.
As businesses navigate the current crisis and the unknowns ahead, these are the leaders they need at the helm: Leaders who are naturally good at managing crisis, or who, with a little development, will be ready to rise to a future occasion.
Dedicating a few minutes to better understand your own leadership skills and the skills of those around you will go a long way in helping you leverage strengths, close gaps, and emerge from crisis stronger than ever. It’s professional development for yourself, and a way to build healthy crisis management behaviors into your company’s CulturalDNA.
At Outmatch, we’re now fully remote, but before the global heath crisis, we had about 50% of employees working from home on a regular basis. For those of you who are new to working remote and managing a remote workforce, we’re happy to share some things that have worked for us.
Cameras
Turn them on! This can be uncomfortable at first, but as more people do it, it becomes the new normal. Our IT team, which is widely dispersed, has been doing this for years, and we rolled it out company-wide about a year ago. It’s a small change that makes a BIG difference in keeping people connected. We communicate better when we can see reactions and body language, and we don’t talk over each other like we do on ‘blind’ calls. Get your leaders in the habit of turning on cameras, and with some gentle nudges, you can have everyone doing it in no time.
No multitasking
This one’s pretty straightforward: if you attend a meeting, be present. It’s hard not to multitask, especially when you don’t have anyone’s physical presence to keep you accountable (friendly reminders help here; so do cameras). We have a no-pressure policy where employees are free to decline meetings that aren’t essential for them to be in. If you find yourself in a meeting and your attention is being pulled away, simply let people know you’re going to drop off.
Flexible schedules
We moved away from set schedules a few years ago, which made sense for us culturally. We have people across all US time zones and a few in other countries, so time is relative. In our current situation, flexibility is key. Kids are home. Routines are off. Everyone is feeling stir crazy. Flexibility gives people the freedom to unplug a few times a day and work during odd hours, if needed. We encourage Outmatchers to find a schedule (or in this case, a new normal) that works for them and their team – and not to stress when they need to care for their families or themselves.
Virtual happy hour
So we don’t become totally socially deprived, we added a non-work meeting to the mix. We started “Find Out Friday” as a way to connect on things that aren’t work-related. Our first edition was “meet your pets.” Other ideas are “what’s your workout?” and “guess who’s childhood photo this is.” Get creative and try to have fun with it. Virtual meetings with no agenda can feel strange at first, but since we can’t chat around the water cooler like usual, it’s a great stand-in.
Weekly company updates
This is another change we made about a year ago. Instead of gathering everyone in our biggest common area (which isn’t an option now anyhow) for a formal quarterly update, we started “Keg of Greg,” which you can probably guess is less formal. Each week, Greg, our CEO, gets on camera for a quick company check-in. People are free to ask questions, voice concerns, and even suggest special topics. By making this a recurring meeting, people are able to stay connected and get regular face time with the CEO.
Recognition
We’re all out of our comfort zone right now, so making sure to recognize people who are working hard and helping others is a great way to boost morale. This was part of our CulturalDNA already, but it’s important to keep alive in times like these. We call this “Expedition Recognition” because we like the explorer archetype and use this theme to guide our values, which are: Build Bridges, Pack Light Travel Fast, and Sherpa Attitude. When Outmatchers do something that represents one of these values, they’re recognized for it (we use a Teams channel), and then they’re sent a charm as a token of appreciation.
Culture Club
This cross-functional team is dedicated to caring for our culture. Having a big remote population already, Culture Club members talked often about, “How do we keep remote workers connected and engaged? How do we create a sense of community across distance?” Now being 100% remote, these conversations are even more critical. With a team already assembled, we’re able to bring together creative minds from across the company, advocate for each other, and keep our culture strong, even in a time of crisis.
Final thoughts…
We know in the HR community, your #1 priority is caring for your employees. But don’t forget to care for yourself. What we’re dealing with right now is heavy. It’s emotionally exhausting, and you’re probably missing meals and sleep to try and meet the needs of others. Deborah Schwarz, HR Vice President at Cousins Properties said this about self-care:
“Don’t dismiss the weight we’re carrying. We’re taking care of people who are taking care of their families, and that is a lot. If you’re feeling heavy or down, you have a good reason. But address it and find a way to take care of yourself so that you’re able to take care of everyone else.”
The recent coronavirus outbreak has been a crash course in disruption. In a matter of weeks, it escalated from “Corona-what?” to a global health crisis that’s challenging business leaders in ways they never imagined and had no time to prepare for. In this live session, we talk with the HR community about their number one concern: how to provide care and continuity to employees during a time of crisis. We take questions, voice concerns, and share lessons learned from our first few days operating in a state of emergency.
All right, let’s get going. We have a panel of HR leaders to talk about the disruption we’re dealing with today, which is of course the Coronavirus outbreak. But I’m sure for many of you, this is not the first disruptive event you’ve ever been through and it’s not going to be the last, so I hope to provide everyone with ways to manage through our current situation as well as disruption in general.
0:41
Again, I’d like to say thank you for being here. I don’t expect you to leave the session today feeling quite as zen as this guy on the slide, but I do hope that by coming together, voicing our concerns, and sharing some insight, we can provide you with a quick breather and a place to pause regroup and prepare for whatever tomorrow brings. My name is Brianna Harper and I’m your webinar host. I’m also your resource for any questions you have during the session or any time after.
1:10
I want this to be an open forum, so we have about 30 minutes of content with our panelists, and after that, I’d like to open it up to all of you. I’d love to answer your questions and hear how you are navigating. So please chat into the questions queue whenever something comes to mind. I’ll share as much as I can with the group. You’ll also see a follow-up email for me after the session today with the slide deck and a link to the recording. If you have any questions that we don’t get to today or that you think of after the session, please reach out. You can email me at bharper@outmatch.com or find me on social @OutmatchHCM.
1:48
This is usually the part of the webinar where I talked about upcoming webinars in our future work series, but like all of you, we’re having to take things day by day right now. When you originally signed up for this, you may have registered for a totally different webinar. This was intended to be the first in a two-part diversity series, starting with Diversity Hiring, Then What, followed by How to Build a Culture of Belonging. But it didn’t seem right to ignore the reality that we’re facing different issues than we were just a few weeks ago, and having to respond to a situation that is changing every day.
2:15
So, in the spirit of being fluid rather than fighting it, we decided to change course. We will absolutely reschedule our diversity series and I will let you know as soon as we do. In the meantime, I’m happy to share our recently released future of work ebook, which has a whole chapter on diversity.
2:39
One last thing: today’s session is valid for one professional development credit for the SHRM-CP or the SHRM-SCP. Look for that activity ID for me at the end of the webinar.
2:56
For our discussion today, we have three leaders from the HR community. Robin Stenzel from Outmatch. Robin will actually be moderating the discussion with our guests. We have DeRetta Rhodes from the Atlanta Braves, and Deborah Schwarz from Cousins Properties.
3:20
Like I said, we had a totally different webinar planned for today. And these ladies have been shining stars in this time of crisis. They were able to turn on a dime to address the current situation, rather than our planned content, and they did this all while putting out fires of their own as well. So, I’m so happy to have you ladies on, and I’m really looking forward to our discussion today.
3:42
First, I would love if each of you could just tell a little about yourself. We’re all working from different places than we normally work from – we usually do our webinars in the Outmatch office in a really quiet room. So, I hope everyone will understand if there’s a little bit of background noise, but I would love for each of you ladies to introduce yourself and tell us, you know, who you are and where you’re working from today. Robin let’s start with you
4:10
So, I’m Robin Stenzel, I’m the Chief Solutions Officer at Outmatch. What that means is I work with our go-to-market team (people like Briana) on our messaging and content; our sales team to make sure that they really know what’s impacting HR during all kinds of times good and bad; and then also our product teams as we think about the products and making sure that those really match to you. But the role I’m most passionate about and I’ve spend most of my career in is the part of leading Talent at the organization. So, really thinking about how are we growing and developing our organization through our people and what does that look like for us. Prior to joining Outmatch almost a year ago, I had spent nine years at a large manufacturing company.
4:57
I also have experience in the retail and airline industries, which are really being impacted right now, and I’m sorry that we’re having to have this conversation, but excited to be able to share this as a community because I think it’s so important during these times that we’re all talking to each other about what we’re doing and how we’re doing that. I am in my home in Atlanta, Georgia, so you may see, because I really have no way of containing her, a small dog popping up and walking through as we go through this session. So excited to be here. Thank you for Robin.
DeRetta (you can’t see her face right now) but, DeRetta, would you please introduce yourself to our audience today?
5:38
Absolutely, and I wish you could see me because I thought I had my picture on. Hello, DeRetta Rhodes, I am SVP of Human Resources for the Atlanta Braves. And as you all can imagine when we’re talking about all of this, a lot of it has to do with the fact that some of the messages that we’re even having to deal with in our organization, we’re getting from MLB. So, it’s one of those things where we’re really having to kind of measure what that looks like.
6:05
My office is actually at the ball park, and so we actually for a brief period of time closed our offices. So, there’s a scant crew that’s here with me being here. So hopefully you all will be able to see me shortly and we can talk more about what this looks like when you think about not only the disruptors that’s going on outside of your organization, but then how you have to manage it inside your organization. I am glad to be a part of this conversation.
6:36
Thank you, Doretta. And Deborah over to you. Hey, yes, this is Debra Schwartz. I’m the HR Vice President for Cousins Properties. We’re in commercial real estate: Class A Trophy Building across the Sun Belt. I’ve been doing this a while over 25 years, which is ironic because for this situation, it doesn’t matter. It is a level playing field.
7:02
We are all in this together, and I have overwhelmed with joy at the amount of connectivity I’ve had with HR people both in my industry, in my city, the ideas we’ve shared. I mean, we’re just going through this together and I really think that is the way to go as an HR professional. We need to be connected right now.
7:29
Yeah, I totally agree. So, thank you again to each of you ladies for jumping on and kind of taking on this content on short notice. We’ve got a really big group on the call today. So, thank you everyone for joining us. Let’s get going.
7:48
So, these are the topics we’re going to discuss today, but I’d like to do a quick poll just to see where everyone is at. So, I’m going to launch this and let you guys tell us what your biggest concern is right in this moment.
8:10
So, chances are you’re concerned about all of these things right now.So, it may be hard to pick one. But if you could just tell us what the most pressing issue for you is right now, you know, the thing that’s really keeping you up at night. That will help us focus our time and attention on the things that are most important to you right now.
8:35
So, we’re getting some answers and I’ll leave the poll open for just a few more seconds, and then I will share the responses with everyone.
8:53
Right now, it looks like providing care and continuity to employees is leading the way, so we will certainly be ready to talk about that with you guys.
9:05
All right. Let me get my close out the poll and share the answers.
9:11
Wow. Yeah, I mean I think this, you know, it’s interesting, Briana, you look at this sort of “providing care and continuity you employees.”
9:16
I mean as Debra mentioned this is an unprecedented time for us, and so really making sure that although we may not know all the answers at this point that we do have sort of at the front of the mind our employees. And then this idea of creating a sense of community is certainly something we’ve been talking about as you work from home, really making sure people, particularly those who might be alone, or you know, that they are having some social interaction. What does that look like and then certainly followed by updates and changes as you start to think about this and we’re going to, you know, touch on all of these and we’ll also touch on technology and sort of the impact that that’s had on all of us in different ways based on all of our businesses. So excited to have the conversation.
10:01
Yeah, absolutely. Let me close this down.
10:15
Go ahead, Robin, I’ve got a set of questions that we’re going through with the panel. So, I’d love for you to take this on and we can kind of frame this for everybody. Yeah, we know that everything while everyone’s being disrupted, it looks a little bit different in each of our worlds because we each were set up in different ways.
10:41
You know, I think just from the simple fact of working at home. As one example, you know, we at Outmatch do that periodically so not as hard. But then there’s been a lot of disruption for us to our customers and what that might look like. I’m curious, you know, DeRetta you and I were sharing some stories the other day on the phone about your workforce and what this meant for you all as it relates to the Braves and MLB. Maybe you could kind of take a stab at sharing what that looks like in your particular circumstance.
11:11
Sure, I think one of the challenges for us, quite frankly, is that you think about it we have two different workforces. So, of course, we’ve got our front office. We also are dealing with our game day staff. What you may have seen, this just recently came out here from MLB, there’s foundations that each one of the MLB teams are going to actually continue to pay our game day staff as we go through this disruption. But the reality around that is that we had to take a lot of things into consideration and understand exactly how we needed to do that. And so, in my world, it’s really interesting that there’s so many different interplays that we have to deal with. Not only are we listening to what the MLB is telling us, but for the Atlanta Braves, we’re also owned by the media. So, there’s all these things that we have to take in consideration before we even go out to our population. But the reality is that we want to put people at ease, and what does that look like? And how do we begin get to really understand how we do that for them?
12:10
So, just as you all can imagine, I’m on several different calls every single day. And as we just were talking, my CEO came in to ask question. So, we just have a lot that’s constantly going on that. we really have to think about and consider.
12:29
That’s great. Thanks. Deborah, how about you within your business or both your business and what you’re hearing? It’s kind of interesting. We’ve got our employees, but then we have these humongous buildings filled with hundreds of people in very close quarters. So, we’ve been trying to communicate proactively, tell them what we’re doing. We’ve been very stringent about sticking to CDC guidelines and making sure they knew we were not giving them directives on how to handle their workforce, but we have come up with ways to manage our properties.
12:59
We are looking at, we have smaller staffs and we’re doing different shifts. I’m actually at our office today basically making sure no one’s here. But we have our we have IT resources and we have building engineers at our properties, but we’re giving people a chance to be home at the same time. So, one shift comes in one day the next shift comes in the next day because there are all these considerations around childcare and kids out of school and just all these variables that we hadn’t ever been faced with before.
13:43
Yeah, I think, you know, as you talk about some of that and, kind of, you’ve got that same base: you’ve got customers that you’re worried about and what does that look like, as well as your employees. Can you tell us kind of what are you seeing? Are people still staying in your buildings and working? Are they asking you all questions about that? They have been asking questions a lot of the company has sent people home, just because of what the government said up to this point.
14:12
It just it’s a new normal and I feel like we’re having to communicate with our customers around that and our employees around that, as well, and the challenges. I keep seeing a lot of emails going back and forth about how to work remotely and it’s all work-related, but I really have been thinking a lot about like, how do you establish a life, a new life?
14:42
I mean, it’s really easy not to not to get dressed. It’s easy to stay in your pajamas all day long, and it’s easy to sleep in but it just kind of seems like the novelty of that freedom is going to wear off and we want to be able to support our workforce in having a routine.
15:02
I just am workforce obsessed right now. They’re just on my mind and it every day. It’s changing and I’m just trying to be ahead of it. But it is, I mean, it is just consuming. Yeah, I think that’s, you know, I think you know as you talked about, you’ve got employees who can’t stay home, right, those buildings, regardless of whether there’s people in them or not have maintenance issues and other kinds of things that have to kind of keep going. So, both you and DeRetta both brought up something I thought was really interesting, too, is you’re managing multiple bases as far as employees and customers.
15:32
So, I think DeRetta, you talked about managing both kind of what are MLB expectations as well as from the Braves organization. And what does that look like? And how does that differ? And Deborah, you mentioned customers, you know in your buildings and as well as what does that look like for your workforce? And I think we’re finding the same thing at Outmatch. We’re trying to think about how do we care and feed our employees?
15:57
Yet, we know that our customers, some of you who are on the line, are also being impacted and you know, we support you in hiring needs that maybe aren’t going on or development needs that you can’t focus on right now. And so, I think there’s just a lot as we start to prioritize and start to look at that. And what did those things start to look like in a new normal will be more of sort of what comes up, and I think we’ll get into it a little bit as we ask, kind of, a few more questions.
16:26
So, as we think about kind of the next thing we talked about, and again, this was sort of the thing that’s top of mind to our participants on today’s webinar, you know, DeRetta, can you talk about how are you caring for your employees during this time? What are the things that you’re doing? You know, what kind of communications how frequent, how formal/informal? What does that look like in your organization? Hey, and that’s a really great question. So, it’s interesting. We’ve got a multitude of things that are going out. So not only we having to manage what we’re telling them, but also we’re having to manage what’s going out from MLB.
16:54
And so, when you talk about the difference between formal and informal, we’re trying to get ahead of things before they before they hear it or see it on the news or in ESPN or wherever they that baseball news may be.
17:12
But the other piece is that when we start talking about how do you provide care, one of those I just mentioned is that we wanted to put our organization around the fact that basically, our baseball season has been truncated to what we know today. So opening day for us was supposed to be April third.
17:31
Well that clearly is not the case, so one of the things that we’re trying to make sure people feel comfortable about is not only how they’re going to get paid, and then the other thing is making sure that we’re talking to them about their benefits, how that’s impacting them, weaving in what we know, things that are being said out there, the new legislation that’s coming out when you about the emergency FMLA, the medical leave act, the emergency sick plan. So, we’ll try to make sure that we keep those communications in front. We’re also trying to make sure how do we manage that to make sure we just make people feel at ease. And this is a challenge. I don’t know if I can say to any individual, oh, don’t worry about it, because we don’t know. From day to day, we’re experiencing new numbers, understanding what you’re supposed to do for social distancing.
18:23
We can’t say it’s going to be okay. We just have to continue to say we’re going to support as best we can and we’re going to move fluidly throughout this whole entire process.
18:34
Yeah, I think you’re right that that unknown of, you know, we all kind of sit in this world of wanting to say, it’ll be alright, but we just don’t know what’s happening. Deborah, how about for you and your organization, or for those people that you’re connected to? What are you hearing about in terms of care for employees? I am hearing that people are being the most fluid they’ve ever been before. They’re doing things like suspending their PTO policies to make sure that people are not coming in to work sick.
19:02
They don’t want them to feel that pressure if I have a sick family member or they’re not feeling well or another issue. We had people who normally ride Transit are afraid to take public transportation. So, we made arrangements for them to be able to start driving to work, reminding people about resources. We have being straightforward that people are afraid right now and we have Employee Assistance programs to help people. I mean, let me think.
19:34
What else? Another thing I’m trying to really get a grasp on is how I can keep everyone connected. I was telling Robin yesterday, I rolled out a challenge, a wellness challenge, where the American Red Cross is desperate for donors right now. And while I was trapped in my house going crazy that I’m just sitting there doing nothing to help, I decided to go give blood and then I thought, well, what if we all gave blood, so I put that out there.
20:04
This challenge that if people go and give blood and send me a picture of them in the chair, they’ll earn money towards their HSA incentives.
20:09
And we always do incentives with money towards that, but this was on the fly. It’s a temporary offer and I’m just kind of thinking ahead, like I’m expecting we’ll have decent participation and then we’ll have all these pictures and we can we can make, you know, a poster of how we help fight the coronavirus. I’m just trying to think about what can we do together while we’re apart?
20:40
I think, you know, kind of as you both have been talking, a couple of things that I just jotted down that I think might be important for the broader group to think about. DeRetta, I like this part of let’s get ahead of what’s coming out of the media. When we can, let’s have our employees here from us versus someone else because I think that helps people feel more calm more relaxed more like they know that you’re caring for that. So, I love that that you’re working to do that, and then sort of thinking about how do we kind of keep these things you know both of you kind of had this normalcy, right, in a time that’s not normal?
21:10
How do we keep things consistent: pay, benefits, health incentives, you know, what are those things that we’re doing that we would do during normal times? We might have to do them a little differently than what we did before, but really keeping that that normalcy and I think kind of too, you know, Debra, you talked about, hey, at some point it gets old sitting in your pajamas. So how do you kind of get up? And how do you stay connected? I know, you know, for us at Outmatch, this idea of cameras on all the time. So, I’m very incented to shower and not show up in a ponytail with not makeup because no one needs to see that.
21:40
So really, kind of being able to create that environment and that normalcy for each other to see that we’re still there and we’re still engaged and what we’re doing. And there are some of these things that aren’t so normal. Again, you might see dogs walking behind me, but you wouldn’t see that normally. But again, what does that look like? And how do we sort of mix this vulnerability because we all feel a little vulnerable right now with this normalcy to kind of make sure that we’re providing that care.
22:10
I think too as we think about communications, it’s really kind of sticking to those channels that your employees know and when you need to making those changes. You know, we do something each week that we call keg of Greg. Greg is our CEO, and you know, it’s one of those things that we’re pretty good about but sometimes we don’t do it or we don’t have a lot, but we know that during these times that has become an important channel for us to make sure that we’re staying connected and doing that. And again, whatever those things that you can do to provide that normalcy.
22:40
I think it really helps during these times to sort of settle people because it feels it’s different and working at home. But these are the things I do every day and they feel a little bit more normal. And I think there’s an educational component with your managers because managers a lot of times aren’t comfortable with flexibility or if I can’t see you you’re not working and it is critical they’re the face of your company, and so that behavior is going to be how the company’s response was perceived.
23:10
And so I kind of feel like if managers are a little stiff, maybe you need to say to them, You know what it’s okay right now, none of us know what we’re doing. I’m here to help you if you want to bounce things off of me or you know, let’s be accommodating. Let’s be accommodating, assume people have good intentions. And that’s our M-O for right now. I mean, I just I see that struggle in managers and it’s just not worth that getting in the way right now.
23:42
I’m seeing a lot of comments and questions come I,n which I love. It’s absolutely the intention of this forum today. So, I just wanted to say that Christine said, “What I still have to put makeup on?” and then Jennifer chatted in asking if we could please talk about how we’re handling employees who have children at home. That’s a great question threat Deborah. You want to start with that?
24:12
Yeah, we have been absolutely flexible. I I’ve always had the mindset about teleworking that that is not how you take care of your child the first 12 months of its life. So, I’ve always felt really strongly that there’s needs to be a line in the sand and there needs to be appropriate child care. Not right now. It is just an impossible circumstance for people if you think about them being able to obtain daycare, it’s pretty much impossible.
24:42
And they’re figuring it out in their family, but single parents or parents that work different shifts. There’s just going to be challenges now. We have to be we have to be flexible. I really do I do think that there needs to be a standard that our performance has got to be there for the job. We’ve got to take care of the health of our companies, so we do need employees performing.
25:06
But if they need to do it a little differently, if they need to work at night once the kids are asleep. I just I think it’s worth making that accommodation, and it’s also amazing. The government is starting to adapt and talk about implementing all of these accommodations, FMLA-wise and other because people need help, people need support, people need money.
25:34
DeRetta, have you heard any things, kind of as you think about sort of the idea of working parents. Things that you all are doing or things you’ve heard from others?
25:48
Maybe we lost DeRetta. I think she’s stuck on mute. DeRetta, are you there?
25:59
We might have to let her jump back in. I got another comment from Sherry that said, “We went ahead and loaded 40 hours of leave for our staff to use at their discretion,” which really started to reduce some of the fears in their workforce. Great, great tip. Yeah.
26:19
I had another question come in about “How do you handle staff when half is able to work from home, but half is required to be there?” I hope DeRetta can come back on with us because it sounds like that’s somewhat of a situation that she’s in, but we can talk to that. Yeah, Debra, you’ve got that too, right with this the building? It’s kind of interesting in tough times like this people really step up.
26:46
So I don’t really feel like they’re comparing themselves to other people, and like I said, we are making accommodations for our property on-site staff to be home part of the time, but I think people really want to do a good job and they understand that they are more critical than ever. Because like what Robin was saying, I mean, we have a hundred systems on every single floor that could break at any second, and if people are working in the office they want lights on and they want heat and air conditioner and all that.
27:22
So, I mean, I think that if it is a problem that you to just have a very direct conversation with your staff about why it’s important and that their health comes first and their safety comes first, but you know, hopefully the company is making accommodations for those type of things, which is why we’re at half staff because there’s less people to be around.
27:46
DeRetta, how about you? Have you guys face this sort of some getting to work at home and some not?
27:50
Well, let me tell you the very interesting thing for us. We didn’t have a work from home policy. So, when you think about our population like we be people to be here because we needed them to be engaged with, you know, our fans, and what happens is so we have to very quickly put together temporary work from home on policy so that we could make sure that we lifted those employees into that type of environment. And so, this is the challenge right now.
28:21
Not only did we have to do that, but then we started to have to talk to people about what does working from home mean? We know this is something that we weren’t typically doing, and it wasn’t that we didn’t want to do work from home.
28:33
It’s just what our body of work is wasn’t that. You know, you have some populations or small groups that could, but for the most part we are a fan-facing, service sports entertainment organization, and that’s what we do, And we look at people every single day. So, for those organizations that already had it, I applaud you guys because now I really need to start thinking moving forward, What is it that we need to do as opposed to spin something up really quickly? That we have other things that are in place that is a contingency part of how we need to do it. And so, I’m in a very different place than I probably think a lot of organizations because we didn’t even have it, and, you know, I have my leaders talking about, Whoa, this is great.
29:18
We have it now and we had think about, What are those components that you have to have work from home? Like people need equipment, people need to be able to talk on the phone. I mean, it’s all those things that we started to have to think about in a very short period of time, literally 24 to 48 hours. And that really dovetails into the value of business continuity plans.
29:40
We put one of those together about a year ago, and the minute this came out we were able to refer to these documents and we really, we had not, Pandemic was not on the list of disasters. But nevertheless, we things we had considered in advance was every single person at the corporate office already had a laptop. I mean that was extremely significant for us because then we could just do a drill with everyone working from home last week, last Monday, and making sure the technology worked and we could support it.
30:20
And so, that will be a great to-do item post this period of time, if you haven’t done it already to really get something on paper that where every function knows what they serve, you know, what they do. If you can’t go to the office, what are your options? It’s it just takes a lot of the reactionary pain out of it. Yeah. I got another question from Coral. She said” I work in the food manufacturing industry if employees aren’t here, we can’t run production. So, any advice or suggestions on how to manage our workforce?”
30:50
So, Deborah and I actually worked together before in a manufacturing environment and we know. We’ve been talking a lot to our colleagues who are still there and needing to run shifts and 24/7 operations. And what does that look like? So again, we came out of the packaging industry. So, for all that great foods you’re making, hopefully, you know, you’re getting packaging that comes along with that. And so how do you do that?
31:18
And I think you know what we are hearing is: lots of communication to people, safety plans to kind of Deborah’s point, you know, there are plans in place. Hopefully, you have those within your food operations plan or if you do have to make some changes, what does that look like? So, there’s contingency plans. The other thing, you know, probably you have some sort of shift change communication that’s going on beforehand. If you don’t, you should have that in place, and then also what our contingency plans that people can use virtually in case they do have issues that are coming around. Those were a couple of things that I had heard from some colleagues who are sort of in that in that manufacturing space because it became so important to them as they thought about their business and thinking about it.
32:04
Yeah, the food and service industries are getting hit really hard and we need to pay attention to them.
32:14
You know, what’s interesting to me about that, too, is that, again, not that I’m unique in any type of way, but in the city of Atlanta, a lot of our part-time employees, we shared with the Hawks and with the Falcons and with the Atlanta United, which are all sports teams.
32:33
And so, the interesting thing is that one of the conversations that I’ve heard is we know that Kroger Public’s and also Amazon is hiring, is that we say, oh, let’s think of other options. And I’m speaking specifically about a part-time staff because we want to be able to provide other solutions for them. And it’s like, you know, the best analogy I can give is that we still want them in the bullpens. Look we still want them ready to go because when we spin back up to play games, which is what our goal is, we still want to have our good people there. We just want to think of other options to support them during this timeframe, knowing that there’s some things we can do.
33:14
But what other partners out there that we can work with that can also help us as well with that population, and just thinking through that as well, and really talking about collaboration from a workforce perspective across different cities and organizations. I think too, as you think about kind of these people who are having to kind of go the front lines and if you’re an employee who’s not having to be sort of front-line, you’re working from home or someplace that that’s a little bit different. You know, what can you do for those front-line employees?
33:44
So, can you provide maybe a meal that you maybe don’t traditionally do, but can you provide a lunch or a snack or a dinner that you wouldn’t]. Just as a thank you kind of thing. And then thinking about kind of those corporate employees and from a support perspective, What are the ways that you can maybe o some virtual, you know, video thank you that you can send into a plant that you could play that show employees are like, hey, I appreciate the fact. You know, I think again so much of being in that environment and how appreciative I was every single day of those people who went on to a manufacturing floor and created a product that gave me a job so that someone was selling it.
34:14
But how might you kind of get those thank you’s from your, kind of people in support staff and things like that to kind of share with those frontline employees. That might be another way to sort of help them kind of think about community and the appreciation that you feel knowing that their work can’t be done virtually and what that looks like. Yeah.
34:37
I’m really loving this conversation right now, and we’re continuing to get lots of comments in. While we’re on the topic of remote work, Tammy wrote in and said that LinkedIn is offering 16 free courses on remote work and that they are compiling a one-pager for their team who’ve never worked remote before, so that’s a suggestion, and then I got another question from Laura asking about you know, how do we stay productive?
35:03
So, when other employees might not have the same volume of work to do, what kinds of directives or suggestions can we make to help them be more productive in the downtime, and then you know, how to keep them sharp so when things get back to normal? I think it’s really easy to just defer to email when you’re when you’re working from home, and it is really important to stick to make the time to set up a conference call or a Skype call. The connectivity is just completely different and I was speaking with someone on my team who does a lot of administrative and receptionist work. So when she’s home we figured out a way for her to answer calls.
35:44
But the traffic that she’s used to just isn’t there, and I think you can, like I-9 purging project – wouldn’t that have been perfect? Too bad we already did that. Something like that that’s kind of been on the back burner.
36:04
You haven’t had time to slow down enough to get it done. Those projects are always waiting in the wings. They’re housekeeping, but they matter, and I think if you kind of flip through the big picture of what your function looks like, some of that stuff is lying around and you might be able to get it done at this time. And I totally agree with that like we just implemented Workday. So, there’s several different optimization projects that people were not excited to do anyway. Now you get to do it. You get to spend your time on that.
36:38
I do like the idea also about connectivity, like all of us being able to see each other.You want to still feel like you’re part of a community, and it’s something sometimes is lost when it’s just on the phone. So, when you can see somebody, I’m like, oh I can see you and I feel connected and I think thinking through those type of things. And just imagine, you all, I’m thinking through those as we again close our offices through April 3rd, and having people work from home. So, we’re just trying to think of how we keep community? How do we compete collaboration? How do we keep connection?
37:12
I think to just that, you know, I think kind of some of these things are sort of on the tactical side, but thinking too about thought leadership, right? What are some of those things that you just sometimes don’t have the headspace to think about in the office because people are coming at you, regardless of your job. You don’t really get that chance to sort of think big picture and strategically. And what might I do? And so, what does that look like? And that could be anyone in their job – I mean. So, for me strategy is about making choices, right? So, what are the choices you want to make when you kind of go back that might be for individual contributors about their career and what that looks like for them. It could be about a business plan, a department plan.
37:44
And what does that look like? And how do you start to put that in place? And then how do you use free resources like things like YouTube? How do you Google kind of where things are coming in, or how do you start to create content? We just went through a run through earlier today. We’re going to talk about some managing your career that you never have time to talk about, but we’re going to do that with our employees. And it was great because I engaged three employees to sort of tell their story around, What does it look like for managing their career in different ways? And we’ll launch that out to the team, you know, need week with a set of resources – books to read, YouTube videos to watch, and article to read.
38:14
So, it’s a great time when people don’t have that to start to build those skills that they maybe don’t get to do during the normal times because all of the stuff that’s coming at them. So hopefully you come out with a workforce that as Deborah mentioned, we’ve still got to be productive and how do we get that, but productivity probably looks a little different today. But imagine if we all go out and build a little bit more skill what productivity can look like tomorrow. Good point.
38:44
And Robin, I love that. Let me tell you why. So, we just came off a Performance Management and we started goal setting. So, I had one of my staff members say, Oh are we not doing goal-setting? I said, And why wouldn’t we? Yes, we’re still doing those setting now. What I may do is, I mean, I extended out a little bit longer for you from a different perspective maybe as opposed to 10 days you’ve got 15.
39:07
But at the at the end of the day, and this is the reality I think we’re going to have to think about because I feel I have a feeling that we’re having this disruptor call, we’re going to have another disruptor call when everything spins back up and we’re sitting here and we’re like, Oh my gosh what’s happened? We’ve got to get people back in the game and we need them to have that happen. So, from a business continuity standpoint, we’re still doing goal setting. We’re still doing those things that are functioning you and your role. To your point, Robin, you come back and it’s not the saying we’re in a new normal, but then you’re back in another normal that you’ve got to get ready for that and be poised to do.
39:44
So, goal-setting is still happening for us. Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s a great point. I got a question in from Ashley asking if we could share our work from home policy. So, it Outmatch we’re a software company.
40:00
We’re about 50 percent remote already, and we have you know, especially people in the IT team that are just all over the world that have been used to this type of environment. And different teams have a different, you know, amount of people who work remote normally, but I can definitely type some things up. Like, you know, how we’ve kind of been operating even before this and then share that with the group if that would be helpful. And then I got a question about hiring. So, Natalie asked, “How are you managing pending new hires that cannot be on-boarded remotely. If we delay their start date and they have already given notice, should we compensate them?” I think, I mean, look you’re all going to be in different places in your in your business.
40:42
But, I mean, for some people you might be facing the fact of I’ve got new hires and I can’t support new hires because my business, right, isn’t growing in this place. As a matter of fact, you know, if you saw today, you know, there’s organizations that are furloughing employees and having to let people go. So, I think if you’re still kind of have that ability to bring people on board, which is fantastic, and can’t do it remotely, if you can at least even, maybe if you can’t do full pay, could you consider partial pay? Is there a way, if it’s benefits that are important, can you start their benefits a little bit sooner?
41:10
So I think really this is the time kind of as HR and finance start to partner together, what are those things that you as an organization can do? And I think, you know, both Deborah and DeRetta have talked about sort of err on the side of doing more versus less. So again, for those who are in that financial position, I think it’s great. You can imagine the goodwill of somebody who’s sitting at home and anxious and you know, Oh my gosh, why did I pick now to start a new job? I was having a conversation with somebody else you thought, I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen. So, the more you can do to bring that on board.
41:44
If you can’t pay somebody, again, can you get your benefits plans in there? If you can’t do pay or benefits, what are the other things? Hey, we’re excited about you coming. Here’s a delivery, you know, here’s an Uber Eats, you know, gift card or something like that that sort of extends the fact that we’re excited you’re joining our team and here’s a way to sort of help out. Again, maybe it’s just it’s a, you know, a grocery card. Maybe you send them a box of toilet paper these days. I don’t know. I mean, there are all these kinds of things that people are trying to face, and what does that look like? Those just might be some ideas to think about. I don’t know if you all have faced that as you’ve kind of started.
42:24
Okay, any other questions that you’ve got coming in? These are great. Yeah, these are great. Um, I think Robin and DeRetta you both touched on this. I mean Doretta you were just talking about the goal-setting project that you just went through. So, someone wrote in how are you managing performance, you know business as usual or are you modifying your performance process? So, I think that’s a good place for us to talk about, you know, like where do we try to be agile and shift quickly? And where do we try to kind of keep focused on those further out targets?
42:54
Well, you can’t argue with the adult there. I mean, I like to start with the results because then you don’t have to micromanage someone. I mean there’s a deliverable and that’s the expectation, but there is some project work that just is not realistic to be done in this circumstance.
43:17
So, you go back and look at how you mapped out initiatives for the year and shuffle some things around, and if things aren’t getting done, I would be willing to address that with an employee. I might be a little more sensitive to the fact that, Is something else going on there that is that is causing it? Do they have 10 kids and the house is insane, or whatever, but I think you have to. I mean, it’s not, we do still have a responsibility to our companies, like I said, and we want our jobs to be there when this is over.
43:57
And I think that’s really a great point. I think you actually have to look at it role by role. So, when I think about my sales organization, right, people aren’t trying to buy tickets, they’re just not. And so, thinking with them about what type of projects do we need to spin them back up o, what are they working on right now in terms of making sure that we can work with them with what that looks like. And you’re absolutely right, performance is golden.
44:22
So, if you were performing before, you should be performing now. What does that look like? I think the other piece to that it was also mentioned is that, are there life items or life things that are happening that you’re having to deal with. So, aging parents?
44:37
What’s that looking like for you now? Do we need to really sure up what our EAP looks like so people can actually work through what this is? And then we’re providing that from a service perspective, looking at our health care and understanding, are there other things that we can offer from a healthcare perspective? Or as a it deals with stress, as it deals with financial planning? I mean, I think we’re going to have to be much more creative around thinking about. These are life issues that we talked about before, but guess what, they are at a heightened rate. Another thing is that when you’re dealing with parents is that they have closed all the schools. And so, you’re dealing with a parent that’s not only working from home but managing kids.
45:19
Like if I for me, I would be horrible at it right now and somebody would have to really work with me because that’s another dynamic I think we need to really consider because there has been a shift with how work is and the output of what the work is going to be like. But there still needs to be performance around what that is. And so, if you reset expectations, reset parameters and then talk with people about their real-life issues and help them with it and provide them support and help.
45:48
I think that will, going back to how we caring for our workforce, that will be the care that we can provide for our workforce. I mean you’re not going to go, “Okay everyone we’re lowering expectations.” Right? You not going to do that. You’re going to alter expectations and you’re going to reshape things. So, I think it’s an easy conversation to have when you approach it like that.
46:19
I think too as HR leaders, right, it’s really our responsibility to be working with our CEOs and CFOs and sort of other senior leadership teams to say, what are the expectations now? What is that from that business, you know, standpoint. I mean you talked about sales, right? Her team would look a little, you know, and our sales teams right would look like a little bit like we were blind to or deaf to what was going on if we went out and tried to sell things, you know, imagine about Outmatch going to a restaurant customer and saying, hey, would you like some software to help with hiring? I mean that’s a little tone deaf. So, how do you make sure that you’re getting through that? And so now, how do you reset those expectations?
46:59
What is it that your CEO, CFO, and Leadership teams really expect and then how do you communicate that down to the organization so that, again, people know what their expectations are. They know, maybe, that it’s okay to take this time to spend some learning, but we’re going to then ask you to come back and teach somebody else something when you come back to the organization. Or we’re going to ask you to lead a project. We ask you to put a project plan together that you can’t maybe execute from your home, but you can get ready then we come back. So again, that they’re really keeping sharp on those things I think are important. DeRetta, I love that you brought up salespeople because we got a handful of questions about sales performance and how to manage that right now.
47:37
So glad you went ahead and addressed that one. Kristen also said, I think one internal opportunity for companies where there’s a mix of experienced virtual workers and those who’ve never done it before – putting them together and giving them some networking opportunities. So, I’ll just share I mean at Outmatch we use Teams. So, were already pretty plugged into that collaboration tool and we actually already had a team that I’m a part of that was called Outmatch moms because I have a three-year-old and so I hopped on there today and said, you know, it’s a really small thing but it made a big difference when I said, “What are you guys doing about daycare? Because I don’t know what to do.” So just to, you know, just knowing that other people are in the same boat as me and having that small group.
48:18
You know, I didn’t have to send like an all company email saying what do we do about day care? I was able to talk directly to the people who are affected by that, and then as needed, we can kind of communicate out from there. But I mean that’s just a small thing we’re doing at Outmatch that maybe is something that you guys can take on in your own companies. I think too, as we talked a little bit about before about work from home policies and maybe if you didn’t have one before, I’ve heard on the news about all these school systems where kids weren’t either having internet access or they didn’t have a computer at home.
48:48
So, how are you enabling your employees to work at home may also require you, again – this is sort of a financial conversation. So how are you partnering with Finance? But do you offer some sort of stipend that allows somebody to maybe pick up your bandwidth or, you know, get internet at home. If that’s something that you didn’t have in the past. It doesn’t have to be forever.
49:12
But again, for this period of time, we’re going to have this allocation so that you can work at home. Or are there people, well, maybe your kids are not getting it free from school, is there something you can do in utilizing that, or can you reach out to a provider that can help you particularly if you’re an industry that’s being, you know, more hardly partially impacted by what’s going on might become another way to think about, how do you help your employees? And how do you bring that that community together is to enable them to do that. I know we had several people ask and say yep, I can bring a laptop home. But really to do my work I need a monitor.
49:47
For us, were able to say, here’s a To Amazon and here’s a monitor that you can purchase and then you can expense. And we did something that was good enough quality, but yet not a huge expense to the organization. So, thinking about those kinds of things really become important particularly for I work at home all the time. I’m either on the road or I’m at home. Those are kind of my options – mostly on the road. So, I was very equipped to do that. But I realize not everybody is in that same situation.
50:16
Yeah, I got another hiring question from Ally: “For someone in a recruiting heavy role who has been told, there’s a freeze on hiring, what recommendations do you have on keeping candidates warm?”
50:30
I think being honest. Just having the conversation. I mean, I know, again, what we typically would understand as business continuity isn’t what we’re used to, right? Think about what happened in 9/11 and some of us are dealing with something very similar, not quite the same, but very similar in terms of disruption.
50:52
And so, I think the conversation, again, is that if there is a hiring freeze we still want to talk to you, especially if it’s great talent because the spin up is going to be something that we all are going to be talking about in these next few months. And how we going to manage that? And so, I think just being realistic with on it with individuals. Being transparent with individuals about what this is right now because it’s not like we’re not all dealing with the same thing and experiencing the same thing and people are hearing it. So, I think if we’re just honest about this is what our organization is doing today.
51:29
And I want to just keep you apprised of what that looks like in just having those conversations and continuing those conversations. Or just calling and saying, How are you? Because people feel trapped and just saying, Oh wow, this recruiter who works for this company I’m considering to go work for thought to call me and check in. Wow, you know. You’re kind of like, you can just give them an example of what kind of culture you come from. So, I mean, it’s the little things right now. It’s the little things.
52:07
We are, for those of you don’t know you don’t know, I mean at Outmatch, we were offering our video technology for free because we know that this is something that you all might be needing to do to stay, another way to stay connected is with your candidates. And again, sort of that Deborah talked a little bit, that desperate feeling is it’s a great way for candidates to be able to come in and share maybe now they’ve got some time and they’re at home. They can share a little bit more through the, you know, using video and that kind of thing, and again, then you got something more personalized to be able to reach back out to them.
52:36
“I just watched your video and I saw this and we’re really excited about you. You know, we’re kind of going through a slower process but here are some of the things…” It gives you something to talk about in another way to do that. So again, just thinking about how, you know, for us it was so important to connect people to purpose and how do we go about doing that?
52:57
Yeah, definitely. Let’s do one last question and then we’ll move towards our final thoughts and wrap up the webinar. We had more slides prepared. But this is better. I’m so glad that you guys had your questions coming in. This made it a really great discussion. So, Sarah wrote in can we talk about other wellness initiatives for working remote – ways to help people feel united as a team.
53:26
That, you know, with us getting to the end of the call, I just want to say this as HR professionals, that’s one group we haven’t talked about. This is heavy. I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck yesterday. I got so much done, but I was exhausted because I am like emotionally invested in this and I thought of the Red Cross thing yesterday and I was like, but that’s only one thing and we’re on the first week of being at home like, oh my, how am I going to come up with anything?
53:56
I think it is really important for HR professionals to – that routine I talked about before and being self-disciplined about making sure you stopped and do your exercise, making sure you eat lunch, making sure maybe you have a hard stop at a certain point at the end of your day because you don’t have to deal with traffic you just keep working.
54:18
So, I think we really do have to take care of ourselves and we shouldn’t dismiss the weight that we’re carrying because we’re taking care of people and we’re taking care of their families and that is a lot. So, if you kind of start feeling heavy or down, I think you have a good reason, but address it and figure out how you can take care of yourself. And then you’ll be able to take care of everybody else.
54:47
Agreed. I think the other thing is as you think about this. I mean I was having this conversation with one of our folks last night is thinking about what are those free apps? Again, going back to if people don’t have enough to do, maybe you’re recruiting team is a little slow right now or there’s somebody else, but having someone research what are those apps that you can get for free? Whether that’s a meditation app whether that is an exercise app. How do you share that out with your employees?
55:16
And I think too, you know, Deborah mentioned, we’ve got a on our plates as HR professionals. How do you utilize the rest of your organization? We have a group that helps us. We call it our Culture Club group, but whatever that is, and you can start to form a group remotely of people to kind of go through, you know, we tried to do a happy hour kind of thing of like show us your dog on Friday to kind of stay connected. It went okay, it was my idea. Not great. Or your pet, didn’t have to be a dog. Dog or cat.
55:47
I was going to do like a “Show us the best brown bag lunch that you that you make yourself at home” or like your canine coworker or like your staff with your like little kids running around. Just something that people, that we could post on our intranet and people would get to see what other people were doing. Or, you know, just send out, I don’t know, a Sudoku or a or a News of the Weird.
56:13
I mean, you can find that all over the place now. Just anything that might be – I think if you can make people laugh that really goes long way. And give them something to kind of go back and forth about because there’s no like water cooler talk right now.
56:26
Yeah, and Deborah I wanted to tell you quickly that Kristen wrote in and said, “As a part of the American Red Cross, thank you for your wellness challenge to give blood. It helps us take care of the nation and it does make a difference.” I’m going to guilt them in!. I’m going to throw that down on them. Your first virtual challenge was a success.
56:50
I think, you know, that sort of leads to a point that I heard from someone the other day. A friend of mine and I were talking about what things do, and she had gotten something from a partner of theirs and she shared it with me and it’s: people want to help right now. So how do we provide employees ways to help, and whether that’s putting our employees, you know again, if you’re not as creative as Debra, I would just say, “Hey employees, we’d like to have a wellness challenge. What do you think this is?” And to get a small group of people who’ve been asking about helping. How do you engage them? How do you keep them busy? How do you keep them connected? Yeah, that’s great. We’ve got about a minute left.
57:23
So, I’d love to go around the room and just get like your 20-second final thought, final takeaway. DeRetta, let’s start with you. Sure, just understand we’re all in this together. So, we can’t feel like we’re isolated are alone. And whoever we need to call: our Board of whatever, Board of friends Board of mentors, Board of whatever it is. We just need to realize that we’re all in this together all kind of working through this together and trying to figure out how we do that together.
57:54
Yeah, definitely. Robin, What about you? Yeah, I would just say gosh utilize your network. Utilize your resources, utilize your family, certainly your HR community. But I’m, you know, I in addition to my great HR community and network, I’m getting great ideas on how to help people through other resources. So, being able to be open and talking about sort of what’s going on and being vulnerable. I mean, I think you know as we put this together, you know, Briana and I talked about like should we be holed up in a room in our house? What should we do?
58:24
And we just decided to be open and who we are, and I did put makeup on whoever asked that question. Yes, you know, not that vulnerable. But that vulnerability, I think we as leaders need to show that we’re vulnerable during even these times – that we’ve got a plan, but look, we’re human too.. And it’s really important for employees to see that. Yeah, Debra. What about you?
58:46
My last words of advice. I don’t know. I mean, this: It is terrifying, but if you’re looking at it professionally, it is the most unique opportunity you’ve had in your career so far because it’s never happened before. And we take care of people. So, I mean, I’m just every day I’m kind of like, when I can take the emotion out and look at it intellectually, it’s just unbelievable in terms of learning and growing.
59:16
Like I’m thinking of people who are you know, three to seven years into their career. Like, wow, if you pay attention now, you’re going to walk away with things that you will use throughout your career forever.
59:29
Not the pandemic part, but that how you deal with people and how you deal with emotion and how you deal with change. It is an opportunity right now for HR folks if we’re paying attention, so there’s a little upside. Little pandemic upside. I love that and I completely agree. I feel like when this is all over and I can look back, I’ll really have some experience and some takeaways that I’ll be able to draw on. And Dom said the same thing, you know, “Three weeks into my new role and we’re dealing with this.” So, you know, I mean that is the potential upside: that we’re going to learn a ton from this experience and will be better for it. So, thank you ladies. Thank you to everyone who joined us.
1:00:16
Before you go grab your SHRM code if that’s something that you need because professional development still thing even in times of crisis. So, thank you again, and I hope to see you all back for whatever’s next. Bye everyone. Bye.
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Other early adopters include baking and financial services, education, sports, and IT. Here’s a look at what’s happening in the top 4 industries: 
