What the Research Really Tells Us About Purpose at Work

Speaker A: This episode of the Digital HR Leaders

Speaker B: Podcast is brought to you by leapsum. For as long as I can remember, we've talked about purpose as if it was something every organisation could and should hand to their people. Find your why at, uh, work, align your values with ours. And yet, when you actually go and talk to people working in all different types of organizations, all varieties of roles and all kinds of environments, what people actually tell you doesn't always match the story we like to tell ourselves. That's why I'm absolutely delighted to be joined today by Jessica Svann, vp, People, Strategy and Operations at Leipzig, and author of two books, Built for People, which makes the case for running hr. Ah, more like a product function. And her latest book, Purpose and Work, which takes a hard look at some of the assumptions our profession has been operating on for years. I'm particularly excited about my conversation with Jessica as we get into the research she conducted for purpose at work and why purpose is more complicated than the way most organizations talk about it. We discuss what Jessica terms purpose washing, what it really means, why it happens, and, uh, what a better alternative looks like. We'll get into how Jessica is putting all of this into practice at leapsum, why knowing your people is the starting point for all of it, and whether HR's reputation problem is finally beginning to shift. So if you've ever felt the gap between what your organization says about purpose and, and what your people are actually experiencing day to day, I think you'll find this episode really inspiring. And with that, let's get started by learning more about Jessica.

Speaker A: Jessica, welcome to the Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Great to have you on the show.

Speaker C: Thank you, David. I'm really excited to be here.

Speaker A: I've been following your work for a while and I know a lot of our listeners, um, will do too. But for anyone who hasn't yet and doesn't know you, um, I'd love for you to introduce yourself in your own words. Who is Jessica Swan?

Speaker C: It's funny, I feel like, uh, whenever people do know something about me, I feel like the version of me that they know is a slightly different one than I am going to explain. So, hopefully everyone gets to learn something. Yeah, My name is Jessica. I have written two books. I've been working in people operations and writing about people operations for a really long time now. My whole career didn't come into this through maybe a more traditional channel. I came into HR through book publishing. So things have kind of come full circle for me. And because this wasn't something that I studied, I Think I've kind of kept this very open mind about where I can steal from other teams and businesses and how we can learn from each other. So that's a big part of kind, uh, of the work that I've done over the course of my career. And I briefly worked as a, well, briefly five years worked as CEOs for companies. And I've only just come back into a pure people ops role at leapsa, which I'm really excited about. I think the gap between where people teams are now and where they will need to be in five years is probably the biggest gap any function will need to kind of bridge. And I'm really excited about being back at the epicenter of all that change.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, let's dig into that. Having obviously come to HR from outside HR and then leaving again and coming back again, uh, and CEO. I'd love to. Love to. So you've joined leapson recently, I think, uh, in April actually. So you're still in your, your first 90 days. And we'll, we'll talk about that in a minute. Um, but as you said, you were a coo, uh, for five or six years before coming back into to an HR role, and you've made obviously a deliberate decision to come back. You know, firstly, what drew you back to the people function and what are you bringing into the people function that maybe the people function? You know, again, being modest, of course, is kind of lacking when we, when we look at the rest of the business.

Speaker C: Yeah. Well, I think the reason that I came back is, it's funny, I never really went that far away. Right. I was still writing about it the entire time and I was still managing the people team, um, and working in a business that was selling to people practitioners at Talentful for heads of talent and CPOs. So I've never really been like that far away from um, it, but it definitely hasn't been my full focus. I think the way that artificial intelligence and technology just generally, um, is changing economics and uh, organizational design and skill profiles and even just the kind of trust and relationship that employees have with their employers, those things are so dramatic, uh, that I think that the skills and work that people operations team will be doing is just completely far away from where it is now. It's almost like going back to the beginning of my career. When I first started working. We just were starting to move out of filing cabinets and into HRAs. Some like, here I am, old dinosaur coming in to tell everyone about the filing cabinet switch. But like that switch from filing cabinets to A hras, uh, on a server or now in the cloud. That was a massive change to how human resources teams worked. And we had this huge disruption to the kind of profile we have. Went from being like the payroll ladies to now we have HR business partners as a whole different world. I think that change is going to look minuscule comparative to what we're about to see happen. And I don't know about you, but I'd much prefer the people that are at the epicenter of that change be people that genuinely really care about it, that love the empathy and the passion and the support of HR just as much as the technology. I don't want people operations to be run by technocrats that think they can optimize everything away. I think I would like the people that have been doing this the whole time really, really well to be the ones at the front of that change.

Speaker A: And um, we always talking about HR being more connected to the business. Obviously you spend time outside HR in the business, you know, and I guess you can, you can, you can bring those two elements together then.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think one of the things that we're going to have to be is something that we already saw happen in Covid, right? Like HR teams and chief people officers became like mini economists overnight. All of a sudden they had to understand like global markets, they had to understand how they're going to pay cross border, they'd have to understand different exchange rate optimization and what that meant to the way that compensation was being calculated, which for really large companies was something that you did have rewards teams to do. But for a company under even like 10,000 people was like a very problem. Right. I think that kind of complexity of commercial decision making is something that is going to get more and more and more important because I think HR teams of one are going to become more and more common. I think HR teams that are very much tightly connected to the commercial realities of a business, particularly as it relates to, you know, revenue per head and how do we understand performance and pay and how do we understand, uh, you know, the skills available in a market and how to assess whether or not we have an EVP to address them. Things that we've always been doing to some degree but will start becoming much more acute. Um, so having a good commercial understanding as a base layer I think is going to become absolutely necessary.

Speaker A: No, really good. And the end of the day we, you know, we might work in hr, but we're business people that work in hr. We're all business people at the end of the day. And, and if it makes you feel any better, when I started in recruitment, uh, I, all my candidates I had, um, they were all on paper.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: So no ats, no, no, no computers. They were literally on paper. So I'm showing my age. It's certainly on that. And I am a dinosaur. So, uh, so, so Jessica, as, as we said, you're in your first 90 days at Leapsum. What's that looking like? You know, I'd love to hear, you know, what you've been doing in those first 90 days and maybe an opportunity to, to share more with listeners about leapsum as well.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I am another part of the reason why I have the draw back into, back into people ops has been I'm really excited about not just like leading this change within a company, but also leading this change within a company who's trying to change this for all HR practitioners. So we're building a tool that is really genuinely, I think, trying to become market leading as it relates to artificial intelligence and how we support the future HR teams. Not just now, not just in a year, but in the next five years, 10 years. And I think that the way that the founding team and engineering team are thinking about that is really, really inspiring and exciting. I think hris tools, um, and generally HR tech have been a little bit kind of Web 2.0 for quite a long time. And I think there's a lot of room for us to build things that really help us make really brilliant decisions. We have so much rich, incredible data. How do we understand that data? How do we then build initiatives and programs using that? How do we be able to give the business tools that they can then use to make really good decisions with us as an advisory partner. So we're trying to build like a HR that I would say closer to a kind of AI powered HubSpot than it is a traditional system of record. And that makes me so excited. I think also going out and speaking to the community with other HR leaders that have really great ideas about what kind of future they would like to see in their tooling has been really fun for me and genuinely trying to build something that's actually like serving the next generation of business leaders in full transparency. Though I've been with the team for nine days, I've been doing a lot of work, been speaking to a lot of customers, been out and about, been building things internally. I also took, uh, three weeks off to go do a road trip across America. So I have been off keys for the last couple of weeks across 19 states, um, and I'm just back in action this week. Yeah, I know, very blessed. But I had the trip booked, but, um, so I've had a bit of a funny introduction. Full go and then full off and now back to full go.

Speaker A: But that's pretty good because you probably had some time to reflect on your first, I don't know, 50 days or whatever, you know, and, and probably it helps you absorb it a little bit more and think about what you could actually do because obviously, obviously you're a leader, so you, you have to do and you have to strategize as well. And that, that reflection time, I imagine is probably quite helpful.

Speaker C: Absolutely. It's also been, I think, really helpful for my team who we set a lot of initiatives with and they're a really, really capable team and being able to say to them like, I fully trust you. You've got the roadmap, you know what you need to do. I'll be back in three weeks time. Uh, anything that you do, if it's wrong, we can correct it. That's going to be all right. And having them have that confidence to take it I think has also been a really helpful exercise in that now I really feel like I have a team that knows that they have my trust and also feels confident enough that they can just execute a little bit more independently. Um, which was kind of a rip the band aid off scary thing for everybody. But I think everyone feels really good about it.

Speaker A: This is not a travel podcast, so I'm not going to ask you too many questions about your 19 states. But, but what was your favorite state that you visited? Uh, in the last three. In those three weeks.

Speaker C: This is probably going to be a little bit of a dark horse, but Arkansas was super beautiful. I loved Arkansas. I went to a place called Little Missouri Falls, um, and it was so beautiful, so lush and so green. Um, and I saw two Armadillos, which was like Highlight.

Speaker A: Most HR platforms started with payroll and

Speaker B: compliance, then bolted on performance and engagement as an afterthought. That's why you're still stitching together people data and struggling to connect the dots between performance engagement and growth. Leapsum took the other direction. They spent 10 years building best in Class performance management, engagement goals and learning first. Then they built the HR is underneath it. That means people data, uh, performance insights and day to day HR operations don't just live in the same platform. They inform each other so you get a complete picture, not half the story. With AI built in to handle the admin, you can focus on the Work that truly moves the business. And because it was built around managers and employees from day one, people actually use it. See what a people first HR platform looks like at leapson.com demo. That's L-E-A-P-S-O M E.com demo.

Speaker A: So I suppose one of the exciting things for you with this role at leapsum is again I'm, I'm being very presumptuous here, but presumably you're also customer zero. So you're helping the leapsum, um, engineering team kind of develop and enhance their product. You're speaking to customers with your HR background as well and effectively your customer zero, I guess for, for this.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I love dog fooding products actually. I feel like I'm like both nosy and opinionated, which are two things that anyone that's building a product both loves and hates. So yeah, I've been really enjoying doing that here at leapsim. So we're using leapsim for everything and being the kind of first customer that gives feedback, the customers that are uh, saying what we'd like to see built. And it's been a really fun process to be able to go through and understand like how does this tool deeply work and where could it be better? But also it's been really fun because I have a lot of big kind of magic feature ideas that I'm like, I would immediately sign if a HRIS did this. Uh, I would immediately do a demo if I read this press release. And being able to kind of see those things, hopefully inspire other people to build stuff has been really, really fun.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I guess it's also for the role because head of HR is usually quite an inward looking role, but yours

Speaker B: is also an outward looking role.

Speaker A: So it adds a real bit of um, a bit of a mix to it really, doesn't it?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's funny. I've been writing and talking about HR and the future of work for such a long time and in my last role, by the way, I also did have this kind of hybrid setup. I did a lot of external speaking, a lot of advocacy. But yeah, being able to have the opportunity and the privilege really to continue to do that is truly such an incredible joy for me. I'm having um, such a fun time. Work should be fun though. That's the whole thing. Work should be fun and inspiring and interesting. So finding a way to make that happen is really important to me.

Speaker A: That's a really nice segue into the next couple of questions where we're going to start. We're going to talk about a little bit about the two books that you've written. We're going to start with your first book, Built for People. And both of these books, listeners are available on Koga via Kogan page. You talk about treating HR as a product in Built for People, which that really resonates with me. And we're seeing a lot of organizations that we work with here at insight 2 to 2 shifting towards that direction and HR very much looking at um, people products effectively. I'd love for you to share a little bit more on this, particularly for our listeners, that maybe this is a

Speaker B: bit of a newer concept and how

Speaker A: are you seeing this play out in organizations and really fundamentally why should we treat HR and people programs as a product?

Speaker C: Yeah. So in 2019 I wrote a blog, um, saying that I, in my experience, in my opinion people operations could be analogized very closely to product management. I said your company is building three products. One is your consumer facing products which is laptops if you're Apple, or shoes if you're Nike, whatever it might be. Um, you're also building a fiscal product which is your shareholder value or your investor capital coming in, whatever it might be. And then the final product you're building is your employee experience. Um, and your employee experience is a subscription product. Your employees are subscribing every single month or they're handing in their notice to cancel their subscription. And it's your responsibility as a chief people officer, vp, people, whatever it might be, to make sure that you are maintaining a healthy, um, subscription base. Those three products are symbiotic. The more successful any of them are, that feeds the others and all of them need to be healthy in order for a company to be successful. I think the kind of part of it that really landed with people was that it gave them the tools to be able to go and talk more commercially with their leaders. I think a lot of HR teams very quickly after this in 2020 started feeling extremely disempowered and like they couldn't really figure out a way to be strategic. They couldn't find a way to discuss things more commercially. And this actually gave them a very kind of easy kind of analogy to say, oh well this is how I could have a very commercial discussion with my CEO. Framing our employees as customers is an easy one for them to understand. So it was uh, quite a successful blog. And then I ended up turning it into the book. What's interesting is at the time of publication I actually had like very little dissent in the CEO, coo, founder Community, Ah, that had read it but actually quite a bit in the HR community. A lot of people said this will never work. It doesn't make any like, yes, maybe it sounds nice, but how we operationalize it, there's too many gaps here. Um, but there of course were a bunch of people that thought this sounds interesting, I want to give it a go. This could give me what I need. And I think what we've seen in the four years since it's been published is that those people that were willing to say no, there could be something in this and I want to try and figure out for myself how I can adapt this to my business have been really successful. And now we see companies like Zapier and Dropbox and Nextdoor and of course Leapsum, um, and many, many others. And there are even consulting companies now that are out there existing doing just people ops as a product and design experience, design consulting. I think what we've seen is that those gaps in execution have started to be filled and it's become more, more and more of a powerful thing because the community led in. It's not just been me, it's been the community really living in and sharing how they've made it work.

Speaker A: Yeah, we see it even. I mean we work with large global companies at uh, insight222 and we're seeing particularly coming from employee experience teams and people analytics teams within, within, within HR that they're very much taking a product mindset, uh, approach to develop to development and actually hiring product management skills within HR as well, usually from outside hr, um, to be honest, as well. So it's definitely, we're definitely seeing that play out and I guess, you know, data and AI is really helping accelerate that process. I don't know if that's, that's your experience as well.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, I think that's spot on. I think the fact that now HR teams can build that was such a big blocker before in like 2020. Um, a lot of the pushback I would get was I had the freedom and autonomy to hire like engineers at my team. My founders really trusted me and they said absolutely, you can hire an engineer, you can do this, you can build that. Um, whereas I think a lot of HR teams don't have that same um, level of I guess support um, all the time. So there was always this kind of question that I was getting which was like, well, how practical is this really? If I can't, if I don't have the same resources available to me to build these things, I still can Take the frame of mind. I can still be output orientated. I can still, you know, launch things in style sprints, but I just can't build as much as you can. And that makes it hard. It ends up being a bit more administrative, a bit more procedural. And now I think that problem is just almost completely evaporated. There are some places where I very strongly say, like, do not vibe code. One of them is actually your HRIs or your payroll, anything that touches compliance, do not vibe code it. But you can absolutely vibe code some really incredible feedback tools or a really quick way to give your team, um, one of the things I've done, which is so silly, but I have one to ones with every single person in our company every year. Um, and I've built a dashboard that anyone in the company can see how many one to ones I've had and who is yet to come and then put themselves to the front of the line. Fun little things like that to make the experience of working somewhere fun and delightful are so easy to do now, um, that there's just no excuse, I think, anymore.

Speaker B: No, I think you're right.

Speaker A: And I think it's interesting you said that when you kind of conceptualize this, this idea, you know, business leaders were very supportive and you got a bit more pushback from CHROs and HR professionals. Um, and if we think about

Speaker B: perhaps forces us to question some of the

Speaker A: assumptions that HR has been operating on for years now, I think we're seeing a general trend that HR is moving from that kind of service or support function of the past into being a strategic function. But that's not the case in all organizations. And I think what that does nicely is it brings us nicely to your second or so pa. More book purpose and work. So when you conducted the research for this, uh, and talked to people working in all kinds of environments around the world, tell me, what did you find?

Speaker C: Oh, my gosh. I was saying to someone, my friend, my good friend Daniel, who runs another really brilliant podcast, modern people leader. There are things that happen in your life, whether it's having children or writing a book about purpose, that kind of shake you to your foundation in a way that you think is going to happen. But you're like, I didn't expect it to be this disruptive. So I started the. I started with the idea and purpose of work. First of all, I finished Built for People and I loudly and proudly said, I'm never going to write another book again. And then I spent some time thinking and I had this idea that I'd kind of been swishing around with drawing built for people that I never really went anywhere with, which is this idea of like the experiential economy or like, what, what job is your job doing for you? And I spoke to a dear friend of mine, Dart Lindsley, and he asked me that question directly. And I was still struggling with the answer to that. Like, well, if work is a product, then what is the product doing? Why are we subscribing to this product? And there's something about that that's so frustrating. If you're a nosy, opinionated person, like I said I was, then I can't just sit on a question that I haven't answered for myself or for anyone really. So I started thinking more and more about it and it kind of eventually formulated a brief that I sent through to my publisher about. They asked if I'd be interested in writing a second book. And then I started interviewing. Now I really foolishly went in with this hypothesis that work was doing this transformative thing for all of us and we all were trying to reach some kind of further validation and this higher threshold of human fulfillment or something through work. Um, and then I started interviewing people and I was like kind of rudely slapped in the face with just how deeply untrue that was across the board. It was a really, really fun eye opening process to speak to people who had moved from like being a ballerina to being an engineer, from being a really senior business person to being a gardener. People that left work altogether. People that were professional actors and they went and founded a learning and development company. Like, I really spoke to this big spectrum of humans and the themes that came out of it ended up, I think, being pretty consistent. Maybe we'll talk about this. But like, one thing is very true, which is that work is not for everybody the same way to get purpose. For some people, it absolutely is their calling. It is the thing that they come to do because this is their reason they're put on the planet and they love it. For some people, it is a job. It's a thing that pays the bills. And their sense of purpose comes from their children or their studies or their books they're writing or whatever it may be. And their job is a means for them to do that. And that is just as valid and just as virtuous as any other sense of purpose. And then for some people, it's a career, it's a way to get from here to there. It's an opportunity to a visa, it's to meet great people. It's to live in a city they love to live in. And again, there's no difference in performance between these categories of people. Each of these people are capable of performing exactly the same. But for a very long time, companies have put all of their eggs in this purpose virtue basket and said this is the one and only way to be a strong performer. This is the one and only way to be happy at work. And it's just blatantly untrue. I think.

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Speaker A: In the book you use the phrase purpose washing, so I'm going to ask you to explain what you mean by purpose washing as well. But you go further than that. You don't just name it, you really go into the detail around it as well. And what happens when purpose washing goes wrong?

Speaker C: Purpose washing is uh, yeah, it's a little phrase I've coined, uh, to talk about the idea that a company talking about their purpose and their mission and what they're on the planet to do and ah, particularly do it in a way that is like so aspirational or so I'd say like big picture maybe or like overstated, ends up making people feel this sense of dissonance between the work they're doing and what's actually happening. So for example, you might be a uh, you know, small accountancy software company and instead of just saying we help companies run their accounting really well or with confidence, you say we're here to change the future dynamics of accounting for every person on the in the planet. And you're like what? Like that's doesn't help anybody feel actually just illustrious words don't make people feel more purposeful. Um, but then also going out and using that kind of overinflated purpose or even like you know, relatively straightforward purpose and telling everybody that that's actually the thing that really drives them and motivates them. This is so important to make you successful. I spoke about this at a workshop I was doing while the book was actually being written as like a bit of a user research experience and to get some um, feedback, talking a bit about the findings I had so far, this idea of purpose washing came up and there was this one lady who spoke, um, put her hand up and told her story. And I thought it was such a moving story, which was for her entire career she had felt broken because she looked around her at all of these people that were saying they fully believe in the company mission, they love their company's purpose. It's the thing that drives them every day. And she said it too. So it was a bit of an Emperor's New Clothes thing. Right? She said it too, but she always felt like, God, I must be doing something wrong. That's not how I feel. My sense of purpose is like, I don't know what she said. Crocheting and selling crafts and being with my children. Um, and the idea that she was longing and searching for something that actually for a lot of people doesn't exist. And we're all just kind of saying it because it's what we think we're supposed to say is such a heartbreaking reality. Let's not even think about the business needs part of it, which of course it impacts the business outcomes. But like, God, what a yucky world to live in. People walking around thinking they're broken because they're trying to reach something that is unattainable. I don't want to be a part of that.

Speaker A: And um, again, I don't know if you found this for your research, but I think people's, as individuals, I think purpose changes. I mean my purpose in my 20s is a lot different to now. Now I'm a bit older. Um, before I had a family, you know, before I had kids, you know, you know, I mean, be frank, it was all about myself, you know, and, and, and, and now. And then it doesn't become about yourself as you, as, as you get, as you get older or have kids. That's just my story. But did you see that, that people will talk about how their purpose changes?

Speaker C: Yeah, Abs. I mean the spot on kids is definitely the number one reason why that happened. So there's a, um, whole section of the book where I talk a lot about the changing realities that people have in relationships with, with purpose and work. Um, and like, actually there's life events that happen which can really significantly change where you are on that. So there's a piece of research by Amy Rosses new ski, who describes those three buckets, right? People that see their job as a job, people see their job as a career, people that see it as a calling. Um, and in my kind of presentation in the book I say that companies can also fit somewhere on a similar spectrum. It's almost like a nine box, right, where your company can either be a service company, which is we give you the service of employment and then you get a job back. You can be uh, an experiential company, which is we give you an opportunity to have travel and great people around you and learning chances. And it's all about the experience you receive. That's the, that's the sense of purpose we can give you that's more closely aligned with the career. And then finally there's companies that are transformational who say if you come and work for us, we will genuinely transform you, we will help you reach your um, vocation. Or we will, you know, maybe we're at an art studio that you get to work with a famous artist and get to have these opportunities that you would never otherwise have. Maybe it's being able to change the world and you work at Patagonia. But there are some companies that fit there, right? And they really heavily align with people that see their work as their vocation. And of course you're going to have places in your company where they, maybe you've got someone that sees their work as a vocation and they're an accountant and you are a uh, logistics company. Sometimes that will happen. But generally most companies are going to fall together on the bell curve with their employees. So there's research that supports that idea. And then people will move within those areas in their career just like companies might move. You may start as a genuinely transformative company, a small startup where you get to work with a second time founder that is really famous and doing great work. But then once you reach a thousand people, it becomes an experience based company because you don't get to do that anymore. And if you're a on the person side of things, you may have children or write a book about purpose or there might be a really significant political event that changes your position about where you want to sit in that spectrum. Or you may have a really significant lifestyle event, you might have someone in your family get sick. That means you have to have additional income that significantly changes where you get your sense of purpose. These things are okay and they happen. And I think the more comfortable we are with the Fact that A, people can and should exist in different parts of that grid and B, companies can and should exist within different parts of that grid and be honest about it, then we can also be honest that when someone says, this used to be my vocation, but honestly I'm now here for the paycheck and that actually is just as motivating, then that's fine.

Speaker A: And um, that I guess makes it. I mean you talked about employee experience, so that means, you know, companies need to think about again is we, we. We've talked about this in employee experience for years now. You need to think about different Personas within and I guess those three types of experience that you've outlined then, or different types of purpose. You need to provide an equality experience that allows all of those people to flourish in different ways within the organization.

Speaker C: Yeah. So spot on. This is actually a good place where I think built for people on, um, purpose and work, kind of work together in confluence is. Yes. This should give you the tools that you need to be able to understand like, okay, well, what is really motivating? What job is this job that I'm building do for these people? I deeply understand the academics behind this and the research behind it. Now how do I apply that? By understanding most likely where the primary ICPs within our company. Who are we building for and what do they expect in their experience? Because if you're building, for example, let's go back to purpose washing. Right. If you're building for everyone, presuming they're there for a vocation, and actually most people are there for an experience, you're going to end up with quite a dissonant employee group that feels frustrated because they aren't having their needs met.

Speaker A: So you need to, as a company, you need to be a little bit mature about it and just accept that not everyone's looking for this huge passion and vocation. Um, and then people have a different kind of understanding or interpretation of what purpose is at work.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker A: So how should organizations design? We'll get, we'll get to what you're doing at Leave some in a minute. But how should organizations design around that? It's a product. It's the product piece again, isn't it? As you said, it links together. I think there might be a third book as well. Jessica.

Speaker C: No, please help me. Gosh, no. Um, yes, I think there's this. You go back to the product question. Right. So it's like, okay, well if we, if we're looking around our company and for like to be completely transparent with you the vast majority of people and the vast majority of the kinds of companies that are working in tech are going to be experiential companies that are going to be career motivated. Um, so with that in mind, uh, I think you need to be honest with yourselves and even just thinking about your own experience at work. I think most people can understand that. Yeah, I'm not bounding out of bed every single morning to go and build software. Right. I'm bouting out of bed every morning because I actually love the HR community and I've really enjoyed getting to know people. It gives me so much opportunity to meet new, interesting people. It's intellectually so challenging. That is way more about the experience of work than it is about the vocation of work. Right. Still deep sense of purpose. And I think if you can understand that for yourself and frame that in yourself, it takes a bit of inner kind of thinking. Well, first, if you're, if you're thinking that the first struggle you're going to see is helping your founders to understand, this is something I hear over and over again is yes, I broadly agree with you. But I think my founder, my CEO, my board of directors, I think if I went and said this to them, they would be recoil, they would be really frustrated and say absolutely not. Okay, well how do you try to make that message land with them? Or if you really feel like it will not land, what parts of the work need to make sense to them without it feeling like you're been untruthful or manipulative. So that might be. Maybe you do a workshop with them about what motivates people rather than calling a purpose. Maybe you call it motivation. Um, maybe it is that you say, these are the initiatives that we're working on based on a set of survey questions that we asked or based a set of user interviews we asked, or what has been successful amongst these groups of people and what are their unifying characteristics? What makes them a cohort? Um, and then execute based on output rather than um, some kind of explanation. But I think some of the um, things I talk about is for example, like um, have you read a book by Martin. I'm always going to mispronounce this Martin Spagelman Spiegelman. It's called ah, flourishing.

Speaker A: It sounds like you're giving a recommendation.

Speaker C: I'm giving a recommendation. It's a book. He's a academic that's focused his career on happiness in psychology. How do people get happy? Um, and he's come up with this idea called perma. One of them Is, uh, positive emotion. So that is having moments of joy at work. How do we build them in? So for different teams, there might be different, um, different ICPs that might look different, but generally people need a sense of positive, um, emotion. Second one is engagement. Do I feel a sense of flow? Do I feel a sense of contribution? Do I feel like I could get my work done? Well, third one is relationships. Do I have strong relationships with work that really mean something that matter? Um, the next one beyond that is meaning. Uh, and that is the company purpose. Is there a sense of understanding that I'm contributing to a greater good? And the final one is a sense of accomplishment. So when I achieve what I meant to achieve, does it feel good? Do I get some recognition for it? Do I know that there's something coming back to me? And I think actually there are tools like this that have been built more for individual purpose. So the way that Martin Spiegelman talks about it is like, how can we create schools that give individuals a sense of perma? I've kind of taken a lot of these frameworks and said, well, how can companies use them within whatever economic reality that they live in to help give people a sense of purpose, meaning and fulfillment at work that isn't just focused on the M of perma, the meaning, but rather focused on all the things we need to be happy and fulfilled?

Speaker A: Uh, very good. And actually you mentioned earlier on, um, about setting expectations a little bit or resetting expectations sometimes with founders or frankly any senior leadership team. And that sounds like that's a really important role for HR or those leading employee experience to do that as well. You're almost interpreting what the founders or the leadership team want, but also they're making it real for the employees.

Speaker C: One of the biggest things holding HR teams, NHL leaders back is this. And I don't want to say victim, and I don't think it's a victim mindset. I think it's a, it's a negative symbiosis that agree that exists where the business is permitted to think of us as being not commercial, not tough, a little fluffy, because we ourselves are sometimes a little scared to step into being more direct, being more advisory, being a little telling people a little bit harder truths. Um, and I don't think that's always the truth.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: But I do think that it's enough of a theme that we do have a reputation for being soft and non commercial and um, maybe a little bit more bureaucratic. And that reputation doesn't come from nowhere. Right. And I think we actually contributed to it more than I think we like to admit. Sometimes I think that particularly with the way that AI and technology is changing, the amount of access we have to how to do the practical basics of the job, uh, are uh, just there to us if someone wants to know. If someone wanted to know a year ago how to terminate someone in the United Kingdom, they had to come. To me, there was no they. They have to Google something. Go to the ACAST website. They're scrolling around for ages, reading things, interpreting documents really hard. I knew all that stuff through experience that now is no longer needed. Right. Someone can just go to Claude and ask them questions. And as long as this clever enough to know how to really check their answers, they can figure out what they need to do and probably draft the letter, probably send the letter, and probably set up the meetings. So then what is the, what is the role of a HR leader in that new world? Well, unfortunately, it is more and more and more we keep asking for, for our roles to become more strategic. More and more it is being able to have the tough conversations about what's, what genuinely is happening in the market, what's actually reality when it comes to like human psychology and organizational design that Claude just won't be able to fill the gaps for. And frankly we should have always wanted something else to fill the gaps for those meaningless tasks and been excited to be able to push founders, push CEOs challenge institutional thinking. And I think, uh, a really small good example of this is like people teams have been traditionally the ones that are driving a lot of change within businesses. They're the ones that are saying that we've got this new organizational change happen, we're going to be the front runners of it. But yet I've consistently seen HR teams again and again be the ones that are most hesitant to change themselves. I think that it's such a big opportunity for us. This is the time, now is the time to really take those steps and be that leader. And I think that's what CEOs are looking for more than anything.

Speaker A: No, absolutely right. And we've, I've had your peers in, in other organizations like Katerina Berg, who's now on previously at Spotify. She wrote a book about, uh, bold, you know, it's time to be bold if you, if you're leading HR or working in hr, frankly. And then actually when we spoke on the podcast, she talked, it was, it was poorly courage, you know, a little bit. And you know, we need to connect what we do to the business, you know, rather than just doing it because it's, we've always done it in HR and we need to be more comfortable using data. Um, and obviously that's going to extend to AI and technology as well. And as you said, we, we need to, yeah, we, we just need to be a bit more pushy at times, you know, because we're the expert, you know, HR is the experts on people. They, they, they particularly if they've got the data to, to, to back that up. Um, and you know, really sort of, you know, resonate with what you're saying here. Um, and actually none of what we've described works if you don't know your people. Um, love to hear about how you're approaching that at Leesam and maybe how at leapsum and how some of your clients are approaching us as well.

Speaker C: Yeah, so I just touched on um, the what something I do is just usual practice, which is try to have a one to one with everyone in my company once a year. This is something I've done for probably almost ten years now. Um, and at leaves I set myself the much harder goal of doing the entire company in the first three full months of working. So I'm extending that three weeks of being off to give myself a bit of grace.

Speaker A: I'll be impressed. I'll be impressed.

Speaker C: Yeah. And it's been an incredible. The reason why I do it anyway maybe is more helpful is I have a very specific set of kinds of questions that I ask and generally I ask three questions that are more leading than just like, how are you finding your role? So I will ask, uh, what is it you really love about your job? Not at this company, um, but the work you do. Um, so for a salesperson, they may say it's like the thrill of the chase. I love like this kind of constant feedback loop of knowing I'm doing well. Um, or they may say I love being incentivized really clearly for my work. I love clear delineation between what I'm doing well and what I'm not. Whatever. Um, the next question then is, okay, well on a percentage base or days of the week, whatever, how often are you doing that thing that you really love at work? And then a series of questions like what holds you back from it? You know, is there any, anything we could do to change it? Um, the next one is if I could wave a magic wand and just solve one problem for you right now, today. What is that problem that you'd like to see me solve? People or otherwise? Just anything in your world and the final Question, which is probably the most spicy one is if we went bankrupt in two years time, what would you say if you've seen it was the beginning of the end? And what I'm really trying to get to there is what is one big strategic decision that you still just don't get, that you're still wrapping your head around. So I'm asking these questions and I'm not writing down what people are saying, I'm not writing down quotes from them. It's like an aggregate exercise exercise. And um, what I end up discovering is just so much rich qualitative information about consistent strategic problems that people just, you know, there's whole patches of folks that seem to really just not get this one thing. It didn't land well. What didn't land about it well is something for me to go dive into there. Um, and I think that qualitative feedback is very often in the, in the discussions around data. Right. I think that HR leaders generally tend to be more con. They lean on surveys too much. That's my personal opinion. Surveys are only one part of the picture. Surveys are good for some reasons, bad for others, good in some places, terrible in others. Um, there's also so much data in honestly, qualitative conversations give you just so much rich data sources. Things like market research, understanding what else is going on, what other companies are doing or what's worked in other benchmarking, and then even just things like looking historically at previous behaviors. If someone's saying this thing is really frustrating me, we'll go back and like look when that thing happened, like what happened around that time. Not everything needs to be a survey that actually is data. And I think that LLMs are actually proving to us more than M more and more and more that qualitative data is data. You can use it and LLMs are built on it. ChatGPT and Claude were worse at numbers than they were at words for a very, very long time and probably still now. Um, and I think that is something that I think we can, we can really like lean on and take through is we have so much quality of data in HR and such a big opportunity now to use it. We should be.

Speaker A: You, you mentioned obviously the evolution of HR and perhaps how we need to be a bit braver, a bit more bold. Um, you know, uh, there's also the sense sometimes in some, some organizations with, with some employees that the HR represents the company and less represents the employee. Do you think that perception is shifting? Should it shift? Um, or is it still the default assumption in most organizations. And if that's the case, what are the risks of that, um, versus the potential opportunities if we can maybe get the balance better.

Speaker C: Goodness, this is such a funny question. I did a little series on LinkedIn recently of HR pet peeves that I have. One of them was that gossip is bad, which I think kind of ruffled a few feathers. I'm like, I actually don't really have a problem with. And I have a problem with lies, but I don't have a problem with gossip. I think gossip is people not knowing where to go with information. And that's useful to you to find out. Another one was that, uh, people teams can't be friends with employees. Um, and what ended up kind of spawning out of that a little bit was this like third one which is around HR is there for the company, um, and not for the employees. It's funny, I think, well, what is a company? It's just people, isn't it? Like, that's already my first like question. And our job is to be there to make the. Yeah, it's there to make the company successful. But in order to do that, people have to be successful. So like, just even putting these two into these adversarial groups is really strange to me. It just sets up for this funny dichotomy that ends up really not being helpful and even leaning into it. I think is, is unhelpful, even just being like, well, actually no, we are here for the people. No, just that's. It's a silly question to ask. It doesn't make any sense. Companies run by humans, humans need to be successful. My job is here to make the company successful. Even asking that question is like moving away from the reality, which is if you are unhappy and not succeeding and don't trust me, then the whole thing falls apart. Right. This is about trust.

Speaker A: Trust is absolutely paramount, isn't it?

Speaker C: Absolutely. And I think the other funny little tidbit that comes out of this often is like, well, HR's not your friend. And it's like, well, is anyone? Like, is finance your friend? Is like, uh, not really. Everyone's there to do a job, right. And I'm very capable of both holding a professional boundary and being extremely close and friendly and trustworthy to people. And I think the more and more we build in our heads that there are these divides, that there are these two separate groups. There's friends and non friends, there's ah, company and people. It actually, it's not true of reality and it just doesn't serve us. It makes our Behaviors really wonky and strange, which is why people don't trust us, because we're not behaving like human beings. We're behaving like authoritarian special treatment behind closed doors, corner office dwellers. And that's just not the vibe that I want in my companies.

Speaker A: If you were to give one piece of advice, and you can give more than one if you want to, to HR leaders, HR professionals that are maybe listening to this episode, who maybe want to shift how their function operates and elevate HR within their organization, what would you tell them? What would be your guidance?

Speaker C: For the last couple of years, I've said be output focused, Be impact focused, do everything you can to have your goals. Be output focused. And I still stand by that advice, but I feel like I give it on every podcast. So my new answer is how don't give up on being resilient while the world feels really scary right now. I think this is, you know, I've given a bit of harsh feedback to HR leaders in this podcast and myself sometimes is included in this. Right. Like we're negative symbiosis and we need to be tougher. But also the thing that I said at the very beginning is still very true. I would rather people, teams and companies be run by people that deeply care, that have been doing this for a long time, than technocrats that want to efficiency away the human parts of work. So with all of the kind of hard feedback I'm kind of giving, it comes from a place of absolute deep respect and admiration. And I know it's really hard at the moment for a lot of leaders in people ops and leadership. Don't give up on the work that you're doing. You should be the ones that lead this change, um, and just lean on each other in the community to figure out ways to do it together.

Speaker A: Because no one knows, Nobody knows. And it's all about. It's all about collaboration, isn't it, at the end of the day, working with leaders, working with employees, working with peers and other functions and having a good

Speaker C: time again goes back to that. Having fun.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Having good fun. Maybe, um, seeing the odd armadillo coming back.

Speaker C: Or two.

Speaker A: Or two. Jessica, it's been a fascinating conversation. I've learned a lot. Uh, where can people find out more about you? Find out more about purpose and work, uh, and also the best way to follow your thinking and everything that. And also find out more about leapsum as well.

Speaker C: Yes, absolutely. So I strongly suggest everybody joins the leapsum people over perks community. I'm present there. It's on Slack. There's also a lot of in person events we're running, including one on July 15th in New York City. For anyone here's listening, the other place, uh, is going to be checking out my LinkedIn. Um, you can just find me Jessica Zwanzi. W A N. I'm like the only person with that name that you'll probably see pop up on LinkedIn. And yeah, I think the last little thing on that is I really love people reaching out to me. So if you have ideas or feedback or something resonated, I really love to hear it. Um, I'm probably going to be a little slow in getting back but it genuinely brings me so much joy. So please, please do. I'd appreciate it.

Speaker A: Great. And I certainly recommend, uh, all listeners to follow Jessica on LinkedIn. There's some great stuff that you share on there. And last question, obviously you touched on the fact that, that you knew about UK employment law and I can detect, obviously a fellow Brit, how often did you get back to the uk?

Speaker C: Um, I'm actually back on Tuesday next week for a bit of time. I'm coming. I try to come back every month or two.

Speaker A: Sounds good to me. All right Jessica, thanks very much. Enjoy the rest of your day. Take care.

Speaker C: Thanks David. You too.

Speaker B: A huge thank you to Jessica for such a rich and enjoyable conversation. For those who you listening, if anything Jessica and I discussed today got you thinking, I'd love to hear from you. Was it the purpose washing concept, the argument for treating HR more like a product or something else? Head over to LinkedIn, find my post about this episode and let me know in the comments. I read every single one. And honestly the conversations that happen there often build on those that we have on the show. If you think a colleague or friend would get something out of this episode, please do, do share it with them. It really does help us bring more of these conversations to HR professionals across the world. And one last thing before we go, for those who would like to keep up with what we do at working on at insight222, follow us on LinkedIn or head to insight222.com you can also sign up for our bi weekly newsletter uh, @myhrfuture.com to get the latest thinking on Ah, HR people, analytics and the future of work. Right, that's us for the day. Thanks for listening listening and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast.

Speaker A: Until then, take care and stay well.