Events

The flurry of significant events in 2020 have built a sense of urgency to act for the greater good of humankind. As a result, we’ve seen innumerable organizations rise to the occasion — acting with a greater and broader purpose, serving many stakeholders, not just shareholders. We wanted to understand better what is happening now, what we can learn from purpose-driven organizations’ approaches in the past, and what HR’s role is in making organizations purpose-driven.

Click on the image below to get the full infographic. As always, we would love your feedback. If you have thoughts, please share in the comments section below!

 

2020 has been a year of volatility as most of us have moved to remote work. In this Q&A call, we talk about how the shift to remote work has impacted managers and how they can better enable employees. We talk about how managers can be more responsive during and after COVID-19, a part of our Responsive Organization research. In the past, managers have focused on efficiency, but now organizations are focusing on different metrics and communicating with employees differently. Here are a few of the questions we discussed:

• What aspects of managers historical roles have shifted due to COVID-19 and working remotely?
• How should managers adjust their approach to better enable their employees in this new reality?
• What performance metrics should managers focus on when assessing work from home performance?

There were many great insights during this Q&A. Thank you to everyone who attended and participated live. We hope you join us live for the next Q&A call.

Video Contents & Questions Asked

You can jump to the following locations in the video using the timestamps on the video and in the chapters menu (next to the full screen icon).

• 0:00 Introduction & housekeeping
• 1:23 Overview of responsivity research
• 4:39 Managers role in responsivity
• 8:41 The impact of 2020’s volatility on managers
• 16:21 Changing role of managers during remote work
• 20:33 Accountability & management
• 25:29 Focus shift to different performance metrics
• 28:32 Successful leadership during remote work
• 35:10 Focus on performance not presence in remote teams
• 42:12 Comparing employees vs measuring improvement
• 45:08 Changes to management approaches during COVID-19
• 53:21 Wrap up

Q&A Call Transcript

Introduction & housekeeping (00:00)

This Q&A session is on how managers should enable employees during remote work and volatility, which seems very timely. And it’s based on actually, let’s start with some, some housekeeping stuff. We always promote everybody to a panelist because we want the discussion. So we answer the questions that have been sent in, but we actually really want the discussion. So if you disagree, or if you have something to say or experiences, please feel free to share, but also make it a safe place. So no attacking. This is not CNN or the comments section of any website. Let’s keep it respectful. We’ve never had a problem with that, but we say it anyway.

Raise your hand to speak. Just to give us a chance to keep order, especially because we’re recording this. Unmute yourself and then feel free to discuss the topics in the chat. The chat often offers us quite a bit of color that we don’t actually get on the the recording. And if it’s of interest to you, we can send you the chat. The other thing that we want to make clear is you are being recorded. So anything you say will be posted live. If you don’t want to say anything to the entire world feel free to chat separately, or to set up a conversation with a separately. Cause we’d love the information. We’d love to talk to you about it. We just want to make sure everybody knows kind of where we are and what we’re doing. Any questions on that before we jump in?

Overview of responsivity research (01:23)

Okay. So late last year and early this year, and then into the summer and now into the fall, we’ve been working on this idea of responsivity. And we determined responsibility as “the ability of organizations to recognize trends in the operating environment and effectively turn possible disruptions from those trends into distinct organizational advantages.” So it’s basically all of the disruption that happens. What are you doing with it? Are you just reacting to it and putting stopgaps in place or actually looking at it and making something out of it? And organizations do this to varying degrees. Some of them do it really well. And some of them don’t.

We published some research in June of this year, which introduced a model. And this was based on lots and lots of interviews. It was based on four round tables and also some quantitative research. What we found was that organizations that were responsive, those that were able to respond to the environments that they’re in, basically looked through the world in four lenses.

The first one is respect for employees. And this one seems to be foundational. If organizations don’t have respect for employees and their skills and abilities, they don’t seem to be able to react much to their environment at all.

The second one is distributed authority, and this has two parts. The first one is how much do organizations push the decision making to the edges of the organization. But it also has to do with how clear they are about the authority that individuals have. So it’s so distributed authority obviously is going to be different in different areas, in different functions, in different industries, but how clear they are on the authority that individuals have seemed to be a pretty big determinant of how responsive they are.

Third one is not surprising to me cause I work in this field, but transparency and growth was huge. Organizations that focus on making sure that their employees are continually growing, tend to do better than those than those that don’t. And those that are transparent about what they’re doing and where they’re going, rather than just treating employees like cogs machine that do one thing all the time also tend to do better.

And then all of these things we thought were really interesting, but what was the most interesting of this study is that there’s a separate set of behaviors that kind of goes along with trust. Trust was by far the most impactful thing that organizations could do to be responsive. And that has a lot to do with community building and purpose-driven sort of mindset and how they handle failure and how they allow people to bring their real selves to work and all that good stuff.

So when organizations, and especially the people in the organizations that help develop the people processes when they develop those people processes, they should be considering each of these four things as they develop those people processes. They should be looking through these lenses and determining if they’re taking care of these four things in order to be responsive.

We actually think responsivity will become the new efficiency. We’ve been focusing on efficiency for about a hundred years, as organizations, we think the ability of organizations to respond to the environments that they find themselves in and take advantage of those disruptions is going to be how businesses get ahead in the future.

Managers role in responsivity (04:39)

So that was the main study. And this model can be found in the report that we put out on that. Since then Stacia has been doing a little bit of work on managers. We found managers to be an incredibly important part of responsivity and organizations. And so I’m going to turn it over to her to describe this side.

Yeah. So kind of to give a little context of you know, what Dani showed on the last slide, we found that there are basically three major factors that can influence organizations’ ability to effectively address what’s in those four lenses. And those three factors were data and technology (So people analytics), managers, and then culture. So we’re kind of working our way through these.

We wrote a report about people analytics which we call “the now of work lessons from an octopus.” And really the idea there being that people analytics and the data and insights that you have, are a big part of what kind of feeds the responsive organization. But so that was the article. Now we’re moving on to this next area of focus, which is around managers and what managers need to be doing.

So if you guys get our newsletter, you probably have seen this engaging in a lot of work on this. So we are, we have a survey live right now on this topic. We’re doing interviews right now on this topic, this Q & A session, and a roundtable really to try and understand this manager topic.

The reason that we're doing another survey is that we had the data from the responsive organizations study with immediately pre-COVID and so we wanted to really be able to focus our understanding on what’s happening during COVID in the social justice movements that you’ve been seeing.

So that brings us to this slide, which is we went out and we said, okay, we know what our data has shown in terms of what responsive managers are doing, but what are other saying right now? And so we went in and looked in and have been working on summarizing what we see and what you see here, I think is a, is a decent summary of what others are saying.

So the first thing is, is that managers have a, in this moment right now, a greater need for, for personal awareness. So an understanding of kind of how they are doing before they’re able, you know, it’s the whole “Fix your oxygen mask before you try to help someone else.” It’s kind of the same thing. You know, managers need to have an awareness of how they’re doing that. They’re doing okay. And before they’re able to kind of turn and support the people on their team.

The second one, and this really aligns to the research that I just mentioned about people analytics, is this idea that they’re gathering information, they’re getting information more broadly, and they’re using that to make better decisions. And that, you know, it completely aligns with what we see with this responsive org model around remote work around distributed authority. Because basically what we have with remote working is a need for distributed authority. We don’t have that kind of same hierarchy that we were seeing before. So that’s bottoms up information.

And then the other thing, and we actually heard this in the round tables that we did in the spring as well, is this, this high focus on authenticity, vulnerability and honesty. And that need certainly to come from managers, but really managers at all levels. What we’ve started to see in the interviews is the importance of just incredibly transparent and timely communications from leaders and then throughout the entire organization about what’s happening. And, you know, the, the statement that “We don’t know yet, but we’re looking at it” is an acceptable statement. Whereas before that may have hurt some organization seem taboo. What we’re seeing so far is that organizations that have done that are farther ahead than those who have just kind of kept their mouth shut and continued whistling in the dark, if you will.

The impact of 2020’s volatility on managers (08:41)

So so these are kinda the 3 things that we seen At least in the external research and that we felt have been validated by what we’ve seen in our own research. So I’d like to pause there and we’ve got a whole bunch of questions. But I want to pause there and just see if anyone has anything else that they want to add in terms of how they’ve seen the volatility of the last 6 months impacting managers.

I think from my Stacia side, it’s MJ, we’ve seen a lot around the trust because we historically had not been an organization where we, I mean, we’re very relationship based. So we, we weren’t remote workers at all. And then all of a sudden we were dabbling in remote working, which is not a bad thing, but a bit of a culture shift for us. Then all of a sudden we’re slammed into this. And we’ve had a lot of conversations about how we support our managers, how we give them the tools to, you know, just let people do their jobs, you know. And if people went dark, how do you go and explore where that person is? You know, what is going on with them without going and being appropriate and doing that without, you know, making assumptions and that kind of stuff.

So all these three things along with the prior slide that Dani presented around trust are things that are manifesting for us. But I do like what you said last, which is we don’t know yet, but we are researching it. I absolutely think, I mean, as a former consultant, especially that that’s a really good answer. But part of the challenge is people don’t have the language and this is, this is a challenge with management anywhere in any organization. If you don’t have the words, you either stumble through it or you make promises, you can’t keep. And so I actually like us getting to the point where we have a different vocabulary.

Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think that the thing that I really like, what you just said MJ, is this idea of even just the phrase it’s giving the phrases to people like these, these are the sorts of things. Like not, not that you have to read this and be an autonomous, but like, these are some of the things.

I often I’ll tell Dani this, like with my kids, this is really funny, but you know, I read these various parenting books, and I used to think that that was completely ridiculous because in the moment I’m clearly gonna know what to say. Obviously that was before I had kids. That’s what I thought. And then now with having kids, I find that, you know, some of the actual literal phrases that come out of the book, that’s like, I see you doing this. Maybe we should consider that. Like having just those words, somebody put them in my head, even though obviously I changed them in the moment when I’m under stress, I need that help.

And I think we’re not that different at work. If it’s a different vocabulary, it’s a different situation that we’ve had just having those words handed to us. And then at least it’s a tool that you can kind of tweak in the moment. I think that’s so, so important.

I think Stacia and MJ, both alluded to this idea of tools, which I think is really important. For lots of years everybody that we talked to said, you know, “our managers suck.” And okay, maybe that may be true, but you can’t fix managers by sending them through training only. I think those tools are tools are increasingly important and I’ve seen more focus been being given to those tools in the last three or four months than I’ve seen it in the last 10 years probably. Yeah. Any other thoughts?

Yeah, Dani, I echo that not all of these problems can be solved with training and it’s really hard to solve it overnight. If you weren’t already on that path and you don’t even have the words word for it, the longterm solution. And I think the willingness and capacity are huge factors. And what happens if the person was not willing or has no capacity? So there’s lots of other factors that take a long time just by definition.

I think that’s true. I think that’s totally fair. And I think I’ve also seen, and Stacia I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too, I’ve seen more of a focus on, are these people, the right people for the management position? Like, can they actually lead people and manage people or do we have the wrong ones in place? Have we been promoting on some weird criteria instead of the ones we need to?

What’s interesting and what I’m seeing, as I’m talking to other people as well, is that there’s like this manufactured authenticity, is the word I might be using, where the managers are now like manufacturing this interest in you and you know how you’re doing. And it almost seems like it’s scripted. Right. Whereas you know, and that’s, that’s emerging a lot through COVID, which it should, people should be interested anyways if your a leader. But that was always a good quality of a leader is like, you know, I care about you, the person I’m leading in addition to, you know, what we’re trying to accomplish here as the business. But it’s one of the downsides I think of what’s happening right now is it’s just, people are manufacturing this care, which again, points to the fact that maybe you shouldn’t be in charge of people in the first place.

It’s true. And I think to your point, Brad, at what I’m seeing is there are some intrinsically good managers, right? And there are some genuine people out there who have always, for years been doing this, they had good role models and they had the language. But I think there’s also a point now with COVID, because it is more of a personal type intrusion or disruption, people are like, okay, when do do I hand them off to a therapist? Or when do I actually have this person get help that I’m not qualified for too? Right? Because I think we all need to know when we’re not an expert in an area, right. There are some things that I am happy to discuss with my talent with my peers. But then there’s some stuff that I’m very well versed in knowing that I’m not trained to handle that. So I think this is a new dynamic too, because for those managers that are really good, they also, I think have to form a bit of a line or a barrier or an understanding to the point about personal awareness of where their capabilities top off.

I think that’s a nice highlighting of the division of responsibilities, if you will, between what managers should and can be doing and what the organization should and can be providing. So, you know, to your point, if, if a manager gets to a point where it’s like, you know, this might be a bit out of my depth knowing where they can turn. Cause I could see there being a hesitancy to have the conversation because it, you know, they forecast it, maybe getting out of their depth. They don’t know where to what the next resources to hand someone off to.

So, you know, knowing, okay, well, if we get to this point, we’ve got a resource that’s now being offered around kind of COVID stress with connections to therapists or, you know, whatever, whatever the particular benefit or resource is. But again, that goes back to, to the concept of communication of information and or organization being able to say, know, this is what we have on offer for this particular moment and the difficulties that are inherent and here’s how you might want to use it. I think that’s kind of the distinguishing factor there.

Anyone else have anything they want to share on this one?

Changing role of managers during remote work (16:21)

Okay. I think we’re going to move on to some of the questions that were submitted for this Q&A session. Let’s start with this one right here. How are organizations communicating the changing role of the manager in the world of remote work? I’m going to kick that to Stacia right off the bat.

Yeah. I’ll start with this and then I want to, I’d love to hear what you all are seeing. So on the basis this on some of the interviews that we’ve been doing. And what we’re hearing is really a range. So we talked to someone yesterday who basically said, “yeah, we’re not talking about this. Like they’re still just managers managing.” We’re like, “Oh, okay. That’s interesting.” And they’re like, you know, “they should probably be talking to their people a bit more and we’re encouraging that. But like, you know, nothing is kind of fundamentally different.”

So that was one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum was an organization that we actually will be featuring in the research. And that is one that kicked off a concept of managerial commitments. And to be fair, that was already in flow before COVID happened, but they’ve kind of tweaked and refined what was happening as a result of COVID. And so they had Chelsea will probably be like, she got this wrong. I think it’s six managerial commitments that every manager is expected to do for their employees. And then the idea is that employees can then hold their managers accountable for them as well. So things that they’re asking you know, whether it’s frequent one-on-ones with the focus on growth and how people are doing kind of in the moment. There’s a of a range of things that are in those managerial commitments, but they’ve been very clear. I’m like, this is what you’re supposed to do. And this is how this looks up at different within COVID and working remotely, et cetera.

So I’ve kind of seen the range of things. And those communications I think, are coming out in a couple of ways. One being certainly direct communications around like, Hey, this is what we expect, et cetera. This organization I’m talking about with the managerial commitment actually then developed a self assessment for the managers to go through and see how they thought they were doing with regard to the commitments. And then they enabled a basically a feedback mechanism. So they could say, “Hey, you know, like I just assessed myself and I kind of have a perspective on how I think I’m doing. What do you all think of how I’m doing so that I can adjust those right now during this time? So I think what I’m seeing is quite varied in terms of that focus.

What are others seeing?

Hi, this is Sandra I’m calling from Quadient. One of the things that we have started to do, we introduced what’s called “smart work.” And it’s around new ways of working and we’ve got three pillars. One is about wellbeing employee wellbeing. And continue to focus on wellbeing as well as the other pillar is empathy. So wellbeing and empathy really came through for us, you know, with the pandemic and employees appreciated the way that the leaders handled and managed and supported. And so we’re looking at well-being, empathy, and we called the way we work.

So we’re introducing working from anywhere. And with all of these, we are providing managers as well as employees with toolkits. And part of the toolkit is coming up with team commitments and holding each other, including the manager, accountable for the team commitments. So I think we are requiring not necessarily more of managers, but a different way of working and how things have just changed and what our expectations of a manager are in this very changing world.

Accountability & management (20:33)

Sandra, you brought up a really interesting point and that is accountability. So when we did our performance management research last fall, every company that we talked to didn’t really have a lot of accountability for their managers to actually develop their people or take care of their people. I think we’re seeing that shift a little bit as well. Accountability is becoming more of a thing. Wondering from all of you, if you’re seeing that as well, if your organizations are more sort of inclined to, to make your managers accountable, whereas before maybe they were just assuming that they were doing their jobs?

Hey gang, this is Ryan. I can speak a little bit of how the transition went for us. And I think we’re fortunate that we have a lot of employee listening tools and you know, we’re able to put in a bit of a continuous listening strategy. But I think how, when you talk about accountability, how it really went for us, it actually went in phases.

So the first phase of accountability was really around communication, and like communication from leader leaders, managers. I think that was like early in the sense when people were a little bit in the dark, not sure what was going on. Are we going remote? Are we, how long are we doing this for? So a lot of what we focused on was just getting that communication out.

The second phase that we started driving accountability on was really then around prioritization, right? So it was around like, how are we making decisions? How are we allocating resources? And that became the next big question. I would say around the summer of like, how are we getting this information out to people? How are people people being brought in to the decisions that are being made around prioritization?

And then I would say the third area that we really, again, been running pulse survey has been getting data back from our employees. The third area that we’ve been most focused on has been burnout, right? We’ve been 6 months in. Schedules have changed. Fluctuated people have been living in this new reality for some time. So the accountability that we’re now bringing back out to the managers and communicating out to them is a more focused accountability around checking in with your people and understanding their wellbeing.

So I think that’s what’s been helpful for us is not to say, you know, let’s, we need to do all of the things all of the time, but dependent on what people are feeling kind of the most strain with and having some of the data to be able to drive us. I think that’s how we’ve seen some of the focus area shift over the last six months.

Nice. So when you say that you’re creating that accountability, is that through the poll surveys kind of getting data feedback back from folks on, on what’s working or not who’s doing it or not?

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s always obviously having our platform makes things quite a bit easier. So I, I recognize that. But in terms of accountability, I think there’s within platform or, you know, within the tools that you have, but then there’s also a lot that we can be doing outside of that, right? And I think that’s again where our people and experienced team has really, really plugged in in terms of creating those forums and those abilities to support managers in that.

So again, when we’re talking about language, that was super important, we have Slack channels built out specifically for mentors, specifically for leaders. So, you know, when things were happening around the social justice movement and how to talk about it, it was just posting language and the manager and leaders channels of like, here’s a Slack that you could send to check in. Here’s a prompt that you could use to open up again. I think there’s stuff that was happening within the platform and how we drive accountability through that. And then I think there’s lots of other ways, again that are asynchronous or almost like communal source, I think is what we’ve went to. It’s like, let’s put the resources out there, whether it’s confluence or in Slack channels and you’re not getting singled out to go and use it, but you can come in and draw from that well when you need.

So that’s another thing that’s been really helpful for us. So it’s been kind of creating those spaces for people to go and grab that language or those frameworks or those templates or whatever it may be that we’re really trying to have a push on. And I do think another key thing that’s been helpful for us as again, like a single focus. So like with managers, we have so many things that we need to carry. So again, being able to focus on a particular thing to work on has also been something that’s worked really well for us. It’s like, let’s just focus on this for this quarter because we’re sensing that this is what our employees are really asking for and what they need.

I absolutely love that, accountability in phases. Our managers are so overwhelmed right now with all the information coming in, everything that we’re asking them to do. You know, we’re shutting down locations or bringing people back in to the office, making decisions about hybrid, remote, onsite. And I think there’s just so overwhelmed with all this information coming at them. And I love this idea of accountability in phases because it makes it, I think, more manageable and more digestible for managers. So thank you. I love that. Any other thoughts? Sorry, go ahead Stacia.

Focus shift to different performance metrics (25:29)

I was just gonna say there was a comment in the in the chat that I wanted to kind of bring up, which is the question. It gets an accountability around the kind of metrics and some of the metrics that may be shifting. So if, if in the past we were focused on efficiency, like what Dani was talking about and maybe some productivity metrics, are we shifting down to metrics such as engagement or resiliency or some other human focused metric? What are your thoughts on that? Particularly in this context of accountability,

I can give you my thoughts, Stacia. I think it’s really scary for organizations who have never done it before to start putting metrics around these types of things. As you heard in the interviews we did for performance management last fall, they’re not doing it. And one of the reasons they’re not doing it is because of that accountability issue. I don’t think a lot of people know how, or what kinds of metrics to put into place to make sure a manager is a good manager. And I think that’s scary for a lot of people.

Yeah. I mean, I’ll maybe share anecdotally what I’m hearing on that kind of the people analytics side of the world. Because a lot of them, you know, kind of what Ryan was talking about are being tasked with, you know, these, these pulses and these updates and the like, and it seems like there’s a real grasping at straws if you will, for, from senior leaders to say, “How, how are we going to be sure that people are doing things like?” There’s a lot of these tools that can look at the email traffic, or when people log on or log off. And like, are those the right metrics? And God bless, most of the people analytics people are like, “No, stay away from this. This is a terrible idea.” Which is, you know, makes, makes me happy.

But I think there is a legitimate question around what are we gonna hold people accountable for? You know, kind of a concurrent area of interest for me right now is what are we going to do with PM this fall? I mean, I know it’s not an annual review of blah, blah, blah, yet a huge percentage of organizations have an annual review. So what are we going to hold up? What are we gonna, what are we going to ask people to measure on? Or are we not? And I don’t, I don’t know the answer there. I know that there’s certainly a lot of consternation around it, which is why, I especially wanted to bring up this question that was submitted.

But you know, my guess has said, it’s going to be much more around on people’s reflections on other people’s impact to them. You know, on the perceptions of how much they helped their ability to flex to the times their ability to kind of think through the problem. Which are much more complex metrics and more subjective. But let’s face it, every metric we’ve had for white collar workers is somewhat subjective. So that’s my gut on where it’s gonna go, but I just don’t know.

Successful leadership during remote work (28:32)

What to make sure we get to some of these other really good questions. I’m going to move us on to the next one. What are the indicators for the types of role person leader that is successful when working remotely? And Stacia actually put a great big, huge X through this one.

And the reason I put a great big X on this one is I don’t think it’s a type of person, right? It’s not a type of leader. Instead if we go onto the next slide, Dani. It’s really about the behaviors, right? So what are the behaviors that can enable that more effective remote working both from a manager, but then also what are the behaviors that our employees need to adopt?

So I have some thoughts here based on kind of some of the reading that I’ve done, but I’d love to turn it open to you all first and get your thoughts on kind of what manager behaviors have you seen that are enabling more effective, remote working.

I think perhaps empathy because everybody’s situation is a little bit different and I’ve seen really great managers kind of flex if you will to situations. So I think empathy is one. Doing more of the checkin before you do the checkup. How you doing? And really, you know, again, that empathy understanding that, you know, some may be parenting, you know, children remotely. So I really think empathy is really key for the managers right now. And resilience, right? They’re often the ones that, you know, they’re the first line of the employees and what’s going on all the emotion there. So I think really empathy and resilience, cause it’s not all going to be pretty.

Yeah, I think from my side, it’s a little bit flexibility and understanding, which ties on to what Sandra was saying about the empathy piece. But I think it’s, it’s this idea that, especially in remote, we don’t all work the same. And so, you know, I have people on my team who are working parents. And you know, when everything’s closed and you’ve got your toddlers at home, they get up and they work from five to seven, they get the kids going from seven to nine, they hand off to their spouse, they get back on. So it’s just being flexible. And I think a little bit adaptable.

And it’s also understanding that we have a shared experience in that we’re all in this together, we’re all home together, but our experiences are not identical. So it’s kind of refraining from judgment to. Just because I don’t have little ones and my guys can go upstairs and basically, it does still challenge their 14 year old executive functioning skills, but they can still, for the most part, get things going. I don’t have that same panic when the kids are running through the camera or I’ve got a toddler on my lap who wants to play with my keyboard and be like mom or dad.

So I think it definitely is stretching managerial capabilities because we all have to get something done, but how we do it and how we go about it isn’t the same. So even though I’m a more senior, more experienced manager, I’m finding myself gut checking myself in my own bias, just to say, “look, if this were you in your twenties, what the heck would you have done? What would you have done in your thirties?” And you know, now that I’m more senior, you know, I still have to kind of bring myself a little bit back and say, “alright, Mary Jo, take a break, see what’s going on. We’ll all get there.” And then just try not to be so judgy.

I think it’s interesting that we stepped out of this sort of sameness. So if you, if you think about zoom calls or conference calls before everybody had the same background. We were talking about background a little bit yesterday. But today everybody’s got a different background and we can actually see in their lives a little bit more than we could before. And I think that speaks to your point, MJ, everybody has to do this differently. And the way that we manage people seems to have become much more flexible and much more empathetic, and I’m going to use the word human because it has to be. I think we’ve stepped out. I think this has been a major step in moving away from sort of the robotic way we’ve treated employees in the past to a much more human and empathetic way that I’m hoping that we continue to treat them in the future.

I want me to ask a question though, cause we’ve been asking this from the interviews. Which is, this is great, like we should be more empathetic. We should be less judgy. We should be all these things, but what’s the organization’s role in enabling managers to do that? Because there’s a lot of onus that we’re putting on managers and saying, “Hey, go do these things that you didn’t do before.” So what do we, as organizations, do to help them do that?

Yeah, I can share a little bit on our end. It was adjusting our performance process, right? So the question that, the very questions that we asked and how we asked how to be looking at accomplishments in light of the last six months or in that last period really made their way into the language by which when we did our performance process the questions had quite dynamically changed. In terms of not moving from what was their accomplishment or, you know, what was the rating or, you know, those types of questions, but very much around you know, “looking in the light of all the change over the last six months, how would you rate how, or how would you go about giving guidance on the, you know, what, what this person did?”

So again, I think it’s just like, again, adding that additional layer of context, knowing that the last three to four months that we went through and we were doing this review are just like unlike any other business period that we’d went through. And so giving that baked into managers to again, give them that framing while they were going through the process of looking back and evaluating and thinking about how performance had looked over the last period was one of the ways that our organization kind of systemically tried to put that mindset across the organization.

I love that. Yeah. And I think that’s the ultimate question. What is the system and what are the incentives within the system to encourage people to do this?

Focus on performance not presence in remote teams (35:10)

And I think that’s actually a really good lead into the next question as well. Which is how best can managers focus on performance, not presence with remote teams. This is something we heard quite a bit in the round tables we did with respect to the responsivity research. A lot of people said ditch the nine to five, it’s not going to work. It’s really not going to work. So how are you doing it within your organizations? And Stacia what have you seen in the interviews that you’ve done with respect to this?

Yeah, I’ll start there and then let others in. You know, the biggest thing is a focus on outcomes and clearly defined outcomes. So moving away from the, we actually talked about this in the report, we did the double double shift on performance management women in COVID. There is a perception or we have a bias that when we see other people working, even if we’re not working with them, but we’re in the same office building with them and we see them over there doing their work, we have a bias about the amount of work they’re doing, the quality of the work they’re doing, et cetera. When someone is physically removed from our vision, our bias is that they, you know, may not be working. Your brain starts to populate with all these questions.

So if you then translate that into exactly what MJ was talking about, where you have some people who are working from five to seven AM and nobody else is online to see them online. And then, you know, they’re breaking off for a period to help their kids. And then it’s intermittent. The biases that we have about that physical proximity then can carry over to what is actually happening in terms of a digital presence.

And so one of the biggest things we’ve seen people focus on instead is very explicit outcomes. And that way you can say, if, you know, no matter when this person is working, if they achieve these things, then, you know, we can say that they’re kind of meeting their goals, meeting their expectations. So that’s one of the big focuses. And of course, you know, we should have been doing this all along when we were talking about our goals and objectives. But the remote working environment is just forcing that much more in a much greater way.

I think Stacia, it’s MJ again, I think what we found a little bit is that when there were performance issues in the physical, in presence environment, those have been kind of exacerbated in remote. And so now they really have to be addressed. It’s not like you can just kind of gloss over somebody or let somebody kind of occupy space and move around to another team member to pick up the slack. It’s becoming more pronounced that this person hasn’t engaged, or this person hasn’t connected with the team or this person hasn’t done their part of a deliverable.

And so it’s almost like, while we have to be compassionate and empathy and empathetic on one side of the house, on the other side of the house, we really have to address some performance problems that maybe would have been hidden or not as pronounced before this circumstance.

How about others? What are you seeing?

I think we see managers struggling. We’ve been talking, you know, since the beginning of COVID, when people were starting to remote. The managers struggling with managing by performance and not presence. Because they were was so used to doing the walk by and, you know, peek over the shoulder, you know, to see what was going on and they don’t have that.

And I think what it really highlighted for a lot of managers and leaders is this whole concept of really having strong outcomes. What are the goals? What are we looking to achieve? And then managing to that. And so I think managers have struggled, but I also think managers have stepped up because they’ve had to make that shift to really focusing in on performance measures, opposed to presence.

I like that idea a lot Sandra. When we when we started the responsivity research or after COVID happened, we saw two things happen. The first one was just a huge uptake in spying software. And there have been a couple of horrifying articles written on it. Where people are taking screenshots every 10 minutes and checking in on the video and making sure that you’re sitting in front of your computer, doing exactly what you want, you’re supposed to be doing. And I think we saw that because of exactly what you’re talking about, a fear that people aren’t doing, what we need them to do. And that kind of goes back to this mindset set that we’ve had forever on efficiency and, you know, on task and all of these types of things.

But when I read those articles, it made me think about the amount of time I spend away from my computer thinking about my work. And how are we accommodating that? You know what I mean? So it’s only fair that if you’re going to take a screenshot of me in front of my computer, then once I leave and start thinking about it, that I also get credit for that work. And how do you do that? And the short answer is you can’t. You can’t know that I was thinking about responsivity was on a walk with my dog. And so how do we actually change that mindset in individuals and managers? And I’m really curious because this is a huge deal right now. How are your managers sort of making that leap from efficiency, you know, on task to as long as the work is done, we’re good.

My sense is that also comes to goal setting and agile goal setting, right? I think there’s a lot of when we’ve done goal setting. Goal setting is hard, right? It’s always like, how do we set the right OKR? How do we find the right measurement? Those things always come up and then you set up and you put them in a glass case. And I think that was something that like, we had to break the glass case pretty immediately. Where, you know, quotas or, you know, the goals that we’d set at the beginning of Q2 just weren’t going to be relevant. So I think it moved into like, how are we bringing goal setting into that weekly, biweekly conversation and adjusting as we’re going.

And then that way it allows us, I think, to say like, okay, well, performance is moving in the direction that we want it to. And we’re kind of capturing that, communicating that more effectively. Rather than like, we put this number or this task at the beginning when we set something. And I think that’s going to continue to be the case because, you know, whether it’s agile or responsiveness, I think organizations are realizing that planning three months out is very much a dice game right now, right? Like it’s, so I think that’s a bit of how is it that goal setting just doesn’t happen at the beginning of the quarter or at the beginning of the year and then we just march to that and measure on that performance, but it is something that’s actively happening in much shorter feedback loops or increments. So that’s another area, I think if the manager and a direct report are talking more about goal setting and remaining aligned on that, I think that’s another way that there’s a lot of benefit that can come from that.

Comparing employees vs measuring improvement (42:12)

I have one more question. I think that was really insightful. I have one more question and I don’t know if I’m going to get any takers on it, but one of the things that we started hearing during the performance management stuff was, we’re not comparing people to each other anymore, we’re comparing people to themselves. Is that playing out at all in, in the performance discussions that you’re having now, because it’s harder now to compare people to each other. And so it’s much more about, I mean, the idea would be that it would be much more about improvement of the individual than it would be about meeting some arbitrary goal for everybody.

Yeah. I didn’t think I’d get any takers. Well, I’ll jump in, because usually no takers means that it’s going to go to Stacia. So I had a conversation with someone yesterday about this. And I think the crux of it is coming down to the extent to which the organization has connected performance scores to compensation. Because ultimately if we step back, the reason we were comparing people to each other ultimately, is to decide, you know, do we give Dani a 10% increase or bonus and Stacia only a 5% or vice versa or whatever.

And so what I have been hearing is that in the organizations that have reduced the tightness of the connection between the two that they are much more open to that idea of comparing people to kind of their growth and the extent to which they’ve, they’ve met their growth and yes, their goals, but, but you know, much more about them as individuals versus the comparison to others.

And those who really still have this tight connection to compensation, they characterize it as, you know super focused on fairness, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m not saying it’s wrong, that’s just how they see it. I think there is a reluctance to move away from that, because if they do that, the whole rest of the system starts to come crashing down. I think you have to take, you have to have someone in an organization like what Cisco did, which is, they just said, “Stop, we’re going to completely stop this and then redesign the entire system.” And that takes a lot of guts to do.

So that’s been, my observation Is just that when there’s the looser connection, yes, focus on growth. When there’s that super tight connection it still seems to be the focus on comparing against each other.

I think for, I completely agree, but I think the when there’s a super tight connection, there are also much better metrics to determine whether or not somebody is hitting that line. You know what I mean? So I think what we’ve tried to do is take Taylorism and apply it to thinking work instead of doing work. And it’s caused all kinds of trouble because it’s really hard to get those metrics for desk workers versus somebody that works on a line. It’s crazy. I don’t know that we have all figured out how to do that yet.

Changes to management approaches during COVID-19 (45:08)

I want to get to the last question that we’ll discuss today, which is: What conscious decisions or changes are managers taking to their management approaches during COVID-19?

And I think we’ve touched on this a little bit. This question was actually written initially more in kind of the first person. So like, what are people, even people here, doing in terms of changing your approaches to managing others during COVID-19? We broadened it, but initially the question was like trying to generate some ideas on what individuals here are doing or are seeing.

I thought I was empathetic. I am. But I just realized how more empathetic that I have become. And also I think trust. I don’t know, I came in late, so I don’t know if we talked about trust. As I think as we, you know, work in this remote environment and we talk about performance versus presence. I think that a lot of managers are learning that they have to build that trust muscle that they may not have had before.

I like that Sandra. And I think it’s actually even broader than just the manager. I think it’s the organization has to figure out how to build trust and how to put the systems in place so that managers can actually do that building of trust. It’s a sort of systemic thing and an individual thing. Other thoughts on this question?

I’m going to jump in with a super tactical one. And that is some of the tools, and this may not be managers themselves, but the organization broadly. I have heard in our interviews so far, a lot of people talking about the greatness that is moving to Microsoft teams or Slack. And not that there’s anything not great about that, for sure there is. But what I have been struck by is some of them who’ve actually focused on, “well, we just do a lot more email.” And those organizations have been also those organizations who have said, “we haven’t really talked much about the changing role of the manager.”

And so I think there’s a discussion around the tools that we use and Slack is a good one. I think, you know, the project management tools. So there’s less back and forth or less scattered back and forth around particular projects. But kind of thinking about how do you actually enable people to work remotely on certain things together, even when they’re physically apart.

You know, we, we had RedThread, we’ve been well again Dani and I have worked remote for like 10 years. So we have we have a ridiculous range of tools for the size of our team. But they’re all designed around kind of this collaboration idea when we’re physically apart. And so that’s something I’ve heard in some of the more forward thinking organizations.

Stacia, this is Dan. So I definitely agree with you guys on the on the tactical side of things. My team has essentially moved more to email communication that we then link back more so to project management documents that have, you know, what I would have considered 6 months ago, you know, too much detail. But as you know, it’s just more task line items with the expectation of dates and times. And then the communication and comments sections are just, you know, much more robust than they ever have been before.

So instead of being in the office having those conversations live, it’s all done over email. Because what we’re trying to do is limit the number of meetings in a length so that, you know, essentially there’s no need for anything over a 30 minute meeting. Because if you haven’t done or haven’t kind of sent forward your comments or your feedback on certain items, then we need to postpone the meeting until you have. And you know, we try to keep the meetings much more succinct now, just simply because we know that these things, meaning online, gets old, it gets tough. And, you know, sometimes we just, we need to be being more succinct with that.

That said we do also take time once every other week to kind of just catch up on completely, whatever else is out there. So if it’s stuff that I’ve researched or something you saw, or if you want to comment on kids’ sports teams or something like that, that’s all that’s all on there. And so the biggest shift that I’ve seen is us managing the work much more closely in these project management tools and then having people much more prepared for the meetings. No one walks into meetings with so give me the update. Like you walk in, everyone knows the update. There’s been a paragraph written about it. You’re expected to read it and then go from there.

Yeah. I love that. I love that. I think we’ve also seen we have a policy that we don’t jump on the phone unless there’s a video. And that is probably because of the 10 years that we’ve worked remotely. We understand how important that that connection is. But we’ve seen an uptake in video used outside of the organizations as well. Just wondering if you guys have seen that. I think it’s a really small decision, but I think it makes a difference when you’re talking face to face with somebody, especially when you’re trying to communicate.

So sorry, I just, I have a good one on this cause my wife and I have talked about this a lot. Cause her team has pretty much moved from all video in the very beginning to sporadic video. And they’ve gotten used to the fact that they can still be on the video and whoever wants to be on there. But they’ve kind of gotten past this policy of majority of the people now are either working out in the middle of the day or, you know, they’re not as business professional during the day. And so they they’re cognizant that, Hey, if I’m not on video, it’s usually because I’ve been doing something else. There’s no need for you to look at me and my, you know, quickly post-workout face or something or, you know, just didn’t have the time to kind of do the whole shower thing in the morning. But I’ve seen it kind of go back and forth. The, the tool, the video usage is up, but the, you know, there’s not a push to, you must be on video, ready to go kind of thing. So that’s just the slight nuance that I’ve seen.

We skip the, you must be ready to go part. It’s basically only when we’re recording that I look like this. You don’t know what the bottom half of me looks like.

You know, I think initially everything was zoom zoom, or we use teams and we found a document. I can’t remember it’s Deloitte or McKinsey. And what it does is help you to focus on how you’re going to communicate. So for meetings, maybe it’s video conferencing. For just a quick question it might be chat within teams. And then for other things, it might be email. So as a team, you sit down and you come up with how you gonna going to communicate. And I think that has helped people as well.

Yeah, I think that’s a great point around communication norms. So Chelsea who’s on our team and who’s actually helping with this research. She just joined and one of the first things I said was, okay, here’s how we communicate about different things and on what urgency scale and like, this is what we do. Cause you’re right. That’s one of the hardest things is knowing. And you know, if it’s a team where like unimportant things should not go on chat, you know, then like, and you’re chatting about stuff that, that person’s like, “why are you interrupting my day?” You know, that creates that dissonance. So I think that’s a wonderful point.

Wrap up (53:21)

I think we’re at time. So we’re gonna go and end the call, but we want to thank you all for your insights and for the questions that were submitted. They have helped this conversation to be pretty rich. And we’re pretty excited about some of the things that we’ve learned here. We will be posting this video as well as the transcript online within a week. So look for that and we’ll send you a link to that as well. And please join us for our next one, which will be on mobility and how you move people around the organization.

And then I want to give a plug. We did a more robust roundtable on this topic that was sponsored by CultureAmp. But that was 80 minutes. We started with an overview as we did today on responsivity, but then we broke up into 4 subgroups and had really rich conversations within those groups. Then we came back together, shared what we learned, did this really cool voting exercise on what people thought was most interesting, and then came out of it with a set of actions that people can go in and do an implement. So if you want to dig in further, please click here for those notes and mindmap.

Thank you so much, everybody. We’ll talk to you next time. Okay. Thanks. Bye.

The flurry of significant events in 2020 have built a sense of urgency to act for the greater good of humankind. As a result, we’ve seen innumerable organizations rise to the occasion — acting with a greater and broader purpose, serving many stakeholders, not just shareholders.

We wanted to understand better what is happening now, what we can learn from purpose-driven organizations’ approaches in the past, and what HR’s role is in making organizations purpose-driven. To that end, this report answers 4 questions:

• What is purpose, and how does it differ from other related terms (e.g., mission, vision)?
• What is HR’s role in creating a purpose-driven organization? What can it control and influence?
• What does the employee experience look like at a purpose-driven organization?
• What are some of the purpose-driven practices we’ve seen in response to significant current events?

This research is the culmination of more than 6 months of research, with updates and insights specifically targeted at organizations managing through COVID-19 and the social justice movements of 2020.

 

 

In this call, we discuss the importance of distributive authority – allowing employees to act in making decisions at all levels of an organization. We talk about good examples (which can be hard to find) and touch on principle-vs-rules-based approaches to decision-making. We discuss empowering employees to act, even when it’s not tied to financials. And of course, we share insights on what is happening during the massive changes we’ve seen this year due to COVID-19.

There were many great insights during this Q&A. Thank you to everyone who attended and participated live. We hope you join us for the next Q&A call.

Video Contents & Questions Asked

You can jump to the following locations in the video using the timestamps on the video and in the chapters menu (next to the full screen icon).

0:00 Introduction
1:28 Overview of responsive organizations research
7:45 How are companies changing culture that is dictated by job levels and titles that become the barrier to empowering employees?
21:02 With COVID-19, have organizations slowed down enough that there is the time to be thoughtful about this and overt to the employees?
25:51 How can my organization find the right balance between allowing broad decision-making and ensuring safety, good decisions, etc?
29:08 Does diversity really affect employees ability to act and react to their environment?
33:54 How do we empower employees to create development plans, document them and act on them if they are not linked to any financials?
41:44 How are companies empowering employees during COVID-19?
44:21 Clients are much more interested in burning topics, getting help with BLM reputation, money management, etc. but broader diversity topics do not get much traction at the moment. Do you relate to this?
46:58 Wrap Up

Q&A Call Transcript

Introduction (00:00)

So our session today is on empowering employees to act. This is a pretty broad subject. Some of the questions that we got will narrow it down a little bit. We want to base some of what we share with you on some of the recent research we did for a responsive organization. So that’s kind of where we’re going. As always, you know, as we go through, please feel free to comment and talk. We want this to be an open space. Obviously we are recording and we will be publishing this. So if you don’t want your face or your ideas out in the public, message us privately, and we’ll keep it to ourselves. But we, we love the feedback and we love the interaction.

So for housekeeping, just, just five, really quick things. First of all, make it a safe place, no swearing, no stomping up and down. None of that kind of stuff. We want this to be a safe place to share ideas. The second one obviously is to share your ideas. Third one, in a group this small probably isn’t as valid, but, you know, raise your hand to speak. We keep a really close eye on what the panelists are doing. So go ahead and raise your hand, unmute yourself, and then feel free to discuss topics in the chat as well, if you’re more comfortable using chat than you are speaking out loud. Any questions on any of that?

Overview of responsive organizations research (1:28)

Okay, great. So when we think about getting employees to act or empowering employees to act it takes us back to some research that we completed in may this year, the responsible organization. And one of the sort of lenses that organizations should look through in order to make sure that their organization can respond to external and internal pressures is distributing authority. So making sure that everybody in your organization has the right amount of authority to move the organization forward. And when we sort of deep-dived the distributed authority portion, or three big buckets that came out.

The first one is how decision-making rights are distributed in your organization: who has the ability to make decisions and how you make sure they have that decision-making ability. The second and third ones were a little bit of a surprise to us, but equally interesting. Diverse and engaged teams. It turns out that when you have a diverse and engaged team, your authority is distributed a little bit more broadly. And collaboration is the other one. When you enable your organization to collaborate, distributed authority is a little bit more prevalent.

So I can talk about this one. So, as part of the responsible organization research. In addition to the four lenses, we basically saw that there were kind of three, three levers or three areas where you can help drive responsive organizations. One of them was the organizational culture itself. Another one was managers, and then the third one was data and analytics. And so we recently, some of you may have seen an article you recently published called “the now of work and lessons from an octopus.” And the idea was how do we take what’s happening with data and analytics and use that to help us understand how to make a more responsible organization.

And so when we think about what that specifically was with regard to distributed authority and the connection of people analytics, we saw, there were three particular items. The first being ensuring broad access to analytics products. So when we think about the role of analytics within responsible organization, a big part of it is giving insights and distributing those insights so that people do have the information they need to make decisions. And from a people analytics perspective that starts with designing for the distribution of information, and then obviously all the relevant security controls and everything else that has to go along with that. But if you start from a bias of, we’re going to share information versus we’re going to keep it from closely held, that makes fundamental differences in terms of your decisions about the types of information you collect, how you analyze it, how you distribute it, what you expect people to do with it, etc.

The second component of this, as it related to people, analytics was about sharing valuable insights. And so the point being, you know, Priyanka and I have at this point looked at, I think, just this year, this last six weeks, 30 different technologies, and we’ve got another 20 to go. And when we look at what’s being delivered to managers, oftentimes it’s interesting information, but it’s not valuable information. And so the distinction being that we want to make sure that what we’re providing, isn’t just something that’s kinda like, Oh, Hey, well, that’s nice. And then I go off and do the rest of my work, but instead I can make decisions that are important and that drive value in the organization based on the information we receive. So that’s the second component from a people analytics perspective.

And then the third component is analyzing and enabling collaboration. So, you know, I know Brian and Max and others who’ve been on here before, you know, we’ve talked to some extent about organizational network analysis and understanding, you know, how does information flow through organizations. And that gets it, Dani’s point a few moments ago about distributing authority. So if we’re understanding how information is being shared, if we understand how people work together and collaborate, that enables us to maybe design organizations more effectively for distributing authority. So these were kind of the three areas we saw within people analytics that can help with distributing authority more broadly.

Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. You’re saying that I mean we’ve heard information has power forever and ever and ever. But it really is when you need a distributed authority, unless people have the right information in order to make decisions that distributed authority doesn’t do anything. And that goes much, much further than just the manager level. In most organizations, we’re seeing information sort of float down the organization till it’s the manager level and then that’s where it resides. We rely on those managers to get that information all the way down to the individuals. But what we’re finding is those organizations that are using technologies and putting systems and processes into place to actually share that information further down. We’re actually getting much more responsivity in their organization cause they’re empowered to do something about it.

So we’ve gone over just two quick models. Are there any, well, it’s the same different aspects of the same model? Are there any comments or questions about these before we jump into the questions?

I’ll just add an addendum. So we, this research getting mentioned, the core research was published in May. It was based on a giant lit. review. We then did a survey of about 300, both HR leaders, as well as managers and employees. And then did a whole, like probably the most sophisticated statistical analysis we’ve done of any research. And that’s kind of how we got to the four lenses and then the sub components of it. So it’s not just some pretty circles on a page, even though that’s what we’re showing. There is a very substantial amount of work that went behind this that’s published in that research for May.

We also ended up doing four round tables with about 30 leaders in each to sort of round out what it meant. It was a really interesting topic, but a very deep and complicated topic. And the stories from those leaders really provided a lot of color and a lot of help to those looking for information on how to do this better.

And those, and we did really nice summaries and mindmaps and everything of those conversations that are available on the website. So if there’s more that you want to see beyond the conversation today, particularly with regard to the other three lenses, that information is available.

Changing the culture of job levels & titles (7:45)

Okay. So let’s jump into the first question. How are companies changing culture that is dictated by job levels and titles that become the barrier to empowering employees?

Stacia and I were talking about this question at the beginning, it took us two or three times the question to sort of understand what it was actually asking, but this is the, this is the big challenge right now. We have really traditional ways of thinking about working organizations and the way that those traditional structures don’t necessarily lend themselves to empowering employees. So what are we seeing that companies are doing to change the culture, to make empowering employees possible?

So I can jump in with, with a start. One of the biggest things that we saw in the research that we just kind of touched on a moment ago is this this topic of decision-making rights. It’s kind of getting that clarified and, and understanding both what is the state today, the explicit state and the implicit state. So there may be a situation where people say, this is what you’re allowed to do. And then there’s what you’re really allowed to do. And then documenting what the changes are or how you need it to be moving forward.

So one of the most interesting things we saw coming out of the round table was a suggestion of publishing a decision-making log, which we had actually never heard of. Maybe you guys have, but the idea that being that we in particularly senior leaders make decisions in the organization, they document what the decision was, the thinking behind the decision-making process. And then they share that broadly, basically one, certainly to communicate, you know, this decision or why. But also more importantly, as part of kind of a learning effort to help the organization learn how they should be making decisions, what are the type of criteria that really matter, and then to be able to model that same type of decision-making.

So, you know, that clarity, I think is one component, the second component being basic, you know, these are the types of decisions that people have authority to make in different roles or titles, etc. And then the third component was that we heard, particularly with regard to COVID was this focus on when it’s appropriate to look to expertise versus title. So, you know, particularly, you know, when you’re close to a customer or you’re close to a particular problem being very clear on, you know, when you, when that person has a higher level of expertise, this is when they should be making a decision versus, you know, other situations. So just being very clear on some of those decision-making rights was one of the biggest things we saw both in the research as well as around too.

Yeah. And interestingly, those organizations that do this best aren’t necessarily the ones that offer the most freedom for decision-making rights, which we found really interesting. It’s more a matter of communicating what decision rights they have. So for example, you know, how do you determine who gets what days off? Do I actually need to ask? Or can I just tell you that I’m going to take Friday off? Or can I provide an extra discount for a long time customer? Is that something that I need approval for? Is that something that I’m empowered to do? So making sure that those communications are really clear and that everybody understands what decision-making authority that they have.

And then the other big problem that organizations run into is consistency. Because a lot of times decision-making rights are really dependent on the immediate supervisor and that can’t be in an organization where you’re trying to get everybody to move in the same direction and be really responsive. So making sure that you have systems and processes into place to make sure that that consistency is there was the other big piece. Any questions or comments on this? What are you all seeing?

I agree with what you’re saying in terms of being clear about what your decision rights are and making sure that it’s consistent. And then I think over time, the blurring of the boundaries and the character of the people and the situation that they’re at. So it’s worth it to come back frequently to review it, whether it’s with your direct manager or organizationally. I’ve seen it where I got to blurry over time. And then it’s like, what Stacia said, what you say and then what really happens, becomes very different.

Yeah. I think a really good example of this is actually Ritz Carlton. And this is the example that’s used all the time, but everybody in that organization knows that they have up to $2,000 to solve a customer’s problems or guests problem, right? So everybody knows what the boundary is. I can sell this guess problem up to $2,000. It’s been communicated broadly and they’ve been consistent in the way that they handle that. So that it’s always going to be consistent. It’s always going to be that. You’re right in a lot of organizations that does get a lot, a lot blurrier and, and not every organization and not every situation is as cut and dried as is Ritz Carlton. But that should be the goal communicate what you can do and then make it consistent across everything. I like that Jacquie, any other thoughts, comments on this one?

I tend to read about it more than I actually see it. And I wonder, you know, it’s great to cite them actually, because one needs to pull out the shining examples where you find them. Certainly not many of the companies I work with would do it, not for lack of pressing them to become more transparent. But I wonder whether there’s a direction in your research, did it emerge at all that larger companies are less likely to do it then smaller companies perhaps? Because I mean, anecdotally small companies I know are doing it, but they’re not the ones I work with. So presumably that’s why they don’t need me because they do it. Maybe that’s the lesson, but I’d be interested in the demographics and stuff that you looked at because is this a handful of large companies and mainly mid, SMBs, midsize companies, or who is doing this good stuff?

I think if it gets even a little bit more complicated between large and small, because you also have situations where there’s a business unit within a large organization that is doing it well. And then there’s sort of a pocket within that organization. That’s doing it. I mean, there are the sort of usual suspects, you know Ritz Carlton, Nordstrom, Gore, those that you hear about all the time that have set this as part of the way that they do things. I think it also becomes an issue of sort of mission and vision and also the way that they handle failure. So when you put something like this in place you have to expect a certain amount of failure. And the communication that you have about that failure is going to determine whether or not it continues to happen or whether it shuts things down completely. And so I think it’s a really complicated thing. And I think you’re right Max. We hear about the really good cases, but we don’t see it broadly. But what we do know from the research is that those organizations that are doing it tend to be much more responsive to the market.

I think the other thing, I mean, we’ve focused a bit here on kind of decision-making rights because that’s where I started us. But, but the other places we think about changing culture that I feel like we’re seeing a lot of is using a lot of the feedback mechanisms, no employee poll surveys or, or the like that we’ve seen particularly explode since COVID. The thing I find fascinating is there, it seems like there used to be an assumption that because people were sitting in the same building and actually knew what was going on in their heads and what they thought as soon as they go to work from home, it’s like, “Oh wait, maybe we don’t know, we need to ask them questions.” And it’s like, well, you probably didn’t know before, but whatever. So, but, but we’ve kind of seen that.

And I think where we’ve started, if we’re talking about this question here about how do we make that shift? One part of it is asking, obviously. The second part is sharing what you’re learning in terms of what people think, feel, things should be done to do the work better. But then the third part is enabling action and enabling that broadly. Do you think the area that we tend to see the biggest trip up is this idea that we just got, you know, whether it’s engagement survey, experience survey, or whatever it is, we just got our results and we, HR going to go and take charge and we’re going to drive the change. And it’s like, you know, HR as a percentage of the organization is so small. And if you’re trying to change company culture, you have to be doing exactly what we’re talking about, empowering employees to act. So what is the enabling action plan that you’re putting in place, but allows people to understand the data and the insights and then to go and do something and to have some structure of the decision-making. You know, these are the types of things that you can do or where you need to get some feedback or check in from our senior leaders. But, you know, giving some reign people to do something that that will drive positive change and gives them a sense of doing something to make my workplace a better place.

I mean, I have one shining example that that really gets me thinking, “Please don’t do that.” And that’s ONA, organizational network and analysis. There’s this whole thing about active analysis where you using surveys and passive analysis where you are putting millstones around their neck, or looking at their emails and phone calls who’s talking to who, etc. And it really bugs me when I see companies saying we are only going to do passive. I said, can’t you pretend to do some active, just so that employees get the impression that you’re interested in what they’re saying. I mean, you can tear them up afterwards, but just try and do that. And I think that I’m seeing that as a sort of a growing trend, more and more passive coming in less and less active. And I kind of wonder, again, I think there’s this dichotomy, you know, when Dani was explaining it very well earlier. Dani, to your point, I wonder if this isn’t sort of Pareto principle or worse, you know, like 80/20, you know, 10/90, 5/95 or something. Because I’m, I’m seeing less. Again, it’s large organizations doing that. But I mean, your, your point that organizations that do do it, do really well when they do it, I think is the, is the key message. And I just, I wish more people would hear that particularly on the ONA front, for example.

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. So I think I’m seeing something slightly different on the ONA front in that you guys, I think there’s more general interest broadly in passive, but there’s still really great reticence, particularly in the bigger organizations that we were talking about to do it. Because of, you know, fear of what happens if it ends up on the front page of the journal. And so I think that I am seeing a bit more interest on active and doing some combination with passive, but relatively like, and maybe it’s just who I’m talking about and I’m looking at others are too. But the kind of acknowledgement of the importance of trust, particularly when it comes to, you know, spying or some of the other things.

I think the thing that bothers me though, we’re talking about what bothers us about ONA is all that information being held within HR. Not that everybody needs to see, you know, the big, pretty graphs and all the rest of that. But, you know, I think I know of only two vendors who are giving an individualized report back out to people that says, here are the people who you said are kind of your trusted network. You yourself tend to be a boundary spanner, and maybe you want to build in these directions or anything that would help people actually do something with the data we’re collecting on them and help them with their career and to be more effective would be great. What bothers me is when it’s all just kept behind and it’s like, okay, well, we’re going to use this decision for succession or for you know, post M&A decisions, et cetera, et cetera. That’s that I think is you know, you’re not distributing authority. You’re not enabling people when you collect the data and then hold everything to yourself. Off my soap box. A hundred percent,

Are companies being thoughtful enough during COVID-19? (21:02)

If I could add another angle, it’s sort of a question with an observation to start in terms of companies changing their culture. I’ve had experience in my past with large companies going fast one way or another. And to me, that’s where the lines get blurry, especially you bring another acquisition and their culture is different. And so in my past, it was always moving too quickly to really have those robust conversations and be thoughtful about what the differences in the cultures were, which ones you want to promote actively or passively one way or another. But now this is my question: with COVID-19 have organizations slowed down enough that there is the time to be thoughtful about this and overt to the employees? Or are we just moving quickly because of crisis and we’re not able to be thoughtful about it? To me, it seems like you have to think both short-term and long-term so that you can focus your resources and be consistent over time and throughout the organization and give that feedback and readjust and all that kind of thing. And I’m curious about what the impact of this year is on those resources and availability.

Well, let me take a stab of that. I don’t know, Stacia and I are going to agree on this, so I want to speak first. (Get your point in before I can) I see what you’re seeing Jacquie, but I’m also seeing sort of a more optimistic view of it. So I think first of all, I don’t think organizations are slowing down. I think they’ve had to speed up tremendously. I use the example of somebody that was trying to put an LSP into place. And they said, yeah, we’re going to roll this out over the next year and a half. And it turns out COVID happened and then everybody was up and going in three weeks. So, we’re seeing things move much more quickly. Stacia and I have had this conversation a lot, change doesn’t take as long as we think it’s going to take. People are much more adaptive than we give them credit for.

So that’s happening. At the same time, because things are happening faster, I think organizations are getting better at adapting and accepting good enough versus accepting perfect. So if you think about a waterfall design versus an agile design. Going through the steps and making sure that everything is exactly right, I think is becoming more and more a thing of the past because things are moving too quickly to do it that way. So now I’m going to throw it to Stacia and see what she has to say.

So, I agree with most of that. I think that we were in this massive period when COVID first happened, crazy acceleration, like Dani said, like, Oh, we got to get this stuff in, we gotta make decisions faster. And I feel like we kind of really ramped up. And then I think we hit the realization that this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. And then I feel like we, in some ways kind of backed off. It was interesting. I was actually talking to a vendor yesterday. He was showing me big data set that the analysis that they had done on hours worked and actually you can see it in the hours work. So you actually see the ramp up to a significant increase in hours in the like six to eight weeks post-COVID, so March to end of April kind of roughly time period, mid May. And then it backed down lot closer to where were .and now actually it seems like it’s kind of going back up and I think maybe that’s because we’re starting to look towards the end of the year, final quarter activities, etc.

But that’s kind of a long way of saying that, you know, I think because Jacquie we’re in this it’s-a-marathon-not-a-sprint period, I think people are now starting to say, okay, well, if we’re going to have this more flexible work from home arrangement, when it, you know, whenever we go back into the office, we’re going to have to rethink what the culture looks and feels like and what the employee experience looks and feels like. Because we’re going to have to design something that people really want to be here and want to do the work. So I think we may be in that moment now, and I’m just starting to hear about some of those conversations. So I don’t have enough kind of data to really say absolutely that’s where we are, but that’s not my gut given all the conversations I’ve had.

One of the one of the really interesting comments we got in our round tables is fairly, forward-thinking guy running an HR department said, “We’re using this as an opportunity to change things that don’t work. We’re weeding out things that don’t work.” And so I do agree with Stacia, like we are slowing down enough to sort of say, okay, now how do we institutionalize this rather than react to everything that’s going on right now? They think we’re doing it much more agilely and we’re allowing ourselves to not be perfect as we do it and adjust as we go rather than the way that we’ve done it for the last hundred years. Any thoughts on that?

I like the opportunity to do it better and fix the things that are broken. And I’m super curious, and I’ll ask you again in three to six months, you know, they had this moment, but did it last? And then how fast did we go back to just how it was or what kind of changes will remain and be institutionalized? It’s a super curious time. Yeah. I mean, please do ask us in six months cause I would like to know as well. I think that’ll be an interesting discussion.

Broad decision-making vs good, safe decisions (25:51)

All right. I’m just looking at time. I think we’re going to move on to the next question. We have many, many questions and we’re still on number one. So let me move to the next one. How can my organization find the right balance between allowing broad decision-making and ensuring safety, good decisions, etc? So this is one of things we heard quite a bit during the round tables and something that we’ve continued to hear is, you know, if I allow this amount of freedom or if we, if we put things in place where things don’t have to be perfect, how do we ensure that good decisions are going to be made and safety and those types of things aren’t going to suffer? You want to take a stab at that first Stacia?

Well, I think that we, we touched on it a little bit on the past question and that’s why we grouped these two together. But I think a lot of this comes down to you know, being clear on the expectations. You know, it’s, it’s a principles approach, not a rules based approach in terms of the decisions we’re making. With the exception being safety. That’s a rules based approach. And Dani and I have actually talked about this in the context of, and even learning systems that we offer. You know, using certain types of learning systems for compliance related content and things that we need to have clearly denoted as having mastery of. Versus other types of learning systems that we use where you’re trying to encourage exploration and learning and it’s okay to fail and all the rest of that. And so I think that that kind of dual track approach is important to think about, I think we have a tendency to rely on doing things one way, but they don’t think that’s the case. So safety, yes, you know, compliance focused. And then, you know, other things being more of a principles based approach and being clear in your communications on that.

I also think this is really changing the conversation we’re having in general and organizations. Like we’ve been so sort of, you know, how’s this person performing on a scale from one to five and if you screw up, you know, what does that mean for your career? We’ve been thinking in those terms for so long, because we’ve been focused on efficiency for so long, but I think this is really interesting. We’re now saying, listen, the world is moving too fast for the people at the top to make all the decisions we have to broadly distribute decision-making authority. So how do we do that? And how do we look at failure as data instead of looking at it as a failure of one individual? How do we take the information from all of those smaller failures and do something with them?

I think in one of these calls, I mentioned the CEO who challenged his direct reports to have intelligent failures. Which I think is really interesting. He didn’t, he didn’t measure them on successes. He measured them on how many intelligent failures, which means they thought through the decision, made the decision and then it still failed. How organizations are starting to think about failure and think about it as data rather than as a career blunder is a really interesting thing for me. And I think it kind of goes back to, Jacquie, the question you were asking. Is this going to hold or are we going to back down and start focusing on efficiency and making sure everybody’s in the right place again? Again, any thoughts from anybody else on this?

Does diversity really affect the ability to act? (29:08)

Let’s move onto the next question. I’m going to toss this one to Stacia because she is our resident expert in diversity and inclusion. One of the things that came out of our responsive organization, stuff that we did not necessarily expect was diversity and the role that it plays. So the question we got was does diversity really affect employees ability to act and react to their environment?

Yes. I mean, we all know, or maybe we don’t all know cause we got this question. There’s, there’s tons of studies that show the impact of diversity and diversity of thought and perspectives on our ability to see around corners, to look at things in different ways, and to be able to react more more thoughtfully and in a more agile fashion. You know, one, the things that ran through the responsive organization research was the importance of taking outside information and bringing it in and using that to kind of change our perspectives. And so when you build in, you have diverse people and diverse perspectives in your organization, you’re enhancing your ability to do that just from the get go, and then continuing to encourage those people to seek out those diverse experiences and diverse information I think is really important.

The other aspect of this, and Dani touched on this a few moments ago, is the idea that because the way information flows through an organization, the way that power networks work and organizations a lot of decisions and information gets held in specific networks within and therefore we’re not having nearly as much participation in providing new ideas, making decisions as we, as we might think we are. You know, just because we have diverse people in the group doesn’t mean that they’re getting the information and making decisions.

And so if you’re able to create a more inclusive environment where those people can bring their perspectives, you’re going to get that broader decision-making and authority. So, you know, if the answer is a resounding yes. I will say though, it’s not easy. And I think that’s the thing about all this distributed authority work is it’s not the most direct line that you can see from here to there. It might, you know, kind of go around and around like this, but the thing is, is when you get here, the result is better, but it takes a a willingness to kind of engage in the less linear path to get there. I think that’s the crux of everything we wrote about in this research is, you know, the greatest efficiency is not necessarily the best way forward. And so we needed to kind of get out of that mindset and be more open, you know, open the aperture to possibilities and ideas that may not be what we, to those in the leadership in the high power positions, think is exactly the right way to get there. Any thoughts on this or examples that you’ve seen?

One of the things that we heard in the roundtables was the idea of introverts versus extroverts and how most workplaces are built for the extrovert. And so we actually had a pretty deep discussion, a 15 or 20 minute discussion, on how you, how you engage those introverts in an organization or in a system that doesn’t necessarily recognize them. A book by Susan Cain “Quiet” is fantastic, especially if you’re like me and are an introvert. But some of the other things that we heard were, you know, send really detailed agendas and make it really how they’re going to be expected to participate in those. Be aware of those that aren’t actively participating in, ask them their opinion, or text them in the background and see if they have questions. Or establish that there aren’t any really bad ideas, there are just ideas and we’re all here to learn from each other. And those things sort of go back to, you know, it’s effort. It’s effort, and it’s not a direct path, but the ideas and the path that you have moving forward is probably going to be much better.

I’ll just add reinforcement, that I agree diversity is very important. Diversity of thought, experience, backgrounds. But I would call out what you just said about the effort that it takes to make it safe for people to put their thoughts forward. Space to fail and also the time that it takes to do all that. And the power networks, I think, is very important to call out the power networks. Trump and many of the others. Because if you’re asking for their opinions or experiences, but they’re only saying what they think the power network wants to hear, you’ll never get that diversity. So there’s other things that are at play. This is definitely not something that stands alone. Any other thoughts on this particular question?

Empowering employees when it’s not linked to financials (33:54)

Okay, let’s move on to the next one. How do we empower employees to create development plans, document them and act on them if they are not linked to any financials? I thought this was a really interesting question. In organizations that are responsive or even organizations that are healthy and that are working well employees understand that those development plans are very useful to themselves. So it’s not just for the organization. It’s not just check the box activity, but they are designed and supported by managers and upper leaders to make sure that that employee is developing in the direction that they wanted to go. And so in organizations where this is not happening, where you’re really struggling to get those development plans in place, it’s usually due to lack of communication about their importance and the benefits associated with him, lack of support from the managers, the direct managers and lack of enablement of those individuals to make sure that those things happen. So in a lot of organizations, if the manager doesn’t value them, then they’re just not going to get done.

(34:57): Whereas in organizations where this is working well, the manager is as involved as the individual, but the individual also knows that they can call on the manager at any time to have that discussion about what’s next in my career and help them move forward. Stacia, did you want to add anything before I open it up?

No. I mean,I just kind of laughing at the beginning because when we first got this question, I was thinking to myself, “Well, what are their incentives, right?” If people know what their purpose is, what their work is, what they’re trying to get out of this experience, I think that this question goes away to some extent. But if you’re unclear on helping people understand what the benefit is: What’s in it for me? And instead if you’re using development plans as a mass grave for just how can we get you to do this work that more effectively for us? And there’s no “what’s in it for me” for the employee then yeah, you’re going to have a problem. Which I feel like is stating the obvious, but it never fails to amaze me how often that seems to get forgotten the ultimate employee what’s in it for me.

Completely agree. One of the other lenses that we’re not necessarily hitting on today is transparency and growth, which kind of weaves right into here. How is your organization providing opportunities for individuals to develop? So if you’re giving them their employee development plan versus opening up and saying, here are all your options, how can I help you develop the way you need to? It’s a completely different mindset and it’s a culture shift, but one we’re seeing more and more. Any thoughts from anybody else?

I think it’s tough developing people in a very VUCA world. So you put plans into place, but nobody really believes that you’re going to be there to enact that plan. Then you have to start saying, “Are we doing this for you as an individual so that you can transcend this company and you can take what we give you to our competitor, etc? So I think we need a new approach for development planning, where we take into account the reality that somebody is probably going to leave in two years. One interesting phenomena and I don’t know if it speaks to this side, I have the privilege and it is a privilege of coaching some great leaders. I’m not a great leader. I’m a much better coach than I am. I’m a better coach of leaders than I am a leader. And I stay with my people from job to job. So when they change companies, I stick with them. And so in a sense that is a continuous development plan. So when we work on the development plan, we don’t make an assumption that they’re going to be staying in the company where I originally started working with them. I wonder if more companies would have the courage to start doing that with their employees, particularly with Gen Zs, by the way.

Yeah. I think it’s an interesting point, Max, and I think it goes into the whole coaching and mentoring aspect that we’re also seeing come up in the development space. Just like with skills. I did a quick sort of view of this space and there are over a hundred technologies that focus on coaching. One of the biggest is BetterUp. And that’s exactly what better up does. It basically says, Hey, coaching is for everybody. And we’re going to bring in these coaches from outside, not necessarily in the organization. And so I’m working with somebody to develop myself, not necessarily develop myself for the role that you need me in right now. So I think more and more organizations are starting to think about that.

I also talked to a really tiny company called Lighthouse started by this woman who’s like 30 years old and she’s kind of on fire right now. What she’s done is she’s basically gone to all the big business schools and recruited people to be coaches for those people that you’re talking about. So Gen z and early millennials basically said, “Hey, you’re moving from your first role to your second role. You need some coaching. Let’s have someone talk to you that just barely got through with that, to help you think through what the next step should be, or what options you have in this place that you are.”

So I think more organizations are starting to adopt that mindset, but it’s hard to get people to stop thinking about what’s in it for me as an organization. What are the immediate things that I can see from developing this person right now to a much broader sort of how do we develop a development culture here? And how do we make it a safe place for everybody to develop and remain friends with them, even if they decide to move on to another organization?

Yes. I was just going to say one thing, literally every client that we work with has rolled out some version of growth mindset in the last couple of months. And as part of that, what we’re starting to see is baking the development into their rewards and recognition. So traditionally, most companies reward some combination of performance and contribution. And adding growth and development to that equation, I think is something that’s sort of a logical next step. If they’re really serious about their growth mindset that you need to recognize and reward the development people are taking on and what they’re accomplishing in that regard. Because it doesn’t necessarily show up right away in their performance or business results. It’s an investment in their future. And that collective future of the organization.

I love that idea Brian. I don’t know that I’ve seen it quite as much as you have yet, but I love the idea of rewarding people for having that growth mindset or being motivated to continue to learn and grow and develop. We’ve talked about how HRN learning and development can’t understand everything that an employee needs. It has to be sort of a do it yourself job. And so rewarding that is really cool. The other thing that I really like about it is as far as performance goes, you’re completely in charge of how you develop. It doesn’t rely on how your function is doing or what your manager did. It’s purer in a sense than some of those other things that we usually measure people on. I love that idea. Other thoughts before we move on here?

So just to add, that’s a great point from Brian, is that at IBM now a growth mindset is a requirement to keep your job literally. So, in other words, you are at risk if you are not developing yourself skills-wise, knowledge-wise, etc. over any given period. So that’s quite quite tough building it in, but very much speaks to the point that Brian was making.

Companies empowering employees during COVID-19 (41:44)

Yeah, very interesting. All right. I think we’re over time already. Let’s do one more question and then we’ll wrap this up. And I think I want to do this one. How are companies empowering employees during COVID-19? I would love before Stacia and I answer this, because we’ve done a little bit of research on it, I’d love to understand from from the rest of you, what are you seeing? How our employees sort of approaching COVID-19 as an opportunity for change?

Well, this is Brian again. I mean, the number one thing is empowering employees to decide if and when they come back to the office under what conditions and what sort of precautions or measures need to be in place. I see that a lot because employees are all over the board. There’s some people that have no intention of returning to the office anytime soon. And some people that really miss being around other people. There’s people who have no interest in wearing masks ever under any circumstances. There’s other people that insist that, if they’re in the office, they want everybody to wear mask. And putting all that decision-making authority in the hands of employees. I think at least four different big clients that we have all taken that exact same approach.

I like that a lot. What are other people saying? Also that seems really important. I don’t know, feeling safe in your work environment seems to be a pretty big deal. So the fact that they’re empowered to actually make those decisions for themselves is awesome. What are other people seeing?

I know, sort of along with that, one of the things that we’re seeing is more organizations are being flexible with work hours. Particularly as students go back to school or not. I know we’re being very flexible with that, right Stacia? It’s a different world than it was in March of last year. And so figuring out how to make it work for your employees so that they can make it work for their families is becoming a bigger thing. Both the hard rock and those organizations that are not allowing flexibility and a benefit in those organizations where they are. Other thoughts on this one?

All right. We have lots of stories in the responsive organization research that kind of address this. So if you’re interested in some more examples, go ahead and go there.

Crisis management vs optimization (44:21)

Dani, there was one comment in the chat that I had just want to squeeze in here before we wrap. So, someone said to the point is it going to hold? And I think this got back at some of the development conversations we were having. This person said, when I speak to strategy consultants selling to C-suite, they tell me that topics which actually get traction with clients right now are burning topics, real crisis management, badly broken things. Optimization topics, the kind we are discussing here are a difficult sell, say the diversity topic we’ve just discussed. Clients are much more interested in getting help with BLM reputation, money management, but broader diversity topics do not get much traction at the moment. Do you relate to this?

So I’ll maybe jump in and then you can open it. I think yes, but I don’t know that that’s any different now than ever. You know, the burning platform is always the thing that is going to get the C-suites attention. I’ll go back to the diversity topic, which I think is potentially different. Particularly with regard to diversity, and also, I may have mentioned we’re doing some research on purpose, there is a greater sensitivity to the purpose-washing or diversity-washing that organizations may be engaging in, particularly right now with regard to Black Lives Matter, then there was in the past.

And so there is a huge amount of cynicism to people just posting on their Twitter account, we believe black lives matter and leaving it at that, if they don’t then turn their focus also inwardly and talk about what they’re doing within their own organizations with regards to diversity and inclusion. Now is that driven because CEOs understand that like BLM management means that it also means you need to focus internally? Maybe that might be it. But I do think that because of the increasing power of employee’s voices as stakeholders that we are seeing that greater focus on a number of things. So so I don’t know that that now is any fundamentally different in burning platforms being what gets attention. But I think the extent of how far the platform is burning into the organization, may be shifting.

Wrap up (46:58)

Any thoughts on that? It’s a big topic. We should have addressed this at the beginning of the end. Lots of say on this one. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think we’re going to leave it there. Always, if you have thoughts or comments that you didn’t necessarily want to share on this call, please feel free to give us a shout out. Contact us on LinkedIn. We’ve provided our email pretty much everywhere. We’d love to hear from you and your, your thoughts. It makes our research better. And I want to mention our next one is September 17th. And I had mentioned at the beginning that you kind of did the slice of responsive organizations for people analytics. We’re going to be doing the slice of responsible organizations from managers. And we’re kicking off that research. We’ve actually got a survey that’s going to publish this week on the topic, and then we’re going to do this next Q&A call also on that topic on September 17th. So if you all want to come along to that, that would be great.

And then the other thing we want to mention is, as I said last time, we have our membership kicking off. It will launch sometime in October. We’re just doing a lot of work on the website. We want to get it perfect, cause it’s brand new. So you all will see that at some point, but I’m not putting my money on it. Maybe by the one after that we’ll have the membership up and going.

Alright, thank you everybody for joining.