The H.I.T. Podcast · 2026-07-07 · 14 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
45 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Lauren Sweeney from Riviera Group Consulting explores the mechanics of creating a workplace culture that actually sticks. The core insight: employees support what they create, so true buy-in requires involving the team in defining values rather than imposing them from leadership. Sweeney walks through a practical framework - having leadership teams list their perceived company values, pooling responses to find shared themes, then reviewing them quarterly on a 1-10 scale to identify gaps between different departments or levels. She emphasizes the difference between stated values (on the break room wall) and lived values, and recommends embedding values discussions into hiring, performance reviews, and everyday problem-solving conversations. On the business case, Sweeney cites Gallup and Harvard Business Review research on employee retention, disengagement, and quiet quitting. She also introduces the concept of "compounded change" - just 1% weekly improvement compounds to over 70% annual change - and argues that every organization needs external perspective at least annually, whether through executive coaching or strategic consulting, because leaders often can't see their own blind spots from inside the organization.
Have your leadership team and staff independently list what they believe the company's values are, then pool the responses to find overlapping themes. The organization's real values are what employees and customers experience, not what leadership says they are.
Touch your values at least once a year, ideally quarterly, to review how well the organization is living them. You don't necessarily need to change them, but keeping them active and measured keeps them from becoming stale.
Research from Gallup and Harvard Business Review shows strong ROI through improved employee retention rates, reduced turnover costs, lower disengagement and quiet quitting, and better organizational performance overall.
Every organization should have external support at least annually - whether a consultant, executive coach, or professional development program - because it's difficult to see blind spots when you're inside the organization.
If you improve just 1% per week as an individual or organization, the compounded effect results in over 70% annual transformation without requiring unsustainable system overhauls.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode contains some actionable frameworks (quarterly value reviews, empathy with expectations, 1% weekly growth principle) but relies heavily on familiar HR concepts and spends considerable time on obvious points. The compounded change principle and specific quarterly review methodology provide modest insight density, but much of the conversation reiterates standard culture-building advice without deep novelty.
people support what they themselves create. So if you need buy in, how do we then come to the table with a problem solution and then get buy in on it?
once a quarter we sit down and we go, all right, one through 10. What do you think? How are we doing on Energy?
The core ideas - values alignment, employee engagement surveys, quarterly reviews, empathy with expectations - are well-established HR best practices rather than fresh thinking. While the framing around 'compounded change' and the specific quarterly cadence offer modest differentiation, the episode largely recycles conventional wisdom without contrarian insight or first-principles analysis.
empathy with expectations. Another great mentor of mine, you know, coined that
the organization is not as I say it is, it's as the employees say it is or our customers say it is
Lauren Sweeney is the founder/principal of Riviera Group Consulting and brings hands-on HR consulting experience working with multiple organizations. While she has relevant practitioner credentials, she is primarily a consultant/thought leader rather than a C-suite operator who built a major company. Her credibility is solid but not exceptional for this audience.
Lauren Sweeney with Riviera Group Consulting
We do that at Riviera Group. But, uh, whether you have a one on one coach for yourself as an executive
The episode references Gallup, Harvard Business Review, and Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset but provides no specific metrics, company examples, or concrete data points. Claims about turnover reduction and engagement improvements are asserted without numbers, timelines, or named case studies. The 1% weekly growth and 70% annual transformation are mathematical principles, not evidence-based findings from actual client work.
You can look at Gallup, right, From Harvard Business Review. You, uh, have plenty of statistics. I don't have the book in front of me
Carol Dweck's, uh, mindset. Right, Growth mindset.
The host asks reasonable follow-up questions (e.g., 'How do you ascertain a realistic answer to what are our values?' and 'What's the right vehicle for annual touch?') but rarely pushes back or challenges claims. The conversation feels friendly but lacks the sharp questioning or productive disagreement needed to test assertions. There's minimal pressure on vague statements or metrics that lack support.
How do you ascertain a realistic answer to what are our values? Right. Like you said, I'm not asking what you wrote on the break room. I'm asking what's really going on.
And, you know, we've talked a little bit about like soft stuff and maybe this falls into soft stuff. Can you make the business case for why? Why would you do this?
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
Great workplace culture doesn't happen by accident - it requires intention, accountability, and consistent leadership. In Part 2 of Toby Kennedy's conversation with Lauren Sweeney, they dive into why company values should be more than words on a wall, how leaders can use shared values to improve communication and accountability, and why investing in culture has a measurable impact on employee engagement, retention, and business performance. Lauren also explains why executive coaching isn't just for struggling leaders, how outside perspectives help organizations grow, and why focusing on small, consistent improvements can create transformational change over time. If you're an HR professional, business owner, or leader looking to strengthen your organization, this episode is packed with practical strategies you can implement immediately.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: Welcome to Hit Podcast, Hit Human Resources, Insurance and Technology. I'm your host, Toby Kennedy. As we do every week, we are dropping into your feed with what I hope are bite sized, digestible, really well curated conversations going on in the space. This week's episode will be no exception. This week's episode is a continuation. We ran a little long in our conversation with Lauren Sweeney, so, so we're breaking this into two episodes. If you missed part one, go back and catch that. Lots of amazing information. Part two, we're gonna pick up right where we left off. This week's episode is brought to you by Montage Insurance Solutions. And without any further ado, we pick
Speaker B: up where we left off with Lauren and remembering. People support what they themselves create. So if you need buy in, how do we then come to the table with a problem solution and then get buy in on it?
Speaker A: Yeah, you just remind me of two expressions. The one that just came up on the end of that is where there's weigh in, there's buy in sometimes. Right. And then the other thing is, you know, what gets measured gets improved. Right. And so when you're talking about like your problem is amorphous, well, you know, like you said, let's, let's, let's detail it, let's name it, let's categorize it and then from there you can kind of measure and prove it. Um, this, this is all super fascinating stuff sticking I think with the kind of uh, the soft complaints. Do you, you think that, are they on the rise? Are they, is it, is there something that an HR person can do to get out in front of this? Mhm.
Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like they are on the rise, but in a good way. Employees feel that they can be more vocal. That's good. And this is partially, um, you know, what comes with it. I think employees too, they care. You know, we're in a post Covid work world where people did realize that they could maybe voice more things. We came out of an era where like what are your company values? What do you really stand for? And those are all good positive things. I think that you can get ahead of it because it goes back to your workplace culture. For example, how many times do we hear that HR gives out an employee engagement survey and then there's not buy in from our, the rest of the executive team and so nothing gets done about it. Well, we lose trust and so those kinds of things that eroded our trust. If we can work to rebuild trust, then employees can feel like they can a come to you, but they can also solve some of these problems themselves and not just complain about it. It also goes back to the intentional. And what are our company values? Not just like what's on the wall in the employee break room, uh, but what are your real values? How do you measure them? And how successful are we? And what is raising the bar really look like in the organization otherwise? Are we just kind of spending our time being satisfied down here? What type of leader are you? Are we creating transformation? What does that look like?
Speaker A: How do you ascertain a realistic answer to what are our values? Right. Like you said, I'm not asking what you wrote on the break room. I'm asking what's really going on. Well, how do you ascertain that?
Speaker B: I mean, the exercise that I like to do is to have our leadership team, our executive team, could be all of the staff, ah. Weigh in on that. So have them first list what they believe our values are as a company and then pool them together so that we could see where there's some shared lines. And, uh, because it's, uh, the organization is not as I say it is, it's as the employees say it is or our customers say it is, experience on the other side. So if we can see where there's some overlap and then talk about how do we define these? And then what I like to encourage is quarterly review them. So if you and I have shared values of, let's uh, say, empathy, communication and energy and collaboration, then we go. Okay, once a quarter we sit down and we go, all right, one through 10. What do you think? How are we doing on Energy? Oh, 10 out of 10. I mean, we bring the energy. Let's go. Okay, how are we doing on collaboration? And if you can do it either with a neutral facilitator, that's something that we do at our organization, or do it through some type of like mentimeter or survey in real time. You want to see the differentiation. So if, uh, 90% of the company says no collaboration, we're like a 2. And then there's about 10% that says we're closer to a 10. Then you can see. Okay, what's the gap like? It's, it's more important that we're accurate in our self assessment than it is what our self assessment really is.
Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. All facts are friendly. Right? We're not trying to be rosy about this. How often would you recommend a company evaluates, uh, their values to, uh, with the intent on changing them?
Speaker B: At least once a year.
Speaker A: Once a year you change your values.
Speaker B: I Wouldn't say that I would have changed them. Yeah. Second half of your question. With the intent on changing them. I think it's maintenance. So if you have them currently first, there's like calibration of them initially, right? I would say once a year we touch them, we review them. Um, uh, we, we put them in the flesh. You know, we touch them and pay attention to them. And I don't know that they necessarily need changing. They might not, but as long as we have them, they're defined and we categorize them. We put life in them every year, ideally even once a quarter, so that you can make sure, okay, how are we living them? The other way that you can do that though is by these conversations. So when somebody comes to you and has this sort of soft complaint, you can say, hey, I hear you, Paul, I hear what you're saying. And one of our values really is communication and collaboration. Would you, is there any reason why you couldn't talk with your boss, Samantha, with the intention of communication and collaboration? Okay, Lauren, So if you can reinforce them in the day to day, then there really isn't a need to change them unless it's needed. I don't know that there's a need for that. But to touch them.
Speaker A: What do you think is the right vehicle or venue for a big annual touch? Is it its own meeting? Is it done at all staff? Is it done at the company anniversary or the Christmas party? What's the right way to touch your values on an annual basis?
Speaker B: Uh, definitely with the executive team. I mean that, that is important because the people are around the leaders every day, all day. They're intentionally or unintentionally setting the culture of the organization at an off site. It does need to be location, has memory. It matters that we're away from the day to day. That does matter. And then from there cascading them down to an all staff company Christmas party. People are there to, you know, have a jolly time or something like that. I don't know. That's always. We're not going to be critically thinking. Usually especially people are drinking or something. But add an all staff perhaps in the spring. So a lot of organizations we work with, there's an exec off site usually maybe in December or November, kind of categorize the year if you run on a regular calendar year. And then towards the spring, we're then meeting all staff with our employees. Uh, it also though should be in our hiring, in our interview questions. It should be in our performance reviews. Like if it's really embedded in the culture. Then it's something that we're actually talking about all the time and not just fancy fun on, you know, on a billboard.
Speaker A: And, you know, we've talked a little bit about like soft stuff and maybe this falls into soft stuff. Can you make the business case for why? Why would you do this?
Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, so let's look at metrics. I mean, you can look at Gallup, right, From Harvard Business Review. You, uh, have plenty of statistics. I don't have the book in front of me, but it's the manager, uh, which is by Gallup, is fantastic for HR statistics. Talks about employee retention rates, so talks about the flip side, turnover rates. It talks about engagement, the percentage of employees that are disengaged and quietly quitting and the cost of that. So there is a huge business case for it just on those X factors alone.
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I'm familiar with that. I just wanted to punctuate it and give you a chance to do that as well. Because I think that, you know, I'll sometimes make the argument on this show, it almost doesn't matter if you're doing it for the fluffy, squishy reasons or literally. You're just a cold hearted business person that purely cares about the bottom line. Like, that's fine. Well, either way, whether you do this for the right reasons or the wrong reasons, I encourage you to do some of this stuff because it does translate right. And I think that like, you know, it might be difficult always to quantify, right. What is the turnover or the customer retention rate changing because of this stuff. But you, you kind of like, maybe without going to the doctor to do the lab work, you, you know, when you spent two or three or four months eating right, taking your supplements and working out, the labs are gonna, you know, translate.
Speaker B: Yeah. And I would argue that most people are somewhere in the middle. Most people are not just like totally cold hearted or totally overly empathetic. Uh, most of us, we wanna do right? And even in a nonprofit, we're running a business, we have to say.
Speaker A: I say that all the time. A nonprofit is a tax status. That is not a business model. Guys.
Speaker B: Like, come on, I work with tons of nonprofits in our organization and there even, you know, a profit for good company as well.
Speaker A: You know, I mean, look, you gotta keep the lights on. You wanna give employees raises.
Speaker B: Yeah, right, yeah, the whole thing. But the employee experience does matter. And, uh, we talk about this too. It's empathy with expectations. Another great mentor of mine, you know, coined that because it's not. Oh, great. Do whatever you want. I'm empathetic. No, we do need guardrails. We do need benchmarks. We do have stakeholders, whether they're our board or there are investors or they're the owner, you know, depending upon the setup of the organization. We need something that's functional. Uh, we're not just building a Disneyland. And even Disneyland, of course, needs to make money. So.
Speaker A: Yeah, well, listen, I think Disneyland's making plenty of money, uh, so they don't need any supporters in organization. Organization. But when do you feel like an organization might need some support?
Speaker B: Yeah, good question. I, you know, Olympic athletes or really great athletes of all kinds always have a coach. And yet in the professional world, it doesn't always translate. And I'm not just talking about therapy. Good therapy is amazing. But an actual consultant or professional development coach or program. I really feel like for us as executives, we always need to be growing and learning. You know Carol Dweck's, uh, mindset. Right, Growth mindset.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker B: So for an organization, if you have it, it's hard to see the label when we're in the jar. And so thinking. We may think we're just amazing. But, uh, there's a lot of things I'm sure that the organization is doing correctly and some things that we could grow in. And it's hard to do that inside of being in. In it. So I would recommend that every organization, at least once a year, it could be every five years, has some sort of consultant. We do that at Riviera Group. But, uh, whether you have a one on one coach for yourself as an executive or you bring in a consultant to kind of look strategically at the organization or whatever type of methodology you use, it is important because there's this great thing, uh, our tagline is compounded change. But if you think about it, you know, money grows compounded interest. We know this principle, but we don't apply that for our professional development. Right. You could grow just 1% a week individually and as an organization. 1%. I'm not changing. Dump everything out. Change all your systems. That's not sustainable. Compounded growth shows. My husband's a mathematician. The math on it. You will actually change as an individual organization over 70% in a year.
Speaker A: Yeah, I, when I. So when I was in college, uh, I played soccer at LMU and our coaches ended up playing putting 15 onto everyone's training sleeve, regardless of your number. And the idea was they wanted to remind us 15 minutes a day, just go work on whatever your position is. If you need extra strength training or extra whatever. If you just did 15 minutes a day, that's, you know, some equivalent of, yeah, small. And it stacks. And it stacks. And all of a sudden, by the end of the year, you can strike a ball with both feet or whatever it is. Right. Whatever you were working on, you're like, hey, my left foot came a long way because I just pinged it against the wall for 15 minutes a day, all year long type of, uh, a thing. Yeah, no, it's, it's, uh, it's real. It translates. I think I went to the LMU side because you mentioned, uh, Olympic athletes having coaches and then you're talking about, you know, how we don't do that in business very often or often enough. And I completely concur, uh, if folks want to get ahold of you. Ah, um, and we can, you know, add a lower third, uh, here. But what's a good website or email or just find you on LinkedIn or.
Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I'm definitely all over LinkedIn. Uh, Lauren Sweeney with Riviera Group Consulting. Uh, they of course can go to our website, Riviera. Consult riviera group consulting.com or. Um, I'm lauren@riviera groupconsulting.com. love to connect, talk more about this topic. Nerd out on all things professional development.
Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome. Uh, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And thank you guys for joining us. That's all the time we have for you today. Thank you to our sponsors. Keeping the lights on Rula Excel Health Truheue Montage Insurance Solutions. Uh, join us next week. Join us every week, uh, until next week. Make this the best week yet.
Speaker B: Was like, I don't.
Speaker A: I love.
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